The Roof is on Fire (Part 3: Too Soon?)

…and then we were both howling. It's probably sheer luck that we didn't crash on the way home, because the rest of the drive was spent in hysterics, taking turns volleying fire-related jokes:

"Did you hear about the fire in the shoe factory? Many soles were lost."  

"Why do ducks have flat feet? To stomp out forest fires. Why do elephants have flat feet? To stomp out flaming ducks!" 

"My grandfather always said, “Fight fire with fire.” He was a great man, but a terrible firefighter."

…while the stereo played that old familiar song, and we laughed at the sheer absurdity of it all. "The roof. The roof. The roof is on fire..."

And that's when I knew I'd be okay. (Part 1: Backstory)

What I would've given to be there the night that Gilbert Gottfried gave what, to this day, remains one of the most iconic performances at a Hollywood Roast. It was the roast of Hugh Heffner, which means it was bound to be lascivious. Pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable is part of the tradition of the Hollywood Roast, and Gottfried himself has a long and rather sordid track record of doing just that. 

“I have to catch a flight to California," Gottfried tells the audience. "But I can’t get a direct flight. They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

This is a joke that, today, might have seemed pretty tame compared to a lot of the 9/11 jokes that have been made in the past twenty-odd years. But it elicited groans of disgust and furtive boos from the audience. Gottfried-- already famous (infamous?) for a sense of humor that some might credit to his gumption, while others will call inappropriate and insensitive-- became one of the most, if not the single most controversial and iconic public displays of gallows humor ever uttered before a crowd.

The phrase, "Too soon!" could be heard among the boos of the audience that night. Two decades later, Vice released a documentary by that name, raising the question: at what point are we allowed to laugh after something terrible happens?

Apparently, two weeks was enough time: enough to laugh, if not to at the tragedy then at least in the midst of it. As the news continued to rehash the attacks over and over, the host of that year's already controversial Roast launched into another joke, and suddenly an auditorium full of people went absolutely hysterical with laughter.

"I'd lost an audience bigger than anybody has ever lost an audience," Gottfried explains later. "People were booing and hissing... oh my God. I was floating through outer space." So, he thought, "why not go to an even lower level of hell?"

"The Aristocrats" is one of the dirtiest jokes of all time. Gottfried himself didn't write it, and he certainly wasn't the first to tell some version of it. The routine has been around in comedy circles for years. Every comedian who uses it has a unique retelling, taking the same generally dirty premise and adding in whatever other repugnant details seem right in the moment. Gottfried's version was no exception, and it may have become the most famous, in part, for some of the repugnant details he includes.

You might think that an audience sensitive to the airplane-hijacking reference wouldn't have responded much better to this depraved ditty, but what happened next was a sensation in the world of comedy.

“The laugh was so deep and cathartic that people were coughing up pieces of lung,” recalls reporter Frank DiGiacomo. “It was amazing... he had united everybody in that one moment."

Gottfried himself was even a bit shocked at the overwhelming response. "The audience was going wild (with) the biggest laughs I ever heard."

What rang out from that auditorium was the sort of laughter that shook stadiums, changed lives, saved teetering comedy careers. World-renowned celebrities dressed to the nines in elegance and class were falling out of their seats, crumpling designer suits as they clutched their sides. Faces well-known to glamour magazines turned red under layers of concealer and cream, contorting as the uncontrollable need to laugh overtook them all. Tears stained glittering gowns as the unthinkable happened, as the people in that room were released, for that one shining moment, from the weight of tragedy, the shackles of couth, the hollowness left by weeks of endless mourning.

It was the sort of laughter that healed.

"I’ve always said tragedy and comedy are roommates," Gottfried explains. "Wherever tragedy’s around, comedy’s a few feet behind... sticking his tongue out and making obscene gestures. When you go to a funeral, the guy at the podium will say embarrassing stories about the guy in the box, and people will laugh... (and) hold their hands over their face like, Oh, I shouldn’t be laughing at this."

But why shouldn't they be?

I think it's a shame that funerals are considered universally inappropriate places for laughter. That isn't to say that churches full of grieving families dressed in black ought to be treated as basement improv clubs or the cemetery as a stand-up audition. No doubt many of those burying their loved ones just won't be in the mood for glib.

But when I think of my own funeral, of the time when it will be my loved ones gathering because I'm the guy in the box, I like to imagine a room filled with laughter. I want to know that they're remembering me as I am now, laughing and playing and pretending death isn't just one missed turn signal or grim-faced doctor's proclamation away from us all.

The trauma of losing my house in a fire pales considerably next to stories of rescue workers and those trapped within the rubble on September 11th, 2001. Which is why I do not intend to compare the two, or hold others to my own timeline of recovery. My intention is never to criticize those who prefer to mourn in more traditional ways, but rather to pose the question: Is there such thing as a universal standard of "too soon"? 

When I told a firefighter from one of my towns that I had lost my cat in a fire, he was sympathetic. 

"I'm so sorry to hear that," he told me. "I'm sorry you had to lose a family member in such a horrible way."

I shrugged. "Sure, I guess I did lose a family member, and that's pretty sad." Then my grin turned sideways. "But I got a pretty cool frisbee out of it."

Apparently I'm not the only writer comedically capitalizing
off the loss of a pet.

In between approving guffaws, he slapped my shoulder amiably and said, "Oh, you're going to fit in just fine here."

By "here," I know he didn't mean that town's fire department. What he had meant to express was his  I'd adjust nicely into the public safety field, because I had demonstrated competence with the national language of first responders: gallows humor.

Discretion is key when utilizing humor as a coping mechanism. Part of discretion is knowing how long to wait before laughing at something. Two weeks after 9/11, there were still funerals going on. Firefighters and officers who had braved the rubble of the city's once proud monument to commerce were still reeling from the catastrophic events that threatened the American way of life. Family members were still inconsolable, and many of the children of the fallen had not yet fully realized that Mom or Dad really wouldn't be coming home this time. So that, perhaps, was too soon. 

But twenty years later, jokes about 9/11 can be funny, as Jimmy Carr proved in 2022 with this absolute knock-out. Legend has it Carr tested the joke on Davidson himself, and Pete gave his go-ahead before it was told in front of the Hollywood Roast crowd. In this way, he proved that a joke, far darker than Gottfried but told twenty years later, can be laughed at without guilt.

It's as they say: tragedy + time = comedy. The twin masks of the theater represent the relationship between the two. Along with comedians, first responders are among those who have cracked the formula for dealing with hard shit. We cope with the difficult things we have to witness every day by deciding, at some point, that it has to be funny. It has to be funny, or else the trauma wins. Tears of sorrow will eventually become tears of laughter, as soon as you're ready to allow them to.

Knowing the rules is important. You can't laugh at someone else's trauma until they laugh at it first, and even then it's often wise to leave the joke-making to them. You also can't be insensitive to the fact that not everybody is comfortable with gallows humor. Knowing your audience, respecting the healing timeline, engaging in a way that will draw people together rather than drive them apart-- these are the skills comedians both professional and amateur must develop before attempting to get the tears flowing.

Though risky, dark humor can be incredibly healing. Cliché as it sounds, shared laughter brings people together. Memes about unpleasant mundane experiences go viral because we see ourselves as well as each other in them. The fact that our experiences are universal means that we're all in this together, and that means that no matter what happens, none of us are ever alone.

Pain is the most reliable constant in all of human history, a "common thread" tying together the entire human race. We all suffer, so why shouldn't our suffering at least mean something? At least when we also choose to share in the struggles of life, we can end the day by laughing together, too.

Time-Life Critical

Today I took my first time-life critical call. The first thing I have to establish with any call, no matter what type of call it is, is the location. If I can only get one piece of information, it HAS to be where I'm sending people. If I don't know what's going on, I can send everyone, and let them hash out the situation. But if I don't know where you are, I can't do anything to help.

Once I know the type of call (police, fire, EMS, or a combination of the three), I get the appropriate help started. Most of the Reg towns have policies where police respond to everything, but I still need to let them know whether they're walking into a domestic (statistically the most dangerous call type for responders), a house fire, an overdose-- whatever it is, I want them to be prepared and walk in with the right mindset and an appropriate level of precaution.

In EMD (Emergency Medical Dispatch), we have a set of cards that we read off of to give medical advice when necessary and appropriate for a situation. They're stored on what looks like an old Rolodex, except instead of dates and contacts, it's sorted by medical scenario. Different PSAPs will have different cards based on their protocol, but usually they look about the same.

The first few tabs are for getting enough baseline information to be able to get me to the right situation card. The green cards are for medical situations like allergic reactions and chest pain, while the purple are for traumas, where the patient may be injured rather than sick. Each card will have questions designed to help me decide ALS or BLS response, as well as provide clarifying information to responders so they can have the right tools ready when they arrive on scene. Once I have enough information, I give pre-arrival instructions, which are usually something along the lines of: 

"Have the patient stay calm, and do not allow them to exert themselves. Allow them to find a position of comfort. Do not allow them to have anything to eat or drink. If they take medication, have a list of their prescriptions or the bottles ready to show responders."

At this point, if it's a low-stakes situation, I can gather the patient and caller's names, a call-back number (which I ought to have confirmed before now, but sometimes things just move too fast), and the patient's date of birth, and then hang up. I usually advise the caller to call back if anything changes, or I keep them on the line so I can keep an ear on the situation until the ambulance shows up.

Those first few cards, though, the all-callers information, also ask for something else. Different people have different nicknames for it, but I call it "C/A/B" status: is the patient Conscious and Alert, and are they Breathing? This is crucial information, as a 'no' to any of these questions will trigger a "hot" response from responding units. Meanwhile, I jump down to those Time-Life Critical cards. There are tabs for CPR, AED, childbirth, and airway control instructions, and they're the only cards where all I do is read them word for word. The other cards I can skip around a little, depending on the nature of the call. 

Today's call would have included CPR, although we never got to the point of giving compressions. By the time the PD had arrived, my caller was trying to get the patient flat on his back on the floor. From what it sounded like, he was struggling to get him out from behind something he was slumped against, possibly a dresser or cabinet. 

So, while it was a time-life critical situation, I didn't really do anything helpful except try to keep the caller occupied while we waited for responders. He was, of course, panicked, as a loved one was lying dead in the room next to him and he couldn't even get him out from behind a piece of furniture. The best I could do was keep him too busy thinking about how to help to have time to panic. 

From what I heard, I don't think the patient survived. Later, I texted my family group chat to tell them about my first (sort of) CPR call. My brother asked me if I was doing okay, and at first I thought he meant, had I performed well enough? Would my DOR (training evaluation) reflect a competent dispatcher, or would stay on remedial training until I eventually was terminated? 

Once I realized that he'd meant, "Are you okay?" as in "That's heavy; are you handling it emotionally?", my reaction was, "Hell yeah. I feel great." I was a bit worried I would freeze up or panic the first time I handled time-life critical. But I performed better than I expected to. The call went into the system quickly and accurately, help arrived in a timely fashion. I did my job well. 

"But," I amended, "Ask me again after my shift ends. I might feel differently once I’ve taken off the professional blinders and processed the human emotion side of things."

After work, I went home and really thought through the situation. I really was fine. Did that make me a bad person? Did it say something about my capacity for empathy that I was more focused on my performance than on the reality of the fact that somebody probably died today, and I had just spoken to likely the last person to see him alive? I've always thought of myself as a deeply compassionate person. So what did it mean that I was able to separate myself wholly from the gravity of a situation like that, and view it as nothing more than a day in the office for me?

That's when I realized that I wasn't cold, or unfeeling. The whole reason I wanted this job so badly was that all I wanted to be involved in the process of saving lives. I wanted to take pride in my work, and being the first step in the emergency response process was the way I could do that. It was the place my skills and aptitudes would best serve those in need.

The fact that I could be so distant was a professional skill I've developed rapidly over the last few months. The key to not being "thrown" by calls like this is to break convention: make the situation about yourself. 

We as people try to avoid taking another person’s problem and making it about ourselves, because that’s considered selfish and unkind. If your friend confides in you she's been struggling with something, you don't say "hey me too, let me tell you about it!" You can offer your experience to her if doing so will establish a bond between you, but this conversation is about her, and you do your best to keep it that way.

But in this line of work, you have to make it about you. Thoughts like: that guy was in such a hard situation, and man, a human life might’ve been lost tonight, will weigh you down, and the job will swallow you whole. 

Instead, you think: how does this affect me? Did I do my job well? What do I stand to gain (experience, perspective, professional acumen)? It goes against social convention, but it keeps you from internalizing the stuff you see (or rather, hear) every day. It’s not about them; it’s about me, and my job, my performance and my success at the situation. Thus, I am no longer emotionally involved in the situation.

It's difficult to override your instincts like that, to subdue for even just short stretches of time the parts of you that feel. But each day I get a little bit better at this job, and though at times I may worry about what that means for my soul, in the end I truly believe the payoff of saving lives will be well worth it.

The Roof is On Fire (Part 2: Hide or Seek)

“Cats are incredible hiders.”

Tilly was a good hider; that much I knew firsthand. For the first few weeks I had her (seriously, I'm talking like fifteen or sixteen straight days), I didn't see her once.  

I knew she was alive, and I knew she was here-- food disappeared from her bowl, the litter box was being used regularly, and occasionally I found stray hairs on my laundry-- but she'd clearly found a very clever place to hide. 

The day she introduced herself to me was one I'll never forget. I was a morning person back then, waking with alacrity each day between 4:45 and 5 AM. That day I’d been lounging on the couch with a podcast in my ears, trying not to wake my cohabitants, when I suddenly felt a weight come down on my chest and settle there. 

Blinking, I found myself staring right into the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen. They were wide for her face, and endlessly deep, looking at me with something like knowing acceptance. As though for two weeks she’d been watching me, scoping me out, and now she had decided that I was worthy of her trust.

“Hello,” I'd murmured. She continued to study me for a moment, then let her attention flicker to my chest. Her white paws kneaded me gently, and I knew the sweat glands between her little toes were busy depositing her scent into my shirt. 

I raised one hand slowly, letting her see my outstretched fingers and giving her plenty of time to communicate any misgivings about the gesture. She apparently had none, so I very gently stroked her face, noticing for the first time how unbelievably soft she was. Those big green eyes met mine again for a moment before closing contentedly. 

We stayed like that for a long time, as I continued to gently peruse her face with my fingertips. Soon enough I'd found the spot, nestled in her jawline right where it hinged open, and when she leaned into the touch I kneaded it with more pressure.

"Of course you like that," I said softly. She pressed her face more firmly against my fingertips, as if she was agreeing with me.

"It's okay, baby girl," I told her. "I've got you." 

It had taken her two weeks of living in my house for her to trust me enough to come out of hiding. So it shouldn't have surprised me that, when she was caught in the house fire that displaced my family for a year, Tilly's first reaction was to hide. She was a cat, after all. And cats are very good hiders.

But still... I can't help but wonder if she might've made it, as the dogs had, had she gone in search of people rather than hide.

Thomas, a firefighter I met on one of my ride-alongs through Reg, told me that he'd once saved a barn cat from a fire when the structure went up in smoke.

"I had to drag it out," he told me. "And you know what it did as soon as I got it to safety?"

"Scratch the shit outta you?" I guessed.

He chuckled sadly and shook his head. "As soon as I put the poor thing onto the ground, it ran right back into the flaming barn."

It's funny how those survival instincts work. Tilly felt safer hiding in some familiar place in the burning house than she did with strangers. Silly cat and her misguided instincts. 

But, don't humans do the same thing sometimes?

One of the oldest truths about human existence is that we all hurt each other. A lot. We break up with each other, miss recitals and eat our roommates' whipped cream from the freezer. Life, love, relationships-- they're all just us bumping around blindly, mostly trying not to screw things up as we fall in and out of situations one after the next. 

But we also need each other. No man is an island, after all. We all rely on one another, on sharing perspectives and skills and insights. We exchange comfort and validation, reassuring one another that there is hope beyond the next sunrise. 

So why is it that sometimes, when the thing we need most is other people, we draw away? Is it fear, or the feline instinct to hide? Is it wariness of being hurt again the way you've been hurt before? Is it shame for having to admit we can't do it alone? 

Whatever the reason, it's a dangerous and possibly deadly instinct. 

I read somewhere once that cats who sense that they're about to die will isolate themselves, find a quiet place to go on their own time-- maybe that's what she was doing. For cats, it makes sense. They do that when they feel that their time is up, at the point where most intervention would be futile. It's their way of dying with a bit of dignity, where they won't bother anyone as they pass quietly into the quiet, dark beyond.

But... we're not cats. As humans, isolating in a time of great need is a dangerous, perhaps even deadly maneuver. 

At work, I hate asking for help. As a recent hire, I'm still considered probationary until I've proven myself by staying put for six months. I was signed off two weeks ago, which means somebody thought I was capable of doing this job on my own. To ask someone for help is to admit that I'm not fully independent, that I have more still to learn. It means taking the risk of being seen as incapable, after all, of doing my job. 

But sometimes, not asking for help can make it worse. If the thing I don't know how to do in the moment doesn't get done, it means my job has not been done correctly. I become a bigger liability by not asking than I would be by admitting I didn't know the first time.

This goes beyond skills, though. Recently I received some news of a family issue that knocked me off-kilter, and I realized quickly that it was affecting me negatively. 

I wasn't sleeping, and the next day I was late to work. At the end of that shift, the supervisor was coming in to replace me. As he set up for the morning, I apologized profusely. I didn't have any excuses; exhaust from the sleepless day spent tossing restlessly between tangled sheets as I turned over in my head all that had happened had simply won out. My alarm just wasn't enough to rouse me. 

He must have picked up on the fact that something was wrong, though. "It's impossible to fully disentangle your personal and professional lives," he told me in a follow-up email later that day. "Part of my job as your supervisor is to help you navigate those stressors -- I can't influence or fix the things going on in your personal life, but I can be a sounding board if you need to confide in someone."

Before starting in my dispatch career, I'd never been someone who shies away from asking for help. But something about the way Reg treated me as a trainee, as though every clarifying question I asked was being tallied against me. At the end of the day, my trainers' reports came back with a list of things I hadn't been able to yet do on my own, SOPs I had not yet memorized, names I hadn't been able to place with the respective town, rank, and badge number. I was tired of being the new guy, fed up with being judged for needing help. 

But... I do need help. We all do, sometimes. Whatever insecurities we hide behind, whatever misgivings about trusting other people with our vulnerabilities-- sometimes we just need to know when to admit, I can't do this on my own. Only after we admit that can we actually reap the benefits of existing as members of a highly social species intrinsically dependent on cooperation.

Public safety and law enforcement require a lot of trust. When lives are on the line, agencies need to be sure they can trust the people they hire. For that reason, much like medicine or politics, these are fields wrought with nepotism and highly dependent on referrals, favoring the familiar over the connectionless outsider often even in spite of qualifications.

But I got hired at Regional completely on my own. Independently I searched out dispatch openings in my area. I found where to submit the resume and cover letter, both of which I had written myself. At no point in my application process did I rely on mutual backscratching or legacy points. 

My current job, however, was a different story.

Towards the end of my time at Reg, I confided in Gabe my anxieties about being able to finish strong. He told me not to worry about it.

"Focus on being successful here if you can," he said. "But if things don't work out, then come find me."

Sure enough, the day Regional sent me away with nothing but a severance letter and a broken heart, he had been leaving work just as I was on my way in to get fired. We sat together in the parking lot, and he called out from the other job he'd been about to leave for an evening shift at. I gave myself twenty minutes to wallow and be miserable, then he came over to my place and we got to work implementing his plan.

First, he connected me with Kara, whom he had personally trained at his favorite job. That agency wasn't hiring, but Kara also worked for another PSAP, one that was currently hiring and that also happened to be an eight-minute drive from my apartment. Then he helped me workshop my resume to include Reg, and coached me in what to say when they asked about why I left. When it was done and there was nothing left to coordinate, he still stayed, sitting beside me on the couch as I lamented the loss of my dream job and cried about how much of a failure I felt like. 

"You are not a failure," he said gently.

"I got fired."

"You'll get hired again."

But it wasn't the same. I tried to explain that with Regional, I had done it all by myself. And as much as I appreciated his help, as much as I was sure my dispatch career would've been dead in the water without him, I hated that I needed his help. I didn't want to be the girl who got hired because she was friends with the right people. I didn't want to be somebody whose qualifications for a job were grounded more in connections than merit.

"You are not a failure just because you accept help," he reassured me, again and again until the words themselves had lost all meaning. Semantic meaning, though, and nothing more. Though the words themselves brought me little comfort, I did internalize his meaning, and I began to realize something. 

In all of human history, no feat has ever been a solitary effort. Benjamin Franklin's key-on-a-kite-string routine wouldn't have been much to speak of had a locksmith not once carved the key. Babe Ruth made baseball history backed by his teammates. That doesn't make the individual any less of a maverick, and certainly doesn't make any of them failures.

What I had been running from, just as Tilly once ran from the firefighters who would have saved her life, was the fear of failure, of not being good enough. 

The fear of needing help is what I'd been hiding from.

Now it was time I stopped hiding, before the roof collapsed on top of me.