The advocacy work that Buscemi has supported — the Dust documentary, the board service with Friends of Firefighters, the sustained public attention to the community’s ongoing needs — is directed at exactly this: the long aftermath, the slow consequences, the ways in which the crisis of September 11 did not end when the cameras moved on. It is less dramatic than the image of a celebrity in firefighting gear at Ground Zero, but it is the work that the coworker’s warning made necessary.
## What the Story Is and What It Is Not
The story of Steve Buscemi at Ground Zero is, in its most accurate form, a story about the persistence of identity and the nature of community. It is not a story about a celebrity who secretly saved lives while no one was watching. It is not a story about fame transcended or celebrity conscience awakened. It is a story about a man who worked as a firefighter for four years in his twenties, who never fully left that professional and personal community, and who responded to the worst attack on that community with the same instinct the community would have expected: showing up to work.
The seventeen years between leaving Engine 55 in 1984 and returning to the rubble in 2001 were years in which he became one of the most recognizable character actors in American cinema. They were also years in which the connections formed in the firehouse remained. The friends from Engine 55. The knowledge of what the job was. The understanding of the culture. These things do not expire when you take a leave of absence. They persist, in ways that are sometimes invisible until a moment arrives that makes them visible.