sully's life

Chapter Sixteen

2005-09-18T20:03:00.000-04:00

Ah, God. Grace.

I should have known better.

I should have known better than to ever have walked through the door of her house. All the saints and angels couldn’t save me now. Maybe I can save myself, but I’m no saint and no angel, and I wonder if it’s even any use trying.

Not that it was a bad evening, or that anything particularly dramatic happened. Actually, if you had videotaped the whole thing, I don’t think anyone would be able to point out anything wrong or unusual. Certainly nobody would be able to say, “This -- this, then, is the point at which John Sullivan once again lost control of his life, his heart and the sense he was born with and placed it into the hands of a woman.”

It wasn’t obvious. It never is when it’s real. But the heart knows what the mind will not allow.

I got to Grace’s house around 7:30. The address she gave me turned out to be a nice little brick house in West Park, nothing fancy but a solid, pretty little post-WWII bungalow. Turning onto the street and approaching the house, I noticed immediately that there were rosebushes surrounding the porch -- mostly floribundas, but one climber on a trellis. I wondered if they had come with the house or if Grace had planted them herself. The floribundas were nothing special, but the climber was a Gloire de Dijon, I was pretty sure, even though it would be a few months before it broke dormancy. The canes had a familiar look to them, and it was the right growth habit. Gloire de Dijons will pull down a trellis and even a wooden porch if they aren‘t pruned carefully. From the look of it, someone had known what they were about with a pruning shears. I wondered if it had been Brad or Grace.

I hadn’t brought wine -- I just couldn’t see opening a bottle of wine with dinner all for myself. Grace doesn’t drink, Seanny isn’t supposed to and Kate is nine years old, so what would have been the sense in that? But I did have one arm around a big bag of groceries: some fresh French bread, a sack of apples, some fresh vegetables for a salad, a few bags of snacks for the kids. In my free hand I carried a 12-pack of Vernor’s ginger ale, to which Grace ad always been partial. I figured if she wasn’t drinking any more, it might be appreciated and…

My thoughts were interrupted by a four-legged Fury of brown fur, drool, tail and toenails flying a me from behind the shrubs at the side of the house, knocking me flat on my ass and sending apples rolling down the driveway from the spilled grocery sack. “AOOOOOF! AOOOF! UFF! AOOOFF!” roared The Thing.

The front door opened and an auburn-haired little girl ran out and down the steps after the dog. “Tick! TICK! STOPPIT! BAD dog! BAD, bad dog! STOPPIT!”

Tick stopped it, all right, long enough to grab the loaf of French bread and run like hell toward the back yard.

I pulled myself to my feet, attempting to retrieve the renegade apples and dust sidewalk salt off my navy blue trousers without looking too stupid. Much easier said than done.

“Hi,” I said, extending a hand. “You must be Kate. I’m John, an old friend of your mom’s.”

“She said your name was Sully.” She said this not with an air of inquiry but as if straightening me out on a matter regarding which I was obviously confused. She shook my hand firmly and quickly -- more like shaking on a bargain that a “how do you do“. “C’mon. I’ll get the rest of that. You ought to go in and sit down. Honestly, that damn dog -- sorry.”

I wasn’t sure if she was sorry for the language or the dog’s behavior, but she didn’t give me much time to consider it. “I’m Kate,” she said, grabbing up the Vernor’s, and proceeded to steer me by the elbow up the front steps and into the house.

As soon as the door opened, the rich aroma of roast beef made with garlic greeted my senses. There was something else, too -- cinnamon? A pie? I accepted Kate’s instruction to “Sit down right there on that couch, and I’ll get Her for ya.” I chuckled at the slender little figure retreating through the swinging doors of the dining room. The square shoulders, the brisk gait, the absolute no-nonsense attitude with which she seemed to regard her world -- whoever had told me she was like Grace had been wrong. Kate was Grace at that age.

I looked around the living room, which was furnished with very simple, sturdy furnishings in neutral tones -- Grace’s picks, I was sure. The décor was simple, earthy and welcoming -- a stoneware vase with some dried sunflowers, a low coffee table with a few picture books -- “Ireland: A Photographic Portrait”, with an introduction by the redoubtable J. P. Donleavy, a book of Ansel Adams’ work, and a photo album bound in unbleached muslin with a few sprigs of some dried herb tied on with ribbon.

I started to open the photo album when Grace came through the dining room doors, wiping her hands on a linen apron and looking flushed from the stove heat. Her haor was out of place in charming disarray, a wavy strand falling into her eyes.

“Well!” she said, grinning broadly. “Look what the dog dragged in! I hear you met Tick.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then it was a dog. I thought maybe you’d taken to raising wildebeests.”

“Sorry about the bread. That great idiot. I just fed him, too, to make sure he’d behave while you’re here. Ah, well,” she finished. “What’ll you have, John?”

“I brought some Vernor’s. I’m fine with that.”

“Sure you won’t have a beer? I bought a six pack of Anchor Steam in honor of your visit. Nobody here will drink it, so if you aren’t having one now I’ll send it home with you.”

“Oh, you didn’t have to do that. Um, sure, I guess; thanks…if it’s not going to bother you.”

“If it’s going to bother me, I’m in more trouble than can be fixed by your not having one,” she said a little cryptically. “I want you to enjoy yourself. It’s not much of a recovery if I’m not capable of showing hospitality, now is it?”

I had to allow as it wasn’t. Being tremendously fond of Anchor Steam, I concluded the only polite thing to do would be to drink it. Manners are so important.

Grace brought back a small tray bearing a cold bottle of the beer with a frosted mug, and a stemware glass filed with something effervescent, a neat curl of lime peel dangling from the rim. “Pellegrino water,” she said. “I’ve become a mineral water snob, I’m afraid, and this is the only stuff I like now.”

I admired this. I always thought of people who “couldn’t drink” as being relegated to consuming Hi-C from plastic tumblers. I found the sophistication endearing. Not sure if “brave” is the right word, and certainly not a word she’d want me to apply, but there was something heartwarming about it. Okay, another word Grace wouldn’t want me to apply.

As we sat and made small talk, sipping our drinks, I watched Grace’s face intently. Not so that she’d notice and be uncomfortable, but still, I wanted to take in every detail. It occurred to me that what I was doing was memorizing her in case this was the last time I saw her for a long time. “Taking pictures with the heart,” we used to call it, a hundred years ago when we were dating. A hundred years ago, they didn’t have digital cameras, I thought. This made me smile.

“Well, it’s nice to see you smile, anyway, John,” said Grace.

“Ya bring that out in me, Grace,” I said, broadening the smile to a grin.

But I remembered that I hadn’t come to talk of the weather, nor to flirt with Grace, and I asked her, “Grace, is Seanny around?”

“Oh, he’s around, up in his room, I imagine, unless he snuck out. He does that a lot. I tried to get him to promise that he would stick around tonight, at least for dinner, but I’m afraid if he knows that’s what I really want, he’ll do the opposite. It’s as bad as that.”

“Man.”

“Yep. The only reason he even agreed to stay tonight was that we’re having roast beef, which he loves, and apple pie. That and the fact I told him you were coming. He still remembers you. He adored you, remember?”

I did indeed. I remembered Seanny as a sturdy, active, outgoing little fellow with a huge cheery grin and a warm, friendly manner.

Which is why I was so ill-prepared for the person coming down the stairs, I guess.

Seanny had changed, all right. He had grown tall, muscular but lean, with finely planed features and rugged good looks. At least, what you could see of his face. He had hidden most of it under a maze of facial hair, cut in lines and patterns according to the current “raver” fad. We had a young guy at the firehouse who had done this. We called him “Crop Circles” until he shaved.

Seanny’s attire was a Hot Topic goth/raver/punk collection of skull wristbands and necklace, a black t-shirt bearing the jolly lowercase motto “you suck“ -- quite the icebreaker -- clown-wide black jeans with enough hardware to open a Home Depot fasteners counter, and bright red-orange tennis shoes with flames airbrushed onto them. For a tall kid with not much to him, the effect was unfortunately more comic than scary.

“Seanny,” Grace said. “You remember Sully, right?”

“Hi,” said Seanny flatly, looking bored.

I extended a hand. Seanny continued to stand there. It was awkward. Ugly awkward. As it was obviously intended to be.

“Right,” I said, and withdrew my hand, trying not to let my irritation show. Something told me it would have pleased him immensely to piss me off, despite his apparent flat affect.

“Seanny,” Grace said, an edge barely discernible in her voice, “why don’t you go wash up for dinner, okay?”

Seanny mumbled something and disappeared back up the stairs three at a time.

“You’d think he’d trip in those pants,” I commented.

“I wish he would,” muttered Grace. A pained expression clouded her features, and she pressed her lips together. We sat silently for a moment. At last she spoke again. “John, I didn’t say that,” she said. “I know I said it, but that wasn’t me. It’s been….rough.”

“I kinda gathered that,” I said. “He’s not exactly running for office around here, is he?”

“I don’t mind the sullen stuff, the brooding stuff, the rebellion. That’s natural. But Jesus, John, sometimes I think he hates me. Or maybe not just me. I think he hates everybody. Or maybe just himself….” she finished, musingly.

“Well, part of it’s the age. But I think maybe a part of it too is what’s happened. And maybe the problems with alcohol affected him. Uncle Eamonn drank a lot, and you say you had a problem, so who knows? Maybe it’s true, this stuff they say about it being hereditary. Is he drinking a lot?”

“Mostly I think it’s the drugs. But he’s drinking too. I think he just pretty much uses whatever he can get ahold of. And these friends of his are just…God, John, they’re just such assholes.”

For Grace, possibly one of the least judgmental people I know, to lump a whole group into the “asshole” category seemed at least as good an indicator of the severity of the situation as anything. (I was going to say “pigeonhole”, but then you have “pigeonhole” and “asshole” and the whole thing just doesn’t work…well, anyway.)

Kate burst into the living room and announced, “The potatoes are done. Ya better come on and eat, because they’re not gonna keep.”

We got up and headed toward the dining room, Grace calling briefly at the foot of the stairs for Seanny, who appeared momentarily. He seemed a little less sullen but I couldn’t be sure if this was because of an effort to improve his disposition or the prospect of roast beef and apple pie.

Dinner was, incidentally, absolutely delicious. Roast beef rare, rubbed with garlic and herbs, a potato souffle type dish with cheese and fresh green beans with bacon and onions. Kate had taken the fresh vegetables from the groceries I had brought and put together a very presentable salad. I have done my share of cooking in the firehouse and if there’s one thing I can appreciate it’s a good meal, especially one that someone else took the trouble to prepare. Everything was wonderful.

We had a very pleasant meal together. Seanny snapped out of his funk well enough at least to speak when spoken to. Grace and I were exchanging news on mutual acquaintances, and Kate supplied stories of schoolmates and offered a rundown of Tick’s genealogy. “He’s part Boxer and part Malamute,” she said, “and Ma thinks he may have some Airedale in there too. He is,” she finished with authority, “a mutt’s mutt.”

When we had finished the main course, I got up to help Grace take the plates into the kitchen. We were getting dessert plates for the pie, and Grace called out, “Seanny, will you please put these out on the table?” when we heard the front door close with a soft click.

“Dammit! He always does this,” said Grace.

“Ditches the dishes?”

“No, leaves without telling me where he is going. He’s off to get loaded with the friends, probably.”

“Will he be back tonight?”

“Who knows?”

“I hope not,” said Kate, who had come in to expedite the pie delivery system. She said this quite matter-of-factly while taking the vanilla ice cream from the freezer.

I was struck by such bitterness in one so young, but said nothing. It showed in my face though, known so well to Grace.

“She’s just used to it, Sully. She’s had to put up with a lot. Last week he swiped her bike to go to a friend‘s, someone took it, and we found it in a dumpster. And he said it served her right for leaving it unlocked.”

“Oh, shit. Seriously?”

“Very seriously.”

“Jesus Christ, Grace, he’s twenty years old! What kind of grade school bullshit is that? Doesn’t he even want a job? Or to make something of his life?”

“Sully, it’s as if the ability to care about anything was just left right out of him. All he seems to care about is partying and avoiding work. And getting on my last nerve,” she finished, putting the ice cream neatly on top of the pie slices. “He’s really had it in for me, for some reason.”

“Probably because he knows you won’t go anywhere. I mean, look -- he never knew his biological father, right? And God knows I didn’t stick around long. And then there was Brad -- well, you left him, but still, you‘re the one consistent person in his life. He knows you aren‘t going anywhere, so you‘re the lucky recipient of all his “angry young man” bullshit.”

“When did you become John Sullivan, licensed psychologist?” laughed Grace. “But you know what? I think you’re right about all that.”

We retired to the living room after dessert. The incredible Katie, who was fast becoming my favorite kid after my nephew Jay, offered to make us a pot of coffee. “I know how,” she assured me. “I help Ma when the AA’s come over.”

“Katie, darlin’, you’re my good girl,” said Grace. “But no thanks, sweetie. I think it’s about time for you to get ready for bed. Is your homework all done?”

“Nah. But it’s just spelling words. I already know ‘em.”

“Katie….” Grace cautioned.

“I know, I know, ‘there’s always room for improvement’, okay, okay.” She did a little sigh-and-eyeroll bit indicating that no matter how many times you explained things to some adults, they just didn’t get it, and it was a waste of breath arguing with them.

Katie stuck out her hand briskly, and I solemnly shook it.

“It’s nice to meet ya, Johnny Sullivan. Yer all right. Stay safe, okay?” Before I could respond, she had scampered halfway up the stairs.

“What an incredible kid,” I said.

“Thanks. She’s a handful, but it’s mostly because she’s very bright. She’s actually not a behavior problem excepting when she’s being stubborn. You have to know how to handle her. She’ll do anything for you if you work with her, but draw battle lines with her and you’ve already lost.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“Are you being smart?”

“Oh, no, no, no. Not at all. It’s just that I have never known anyone like that in my life and can’t fathom where she gets it.”

Grace smacked me playfully with a small couch cushion. There was a time when that would have quickly resulted in some pretty rambunctious sex. I’m not saying it wasn’t an attractive idea, but it wasn’t appropriate even to think of it. Or was it? This was confusing.

“Well, anyway, she’s a great kid. Now. About the Seanny question….”

“I was hoping you would talk to him. Obviously, that isn’t going to happen tonight. But you see what I’m dealing with.”

‘Yeah, it’s bad. Seriously, do you think he’d listen to me?”

“I don’t know. You stand at least as good a shot as anyone. Certainly better than I do.”

“Well, I’ll try. I don’t know how much I have to offer him, though.”

“Sully, I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t think you could help.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe the best we can do is for me to try to get ahold of him again a little later. At least now he knows I’m around….”

“Are you?”

“Well, yeah. I’m around if you need me. You called, I came over, right?”

“Right, well….”

There was something she and I weren’t’ saying, and I didn’t know where to go with this. I tried changing the subject.

“So, this AA thing, this sobriety -- it’s working for ya, huh?”

“Sully, the drinking just had to go. I was a mess.”

“Hard to imagine, but I’ll take your word for it. You were never a mess that I knew of.”

“We all have our bottoms. Mine still hurts where I hit it.”

I laughed. “You’re a caution. Always were.”

Grace smiled fondly at me. “Yeah, well, you tore up a few miles of road yourself back in the day.”

We looked at each other. It seemed like a very long time passed. Finally, Grace lifted her hand and touched my face.

“John, I don’t want you to feel obligated here. I turned to you for help because I don’t know what else to do with Seanny. I’m not looking for anything else.”

“But if something else should come of it?”

Long pause. Long, long pause.

“We…I guess we shall see, won’t we?”

“Yes, Grace, I guess we will.”

I leaned toward her and gently kissed her. She returned the kiss, gently at first. But it was like we never had been apart. People say that sometimes, and until you’ve felt that way you just don’t know…how close, how quick, how dear….how passionate…and how fast it all comes back….

Memories washed over me. I wanted more and knew more was not mine to take. Grace’s soft, warm mouth, her agile tongue, her soft lips…

“Grace.” I stood up, hugged her to me a little bit. “Grace, I have to go.”

“I know,” she whispered, her eyes lowered. “I’ll walk to the door with ya.

We walked to her door, and I gently kissed her forehead, and she raised those eyes to me, those hazel and olivine eyes, so tender and expressive, and stood on tiptoe, kissed me quickly on the mouth, and said, “Stay safe, Johnny Sulivan. Until we meet again.”

I got halfway across the porch, turned and said, “That will be…when?”

She looked at me, shook her head, blew a kiss and closed the door.

God damn it. I’d settle for a night’s sleep, let alone a way to figure this out….

Chapter Fifteen

2005-09-11T19:56:00.000-04:00

Well, I don’t like to be bored. It’s a good thing, too.

I took the half-tour for Bones, who went home with the flu. I don’t mind filling in when a guy is sick or needs a day, because it’s a chip you can always call in, and besides, it bugs me to think of the house being short a guy. The thing about having A, B and C shifts is that there is always a long list of people they can call, but if somebody asks, I say yes. No skin off my ass and generally comes in handy at some point.

It’s almost a rule, though. If you take an extra shift or a half, you’re in for some fun. Stuff that would never have happened seems to have a way of coming together -- what the news analysts are always calling a “concatenation of events” -- any time you’re overextended, you’re in for a ride. I don’t mind; it’s just how it seems to work out.

Tonight was no exception.

Early on, it was the usual for a Saturday night. There were a bunch of kitchen fires, an out-of-control barbecue in some guy’s garage -- by mid-February, Cleveland people are tired of winter and longing for a taste of outdoors -- and the usual smattering of false alarms and minor medical emergencies. Neighborhood stuff. Some lady locked herself out of her apartment, and she was half drunk, and I let Derrico talk to her, having had enough of that particular dish for awhile. She was pretty cute, but it didn’t help her case with me that her name was Jennifer, and as long as we could get her into the apartment, I really didn’t care to investigate the perks. I wore my hero hat Friday night, and it’s been my experience that if you’ve seen one drunk broad, you’ve seen ‘em all, at least for one weekend. It all depends, I guess, on how desperate you are and how lean a stretch it’s been, but after the Jenny debacle, I was good for at least a week.

Of course, Derrico the comedian was all jollies on the ride back to the house. “Drunk AND cute and her name was Jennifer. I think she smokes too, Sully. Shoulda given that one a go, brother.”

“Have I ever told you the joke about the shithead firefighter who keeps teasing his buddy about the drunk broad? No? It’s a long story. I’ll just give you the punch line: Fuck you.”

“Jesus, you’re not sore or anything, are ya, Sully?” He made a little noise like he had had too much to drink and was about to blow guts. Very convincing.

“Derrico, I hope your wife is in a three-day bad mood for ya. I hope your kid gets online with your credit card and buys a whole whorehouse. I hope the goddamn…”

The radio interrupted this cavalcade of kindly thoughts with a call for an address over in the ‘hood. The truck and engine were both called.

As we turned down the street, McCann, who was driving, said, “Payday, kids. Hope everybody’s rested up.”

It was obviously a good working fire, a hell of a blaze. It was about three o’clock in the morning, so it was likely a bunch of kids or drunks, arson. What we couldn’t make out for a moment was what type of a building it was, standalone on a vacant lot next to some apartments. It seemed like a strange place for a building. Maybe -- wait -- was it a trailer?

No, it wasn’t a house trailer, it was an 18 wheeler. Abandoned, perhaps stolen and abandoned -- but how likely was that? And why the hell was an abandoned 18-wheeler on fire? Must be a case of arson for fun rather than spite or profit, unless it was full of goods.

Well, it turned out to be full of goods all right, and as we rolled up, we also saw it was full of people. People were everywhere. Climbing out the back doors, standing in the lot, and some running and jumping the fence. A couple of CPD zone cars were pulling into the lot just as we parked. We got the pumper started, and the truckies got onto the roof and started venting it.

A guy was running across the lot and we shouted at him, “Hey! Anybody inside?”

“Oh, man, everybody was inside!” he yelled, and kept running. One of the cops shouted for him to stop but he was over the fence before they got out of the car.

It didn’t take long to get the fire knocked down, but the people standing around didn’t stick around to volunteer any information. They were off and down the street, melting away like the patches of February snow on the asphalt around the truck.

But when we got inside, the site itself told a story.

Inside the burned-out hulk of the eighteen wheel tractor trailer was the semi-destroyed remains of what had apparently been an illicitly operated bar, also known as a cheat spot. There were several folding card tables, a few wooden crates that had been draped with plastic cloths to serve as the bar, and an old plywood entertainment center stocked with a few dozen bottles of cheap liquor. They had everything -- brandy, vodka, bourbon, liqueurs, even a few fancy flavored vodkas. There were two Coleman coolers full of canned soda -- club soda and ginger ale, mostly -- and another cooler full of ice. Plastic cups were scattered everywhere, some melted together and stuck to the floor.

There were posters on the walls that looked like somebody had swiped them from a travel agency -- there was Italy, France, Spain and a huge outdated map of Russia that said “USSR” in block letters and hung crookedly over the bar back. There was also hanging over the bar a crudely lettered poster board that read: “Bar Drinks Three Dollars And No We Cant Take Checks So Don’t Even Ask. No Guns And No Drugs. The Management”. The sign was smoke-stained and warped by the water and hung crazily at an angle by its remaining thumbtack, but the printing was still clear. We weren’t sure whether the “No Guns And No Drugs” part meant they weren’t allowed or weren’t supplied. “Gotta bring your own, I guess,” said Derrico.

The source of the fire became readily apparent when the smoke had cleared. Running through the center of the truck was a collection of four or five frayed extension cords connected end to end. This was connected to a huge spotlight -- far too big to be supported by the power drawn by the misfit collection of cords -- which was trained on an improbably large mirrored disco ball suspended from the ceiling by a couple of coat hangers and some fishing line. Running off one of the plugs on the extension cord was a boom box. The cord had started a fire in one of the cheap throw rugs scattered around the floor, and the fire had spread to the glitter-impregnated gauze which someone had attached to the walls with a staple gun. It was a regular Four Seasons ballroom in a box.

“Hey, Sully,” said Cullen, “what do we do with the stuff that’s left here?”

A big red-faced cop whose badge identified him as Officer Degyansky had just lowered himself through the vent hole we had hacked in the ceiling. This really wasn‘t necessary since the truck‘s doors were wide open, but whatever. He bellowed out: “You don’t touch it. Crime scene.”

“He’s new,” I said. “He’s just trying to help. A probie.”

“Well, you better control your men,” snarled Officer D.

“Hey,” I said, “there’s no need to get that way about it.”

“Yeah,” said the cop, “and the next thing you know the booze disappears from the scene.”

“Oh, you know,” I said, “you’re right about that. That would be a goddamned shame, because then there would be none left for the cops.”

“Sully,” started Derrico.

“I got it,” I said. “Come on, Cullen, you don’t want to hang out with the criminal element here. You’re off to a good start and I don’t want ya getting corrupted.”

“Listen, asshole,” the cop began.

“Ah, keep yer goddamn hair on,” I said. “Come on, guys, let’s clear the scene. There’s stuff left here that hasn’t been stolen yet, so let’s let the cops do their jobs.”

“You got a problem with cops, jerkoff?”

“Oh, nooooo, Officer. In fact, one of my cousins is a cop. A uniform in the Second District.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”

“Pogue. Pogue Mahone.”

For the uninitiated, pogue ma thoin means “Kiss my ass” in Irish Gaelic. I figured there was no way somebody named Degyansky was going to get this unless he was half Irish, and this guy didn’t look half anything but stupid.

So we parted on fairly good terms. Derrico, who has hung around the mostly Irish firehouse long enough to become culturally enriched, turned away so the cop wouldn’t see him laughing. We walked outside with Cullen and started helping with the takeup.

As we rolled out of the lot, the cop waved a reasonably civil goodbye and asked warily, “Now what is this cousin’s name again?”

With a mind like a steel sieve, I had just about forgotten the exchange. Derrico was at the ready, though.

“Pogue Mahone,” he cried cheerfully. “If you know Pogue Mahone, you know every Irish firefighter in town.”

To say I found this funny is quite an understatement. I said to Derrico, “Ya know, for a complete shithead you do okay sometimes.”

We rolled back to the house, and when I got to my bunk and checked my cell phone, there was another message from Grace. I didn’t really want to call her so late, but Grace is a night owl just as I am, and since we’ve never stood on ceremony, I decided to go ahead and return her call. May as well get it over with, I figured. Her messages were never long or detailed, just “Call me when you get this.” If I wanted to know what was up, I was going to have to call her.

We have a little exercise room just off the shower room. I think it was meant to function solely as alocker room, but we’ve managed in the last few years to kick in here and there and raise ourselves enough money for some workout equipment. Nothing too fancy -- a couple of weight benches, a weight machine and a treadmill. Enough to keep us fit and keep us from going stir crazy in bad weather when we can’t get outside. Anyway, it’s far enough from the bunks to be somewhat private, so I took the phone in there and dialed Grace’s number.

“Hello?” Grace’s voice sounded tired, but not as if I had woke her up.

“Yeah, Grace, it’s me. Sorry I didn’t call you before this…”

“That’s okay; I never said what it was about.”

“Anyway, what’s up?”

“Sully, it’s…it’s Seanny. It’s…well, it’s about me and something I’ve done…”

“Grace, what? Are you okay?”

“No, no; let me finish. What I’ve done isn’t bad. But Seanny…”

“What did he do, the little shit? You want me to straighten him out for you?”

“Johnny Sullivan, will you please for once let me explain before you jump in, guns blazing? I’ve managed these last fifteen years on my own -- got married, had a baby, got divorced, all that -- and now you want to save the day for me. What’s going on is big and it’s going to take some explaining, and you can’t solve it with a bigger hammer.”

“Okayyyyyyy…then, what’s the trouble? I’m all ears.”

“Let me start at the beginning, or at least where the touble began…oh, Jesus, John, it’s such a mess….”

“Easy, Grace, easy. All will be well, remember?”

This had been our code phrase for years. “All will be well”. A school friend of Grace’s got it from the biography of some saint or something, Julian of Norwich, and passed it on to Grace, who passed it on to me, and we drew on it for everything from family deaths to running out of money before payday.

“Well, I hope you have some time to talk,” said Grace.

“I do,” I said, “and what concerns you concerns me, so let’s get it all out on the table.”

“Well, you remember in the old days how we used to drink and carry on?”

“Sure.”

“Well, Sully, that’s part of what went wrong in my marriage. I was still drinking long after the party was over. You know how I used to get so drunk sometimes that I wasn’t making sense and didn’t remember anything the next day?”

“Well, hell, Grace, everybody does that.”

“No, John, not everybody. At least, they’re not supposed to. And certainly I’m not supposed to. John, I’m an alcoholic.”

This struck me as pretty extreme. Now, that girl from the other night, Jenny -- she probably qualified as at least an alcoholic in training. But Grace? My Grace? Well, not that she was my Grace, but….

“Grace, don’t paste a label on yourself. I’ve never even seen you drunk. Sure, you liked to tie one on back in the day. We all did. Still do.” Here I ruminated on my own none too stellar history with the bottle of late. “But Grace, don’t be too quick to judge yourself. What is this, some kind of support group speak?”

“No, John, no” she said slowly. “I drank too much for too long. And this isn’t sudden. And I’m not drinking any more. As a matter of fact, with the help of God and the support of my fellows, I haven’t had to take a drink in eighteen months.”

“Wow. Well, that’s great. But the divorce? I thought that was recent.”

“It was. It was finalized last month. My marriage survived my drinking, but it didn’t survive my sobriety. It happens.”

“Oh….well….I’m sorry.” I mean, what the hell can you say to that?

“Anyway,” Grace continued, briskly shifting focus, “this isn’t about me. It’s about Seanny.”

“Yeah, okay, well, how can I help?”

“John, he’s lost. He’s totally confused and a mess. He started using drugs and drinking some time last year and I thought maybe he’d snap out of it, but it’s gotten worse. I thought the divorce and the move might actually help -- you know, the fighting and the tension ended, it got us away from his old crowd…”

“How’s Kate doing?” Kate, Grace’s daughter, is nine and looks and acts just like her mother, according to my many sources among family and friends. In my perhaps biased opinion, there needs to be a man in their lives in the future just to keep the shotgun trained on prospective suitors. Grace would probably be more than capable of handling that, though, if my experiences with her are any gauge. Anyway.

“Kate is fine. She isn’t happy, of course, misses her dad -- Brad and I have a split custody arrangement…”

Brad. Grace had actually married someone named Brad. I had forgotten that.

“…and Kate is doing fine in school, staying in touch with old friends, making new ones. But Seanny is about to drive me mad.”

“He in any legal trouble?”

“No, not yet….But John, this whole thing…it’s threatening my sobriety. I mean, I’m not about to rush out and get drunk. But it’s the water torture thing. He gets high in his room, I find the stuff, throw it out…he stays out all night, I change the locks, he climbs in the window…he gets mouthy with me, I call the police…they say there’s nothing they can do…”

“Wait a minute. Isn’t…err, Brad…isn’t Brad supposed to be helping you out here? How old is Seanny, anyway?”

“He’s nineteen. And Brad never had official legal custody anyway. And even if he had, John, they never got along.”

“Yeah, that sounds bad. Listen, Grace, do you think it would do any good if I talked to him? I mean, he may not even remember me…”

“Oh, yes he does. You know that little Tonka fire engine you gave to him when he was five? He still has it on his dresser.”

For God’s sake. The stuff we do that we never figure will matter a bit to anyone, and here come to find out….

“Listen, if you think it will do any good, I’ll talk to him for you. Just don’t hold me responsible for the results. Every time I’ve talked to anybody lately I seem to hve made bad matters worse.”

“Well, since he’s neither working for you, supervising you or sleeping with you, I’d say you stand a prayer in hell.”

“Thanks, smartass.”

“You’re more than welcome. When shall I expect you, then?”

“Tomorrow okay?”

“I have to work during the day, but why don’t you come over for supper around seven?”

“Okay; I’ll bring a bottle of wine. What kind…oh, wait….I guess I shouldn’t…”

“Sully, I don’t give a damn what’s in your glass; I only concern myself with what’s in my own. Kinda like the old days.” I could hear the sly mischief creep into her voice. “If you want something for yourself, bring wine. I’m drinking club soda. We’re having roast beef. See you at seven.”

“Okay…”

She had already hung up. God alone knew what I was getting myself into, but it would be good to see her. I wasn’t sure I understood all this business about her being an alcoholic, but I trusted her judgment.

Now if only I could be sure I can trust my own.

Chapter Fourteen

2005-07-13T21:06:00.000-04:00

What did I say? What did I say about being an Indians fan? And being optimistic?

Jesus H. Christ on a cracker. What the HELL was I thinking, imagining this Jenny business could go well?

All right, so maybe it wasn’t a total disaster.

No. Bullshit. It was a disaster.

I pick her up at eight, right? We are going to go to TGI Friday’s, no place fancy, it’s just a first date, and all we want to do is have a few drinks, a bite to eat, get to know each other a little better. Then, if we hit it off, I had plans to take her to a movie, maybe an after-movie drink, maybe a smooch or two in the car or in front of her apartment, then who knows? I could call her next week, we could go out again…you know the drill. Blah and et cetera and on into the relationship, until Sully fucks it up or until the girl breaks it off for unexplained reasons, or until we hit it off and bells ring and fireworks explode and this is The Girl, and I pop the question and she accepts and we get married and have a house full of rug rats named Hadley and Brielle who will take dancing lessons and get straight A’s while their mother goes to medical school and I make Chief and…..

All right, all right. Out of all the scenes I’ve outlined, which one seems most likely to you?

Yeah, okay, whatever. But I can guarantee you the scene which took place tonight would not only never have occurred to you, it would never have occurred to me either, or I would never, NEVER have asked this broad out. And if you know me and know of my distinct habit of non-selectivity in the ass-chasing department…well, anyway. It ended badly, and if the guys at 19 ever hear about this, I am never hearing the ass-end of it, until they plant me. Let’s just hope to Christ we don’t get any trauma runs this month, or that, if we do, Jenny, may God bless and preserve her dear sweet ass, is not on duty over at Metro.

Anyway. I pick her up at eight, at her townhouse apartment, a nice little place in Broadview Heights (lovely name for a community, incidentally), and she comes out before I even get a chance to ring the doorbell.

“Hi,” I smile. (I am always very sharp with the smooth lines on a first date.)

“Hi,” she says. “Ready to go?”

“Ready if you are, gorgeous,” I smile. “Where to? Friday’s still sound good?”

“Terrific,” she smiles back, and I help her into the cab of my truck. As I do so, I notice a distinct note of something additional in her cologne. I am hoping it’s not tobacco smoke, but maybe it’s just a kind of general musky smell. Maybe her neighbor smokes and she was over there visiting. And alcohol. I think I can smell alcohol, too. Bourbon whisky, to be exact. Despite years of inhaling every kind of toxic gas and fume known, I still have a bloodhound’s nose. I really wish I didn’t. Stuff that other people can’t even smell will keep me awake nights. Derrico, the smartass, calls me “Dr. Lecter”. Anyway. Maybe Jenny had a drink after work or something, and that’s what I’m getting. I decide to ignore this and we head out.

We chat along the way, mostly about work, about our respective jobs, and I notice that Jenny is a lovely woman, in a young Debra Messing kind of way. Long, blonde hair, delicate features, creamy complexion. Not built badly, either. A fine armful of a girl, as Uncle Owen would say. Not beautiful, but lovely. Very pretty.

We are playing the radio, searching around the dial for something good, and a song by Mariah Carey is on the local Top 40 station. Now, Mariah Carey has a lovely voice, but I don’t like her choice of material, and I would probably rather have someone work on my bare ass with a tattoo needle for twelve hours than listen to an entire Mariah Carey CD. This, however, is not an appropriate observation for a first date, and so I just smiled silently.

“Mariah Carey! Oooh, I LOVE Mariah Carey!” said Jenny.

I continued to smile and kept my opinion to myself. It’s a wise man who keeps his mouth shut until after dessert, if you get me.

We continued on to Friday’s, which was, of course, crowded, even the night before Valentine’s Day, and gave my name so that we could get a table.

“Smoking or non?” asked the hostess.

Jenny jumped in, “Would we get a table faster if we sit in the smoking section?”
“Probably so,” said the hostess. “We’re pretty busy right now, so it might improve your chances.”

“Okay, we’ll go with that. Okay with you, John?”

It took me a second. I honestly do forget that I have a first name sometimes. By the time I recovered my wits, we had agreed to sit at the first available table, smoking or non.

Meantime, we sat at the bar, and I ordered my usual date drink, which is a Guinness. They have more bang than a beer and are considered a little less hardcore than whisky, and might even hold you until dinner. Plus there’s all that “Black 47”, “hard man“, U2 bullshit mystique involved there.

Jenny ordered quickly, “Manhattan, no cherry, and a twist, please. Rocks.”

“Wow,” I laughed. “I don’t think I’ve heard anyone order one of those since my Aunt Peg was living.”

Jenny laughed. “It’s kind of an old-fashioned drink.”

“No,” I said. “That would be an Old Fashioned.”

We chuckled at that, her probably more to be polite than because it was such a witty remark. We sipped our drinks and made some conversation about the weather, which was intensely slushy and nasty at the moment, and about the movies -- the usual first date stuff. As we finished our drinks, the bartender asked us if we would be having another, and I started to say that we were expecting our table any minute, but Jenny immediately said “Sure!” Not wanting to appear either a lightweight or a tightwad, I nodded. Usually I am careful not to drink too much on a first date, but Jenny didn’t seem too concerned about it, so I decided to lighten up a little.

We drank some more and talked some more, and the little electronic pager went off, telling us our table was ready, and so we found the hostess, who guided us to a table that was smack in the middle of the smoking section. I wasn’t too keen on this, but figured I’d just try to go along and have a good time rather than make a fuss.

As we sat down and were presented with menus, Jenny excused herself to the powder room and departed through the blue haze surrounding our table.

As I looked over the menu, a waitperson approached with two fresh drinks.

“Thanks,” I said, “but we didn’t order these.”

“The lady ordered them, sir,” he said.

Huh, I thought. I’ll be goddamned. Well, that’s fine. As long as we are having a good time, I reasoned….

Back to the table came Jenny. Jenny and her freshly lit cigarette.

“Um, hey,” I said. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Do you mind?” she smiled.

“Not as long as you don’t force me to smoke too,” I said. I knew it was a lame thing to say, but I figured we had got this far with the evening and were having an okay time, and everybody was happy, there was no need to be a jerk about it. I had seen and dealt with worse things. You have to give people a chance.

This is usually your first and worst mistake in this situation, though it is usually by no means the last one.

Jenny downed the remains of her original drink in one gulp. She then grabbed the fresh drink as if it were the cure for cancer and took three long swallows. She finished this off with a luxuriant puff on her cigarette, most of which went straight in my face.

I was rapidly becoming unimpressed.

“Would you like to order now?” I asked, in a tone that I hoped implied this was more a polite command than a request for information.

Jenny tossed back her long, blonde hair, took another sip of her drink and said brightly, “Oh, we don’t have to hurry on that, do we? What’s the hurry? We’re just getting to know each other. In jobs like we have, we so seldom get to relax -- let‘s not hurry.”

I don’t know what it was -- maybe the extra drink, maybe her using the same word three times in rapid succession, maybe the smoking -- but my “oh, shit” alarm was going off with a clang. This date was not going to end well, but God willing, it was going to send soon. I had every intention of feeding this broad, hauling her tipsy, nicotine-addicted ass home and calling it a night.

“Let’s get some food and talk about it more.”

“Sure!” she said. “C’n I have another drink?” She was already lifting her glass to summon the waiter.

Well, what could I do? I could have ended the date right there, I guess, but I didn’t want to be the bad guy, and I don’t like scenes. I’ve had my share of scenes with drunken babes being told they can’t do what they want to, and you may trust me, my brothers, when I say I have done your research for you and you aren’t missing anything. Like Jesus, I have suffered so you won’t have to, if only you will heed my word.

Anyway. I okayed the drink, compounded that with the mistake of ordering another for myself, to calm both the nerves and rising irritation that were beginning to make this night anything but fun, and made an utterly ineffectual attempt to steer both the conversation and the course of events toward at least an approximation of “normal” and “fun”, words one generally associates with voluntary social activities.

Looking back, I should have just called a cab, sent her inconsiderate ass wheeling home, and gone home to watch basketball and drink beer with Chester. I would have been better off, would have got my laundry done, and would have avoided the entire rest of the evening with Jenny. But then, I wouldn’t have anything to tell you, would I? You had damn well better appreciate this, dear readers, whoever you are.

Just as I was trying to persuade Jenny to order some food, she excused herself to the ladies’ room again. When she returned to the table some fifteen minutes later, I was aware that she was shitfaced drunk, totally plastered. She could barely walk. Her lip gloss, a too bright vinyl pink, was smeared, her hair, which had looked so soft and touchable earlier in the evening, was shellacked back with what appeared to be Gesso, and there was a raccoonish coat of fresh eyeliner ringing her once blue and now very red and blue eyes. She plopped herself down in the chair, which spun rakishly around, and all but bellowed, “HEY! Waiiiiterrrrrr! How about another drink for me an’ my friend here?” She then turned to me and said, in an exaggerated whisper, “You are my friend, aren’t you?” She followed it with a leering wink that reminded me of nothing so much as Bette Davis in her turn as “Baby Jane”.

I summoned my courage. Coward that I am, I took a gulp of Guinness first and savored my last few seconds as a non-hated non-“Bad Guy“.

“Jenny,” I said. “I think you had something more to drink when you left the table. Now, I think it would be a good idea if we ate something right now, and if you didn’t have any more drinks until after we have some food.”

“Oh, bullshit,” she said, with what I guess was supposed to be a dismissive wave of her hand, but which knocked the paraffin candle over onto the tablecloth, where it promptly ignited.

“Jesus everloving Christ,” I said, and grabbed the nearest thing I could find to smother the flames. It was, unfortunately, Jenny’s oversize purse. It did a fine job of smothering the small blaze on the tabletop, but the drawstring cinch at its top came open and the contents came tumbling out, including two packs of Camel filters and a pint bottle of Black Velvet with a very loose cap, which of course, came off. Whisky, cigarettes, lipstick, ragged Kleenex, stray earrings, a few tampons, a small address book and a roll of peppermint Life Savers tumbled to the floor out in a merciless cascade of embarrassment. I was almost glad for Jenny that she was so goddamn smashed. With a little luck she wouldn’t remember any of this.

“Could we please have our check?” I asked the waiter, who came rushing over with the manager?

“HAHAHAHAHAHA!” shrieked Jenny. “He’s a goddamn fireman and we started a goddamn fire! How fucking funny is THAT?”

Apparently, a hell of a lot funnier to her than to anyone else in the place. I gathered the drunken woman, her sodden purse, jacket and possessions and handed the waiter a fifty dollar bill.

Steering a woman in that condition toward the door of a place she does not wish to leave is no mean feat. I have carried people weighing three times Jenny’s weight across some treacherous paths, but I have had the advantage that they were either passed out from smoke inhalation or at the very least they wanted very much to get the hell out of there. No such luck here.

“HEY! Whaddya mean, we gotta leave? We were just getting’ started! What about dinner? Hah? Aren’t we gonna eat our goddamn dinner? I mean, what the FUCK?”

I did what I would do in any situation where a person objected to being carried away from a dangerous situation. I slung her over my shoulder and carried her out of the restaurant, away from the stunned and snickering patrons, a few of whom applauded, and to the relative safety of my truck.

With some difficulty, I managed to maneuver Jenny into an upright position in the passenger seat, and I climbed in and started the truck over her shrieked objections. But as I pulled out onto the road, she shut up for a few seconds, looked at me with bleary-eyed admiration, and said, “You just carried me out of there. Just fuckin' picked me up and carried me out of there. That is soooooo sexy, baby.” And to my horror, she began to hike up her skirt.

Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t get very far. Midway through this maneuver, she made a noise resembling the firing of a small steam boiler, and abruptly and thoroughly vomited -- all over herself, and all over the newly detailed upholstery of my truck.

Jesus Christ in garters. Up to now, I had been the picture of patient chivalry, but my truck! My freshly washed and newly detailed truck!

“Goddammit,” I shouted, “couldn’t you have at least rolled down the goddamn window?”

She did what all drunken women do as a matter of last recourse. She burst into tears.

“You didn’t h-h-h-h-have to yell at meeeeeeee,” Jenny began wailing.

“Oh, for the love of Jesus, shut UP,” I muttered, half to her, half to myself.

That was it. This tore it. This couldn’t have been a worse balls-up if I had planned it this way. But I was wrong.

As I floored the truck in hopes of getting this daffy broad home and the hell out of my truck, my sight and my future agenda, what should I spy in the rearview mirror but the flashing lights of a Broadview Heights zone car?

I pulled over and showed the cop my ID. They don’t take kindly to much deviation from the norm in beautiful suburban Broadview Heights, and if he had wanted me to take a Breathalyzer, he probably would have had me dead to rights. Still, the cop took one look at the sobbing and by now hiccupping, vomit-covered broad to my right, glanced at my firefighter’s union card, sniffed the air of the truck and must have figured I had enough problems. I didn’t mention Jenny’s job because I didn’t want to embarrass her, though I might have gone that far if it looked like a tie-breaker was needed. The cop let us go with a warning. He did the second worst thing he could have done, though, only exceeded by writing a brother a ticket: he snickered.

Oh, well. A Broadview Heights cop’s snickers didn’t cost me a couple of grand in fines and three mandatory days in the slam, so I guess I can forgive him that. I’ve certainly done my share of giggling and even downright guffawing in similar situations, so I just nodded as a thanks for the professional consideration, and he waved me on my way. I dragged Jenny up the steps to her door and fished her keys out of her purse, carried her inside and laid her down carefully on the bed, on her side to avoid choking. Just to show what a prince of a guy I am, I very thoughtfully dug in the broom closet for a bucket and left it on the floor beside her lovely head, lest she have need of an emesis basin during the night.

Christ, what a night. And when I got home, there were two messages: one from Grace, and one asking if I could go into work the next day and take a tour for a guy who had the flu.

Happy goddamn Valentine’s Day. Is it baseball season yet?

Chapter Thirteen

2005-07-13T19:20:00.000-04:00

Well, that’s set up. I’m picking up Jenny at eight tonight. Valentine’s day is tomorrow night, but we figured we’d grab a bite and maybe see a show tonight since it might not be easy to get show tickets or a table tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to call Grace all goddamn day, and all I get is her message machine. I left a message on the first try, but I’ve had stuff to do around here, and I don’t want to sound desperate.

It’s not like I’m worried or trying to impress her -- I’ve known Grace almost all my life, for Christ’s sake. But I don’t know her situation, and I don’t want to scare her off. That’s one thing about Grace. She tends to bolt and run, especially if she feels pressured. I don’t know why that is, but it’s a good thing to know, especially since I’m not interested in having her drop out of sight for several more years just because I said something stupid.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t say something stupid. I just don’t want to say THE something stupid, the one thing that will trip her trigger. Saying stupid things to women happens to be a specialty of mine, a craft I’ve mastered after twenty-plus years of practice. I like to think that in a field of experts, I stand out as one of the all-time virtuosos. I am goddamn Bob Feller throwing a no-hitter when it comes to saying stupid shit that no woman in her right mind can respond to with anything like a positive reply. But most women will at least take a crack at it. Maybe they like the challenge; I don’t know. But Grace won’t even take a shot. You say the wrong thing to Grace, and you are leaving the ballpark, they’re turning out the lights and nobody’s seen her since the bottom of the third inning.

Heh. Baseball. I miss baseball, especially this time of year. I know the Indians are warming up in Winter Haven, but it’s still too long until Opening Day. I can’t stand the thought of no baseball for almost two months.
Baseball is important to me for many reasons.

Some of my earliest, fondest memories center around baseball. It has consistently, throughout my life, been the one thing I can depend on to pretty much be what it is, what it appears to be and what it promises to be. This has nothing to do with winning or losing, promises of another type entirely. I am talking about baseball's basic promise: it Is. Strikes and other nonsense notwithstanding, Baseball Is.

I remember as a very tiny child, listening to my parents and our friends and relatives discussing the Rocky Colavito trade. I had the sense something happened to someone we knew personally. Those adults, who would later try to drag me to church and civic organizations and teach me manners and compassion, had already accomplished that in part. They were together, mourning a loss, and determined that one individual's or group's bad behavior (in this case the evil manager Frank "Trader" Lane) would not determine their overall outlook or their opinion of the institution. "Ah well," they would say, "I'm still gonna wait and see what happens. It's a long season."

And, from their perches on the sunwarmed concrete steps of the back porch, they would take a pull of their Stroh's longneck, a puff of their Lucky Strikes, and start discussing the Tribe's chances for '66. When you are exhausted from a long day's work at the steel mill, the railroad or the firehouse (or from washing all the work clothes twice -- there was no "extra rinse" cycle in those days -- and hanging baskets of soggy, heavy cotton clothes out to dry -- in those days women didn't need weight training for 'toning') -- when you are exhausted and sore and losing hope for the world's state, it is a good thing to sit on one's porch on a summer night and talk baseball.

If you minded your manners and got good grades in school, the nuns would tuck a pair of Indians tickets -- box seats! -- into your report card. The Tribe gave them to the Diocese, and the Diocese gave them to us. They were printed paper tickets, red or orange, and they were a Sign from Above that good work is rewarded -- maybe not immediately or as specified, but 'if you do A, then B is a reasonable expectation' -- another lesson baseball taught me early. You would bug your dad every day from school's closing to game day. Then, when the big day came, you would climb into the passenger seat of the '59 Oldsmobile, Da at the wheel, and wave as solemnly to the neighborhood kids as if you were a head of state being chauffered. You'd go down to the game, and the Indians would of course not win, but your old man would buy you Sno-Kones and hot dogs and peanuts and lemonade, and he would drink several waxed paper cup beers, and you would get to watch the names you heard on the radio actually working in the field, and it would be wonderful. It was like proof the saints existed or something. Duke Sims, Leon Wagner, and the heartbreaking Sudden Sam McDowell, all there in living color, just as you had heard of them on the radio and watched them on the old black and white Philco with the foil on the antenna. It was as close to proof of the existence of something greater as some of us got, and there you were at your Dad's side, taking it all in.

Summer evenings, when my Dad worked overtime or night shifts or was out with the boys, my mother and we kids would listen to baseball on the radio. Ma was always busy with something -- painting a porch, repairing cabinets, stripping varnish from woodwork -- and baseball was her background noise. It was usually the Indians, but she wasn't averse to listening to a Reds game if we could pick one up -- growing up in rural Indiana, she was a big-time Reds fan too. So Ma would work, and baseball would be on the radio, and we would "help" by getting in her way, or we would sit on the porch playing with cars and trucks, or Kevin would come over, or my older brothers would be hanging out with their friends, and we would listen to the Indians and to Herb Score. Wounded by a wild ball at the height of his career, Score went on to become one of Cleveland baseball's most beloved voices. So, right there, I learned multitasking, the virtue of keeping one's mind engaged while working, and, from Score, that a career-ending injury can be the start of something else.

All my life, baseball has been there. It was the only 'date' on which I really felt comfortable during my adolescence because I knew and understood what was going on, there was something to talk about, and we were in a public place and out in the sun. Movies and other indoors entertainments were not as enjoyable -- I had to make small talk and had to pray I didn't make a complete klutz of myself, such as a gangly, tall guy like myself does at dances and miniature golf. If I could talk a girl into going to a baseball game, though, she was on MY territory, baby, and confidence was mine. Plus the likelihood of her old man suspecting me of being an axe murderer, a pimp or a Communist was considerably lessened.

When later in life I went through some troubles, I could always count on listening to a baseball game to make me feel better. It was a combination of happy childhood memories, the orderly predictability of nine innings and 27 outs in most cases, and enough flexibility that it didn't always happen that way, thus keeping it interesting. When Grace was going through her first divorce, and she would come over, there was nothing unaffordable, immoral or challenging about our sitting at my wobbly wooden kitchen table, swigging beers and listening to the '86 Indians take a worse trouncing than even we had taken in our personal lives. And there was always the remarkable Tom Candiotti to remind you that even in the worst of times, there is something to look forward to.

Baseball is a constant down at 19, too. Sitting around the firehouse listening to baseball, out on the concrete apron on a summer evening watching the girls go by, drinking lemonade or occasionally some beer somebody sneaks into the house -- well, there is nothing better than that. That and watching the poor goddamn cadets polishing the engine while we sit there on our webbed folding aluminum lawn chairs, telling them they missed a spot.

Through all the ups and downs of my life, baseball has been a constant. I do not admire the way it has become a money sport, and I do not like the crybabies. But I have a feeling that just as music survived disco, the Church survived Vatican II and fashion survived the '80's, baseball will endure.

It HAS to, for Christ's sake. I am not going to die, happy or otherwise, unless Cleveland wins a Series in my lifetime, and nobody wants a 118-year-old grouch hanging around.

Well, anyway. I gotta go get ready to pick up Jenny. I hope we have fun tonight. Chester is a pal, but he’s not much company. Always bitching, doesn’t care about anything but dinner or whether I brought him something, hogs the covers, so forth. Which pretty much describes my last six girlfriends, too, but at least Chester can’t talk.

Okay, I am going to try to have a positive attitude here. Maybe Jenny will be all right. New season, fresh start.

Of course, I have to be optimistic. I’m an Indians fan.
*****

Chapter Twelve

2005-02-07T09:36:00.000-05:00

Last night we had a couple of standard runs to factories for accidentally tripped alarms, and we also had a small apartment fire with no injuries and only one unit involved, so life is good. I am going home in about an hour to take care of the house, of Chester, the no-good cat, and to get a head start on the landscaping leads for the coming spring. It's not too cold, about 45 degrees F outside, and there's a nice February mix of sun and clouds. Can't complain, wouldn't do any good, as the old saw goes. No reason to, really.

It's kind of odd being home in the middle of the week sometimes. It's like you're out of step with the rest of the world. I am headed home on the freeway at an hour when most people are headed off to work. I like that feeling. It's almost as if I'm playing hooky in a way, even though I just put in a twenty-four hour tour. I have always liked going against the grain, so I suppose in many ways this job is a natural. Firefighters do a lot of things in their lives the opposite way of the rest of the world.

When I get home, Chester will be waiting for me with a sob story of how terribly he's missed me and how cruelly his world has treated him, how he has done nothing but sit by the window and cry throughout the lonely hours. This is mostly bullshit. I know it and he knows it. He's a cat. A big, fat, lazy ginger tomcat who was on life number eight when I pulled him out of the alley behind the firehouse and brought him home with me. Chester's life prior to our acquaintance consisted mostly of scrounging from garbage cans and dumpsters, fighting other male cats, and servicing all the female cats in the neighborhood. That and spraying like a mad bastard. Amazingly enough, that stopped after he was neutered. For some reason, even though I had the vet take a chop at Chester's package and deprived him of his harem, he has not been angry enough with me to spray my house. Gratitude, I guess.

This isn't the story with the other cat, the firehouse cat. We keep him around because he is a good ratter and mouser, because he is friendly, and because he can be good company when he's not in a biting and fighting mood. We took him down to the Animal Protective League and had him neutered too, just because it's a healthier thing for them -- keeps them from wanting to fight and roam. My sister Katie has a bunch of cats, and this is what she says, so we did it. Katie is on a first name basis with the docs down at the APL, and they gave us a two-for-one special on Chester and the firehouse cat.

This cat, however, rather than being grateful that he will spend his days being fed and cared for, developed an attitude. Derrico says he doesn't blame him; if somebody took a whack at our testicles, we'd be in none too shiny and happy a mood either, and I suppose put that way, it makes sense. But the only place in the firehouse that this cat is allowed is on the apparatus floor, where there are hoses and drains. This is because he can spray at a greater radius, at greater volume, and with greater gusto than any animal I have ever seen. This is how he got his name, "Seagrave". A standard Seagrave engine can pump about 500 gallons of water a minute. I would say that Seagrave would give Engine 19 a run for its money. If there was a Cat Piss Olympics, I would bet my house and two vehicles on Seagrave. I have seen him hit moving targets from a good twenty feet away.

We had a Lieutenant who didn't like Seagrave. Lieu would aim a boot at him every chance he got. Seagrave appreciates subtlety and paybacks -- a legacy of his years on the street. So he waited until Lieu was having a conversation with the Batallion Chief after inspection one morning, took aim from across the apparatus floor and doused him across the back of his dress jacket. Lieu jumped a few feet, whirled and dodged. Seagrave wasn't finished. He let Lieu have it right across the shirt front, finishing up with a good blast to the eye. Lieu was jumping and yelling, "That son of a bitch is GONE! OUTTA here! Sully, let's get this bastard!" Seagrave, no stranger to the principle of cause and effect, was suddenly nowhere to be seen, a black and white streak of lightning between the rigs and then nothing. Lieu dove under the ladder trying to grab him and came up with a handful of nothing. The Chief was laughing like hell. I was laughing like hell. Derrico was practically in hysterics. Lieu was as red as 19 and probably a little louder than its siren. Bones was standing in the office doorway, shaking silently with mirth, tears in the corners of his eyes. Cullen came in from the yard, where he had been doing a little work on the flagpole lanyard, sized up the situation and dove into the kitchen lest Lieu see him laughing. A couple of other guys, McCann and Williams, were in the kitchen and immediately called the guys over at 43 to let them in on the hilarity. Good sports reporting requires a color commentator, and we could hear McCann's detailed description: "Yeah...all the way across the goddamn apparatus floor...oh, Christ..Lieu was screamin' like a woman, I tell ya...."

It wasn't long after that we got a new Lieutenant, a guy named Walsh, who's still here now. We like him pretty well, a little better than the old Lieu. We've never had a really bad one in all the years I've been with 19, but let's just say that Walsh is a little more flexible and a little less likely to become flustered at an unexpected apparatus malfunction.

Well. This morning I expect to go home and feed Chester, change his litterbox, do a little laundry, pay some bills and catch up on correspondence. I'm sure there will be a bunch of messages on my machine. There's a girl I was really hoping to take out for Valentine's Day -- since I will be working, it will have to be before or after that. She works second shift at Metro Hospital, so she'll probably understand. I met her in the ER at Metro when I was on a medical run. The EMT's didn't take the run because it was a minor emergency -- some guy was choking on a fish bone, had since dislodged it and was now just being transported for evaluation and a possible psych eval as well -- my work calls for such heroism sometimes -- and she was on the admissions desk. Her name's Jenny -- really pretty girl, smart, good sense of humor. Our patient was obviously going ot pull through, which left us a little time to talk while doing the paperwork. Turns out her brother and my brother Mike worked with the same PAL softball league. We hit it off, at any rate, and it will be nice to have a date with somebody who actually understands the complications of working emergency services for the city. I've been getting a little tired lately of girls who get mad at me because I have to work weekends.

Anyway, I think this morning I will avoid the stop at the Tap House on the way home. As I said, there's something fun about going against the grain, and sitting in my favorite bar on a Wednesday morning drinking beer and watching the rest of the world speed off to work is kind of funny. It's like that Sheryl Crow song about the people drinking across from the car wash. And really, that is all I want to do today is have some fun. But I have bills and house chores, and I am pretty sure I will need to get some serious quality sleep if I am planning a date with Jenny -- I'm sure we'll be out late.

I just wonder what it was that Grace wanted when she stopped by last night. I really want to call her, but I'm afraid to. What can it all mean that she's not married any more? And what is it that she could possibly find so important to talk about after all these years? I'm curious, but, and I hate to admit this, I'm also afraid. A conversation with Grace is always a can of worms -- I have never known a woman who can say more in less time, nor one who could start more trouble,internally and externally, with a few simple declarative sentences. Still, we have known each other many years, and one of the hallmarks of our relationship is that no matter what kind of dealings have gone before, we remain friends always. We have always been there for each other, sometimes in the most unlikely of circumstances, and if Grace needs to talk, then we are going to talk.

I have never forgotten that Grace was there for me when my little brother Paulie died, back when we were kids, and that she understood in a way that none of the adults were able to just what was going on inside me. I know she'd say I owe her nothing for that, but I will always be grateful. And when Grace's brother, Sean, was killed in Viet Nam a year after that, I clumsily tried to return the favor. I don't know if I was a comfort to her, but it seems to me that at times when nothing that can be said makes sense, the greatest comfort anyone can be is to be there for you. Also, when Grace came back home after her divorce form Seanny's father, she leaned on me in ways that neither of us ha forgotten -- I don't think they ever had much of a marriage, and I don't think Grace had ever experienced much happiness in an adult relationship, and, well, we taught each other a lot. During the days after Grace's divorce, we cried together a lot, sometimes for sadness at the bittersweetness of it all, but also sometimes for pure joy. For Grace, the experience of joy is not a simple thing; her joy is transcendent almost in the religious sense. We share a powerful bond, Grace and I. I owe it to her not to leave her waiting to hear from me.

Still, this is going to be difficult, especially after so long a time, and especially knowing that she must be going through more trials, seeing as she made the remark about not being married any more. We shall see, I suppose.

Okay. I am very nearly out of here. I can hear the B-shifters rolling in for their briefing now. I need to make sure that I stop on the way home and get some Pounce treats for Chester and maybe a cold half-rack of beer. And laundry soap. Always laundry soap. I suppose I could pick up some actual food, too, though I am not too fond of cooking for one. Maybe I will grab a couple of steaks for the grill. Grace likes steak....

What am I thinking? Beer for one, steak for one, and Pounce for Chester. That's the list. At least, for now. More later, I suppose. Always more later. I think that's what I want on my headstone. "More later".

Take care and stay safe 'til God wills we meet again, as Uncle Owen would say.

Chapter Eleven

2005-02-01T05:14:00.000-05:00

A lot of people think being a firefighter is an exciting life. Much of this is because when you see a TV show or movie about firefighters, it focuses on the action. Fairly or not, people get the idea that we are constantly racing around, responding to third, fourth and fifth alarm situations, rushing from one exciting conflagration to the next. They see us as heroes, warriors, gladiators in the battle against the Red Devil.

We would love it if this were the case, if we were given this much opportunity to be useful, but unfortunately, it's not. A lot of firehouse life is just like your own life at home only more so, as Yogi Berra might say.

We live together, eat together, sleep under the same roof, all one big happy and occasionally slightly cranky family. Since we work in twenty-four hour shifts, that's a lot of hours logged together. Out of each twenty-four hour shift, our engine company will get an average of between twenty and thirty calls a shift. Of those calls, on a busy night for our house, two or three might be what we call working fires, blazes that require a certain amount of throwing our backs into it. Of the rest, there will be freeway accidents, medical calls and about ten will be false alarms. Most of these are accidentally tripped alarms at businesses and residences.

Not many people these days pull false alarms for the fun of it, because it carries substantial penalties. In what my Uncle Owen remembers as the Hough years, during the riots and civil unrest of the late 60's and early 70's, fase alarms were pulled as a form of civil protest, and the busier companies could get up to thirty a night. The greatest problem with this was that for every batch pulled, at least one was a true alarm, and quite often it was a working fire, a serious one, so each alarm demanded immediate response. Those years saw a lot of arson in Cleveland's Glenville/Hough neighborhood.

This reflected the scene for fire companies in every major U. S. city. Arson was in those days not only a crime against property but considered a form of protest. Large urban areas that had fallen to decay were filled with properties, businesses and apartment buildings owned by slum landlords. Inner city residents were unemployed, angry and restless. There was a growing climate of dissatisfaction with the war in Viet Nam, the poor economy, the worsening conditions of poverty and despair that afflicted big cities like some sluggish cancer. The disenfranchised and the disgruntled adopted arson as a form of anarchic justice. If nobody was going to listen to them, they were going to make themselves heard. "Burn, Baby, Burn" was the urban guerrilla's battle cry during that restive era.

I have listened to Uncle Owen and some of my other uncles and older cousins tell stories of this era. They saw the residents of these neighborhoods as victims too, although their empathy was not always returned. A lot of times firefighters would be lumped in along with the cops as "The Man," the presence of authority. There would be jeers and taunts directed at the firemen on the scene (for in those days there were no female firefighters; "firefighter" wasn't even a term used much back then. These days, in the era of PC jargon, we say, "We are firefighters. A fireman works on a steam engine."). Still, the majority of the people were law-abiding citizens trapped by social and economic circumstance within a climate of anger and fear. Although citizens displayed hostility on occasion, the firefighters knew that they were battling conditions far more dangerous and hopeless than fires in abandoned buildings, and most of them were sympathetic.

One time when I was a kid, listening to the uncles and cousins in our kitchen telling stories of their day's work, I asked Uncle Owen, "If you guys were the good guys, why weren't they glad to see you?"

He answered, "Because we were the ones who showed up." I never forgot that. His answer was completely absent of rancor and sarcasm; it was plain to me that he felt empathy for the people he served. Firefighters are indeed "who shows up". No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the reason, if we are called, we will be there. Unlike bureaucrats and politicians, we are bound to our duties by personal ethic as well as federal law. We leave no cry for help unanswered; we do not even hesitate. The most routine run in the world is still as important as "the big ones". We don't question why or how we were called, nor who called us. We show up. It's what we do. You can bet your life on it, and we understand that quite often that's exactly what's at stake. You call, and we answer. It's one of the reasons I feel good about what I do. My badge is an emblem of dependability, usefulness and responsibility to the community I serve and, by extension, to humankind. I'm very proud of that.

Well. Before I started waxing saintly here, I was telling you about how routine firehouse life really is. And it is that.

Just yesterday, I was out shoveling the snow from the sidewalk in front of the firehouse. It's one of those things we do that make this job a lot more like a lifestyle than a career. If you have a regular job, you get in your car and go to work and somebody who was hired to do so has shoveled the snow. When you get home, you shovel your own snow. That's kind of a capsule description of firehouse life: you shovel your own snow. In the same way, you cook your meals, you wash your vehicles, you shop for groceries and you clean the place regularly. In some ways, I suppose that makes it more like home than home is for some of the guys. The married guys usually get a little help in the housekeeping department. Here we do our own.

I don't mean to make that sound like a pain in the ass, either. It isn't. I actually enjoy some of the chores around here. Shoveling snow is one I pretty much enjoy. It gives me a chance to get outside, which can be a lot more refreshing in mid-January than it sounds. When you are between runs and you've cleaned up after dinner, and you've done all scheduled equipment maintenance, exhausted all possible discussions of the Super Bowl and of baseball off-season trades and news, and there's no good gossip, and you're tired of playing cards and you're not tired enough to turn in, the firehouse can be a pretty dull place to be. Quiet is good, but sometimes in midwinter, the place can actually be too quiet.

So I like to go outside, shovel all the snow from the apron in front of the apparatus bays and do all the sidewalks and paths around the building. We actually have a snowblower that somebody brought in from home and that somebody else fixed and that somebody else broke again, but even if the thing were running perfectly, I wouldn't want to use it. I like the chance to be outside, to say hello to neighborhood people, to think that I might spare the older folks a slip on an icy walk. I like the quiet, steady hard work of shoveling snow under the iron-grey Cleveland sky, using a broad-blade steel shovel to push and scrape, steadily, thoroughly clearing a path.

Snow shoveling, properly done, is an art. It's like I suppose a Zen exercise would be. You are making the path before you be not-snow, accepting that more snow will cover your work and eventually the sun will melt all. There is nothing permanent about snow shoveling. Maybe I've been reading too much about Eastern religions lately, but if there's one principle they seem to grasp, it's that nothing we do is eternal. In this way, snow shoveling has similarities to firefighting. It teaches you acceptance. You shovel snow and an hour later the path is covered again, but you do it anyway, because all that you can do anything about is what is here and now. In the same way, a building that's on fire now needs to be put out now. It may burn to the ground a week, a month, a year from now, but that is not your problem. Firefighting very much teaches you to be here now, as they say.

Well, in the midst of similar meditations yesterday, I was hit in the back of the neck by an iceball. Hard. It wasn't big, and it wasn't hard enough to injure me, but it stung like hell, and it made me pretty mad. I immediately swung around to see if I could spot the marauder. There are a couple of young kids in this neighborhood who are pretty mischievous, and I was trying to spot a rapidly retreating dirty Browns parka or camouflage flak jacket, favorite apparel of a few of the primary suspects. My plan was to chase down the offender and give him a good facewash with a gloveful of snow, not really too terrible but certainly a punishment fitting the crime.

I looked in all directions in the rapidly deepening winter dusk but saw nothing. I took a few tentative steps in the direction of a large oak in the treelawn on the street alongside the firehouse. I heard a giggle. It sounded like a girl -- no, more like a woman. We have a few of what my father calls "characters" in the neighborhood; I was hoping it wasn't Mrs. Duffy from around the corner, who is fine when her daughter can persuade her to take her meds, but also has some disctinctly non-fine days here and there, an occasional one of which requires transport to the psych unit at Metro.

I kept steadily, slowly onward in the direction of the tree until I was nearly up to it, then rushed over to run around behind it.

There was Grace.

Flushed, smiling, with snow in her hair and all over her coat, laughing and giggling like she was about eight. At least, like I remembered her from when we were eight.

I didn't know what to say. I was totally astonished. I stammered a bit. Finally, I managed, "Grace -- what the hell -- what ARE you doing here?"

"Sully, I need to talk to you."

"Just like that? You show up after all these years, whack me with a snowball, and it's 'Hi, Sully old pal; let's have a chat? How's every little thing?' Are you crazy?" I didn't mean to sound like an asshole but I also realized to my horror that I had a running start on the prospect. Too late to take it back; best to shut up now while I was at least somewhat ahead.

Grace shook her head, shook some snow from her hair and laid a finger over her lips as if we really WERE still eight years old and hiding from older neighborhood bullies.

"Not now, Sully. But I need to talk to you. Here's one of my cards," she said, fishing a business card from a knit wool bag, "and there's an email address and phone number written on the back. Use them; don't use the business numbers."

I wasn't sure whether I was irritated, amused or both. I settled on both.

"What's with the Bond girl routine? And what is so important after fifteen years that couldn't wait until you at least tried to see if I thought it was a good idea to talk?"

As if it answered my question perfectly, she said, "I have to pick Seanny up from the bus stop in ten minutes and then go get Kate from after-school. But I want you to call me." She turned to fly off into the night, down the snow side street, away again, always away from me....

I reached out before she could go and grabbed her shoulder. It felt so thin through her cloth coat, like the bones of a bird.

"Grace. What is this about? Why now? Why ME? And I thought you were married. Is everything okay at home?"

"WAS married. There is no 'at home'. But it's all right. Call me. I really have to go."

And she twisted free form my grasp, lightly, quickly, and was off down the snow-silent street just as the streetlight came on, casting its cold glow over the snowdrifts.

Maybe I'm a coward but I didn't chase her. And maybe I'm a fool but I want to call her. If only to see what could be so important to her after fifteen years and two more husbands that she still thinks of me at all.

Chapter Ten

2005-01-23T19:43:00.000-05:00

Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for. I had no sooner written that last sentence than the tones went off and we had a dandy. Triple winner -- a wreck with passenger injuries, a vehicle fire and a fatality.

Engine companies get called to the scene of traffic accidents whether or not there is a fire, because chances are we will get there first, and there is always the possibility of a vehicle fire. Some houses have a Rescue unit with a Hurst tool and other equipment to pry people from wrecks; some have EMS units. We're a fairly small house; we have one engine apparatus and one ladder apparatus. But when there is a wreck nearby, we get the call, and we are usually on the scene at the same time as Rescue and EMS if not before. If none of the vehicles involved are on fire, we usually stay until we are sure that everything is under control per EMS and the police. If there is a fire, of course, that's our job.

The call came in just as I had turned off the laptop and was hitting the rack. We are often called to the scene of medical emergencies -- heart attacks, falls, fights, industrial injuries. This is because there are more firehouses than hospitals, so chances are we can get to the scene first. Most firefighters have some EMT training and all of us have CPR and basic first aid, so we are often called in first to take care of the situation until EMS can arrive with an ambulance. Wrecks are more frequent non-fire calls, though, and they usually involve a lot more than CPR and a little handholding. This one was sure no exception.

It was raining, and the rain was turning to sleet. A car and a minivan had collided on the on-ramp to I-490 at East 55th. Apparently the car cut off the minivan and the minivan driver didn't see it and was unable to slow down in time. The car was totaled. It looked as if a very pissed off minor deity had grabbed it up, wrung it like a washcloth and tossed it to the pavement. The front end of the mini-van was smashed in pretty thoroughly. The impact had sent the minivan fishtailing into the guardrail, where the gas tank eploded. Flames were shooting from the minivan's undercarriage and left rear.

This doesn't happen nearly as often as the movies show it; if you've seen an action movie with a car chase, you might think that every vehicle is built to explode on impact. In truth, since Ford recalled the Pintos in the mid-70's, there have been very few vehicles made that are likely to explode even on very hard impact. What generally happens is that the gas tank is punctured on impact and the accumulated fumes eventually explode as a result of friction from passing vehicles, an attempt to turn the ignition key, sparks from the vehicle's electrical system or improper attempts to pry the wreckage or other accidental sources. However, regardless of the reason or timing, it's always nasty when it happens. Best case is that all passengers have been removed from the involved vehicle and emergency personnel are well out of the way. But of course, if this was a best case, you wouldn't have a massive wreck on the freeway ramp at 2:30 in the morning.

In this case, the goddamn thing went up just as the last passenger was being removed from the minivan by Rescue. We were on the scene just as it happened, which was amazingly good timing considering how bad the rest of the situation was. Dispatch had told us there was no fire, but Dispatch forgot to say "yet".

We were off the truck and had the pumper going immediately, and we had the fire out within a few minutes. The driver of the minivan, a woman who looked to be in her mid-fifties, had been bundled into the Metro ambulance, bleeding from a head wound, but she was sitll conscious. Her passengers, a younger woman and three little kids, were put into the EMS ambulance. The younger woman was ambulatory but her dull, lifeless expression indicated she might be in shock. The kids, who all looked to be under five, were screaming and crying, but it would be hard to tell if they were hurt and how badly until they got them to the ER.

The car was another story. Rescue had the driver on a Gurney and he was covered by a sheet, waiting for transport. He wasn't going anywhere in a hurry, now or ever again.

Probably the thing that bothered me most about this is that as we were standing talking to the cops about what happened, a brightly colored object on the sleet-drenched pavement caught my eye. It was a small stuffed bear with a bright purple ribbon around its neck. And on the ground next to it was a ripped-open twelve pack of Natural Light beer and a couple of empty cans.

"This come from the van?" I asked the younger cop.

"Nah. All his," he said, indicating the body on the Gurney.

"Was there a kid in the car?"

"No. Not tonight, thank God."

"Man."

"Yeah."

No matter how many times you see it, it never loses its impact. At least, it doesn't if you are doing this job for the right reasons. As dead bodies go, this was one of the tidier ones, and he had the courtesy to be nicely covered before we got there, but I don't care how many of them you see -- it's never easy. It's part of the job, and you can't afford to emotionally process every fatality you encounter as it happens. You have a job to do. Grief and its handmaidens, Fear and Anger, don't have seats on any working apparatus. We have an obligation to the survivors and to our brother firefighters, to save lives and minimize damage. But dealing with death will definitely work on you, and sometimes, if you don't fully realize its impact at the time, you will later.

There is, of course, a lot of black humor involved. We find nothing funny about the fact that someone was killed, but we definitely joke about the circumstances in which we find them and find ourselves. What passes for humor among the brothers might not be considered amusing or appropriate to the outside world, but believe me when I tell you, we grieve your loss too. Some of the jokes we tell are just coping mechanisms for enduring the pain of loss we feel too. Our loss is in no way as great as yours, but our loss is compounded by the pain of failure. Whether or not it is right, any fire in which there are fatalities makes us question whether there's something more we could have done, something we neglected, overlooked or failed to consider. We are taught to solve problems as well as save lives, and when we feel we have failed to do so, we blame ourselves.

So our humor is a method of surviving what would otherwise be an unbearable burden. You need us at maximum usefulness, so we need to avoid crippling emotions such as grief, self-doubt and bitterness. One of the ways we do this is by joking. Never at the scene, never within earshot of any of the victims, but things can get pretty raw sometimes back at the house. It's our way, and it may sound odd to say, but it's humor born out of love for the people we serve. An outsider might be shocked at some of the things we consider funny, but it's all a way of "keeping our heads from killing our bodies," as my Uncle Owen used to say. So my remark about the fatality having had the decency to be covered with a sheet is not intended to be disrespectful to the guy who was killed. It's more a way of keeping the living on an even keel.

Anyway, back at the house, there was a little winding down before we all got back in the rack, but the atmosphere wasn't as charged as it would be after, say, a multiple-alarm fire involving a residential block. As wrecks go, it was nasty, but it was pretty standard fare. There were a few mutters about the driver who caused the wreck. Derrico had learned from one of the cops at the scene that the diver had a record of multiple DUI's, something like four in the last three years. "Yeah, well, just think of all the time they'll save in Traffic Court" said Derrico. "The cops ought to like that. The downside is his bartender probably won't be able to buy a boat until next year." Black, bleak humor, but sometimes that's how we are.

But when I turned in, as I lay there in the rack, a single image kept coming back to me. There, face down on the pavement in the sleet, had been that little teddy bear. Somebody's toy. Somebody's daddy. Alcohol removed a lot more than a drunken driver from the road this night. It also took away a big part of some child's life.

I've been drinking a lot lately. Part of it I've been blaming on the Grace thing, part of it is blowing off stress after work. It might be a good time to look at that. On the one hand, I'm not somebody's father or husband or.....

On the other hand, there's a life involved here too. Mine.

I'm too tired to process all this right now. The hell with it, and we'll see what happens in the morning. Unlike that poor guy, I'll have another day to think it all over. Believe it or not, for that I'm truly grateful.

Chapter Nine

2005-01-19T13:51:00.000-05:00

I can't stop thinking about Grace.

I knew when I saw her a few weeks back that it would set off some pretty difficult reactions.

Derrico asked about her just the other day. I of course told him that I didn't know, hadn't heard from her in awhile, had no idea what she was up to.

Why is is that when you shouldn't think about somebody, you can't stop? I know at least half a dozen women who periodically bug the shit out of me about staying in touch. Oh, some of them go at it kiddingly, leaving me phone messages that I'm sure are intended to be light and airy and funny, stuff like, "John, this is Jenny; just checking to see if you're still among the living. Give me a call some time! Catch ya later!" One of my favorites was from a girl who's really more a friend than a girlfriend: "Hey. Sully. If I was a goldfish I 'd be dead by now. Call me." But the underlying message is still the same: "You shithead. You never call. What do I, have to show up naked for you to be glad to see me?"

The honest answer to that, sadly, is, "Pretty much. " It's not that I don't like the women I date, or that I don't care how they feel. But I just don't get seriously involved if I can avoid it. Like most guys, I have been hurt pretty badly a few times, and like most guys, I don't lay all my cards on the table at once. Also, like most guys, I probably say a lot of stuff I shouldn't in order to get laid. Funny how a phrase like "You're amazing," which I considered to be fairly safe and noncommittal, can come back to bite you in the ass months after the fact. I had one of my "one-week stands" come up to me at a bar where Derrico and I were downing beers and watching babes, dump a beer on me and say, "How amazing am I now, asshole?"

Look. It's not like I told her I loved her. It's not like I promised her anything. It's not even like we dated for a long time, or that I left her without goodbye. In fact, she left me. This might have had something to do with the fact that I didn't call her for two weeks after our last round in the sack, but it's not like I did anything evil or mean, like calling her best friend instead.

In fact, most of the trouble I get into with women seems to be directly related to things I don't do. "You don't call me enough, you never want to take me shopping, you didn't remember our one-month anniversary, you never tell me I'm beautiful, you never send me cards..."

My God. I don't keep lists, I don't do anniversaries, and if you want cards with kittens on them, call your Aunt Rose. If I am with you, I think you're beautiful. I don't mind fixing your front porch railing, changing your oil, picking up your kid from preschool in a blinding snowstorm or replacing the batteries in your smoke alarm. But for Christ's sake, don't expect me to dance like Astaire, feed you all the best lines or help you choose new outfits. If you want a guy who'll do all that, I hope you have male pals who are gay, because I'll tell you the truth -- most straight guys who will even think about doing that sort of stuff will only do it for about a week. After that, they're looking to get laid somewhere else.

Sometimes women get the mistaken impression I am a sensitive guy because I love roses. I really don't think so. Roses are real. They have genus and species, specific characteristics, history, growth habits, all sorts of interesting stuff. Some, like the tea roses, are very fussy and take a real expert to grow successfully. Some, like the floribundas, practically grow on their own, but you have to know what type of environment they like: soil acidity, climate and so forth. There are old garden roses, "collector" hybrids and species, and lots of different varieties even within the same group. They're interesting, they can be expensive, and it's necessary to know what you are doing.

In that way, I don't see how being a rose hobbyist is fundamentally different from having an enthusiasm for, say, sports cars or wild birds or horses or antique guns or woodworking. They do involve the care of a living thing, so I suppose you could call that a nurturing thing, but I don't see how my fondness for roses is romantic. But you can't tell women that. You can't tell the guys at the firehouse that either. If you're smart, you won't try.

I suppose the romance connection is obvious; it's the long association with roses as the flower of love. The standard American Beauty long stemmed thornless rose, deep red and in tight-budded perfection is a lovely thing, of course. But I have never thought of it as particularly romantic. McCann, one of the guys on B-shift, calls them "Get Out Of The Doghouse Tokens" and rates his adventures by the numbers -- "that was a six-token job," "that was a genuine twenty-four-token bitch-up", etc . Roses, at least the kind I like, are a lot more interesting than that, and I don't count many red varieties among my favorites.

Well, anyway. Like most things I have thought about this week, thinking about roses brings me right back around to Grace. She used to have quite a garden full of them that she took over when Uncle Eamonn died. Her mother remarried after a few years and eventually moved out of state, so when Grace returned to Cleveland after her divorce, she and her son, Sean, lived in the old house. Grace had always had an enthusiasm for plants and animals, and under her loving care the garden soon was overflowing with new and revivified old life.

I would come by some mornings after my shift and do a little pruning, sneak a new variety into the plot, add some bone meal to the soil. Even though Grace was at work and Seanny was at daycare, Grace's presence was somehow still there in the garden, and I don't think I ever felt as close to her as when I was alone planting roses in her garden, listening to a cardinal's song and the hum of traffic from the freeway nearby and enjoying some music on the little portable radio she always left out on the back porch for me. I didn't have a key and I didn't want a key. Grace was very independent and if the time came for me to have a key, I guess that's how it would have been, but I never pushed her for it. With a girl like Grace, it was always better not to push.

We would sit drinking beer on her sandstone back steps long after Seanny was in bed. We'd listen to the Indians on the radio and smell the amazing perfume of some of the night-blooming white roses, and we wouldn't say much. We'd maybe comment on an occasional play: "My God, is he actually going to pull Candiotti when he's ahead in the count? Christ!" We'd slap a mosquito or two sometimes we'd get a citronella candle going if they were particularly hungry. After the game, we'd turn off the radio, cuddle together on the big wooden porch swing and listen to the gentle patter of the lawn sprinkler as its jets made an arc through the tree leaves overhead. Generally, the thing I liked most about those summer evenings was the sense of deep peace. I don't think I've ever found that kind of peace before or since. There are lots of women who are easy to talk to. Grace was a woman with whom it's easy to be silent.

After awhile, we'd bundle up our empties, toss out the invitable Subway wrappers and maybe a Happy Meal box left from Seanny, and go into the house and up to bed. We'd make passionate, slow love. We never said much then either. We made the usual noises humans make when they are ecstatically happy, accompanied by very few words. We seemed to have in common that the happier we were during sex, the less we had to say during or afterward. I would always tell her I loved her right before we fell asleep, but I can't say that she always answered me, either.

Strange. You'd think that detail would have been important, and yet I can't recall it. Maybe I don't want to remember it. One thing is very certain at times like today, and that's that I wish I didn't remember anything about Grace at all. And yet such a part of my life would be missing if I didn't.

This is too much thinking. I almost wish the tones would go off and we'd get a working fire. Not that I want anyone in harm's way or that I want to see a building burn. But feeling useful right now, feeling needed and good and helpful and that I am fighting on the side of right, would go a long way toward getting my mind off things I have no right to think about.

Wherever Grace is, I hope she is well.

Chapter Eight

2005-01-08T17:48:00.000-05:00

Almost all firemen have side jobs. Generally, we work two twenty-four hour tours in a week’s time. That leaves us with a lot of unoccupied time.

I’ve heard people say, “Oh, that must be wonderful, all that time you have to spend with your families.” Well, I’m not a family man myself, at least not in the married with kids sense. But one of the engine crew at our house, Bones, is married with five kids and his wife damn near left him once out of exasperation. Her complaint? He was never home.

Bones did what a lot of guys do. Since he had a pretty large family to support and since this job allows for large chunks of time to be spent at other pursuits, he had a second job that took up most of his days off. So, he was putting in three ten-hour shifts at a machine shop in addition to working two tours a week here at 19 Engine. Many of the guys have wondered aloud how it is he found time to father five little Boneses. Speculation has circulated at the dinner table that there is Mailman Bones Junior, Cable Installer Bones Junior, Beat Cop Bones Junior, etc. Bones takes this pretty well. He knows we are joking, and if he gets a little hurt, we console him by assuring him that the Bones tribe is far too ugly to be anybody but Bones’ kids.

But most firefighters have second jobs. It was pointed out to us when we were in training that we would never get rich on a fireman’s pay. The rich irony here is that the guy telling us this, a retired battalion chief and fire school instructor, made some smart investments and became one of the wealthiest men in Cleveland. But he was right; though the pay and benefits are very good, you don’t go into this line of work because of the easy money.

But most firefighters, like the BC who made good, are also innovative about making money on the side. I know guys who do everything from tending bar and playing in a band to working as investment brokers, carpenters, substitute teachers and computer programming consultants. One guy over at 42 Truck went to law school while on the job and hung out his shingle last year. His specialty? He works with the city and the DA‘s office, prosecuting arson cases. You might say he’s more than an ambulance chaser; he’s driving the firetruck.

When I first started, I did some work as a stringer for a local community newspaper. My degree from Northwestern got me the job, but I found it hard to sustain interest. Also, they expected that since I was a firefighter, that I had some sort of finger on the pulse of city politics. Well, in a way, I do, but my opinions seldom jibed with those of the conservative paper franchise and I was unwilling to provide them with more than the public-record facts. Journalism is a dirty business, which is part of why I went into firefighting, but that’s a long story I’ll save for later. Let’s just say that if the Plain Dealer building was on fire I would help put it out, but that’s about it.

Anyway, my favorite side work is not writing or anything like it. I have a minor in Plant Biology/Horticulture and I am a rose enthusiast. This is not exactly something I trumpet all over the firehouse. The fact that I know a monocotyledonous plant from a dicotyledonous plant isn’t too bad -- that would probably just produce some grudging admiration or a “so effin’ what?” from the majority. But if I were to sit down over coffee with Bones and Derrico and rhapsodize over the glories of a Madame Hardy damask rose versus these come-lately floribundas, admitting that the David Austin English Roses are, however, a combination of disease resistance and beauty….well….let’s just say that if I ever go off my trolley and try it, I had best be sleeping with one eye open. Horse manure in my locker would probably just be the opening salvo.

But the plant thing has paid off. My brother Pat is a priest (yes, we are practically a “stage Irish” family -- my siblings and I include a priest, a firefighter, a mother of four, a social worker, a cop and a pipefitter) and he was assigned to our old parish, St. Kieran’s, as assistant pastor. St. Kieran’s, being an older parish in the “hood”, was badly in need of re-landscaping. I took the job, learned quite a bit about everything from best prices on topsoil and brick to the finer points of acid-loving plants and soil testing, and built a rose garden on the grounds that even includes a running fountain and a created seating space -- a beautiful place to meditate, right there in the city soot and traffic, tucked away behind a wall I built myself on days off. Pat loves it, the older parishioners love it, and I recently heard that the kids all have their class pictures taken there, so that’s something that makes me feel good.

Doing all this had its own reward, though. I learned a fair bit about landscaping as a business, and for the last few years have managed my own little landscaping company during summer months. I’m never shorthanded, as there are always guys from the firehouse who are willing to come along and help in order to earn a few extra bucks, and we have a lot of fun getting the work done. The only way we advertise is by word of mouth, but we are never at a loss for jobs in spring and summer. And of course, in the Fire Department, everybody knows somebody -- we have bricklayers, materials suppliers, contractors, one guy has a rototiller, another guy has a backhoe, another guy knows a lakefront property owner who will give us all the decorative limestone we care to haul -- it all works together.

Last summer Pat called to say it had been five years -- apparently, time flies whether you are having fun or not -- and ask if we could come out and overhaul the garden. Things had died or become overgrown, retaining walls had given way, mulch had washed out. So, I got a crew together consisting of Bones, Derrico, Cullen-the-Cadet, and a couple of B-shifters and C-shifters from 19 Engine as well, and we spent a sunny Tuesday afternoon spreading redwood bark mulch and gravel, replacing ailing rhododendrons, and rebuilding a rose arbor. I am happy to report that the rose arbor needed to be rebuilt due to the vigorous growth of a Gloire de Dijon climber that I had installed myself when I originally put in the garden. It was a little disappointing that there was nobody with whom I could share this. Grace knows roses, but I hadn't seen Grace in a few years then, and Derrico thinks he knows roses, but Derrico thinks he knows everything. Cullen would be lucky to know which end of a rosebush to plant in the ground, but at least Cullen would admit it.

Well, firemen, as a general rule, consider the consumption of beer to be essential to any well-executed construction project, and this was no exception. We had two coolers going, not of beer and soda but of real beer and "toy beer", popularly called light beer. I think somebody had brought a 12-pack of cold Coke as well, and this got scattered in there, and Pat's housekeeper made us a jug of lemonade that looked like she should have used a dolly to roll it from the kitchen, and we were set. We had a few lawn chairs for breaks and of course somebody had brought cigars.

The only thing missing from the jobsite were pretty girls walking by. You don't get a lot of those in St. Kieran's neighborhood -- even the young and healthy have a rather beaten look that comes of living too long with too little and trying to do too much with nothing. Not an indictment of the neighborhood's people so much as a fact -- it's the near West Side of Cleveland and hope, health and Hollywood good looks aren't found in abundance.

Imagine, then, our surprise when a few hours into our labors, a brand new Passat pulled into the lot just off the alley, between he convent and the rectory. Imagine, if you will, our increased surprise and the addition of delight when from that shiny blue Passat emerged a statuesque, athletic goddess with cropped honey-blonde hair, gorgeous blue eyes and a San Diego tan. Not your average girl, not from around here and definitely not an unwelcome sight.

Good news travels fast, especially across small spaces. Cullen dropped a fence section he was moving, Bones dropped his jaw, and Derrico dropped any pretense of trying to spread mulch evenly. Nobody dropped their drawers, but then, we were only halway through the first case of beer. One of the C-shifters, a guy named Gus, emitted a long, low wolf whistle. Most of the guys on C-shift are rude, coarse, low, vulgar animals who have no gentlemanly respect for the delicate sex. This is not slander; it is a simple statement of fact. And if C-shift were speaking of us, they would return the compliment. But probably in worse language, because that is just the way they are, the dirty dogs.

Anyway.

Gus let out a relatively subdued catcall. The apparition, gorgeous and unruffled, stepped to the trunk of her car to unload a briefcase and some books. Four guys were immediately at her side. "Here. Let me get that for you," said Derrico, and attempted to appropriate the briefcase.

She smiled serenely at him, pulled back the briefcase, scooped up the stack of books in her other arm, smiled, said, "Thanks; I have it," and glided -- not walked, glided -- across the lot to the rectory gate. She was the picture of gorgeous, golden, athletic grace, shining in the summer sun. Statues of Nike have been modeled on lesser women. We were stunned. We were in awe. We were also half smashed.

It was too lovely a moment, too perfect, and of course, some shithead had to ruin it. This always happens. If this story were about any other bunch of guys, it would be either unremarkable or picture-perfect. Not Animal House. Not 19. It's always something with these guys. Always.

Gus led off. "Hey," he called after the goddess' retreating figure, "are those gorgeous legs tired? 'Cause you've been running through my dreams!"

Oh, no. Oh, my God.

Cullen, seeing this as an opportunity to for once not be the lowest on the house totem pole, said, "Gus, Jesus. Watch your mouth, willya?"

The Goddess nodded in our direction as if to acknowledge that chivalry does indeed still live, in the person of Cullen-the-Cadet, and continued across the rectory porch. She was no sooner in the door than a huddle of furious firemen descended on Gus as if he was a small but dangerous brushfire.

"Nice goin', asshole." This from Derrico, who has made his share of bonehead moves where women are concerned and was probably just glad that for once it was not him.

"Do you mind?" I added. "She probably knows Pat, wouldn't you say? And she's here on church business of some sort, so she's probably not the kind of broad you would hang out with anyway."

"Certainly she wouldn't hang out with YOU," added Bones.

The shamefaced Gus, recovering from the scolding, started to bristle.

"Ah, whadda you assholes know? She was givin' me the look anyways. I saw it."

"The look, my ass," I retorted. "The look people get when you pull them out of the smoke, right before they puke all over the EMT, maybe."

"I don't think she was lookin' at anybody, guys." This from Cullen, who is occasionally allowed to speak.

"Whaddya mean? You think she's gay? No way," said Derrico.

"Um, no, I think she might be married. She had a wedding ring, " said Cullen.

Derrico, Bones and I took this as further proof of Gus' utter degeneracy and a reason to further berate him. Not that he said anything we weren't all thinking, but you have to take opportunities when you find them. Especially with C-shifters.

Gus, not about to concede, said, "So what if she's married? A lot of those married broads are players. I bet she's a player. She had that look. And she was lookin' righ at me, boys. Eat your hearts out."

"Fifty bucks," I said, "that even if she's the type, 'if she do, it ain't with you'," I finished, using a favorite firehouse saying.

"You're on," said Gus, cocky and now with a point to prove.

We didn't have long to wait. The vision emerged from the rectory, accompanied by Pat, who called to us from the porch. Now we would see whether there was any flirtatiousness. Firemen are ver good at picking up this sort of thing. We have to be. It's a very important people skill. We have to be good with people to work with the public, right?

"Johnny," called Pat. "Come here. There's someone I'd like you to meet. Come on, guys, you too. Come on over here."

This was unusual. Usually it takes hours to gain an introduction, and it takes a lot of work. Pat was certainly eliminating the middle man.

We crowded around the porch. If we had been wearing hats, we would have taken them off. Kerchiefs mopped sweat and dirt from sun-reddened faces. We wiped garden-soiled hands on our shirttails in anticipation of shaking the slender, soft hand of the golden vision before us. We were nothing if not a troop of angels with only slightly crooked halos.

"I'd like you to meet Sister Jean. She has recently returned from El Salvador and will be the new athletic instructor at St. Kieran's. Don't know if any of you guys have kids in school here, but thought you might like to say hi."

Well. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop, but since there were no pins involved, it's fair to say that the dropping of expectations was nearly audible. It seemed to be a win for gravity, that's for certain. We all shookhands politely, mumbled "Hi, Sister," as we were all taught to do years ago in school, and stepped back, almost as if we were afraid she'd break.

Sister Jean laughed, a sound like the clear pealing of a single chapel bell, and said, "Please, guys. It's Jean. I'm only 'Sister' to my students."

Well, it was fair to say we'd all learned something that day, but I'm sure that's not what she meant.

Later, order being restored and back to our work, we discussed the situation in hushed tones.

"Jeez, Sully, I bet you're glad you didn't say anything to her," said Bones. "You're usually the bigget mouth in the bunch."

"Grace of God, I guess. Hey, at least I didn't think she was married."

Cullen chimed in, "She must be a Dominican sister. They wear a wedding ring to show they're the betrothed of Christ."

"Hey, cadet, how do you know so much?" said Derrico.

"I read a lot," said Cullen.

"Yeah, read this," I said, making the universal gesture. "Let's finish up here; the Tribe's playing the Yankees tonight and I don't want to be dipshittin' around with this at game time."

Gus didn't say anything. But it was a very, very long time before he asked to work landscape with us again.

And probably even longer before he hit on his next nun.

Chapter Seven

2004-12-01T16:50:00.000-05:00

Of all the fires that we handle, I think the ones that bother me the most are the "arson for insurance fraud" type.

Usually you can tell these fires right away. They are generally set on a top floor. Usually it's a floor vacant of tenants. Nobody sees the arsonist and generally the rest of the building can be evacuated. They will be set in a back room, away from the street, in order to avoid attracting attention until they are well underway. They are set on the top floor because it's most likely to do the most damage fastest. Even if we are on the scene as soon as the fire gets going, we are probably going to punch a hole in the roof, and we are definitely going to use a lot of water, which will seep down to all the lower floors. So, you have an open roof and water damage as well as possible collapse of the top floor onto the floors below. Lots of damage, lots of money, lots of room to defraud the insurance company.

The reason these fires make us very unhappy (to call us "unhappy" about this is probably an understatement along the lines of calling the Statue of Liberty "an empty building") is twofold. One, I have seen some very good men hurt very badly all in order for some scumbag slum landlord to collect his insurance money, rebuild, and burn the whole thing again, sometimes as many as three times in five years. A thing like that can make a lifetime firefighter a little cranky.

Of equal significance is the fact that the people living in or adjacent to these properties have nothing. They are usually uninsured, have very little to begin with , and noplace to go once their home has been destroyed. The buildings are generally of such cheap composition and construction that they go up in a flash anyway, leaving virtually nothing behind. And occasionally there is also loss of life. Just because a fire is set on a vacant floor is no guarantee that the people in the floors below will get out safely.

Once a fire is made, there is little way to control it. Depending on the accelerant used, the age and condition of the building, wind conditions, and at what point the alarm is turned in, an arson fire can be one of the most unpredictable forces outside of a natural disaster. There is no controlling it. If we're "lucky" they use kerosene or another "slow" accelerant that will be slow to catch. Kerosene isn't that great either, as it is more difficult to put out than gasoline, but the fact that the fumes are not as flammable makes it a less "hungry" agent. I have seen gasoline fires that incinerated not only the building but the arsonist -- they are that quick, that unpredictable, and that hard to control.

Of course, most arsonists are not Rhodes scholars to begin with. The dumbest are usually the guys who do it themselves. They forget little details -- oxygen feeds fire, gasoline fumes are heavier than air -- and they tend to get carried away. Sometimes literally. More than one building owner turned arsonist has been caught by checking the burn units of the local hospital for admissions. This used to be illegal for confidentiality purposes, but a law enacted some years back, started in New York after a rash of arson/murders but adopted here, makes third degree burns over five percent plus of the body a "mandated report" for the treating ER and physician. The Fire Marshal must be notified.

Even professional torches slip up, particularly if they are not career arsonists. If they are pros, they know what to do and how and when to do it in order to get the biggest bang for the slumlord's insurance buck and, most importantly to them, to avoid getting caught so they can spend all their hard-earned cash on booze, drugs, whores and very ugly clothing, as they seem to believe God intended. However, if the "professional" arsonist is somebody's nephew who was paid fifty bucks to douse the place with lighter fluid, the results can be nearly as bad (and as traceable) as the do-it-yourself school. Certainly there is not usually fifty dollars worth of difference in the quality of the job, and usually it turns out Uncle Scumbag could have saved himself the fifty and gone to jail by himself. With most of these guys, it's not a matter of whether they're caught but when. Some of the slum landlords have enough money to keep it in litigation or make it go away; sometimes the Fire Marshal gets enough right off the bat to get a conviction, particularly if this is not the first time.

Anyway. The reason these fires piss us off is that innocent people are hurt. Sometimes it's the firefighters, sometimes it's the tenants, sometimes it's only the honest policyholders of the paying insurance company. Sometimes, as in what happened on the summer night I'm going to tell you about, it's all three. And occasionally the guilty will fry. That happened too on this muggy July night.

On this particular evening, after Derrico and I unsuccessfully tried to retrieve Mags' diamond claddagh necklace from the floor drain of the garage (the time-honored gum-and-stick routine, by the way, is useless -- chewing gum these days is made of some vinyl-like material that apparently doesn't adhere to much of anything but theater seats), we were discussing the borrowing of fishing equipment. We both like to fish, and since we are particularly partial to bass fishng up around Sandusky and Kelley's Island, we have quite a bit of interchangeable equipment. Usually whoever has the latest thing in lures will share, though personally I prefer the Erie Dearie; always have. But Derrico gets very excited about new technology. If a lure has a scent, a sound, a special reflective paint, anything new or different, he has to try it. He proselytizes his new discoveries with missionary fervor. "Sully," he will say, "you gotta try this new one. Have you seen the new...." He will then launch into a description of the bells, whistles, pheromones, LED displays and so forth that are guaranteed to have bass jumping out of the water and into the boat. "Sammy," I wil say, "I don't want a goddamn video game; I just want to relax and catch fish." But he gets hurt, and it's easier to just say "Thanks", shove the thing into a safe place in the tackle box, and thank him profusely when you get back. Of course, this can be carried into a joke.

One time I had him convinced that I caught ten fish using his brand new "Fishing Systems Inc." lure and a scrap of neon-pink synthetic lace. Where I got the lace is just exactly nobody's business. But where Derrico got the lace -- by buying a pair of drawers at Wal-Mart (the lace had to be identical, you see) was nobody's secret, especially when I snapped a digital photo of him holding up the goods there in the lingerie department (the drawers were huge, about Derrico-size, since he needed enough of the lace, you see) and put it on the wall of the house for all the guys to admire. Amazing what they can do with digital cameras these days -- enlargements, color enhancement....

Anyway. I was just saying to Sammy, "Hey, have you got any...." when the squawk box announced a fire at a nearby intersection. A tenement building with some cheap retail storefronts at the street, this was a building that had burned only about two years prior to this.

Apparently, this was going to be a big one. “Truck goes, engine goes,” went the instructions, and the indication was that we were first due, with a second alarm.

Being first due means that like any good hosts, we will be the last to leave and clean up after ourselves when we go, so we knew this would take awhile. Not that any of us has ever minded. We didn’t become firefighters because of the outrageously high pay and soft work. I have never, in fact, had the displeasure of working with anyone who isn’t 100% a firefighter. Oh, we’ve had a few guys come and go over the years who weren’t heart and soul, but they didn’t really last long enough to become part of the group I’d think of as co-workers. Most of us came into this because we like putting the wet stuff on the red stuff, fighting the really big ones, and because there is no greater satisfaction than saving people’s lives.

Anyway, we rolled up onto the scene and were fairly sure that this was arson. That, of course, would be the Fire Investigator’s call, but just the fact that the blaze seemed to have originated on an apparently empty top floor of the six-story building was suspicious. And of course it was in the back, making access more difficult.

The truckies got up on the roof and started to ventilate. Of all the jobs I really admire in this profession, the truckies are second only to Rescue in my book. No sane person wants to be anywhere near a fire, and especially not inside a burning building, but I’ll tell you right now, I would any day rather be in front of a fire than on top of one. Truckies are the guys the civilian thinks of as “hook and ladder” guys. I’m an engine guy myself, which means that the apparatus to which I’m assigned (that’s “firetruck” to the layman) is a pumper, carrying an engine with a 500-gallon water tank, hoses and equipment. A truckie is one of the guys you see on an apparatus with a ladder. Usually the ladder has a 50-foot reach capacity. Putting the ladder together with the center supports is a feat in itself, and is only the first step toward getting up on the roof of the building or inside of the upper stories.

Anyway, the truckies were up top, cutting a hole in the roof. They do this to allow the superheated gases from the fire to escape, preventing the fiery explosion of the building and everything (and everyone) in it. We were at the street, getting a line in off the hydrant. Had there not been a hydrant, we would have been out of luck, because it takes 250 gallons of water a minute to knock down a fire of any substance, and this one was really going. We could tell that at least half of the sixth floor of the building was involved, and the flames were perilously close to making the leap across the narrow alley separating “our” building from adjacent buildings.

The night was fairly warm, and the middle floors of the building were occupied apartments which had apparently been successfully evacuated. There were people everywhere in the street, some crying and some cheering us and some just standing there gazing up as if at the stars. Everything these people own was probably in this building and the wonder was not that they were milling around excitedly so much as that so few of them seemed upset. I guess the shock and the initial excitement were keeping everyone from thinking this through any too well, though a few people were crying and yelling.

39 Engine and 42 Truck came rolling onto the scene, second due, as well as the Battalion Chief and his driver. Our orders came to get in there and knock back the flames to the interior as well as to search for anyone trapped inside. We used an open door and took the stairs, fanning out into the smoke-filled floors, crawling along corridors in search of any straggling survivors or unconscious victims. It was, of course, black as hell in there, and with our masks and helmets on it was hard to hear clearly, but you develop sort of a sixth sense about finding life.

Cullen-the-cadet was the can man, carrying a portable extinguisher, as we went in with our Halligans and axes, breaking doors and taking out any obstructions. When we reached the fourth floor, we heard a noise behind a door. It was hard to tell but it was apparently a utility or supply closet. Derrico tried the handle -- locked. He used the axe to splinter the door but it was a pretty heavy wood door and so we used the Halligan to pry it off. The noise grew louder; it was whimpering. We shouted assurances: “You’re all right; hold on, just another second; we got you….”

Then, a portion of the ceiling started to collapse directly overhead. Avoiding it would have meant backing away from the door. It all sounds complex yet fairly obvious, but I am here to tell you that when something like this happens, you had better have good reactions, because there isn’t time to think. I reacted by jumping back, but not before I grabbed the tail of Derrico’s turnout coat to pull him back as well. Cullen was off to one side, and got knocked on his ass. A flaming ceiling beam had fallen between me and Derrico, forcing me to let go of Sammy’s coat and knocking me to the floor as well. Derrico, the hardheaded bastard, had actually grabbed onto the door handle and would not let go. The whimpering from within the closet had turned to a series of wails and moans.

“Sammy -- Sam! You hurt?” I never use his first name unless we are at a wedding or christening or unless there is an extreme emergency, and this sure as hell wasn’t the inside of a church. I could tell that he had taken a chunk of the beam to his shoulder. It lay between us, burning hotly. Cullen knocked down the flames to the beam but plaster and debris continued to fall. Derrico doggedly continued prying at the closet door, which finally gave with a cracking sound.

There, on the other side of the door, was a guy probably about our age -- hard to tell with all the smoke and the shit flying through the air. And there in his hand -- I will never forget this -- was a plastic gas can with a melted nozzle.

“You no-good son of a bitch!” I shouted. Sammy grabbed the guy and yanked him back away from the smoldering beam just in time to avoid another shower of burning ceiling debris. We had to get out of there fast. As if in tune with my thoughts, we could hear the Battallion Chief shouting on the bullhorn from the street: “All companies evacuate…All companies evacuate…”

“Cullen! GO!” I yelled.

“Sully, I got to ….” I couldn’t really hear, with the masks and such, and besides, I didn’t give a shit. Cullen is only a kid, a cadet, just started with the Department last year. “Get the hell out of here, “ I shouted, and gave him a shove in the direction of the stair.

Then I turned to check Derrico, be sure he wasn’t badly injured -- he couldn’t have sustained a hit like that and not been hurt but when you’re in the middle of a job you don’t notice right away -- adrenaline and all that. “Sammy, you good to walk?”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on, Sully, help me get this piece of shit on his feet.”

I’m not proud of my next impulse. I swung on the guy, a full roundhouse.

Derrico, with the arm that got hit, grabbed me. “Goddammit, Sully, NO. Let’s just get the hell out.”

It was dumb of me. If I had connected and knocked the bastard out, we would still have had to drag him out of there. As much as my own personal anger might have tempted me to leave him in the building he had set on fire, human life is human life, and our job is to preserve it. Who lives and who dies is up to God, and our job is to make His job a little easier by saving lives whenever we can.

Worse yet, I forced Derrico to waste precious time and energy on preventing me from hitting the guy. Another of my less than proud moments.

Anyway, we dragged the guy down the stairs (we weren’t too careful about being gentle with him, I’m afraid), and got him out to the pavement. Of all the people in that building, he was apparently the only one who had not escaped. We bundled him into a waiting ambulance. I would be willing to bet that he had to be treated for more contusions than burns; I can guarantee you that being escorted down three narrow, steep flights of stairs by two angry firefighters is not the way you want to leave any building, whether it’s on fire or not.

The building, of course, was a total loss, but we finally got it out without the surrounding properties becoming involved. And it turns out the arsonist was not just a client, he was the owner, to paraphrase the TV commercial, so it was very easy for the fire investigators to find and interview him -- he was in Metro Hospital under police guard, making their job easier if no less delightful.

EMS was waiting at the scene to assess and treat any of us that were injured and transport us to Metro if necessary. Derrico was sitting on the back of the meat wagon with a pretty young EMS standing over him insisting he go for evaluation. “Sweetheart,” he was laughing, “I got heartburn that hurts worse than this. Forget it.”

“Sam,” I said to him. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’d you stop me? You know.”

“Because, my friend, your dumb ass is worth ten of his, and you are the one who would have regretted it.”

“Oh, Sweetheart. Can I get that in writing?” I made a kissing noise.

The pretty EMT, accustomed to these sorts of hijinks among firemen, started packing up her supplies. “Wouldn’t want to interrupt a romantic moment,” she said.

“Oh, come on, baby -- we swing both ways!” I said.

“Sully, you asshole, watch your language in front of this blushing young flower,” said Derrico.

“Can it, shitheads,” said the EMT as she snapped her kit shut, to scattered applause from the curb.

And so ended another night for 19th Engine. It left me with a lot of unanswered questions about things -- why Derrico would lay his life on the line for that piece of shit arsonist, why I didn’t connect with said piece of shit‘s jaw, what the EMT’s name is….

Probably just as well I don’t know the answers to any of them. I like surprises.

to be continued....

Chapter Six

2004-11-16T20:40:00.000-05:00

Talking about Kevin always makes me think about how life is too short to waste it on mistakes, you know?

There are a lot of mistakes a person can make over the course of a lifetime that don't really seem to make too much of a difference when you look at them individually. But when you get to be in your forties, you start looking back at the little chunks of time, parts and pieces of your life, and you realize that it all adds up.

That's not particularly profound, but I'm telling you, when you're in your twenties and even thirties and still immortal, none of this really falls into place.

It's when you're around 45 and realize that you are at the halfway mark (and that's only if you're lucky; how many people live to be 90 or over) that you start looking back and saying, "Wow. That person, that experience, that period of time represents a substantial chunk of my life."

For instance, you may have known a person since you were in your mid-twenties. That's not too remarkable, right? Lots of us have old college pals or first-job cronies with whom we still stay in touch.

But think about it. Say you've known someone twenty years. That's almost half your life, and it's at least twenty percent of your overall span. And as I was saying, that's if you're phenomenally lucky and live to be a hundred.

So I was thinking about some of the people I've known, things I've done, and about percentages. I've been on this job for twenty years. There's nearly fifty percent of the ticket. Forty-five percent, something like that. I was always shit at math. Anyway.

I've known Derrico for 18 years. That's about forty percent of my life and an overall percent of about fifteen- eighteen, provided I live damn near forever like my Ma's side does.

Is this a guy I want to say is involved in fifteen percent of my life span?

Well, to look at him he's just your average shithead fireman, just like me, just like Costello, just like Cullen-the-Cadet will grow up to be if he doesn't get his dumb ass killed. Derrico is a loudmouth and a little of a braggart and he's really got the macho Italian guy thing going on, but he is also a man who would die for his kids, would risk his life for a friend (and, maybe more tellingly, for a guy he doesn't even like -- more about that later) and who would rather keep his mouth shut and be thought a fool than look smart at someone else's expense. He also knows more about ice hockey than anyone I know (he has a brother and two cousins who play in the AHL, his brother for Rochester and the cousins right here in Cleveland), can remember people's names for years after meeting them once, and owns everything Neil Young ever recorded. His wife is godmother to one of my sister's kids and I am godfather to his oldest son.

Derrico is a lifetime investment, well worth my time, and I don't begrudge a minute of it. We have history together, you know? I feel better just knowing there IS a Sam Derrico. Because he knows where my bodies are buried and I know which of his skeletons hang in what particular closets and we both know too much, and it's a safe arrangement. You can be at ease with a friend like Derrico. He's the type who is not just good at comforting you when you are down, but is excellent at helping you plot revenge. When the revolution comes, as Kevin often half-jokingly said it would, I want Sam Derrico on my side.

Other relationships may not represent such a great investment of your time. I spent an estimated three percent of my time so far on this planet involved with the lovely, talented and enigmatic Margaret Brentham.

I say lovely because she was. Margaret -- I liked to call her Maggie, which she hated, because her artsy friends knew her as Margo -- was (and still is, for all I know) second cello with the Cleveland Orchestra. She drove a little red convertible Miata, lived in a beautiful old house in Cleveland Heights, and had the longest legs of any woman I have ever dated. (Grace would be indignant at this -- Grace of the "yard of leg" -- but Margaret must have been close to six feet tall, and I swear three-fourths of it was leg. I'm a leg man. Probably because my Ma was a dancer and dance instructor before she met Dad and had to settle down. Her stories of her youth stay with me still.)

Mags -- she hated that moniker even worse -- was indeed musically talented. I don't know if she was gifted or not -- I heard her play a few times, but quite frankly I wouldn't know good cello from bad unless it was off-key or something, and that's one thing you could say for Margaret -- she never missed a note. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music as a very young woman and showed exceptional promise, and received an offer from the Cleveland Orchestra alnost immediately after graduation. I had no idea where or what the hell the New England Conservatory was before I met her, but I learned that it is a very prestigious school indeed. As a musician, Margaret couldn't expect to make much money, but she was very well taken care of. Her parents were old Connecticut money, her father was an investment banker who had done pretty well for himself in addition to having been born into a fair chunk of money, and Margaret, an only child, lived on a trust fund that pretty much allowed her to do nothing but play cello and travel with the Orchestra. She lived where she wanted and how she wanted and really didn't need anything. Particularly, it would seem, she didn't need a scrubby, dirt-poor fireman hanging around, however much fun it might be while it lasted.. She always made it pretty clear that she had chosen me, and if or when it was Game Over time, that would be her call. Still, she was so cheerful and charming about it that you never really held it against her. She wasn't mean or spiteful about it, just...reserved. And since I didn't exactly have anything better to do than sleep with a gorgeous heiress who claimed to find me adorable....well, you know how it is. Maybe. I actually didn't know how it was myself even as it was going on. It was actually a pretty strange relationship. And about half of one per cent of my life.

You don't meet women like that hanging around the firehouse, obviously, and I met Maggie at a benefit the Department was giving. We had a $500 a plate dinner the spring after September 11, to benefit the families of firefighters who were killed. It was held at the Four Seasons downtown, and there were a few speakers, New York City firemen who had survived the 9/11 aftermath, and there was a string quartet playing during dinner. The quartet was pretty much unnoticed; all focus was on the New York firemen. Most of the people at the dinner were the sort you could expect to be at a $500 a throw dinner, but there were a few of us there to present the check to the speaker and say a few words on behalf of the Department. I had kept my nose clean so far that year, and I was one of the guys chosen. I really had no goddamn use for either a bunch of swells at a dinner or the creamed chicken and green beans that they always serve at these things, but I was glad to be able to hear the brothers from New York. It was very hard to keep from crying listening to these guys talk, and I am glad I was there. As for the bullshit speeches by the Mayor, though, and all the goddamn fancy h'ors d'eouvres and the chamber music -- well, the Indians were playing an exhibition game against Boston plus it was getting toward hockey playoff time and...well, anyway, I wasn't in much of a mood to be standing there making speeches and peeing out my eyes, not with three games and an exhibition ballgame on TV at home. But it was for a good cause, so I said what the hell and ate my Chicken A L'Orange.

To pass the time, I watched people. The string quartet was interesting to me because the only live music I usually hear is either rock and roll or Irish traditional. I like music of any sort, though, and was fascinated by how easy the musicians made it look.

Particularly interesting, of course, was Margaret. As I said, I don't know much about music, but I'd venture to say that one subject in which I have a lively, sustained and empirical interest is women. Margaret was beautiful, and under the bright light, with her hair falling like golden cornsilk over her black velvet blouse and her lovely tapered fingers coaxing rich, sweet sounds from the cello, and ...well, the words of an old Irish folk song came back to me:

"Her eyes shone like the diamonds
You'd think she was queen of the land
And her hair hung over her shoulder
Tied up with a black velvet band..."

I was very taken with her. And of course, I worked that shy, diamond-in-the-rough firefighting lad mystique for all it was worth, and wangled an introduction after the dinner.

I'm gonna spare you the details; suffice it to say it was a wild, sweetly romantic and tempestuous affair. I alternated between the heights of elation, unable to believe that such a beautiful and ethereal creaturee loved me, and the absolute depths of gloom -- I had no idea where the hell the Slough of Despond is, but by God, Mags old girl dragged me through it. She was an absolute dream in bed. I don't know what it is with those rich Protestant girls, and I beg the pardon of any reading this, particularly if you are interested in dating a fireman named John Sullivan, but she could perform the most incredibly debauched, obscene, deliciously shocking acts and act as if she were just baking cookies or doing a watercolor painting or.... Many times I would say, at Mags' mouth or fingers or incredibly ready sex in positions or places I had never thought to expect them: "Oh my GOD, you're not gonna...." I don't think in the months we were together that I ever actually finished that sentence. I didn't, but she did, and those actions spoke far louder than words, and maybe how well I will tell you later.

Anyway. She was a dream in bed but a nightmare out of it. She was very turned on by the "rough, tough macho fireman from a poor Irish background" thing, but in a way that hurt me. It was like I was playing a role for her, you know? Part of this was my fault. I never told her about my journalism degree from Northwestern, mainly because I felt that it would somehow shatter her image of me. Isn't that stupid? One of the greatest, in fact, the few, accomplishments I have to my name, and I hid it from her. I still don't understand that entirely. Also, I never told her about the rose garden I designed and maintain over at my brother Pat's rectory. I know she would have liked it, but I was afraid it would clash with her image of me. Maybe she would have found it romantic, you know? But i was stupid and insecure and besides, it never got that far. Things were just not destined to hold together.

The problem was that Mags was, I don't know, detached. She was unfailingly pleasant and cordial and seldom disagreed with me; had a gentle sense of humor and a dazzling smile and was great company, easy on the eyes and the spirit as well. But Mags never....well, she never engaged. She was nice and polite and pleasant, and she could make love like a wild woman, but she was never passionate. It's not that she couldn't be passionate in bed, but she had no native passion. I would get all worked up, in bed or out of it, and try to pull her into the spirit of the moment, and it was like she was a spectator. Amused, appreciative, at times even delighted, but never once involved.

Well, the way we broke up was so stupid that I dont want to tell you, but I've got this far and it's a Sunday afternoon and things are quiet, so I don't even have an excuse to stop.

I am a baseball nut. I was born during an Indians game. Not there at the game, but my dad was watching TV in the hospital lounge and Early Wynn was spitching one of his last games and....well, Ma's still pissed, but never mind. I ate, slept and breathed baseball as a kid. Still do. My favorite teams are the Indians, the Red Sox and, in the National League, the Diamondbacks and the Cardinals. But I do not like any team from New York. I don't even like the Giants, though they've been in San Francisco forever, because I haven't forgiven them for the '54 Series. I love Willie Mays, but...anyway, poor, sad, goddamn Vic Wertz... Okay, okay. Don't get me started on baseball. But if they're from New York, I hate 'em.

So, Mags and I were lying in her huge, antique four-poster early one Saturday morning, and I mentioned that it would be a good day to go down to the Jake and see an Indians game. She looked at me with that pretty smile and said, "Oh, thanks no, Johnny; I never watch any team excepting the Mets," and laid her pretty blonde head back down on the pillow and fell sound asleep.

I don't know why, but this bugged me. A shrink or other witch doctor would probably say that this was a sign of deeper underlying problems and that this was only a precipitating incident. Yeah, yeah. It was bullshit was what it was, and I wasn't having any more of it.

I didn't get many Saturdays off, and of course I had gone to a lot of trouble to trade schedules so I could be with Mags, and one of the things I thought I could treat her to, one of the few affordable things, one of the few things I knew, and could maybe even share with her and make interesting to her, was a day at Jacobs Field, watching the Indians play the White Sox.

The whole thing kept echoing in my mind...."Johnny...she called me Johnny....I hate that...'thanks no'...who the hell talks that way, I ask you...'excepting the Mets'..." A very shrill, snotty, whiny voice was mocking Mags' words in my head. I wasn't sure if it was my own or hers. I was just sure I hated it.

I have left a couple women in my life. Grace...well, Grace and I have left each other but somebody always comes back. There is something about Grace and me that is never quite finished. But other women? Oh, brother. I am not really proud of this, but I'm just not that great at sticking around. It's always something. Either the woman wants to get married and issues an ultimatum, or they are fooling around with someone else, or they want me to be "serious", or....listen, I hate this topic.

Anyway, none of that is any excuse for the various irresponsible ways I have chosen of ending relationships. And most of the women I have left, I have HAD to sneak out. They had tempers. Some had weapons. They had big, mean, loud families. They had ways, means and every method of keeping a guy prisoner.

I knew Mags wasn't like that. She was always so....nice, you know? Too nice.

I have been in a lot of fires where I felt trapped and knew that if I didn't keep my head I was going to die. I have thought my way out of fire situations where following my own gut instinct would have killed me. But I don't have any of this kind of sense at all when it comes to women. I panic.

This morning, I panicked. I took a scrap of paper and a pen from near the telephone, and scrawled a note.

"Mags: [I knew she would hate that]

I have gone to the Indians game and I am not coming back.

I wish you well.

Love always, John Sullivan.

p.s. you could keep the necklace."

I folded the paper, took the orange juice out of the fridge, and stuck the note under the half-gallon carton on the kitchen counter. (I knew not to leave it on the wood table; that would make her even madder.) Then I went out to my truck, jumped in (but shut the door quietly -- I felt like such a snake) and left.

When I got home, there was a message on my machine that they had two guys call off second shift at the house that night and were looking for fill-ins. I called and said I would be down right after the game. I went to the Jake by myself and watched the Tribe lose to Chicago 6-3. I couldn't even have any beer because I was headed to work. Then I drove in to the house.

I had been sitting in the break room dissecting the game with Derrico when Cullen-the-cadet came in and said, "Sully, there's somebody here to see you."

"Who the hell....Guy or woman?"

"A woman."

Suspicion dawned uneasily (and correctly) in my guilty soul.

"What does she look like?"

"Um, she's beautiful, kinda tall, with long blonde hair and green eyes..."

"Listen, I don't need the Forum Mag version. Cullen. Do me a favor. I'm not here. Go tell her...."

Too late. There in the doorway of the break room stood Mags.

"Johnny!" she said, a little too brightly. One look told me she had been crying. A lot. I grabbed her by the elbow, gently, and steered her out to the garage.

We stood by the hook and ladder rig, and I tried to talk to her:

"Ah, now, come on, Maggie....er, Margo...Margaret....we don't want to remember it this way, do we? There's no reason to be bitter, is there? It's me -- John. You know me. I wouldn't ever want to hurt you. It just couldn't go on like....hey, don't cry....oh, come on, Honey...I will always be your friend...."

Well. You never know with women. Apparently, I sure as hell didn't know with this one.

Ms. Glacial Cool, the Ice Queen of Northeastern Ohio, went into full-fledged meltdown mode before my eyes. Those chiseled high cheekbones flushed a lovely dusty rose, her green eyes narrowed like a cat's sighting prey, and she spat at me, "You son of a BITCH!"

Really. Remarkable. I didn't know she had it in her. In that split second of surreal, unreasoning wonder that often precedes the brutal impact of reality, I was perversely proud of her.

"Honey, I...."

"Don't you 'honey' me, you fucking PRICK!"

I had never heard her use such words outside of very pleasurable situations, and never in that order. Certainly not with such passion. I was quite bewildered.

The next thing she did was far more painful to me than anything she said. She reached around her neck and grabbed the little gold and diamond Claddagh necklace I had given her to celebrate our first month together. It was a stupid thing of me, set me back a week's pay, and I always did feel like she wore it just to please me, like it was a case of "Look what Paddy got at the dime store -- how quaint." Anyway, she ripped the necklace from her neck, without even bothering to unfasten the clasp, which must have hurt -- a red mark immediately showed -- and tossed it at me. It skittered across the apparatus floor and dangled from a metal drain grating.

I stood transfixed, unable to speak or move, and could only watch her stomp down the concrete apron and jump into her little red Miata. She screeched away from the house in a cloud of exhaust -- and proceeded the wrong way down the one way street running behind the firehouse. She flew into a U-turn just in time to attract the attention of Hanrahan and Gage, the zone cops who had the patrol in our block, who went flying after her with sirens and lights going. They pulled her over about half a block down the street.

I looked up to see Derrico in the garage doorway.

"Jesus, Sully."

"Yeah."

"Should we go help her out?"

"Ah, the hell with her. Those two numbnuts will get a load of her and let her off with a warning. Besides, she'll say she knows me and they owe me one for the bookie thing."

"Yeah. Well -- oh, shit!"

We both looked down just in time to see the claddagh necklace swing tantalizingly for a moment and drop into the floor drain.

"Shit, John, I'm sorry. Hey, maybe she'll be back. She's gotta come back, right?"

"Christ, I hope not. Hey, have you got any....."

Well, what Derrico may have had will have to remain a mystery for now. For one, the callbox went off just then, and ....well, we were in for a hell of a night, which I'll tell you about next time. It was one of our worst blazes in my twenty years with the Department. Way too much to tell here.

But I have to quit now anyway. Derrico needs another hand for poker. Which might seem like a waste of time to you, but as we've just been over, there are wastes of time and then there are investments. Mags -- well, she was on the debit side of the ledger. Derrico, he's an investment.

Chapter Five

2004-11-12T06:19:00.000-05:00

There's not a lot I can tell you about my cousin Kevin that you haven't probably already read in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He died in a fire about three years ago. The paper said that he was married, the father of three, a graduate of Cuyahoga Community College. It said that he was helping rescue some kids from a burning house, and that he was a hero, and that he will be very much missed by his brothers at the firehouse, his wife and family, and his large extended family, which included two sisters, two brothers, his mother, several nieces and nephews and a number of cousins who are also firefighters. It said that he was the son of Owen Kilbane, a retired firefighter. It mentioned that he was a member of the Pipe and Drum Corps and also that he was an amateur ham radio operator. They didn't miss too much. (If you know the Plain Drooler, this in itself is an unusual thing.)

But I want to tell you the things about Kevin that the Plain Dealer may have missed. It's early in the morning, we just got back in from a job a lot like the one that took Kevin, and none of us are hurt. The two cadets, Cullen and Marshall, are coughing a little, but that is because the dumb shits went in without masks, just exactly as they were told not to, which is the sole thing you can always count on a cadet to do, is the one thing you tell him or her not to do.

Anyway, none of us are hurt, I'm feeling grateful and still pretty wired from the fire, and I'm still trying to get this whole Grace thing out of my mind, so I figured I'd focus on something a little sobering.

Kevin was my cousin through my mother's brother, my Uncle Owen. Ma's side of the family is the lighter, blue eyed and freckled Irish. My dad's side is what they call Black Irish, which means that they have dark hair and dark or blue eyes. People say that's because the Spanish invaded the western coast of Ireland. I don't know if that's true but it might also account for the fact that every Black Irish person I know has a hot temper and a taste for spicy food. Well, maybe not every one. At least I do. Anyway, this is about Kev and not me, so I'll try to stick to my last here.

Kevin was tall, with thick dark blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles. He looked like the old Arrow shirt ads, my folks used to say. Girls adored Kevin on sight, the lucky bastard, because he was that perfect blend of handsome and innocent that chicks always go for. He had a little boy grin and a big, deep laugh. It would have been easy to envy him if he didn't have such a natural, self-deprecating way about him. As my mother used to say, Kevin's biggest attraction was that nobody had ever told him he was handsome, or if they did, he hadn't believed them.

Kevin was three years older than I am and I used to follow him around a fair bit when we were kids. He knew how to play bagpipes from an early age. Uncle Owen taught him, and he took lessons at the West Side Irish American Club too, and he was a natural, very good at it. At least, as good as anyone can ever make bagpipes sound, which isn't too good according to many people, although I've always liked the sound. When we were teenagers, he took a lot of flak from our other cousins. Everyone knew that if you wanted to get laid, you learned to play the guitar, and of course there were lots of jokes directed at Kevin. It was a pretty rich vein and we mined it well, so that by the time we were in the last years of high school, Kevin's piping was kept under wraps, like a secret vice.

One morning before school, Ma had sent me over with a dress pattern that she had borrowed from Aunt Mamie, Kevin's mother, and I caught Kevin out in the back yard practicing. He was playing an air I recognized from St. Patrick's Day parties and from the old 78 rpm records Dad and the uncles liked to listen to. The tune was called "The Minstrel Boy", and Kevin was doing it fair justice.

I entered the yard by the garden gate off the alley. I nodded to Kevin, who kept on playing. I'm glad I didn't say anything smart that morning. It must have been, as the old ones say, the grace of God, because it was not like me to let such an opportunity pass without a wiseass remark of some sort. We viewed it as practically an obligation in our family, a familial duty to keep each other humble, particularly the boys. But there was something about the sun on Aunt Mamie's scarlet roses in the garden that morning, and the wistful sadness of the air, and Kevin's earnest concentration....

See, this is why I hope to Christ nobody in the firehouse ever gets ahold of my laptop. If they were to read this, I would never hear the end of it. I would be accused of everything from being gay to thinking I'm William Butler Yeats, and since I don't see either as a shameful option, I would be forced to defend myself, and...well, these guys can be real shitheads when they smell blood. Firemen gossip like crones at a wake, and they love to play practical jokes, and if they know they are getting under your skin, they are more than delighted to take what started as a small, accidental joke and turn it into a running gag that goes on for years, being handed down in firehouse lore. "Remember the time we caught Sully writing that girly-girl novel, and we...." Yeah, yeah. So I keep this under pretty tight wraps here. If anyone asks, I tell 'em I'm writing love letters to my married girlfriend. I don't have a married girlfriend, but these guys are always quite ready to believe the wrong thing, especially if it involves banging some broad who's off-limits, and so I'm fairly safe for now.

Anyway, Kevin was a good piper, and he also wanted to follow my Uncle Owen into firefighting. It came almost as second nature to him. Some guys have to go off and "find themselves", have to go to college and work a desk job and maybe go in the Army or work as unemployed artists or whatever the hell it is they think they're going to do, and then one day it hits them that there's a greater purpose and they go into The Job, either firefighting or police work, twin heads of the Irish Catholic Career Hydra. The other option in this town is to be a pipefitter or ironworker. You're Irish, you're male, you're a cop, a firefighter or a journeyman pipefitter or ironworker. None of this bullshit about being a stockbroker or an English teacher or any of that other shit they tried pushing you into in college, if you were lucky enough to go to college and sit on your ass for four years and think about things, getting pussy beaucoup and free beer and prepared meals and reading all night and taking little multiple choice quizzes...... No, sir. You are going to work hard and if it was good enough for your father/brother/Uncle So-and-So....

Anyway. Some guys come into it the roundabout way, like I did after getting an English degree from Northwestern University and driving Ma and Dad nuts for three years while I lived at home and bummed through a succession of jobs. Other guys, like Kevin, are born to it. They seem to know almost from childhood that they want to go into The Job, and they do so with a preternatural concentration.

Kevin took the Civil Service test and got on as a probie straight out of high school. Back in those days, the mid-seventies, you could do that. It's very unusual today. First off, most people want to go to college. Almost nobody starts work straight out of high school these days. Secondly, the Job wants you to have some training through the community college, either emergency medical technician, criminal justice, or both. Now you can even do a special safety technology course that's tailored for firefighting.

In those days, though, you didn't have to do that. Suit up, show up, pass the Civil Service test and report for work. Kevin was unusual in that he wanted to do more, to learn more. He didn't just want to be a firefighter, he wanted to be the best firefighter possible. He enrolled in night school and did a course in emegency medicine. He could have been an EMT, which in those days paid better, but he wanted to fight fires. He wanted to be on the front lines. It was the way he lived his life.

The fire that took Kevin was pretty ordinary. I say that because when you've been on this job for a lot of years, you see a lot, and although there is nothing ordinary about a burning building to most sane people, when you have been doing what we do for awhile, you learn to recognize that it's always dangerous but it's not often exciting. Yeah, there is a rush about going into a burning building -- the old saw goes, firemen are nuts because we run into a building that any sane person would run out of -- but there are fires and then there are fires. As with any job, there are defining moments and triumphs and narrow escapes and brilliant moments, and then there is the old same shit, different day ennui that haunts most of our day to day gigs.

Whether you are a firefighter or a computer programmer or a housewife packing school lunches, some days it seems so much the same that you couldn't really say what day it was when this or that happened; they all run together. This was that kind of a day except for one thing: we lost Kevin. It just goes to prove that we never know, any of us, what a seemingly routine day can have in store. There are no guarantees in this life except that one day, something is going to kill you. It may be as benign as old age or as dramatic as a gunshot, but one day, you are gonna go. In our line of work, you'd think we'd bear this in mind, but you can get used to anything if you deal with it often enough. Get too comfortable and it cankill you, whether you're a firefighter inside a building whose roof's about to collapse or a CPA speeding along the freeway at 85 mph. Mindfulness is an important thing. I'm more aware of this as I get older.

There are a very few, up in their comfortable offices in City Hall, who will say that Kevin was not mindful on that day. They, the self-crowned efficiency experts, are generally regarded with contempt. Those who knew Kevin at all know what he was, what he stood for, and that he was the kind of firefighter you would always want on a job with you. He didn't take stupid chances, he wasn't a fool who thought he was bulletproof, and he didn't forget for a minute the reason we do our job: fires take lives.

It was a house fire, in the early morning hours, over on the east side on Kinsman Road. There must have been fifteen people, most of them kids, living in the old two-story clapboard Colonial. Most of them were gathered on the lawn, a large woman huddled with three tiny kids, a crying baby slung over one of her ample hips; a shirtless teenage boy, a couple of young girls, an old woman wrapped in a blanket, and various school-age kids, shivering in the predawn cold and damp (it was a rainy early March morning, ugly and windy and the streets were snot-slick with fresh sleet). Two lines had already gone in; the fire had been contained to an area in back of the house but was now spreading to the second floor. The family had been using a kerosene heater that one of the kids had tipped over, and the place had gone up fairly quickly. We had thought everyone was outside, but the woman had started screaming after an initial head count that someone named Raphael was on the second floor. Raphael, it turned out, was a four-year-old boy, and he had gone back inside to save his dog.

I'm not going to make this any longer than it has to be. You don't want to read it, and more importantly, I'm not sure I can tell it. The roof gave in, in a shower of sparks and debris, while Kevin was in there trying to find Raphael. When we finally got in, through all the black smoke and heat and spray from the hoses, and cut through the wall of the back bedroom, we found them.

Kevin had thrown his body over Raphael, who had thrown his body over the dog. All three were dead of smoke inhalation. The coroner says they didn't last long, but then the coroner wasn't trapped inside a burning house. All I know is that Kevin was a hero. Rescue was on the scene almost as it was happening, but there just wasn't time. It all happens so quickly in that situation.

Kevin's funeral was on a Monday. Ma and Dad sat in the front of St. Kieran's with Uncle Owen and Aunt Mamie. My brother Pat, the only priest in our family, said the funeral Mass.

It was raining like hell that day, and I don't remember everything Pat said, and I had to get up and say a few words, and Jeannette, Kevin's widow, said a few words before having to be helped back to her seat beside Uncle Owen. Kevin's kids were all in one pew, with my sister Theresa looking after them. Sean and Jimmy were seven and five, old enough to know what was going on, but Katie, the baby, who is named for my mother, was in Theresa's arms, smiling at all of us. There might be something more heartbreaking than that toothless little smile on that merciless March morning, but I hope I never see it.

The pipers, playing "Amazing Grace" as the coffin was borne from the church, had a notable absence. The clearest note among them was never to be heard again.

The cemetery was a pretty difficult scene, and there never seems to be good weather when someone is buried. I don't know why it works out that way, and maybe it's better, but all I know is that I have never been to a cemetery on a day tat was sunny and seventy. I'm sure there are such funerals -- I mean, they have funerals in California, right? or maybe they just scatter ashes off a cliff into the ocean; I don't know -- but I have never been to one.

We all repaired to the Flat Iron after the funeral breakfast, at least, the brothers from the firehouse and Uncle Owen. The wives and kids had gone to Jeannette's afterward. We all got pretty drunk that afternoon and evening, at least, the ones who didn't have to be at the house. That is another thing about our job. Fires don't take a break, and somebody always has to go back to the house. I made it home somehow, and next day I had to report for a shift, and we all made it through the next few weeks without too much ado. St. Patrick's Day was in there somewhere, and a bunch of us made it to the parade, and it was pretty tough seeing the Pipes and Drums go by without Kevin.

But I think the toughest thing, or at least the toughest thing so far, was cleaning out Kevin's locker at the house. His pipes were in there, and that was pretty awful, and there was of course his civvies and his shoes, and a couple of library books, and a tiny bottle of Irish Mist with the seal still on that Uncle Owen had brought back from Shannon's duty free shop when they all went Over the year before. There was an old black wooden Rosary and a bunch of issues of Mother Jones (Kevin always was a reader and used to get teased about being a wild-eyed radical). There were pictures of Jeannette and the kids taped to the inside, and an Indians sticker, and of course there were comments scrawled all over it in magic marker -- you aren't loved unless there are droll obscenities on your locker. But I think the thing that got me most was that there, at the bottom, was a small toy metal firetruck I recognized from when we were kids. It was a Tonka truck, one of the miniature kind, and it was chipped and banged up and one of the rails was broken off. But here Kevin had kept that with him all these years. A memento? An inspiration? A talisman?

You just never know.

Chapter Four

2004-11-11T21:30:00.000-05:00

Well, we're back from the grocery store. Derrico had to go along and supervise. He always does, the big dumb Dago. You'd think he was Chef Boyardee.

Not that he can't cook. And not that he limits his specialties to Italian food, either. It's not what you'd expect, you know -- a fireman in charge of the kitchen, a Neapolitan Italian, you'd think we'd have Chianti and white tablecloths and huge pots of pasta and all be singing "O Sole Mio". Real "Lady and the Tramp" stuff.

Unh-uh. Derrico's latest thing is Thai food. Last week, the crazy bastard had us driving all up and down St. Clair Avenue looking for -- get this -- lemon grass. Lemon grass, he says. The Thai sine qua non of Derrico's Thai clay-baked chicken. Here we are trolling up and down St. Clair near Hamilton Avenue, in Chinatown, stopping the rig at first one Asian grocery and then the next, people stopping ont he sidewalk to peer into the shop windows.

Which brings me to a point.

Of course, the assholes who have no idea what they are talking about will always have plenty to say.

"Look at those firemen wasting the taxpayers' money," they whine. "Out grocery shopping and using the city's equipment to do it! Tch! Disgraceful! They even leave the engine running! Wasteful! Awful!"

Okay. Excuse me. Hold the goddamn phone here, just for a minute.

If I am in the middle of my shift and it's my turn to shop for the house, and we get a call on the callbox that your house is on fire, would you rather I had taken my little shitbox 1994 Subaru? Would you? Or would you rather I can dump the grocery chore (because yes, it is a chore for me, just like it is for you, and firemen gotta eat, just like you do) -- would you rather I dump the grocery basket, run out in the lot where the guys are keeping the engine running, jump on the truck and speed over to your house? Or would you rather I brought the Subaru?

Yeah. I thought so. Try to remember that next time you see a rig parked outside the Stop-n-Shop, will you?

Anyway, I was on the subject of Grace and women, and maybe that's two subjects.

As Grace and I grew a little older, I started to think maybe we would end up together. We liked each other, got along well enough, and when the crowd got together for parties in people's basements, football games, etc., Grace and I always seemed to wind up paired off. It was very natural. People started saying, "Grace 'n' John," like the names belonged together somehow.

Uncle Eamonn called to me from the front porch of his house as I was going by on my bike one summer Saturday morning.

"Johnny. Johnny Sullivan. Come here," he intoned.

Uncle Eamonn (not really my uncle; in our neighborhood all the parents were Uncle and Aunt) was not someone to whom you said no, you thought you'd come back later. There was only one proper answer to Uncle Eamonn, and that was "Yes, sir."

First of all, Uncle Eamonn was powerfully built, a fast runner, and his temper was legendary. Twenty-five years of work as a pipefitter had kept him in pretty good trim, and he had boxed semi-pro as a young man. He had a pretty bad temper when he drank, which was more or less all the time. You never saw Uncle Eamonn legless, disgracefully drunk, but you never saw him sober, either. The only one I knew who wasn't afraid of his temper was Grace, but then, it can be fairly said Grace probably would have slapped the Devil himself for having a smart mouth, so that was pretty much a given.

Wanting to avoid any sort of confrontation with Uncle Eamonn, and also wanting to please Grace, I parked the bike alongside the brick porch and walked into the kitchen of the house.

"Will you have a drink, Johnny?" asked Uncle Eamonn. "A beer? What'll you have?"

"Oh, I'm too young to drink yet. Sir." I was very nervous. I was no stranger to drinking, in fact had tied one on the night before with my older brother Dan's friends, but I was not about to let on.

Uncle Eamonn walked to the cupboard, took out a glass, and poured a generous dollop of Bushmill's into it. He indicated I should drink it. The very smell under my nose made my eyes water, and I only pretended to sip at it.

"You've been keeping company with my daughter, Johnny," said Uncle Eamonn. It was not a question but a statement.

"Yes, sir."

"Have the two of you been....what is your intention, Johnny? Is my girl...."

I had no idea what he was getting at -- well, no, I had every idea what he was getting at -- and I was scared shitless.

"My Grace," he continued, "my girl is the apple of my eye, my heart's darling, ma bhoirnin, my child...She is INVIOLATE!" he finished with a shout, and pounded his fist on the table. A saucer fell from a shelf and shattered in the sink.

I nearly pissed myself.

"She is inviolate and will remain so, Johnny Sullivan. Or I will break your neck. Never doubt that I would, lad." He said this last very sadly, as with the heavy heart of someone who must break bad news, however difficult.

"I...I....." Not only was the subject terrifying to me, but if Uncle Eamonn only knew that it was the dearest desire of my heart to accomplish exactly that for which he would break my neck, I had no doubt he would do so. Sadly and tenderly and with no other recourse, but, as my Uncle Owen would say, as sure as shit stinks. I have doubted and pondered many mysteries, such as Transubstantiation, Schroedinger's cat and the infield fly rule, but I harbored not one scintilla of doubt that in this case Uncle Eamonn was a man of his word. He would snap my neck like a matchstick if I so much as....

A noise on the stair, and Grace came into the kitchen, cheeks flaming pink, eyes blazing.

"DA! What the hell kind of nonsense is...Johnny Sullivan! Have you been drinking? In the middle of the morning????"

I daresay we looked about as stupid as it is possible to look. It's a good thing there were two of us; I doubt one man could have looked sufficiently stupid when Grace was on her mettle. To make a long and dull story short, she threw me out of the house and made Uncle Eamonn go out and weed the garden before her Ma got back from work. As I have said, there has never been another Grace.

Ah, Grace. We graduated high school, and I went off to Northwestern University and she stayed at home to go to John Carroll. I saw her at Christmastime, and hadn't the sense to realize that young Grace with her slender build and pale skin, her budding breasts and funny, froggy little voice, her impossibly unruly auburn hair and her huge hazel eyes that were so sad and merry by turns, her ten-dollar words and her banshee visions (she always subscribed to some sort of alternate spirituality, which she never would explain to me), was worth ten of any of the cool, Farrah Fawcett-tressed sorority types that I never seemed to get far with. Oh, I got laid, and lots of it, but they kept a well-bred distance, and always there was something about Grace that saw through to your soul.

Maybe I was afraid to be so close to her. She knew what I was, and what I was about. We went our separate ways, and I heard she moved away somewhere down South and married, a real fancy pants type, a physicist or some high-tech type, and the bastard beat her (Uncle Eamonn had long since died, more's the pity since he would have killed anyone who laid a hand on his Grace), and she had a boy, and left the no-good husband and moved back here with the child. I saw her briefly then, right after the divorce, but it wasn't right.

We were sitting watching the Indians game on television after she had got the little one to bed, and we were sharing a beer, and she looked right at me and said, "Go on, Johnny Sullivan; you're bored to pieces, I can see it in your eyes."

"What do you mean?" I asked, genuinely puzzled.

"Go," she said. It wasn't melodramatic, but it was a definite command.

"But why....Grace....I thought...."

"You thought wrong. Oh,there's beer, and baseball, and conversation, and after awhile we'll go up to bed, and then you'll have me, but it will never be enough. You don't want me, you want The Life."

At the time, I was a probie, just got on with the house I work out of today, and we were all a wild bunch, but no worse than the rest, I suppose.

"What do you mean, I want 'The Life'?"

"Oh, you do," she went on, "though you may not even know it yourself yet. Go on, then," she said, and handed me my jacket.

"Grace, what the hell are you...."

But she wouldn't explain, wouldn't say another word, just ushered me to the door as if this was something we had agreed upon, as if it were all for the best and an inarguable fact of life. The Natural Progression of Things.

I was hurt beyond words, but for some reason, deep inside I knew what she said made sense. I was in no way ready to settle down, and I would have only broken her heart, and somehow she knew that. But her behavior was like nothing I have ever encountered in any woman before or since. She seemed to be recklessly breaking a thing for the sake of it being broken. Women don't usually do that. They build things. It's usually us, the men, who break them. But not always.

I didn't know then that it was herself she feared. I think I understand that now. She always made talk about other girls too, as if she were the jealous type, but a fellow who could see beyond that could see that she was really afraid of her own inability to love. I was not a fellow who could see beyond my nose at the time, and I have had plenty of time since to regret that.

I heard a year later that she had got married and was expecting a baby. I was on my third post-Grace girlfriend by then, and just scoffed. I ran into her in the grocery store and she was radiantly, startlingly pregnant, and made conversation with me as warmly and casually as if we had parted just an hour before. I lost track of her after that, though down through the years, I thought of her often. And the night I heard she had a little girl, I went out and bought a Cecile Brunner shrub rose and planted it in my garden and got very, very drunk. But I didn't see her again until....

Last week, a bunch of the guys and I were having lunch down in the Flat Iron Cafe in the Flats. (This is another thing. Firemen eat lunch together in public places, and when they do, they take the firetruck. And why do they take the firetruck? Come on...come on....see? You're catching on!)

Well, we had a window table, and I saw a car pull into one of the spaces under the bridge, and a woman got out -- no, leaped out. She strode through the thin November sun, bright red wool cape swirling around her in the wind, her dark hair glowing burnished auburn, an unmistakable authority in her long stride....

It was Grace. As she walked into the bar, thirty years passed my eyes, and I saw The Girl. She made no overt move of recognition, just flashed us all that dazzling smile she's so good at throwing out when she wants to keep her cover. I saw a bunch of rings on her hands, but it was impossible to tell if one was a wedding ring. Derrico made some smart remark about "Red Riding Hood," and I wanted to deck him, but I didn't want to tell him anything. My heart ached watching her -- she was having lunch with some fellow who must have been her brother or a friend -- it wasn't her husband and if I know Grace, if the husband's still around it wasn't a lover -- Grace always did play it straight.

And God help me, I hope I see her again, because there is a very wicked, ugly side of me that would like to change that....

I think next time I will talk to you about my cousin Kevin - the whole Grace subject seems to provoke an allergic reaction in me....it's hard when you know right from wrong and know that you'd go with wrong in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented. Cognitive dissonance and all that great shit. My whole life is about being one of the Good Guys, and I think I need to remind myself of that right now. So, next time I will tell you about Kevin.

Chapter Three

2004-11-11T20:37:00.000-05:00

I guess I can talk about girls. Women. Dames, broads, babes, vessels of life, flowers of creation, yeah, yeah. How about royal pains in the ass? Can we say that?

Where to start? Well, I can't go on long, because it's my night to go to the store. Anyway.

The beginning. I'll start at the beginning. Grace was my first. Grace was not just a girl, she is my idea of woman. She formed me. I know that sounds corny, but there it is. Before I knew girls, I knew Grace. She was The One Who.

Gracie and I knew each other in grade school, back at old St. Kieran's. She was the only girl I ever knew who could make the nuns as mad as the baddest guy in the school. She was smart, and when she wanted to, I guess she did all right, but sometimes it must have seemed to those Sisters of Saint Joseph nuns that Grace was their special penance, sent from a God who thought that their lives, their devotion, their chastity and their material goods were not enough. He, being Divine Trickster, wanted to fuck with their heads as well.

Gracie liked to do stuff like set off firecrackers in the toilet stalls, write graffiti on the blackboards during recess. But those were minor deviltries. She once set up a proof that Jesus could not possibly have been the Son of God, and used the Catholic Bible to do it. She got sent to Father Kelly, and then had to go home for a week. She also cut off just one of her footlong braids and came to school that way. Her specialties also included playground fighting, smuggling Uncle Eamonn's Black Watch cigars to school and teaching us to smoke behind the school boiler house, and making up the dirtiest limericks I have ever heard before or since. Grace used awful language for a girl. For anyone, for that matter. Ma said that it would bar her entry to Heaven one day. Sister Mary Colman nailed it better; she said that Grace had a mouth on her that made the saints cry and could cut through a four-hour steel door. I have seen fires that burn through four-hour doors, and I think Grace's mouth would have given them a good run. For many reasons.

Yet Grace was one of the gentlest females I have ever known, then or now. She would beat the bejesus out of you on the playground, win all the marbles and keep 'em, go nose to nose with a sandlot umpire as good as any big-leaguer I have seen, but somehow she had a knack for knowing when there was real trouble in your life. She would always mysteriously appear when you were alone and in a bad way, offering a shoulder, an ear. She never said a word, just let you cry and promised not to tell. She was there for me when my younger brother, Paul, was dying. Never said a word, just let me sob it out on her clean white blouse and gave me a piece of licorice from her pocket after. "Yer all right, Johnny Sullivan, yer fine," she'd say in that funny little hoarse voice of hers, "God just gave you a little much to handle here." She clumsily patted my back and was off down the drive on her bike before I could say anything.

I remember the day when I saw Grace as someone more than Gracie of the skinny legs and swift right cross and oddly olive green eyes, Gracie of the dirty vocabulary and soft heart and kind, capable hands, hands always engaged in throwing a ball or picking a locker's lock or shooting a ringer marble or patting one of the many stray dogs that populated our neighborhood. (Gracie loved animals. Uncle Eamonn would not have a dog, so Grace used to buy dog biscuits and keep them in her jacket pocket for the neighborhood strays. She usually had a mangy, scrawny cat or two hanging around her, too.)

Anyway, I remember when Gracie made that transition from a girl to The Girl. There was nothing too definite about it, but it was memorable. We were in high school, and there was a dance at St. Kieran's for the CYO, and I remember the band was covering a Raspberries tune, "Go All The Way," and I asked Grace to dance, and it was really weird. Suddenly she went from this scruffy, skinny girl I had known all my life to an attractive young woman. It was just something about her movements. I don't know how to describe it. The other girls were out there jumping around, shaking it pretty good, but there was something about the way Grace moved -- she looked -- I don't know -- dangerous. Like she could do a guy some damage. Not in a mean or crazy way, she just -- she didn't look like anyone I ever saw. I didn't know it, standing there in the sweat-scented gym of St. Kieran's, but she looked like no one I have ever seen again. There has never been another. And I did not know, that chilly November night, when she grabbed both my hands behind the gym, that it would never happen quite this way again.

"Kiss me, Johnny Sullivan," she said, "kiss me like you mean it."

I awkwardly put my mouth over hers and attempted a kiss. I wasn't entirely sure about where tongues should go and so forth. Grace showed me. I felt like I was immersed in liquid fire, and yet I felt like laughing. It was absurd, and it was wonderful. Grace's breath smelt of Dentyne and a faint tinge of Irish whisky, probably filched from Uncle Eamonn's supply, and under the sodium light, her eyes were emerald and liquid and....

"JOHN SULLIVAN AND GRACE ANN O'MALLEY!"

It was Father Kelly. He was in a self-righteous lather, and he had probably had a little whisky himself, and we realized that we could at least outrun him if we didn't outrank him, and we jumped the fence behind the gym into some bushes and ran down a gully and onto the Norfolk and Western tracks. We walked the tracks home, as we lived only a few streets apart.

"I'll walk you to your door," I said.

"You'll play hell," she said. "D'you want my father to break your goddamn neck? Go home, Johnny Sullivan, and try not to find any girls between here and there." And with a harsh laugh, she ran off into the dimly lit brick street.

I was a little hurt, but still bedazzled, and I wandered home half-drunk from the night air and the kiss and the insane realization that this was a girl I could never let go.....

Oh, for God's sake. Wouldn't you KNOW that that shithead Derrico is down there roaring like he's giving birth? I'll tell you the rest a little later, I promise. It's important I keep this going. You see, I saw Grace yesterday....

Chapter One

2004-11-05T01:34:00.000-05:00

Well, anyway. I thought I'd transcribe some stuff here between jobs. One of the guys thinks I ought to write a book. "Yeah," I told him. "A book about what? My love life? Two chapters long and mostly blank." He thought that was pretty funny. Bastard. He thinks everything's funny as long as it's not on him.

I suppose this is the part where I tell you about who I am and what I do. My name is John Sullivan. I'm a firefighter. There. Is that enough? I suppose not. I really ought to give you a little more background, maybe the standard opening paragraphs about being a kid in Cleveland, about the family, about my hopes, dreams, what drove me to become a firefighter.

Nah. You don't want to hear that. So what I will tell you about is what happened last December on Buckeye Road.

We were putting out a warehouse fire. Since the Buckeye neighborhood went downhill, what you have is a lot of empty warehouses, factories and storage facilities on the outskirts of a residential area. It used to be a pretty profitable business district, and the residential area was filled with people who worked in these buildings or in the steel mills down in the Flats. Now it's pretty much abandoned. Nobody lives here who doesn't have to. You have elderly homeowners, out-of-work tenants, Section 8 tenants and people who somehow get by without jobs or welfare, mostly running numbers or other petty racketeering, though there are a few drug dealers. Something for everybody. The neighborhood used to be mostly Polish, but now it's a few older Polish, mostly poor people, white and black, and a few Asians. Asians are the new black in this neighborhood.

Anyway. We get the call to go to this old metal stamping plant off Buckeye over by 55th. We get there, it's about 2 a.m. on a nasty, chilly, raw night, the kind only Cleveland can produce in December. There's a standpipe for the pump hookup but no way to tell if it's patent; that is, if it's clear. There's a hydrant on the street, too, but obviously the standpipe, being closer to the building, would make this easier. We're in no hurry -- there hasn't been anyone inside this building for ten years -- at least not anyone who's supposed to be.

We're not supposed to go inside an abandoned building, particularly factories or warehouses, because they can collapse in an instant, killing an entire crew. It's not like an apartment building where you have to go crawling around making sure there are no kids hiding in closets, elderly people passed out, so forth. So we assume we're not going in. We are going to hook up, get a couple nozzles inside, break open the roof so there's no implosion, get the bastard under control, see what we've got, maybe then go in if there's still a hot spot. This is not urgent work, but we have to do it, and if we're lucky, this standpipe is clear and it won't take us long to get this under control, take up and get out of there.

So we have Cullen, one of the cadets, jump off the truck -- cadets are probationary firefighters, and we usually graciously assign them the shit detail -- we say it's so they'll learn, which is partly true, but also because everyone has to pay their dues and so the pain in the ass stuff falls to the last hired. It's also least hazardous, so there are tradeoffs. The cadet grabs a wrench, goes over to check out the standpipe, and shouts, "Chief! There's somebody in the building!"

Jesus Christ. This is not good news, because we can tell by the way this is burning that it's probably arson and probably burning pretty hot and that it is probably not the ideal place to be, either for anyone inside or for us. It is also an older building, mostly lathe and plaster, wood joists and beams with a brick front, and it is going to go quickly.

Anyway -- Well, goddammit, do you believe that? There goes the callbox. I gotta go. I'll finish this when we get back. Hope this isn't a long one, because I haven't eaten yet. More later.

Chapter Two

2004-11-04T21:36:00.000-05:00

All right. Where was I? Kinda hard to keep up with this with everything that goes on around here.

Oh, yeah. The stamping plant off Buckeye Road.

Well, Cullen-the-cadet is shouting that there's someone inside. We are trying like hell to get a line going in. Two of us go over to help whoever may be trapped inside. Derrico, who is my height but a lot heavier, grabs a halligan and takes out the window. You can hear screaming coming from within. It's not loud screaming, more like sobbing. Cullen and Derrico go in. I am right behind Derrico.

I couldn't believe what we were seeing. There in the smoke and dirt, trapped under a metal storage rack, are a man, a woman and a baby.

The guy is huddled over the woman to protect her. The woman has wrapped her body around the baby. The baby is whimpering more than crying. They are wrapped in blankets, and their clothing is dirty and torn. It's hard to tell if it's sooty from smoke or if they're just filthy. Anyway, things are happening too fast to take in all the details, and it's dark, and the only light is coming from the fire, which is closing in fast. The two of us manage to push the metal rack off the people, and it totters to the concrete floor with a crash. Derrico helps the man to his feet. I grab the woman, help her to her feet, and Cullen takes the baby. It's a young baby, maybe a year. My sister Katie has a one-year old, which is how I know.

We herd the people out of the building. Meanwhile the guys on the truck have hit paydirt -- the standpipe is clear and it is a Siamese standpipe, which means if the engine has enough pressure we can get two lines going in at once. This may go faster than we thought. We get the lines in, turn on the water and we are putting out the fire pretty well. A small section of the roof caves in a shower of sparks, and steam comes up through the opening. It actually looks worse than it is because the cold air intensifies the steam as the water hits the fire.

We get blankets off the truck for the little family shivering here on the concrete, and we put in a call to the EMS.

If we hadn't been able to get them out on the first try, we would have had to call Rescue. Not all houses have a rescue unit. The rescue guys are the prestige crew. These are the guys who get called to the bad ones, and it's a high-profile job. Generally their work involves cutting people out of impossible places and piecing them back together until they can be transported to a hospital. Nobody wants to need Rescue, but I have yet to hear of anyone who wasn't glad to see them. Firefighters are always the good guys (well, almost always -- we ghave been to a few scenes where an ongoing domestic dispute made us the bad guys until the police arrived and sorted things out), and Rescue is the good guy elite.

I am trying to get information from the people. This is really a job which will be started once an ambulance arrives to transport the victims to the ER over at Metro, but in the meantime I figure it might help them get over their fear a little. They are not obviously injured, maybe a little scared, but it''s also important to determine whether anyone might be in shock.

"You're gonna be okay," I say to the man. "We have a unit on the way to take you to the hospital. We want to make sure you're both okay and that the baby's fine." The man is bundling the blanket more securely around the woman's shoulders. The baby is whimpering and coughing a little. "Anyway," I say, "what were you doing in there? Do you live around here?"

"In there," says the man, pointing to the building. The man is of medium build, a little stooped, kind of dirty brown hair. It is impossible to tell under the streetlights what color his eyes are.

"In there," I repeat. "You lived in there."

"Uh-huh," says the man. "It was all we could find."

The woman, a little, tiny thing with thin shoulders and huge eyes, is clutching the baby tightly to herself. She looks as if she could cry at any minute. She is trying to articulate a thought but her words are coming in short bursts and she is nearly impossible to understand.

"I got...they...you won't....them if...TELL them...oh my God oh my God oh my oh...oh...Mi Dios, Mi Dios...."
I'm worried she might be verging on hysterical shock.

"Ma'am. If you'd like to sit down, we can go over to the truck."

"NO!" She's pretty definite about this, and I don't want to upset her more. I try a different tack.

"Ma'am, it's no good for the baby being out in this cold. Let's just take a walk over toward the truck and you can get him out of the wind. Is it a he?"

"Yes. This is Javier," she says, presenting him a little awwardly. She pronounces it "Havi-yay". I thought they looked Hispanic but in this light everyone looks pale green or lavender anyway.

The baby is still sniffling a little bit but settling down. I stoop a little, smile at him, and say, "Hi, guy."

Javier manages a crooked, bewildered little smile and begins to whimper again.

"C'mon," I say, "let's get him to the truck."

So we walk back over toward the rig, and Derrico wanders over and we get the woman up into the cab with the baby on her lap and another blanket around them. The guy remains on the ground and we are talking.

"Anyway. How the hell did you guys happen to be in there on a night like this? It's gotta be no warmer than the mid-twenties out here. What were you doing in there?"

"We live there," the man repeats.

"Why? What happened? Nowhere to go? You in some kind of trouble?"

"I'm out of work. I lost my job last year when the mill closed. Estella don't work. We had Javier last year and there was nobody to care for him. Me, I could stay home with him but Estella can't work. She got...problems."

I'm not sure I want to know what kind of problems, because this sounds like a Neverending Story, and there are a lot of them in this part of town, and I must confess, my own selfish interest is to get these people to a hospital and get the hell out of this weather. I am begining to wonder just what in the Christ is holding up EMS when they arrive on the scene. Here comes the cavalry. It's all good.

But I still feel oddly responsible for this strange little family group. Living in a goddamned abandoned factory in the middle of December, of all things. These people have seen rougher times than the worst ones I have lived through, and they probably see them daily. The worst rough night of my life is their daily existence. Maybe worse. My rough nights are mostly my fault, and I can quit having them whenever I want. (My ex-girl says I can't quit, but we won't get started about her.) Anyway. These people just live this way. Period. And then some asshole sets their only shelter on fire for fun.

So I ask the guy, as the woman and baby are bundled into the rescue unit: "You looking for work?" I have no idea why the hell I am asking him this, or what to tell him if he says yes.

"Yes," he says. Of course.

"Listen," I say. "My sister works for Child Services. Maybe she can put you in touch with some people who can get you a place to live. You can't...."

"Sully, for Christ's sake would you quit playing Mother Teresa over there and get on the truck?" It's Derrico. He's hungry, he's cranky and it's his night to cook. Probably not a good idea to piss off the cook.

I keep my sister's card in my coat. We run across people in bad situations -- it's kind of what we do. So I grab a card and press it into the guy's hand. "Here. Call here," I say. Roz' number stands out in clear black type, along with a bunch of Child Services numbers.

"Thanks, man," says the guy. He extends his hand. "Manny."

"Sully," I say. "Nice to..."

"Sully for the sweet love of Jesus willya COME ON," I hear from the truck.

I wave, leave the family in the care of Rescue and hop onto the truck for the ride back to the house.

That night after supper, I am lying on my rack and it occurs to me that the people I have met are like characters in a play. I start thinking about them. Estella and Manny and Javier. I suppose Manny is short for Manuel. Manuel is Spanish for Emmanuel, isn't it? And Estella, that means star. And Javier is also spelled Xavier, which means "Savior". Emmanuel, Star and Savior, in an old building on a cold December night. Nah, why do I always think sappy stuff like this? There absolutely aren't three wise men or a virgin in our entire goddamn company, that's for sure.

But anyway. The story struck me as funny, like funny-peculiar. Thought you might be interested. Also, I have a feeling I will see these people again some day. Why, I have no idea. I just hope it's under better circumstances. It also makes me wonder what the hell is going on that a man and his wife are living in an abandoned factory with a little baby and there are people on reality television making millions for acting like complete jerks.

Me, I usually act like a jerk for free. But more about that later. I gotta turn out the light; it's Saturday early morning and the weekend revelers are toning it down, incubating today's hangovers, their arson and carelessly tossed cigarettes and tipped kerosene heaters all projects for later on tonight. Shitheads. We always have customers, ya know?

More later, be good, and if you can't be good, for Christ's sake come back and tell me about it. I'll be here.