Report from Engine Co. 82 (20 page)

Tina deVega is eighteen years old. She was bom in Puerto Rico, and came to this country with her mother and three sisters
and four brothers when she was a child of six. Tina doesn’t know much about the South Bronx. She doesn’t know that the detective
squad working around the corner in the Simpson Street Station House investigates more homicides each month than any other
squad in the city. She doesn’t know that the men in the firehouse three blocks away—my firehouse—respond to more false alarms,
and fight more fires than anywhere else. She doesn’t know that the V.D. rate, and the infant mortality rate, is three times
greater than that of any other section of the city. What Tina knows is that she is a five dollar trick, and lately she’s been
forced to go for four. Times are tough, and even the whores on Southern Boulevard feel the inflation bite. The Boulevard is
busy with girls, but there aren’t enough slow-cruising Ford sedans and Chevrolet station wagons to go around. Even the tired
forty-year-olds are back, walking the Boulevard in matted sweaters and sagging nylons.

Tina rises at eleven each morning. Each day is like the one before, and she searches out her man, and hits him for a taste.
The heroin is stabilizing, always, and her appetite builds. She then goes to Amillio’s Bodega for a breakfast of Pepsi-Cola
and Drake’s Doodle-dogs, and back to her apartment where she watches the afternoon soap operas, and nods.

The apartment Tina lives in is in a building next to the abandoned building where the garbage is piled high in the vestibule,
the one we have just come from. I was sitting on the fender of a derelict car, waiting for the order to take up, when I saw
her walking slowly towards me. It had been years since I last saw her, but her face is unmistakable. Unmarred dark skin, and
the delicate bones of a European aristocrat. Thin lips, graceful narrow nose, knowing eyes. But her eyes don’t sparkle as
they used to; drugs make the lids droop. They used to radiate happiness, or at least pleasantness, but that is all lost. She
is wearing a short white nylon skirt that clings to her thighs, and a thin red polo shirt that fits snugly around her breasts.
In another time, another place, people would say she was developing into a smart, chic young woman. Her feet are bare and
sandaled, and her calf muscles are strong and appealing. The only unbeautiful things about her are her eyes, and her pin-scarred
arms.

“Denise, Denise,” she calls, her accent making my name sound like its female equivalent. “How are you?” Her voice is dull
and drawled, but genuinely happy. “Man, eets good to see you.” She brushed her long black hair away from her face, and put
her hand on my arm, with such simple, easy grace that a Vassar graduate would find the gesture in a style to be duplicated.
How ironic that a five dollar trick from Fox Street would have the soft, natural class to make a Vassar girl envious.

We didn’t talk long, but she held her hand on my arm all the while she spoke. She told me she shared her apartment with two
other girls, and four kids. One of the girls is on welfare, and the four kids are hers. Tina wants to go on welfare, but she
just hasn’t gotten around to applying. Anyway, she really doesn’t need the money, because her man gives her enough of her
earnings to make her happy. The apartment she shares has two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There hasn’t
been any hot water since Tina has been living there, which has been five months, and a pot of water is always simmering on
the stove. I asked her if there were many roaches, and she said, “Sure. And the mouses too.” She told me too that she has
tried to kick the drugs, but it didn’t work. Maybe someday. And she talked of shooting up with a pathetic resignation that
convinced me that she knew as well as I that the dope would kill her someday.

Benny and the others returned to the street, pulling the wet hose behind them. Tina took her hand from my arm and offered
it to me to shake. I held it, as she said, “Well, good-bye Denise. I see you. O.K.?” I answered a positive, “O.K.,” and Tina
walked slowly away, nodding slightly. I called to her, but she didn’t hear me, at least she didn’t acknowledge that she heard.
I called, “Take care of yourself, Tina.”

And now as I lie here in the cool comfortable secure regimented confines of the firehouse bunkroom I think of how stupid that
must have sounded to her. “Take care of yourself.” But that’s what she is doing. Tina is taking care of herself. She is surviving
in the best way she knows.

When I first met her four years ago she was a shy, sensitive fourteen-year-old high school freshman. She lived on Home Street
then, with her family. Her little brother liked fire engines, and one day she brought him into the firehouse. I was on house-watch
duty, and I spoke kindly to her. I asked what school she attended, and if she liked her studies. I played with her brother
Fillipo. After that, she and her brother came the short block from their apartment to the firehouse regularly. She would ask
for “Denise,” and the guys would rub me about being the idol of the under-sixteen set. And soon she told me that she hated
living at home with all her brothers and sisters, and she hated school, because she couldn’t read very well, and she wanted
a job so she could buy pretty clothes, but she wasn’t old enough to quit school yet. She had the same problems as millions
of other adolescents in America. She was growing up, and trying to become a person instead of another mouth to feed, or another
body on the living room pull-out couch, or another English-as-a-second-language voice in an English-as-a-first-language school.
After two or three months—I can’t remember exactly—Tina stopped coming to the firehouse. I had forgotten her completely until
she walked up Fox Street this morning. And I can’t help but think of all the other people who must have forgotten her somewhere
along the road—the short road of three blocks from Home Street then to Fox Street now. I wonder if a school counselor ever
talked to her, or a teacher? I remember that her mother was on welfare, and wonder if some social services official knows
she exists, or existed. Wasn’t there even one person with some sense who talked to this shy, sensitive young girl? Someone
to tell her that there are ways to unravel the emotional entanglements that human beings experience as they grow. Wasn’t there
someone who knew at least something about guidance, direction, goals, self-motivation, self-esteem? But, maybe that’s not
it at all. Maybe it has nothing to do with counseling or direction. Maybe it has to do, simply, with living in a tenement.
How can you talk to a child of self-esteem when she is forced to wear her older sister’s outgrown clothes? How do you talk
of self-motivation to a child who has never known the privacy of a room, or the quiet of a home? How do you talk of goals
to a child who has never experienced a ten dollar pair of shoes, or to a child whose only trip in life has been from Puerto
Rico to America?

I was fifteen when I unofficially quit high school. I just didn’t go. My mother was asked to bring me to the school guidance
father. The priest told her, and me, that he got where he was by studying hard, and that I should do the same. I told him
that I didn’t much care for being where he was, and I didn’t care either about being a failure in life, for that’s what he
told me I would be if I refused to knuckle down. I tried to make him, and my mother, understand that it wasn’t that I was
tired of being slapped by the Irish Christian Brothers, and that I didn’t mind being locked into a building for six hours
a day, or about the reams of homework I was assigned daily, but that I had the prospect of this great job delivering flowers.
I was going to be paid fifty dollars a week. Fifty a week. I could do whatever I wanted on fifty a week. But they didn’t understand,
and my mother cried, and the priest told me that I was an insult to a good Catholic mother.

I was fifteen, and my pockets were empty. The country was enjoying the prosperity of the fifties, but I was still wearing
six dollar shoes. With forty-two dollars take-home a week I could buy a pair of London Character wing tips. But nobody understood
that I was wasting time in school. Time was fleeting irretrievably by in a classroom, when I could be earning money to save
for a new one-button powder blue suit. Man, would I make a hit at the Police Athletic League dances with a powder blue suit,
a pink shirt backgrounding a black knitted tie, and London Character wing tips. And shekels in my pocket to take a girl for
a pizza after the dance.

I got the job in a Second Avenue florist shop, and I told the people I wanted to impress that I was studying to be a botanist.
I walked the streets of Sutton Place, in and out of buildings that housed the richest people in the country, like I belonged
there. It was only a matter of time before I would stand camel-haired in the lobby waiting for the starch-collared doorman
to hail me a cab. And I would forget the dim, concrete floored, brown-bricked corridors of the service entrance.

The forty-two dollars didn’t go very far. I gave my mother ten a week towards the rent, food, and laundry, and I bought my
own clothes, and stopped meeting girls in the movies and started to pay their way. I ate lunch at Riker’s every day, and since
I started smoking I had to buy cigarettes. And since the guys in the gang I hung around with were either still in school,
or out of school and not working, I had to pay the freight for a lot of Friday night Cokes and French fries. As I think of
it now, I’m sure I would have stayed in school if someone would have offered me twenty a week to be there. At least in school
we had Saturdays off, but the florist was a six-day operation.

Like Tina deVega I searched for, and found, my own way of survival. After a time I became unhappy in my job, but it is always
better to have money in the pocket when unhappy, than to be unhappy and broke. I kept on working. I rang the back doorbells
of the “earth shakers,” and delivered the orchid centerpieces, and the maid would thank me as she pocketed the fifteen cents
tip that she would tell the boss she gave me. And on Saturday nights we drank beer down by the river, and watched the blinking
Pepsi-Cola sign on the Queens side, and got drunk. We made out with girls in sleeveless blouses and long, crinolined, felt
skirts, playing “trust me.” A nervous hand on a felt-covered knee, and an anxious voice saying “trust me,” and after an apprehensive
nod the hand moves to the thigh, and with each nod another inch up and around the leg until the mysterious excitement of holding
a female’s buttock is realized. And satisfied with that we got drunker, until our bodies rejected the strange dizzying liquid.
And we vomited, and the girls ran home, and we staggered through the streets abusing anyone we thought cowardly enough not
to reply. And all the while we forgot about the stifling crowded tenement rooms, nagging mothers, and drunk or gambling or
cheating fathers.

Someone on the apparatus floor is hammering the fire bell on the Chiefs car, the signal that lunch is ready. I ditch the cigarette
in a sand bucket, and slide the pole to the street level. Cagey Dulland has cooked roast beef, and the kitchen walls steam
with the heat. The air-conditioning unit we bought for the kitchen was second-hand, and didn’t last long. The comfortable
coolness I was feeling a minute ago is gone, and I can feel the perspiration beads building on my forehead.

Thin strips of roast beef lie across warm toast, covered with a hot brown gravy. The heat of the gravy steams over my face
as I lean over the lunch, but I am hungry, and I don’t let it bother me. Willy Knipps is complaining to Cagey that he should
have had better sense than to cook a hot meal on a day like this.

“And for eighty-five cents,” he says, “for chrissakes, I could eat roast beef in the Stork Club for that price.” But Cagey
just utters a few words about inflation, and lets it go at that. He knows that the guys are grateful that he took the time
to cook for us, and the wisecracks are as natural as the rising sun.

I am sponging the gravy from the plate with a piece of white bread when the bells interrupt. At least we got to finish our
lunch. “Southern Boulevard and Fox Street,” the house-watchman is yelling.

Box 2787. We were just there. “I bet it’s that abandoned building again,” Benny Carroll says.

“Well, of course, what else?” rejoins Willy Knipps as he puts the three-pound helmet on his head.

“Listen Willy,” Benny says, with a sly smile on his face, “since you had the nob at that job this morning, 111 take it if
we have a job now, O.K.? I mean you must be pretty tired and alL”

“That’s no on two counts,” Willy replies. “I’m not tired, and I won’t give ya the nob.”

“Say no more,” Benny says, pretending indifference.

The clock on the firehouse wall reads 12:45 as tne pumper screams out of quarters. Ladder 31 echoes close behind. We can see
the dark, dancing clouds of smoke as we roll up Tiffany Street. “What did I tell ya?” Benny says, pulling his boots to his
thighs. I swing my rubber coat on, and I realize that it is going to be hot. The coat insulates the skin pores from the air,
and I can feel my shirt already sticking to my chest. As I look over the side of the rig to get a view of the fire, I can
see Bill Kelsey strapping the thirty-pound air pack to his back. The smoke is high and wide in the sky, and that tells me
that the job is going to be a tough one.

The people of Fox Street have left the midday heat of their apartments, and have gathered in the middle of the street to watch
the fire. Billy Valenzio is driving the pumper today, and he is hitting the air horn wildly as he tries to drive through the
crowd. The mood is like a Mardi Gras. The people cheer and shout as they cross to either side of the street to make room for
the pumper.

Why can’t the city tear these buildings down fast enough, I wonder, as we approach the same abandoned building we had earlier.
Whoever set the place up this time didn’t feel like climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, because the fire is jumping out
of all the windows on the second. The pumper stops in front of the building, and Lieutenant Welch yells to stretch the inch-and-a-half
line as he runs into the building. Bill Kelsey jumps from the side with a face mask in his hand, and Vinny Royce comes from
the other side to help with the stretch. Knipps has the nozzle in his hand, and is crossing over the garbage heap in the vestibule
as the men of Engine 94 reach the back of our rig and start to stretch a second line. Chuck Radek, Billy-o, and the others
from Ladder 31 have entered the building to ventilate, as Cagey Dulland goes into the adjoining building to cross the roof.
As Valenzio moves the pumper to a hydrant, I can see Ladder 48 careening up the street. They’ll search the floors above the
fire.