With time, the frenzy over firemen has cooled

This season New York firefighters are back to spending the holidays with one another, back to the brotherhood and neighborhoods that have always sustained them. It seems the sisterhood -- or at least the women who “discovered” firemen after Sept. 11 -- is a little fickle. The cult of the hunk fireman is mostly over.

Consider: For the second year in a row, a celebrity (please, no names) invited his Upper East Side firehouse (along with stars Meg Ryan and Regis Philbin) to his annual Christmas bash. Last year these firemen were the honored guests. This year guests were complaining that the firemen were drunk and pulling girls onto their laps.

In the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, it seemed that every woman in New York wanted to throw her arms around a firefighter. Marisa Tomei told David Letterman she was dying to have a romance with one. Jennifer Aniston, Britney Spears, Sarah Jessica Parker, Gwyneth Paltrow and others popped by Ladder No. 5 in Greenwich Village to show their appreciation. Which meant hugs all around. And group photos.

At another firehouse across town, women in skimpy tops and tight jeans stopped by regularly with all the fixings for Friday night supper. One brought her guitar to a firehouse near Madison Square Garden and spent the next two hours serenading the late shift.

All over status-conscious Manhattan, cultural divides melted the way they did in the 1960s days of radical chic when Black Panthers were hanging out at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. The American hostages returning from Iran in 1981 got a taste of the same treatment when Kenny Rogers took them all to Las Vegas for a vacation. (Within weeks, one hostage was complaining that he couldn’t even get his newspaper delivered.)

But while sophisticated-girl-meets-humble-fireman has high cinematic value, the reality is predictable: Cultures eventually collide. Rebecca Liss, an attractive New York television producer, was quite taken with a fireman in her neighborhood. After tearfully recalling his Sept. 11 experiences, he worked up the courage to ask her out. For their first date they went to a hip local restaurant, not the sort of homey place he was used to. He ordered the mozzarella appetizer. But when the cheese turned out to be smoked, he seemed taken aback: “It tastes like fire,” he told Liss. Then, after a meal he clearly didn’t enjoy, he asked if she wanted to go for pizza.

“I realized we had nothing in common,” Liss says. “He was so cute and sweet, and I was so moved by him and his tears. I did want to reach out and take care of him. I couldn’t say no when he asked me out. But our worlds were so different.”

Now she’s back to dating lawyers.

Mike Simon laughed when he heard this dating story. Tim O’Neill snickered at the notion of his comrades getting rowdy at the celebrity Christmas party. In separate interviews Simon and O’Neill, firemen in Ladder No. 5, had almost identical reactions.

“What did she expect?” says Simon.

“What did they expect?” says O’Neill. “A year ago it would have been funny, right, if a bunch of firemen got a little drunk at a Christmas party. Now it’s: What are these guys doing here? Well, we’re the same guys. We’re who we always were.”

O’Neill and Simon and the rest at Ladder No. 5 are real men in real relationships who experienced real trauma last year. Just 15 months ago life as they knew it took a hairpin turn, and they found themselves sifting through bent steel for body parts and mourning 343 of their own.

While there is still a huge reservoir of respect and affection for all New York firefighters, life has returned to normal for most of their newfound admirers. But not for the firemen, and that’s the real cultural divide.

Sure, they’re back to their mind-numbing routines -- drilling twice a day, double shifts twice a month, paying into football pools, saving little old ladies from gas leaks, putting out Christmas tree fires, working out in small gyms tucked into the corners of the firehouse.

But the loss is relentless.

Half the men of Ladder No. 5 and Engine No. 24, who share a firehouse on 6th Avenue and West Houston Street, are gone. Eleven died when the towers fell. Another dozen are retired or on medical leave. The house is now filled with young recruits who need a lot of training. And now the mayor is closing eight firehouses and enforcing a hiring freeze citywide. Which means more overtime for everybody but also more fatigue.

The confluence of death, retirement and cutbacks is keeping the pressure on experienced leaders like Anthony Varriale, the 51-year-old captain of Engine No. 24. He also has to cope with injuries of his own. Varriale lost 14% of his lung capacity working on the cleanup at ground zero and was out sick for four months. Although he is tan after a brief Caribbean vacation, he looks tired and tense.

“We need more training for terrorism and biological warfare, and all we get is a three-hour course and $9 radiation detectors with batteries that go out,” he says.

Varriale is irritated with the mayor, with the whole city for that matter. With 26 years in the department, he too could retire. So many have gotten out. But he can’t seem to leave. His concern is for the men, particularly for the recruits who have come into the department in so much turmoil, he says.

Now they’re losing their “hunk” status. The unkindest cut of all? Varriale forgets his anger for a minute and laughs. “As if I care,” he snorts, stepping into his boots to answer a call.

Not that there isn’t always plenty of action around the firehouse lately. Eleven guys became fathers last year, high for house of just 50 men.

“That number 11 sticks around here a lot,” says Simon, pausing for a long drag on his cigarette. It’s a warm night for December, and he’s out in front of the brick firehouse, studying the skyline after a busy shift. “We lost 11 guys on Sept. 11. We’ve had 11 babies. There are 11 probies [new recruits still on probation] in the house right now. It’s weird.”

A little while later he mentions that a neighbor was around the house that evening dropping off her annual gift for the guys, a barrel of chocolate-covered pretzels. She did that the Christmas before the attack, and she’s still doing it.

“It’s a whole new ballgame around here,” Simon muses. “It’s slowed down with people trooping through. And yet the neighborhood is still good to the house. Some things are really very much the same.”