Today the backup that may or may not have saved him is far less likely to arrive. When Vallejo entered bankruptcy, the fire department was cut from 121 to 67, for a city of 112,000 people. The department handles roughly 13,000 calls a year, extremely high for the population. When people feel threatened or worried by anything except other people, they call the fire department. Most of these calls are of the cat-in-the-tree variety—pointless. (“You never see the skeleton of a cat in a tree.”) They get calls from people who have headaches. They get calls from people who have itches where they can’t scratch. They have to answer every call. (“The best call I ever had was phantom leg pain in a guy with no legs.”) To deal with these huge numbers of calls, they once had eight stations, eight three-person engine companies, a four-man truck company (used only for actual fires and rescue calls), one fireboat, one confined space rescue team, and a team to deal with hazardous materials. They now are down to four stations, four engines, and a truck.
This is particularly relevant to Paige Meyer because, two months ago, he became Vallejo’s new fire chief. It surprised him: he hadn’t even applied for the job. The city manager, Phil Batchelor, just called him to his office one day. “He didn’t ever really ask me if I wanted the job,” says Meyer. “He just asked how’s the family, told me he was giving me the job, and asked if I had any problem with that.”
He didn’t, actually. He sat down and made a list of ways to improve the department. He faced a fresh challenge: how to deliver service that was the same as before, or even better than before, with half the resources. How to cope with an environment of scarcity. He began to measure things that hadn’t been measured. The number one cause of death in firefighting was heart attacks. Number two was a truck crash. He was now in charge of a department that would be both overworked and in a hurry. Fewer people doing twice the work probably meant twice the number of injuries per firefighter. He’d decided to tailor fitness regimens to fit the job. With fewer fire stations and fewer firefighters in them, the response times were going to be slower. He’d need to find new ways to speed things up. A longer response time meant less room for error; a longer response time meant the fires they’d be fighting would be bigger. He had some thoughts about the most efficient way to fight these bigger fires. He began, in short, to rethink firefighting.
When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they’ll figure it out. They don’t always do that. But you can never rule out the possibility that they will. As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the end of every book I write there always seem to be people who deserve more than to be thanked at the end of a book. This one is no different. Act II of the financial crisis was set in places it would never have occurred to me to go. I’d like to thank Graydon Carter and Doug Stumpf, at Vanity Fair, for encouraging me to go there, and Jaime Lalinde, for researching these places so well that I sometimes felt he, not I, should be writing about them. Theo Phanos offered me not only friendship and encouragement but the shrewd views of an interesting money manager, from start to finish. At W. W. Norton, Janet Byrne has appeared from nowhere to improve my prose and, to the extent it is possible for an editor to do this, save me from myself. Starling Lawrence remains my touchstone.
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Lewis
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Vanity Fair, where the pieces in this book appeared, in slightly different form:
“Wall Street on the Tundra,” April 2009; “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” October 2010; “When Irish Eyes Are Crying,” March 2011; “It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!,” September 2011; “Too Fat to Fly,” November 2011.
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