Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [8]
Then a nine-year-old boy reached up and pulled the alarm-box handle. Kids do this a lot in the South Bronx. His friends giggled, and they all ran up the street to watch the fire engines come. The box came in on the bells—2787—Southern Boulevard and 172nd Street. Mike pulled himself up on the side step of the apparatus. The heavy wheels turned up Intervale Avenue, the officer’s foot pressing hard on the siren. At Freeman Street the apparatus turned right, and Mike lost his grip. He spun from the side step like a top. Marty Hannon and Juan Moran jumped off the apparatus even before it came to a screeching stop. There was blood all over. They could see that Mike had stopped breathing. Marty cleared some of the blood away with a handkerchief, and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He told me all he remembers of those agonizing minutes was the Battalion Chiefs voice blaring over the Department radio: “Transmit signal ten ninety-two for Box 2787. Malicious false alarm.”
The following day the city’s newspapers ran the story stating that the Uniformed Firefighters Association was offering a thousand dollars reward for information leading to the arrest of the person who pulled the box. That afternoon a nine-year-old boy was led through the heavy iron doors of the Forty-first Precinct House. News spreads quickly in the South Bronx, and the boy’s friends told their parents, who called the cops.
While the boy was being questioned at the police station, people from the Hoe Avenue Association, a neighborhood action group, painted alarm box number 2787 black, and hung a sign around it. The sign was in two parts, the top half in Spanish, and the bottom in English. It read: A FIREMAN WAS KILLED WHILE COMING HERE TO A FALSE ALARM. Before the paint was dry another false alarm was pulled at the same box, and the men of Engine 85 took the sign down.
Mike had two sons, one seven, the other nine—two brave and frightened boys now walking on either side of their mother, walking slowly behind a shining red fire engine that moves between endless rows of their school chums, and hundreds of firemen. They look up at the flag-draped casket on top of the fire engine and feel proud that their daddy is the cause of all this cereaiony, but they are also frightened because they are old enough to realize that there is a tomorrow, and it is going to be different without him.
The young boy in the police station is frightened too, but in a different way. He is confused, and wonders why everyone is so upset. All the kids pull false alarms. At least the kids he pals around with do. He came to this country from Puerto Rico five years ago, and the kids on the block taught him that you have to make your own fun in the South Bronx. You can play in the abandoned buildings, they told him, or on the towering trash heaps in the backyards, or in musty, rat-infested cellars. There used to be a boys' club in the neighborhood, but it burned down and never reopened. He learned, too, that pulling the handle of a fire-alarm box causes excitement, and a certain pleasure that comes with being responsible for all the noise, the sirens, the air horns. Why is everyone so upset?
I know why I am upset. My company alone, Engine 82, responded to over two thousand false alarms last year. Many of them were caused by kids like this. Kids with no place to go, nothing to do. Kids whose parents never talk to them, never have a surprise gift for them, or a warm squeeze. Kids whose real meaning in the family is that they symbolize a few extra dollars in the welfare check each month. Kids whose parents did not know anything about contraception to begin with, and never learned to love what they did not ask for. Kids born of poverty and ignorance into a system of deprivation.
What do you do