Name: Firefighter on Getting Called to Drug Dens
Uploaded: 2026-02-05T16:15:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Firefighter on Getting Called to Drug Dens' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-02-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Firefighter on Getting Called to Drug Dens' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-02-05. Transcript available.

So you get in a ladder, and where's the ladder at?
What's that like?
161st Street in Manhattan, off of Amsterdam Avenue,
in a place called Washington Heights.
Washington Heights?
Yeah.
Yeah, a lot of Dominicans up there.
Oh, my God.
When I got there, they were just coming in.
Yeah.
And they took over with blood, man.
They killed everybody.
Really?
Oh, they took over the drug business, because that was the hub.
You had the GW Bridge right there.
You had all the parkways to head out to Brooklyn, out to Long Island.
So everybody would come in and buy their crack and their cocaine.
Yeah.
So it was badass.
I mean, they would be shooting all day long.
Was it exciting?
It was.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
And the place was so crowded.
It was, like, full of people with these old, broken-down tenement buildings.
Brownstones, tenements, all broken down, 100 years old.
The firehouse was 100 years old.
What were some of the environments you went into?
Like, did you ever just walk into an environment, like,
oh, well, this is crazy, or like a drug den, or like a...
Oh, plenty of drug dens.
I mean, every building had a drug apartment where they would sell drugs.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, but this one fire that I went to, it was in the middle of the day.
It was, like, the second floor.
We pull up.
Fire's blowing out four windows.
I mean, it was going good.
And so we run out.
Now we're second due, which means we go to the floor above the fire.
So the first due truck has the fire floor.
Second due goes to the floor above, which the floor above is really shitty.
Because that's where the heat's going up.
That's where everything's going, you know?
So now we get up the staircase, and it's starting to bank down and get dark.
And I see a guy runs past me, no shirt on, no shoes.
He's got, like, a three-year-old kid under his arm and a hefty bag.
Oh, yeah.
So a politician, probably.
So he slips by us, you know?
So now we're going to take the door in the hallway above the fire apartment.
And it's getting smoky, and my boss puts his mask on.
But we have to take the door, so I wanted to see a little bit.
So I'm hitting the, you know, the guy's got the halogen in the door jam,
and I'm smashing it with an axe.
And he's trying to get a bite on the jam to bust the door open.
So finally, we get it.
We bust the door open.
We put our masks on.
And we go in, and we're crawling around.
And the engine company did a good job.
They knocked the fire down pretty fast, you know?
So as we're crawling around, it's starting to, the black smoke's starting to go
away,
and it's getting lighter.
And I'm on the floor, and I bump into a dresser.
I'm like, oh, now I can start to see a little bit.
I put my light on the dresser.
All the drawers are open.
Stacks of hundreds and $50 bills.
Every drawer, I mean.
No 20s, no, it was all Coke money.
Yeah.
Bam.
And I'm like, oh, my God, you know?
I'm still like a, I'm like my one year there.
So I'm, oh, yeah.
I'm a junior man.
You're like, I got to get something for Christine.
Well, that's it.
You know, I got an angel and a devil on my shoulders, and they're fighting it
out.
You know, I'm looking at, we're in smoke.
So, I mean, it ain't like a setup.
Nobody's ever going to know.
So I'm thinking, oh, my God, I could buy myself a new Harley with that money,
you know?
And then I was like, the angel would be like, oh, you buy the new Harley, and
you're going
to crash, and you'll get paralyzed.
And I'm like, oh, shit, that could happen.
So now I told the senior man, I said, Eddie, come here.
Look in the drawers.
Yeah, bring another guy in now.
Senior man, you know?
And he's like, holy shit, Tony.
He's like, what are we going to do here?
Oh, Eddie's setting you up again.
Yeah, I'm like, you're the senior man.
You tell me what to do.
Oh, this is dirty tennis, you guys.
I mean, I could have been stacking thousands in my pocket.
If Eddie would have been like, hey, let's take a little, you have to, huh?
I would, yeah.
Yeah, you got to.
Yeah.
I think just to even make sure that it is what it is, get it back home.
Right.
I, you know, I was young.
I had this, oh, it's dirty money.
It'll bring me a bad juju, you know?
It could have.
Yeah.
You never know.
I mean, I think that the karma of it, who knows?
Yeah, you don't know.
So the boss walks in, you know, the lieutenant, and he's like, what do you got?
And I was like, we got all this drawer full of, dresser full of money.
He's like, oh, I don't see nothing.
He was like, I don't know if you ever see Schultz on Hogan's Heroes.
He's like, I see nothing.
He turns around, he walks away, you know?
So now we're like, so now we go out, and it's still a little smoky, but we
could see
we don't have our masks on.
And there's another room with a padlock on the door.
So he's like, take the door.
So he puts the ads into the halligan, and I whack it with the axe.
Yeah.
The door would bust it open.
And Theo, I'm telling you, there was like half the coke in Manhattan was in
there.
Bricks all the way to the ceiling on all sides of the walls.
A pile of cocaine about 18 inches high on the table.
We were like, holy shit.
So the boss gets on, tell the battalion we got a drug apartment, send the PD up.
So now we're like waiting for the PD to come.
We wanted them to come before the drug dealers got back.
So finally, two NYPD guys show up, and they're like, yeah, guys, what do you
got?
I said, well, go in that room and go in that room.
I said, that's the money room.
That's the coke room.
So they both go in, and at the same time, they go, holy shit.
Wow.
They call a backup, you know?
So now we're like, my boss is like, all right, we're out of here, you know?
We don't want to be nothing part of this whole show here.
I'd have stuck around, man, you know?
Like Joey Diaz says, every now and then, you bump into a Colombian, you know?
So I had this junkie that we called three times.
We got called to the sixth floor.
He kept lighting fires to stay warm in the winter.
Yeah.
And he was a young black kid, you know?
And so we would have to climb up these vacant stairs.
I had to pop a hole in the cinder block walls to get in, vacant building.
And a couple times it's happened.
Yeah.
Oh, well, it's the first one.
We go up, sixth floor, dark, cold.
It's icy.
It's about 30 degrees out.
And nice kid?
I have no idea.
I got to the back with my, and I see my Irish lieutenant yelling at him.
He's like, what the fuck you doing?
You can't light a fucking fire, blah, blah, blah.
And he was sitting there, and he was in the corner.
And I came in, and I put my flashlight on him.
And he was looking at me with these eyes, you know?
And I was like, God, he had like tombstones in his eyes, you know?
And he was only about 16, 17.
So we put the fire out.
We leave.
Two hours later, we get called back again.
Go up, oh, got to climb these stairs.
Six floors, no steps, just risers.
God.
And no lights, it's dark.
So now we climb all the way up again.
We go through the thing.
He lit it up again.
The boy says, you know, you can't fucking do this.
He's yelling at him and shit.
I got the light on him, and the funny part was we just broke into an Entenmann's
cake at the firehouse
with the vanilla icing that we would keep in the fridge, get it nice and stiff.
So as my friend Jeff in the dark, he's putting the fire out, I put the light on
him,
and he's still got the vanilla icing on his mustache.
Somebody took a piece for the road, Jeff, huh?
The boy says he's yelling at him.
That's why he's pissed.
This guy interrupted his dessert, huh?
No, three companies and a battalion are responding every time, and we got
chains on.
It's snowing.
It's not like no easy ride.
Right, so you get a lot to get out there.
So the third time, I hear we just got back from something.
We went in our bunks, and we get in the bunks, and we're like a little pillow
talk before everybody
was sleeping, and then before you know it, beam, boom, same box.
Here we go again.
I hear the boss yelling, fuck shit, I'll kill that motherfucker.
Yeah, dude, let him cook at this point.
We're sliding down the poles.
This guy's trying to get to heaven, and you guys keep coming in and ruining his
trip.
Third time, so we're in the rig, and I said to my friend Jeff, I says, let's
tell the boss,
stay on the, don't even come up the stairs, we'll take care of it.
And surprisingly, he agreed.
So when we got to the door, I says, Lou, we'll take care of it.
You stay down here.
So me and Jeff go up, though, my light, my diehard battery died on me.
So I had like no light left.
I'm trying to follow Jeff's light, and we're going up just on the rises, and
then there's
no platform.
So you got to like lean over your step to get on.
And when you get to the fifth or sixth floor, you're looking down at the
skeleton staircase.
What?
Yeah.
So now we go in, go through the dark apartment again.
He's in there again.
Now he's got candles burning because we broke his bucket up.
We smashed it all up.
So we're like, holy shit.
So now Jeff is like leaning into him, and he says, listen, you can't fucking do
this anymore.
And Jeff's like the good cop, you know?
I'm the bad cop.
So I lean into him.
I look at him.
I says, we come back here again.
I'm throwing you out that fucking window.
And he just looked at me, you know?
And that was it.
That was the last time we went back.
We left there.
We took his candles.
And years later, I would see that kid's face looking at me.
And it made me feel so bad.
A wasted life like that, you know?
Heroin.
He had the works.
Everything.
That's scary.
And the fact that he kept going back to do it, it's just that power of
addiction, you know?
It was cold.
Oh.
Well, I guess it'd keep you warm up.
Yeah, he was in a vacant, yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
A lot of shit like that.
Vacants were disgusting.
Because it's just, anybody could be in there doing anything, huh?
Squatters.
Yeah, they're shitting on the floor.
They're drugs, needles.
And you're crawling around in there because you still have to save them.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah, vacant fires.
Yeah, do you start to develop a certain, like, attitudes towards humanity or
drug users
or society or something?
Absolutely.
Call them skells.
They're all skells.
Yeah.
To us back then, you know?
And matter of fact, on my block, we had a tight block, 161st Street.
Mm-hmm.
And we had a bodega, a gypsy cab dispatcher, a whorehouse, and a bunch of drug
apartments.
Yeah.
And it was a busy block.
And we had two guys on the block that were almost there the whole time I was
there.
And they were the lookouts.
And one guy was bald, and we called him eight ball.
Mm-hmm.
And the other guy always had a hat, and we called him the hat.
And the funny part was they would watch our cars for us so nobody would break
into the cars
and shit.
But, you know, I mean, I would see every agency there is come down and radar
block through
the years I was there, ATF, Manhattan Tactical North, CIA.
I mean, everything.
I'll tell you who was the worst ones was the FBI.
Yeah.
They come down with machine guns, and I've never seen anybody that.
And then they clear the street.
They hit all the apartments.
It's amazing.
I bet they were all just visiting that whorehouse.
That whorehouse.
Yeah.
I would inspect it now, and then I'd go in there with my hat, and they'd all be
looking
at me, you know, and be like, what the fuck do you want, you know?
Like, I got to inspect this place, you know?
What was it like in some of those joints?
Was it interesting in there?
Was it just women trying to just survive most of those types of people?
Yeah, it was just some middle-aged, young, not too young, Dominican women.
I guess they took care of the cab drivers and stuff.
And they had the different rooms, you know, everybody had their little bed in
there.
Just trying to sit down.
And I would inspect it, you know?
Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.
I got you.
You got condoms?
The condoms are here?
Making sure the alarm works, ladies.
Yeah, they would be like, come on.
Some of them were the other, the prostitutes would be like, get the fuck out of
here, man.
You know, they'd be up all night.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
Oh, I'm sure.
Yeah.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.
They didn't want nothing to do with me.

Firefighter on Getting Called to Drug Dens

So you get in a ladder, and where's the ladder at?
What's that like?
161st Street in Manhattan, off of Amsterdam Avenue,
in a place called Washington Heights.
Washington Heights?
Yeah.
Yeah, a lot of Dominicans up there.
Oh, my God.
When I got there, they were just coming in.
Yeah.
And they took over with blood, man.
They killed everybody.
Really?
Oh, they took over the drug business, because that was the hub.
You had the GW Bridge right there.
You had all the parkways to head out to Brooklyn, out to Long Island.
So everybody would come in and buy their crack and their cocaine.
Yeah.
So it was badass.
I mean, they would be shooting all day long.
Was it exciting?
It was.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
And the place was so crowded.
It was, like, full of people with these old, broken-down tenement buildings.
Brownstones, tenements, all broken down, 100 years old.
The firehouse was 100 years old.
What were some of the environments you went into?
Like, did you ever just walk into an environment, like,
oh, well, this is crazy, or like a drug den, or like a...
Oh, plenty of drug dens.
I mean, every building had a drug apartment where they would sell drugs.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, but this one fire that I went to, it was in the middle of the day.
It was, like, the second floor.
We pull up.
Fire's blowing out four windows.
I mean, it was going good.
And so we run out.
Now we're second due, which means we go to the floor above the fire.
So the first due truck has the fire floor.
Second due goes to the floor above, which the floor above is really shitty.
Because that's where the heat's going up.
That's where everything's going, you know?
So now we get up the staircase, and it's starting to bank down and get dark.
And I see a guy runs past me, no shirt on, no shoes.
He's got, like, a three-year-old kid under his arm and a hefty bag.
Oh, yeah.
So a politician, probably.
So he slips by us, you know?
So now we're going to take the door in the hallway above the fire apartment.
And it's getting smoky, and my boss puts his mask on.
But we have to take the door, so I wanted to see a little bit.
So I'm hitting the, you know, the guy's got the halogen in the door jam,
and I'm smashing it with an axe.
And he's trying to get a bite on the jam to bust the door open.
So finally, we get it.
We bust the door open.
We put our masks on.
And we go in, and we're crawling around.
And the engine company did a good job.
They knocked the fire down pretty fast, you know?
So as we're crawling around, it's starting to, the black smoke's starting to go
away,
and it's getting lighter.
And I'm on the floor, and I bump into a dresser.
I'm like, oh, now I can start to see a little bit.
I put my light on the dresser.
All the drawers are open.
Stacks of hundreds and $50 bills.
Every drawer, I mean.
No 20s, no, it was all Coke money.
Yeah.
Bam.
And I'm like, oh, my God, you know?
I'm still like a, I'm like my one year there.
So I'm, oh, yeah.
I'm a junior man.
You're like, I got to get something for Christine.
Well, that's it.
You know, I got an angel and a devil on my shoulders, and they're fighting it
out.
You know, I'm looking at, we're in smoke.
So, I mean, it ain't like a setup.
Nobody's ever going to know.
So I'm thinking, oh, my God, I could buy myself a new Harley with that money,
you know?
And then I was like, the angel would be like, oh, you buy the new Harley, and
you're going
to crash, and you'll get paralyzed.
And I'm like, oh, shit, that could happen.
So now I told the senior man, I said, Eddie, come here.
Look in the drawers.
Yeah, bring another guy in now.
Senior man, you know?
And he's like, holy shit, Tony.
He's like, what are we going to do here?
Oh, Eddie's setting you up again.
Yeah, I'm like, you're the senior man.
You tell me what to do.
Oh, this is dirty tennis, you guys.
I mean, I could have been stacking thousands in my pocket.
If Eddie would have been like, hey, let's take a little, you have to, huh?
I would, yeah.
Yeah, you got to.
Yeah.
I think just to even make sure that it is what it is, get it back home.
Right.
I, you know, I was young.
I had this, oh, it's dirty money.
It'll bring me a bad juju, you know?
It could have.
Yeah.
You never know.
I mean, I think that the karma of it, who knows?
Yeah, you don't know.
So the boss walks in, you know, the lieutenant, and he's like, what do you got?
And I was like, we got all this drawer full of, dresser full of money.
He's like, oh, I don't see nothing.
He was like, I don't know if you ever see Schultz on Hogan's Heroes.
He's like, I see nothing.
He turns around, he walks away, you know?
So now we're like, so now we go out, and it's still a little smoky, but we
could see
we don't have our masks on.
And there's another room with a padlock on the door.
So he's like, take the door.
So he puts the ads into the halligan, and I whack it with the axe.
Yeah.
The door would bust it open.
And Theo, I'm telling you, there was like half the coke in Manhattan was in
there.
Bricks all the way to the ceiling on all sides of the walls.
A pile of cocaine about 18 inches high on the table.
We were like, holy shit.
So the boss gets on, tell the battalion we got a drug apartment, send the PD up.
So now we're like waiting for the PD to come.
We wanted them to come before the drug dealers got back.
So finally, two NYPD guys show up, and they're like, yeah, guys, what do you
got?
I said, well, go in that room and go in that room.
I said, that's the money room.
That's the coke room.
So they both go in, and at the same time, they go, holy shit.
Wow.
They call a backup, you know?
So now we're like, my boss is like, all right, we're out of here, you know?
We don't want to be nothing part of this whole show here.
I'd have stuck around, man, you know?
Like Joey Diaz says, every now and then, you bump into a Colombian, you know?
So I had this junkie that we called three times.
We got called to the sixth floor.
He kept lighting fires to stay warm in the winter.
Yeah.
And he was a young black kid, you know?
And so we would have to climb up these vacant stairs.
I had to pop a hole in the cinder block walls to get in, vacant building.
And a couple times it's happened.
Yeah.
Oh, well, it's the first one.
We go up, sixth floor, dark, cold.
It's icy.
It's about 30 degrees out.
And nice kid?
I have no idea.
I got to the back with my, and I see my Irish lieutenant yelling at him.
He's like, what the fuck you doing?
You can't light a fucking fire, blah, blah, blah.
And he was sitting there, and he was in the corner.
And I came in, and I put my flashlight on him.
And he was looking at me with these eyes, you know?
And I was like, God, he had like tombstones in his eyes, you know?
And he was only about 16, 17.
So we put the fire out.
We leave.
Two hours later, we get called back again.
Go up, oh, got to climb these stairs.
Six floors, no steps, just risers.
God.
And no lights, it's dark.
So now we climb all the way up again.
We go through the thing.
He lit it up again.
The boy says, you know, you can't fucking do this.
He's yelling at him and shit.
I got the light on him, and the funny part was we just broke into an Entenmann's
cake at the firehouse
with the vanilla icing that we would keep in the fridge, get it nice and stiff.
So as my friend Jeff in the dark, he's putting the fire out, I put the light on
him,
and he's still got the vanilla icing on his mustache.
Somebody took a piece for the road, Jeff, huh?
The boy says he's yelling at him.
That's why he's pissed.
This guy interrupted his dessert, huh?
No, three companies and a battalion are responding every time, and we got
chains on.
It's snowing.
It's not like no easy ride.
Right, so you get a lot to get out there.
So the third time, I hear we just got back from something.
We went in our bunks, and we get in the bunks, and we're like a little pillow
talk before everybody
was sleeping, and then before you know it, beam, boom, same box.
Here we go again.
I hear the boss yelling, fuck shit, I'll kill that motherfucker.
Yeah, dude, let him cook at this point.
We're sliding down the poles.
This guy's trying to get to heaven, and you guys keep coming in and ruining his
trip.
Third time, so we're in the rig, and I said to my friend Jeff, I says, let's
tell the boss,
stay on the, don't even come up the stairs, we'll take care of it.
And surprisingly, he agreed.
So when we got to the door, I says, Lou, we'll take care of it.
You stay down here.
So me and Jeff go up, though, my light, my diehard battery died on me.
So I had like no light left.
I'm trying to follow Jeff's light, and we're going up just on the rises, and
then there's
no platform.
So you got to like lean over your step to get on.
And when you get to the fifth or sixth floor, you're looking down at the
skeleton staircase.
What?
Yeah.
So now we go in, go through the dark apartment again.
He's in there again.
Now he's got candles burning because we broke his bucket up.
We smashed it all up.
So we're like, holy shit.
So now Jeff is like leaning into him, and he says, listen, you can't fucking do
this anymore.
And Jeff's like the good cop, you know?
I'm the bad cop.
So I lean into him.
I look at him.
I says, we come back here again.
I'm throwing you out that fucking window.
And he just looked at me, you know?
And that was it.
That was the last time we went back.
We left there.
We took his candles.
And years later, I would see that kid's face looking at me.
And it made me feel so bad.
A wasted life like that, you know?
Heroin.
He had the works.
Everything.
That's scary.
And the fact that he kept going back to do it, it's just that power of
addiction, you know?
It was cold.
Oh.
Well, I guess it'd keep you warm up.
Yeah, he was in a vacant, yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
A lot of shit like that.
Vacants were disgusting.
Because it's just, anybody could be in there doing anything, huh?
Squatters.
Yeah, they're shitting on the floor.
They're drugs, needles.
And you're crawling around in there because you still have to save them.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah, vacant fires.
Yeah, do you start to develop a certain, like, attitudes towards humanity or
drug users
or society or something?
Absolutely.
Call them skells.
They're all skells.
Yeah.
To us back then, you know?
And matter of fact, on my block, we had a tight block, 161st Street.
Mm-hmm.
And we had a bodega, a gypsy cab dispatcher, a whorehouse, and a bunch of drug
apartments.
Yeah.
And it was a busy block.
And we had two guys on the block that were almost there the whole time I was
there.
And they were the lookouts.
And one guy was bald, and we called him eight ball.
Mm-hmm.
And the other guy always had a hat, and we called him the hat.
And the funny part was they would watch our cars for us so nobody would break
into the cars
and shit.
But, you know, I mean, I would see every agency there is come down and radar
block through
the years I was there, ATF, Manhattan Tactical North, CIA.
I mean, everything.
I'll tell you who was the worst ones was the FBI.
Yeah.
They come down with machine guns, and I've never seen anybody that.
And then they clear the street.
They hit all the apartments.
It's amazing.
I bet they were all just visiting that whorehouse.
That whorehouse.
Yeah.
I would inspect it now, and then I'd go in there with my hat, and they'd all be
looking
at me, you know, and be like, what the fuck do you want, you know?
Like, I got to inspect this place, you know?
What was it like in some of those joints?
Was it interesting in there?
Was it just women trying to just survive most of those types of people?
Yeah, it was just some middle-aged, young, not too young, Dominican women.
I guess they took care of the cab drivers and stuff.
And they had the different rooms, you know, everybody had their little bed in
there.
Just trying to sit down.
And I would inspect it, you know?
Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.
I got you.
You got condoms?
The condoms are here?
Making sure the alarm works, ladies.
Yeah, they would be like, come on.
Some of them were the other, the prostitutes would be like, get 