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Firefighter Fellini or Hitchcock Hose Jockey?

I NEEDED A DIVERSION FROM the loneliness and guilt I was feeling because of the impending divorce. That Christmas season there was one day at work when the entire crew was washing hose from a fire the night before and singing Christmas carols in our joyous, off-key way. It occurred to me that every celebrity down to the D level had made a Christmas album of the same old tunes (a couple of my favourites are by William Shatner and Ed McMahon). What’s to stop a bunch of untalented firefighters from making a Christmas album just as mediocre as the ones by those guys? Marketed right, we could be the next Four Tenors, or rather the Fourteen Hose Boys. This could be our get-rich-quick scheme.

“Just make a video of fire trucks. Kids will eat that shit up,” said Wayne Patterson, one of the guys washing hose. Around that time, some guy in the States had made a video of a bunch of tractors pushing dirt and stuff, and he was making a shitload of cash.

We could do that. Wayne and his buddy Steve Stephen both had great business sense, and I could be the host. I am an actor of sorts, but that means nothing in the fast-paced world of children’s video production. I had acted in a lot of TV commercials, but I never got to say anything. Commercial producers didn’t like my voice. They said I sounded like a movie star, but unfortunately that movie star was Demi Moore. I had even auditioned for my own voice for a Tylenol commercial in which I was the hero, and I still didn’t get it. But I was my own producer now, and damn it, I was going to hire myself and use my own voice.

We saddled up the palomino and drove south on a road trip to fire stations across North America. We knew what we were doing, or at least we had an idea. We were simply going to film Rat (that’s me) visiting different stations and looking at different fire trucks and trading patches and stuff with other firefighters.

We started on Boxing Day. Off we went for ten days and 5,000 kilometres — and I drove every inch of it. I had to; if I sit in the passenger seat I get carsick, and it was my beat-up Volvo anyway.

The plan was that Steve and I would videotape stuff on the way down south and hook up with Wayne in Florida. We’d pick him up from his dad’s retirement condo and then drive back north, filming the whole way. This planning is called pre-production: the preparation before actual filming of a movie (or, in this case, a kid’s entertainment video).

First stop: Buffalo, New York. Steve and I set off from Toronto and got lost in Hamilton, which is about an hour from Toronto. And then, because I didn’t know where I was going, we missed the state of New York completely.

Take two. First stop: Detroit, Michigan. Since I still had no idea where I was going, I found out that Detroit is the only city where Canada can be seen by looking south (check it out on a map). Also, during the War of 1812 the city was captured by Canadians in the siege of Detroit before being recaptured by Uncle Sam in 1813. Anyway, Steve had been to Detroit once to see a hockey game at the Joe Louis Arena and remembered that there was a beautiful old fire station next to the stadium. So, throwing away the playbook/route plan that charted our journey through the US from Buffalo, we set sail for the Joe Louis Arena.

Sure enough, there was indeed a beautiful fire hall next to the stadium, built, I’m guessing, in the late 1800s or around the turn of the past century. The stonework above the doors was carved into gargoyles and scenes of firefighters rescuing children. Clearly this was the headquarters of the Detroit Fire Department. The place had about seven bays for fire apparatus that had likely housed horse-drawn hose wagons and steamers when it was built.

Steve and I walked into the beautiful building. Inside we saw one sad-looking fire truck. Sheets of peeling paint hung from the ceiling. Where were the dozens of guys and hook-and-ladders and stuff that a kid from north (technically south) of the river would get a kick out of seeing? I guess I missed the memo about Detroit going through a major downturn with that whole economic crisis thing. We were told to check out another fire hall not too far away.

Coming from a culturally diverse city like Toronto, I found it quite sad that the fire halls in Detroit, according to the firefighter I talked to, were segregated into black and white. The black guys worked in the core and the white guys worked in the suburbs. The white guys in the suburbs got the new trucks and the black guys in the core got the junkers. The “trickle down” didn’t trickle down to those guys. Politics was rearing its ugly head once again.

After a couple of video shoots of trucks and fire stations, we were off on another assignment: finding a bar. Being brothers, firefighters transcend all cultural and ethnic boundaries, and these guys were no exception. They were awesome. “You white boys are all right, but I wouldn’t send you to any bar around here,” one of them said. “Better go to Greektown.” Off to Greektown we went, to drink with the other whiteys.

Next on our improvised tour, we hit Philadelphia, home of the modern fire department. It was there that the kite-flying Ben Franklin formed the first organized fire brigade (I’m guessing soon after his kite burst into flames after the lightning bolt hit it). A dispatcher from Philly Fire took us around to the different fire halls, and we even caught a little fire in a vacant lot (it was a bunch of Christmas trees). At one point we convinced a couple of kids that we were a news crew from Channel 2. They said hi on camera to their friends and parents. Is there a Channel 2 in Philly?

Back on the road we went, doing the whole guerrilla filming thing for a couple of days as we made our way south. But we were getting burned out before we had really got going on the production. The routine of the road went like this: I would drive all day, we would visit a fire station or two and videotape it, and then I would drive until one or two in the morning. I would sleep as Steve logged the footage we had shot during the day. Then the next day he slept in the car until our next city’s video shoot.

WE VISITED ATLANTA, IN THE lovely state of Georgia. That city has a history of good fires, such as when General Sherman burned the shit out of the place during the Civil War. We had a meeting set up with the fire chief — awesome. Using our gas-station road map, we found out (after several wrong turns) that every street in Atlanta is called Peach–something or other, and they’re all one-ways. We could even see the building we wanted to go to, but we couldn’t figure out how to get there through all those damn one-way streets!

Finally we got to Atlanta City Hall. Ironically, the building stood on the site of the home of Bill Sherman, the man who had burned the shit out of the city on his “March to the Sea” in 1864. We parked the car and ran to the front door, only twenty minutes late for our meeting. Gasping for air, we told the security guard at the door that we had a meeting with the fire chief.

“He doesn’t work here,” said Mr. Security. What? We told him that Steve had arranged a meeting with the chief at city hall.

“His office is in City Hall East,” said the guard. How stupid of us to assume that Atlanta had only one city hall.

An hour later we found Atlanta City Hall II. The chief turned out to be a super guy, and he told us his aide would drive us around for the day. We caught a fire and we talked to a lot of really great firefighters. At the end of that successful day, we took our guide out for beers.

The chief’s aide told us which side of the street to walk on. “You’re okay on this side,” he said. “The bums will bug you over on that side.” Shouldn’t there have been a sign for tourists?

As we were walking along on the wrong side of the street, a street person asked me (or rather told me), “Be a man. Give me some money.” We have panhandlers in Toronto, but I have to give this guy credit for having his own style. He kept following Steve and me. At one point he actually jumped on my back and wrapped his arms around my neck. I felt panicked, but being a muscular kind of guy, I instinctively flung him off me, effectively launching him against a post. Half dazed, the guy still wouldn’t let up: “Be a man. Give me some money.” So, being a kind Canadian, I tossed him a one dollar coin, a loonie. He picked it up. “What the hell is this?” The guy had style; yes, he did.

We picked up Wayne at his dad’s place in Clearwater, Florida, to video a few places in the state before heading back up north to Canada. We were in the part of the state where the locals are featured in reality shows about swamps and gators and such when the radiator on the old Volvo gave up the ghost. We pulled into a 7-Eleven to get some water to fill up the rad and check a phone book for a rad shop nearby. I was tired and hot. I just wanted to be magically beamed back to my bed in Toronto to sleep for a week straight. Wayne wrote down the address of the rad shop and with the aid of a local map purchased at the 7-Eleven drove off to get my junker repaired.

The neighbourhood where the rad shop was located was a scene straight out of the movie Deliverance. Dilapidated cars and boarded-up shacks. The only thing missing was the scary looking kid playing a banjo. We spotted the rad shop by the radiators hanging like Christmas decorations from a large tree. Inside the shop the floor was flooded with radiator fluid. A young boy, with bare feet and in overalls (one brace obligatorily unhooked), came sloshing out to meet us. “Dad’ll be out in a minute,” said the boy. Dad came out and, just like in Deliverance, “sure had a purdy mouth” in need of a dentist. He looked at my Volvo and then at us three exhausted Canadians standing at his mercy. “Foreign car. That’ll be thr … four hundred dollars.” Sold. Just get us the hell out of this backwater hole. After the rad was fixed we shot a few things here and there and then went on to Jacksonville for the day.

As we were driving through the city, a fire truck whizzed by. Steve popped his head through the sunroof of the Volvo and I hit the gas in pursuit of the fire truck and hopefully great video action. We caught up to the truck and stuck to its tail, ignoring red traffic lights and getting more than one astonished look from Jacksonvillians.

The fire was in a dry cleaner’s just up the street from a nearby fire station. We parked our car at the fire hall and walked up to film the fire action. A group of guys started yammering at us as we walked past their house. I thought we would have another confrontation like the one on our St. Croix adventure. But, from across the street, an older woman standing on her porch yelled at our tormentors with her booming voice, “Leave those boys alone!” They left us alone all right. We waved to the woman to thank her. At the dry cleaner’s we grabbed some great video of the fire which made it into Fire Trucks and Firefighters and Volume One of Lots ’n’ Lots of Fire Trucks.

At four in the afternoon we finished our day’s shooting. Wayne turned to me. “You have four hundred miles to drive before you can turn the car off.” Fine. We’ll grab some food for the road. McDonald’s had a special offer going: two triple burgers for two bucks. So naturally we each ordered four, for a total of twelve slabs of greasy meat. Yum! You could hang wallpaper on our faces with the grease seeping through our pores. Steve and I had been eating burgers for a week, and felt like I was now experiencing the early symptoms of scurvy or some other malady ancient mariners suffered. The only vegetables we had eaten for seven days were mustard and ketchup.

By the time we reached Washington, DC, we were tired of bunking in fleabags. We splurged on the kind of hotel that people with jobs stayed at. By this time our bodies had gone into complete rebellion mode from all the crap we had been eating. The three of us met for dinner in the restaurant: green salad, consommé, and sparkling water.

Back in Toronto, we dumped fourteen hours of raw footage on the editor’s desk and went to bed.

The road trip had given me a much-needed break from dwelling on my screwed-up life. But now that I was back in Toronto, I was confronted with reality. I had to keep that video diversion going, at least until I had got my wits about me again.