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Locals That Gave the Place Flavour

WHEN I FIRST GOT ON the job, the fire hall doors were never locked — the chief felt it was a public building and should be accessible at all hours of the day. Unfortunately, it was also accessible when the crews were out at a call. It came as no surprise that the tv would go missing on a regular basis, as well any shoes that had been left on the apparatus floor when we went out on a run. That’s why the guys at Seven wore the stinkiest beat-up running shoes they could find. At least those would still be there when we got back from picking up another drunk or chasing another false alarm.

Even though my personal life was a mess, I still enjoyed my life at the fire hall. Part of the fun working in Regent Park was the local cast of characters. Here are my favourites:

Frenchie

Frenchie was an interesting character. He would walk by the hall, stick his head in the window, and yell, “Shut your bubble!” for no reason. That’s all he ever said. He never talked to anyone or stopped in to say hello. Just “Shut your bubble!” Nobody knows why.

Bagel Ruth

At change of shift on warm nights, the guys would have coffee in the parking lot and wait for Nick the Ice-Cream Man. One night a street guy walked by with a monstrous plastic bag jammed full of bagels — a couple hundred for sure.

I, being the smartass that I am, yelled out to ask if he had any lox to go with that bale o’ bagels. The guy dropped the bag, reached inside, and started whipping bagels at me. I was like Ken Dryden trying to stop a barrage of pucks blasted my way by the Soviets. I was laughing so hard I spilled coffee all over my legs. After he’d pelted us with thirty or forty bagels, he just walked off, never to be seen again.

The bagels were gone by next morning, and I had to spend about an hour hosing seagull shit off the cars.

Trish the Dish

Trish the Dish was a firefighter groupie who had been making the rounds for a couple of decades. I only met her once. She was sitting in the floor-watch room when I arrived for work one afternoon. The guys were all jammed into the kitchen because nobody wanted to talk to her. She seemed nice to me.

Trish died a few years ago. Her obituary was pinned in a prominent position on the station bulletin board and someone added the handwritten words Trish the Dish is dead. The flags were lowered.

Brian the Artist

Brian was a First Nations artist whose paintings hung in galleries around the world. He had a ton of talent, but loved the bottle a bit too much. He would sell the guys art at cut-rate prices when he was sober, asking for cash so he could get torqued. There were a couple of legitimate art collectors in the hall; Brian would sketch something on a piece of paper and sell it to one of the guys for ten bucks. He tried selling me a chalk sketch he put on our blackboard, but one of the guys told me I was getting ripped off.

Because our doors were always unlocked, Brian once stumbled in when the truck was out on a call, pissed on our couch, and tried phoning for pizza on the department phone: a direct line to dispatch.

Gail the Hooker

Back in the day, prostitutes used to have to check in at the police station next door to the fire hall, so we got to know a lot of familiar faces. It was always a good time. A sex worker advocate once came to talk to us about supporting the prostitutes working the streets. She gave out stickers that I put on my guitar case — the one with the bear teeth marks in it — that said “Support sex workers” and “A hooker’s a person in your neighbourhood.”

A regular, Gail, always said hi to us. One day she came into the hall to grab a couple of the latex gloves we used for medical calls, saying that she had run out of condoms.

Lance Armstrong Wannabe

There’s a sign on the back of every fire truck: stay back 150 metres (in the States it says to stay back 200 feet). There’s a reason those things are affixed to the backs of fire trucks. During an emergency run, the drivers of these fifty-ton trucks have to weave back and forth through traffic dodging a-holes who don’t pull over, all the while keeping a lookout for the address they’re responding to and trying to spot a fire hydrant behind illegally parked cars so they can have water to put out the friggin’ fire they’re about to arrive at.

Our Lance Armstrong wannabe decided to race his bicycle behind our pumper as it was responding to an alarm call. He was decked out like a Tour de France force of one: tight jersey, spacey helmet, skimpy riding shorts — the whole shebang. This guy was really motoring. We were breaking traffic for Lance and he was drafting behind our truck like a Formula One racer. His head was tucked down and he was cranking those pedals at lightning speed when we reached our emergency — and stopped. He didn’t. BAM!!! Lance ate the back of our fire truck.

Lance was actually a yuppie lawyer only playing at being a cycle star. He sued the fire department for damaging his bicycle.

Johnny the Walker

J.W. was a man who stole hand sanitizer from hospitals to get drunk. Fortunately for him, the SARS outbreak in Toronto meant that all public buildings had to install hand sanitizer dispensers at their doors to combat the spread of the virus. While sars is long gone, the dispensers remained, even before they became far more common during the COVID-19 crisis. J.W. would just walk through the front door, break open the dispenser, and walk off with the bag of sanitizer goo, which he’d suck on like a freezie treat. It goes without saying that this messed him up good. He would end up in the hospital almost daily. A paramedic we worked with said he was admitted more than two hundred times in less than a year.

At the rate he was drinking the stuff, we didn’t think he was long for this world.

One night our crews answered a call for a pedestrian hit by a delivery truck, and found J.W. folded up under the vehicle. He was taken to hospital. Two weeks later, the paramedics that we ran with said he was still alive. His back was broken, but he was alive.

Months later we heard through the grapevine that J.W. had gone MIA. He’d slipped out of the hospital with his walker and cervical collar. We got another call for Mr. Invincible a month later, sans walker and collar, but still stealing and drinking hand sanitizer.

After dealing with him for two years, I finally asked him why he drank that sanitizer gunk. He replied that his ex-wife had accused him of sexually assaulting his child and he couldn’t see him anymore. He was going to commit suicide by drinking himself to death.

Every tragedy has a story. Every whack job — and I’m including myself in that category — has a reason for their actions. It was easy to become inured to the street people we dealt with on a daily basis, but to stop myself from going crazy (or at least crazier), it was better to keep a safe distance and just tackle the symptoms.