Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [94]
Then there was a forty-five minute lunch break, and a hundred and fifty probationary firefighters would unwrap the sandwiches made for them by wives or mothers, or bought earlier in a hero shop, and talk about the job, and how nice it would be to have a beer with the sandwiches. But, it was against regulations to leave the island at any time during the work day, so all managed to satisfy themselves with the only available liquid—water or canned soda. We ate quickly, and rested in the sun for the remainder of the period, talking excitedly about our futures, about studying for the lieutenant’s exam, about our families, and girl friends, and relentlessly projecting our coming assignments. Would we go to a firehouse in a ghetto area, or a slow house in Queens or the upper Bronx? A truck or an engine company?
In the afternoons we had three hours of field work: stretching hose up stairs, up fire escapes, up aerial ladders; crawling past fifty-gallon drums filled with burning wood scraps in the heat room, crawling through controlled smoke conditions in the abandoned buildings of the old State Hospital on the island, breathing the first whiffs of the poison that we would soon get to know as a doctor knows death; chopping through floors and doors with eight-pound axes, forcing locks with halligan tools, ripping down ceilings with six-foot hooks, connecting pumpers with water hydrants; lifting, carrying, and placing twenty-five-foot ladders, lowering ourselves down the outside of a five-story building with a rope and a life-belt, being lowered by others from the roof, stopping to pick up a simulated victim at a windowsill—the victim invariably a firefighter bigger than the rescuer—jumping three stories into a life net, aiming for the red bulls-eye in the middle of the white canvas; carrying victims in stretchers, in chairs, over the back, making inch-by-inch searches in smoky rooms looking for a dummy well hidden by a diabolical instructor, and when returning without it being ordered to crawl back and find it; bandaging foreheads, splinting legs, climbing from floor to floor up the outside of a building with a twelve-foot scaling ladder—but safe, always safe, with a net below. We learned everything about being in a fire, the heat, the smoke, the quick exhaustion of strength—everything but what it is like to be in the uncontrolled madness of a real fire. We would soon learn that.
The awaited graduation day came, and our Department Orders. Like soldiers huddled for mail call in a World War II movie, we grouped expectantly as a Lieutenant read the assignments. “Dennis E. Smith, Engine Company 292.” I was happy with that. Engine 292 was in Queens and, since I would marry within the month, I would be moving to Queens anyway, so it would be convenient traveling. Engine 292 responded to about a hundred alarms a month. I liked that. Not too fast. Not too slow. I intended to return to college, and I didn’t want to be overworked. I needed time to read, and on my days off I needed to be rested to attend classes at New York University. Yet, Engine 292 was busy enough so that I had a piece of the action. I was being paid to be a firefighter, not a student.
Three years passed quickly in Queens. My wife bore two sons, and I had managed to get through my sophomore year in college. But I still had a long way to go for a degree. A thousand novels lay before me, and the hours of my life were carefully rationed: so many hours in a quiet Queens firehouse, so many hours in school, and just so many hours at home with my family. It became a terrible, boring grind. Boring because no one thing demanded the total commitment of my mind and body. I was doing something worthwhile in that Queens fire-house, but I felt I just wasn’t doing enough. I needed a change in the tempo of my life. My whole future seemed bounded by an incarcerating triangle. I loved my wife and family and I realized they represented the one immovable angle of my dilemma. I didn’t want to quit school, because the diploma had become important to me. The choice left was to either quit being