Deep Throat

My gold tooth keeps the signals out

TW: Transphobia, lynching, slurs, scuzziness

“I’m telling you, bisexuals are not real.” My boss corrects me in a long-suffering tone after about 5 days in the cramped cab of a brushfire engine, too little activity on the line to save me from this conversation. “That’s a choice people have to make, you can switch but only be either-or. My ex was thinking about going back to being a Lesbian before I talked her out of it, reminded her what her life was like when she was doing that lifestyle. You’ll understand one day.”

We’re going to diverge a bit, going forward from childhood to an episode from when I was a young man. Illustrative, and perhaps defining.

I was on the Gold Hill fire outside lovely asbestos-riddled Libby, Montana in the long ago mists of 2018. My joy at leaving off from minimum wage restaurant work and unreliable manual labor for the luxury of the wildfire life had been only slightly dimmed by getting the worst food poisoning of my life the night before I hit the fireline, figuring that I was roughly as functional as I would have been if I’d shown up hungover like a real wildland firefighter. Stressing out over how to my scant dollars plug the hole left by Stewart’s refusal to reliably pay child support had worn me down, and the secure knowledge of a filthy private contractor’s paycheck and government provided meals put my mind at ease for a while.

It’s never that easy.

I’d had two leading indicators that I was going to have a bad time: The first was a hurried phone call from another supervisor with the company, tasking me with reigning in my own immediate boss for this assignment so that he wouldn’t try to badly schmooze with higher-ups in the fire camp and embarrass the company. The second was a prior incident in which this same man I would be working under had, being a long time professional and knowing that assignments to brush fire engines in a company are temporary, changed the main account on the work laptop that went with the truck to his name, reset the profile picture to his face, and password locked it without telling anyone.

Seeing all of my coworkers die laughing in a hotel room on the way to California, greeted on startup by this dude’s copied Facebook profile picture pointing dramatically to the horizon in his home volunteer department bunker gear, had stuck with me. So had overhearing the awkward phone call with the company owner demanding the password to her own laptop and the software we needed for filing Department of Transportation paperwork.

My expectations had been low, and I was still disappointed.

The beginning of the Gay Conversation had been sprung on me unprovoked after several days of ever more dismaying behavior. My boss wanted desperately to impress his superiors in our chain of command, and it showed through embarrassingly in his every interaction. Every little hot spot we put out patrolling the roads on the edge of the fire seemed to be larger, burning brighter, and spreading faster than I remembered it by the time it was reported to a superior. Whenever it was time to relay some task we’d done in the day, five words were never allowed to carry a statement that could fit ten and five where none would have been fine.

Our conversations inside the engine between incidents of productivity was hardly better, he once claimed at length that a famous local figure in the firefighter scene had passed to him and him alone before his death some sort of secret wildfire school of techniques that he’d been waiting his whole career to pass on to a worthy student. He ended this one with significant eyebrow-raised eye contact at me in the back seat, obviously implying that if I went for it I could be his chosen grasshopper.

I never ventured to whatever secret mountaintop firefighting monastery he’d been keeping in his back pocket his whole career, mostly because the concept of secret and powerful firefighting techniques is counterintuitive bullshit. It was not the first time some weirdo had pledged to me that I could be a student to carry the torch of some hidden solemn wisdom that had once been passed to them, nor would it be the last. I think I just have one of those faces.

Without occult mysteries of wildfire to center the conversation, he inevitably drifted to politics. I’d heard previously that he’d at one point had a notably unsuccessful stint as some kind of private security that earned him the nickname ‘Robocop’ in nearby towns, so even at this transitional stage in my beliefs I was bracing myself. Politics on the line was something I avoided, but my refusal to humor the idea that sexuality is a choice seemed to irk him and my insistence that bisexuals were real even more so. He was convinced that anyone at any time could make the wrong choice to Go Gay and screw up their lives, and looked at me like I was the weird one for dismissing it. I had never gotten any of the queer radio signals from the Devil that Christians often go on about, maybe just because he hasn’t gotten around to me yet, and he was unwilling to accept that explanation.

Despite the generally chilly reception of his wisdom and gay opinions, Bossman elected to share even more of his private self with my long-suffering coworker and I. His many self-aggrandizing stories all had the feeling you get from Trump starting an anecdote with someone calling him ‘sir,’ specifically the tang of utter bullshit. They were also so banal and boring that most have escaped my memory, the kind of petty interpersonal drama that makes your eyes glaze of over if it shows up in a Reddit post, related with inordinate pride.

Simultaneously, he was working overtime to thoroughly ruin our impression of him by ‘jokingly’ hitting on a woman further up the food chain despite all my attempts to get him to cool it, at one point slapping his flabby hand unasked for up her arm to imitate a salmon flapping out of water and flashing a gaping smile with one gold tooth gleaming in a ruin of broken and decayed stumps far too close to her face. Since this certainly meant we were now first in line to be cut from the roster when the fire calmed enough to release equipment, very likely taking money directly out of our pockets if we didn’t happen to be kicked out precisely when another fire needed our type of engine, we were less than pleased. I and my intrepid fellow, who had little more luck than I at keeping Bossman within bounds, consoled ourselves with the fact that we we wouldn’t have to deal with this guy for very long.

Naturally, this meant we got to hear his very favorite story.

Bossboy considers himself something of a new American Cowboy, proud of always going armed and dangerous with a spring in his step. One fine day in the Kalispell Wal Mart, boy was horrified to come into direct eyesight with someone who wasn’t strictly gender conforming.

“He or she or it or what have you was in these fancy shoes and a blouse and pants so tight you could just see everything,” the manchild said disdainfully and in a slightly puzzled tone, keeping his lower lip curled in a sneer that exposed the one gold tooth beside its fractured and jagged fellows, “So I turned to my friend so that the outline of my pistol showed right through my pants and I said ‘remember when we used to lynch faggots like that?’ Right there in front of it.”

He slapped his hands down on his thighs, waiting expectantly in a cold silence that went on and on. Eventually I replied “So that was brandishing then.”

Brandishing is something of a cardinal sin among people who carry concealed weapons. It is also a crime. Carrying a gun means that in every argument you are always wrong, in every confrontation your job is to deescalate, and in every situation you are working to avoid having to draw that weapon. Or, rather, that is how gun ownership is supposed to work. Under this model, and very much in the eyes of the law, when your life or the life of another is not in danger letting someone know verbally or by displaying your weapon in a threatening manner that you are armed is a very large no-no.

Boy insists that this very clear-cut case of brandishing is not one, and I switched tacks to mocking him openly for being so frightened of someone so harmlessly out of the ordinary that he felt in fear of his life. After all, those tight pants he put such emphasis on precluded almost any easily accessible concealed weapon, and there was absolutely no contact beyond the temerity of this person to work in a Wal mart, so he must have been shaking in his boots at the mere brush of vibes.

The ideal outcome in that situation would have been another customer kindly reminding him that lots of people carry concealed, and he should behave like he lives in a polite society. Tragically he seemed to have gone unchecked for years until my mild sass.

I let it drop when we were inevitably assigned to the Chipper, a dreaded final stage in a fire operation that has been dying down and is now terminal: Very often a successfully hero’d fire will simmer a while below the level of having enough work for all hands, but still leave open a window in which it could roar back to life in adverse weather. Releasing your resources, heavy equipment to working squads with chainsaws and shovels, too early can result in a reinvigorating wind catching fire command short-staffed and running under the gun. Thus, the end of a fire features an awkward period where you have more men and equipment than you really need for their actual jobs. The natural instinct of the wildland firefighter in these times is to find some hole out of sight of overhead authority with shade and a cooler and go unnoticed while theoretically on their last given task, emerging stealthily at meal times. The natural instinct of overhead is to ferret out the idle hands and find them something to do.

As the fire dies, the cleanup begins, and the woodchippers come out. Feeding a large, trailer-pulled woodchipper the mounds of smashed timber and hacked up brush that clearing fireline generates is hard, dirty, and dangerous, but doesn’t have to be a horrible experience if you have a good crew that works well in concert. What makes it bad is if you’re one of several three-man crews hailing from Type Six brushfire engines grafted together into an ill-functioning impromptu labor gang.

You can be exposed to all kinds of personalities this way, someone for example might try to start a fight with the other engine bosses or order everyone around when they have no actual authority. When work begins, some people are faster than others, some guys seem to be in it to prove their manhood by yanking bigger trees than everyone else from the roadside at all costs, and several people might just fuck off and assign themselves busywork like brushing pine needles off the road for the duration of the work day.

By the time everyone starts to actually function together as a smooth running team, it means the fire is over and everyone’s going back to their home states. Sometimes you even stay in touch with the cool people, and get to hear from them over Facebook when their colleagues get busted trafficking lots and lots of meth across state lines hidden in the water tanks of their fire engines.

In this case I thought we were off to a good start, the chipper had been christened “Deep Throat” in large stenciled letters over the maw and seemed to stafeed by the kind of guys who will help a stranger out of a ditch on the side of the road at in time, in any weather, in exchange for a 45 minute conversation about anything. Their favorite joke was conspiratorially telling people the name was really about Watergate, and their favorite anecdotes were the female work crews that posed for group photos with the nameplate. We could have done much worse. Sometimes you get to share an assignment with dudes who narrowly avoid getting busted by drug dogs in camp by smoothly tossing their paraphenelia into a dumpster mid stride.

Not too long into losing myself in the circle of chipper feeding, thoughtless but ever aware and generally feeling grateful to still be on the fireline and earning for my family, Boy decides to bring up his very favorite story again. I was shocked, knowing that he had no sense of what was appropriate and that he was an asshole, but confessing to a crime didn’t strike me as the kind of story that left the cab of the engine. Even the actual worst engine boss I ever worked with kept his bragging about his many felonies in private settings.

For their part, the Deep Throat men didn’t seem terribly impressed, although I could be assigning this charitably in my memory, but I was particularly struck by his delivery was exactly the same. Rehearsed, polished, performed with dramatic flare. This wasn’t a one-off he told me in the cab to get a rise out of the guy who thinks we’re not all born with an on/off gayswitch, this was one of his best showpiece memory. He told everyone this stupid, petty, disgusting little tale because he was oh so proud of himself.

It didn’t matter whether it was true or not, there is every chance that he just saw a transwoman in public once and walked home imagining a badass scenario to comfort himself, it was that he had apparently been navigating through life just fine spouting this one off repeatedly without getting his ass kicked. The patronizing tone of “Oh, you didn’t like that one huh?” when I brought up maybe not telling that story to all and sundry to avoid getting us kicked off the fire topped off the memory with a dusting of condescension and set it for life.

I thought back to our day with Deep Throat often in the coming years, when favorites like Jordan Peterson started in on the Trans Rights legislation whenever reason prevailed in some legislative body, through the Women’s Sports panic, and the Super Straight nonsense. Hooks that might have caught me in the process of shedding my old ideological sin slid off when I remembered a gap-toothed dweeb with a wannabe cop, skipping through life bragging about threatening to lynch someone whose only crime was existing and working a job. If I had not been exposed to the ugliness and transphobia and where persistent dehumanization leads, I might still be operating on the same wavelength as notables like ShoeOnHead and assorted r/atheism-mod-looking-dudes I used to talk about right wing evangelicals with: Ignorant, dumb, and missing a large part of the picture.

So thanks bud, wherever you are, the second worst boss I ever had on the fireline and a turnkey moment in pushing me towards militant LGBTQ support. Whenever I think of Deep Throat choking down wood, I think of you.