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.