By Santiago Melli-Huber
It started off very faint, but eventually, the stench of smoke from across the street alerted Josué Contreras that something was very wrong.
“I closed the door, because the smoke started coming in,” said Contreras, who was working the door at Trick Dog in The Mission one Friday night in January, at around 7 p.m.
Seeing residents across the street were trying to clear things out of their apartment, he soon noticed the house next door was in trouble. That house was the source of the smoke. The son of the elderly couple who lived there told Contreras that his parents were “all the way up.” Facing a fight or flight moment, Contreras chose flight — two flights, to be exact — as he raced up to the third floor of a burning home.
Higher and higher he climbed, the light dwindling floor by floor. The smoke thickening, filling his lungs. Finally, he reached the top of the stairs and found a woman face-up on the ground.
“I picked her up and I dragged her down. Somewhere between the first and second floor, I gave her to her son, and I decided to go up there again. That’s when I kind of figured, ‘Holy shit, I might die here. This is bad.’ But I was already halfway up there.”
Back on the third floor, Contreras realized he didn’t know the layout of the home, and the only space not filled with smoke was a narrow layer of air from the floor to his calves. His intuition pointed him to a door he thought might logically lead to a bedroom.
He was right. In the room, a man was sitting on the bed, trying to put his shoes on.
“I remember grabbing him by the back of his jacket and just yanking him and like, no, we’re not waiting for you and your shoes. I remember seeing one little foot up with no shoe, one shoe on.”
He was probably right not to let the man put his shoes on, as the smoke was getting thicker and thicker.
“I lost my way, and that was really a bad situation. I couldn’t figure out where the stairwell was anymore. This old man is trying to figure out what the hell is going on, because I’m holding him down, trying to let him breathe down there. If he had gotten up, he would have inhaled all that [smoke].
“At that moment, I was kind of accepting I was fucked, just thinking I was going to die with this old man, because there was no way out.”
Flickering lights helped him barely make out where the stairs were. He got the two of them down the stairs, again handing the parent off to his son.
“I think that’s when I realized what happened, because I’m walking down the stairs and I’m out of breath, and I just hear the building crackling around me.”
That January fire might not be the last time Contreras runs towards danger. The blaze ignited a long-dormant passion to join the San Francisco Fire Department, a dream that escaped the 35-year-old in his early 20s.
“Before the fire started, I was trying to do the barback and become a bartender eventually, but now I’m going to be a firefighter.”
He’s currently in an eight-week course to become an EMT, the first step down his path to join SFPD. In the meantime, he’s continuing to work as the doorman of a bar, a job with late hours that make juggling his courseload more difficult.
“The classes are in Alameda. It’s a little bit daunting. I get out of here at 1, 2 sometimes, try to wake up early to study. It’s very intense, learning everything an EMT needs to know, just how fragile we are as humans.”
Intense, yes, but fascinating to learn about how the body functions: “I love it. I’m really enjoying what I’m learning. It’s exciting to put that into use.”
He says he first took a test in his early 20s to become a firefighter, which he passed, but he never heard back.
“After that, life happened,” he said, reflecting on an experience all too familiar for 30-somethings, who try and try to reach their goals, only to find themselves forced to move on.
“You kind of forget about your dreams, but then this happened, and suddenly life has given me a chance to do whatever I can to do this.”
He says he’s a very different student than he was the last time he was in school, using his second chance to sit in the front row and work hard to make his decade-long dream come true.
“It’s definitely beautiful, the way life works.”
Santiago Melli-Huber is a San Francisco-based writer.
Watch Santiago’s interview with Contreras
Credit where it’s due: We also saw iterations of Josué Contreras covered in SF Chronicle, KTVU and Mission Local; however, someone at The Bold Italic met Contreras by chance one night, which inspired us to follow this story.
