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.