Half Past Awesome

In the art of panhandling, as in warfare, strategy and tactics decide the victor. When you panhandle in the name of someone else, the stigma surrounding begging fades into the background, and people seem more willing to part with their hard-earned dollars.

On a constant and consistent basis, I see the less fortunate among us at highway off-ramps, imploring drivers to help them get home, get some food, get some blessings from God. Often these poor souls seem to be at their wits end, sometimes they are smirking, and always there is an unspoken pressure when the light turns red and you’re stuck, staring at a person in need. Are they really in need? Are they scamming you for a shot of sweet alcoholic release? We wonder about it, and pray for our own release in the form of the green light, hoping our kids don’t ask us why we didn’t help that man. It’s a powerful tonic, guilt, and it’s chaser is often anger at the intrusion into our own personal space.

And so, once a year, I turn the tables.

I get dressed in my firefighting pants, throw on a department tee shirt and hold a rubber boot out for mall shoppers to help raise funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, commonly known as “Jerry’s Kids”. For a couple of days I get to look into the eyes of the shoppers, to wordlessly implore them to reach into their change trays and help the innocent victims of a terrible disease. Today, The Outlaw Trucker, The Pimp and I spent about four hours selling the imagery of firemen for The Kids.

It works like magic, but one has to be careful.

When you wear the gear, when you go out as a representative of the fire service, people aren’t throwing money in your boot because they think YOU look good. They throw it in because they like the idea of firefighters and what they represent; if we’re willing to say you oughta donate to this worthy cause, then it carries a certain cache with it. More importantly it carries a responsibility. We might see it as a chance to broil our backsides off in the sun and laugh and joke and shamelessly flirt, but deep down, we’re hoping you see it as worth your time and money. It’s a gamble, putting your image as a public servant out there for people to toss pennies at – but one look at how much money firefighters nationwide raise for this cause gives heart to those of us flailing around in the heat. It’s days like this that invoke intense pride in our chosen profession, when you realize that countless firefighters across the country, career and volunteer, union and unrepresented, are all working for such a worthwhile cause.

The most telling detail of the Boot Drive, and one that never fails to amaze me, is that those people whom you’d cross the street to avoid – the thugs, the beat-down, those with the appearance of nothing to give…..they are the ones who never fail to put what they can in the boot. And the people in the very finest automobiles? They’re the ones who roll up the windows and hurriedly pick up their cell phones so as to avoid eye contact. And that’s okay – people should only give if they feel it is worth their time.

Standing in the sun and begging for your loose change is certainly worth mine.

Last night I hung up my firefighting gear for the foreseeable future. And by “foreseeable future” I mean “the next two weeks” since I have the attention span of a fly and two weeks into the future may as well be two decades. The family is heading out of Missouri, as mentioned in this post, the nerve-wracking, make-me-sweat-like-a-whore-in-church experience known as emceeing the Blogaronis is over, and Hotwire has been put in charge of maintaining the compound while we drive like mad bastards to my home state. All is good on the horizon.

Sometimes it feels like a royal pain in the a-double snakes to be a government employee – the bureaucracy, the constant cycle of loathing/admiration/hating/envy that the citizens feel towards public safety (pension problems, anyone?), the feeling of being a cog in a blue shirt, replaceable within about 5 minutes or less. The bureaucracy – yeah, I gotta mention that twice, and if you work in government service, you can appreciate this.

But on top of that, I feel really lucky. Lucky that I’ve found the career that makes sense to me. The fire service is loaded with all kinds of wayward issues, but really, what job isn’t? Anytime you have more than two employees, you have politics. Any time you answer to the citizens, there’s gonna be one old grouch out there who wants to kick you in the balls just because he got a speeding ticket once. So we accept where we’re at, but that doesn’t always translate into appreciating it.

Every third day I spend in the company of 5-7 others who endure my lies and copious bull. I drink ungodly amounts of coffee, I get to tinker with a three-quarter million dollar ladder truck and generally when people dial 911, they’re happy/relieved to see us arrive. Little kids never, ever fail to wave up at the truck, little old ladies always coo when we change their smoke detectors and our spouses are generally happy to get rid of us for one day out of three. When the economy is down, our business seems to pick up, not necessarily a good thing in terms of public safety, but it makes for interesting times. We operate on a level of maturity with one another that you may have last witnessed in sixth grade.

And still, we bitch about it.

For the next couple of weeks, I’ll hopefully sleep through the night. There will be no phantom alarms at 3am, no loudly lamenting the empty coffee pot, no staring off at the rest of the world going home at 5pm while we have a whole 14 more hours of gilded cage time. No staring at a giant truck knowing that there’s really several hours of checking it that need to get done. No arguing over what channel to watch. I’ll need to keep my mouth in check, since firehouse humor doesn’t necessarily translate smoothly outside the station. It won’t go well, and I’ll end up saying stuff I regret. The Pimp and The Pirate won’t be around to berate me, and tales of JoBoo’s adventures into Oklahoma will have to wait. I won’t think about funding issues, staffing issues, pension issues, rookie issues or the plain ol’ business of fighting fires.

The Heathens will spend time on the beach, time at Disneyland, and time on my nerves. The Wife will pass judgment on my driving skills and my brothers will point out how great it is to see us and how old I’m looking. The Lyin’ Dutchman will probably make some sort of appearance, trying to ambush Buns and me through a meeting that Bones will have unknowingly set up. I’ll spend an inordinate amount of time missing living on the coast. I’ll watch Barbara get married and lament losing time with my family. I’ll secretly wish for a return to a life that really never was. Hopefully The Author and I will have time to meet up and we can wax idiotic on classmates from twenty years ago.

And in two weeks? Putting on the turnouts and climbing on to Truck 2 will seem like a damn fine way to make a living. Even if the coffee pot is empty.