And besides, on shifts at least, Mike was still pulling his weight. He pumped himself full of nicotine and caffeine and kept busy — making beds, fixing meals, washing the rig. When the alarm sounded, the adrenaline kicked in. Break a window, cut a hole in a roof, climb a ladder, take a door. As anyone who’s seen combat will tell you, you can pretty much keep going when the shit hits the fan. It was the empty, off-duty hours that were killing him. Even the simplest tasks seemed monumental. He started to toast a bagel one day, then watched with no particular interest as black ribbons of smoke emanated from the toaster. It was Tig — firefighter Jimmy Francesco — who unplugged the toaster and fished the cremated bagel out. All the while Mike just watched, not even sure if he’d really been hungry in the first place. When a firefighter in the engine company mentioned that he was going in the hospital for stomach surgery, Mike found himself daydreaming about the man’s anesthesia. Right now, he’d gladly trade a gut full of staples for a few hours of blankness.
When the insomnia first hit, Mike fought it by driving his car up to his former house — a semi-attached stucco in Woodlawn across from the cemetery. He parked across the street and imagined Gina inside sleeping, wrapped up in one of his old FDNY T-shirts. Except she wasn’t — not one night anyway. She never came home. Then his car got stolen — he’d parked it too far from the firehouse doors. (The guys on duty got first dibs on the “safe” spots.) That ended his evening excursions.
“If my wife kicked me out, I’d go home and beat the crap out of her.” Marital advice from Chuck of all people, the senior man in Ladder 123. Twenty-two years in the same firehouse and he still insisted on driving the rig all the way over to Arthur Avenue to buy groceries from the Italians. “I don’t buy from these,” he’d say, bringing the flat of his hand in front of his face: firehouse code for blacks. Chuck’s real name wasn’t Charles. It was Harry. Harry McGreevy. Chuck was short for “chuckles,” firehouse black humor. No one ever accused Harry McGreevy of being lighthearted. To Chuck, women were whores or lesbians, kids were parasites (he should know, he had five, all grown with two still living at home in Throgs Neck), and the city was personally out to screw him. His hobby was writing up parking tickets (a power no other firefighter in Mike’s memory had ever invoked). And he spent much of every tour talking about his theory that intelligence was inversely related to how close your ancestors lived to the equator. Mike wondered whether that meant people in the Bronx had a leg up over the other boroughs, but he wasn’t taking bets on it.
“My church runs a prayer group for couples.” More advice. This time from Frankie Bones — a.k.a., Frank Bonaventura — the biggest guy in the firehouse. Six-foot-four, three hundred and fifty pounds, he looked like a Mafia enforcer out of central casting and used to have a reputation to match. But about ten years ago, Bones and his wife found Jesus and it had transformed him entirely. Of course, the joke around the firehouse was that if Frankie Bones went looking for you, you’d better damn well be found.
“I’m not religious,” Mike reminded him.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“None more mysterious than you,” Chuck told Bones. Being senior, Chuck could say anything he wanted, even to Bones.
“Hey, man,” Jimmy Francesco piped up, “you can stay at my place.”
It figured that Tig, of all the firefighters, would make the offer. Francesco was everyone’s favorite firefighter, nicknamed after the Disney character Tigger because he was always bouncing around, ready for action. Too much action, as Mike saw it now. If his hands weren’t slapping his thighs, then he was doing a drumroll on the table. Or stroking the ever-needy Rufus. Tig had been a cop briefly before joining the FDNY, but no one could picture him arresting people. If he ever managed to collar some gangbanger, he’d have probably let him off with some cheery Disney advice like, Don’t do that again, buddy boy, okaly-dokely?
“We’ve got the spare bedroom,” said Tig. “At least until the baby comes.”
Mike watched Tig doing a drumroll on the table and wondered what twenty-four hours of that would feel like. Wondered how his wife stood it. A baby thumping at her insides, a husband doing the same from without.
“Naw. Thanks anyway. I’m good.”
Well, maybe not good. But insomnia did have its up side, even if it seemed to take longer and longer for Mike to tie his shoes or fit together two lengths of hose. The less sleep he got, the more he noticed he could manage without it. Had he really been spending a third of his life in willing oblivion? Death before death, as he saw it now. He watched firefighters napping in their bunks, people dozing on the subways, and he studied them with almost scientific detachment. They were dying every day and they didn’t even know it, slipping into their own private heaven and hell. Maybe that’s all heaven and hell was anyway, a longer bit of sleep.
“I’m flling for separation,” Gina told him over the pay phone at the firehouse one day. “I think we should call your folks.”
The morning crew was testing the saws and two other guys were arguing the Yankees batting lineup, so it took him a minute to process the news.
“Was it the uniform?” he asked finally.
“What?”
“The uniform. My coat. My helmet. The big red truck that went ding ding through your neighborhood?”
“You’re not making any sense, Mike.”
“You get turned on by a little Nomex cloth and plastic?”
She said something after that, but Mike couldn’t hear. The guys on duty had a run. Curses. Shouts. Feet slapping the rubber mat as they slid down the pole. The diesel throttling. The gears in the apparatus door cranking away as they rolled up to reveal the hot, steamy August morning heat and the vague smell of urine on the pavement.
“You even know who I am?” He wasn’t sure if he’d said those words or just thought them before hanging up. It was hard to tell over the noise.
For a blessed moment after the truck pulled away, it seemed to suck all the noise with it. He didn’t feel the rumble of the Jerome Avenue elevated overhead or the honk and grind of buses and gypsy cabs on the blistering street. Then the great doors closed again and he felt for one panicked moment like he was drowning.
He needed a cup of coffee. (Gotta get that espresso with the lemon peel.) And a couple of smokes too. And then what? The rush would last twenty minutes tops, then he’d forget how to connect a hose, or which way the walkie-talkie batteries went in. He’d write the wrong month in the housewatch book. He’d dial the wrong combination to his locker.
What he needed was to get out. But without wheels, his options were limited. This was Tremont, after all. What wasn’t paved over in housing projects and six-story crackerbox apartments was covered with storefront strips of check cashing joints, bodegas, liquor stores, and Pentecostal churches. The heat made the days untenable. And at night, what pale-faced Irishman was likely to feel at home here?
It was Rufus who finally drove him out. Rufus, that rangy, bowlegged mutt who suffered the animal equivalent of a panic attack every time the firefighters left on a run. Mike couldn’t sleep when the firefighters were in quarters and Rufus couldn’t sleep when they were out. A walk would do them both good.
So he tied a length of rope around Rufus’s collar late that night and off they went, the dog — part retriever, part Sherman tank — gleeful at their escape. Rufus plowed along the boulevard with the determined gusto of an evangelist. He liked everyone — toddlers in soggy underwear dancing under the sprays of uncapped fire hydrants; fat old women in housedresses drinking beer on tenement stoops; drunks slugging it out for the right to bed down under an overpass. None of it tired him out. Or Mike, for that matter. But it did give him an odd feeling of liberation to be crisscrossing housing projects at 2 a.m., sidestepping the hulking young men with looks as sharp as razor wire.