Report from Engine Co. 82 (28 page)

Eight thousand men competed that Saturday morning in schools throughout the five boroughs of the city. The list would be promulgated
a few months thereafter, and two thousand would be eligible for Department jobs over the next four years. The firemen’s test
is traditionally the most difficult of all the tests for the uniformed services. More men apply to become firemen than apply
for any of the other services, and because there are fewer job openings the examiner makes the test harder to pass, ensuring
that the city will get the cream of New York’s employable youth. The men who failed the test that day, or who did not pass
with a grade high enough to be within the two thousand selected, would seek other city jobs—the Police Department, the Transit
Police, the Housing Police, the Sanitation Department. I was lucky. I passed. But I found a ten-dollar tag on my car. I decided
it was a small price to pay.

I was investigated thoroughly, and my moral character was ascertained. A firefighter goes, in the course of his work, into
banks, jewelry stores, and people’s homes—an applicant with a criminal record is not considered for obvious reasons. I took
a strenuous physical examination in which we ran obstacle courses, climbed over walls ten feet high, lifted weights of no
pounds and more—the more weight one pressed the higher the mark—broad-jumped a minimum of six feet, and did sit-ups while
holding a minimum of forty pounds behind the neck. The physical examination was also competitive, and the grade was averaged
with the written mark to give the applicant a final score.

Then there was the medical examination. Flat feet, missing digits, being less than 5 feet 7 inches in height, having less
than 20/20 vision or less than perfect hearing, an even slightly imperfect cardiogram were all automatic disqualifies. I passed
again, and two years later, in 1963, I was appointed to the rank of Fireman in the New York City Fire Department. I was engaged
to be married then, and in my first year of college.

The swearing-in ceremony was brief, and after a few gratuitous and banal remarks about courage and dedication by city officials
I was given the three-inch chrome maltese cross that is the badge of a firefighter. Badge number 11389, NYFD. It was a symbol
of security and importance to me—and it saved me the fare each time I rode a city subway or bus. It would act in place of
a ticket in many of New York’s movie houses—it is always nice to have a firefighter in the house, a kind of cheap insurance
policy—and it represented a ten percent discount in many of the city’s shops and department stores. If stopped by a policeman
after running a red light, or speeding, it usually meant that the cop would not write the ticket. It was a free meal in many
of the best restaurants, as long as the meal was eaten in the kitchen, and a room at half price in the hotels if there was
a girl friend.

Merchants were good to firefighters then, because they expected firefighters to be good in return as they made their annual,
semi-annual, or monthly fire inspections. But, the system has changed now. Firefighters are perceiving themselves as professionals,
and they perform inspectional duties with the diligence of a woodpecker pecking at a soft tree. Violation orders are written
if the proper number of portable fire extinguishers arc not hung on the walls of factories, and summonses are issued for locked
exit doors. There is no bargaining for future discounts, and there are no promises of free merchandise. Firefighters know
that a conscientious inspection can mean the difference between life and death. Souls are not sold anymore for a ten percent
discount, or a two-dollar movie ticket, or a ten-dollar dress for the wife.

I was inspecting a restaurant recently. It was housed on the ground floor of an old two-story wooden frame building. The place
was clean, but I noticed that the ducts over the oven were coated thickly with grease. I began to write a violation order.
The owner folded a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the table. He didn’t offer it to me, he just let it sit there beside
the salt and pepper. “Listen, I’ll get the ducts cleaned, but I don’t want a record of the violation,” he said. A double-sawbuck
is a night out for my wife and me, or new shoes for the kids, or a hundred other things we need that twenty dollars can buy.
I earn $10,950 a year, but it doesn’t go far. I pay my bills, and that’s all. I have no savings account, no investments in
stocks or bonds. The only investments I’ve ever made were in a house and a car. If my boys want to go to college, I have to
pray that they will be smart enough to pass scholarship exams. Twenty dollars is a lot of money to me. But it doesn’t take
much heat to ignite grease, and when it ignites in the confines of a duct it spreads fast. The duct metal radiates the heat
until the building is on fire. The people living above the restaurant would be burned out, if not burned to death. And even
if there were no people living above, there is an insurance company that would have to cover the building loss. I handed him
the violation, and said, “We’ll be back in two weeks.” Of course, I could have reported him for an attempted bribe, but I
understood that he was operating in an old system. I did not want to jail the man, but teach him.

The swearing-in ceremony was held on a Saturday, and we were ordered to report to the department’s training school the following
Monday. It was a humid June morning as I rode the bus from Manhattan to Queens. The iron expansion plates of the Queensborough
Bridge sang as the bus wheels rolled over them. It was a happy day for me—the beginning of a new, stable, secure life. From
the bridge I could see the training tower of the Fire School rising high on Welfare Island, a two-mile strip of land in the
middle of the East River, between Queens and Manhattan. I took another bus from Queens to Welfare Island, and there my career
as a firefighter was bom.

We began each morning, Monday to Friday for eight weeks, with forty-five minutes of calisthenics, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups,
jumping, and running. Then, there were three hours of classroom work—learning building codes, inspection procedures, fire
laws, first aid, building construction, the science of fire, the science of fire control, and about building fires, car fires,
ship fires, chemical fires, explosions, implosions, the telegraph alarm system, bell-signal codes, community relations, arson
investigation, and a hundred other subjects as diffuse and difficult as any college course I’ve taken.

Then there was a forty-five minute lunch break, and a hundred and fifty probationary firefighters would unwrap the sandwiches
made for them by wives or mothers, or bought earlier in a hero shop, and talk about the job, and how nice it would be to have
a beer with the sandwiches. But, it was against regulations to leave the island at any time during the work day, so all managed
to satisfy themselves with the only available liquid—water or canned soda. We ate quickly, and rested in the sun for the remainder
of the period, talking excitedly about our futures, about studying for the lieutenant’s exam, about our families, and girl
friends, and relentlessly projecting our coming assignments. Would we go to a firehouse in a ghetto area, or a slow house
in Queens or the upper Bronx? A truck or an engine company?

In the afternoons we had three hours of field work: stretching hose up stairs, up fire escapes, up aerial ladders; crawling
past fifty-gallon drums filled with burning wood scraps in the heat room, crawling through controlled smoke conditions in
the abandoned buildings of the old State Hospital on the island, breathing the first whiffs of the poison that we would soon
get to know as a doctor knows death; chopping through floors and doors with eight-pound axes, forcing locks with halligan
tools, ripping down ceilings with six-foot hooks, connecting pumpers with water hydrants; lifting, carrying, and placing twenty-five-foot
ladders, lowering ourselves down the outside of a five-story building with a rope and a life-belt, being lowered by others
from the roof, stopping to pick up a simulated victim at a windowsill—the victim invariably a firefighter bigger than the
rescuer—jumping three stories into a life net, aiming for the red bulls-eye in the middle of the white canvas; carrying victims
in stretchers, in chairs, over the back, making inch-by-inch searches in smoky rooms looking for a dummy well hidden by a
diabolical instructor, and when returning without it being ordered to crawl back and find it; bandaging foreheads, splinting
legs, climbing from floor to floor up the outside of a building with a twelve-foot scaling ladder—but safe, always safe, with
a net below. We learned everything about being in a fire, the heat, the smoke, the quick exhaustion of strength—everything
but what it is like to be in the uncontrolled madness of a real fire. We would soon learn that.

The awaited graduation day came, and our Department Orders. Like soldiers huddled for mail call in a World War II movie, we
grouped expectantly as a Lieutenant read the assignments. “Dennis E. Smith, Engine Company 292.” I was happy with that. Engine
292 was in Queens and, since I would marry within the month, I would be moving to Queens anyway, so it would be convenient
traveling. Engine 292 responded to about a hundred alarms a month. I liked that. Not too fast. Not too slow. I intended to
return to college, and I didn’t want to be overworked. I needed time to read, and on my days off I needed to be rested to
attend classes at New York University. Yet, Engine 292 was busy enough so that I had a piece of the action. I was being paid
to be a firefighter, not a student.

Three years passed quickly in Queens. My wife bore two sons, and I had managed to get through my sophomore year in college.
But I still had a long way to go for a degree. A thousand novels lay before me, and the hours of my life were carefully rationed:
so many hours in a quiet Queens firehouse, so many hours in school, and just so many hours at home with my family. It became
a terrible, boring grind. Boring because no one thing demanded the total commitment of my mind and body. I was doing something
worthwhile in that Queens fire-house, but I felt I just wasn’t doing enough. I needed a change in the tempo of my life. My
whole future seemed bounded by an incarcerating triangle. I loved my wife and family and I realized they represented the one
immovable angle of my dilemma. I didn’t want to quit school, because the diploma had become important to me. The choice left
was to either quit being a fireman, or transfer to another firehouse. Since I had no other means of supporting my family,
and since I liked being a firefighter, I decided to transfer to another firehouse, another company.

I did not know where to go. I had friends working in Brooklyn companies and Manhattan companies, but Brooklyn was difficult
to get to from my apartment in Queens, and there was no place to park a car in Manhattan—I dislike riding the subway.

I picked up a copy of the Fire Department’s annual report, and turned to the statistics page. The company listed first under
“
RUNS
” and “
WORKERS
” was Engine Company 82. That’s where I’ll go, I said to myself. If you’re going to make a change, make a full change. Go
to the busiest engine company in the city, the one at the top of the list. It was a decision I’ll never regret. That was 1966.

I am in the bunkroom of the firehouse now, lying on a bed, absentmindedlv counting the nails in the ceiling, and wondering
why I’m here. There are conversations floating through the air around me, but I try not to hear them. Dust has settled on
the ceiling, and because the paint is heavier over the plastered nailheads the dust has not stuck to the surfaces there. I
can count the series of round, lighter marks. There are 39 marks to a row, twelve inches apart. I’m tired. I should be home
like the rest of America on this hot Sunday night, watching
Lassie,
and the
Ed Sullivan Show,
or reading the Sunday supplement.

Over five years have passed since I transferred to Engine 82. Five summers with the length of five long winters. What would
Wordsworth have said of the South Bronx? He wouldn’t write of hedgerows hardly hedgerows, but of people hardly people. I worked
last night, and I’m tired. We had no fire of consequence, only burning rubbish and false alarms. False alarms at five in the
morning, at six, and at seven. A rubbish fire at eight. It doesn’t make any sense. The people are killing me, and I don’t
know why. Five summers with the length of five long winters, and I’m tired. I went to my mother’s house this morning, to rest,
but I didn’t get much sleep. I had breakfast, and my mother asked, again, “What do you keep knocking yourself out for?” I
didn’t sleep well, because I tried to answer her. Nothing I said made sense.
Somebody has to do it!
Perhaps I need to sit in the North Bronx and write.… Lines Written a Few Miles from Charlotte Street. Get away, and think
about it. It does no good thinking about what I’m a part of. We went in and out of the firehouse thirty-two times last night,
rubbish and false alarms, and I can’t explain it. People in the South Bronx—many of them—are unhappy. I understand that. They
pull false alarms. I understand that. But is there no end? Five years. And I’m tired.

It is six o’clock. The evening is still bright, and I will work through the night, watching for the morning horizon all the
while. In fifteen hours it will be 9:00
A.M.,
Monday, and I will be relieved of duty. Then I’m off for three days, but I will sleep through the first. The first day after
a set of night tours is not really a day off. On Tuesday I will relax, read Steinbeck or Mailer again, and practice the guitar.
I will play the bagpipes, and when the neighborhood children hear the piercing tones of the pipes they will gather on my back
porch entranced by the foreign music—thirty little eyes, shy, and unsure of their welcome. They will squirm playfully, and
poke the small bodies around them, watching carefully for signs of my disapproval. I will pack the pipes away, and and ask
them if they would like to learn a folk song or two. Half, perhaps, will run away, afraid, or simply not interested in a more
personal interaction. And I will sing with the remainder until they, or I, get bored. The night will come, and my biology
will begin to function normally again after having been imbalanced by my work schedule. I will hold my wife, and love her
furiously, knowing that she has been denied because she married a firefighter.