23

A Reprieve from the Dark Side

BEFORE SITTING DOWN TO WRITE this book I was originally going to call my memoir Burned Balls and Other Good Times. My intention was to chronicle a series of funny anecdotes to hand out to my friends and family. But once I started writing, I discovered my life as a firefighter entailed a very dark side. Revisiting my journey into depression was a painful process but within that depressive period there was light in my life. Even though my relationship with Linda was deteriorating, my boys were a source of happiness and compassion. And life at the fire hall was going well. Our crew at Seven bonded and were truly brothers in arms. We looked out for each other. We were family. My time among my brethren gave me a reprieve from my dysfunctional marriage and kept me from sinking deeper into depression. They were the sympathetic ear that I needed to vent my hurt and frustrations. And they brought good times to my life, or if the times weren’t good, they produced some good stories.

Early one Sunday morning we were working away at the traditional fire hall breakfast of eggs, brown stuff (usually burnt potatoes), toast, and what we called “red lead.” Red lead was named after lead tetroxide, a red-pigmented anticorrosive added to primer paint used on ships during the Second World War — and it’s carcinogenic. Yum! Our version was harsh stewed tomatoes that you heaped onto your breakfast.

Just like clockwork, an alarm came in for a fire, with multiple calls received at dispatch. We headed out and, sure enough, as we turned the corner onto Sherbourne Street, we could see flames rolling out of a balcony door on the third floor of a high-rise.

We humped it up the stairs and found the fire apartment. I was the entry guy, meaning I had the sledgehammer and pry tool. I broke in the door and one of the guys on the pumper crew hit the flames with water. The place went dark — visibility nil. Sometimes it makes sense to let a fire free-burn for a couple of seconds so you can look around and get your bearings. In this case I didn’t have that luxury.

I tripped over and fell onto a pull-out couch that had been deployed. I checked for a sleeping victim — empty. The mattress was almost completely burned away. Almost. Its wire springs were exposed, perfect for entangling a young man’s fire boots, which is exactly what happened. My foot got caught up in the burning mattress, and the flames were burning between my legs.

Today firefighters wear what’s called a bunker suit. The suit is so named because it encapsulates your body and protects it from the heat, creating a “bunker” for your body that functions much like an oven mitt. Since this was a time before we got bunker suits, we still wore high rubber boots and a long canvas patch coat, which instead of acting like an oven mitt functioned more like a tea cozy, especially when draped over a burning mattress, keeping the ’nads toasty warm. The only upside to cooking your nuts is that the swelling makes them look quite impressive.

SUMMERTIME WAS GENERALLY PRETTY BUSY in Regent Park. School was out and the little jokesters were getting busy setting stuff on fire. Those darn kids! One hot summer night we were running our asses off, responding to several alarm calls in succession, when we got a call for another high-rise fire.

It was an apartment building of about twenty-four floors that had been built in the early sixties. All the buildings from that era look like they were designed by the Jetsons. This one was no exception. We went into the lobby and checked the annunciator panel, which indicates where the smoke alarm or pull station was activated. The thing was lit up like the phone lines of a radio station giving away free Justin Bieber tickets. All the lights were illuminated.

Tenants who had been evacuated to the lobby said they had seen smoke on several floors. Great. Up the stairs we trudged. Turns out those rascally kids had dowsed the inside of the elevator with gasoline and set it on fire. A laugh riot, those guys. The thing was, the elevator just kept moving, passing from floor to floor like a torch going up and down the elevator shaft. Normally when the fire alarm is pulled in a building the elevators are programmed to automatically return to the ground floor. I can only guess it didn’t do this because the fire inside the elevator had corrupted or destroyed the electronics that would do this. I thought to myself, this could be bad, very bad.

The radio kept chattering. “It’s on the fourth floor!” “It’s on the tenth now!” “It’s back down to five!” “It’s at seventeen!” All this time the crews were clambering up and down the stairs, hoping to catch it when it stopped.

When it did stop, my partner, Mark Compton, and I were in the right place at the right time. Mark grabbed the hose from the standpipe cabinet and I charged it for him. Flames were licking out of the elevator into the hallway, burning the wood-panelled walls and moving up across the ceiling. In a coordinated effort, I pried open the elevator doors so Mark could stick the nozzle in and knock down some of the flames. The elevator doors wouldn’t open completely, so I had to reef on the pry bar with constant pressure to keep them open for Mark. Flames were spitting out over our heads. Mark and I were both struggling, and the low-air warnings on our breathing apparatus were starting to clatter.

An apartment door next to the elevators opened and a well-dressed woman stuck out her head. We both craned our necks. What the hell was she still doing in the building?

“Excuse me,” she said through the smoke. “Is there a problem? Because I’ve got guests and I can’t leave.”

How do you respond to that? I guess it’s safe to assume her guests weren’t a group of Mensa members.

MAE WEST, HOLLYWOOD MOVIE STAR of the 1930s, once said, “A hard man is good to find.” To paraphrase a bit, I would say, “Ladies, a smart man is good to find,” or “A good man is smart to find.” But here was a guy who was neither smart nor a good find — our next contestant in the Regent Park Brilliance Competition, a guy I like to call Tarzan.

Tarzan, the King of the Jungle, swung from vines high above the ground to catch his prey — say, an unsuspecting jaguar — by surprise, impressing the shit out of Jane at the same time. Unlike the real Tarzan, it wasn’t his girlfriend our guy was trying to impress with his high-wire antics. Instead it was his drinking buddies.

Tarzan lived in the Broadview Hotel, which, like most Victorian hotels of the era, had suffered a major slide in prestige. The hotel had hit rock bottom as yet another rooming-house type of place, but in recent years it had undergone a major facelift and a resurgence in respectability when it became home to Jilly’s strip club.

As I was saying, Tarzan was drinking with his buddies — a major rooming-house pastime — and told them he had to go back to his room for something. Trying to impress said buddies, who were in the third-floor room next to his, Tarzan figured he could give his co-drunkards a scare and impress them at the same time with a display of his athleticism. He started fashioning a rope from his bedsheets, a skill no doubt learned from Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. (I’m pretty sure that in the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan wasn’t a boozer. And, come to think of it, I don’t recall the King of the Jungle ever using bedsheets to swing through the trees.)

There was Broadview Tarzan hanging out of his third-floor window with a belly full of beer and a head full of emptiness. With a mighty swing, he launched himself over to the open window of the party, yelling to startle his buddies, “This is a buuuuuust!” Thud!

For a couple of minutes the drinking didn’t even slow down. Then, just like in a Monty Python skit, one dude slurred, “Hey, did you just see that?”

A couple of minutes went by. Then, “Hey, where did Buddy go?”

Buddy had landed. He was lying crumpled up on the air-conditioning unit of the restaurant next door.

Even in the rescue squad’s Stokes basket, strapped down to a backboard, Tarzan still thought it had been a pretty cool idea.