Report from Engine Co. 82 (23 page)

The National Safety Council has told me that firefighting is the most hazardous occupation in the United States—more hazardous
than underground mining, or quarrying, or construction. I live in a country where the rate of death by fire is twice that
of Canada, four times that of the United Kingdom, and six-and-a-half times that of Japan. Over twelve thousand persons died
by the terrible swiftness of fire last year in this country.

I hope that the young men joining the fire departments around the country are doing so out of some sense of commitment to
the profession and to the people, not because of the excitement of the sounds of sirens and bells. Firefighting is a brutalizing
business. The community will take you for granted, they will not say “thank you” often if at all, and they are rarely on the
firefighter’s side when the time comes to negotiate salary and benefits. Romantic visions of courage and heroism are the stuff
from which novels are constructed, but the reality of courage and heroism to a firefighter is hard, dirty work. There are
rewards, but they are intangible. Each firefighter must seek them in his own way.

As I stood shaving at the bathroom sink this morning, my wife came and stood by the door as she does at times. I was shirtless,
and after watching me for a short while she put her hand on the long scar on the back of my neck—one of the reminders of a
Fox Street fire. “That’s an ugly scar, Dennis,” she said. “Do you think it will ever go away?”

I smiled at her reflection in the mirror, and replied, “I doubt it, but a shirt collar hides it, so what does it matter?”

“It only matters as a warning for the next one,” she said, pulling my face down and pressing her lips to my fresh-shaven cheek.
Then, her eyes wet with concern, she continued, “Because in Engine 82 there will always be a next one. Oh, I know, you’ll
tell me that somebody has to do it, and I’m even learning to accept that, but I worry about you all the time. It will be hard
for me to sleep tonight knowing that you might be in the middle of a fire, and as I lie there I’ll be wishing that you were
beside me like a normal-living husband. But, at the same time, I’ll be as proud of you as the boys are. They just know that
their father rides on the back of a fire engine, and they’re proud of that, but I know that you are doing what you think is
right for all of us, and that’s good enough for me.”

At that very moment I felt one of the rewards of my occupation. My wife was communicating to me that she understood the nature
of my job. She was fearful of the future, yet she acknowledged the importance, the value of fighting fires. I was so moved,
so unduly proud of myself, that all I could think to say was “I love you.” It was enough.

The September sun is setting beyond the bulging tenements of the South Bronx now. It is six-thirty, and I am standing in front
of quarters, enjoying the last warrh breezes of summer. I dread the thought of the coming winter—winter cold and firefighting
are a hard combination. The summer has been frenzied, but we have begun to slow up. We were doing thirty to forty runs a day
during July and August, but we have dropped down to twenty to thirty these September days. The neighborhood children have
returned to school, and that eliminates a lot of daytime rubbish fires.

My attention is drawn to a little girl, about eleven years old, standing by the curb to the side of the firehouse. She has
a pretty, round, Spanish face. Her head is lowered, but her eyes are staring up at me apprehensively. She is holding a black
and white patterned notebook in one hand, similar to the kind of school pad I used as a child, and in the other hand she has
a sharpened pencil. She seems to want to say something to me, but is too shy and timid to open her mouth. I walk closer to
her, smiling, hoping to loosen her up.

“Hello,” I say, in as gentle a tone as I can handle, “can I help you in any way?”

She doesn’t move, and her head is still lowered in a way that reminds me of the self-consciousness and underrated self-image
of poor children.

“My name is Cynthia,” she says, quietly, “and I have to write a report about firemen. Are you a fireman?”

I am standing next to her now. “Yes, I am a fireman, and I’ll be glad to help you with your report.”

She widens her mouth in a smile, and raises her head. “Are you a Chief?”

“No, I’m not a Chief, but I think I can help you anyway,” I reply. I am about to ask her if she would care to take a closer
look at the fire engines, but the bells are sounded. Box 2509. Westchester Avenue and Tiffany Street.

“If you’ll wait here until we come back,” I say to her quickly, “I’ll show you around the firehouse.” It is probably a false
alarm, I say to myself, and we will be gone for just a few minutes. I wave to her as the pumper rolls out of quarters, and
she waves back, happy that she has made a friend.

Box 2509 is normally a false alarm, but we make the usual search up and down the block. Knipps, Royce, and Kelsey take one
side of the intersection, and Carroll and I the other. This is the beginning of the “Persian Market,” the strip along Westchester
Avenue, from Tiffany Street to Southern Boulevard, where the South Bronx whores hustle their bodies and mouths. Three girls
are standing in the entrance of a closed hardware store. “Did you see anyone pull the alarm box?” I ask them. Not expecting
an answer.

One, in a flaming red wig, says, “Honey, I ain’t got time to watch no fire alarm box. I’m in business, and I got to make money.
Now if you want to talk some busnez…”

Another looks at Benny, and says, “Where you get those pretty eyes?”

Carroll and I laugh as we turn and give the thumbs-down gesture of a false alarm.

Lieutenant Welch is about to radio the “ten-ninety-two” signal over the air, but he stops as he sees the Battalion car approach.
Chief Niebrock is on vacation leave, and Chief Solwin is working in his place. As Lieutenant Welch walks to the car to report
a false alarm, a small boy comes running up Tiffany Street. He is yelling, “Hey firemans! Hey firemans! A man is dying in
the alley.”

We get the address, and the pumper wails down the street. We push through a small crowd, and there, face up in the alleyway,
is a young man, hardly a man, about nineteen years old. He is a light-skinned Puerto Rican, goateed, and wearing soiled sharkskin
pants. He has been cut across the stomach, and stabbed in the heart.

I would like to turn away from him, away from such a sickening sight, but I know what I have to do. Royce and the others push
the crowd back as Benny and I check his eyes and his pulse. We unbutton his shirt and take a close look at his stomach, and
chest. Was he murdered by a junkie for a five dollar bag of heroin, or by a jealous husband, or by an abstraction called
machismo,
the uniquely Spanish need to prove virility? I’ll never know. I only know that it is too late for us to do anything for him,
and I shake my head. What a waste of life. In other times this sad cadaver before me may have been the healthy son of a farmer,
or a hard-working clerk, or a poet. But, fate brought him to America. His life may have been insignificant, I don’t know,
but it was life nonetheless. And the South Bronx robbed him of it.

Cynthia is still standing in front of the firehouse, and I can see the happiness in her face as the pumper backs into quarters.
I take her into the firehouse, and explain the difference between the long ladder trucks and the pumpers. I show her the equipment
we use. She questions everything as a star reporter would, and scribbles furiously in her notebook. She is a very bright child,
and it gives me great satisfaction to talk to her. Her apprehensiveness has changed to self-confidence, and her questions
are phrased concisely and intelligently. Her speech is flawless. She is the first child of her family to be born in the States.

“Are you responsible for other things besides putting out fires or, I should say, extinguishing fires?” she asks. We have
had commissioners in this job, I think to myself, who would not be capable of phrasing a question so well. I explain our building
inspection duties, our hydrant inspection duties, our community relations program, and our fire prevention duties. She questions
everything intensely. I tell her about our committee work, and how we keep the firehouse clean. “Oh, we have a man in our
school who does work like that,” she says. “He’s called the custodian, but why don’t you hire a man like that for your firehouse?”
Very perceptive child indeed. Rather than try to answer her question, a question I have been thinking about for as long as
I have been a firefighter, I ask her, “What do you want to be when you finish with your schooling?”

“Oh,” she begins most of her sentences with “Oh,” “I don’t think about it very much. Right now I just think about getting
into a good high school, like Bronx School of Science. Maybe I’ll be a teacher, or a lawyer—I wrote a report about the Supreme
Court last year.”

I am about to ask her if she ever thought about becoming a journalist, but she quickly puts another question to me. “I really
must be getting home,” she says, “but I want to ask you the most’important question.”

“Go right ahead,” I say.

“Well, what do you think I can do to help the Fire Department? What can I tell the boys and girls in my class to do?”

I know the answer to this question as well as a White House switchboard operator knows the President’s extension, for each
time a group of schoolchildren comes to the firehouse we try to impress upon them the importance of three things.

“First,” I answer her, “you should not play with matches, or start any kind of fire.” This seems like a banal and rudimentary
answer for Cynthia, but she writes it in her book, and I continue, “Second, ask all your friends never to pull a false alarm,
and third, ask your parents never to smoke in bed, and to be careful of their cigarettes at all times.”

Cynthia finishes her writing, puts her pencil and book in her left hand, and offers her right hand to me.

“Thank you, Mr. Smith,” she says, “you have been very helpful.” And then she turns and walks out of the firehouse with as
professional an air as I have ever seen.

The subject of kids is usually a sad one to us, and my little talk with Cynthia makes me feel light and happy. This neighborhood
is a scries of garbage heaps, and the kids use the garbage-strewn backyards and vacant lots as playgrounds. They build forts
in the refuse, and the enemy burns them down. Many times they set fires just to get firefighters there—a diversion in their
play that gives them a chance to climb on the apparatus, making monkey bars of the ladder truck.

Talking to Cynthia has made me feel good, because I realize that there must be many children like her in the South Bronx,
and she represents the future as I want to see it. It is unfortunate though, that we don’t get to see many Cynthias. We see
kids in filthy clothes playing in filthy alleyways, or on hot summer days swimming in filthy street-corner ponds caused by
backed-up sewers. Kids that jeer at us, and throw things at us. But, we have been into their homes. We have seen the holes
in their walls, the rats in their halls, and the roaches scrambling over their bedsheets. It is not difficult to understand
why kids are a problem to us in the South Bronx. It simply cannot be expected that Cynthias will be nurtured in these environs.
Cynthias exist on Charlotte Street, on Fox and Simpson Streets, but it will be a long time before they will be able to grow,
unaffected by the deprivations and the tragedies of the streets. But, at least they exist.

With the help and cooperation of a neighborhood action group, we recently took a group of 150 neighborhood children on a day
outing to an amusement park across the Hudson River. Twelve firefighters from the big house, a few concerned black mothers,
two lieutenants from the Department’s Community Relations Bureau, and 150 children—all learning from, and about each other.
It was a grand day. We sang songs on the buses to and from the park, we rode the roller coaster together, we shared hot dogs.
Friendships were made easily, and we were relatively sure that there would be at least 150 kids in the South Bronx who would
think twice before setting a garbage fire or pulling a false alarm. But, the buses, the ride-tickets, and the food cost money,
and the department does not have much of that. I thought it a successful day, but it does not seem to be in the cards to have
another day like it for some time to come.

The city is in a financial crisis, and all department budgets are being cut. The Community Relations Bureau will be the first
to go in the Fire Department. It’s too bad that getting to know kids costs money because getting to know 150 kids in the South
Bronx is like getting to know one fish in the ocean.

It is now twelve-thirty. We have just returned from the sixteenth alarm of the night. It was a rubbish fire in the rear yard
of a building on Prospect Avenue. We had to pull about 200 feet of the booster line to reach it.

After the fire was extinguished—it was a pile of discarded mattresses, armchairs, and assorted brown paper bags—we humped
the hose back through the infested darkness of the alleyway. It was covered with food waste and human excrement, and we had
to wash it down before reeling it in.

Bill Kelsey was hand-cranking the booster reel, and wondered aloud why the hell the Department refuses to install electric
motors on the reel. I told him that it is not a question of initial cost, but the time and money it would take to maintain
a power booster. I added facetiously that his arms were in need of a workout, anyway.

Kelsey ignored my remarks, and said, “Well, 111 tell ya this—there is not a Volunteer Fire Company on Long Island or in Westchester
County that operates with a hand crank. And we are one of the busiest companies in the world. What a lot of crap.”

“Easy, Bill,” I said. “Don’t be so bitter.” He was crouched down on top of the pumper, cranking the reel as men fifty years
ago cranked the front of a Model T Ford. I was guiding the hose as the reel turned. I continued, “The fact is that you don’t
know about every volunteer outfit on Long Island or anywhere else. We are still the best company in the world, and I don’t
know that for a fact either, but we think we are. And we manage to keep thinking that even with a hand crank. And if you don’t
like being a part of that, you know there are companies in this city that hardly use the booster reel, and you can transfer
there.” I could see that Kelsey was somewhat affronted, so I quickly added, “But, we would really hate to lose you Bill.”