42

Merry Effing Christmas

IN 2003 I TURNED FORTY, and Kelly arranged a surprise party at my local pub. It was a grand time, with much of my crew from Station 24 and my new hall, 314, in attendance. I even got a surprise visit from my sister Brenda (whose clothes I hadn’t worn in years) and her husband, Donny. It was great to see them, and even more so because I knew the drive from Geraldton took fourteen hours.

Two weeks later, Donny was dead from a heart attack. He was only forty-six. Two weeks after that, my mom died from congestive heart failure. Three weeks after that, my dad died from complications due to a stroke. As years go, 2003 sucked.

In the aftermath, Chereyl, Brenda, Adrian, and I became closer than ever. We had come together to deal with the burial arrangements and sorting out of the estates. We had never been a very emotionally demonstrative family, but this series of losses changed that. I was hurting emotionally, but luckily I could count on the strength and support of my beautiful wife, Kelly.

The following winter, Kelly left me. Before everything turned to shit, I guess life had been going too well for me. Maybe I was due for a metaphorical kick in the balls. I moved into my brother’s place, an hour outside the city, while our matrimonial home was up for sale. I was drowning in a sea of expenses, trying to save for first and last months’ rent for a new apartment, child support, my boys’ university education, a divorce lawyer, and subsequent division of the assets, all the while paying for a new car that I had leased just the previous spring. I was running a deficit, and every month I was getting deeper and deeper in debt. Eventually the banks refused me any more credit. The winter of 2004 was going to see one bleak Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, I got a phone call at work. A young female voice was on the other end. “Hey, Bryan, I was hoping to get in touch with you. Are you going to be around the fire hall for a bit?”

I told her yes, that we tend to stay at the fire hall when we’re working, but also that we could be at any number of addresses up and down the core of the city.

A half hour later there was a knock at the door at 314 and I opened it. A good-looking woman was standing there. She asked for me, and I started thinking that I might have seen her on set sometime and maybe she wanted to talk about tv work and agents and that sort of thing — it wouldn’t be the first time.

“Hey, it’s Christmas Eve. Come on in and warm up a bit,” I said, trying to be charming.

“You’re probably expecting these,” she replied. She handed me an envelope and bolted out the door. I opened the envelope and discovered that I had just been served my divorce papers. On Christmas Eve.

That night at 314 was as busy as usual. The gay bar next to the hall was pounding techno music and rowdy a-holes were yelling and fighting in the alley. I stewed in my room at the station between calls, replaying the past six months of my life.

THE NEXT MORNING, EXHAUSTED FROM running my ass off all night, I trudged outside into the snow. A full beer bottle had been smashed across the top on my new car, denting the roof and covering my overpriced vehicle with frozen Budweiser. Of course it had to be Budweiser! As if it weren’t enough that they had dumped me from the commercial that triggered my spending spree in anticipation of the thousands in royalties that didn’t come — the main source of my massive credit card debt — their frozen product now shrouded my once oh-so-perfect life with shame. Why me? What have I done to deserve this? How come my life sucks so much?

Twenty-four hours later, the problems that had made me feel so sorry for myself came splashing into perspective. A tsunami struck the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day, killing more than 230,000 people in fourteen countries. What I had perceived as catastrophe in my personal life was nothing compared to the death and destruction experienced by the millions affected by the giant tidal wave.

I looked in the mirror and convinced myself that I had nothing to complain about. Perspective is everything, just like when I felt suicidal in 1994 and started thinking about the British people enduring night after night of bombing in the Second World War. I could endure this.

I envisioned all the negative things in my life, whether it was my marriage breakup or my financial problems, as a kind of swamp I had been dropped into. The only way to get out of a situation like that is to keep walking forward until you get to the edge, find some solid ground, and then, once your feet are dry, order a shitload of chicken wings and beer.

I struggled, but I kept on moving forward. “Forward only! Forward only!” was my mantra. “Life is a one-way street.”

After a few months, things were finally getting a little better in my personal life and I was starting to feel good about myself again. I even briefly dated a beautiful television personality I had met at a charity event. She found me charming, cute, and funny, but ultimately sad inside. She became a good friend and convinced me that I wasn’t ready to see anyone romantically just yet. She was very supportive and let me know that a lot of wonderful things awaited me in life. Sadly, that didn’t include a romantic relationship with her.

While still dealing with the divorce elements and subsequent financial burden, I had moved into a two-bedroom apartment back in the east end of Toronto so I could be closer to the boys and they could have their own room when they stayed overnight. It was much too expensive for me but it forced me to work harder at getting back on my feet.

To trim some expenses to help with my ability to pay my rent, I got rid of the expensive car and bought a cheap, beat-up Volvo. A firefighter from the Yorkville Fire Hall knew I needed an extra job and offered some of his work as a bottled water delivery driver. The commercial auditions and the prospect of a television windfall had dried up and I readily accepted. It wasn’t going to be easy on my body as I was training hard for the upcoming Canadian Bodybuilding Championships and I still had to fit in gym time if I had any chance of getting in competition condition. There would be limited down-time between fire hall tours of duty.

On my days off from the fire hall, and when I was in delivery driver mode, I would leave my apartment at six in the morning, drive to the far west end of the city, pick up the delivery truck, drive back into the core of the city for a full day’s hard work slugging fifty-pound bottles, drive back out to the west end in rush hour traffic, drop off the truck, jump in my Volvo, drive back across the city through rush hour traffic to my apartment, walking in the door around half past seven in the evening. It paid $150 per day.

When I worked the night shift at 314 I would leave the fire hall at seven in the morning, after doing fifteen, twenty, or more calls during the night, drive out to the far west end of the city again, pick up the truck, and drive back into the same neighbourhood I was running all night in the fire truck, to deliver water. At around two-thirty in the afternoon, I would finish delivering water and hightail it back to water plant to drop off the truck, pick up the Volvo, and scoot back into the city core before I was late for my night shift. When I got back to the fire hall after a sleepless night running calls and a fire or two and then a full day slugging water bottles, I was totally exhausted to the point of feeling ill.

After another busy night shift, I was driving the water truck on August 2, 2005, when an Air France Airbus A340, during a torrential rainstorm, ran off the end of a runway at Toronto Pearson International Airport and crashed into the Etobicoke Creek. All the traffic around the airport came to a standstill with responding emergency vehicles and rubber-necked drivers drawn to the crash. After another exhausting day of delivering water and trying to return the truck to the plant I got stuck in the gridlock. It was going to take me a long time to get back to the core of the city for my night shift. Normally, I would be able to make it back to the fire hall by four in the afternoon, but this time I didn’t make it back until half past six. The captain I was relieving at the time was not impressed.

The only upside to the exhaustive physical regimen my dire financial situation dictated was that the sheer volume of physical work and lack of sleep burned off any bit of body fat I had on my body. In late August of 2005, at the age of 42, I attained the best physical conditioning in my life and finally won Natural Mr. Canada after eight years of unsuccessful attempts. It seems every hardship has an upside.

After a year and a half of slugging water, my financial footing was secure enough that I could cut back on the water delivery work. I was making ends meet and finished dealing with the dispersal of assets and paying off my lawyer fees. I could recharge my physical and mental batteries.

BACK AT WORK THAT WINTER day, we answered an alarm call in a high-rise. Russ Vernon, a funny guy who twirled his hair a lot, was my crewmate. People were cluttering the lobby. We both took notice of the crowd that met us — not a good sign, for that building anyway. Normally, because alarm calls were so common here, the tenants rarely assembled in the lobby. The fact that the tenants felt they needed to evacute their apartments alerted us to an emergency situation. Someone had pulled the alarm on the seventh floor, and the tenants told us there was smoke in the stairwells on the way down.

We made it to the seventh floor. Billy, my captain, Russ, and I made our way down the smoky hallway. A soot-smudged man was standing outside the doorway of a smoking apartment. He was so skinny he looked like a burnt matchstick wearing jockey shorts. He was also swaying back and forth, and since there wasn’t a noticeable breeze in the seventh-floor hallway, we figured something was wrong.

We had dealt with this dude before. When he was drunk, he would call 911 about his asthma. There was never anything wrong with him; he just liked attention. With a pronounced slur, he filled us in on the situation. “There’sh someone inside.”

The smoke was thick and black. It didn’t bode well for his buddy. “Where?” I asked him.

“On the couch. I couldn’t wake him up.” Holy shit.

We masked up and crawled into the black smoke, Russ and I making our way by feel. There was zero visibility, but we found the couch and the man lying on it. Russ and I tried to pull him off onto the floor, but he was a very portly man. He rolled out of our grasp like a huge chunk of pizza dough, but we each managed to grab onto an arm and dragged him out into the hallway.

A second crew arrived, set up a hose line, and entered the apartment to attack the fire. In the light we could see that we were dragging an obese man of about sixty. We laid him on the floor of the hallway, grabbed a cylinder left by the second crew, and administered oxygen to the fat man.

The fire captain from the hose line crew came out of the apartment, took off his mask, and told Billy that the fire was knocked down. The kitchen was toast and smoke was venting nicely out the balcony door. Good, Billy nodded.

The skinny fire victim stood wobbly-legged over the fat man as we gave the guy oxygen. Captain Billy asked Matchstick if he’d been drinking. “Yeah,” he said, then slumped over and slid down the wall into a sitting position, leaving a sooty smudge.

We told the guy he should go to the hospital, as he’d taken a lot of smoke. With the conviction of a pope, he asked, “Is one of us going to make it?”

Russ and I looked at each other. “Nope,” Russ said. Matchstick closed one eye, trying to focus. “You both are.”

The fat guy on the ground opened his eyes, then closed one and tried to focus as well.

Captain Billy asked Matchstick what had happened.

“I picked up my date at the bar,” he said. What? On previous 911 visits he’d showed us pictures of his husband, a good-looking man. “I know how to pick ’em,” he’d said.

We looked at the drunken slob on the floor mumbling to Russ. I guess Mr. Matchstick’s husband was out of town. Billy asked Matchstick how the fire started, and he told us in his very drunken manner that he had been cooking bacon and eggs, minus the eggs. Blah, blah, blah.

A housefly was riding up and down on the victim’s lip as he mumbled through his story. It was mesmerizing. As I watched in amazement, his voice faded out. The only sound I heard was in my mind: the pounding of the fly’s little feet as it trotted across the top of the man’s lip, riding it like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

Russ and I couldn’t contain ourselves. We started to giggle uncontrollably as the fly hung on for dear life. The man kept yammering, totally oblivious.

Billy told us to shut up and let buddy know that he couldn’t stay in his apartment. The kitchen was gutted and there was heavy smoke damage in the rest of the place.

Focusing avec one eye closed, Matchstick said, “I’m going back to the bar, then. Get me my pants.” He struggled to his feet and stepped over to the fat man. “Larry, come on. Let’s go back to the bar.”

The fat man mumbled and took off the oxygen mask. The two, arm in arm and wearing only underwear and socks, walked towards the elevator looking like Laurel and Hardy after rolling in a coal bin.