Report from Engine Co. 82 (24 page)

Kelsey saw an opening for a good retort, and said, “Listen, Dennis pal, I’ve been in Engine 82 as long as you, and I’ll be
here long after you’re gone, so don’t worry about Bill Kelsey. I’ll always carry my own weight.”

I was about to answer when Benny Carroll said, “Stop the bullshit and wind the crank.” And Kelsey did wind, and the gears
turned, and the reel seemed to eat the hose as it revolved. Two hundred feet passed through my hands—wet, dirty, one-inch
hose. Kelsey was right. We stretch this hose ten or fifteen times a day, and there is no reason for not having an electric
booster. It would make our work much easier, but the traditional budget-cutters, the bosses of the Fire Department, don’t
worry about making our work easier—not if it is going to cost them money.

I am sitting at the housewatch area talking to Billy-o who is on duty there.

“Listen Billy,” I say, “Benny and Carolyn are coming up to my place next Saturday, why don’t you and Cathy and the kids come
up for the day. It will be a nice day. Kelsey and Knipps are planning to stop by.”

“Geez, I’d really like to, Dennis,” Billy-o says, “but I just made an agreement with myself that I’m not going to do anything
on my days off until after the Lieutenant’s test. I’ve gotta give this thing a good shot this time, and the only way to do
it is to discipline myself.”

“God, the Lieutenant’s test is nine months away,” I say.

“I know, but that’s nine full months of studying ahead of me, and I’m determined to make it.”

Many men in the firehouse feel as Billy-o does. They take a big chunk out of their lives, and dedicate it to one hundred multiple-choice
questions. Carroll and Knipps are also studying hard, but they have been studying constantly for the past two or three years.
They can find time to take their families out for the day.

To be a Fire Lieutenant a man must read and be responsible for about the same amount of knowledge required in a four-year
college course, but a firefighter can blow it all, all that time, all those books, all that energy, in a four-hour examination.
It’s a bad system, but justified by the city’s Board of Examiners because it precludes any kind of political patronage or
favoritism.

Billy-o is smart enough to recognize the precariousness of the system, and he knows that he is giving up more than he should,
but he also knows what he is forced to do if he wants to become an officer in the Fire Department. And he needs the two thousand
dollars difference in salary.

Suddenly there are wailing screams coming from the street, and Billy-o and I jump from our chairs. As I step into the street
I am met by a young girl. She runs into my arms, crying uncontrollably. Her feet are bare, and all she is wearing is cotton
panties and a bra. The straps of her bra hang from her shoulders so that one of her breasts is free and exposed. She is covered
with blood, and the red liquid runs over her deep brown skin from gashes across the side of her neck.

Her body goes limp in my arms. She is about seventeen or eighteen years old, and slightly built. I pick her up, and carry
her back to the kitchen at the rear of the apparatus floor. There, I sit her on a plastic-covered kitchen chair as Billy-o
gets the first-aid kit from a side compartment of Ladder 3i’s truck. The girl is conscious, but her face shows great fear,
and her eyes are closed in pain.

Carroll, Knipps, and Royce are in the kitchen, and I ask Benny to call for an ambulance and the police. As Billy-o returns
with the first-aid kit, the bells start ringing. Box 2412. He runs from the kitchen yelling, “Eighty-five and Seven-twelve
goes.” Royce opens the first-aid kit, and hands me a bunch of gauze pads.

It is not only her neck that has been cut, but the top and the back of her shoulder also. I wipe the shoulder clean as gently
as possible, but she winces whenever I approach one of her wounds. I stroke in short, quick movements over her small stained
breast, and up over her chest and shoulder. The wounds are large, but they are not deep, and I see tiny bits of glass reflecting
from them.

Knipps has gone upstairs for a clean sheet, and he returns with it. The girl is still whimpering, and tears are falling from
her full, brown eyes, but she has settled down some, confident that she is being helped. “You’ll be okay now, there’s nothing
to worry about,” I keep telling her. Knipps covers her with the sheet, and she holds the end of it over her naked bosom.

“Thank you,” she says, almost in control of herself.

An old woman enters the kitchen, crying, “My baby, my baby.” It is the girl’s grandmother, and upon seeing her the girl collapses
again into a fit of tears. The old woman puts her hands around the girl’s shoulder, and the girl screams in torment.

We can hear a voice from the apparatus floor, a high feminine voice repeating a litany of curses. “Dear God,” the voice echoes
into the kitchen, “that man is a no-good sonovabitch, and I swear to you when I see him I’m gonna kill ‘im for what he done
to my chil’. I swear to you God I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.”

The old woman goes out to the apparatus floor, and both women return to the kitchen. The younger woman runs to the girl, and
kisses her face over and over. The girl attempts to throw her arms around her mother, but the movement of her arms causes
the glass-packed wounds to shoot her full of pain. She has let the sheet fall to her lap, and her mother picks it up and covers
her.

Lieutenant Welch has entered the kitchen, along with Captain Frimes, who is working with Ladder 31. Lieutenant Welch will
have to make out a report of the incident, and he questions the girl’s mother. She is a handsome woman, about forty years
old, and dressed attractively in bell bottomed pants and a silk blouse. She is very upset, and her voice trembles as she speaks.

“This girl is my daughter, Jenny, and my husband tried to get in the bed with her. He was drunk, and when she tried to beat
’im away, he broke a bottle and cut her with it. I started to fight with ’im, and Jenny runned around here to the firehouse.
We live around the comer on 169th Street.” The woman starts to cry, and she turns away, saying, “I jus’ been married to him
for a year, and now I’m gonna kill ’im when I see ’im, for what he did to my Jenny, I swear to God, I’m gonna kill ’im.”

The police arrive, and take the necessary information from Lieutenant Welch. Billy-o tells us that the dispatcher has told
him that there is a backlog of ambulance calls in the South Bronx, and we will have to wait forty-five minutes before one
will arrive. The policemen decide to take the girl and her mother to the hospital in their squad car.

The girl is composed now, although still frightened. Her mother’s lover loved her, and his lust is still breathing from her
shoulder and neck, and Electra must rage as she sees the wounds of passion on the smooth, dark shoulder of a South Bronx virgin.
Saints have been made for less pain. And now, as I watch her bare feet walk to the police car, as I watch her body move beneath
the wraps of a firehouse sheet, I can’t help thinking of Cynthia, and of all the Cynthias of the South Bronx. God, I think,
God protect them!

Engine 85 returns from its run, and as the pumper begins to back into quarters, the police car wails off to the hospital.
The bells ring. The pumper stops at the door, the driver, Oscar Beutin, counting the signal. Box 2738. Oscar knows that signal
as well as we know the signal for Charlotte Street and 170th. The men of Engine 85 retake their positions on the back step,
and the pumper takes off. Their destination: Southern Boulevard and 172nd Street.

There is a blacktopped lot on the corner of Southern Boulevard and 172nd Street. We had a block party there a couple of weeks
ago, a kind of back-to-school party for the neighborhood kids. The Department’s Community Relations Bureau paid for the ice
cream and soda. The men of the firehouse chaperoned.

It was a nice day, an end-of-summer day. Like the bus trip, the party was organized so that the kids could get to know the
firefighters better, and the firefighters the kids. Captain Frimes of Ladder 31 did most of the work in preparing the day.
He arranged with the owner of the property to use the lot, he met with the community groups, he asked the Salvation Army for
the use of one of their trucks to dispense the soda and ice cream, and along with two lieutenants from the Community Relations
Bureau he contracted for the entertainment with a steel band. Captian Frimes is a community-minded man.

A notice was put up on the bulletin board of the firehouse kitchen a week before, asking for volunteers to come in on their
day off to meet with the kids, answer their questions, and generally add to the excitement of the party. Some of the men,
predictably, said they wanted nothing to do with these kids. One said, “Why the hell doesn’t the Department give a party for
our own kids instead of wasting money on these ldds.”

I don’t like this prejudice, but I understand it. Firefighters know that one out of seven people in this town are on welfare.
They know that ninety percent of those are black or Puerto Rican. They know that half the people in this community are black
and the other half are Puerto Rican. Like most lower middle-class people, firefighters cannot reconcile the fact that so many
people are being subsidized for doing nothing while they work hard and can barely make the payments at the end of the month.
They look at the Fire Department statistics and see that the busiest areas of the city—where the false alarms are greatest,
the garbage fires greatest, and the incidents of harassment are greatest—are where minority groups live. There is no doubt
that the firefighters’ job is more difficult, and more dangerous, in black and Puerto Rican areas than in other parts of New
York City.

What most firefighters do not know, however, is that a good case for economic determinism can be made to explain this prejudice,
that those one rung up from the bottom of the status ladder traditionally resent those below them. Nor do most firefighters
know that conditions make their job tough, not people. People only reflect the conditions. Poverty is manifested in fire statistics—that’s
a safe generalization.

But, many of the men came to the block party. Some came as a favor to Captain Frimes, some came because they were genuinely
interested. Billy-o was there, and McCartty, Royce, Carroll, Knipps, Kelsey, and others. And the black firefighters from the
big house, Horace Brewster, Juan Moran, Melvin Henderson, Eddy Montaign—men truly committed to developing better rapport with
their brothers and sons.

The day passed quickly. We listened with black children to the dream-like sounds of soft hammers hitting steel drums, and
we watched an African dance troupe move to the rapidity of the bongos. The white firefighters had a fascinating lesson in
black culture, and black children held hands with white firefighters, feeling an unspoken friendship.

The time came to disburse the ice cream, and we had a terrible time trying to keep the kids in order, for where is there order
when free ice cream is being given to children? There were over two hundred kids, and one truck. Those not fortunate enough
to be in the front of the line refused to accept their misfortune, and crashed to the front. It was a mass of pushing children
hungry for the cold sweetness of ice cream. It took great effort to regain order, but finally, under the half-serious threat
of closing the rear doors of the truck the children quieted. And then we heard the sound of the approaching sirens. In the
confusion someone had pulled the alarm box at the corner—in the midst of the Fire Department’s party. The firefighters who
responded had harsh things to say about community relations that day, and they kidded those of us who were there unmercifully,
but, aside from the false alarm, it was a day of victory for the community relations program. The children were stuffed with
ice cream, and satisfied.

As I think of those anxious, laughing children now, I regret that some of the firefighters chose not to take part in the party.
They let the banality of prejudice interfere with what could have been a happy experience for them. I do not understand how
a man can risk his life in a blazing tenement to save one black child, and refuse to see, to be a part of, two hundred black
kids eating ice cream.

I
T’S
hard to keep my eyes on the road this morning. The colors of summer are beginning to turn to those of fall, and the early
Friday sun makes the leaves seem even brighter than they are. The annual transition from quiet greens to exploding golds and
purples has been going on for a week now. It’s comforting somehow that nature’s changes are the same from year to year. It
makes it easier to think of the world in terms of millions of years and it helps to keep my mind from the day to day nature
of my existence. I have lived half an average life span, and I sometimes wonder if the other half exists.
“The signal five-five-five-five has been transmitted. All department flags shall be lowered to half mast. It is with deep
regret…
” I’m not really afraid of that. It may be in the cards, but all firefighters know that. Time will pass, the children will
grow. I don’t really think about it often, just when I’m too tired and trying to figure out what I’m doing in the South Bronx.
But it’s something you can’t think about for long.