Entry 4:

Our new chief has recently undertaken a massive organizational restructuring, overloading the administration with a half-dozen new highly paid staffers. His most puzzling hire was that of a lady with a Ph.D. in something vague and fuzzy-sounding that doubtless required a lot of Kumbaya time for her fieldwork. We were told she'd be helping us build community and foster teamwork, which is funny because while we often complain about false alarms or ladders that are falling apart with age, it's pretty rare to hear a firefighter say, "Gosh, I just wish that I liked the folks I work with."

I got to bed about midnight last night, and as soon as I sat down on my bunk the entire thing collapsed in a crash. Somebody had replaced all the bolts with toothpicks. Firefighters have the free time and sophomoric inclinations to devote hours to the commission of elaborate practical jokes. Safety gear is off limits, but beyond that anything goes. One crew tape-recorded a state lottery drawing, then bought a guy a ticket with the outdated winning number. He neglected to check the date on the ticket and when they played the tape for him—he thought it was real time of course—his buddies had him believing that he had won $48 million. He started strutting around the firehouse, even called the battalion chief (who was in on the joke) and told him to "stick his badge up his ass." It must have been quite a letdown.

There is a plaque in the watch room of Station 3 that reads: He Also Serves Who Only Sits and Waits. If there is one thing that firefighters do well, it's hang around the firehouse and kill time. After the basics like equipment maintenance and feeding ourselves are done, we basically have the time between runs to ourselves. The boredom can be staggering, and everybody finds their own way to pass the time. I read a lot and ride the stationary bicycle endlessly to nowhere. One guy is carving an entire carousel's worth of wooden horses and dragons for his daughter; one crew exhaustively diagrams and re-creates entire World War II battles, complete with little boats and hand-painted infantrymen. I don't have a television at home, but at work I watch an embarrassing quantity of Ricki Lake and Oprah.

But by far the greatest pastime is simply telling stories and making up lies around the kitchen table. The sort of water-cooler conversation that is limited to 15 minutes on a regular job goes on around the clock in the firehouse. One's failures spread instantaneously: When a vacationing firefighter was denied his request for a dance with a girl in Hawaii, those of us back in Oakland were howling at his humiliation within minutes. When he got home the guys had stocked his locker with half a dozen books with titles like Why Am I Always Dancing Alone and How To Drive a Woman Crazy. The firehouse is no place for the thin-skinned.

Firemen are quick to hand out nicknames—usually designed to reveal a colleague's weakest feature of attitude or appearance: Snacks, The Missing Link, Mustache on a Stick, Chardonnay (he's a fine whiner), Ratboy. While nicknames are often more than a little mean-spirited, they also convey a sense of belonging: If you're getting hassled, it means that people care enough to notice you. One firefighter I know desperately wanted a nickname and tried to slyly assign himself a tough-sounding one, going so far as to write it in the collars of his shirts, leaving pieces of paper with his new nickname lying around conspicuously. His ruse was of course immediately discovered, so now we call him Tinkerbell or Daffodil—anything to deflate his massive ego. I'm sometimes called Harpo, a reference to my odd curly hair that makes me look more like the "Greatest American Hero" than a Backdraft-style smoke-eater. Firefighters will pounce on any sign of frailty and exploit it endlessly. One firefighter revealed that he didn't care for chicken, so he was of course served chicken every single day at the firehouse for three years. When he'd take a day off the guys would post pictures of themselves eating salmon fillets and barbecue ribs.

When I think about the firehouse I can't help but say "the guys," because the culture is really that of a fraternity but without the beer or the sex, if such a thing can be imagined. About 8 percent of Oakland's firefighters are women, and I have to admit that I don't envy them. While the vast majority of men in the department are friendly and easygoing, there is a small minority who feel that women have no place in the fire service and have committed themselves to proving that. I know a woman who was pulled from her bunk at 3 in the morning and forced to throw ladders until her back gave out. The truth of the matter is that worthlessness on the fireground is not confined to female firefighters; worthlessness is confined to worthless firefighters.

My job requires me to spend 52 hours a week in the firehouse, and overtime can increase that dramatically. The crew functions as a family with all of the petty problems and dysfunction that one might expect. Somebody snores too loud, somebody eats too much, somebody does a lazy job with the toilet brush. Often when I go home in the morning I miss seeing my wife before she leaves for work, and I realize that I spend more waking hours with my captain than with the woman I'm married to.