19
Becoming an EMT has allowed me to do the impossible. I am thinking of how true this is as I am sitting behind the wheel of one of Georgetown’s fire trucks.
Bernice has decided that she has to get a 2Q driver’s license. This legally allows the operator to drive vehicles over 26,000 pounds, huge vehicles like fire trucks. Jimmy Mecozzi, a professional fireman in Stratford, Connecticut, and a longtime member of the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Department, is the instructor. Bernice has lured me into taking the class. The idea of driving a fire truck seems so silly to me, an ex–New Yorker who didn’t know how to drive a car until I was twenty-three, that I said, “Sure, why not,” in a moment of unbridled lunacy.
Bernice and I report to the parking lot of the local high school on a Sunday. The lot is empty, except for our few empty parked cars, and Jimmy Mecozzi and the big red fire engine. Bernice steps out of her Lexus and a smile immediately stretches my face. She is wearing shorts, her legs are trim and tanned, and on her head is a large straw hat covered with silk flowers.
We are not the only people who have signed up for the course. There are a number of young men from the fire department who also want to be trained. We are issued a yellow manual from the Connecticut Fire Academy. I thumb through it and the smile that started with Bernice’s flowered hat has now turned to outright laughter. I might as well have been given a manual for decoding a Martian spaceship. I recognize nothing at all familiar. There are diagrams of push rods and cam rollers, manual draining valves and slack adjusters. I see Jimmy Mecozzi looking at me as I laugh like a loon. His face lights up happily. I suspect he thinks I am digging the heavy-metalness of it all. Everyone at the firehouse loves Jimmy Mecozzi. The Mecozzis have been active members of the firehouse forever. Jimmy used to be a volunteer fireman and now is a professional. He is tall and handsome and has a disarming grin. He tells great stories about fighting fires in Bridgeport and Stratford. He always has a skin-crawling tale about finding a cadaver dead so long, its face fell off when it was moved, or zillions of rats leaping out from behind walls that the firemen chopped down. He brings in his fireman’s hat that has recently melted into a burned wad from a flashback fire. He shows it off to all the young firemen as a cautionary tale.
I explain to Jimmy why I am taking the 2Q class. It goes something like this: “If there were no firemen left on earth and the truck absolutely
had
to get to a fire, then I would drive it.”
“It’s good for everyone to know how to drive the apparatus,” he says. “You’ll do fine.”
We all stand around dwarfed by the huge shiny truck. It really is a gorgeous thing. I love the gold lettering on the side that says GEORGETOWN. We are going to do a walk-around. I wonder if this is like a walkabout, recalling a Crocodile Dundee movie that had Aborigines doing this on a regular basis in order to go into a mystical trance. I find there is nothing transcendental about walking around the fire truck. It reminds me of what you see people do when they buy a used car. You basically walk around tapping things and peeking at them from below. Jimmy tells us, “You will check the manual slack adjusters on the S cam brakes. Use gloves and pull hard on each slack adjuster that you can get to, check the brake drums and the linings; they must not have cracks longer than one-half the width of the friction area.”
I have been in 2Q class twenty minutes and I am already totally lost. I walk around the truck banging on things, pulling things, and squatting down under it to pretend to look at stuff. Jimmy finds all sorts of things in need of repair on the truck. He shows them to us, but nothing registers with me. I shake my head yes as if I get it. When I get tense I look at Bernice’s petunia-ridden hat, which cheers me up.
By the second hour of this first class the students are allowed to climb up into the cab and get the feel of what it is like behind the wheel. We hit the right switches and the ignition goes on. The steering wheel is huge and flat, not in an upright position like a car. Climbing up into the cab has taken effort, I am already breathing hard. Jimmy sits in the passenger seat. I am the driver. He has placed orange cones around the parking lot, and he expects that we will all drive forward slowly, and then around the obstacle course. With the ignition on, I grab the wheel in a death grip. This truck is huge. It weighs 45,000 pounds and is twenty-seven feet long. Jimmy Mecozzi puts his seat belt on, which I think is a mighty good idea. He coaches me to step on the gas pedal and make the truck move forward. My toe taps it so gently that nothing happens. I am exerting so little force I would not break a spiderweb. He keeps encouraging me, and finally I depress the petal enough so the truck moves. I instantly hit the brake, lurching us to a stop. “That’s good,” Jimmy says optimistically. “Now you see that the brakes work. Let’s go forward again.” After half an hour I have summoned up enough nerve to actually drive the truck, albeit very slowly, around the orange cones. I am probably going ten miles an hour but I feel like an unstoppable juggernaut. I am looking in both side mirrors and all I see is endless yards of truck behind me. “Now slow down and stop,” Jimmy says, and when I hit the brakes it feels like nothing is happening. The truck is so much heavier than a car that even going ten miles an hour, it seems to take forever to stop.
Over the next few weeks Bernice and I take our 2Q lessons together. She is a natural; in her shorts and sandals, with brightly painted toenails, she drives the truck forward, backward, and around the cones, stops smoothly, and climbs out of the cab with ease. I love taking the lessons but it is clear to me from the beginning that I have some sort of spatial dyslexia. When Jimmy says go right, I go left. I run over the orange cones. When I back up I come dangerously close to the brick wall of the high school. Over the roar of the engine I hear people on the ground yelling,
“Stop!”
Michael comes by the parking lot one Saturday morning with a camera and takes pictures of me and Bernice in front of the truck. I have a feeling I will not see the end of the 2Q class, so I want something for posterity.
Bernice and I arrange a special practice session with Jimmy Mecozzi late one afternoon. We are actually going to drive the fire truck on the road. Bernice goes first. She and Jimmy are gone at least half an hour. She has a triumphant look on her face when they return. The sun has gone down and it is now dark. I am absolutely terrified of driving the truck at night. I can’t see where I am going during the day, and now it is all shadows and darkness.
“Just relax,” Jimmy says as he sees my white knuckles around the wheel. I’m chewing my gum hard, because I need some saliva. With Jimmy’s encouragement, I slowly pull the truck out of the firehouse bay. I bite my lower lip as I see how close the side mirrors are to the garage door. “Okay now, when we get out on the road we are going to go right and turn right again on Route 57.” I creep slowly along the road, so slowly the speedometer hardly moves. “You can pick up the pace now,” Jimmy says. I gingerly press the gas pedal harder. I feel the truck pick up speed. I make a decent turn and we are going down Route 57, which at this hour is blessedly empty. I get the truck up to about twenty miles an hour, which feels superfast. I can feel a nice breeze blowing in the open windows of the truck. “Faster,” Jimmy says, and again I press the pedal closer to the floor. We are a few miles from the firehouse and I am now going about forty. The blood has rushed back into my hands as I have relaxed my grasp. “Turn here,” Jimmy says. I take my eyes off the road for a moment and look at him. He is really handsome. I can see why when his name is mentioned by the ladies of the firehouse it is followed by a sigh. We head down one road, and then another, I am taking the curves with authority. Cars pull over when I pass them. We reach the big senior citizen housing development in the process of being built in Georgetown. It is still under construction, and no one is around at night. “Park at the bottom of the driveway,” Jimmy instructs, and I manage to get in the right position. “Now,” he says with a big grin, “I want you to drive the truck backward up the driveway.”
I know this driveway; I have driven it during the day, forward, in my Subaru. It is serpentine and narrow. “You have to be kidding,” I say to him.
“You can do it,” he says, and I see a flicker in his eyes that explains to me why firemen are a breed apart from the rest of us. He has absolutely no fear. He sees no reason why I, who can’t tell right from left, shouldn’t back up a half-mile-long driveway with ruts on either side in the dark in an immense fire truck. I breathe in his courage. I relax my hands and look at the mirrors on each side of the truck. Everything is backward, everything looks closer or farther than it really is. I slip the gears into reverse and start to hit the gas pedal. I can hardly see the road and the ditches are obscured by shadows. I look at Jimmy, who looks calm and amused. “C’mon,” he says, “it’s easy.”
I have a choice. I can sit in the cab next to this handsome fireman and tell him the long sad story of my life, all the childhood abuse I have suffered, my recurring depressions, the strength of my Prozac prescription, all my fears and anxieties, or I can just do it. I choose the latter. I clear my mind of its racing thoughts; I exist only in this moment. I have no history at all. It is up to me to stay put or go forward (or in this case backward) and before I can overthink what to do and the hundred reasons why I can’t, I am doing it. Backing up the driveway at a fast clip, spinning the steering wheel, watching how I am able to keep the giant tires out of the ruts on either side of the unfinished driveway.
“Good job!!!” Jimmy says. I go at a quick pace down the driveway. I know my way back to the firehouse. Jimmy jumps out when we get there and guides me and the truck back into the bay.
“Thanks,” I say to him, as we close the bay door and head for our cars.
“That was good,” Jimmy says. I smile at him. I smile my big smile, which shows the crack on my front tooth at the gum line that I am self-conscious about. I smell sweaty, but that’s okay too. I keep smiling all the way home. I dream about the fire truck that night, I dream that I am at the wheel and that Jimmy Mecozzi and I are driving eighty miles an hour through the wheat fields of Nebraska. It is flat as a plate and we are the only vehicle on the road.
I wake up having never felt so purely happy. When the state instructor shows up a month later to give the 2Q test, Bernice passes. I do not show up for the test. I don’t know why I chose to stay home, but I think I felt that my ability to drive the fire truck that night was like a fairy tale; that in the bright plebeian light of day, the magic would be gone, and I would again not know my right from my left. I do not want to see my fairy coach turn into a pumpkin.
20
It has been more than two years since I became an EMT at Georgetown. I have been there long enough to have to recertify, so I must take refresher courses in everything I know, hit the books again, show instructors that I can use the defibrillator correctly, do CPR, insert an oral airway correctly. The recertification class is much more homey than the class I originally took in New Canaan. There are about eight of us, and we are all EMTs already, so we are treated with respect by paramedic Harry Downs, who teaches the class. It is fun. Our chief, Mike Heibeck, and our assistant chief, his brother Marty, are in the class, as is Charlie Pfhal, whom I have come to adore. It is hard for me to remember how scared I was of him when he first showed me the ambulance; now when we see each other we give each other a big hug. Dot is there, too. It feels like old times when she comes in to each class slightly late, throws her backpack down on the desk, and scowls at everyone. I realize how much a part of it all she is.
In recert class, which runs about four hours a night over the course of eight weeks, we take a break in the middle of the class. Someone runs out for pizzas or a six-foot hero sandwich from the local grocery store. We gobble it down with cans of Pepsi from the soda machine.
I like being at the firehouse for recert class; I feel truly safe here. I like that things stay the same, that life is logical and predictable. The meetings and drills happen on schedule. The big TV in the great room is still tuned to NASCAR races, notices for parades we can march in are posted on the bulletin board. Even the things that change happen slowly, at a pace I can digest.
We get a new ambulance. It is a state-of-the art, glorious vehicle. We meet as a committee to choose all the details. The guys choose the chassis and engine and the girls choose the color scheme. It’s a sexist cliché, but that is how we do it. Bernice and I have our hearts set on a soothing blue interior. Bernice wants to add glue-on glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling so the patients will have something nice to look at.
Some people find the monthly meetings and drills boring. I adore them. It is what my family never did: sit down together and talk about things, even argue safely (the firehouse president bangs his gavel if things get out of hand). Everything from a new dishwasher to painting the stairwell is debated and discussed. People get hot under the collar but it still seems safe. The chief, the president, and the firehouse secretary, who all sit at the big table in the front of the room, are in control. I can relax here.
I love the meetings. I love standing at attention and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I love hearing the minutes of the last meeting. I love how the secretary, Greg Zap, reads the correspondence at the end of the meetings, notes and letters from people in Georgetown who thank us for our help. Most people outside the firehouse don’t understand how meaningful these notes are to us.
After the meeting I follow the crowd back to the TV room, where I join in the ritual of eating hard-boiled eggs, M&M’s, and cookies. I look around and feel a great swell of comfort wash over me. Like Ralph Cramden at his Raccoon Lodge, this is my special place.
Charlie Pfhal walks toward me. He often comes over to talk after a meeting; sometimes he asks me for a recipe for his wife, to whom he has been married for fifty years. He had been in an officers’ meeting that took place before the general monthly meeting. “Young lady,” he says (this is what he calls me), “we were wondering if you would take over the role of firehouse secretary when Greg Zap’s term is over.”
I am agog. The role of secretary means that at the monthly meetings I get to sit at the big table with the top three, my name on the list of people in command not far below those of the chief and the president.
“Yes, absolutely,” I stammer, thinking maybe I have heard him wrong.
But I haven’t, and over the next month I am shown the file cabinet where the monthly meeting minutes go back decades. The original ones are old and yellowed with age, handwritten and to the point. I plunge my hand in and bring out 1949. I see Eddie’s name, as a member of a “card committee.” Eddie is the man who stopped coming to the meetings last year when he couldn’t smoke his cigar in the firehouse anymore. There is an accounting of $2.81 cents paid to Heibeck’s Garage, a memo that a motion was made and seconded to buy two “books of chances” from the Riverside Fire Department, someone gave a donation of $10.00 to the ambulance, and a motion was made to buy a wheelchair for the firehouse, as well as rent a tank of oxygen at a cost of $1.00 per year.
There have only been five firehouse secretaries since the firehouse began. Oddly enough, one of them—a retired member who has since moved away—is the man who built and sold the house Michael and I live in now, and Charlie Pfhal did all the interior painting and wall-papering in our house back in the 1950s.
It is finally time for me to take over as secretary. I am given a special set of keys that opens the chief’s office door (where the secretary’s file cabinet is kept), a special license plate for the front of my car (ahhh, bliss), and an attaché case that, like my front license plate, has a thick sign that says SECRETARY, FIRE DEPT., GEORGETOWN, CT. screwed onto its side. The case is a vintage American Tourister, pebbly black with a red interior, and looks like it is from the early 1960s. Inside the case is a mix of wonderful things, blank greeting cards for “Get Well” or “Sympathy,” meeting minutes, financial reports, and manila envelopes filled with names and phone numbers so I can call or send fruit baskets to members who are sick.
Greg Zap walks over to me, and in a heartfelt way hands me the briefcase. We smile at each other because it seems sort of corny but we both know it is an important moment. He is handing me the history of the Georgetown Fire Company from its inception. I will be the first woman secretary. I open the briefcase when I get home. Greg has left me a gift inside. Three inexpensive Evermore cigars, made in Connecticut, in a small white cigar box. These are what he smokes. I never smoke them but I keep the box of cigars in the briefcase forever. I am now “one of the boys.” Along with the cigars comes a gift from Tom Pasiuk, a very quiet man who has been a firehouse member for over twenty-five years. “My friend made this and I thought you would like it,” he says, and hands me a pair of small wooden pinchers. I have absolutely no idea what they do. “I figured a lady like you would need toast tongs,” he says shyly. I imagine myself in his eyes being like Mrs. Toplofty, a character in the old Emily Post etiquette books, who always knew the correct fork to use. The toast tongs go in the briefcase with the cigars.
The first monthly meeting comes, and there is an empty chair for me at the big table in the front of the room. The chief nods at me, the president bangs his gavel, and we all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I place my right hand on my heart and face the flag; “. . . one nation, under God, indivisible...” I say along with the rest.
Indivisible
. I think of what that word means: united, one of a group of many, not alone. When I was a kid I thought the word was
invisible,
which is how I felt most of the time. I sit down at the front table and thirty-two people look at me. They see me, I am real, I am here, and I am part of something, at last.