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Contributor's note

By Michael Martone

By Michael Martone, from the Autumn/Winter 2004 issue of The Journal. A collection of Martone’s contributor’s notes, entitled Michael Martone, will be published in December by FC2.

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up in a small house, white with green trim, in the neighborhood known as North Highlands. His neighbors across the street were the Mensings, Ed and Mildred. Mr. Mensing was a fireman, but he no longer lived and worked in a firehouse. He was an assistant chief, which meant he had a white helmet he kept on the back shelf of the fire-engine-red department car he drove home at night from work. His work was fire prevention. In his dress uniform, he left each day just as Martone was leaving to walk to school (Price Elementary, Franklin Junior High School, North Side High School), got into his car, and drove to inspect factories, offices, theaters, and schools. Martone saw him inspecting his schools and would say hello as Mr. Mensing checked the panic bars on doors or the recharge records of extinguishers. Mr. Mensing also went to construction sites and ran tests on the automatic sprinkler systems, the dry standpipes, and the emergency overrides on elevators and escalators. Martone saw him at the high school basketball tournament games at the Memorial Coliseum, counting the cheering fans sitting in the stands. Probably most exciting, however, was when, every fall, Martone saw his neighbor on television during Fire Prevention Week, when all the schools in the city school system participated in one huge fire drill, the only fire drill that wasn’t a surprise. Martone watched as Mr. Mensing (surrounded by the mayor, the school superintendent, other fire chiefs, insurance agents, radio announcers announcing, and television weathermen commenting) pushed a button after all the other officials made speeches about fire safety. When Mr. Mensing, dressed up in his formal white hat and gloves, pushed the button, the fire alarms sounded all over the city: the sirens, whistles, horns, buzzers, bells. Everyone pretended the whole city was ablaze.

And each fall, no matter what school Martone was attending, he would get up from his desk and walk quickly yet in an orderly fashion to the designated exit, clear the building, and assemble with his classmates at the safe specified distance from the school, then turn and face the building and wait for further instructions. Usually on those days there was a fire truck nearby that the students inspected during their lunch breaks or recesses. The sun reflected off the bright polished hardware of the fire engines or ladder trucks and blazed on the reflecting stripes taped to the helmets and coats of the bored firemen. Mr. Mensing always had extra badges and plastic firemen’s hats left over from the event. The hard red plastic badges and hats were donated by the Hartford Insurance Company and featured a picture of a deer with huge antlers. He gave them out as treats for Halloween, pinning a badge on a ghost or pirate who might also don a helmet that became part of the costume for the rest of the night. Mr. Mensing did not like to turn on the lights in his house on Halloween or on any other night of the year. He delayed turning on a light, and when he did it was a single fixture, dim and dull. Martone never knew if Mr. Mensing hoped to save money or demonstrate some basic mistrust of electricity or reveal some knowledge of its inherent danger. For as long as he could, Mr. Mensing read the evening newspaper, the News-Sentinel, while sitting in a lawn chair just inside his glass storm door, his back to the door, what little light there was falling over his shoulder to illumine the open pages he held up. He was there in the morning too, sitting in the webbed lawn chair inside his door, reading the morning newspaper, the Journal-Gazette. Even in winter, he sat in the doorway, collecting that pale light transmitted through the frosted glass. When the winters were cold, Mr. Mensing would have to climb the city’s water towers and make sure the water in the tanks that put pressure on the system, pressure that the fire department needed at the hydrants, hadn’t frozen. One particular cold spell, he spent several nights in a rubber dinghy floating inside one of the huge tanks that read on the outside FORT WAYNE, agitating the water with an oar so it wouldn’t skim over with ice and then freeze solid and shut off the water. In the spring there would be floods in Fort Wayne, and Martone, in high school, helped fill sandbags and shore up the leaky levees. Mr. Mensing spent the floods wading beside and guiding boatloads of rescued people to dry land. He told Martone that floods were worse than fires. Manhole covers popped out of place from the pressure of the rising water, and the muddy water prevented someone walking a boat or raft from seeing the ground below. Suddenly, the solid street wasn’t there, and you fell right through the hole, down under the street, impossible to see the way back up to the surface. Not like falling through ice, Mr. Mensing told Martone. With ice you swam up, ignoring the light above you. The light was the solid-ice ceiling illuminated by the sun. The way out, the hole in the ice, was not lit up. Against your instincts, he told Martone, swim to the spot above you, the spot that looks the blackest.

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