46

A Promotion to Captain

I FINALLY GOT PROMOTED TO the rank of captain in February 2010. My new fire hall, #344, was built in 1910 and originally housed horses and a steam engine. It was also used as the Toronto Fire Department training facility until 1980. Photos of previous classes line the walls of the sitting room.

Station 344 is in the Annex, a section of the city close to the University of Toronto, just outside the downtown core. My new truck, Pumper 344, didn’t do 4,700 calls a year like Pumper 314, but rather a more humane 2,800: somewhat fewer false alarms and a lot more fires. I had moved on from rooming houses to fraternity houses. My drunk quota changed as well … sort of.

I left a district of down-and-out drunks for a district of university drunks, which was not necessarily any better. At least with the older drunks I could understand what the hell they were saying. It seems like when kids say something is bad it’s really good. “That’s sick! You guys are the shit!” Those are good things, apparently.

However, “I’m sick with the shits,” does not mean you are cool in either lingo. One time during frosh week we had a first-year, first-time drunk student who had passed out from too much alcohol. She looked cool in her leather jacket and fishnet stockings, that is, until she crapped herself and the poo pushed out through her fishnets, creating a pile of mushy french-fry turds.

I embraced my new role as captain. As an acting captain for many years I was confident in my abilities on the fire ground, but as an acting captain I was sort of the hired hand only in charge of my truck when my captain was off duty or being shipped to any truck that needed a captain for the day. I wanted my own crew. I wanted a home to finish out my career. I had worked at 344 in the past and I was thankful to be posted to such a storied fire hall with a great history and a great running area. My new crew at 344 had been working together for a few years and I knew most of them from years of running fires where the running districts of 314 and 344 intersected.

Every fire department, every district, and even every apparatus has their own way of doing things based on the firefighting style of the crew and the geographical or socioeconomic makeup of their particular running area. For example, a pumper crew working in a suburban neighbourhood will require a different hose layout than a crew working in a dense urban area of the city. The suburban crew had wide streets and long front lawns while the urban crew dealt with narrow streets and would have to access the back of a row of houses via a rear laneway. Luckily for me, my new crew was a well-seasoned group that welcomed me into their world and filled me in on the unique attributes of my new running district.

One of the first non-fire calls at my new digs was for a report of a young man who had fallen in the yard of a fraternity house. It was a bitterly cold night as we got off the truck in front of a fraternity house that we responded to frequently for students that had overdrank and needed help. At the time I was preoccupied, as I had just had a spat with one of my sons. It was a dumb argument, but my son was upset with me and wouldn’t talk to me. I was angry with myself for hurting his feelings.

We were ushered to the back of the large frat house to the parking lot. A young man, twenty-one years old, lay crumpled on the pavement. One of my crew slipped and fell on his frozen blood as he approached to assess the boy. My job as the captain of a medical response is to gather as much information as possible about the victim — name, age, etc. — and the circumstances of the accident. Upon investigation it was revealed that the boy had locked himself outside on the fire escape during a party and attempted to crawl into an open window, slipping on the icy roof and falling, hitting the fire escape, on the way down.

I looked at the boy. He was dead. Head smashed. Fingers mangled from when he had bounced off the fire escape before he hit the pavement. My crew and the incoming paramedics worked frantically to save this young man. In my mind I saw what could have been one of my sons, now the same age as the dead boy. Same size, same hair colour, same style of clothing. I flashed back to how depressed and hurt I felt when I couldn’t see my boys after I first left Linda and had to fight to see them. I hurt for the parents of this young man. I could imagine and could feel what they would feel upon learning their boy, his whole exciting life ahead of him, had died in an accident.

Another memorable call, six months later, that affected me by resurfacing dormant depressive thoughts was for a man collapsed in a backyard of an apartment house.

Our truck arrived, and as we jumped off, we were directed by tenants who lived upstairs in the large house. We were told that they were having a party the night before and saw the old man who lived in the basement drinking on a lounger in the backyard. He was in the same position this morning and thought someone should check on him. Hey, why didn’t you check on him, neighbour?

We walked down the driveway to the backyard where we found the man lying on a lounger just like the tenant said. From a distance it appeared this man, in his sixties, had passed out drunk. A large empty bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey stood next to the lounger. A bust of Elvis Presley sat on the lawn next to him. As we approached we realized this man was not just passed out drunk. Blood was dripping down from his throat and from his forearms. Bees were buzzing all around him; some were crawling out from large cuts to his neck and the crux of his elbows. A box cutter knife was on the grass next to him. The man had been dead for many hours. It’s too bad the partiers didn’t bother to check on him earlier.

He was pronounced dead by the attending paramedics via the base hospital we work under and the coroners arrived a short time later to take the body to the morgue. It was the morning of August 17, the day after the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It appears the man was mourning the loss of his hero and took his own life. It was another reminder to me that suicide is so final. I was glad I didn’t have the heart to do it.

But the problem now remained how to place the bee-covered corpse into the body bag to be transported to the morgue.

With the dignity of the man being our priority, we did our best to shoo off the bees and bandage up the cuts to stop the bees from further feeding on the blood sugar. Since the coroner’s team had no protective clothing, our crew covered up with bunker gear and gloves to pick up the body, place it in the body bag, and carry it away from the swarm of bees. The body bag was placed into the hearse and we went back to the lounger to wash off the blood with water and bleach for the sake of the tenants. Another lonely soul had taken his life. Over the years I’ve seen dozens of suicides and each one makes me look within myself. I’m so thankful to now be on the other side of my own suicidal thoughts.