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Authors: Studs Terkel

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (113 page)

BOOK: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
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The officer is the first one into the fire. When you get to captain or lieutenant, you get more work not less. That’s why I look up to these guys. We go to a fire, the lieutenant is the first one in. If he leaves, he takes you out. One lieutenant I know got heart trouble. When he takes a beatin’ at a fire he should go down to the hospital and get oxygen or go on sick. He don’t want to go on sick. I used to go into a fire, it was dark and I’d feel a leg and I’d look up and see the lieutenants standing there in the fire and smoke takin’ beatings.
When I was in the army I didn’t respect the officers, because the men did all the work. That goes for the police department, too. Cops get killed. You never see a lieutenant get shot. Ten battalion chiefs got killed in fires in the last ten years in the city. The last three guys in the fire department were lieutenants that got killed. ’Cause they’re the first ones in there. I respect that. I want to respect an officer. I want to see somebody higher up that I can follow.
You go to some firehouses, these fuckin’ guys are supermen. I’m not a superman, I want to live. These guys are not gonna live. Every day orders come down, guys are dyin’, retirement. I don’t think these guys get their pensions too long. I never heard a fireman livin’ to sixty-five.
When you get smoke in your lungs, these guys are spittin’ out this shit for two days. A fireman’s life is nine years shorter than the average workingman because of the beating they take on their lungs and their heart. More hazardous than a coal miner. The guy don’t think nothing’s wrong with him. You don’t think until you get an x-ray and your name’s on it. We got this lieutenant and when he takes a beating he can’t go to a hospital because they’ll find something wrong with him. He was trapped in a room and he jumped out of the second-story window. He broke both his ankles, ran back into the building, and he collapsed.
There’s more firemen get killed than cops, five to one. Yet there’s only one-third of the amount of men on the job. We get the same pay as policemen. These politicians start to put a split between the departments. I’d like to take some of these politicians right into the fuckin’ fire and put their head in the smoke and hold it there. They wouldn’t believe it. They don’t give a shit for the people. Just because they wave the flag they think they’re the greatest.
The first fire I went to was a ship fire. I jumped off the engine, my legs got weak. I nearly fell to the ground, shakin’, right? It was the first and only time I got nerves. But we have to go in there. It’s thrilling and its scary. Like three o’clock in the morning. I was in the ladder company, it’s one of the busiest in the city, like six thousand runs a year.
101
The sky is lit up with an orange. You get back to the firehouse, you’re up there, talkin’, talkin’ about it.
I was in a fire one night, we had an all-hands. An all-hands is you got a workin’ fire and you’re the first in there, and the first guy in there is gonna take the worst beatin’. You got the nozzle, the hose, you’re takin’ a beating. If another company comes up behind you, you don’t give up that nozzle. It’s pride. To put out the fire. We go over this with oxygen and tell the guy, “Get out, get oxygen.” They won’t leave. I think guys want to be heroes. You can’t be a hero on Wall Street.
There’s guys with black shit comin’ out of their ears. You got smoke in your hair. You take a shower, you put water on your hair, and you can still smell the smoke. It never leaves you. You’re coughin’ up this black shit. But you go back and you have coffee, maybe a couple of beers, you’re psyched up.
You get a fire at two, three in the morning. The lights go on, you get up. I yelled, “Jesus, whatsa matter?” It dawned on me: Where else could we be goin’? All the lights goin’ on and it’s dark. It’s fuckin’ exciting. Guys are tellin’, “Come on, we go. First Due.” That means you gotta be the first engine company there. You really gotta move. It’s a pride. You gotta show you’re the best. But what they’re fightin’ over is good. What they’re fightin’ over is savin’ lives.
You go in there and it’s dark. All of a sudden smoke’s pourin’ outa the goddamn building. It’s really fast. Everybody’s got their assignments. A guy hooks up a hydrant. A guy on the nozzle, I’m on the nozzle. A guy’s up to back me up. A guy’s puttin’ a Scott Air Pack on. It’s a breathing apparatus. It lasts twenty minutes.
Two weeks ago we pulled up to this housing project. On the eighth floor the flames were leaping out the window. We jumped out, your fuckin’ heart jumps. We ran into the elevator. Four of us, we rolled up the hose, each guy had fifty feet. We got off on the seventh floor, the floor below the fire. We got on the staircase and hook into the standpipe. The guys were screamin’ for water and smoke was backin’ up. You’re supposed to have a wheel to turn on the water and the wheel was missin’! Someone stole it in the project. You get these junkies, they steal brass, anything. They steal the shittin’ life. A guy with a truck company came with a claw tool and the water came shootin’ out.
They started yellin’ for a Scott. It weighs about thirty pounds, got the face mask and cylinder. I couldn’t get the damn thing tight. There’s three straps, I tied one. They need me upstairs. They push you into the room. (Laughs.) This is it. One guy’s layin’ on the floor and I’m crawlin’, feeling along the hose. The second company comes in with Scotts on. One guys got his face piece knocked to the side, so he’s gotta get out because the smoke is gettin’ him. The other guy yells, “Give me the nozzle.” It started whippin’ around, fifty, sixty pounds of pressure. Knocked my helmet off. I grabbed the nozzle. I looked up and saw this orange glow. I start hittin’ it. The damn thing wouldn’t go out. It was a fuckin’ light bulb. (Laughs.) A bulb in the bathroom.
I felt this tremendous heat to my left. I turn around and this whole fuckin’ room was orange, yellow. You can’t see clear through the plastic face piece. You can just see orange and feel the heat. So I open up with this shittin’ nozzle to bank back the smoke. The guys came in and ventilated, knocked out the windows. A seven-room apartment, with six beds and a crib. That’s how many kids were living there. Nobody was hurt, they all got out.
There was a lot of smoke. When you have two minutes left on the Scott, a bell starts ringin’. It means get out, you got no oxygen. The thing I don’t like about it, with the piece on your face, you feel confined. But as I went to more fires, I loved the thing because I know that thing’s life. Ninety percent of the people die from smoke inhalation, not from burns.
You got oxygen, it’s beautiful, but you can’t see. It’s a shitty feeling when you can’t see. Sometimes a Scott’s bad because it gives you a false sense of security. You go into a room where you’re not supposed to be. You’d be walkin’ into a pizzeria oven and you wouldn’t know it. You can’t see, you feel your way with the hose. You straddle the hose as you get out. You gotta talk to yourself. Your mind’s actually talkin’. I’m sayin’ things like: It’s beautiful, I can breathe, the fire’s over.
In 1958 there was a fire across the street from where I live. It was about one ’ in the morning. There’s flames on the second floor. I ran up the stairs and grabbed this little girl. She was burnt on the arm. I ran down the street and yelled to the firemen, “I got a girl here got burnt.” They went right past me. I hated the bastards. Now I understand. You gotta put the the fire out. There’s more life up there you gotta save. This girl’s outside . . . It’s real . . .
When you’re with the police, it wasn’t real. I heard guys makin’ arrests, they found a gun in the apartment. In the paper they say the guy fought with the guy over the gun. When you know the truth, the story’s bullshit. But in the fire department there’s no bullshit. You gotta get into that fire—to be able to save somebody’s life.
About two years ago a young girl ran to the firehouse. She’s yellin’ that her father had a heart attack. The guy was layin’ in the kitchen, right? He pissed in his pants. That’s a sign of death. The fella was layin’ there with his eyes open. Angle pushes the guy three times in the chest, ’cause you gotta shock his heart. The son was standin’ in the room, just starin’ down. I got down on his mouth. You keep goin’ and goin’ and the guy threw up. You clean out his mouth. I was on a few minutes and then Ed Corrigan jumped on the guy’s mouth. The captain bent down and said, “The guy’s dead. Keep goin’ for the family.” We took over for ten minutes, but it was a dead man. The son looked down at me and I looked up. He said, “Man, you tried everything. You tried.” You know what I mean? I was proud of myself. I would get on a stranger, on his mouth. It’s a great feeling.
We had this fire down the block. A Puerto Rican social club. The captain, the lieutenant, and the other firemen took the ladder up and saved two people. But downstairs there was a guy tryin’ to get out the door. They had bolts on the door. He was burnt dead. Know what the lieutenant said? “We lost a guy, we lost a guy.” I said, “You saved two people. How would you know at six in the morning a guy’s in the social club sleeping on a pool table?” He said, “Yeah, but we lost a guy.” And the lieutenant’s a conservative guy.
You get guys that talk about niggers, spics, and they’re the first guys into the fire to save ’em. Of course we got guys with long hair and beards. One guy’s an artist. His brother got killed in Vietnam, that’s why he’s against the war. And these guys are all super firemen. It’s you that takes the beating and you won’t give up. Everybody dies . . .
My wife sees television, guys get killed. She tells me, “Be careful.” Sometimes she’ll call up the firehouse. I tell her we had a bad job, sometimes I don’t . . . They got a saying in the firehouse: “Tonight could be the night.” But nobody thinks of dying. You can’t take it seriously, because you’d get sick. We had some fires, I said, “We’re not gettin’ out of this.” Like I say, everybody dies.
A lotta guys wanna be firemen. It’s like kids. Guys forty years old are kids. They try to be a hard guy. There’s no big thing when you leave boyhood for manhood. It seems like I talked the same at fifteen as I talk now. Everybody’s still a kid. They just lose their hair or they don’t fuck that much.
When I was a kid I was scared of heights. In the fire department you gotta go up a five-story building with a rope around you. You gotta jump off a building. You know the rope can hold sixteen hundred pounds. As long as you got confidence in your body and you know the guy’s holding you, you got nothing to be scared of. I think you perform with people lookin’ at you. You’re in the limelight. You’re out there with the people and kids. Kids wave at you. When I was a kid we waved at firemen. It’s like a place in the sun.
Last month there was a second alarm. I was off duty. I ran over there. I’m a bystander. I see these firemen on the roof, with the smoke pouring out around them, and the flames, and they go in. It fascinated me. Jesus Christ, that’s what I do! I was fascinated by the people’s faces. You could see the pride that they were seein’. The fuckin’ world’s so fucked up, the country’s fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You see them put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying. You can’t get around that shit. That’s real. To me, that’s what I want to be.
I worked in a bank. You know, it’s just paper. It’s not real. Nine to five and it’s shit. You’re lookin’ at numbers. But I can look back and say, “I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody.” It shows something I did on this earth.
1
E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo,
The Unknown Mayhew
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
2
Richard Hoggart,
The Uses of Literacy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).
3
Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its
(New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1962).
4
New York Times,
June 10, 1973.
5
Ibid.
6
From the preface to
Division Street: America
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).
7
From the preface to
Division Street: America.
8
Richard Hoggart,
The Uses of Literacy.
9
“Today, because of our struggles, the pay is up to two dollars an hour. Yet we know that is not enough.”
10
“Since we started organizing, this camp has been destroyed. They started building housing on it.”
11
A variation of strip mining.
12
Mineral rights.
13
A major multilane expressway running through Chicago.
14
During the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, Friedheim, a public relations officer of the Defense Department, was the Administration’s spokesman in dealing with the press.
15
“In New York, stewardesses live five or six girls to one apartment. They think they can get by because they’re in and out so much. But there’s gonna be a few nights they’re all gonna be home at once and a couple of ’em will have to sleep on the floor.”
16
Pronounced “beer.”
17
A play in which he appeared, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
18
From
Notes on a Cowardly Lion
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), John Lahr’s biography of his father Bert Lahr, the highly gifted clown: “Advertisements for potato chips have made more people aware of his face than ever before. He invented a catchword for the product—‘de—lay—cious’—turning his comedy easily from art to marketing. Cab drivers stop their cabs to yell, ‘Bet you can’t eat just one.’ Grandmothers accost him like one of their own to ask if he really eats potato chips. These commercials, amounting to work more easily measured in minutes than days, earns him $75,000 a year, far more than a season on Broadway. . . . He is proud to have survived and succeeded in this newest facet of show business, the television commercial. But he is perplexed. His laughter was meant for people, not merchandise. The paradox has been hard for him to resolve. Even though his commercials are excellent and he has devised many of their comic situations, he is suspicious, ‘I wonder if these ads have been good for my career? Here’s a strange thing, John: after all these years of struggle, the biggest success I’ve had is in these trite commercials. It’s stupid.’ ”
BOOK: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
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