The People Behind the Stories

Suzanne Chazin (rhymes with raisin) has written three novels,The Fourth Angel, Flashover and Fireplay; short stories, essays and magazine articles. She was Senior Editor at Reader's Digest for ten years, and has taught fiction and non-fiction at NYU, the New School and Sarah Lawrence, in the City.

I met Suzanne when I moderated a panel at an MWA dinner (I forget on what). I was intrigued that she wrote about firemen, in and out of the firehouse. I wondered if she were one of those hardy pioneers who had broken into the ranks of the FDNY in the 1980s, then put her experience into books. Not so: her husband is a Chief in the FDNY, but she definitely knows her way around a firehouse. I appreciate her eye and the voice, as I think you will.

Robert Knightly

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I’m reading a really great mystery novel by Paul Levine at the moment called Illegal. But what first struck me about the book, before I ever got to the story, was the dedication:

To the woman carrying a rucksack, clutching her child’s hand and kicking up dust as she scrambled along a desert trail near Calexico, California.

I love that dedication because it reminds me that sometimes an inspiration for a story is nothing more than an image you can’t shake. The only way to make sense of it is to write about it.

My first three mysteries were set in the FDNY where my husband is a chief. Yet ironically, the image I couldn’t shake didn’t come from him, perhaps because I was too close to the story to see it. It was the late 1990s. I was working as a writer for Reader’s Digest and my editor asked me to spend three or four shifts (called “tours”) riding with the FDNY for a day-in-the-life story for the magazine.

I got clearance to ride with a rescue company—an elite unit that handles large fires and rescue operations throughout the five boroughs of New York City. As the only woman in an all-male firehouse, I got a quick education in how to “blend in:” get in and out of the bathroom quickly (and don’t put too much faith in the latch on the door). Get comfortable with being dirty and tired. And make sure you’re not the last one on the rig when a run comes in.

I did four night tours—6 p.m. to 9 a.m.—over the course of two weeks and developed a reputation for being “a white cloud.” That’s what they call a firefighter who never seems to catch a job. All the major fires and emergencies kept happening when I wasn’t there. But this gave me a chance to get to know the men and hear their stories.

I soon learned that one of the officers in the company had lost his firefighter brother, a father of three, in a deadly blaze in Queens two years earlier. On one of those long, sleepless “white cloud” tours, the officer opened up to me about the night he was yanked from duty, informed of his brother’s death and then asked to break the news to his brother’s wife. He showed up at their house in the middle of the night and found the whole place lit up like a Christmas tree.

She already knows, he thought. Why else would all the lights be on at 2 a.m.? And then he realized something worse: his sister-in-law kept all the lights on every night his brother wasn’t there. She couldn’t bear the darkness when he was gone. And here he was, standing on her doorstep, bringing her a lifetime of darkness.

Even though I was married to a firefighter, I had never allowed myself to picture such a moment. But that image of the house lit up like a Christmas tree spoke to me deeply, both as a writer and the wife of a firefighter. I knew I had to tell that story—not directly perhaps, but in a way that would capture the uncertainty firefighters and their families face consciously or (in my case) unconsciously every day.

I ended up writing three mystery novels about life and death in the FDNY. Now I’m working on a mystery series that concerns undocumented immigrants in suburban New York. This series also began with a moment. For several years, I had been working with immigrant outreach organizations near my home, helping to write the real-life stories of undocumented Latinos. During this time, I was introduced to a Guatemalan man in his late 20s who had nearly died of dehydration on two separate border crossings. I found myself riveted by his description of those harrowing journeys. Machetes held to his throat. Pistols pointed at his head. Desperate moments in the desert when he was reduced to drinking his own urine to survive.

But what really struck me were the circumstances that led to his second border crossing. He and his kid brother were living in suburban New York at the time. It was winter. Jobs were scarce. A garment wholesaler offered them temporary work in New England sewing clothes. After two weeks, with their wages in their pockets, they were ready for the trip back to New York. To celebrate, the kid brother ordered Chinese takeout—chicken and broccoli—to be delivered to the motel where they were staying. By the time the food came, the brother had fallen asleep so the man went downstairs to pay for the food. Instead of a Chinese delivery clerk, he was met by immigration agents who arrested him, shipped him off to a detention center and eventually deported him back to Guatemala. (His brother, by the way, slept blissfully through the whole ordeal and never got arrested or deported).

Imagine your whole life being upended over an order of Chinese takeout! Imagine having the courage and determination to undertake that dangerous, brutal, near-death journey all over again. (Not to mention still being on speaking terms with your brother afterwards.)

There are writers who could think up these situations out of thin air. Maybe it’s because I started out as a journalist, but my inspiration almost always comes from real people. Their stories keep me honest. And forever indebted.

Suzanne Chazin

That Day: We Remember…

September 11, 2001, a Tuesday, was a nice Fall day, I think (aging has a way of dimming memory, at least mine, no matter how ‘unforgettable’ the subject). My wife Rose and I left our apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, earlier than usual that morning to vote: it was Primary Day in New York City. At the polling place, we heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center (just that, nothing more). We went back home to turn on the TV. This is how we remember it:

ROSE: When we saw the plane had hit the Tower and it was burning, I remember thinking I’d better get on the road now before the traffic is impossible. Only a New Yorker could have had such a reaction to a disaster. I owned a boutique called Metaphors on Bedford Avenue at North 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, three blocks from the East River, just opposite the Manhattan waterfront at 23rd Street. Eventually, I got to my store. As I was pulling up the gate, Karen, who owned Luanna’s, an Urban Cowboy boutique across the street, hollered at me to close my store!

“Why?” I shouted back.

“Because the country is under attack.”

“But,” I said, “we have a captive audience today, The subway is shut down.”

“Go home!” she said. So I did.

ROBERT: I was working as a trial lawyer in the Queens Office of the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society. The office and the Criminal Courts were on Queens Blvd. in Kew Gardens, a 7-minute ride on the G-train from the Roosevelt Avenue station in Jackson Heights. I took the train; we were a one-car family then and Rose needed it to get to the store. When I arrived, everyone was glued to the TV. Like everyone else, I stayed in the office and watched. What did I feel? Astonished! Did I see the Towers fall? I‘m not sure; maybe one? From the vantage of age 70, I’m convinced that I don’t remember more than I do remember, and depending on how much time has passed, my recollections may be mist-enshrouded.

For example, on November 23, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, I was employed as a copyboy on the New York Journal-American, an afternoon daily, one of the City’s 7 daily newspapers at the time. When the inevitable cliché is asked: And where were you on etc., etc, etc.? – I usually say I was working in the City Room that late morning when Kennedy was shot. But was I? I think I was because I have a vivid recollection of standing immovable in that room with everyone else — editors, reporters, copyboys, pressmen – transfixed by the TV showing . . . something? Announcement of his death in the Dallas Hospital? The Funeral? The assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby? I’m not sure; I’m guessing (always reminds me of the movie, ‘The Mists of Avalon’).

The Courts shut down; the subways, too. I walked the 3 miles home. I had it easier than most.

ROSE: I drove home through Long Island City, Queens, past the 59th Street Bridge which thousands of people were spilling off onto Northern Boulevard, all of them fleeing Manhattan. I stopped and offered a ride to a foursome of Indian-looking people, hoping they lived in my neighborhood of Jackson Heights, also known as ‘Little India’. I was disappointed and more than a little embarrassed to see very few cars stopping to offer rides. The man owned a newsstand in Midtown and the three women were his employees. They thanked me for being “a human being,” but alas, they lived in Flushing. I had to take them all the way, I could do no less. As we talked, I asked if they were from Pakistan. “No, No,” they cried, “India, India!”

Past Jackson Heights, of course, my 1990 GEO overheated and stalled out in unbelievably stop-and-go, snail-paced traffic. Then a passing Caddy stopped alongside, the window rolled down, and a lovely, black female arm miraculously extended a plastic gallon of water to me. My newsstand owner then exclaimed that he had been an auto mechanic in India and “Not to Worry!” And, indeed, after a brief rest and some work under the hood, we were back on the road. After leaving them off on Main Street in Flushing, I had a comparatively smooth ride home.

The next day I was determined to open for business as usual. The shop was filled all day with frightened young people. Williamsburg then was a haven for wealthy trust fund babies and poor artists pushed out by rents across the water in the gentrifying East Village. I sold one pair of earrings for $12 all day. That was all right because September 12, 2001, was a day to be together to start to feel safe again.

ROBERT: In the days, weeks, years after ‘9/11’, four things still stick in my mind: First, the names with personal detail and photographs, affixed in the thousands to every fence and empty wall in downtown Manhattan. Second, the sea of dirty-white dust of ‘cremains’ that blanketed cars, trees and streets when the prevailing winds blew towards Queens. Third, the dazed, sad look on the face of my friend, a Fire Department Lieutenant, who was on the fourth floor with his men when the North Tower fell, as he told how he’d been dug out of the rubble like a rare artifact. Fourth, the resigned-hopeful face of the young NYPD detective who’d done 12-hour tours, six- days-a-week for months at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island (Had a site ever been more aptly named?) His job and that of his brother-detectives: to rake through thousands, tens of thousands, of tons of debris from ‘ground zero’ in search of human remains. They told him to wear a mask. What they didn’t tell him? That in 2004, when I met him, he’d be forever unfit for duty, unable to run or climb without gasping for breath, unlikely to see his children get much older.

Oh, yes, lest I forget: If Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Thomas Von Essen, his handpicked Fire Commissioner, had been delivered into the hands of the rank-and-file of the New York City Fire Department after 9/11, I suspect the ‘Mayor of America’ would have been hard-pressed to explain why the Fire Department’s radios failed to deliver the message to vacate the Towers while the Police Department’s radios worked fine – especially, since the City had known, since the prior bombing of the WTC in 1973, that the FD radios were defective… Just a thought.

Robert Knightly