Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [21]
Captain Albergray’s walkie-talkie is blaring. The Chief has ordered Engine 94 to stretch a second line to the floor above, but they won’t need it. We’re in now. The smoke is lifting and we are sitting on our heels. Jim keeps the nozzle moving in a circular motion. The water is bouncing off the ceilings and walls, and hits us in the face as steam. Every ten seconds Jim yells, “Gimme three more feet,” and we hump the hose in.
Ladder 31 is here now, and Allen Siebeck is in the room pulling at the ceiling with a six-foot hook. “Where the hell ya been, Allen?” I yell to him.
“We stopped for dinner at Delmonico’s, you dumb ass. Where else would we go?” Allen would normally have a lot more to say, but it’s his job to check for fire extension, and he ignores me.
“Just a few more feet and we got it,” Jim yells.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Captain Albergray keeps saying.
Benny is back now, and he helps me with the hose. Jim makes the far room.
The fire is out now and Chief Niebrock is checking for extension, but the fire never got beyond these two rooms. Jim and I go over to a window. The air tastes good. I look at Jim and at the mucus running over his mouth. He takes his glove off and blows his nose into his hand. He coughs up a large glob of stuff from his diaphragm and spits it on the wall. It hits solidly—black with occasional veins of gray.
Ladder 31 and Ladder 19 start tearing the walls and ceilings down. Everything in both rooms is burnt—a bedroom set, a couch, a couple of stuffed chairs, a television console. A cop leads a woman into the room. She looks around and screams hysterically. She didn’t have much, and now she has nothing. She collapses, and Benny helps the cop carry her into a neighbor’s apartment.
Before leaving, we give the rooms a heavy bath. Our underclothes are sticking to us, and the brisk breeze sweeping through the ventilated apartment chills us. I think of those men on Charlotte Street, and wonder how people can drink beer on street comers in weather like this.
The kitchen clock reads eight o’clock as I put fifteen cents in the soda machine. Matt Tunney looks up and says, “They took Nick Riso to the hospital.”
“What happened?” Vinny Royce asks.
“We were coming back from Hoe and Aldus and some guy threw a brick and hit Nick in the chest. Not a half brick. A full fuckin' brick. The pumper was going about twenty-five miles an hour, and if it would’ve hit him in the face, it would’ve killed him.”
“Is he hurt bad?” I ask.
“Well, they’re lettin' him outta the hospital, so it can’t be too bad.”
Matt looks up, and a smile appears on his face. Riso is standing at the door.
“How ya feel?” ask Matt and Vinny at the same time.
“A little weak,” Nick answers. “A lot of blood vessels in my chest are broke.” He opens his shirt and shows us the redness on his chest. “If I didn’t have my rubber coat on, the impact would have knocked me right off the pumper. It absorbed the impact, ya know. The Doctor says I need a lotta rest.”
The bells start sounding again—Box 2402—and the guys of Engine 85 and Ladder 712 hustle out of the door. Nick goes upstairs to change clothes. He’ll be on sick leave for a few weeks. We call it “R & R (Rest and Recuperation).”
I follow Nick up the stairs. In my locker somewhere there is an old battered book of Yeats’s poems. I search through the pile of dirty laundry, the paperback mysteries, the wom copies of Playboy and the Saturday Review. Ahh, there it is. The red cover is coming apart, and some pages have loosened, but it’s still complete. I remember reading a poem where Yeats talked about wise men becoming tense with a kind of violence before they can accomplish fate, and I finger the pages looking for it. It is this kind of violence I am feeling now, as Nick Riso slowly changes his clothes across from me. What can be done with people who throw bricks at the very men who are most committed to protecting the lives of the brick throwers? I feel empty and helpless, because I know that nothing can be done. And I feel violent, because I know that this insanity will continue until the