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by DIANE WERTS
After 10 years on the New York Fire Department (1977- 1986), and a couple of decades in show business, Jack McGee, 55, arrives at a place that puts it all together. Playing the beloved but belligerent crew chief in FX's new FDNY-set drama, "Rescue Me" (debuting tonight at 10), he's got something to say about everything. (And often a bet to place upon it.)
So does McGee himself, who no sooner starts talking than you've learned, "I come from an Irish-Catholic family of eight, and it's 101 nieces and nephews, soon to be 102." He's from the South Bronx projects. He worked Engine 38, Ladder 51, Engine 89, Ladder 50. He had badge 738, which he got from his brother Bernie after he retired out of Engine 69, and which his nephew, Bernie's son Stephen, has now inherited.
"No matter what happens to this project," McGee says of "Rescue Me," "I just know what they've been able to capture as far as what a firehouse is like." And McGee speaks from good experience: He worked in the fire films "Backdraft" and "Turk 182."
Built like a fireplug, he says in his spark-plug patter, "There's a lotta nonsense when you put guys together for 24 hours at a clip, the --- contests amongst 15-year-old boys and 80-year-old washerwomen. You're gonna get fat. You're gonna find out which one you can trust, which one says he's never in on the meal, and then he's gonna ticket your leftovers. You know when the --- hits the the fan who you can count on."
'This thing about us'
He also knows what the firefighter's life can do to those who embrace it, volunteering, "I'm just celebrating now nine years of sobriety."
"We've got this thing about us. If you're a doctor or a nurse, you go into your profession exposed to stuff on an intellectual and educational basis. But with firefighters, they just teach you how to use the tools, and the next thing you know, you're cutting dead things out of a car."
Filming "Rescue Me," he says, "brought me right back to about 20 years ago. Four in the morning Thanksgiving morning, we went to a job and pulled two old folks out of a building. Gone. Dragged 'em out on the street. And there's a beautiful 14-year-ol black girl screaming in agony and horror looking at her grandparents. They got up early to do the turkey deal, and something went wrong. And then I go home, and I'm sitting down having dinner. Nobody prepares you for that. How does it leave your head if it's something like that?"
More important, how do you cope with it sticking there? To McGee, that's what "Rescue Me" - which stars Denis Leary as a wisecracking fireman - addresses most crucially. "Where I come from, if you hurt your leg, you go to a doctor, and he puts it in a cast. When your heart or your head hurts, you just don't talk to anybody. It vents in the form of rage, anger, alcoholism, philandering.
"Maybe they're heroes," he says of firefighters, "but they've also got some stuff going on."
Art imitates life
McGee's character boils over in the FX series' second episode after an ex-firefighter says in print that some fighters are gay. He tracks the guy down, unleashes his fists and sets up trouble for subsequent weeks.
"What was it like for me to beat up a gay guy? My brother Tommy was one of the heroes in my life," he says, voice cracking, "and he died in '88 of AIDS. I took that anger and rage about his loss and used it in that."
That's because McGee "found a new set of tools" in his journey. "I'm hoping with this thing here that we get some of these nitwits to get some help," rather than adhere to the firefighter's old shut-up-and-suck-it-up approach to emotional backdraft. "We need to cry," McGee says. "Guys need to cry about this ---."
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