Pyromanticism

By * Brad Darrach

REPORT FROM ENGINE CO. 82 215 pages. McCall Books. $5.95.

"I remember the day I filed for the firemen's examination as clearly as a king remembers his coronation ... I was ecstatic that I would soon be a part of the gong clangs and siren howls . . . climbing ladders, pulling hose, and saving children from the waltz of the hot-masked devil. Tearful mothers would embrace me, editorial writers would extol me, mayors would pin medals and ribbons to my breast."

Assigned at his own request to Engine Co. 82, the busiest fire-fighting unit in New York City, Fireman Dennis Smith (Badge No. 11389 N.Y.F.D.) soon discovered that the job of putting out fires in an urban ghetto is actuarially the most hazardous he could have found, financially one of the least rewarding, and emotionally about as soothing as selling U.S. Treasury Bonds in the streets of Hanoi. In this book he sums up an eight-year experience in which disillusionment battles with youthful pyromanticism--but never quite wins.

No. 11389 is at his best when he describes the fires he has fought. In scene after scene the men of Company 82 race up the stairs of flaming tenements, hose-whip tornadoes of dark orange flame, crawl through smoke as thick as gravy, groping for bodies, stagger out with a tragic load of suffocated mothers and babies, then puke black phlegm all over the pavement. Many victims, it is true, are brought out alive--Engine Co. 82 performs prodigies of rescue every day.

In the Bronx, fire is not the only problem a fireman faces. Because the fire truck usually gets there faster than the squad car, ghetto people commonly rush to a firebox to get help when somebody has been stabbed, shot, raped, run over or overdosed. Fireman Smith spends much time caring for the victims. He doesn't complain about these extra social services; he grew up in a slum himself, and in helping poor people he feels he is helping his own kind. What stuns him, what drives him almost to despair, is that in return for his help almost all he gets is hatred.

The South Bronx, as Fireman Smith sees it, is a prison taken over by the inmates, who still think anything wearing a blue uniform is a cop. They turn in about twelve malicious false alarms a day to Smith's company alone (in Greater New York, MFAs are now coming in at the rate of 90,000 a year).

They wreck hydrants by hacksawing the control stem or stuffing the shaft with beer cans. They fling bricks at passing fire trucks and often hit the fire men. "Burn, baby, burn!" they chant as their neighbors' homes incinerate, and often as not investigation shows that the fires Smith fights were set by rejected lovers or crafty landlords or teen-age torch parties.

What makes a man stick at such a job? Naturally some stay for security.

Most -- including Smith, who last year took a college degree in English literature -- stay for one simple reason: they love their work. The men in Engine Co.

82 are adrenaline freaks who love the challenge of a fire and take pride in their intricate special skills. They exult in the "victory" when a blaze is beaten down. In the busy companies, Smith explains, the morale is tremendous. The men scramble for the front position on the hose; they take a military pride in their battle scars; and in the heat of a fire fight they would die to save a victim from the flames -- and in fact they often do. In Smith's well-supported opinion, they are indeed "New York's Bravest."

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