Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [29]
The telephone rings. It’s for me. Artie Merritt who lives ten miles below me wants a lift to work. His car broke down. It is three-thirty, and time to leave for the firehouse. I kiss Pat goodbye. I can tell she is not happy with my explanation, but the wisdom of her eyes prevails, and the question of working in Engine 82 is left floating in the air.
Brendan is off somewhere riding his bicycle, but the two younger boys come running from a neighbor’s yard where they have been playing. Neither can ride a two-wheeler yet, and they stay close to the house, always ready to say hello or good-bye to their father.
“Good-bye Dennis. Good-bye Sean. Say good-bye to Brendan for me.”
Both heads nod, and little hands blow kisses as I back down the drive. Pat is on the porch, her arms folded below her breast, and her long hair blowing in the cold wind. She waves.
“Good-bye baby. Love ya.”
Artie Merritt is waiting for me at the bottom of a steep hill. He rents a house at the top of the hill because he says living up there is one of the few ways a man can feel on top of the world. He lived until recently in a Greenwich Village apartment. He moved when he realized that he could live on top of a hill for the same rent—away from traffic noise, crowded subways, teenage beggars, urine-stenched hallways, and away from people walking aimlessly, hopelessly, on cracked sidewalks, guided by the wide, unmoving, catatonic eyes of the chemically possessed.
Artie has been a fireman for over ten years. But he is different in many ways from other firemen. He has a beard, a master’s degree in sociology, and a way of speaking that is hardly funny, but always convincing. His eyes are small, and glare out above the full Brahms-like beard, following, studying reactions as he speaks. His voice is low-keyed, but each word is carefully pronounced and fully thought out.
He used to work in another company in the South Bronx, but transferred to Ladder 31 because he was having some trouble with a Battalion Chief who didn’t like the idea of a fireman having a full beard. Rather than put up with the Chief’s subtle harassments—you don’t fight a Battalion Chief—Artie asked to be transferred to Ladder 31. His differences don’t bother the men on Intervale Avenue. Artie is a tough firefighter, and that’s what counts.
Artie and I don’t speak much as we drive down the Palisades Parkway; he is reading a book of Malcolm X’s speeches, and I have to focus my attention on driving. A light drizzle begins to fall. It’s a dismal day. It reminds me of a thousand afternoons I spent standing on the stoop of a midtown tenement, wishing with friends that there were something to do. The sky would be overcast, as it is now, and the buildings down the block would become vague images, quiet and lonely. Soon, the occupants of my stoop would trudge off to their buildings for want of something to do, and I would sit on the wrought iron handrail alone, not wanting to climb the stairs to the still lonelier confines of a four-room railroad flat. Cars would pass, and the strange sound of tires riding over wet pavement would excite me. “Whisshh,” they would go. “WhisSSHHH.” Each sound taking people places.
I listen now to the tires of my own foreign economy car. The sound is steady, “sshhh,” with no beginning and no ending, and the “polop, polop” of the windshield wipers completes the monotony.
“It’s too