Report from Engine Co. 82 (5 page)

The Chief was sitting behind me, and he walks past with a paper napkin to his lips, saying, “It never fails, never fails.”
I once kept a running account of how many meals I could eat in the firehouse without interruption. It went for three and a
half months, and in that time I never ate one uninterrupted meal.

I am eating now as fast as I can, but the bells come in. At least I have finished half—enough to satisfy me anyway. The housewatchman
yells, “Two, Seven, Nine, Three, Boston and 169. Get out 82 and 31.” Forty seconds later we are racing up 169th Street, past
Stebbins Avenue, past Prospect Avenue, past Union Avenue. Benny Carroll leans to the side of the apparatus and looks up the
street. He looks at us now—me and the other men working tonight: Vinny Royce, Ed Montaign, and Carmine Belli. We are huddled
on the back step of the fire engine, gripping the crossbar. He says, “Looks like this is our night for accidents. There’s
a guy up there just knocked down the traffic signal.”

The pumper stops in the middle of Boston Road, a broad, main thoroughfare in the Bronx. There was once a traffic stanchion
standing in the middle of the road. It is now laying flat on the ground, partly covered by a new Continental. The car evidently
climbed five feet up the pole before the pole came crashing down.

There are six people in the car. Four are unconscious, and one, a woman, is dazed, and muttering incoherently. The driver
has the steering post through his chest and looks dead.

Herbert and McCartty come with Ladder 31’s first-aid box. They begin unraveling bandages and applying them to head wounds.
The two other women begin to come to, and one starts screaming, “Rufus, Rufus, Rufus.” She is hysterical, and Herbert and
O’Mann lift her out of the car and lay her on the ground. The conscious woman gets out of the car and sits down next to her.
The third woman is moaning, and bleeding badly from the mouth. All her front teeth have been knocked out. I climb into the
back seat and sit next to her. I put my arm around her, and her head falls onto my shoulder. I begin to clean her with a gauze
sponge.

A lanky youth, about nineteen or twenty, leans in the car, with his hands on the floor. “What do you want?” I ask.

“It’s okay,” he replies. “I’m the man, man.”

“Well you go be the man somewhere else,” I tell him.

There is a crowd around the car, and people keep poking their heads in the rear. I keep telling them to keep back, until Carmine
comes over and stands guard by the door.

Chief Niebrock responds from the other alarm—it was an MFA (malicious false alarm). He holds his portable lamp close to the
driver. “Better take him out,” he says to Ken Lierly, Ladder 31’s lieutenant.

The man is obviously the worst off of the six, and the only way to give first aid is to remove him from the car. He is a heavy
man, and it takes four firemen to lift him. He may be dead, but only a doctor can say that for sure, so Bill Finch, the Chiefs
aide, applies the resuscitator to him. The other two men in the front seat have hit the windshield, and their foreheads are
wide open. McCartty and Herbert have more room to work on them now.

Two police cars are at the scene, one from the Forty-first Precinct, and the other from the Forty-eighth. The boundary between
the two precincts is Boston Road, and the car has crashed dead in the middle of it. There is some disagreement as to which
car wiU take the accident. All those forms and reports that have to be filled out means one of the cars will be a loser, and
the other a winner. They finally decide. The two men in the car from the Forty-first will take it, and the other car drives
off.

After twenty-five minutes or so, two ambulances arrive. The men are quickly stretchered and driven away. The two seriously
hurt women are put in the other ambulance. The third woman is walking around the car crying, “Has anybody seen my pocketbook?
Please give it back. You can have the money. I need my keys and my cards. Please, oh God, please, PLEASE give me back my pocketbook!”

The crowd looks wonderingly at her, and the cops and the firemen search in, under, and around the car. A cop goes back to
the ambulance, and returns saying that the other two women don’t have their pocketbooks either. The crying woman falls to
the ground amid broken glass and drying blood. “I am not leaving until I have my pocketbook!” she screams. Herbert and I gently
lift her to her feet, and she becomes passive. We lead her to the ambulance, and sit her in the corner seat. The yearning
cries, “Rufus, Rufus!” will occupy her mind until they reach the hospital.

We are about to return to the firehouse, but I ask Bill to drive past the squad car, where the two cops are recording the
information in their logbooks. “Hey, Officer,” 1 yell. “Which one was Rufus?”

“The driver,” he replied.

Bill directs the pumper toward the firehouse, stopping for the red lights along the way. We are about to turn onto Intervale
Avenue when the apparatus begins to go faster, and the siren begins to penetrate the air. The Captain has received an alarm
over the department radio.

We turn down Hoe Avenue. There is a small crowd of about thirty people waving to us. Bill stops the pumper next to the crowd,
and as we push through them Benny Carroll says, to no one in particular, “Looks like an O.D.”

There is a boy, about fifteen years old, lying on the hood of a car. His eyes are closed and his arms spread out, like he
was crucified on the ’69 Oldsmobile. The car is white, and the boy’s black face seems darker against the solid white background.

I get to him first, and as I check his arms, I can hear Captain Albergray asking “Does anybody know him?” There is no reply
from the crowd. The boy’s friends are probably there, but if they are, they are high, and know they can’t get involved.

The boy’s wrists and forearms are covered with holes, and round, purple scars. I raise his eyelids and see that his eyes haven’t
rolled back yet. They stare straight out as if belonging to a catatonic.

“Someone go get some ice for us!” Benny yells to the crowd. A man turns to a woman, talks to her in Spanish, and she runs
into one of the tenements.

The boy is breathing, but his breath is dangerously slow. An overdose of heroin slows up the system until everything stops
completely. We lift the boy up and begin to slap his face and shake him. He isn’t conscious enough to walk around. If this
boy lives it will be because his blood begins to circulate normally again.

The woman returns from her apartment with a small pot filled with ice. Benny takes it and thanks her. He puts a half dozen
cubes into his handkerchief, and knots the top. “Pull his drawers down, Dennis,” he says to me.

Ladder 31 and the Chief have pulled into the block now. Billy-o comes over with a blanket, and he and Vinny Royce lift the
boy up as I pull his dungarees and shorts to his knees. Carmine Belli has the blanket, and shoves it under him. Benny takes
the ice pack and places it under the scrotum. He covers his arm and the boy’s legs with the blanket ends.

The crowd looks on with interest. There is no yelling or pushing, only the fast syllables of conversational Spanish. A man
once told me that he was told by an immigration officer in Puerto Rico to call the Fire Department if he ever needed emergency
help in New York City. The people in the South Bronx know that when the corner alarm box is pulled the firemen always come.
If you pick up a telephone receiver in this town you may, or may not, get a dial tone. If you get on a subway you may, or
may not, get stuck in a tunnel for an hour. The wall socket in your apartment may, or may not, contain electricity. The city’s
air may, or may not, be killing you. The only real sure thing in this town is that the firemen come when you pull the handle
on that red box.

Billy-o is rapidly squeezing the boy’s cheeks. Bill Finch has the resuscitator turned to the inhalator position, and puts
the face piece an inch from the boy’s mouth. The boy finally begins to moan and move slightly. The crisis is over for him,
at least until the next time he squats in a vacant building, wraps a belt around his arm, and puts a match under a bottle
cap filled with white powder.

“Put in another call for an ambulance,” Chief Niebrock says to Captain Albergray. It is now near 11:30
P.M.,
and I make a mental note to pick up a container of milk and a piece of cake on the way back to the firehouse. I have lost
any hope of being satisfied with dried-out Irish football.

We have been here a half hour when the ambulance arrives. We are able now to walk the boy to the ambulance, although he still
cannot support his own weight. The nurse in the ambulance looks at me and says, “What a night!” I know what she means.

Some nights our job has little to do with fire. Since the O.D. case on Hoe Avenue, we have responded to eleven alarms. One
was a water leak—a guy’s bathtub overflowed at four in the morning. Another was a fallen street wire, which required the emergency
crew of Con Edison. And the other nine were false alarms—one each hour from midnight to eight.

It is a little after 8:00
A.M.
now, and I am sitting in the kitchen having coffee and a roll. The men working the day tour begin to arrive, but I’m too
tired to say much more than “Good morning.” Instead of driving the sixty miles to where I live, I think that I’ll take the
subway to my mother’s apartment in Manhattan. At least there I’ll be able to get six solid hours of sleep in. I’ll have to
get up at four, because I’m due in again tonight at six.

I
can hear a vague voice calling, “Dennis, Dennis.” I don’t want to get up, but I realize I have no choice. I was dreaming,
but I can’t remember what about. It must have been pleasant though, because I feel relaxed, relieved. “Dennis, Dennis,” my
mother calls. Her words sound apprehensive. They lack conviction, like she doesn’t want to say them, but knows she has to.
“Dennis, Dennis,” the words soak through my body, and I make an effort to rise. Then the words suddenly change in my mind,
and I am hearing “Rufus, Rufus,” and I rest my head back again. I wonder what that woman is doing now. Before I left work
this morning, I heard that Rufus was D.O.A. at the hospital, and now all I can think of is the yearning, pleading sound of
his wife’s voice.

“Dennis.”

“All right, Mom. All right. I’m up.”

“Do you want some bacon and eggs?”

I look at the clock on the kitchen wall. “No thanks, I don’t have time.” It is four-thirty. I like to be in the firehouse
before five, but now I won’t make it there until five-thirty.

“How about a cup of coffee, or tea?”

“Yes. Tea. Fine. Thanks.” I get up from the living room couch, and look for my socks on the floor. I get on my knees and look
under the couch. There they are. Now my pants. I left them on the chair, but I don’t see them. “Hey Mom, did you see my pants?”

“I put them on a hanger. Somebody has to take care of your clothes. They’re hanging in my closet.”

O.K. Now where is my shirt? “Hey Mom, did you see what happened to my shirt?”

“It’s here in the kitchen. I just pressed it.”

I walk to the kitchen and kiss her cheek. “Thanks. It looks fine.” I sit at the table and spoon sugar into my tea. My mother
puts two pieces of toast in front of me and goes to the refrigerator for a jar of jelly.

“You know, Mom,” I say, “you should have been named Goldberg. I’m surprised you don’t give me some chicken soup.”

“Well,” she says, “I was born a Hogan, and I married a Smith, but a name doesn’t make any difference to a mother. A mother
is supposed to mother, and that means to take care of her children.” She sits down opposite me. “And while I’m at it,” she
continues, “maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but you really aren’t getting enough rest lately. I don’t know why you don’t transfer
out of that place you work in. You’ve been there over five years now, in that rotten neighborhood, with all those fires. Can’t
you get a job working in the Mayor’s office or something?”

My mother thinks that having a city job should entitle me to have a say in its government, that the job should be a sinecure,
and I’m not supposed to do any actual work. Many people in New York, like my mother, remember the old Democratic clubs, and
the dying days of Tammany Hall patronage, but they never realized that the system died.

“Listen Mom,” I say as forcefully as possible, “there are a lot of hard-working people in that rotten neighborhood, but because
they are black, or because they speak Spanish, they can’t live in midtown Manhattan, even in a tenement like this. Even the
people who could work, but don’t, are entitled to city services. That’s what I do. I provide a service—an emergency service.
And that’s what I like to do for a living. When the day comes that I’m not happy doing what I do, then I’ll transfer, but
until then I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I guess you know best, but I still think you’re crazy to work there when you could go downtown
and work in a nice clean office.”

“Thanks for the tea, Mom. I’ll call you in a few days.” 1 learned a long time ago that one explanation a day, regarding anything,
is enough. If I had to explain everything I did, I’d never get a chance to do anything.