What I really hate is when something truly painful happens to my body in fire class and I don't even get a decent bruise to show for it. Deep hurt should be karmically rewarded with the physical scars that assert good bragging rights. This Saturday I was popping the door off a car with the famed jaws of life, and the hydraulic spreaders suddenly kicked out of the frame and hit me squarely in the thigh. It was like being slammed solidly by a fifty-pound block of metal (exactly like it, in fact). It was the kind of pain that momentarily gives one pause, that stops life down to a precious instant in which you wonder dispassionately if you will even walk normally again but don't yet have the presence of mind to worry about it. I felt like someone had just hit my femur with a sledgehammer.

"Are you OK?" an instructor asked me. I was still waiting to see if my thigh was going to snap in two and collapse under me. If it had hit me two inches lower, one of the trainees standing behind me could have caught my kneecap in midair.

"Yeah," I answered instinctively. It is not a good policy to show weakness in fire class. I would have to be physically incapacitated, probably unconscious, before I would reveal obvious signs of suffering. Something about fire class really jives with the ascetic in me. A few centuries ago I probably would have been beating the hell out of myself with a knotted rope all night and copying the Bible in my own blood by day. Now I crawl around in burning rooms, trying to save my soul the only way that makes sense to me.

I began maneuvering the hydraulic spreader back into the gap in the car door. The machine whined and caught, pressing the metal apart like curtains to reveal the hinges. That's going to make a decent bruise, I thought. It's going to be a hard to determine which part of me gets iced first tonight.

After a few hours of additional punishment, we broke for lunch. I eagerly doffed my gear and went to the bathroom to see what would certainly be a nasty patch of flowering blue on my mid-thigh. But there was nothing there but a little pink smudge, like a spank-mark. For all its magnificence I might as well have just slopped warm coffee in my lap while driving to class. What a complete disappointment.

Fire class has changed my life in some odd ways, not all of them related to tolerance for yelling and pain. For example, on my drive home from the academy early Saturday evening I've begun listening to "The LBJ Tapes," a show that I previously found intolerably boring. Basically, it's just old tape recordings of President Lyndon Johnson calling various people on the telephone. Most are political contacts; some are familiar names, but I've never heard of many of them. An announcer mentions who LBJ was calling between each segment and provides a brief description of the various topics covered. Then comes the unmistakable hiss of old recording equipment and the memorable drawl:

"Hello?"

"Hello, Mister President!"

C-SPAN radio plays the LBJ Tapes every Saturday afternoon, and they have become standard fare for my drive home after fire class. I cannot begin to explain why. Maybe I'm so tired that I can't even tolerate the sensation of musical rhythms beating against my flesh. Whatever the reason, driving home from Rockville with the LBJ Tapes playing has become something of a tradition, one that I'll miss after fire class is over. On Saturday they had a special edition comprised exclusively of conversations between LBJ and Bobby Kennedy, and I actually sat in the car for an extra couple minutes after I got home, waiting for a particularly engaging call to end. Then I got out and began fishing my gear out of the trunk. I noticed that my leg was feeling significantly more stiff and painful than earlier in the day. Maybe the bruise was still setting in. Things were looking up.