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.