Report from Engine Co. 82 (15 page)

Ladder 31 is behind us as we rush up Southern Boulevard. They must have been special-called too. The traffic is backed up,
and we turn into the oncoming lane, forcing cars to the curb. We reach the intersection, and the pumper turns up 172nd Street,
and stops opposite the alarm box. This is the box that Mike Carr never made it to, and as I picture the letter President Nixon
sent to his widow I wonder if the President read the text before he signed it.

I stop thinking about Mike Carr and the President. Standing on the back step of the fire engine, I look at a wild scene before
me, in the middle of the intersection. Ladder 712 and Ladder 31 are stopped side by side on Southern Boulevard, and Engine
45 is facing them having come from the opposite direction. Between the companies there is a naked man, his eyes flaming torture,
his writhing body dancing in insane lament, and his mouth bellowing scornful, mad sounds in Spanish. In his hand he holds
a whip, and like a Central Park carriage driver he swings it savagely.

Some Saturday mornings we would buy “guinea-heros,” and walk the nine blocks from East 56th Street to Central Park. Salami
and Swiss, with lettuce and mayonnaise, for a quarter. Put it on the bill, my mother said it’s O.K. Our sandwiches were secured
to our belts with old string as we climbed imaginary rugged mountains. It was Texas. Bobby Benson is being held on the other
side of the hill, but the B BAR B boys will save him. At noon, we found a niche safe from strollers, and bit into the soggy,
melting bread. Satisfied, but thirsty, we searched for a jumping-water fountain. Found it, and saw the Victorias rolling by,
and the bobbing heads of tired mares. Run fast. Stay low. Grab the spring, the strong curved metal bar, and pull up. There
is a crossbar to hold the ass. The driver sees us. The knotted whip end flies backward, and we take Spango, his eye bleeding,
to the hospital.

The handle is four feet long, wrapped in black leather, and the whip is as long. Chief Niebrock tells Lieutenant Lierly that
the man has to be restrained, but the whip swings dangerously on target for all who approach. A crowd has gathered. It yells
taunts with great amusement, while impatient motorists lined up and down along the boulevard honk their car horns.

“Better surround and rush him,” says the Chief. Benny and I move wide on the periphery to get behind him, but he watches us,
and realizes what we are going to do. He runs to the front of Ladder 31’s truck to ensure that no one will get behind him.
McCartty gets a hospital blanket from the Chiefs car, and opens it wide. He will hold it in front of him as a shield, and
then wrap the guy up.

The man is not more than thirty, and filled with great energy that is made even stronger, I suppose, by his insanity. He takes
the thin, tapered end of the handle, and swings the heavy end at the truck. It hits forcefully, and cracks run quickly from
the point of impact along Ladder 31’s windshield. Lieutenant Lierly, thinking of the damaged property report, yells “Goddammit,”
and Charlie McCartty, the blanket held at eye level, yells “Now.” Seven firemen run towards the pathetic figure, and the whip
swings frantically, but not fast enough. Charlie has the blanket around him, and the man is on the ground before I reach them.

“Pick him up, and carry him into a hallway until the ambulance comes,” Chief Niebrock orders. The man is a wriggling mass,
but I manage to grab his legs as Charlie lifts his shoulders. Somehow, the man frees his arms from the confines of the blanket,
and lashes out, his nails digging into Charlie’s cheeks. Both sides of his face are scratched, and slightly bleeding, but
Charlie doesn’t drop his end. “Get his arms!” he yells, but not before Billy-o and Tom Leary have grasped them. The man never
stops squirming, and it is a continuous struggle to carry him.

In the hall, we lie the man face-down on the floor. The building is one of many old brick tenements lining the boulevard,
and the hall reeks with strange odors. It looks like the floor has not felt the soft surface of a mop for months. Cagey Dulland
enters with another blanket, and puts it under the man’s face. At least he won’t be able to smash his head against the hard
marble floor.

“We can handle him,” Charlie says. He and Billy-o have a firm grip on the restraining blanket, and Leary is holding the man’s
shoulders to the ground.

Benny and I, knowing that our part of the job is done, return to the street. There a man is saying to the Chief, “I know him.
His name is Juan. We were together.”

He talks in rapid, hard-to-understand, broken English. In small, sharp phrases, he relates what has happened to his friend
Juan.

“Juan and me drink together across the street in the Blue Velvet. Juan say something to a girl. The girl’s boyfriend was there.
An argument. Then a fight. Other men join in. Juan is on the floor. I run out of the bar, and stay across the street. For
five minutes maybe. Then Juan is thrown out from the Blue Velvet by men who take off his clothes.”

“Where did he pick up the whip?” asks Chief Niebrock.

But, the man doesn’t answer. He shrugs his shoulders. Nobody knows.

“Did the cops get here yet?”

“Not yet, Chief.”

“Well, stay with this man until the cops get here. He’ll have to tell this story to them.”

As we return to quarters I am thinking about the events that drove Juan from the edge of sanity. Time, it seems, is a circling
tower. The action is always the same, only the actors change. It was only last week that Benny and I were sitting at a bar
in the North Bronx. We had worked a tough day tour—more hours of the tour were spent inside of burning buildings than not—and
decided to go for a few beers after work. We needed the relaxation that is easily found hopping from bar to bar. The hours
passed quickly, and it was almost ten o’clock as we entered a small place on East Tremont Avenue. The joint was nearly empty.
There was no one at the bar—only a group of four men sitting at a table in the rear.

“Two beers,” Benny said, laying a five dollar bill on the bar. I threw up three singles, and some change. The bartender looked
at us coldly, with a suspicious glance, pulled the stick for the two steins, and took one of my dollars. He rang it up, walked
to the other end of the bar, picked up the
Daily News,
and ignored us. “Friendly, huh?” I said to Benny.

“Say no more,” he replied.

We were going to drink the beer and leave. Any joint where the man behind the bar is reading the newspaper isn’t worth staying
in.

Benny and I were talking about the day’s fires when our attention was redirected by a loud slam. The door of the ladies room
at the rear of the place snapped shut. A young girl, about twenty, walked past the men at the table, and approached us. She
was not bad looking. She was built nicely, but her mouth was shaped in a peculiarly repugnant way, which implied that her
favorite words were “Go screw yourself!”

She walked directly to me, as if she had planned the move. “You’re sittin' on my stool,” she said.

I looked down the bar, empty but for Benny and me. The bartender’s nose was between the pages of the newspaper, and the men
at the table were talking amongst themselves. I didn’t know what this girl was up to, but I had drunk enough beer not to care.
“Listen sweetheart,” I said, “there are twenty empty stools in the place, but this particular one is yours, right?”

“That’s right,” she answered, moving her body so that one shoulder was lower than the other.

“C’mon, give me a break,” I said to her with a forced disinterest, and looked away.

“That’s my stool, and I want it,” she said.

“Well, you’re not going to get it,” I said.

She turned in a huff, and walked to where the men were sitting. She said a few words to them. All four men got up. Three took
their drinks to the middle of the bar. The fourth walked to my side. He smiled slightly, but in that ironic way that told
me that he knew more about something than I. And God was he big. Bigger even than Charlie McCartty. “I can vouch for the girl,”
he said. “She was sitting right there.”

“Look,” I said, wishing that Charlie was with us, and Billy-o, and Herbert, “it’s really not that important. If the girl wants
the stool so bad I’ll give it to her.” The girl smiled, and approached us. Benny moved to the stool at the corner of the bar.
I moved over one. The girl sat, still smiling.

“Ya know, you’re a real snotty guy,” he said to me, both hands on the bar. It was going to be hard to avoid a confrontation.
I remember laughing inwardly at that understatement.

I tried to ignore him. “We’re in trouble,” I said to Benny.

“I can see that,” he replied. “I really don’t wanta leave my teeth laying on the floor here, but I don’t think we’ll have
much choice.”

The man spoke again. “I think I’m gonna break your ass just for laughs. Just as soon as you make the wrong move.” The three
others, poised and confident, chuckled. The bartender put the paper down, and became interested.

I looked at Benny as he played pensively with a book of matches. “Listen Ben,” I said, “you don’t have to get involved in
this, but I’m going to have to make a move.”

“I’ll be right behind you. Say no more.”

Just then the front door opened. A small-framed man walked in. “Benny Carroll,” he sings. “How are you? Haven’t seen ya in
years.”

“Hey,” Benny forgot his name. “How are ya? What are you doing here?”

“I own the place. Bought it about six months ago.” The bartender walked up to the front end of the bar, and listened to the
order. “Buy my friend, and his friend, a drink!”

It was over. The God of my grammar school days watches over me. He who lived in the tabernacle on Fifty-fifth Street and First
Avenue protects me still. I am safe in fires, sober and frightened, and in bars, drunk and unafraid. My enemy took the girl
by her elbow to the table in the rear, making room for our redeemer, the lost friend—the owner.

Yes, life seems to make recurrent statements. I don’t fully understand karma, the three gunas, or the Blessed Trinity, but
I know they exist. They operate differently, but their meaning is the same. They control. They lead me up a winding staircase,
assuming that with each step I’ll be able to see farther. But I never do. The horizon is the same, and I can only compare
it with what I saw at lower steps. It has no profound implications. I only know that I would have been lucky to leave that
bar naked—or at all.

Yes, time, if studied, is cyclical. Only at death does it become linear.

It is a little after nine when we return to the firehouse kitchen. The ambulance came for Juan, and the police came to talk
to his friend. It will all be recorded officially—the police report, the fire report (no fire, assisted distraught civilian),
the ambulance report, the hospital report. And Juan will end up in Bellevue for a few days if luck is on his side, or in a
state hospital for the rest of his life, forgotten by all but a few close relatives.

Engine 85 is back from Hunts Point, tired and disgusted. They had to stretch two full blocks for a rotten garbage fire. Wasted
time, wasted effort, all because the laws are meaningless when a few dollars are available. They tell how the men of Ladder
48 wore themselves out overhauling the mountains of trash. Pulling with their hooks, their halligan tools, their hands at
car bumpers, fenders, refrigerators, mattresses, metal boxes, wooden boxes, bedsprings, car seats, tires, and hundreds of
brown paper bags filled with American waste.

Cagey Dulland is cooking the night’s meal. The kitchen is crowded, as it usually is before the meal. Men pass the stove, excited
by the cooking smells, looking for a little knosh, a small indicator of the meal to come. Willy Knipps begins to cut the meat.
Thick slices of sirloin, cut on the bias, hot juice spilling over the cutting board, mushrooms falling to either side of the
meat. He cuts into the bumed edges of the steak, through the reddening center, and again through the crisp edges. Each time
he feels the cutting board he flicks his wrist, and the meat falls uniformly into a chrome serving pan, carried there by a
slight movement of the arm and a turning knife. Fourteen, fifteen slices, and Willy comes to the end, the lonely tapered end
not worthy of slicing. He cuts it bruskly into three parts. He puts one in his mouth as he knifes another and offers it to
me. Cagey, watching the progress closely, reaches past me for the third. My mouth waters, and the meat dissolves like a communion
wafer, the juices leaving a desire for more.

There are two more cuts waiting to be sliced, and Willy raps the knife quickly against the long thin metal of the knife sharpener.
I walk onto the apparatus floor, counting the minutes until the bell rings signaling mealtime, and leaving the space behind
Willy for another to watch him slice down to the knosh end.

It is a quarter to ten as Billy-o pulls the hammer of the bell on the Chief’s car. The price Written on the blackboard is
“$1.35.” I take the money from my pocket and put it into the collection bowl sitting on a shelf next to the blackboard.

“Just to show you how much confidence I have in you Cagey, I’m going to pay for the meal before I taste it.”

Cagey grins as he walks by me, plate in hand. There is a running joke in the firehouse that the meal does not have to be paid
for if it is not absolutely satisfying. I run my finger across my chalked name on the blackboard, and take a place between
Billy-o and Tom Leary.

On the plate before me there are two pieces of meat, and a large baked potato. Next to the plate there is a side dish of salad:
lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, scallions, stripped carrot. There is a bowl of french dressing, and a bowl of sour
cream and chives on each of the four tables. Tom is telling Billy-o about the months of skin grafting he underwent. Skin from
his belly to his leg and foot. Micro-thin layer over layer. He was working, making a search, in the apartment above a fire.
The floor gave way. Tom’s leg went down. He couldn’t get loose. His leg jutting into a roaring inferno, he screamed, and screamed.
His boot was gone when they pulled him out, but parts of it were stuck to the bone of his leg.