The Search - Thirteenth Installment

Maybe it's because my dad was a Jiffy Lube Marxist that I tend to see everything as a class struggle. It always seemed to me that if there were jobs out there that had to be done, and we recognized that we were all in need of those services, then we were all equally on the hook for doing those jobs. It was my dad who gave me his copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at an early age and told me it was his favorite book. Being a mechanic, or a crane operator, or a truck driver always seemed cooler, and maybe even more powerful, than being a hospital administrator or an attorney - at least to me. I was happy to let my brother, or anyone else, read the instructions while I built the model. I didn't share my grandfather's concerns that someone else would make more money than me.

My family's sense of money as a finite resource was much like our sense of serving sizes at the dinner table:  when the supply is limited and there are a lot of hungry people, take what you need and leave some for everyone else.

Not that we were poor. All four of my parents had full-time jobs, even if they changed them up every now and then. Government jobs. University jobs. Sales jobs. Oil change jobs. Whatever. People whose dads are doctors will tell you right off, as a way of explaining their own eccentricities, "growing up, my dad was a doctor." My dad's job isn't even the fourth thing I'm likely to tell you about him.

My dad is a funny, sarcastic, smart, mischievous, drunk philosopher who worked, for a time, at Jiffy Lube. Although he spent most of my childhood, and probably the majority of his working years in the shop and in the office at Shutters, he ended his working life in the same place he had started as a recent college graduate - as a caseworker for Florida’s Department of Children and Families where he dealt with the bureaucracy and heartbreak of what was commonly known as “welfare” as it morphed from AFDC to TANF. I never gave a shit about his title or what he did for a living, but it turns out, he did - much more so than I thought at the time. His tendency towards depression, alcoholism, and chronic disappointment in himself ultimately led him to believe that his two sons would simply be better off without him. He wasn't suicidal, he just quietly checked out of our lives.

My father's mother was an artist with a PhD in education, and her father had been the superintendent of schools in Long Island. Her mother was an opera singer who had performed at Carnegie Hall. My mother's father was a Colonel in the Air Force who fought in every war from Germany to Vietnam. He flew 36 bombing missions over Germany in 1945 without losing a man and went on to pilot missions in Korea and Vietnam while my mom and dad marched against the war in DC (putting the final nail in the coffin of my mother’s relationship with her father). When my grandfather got back from Vietnam, he went to work for NASA on the Apollo program. I don't tell you these things to bask in the glory of my family's accomplishments - I tell you to show just how little we were able to accomplish on the shoulders of their achievements. The more I think about it, the more I marvel at what a hard time my parents and I had at turning all our obvious advantages into any sort of power. Maybe we just didn't want it, but part of me feels like we never understood that it was there for the taking.

Plenty of people's parents pulled strings to get them their first jobs. I'd gotten my own jobs since I was fourteen (from phone solicitor to busboy to machinery auction attendant), but at eighteen, my parents finally pulled some strings for me with the father of one of the kids on my youngest brother's Little League team and they got me a construction job - framing houses in the Florida sun. That summer, I shot a 16-penny nail through my index finger, and I watched as my co-workers drew up dirty water from their igloo coolers to shoot heroin in the sweltering van on our half-hour lunch breaks.

Having left high school at seventeen to start college as an early admissions student in the Honors College, I'm pretty sure I was the only one of my classmates who spent the summer throwing 3/4" sheets of plywood to sweat-soaked junkies in the 95-degree heat - my slowly-baking head full of Plato, Descartes, and Wittgenstein.

That same summer, my dad left his oil change job and joined a construction crew that happened to be working right around the corner from mine. I think he had been on shaky ground with Jiffy Lube ever since he dropped an oil filter against the battery terminals on a late-model BMW, welding it to the terminals, and causing the whole car to burst into flames.

When I finally got around to seeing my dad again, he had on his forehead the same two callouses that I had on mine, one just above the outside of each eyebrow, like something that ran in the family. When you hoist a four-by-eight sheet of plywood up from the ground to throw it on the roof, there's a second where you have it airborne, balancing upright with its bottom edge at thigh level, waiting for the man above to catch it and pull it up. If he misses the catch (maybe it was a bad throw, or maybe he’s too high), the sheet will tip back towards you and hit you either on the right or left side of your head, depending on which way you’re looking. Eventually, you will develop callouses on both sides, but it takes a while, and it only happens to the ground man who is literally and figuratively the lowest man on the job.

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Finding and keeping a job that would pay the bills always seemed like more of a struggle than it should have been for me. I was supposed to be smart and resourceful. Why couldn't I figure out this capitalism thing? For a long time, I thought that if I could just break through to the next level of clientele, making things that were ever-more expensive for people with more and more money, I would finally have made it.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Just a few years ago, the best bespoke tailors in New York City were charging $5k a suit, but they could only make about 2 suits a month. Running a business in New York City that only grosses $120k a year is not exactly the road to riches, and these guys were some of the best in the world. As a craftsman, there's only so much you can produce with your own two hands, and you can increase your prices to a point, but there's a ceiling there, and the ceiling isn't all that high. To use one of venture capital's favorite terms, the business isn't "scalable". Plus, do you really want to be working for the richest of the rich, making things you could never afford to buy for yourself? 

The richest people I ever met didn't make their money selling small numbers of expensive things to rich people. They got rich selling huge numbers of cheap stuff to poor people.

So, while I continued to make expensive stuff for the only people who could afford it, I used the steady income and benefits from my new fire department job to take some of the pressure off. This allowed me to stress a little less about the economics of the whole affair, and it gave me an opportunity to enter the even more economically foolhardy world of art and art making as a quasi-profession.

In my best years as a designer and builder of exquisite pieces of custom furniture, I had a hard time making much more than $50k a year with no benefits, pension, or any real security. These days, I can easily make twice that (plus pension, benefits, and security) just for keeping houses full of the cheapest Rooms To Go furniture from burning up.  In the days before fire and EMS mergers were common, the paramedics would taunt the firefighters with an oft-repeated joke - “Paramedics save lives, firefighters save furniture”.

The Search - Twelfth Installment

First let me say, unequivocally, that my purpose here is not to exalt myself as some kind of hero. I don’t consider myself to be any stronger, braver, or more level-headed than anyone else, really. Certainly, there are exceptions, but I don’t feel myself or anyone else in my profession to be particularly unique. I do, however, feel strongly that there are certain, rare instances, on this job in which you will be called upon to perform what others may consider to be incredible acts of bravery - and that not only is it your obligation to step up and perform in those situations, but that it is what the public expects from you, and it is the reason they have afforded you whatever respect you may be enjoying from them. If nothing else, it’s why you get that high-risk pension.

My purpose in recounting these experiences serves a few functions – to entertain and enlighten the reader with glimpses into situations and personalities that they may never have an opportunity to experience themselves, but it is also a salve for my own wounds - a way for me to process and organize these often-disconnected experiences into a whole that carries with it some kind of larger message. And perhaps that message is simply one that I have manufactured to fool myself and you, dear reader, into thinking that there really is a purpose to all of this.

There’s a couple in our neighborhood with a three-legged miniature poodle. I have long suspected that they adopted the dog specifically to serve as a conversation starter – something that would give them points or sympathy credits among those they may encounter on the sidewalk, in the bar, or anywhere else they happen to have the little guy tucked up under their arms - saving him the indignity of hopping along beside them. In fact, I may have suggested once or twice that they cut the dog’s leg off themselves specifically to gain these advantages. You can just tell how much they love it every time they see you seeing them with the dog.

In some of my more self-critical moments, I fear that this is what led me to firefighting. Tired of struggling with my ongoing doubts about the usefulness of art and art-making – the tendency towards self-indulgent naval gazing - I finally chose to do something with my life that was unquestionably good – something that I didn’t have to defend to myself or to others.  For this to work, though, I would actually have to be a good firefighter, and that little distinction was never a guarantee for me. I was never the strongest, most athletic, or bravest of my friends, but I was smart and relatively fearless (fearlessness and bravery being two different things). Of course, “smart” is not stereotypically a trait that’s required of firefighters, but it’s something you can lean on when you might not have the brute force needed to get the job done the old-fashioned way. (Once, during a protracted resuscitation attempt, I complimented my young, tall, handsome rookie on the quality CPR he was providing and he said “Well, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but if you need someone to push hard on something over and over, then I’m your man.”).

Prior to 9-11, I didn’t know the first thing about the fire service, firefighting, firefighters, or even emergency medicine for that matter. I don’t think I even knew that the two were connected. My sole encounters with firefighters consisted of having watched them on my street the day Scotty Rankin’s house burned down when we were in seventh grade, and a few years later, when Chad Something-Or-Other, an acquaintance from my junior high skateboarding days, told me that he had been volunteering for a local fire department. I remember being astonished that they would let a guy like that ride around on a fire truck. I can’t remember much about Chad, but I can still picture his frosted, mousse spiked hair and his mouth - one of those overly-wet white boy mouths, the cracked, swollen lips that never quite come together and the always-exposed large front teeth. I’ve only been in two or three fist fights in my life with anyone who wasn’t one of my brothers, but in ninth grade, Chad was one of them. I lost pretty badly. I couldn’t imagine wanting to be anything like that guy.

In 1995, I graduated from the University of South Florida with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, concentrating in sculpture and photography. I had worked my way through school as a darkroom tech, welder, and fabricator of race cars, but when I graduated, I went to work as the lead carpenter for Design Line, a local theatrical design company. I was using my degree more than many of my classmates, but the pay was low and the work was often inconsistent.

Design Line was one of the magical places you drift through in life where forces somehow align to bring the right people together in the right place at the right time for what, at times, may even be the right reasons. As is often the case in these situations, the magic of Design Line was mostly born of benign neglect on the part of its owner, Pete Geisler, who had somehow assembled the funds, facilities, and contacts needed to provide design and fabrication services for everything from low-rent local church theater productions to large-scale theme park buildouts, but his skills as a communicator and business owner were often lacking, to say the least. Employees were found mostly through a tight-knit network of artists, musicians, drunks, and junkies who could be found hanging around the 90’s loft spaces of Ybor City’s arts community, and all but the lowest people in the organization could hand out jobs to their friends, bring them in and sign them up without anyone in management asking any questions. We weren’t always the hardest working bunch, but we certainly had the most fun, and we produced some of the best job site graffiti I’ve ever seen. Our Port-O-Let illustrations tended towards depictions of our leader, Pete, drawn Monopoly Man-style, turning out his empty pockets with an aww-shucks expression on his face - yet another week with no paychecks. On the weeks when we did get paychecks, there was never any guarantess that we were actually going to be able to cash them. Not being a group who could generally make it through the weekend without a payday, we stopped taking the checks to the company bank and started going to the check cashing store, happy to pay their exorbitant fees in order to cash checks that we knew weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Eventually, the word got out and even the check cashing stores stopped accepting checks from Design Line. With few options left, one of the more enterprising junkies in our group simply loaded up his truck with tools from the shop, took them to the pawn shop, and presented Pete with the pawn tickets. He had pawned what he estimated to be the value of his paycheck, and Peter was free to go pick up his tools whenever he had the money.  

I formed some life-long friendships with the ragtag band of weirdos that drifted in and out of Design Line over the years, but as my skills grew as a carpenter and fabricator, and the “black Fridays” became more and more frequent, I began to follow the money and I drifted further and further from the creative free-for-all that I had loved so much in the earlier days of my post-college working life.  By 2001 I had left Design Line, and I was leading a crew of itinerant trim carpenters on high-end commercial installations in churches, airports, and nightclubs. I was making $25 an hour in 2001 dollars, and despite a lack of health insurance and any real job security, I was doing better than a lot of my friends were at the time. I owned a house and paid rent on a shared studio space where we made art and took on our own fabrication jobs. We had even begun to execute a few large-scale public art commissions. Things were going well but I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the kind of work I was doing, and I had started to tell myself that I no longer wanted to build anything that I could not afford to buy.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was standing on a ladder in the First Baptist Church of Saint Petersburg, installing one of several pairs of large arch-top doors, when someone changed the station on the job site radio, and we listened to the play-by-play as the second plane struck the south tower. We closed up the job site and went home, worried about having to drive across the bridge from St Pete back to Tampa. In the days that followed, all our other jobs shut down. Our job at the airport was on indefinite hold and they insisted that anyone who worked there have a security clearance, but I was the only one on my crew who didn’t have a felony record.

The job at the church was the only one still going, so I commuted across the bridge every day with the other stunned, silent motorists. Somehow, in the early days after the attacks, it was the traffic jams that touched me the most. Every afternoon I would sit in traffic on the bridge, directly in the flight paths of two airports where, now, no planes flew. We all just sat in our cars and looked at each other, feeling the broken hearts of those in the cars around us. Every night at home was an endless stream of TV news with firefighters working the “pile”, and the stories of those who had been lost were beginning to trickle out. I can remember distinctly an interview with the wife of an FDNY firefighter who said that she never expected to lose her husband in this way. They had met each other in art school. He was a sculptor. Him becoming a firefighter, much less dying in the World Trade Center, was the last thing that she could have imagined. I don’t know why this would become a selling point for me, but when the desire to help was greatest in me and in the public, before we had split into factions who favored war or revenge over rebuilding or reconciliation, I could see a way forward for myself that felt like a contribution to what was, maybe only for a brief moment, a national resolve to honor the sacrifice of those we had lost. Plus, there were no more jobs on the horizon for me. I was going to have to do something.

I started to research firefighting as a profession, and I was immediately struck by the amount of medical training required. I truly had no idea what the job entailed, and I had always been a little squeamish. In fact, I had passed out at the sight of blood on more than one occasion. Maybe this wasn’t the job for me after all. I learned that EMT certification, along with completion of the fire academy, was required to be hired by just about any fire department in my area, and with the EMT course being the shorter and cheaper of the two schools, I decided I would enroll to see how I liked it. I figured if I couldn’t hack it, I would know inside of a semester, and I could move on to something else. I enrolled in EMT school and applied for unemployment assistance for the first time in my life. At the unemployment office, they told me that there were programs in place to retrain people whose jobs were lost as a result of the 9-11 attacks, and EMT school was one of the options available. I told them this was perfect because I had already enrolled in EMT school. “Sorry” they said “in that case we can’t help you. If you are already enrolled there’s no assistance available to you.” So much for being proactive.

I started school and immediately enjoyed the subject matter. My instructor was a chief in the local fire department, a paramedic from the early days of EMS, and an aspiring rocker - a bass player who saw something kindred in me with my long hair and goatee – not your typical firefighter candidate. I had already decided that I wanted to go straight from EMT school into the longer and more rigorous paramedic program, and my instructor had seen me being interviewed on a local news show when the band I was playing in was being profiled. I told the interviewer that I was studying to be a paramedic, and the chief called me out in front of the class. He was impressed that my musical career had taken me marginally further than his had (local news was about as far as I ever got), but he couldn’t let me live down the paramedic comment when I wasn’t even halfway through EMT school. Then there was the matter of my squeamishness. I almost passed out at the hospital on my first clinical rotation simply from watching a nurse draw blood from a patient. I wanted to continue my studies, but somehow I had to get over my aversion to the gory bits.

I sat on the couch at home by myself and flipped through the pages of my EMT textbook. There was one picture – a “degloving” injury - that I had been particularly avoiding. The patient had a ragged circumferential laceration around the wrist and the skin of their entire hand was bunched up around the tips of the fingers, as if they were in the act of taking off a thick glove that was a little too small. I couldn’t look at it without feeling woozy. I decided that the only way through was to confront my fear directly and I sat staring at the image as my vision closed down around me, my ears began to ring, and I slumped over, briefly unconscious on the couch. I came to with the open textbook still on my lap and I sat up, looked down at the picture, and immediately passed out again. I’m not sure how many times I did this, but I was glad that my wife was at work and there was nobody around to witness this spectacle. After what was probably the fourth or fifth viewing, the sensation had left me and I was able to investigate the picture with a medical curiosity about the nature of the patient’s injuries. I never again felt faint at the sight of an injury.

The Search - Eleventh Installment

We are like neighborhood ghosts. In it, but not of it. Any attachment that we may have to this community could go away at any moment with a transfer or a promotion, but in many ways, we are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood. We’re up at all hours - prowling the streets. We’re in the liminal spaces between shopping centers and water treatment facilities. We know who the drug dealers are. The dog fighting operations. The junkies and thieves. We’ve investigated the garbage bags full of body parts thrown in the canal. Nothing human, just headless goats and chickens. Santeria stuff.

We know when a bad batch of heroin hits the streets. It starts with early morning OD’s near the Twistee Treat (where the dealers deliver to their connections), and the ripples spread further and deeper into the neighborhoods, moving out from the street-level junkies and homeless addicts to the recreational users, club kids, and first-timers. By evening, we’ll be running OD’s at suburban family reunions in clean, well-kept houses with sparkling tile floors and the ever-present smell of Fabuloso in the air.

Our new truck has a pull cord for the air horn just like an old semi, so when the kids give you the old tug-tug-of-the-arm gesture from the side of the road (how can that gesture even hold any meaning for them now?) you can actually pull the cord above your head and give them a good toot of the horn. Wait until you’re past them though. They know not what they ask for. That horn is loud and if you honk it when you’re right next to them, you’ll scare the shit out of them.

We watch our homeless regulars crossing the street with careless abandon. Dewey in his wheelchair, Jose with the cast on his leg, Helen and all her umbrellas. I pulled over one morning on my way to the station to tell Roger that if he kept running in traffic like that, we were going to be picking him up off the road. Still, two days later, we were picking his body up off the road.

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What I have been giving you so far are the highlights. Heroism. Adventure. Gore. Tragedy. Humor. So, how to convey the rest – in fact the majority – of what we do? Boredom. Sleeplessness. Frustration. Repetition. Wasted resources.

I’m always amazed at how many conservative Republican firefighters there are. Hardcore conservative Republican card-carrying union member public servants who provide free socialized medicine to anyone who asks for it as part of their taxpayer-funded pension-generating government jobs. It doesn’t make any more sense in real life than it does when I write it down. But I guess it’s as natural as teenagers hating their parents. And sitting in judgement of those you have sworn to protect is a defense mechanism that allows you to separate yourself from them. You can tell yourself that “those people” asked for the fates that befell them – that these things could never happen to you or your family.

As an officer in the fire service, I often have discussions with my crew members about what it takes to do our jobs effectively, ethically, and compassionately. I probably initiate these discussions more often than the average tough-guy firefighter would like. Well, that’s too bad, I guess.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about what makes cops and firefighters different, and I will admit that I think the differences are vast, but the truth is that we still have a lot in common - sometimes even more than I would like to admit. I find myself speaking to my firefighters about the stark contrasts between the two professions in an attempt to impress upon them the idea that the job of the firefighter is fundamentally different from the job of the police officer. I know I’ve said to them in some of my shorter-tempered moments “if you want to be a cop, go be a cop somewhere else.” While cops share many of the same traits as firefighters (unionized, public sector, government employees with pensions), it just makes sense to me, and a lot of other people, that they would be Republicans.  

Firefighting and law enforcement are both dangerous, stressful, PTSD-inducing occupations. They two often work side-by-side, so each side tends to think that they have a little insight into the mentality of the other. And despite what the general public may think about the people who do these jobs, both jobs are performed by flawed, vulnerable, weak human beings who are, by and large, just as afraid as anyone else.  First responders worry about their own safety and the safety of their families. They buy too much insurance, and they pay for ridiculous extended warranties. More than a few of them stock up on guns and alarm systems. Many live in gated communities and send their kids to private schools - working overtime and second jobs to pay for it all.

I spent the first half of my life as an itinerant artist and musician, and I can tell you that in comparison to the average first responder, most artists don’t do any of those things. Some of that is just plain old obliviousness, but a good portion of it comes down to actual courage. I can think of a thousand ways in which artists and musicians are more courageous than cops and firefighters. Artists work for little to no money, often without healthcare and certainly without pensions, for very little recognition and with tremendous exposure to risk. I never had a little kid wave at me from the side of the road when I was an artist driving a beat-up pickup truck around the neighborhood. I never had anyone look at me with admiration and offer to pay for my food when I showed up at the grocery store, covered in soot from my welding job. 

Some of the hypervigilance seen on the part of first responders is a natural response to the chaos of the job, but the constant, low-level terror that lives just beneath the surface for all of us is the fact that terrible things can and do happen to good people all the time. We’ve seen it happen over and over again. And the thought of just how seemingly random the universe can be, coupled with the images of what we have witnessed over the years can, sometimes, just be too much to bear. So, we armor ourselves in any way that we can find. With uniforms and rituals, with superstition and religion, with guns and alarms, with cameras and gates - but also with alcohol, and drugs, and sex, and violence. And contempt.

Every occupation has its natural adversary, and the tried-and-true response towards that adversary, in any profession, has always been contempt. Bartenders hate drunks, mail carriers hate dogs, artists hate Republicans. The story is as old as time. Firefighters just got lucky in that our adversary, for the most part, is utterly contemptible. Nobody likes house fires. Nobody likes car accidents. Nobody likes heart attacks. And when we save our contempt for our actual adversaries, we end up doing just fine. The problem comes when we start to mistake the people who are our customers for the forces which are our adversaries - we begin to view the people that we have sworn to protect as the cause of our problems. “I had to get up in the middle of the night because of some homeless guy” or “I got puked on because that guy’s a drunk”. It’s easy for us to attach human faces to what are often systemic problems and then blame those particular humans for the larger problems of which they are merely a symptom.

The next step on this slippery slope is when we begin to use our contempt of the individual as a shield with which to protect ourselves from the harsh realities of the job. In order to separate ourselves from the random cruelty of the universe, we have to define ourselves as being somehow different, separate, or better than the people that we see terrible things happening to every day. We can’t bear the thought that the next dead kid could be ours, and we can’t spare the compassion necessary to fully grieve each passing, so we shield ourselves with contempt. “That guy wouldn’t have gotten shot if he hadn’t resisted.” “Those kids wouldn’t be dead if their parents gave a shit about them.” “That patient may have had a ‘poor outcome’, but it doesn’t matter because he was a scumbag.”  This is the essence of protective contempt.

I find myself coming back to this idea repeatedly because it’s one of the few approaches that actually gets through to grizzled old (or jaded young) firefighters - and the argument goes something like this: “You can use that ‘protective contempt’ to shield yourself from the things about this job that you don’t want to think about, and it will make you, at best, a poor firefighter. And, the truth is, you might not even care about that. But here’s something you probably do care about:  eventually, as you rise through the ranks, your customers are no longer going to be members of the general public. As a leader of this organization, the people you serve – your customers - are increasingly going to be your subordinates. Meanwhile, all you have done for the last twenty years is cultivate an attitude of contempt towards your customers. You’ve clung to the idea that the customer is always wrong, and now, when you only have one tool in your toolbox, those customers are your brothers and sisters.  Remember those people you said you would lay down your life for? Now you’ve turned your contempt against them and become the kind of leader that you were just bitching about not five minutes ago. You really want to be like that guy? Keep doing what you’re doing because this is how you end up there.”

I’ve seen quite a few looks of humble recognition on firefighter’s faces at the end of that discussion.

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I’m not going to go so far as to give modern-day fire departments credit for being forward-thinking and flexible. The old saying “three hundred years of tradition, unimpeded by progress” is still, sadly, true in a lot of cases. But in many ways, it is the long-standing traditions of the fire house and its culture that make firefighting the rare public occupation able to maintain its focus on the people being served without succumbing (as much) to the usual concerns of efficiency, economy, and profit.  Part of this may be sheer practicality. If someone had found a way to save money and by letting poor people’s houses burn, I’m sure that we would have tried that approach. The problem is that fires have a nasty habit of spreading when they’re left unchecked, and rich people’s houses tend to burn just as hot, if not hotter, than poor people’s houses.

There are, however, two critical ways in which the modern fire service has been able to adapt to the changing times in ways that police departments could learn something from. For one thing, within the last fifty years, fire departments have learned about the importance of fire prevention and we have made it our job – not a job for another agency. In 1977, the number of per capita fire deaths in the US was about three times what it is today (32 deaths per 1M population in 1977 vs 11 deaths per 1M population in 2020), and the total number of fires has decreased in similar fashion. This has largely been due to increased safety standards, more stringent building and electrical codes, increased inspections, alarm systems, sprinkler systems, improved municipal water systems, and faster fire department response times. Most, if not all, of these changes have been spearheaded by fire departments and national safety agencies like the NFPA, often with incredible resistance from those who would stand to lose considerable amounts of money from more stringent safety standards, most notably the housing industry. Today our inspectors save more lives than our front-line firefighters ever will. By focusing on prevention, we’ve done the one thing that most public agencies are loathe to do – we’ve decreased the demand for our services. The total number of actual fire calls in the U.S. today is half of what it was thirty years ago, even with the near 50% increase in population. Medical calls, on the other hand, have gone in the opposite direction.

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Fire department calls for medical assistance are almost five times what they were thirty years ago. This is where the fire service saw an opportunity for itself, and fire departments around the country were able to capitalize on the changing dynamic of emergency services. It wasn’t by any means a foregone conclusion that fire departments should take on EMS services – it doesn’t really even make sense on the face of it – and people still ask us all the time why a fire truck shows up when someone is having a heart attack. The answer is because our fire trucks are full of firefighters who are cross-trained as paramedics, and the systems for delivering those medics rapidly throughout our neighborhoods were already in place, so we chose to take advantage of them. We also managed to save money for municipalities that were paying for both fire and EMS services separately, all while increasing our own salaries substantially and improving patient care and response times. But it didn’t come easy. It required a serious culture change. The department that I work for merged its fire and EMS services in 1997 and we are still feeling the pains of it today.

So, what does all of this have to do with policing? It’s simple. Compared to the firefighter’s adversary, the cop’s foe is just easier to anthropomorphize. It’s clear that, over the years, policing in America has begun to mistake customers for adversaries. What seems like a small distinction is actually a critical difference – the difference between fighting crime and fighting “criminals”. Just about anyone can identify a crime in progress – there is rarely any doubt about what’s happening. But how do you identify a “criminal”? Implicit bias? Stereotypes? Racism? Contempt? The answer is that you don’t – or at least you shouldn’t. It’s not a cop’s job to identify criminals. Cops are there to identify crimes that have been committed and, on rare occasions, to interrupt their commission or to stop them from happening in the first place. Cops fight crime not criminals. Criminals are made in a court of law.

Most of us know that punishment as a deterrent to crime doesn’t really work all that well. In fact, this argument is central to those who would advocate for defunding or disbanding police departments in their current form. So, if we have recognized that deterrence is not helping in the streets, why would we think it would help within the institution? We can create all the civilian review boards we want, enact duty to intervene laws, we can put body cameras on every cop in America, and it’s not going to change much of anything.

I have to say that I’ve been surprised by the amount of resistance I’ve encountered every time I’ve suggested that the only way to solve the problems that we are facing today is through training and intentional culture creation (also intentional culture destruction when those cultures are toxic). I think a lot of the resistance comes from the natural desire to give the enemy a face – the same miscalculation that we have already identified as being a problem on the part of the police (or the fire department, or anyone else).  This is Lenny Bruce’s classic argument about people’s inability to separate “The Authority” from “The People With the Authority Vested In Them”.  At the same time that we are decrying the ills of systemic racism and the seemingly permanent stain that it has left on our fragile democracy, we have been unable to separate the people committing these atrocities from the institutions that made them what they are. I know this because many of you have probably already decided that this is an apology piece for the police (“copologia” as we have come to call it), when I have not even begun to discuss the institution of policing.  I’ve just been talking about cops, and cops are just people. They’re flawed and scared and stupid and racist just like a lot of people (they are also selfless and compassionate and dedicated like a lot of other people). Are there bad ones? Of course. Are there a lot of bad ones? Probably. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that getting rid of the bad ones will solve any of the problems we are currently experiencing. Those bad cops were made by the system that put them in power, a system that promptly turned its back when they abused that power. And as long as that system exists in its current form, we’ll just continue to create more and more bad cops. How could we not?

 Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the current crop of murderers shouldn’t be punished. In fact, I think cops (or firefighters, or other public servants) who murder, or otherwise abuse their power, should be punished more than the average guy on the street - because they have broken a sacred pact. We entrusted them with our safety, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in their presence, and they chose to violate that trust. At the very least, I think these bad cops should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And then I think we should change the laws. And the culture. And the incentives.

If we have learned anything from these last few, rudderless years, it’s that what I’ve been telling my son all along is true. One-third of the population is made up of genuinely good people who have the well-being and interests of their fellow travelers at heart. They truly want to make the world a better place, and they’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen. Fully another third of the population are simply horrible monsters. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. And the last third is just along for the ride. They could go either way. But we can teach them to be good people. We can model acceptable behaviors, and if we can get them to go along with us, we’ll have the monsters outnumbered by two to one. The numbers are never going to get any better than that.

And the monsters never stop working, either. Like wolves, they prowl our perimeter, picking off our most vulnerable members, always ready to enter our circle and sow their seeds of destruction. But we can continue to guide the conversation, to lead by example, and to exert one of the most powerful forces we have at our disposal – peer pressure. In the last few years, I’ve seen the same meme repeated over and over. The basic statement reads something like “I can’t believe I have to tell you not to be a horrible person”. But still, we do. And we have to say it over and over again because the horrible people don’t just go away. They are always there waiting for an opportunity to strike, and all we need to do is to hand them the microphone for the briefest amount of time and we can see our numbers start to dwindle. And right now, the sides are about as evenly split as they have ever been. The scales could easily tip past the point of redemption. We are currently in a pitched battle, and it seems to me that the moral arc of the universe is beginning to bend back towards justice. It doesn’t bend on its own, though. Sometimes you’ve really gotta lean on that fucker.

______

The Search - Tenth Installment

I've been thinking about trying out standup comedy, but I don't think I have the physique for it. I'm a firefighter and I look like a firefighter - not the stereotypical Mister October made-for-tv firefighter, but like an actual firefighter. Like a 49-year-old, twenty-years-on-the-job firefighter who's losing his hair and taking supplemental testosterone. I look like I can still deadlift 450 pounds, but I'm just as likely to eat a whole box of thin mints.

I look the way I do partially because of genetics, partially because of the job that I do, and partially because I grew up in the eighties with an older step-brother who wore tight jeans and kept a pistol in his back pocket. He worked as a crane operator before he joined the Marine Corps. He rode a motorcycle and insisted that we not refer to it as anything other than "Mr. Bike".

Eight-year-old me wanted to be just like him, and I guess a small part of me still does. I wanted to dress like him, to feather my hair like him. I wanted to smoke Camels and refer to Charlotte, North Carolina as "North Clit".

He and I don't share any blood. I've never shot a deer, and while I've never owned a Jeep or even a pair of cowboy boots, he's all Jeeps and boots and deer killing. He's been a cop now for longer than I've been a fireman, and despite what a lot of people think, those things are opposites too. For all the ways that I'm nothing like him, and despite the lack of any blood relation, I'm built just like him.

It's not a body for comedy. It's a body for law enforcement and coaching football.

When was the last time someone got funnier AFTER they got muscles? Joe Piscapo? Carrot Top? Ricky Gervais? Joe Rogan? Dave Chappelle? Muscles are the death of comedy. Imagine if Woody Allen looked vaguely threatening - and not just in a sexual predator kind of way.

The space needed for laughter is so ephemeral. Even the faintest whiff of menace can kill the mood. How funny can you be when you look like I do? Nobody wants to dance when the cops are in the club.

In a time when a lot of people are exploring the mismatch between the person they, internally, know themselves to be, and the physical presentation they manifest on the outside, I can fully understand what it’s like to feel that you were born into the wrong body. I’m comfortable in my gender presentation and I'm confident in my sexuality, but there's still something that doesn't fit for me. I'm a straight, white, cis-gendered, middle class, heterosexual, American dad. I'm a fireman, a paramedic, and a small business owner. I'm a pretty good carpenter and a damn good welder. And all those things, taken together, conjure in most people a whole host of other images - most of which I don't feel myself to be at all. I don't drive a pickup. I can’t stand modern country music. I've never owned a boat. Fishing bores me. I’m not interested in being ‘tactical’. I don't own any white shoes or a belt clip for my phone. I'm an artist and a musician. I can recite Emily Dickinson poetry from memory. I play the drums and the banjo, and I don't give a shit about football or even capitalism, really. So, part of me feels like I ended up in the wrong body.

I wanted to be thin and angular, like David Bowie or Marcel Duchamp. I wanted fingers like prayer candles not these Irish, potato, digging-in-the-dirt fingers. I wanted to appear thoughtful. And if that didn't work, maybe I could at least be funny. But you've got to play the hand you are dealt.

Firefighting ruins your sleep schedule, especially over the long haul, and the effects of this become more and more apparent as you age. One of the common manifestations of poor sleep hygiene and constant interruption of our circadian rhythms is obstructive sleep apnea. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem - is the poor sleep causing the sleep apnea, or is the sleep apnea causing the poor sleep? Other causes of sleep apnea can be anatomical. People who carry a lot of weight in their neck and torso can be especially susceptible - people who look like firefighters - big, thick-necked dudes who can deadlift 450 pounds.

One of the secondary effects of continually interrupted sleep cycles (especially that caused by obstructive sleep apnea) is low testosterone levels. Testosterone is released in our bodies during sleep, and interrupted sleep cycles can lead to significantly decreased levels of testosterone. And this is all happening in a population whose testosterone levels are, arguably, higher than average at the start of their careers (I would include women in this assessment as well). I enjoy talking about these issues at the station because it lets the younger firefighters know about some of the potential risks of the job, but it also leads to some interesting conversations with young, testosterone-obsessed firefighters.

“Hey Cap, I just had my bloodwork done and my T levels are pretty low. Do you think I should look into getting on testosterone?”

“You should have a sleep study done first. A lot of low T readings are caused by sleep apnea, and it’s possible that if you fix the sleep apnea, the low T will fix itself. You don’t want to start taking testosterone unless you have to. Once you’re on it, you’re probably never coming off, and there are other risks associated with it.”

“Damn. I was kinda looking forward to the extra testosterone.”

“I know. My concept of how I should feel doesn’t really match up with what nature has given me either. I think I have kind of a mild case of gender dysphoria. We’re all a little trans. Sounds like you are too.” 

I think I've always felt this way. Even as a fourteen-year-old suburban punk rocker, I always felt like I looked like a cop who used to be a crane operator. Everybody else always had way more flair than me. Their looks ran deep and seemed effortless - like every surface had another surface underneath. And all of it perfectly weathered and fitting together into one cohesive unit that looked like they were just born that way. If I ever did anything to add a little bling to my ensemble, it just highlighted how plain the rest of me was. I know people who can walk around town in a fedora with a giant feather sticking out of it, and nobody will say the first thing to them about it. Not me. Every single person I passed on the street would just smirk and say “nice hat”. And if I decided to push the issue, I’d just be that guy with the hat. My vibe has always been more Village People than Sex Pistols, so I stopped trying to accessorize early on. I told myself that being an incognito weirdo was better anyhow. I learned early on that it's hard to be a criminal in a flashy car. Better to blend into the background. Keep all your weirdo ideas hidden under a thin veneer of normalcy.

These days I joke with my wife that she's the only reason people recognize me at all. There's me with the whole jeans-and-a-t-shirt, medium height, white guy thing going on. No tattoos. No distinctive scars or tics. Not even a piercing, or a birthmark. And then there's her - a Black Trinidadian woman, gorgeous, with dreadlocks to her waist and a slight accent. I've seen it happen a thousand times. I walk into a room ahead of her and there's not even the faintest hint of recognition on anyone's face. They've seen thousands of me. Millions. And I get it. I don't really want to see another one of me either. But then they see her, and their faces light up. And in seeing her, suddenly, they see me. I'm with her.

She doesn’t like it when I point this out, I’m sure because she feels like I’m exoticizing her when what I’m trying to do is show how nobody gives a shit about me. It’s tough. Everyone sees everything from their own frame of reference and her life experience has largely been one of being the one thing that is not like the others, whereas mine has been the opposite. I am all the others. And there is probably as much power to be had in anonymity as there is to be had in recognizability.

I'll take it. The downside is that nobody remembers that I've actually been around here for a long time. I've lived in this same town now for almost fifty years. And I've done a lot of different things here, but there's often not a lot of crossover between them. There are plenty of firefighters I've known for twenty years who don't know that I play the drums or make big crazy sculptures. And there are plenty of musicians and artists who don't know that I'm a twenty-year veteran of the fire department. I’m the perpetual rookie, the younger brother. There’s a lot to be said for that in terms of keeping yourself humble, but the ensuing imposter syndrome can be difficult to overcome when you need to convince yourself or others that you are, in fact, qualified for the job. I’ve largely settled on showing people rather than telling them, but that’s easier in some respects than it is in others. As a fire Captain, my experience and authority is immediately recognizable. I step out of the Captain’s seat on the truck, and I’m the one with the white helmet. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. What’s interesting to me is that whatever small amount of authority comes from me being in uniform changes the way that I interact with people on every level. I’m no longer the rookie or the guy I assume nobody wants to talk to. The uniform is a calling card that says “You’re safe with me”. I find myself entering easily into conversations with strangers on even the most sensitive of subjects. I can be thoughtful and vulnerable and sensitive. But I can also be funny and irreverent and self-deprecating. And the more I enjoy the privileges of the instant familiarity that my uniform brings, the more I wonder if that wasn’t, at least partially, what I was after all along. But it would be weird for me to wear my uniform up on stage for an open mic in a bar.

The Search - Ninth Installment

Tony steps out of the shower wrapped in a scandalously short towel that’s obviously been stolen from the ambulance, wearing a pair of cheap plastic slides. The tiny white hospital towel barely makes it around his age-thickened waist, and there’s a deep slit positioned over his right leg to expose a large, colorful tattoo – a bird of paradise flower that covers most of his upper thigh. Standing in the hallway shirtless and grinning in his shower shoes, toothbrush and deodorant in hand, water droplets rolling down from the top of his shaved head, he looks a little like Uncle Fester and a little like the oldest kid at summer camp.

Tony has a couple other tattoos that could easily have been done in prison – a misshapen eagle’s head on one shoulder, a shaky Maltese cross on the other - along with a thick keloid scar that looks like an attempted brand on his left breast. The tattoos on his upper body are all rendered in the same faded, wavy green lines. They have probably been there for forty years, which makes the tattoo on his leg that much more incongruous. It’s noticeably newer, with bright colors, and crisp lines. While it’s not going to win any awards, it was obviously done by a somewhat more experienced hand. The subject matter is what makes it puzzling. The bright, flamboyant flower is an odd choice for a fifty-five-year-old macho Cuban firefighter.

“What’s up with that?” I say, pointing at his exposed thigh.

“Bro! I’ve got a story for you!” Tony laughs.

It’s getting late, but I figure we have time for one more shot of Cuban coffee before bed. I fill the moka pot and put it on the stove while Tony begins the story of his newest tattoo.

“So, I had this buddy who was a Sheriff’s deputy and he owed me like four hundred bucks.”

I find that - as an adult with a steady job and friends who are mostly adults with steady jobs - I don’t have a lot of people who owe me four hundred bucks anymore, but Tony and I don’t run in the same circles. Tony spends his free time working as a cutman for local boxing matches, taping up fighter’s gloves and faces and getting himself into situations where off-duty Sheriff’s deputies owe him four hundred bucks. He eats lunch in the same café every day where the same old Cuban men spend hours over cafecitos and card games, arguing politics and paying their tabs at the end of the month. 

“My buddy told me that he didn’t have the money to pay me, but he had another guy who owed him like four hundred bucks, and that guy didn’t have any money either, but that guy was a tattoo artist, so my buddy told me that if I wanted a tattoo, he could get me a four-hundred-dollar tattoo for free and then everyone’s debts would be settled.”

Again, Tony and I are different people. I don’t have any tattoos at all, so this sounds like a bad deal all the way around to me, but even if I were covered in tattoos, the idea of getting one, unplanned, from an unknown artist in an unknown place to settle what is otherwise a very real debt does not seem like the best trade to me, but Tony didn’t see it that way.

“Sounded like a good deal to me, so I said ‘Okay, let’s do it!’” Tony says, laughing.

I could never commit to a tattoo because I never felt like I could find anything that I would feel comfortable having on my body for the rest of my life. As much as I might love something today, I know myself well enough to know that there’s a very real chance I’ll feel differently about it tomorrow. But that’s not what tattoos are for. Turns out, I had it all wrong. Tattoos serve as mementos of experiences, and just like the experiences they memorialize, they don’t all have to be good. In fact, when too many of them are too good, it makes the wearer just as suspect as someone who insists that all their past experiences have been positive. And this is where Tony and I are much the same. We are both collectors of experiences in our own distinct ways. Most of my experiences end up manifesting themselves as stories and works of art. Tony’s manifest as bad tattoos.

“So, we hop in my buddy’s car. He’s driving us further and further out of town which I think is weird, but I’m not asking any questions. When he turns into the entrance of a trailer park in Palm River I finally ask him what’s going on.

I go, ‘Bro, I thought we were going to a tattoo parlor.’

But my buddy just says, ‘This guy works from home.’”

Were it me, this is the point where I would have bailed out on the experience. I’m not really a confrontational person, especially with strangers, and I know that if we make it into this dude’s trailer, there’s no way I’m going to be able to say no to the tattoo, no matter how sketchy the situation. I could never be that rude to someone in their own home. It goes against literally everything I was taught as a kid. If I’m a guest in somebody’s home and they offer me a meal, or a bed, or even a hepatitis-infected tattoo needle, I’m going to smile and say, “Thank you very much”. But we’re not there yet. There’s still time to turn the car around and leave without hepatitis or a four-hundred-dollar trailer park tattoo. But, again, Tony and I are different people.

“So, we go into this dude’s single-wide and I’m looking around for the flash art. I didn’t have my own design, so I figured I’d just pick something off the wall, but he doesn’t have anything up on the walls. It’s not the dirtiest trailer I’ve ever been in, but it’s no tattoo parlor either. I ask if he has anything for me to look at and he just yells to his old lady in the back, ‘Hey babe, come out here!’

His old lady comes out of the back bedroom wearing a string bikini, and she’s covered in tattoos. He just points at her and says ‘Why don’t you pick out something on her that you like?' She’s his flash wall!

I didn't really like any of her tattoos that much, but she had this one bird of paradise tattoo on her shoulder that I thought was okay. Hers was really small though, and I wanted something that was worth four-hundred bucks, so I told him to give me the same one but to make it real big!”  

I told this story to a friend of mine who said that it should be taught in every economics class as an example of why the barter system doesn’t work. I think of it every time a firefighter tells me that they are switching their pension over to the investment option because they can be a better manager of their money than the pension fund managers. And I think about it whenever I’m in a situation where I’m bending over backwards to broker a compromise on something where I was clearly at a disadvantage from the start.

It’s easy to laugh at Tony and what he got for his four-hundred dollars, but he doesn’t feel ripped off at all. He’s standing in the kitchen in an indecent towel and slides with a giant, ridiculous tattoo on his leg, a delicate little demitasse of espresso in his hand, and a huge grin on his face. Seems like four-hundred dollars well spent.

The Search - Seventh Installment

My brief, early experience as a substitute teacher may have turned me on to a few of the things I needed that I never even knew I was looking for. The first was the idea that I could be a caretaker, a public servant - a contributing member of society. The second realization had to do with my relationship towards the rules. While I had always pushed back against the rules, at some point I realized that what I was looking for was not a situation in which there were no rules – I was looking for a situation with rules that I could feel justified in breaking.

I was never really into drugs, especially weed which just made me paranoid an anxious. To quote Lenny Bruce again “I don't smoke pot, and I'm glad because then I can champion it without special pleading. The reason I don't smoke it is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations-and I've got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot.” I feel the same way. The few times, years ago, when I happened to be in possession of my own marijuana, I always thought it was much more fun to have the weed in my pocket than it was to actually smoke it. I didn’t like the feeling of being high. What I liked was the feeling of breaking the law. Now that it’s mostly legal, I’ll probably never smoke it again.

As a firefighter and paramedic, part of what helps me to deal with the stresses of the job is a complete lack of judgement towards people who would choose to endanger their own lives – whether it be through drugs, guns, crime, fireworks, motorcycles, or just poor life choices. As far as I’m concerned, if your own reckless behavior doesn’t endanger anyone other than you or the others who have consented to those same dangers, I’m fine with it. In fact, I’ll rush over with sirens blaring to give you the Narcan you need, or to apply pressure and a tourniquet to your pulsating nub of a hand on the Fourth of July. And I don’t care if you’ve learned your lesson or not. That’s up to you.

I’ve seen people make the argument that those who would kill or maim themselves through their own poor choices should think twice about the trauma they are inflicting on the poor first responders. I think they should consider the trauma inflicted on their children and families by their actions, but they don’t need to worry about me at all. I’ll be fine. Seeing bad things happen to people who asked for it is just the natural order of things. It does me no harm at all. When bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it – that’s when it starts to take a toll. Innocent children suffering from horrible diseases or the poor choices of their parents, responsible citizens killed by drunks and thieves, people who could just as easily be your own wife, mother, brother, or son. Those are the ones that sting.

I don’t know how many July 4ths I’ve worked at this point, but I’ve seen plenty of hand and eye injuries as well as quite a few house fires, dumpster fires, and brush fires all caused by fireworks. In fact, the structure fire chronicled in the opening scenes of this memoir was caused by an errant bottle rocket. I’ve had to risk my own life on several occasions to deal with the aftermath of fireworks. So, do I think they should be banned? No. I think that fireworks are part of America’s cultural heritage, and I like to try looking at things from a relativist perspective. How would I view a custom or tradition if I encountered it in another country? There are all sorts of customs around the world that bring with them a certain element of risk - whether it’s jumping off a tower with vines tied to your ankles in Vanuatu, or running with the bulls in Pamplona - there are plenty of examples of dangerous or questionable behavior that we celebrate under the umbrella of cultural relativism.  So, I think America gets a pass for fireworks.

From my perspective, the only valid argument I have heard for abandoning our national love affair with fireworks is that they traumatize our veterans and others who suffer from PTSD. Apparently, the fake rockets and bombs we love to throw around on the 4th of July remind our vets a little too much of all the real rockets and bombs they encountered in service to our country. With a grand total of about 18 years of peace in our 247-year history, it’s difficult for a veteran of the American military not to have negative rocket and bomb associations. My first suggestion would be that we try to curtail the use of the real ones before we go banning the fake ones. “Well then”, you ask, “if you won’t do it for us and our vets, will you at least do it for the dogs?” No. I won’t. I think that fireworks are the price that dogs have to pay for getting to live in America.

Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not advocating for some kind of Libertarian free-for-all, either. I think that laws are necessary and useful. In fact, I think that most Libertarians are closet rule followers who can’t deal with the fact that there needs to be some flexibility in our system. Every Libertarian I’ve ever heard calling for the abolishment of some law or tax has been citing a way in which they think the rule was unfairly applied or ignored. They can’t seem to wrap their heads around the concept that we are to be tried by a jury of our peers, and we have flexibility built into our system. In the Libertarian mind, the fact that there may be exceptions (especially when those exceptions don’t directly benefit them) means that the rule needs to be abolished entirely. I think the genius of the American system is that we have a set of rules to guide us, and if we choose to ignore them, then we have a chance to explain ourselves. Of course, I’m not naïve enough to think that it actually works that way, especially if you are Black or brown or female or poor. But if we could remove race, gender, culture, and class from the equation, then selective enforcement would actually be something worth shooting for.

I've never had much patience for rules.  I like to take each situation on a case-by-case basis and having hard-and-fast rules in place always seems to stifle any attempt at truly thinking your way through a situation.  Plus, nobody loves a rule book like a dumb person loves a rule book. The biggest rule followers in any organization are invariably the least creative, most unimaginative thinkers. Whether it's The Bible, or the City of Tampa Construction Code, there's nothing that makes life easier for the dullard than being given a written set of instructions to follow.

The modern fire department is as rule-bound as any other paramilitary organization, but unlike other similar agencies, firefighting has a long history of creative rule breaking. I like to think that this goes back at least as far as 19th century America, when rival fire companies were known to brawl each other in the street over who got to put out the fire (and who got paid by the insurance company) while the building burned, unchecked behind them. What saves us today as firemen who frequently defy the rule book is that the outcome is easily measurable. Did the house burn down? Did the patient survive? Did anyone get hurt?

Every situation is different, and the rules as written often don't apply at all. If you can justify your actions, and the outcome is satisfactory, you can put it all down to being  quick on your feet and responding to a dynamic situation.  You just have to hope that your actions land on the right side of things when the history of the incident gets written. There are plenty of situations, at least in the moment, where it may be possible to see two distinctly different outcomes. Your “heroic” actions are just as likely to get you demoted as they are to get you Firefighter of the Year. It depends mostly on who wins the battle.

When I first became interested in a career in the fire service, I read everything I could get my hands on about firefighting, EMS, as well as the history and culture associated with both professions. In the days just after September 11th 2001, there was no shortage of stories about the fire service in the news. I remember reading a story about crews remodeling their stations without the knowledge or approval of their department. Years later, I learned of a fire house in New York that had added an entire story to the top of their station without any permits or approvals, so that off-duty personnel would have a place to hang out between shifts instead of going all the way back to their homes in Long Island or Westchester. This seemed, to me, like the type of culture where I would fit right in.

So, this is where I found myself in the summer of 2013, a newly-promoted Driver Engineer sent to one of the furthest outlying stations in the wilds of southeastern Hillsborough County.  I had come from a moderately busy suburban station that averaged 8-10 calls per shift covering an area of about 6 square miles, to a rural station that averaged 1-2 calls per shift and covered an area of 125 square miles. We didn't do much, but when we did it was usually serious, and our backup was a long ways away.  You could easily have a structure fire all to yourself for twenty or thirty minutes before another unit arrived on scene, and outside of the small town of Wimauma itself, there were no fire hydrants anywhere in our first alarm area.

In the Florida summer, Wimauma and its surrounding agricultural lands are the frequent site of large-scale brush fires that can burn hundreds or even thousands of acres. These fires may take anywhere from several hours to several weeks to control. The apparatus assigned to our station consisted of an engine manned by a crew of three firefighters, a one-man tanker truck carrying 3500 gallons of water, and an un-manned 4-wheel drive brush truck staffed by the firefighters from the engine as needed. When called for a brush fire, we usually just grabbed our gear from the engine and jumped on the brush truck with the tanker following in our wake. 

We received a mid-afternoon call for a small grass fire at an address at least 10-12 minutes from our station.  The three-man engine crew piled into the brush truck and pulled out of the station with the tanker close behind. On small outdoor fires such as this, we generally only dispatch a single engine or brush truck. In this case, due to the water supply issues, we had the tanker coming as well. As we got closer, dispatch updated us that the fire was "possibly" threatening a structure on the property. A few more minutes passed and they were advising us that this was a confirmed structure fire with at least one house burning and an unknown occupant level. With each update we discussed our plan of attack, but our strategies were limited by our choice of apparatus and the equipment that we had available to us.

We discussed the possible scenarios as we sped towards the rising column of thick, black smoke in the distance. On our truck, we had three people, one airpack (each brush truck only had one air pack on it), two sets of structural firefighting gear (our rookie had left his on the engine, only bringing his lightweight brush gear), and no handlines suitable for fighting a structure fire. We ran down the inventory coming behind us on the slow-moving tanker - one more airpack, 3500 gallons of water, a pump, and two 2" handlines that had probably never been pulled on a structure fire before. The beginnings of a plan started to come together. The Captain and I would suit up in our structural gear with him taking our one airpack while our rookie pulled the booster line from the brush truck to fight the grass fire. I would don the tanker’s airpack and the Captain and I would pull both of the tankers 2” handlines to fight the structure fire. As we discussed our options, I tried to stifle the grin on my face, but I couldn’t help voicing to my crew what I had been thinking since the start of this whole debacle. "This is gonna be awesome."

People often ask me, “When did you know you wanted to be a firefighter?”, and this is the story that I always tell. Of course, my decision had been made years before, but this was the moment when I finally knew for sure that the job was right for me. By any rational analysis, we were walking into a situation that had already gone wrong in just about every way possible. We were understaffed with the wrong equipment and not enough of it, we were facing a large and growing fire with a limited water supply, and any hope of help that we had was still a long way away. I saw all those hazards and recognized them for what they were, but I saw something else - opportunity. I knew that we were going to have to be fast, efficient, courageous, and inventive if we were going to have any chance at success. I knew that we weren’t going to have to worry about the rulebook. We could do whatever we wanted.

______

As we approach the scene, we can see the chaos spreading out before us. A large, manufactured home is set well back from the road, surrounded by several acres of tall, dry grasses. Old cars and tractors are scattered throughout the thick underbrush. Everything in the yard is on fire. The smoke is staying low to the ground and moving rapidly from left to right as a strong wind pushes the fire to the northeast, past the house and into the tall pines of a large, wooded area to the east. The grass around the house has already burned, killing several dogs whose smoking bodies dot the clearings around the blackened yard. The fire is getting into the trees, and it may be spreading towards a cluster of houses to the north. It is hard to tell just how much of the interior of the house is involved, and it’s impossible to know whether there are any occupants inside.

My Captain dons the lone airpack on our truck, and our young firefighter grabs the booster line from the rear of our truck. Without an airpack of his own, he pulls his Nomex hood up over his nose and mouth to provide some small amount of protection from the blowing smoke. He takes a wide path around the house to the right, wetting the fire at its southern edge. He cuts a path across the head of the fire, allowing it to continue its burn to the east where it has already made its way into the woods, and he turns back towards the house to stop the fire from surrounding us and moving on to the north. My Captain radios our size-up to the other units now enroute to us, he requests the forestry service and a Sherriff’s helicopter to help with spotting the fire and directing units to stop its progress into the woods. I’ve worked with this Captain for four or five years now. He’s unflappable - a firefighter’s firefighter. I’ve been through all sorts of situations with him, and I’ve never seen him anything other than focused, calm, and determined. Not today. He’s screaming his commands over the radio.

The tanker pulls up and stops behind our brush truck, ready to supply his water to the pump on our truck (what we call “nursing”), but I jump up on his running board and tell him to put his truck in pump gear and be ready to charge his own handlines. I don the airpack from his side compartment, the Captain and I each shoulder one of the two handlines, and we begin advancing towards the house.

We are so accustomed to watching our rookies pull handlines that it’s easy to forget what it looks like when it’s done by an experienced firefighter. Today it’s being done in stereo, and the two firefighters, each with 200 feet of 2” hose on their shoulders, have about forty years of experience between them.

Watching a well-run fire scene can be like watching a slow-motion dance on the moon. There is a flow that happens when the members of a crew are all working together, when nobody needs to take direction from anyone else. We’re both taking large strides toward the house and throwing flakes of hose off our shoulders at each second step. The uncharged hoses cut two jagged lines through the yard behind us, and we march towards the house in what feels like perfect sync. We pay out the last of our lines, and there is no need for us to give the tanker driver the signal for water. He can see us, and he knows, when the last flakes hit the ground, that we are ready. He throws the levers to charge our lines and the loose bends of the empty hoses snap to attention, straightening our lines and pushing us further in towards the house.

My Captain moves right, towards the eastern side of the structure, where the grass fire has ignited the siding, burning the roof overhangs, and threatening to make its way up into the attic. In another minute or two, this whole house is going to be on fire. I move left, towards the front door to make an interior attack. With our nozzles set to a medium fog pattern we’re sweeping the area in front of us and knocking down as much fire as we can on our approach.  

I make entry through the unlocked front door and the interior is surprisingly untouched by the chaos outside. There is some light, lingering smoke up high, but there are no signs of the fire having made its way into the attic.  I give each room a quick check and everything is clear. The occupants either were not home, or they vacated prior to our arrival. I radio my size-up from the interior and announce that the primary search is complete. It’s eerily quiet in here. I can hear the distant approach of the Sherriff’s helicopter and the sirens of the other units responding to our location but the late summer air in here is still and dead. Through the bedroom window I can see my Captain knocking down what’s left of the fire on the exterior, and our rookie has finished making his way around the perimeter, stopping any further forward progress of the fire and saving the houses to the north of our location. The fire is still burning unchecked in the woods to the east, but that part is going to be somebody else’s problem. At least for now.

We make our way back through the yard, dousing any hot spots left, past the bloated bodies of the dogs, towards the tanker and its driver who we can see offering up cold bottles of water through the smoke. The other units have arrived, and there are crews in the woods beginning to attack what is now a full-blown forest fire to our east. The helicopter is circling high above, giving radio updates on the progress of the fire as the ground crews move themselves into position and chiefs in white shirts point their fingers and yell things to each other and into their radios. The Forestry Service will soon be cutting plow lines around the perimeter of the fire in a further effort to limit its spread. It’s going to be a long day for everyone involved.

For right now though, we can take a moment to sit on the bumper of the tanker with jackets off and bottles of water in hand, our legs swinging like three little kids on a park bench.

The Search - Sixth Installment

For most of my life I have been cursed with the ability to see situations from two sides at once - struggling to inhabit the character of myself, and simultaneously seeing myself from the outside as I think others might see me. I’m not suggesting that this provides me with any greater empathy or understanding. It’s just one more way of separating myself from the action, and I often feel like more of a spectator than an actor in the play that is my life.

I feel like I have my feet planted firmly on opposite sides of a great divide. I am a middle child with an older brother who is the quintessential literary-minded genius. My youngest brother is finishing out a career in the Marine Corp’s Special Operations division. I also have an older step brother who was in the Marine Corp when I was young. I have a lot of siblings, but it’s basically a Marine sandwich full of academics and a firefighter right in the middle, for spice. We had step and half siblings that came and went at each of our different houses, but it was my older “real” brother, Taylor, and I that spent our most formative years together, shuttling back and forth between the separate households of our divorced parents.

Neither one of us was much into sports, BMX bikes, or petty theft, which set us apart from the kids in our suburban Florida neighborhood. Maybe we were just snobs, but we always viewed ourselves as being different than the neighbors. This was central Florida in the eighties, and our family was decidedly more liberal, arguably more educated, and possibly even a little better off than most of our neighbors. My stepfather worked for the county and my mother was an administrative assistant at the local university. My brother and I played on a few soccer teams that did nothing but lose, the Boy Scouts had politely asked us to leave, and until we discovered the physicality of music (and punk rock especially), ours was a relatively sedate childhood. My brother was, I think, content to live in a world of books, music, and poetry, but my tolerance for these things was limited. I despised his habit of carrying books around with him, burying his face in them whenever there was a lull in conversation. I would scream at him as he read and he would sit, unfazed, behind a wall that I could never breach.

We were both creative children, but we came at it from completely different angles. I built things and took things apart. Taylor did the same with language. Neither one of us has really changed. For me then it was cameras, watches, music boxes, and model rockets - anything I could get my hands on that contained a little mystery. Soon my parents were giving me broken clock radios and old televisions to keep me from disassembling everything of value in the house.

Taylor and I established a system of building model airplanes analogous to the relationship between the two of us. He would read the instructions carefully and direct my efforts while I freed each piece from its delicate plastic grid and glued it to the next one with the tiniest dab of glue. During one of these model building episodes, my grandfather called my mother and asked her what the boys were up to. She explained that we were building a model and what our division of labor strategy was. “Don’t tell Devon I said this,” my grandfather said to my mother, “but Taylor is going to make a lot more money than him.”  He was wrong though. Neither one of us makes any money.

For most of my childhood, my father worked in a shop that made wood window shutters. The shop went through several different names during his twenty-plus years there, but we never called it anything other than “Shutters”. Knowing how I loved to tinker, he would come home with bags of scrap lumber and hardware. I found the tiny brass screws and the spring-loaded bullet catches especially captivating. On weekend camping trips, we would dig a fire pit and assemble these pieces into elaborate dollhouse structures that we called “Hitler Houses”. Like most of my dad’s little jokes, I had no idea where the name came from, but I assume now that it was a reference to the 1933 Reichstag fire, but who knows, I still haven’t asked him. We’re not really talking.

We would stuff each of the little rooms of our Hitler House with newspaper, douse it all in lighter fluid and set it ablaze. These exercises in architecture, design, materials science, and engineering ended in what was, for me, the best type of pyromaniac finale.

______

Entering the workforce with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, my father viewed his life after college as a long series of failures – never living up to what he thought was his true potential. Later in life, my brother may have been interested in dissecting the finer points of Marx and Engels with him, but I thought his life at Shutters was far more interesting than his degree or his intellectual aspirations.

His frustrations with himself, in many ways, mirrored his frustrations with the schools of thought to which he had bound himself. This was America in the eighties. We were witnessing the fall of communism and the supposed triumph of capitalism. Reaganomics was winning out over Marxist ideology every day. It frustrated him to no end, but either through simple curiosity, or a masochistic desire to wallow in that which he despised, he always had a hard-bound copy of the latest Lee Iacocca biography or Trump’s “Art of the Deal” on the coffee table next to the big blue glass ashtray, the little hand carved Persian boat, and the ever-present pull tab can of Budweiser.

______

At Shutters, Dad worked in the office while my stepmother, ran the finishing department - working alongside a group of women who meticulously sanded each shutter’s dozens of wooden louvers by hand.  I loved riding to work in the truck on summer mornings - the early morning commute that was so different from my usual walk to school.  Mugs of black coffee. Me riding in the middle of the bench seat between the two of them, straddling the gear shift, bare legs sticking out of too-short corduroy shorts, studying the “H” shaped diagram on the gear shifter’s handle, the worn pattern in the leather where my father rested the thick fingers of his turquoise-ringed his hand. 

Shutters was a place where things got done, and the progress was easy enough to track. Raw lumber came in one end of the shop, finished shutters and bags of sawdust came out the other end. Line shafts still ran the length of the factory ceiling where wide fabric belts would attach the spinning shafts to the flywheels of the antique saws, drills, planers, and jointers.  I once helped to search through a pile of sawdust next to the jointer where a new worker had just lost a finger to the spinning blades of the machine. Unlike a table saw or a band saw, jointers don’t take things off cleanly. As my current business partner said to one of the new guys in our shop, “If this thing takes your fingers off, you’re not getting them back. You’ll just have, like, shorter fingers.” Our search through the pile of wood chips was futile, the fresh chips being just a little more moist and pink than they normally would have been.

The language spoken at Shutters was a fluid mix of English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Bulgarian, and it was always an adventure to see what each person was having for lunch in the break room. These pre-dawn chats over weak coffee, in the presence of so many new and interesting characters had me spellbound. There was the weekend musician, the aspiring chef, the amateur archeologist - each also skilled with their hands and skilled in the art of casual conversation. These conversations were had for hours each day as they quietly hand-sanded yet another batch of louvers. I wanted to grow up to be like them - to spend my mornings on a cheap vinyl chair, its cracked upholstery covered in a light dusting of white lacquer overspray and saw dust, to hear the thunk of the time clock as people pushed their chairs back, groaned, and made some sort of “here we go again” joke.

My father and stepmother had worked at Shutters together for years. My mother had worked there as well. Then, at some point, my mother didn’t work there anymore, my parents weren’t married anymore, and my father and my stepmother were living together. Being seven-years-old at the time, this sequence of events was something I didn’t put together until years later. I remember passing through the new subdivision to our east as the two of them talked about their upcoming anniversary and how many years they had been together. I put my second-grade math skills to work and something didn’t add up to me.

We were headed towards the new stretch of Interstate 75 that connected Tampa to Sarasota and all points south. My dad had taken me out on that same stretch of road within days of its opening and we raced along its smooth black surface without another vehicle in sight, just he and I in a little beige Toyota pickup with fresh tires that hummed along on the slick new asphalt as he tried to get the speedometer up past 100. Open container laws were non-existent in Florida at the time, and I’m fairly certain that he had a can of Budweiser tucked between his legs, just as he did on any other outing that the two of us went on.

In a hazily remembered episode from early childhood, we were in the truck headed north on 56th Street at Fowler Avenue, on our way back to our apartment, when my mother and father were still living together. As we approached the intersection, we could see that the road ahead was closed. The Schlitz Light National Marathon was having its inaugural running from the Schlitz brewery on 30th Street down the as-yet-unfinished Fowler Avenue. A stream of Jim Fixx-inspired marathoners in silky shorts, tube socks, and Nike waffle treads were shuffling east on Fowler towards Temple Terrace. The police were out of their cars stopping traffic as the runners passed.

“What kind of bullshit is this?” my father asked the two small children in his car as he rolled down his window to question the police officer directing traffic.

This may be hard for some to imagine, especially those who may be dark-skinned, or foreign, but there was a time in America – and it wasn’t that long ago – when a shirtless, longhaired (White) hippie driver might intentionally (and somewhat hostilely) confront a police officer while driving -half drunk - in the middle of the day, with an open beer between his legs, and his two young children unbelted in the front seat of his pickup truck.

“What’s going on here?” he asked the cop from the open window of the truck.

“Sir, you’ll need to wait a few minutes until the last of the runners pass or turn around and go over to 301.”

“But I live right there!” my dad said, pointing at the apartment complex just north of the intersection.

“Sir, I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait until these runners pass. I can’t let anybody through.”

With that, he put the truck in gear, easing it slowly forward and causing the officer to side-step to avoid being hit.

“SIR! Do not go any further!” the cop said, strengthening his stance and thrusting his palm forward.

My dad grinned slightly and moved the truck forward another six inches, causing the officer to take a step back.

“THAT’S IT!” the copped yelled, turning around and dragging his heel across the pavement in front of the truck, drawing an imaginary line on the ground as he walked backwards across our path.

“If you cross this line, I’m taking you to jail!”

With that, Dad looked casually both ways…and just went for it. The startled runners managed to avoid us as we moved slowly through the intersection, and their voices receded and mingled with the voice of the angry cop.  And that was it. No chases. No shots fired. We turned into the apartment complex and parked in front of our unit - Apartment #1 – in full view of the street.

 Possibly my most treasured photograph of my dad, and the one that I think works best as a portrait of him at the time, is a 3x4 Polaroid taken, I think, at Tampa’s annual Gasparilla parade, although it could just as easily have been taken at the Daytona 500 or the San Antonio Rattlesnake Festival. In deep, dramatic Polaroid blues and blacks, the photo shows his midsection from about his belly button to his thighs. He’s shirtless, skinny - skinnier than I have ever been - wearing a pair of cutoff Levi’s so short that the tips of the white pockets are visible poking out below the ragged denim hem. He has the plastic ring of what’s left of a six pack of Budweiser looped over the metal button of his cutoffs, and the sixth and final beer swings from the otherwise-empty holder. The sun is shining. He has a degree in philosophy.

The Search - Fifth Installment

There is a certain comic element that comes along with any uniform. Uniforms function like monetary systems or religions – a collective fiction in which we all agree to participate. The power of these fictions is real, so long as we all continue to believe in them, but every now and then someone comes along and says, “You know, someone just made this all up, right?” So, it pays to keep the uniforms modest, lest you start looking and acting like a third world dictator. At a certain point, it becomes painfully obvious that someone really did just make it all up.

As an eighteen-year-old kid who cast his first presidential ballot for Bill Clinton in 1992, I still remember the newsroom chatter about the robe that Chief Justice Rehnquist wore for Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial. Rehnquist added a series of shiny gold stripes to the sleeves of his robe back in 1995, but few people paid them any mind until he showed up on the somber occasion of the first presidential impeachment in 130 years looking like the Chief Pirate of Penzance. In fact, the real-world inspiration for Rehnquist’s ridiculous getup came to him from the costume of the Lord Chancellor in a local theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. The stripes carried absolutely no institutional significance whatsoever. I have two similar stripes on the cuffs of my dress jacket. The Fire Chief has five on his. Rehnquist only had four. I have no idea what our stripes mean either.

The truth is that it’s all made up. The good and the bad. Our money and our uniforms. The Bible and Mein Kampf.

My brother, Taylor, related a story to me from when he was studying with the great poet Robert Creeley in Buffalo, NY. Creeley presented some of his work at a local reading followed by an audience Q&A. The first question from the audience was a line that I still repeat to this day: “Was that a real poem, or did you just make that up yourself?”

The authority vested in all these acts of human creation hinges on the perceived legitimacy of the institutions backing them up. The uniform serves a dual purpose:  it’s there to convey a sense of authority to the consumer – the subject of the authority in question – but it has another role that is just as important - the sense of authority conveyed by the uniform serves to boost the confidence of the agent of the system being represented. It’s a defense against our own imposter syndrome.

We believe that our dollars are worth something because of the strength of the institutions backing them up – the police forces, armies, and infrastructure are what make all of those dollars worth something. And the police forces charged with protecting the value in those dollars believe in their own authority when they look down and see the stripes on their sleeves – indicators of the institutional authority that validates their own self-image. The uniform functions as a suit of armor, protecting the wearer from the perils of the job, and separating them from the rest of society. The problem is that the public often conflates the wearer of the uniform with the institution that the uniform represents. Lenny Bruce spoke about people’s inability to distinguish between “the authority” and those with the authority vested in them. “Now comes the riot, or the marches, and everybody’s wailing and blopblopblopblop. And you got a cop there who’s standing with a shortsleeve shirt on and a stick in his hand, and the people are yelling Gestapo! at him! Gestapo? You asshole, I’m the mailman!”

As a rookie firefighter, I was proud of my uniform in a way that I could never have anticipated. Growing up as a snot-nosed punk, having been asked politely to leave both the Cub Scouts and my own high school marching band, I never expected to find a uniform that held any particular sway over me. But from the time I started in the fire academy, the uniforms, the gear, and the fire department insignias produced the same feelings of reverence and fascination in me that I had only previously felt from objects like musical instruments and tools. These things represented my membership in a secret society.

I always knew that it was tacky to wear my uniform when I wasn’t on duty, but I still got a small thrill when I had to stop for gas on my way into the station. Sometimes I would make excuses to go to Home Depot on my way home before I’d had a chance to change clothes. I could feel the eyes on me and sense the respect and admiration that came along with them. For a person who (right or wrong) never felt all that needed in any situation, this was a new sensation. I don’t want to lament the plight of the straight, white, cis-gendered, middle-class, heterosexual, dad in modern America, because we all know that’s a ridiculous complaint, but I will say this: I’m a forty-something dude who likes to smile at babies and talk to small children in grocery store checkout lines. I’m smart enough to know that the only time it’s safe or acceptable for me to do that is when I’m in uniform. I’m not angry about it. I don’t really even think it’s unfair. Those restrictions are there for a reason. I just can’t stand having to prove myself to people at every turn, and the firefighter’s uniform is one of the quickest ways that I have found to quickly show good intent to a stranger. As I’ve come to know more firefighters, I realize how misguided that impression may be, but I’m still happy to take advantage of it whenever possible.

When I graduated from college in 1995, I took a job as a substitute teacher for my local school district. I had just turned twenty-one, so I was a scant three years older than some of the kids in the classes I was teaching at my old alma mater. I still felt the same. My hair was a little shorter, and I wore black Wranglers and a collared shirt, but I was the same punk kid that had wanderd those halls just a few years prior. The staff knew it too. I once had to explain to a dean who wanted to see my hall pass that I was no longer a student, I was one of his coworkers.

I mostly saved my imposter syndrome for the relationship I had with the students. I didn’t feel any particular sense of authority over them, and my own memories of substitute teachers who took their jobs a little too seriously were still fresh in my mind. Plus, I just didn’t care all that much. I was mostly on their side. I thought the rules and regulations of the institution were just as ridiculous as they did, if not more so, and I did my best to keep the mayhem contained within the walls of my classrooms, figuring that what the administration didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. It wasn’t like anyone was expecting me to educate these kids anyhow.

A few months into my tenure as a substitute, I accepted a short-term temporary position at a local elementary school. I preferred working in high schools, but the prospect of a slightly longer-term assignment was appealing because it saved me from having to answer the phone at 5am to find out where each day’s vacancies were located. In a county roughly the size of Rhode Island, many of the assignments could be forty or fifty miles away. That’s a long way to drive for $8.25 an hour. For a few weeks, I was to fill the teacher’s post in a nearby elementary school for a class of mentally and emotionally handicapped pre-kindergarteners. On its face, this sounds like a nightmare scenario, but these positions were almost always accompanied by a teacher’s aide who already knew all the students and how the class functioned. The substitute teacher’s job in this setting was mostly to stand by and assist the aide - a fairly easy assignment. At least in theory.

I still don’t know why, but this particular class had no teacher’s aide. It was just me and a class full of three, four, and five-year-olds with a whole range of issues. Most of them could not even use the bathroom without assistance. I would be in the bathroom helping to clean up one of the kids, while the rest of them were turning over the bookshelves and ransacking the room. The small portable classroom sat alone in a field by the basketball courts, away from the rest of the school and the prying eyes of the administration. It came equipped with an old scholastic style record player and a few records, so I taped a couple of quarters to the tone arm to keep it from skipping when we jumped up and down, and we had a non-stop dance party for two weeks while the teacher was gone. It was the only thing that kept the kids from destroying the room at every turn. In the end, I grew to love it. The assignment had all the hallmarks of my favorite kinds of jobs – you’ve been left to fend for yourself by a rule-bound bureaucracy indifferent to your own existence. Go nuts! It’s been twenty-eight years now, and I can still sing some of the songs that we danced to. In fact, when I walked in the door this morning after my tour at the fire station, the first thing I said to my wife was “I ga go babroom!”, a phrase I picked up from one of the little girls in that class. A phrase I’ve been repeating ever since.

It occurs to me now that this may have been my first real experience being thrust into the role of a caretaker. I had grown up in a setting where none of this was expected of me. I had a brother who was nine years younger than me, and I assisted in things like burping and diaper changes as a kid, but those experiences just gained me points with the adults in my life – caretaking was never something that was expected or required of me. So, as I stood in the bathroom of the little portable classroom while the kids outside the door danced one more time to “The Freeze”, with the sleeves of my thrift-store dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a wad of dirty toilet paper in my hand, I thought to myself, I know I’m a good person, but nobody else does. I wonder if anyone knows that some twenty-one-year-old punk is in here alone, wiping this little girl’s ass? In the last twenty-eight years, I think I’ve learned the sad answer to that question. They probably knew. They probably didn’t care.

What I needed then, and now, was a clear sign for anyone who happened to walk into the room that said as clearly as possible “No, really, I’m a good guy!”. To this day, I don’t think there’s anything better for that than a firefighter’s uniform, but the feeling has definitely lost some of its luster for me in the last few years. I’m sure that most of it has to do with the novelty having worn off, but in many ways, I think my disillusionment with the particular institution that my uniform represents (not the fire service in general, but my actual department) has had something to do with my less-than-reverential feelings about myself in uniform these days.  I can test the truth of this by seeing how I respond to other firefighters from other departments in other uniforms, and I can see that the feeling is still there. I still get the same feeling that the public gets when I see firetrucks out on the road. They still make me smile.

The Search - Fourth Installment

I've been thinking about trying out standup, but I don't think I have the body for comedy. I'm a firefighter and I look like a firefighter. Not the stereotypical Mister October made-for-tv firefighter, but like an actual firefighter. Like a 49-year-old, twenty-years-on-the-job firefighter who's losing his hair and taking supplemental testosterone. I look like I can probably still deadlift 450 pounds, but I'm just as likely to eat a whole box of thin mints.

In a time when a lot of people are exploring the mismatch between the person they, internally, know themselves to be, and the physical presentation that they manifest on the outside, I can fully understand what it feels like to be uncomfortable in your own skin. I’m comfortable in my gender presentation and I'm confident in my sexuality, but there's still something that doesn't seem to fit with me. I'm a straight, white, cis-gendered, middle class, heterosexual, American dad. I'm a fireman, a paramedic, and a small business owner. I'm a pretty good carpenter and a damn good welder. And all those things, taken together, conjure a whole host of other images - most of which I don't feel myself to be at all. I'm also an artist and a musician. I can recite Emily Dickinson poetry from memory. I can play the drums and the banjo, and I don't give a shit about football or capitalism, really. I don't drive a pickup. I've never owned a boat. I don't have any white shoes or a belt clip for my phone. And it I’m writing a book about my experiences. So, part of me feels like I ended up in the wrong body.

I wanted to be thin and angular, like David Bowie or Marcel Duchamp. I wanted fingers like prayer candles not these Irish, potato, digging-in-the-dirt fingers. I wanted to appear thoughtful. And if that didn't work, maybe I could at least be funny. But you've got to play the hand you are dealt. I did a little standup routine a few years ago in a local bar, and someone called me the "creepy Tampa Henry Rollins". The Henry Rollins comparison was the part that bothered me the most.

I look this way partially because of genetics, partially because of the job that I do, and partially because I grew up in the eighties with an older stepbrother who wore tight jeans and kept a pistol in his back pocket. He worked as a crane operator before he joined the Marine Corps. He rode a motorcycle that he made us all refer to formally as "Mr. Bike". Eight-year-old me wanted to be just like him, and I guess a small part of me still does. I wanted to dress like him, to feather my hair like him. I wanted to smoke Camels and refer to Charlotte, North Carolina as "North Clit".

He and I don't share any blood. I've never shot a deer. I've never owned a Jeep or even a pair of cowboy boots, and he's all Jeeps and boots and deer killing. He's been a cop now for longer than I've been a fireman, and despite what a lot of people think, those things are opposites too. For all the ways that I'm nothing like him, and despite the lack of any blood relation, I'm built just like him. And it's not a body for comedy. It's a body for law enforcement and coaching football.

When was the last time someone got funnier AFTER they got muscles? Joe Piscapo? Carrot Top? Ricky Gervais? Joe Rogan? Dave Chappelle? Muscles are the death of comedy. Imagine if Woody Allen looked vaguely threatening - and not just in a sexual predator kind of way. Who wants to be entertained by someone who reminds them of their oppressor?

Straight. White. Cis-gendered. Middle-class. Heterosexual. American. Dad.

Threat. Threat. Threat. Threat. Threat. Threat. Threat.

How funny can that combination be? A little bit of menace can add some edge to any performer, but there’s definitely a limit. Nobody wants to dance when the cops are in the club.

I think I've always felt this way. Even as a fourteen-year-old suburban punk rocker, I always felt like I looked like a cop who used to be a crane operator. Everybody else always had more flair than me. Their looks ran deep and seemed effortless - like every surface had another perfectly weathered surface underneath. And all of it fitting together into one cohesive unit that looked like they were just born that way. If I ever did anything to add a little bling to my own ensemble, it just highlighted how plain the rest of it was. I know people who can walk around town in a fedora with a giant feather sticking out of it, and nobody will say the first thing to them about it. Not me. Every single person I passed on the street would just smirk and say, “nice hat (dipshit)”. And if I decided to push the issue, I’d just be That Guy Who Always Wears The Stupid Hat. My vibe has always been more Village People than Sex Pistols so, I stopped trying to accessorize early on. I’ve never gotten a single tattoo, and that’s saying a lot for a Gen-X firefighter who’s played in punk bands. I told myself that being an incognito weirdo was better anyhow. I learned early on that it's hard to be a criminal in a flashy car. Better to blend into the background. Keep all your weirdo ideas hidden under a thin veneer of normalcy.

These days I joke with my wife that she's the only reason people recognize me at all. There's me with my whole jeans-and-a-t-shirt, medium height, white guy thing going on. No tattoos. No distinctive scars or tics. Not even a piercing, or a birthmark. And then there's her - a Black Trinidadian woman, gorgeous, with dreadlocks to her waist and a slight accent. I've seen it happen a thousand times. I walk into a room ahead of her and there's not even the faintest hint of recognition on anyone's face. They've seen thousands of me. Millions. And I get it. I don't really want to see another one of me either. But then they see her, and their faces light up. And in seeing her, suddenly, they see me. I'm with her.

She doesn’t like it when I point this out, I’m sure because she feels like I’m exoticizing her when what I’m trying to do is show how nobody gives a shit about me. It’s tough. Everyone sees everything from their own frame of reference and her life experience has largely been one of being the one thing that is not like the others, whereas mine has been the opposite. I am all the others. And there is probably as much power to be had in anonymity as there is to be had in recognizability.

I'll take it. The downside is that nobody remembers that I've actually been around here for a long time. I've lived in this same town now for almost fifty years. And I've done a lot of different things here, but there's often not a lot of crossover between them. There are plenty of firefighters I've known for twenty years who don't know that I play the drums or make large kinetic sculptures. And there are plenty of musicians and artists who don't know that I'm a twenty-year veteran of the fire department. I’m the perpetual rookie, the younger brother. There’s a lot to be said for that in terms of keeping yourself humble, but the ensuing imposter syndrome can be difficult to overcome when you need to convince yourself or others that you are, in fact, qualified for the job. I’ve largely settled on showing people rather than telling them, but that’s easier in some respects than it is in others. As a fire Captain, my experience and authority is immediately recognizable. I step out of the Captain’s seat on the truck, and I’m the one with the white helmet. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. What’s interesting to me is that whatever small amount of authority comes from me being in uniform changes the way that I interact with people on every level. I’m no longer the rookie or the guy I assume nobody wants to talk to. The uniform is a calling card that says “You’re safe with me”. I find myself entering easily into conversations with strangers on even the most sensitive of subjects. I can be thoughtful and vulnerable and sensitive. But I can also be funny and irreverent and self-deprecating. And the more I enjoy the privileges of the instant familiarity that my uniform brings, the more I wonder if that wasn’t, at least partially, what I was after all along. But it would be weird for me to wear a white helmet up on stage for an open mic in a bar.

The Search - Third Installment

When things started shutting down for the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, I found myself, like many others, restless and anxious. It turns out that my fire department schedule - 24 hours on and 48 hours off can provide for quite a bit of free time if that’s the only job you are doing. I had never really experienced it before because I always had another job - a business to run, or a child to raise, or often all three.

Firefighting as a profession stands apart from many other modern-day pursuits with its distinct culture and strong sense of history. “Two hundred years of tradition, unimpeded by progress” as the old saying goes. I’m not much of a nostalgist and I don’t spend a lot of time pining for the days gone by, but neither am I much of a capitalist, so I find many of the fire service’s antiquated methods and institutional inefficiencies to be kind of endearing – when I’m not busy finding them infuriating. As so many other jobs have gone the way of automation and privatization - focusing on worker efficiency and maximum return to the shareholders - firefighters have been able to stave off many of the changes that have doomed so many other formerly noble professions. Some of these victories have come from solid strategic thinking on the part of firefighters past, and some have come from sheer obstinance and refusal to change. I think it is partially the peculiarities of the job and its history that make it so fascinating to outsiders. So many of the customs and traditions of the fire house are second nature to me at this point, but many of them are not commonly known, or they are commonly misunderstood, so I’ll try to address some of the most frequent questions and misunderstandings.

What I find particularly elegant about the structure of the typical fire company can be seen most easily in two places – the shift schedule, and the seat assignments on the truck. Part of the beauty of both is that their structures are circular, and the responsibilities are clearly delineated. I can calculate my shift schedule for years in advance, and I know my job for the day just based on where I’m sitting on the truck.

In terms of the schedule, the beauty is that it’s the same for everyone. Twenty-four hours on and forty-eight hours off. Monday, Thursday, Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday, Tuesday, Friday. From the lowliest rookie firefighter to the most senior Battalion Chief, if you are covered by the union contract (ie you’re not management), you have the same schedule as everyone else. In the early morning and in the middle of the night. Weekends. Holidays. Anniversaries. Graduations. It's not about seniority, or who’s the most popular. Everyone is up for grabs. But alongside this shared hardship, we have been given a gift - the ability to swap shifts. With some creative scheduling – a few shift exchanges, and a vacation day or two - I can be off for quite a bit of time without a whole lot of trouble. As firefighters, we are considered to be essentially interchangeable, so as long as someone similarly qualified is sitting in my seat, nobody really cares who it is.

The seat assignments on the truck provide a way of understanding the different positions and the ways in which they work together. Most of our trucks have four seats in them, and ideally, we ride with a crew of four firefighters, but on most days, we have three people assigned to an engine company. Truck companies usually have at least four. Let’s start at the front passenger’s seat and call that Position 1. This is not your typical family car arrangement - the person driving is not the one in charge. In the fire service, the power resides in the passenger’s seat – what we refer to as the captain’s seat. Sides of the truck are referred to as either driver’s side or captain’s side. The captain’s seat is occupied by the officer or acting officer in charge of the fire company. The captain is responsible for navigating to the call, operating the sirens, making decisions about vehicle positioning, access, and route finding, as well as the tactical decisions made on the fireground and the management of the personnel within the company and station (including their training, evaluations, and discipline). The captain is responsible for the safety of the entire crew, and perhaps most important for our purposes, the captain goes into the fire with the least senior person on the truck – the firefighter who is sitting directly behind them.

Let’s take a short break to go over some basic vocabulary. What is typically known to the public as a fire truck is known in the fire service as an “engine” or “pumper” due to its on-board fire pump, however, when speaking about the apparatus itself, we may still refer to it generically as a truck. A fire engine with a ladder on top is known as a “truck” or “ladder”, and the truck company has duties on a structure fire that are distinct from engine company duties. So, when you’re talking about the truck itself (as in “the truck has a flat tire”) it could be any truck (a truck, an engine, a ladder, a pumper, etc.), but when you are talking about a truck company (a group of people assigned to a truck – which is a ladder), you may say something like “Send the Truck to the Charlie side of the structure” which would mean send the people from the truck company to the right side of the building. Simple, right? The truck company provides rescue and elevated master stream capabilities with their ladder (which we call a stick because a ladder is a truck). The Truck is also responsible for interior search and rescue operations, securing of power, roof access, ground ladders, and ventilation. Truck companies often carry other specialized equipment to facilitate rope rescues, complex vehicle extrications, and other heavy rescue-type incidents. So, rescue is a truck company duty. But a “Rescue” is a type of truck. Not a capital “T” Truck. Just a truck. Specifically, an ambulance. So, an ambulance is a Rescue. Sometimes. Usually, we just call the ambulance “the box”. So, you could say “Send the Truck to ladder the Charlie side for a rescue from the third-floor balcony.” - which would mean, send the truck company personnel to place a ground ladder to the third-floor balcony on the right side of the structure where somebody is in need of rescue. Or you could say “Send a truck to the Ladder on the Charlie side for Rescue on the third-floor balcony” – which would mean, send an engine to the ladder truck parked on the right side of the building to assist a crew from the box who are on the third floor balcony. It’s important to be clear and concise in and emergency.

The seat directly behind the captain, which we will call Position 2, is referred to as the Firefighter’s seat. Until very recently, these seats always faced the rear of the truck, and to this day, we often refer to the firefighter’s position as “riding backwards” even though most of the newer trucks have forward-facing rear seats. The rear-facing seats were a holdover from the old open cab fire engines which allowed the crew members a quick exit to the rear of the truck to deploy hose lines, etc. The open cabs also exposed the crews to rain, sleet, snow, and heat, and while they were a step up from riding the tailboard of the truck, they still left something to be desired in terms of modern-day comforts and safety. In the early days, it was assumed that anyone on the truck was already wearing full bunker gear because fire trucks only responded to fire calls. In today’s fire service, 80% of our calls are medical (more on that later), and the workman’s comp providers would rather have us in the safety of an enclosed cab than wearing our bunker gear strapped to the tailboard in the rain. The NFPA, however, did not forbid riding the tailboard until 1992, and many of the older chiefs and captains who were still on the job when I started had stories of their days riding tailboards and sliding down fire poles.

Workman’s Comp insurance providers and modern building codes have probably done more to change the traditions of the fire service than any other internal or external forces. We no longer build multi-story fire stations since it has been determined that fire poles are particularly unsafe (especially in the middle of the night when personnel may be waking from a deep sleep to slide down a multi-story pole). There are still a few fire poles around though, and I got the chance to slide down a few of them while doing my paramedic ride time with neighboring departments. We now have ADA accessible fire stations which makes things nice for the public when visiting, but I’m still not sure why we need wheelchair-accessible showers and Braille signage on the room where we store our bunker gear.

The firefighter in position 2 fills the role that the public sees as the archetypical firefighter. They are the one on the nozzle charging headfirst into the burning building. What the public doesn’t see is that they are typically the least experienced member of the crew. What they need for the job is not so much experience as the hard-charging youthful energy that comes from being in your first fire at twenty years old. And they always have a captain right behind them, providing encouragement, pulling hose, directing their actions, and looking out for their safety.

Taken together, the captain and the firefighter are often the oldest and youngest members of the crew, and it is this combination that provides for the strength and development of great fire companies. The combination of experience and technique with energy and enthusiasm. The old aphorism that says those who can’t do, teach, does not apply here. If you want to show the new person how it’s done, you’re going to have to go into the fire with them, and it is this arrangement that, to me, makes being a company fire captain one of the best jobs in the world. In so many other professions, the point at which you become a supervisor of others is the point at which you stop actually doing the work yourself. And it is your love for the work, presumably, that drew you to the profession in the first place, not the opportunity to supervise others doing the work that you love. I still love to fight fires. I also love to teach and mentor and guide the younger members of our team, but the terrible beauty of a house on fire has never lost its draw for me.

Moving back to the front of the truck brings us to Position 3, the driver, generally the second-most senior person on the crew. The driver, or more formally, the Driver Engineer is responsible for everything having to do with the truck – from driving the apparatus to and from the scene, to maintaining all its equipment and hoses, operating the pump, and ensuring adequate water supply to the firefighters during fireground operations. These days, the driver is often also the senior paramedic in charge of patient care on medical calls. And much of the time, the driver is also the cook.

A good driver functions as the liaison between the captain and the crew, dispensing tips, advice, and the insights that come from experience without having to involve the captain in all of the mistakes and learning experiences of the newer crew members. A den mother of sorts. And when the captain is out, the Driver Engineer moves over to be the Acting Captain and everyone else moves up one position. Drivers are truly the backbone of the fire department, and they often have the most work to do - from checking out the truck, keeping medical supplies stocked, shopping for groceries, and preparing meals, to treating patients, writing medical reports, and generally keeping the crew in line.

The last position on the truck would be the rear seat behind the driver. Position 4. This seat, when staffed, is occupied by the second firefighter (or “Can Man”). The Can Man’s name comes from the position they fill on a typical truck company, where they traditionally would carry a 2 ½ gallon water can into the fire to effect search and rescue operations in the absence of a hoseline. On an engine company, the Can Man is charged with making the hydrant connection and ensuring that we have an adequate water supply. This position is generally filled by the more senior of the two firefighters in order to give the rookie in position 2 more time on the nozzle.

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I work 24-hour shifts every third day on a perpetual rotation (most fire departments break things up into A, B, and C shifts.) Working every third day, with seven days in a week, creates a twenty-one day (three week) cycle. Monday, Thursday, Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday, Tuesday, Friday. After almost twenty years, ordering the days of my week in this fashion is just as natural to me as any other sequence. Even my family has come to understand the schedule, although with my son, I think the understanding is on a more intuitive level - he just knows that when I’ve been home for two days, he’s probably not going to see me the next day. Additionally, in my department, we get an extra day off every three weeks. For me, that day is Thursday. When my shift falls on a Thursday, I don’t work. We call this extra day off an “R” day, or “Kelly day” - named after Chicago Mayor Edward J. Kelly, who gave firefighters an extra day off for every seven days worked in 1936 – reducing the firefighter’s workweek to 72 hours at the time. For us, the extra day off gives us five days off in a row and results in a 48-hour work week when we average out the three-week cycle. Federal overtime laws are different for firefighters, so employers are not required to pay time-and-a-half until firefighters work more than 53 hours in a week - the tradeoff, I guess, is that sometimes we get paid to sleep. Sometimes.

When I was hired in early 2004, our department ran approximately 65,000 calls a year from 40 fire stations in a county about the size of Rhode Island (1,266 square miles). In 2022, we are on track to run 135,000 calls out of just 45 stations. That’s an increased call volume of more than 100 percent, with only about a 12 percent increase in the number of stations. We have added some extra apparatus, and the total number of field personnel has gone up some, but most stations are running twice as many calls today as they were when I started. I ran five calls after midnight on each of my last two shifts and I’m not at a particularly busy station. That’s not the norm for us, but it happens, and nights where we don’t get up at all are rare these days.

The 24-hour workday is a prime example of one of the seemingly antiquated traditions that have persisted in the fire service despite all odds, but make no mistake, it still exists because it saves money - not because we like it. Staffing a fire station 24/7 in 8-hour shifts for 7 days a week would require staffing a fourth shift - the unthinkable “D Shift”. A thirty-three percent increase in the size of the workforce is nothing to sneeze at - better just to buy us some cheap mattresses and let us get whatever sleep we can while saving the county 30 or 40 million dollars a year.

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Firefighting as a job happens in discreet units known to us as “calls” (in my department), “runs” (in other departments), or “jobs” (in the Northeast). A typical call lasts and hour or two at most, with structure fires taking sometimes from three to twelve hours, but it’s extremely rare that we would go home while still in the middle of a job. We finish every job before we go home, and every day is a clean slate. This is an essential distinction between firefighting and almost any other profession. You don’t take anything home with you. Except for all the stuff you take home with you.

Perhaps we could separate damages done to our psyche as coming from two forms of negative stimulus – stress and trauma. Stress being worry about the future, and trauma being worry about the past. I think, when given the choice, most people would choose stress over trauma. This is a smart choice since stress is not always harmful while trauma almost always is. And stress is often simply worry about potential trauma that never actually materializes. The choice is somehow different for firefighters. It’s the not knowing that we can’t handle. Every portion of our day is focused on eliminating stress about the future. We train. We prepare. We work out. We oil the tools. We wash the truck. Most of the job is simply getting prepared and waiting around for something to happen.

This willingness to endure trauma is, I think, often misinterpreted as bravery when it’s really just a different type of avoidance. Firefighters are as fear driven as anyone else, perhaps even more so, we just tend to focus our energies on preparedness rather than anxiety. This is a good strategy when things are probably going to go poorly. Houses are going to burn down. Patients are going to die. But if we can tell ourselves that we did everything in our power to prevent the worst from happening, we can view the outcome as being at least endurable if not an unqualified success. True success in our business is rare. Chokings, overdoses, hypoglycemia, and pediatric drownings. That’s about it for the list of things we can actually fix if we get there fast enough, but even those come with a fair share of absolute tragedies.

For some more insight into the mind of the firefighter, I would have you look at some other choices that firefighters commonly make. First, the job itself, with its pension and promise of security is a tradeoff for trauma over stress. We don’t stress about where our career is going, or how we are going to retire, or whether our company is going to survive. We simply accept the trauma of relatively low pay along with hazardous working conditions and the concurrent damages to our physical and mental health. But we’ll take the known over the unknown.

It's not unusual for a firefighter to drive a $60k pickup truck that they never use to haul anything other than, occasionally, a boat or lawn trailer. I think the logic is that they might need to haul something at some point, so a pickup truck is the best option. Not to mention that it’s more macho than a minivan. As gas prices have steadily risen, I’ve noticed a new phenomenon amongst the drivers of the biggest gas-guzzling pickups – the “station car”. The station car is a small car that gets good mileage, purchased to drive back and forth to the station to save money on gas and to reduce wear and tear on the $60k truck. When I first started seeing these, they were $2k beater cars with a lot of deferred maintenance, but now that cheap used cars are no longer readily available, people are spending $15-20k on their station cars (for a total of $80k invested in transportation) to save a few dollars on gas. I’ve been driving the same $18k van for the last seven years. The gas mileage is not great, but I’d have to drive it a hell of a lot to save $62k on gas. This is the same belt-and-suspenders, fear-based logic at work. By having a truck and a car, and a lot of guns, and living in a gated community with lots of insurance policies, etc, etc, you are prepared for every possible eventuality. If something goes wrong, at least you can tell yourself that you did everything you could do.

At some point, this sort of fear-based over preparation begins to get in the way of true safety in the hazardous environments that are common to firefighting. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from mountain climbing is that there are certain situations that are inherently risky, and beyond taking the most basic precautions to ensure your own safety, the best strategy is simply to reduce the amount of time spent in the hazardous environment. In mountain climbing, this has led to a programmatic change from the siege tactics of the 1950’s (involving hundreds of people with teams of porters, pack animals, and the multiple large camps needed to support such an operation), to fast and light two or three person teams who can move quickly up and down the mountain, thus exposing themselves to much less risk in the inherently dangerous environments of the high mountains.

Applying this logic to firefighting has made me a bit of a Luddite when it comes to firefighting’s latest and greatest advancements. When I evaluate a new piece of equipment to determine its usefulness to us on the fireground, one of the first things I ask is “How many of my tools is this going to replace?” If the answer is anything less than two, I probably don’t want it. I don’t need any more stuff. I don’t need the truck to get any bigger. I don’t need to be any slower. If our truck is fast, light, and maneuverable, and the firefighters on it are similarly agile, the time between us getting the call and us putting water on the fire can be greatly reduced. And the simplest way to reduce hazards in our profession is to put water on the fire (whether literal or figurative) as fast as possible. Early intervention in critical situations improves the outcome greatly, and it exposes you and your crew to the least amount of risk. Ironically, bravery is what it takes to ensure your safety.

The Search - Second Installment

I’m at one of our southernmost stations, a place I don’t often work, and we are drinking Cuban coffee from the stovetop espresso maker just like we would do anywhere else in the county. We call this having a “booch” and I have no idea why. I’m sure it’s a bastardization of some Cuban/Spanish term mixed with some mutated fire department slang, but nobody seems to know where it came from, and I’ve never heard it used anywhere outside of a county fire station.

I’m talking with a guy I haven’t worked with before. He’s tall, bald, with a regulation-defying handlebar mustache - the kind of person you could see on the street and just know that he’s a fireman. I put the name embroidered on his shirt together with my dim memories of union emails and GoFundMe pages. I’ve never met him, but I already know his story. He’s got four young kids and his wife is dying of cancer. It’s the kind of thing you can easily know about someone in a tight-knit, digitally-connected community without ever having laid eyes on them. He’s not talking about his wife though, and I’m certainly not going to be the one to bring her up. He’s talking about something we talk about all the time – the myriad ways in which we, as firefighters, are misunderstood, underappreciated, underpaid, and generally disrespected by everyone from the public to our closest friends and family. I’ve heard these complaints a thousand times and the tales of greatest sacrifice always seem to come from the guys who are willing to give up the least when things are at their worst. The guys with the most to prove. The bigger the truck, the lower the body fat percentage - the less likely they are to be of any real use when it’s needed. These guys are the first ones to burn through the air in their bottles. When everyone else is doing hot bottle swaps, going back in for their second, third, or fourth round, these guys have stripped off their coats and are flexing for the neighbors as they drink all the Gatorade in the rehab sector.

Today I sense a difference in the tone of the complaints – there’s a sensitivity and a vulnerability that I don’t often hear. He’s talking about the service that we provide to the public not as a collection of physical acts of bravery and compassion - for which we should be lauded as heroes or compensated handsomely - but as a group exercise in collective memory. It is our job to carry around the memories of things that most people would rather not see. The things they would prefer to forget. It is our job to bear silent witness to these scenarios, whether they are funny, sad, or truly horrific. We often have a willing audience for the funny stories at home, at the bar, or at the next family gathering, but we tend to only share the horrific stories with each other, and the sad ones we mostly just keep to ourselves. Most often it’s not the totality of the scene that sticks with you anyhow, it's the details.

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There’s a beautiful twenty-three-year-old girl with a hole in the middle of her chest from a nine-millimeter fired at point blank range. The gun on the counter looks like it’s too big to be hers. Her boyfriend says she locked herself in the bathroom and turned it on herself. I’ve heard the old theory about women not shooting themselves in the head because they don’t want to mess up their faces - and maybe there’s some truth to it – but right now it seems like the kind of dumb thing that people like to repeat to each other until it becomes fact, whether it’s true or not. Here she is, though, without a scratch on her, other than the dime-sized hole in her chest, puckered at the edges with a ring of powder burns around it. She’s not breathing. She doesn’t have a pulse, and I’m hoping that she’s at least in some kind of shockable rhythm. She’s not. This isn’t like the movies. You can’t shock a dead heart back to life - there needs to be some sort of underlying electrical activity there to begin with. And maybe we could get some back if all the blood in her body hadn’t come out onto the apartment carpeting where she lays on the floor just outside the bathroom.

None of this is particularly unusual. It could be just another day at work for me. I’ve probably forgotten more of these calls than I remember, but this one has stayed with me for years. And what stays - ten, fifteen, twenty years later - is not her face or her hair, or even her bare breasts as I cut through her bra to attach the electrodes to her chest. What stays with me is the contrast between her sun-bronzed skin and her pink, lacy, underwear.  Clean underwear. A matched set. The kind of underwear that you put on for someone else. We see a lot of people in their underwear on this job and it’s almost never clean. Most of those people don’t care that we’re seeing them at their most vulnerable. They reveal the most intimate sides of themselves to us without a second thought. It’s one of the truly amazing and touching parts of the job.  Something I constantly marvel at – to walk briskly into somebody’s house and be trusted implicitly as a perfect stranger. It’s really the highest of honors, and one I try to live up to and respect every day. But I’m not supposed to be seeing this. She didn’t have the time to think this through – or she’s not the one who pulled the trigger.

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We enter through the front door and make a left turn which should put us on the Alpha side of the structure. We are doing a left-handed search. By keeping a left hand, or boot, on the wall at all times, we can navigate through in a clockwise fashion even when visibility is near zero. And it is. We have made several turns since we came in and now, I’ve lost track. I’m not sure I know where we are. Are we on an exterior wall or have we turned back towards the interior? How far did we travel after our last turn?

I feel up and down the wall as I move. A low windowsill tells me that I’m on an exterior wall, probably the living or dining room, and it offers a route of escape should we need it. That’s the leg of a table, and that’s a chair. We appear to be in a dining room. There’s nothing under the table. Reach up on top and feel. Nothing there.

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Another day, another call, another side of town. An elderly female is lying supine on top of her perfectly made bed, her hair and makeup freshly done. It’s hot in here. She must have the thermostat set at 85 degrees. Stale afternoon light filters through layers of sheer drapery and every sound is muffled by the deep shag carpet, the lace bed skirts, and the thick brocade upholstery on every surface.

The hollow core doors in these houses always burn from the tops down. As the heat stacks up in the early stages of the fire, the thin luan of the doors starts to ignite near the ceiling and burn its way down towards the floor. After the fire is out, theses little ranch houses often look like daycare centers outfitted with Dutch doors at every opening.

In the front yard, scraggly, sun-scorched grass edges up to the chain link fence where our truck sits idling a deep-throated diesel hum. This room feels like it’s miles away from there. Hot. Still. Silent. She’s dressed as if she was on her way to church with a colorful polyester blouse, skirt, stockings, and Mary Janes. Her fuzzy little lap dog is next to her on the bed. Between them lies her pocketbook and the two-shot Derringer pistol. She and the dog are both long-dead. I’m not sure how we got this call, but there’s nobody else in here now - it’s just us and the cops. We can hear the faint crackle of their radios coming from down the hall. Maybe her family called us for a welfare check. Maybe Meals on Wheels couldn’t get her to answer the door. We have a paramedic student from the community college riding with us today and he’s never seen anything like this. He looks at my partner, stunned, an incredulous look on his face and asks, “What happened here?”. My partner - seasoned, unflappable, and completely devoid of expression answers “Well, we’re not sure,” pointing at the scene in front of us, “but we think that dog shot that lady.”

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My new friend today is telling these same kinds of stories. Funny stories. Sad stories. Horrific stories. But he’s organized them spatially, as if they were points on a map. The markers of tragedy that dot his drive into work in the morning. The place on the interstate, southbound, where the minivan left the road and rolled. Nine people in the van. Seven of them children. Six of them ejected from the vehicle as it rolled and tumbled into the pines. Dead children in the bushes for a hundred yards. Another overpass where a tomato trunk left the interstate and plunged to the surface road below, killing another driver, spilling its load and bursting into flames. The smell of burning diesel and roasted tomatoes. The exit with the water treatment plant - where a worker was literally swallowed up by the ground when an underground pipe burst, turning the soft soil into literal quicksand. We had to shut down the interstate and bring out the ground penetrating radar to locate his body - ten feet below the surface when we finally got to him. The looks on the faces of his co-workers. “I put a strap around him and tied it to the forklift. I tried to pull him out, but I was afraid I was going to rip him in half. I turned around to get something else and when I looked back, he was gone.”

The Bad Memory Palace.

Now, I don’t know if I had always, subconsciously, seen things in this manner, or if this tall, mustachioed fireman has just planted the idea in my head, but now that I’ve seen it, I can’t get away from it. Every drive to work. Every turn into a familiar neighborhood.

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My family is always surprised at the way I can navigate this city - not just the main roads - I know the subdivisions, the alleys, the lanes, courts, and cul-de-sacs. The cut-throughs, and the desire paths through the woods. I know the nail salons, barber shops, pool halls, and bottle clubs. I know the places where you can turn around a forty-foot truck that weighs forty thousand pounds. And the longer I work here, the more each intersection and U-turn has a memory. A kid waving at us from the curb. The place where our homeless friend was killed by a car. People whose lives now exist only in our stories. The stories we carry around with us, or leave in these places, where they happen to be found again the next time we are there.

The Search - First Installment

The search begins in a burning house - through the front door on hands and knees. The smoke is almost down to the floor, and we stay low where the visibility is better. It would be impossible to stand up anyhow. The heat has been stacking up in here as the fire has burned unchecked - the smoke stratifying into layers of superheated gases and products of incomplete combustion - creating a thick, toxic soup that is best left undisturbed for now. The temperature at the floor is probably three hundred degrees and we can feel it in the places that our gear is tightest – across our elbows, knees, and backs as we crawl slowly forward. At five feet up, it is hot enough to melt the visors on our helmets and possibly even burn through the face pieces of our breathing apparatus. The heat is like a giant, malevolent hand pushing us to the floor, and the longer this search takes, the more we feel its weight.

There is a terrible beauty to be found inside a house on fire. It’s as if the whole world has been turned upside down. Roll the house over in your mind and picture it as an empty vessel being filled with a thick, viscous flame - the way a drop of cream billows and spreads at the bottom of a cup of coffee. The smoke is a dense, black, turbulent ooze that streams towards the ceiling where it begins to roll and spread like the bell of a trumpet. When the widening plume reaches the corners of the room, the turbulence increases, and the smoke begins to curl under on itself, banking down the walls back towards the floor. The longer this smoke is poured into the room, the more it fills from the top down. Sometimes in the early stages of a fire, the smoke level will create a hard “neutral line” below which visibility will be nearly perfect, as if the ceiling of the room had been slowly lowered over your head. This angry, black roiling mass looks like the surface of a boiling sea when seen from below, and as the temperature increases, fire occasionally dances across its face as the unburned gases ignite into racing fingers of flame. Left unchecked, this blanket of hot gases radiates enough heat that it eventually brings every item in the room up to its combustion point and everything flashes at once in an explosion of heat and flame that is usually not survivable even for firefighters in full gear.

This is why we do the job.  Of course, there are other reasons - saving lives, helping people, the perpetually-discussed pension - but there is something more primal, and perhaps less noble, that keeps calling us back here. Combined moments of beauty and terror have a way of making impressions that can leave you aching for more. There are things that we know, instinctively, we are not supposed to see. I have experienced a few of these sights in my life, from high mountain vistas to deep blue oceans, but few can approach the beauty and terror found in the living room of this little 60’s ranch house as it burns.

______

I’m in my second year on the job and I’ve finally made a couple of friends. We’ve taken up mountain climbing as an escape from the rigors of firefighting in Florida’s summer heat. After months of training, travel, acclimatization, and waiting on the weather, we’re finally climbing into the dawn just below the icy summit of Mt. Rainier on a frigid July moring. The size our world has condensed to the narrow cones of light cast by our headlamps whose frozen batteries are starting to die, but we remain insulated – by the equipment we’re wearing and the sense of detachment that comes from walking through an alien landscape. Kick a step and breathe. Kick a step and breathe. Plant your axe and breathe. Every sound is hollow and metallic, like the tinkling coals at the base of a fire - the crinkly noises you hear on the edges of your hearing when you’ve sucked down a lungful of nitrous oxide. My breath is raspy and cold, mentholated. With each step comes the satisfying crunch of the snow’s icy crust giving way to the points of my crampons, followed by the whoosh of metal on ice as I plunge the handle of my axe up higher on the slope, lean in, and ready myself to take another step up. I lock the knee on my downhill leg, straighten my stance, and allow my bones to take the weight from my aching muscles for a second. Rest and breathe. I can hear the distant clang of other climber’s axes from up and down the slope, and far below me, a slowly undulating snake of twinkling lights is carefully winding its way up the mountain – the faint headlamp beams of other climbers working their way up from the same camp we left hours ago. The other teams in the hut told us they were leaving at midnight, so we left at nine. We know ourselves. We are from Florida, and we are slow. No amount of trips to the top of Tampa’s Bank of America tower could possibly prepare us for 14,000 feet of elevation, but we have still made plenty of them - taking the elevators down from the 44th floor on our tenth or twelfth trip up the stairs under forty-pound packs. Standing in the elevator breathing heavy and sweating profusely. I’m wearing a pair of short, silky running shorts and a large backpack. I can smell the perfume and conditioner of the perfectly coiffed paralegals who are staring quizzically at the two sweaty backpackers in their midst. I look down to see an actual puddle of sweat forming on the floor beneath my feet. Today we move steadily upwards in the darkness, climbing through the cloud ceiling before the sun has made its way over the horizon and now, below us, a taut, woolen blanket of clouds separates us from the sun’s first rays as they begin to illuminate the sleeping world beneath us. We are on the opposite side of an overcast morning, clouds beneath our feet. At first imperceptibly, and then with surprising speed, the brilliant knife edge of the sun cuts its way up through the clouds as we step through dawn’s peephole and the entire universe explodes before us - our field of vision going from a few feet to a few hundred miles in seconds. The mountain casts a perfect triangle of shadow across the sky, and I imagine that somewhere in its image I am silhouetted, clinging perilously to the slope - my own shadow large enough to envelope entire villages on the Earth’s surface below.

 There is a loneliness in these settings that both attracts and repels. Part of me craves the view from these wild places, but my first reaction to them is always a kind of pressure in the chest and a slight shortness of breath. Maybe it isn’t relaxing at all. Maybe it’s not supposed to be. Enjoying the wonders and immensity of nature from an extremely precarious position - maybe that’s all that we’re doing. You could just stay home and read National Geographic with a pistol pressed to your temple.

______

The solitary feeling of freedom and loneliness to be found at the frozen peak of a tall mountain is not all that different from the feeling down here, right now, pressed to the linoleum of what appears to be a 1970’s suburban kitchen. Even when there is nothing but chaos all around, there is often a quiet calm to be found in these spaces. Settle in and control your breathing, lower your heart rate, and relax as much as possible. Feel the heat and the pressure as it wraps around you like a warm opiate blanket. Stretch things out. Try to stay calm.

It’s loud in here. I have my radio mic clipped at my shoulder and it’s turned up to an ear-splitting volume. I don’t want to miss anything said by the other interior crews or those on the outside who might be seeing things deteriorate - things that we’re not able to see. The overdriven sound of breathing can be heard through the talk box on my partner’s facepiece. I don’t use a talk box myself because they distort your speech and they can only get so loud (I’d rather just yell if I have to), but mostly, I just don’t want others to hear me breathing. I need to project a sense of calm, and panic can be contagious. Keep your voice down, keep your breathing in check, speak slowly and clearly on the radio.

We are not the first ones into this fire, but it is still free-burning at the front of the house, and the hose streams from the attack crews are starting to push the heat and smoke into the rear of the structure. With no back door and few rear windows, there is no easy way to dissipate the heat that has accumulated in the back of the house. Some ventilation would be nice, but as long as that fire is still burning in the front, we don’t want to give it any more oxygen than it already has. We search blindly, keeping our left hands on the wall to keep from getting turned around.  We don’t have the benefit of a hose line to follow if things go wrong, so we need to do our best to stay oriented to our surroundings. I reach back and place my partner’s hand on the heel of my boot. I want to feel him there. I crawl forward, and we yell back and forth to maintain contact with each other.

I shouldn’t need to tell you that we’re crawling through a metaphor – one where firefighting becomes a parable for life’s larger struggles and questions. How do you form an overall picture of a chaotic situation and your place within it while still deep in the darkness, blindly groping your way along? The room is always smaller than you thought when someone finally turns the lights on. The time dilation brought on by adrenalin leads to spatial dilation in the darkness. The distance between the couch and the dining table can be an eternity in the moment. Walking through the house after the fire is out is a lot like returning to your childhood home as an adult. All the dramas and intensity are reframed in a new light, everything is smaller, and all the stakes are suddenly much lower.

This, I suppose, is how I feel most of the time. Like the blind man and the elephant, I have no sense of where I am, or where my story begins. But who does? Perhaps it’s better to think of this story as a balloon large enough for me to step inside. Each measured breath stretches the skin a little tighter, and the connections on the surface move further apart while keeping their positions and relationships to each other, as long-forgotten details are uncovered to fill in the gaps – a story that expands with the breath of the universe that it’s in.

You Can't Get There From Here

There's an old children's game that involves holding a makeup mirror under your nose and walking around the house with it held there, facing up towards the ceiling. The mirror reflects the ceiling into your peripheral vision, and you start to subconsciously navigate around the house as if the ceiling were the floor - stepping over the tall thresholds created when door headers are reflected onto the floor, and running into furniture that goes unseen on the smooth expanses of the ceiling. This trick and others like it have always been of interest to me. I suppose I was destined to experiment with drugs as some of my earliest pastimes were spinning around until I was dizzy, holding my breath, and pushing on the outsides of my eyeballs until I saw double. But as a hard-core rationalist and someone who permanently gave up psychedelics after a single, life-changing experience at the tender age of seventeen, I've always been drawn to the types of out-of-body experiences that can be attributed to glitches in our own internal processing or other types of visual and auditory phenomena that have a simple, rational explanation.

As a kid, I had a treasured book that dealt with metaphysical phenomena such as astral projection and lucid dreaming. The astral projection bit always seemed a bit hokey to me, but I still applied the techniques and tried to imagine myself pinned against the bedroom ceiling, staring down at my own prepubescent body, comfortably wrapped in my favorite brown and orange 70's sheets with the mountain/sunset motif. I had more success with lucid dreaming, and I still have some successes finding the cracks in the veneer of a dream's believability - those cracks that are the openings allowing you to step in and take control of the dream for yourself.

This interest in the ability to exert a level of control over what is essentially a delusion takes me back to my problem with psychedelics. If you take enough acid (which I certainly did that one night), you can reach a point where you can no longer continue to tell yourself that you feel the way you feel because you ingested a foreign substance. It's the opposite of lucid dreaming. Once you lose the thread that ties you back to reality ("I did drugs, and this will pass"), your current situation becomes your reality - and your reality is theonly reality. Our only connection to "reality" is through the unreliable input from our senses and we all experience the world in our own ways. There is no objective reality.

When I awoke from my one-and-done acid trip with my seventeen-year-old body tied down to a hospital gurney, the doctors who insisted that I stay there for three days against my will did so because they were ostensibly concerned that I might have a "flashback". It didn't help my state of mind any that the reality I had woken up to was just as surreal as the drug-induced one that I had just left behind. Neither did the fact that they pumped me full of other psychoactive medications - drugs which caused me to shake violently - and then proceeded to interrogate me about why I was shaking. Laying there supine, naked, struggling against the thick leather restraints, I did my best to astral project myself right out of that hospital room, but alas, it wasn't going to happen.

I'm pretty sure my elite team of doctors got their training from watching old episodes of Dragnet, still, as the years have gone by, the dreaded flashbacks they were so valiantly shielding me from (with Haldol and stomach pumps) never came to pass in the sense that I never had the experience of unexpectedly returning to my previously-drugged state, but I did eventually experience a type of flashback, one that manifested itself as a reliving of past traumas experienced during my experience on acid - little flashes of PTSD. Just because something didn't really happen doesn't mean that it didn't happen for you. I still have nightmares about my seventeen-year-old nightmares.

Perhaps because of the memories of these past traumas, I've become interested in creating environments and experiences now that shift our perceptions as a sheer exploration of joy. I want to induce auditory and visual hallucinations that can be turned off at any point - take off the headphones or step out of the room and it's over. The ability to escape these situations does not make them any less powerful, it simply makes them safer and less likely to traumatize the participants. Still, these experiences have the potential to show us what's on the other side of the curtain, not that there is a world of magic and mysticism out there, but that the world is simply what we make of it. So maybe there is magic and mysticism after all. There is if you want it. I don't really, but anything is possible.

Reading in bed without craning your neck is possible if you have a pair of these fancy new "Lazy Reader" prismatic eyeglasses! The glasses shift your gaze 90 degrees to the south, so when you're lying in bed staring at the ceiling wishing that the Haldol would wear off and somebody would give you a blanket -instead of actually staring at the ceiling, you can stare at your feet as your ankles tug against the restraints. You could read a book if somebody would just prop it up on your chest. Or you could re-read the short inscription on that Jesus Lizard record that your brother had the band sign for you to cheer you up while you were in the hospital.

Or maybe you're not a sedentary person. Perhaps your idea of a good time is hanging off of a sheer rock face hundreds of feet in the air, belaying your partner as he picks his way through the next pitch of 5.14 cracks, running out of places to put any decent protection as a storm rolls into the valley. Don't strain your neck staring up at your partner's ass all day. Put on a pair of these prismatic "belay glasses" and look straight up while looking straight ahead. Or walk around the house looking at the ceiling as if it were the floor. Like you did when you were a kid.

It is only because of Amazon and Facebook's intimate knowledge of my interests and shopping habits that I learned of the existence of belay glasses. I had the idea to create an installation like this years ago, but the glasses part of it just seemed too fussy and complicated to bother with. I shelved the idea and thought there was no way that anyone was ever going to make a commercially available pair of glasses that looked straight up in the air, but here we are. And here I am, preparing to spend more than $1K on acrylic mirrors to cover the ceiling of a gallery so that people can walk around in goofy glasses, looking at the tops of their own heads. This may turn out to be a perfectly pedestrian experience, or it may be mind blowing. There's only one way to find out. We're going to have to do it.

And this is how my recent artistic practices have really come to excite me. I don't know what's going to happen. It might not work at all. Or it might just be kinda lame. Or it might be completely disorienting with people bumping into each other and falling down. Or it might be totally transcendent.

I spend a lot of time making mock-ups and renderings to help myself envision the way things are going to work, and those things do help, but there's really no way to tell how these environments are going to work until you experience them in person. What I have tried to focus on here is simplicity. Works such as this can have all sorts of  after-the-fact meanings attached to them, issues of surveillance, voyeurism, mysticism, etc can be layered onto a work like this in an attempt to make some sort of larger statement. I've been guilty of plenty of those things in the past. This time I would just like to keep it simple: a stage onto which other dramas can be projected.  A frame or vessel in which art can be created and enjoyed. Or we can just dance and attempt to transcend ourselves in the most primal of ways - through music, and  movement, and trance.

I had one of those moments at Tempus two years ago when Prince died and Tracy held an impromptu dance party in his honor. I'm not a dancer. Can you tell that I'm self conscious? I can't get out of my own skin. But that night I did, for just a few brief moments as we drank and danced and mourned the loss of someone that had pulled back the curtain for us so many years ago.

So let's make this a dance floor, and have a dance party. And we'll let Tempus and Tracy program the play list, and we'll hope that it's heavy on the Prince because we know that it will be. And we will literally leave our bodies behind. We'll project ourselves up and out to look down and see ourselves dancing - as others would see us - and not our own flawed conception of others as people who are critical of us because we are critical of ourselves and the others that we imagine are products of our own self-critical imagination. Actual others. Others who really don't give a shit about us, but also they don't live in our skin and they can see the beauty of our herky-jerky old man dance, or the wild mania of the twirling girl, or the joy in that guy who just keeps jumping straight up and down. We'll be both ourselves in our dancing meat bags and we'll be everything else that is not us and our meat. Or we'll just be a bunch or dorks walking around in silly glasses. Whatever. It's worth a shot."

Speculative Geography

I've recently been invited to join an old dudes book club, where a few forty-something guys read books about punk rock and get together in a bar every couple of months to talk about what they've read. It's quite possibly the least punk thing I've ever done. As an ardent anti-nostalgite, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the whole thing, but I've started to realize that now is the time that our own personal histories start to get written, and if we want them to be written well, or at least accurately, then we need to participate in the entire process - not just in the consumption of these histories, but in their critique and even their production.

To this end, I have been working on the very early stages of a personal project that I'm tentatively referring to as "Natural History". The idea goes against most of what I've explored artistically and intellectually to date. The project approaches my own personal history (my actual lived experiences combined with fantasies, false memories, imaginings and influences from music, art, film, and popular culture) as fodder for a multi-faceted, museum-style exhibition. Think less Museum of Modern Art and more Natural History Museum. Where the world has been reduced to the size of a man. The man as museum - complete with dioramas, diagrams, puppets, illustrations, photographs, and recordings. The dioramas have become especially fascinating to me as they seem to carry with them the institutional voice of authority (and a certain quaint antiquity) while still being easily subverted. The fractal nature of our experience becomes immediately apparent as models are developed at full scale in a digital environment and then scaled down to be 3d printed, laser cut, or sculpted from materials generally acquired from hobby shops. The viewer's access to information can be easily controlled through carefully constructed apertures that allow only limited views of the action. There can be, both literally and figuratively, elements included in the works to which the casual observer may never have any access. This is an idea that I have often struggled against in contemporary art. The idea of the artist's intent (which can only be discerned through examinations conducted outside of the work) giving the work its meaning and, ultimately, its value, is something I've always taken issue with. On one level, the concept of artistic intent is something that has been used as a key to the capitalist lock in contemporary art. Only a select few are given the tools needed to assess the value of a work of art. Those without the necessary background are left in the dark. It's no accident that Wall Street speaks a language that Main Street doesn't understand. It's not that the people on Main Street are incapable of learning the language, the obfuscation of certain financial instruments is as intentional as the deliberately opaque language and background information surrounding much of contemporary art. I like to think that my approach differs both in practice and intent. The idea of literally burying certain information deep within the work becomes an exercise in what I have come to call "speculative geography"  - a way to inhabit the characters of a story through real and imagined connections to place. The exercise can be viewed similarly to the actor who writes a detailed back story for their character. A back story that never ends up on screen, but serves to inform the actor's performance. In a sense, though, what I'm interested in is displaying only that back story without its accompanying narrative.

I have found myself looking for inflection points in both my own real history and in the history of important events that I've used to build my own personal cosmology. These inflection points always seem to be tied intimately to an actual place in time. Sometimes this place is purely imagined or constructed from second-hand descriptions, but I can nevertheless feel the size of each room, the quality of the light and the sound. It's often only through hindsight that one can identify the point where two disparate ideas, influences, or people rubbed up against each other and the world was forever changed - a time when the membranes became so thin that ideas and influences could move across the normal barriers that we encounter every day.  

As our first book club assignment, we are reading Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr. I'm not even close to finishing it, but I've been struck by a particular scene - the moment where all of the principal players come into contact with each other (without most of them even knowing it). The "meet-cute" as it were. Paul Westerberg is walking home from work along his normal route (in the snow, in my imagination) and he hears the distinctive sound of Bob Stinson's guitar, Bob's eleven-year-old brother Tommy on bass, and Chris Mars on drums, as their band, tentatively named Dogbreath, blazes through an instrumental cover of the Yes song "Roundabout".  Westerberg kneels at the basement window of the house at 3628 Bryant Road in Minneapolis and tries to glimpse the source of the racket. I imagine what he hears is mostly Tommy's bass through the thick basement walls. Perhaps he sees the top of the kid's head, his blonde bowl cut bouncing to the song's distinctively quick, funky, prog rock bass line. The Stinson brothers play their own version even faster than the virtuosic tempo of the original. I imagine that it's wintertime because I love the way sounds carry and die on the snowy ground. When the sound of the whole world is softened and muffled under a blanket of snow, the noise of a band like Dogbreath blasting out of a cold Minneapolis basement, on a dark and quiet street, feels all the more strange and cacophonous.

One of the great things about modern speculative geography is the information that is readily available at one's fingertips. Google Earth took me right to the house at 3628 Bryant Road and I tried to glimpse its character through a springtime thicket of trees. I had better luck with Street View where the trees were denuded of their foliage. I took a screen shot of the facade, loaded it into my 3d modeler, and began to recreate the house in my imagined world. I carefully scaled all of the dimensions based on the assumption that the front door was a standard 6'8", as most front doors are.  I placed the four doric columns on the front porch, overly ornate for a house so plain. I imagined the interior layout and tried to pull up the property on the Hennepin County property appraiser's site without any luck. I would have to come up with the floor plan on my own. I thought of the classic TV sitcom interior seen so many times, all the way from Archie Bunker to Al Bundy. The front door to camera right, the staircase on the back wall, kitchen to the left. I downloaded a four piece drum kit and a couple of human figures and began to place them around the scene. I will continue to fill out the scene, adding details, decorating the rooms, sculpting the characters faces to fit their likenesses. And I will put myself in the scene over and over feeling the impact of the surroundings and the details slowly recalled. Cigarettes smoked in the cold. The crunch of snow under foot. Westerberg's tracks through the deep lot. The dark house with a faint glow from the low windows. The vibration of absolutely everything at once.

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The house at 3628 Bryant Road where the Stinson brothers lived with their mother.

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A rendered view of my 3d model of the Stinson house. More details remain to be added, but this provides a preliminary view of the scene to be depicted in the final diorama.

Interstices

What is being mapped here are so-called "desire paths", the routes through the woods that only the kids and the hobos know. Forgotten and overlooked infrastructure. The places where there is no "there". My whole life I've felt like I was in-between. An honor student taking OJT and working nights. A 30-year-old sculptor in the Fire Academy. A southern liberal. 

And it's always back to these same houses. Single-story, low roofed, chain link fenced, concrete block. These houses that burn in minutes. Everybody's house is a mess. People are den animals who like to burrow in to their own mounds of stuff. Everyone has the same stuff. Very few people have walked into the number of strangers homes that I have. Just walked in with impunity. Looked at all the pictures on the wall. Rifled through the cabinets to find the medications. How many pressboard vanities have I seen falling apart? All of them. How many trailer floors have I fallen through? Remembering that trailer with the rookie firefighter that looked like they had rolled the carpet with a paint roller charged with feces. The negative image of the dead dog left on the floor when the animal was removed and the room cleared of the strange, thick, greasy yellow smoke.
I would give up my sense of smell in a heartbeat. The ratio of unpleasant to pleasant smells experienced is at least three to one.
And somewhere, down the hall, there's always a smoke detector chirping. Is that what it is? We've been wondering. For God's sake, yes! Me with a clipboard full of nine volts, changing out batteries while my crew addresses the patient.

Dumb Jobs For Smart People

This is what happens when you grow up as a smart kid in Lutz. In a down-at-the-heels exurban Central-Florida neighborhood with a step-father who works for the county and a mother who is a secretary at the nearby university. Four of their five kids are within two years of each other. Two are his, two are hers, and the youngest one is theirs together. Or, as she likes to say "his, mine, and ours".

I was in the middle of everything.

By the standards of our neighborhood, we were practically rich. We lived in an honest-to-god house on a street full of houses, just a block from the run-down travel trailers and old single-wides of the MGTP (the Mighty Good Trailer Park).  Ours was the cypress-clad house on the corner with a hot tub on the back porch and a stained-glass window in the gable - lit from the inside at night (my step-dad's idea). A constantly rotating fleet of well-used cars filled the front yard, nosing up to the chain-link fence. 

To our friends on the block, we had everything we could want - electric guitars, drums, a four track cassette recorder, a microwave oven, and a refrigerator stocked with Toaster Strudel and Dr. Check. I had a go-kart that I'd bought for thirty dollars from a friend.  It had a three horsepower Briggs and Stratton motor, but no brakes or gas pedal. To drive it you had to hold one hand on the wheel and the other behind you on the engine's throttle lever. The kart's braking mechanism involved wearing an old pair of shoes that could be planted on the pavement to bring yourself, ever-so-slowly, to a stop.  When eventually the go-kart was stolen from my yard, I got my big metalhead friend Eric, and we walked over to the MGTP where we - or he - physically threatened the suspected perpetrators until they produced the go-kart, somewhat the worse for wear. Eric's dad gave me my first welding lesson as we fixed the steering mechanism that the thieves had broken while racing the kart through the woods behind the Handy Mart. 

We were one of the first families in our neighborhood to have cable TV and a VCR. We didn't have any movie channels so we had to turn the cable box up onto its dial when the parents went to bed in an often-futile attempt to unscramble Cinemax's latest installment of Emmanuel or Lady Chatterly's Lover. When the image wouldn't unscramble, we would sit listening to the audio and speculating as to whether the dark spots on the screen were perhaps nipples, kneecaps, or eyeballs. The VCR was a top-loading JVC with giant, primary-colored Mondrian buttons and a "remote" whose cord you had to route under the living room rug so people wouldn't constantly trip over it.

The neighbors thought we were pretty fancy, but we didn't compare ourselves to the neighbors. What we saw as kids, and especially as teenagers, were our own shortcomings in the eyes of our classmates at an upper-middle class suburban high school - having gained admittance through the use of a fake address. There, we were the poor kids. Still, our parents had bought us each a car for our sixteenth birthday - just like all the other kids at our school - but ours were bought for $500 (an AMC Hornet, a Plymouth Reliant, a green Pinto station wagon) and were necessary for us to get to school on our own, while the cars our classmates drove were BMWs and, at the very least, newer Toyotas.

Our savior, and eventually our curse, was punk rock. Money didn't make you cool in the world of 1980's punk. In fact, it was quite the opposite, and our shift from wanting the latest fashions to shopping almost exclusively at the thrift store couldn't have made my mother any happier. She wasn't a fan of our hair, but I guess you can't have it all. Our high school friends had a harder time establishing their working-class punk cred, but they had a lot more to rebel against than we did. The anti-establishment fire may have burned a little hotter in them. They were the children of the buttoned-down yuppies that all of our new idols despised. Our parents were more of the post-hippie Laissez-faire variety. They took us to bluegrass festivals and we periodically stole bits of stale old weed from the same little baggie in their top dresser drawer. By the time I was sixteen, everyone of us, children and parents included (except my youngest brother who was only seven), smoked cigarettes in the house all the time. It was unbelievable.

I'm not quite sure where it came from, but the one thing that seemed to run strong in our family was what has typically been called "Protestant work ethic". Perhaps this was something that my parents got from their parents (most of them survivors of multiple tours of duty in multiple wars, the Great Depression, cancer, heart disease, alcoholism, and perhaps most notably, depression). Somehow this work ethic had been passed along almost completely intact, but devoid of all religious associations. We were raised, and remain largely, agnostics and atheists. Hard work was not something done to achieve salvation, but simply because it beat the alternative, and in the years before Prozac, hard work was second only to alcohol in providing many of us with a way to outrun our own creeping depression.

I've always had a bit of a split personality. The hands-on, real-world side of my brain is in a constant struggle with the more imaginative, free-association side. One thing I've never had much patience for is rules. I like to take things as they come, and having hard and fast rules in place always seems to stifle any attempt at truly thinking through a situation. Plus, nobody loves a rule book like a dumb person loves a rule book. The biggest rule followers in any organization are invariably the least creative, most unimaginative thinkers. Whether it's the Bible, or the City of Tampa Construction Code, there's nothing that makes life easier for the dullard than being given a written set of instructions on how to conduct oneself. This is why, contrary to popular belief, I think atheists are the most morally-minded of individuals. There's a lot of hard work that goes into creating your own morality without the assured guidance of rule books and sermons.

The fire department is as rule-bound an institution as any other paramilitary organization, but unlike many similar agencies, firefighting has a long tradition of creative rule bending and breaking. What saves us as firemen and frequent defiers of the rule book is the fact that the final outcome is usually easily measurable. Did the house burn down? Did the patient survive? Did anyone get hurt? This is helped by the fact that every situation is different and the rules often don't apply at all. As long as you can justify your actions to someone after the fact, and the outcome was satisfactory, you can chalk it all up to thinking on your feet and responding to a dynamic situation. You just have to hope that your actions come down on the right side of things when the history of the incident gets written. There are plenty of situations where, at least in the moment, it may be possible to see two distinctly different outcomes. Your heroic actions could just as easily get you demoted as get you Firefighter of the Year.

So this is where I found myself in the summer of 2013, a newly-promoted Driver Engineer sent to one of the furthest outlying stations in the wilds of southeastern Hillsborough County. I had come from a moderately busy suburban station that averaged 8-10 calls per shift covering an area of about 6 square miles, to a rural station that averaged 1-2 calls per shift and covered an area of 125 square miles. We didn't do much, but when we did it was usually serious and our backup was a long ways away. You could easily have a structure fire all to yourself for twenty or thirty minutes before another unit arrived on scene. And all this with no fire hydrants.

In the Florida summer, Wimauma and its surrounding agricultural lands are the frequent site of large-scale brush fires that can burn hundreds or even thousands of acres. These fires may take anywhere from several hours to several weeks to control. The apparatus assigned to our station consisted of an engine (or fire truck) manned by a crew of three firefighters, a one-man tanker truck carrying 3500 gallons of water, and an un-manned brush truck staffed by the firefighters from the engine as needed. When called for a brush fire, we usually just grabbed our gear off of the engine and jumped on the brush truck with the tanker following in our wake. On this particular afternoon, the call was dispatched as a simple grass fire at an address at least 10-12 minutes from our station. The three of us piled into the brush truck and pulled out of the station with the tanker close behind. On small outdoor fires such as this, we generally only dispatch a single engine or brush truck. In this case, due to the water supply issues, we had the tanker coming as well. As we got closer, dispatch updated us that the fire was "possibly" threatening a structure on the property. A few minutes passed and they were advising us that this was a confirmed structure fire with at least one house burning and an unknown occupant level. With each update we discussed our plan of attack, but our strategies were severely limited by our choice of apparatus and the equipment that we had available to us.

We discussed the possible scenarios across the front seats as we sped towards the rising column of thick, black smoke in the distance. We had three people, one airpack (each brush truck only had one air pack on it), two sets of structural firefighting gear (our rookie had left his on the engine, only bringing his lightweight brush gear), and no handlines suitable for fighting a structure fire. We ran down the inventory coming behind us on the slow-moving tanker - one more airpack, 3500 gallons of water, a pump, and two 2" handlines that had probably never been pulled on a structure fire and may have been completely unserviceable. The beginnings of a plan had started to come together. The Captain and I would suit up in our structural gear while the rookie pulled the brush line and fought whatever brush fire there was and we waited for the tanker. One of us would pull the second airpack off of the tanker and we'd pull both of the 2" handlines to fight the structure fire. As we discussed our options, I realized that I was grinning from ear to ear, and I voiced to my crew what I had been thinking since the start of this whole debacle. "This is gonna be awesome."

Sense Memories

Florida scrub heat.  White powder sand. Palmettos.  The clicking of insect wings in the still air.

Sand so fine it works its way through the fabric of your shoes.  Sweaty dirt between your toes.  ‘Dirt tan’ rings at the tops of your socks.

Sandspurs.

Sky.

Drinking Kool-Aid from the plastic cooler/pitcher that leaked all down your front no matter how careful you were.

Slick wet tree bark and two-by-four steps to an ageing rope swing.

Things you can jump off of into the water.

Canoe blisters.

Wet tennis shoes.

Alcohol and vinegar solution from a ketchup bottle in the ears.  The hot, pungent sensation of it as it ran down your neck.

The cool water at the bottom of the lake, the muck that your feet sank into.

The smell of lake muck.

The smell of everything when it gets hot.  Like a red Tupperware lunchbox that’s been left in the car all day.

Road heat.  Grass heat.  Car heat.  Sidewalk heat.  Baseball diamond heat.  Parking lot heat.  Boardwalk heat. 

The bench seat of a VW camper van.  Orange and brown plaid interior.

Trying to make the Star Wars laser sound by hitting telephone pole cables with wrenches.

Crowded back of a light blue Plymouth K Car.  No AC.  Sweaty and newly hairy adolescent knees sticking to each other.

Cigarettes on the beach. Cigarettes in the mall.

Hollow brass door knobs.

Sour laundry.

The cold air blast of a HARTline bus.

The sound of a bicycle chain with sand in it.

Everything fixed with tape.  Sticky, hot, tape residue on everything.

The inside of a car’s ashtray.

Dashboard foam split by heat.

Lawnmowers that don’t start.

The dampness at the back of an aluminum shed.

Chain link everything.

Dog runs along the fence.  The way the dirt piles up in the corners.

The taste of water from a sun-baked garden hose.

Palmettos.

The Great “Merchandise” Debate

Over the last week or so, there has been a vigorous online debate about the contents of an interview with the Tampa band Merchandise published by the Pitchfork writer Jenn Pelly on the website dazeddigital.com.  The interview is a virtual treasure trove of priceless quotes for those interested in the follies of youthful philosophizing and hipster literary pretentions.  Merchandise was recently signed to the British independent record label 4AD (home to indie superstars like The National, Bon Iver, and Iron and Wine – among others).  By all accounts, and based on my own limited exposure to their music, these guys are talented musicians and they are probably going to be very big.  So what’s all the fuss?

Well, in the course of his interview, vocalist Carson Cox spoke about his work and his hometown of Tampa in terms like this:   "I'm proud of the fact that we did this in a cultural wasteland, that we made something we think is intelligent in a place where they just don't want anything intelligent”.  Cue the internet outrage.

This is where I get a little squirmy with the vitriol being directed at these guys.  Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re just as naive and misguided as everyone else does, but perhaps it’s for different reasons.  Whenever somebody says something negative about Tampa (or anywhere else for that matter), there emerges almost instantaneously a group of defenders of the area that all sound like they work for the state tourism board.  When somebody accuses you of being unintelligent and culturally bereft, to point out to them that we are home to the Dali Museum and the Chihuly  collection just makes you seem ridiculous.  It’s as if people think that, with enough persuasion, we can convince anyone that Tampa is a great town.  We can’t.  And we shouldn’t try to.  Tampa is a great town for a certain type of person (self motivated, immune to insults and humidity, capable of handling failure and rejection, etc.) and it’s not a great town for other types (lazy, entitled, hipper-than-thou douchebags).  This is exactly as it should be.  Part of what we all love about Tampa is that it actively encourages those types of people to leave.  It’s a self filtering machine.  And this is where I take umbrage with Cox and others of his ilk; he seems to be exactly the type of person that usually gets propelled out of Tampa like a magnet with the wrong polarity, and yet he’s still here, and he’s still bitching about being here.  In public.

We’re from Tampa.  We don’t need self esteem.  We are not strivers.  We are not ambitious.  This doesn’t mean that we won’t work tirelessly to express ourselves or improve our communities, it just means that we know that the recognition we receive will be virtually non-existent, but we will know what we have done and those that know us will know and appreciate it too.  One of the things that I always say I love about Tampa is that when something cool happens, there’s a good chance that you either did it yourself or you know the person responsible.  I don’t have any real gripe with New York or Portland or San Francisco - there’s much to love in all of those places - but I do take offense when someone I know moves to New York and three months later they are telling me that “their city” is the greatest city on Earth.  You didn’t build that.  You paid the price of admission, and that’s fine.  Some people like to do things themselves and some people like to hire someone else.  To each his own, but if we are going to apply a “cool factor” to each individual, I will always argue that those who do it themselves are cooler.  And poor people are always cooler than rich people.  And the Yankees suck.  Sorry, but that’s just the way it works.

So I’m not surprised when somebody like Lena Dunham says that we can’t afford to have the Patti Smith of our generation moving to Tampa.  The article’s writer, Jenn Pelly, is living in Lena Dunham’s New York and deriding the horrors of Nebraska Avenue and Alpine Liquors.   These “kids” were just recently introduced to Patti Smith by reading her National Book Award winner “Just Kids”.  Smith wasn’t even on their radar until she made it to the top of the New York Times bestsellers.  And now they imagine themselves inhabiting that same New York.  That New York doesn’t exist anymore.  That New York was a collection of Nebraska Avenues and Alpine Liquors – and cool people.  Whether or not you think that Tampa has what it takes to nurture those same sorts of cool people doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that the people that live here – and choose to stay - do.  And that’s what’s so annoying about Cox’s attitude.  He doesn’t get it, and yet he’s still here.  He’s supposed to be an artist with an ability to see what lies beneath the surface, and everything that’s cool about Tampa is beneath the surface.  Cox is seeing Tampa through the eyes of a New Yorker, and still he stays.  We’ve always viewed ourselves as a sort of anti-New York that doesn’t open itself immediately to the casual observer.  It takes patience, and perseverance, and creativity.  I’ve said for years that I’m going to make some bumper stickers with a new twist on a clichéd old saying:  “Tampa:  nice place to live, wouldn’t want to visit.”

The Night They Burned The Harbor Club Down

Last night in Tampa, the old punk rock haunt The Harbor Club burned down, about ten years after most thinking people believed that it would have. Frankly, it was the only way to effectively clean up some of the messes that had been left there. GG Allin did things inside that even a raging inferno cannot completely eradicate. In the same week, the Cuban Club demolished its outdoor bandshell, site of the famous 1986 Black Flag 'riot' as well as performances by punk giants like Bad Brains, Seven Seconds, Descendents, and many memorable Tampa "Slam Fests". Now the mayor wants to destroy the Bro Bowl skate park, a famous daytime hangout for Tampa's disaffected youth since the late seventies. 
So here's the truth about all of these venues: they all sucked. That's precisely why we were allowed to have them as a bunch of violent, snot-nosed little nihilists in the mid-to-late eighties. The community, such as it was, didn't give a shit about us or any of these venues during those years, and we used that neglect to our advantage. We could do whatever we wanted in these places. It was the first lesson for a group of predominantly middle-class, predominantly white youth, about the (limited) benefits of marginalization. "Benign Neglect" would have been a good name for one of the many hardcore bands that came and went so quickly in this era.
I always feel a little conflicted about the loss of one of these 'institutions'. We can get up-in-arms that our history is being destroyed, but what is the alternative? Preserve it in its present state of decay as a museum to some bygone era? The Harbor Club was a death trap. The Cuban Club was a horrible performance venue with terrible acoustics, and the Bro Bowl is one of the lamest skate parks still in existence. But again, it was those shortcomings that made them available to us, and it was that benign (or possibly malignant) neglect that allowed us to explore methods of expression that actually came to matter to America's cultural legacy. This is the lesson that Tampa seems incapable of learning. The official response has always been to recognize the importance of underground or grassroots movements only after they have either run their course or they have become simply too big to ignore. The first official response is to shut down whatever is happening and then announce a plan to build a state-of-the-art replica of that which they've just destroyed (witness the current assault on the burgeoning craft beer industry by our state legislators for a current example of this behavior). This makes me think of the first time Kelly (Kombat) Benjamin ran for City Council. He was in a panel discussion at Tampa Theater where one of the other candidates -who had long been involved in the workings of Tampa’s government - was crowing about their plan to turn downtown Tampa into an “arts district”, Kelly laughed and said “You had an arts district in Tampa. It was called ‘Ybor City’, and you destroyed it.”
It’s easy to say negative things about politicians and their love of money and power, but there’s something else at work that is not often expressed. Politicians are dorks. They have never known what is cool, and they never will. They appeal to a large swath of their constituents in the same way that a beige wall appeals to the largest group of potential home buyers. If they were cool, they wouldn't spend so much time worrying about whether or not people like them (people don’t). So here’s an idea: what if we just lead them down the wrong path? This technique has a long history in this region. The local Indian tribes convinced the first groups of Conquistadors that the gold they sought was always just around the next bend. They passed them off to neighboring tribes and got them to walk all the way to Texas. So let’s change tactics. Let’s start talking about how much we like Family Dollar and Wal-Mart. Let’s insist that they move into our neighborhoods, and then let’s NEVER shop there. Soon enough, these places will be abandoned (ex. NAPA Auto Parts on Florida), neglected, and all-but-forgotten by the powers that be. That’s when we pounce! We can move in to their buildings, have punk rock shows, and once again beat the shit out of each other with impunity.