Report from Engine Co. 82 (9 page)

Of course, things change, and people change from day to day. The day may come to gather family and possessions and move on.
It’s my job as head of the family to watch for changes that will alter our relation to our society. Right now we feel secure.
Tomorrow, perhaps, we may have to move on. It’s not like running away, but rather like keeping one step ahead of insanity.

New York City is simply too big. I have lived in it too long to hate it, but I know it too well to love it. I am still a part
of it, yet I feel removed, like a broken jockey who grooms horses. 1 earn my living caring for it, but I feel helpless because
I know that I can’t train it, or ride it, or make it win. New York’s leaders are aristocrats who have never labored, or political
hacks who have conned and schemed their way up. I have never been convinced that aristocrats really care about the problems
of the poor or the ignorant, about the vermin-infested, broken-walled coops that people are forced to huddle in and call home.
Rather, they have developed through their private educational system and their Parke-Bernet preview-showing kind of society
a patronizing benevolence that sounds good in campaign speeches, and looks good in print. But they never knew there was a
drug problem in this country until their own children began to get arrested. They find easy moral arguments against the war
in Asia because it isn’t their own who are coming home in rectangular boxes, and they don’t have to rationalize the significance
of death.

I have more respect for the old-style machine politicians. They, at least, had the perception to recognize an ugly system,
and to learn how to operate within it. They paid their dues in city government. They didn’t buy it. They learned how to fold
their napkins after dinner, push their way to the front when photographers were shooting, and say the right thing when asked
questions. They never ordered cops around, but spoke quietly to the Captain in a side room. They understood their power, and
utilized it without making waves. In their own way they got things done.

But things aren’t getting done in New York City anymore. The city is dying. City tax dollars flow to Albany and little is
returned. The finances of the richest city in the world are controlled by men who represent farmers in the State Legislature.
It makes no sense.

The last real hope for New York City was when Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ran for Mayor and City Council President. Mailer
wanted to make the city the fifty-first state, and divide the city into a lot of small towns, any one of which would have
had a population larger than the state of Vermont. And Breslin is one of the few human beings in this world who realizes that
what the guys are saying at the comer table of the steamfitters ball has some validity. But both men were defeated in the
not-too-close race. The wheel of democracy turns slowly, and when it revolves again to the next mayoral election I won’t have
my say. I’m going to miss that. Like the jockey, I have an affection for the horse, and I am just a little bitter because
I don’t have a part of the action.

Yes, New York City is too big for me—too big for anyone really. There are too many people, too many schools, too many officials,
too many people in jails, too many Cadillacs, too many people on welfare, too many banks, too many abandoned buildings, too
much misery. But we would still be there—the five of us in a three-room walk-up—were it not for an old lady who forgot to
make out a will.

I am sitting in my kitchen now, waiting for my wife Pat to finish cooking a mushroom omelette. She is standing with her back
to me, and her whole body is vibrating as she beats the eggs in the frying pan. It is three o’clock. The children are outdoors.
I wish I had time to hold her softly, and tell her I love her, and more. But I have to go to work, and only have time for
an omelette and tea.

I have been on medical leave for the last two weeks. My throat doesn’t hurt anymore, and I’m anxious to return to the firehouse.
It’s boring just resting. A man has to do things with his hands and body. I have read a lot of magazines and newspapers during
the past weeks, but it is not enough to exercise the mind. Like a drunk without a drink, I feel a little “mokus,” the need
to get back to what I like. Fires are burning in the South Bronx, and I get paid to fight them.

Pat places the steaming omelette in front of me. She leans toward me. Her lips touch mine, and she begins the game we call
love metaphor. I can feel her soft, moist lips moving as she asks, “How much?”

“This much,” I say, extending my arms as far as possible.

She looks both ways to make sure both hands are open, and the fingertips stretched. “In money?” she asks.

“The Pope’s treasury.”

“In minerals?”

“A flawless diamond.”

“In animals?”

“Big as an elephant.”

“In mountains?”

“Mount Everest, of course, and Rolls Royce in cars, and New York in cities, and
On the Waterfront
in movies.”

I wrap my arms around her and end the game. She laughs lightly, as she laughed eight years ago when I first held her in my
arms. I think how little our relationship has changed in all those years. Our feelings for each other have grown stronger,
and we’ve learned to adapt to each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but we still play the same games, laugh the same laughs,
and kiss the same kisses.

Her slender frame wriggles in my arms, and finally she escapes.

“Your eggs will get cold,” she says.

“I always leave hungry when I leave without you, baby,” I say.

“Well, eat your eggs, and at least your stomach won’t bother you,” she retorts.

God, is there anything in this world that time doesn’t cheat you out of at least once? How many times have I wished for another
hour, or even thirty minutes? And how many fires have I fought in freezing cold or exhausting heat, wishing each minute that
another hour would pass?

“It’s three-fifteen,” Pat says. “You’d better hurry if you want to get to the firehouse by five.”

She pours a cup of tea, and sits across from me. She looks at me with her sharp, sensitive eyes, and bites the inside of her
lower lip, a habit she has when there is something on her mind. Her gaze is fixed on me as I start the omelette, but she says
nothing. I continue to eat, and still nothing. Finally, I finish the eggs, and put some sugar in my tea. As I stir the tea,
I say, “All right, Patricia Ann, stop biting the lip and let it out.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

Every time there is something important for us to talk about, Pat insists that it is not really important.

“You know what I mean,” I answer. “When you look at me, and bite your lip, there is always something to say.”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, really. I was just wondering if you feel all right, if you should really go
back to work.”

“I feel fine, sweetheart. Cross my heart. If I had known you were concerned I would have brought you a note from the doctor.”

“Don’t be funny, Dennis. I was talking to your mother the other day…”

“So that’s it!” I interrupt her.

“Yes that’s it, and she’s right! How many years are you going to work in the South Bronx? I never worried half as much when
you used to work in Queens, at least then you came home to me with some life in your body. But, now you come home dead tired—if
you come home at all, if you’re not tied up at some hospital getting stitched, or X-rayed, or burns patched. Even in Viet
Nam they send the soldiers home after a year, but you’ve been in Engine 82 over five years.”

I can see that she is genuinely upset, and her concern surprises me because she has never mentioned it before. Every fireman’s
wife worries about her husband, but up until now Pat had her anxiety under control. Her face begins to contract, and it looks
as though years of suppressed worry are about to surface. I have to reassure her, comfort her. I realize, however, that there
is little I can say to her that will calm her fears. How many years? I have never thought about it. Is it time to transfer
to a clean-upper-middle-class-white neighborhood, where the only false alarms transmitted are those caused by European visitors
mistaking the alarm box for a mail box? Where there are no abandoned buildings or abandoned cars to ignite? How many years?
Am I working in the South Bronx because of some abstract moral commitment, a belief that poor people must have professional
protection from fire and that it’s my obligation to protect them? Like crime and disease, fire victimizes the poor most. Am
I crusading? Or am I just doing a job?

I reach over the table and grasp her hand. “Listen baby,” I say, “I wish you wouldn’t worry about it. I’ve told you before
that if a fireman is going to get hurt, or even killed, it happens just as easily, just as quickly, in Queens or Staten Island
as it does in the South Bronx. Okay, so I come home tired once in a while, but I’m still a young guy. I can take it. Have
you ever heard me complain about the work?”

“That’s not what I mean, Dennis,” she says imploringly. “I just don’t know why you want to work down there when you could
get a job at the local high school, five minutes away from home. You could work from nine until three. You would be home for
Christmas for a change, and you could have the whole summer off every year. Not only that, but you would make more money teaching.
I don’t even care that much about the money. It just doesn’t make any sense to me!”

I feel defenseless, stripped naked, because I realize I don’t know how to justify my job except to say that I like doing it.
I put my empty tea cup into the sink, walk to where Pat is sitting, and hold her pretty face between my hands. “Just think,
Pat,” I say in a near whisper, “in twelve short years I’ll be able to retire at half pay. I’ll only be forty-two years old,
and we can move to a quiet academic town somewhere in the New England hills, to Ireland, back to New York City, or anywhere
we please. Life will be easy, relaxed. The children will be grown. We can travel or not travel, but at least we’ll have the
choice. Right now though, I like what I’m doing. I’m pleased as a worker and as a man. I have something to contribute.”

The telephone rings. It’s for me. Artie Merritt who lives ten miles below me wants a lift to work. His car broke down. It
is three-thirty, and time to leave for the firehouse. I kiss Pat goodbye. I can tell she is not happy with my explanation,
but the wisdom of her eyes prevails, and the question of working in Engine 82 is left floating in the air.

Brendan is off somewhere riding his bicycle, but the two younger boys come running from a neighbor’s yard where they have
been playing. Neither can ride a two-wheeler yet, and they stay close to the house, always ready to say hello or good-bye
to their father.

“Good-bye Dennis. Good-bye Sean. Say good-bye to Brendan for me.”

Both heads nod, and little hands blow kisses as I back down the drive. Pat is on the porch, her arms folded below her breast,
and her long hair blowing in the cold wind. She waves.

“Good-bye baby. Love ya.”

Artie Merritt is waiting for me at the bottom of a steep hill. He rents a house at the top of the hill because he says living
up there is one of the few ways a man can feel on top of the world. He lived until recently in a Greenwich Village apartment.
He moved when he realized that he could live on top of a hill for the same rent—away from traffic noise, crowded subways,
teenage beggars, urine-stenched hallways, and away from people walking aimlessly, hopelessly, on cracked sidewalks, guided
by the wide, unmoving, catatonic eyes of the chemically possessed.

Artie has been a fireman for over ten years. But he is different in many ways from other firemen. He has a beard, a master’s
degree in sociology, and a way of speaking that is hardly funny, but always convincing. His eyes are small, and glare out
above the full Brahms-like beard, following, studying reactions as he speaks. His voice is low-keyed, but each word is carefully
pronounced and fully thought out.

He used to work in another company in the South Bronx, but transferred to Ladder 31 because he was having some trouble with
a Battalion Chief who didn’t like the idea of a fireman having a full beard. Rather than put up with the Chief’s subtle harassments—you
don’t fight a Battalion Chief—Artie asked to be transferred to Ladder 31. His differences don’t bother the men on Intervale
Avenue. Artie is a tough firefighter, and that’s what counts.

Artie and I don’t speak much as we drive down the Palisades Parkway; he is reading a book of Malcolm X’s speeches, and I have
to focus my attention on driving. A light drizzle begins to fall. It’s a dismal day. It reminds me of a thousand afternoons
I spent standing on the stoop of a midtown tenement, wishing with friends that there were something to do. The sky would be
overcast, as it is now, and the buildings down the block would become vague images, quiet and lonely. Soon, the occupants
of my stoop would trudge off to their buildings for want of something to do, and I would sit on the wrought iron handrail
alone, not wanting to climb the stairs to the still lonelier confines of a four-room railroad flat. Cars would pass, and the
strange sound of tires riding over wet pavement would excite me. “Whisshh,” they would go. “WhisSSHHH.” Each sound taking
people places.

I listen now to the tires of my own foreign economy car. The sound is steady, “sshhh,” with no beginning and no ending, and
the “polop, polop” of the windshield wipers completes the monotony.

“It’s too bad,” Artie says, breaking into my thoughts.

“What’s too bad?” I ask with interest.

“That Malcolm was zapped,” he says, closing the book, and throwing it on the back seat. “You know,” he continues, “I bet our
times get named. Just like the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and the Great Awakening. Our life-time is going to be known
as the Great Zap. You know, historians will look back and say ‘It’s too bad about those people in the twentieth century. You
know. It could have been an age of peace and harmony, but they let their leaders get zapped.’”