MC: My career started on June 5, 1988. I was one that flew under the radar. I didn't do a lot of spectacular things, but I did my job every time. I went from Engine 6, to Fire Alarm (dispatch) for a year and a half, to Engine 3 for a year. I went to Rescue 2 for almost five years with Tomlinson, then I went to the 4s, back to the 3s for nine years. Once I got promoted to lieutenant I went to the 5s. Then went downtown to Engine 2 for five years. I ended my career at the 4s as a captain. TT: So '88 to last year, right? MC: June 5, 1988 to June 18, 2016. TT: Twenty-eight years? MC: Twenty-eight years, two weeks, and a handful of days. TT: Your name's come up a couple of times. One of them was the Hargraves incident. (John Hargraves was the last line of duty death in 1993.) MC: Oh. Unfortunately, I was on the rescue that day. TT: Who were you with? MC: Mintsmenn. TT: Did you guys get there as they were-- MC: We were there before it all turned to shit. TT: When he came out, consciousness-wise-- MC: He was conscious and walking. He didn't have a mask on, he didn't have gloves on--I remember that because he was burnt. His hands were burnt, his face was burnt. Why he went into that building, entered that basement, no one knows. Who he was following, no one knows. He came out of the side door after other people had come out the front. I don't remember if anyone else came out of the side, but I remember he came out of the side with this glazed fucking look on his face ... and he was ... he was toast. And then uh, he just begged me not to let him die and uh, we put him in the back of the rescue, did a couple of things--that was back before the rescue was really as advanced as it is today. Did what I could, brought him to Memorial Hospital and he never left the hospital. TT: So from Memorial-- MC: He went to Boston. They put him in an induced coma at Memorial Hospital, I remember that, because of the pain and all that other shit. He had burnt his lungs, I was told, and that was pretty much it. And then he was transported out and I don't think he ever came back after that. TT: It's like an unspoken agreement between the fire department, news outlets, the city--suicides don't get reported unless they're public, right? You never hear about it. MC: No it usually says, "Died at Home." TT: When I was talking with different guys, personally, for me, the hangings are the creepiest. MC: I can tell you some really bad, sad stories about hangings. One of the first ones I ever had, was an elderly husband and wife. We had to break into the house because the people said they hadn't seen them in days. Went into the house and sure enough in one closet the lady was hanging, in the other closet the old man was hanging. That was probably one of the saddest. They're all sad, I hate when people kill themselves. You know? One of the other worst ones, this guy had gone to his bachelor party the night before and his brother-in-law told his future wife that he got a lap dance. The wife freaked, he went down stairs and hung himself with a fucking garden hose. We picked him up, tried our best to bring him back, but he didn't make it, which is a sad fucking thing to happen. Over a night before lap dance. Your life is ended. TT: For some reason the hangings always--because the person's intact. The gunshots, you can just kind of wall it off because you're not even looking at-- MC: I've had a lot of those too. Like I said, it's weird to think of all the shit you see on this job that nobody else knows ever existed. One of the strangest deaths, I was still young. I was with Tommy Moore, and this guy was sitting on his couch, he was black, and he looked like he was about 280 pounds. But when we looked at his license he was only a buck seventy. And the newspaper was on his lap, he died January 1, he was reading the newspaper, and before Tommy Moore had a chance to tell me, "Don't touch him" he exploded, and like shit just, he just blew up and stuff came out. It was--I had never seen shit like that before and I said, "That was fucking awesome." TT: And the stench of that-- MC: The smell of death, I remember the first time I ever smelt it, I was like, "What the fuck. That smells awful." And then one of the older guys says, "That's death." He says, "Do yourself a favor and learn how to breathe with your mouth, not your nose when you smell that." As we were leaving the building I saw the Engine 6 guys outside puking because they didn't like death. They were babies (laughs) TT: Gunshot suicides, shotguns... MC: Shotguns to the head, pistols to the chest, people would do themselves in cars, carbon monoxide deaths, that's another shitty one. We've had to fish people out of the river, that's not a cool thing
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AuthorTom Trabulsi was born in the Midwest, attended high school in Rhode Island, and graduated from Boston University with a degree in American History. He was a bike courier in Boston and New York City, worked construction in the mountain west and east coast, and is currently a firefighter in a northeast city. Archives
August 2022
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