None of these individual acts is exceptional. Together, they constitute a sustained relationship with a community that he entered at twenty-two and has never left. The community, in turn, has kept him: the Honorary Battalion Chief designation is the institution’s formal acknowledgment that it considers him one of its own, which is a different kind of recognition from the kind that the entertainment industry provides.
The sustainability of this relationship across decades is, in some ways, the most significant element of the story. Celebrities make a great many promises, explicit and implicit, about their commitment to causes and communities. The promises are often sincere at the time of making and often do not survive the next project, the next crisis, the next thing that demands attention. Buscemi’s commitment to the FDNY community has survived thirty years of career evolution, the deaths of former colleagues, the passage of time, and the competing demands of a sustained professional life. That persistence is not dramatic. It is, however, real.
The story that begins on September 12, 2001, with a former firefighter arriving with old gear at the pile where his company is working, does not end on a specific date. It continues in every subsequent expression of the relationship — every interview, every documentary, every board meeting, every public statement. The bucket brigade was not the point; the bucket brigade was an expression of something that had been building for twenty-one years and would continue for the decades that followed.
He knew these people. He went. He has not stopped going, in whatever form going takes in each subsequent moment. That is the whole of the story, and it is enough.