Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [44]
What’s he doing in this neighborhood? Suppose someone saw him knocking at this door. What would they think? They would find out that we were on welfare. The news would get around, and my friends would do a job on me. I would be ridiculed, and I would have to fight my way out of any dirty remark. Why did they have to send this guy? What happened to Mr. Feeney, the regular investigator?
My brother dressed, and left the house. I went into our room, squeezed past the chest-of-drawers, and climbed up to the top bunk bed to read my collection of Hot Rod magazines. I tried to listen to the conversation that was flowing over the kitchen table, but the voices were low, and I couldn’t hear. Instead, I looked at pictures of bullnosed ’49 Fords.
After a short while, the investigator left, and I jumped down from the top bunk. My mother told me his name was Mr. Fogey, which I thought a strange name for someone who wasn’t Irish. She said he was a much nicer man than Mr. Feeney. He was recommending extra money for us so that we could buy coats for the coming winter, and he didn’t even bother to look through the rooms.
The boys of Home Street have disappeared with their bicycles, and twilight has become the dark of night. It is seven-thirty, and we have had only one run, a false alarm, since I started work at five-thirty. I am glad that it is slow—surprisingly slow for such warm weather—because today is the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, a day of recuperation for many New Yorkers. Yesterday I played the bagpipes with the Fire Department Emerald Society Pipe Band, my kilt swaying in the wind as we marched up Fifth Avenue. After the parade we went bar-hopping down Lexington Avenue. The bars were overcrowded and turning people away, but always ready to receive a bagpiper and his friends on March 17th. Give the firemen a drink on me, a hundred voices would say, and ask the piper to play “Scotland the Brave.”
“Not on Saint Patrick’s Day. I won’t play that, but 111 play the Garry Owen for yas,” I say, “and O’Donnel Abu.”
We talked to girls named Jablonski and Bluestein, their hair dyed green for the day, and to a Hawaiian bartender who wore a Kiss-Me-I’m-Irish button. A pretty black copy-writer explained to me how things would have been different in Ireland had Wolfe Tone been able to muster the soldiers in France for the ’98 rebellion. It was a day of surprises and free booze. A young girl in a Forty-seventh Street bar lifted my kilt when I refused to tell her what I was wearing under it. I let it go, but a few minutes later when I lifted her skirt to her shoulders she took great offense.
“What’s good for the goose…,” I told her. “Go ask Women’s Lib.”
By midnight I was exhausted and hiccoughing, and I took a cab to my mother’s apartment for a night’s rest.
Captain Albergray walks down the stairs from the second floor. “Everybody in the kitchen for company drill,” he says.
Benny Carroll has suppered on aspirins and Alka-Seltzers, still suffering from “It’s-a-great-day-for-the-Irish.” He holds his hands to his head, and says, “Listen, Captain, let’s not do anything too strenuous, if we can avoid it.”
“Ya can’t expect to wallow with the pigs one day, and soar with the eagles the next,” Captain Albergray says. Benny laughs, and we walk to the kitchen for the hour drill period.
The members of Ladder 712 and Ladder 31 are sitting around a kitchen table, their attention focused on Billy O’Mann who has just announced that he has something interesting to say. He has a newspaper clipping in one hand, and a cup of coffee in the other.
“Listen to this,” he says, waving the oblong piece of paper. “Yesterday, while all the brothers were enjoying themselves at the parade, Engine 82 had four rubbish fires, one right after another, up in Crotona Park. Each time they would put the fire out, and each time they left, the kids would light up another trash can. Lieutenant Nandre was working,