Officer Alex muses on how to keep amused during the inevitable cold spells
I came back into the fire hall with absolutely no sensation in my cheeks despite the weird scarf-contraption-thing dear ol’ Momma Teach had bought me years ago pulled up over my nose, and the leather (pleather?) gloves with separate glove liners having experienced equal failure in keeping my fingers functional. I mean I’m talking about wearing gloves over my gloves, and still risking frostbite here.
“This is southeast Tennessee!” I cried out inside. I tried to grit my teeth in anger, but they wouldn’t stop chattering.
Another failure.
I closed my eyes and stood still a moment, and despite my past becoming exceedingly cloudier as pasts tend to do over the years, I could barely recall a time that winter brought any joy whatsoever. I mean your drinks stayed cool in the back of the truck 24/7 without ice, and grass didn’t grow and leaves no longer fell, but beyond that…? I dunno. Wearing a coat makes it easier to conceal a gun off-duty, and that’s about it. “Woo.”
There were no more subtle joys…or what few there were have been perpetually overshadowed by their professionally related downsides, because a cold beverage was no relief for the insane difficulty the simple act of micturition had become when you have now added two layers of zippered, buttoned, and Velcro’d apparel designed to accommodate the protrusions of a modern gunbelt, making an already difficult task under pressure (aka, “having waited too long”) now the equivalent of the life and death terror of disarming a literal dirty bomb from which there would be no hope of social escape.
“Lighten up fella,” my partner said. “You’re like the angry Joe Pesci of cold weather.”
“Exactly!” I said. “And I’m going to change that.”
A look of disbelief from my partner was potentially genuine, and he said “How do you plan to change that, by walking outside every 20 or 30 minutes like a moron?” I smiled in response. Or at least I think I did. Numbness, after all.
“By finding joy again, my good man. By turning this ice into a Slush Puppy. I’m putting the bubbles back onto this beer, brother.” I actually winked at him…an act akin to making eye contact while in the sanctity of a public restroom, just to throw him off. Then I checked my watch, stood, and walked back outside for what would be the last time this night…my mission here was nearly over and I’d be heading home shortly.
There was silence for a short while in the common room of Number 11 Fire Station, and one of its perverted Blue Shift residents who had been busy trying to watch a “Friday Night Lights” marathon while we sought warmth these last several hours decided to break his silence with the words, “You better check on your boy.”
My partner squinted his eyes in confusion, while the fireman’s eyes never left the TV screen. “Huh?”
“Your boy,” he repeated. “Whatchoo think he’s been doing every little while outside? He crazy,” he paused. “You see.”
Smitty sat there a few seconds, but at heart knew the deviant was right. He silently stood, put his own coat on, and stepped outside. The litany of foul language was almost immediate.
I had been stepping outside every twenty minutes for at least two and a half hours applying coat after coat of cold water to the exterior of my co-worker’s patrol car until the ice was so thick you could barely identify it for what it was, except for the strange extra hump the light bar added to its now crystalline roof.
Fire stations have water spigots inside their bay doors where they will not freeze. I had always assumed this was the sole purpose for such. I could have just squirted water into the door locks and been done with it, sure…but was that the work of a man committed to bettering himself? I mean truly committed? No. Two inches of nearly bubble-less ice covering a 2001 Crown Vic: Now that was “commitment.”
“It’s 16 degrees…how am I gonna thaw…how am I gonna get in it? How am I gonna get home…?”
(Panic sets in.)
The fireman heard the histrionics outside, and allowed himself a smile that almost turned into a laugh…all, again, without his eyes leaving the television screen. “Told you he was crazy,” he said to no one at all.
Retaliation would be brutal…but it sure as hell wouldn’t be tonight, he thought before losing himself again in the Food Network channel.
(Stay warm, folks.)
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.