By the time I was fourteen, my mom was at her wits’ end. She began looking around for a way to get me off the druggy trail I was following and found something called Fire Explorers. It’s a program designed for teenagers who think they might want to be firefighters. It could have been for budding taxidermists, for all my mom cared. So long as it kept me on the straight and narrow, she was happy.
The last thing I wanted to do was spend my evenings in another classroom with a bunch of fire geeks. But I went along, hoping to get her off my back.
On the first day of class, the instructor handed out a textbook, Essentials of Fire Fighting. It was 716 pages long. I nearly fainted. I’ve never been much of a reader, and I thought, What the hell am I going to do with this thing?
The instructor finished handing out the books. “This is not just another textbook, like you get in school,” he said. “This is the book being used in the fire academy right now. It’s life and death.”
I opened the monster and turned to the first page:
This manual is dedicated to the members of that unselfish organization of men and women who hold devotion to duty above personal risk, who count on sincerity of service above personal comfort and convenience, who strive unceasingly to find better ways of protecting the lives, homes and property of their fellow citizens from the ravages of fire and other disasters… THE FIREFIGHTERS OF ALL NATIONS.
I read the paragraph again. Something there appealed to me. The idea of a worldwide brotherhood, maybe. Of service. Of sacrifice.
I had never sacrificed anything in my life. I had nothing to sacrifice. We were too broke for that. But here was a profession where I could save others and still live out an adventure.
Fire Explorers was the first thing in my life I took seriously. I loved the long, punishing workouts and the push-up contests. I liked the discipline. I even liked the technical stuff. I learned how to tie different knots—a bowline, a clove hitch, a figure-eight follow-through, a becket bend. I became a deft hand with an ax. I could search a room engulfed in flames just by touch (though we never trained with live fire).
Even if I was hungover or high or depressed, I never missed a class. I decided I wanted to be part of this brotherhood. I wanted to be a firefighter.
But what I was was a drug dealer. It was the only way I knew to make decent money. By seventeen I was running a thriving business in pot and pills. If you were looking to score in Prescott in 2010, I may have supplied you with weed or Molly tabs. Primo stuff, too. I was really good at my job.
I had to make money somehow. And being a drug dealer is a great way to make friends. I had clients who were star football players, physics nerds, rich Cali kids. They invited me to their parties. They paid pretty much whatever I asked them to. For a stoner like me, it was a dream job.
But my addictions were getting worse. I sampled my own product so much that it seemed I was stoned from morning until I passed out in bed at night. School was an afterthought and my grades bottomed out.
My mom would ground me, or attempt to. But she was too worn out from working to chase me down and actually make the punishment stick. My senior year we ended up living a few houses down from Prescott High. I took advantage of this by running home during lunch break, taking some huge rips on my bong, snorting a few pills, and then heading back for my last classes. A midafternoon pick-me-up. My go-to pills were OxyContin and Percocet, which I got dirt cheap.
One day I took one too many hits on the bong and crawled back to school late for the bell. The next period was computer science, a class I was barely passing, and I needed to be in there. I skulked outside the window trying to catch the eye of one of my friends. Finally, one of them spotted me. I gestured for him to open a window in the back of the room. He got up, strolled over to where I was, and slid the window up. I was going to go in commando style, hit the floor on all fours, and crawl to my desk. With the Percocet in my blood, this made perfect sense to me.
I managed to pull myself up to the sill and slide my body through without alerting the teacher, but on my way down to the floor I knocked a chair over.
BAAAAAMMM!
The teacher whipped around. I was lying on the floor, laughing my ass off.
I imagined that I was building my legend. But really I was trying to escape my life. My mom’s unhappiness. Her screaming at me as soon as I walked in the door about my pissing my life away, being a degenerate, and so on. The fact that my father would have walked by me on the street without recognizing me. The fact that my brother would have done the same just because he didn’t care to be associated with me.
I graduated high school in 2009. With school, my life had some structure. But after graduation, I joined the small Prescott community of tweakers, dealers, and future inmates that centered on Whiskey Row.
A typical weekend night from 2010:
I was invited to a party at a mansion in the hills, one of the million-dollar homes I would one day keep from going up in flames. My friend picked me up in his lifted Toyota Tundra and I jumped in there with four other guys. When we got to the party, the driveway and nearby streets were packed with Lexuses and Porsches. I walked into the mansion and all I could think was Whaaaaaaat. There was a dance floor bigger than any apartment I’d ever lived in. A live four-piece band that could really play. Men with strange masks on their faces and women in dresses made out of shiny patches stitched together with black lace. Guys wearing high-end watches that cost more than pickup trucks.
One of my friends went to the bathroom and came back with his eyes wide.
“Dude, there are hidden cameras in the bedrooms.”
“What?! Why?”
“Why? Because this is a swingers party, man!”
We looked around. All the men seemed to be around fifty and all the women around twenty-one. So obviously at some point in the night, there was going to be a joining of these two populations.
We had to think this over—why had we been invited?—and smoke some weed on the patio. It was about eleven o’clock and the deck was thick with people popping pills and swilling champagne.
Out of nowhere, I felt something smash into my right cheek. I staggered back and saw a stranger in a white shirt getting ready to hit me again. His eyes were bloodshot and there was a tie pulled halfway down his shirt.
My buddies bent the dude over the railing. People were screaming as his feet tilted up in the air.
“Throw him over the railing!” one of my buddies yelled.
The patio looked out over a cliff of scrub, landscaped rocks, and cacti.
“Toss him!”
“Hell no,” shouted another friend. “It’s thirty feet over there!”
We dropped the guy back on the patio and turned to see the place in riot mode. Inside there was chaos. Chairs arcing over the dance floor, cocktail glasses being smashed on people’s faces, figures wrestling in the half darkness. The band was running for their lives.
Had the kids figured out what was going on and revolted? I never found out. Didn’t matter who started the fight, because we knew whose side we were on. My friends and I waded into the brawl, throwing haymakers at the older dudes and knocking one or two out. Then, with bodies scattered across the polished floor, we ran for the exit.
It was all good times until it wasn’t. By the time I was eighteen, it seemed no night was complete unless I’d blacked out or knocked someone’s front teeth in. Several ended with me being chased by the cops. I even had a fake name—Chad, easy to remember—that my friends called me on certain nights so that, should things go south, the authorities wouldn’t be able to track me down.
But I still wanted to be a firefighter, and directly out of high school I went to the fire academy in Prescott. There was a guy there named Tony Sciacca, who was enrolled in a class on structure firefighting. Tony was a local hotshot legend. He’d started out at the bottom, working forest fires, and he’d built himself up so that he was now leading a Type 2 incident management team, which means you’re certified to handle most kinds of natural disaster, even up to FEMA-level catastrophes.
I told my mom that Tony was teaching at the academy. Mom, who’s nothing if not direct, went to talk to him behind my back. The next day Tony found me in class.
“I hear you want to be a firefighter,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, but do you want to sit on the couch and watch Lifetime movies, or do you want to actually work?”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Why don’t you become a hotshot?” he said.
“A what?” I had never heard the term before. Shows how clueless I was.
“We fight forest fires,” Tony said. “Sometimes we’re out in the woods for two weeks at a time. You’re choppered in with some chow and your gear and you live in the wilderness and you actually work.”
It sounded like heaven. I’m not saying Tony whitewashed things, but he definitely emphasized the good parts of being a hotshot: the camaraderie, the outdoor life, the nonstop action. He also made it sound easy. I was so green, I thought, Wow, you get paid to go out into the forest and kill big-ass fires? Sign me up.
I would soon learn how wrong I was.
I didn’t want a desk job. I didn’t want to be a supervisor or a captain or chief. I just wanted to start out as one of the youngest firefighters in Arizona history and put in twenty-five years of hard work, fighting every kind of blaze there was. I wanted to be the kind of veteran with two knee replacements that some young buck calls “Gramps” one morning and asks what time he’s due back at the retirement village—before I leave him gasping on a brutal mountain run. A grizzled old bastard who tells stories around campfires about the wickedest fires he fought. Who’s earned the respect of everyone.
That was the sum of my desires. To be a firefighter’s firefighter.
In the spring of 2010, I was on my way. I was enrolled in an EMT course, which every structure firefighter has to pass. My mom had been hired at a fire service station out near Chino, working the front desk at their main offices. I’d taken a wildland firefighting course at the Prescott Fire Center and aced it. I felt like I was ready to start fighting fires.
But in my EMT class, my lifelong difficulty with book learning finally caught up with me. I’d made it through high school without ever learning to study. I was quick and had a good mind, but I just couldn’t sit with a book in my lap and read. I’d never been diagnosed with ADD, but I was always convinced I had it—maybe that was the origin of my boyhood nickname, BB. As hard as I tried, it seemed my eyes jumped away from the page before I got the sense of what was on it. But I don’t want to blame some disorder. I didn’t push myself hard enough to overcome that.
Whatever the reason, halfway through the EMT course, I flunked out. This derailed all my plans to join the Prescott Fire Department. I saw my buddies finishing the class and getting jobs with fire departments and crews. Believe me, it was depressing as hell.
Then I remembered what Tony Sciacca had told me. And I realized that hotshots aren’t required to pass an EMT course. I was so relieved. Here was a way into the brotherhood. The last way for me.
My mom kept an eye on openings at a Type 2 crew station in Chino and let me know when they were looking for guys. She put in a good word with her bosses at the Arizona State Forestry, which ran that particular crew. I’m a shoo-in, I thought. I knew I’d be good at the job, too. I felt like all I needed was one clean break and I’d be done with drugs forever.
When the time came, two of my friends and I applied for the open slots at a different Type 2 Initial Attack crew, basically hotshots who are among the first responders to a fire. I checked my application twice before sending it in. “In three months,” one of my friends told me, “we’ll be out on the line killing fires together.”
The competition was intense. Every other kid in Prescott grows up wanting to be a firefighter, or at least the kids I knew—the ones with no college degree and parents who were barely making it themselves. The cowboy jobs are gone. The army and marines take you away from your family for months at a time. Everything else is minimum-wage jobs.
But being a hotshot? That was the dream. And the slots filled up quick.
A month later, the list for the new hires was out and I went to the Forestry station to confirm that my name was there. I was feeling good. This is the first day of the rest of my life, I thought. Like my mother, I’m addicted to that feeling of a fresh start.
But before I even got a look at the names, a supervisor pulled me into his office. “Brendan,” he said, “I don’t know what happened, but you’re not on the list. We’d really like to hire you, but if your name didn’t show up, my hands are tied.”
I was dumbfounded. How was I not on the list?
“Can you call the forest service and find out what’s going on?” I asked.
The supervisor shook his head. “Even if it was a clerical thing, they won’t let us take you. They’ll tell us to go back to an old list and hire from there. It’s procedure.”
We found my application and went over it line by line. There it was, on page two. I’d mistakenly clicked “one semester” of training instead of “one year.” One little pull-down question and I was done. It was my own damn fault.
I was completely gutted. But I didn’t want to whine about it.
“I appreciate your time, sir,” I said to the supervisor. “If anything changes, please know that I’m ready to go. And thank you.”
He nodded. I walked out to my car. It was a blazing Arizona day, the sky so big you feel you’re floating faceup in blueness. But for me everything had turned dark. I got in my car and cried my heart out.