My July column has generated several responses. Some of you took great exception to the way I described a friend of mine. It certainly wasn’t my intention to demean or poke fun at anyone (aside from myself). In an effort to clarify the situation and keep the peace, I’d like to fully explain my relationship with Mr. Blueberry.
I first met Mr. Blueberry during the late 1980s when he randomly walked into the fire station I was assigned to. He acted as if he’d known the 10 of us his entire life. After a brief conversation, the group of us struck a deal to pay Mr. Blueberry and provide him two square meals per day in exchange for some light housecleaning. Through the years, he became a fixture at our station.
Mr. Blueberry lived across the street from our station in a small shack that looked like the set of a Sally Struthers “Feed the Children” commercial. The tiny hovel was made out of scrap lumber, plywood and stucco over tarpaper. The floor was an eclectic mix of broken concrete and desert earth. The bathroom had the size, elegance and aroma of a peep-show booth in a skid-row porno shop. The galley-style kitchen consisted of an outdoor faucet above a 5-gallon plastic paint bucket, a hot plate and a microwave oven. An insect infestation helped to fill the cracks in the walls. It was the kind of place one would expect an inefficient government to house one of the many people it was responsible for looking after but couldn’t have cared less about.
A couple weeks after we met Mr. Blueberry, Rodney the Engineer went across the street to take a look at the rusted-out cooler attached to the side of his house. The device was inoperable and had become a birthing den for mosquitoes. I was in the front room of the station and watched through the window as Rodney and Mr. Blueberry examined the defunct cooler. After Rodney completed his list of repair parts, the duo headed back toward the station.
The two of them made an unlikely pair as they stood on the curb waiting for traffic on the busy street. Rodney was a well-groomed health fanatic. He had the physique of a professional surfer and the rugged good looks of a B-shifter who had his nose broken on more than one occasion. Mr. Blueberry had obviously come from a different stork. He was an inch or so short of 6 feet tall and weighed about 245 lbs. His head was crowned with a black Billy Jack-style Stetson hat. He wore a purple sweater vest over a burnt orange, polyester long-sleeve shirt. The sweater had a big white cat and the words “Pretty Kitty” knitted into it. His plaid pants were a few inches too short, but this wasn’t a fashion problem because his white patent-leather boots filled the gap. Mr. Blueberry always traveled with several shoulder bags full of junk, and a multitude of clocks, broaches, buttons, flashing lights and other battery-powered devices decorated his sweater. He quite literally looked like a Ferris wheel rolling at you.
Rodney the Engineer and Mr. Blueberry had been waiting for a break in the traffic for a couple seconds when Mr. Blueberry reached into one of his bags and pulled out a full-sized stop sign. Someone had attached a wooden handle to the bottom of the traffic-control device, and Mr. Blueberry had written the word “bus” underneath “stop” on one side of the sign and “car” on the other. He hesitated for a second while he made sure he had the “bus” side out, and then he stepped into the street, thrusting his sign out in front of him like it held the power of Medusa’s severed head. Before Rodney the Engineer could process what was going on, the howl of large tires skidding filled the air. I sat in stunned disbelief as I watched a city bus slide sideways toward Mr. Blueberry, who stood defiantly in the middle of the street with the “Stop Bus” sign in his outstretched hand. The bus was sliding at such an extreme angle that it took all of two lanes of traffic and part of a third. From my vantage point, it appeared the bus would strike Mr. Blueberry just behind its front tires before it knocked him to the ground and ran him over. The combination of Rodney pulling Mr. Blueberry out of the street along with the bus driver throwing his Downtown Express into a slide miraculously saved our station-cleaning friend.
Mr. Blueberry quickly became very well known within our department. He filled his days and made extra cash cleaning fire stations and washing firefighter’s personal vehicles. In the beginning it wasn’t unusual for Mr. Blueberry to show up wearing filthy clothing and smelling like an unwashed backside. Proper hygiene became an enforced rule for station visits. Before long, firefighters were taking Mr. Blueberry to Sunday services with their families. My kids looked forward to our monthly family breakfasts with Mr. Blueberry.
Several years into our station’s relationship with Mr. Blueberry, we received a visit from his social worker. He stopped by to meet the group and eat lunch. During our get together, he gave us some of the details of Mr. Blueberry’s childhood. It was a brutal tale of biblical proportions, complete with a childhood spent in a cage at the friendly neighborhood mental institution. Mr. Blueberry was released into the world when the Reagan administration decided the federal government didn’t need the added expense of warehousing the chronically mentally ill. This left a large man with the mental capacity of an 8-year-old child to fend for himself.
Some readers complained that I used the word “mongoloid” to describe Mr. Blueberry. I did not use this word as a vulgar definition for someone with Down syndrome. I am not a mental health clinician, but I don’t think Mr. Blueberry has Down syndrome. Mr. Blueberry came into this world with a body made out of broken parts. The bones in his head never fused together properly, his fingers and toes were webbed, and his fetal brain was damaged from a mother whose idea of prenatal care included copious amounts of hard liquor. Because he has jet-black hair, very dark skin, and a large, round head and face, I quite literally meant that he looked like an ethnic Mongol from Mongolia. It probably wasn’t the best word choice, and for that I apologize to anyone who took offense. If it’s any consolation to those of you who just can’t get over my bastardization of the English language, many of my friends openly held the theory that Mr. Blueberry was my long lost twin.
Mr. Blueberry is unique. While the wording I used to describe him may not have been politically correct, it was accurate. Mr. Blueberry also had the tendency to behave like a child, and this oftentimes frightened people who didn’t know him. His behavior wasn’t a big deal when he was hanging out with a group of firefighters who also had a tendency to act like really big children. However, it didn’t surprise any of his firefighter friends that two different churches banished Mr. Blueberry from attending Sunday services. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that many of the parishioners responsible for getting Mr. Blueberry thrown out of their places of worship probably take great hypocritical pride in making sizeable donations to charities that help the Mr. Blueberries of the world. Every time Mr. Blueberry was 86ed from church another firefighter’s family would adopt him into their church.
I’m sure a psychiatrist, a social worker or a talk-show host could write a book that described our relationship with Mr. Blueberry on a Freudian level, but we brought a certain stability to Mr. Blueberry’s life, and the group of us just treated one another like we were all friends. A few years ago, one of Mr. Blueberry’s regular stations gave him a flashlight for Christmas. This was a thoughtful gift, as Mr. Blueberry often travels after sunset. The flashlight was not your garden-variety model. It threw so much candle power that, coupled with a good pair of eye glasses, one could clearly make out the canyons of mars on a moonless night. During this timeframe the chief of the flashlight-giving station told his underlings that Mr. Blueberry was no longer permitted to answer the station phone because most people had a difficult time understanding him. The truth of the matter was that most callers spent more time engaging in casual conversation with Mr. Blueberry than they did with the person they intended to call. Being team players, the crew informed Mr. Blueberry that he could no longer answer the station phone. But merely telling Mr. Blueberry that he could no longer do something was never enough. In order to obey a rule, he wanted to know the conspiracy theory behind it. In the case of the phones, the crew told him that the chief had spies everywhere. This included hidden cameras and listening devices attached to police helicopters. As luck would have it, Mr. Blueberry was just getting home from his late-night bus ride when he observed a police helicopter patrolling over his neighborhood. This flipped a switch in the former phone receptionist, and he used his flashlight to signal to the nosy chief in the police helicopter that he was wise to his game. Police helicopter pilots do not take kindly to being temporarily blinded by people on the ground shining bright lights at them. The police quickly identified the perpetrator, and several minutes later, a dozen or so angry officers stormed Casa de Blueberry and took him into custody. Being no stranger to Mr. Blueberry or his circle of friends, they telephoned his favorite station (the one that gave him his beloved flashlight) and told them to come down and make his bail. In the end, the thing that struck the most fear in Mr. Blueberry’s heart was not the judge’s stern admonishment after he made the decision he was not capable of standing trial-it was the station’s warning that if he didn’t cease signaling helicopters with his tractor beam or stop trying to control the flow of traffic with his outlaw stop sign, his station visits would cease.
This brings us full circle. I would like to thank the folks at FireRescue magazine for taking such good care of me and for giving me a place to share my innermost thoughts. Some readers took issue with some of the things I wrote and took the magazine to task for it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. We live in a world where public discourse is expected. If you don’t like something someone has to say, you ought to call them on it. For those of you upset because the magazine allowed me the freedom to express my perspective, consider this: The staff does edit what I send them, and-trust me on this-you owe them a great debt of gratitude for that. I have spent the last 27 years as a firefighter. This has cooked my brain in ways I’m still discovering. Remember my June column on inappropriate workplace intimacy? I felt my original version approached the level of pure literature. My editor told me in no uncertain terms that most of the descriptive content would be considered too obscene for the Kama Sutra, and the tale of my kidnapping on the Mexican border was not going to make it into the final press run. This reduced my eight-page masterpiece to four pages of pedestrian narrative. I was OK with this because some of the things I send her draw long lectures and outright refusals. As long as FireRescue gives me space in their magazine, I will keep filling it up. I love you all.
