Report from Engine Co. 82 (22 page)

The Chief from the Seventeenth Battalion has been special-called, and as he looks about him he tells his aide to request an
ambulance and police assistance. The man is lying on his side, with his head on his forearm. He is about thirty-five years
old. His eyes are open, and he seems to sense our presence. He moans painfully as I ask him where it hurts, and mutters something
in Spanish. Johnny Nixon puts a blanket under his head as I turn him over. We can see now where it hurts. His right ear has
been slashed, and is swinging freely by its lobe. John opens the first-aid box, and hands me a sterile sponge. I pick up the
ear, and place it where I think it belongs. I hold the sponge in place as Johnny wraps a bandage under the chin and around
the head. Now if the guy dies at least he will look clean and cared for.

As Johnny ties the bandage, Benny, Vinny and the other members are holding back the crowd. But a commotion starts on the other
side of the street, and the crowd deserts us for better excitement. There is a lot of yelling, and I feel a passion for blood
in the air. A young man starts running up Seabury Place, the crowd following. He doesn’t run fast enough, and is pushed to
the ground. The crowd circles around him, and each screaming, kicking man and woman is getting even for the bandaged ear at
my knees. The cops haven’t come yet, and we wonder where they are. The Chief orders another request to be made—an emergency
request. We can feel a sense of urgency to save this guy being beaten, but the block is filled with an easy two hundred persons.
To try to interfere with this kind of mob action is stupid. We have learned from experience that this is a cop’s job—he’s
got a gun. People have a fear of being shot, and a fear of being arrested, but they do not have a fear of firemen. Firemen
are supposed to come only when needed, and it is obvious that this crowd does not feel a need for us now. This is street justice.

The people suddenly stop their punching and kicking. The man has been paid, and three men carry him into a building as the
squad cars turn onto Seabury Place. We leave the injured man in the care of the Police Department, and we return to quarters,
not knowing, and only casually caring about what the argument was all about.

It is three-thirty as the pumper backs into the firehouse. The sun isn’t beating directly on us anymore, but the air is still,
and the heat seems to radiate from the sidewalks. I go to the kitchen, and to the soda machine. The dime goes through the
machine several times before it finally catches, and I follow it up with a nickel. The machine makes a short buzzing noise,
and the select sign lights up. I press the Pepsi button. The machine makes a kind of wheezing sound, and I can hear the can
roll through the machine and fall into the receptacle box at the bottom. I take the can and pull hard, a little too hard,
on the snap-open top, and the ring breaks off. I go to the drawer by the sink for a can opener, but before I can get there
the bells redirect me. Box 2743.

We arrive at Charlotte and 170th Streets. Kids are playing in a puddle at the corner, and people walk aimlessly by. We make
a search as we have done a thousand times before, and we give Lieutenant Welch the thumbs down signal. He radios the dispatcher
that it is a false alarm. As we are getting back on the rig Bill Valenzio tells us that there is an “all hands” going up on
Tremont Avenue. The fire is in the basement of a supermarket.

In the firehouse again I take an ice tray from the refrigerator. The creases have fallen out of my clean shirt, and there
are large sweat stains at the underarms. I put the ice in a coffee cup, and pour the soda in after it. It fizzes to the top,
and I stand over it patiently waiting for it to recede, but the bells come in, and I have to leave the soda once more. Box
2787—for the third time today. Kelsey is screaming with all the power in his lungs: “Southern Boulevard and Fox Street. Again.
Southern Boulevard and Fox Street. The Bronx is burning. Get out Eighty-two and Seven-twelve. I bet the bastards set it up
again. Get out.”

Lieutenant Welch slides the pole from the second floor, but instead of running to the apparatus he runs to the housewatch
desk and picks up the phone. He speaks into the receiver for a few seconds, and then runs to the pumper, explaining as he
runs that he called for police protection. There is no sense going into that block today without a squad car.

As we head up Tiffany Street we can see the smoke still rising above Hoe Avenue to the north, and as we look to the southeast
we can see still another column, billowing rapidly above Fox Street.

“Ya know,” Benny says to me as he pulls his boots up, “Kelsey is right. The Bronx is burning up, and the sad thing about it
is that no one knows it. This is an insane day for fires, but ya won’t read anything about it in the papers tomorrow, and
ya won’t see anything about it on T.V. tonight. That’s the real sad thing. We work our ass off, and nobody knows about it.”

I nod my head in agreement. It is sad. But even sadder is all the families who will be shoved into welfare hotels tonight.
Nobody knows about them either. One family in a small stinking stoveless, sinkless hotel room, and the immoral bastard of
a hotel-keeper will charge the city fifty dollars a day for the vermin-infested room that he used to be lucky to fill for
twenty a week. I think of the fire on Hoe Avenue—there must be fifteen or twenty families burned out there, and it’s a good
bet that most of them are on welfare. And the fire on 138th Street.

But I have a fire of my own to think about now. I pull my boots up, and throw my rubber coat over my shoulder. Vinny holds
an end up as I slip my arm into it.

There is a squad car waiting for us at the corner of Fox Street. As we near the corner the cops drive slowly down the block,
siren wailing. The crowd in the street makes room for us to pass. There is fire playing out of the windows of the first, second,
and third floors, and we can feel the intense heat as we pull in front of the building. A small crowd of teenagers is gathered
across from the burning tenement singing, “Bum, baby, burn! Burn, baby, bum!”

“I’d like to take a few of them in with us,” Willy Knipps says as he takes the nozzle, and drops a length of hose from the
pumper. “I’d burn baby them.”

“It’s all a big joke to ’em, Willy,” Vinny says, pulling the hose.

“Some joke.”

“Listen Willy,” I say, “we’re going to be here for the rest of the day. Why don’t you let me take the nob in a little way,
and you go get a mask.”

“It’s all right, Den. I can do it.”

“C’mon, Willy,” I say forcefully, making a grab for the nozzle. Willy is a very proud man, and I know that he doesn’t want
to give the nozzle up. “What the hell do you want to kill yourself for,” I ask. “It’s only an abandoned building.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he says resignedly, loosening his grip on the nob. Valenzio has driven the rig to the other side of
the street, and has begun to hook up to the hydrant as Willy runs to the mask bin. Kelsey is helping Valenzio with the big
hydrant connection, and we get water in a matter of seconds.

“Give it a good dash from the street first,” Lieutenant Welch says, and I direct the nozzle toward the first floor window;
250 gallons per minute hits the flaming room, and the fire darkens quickly.

We go into the vestibule, and over the wet garbage. It doesn’t smell so much now, but it is ugly and soggy—a pyramid of waste
and decay. We go up five steps, and the fire meets us at a front door of the first floor. Lieutenant Welch is saying that
the Chief will have to transmit a second alarm on arrival. The truckies of Ladder 712 pass by into a smoky apartment on my
left, searching for fire extension, and the men of Engine 94 start to go up the stairs to the second floor with a line. The
fire hisses and crackles before me, and Benny and Vinny are behind me relieving the back pressure of the surging water. Lieutenant
Welch says that we can move in, but slowly. I keep the nozzle directed at the ceiling, and I’m making circular motions with
my arms as Benny and Vinny hump the hose in. Suddenly, a heavy piece of plaster falls, and my helmet is knocked from my head.
I feel a long, cutting pain across the back of my neck. The melted paint is dripping from the ceiling. I let out a small yell,
and Lieutenant Welch quickly grabs the nob. Benny Carroll moves up. “What’s the matter?” they both ask.

“I got burned on the neck.”

“Back out,” Lieutenant Welch says.

“No, I can make it. Just look for my helmet on the floor.” Burns are funny things. After the initial pain, they stop hurting
until a few days afterward. I really feel I can make it in a little more, but Benny climbs alongside of me and takes the nozzle.
Vinny moves up, and I climb over him toward the hall door. My face feels flushed with the heat, and my nose is running over
my mouth. As I reach the vestibule door, the soggy Fox Street air wraps around my face, and I take a heavy, refreshing inhalation.
But I remember that I left my helmet in the fire. It cost me twenty-eight bucks, and I don’t want to lose it under fallen
plaster and lath.

Willy Knipps and Bill Kelsey, their masks donned, pass me. They are rushing into the fire, and don’t notice me behind them.
“Hey Willy,” I yell, “tell Carroll to look for my helmet.” Knipps turns, and seems surprised to see me in the hall, but he
says “O.K.” and enters the apartment on his knees. The smoke is banking down now, and rushing for the oxygen at the door.
I start to cough, and crouch low to get beneath it, but the smoke follows me down. What, I ask myself, am I doing here. I
return to the street, and sit on the fender of the derelict car—just where I sat when I saw Tina this morning. Firemen are
racing past me, either dragging hose or carrying hooks and halligan tools. The street is filled with hose—like arteries on
a highway map. Sirens are wailing the arrival of second alarm companies.

I put my gloves in the pocket of my rubber coat, and feel the back of my neck. The blisters have risen across the full length
of my neck, and I can feel the rough surface of the paint still sticking to the swollen skin. It doesn’t hurt at all, but
it will be tough moving my head for the next few weeks.

Benny and Vinny appear, dripping wet, in the doorway of the abandoned tenement. Benny has my helmet in his hand. There is
nothing for me to do now but wait for an ambulance to come.

E
VERY
fourth year or so the city’s Department of Personnel gives notice that the filing period for the fireman’s examination is
open. I read such a notice yesterday, and the ten years that have passed since I read the first one disappeared. I have been
a firefighter for over eight years, but I remember the day I filed for the exam as clearly as a king remembers his coronation,
or a cardinal his elevation.

It was a September day, much like this day, and the heat of summer was beginning to wane. The winter lay ahead, but I felt
that somehow the coming winter, and all the future winters of my life, would be less harsh once I became a firefighter. Yes,
I would be a firefighter, and for the first time in my life I saw the brightness of stability and security.

There were no flowering trees to see as I walked the seven concrete blocks from the tenement I called home to the Lexington
Avenue subway. But, as I passed the firehouse on East Fifty-first Street I felt the excitement a poet might feel upon viewing
an acre of exploding crocus. The doors were open, and the apparatus stood poised and ready for the charge. There was a chromed
numeral attached to the front grill of the pumper, but as I looked at the number I saw instead William Carlos Williams' “figure
5 in gold.” I was ecstatic that I would soon be a part of the gong clangs and siren howls. I would play to the cheers of excited
hordes, climbing ladders, pulling hose, and saving children—always saying children—from the waltz of the hot-masked devil.
I paused and fed the fires of my ego. I would be a firefighter, part of this great red whirl. Tearful mothers would embrace
me, editorial writers would extol me in heroic phrases, and mayors would pin medals and ribbons to my breast.

As I stood there I wished that an alarm would rock the firehouse, and men would slide, fly, down the flashy, gleaming poles,
jump into their folded-down hip boots, and amid great excitement be off in answer to a call of distress. And as the pumper
careened up the street, the men swinging gallantly from the back step straps would hear me yell to them that I too possessed
their courage, and would soon join them.

But the firehouse was silent, the bells did not clang, the sirens did not wail. I was only slightly disappointed, for I realized
it was a healthy silence. False alarms were rare in those days, and people were safe when the bells were still. I took the
subway to the Personnel Department, down near City Hall, and I filed for the exam—the first step, the most important step
toward becoming one of “New York’s Bravest.”

Now, so many years later, whatever romantic visions I had about being a firefighter have faded. I have climbed too many ladders,
and crawled down too many grimy hallways to feel that my profession is at all glamorous. I have watched friends die, and I
have carried death in my hands. There is no excitement in that, no glamor.