Chapter OneI know what I did was wrong. I just want people to understand I didn’t set out to become a thief. I was just looking for love.
It was a fact. I was no Tobey McGuire. I stood five-nine, one hundred twenty pounds. I had a shaved head, bad teeth, bony arms, and was so skinny people made TB and tape worm cracks about me. I was twenty-three, living in a boarding house, working as a maintenance man for a cab company and doing my best not to get my ass kicked. I had a flaming skeleton devil head tattoo on my right arm that I had gotten to make myself look tougher, but people even made fun of that. I had wanted a menacing specter, but people said my devil looked more like a goofball than one of Satan’s crew. Sadly, it was true, and once you are branded with indelible ink, it doesn’t come off easy.
I cleaned the offices and garage at Yellow Cab, washed, vacuumed and changed the oil on the rides, and when one wasn't signed out to a regular driver, the owner let me work the streets. I worked mainly at night, and split everything I took in with my boss. It wasn't the best deal, but it helped pay off the money I owed for burning down my neighbor's garage. They were never able to prove I had done it deliberately -- they thought I had in retaliation for my belief that he had poisoned my dog -- but since I agreed to pay the bastard back, they decided that was punishment enough, and it kept my adult record clean, my juvenile stupidities already purged on my eighteenth birthday.
I liked driving, working the Hartford streets, both the customer contact and the knowledge of the roads, which came in handy for my later employ. If people wanted to talk, I was more than happy to converse with them. If, which was most often, they wanted me to just to drive, I easily assumed the role of the invisible man.
My mother didn't like me working at night, particularly in the North end, but she didn't complain when I kicked some cash her way every week for her Monday bus trip down to the casino. Our unwritten deal was if she hit the slots jackpot, I would receive an equal share, but any profit she ever made on any particular visit just went back into her general slot fund, which was always eventually returning to zero. That was all right. At least I got a motherly kiss and an I love you after Sunday dinner, which was more action than I was getting from women of my age.
The closest I came to any sex was the business that went on in the back seat of my cab. I'd pick up old men at the elderly housing and take them for a ride down Ashley Street, where a crack whore would get in the back and give them the business for ten bucks. Sometimes the whores would just take the cash and bolt. Then I'd get stiffed because the poor old guys wouldn’t pay me the fare, blaming me that they'd been ripped off as if I were the pimp. Hell, I wasn't even getting a commission, not that I had the nerve to ask for a percentage nor the desire to profit from such trade.
Those crack whores were mean, nasty women, who no doubt had mean nasty upbringings that had dragged them to that point where they had sold their souls to the rock which made them do what at some point in their life must have been unthinkable acts. After awhile I learned which whores to avoid. The rip off artists, the ones who'd spit their exchange back out on the seat, and the ones who looked like cops. I promised not tell what the one who showed me a badge said to me. Let's just say silence is expensive and talking even more so. Everybody’s got a racket.
On Saturday nights I cruised downtown, particularly by the train station where all the young high school and college lovelies were dollied up and out drinking at the bars. One night a young redhead and her man came out of the Pig’s Eye pub and hailed me as I came slowly down the street. She was skinny, blue eyed with a freckled nose. She looked real cute in her lime green sun dress. She couldn’t have been old enough to drink. He was older, maybe mid-twenties, broad-shouldered wearing a white shirt with a loosened red power tie, carrying a suit jacket. He looked like he had a good job and could have whatever woman he wanted. He asked to go up to Girard Street.
They hadn’t been in the back long enough for me to write their destination down on my manifest when she straddled him, and started tugging at his belt. All that shifting around and groaning and in no time she was bouncing off him and telling him to keep doing what he was doing. When she’d arch her back I could feel her long hair against my head.
I was embarrassed and leaned forward to avoid letting her hair touch me, but then I admit I kind of got excited myself. I don’t consider myself a pervert – I mean the only porn I ever bought myself was an occasional Penthouse or Playboy – a guy has to get by when he can’t afford the cover charge, a beer and tips at the tittie bar – but hearing her say over and over what she was saying, well, I tried to imagine she was saying it to me. Her hair had a wonderful scent -- like bubble gum and strawberries. She was young and wild and crazy and I imagined she wanted me like girls in the movies want the hero. I drove as slowly as I could, then instead of parking right in front of the apartment; I pulled a little bit past to a spot not under a street lamp. I heard a groan then, and she tried to keep riding, but he said, his voice changed, “Easy.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “Play that song for me.” She kissed his neck, and as she did, his eyes met mine in the rear view mirror. He looked irritated.
“I’m tired,” he said to her.
“I’ll get you going again.”
“Ow,” he said, “No, I need to sleep.” He sort of pushed her off him.
“What?” she said.
“I’m sorry, I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
“That’s it?” she said as he buckled his pants.
He reached into his wallet and handed me twenty bucks. The meter only read “$5.45.” “This ought to cover it with a tip. Take her where she needs to go.”
“That’s it?” she said again.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been fighting a migraine all night. He’ll take you back downtown. Here’s my card. Call me. We can hook up another night.”
He handed her the card. She took it, and then threw it back in his face. “I can’t believe you. I just made love to you and that’s it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Get out,” she said. She hit him. “You fucking jerk!”
He looked at me as he stepped out of the car like she was the crazy one and maybe I might have some male sympathy for him. I just shook my head. I couldn’t believe it either.
“I agree with you on that one,” I said to her.
“What!”
“I agree he’s a jerk.”
She just grunted.
What I wanted to say was something smooth, something soothing, and maybe a little funny, something to make her feel alright and maybe see me in a different light – as a man, not as a witness to her humiliation. I didn't think anything I could think of would work. I told you I was no Tobey McGuire, because if I was she would have ended up home with me, not in my boarding house, but in my mansion over the city.
“Where can I take you?”
“Back downtown.”
She turned her face to the window.
I was silent as I drove her back to the Pig’s Eye Pub where I waited while she went in, only to see her come out, and look around like a lost little girl.
I called to her. “You going to be all right?”
She looked at me at first like she was going to blow me off, like what kind of creep was I to be stalking her. But she had no friends at that moment. “They left,” she said.
"Where do you live?" I finally asked.
"What do you care?" she demanded.
"I'll drive you there."
"I have no money."
"It's on me," I said. "I'm done for the night anyway," which I wasn't. “Get in.”
I hit the meter off. “You can sit in the front if you want.”
“I’m fine back here,” she said.
“Okay, your preference.”
I put the radio on. Bob Seeger. “Night Moves. You like this?” I asked. “This is a great song.”
She didn’t answer. I keep glancing up in the rear view mirror as I drove. She was crying, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, and decided silence was best. If I couldn’t be the hero, I’d best not be a fool.
She lived about fifteen miles away in Glastonbury, in a big house at the end of many dark roads. When I approached the drive, she said, “Right out here is fine.” She got out, closed the door and tottered up the long drive, not a word to me.
Instead of going to Cousin Vinny's on West Service Road where I sometimes went to see the dancing girls, I went home, and lay in my single bed and dreamed I had a different life. I dreamed that I lived in a big house at the end of a dark road, and that I was handsome and brave, and that at night, I made love to my cute red-headed wife who slept with her cheek on my strong chest knowing I would always keep her safe.
Chapter Two Fred Waters and I went to high school together. We were best pals. Some called us Beavis and Butthead. I didn’t care for it, but in high school, you don’t choose your handle. We were motor heads -- into cars -- even though neither of us had one unless our moms let us use the family auto, which was rare after we got busted for underage drinking while watching the street racing down behind Bulkley High School. Believe me we would have been too embarrassed to drive their rusted station wagons down there where souped up Civics and Mitsubishis ruled.
Fred had more luck with the girls than I did, though, and he wouldn’t have had any luck at all without grape juice and gin, which made Fred's ascension into a chick magnet more remarkable. Instead of juice and gin now, he had stories -- and good ones.
Fred was an EMT and worked for Capitol Ambulance in the city. He lost the bad haircut, got a military buzz cut, and started lifting weights. He got his sights set on becoming a paramedic firefighter and hooking on with a city pension job in East Hartford. So in the meantime, while he applied to medic school, he was just pounding out the hours on the ambulance, making good pay with the unlimited overtime -- pay enough to afford his own apartment, make payments on a new pickup, and have cash to spend on the ladies.
A couple nights a week when he'd get off work, I’d meet him and some of the guys he worked with at the Brickyard Pub on Park Street for beers and pizza. There was a regular crowd of women there, particularly on Thursday nights, and we often ended up with tables pushed together and pitchers of beer lined up on the table with plates of nachos, buffalo wings and potato skins. Fred would be wearing his black boots and navy blue "EMS in the jungle" tee-shirt, showing a medic swinging on a vine over the city rooftops on the front with HARTFORD EMS on the back. Looking at his biceps, I was thinking a little time in the gym would do me well, but then again Ronnie Meyers – Fred’s partner was as scrawny as me and he always had a girl sitting on his lap. I thought what really made the difference were the stories they told, how they were always the center of attention. He and his buddies would tell their incredible tales, and the chicks would dig it. Me, I just sat like a little grinning idiot, happy if on any given night when they'd push the tables together, a girl would be stuck next to me, and I could at least go home with the scent of perfume on me.
"So we get called to Edgewood Street," Fred goes, as a blonde named Candy refills his beer, and the brunette Mindy, a hairdresser from down the street who has been his choice of the month, rubs his neck. "We go to Edgewood Street for the shooting. The address is the same one where we did that triple heroin overdose I told you about last week-- the one where Higgins shoots one guy with the narcan, wakes his ass up and has him do CPR on one of his buddies while I pounded on the chest of the other, and Higgins tubed them both while we waited for backup. That building is like EMS Central Training Academy. Shootings, overdoses, presumptions, assaults, fires, even a baby delivered there, but listen to this -- this one tops them all. We go charging in there because the junkie who met us out front is going nuts, and you know junkies never get excited about anything except getting their stash ripped off. We go flying up the stairs with the cops right behind us.
”I get up there and I see this guy lying on a mattress holding his groin. The guy's going "My dick! My dick!" The cop behind me shines his mag light on him, and where his dick should be there's nothing but a crater, a crater filled with blood.
”’He hit 'em with a shotgun,’ the junkie who led us up there declares. ‘A shotgun -- Boom, right in the fucking nuts!’
"’My dick! My dick!’ the guy screams.
”And you can see it laying there, hanging by a tiny piece of tissue, like he almost shot it completely off, floating in the bloody crater like a dead whale.
"’Who did this?’ the cop demands. ‘Was this over drugs?’
"’Drugs?’ the junkie goes. ‘He shot him in the dick!’
”Ronnie's running down to get the scoop stretcher so we can carry him down the stairs. I'm calling for a medic on the radio and dispatch is asking ‘What do you have? What do you have?’ I want to say, ‘He’s shot in the dick!’ but in deference to the FCC, I just say, ‘Shotgun blast to the groin!’
I put some gloves on. I don't mind a little blood, but this is nasty land and a guy needs to be careful. I wrap a couple trauma dressings around him, and Ronny comes back with the scoop and some straps, and then we are carrying the guy’s screaming ass down the cranky stairs. I'm thinking to myself I hope his dick doesn't fall completely off and drop to the floor, cause I'm imaging the scene in the trauma room where the doctor is going to say ‘Where's his dick?’
“I don’t know, doc, it was right here.’
“Well, go back and get it so we can sew it on!”
Then we have to go back and find his dick so they can reattach it. We get there and see a big rat making off with the wiener. We chase the rat all over the house, up and down the creaky stairs, trying to get the guy’s dick away from him. Next thing I know we’ve both fallen through a hole in the floor and are in the basement where these giant rats are sitting around a table playing poker. These rats are like state fair pig size rats – they’ve gotten so big from feasting on dead junkies and homeless people. They see us, and its snack time. Except they get in an argument about which one of them gets to eat us, so they start fighting each other, slamming their snouts into the others’ bellies and its like a shark rat frenzy, blood and guts splashing everywhere while we Speedy Gonzales it up the basement stairs and out of that crazy place. No thank you! I’m not going back for anyone’s dick unless it’s my own.”
He has them rolling with laughter, and the girls are turning red, trying both to be ladylike and not to pee themselves because the way he is telling it is really funny.
"We get him in the ambulance, and I shout to Ronnie to drive because the only medic who is clear is coming from cross-town, and Saint Fran is just up the road.
”The guy is going, ‘Are they going to be able to save it? Are they going to be able to save it?’
”I say ‘Dude, you've got to worry about them saving your life. I mean first things first here.’
”And he gets all frantic and screams again ‘My dick! My dick!’
”We get to the hospital, and already there's a crack whore there. She’s got a swollen bloody face and she's yelling at him, ‘You don't know nothing, remember that, you know nothing! No one did this to you but yourself. It was an accident, you tell them!’
"’But he shot me in the dick,’ he protests.
"’I love you, but you shouldn't have gone boasting your mouth.’
"’He shot me in the dick!’
Then Ronnie stands and points to the TV, and there it is on the news.
Right there over the bar on the big TV, a shot of the Capitol ambulance, and Ronnie and Fred wheeling the patient into the back, surrounded by cops. Then the ambulance, red lights flashing, pulls away into the night. The announcer says. "The patient is in serious condition with unknown gun shot wound."
"Unknown," Ronnie says to laughter. "He got shot in the dick!"
Everyone laughs, and the two of them are like superheroes. This isn't the first time they've told their stories, and ended them just as the news confirms their tale. Amazing.
"So they couldn't really put it back on, could they?" Mindy asked.
"No, it’s probably back on by now," Fred said. "A couple inches shorter maybe, but they were going to put it back on."
"That's incredible."
"Many years from now,” Fred says mock solemnly, “when my grandchildren ask me what I did on the great streets of Hartford, well, after tonight, I will never have to say, I didn't save dick."
And everyone cracks up again.
When the evening is over and the barmaid is wiping down the counter, and Fred and Ronnie are off with their women, and everyone else has paired off, the chubby barmaid approaches me, and says, "That's it for tonight. It's time to go home. Time for bed." She says it in such a disinterested way that is clear to me she doesn’t even see me as someone who might even in her dreams, take her home to bed. I’m just another obstacle to her night ending, someone to be shooed away in the same manner as the bar wiped down and the chairs put up on the tables. She pulls the plug on the Doom video game I am playing.
“Com’on!” I protest.
She takes my quarter full mug of leftover beer off the table, and turns her back on me. I sit there shaking my head at the callousness of it all, then head out into the night, and walk the twelve blocks to my boarding house alone.
Chapter Three That night I dreamed it was me, telling the stories. I stood six foot four, a muscled two hundred twenty, with tattoos on both my arms, screaming skulls who feared no one or thing, and as I held forth, the table was not the mixed motley crew of the regular Thursday night, but all the dancers I had seen at the Electric Blue and Cousin Vinny's and Kahoot’s and the Culinary Kitchen down on the Turnpike, and they looked at me like I was the bouncer who kept them safe, and loved them true, and they all held a secret wish to marry me and bear my children. The dream ended badly of course, with my waking up to find the bar emptying out and Mindy saying "Have fun jerking off," as she and Fred exited arm and arm, or arm and shoulder, or arm and her humongous bosom. Later I sat out back by a campfire with the animated incarnation of the smiley skeleton head on my arm, and he was laughing at me so hard, he actually did pee enough to put the campfire out. "You are such a loser,” the jolly flaming skull said, "Why I hang with you? I don’t know."
"What does it take to get on at Pro?" I asked Fred when he stopped by the taxi office when he saw me out front, washing the owner's white Cadillac de Ville.
"A pulse," Fred said.
"No, I'm serious."
"Hey, dude, we're hurting for bodies. You've got a pulse and a driver's license; they'll put you in the seat. That and an EMT card."
"How do I get that?"
"The Fire department's holding a course two nights a week starting in September. It’s free if you volunteer out there, riding a shift a month. That's how I got in it. It isn't that hard. You passed high school, you can pass the EMT. It might take you a time or too, but you have half a brain, so it shouldn’t be too hard. It’s good money with the overtime. I'm doing eighty hours a week now, and could do a hundred if I wasn't so busy getting laid."
"Maybe I'll look into that," I said.
"Let me know, I'll put in a word for you. You'll love it. It's a gas. Plus I'm going to go for my medic next year. I get there, put in a year in the city, and then you're talking fire department medic; you're talking a whole other class of broads when you get that. You get that, you get yourself a nurse who wants to do nothing but take care of you, and then you learn to play golf, retire after twenty years with a city pension. That's the gold mine. That's where I'm headed."
He had me thinking, I’ll admit that. And it wasn't about the golf, or the pension. I just was thinking maybe, just maybe if I could get a job on the ambulance, I could get some stories of my own, get a little notice, get a girl. Maybe things would start going my way. I wasn’t picky, I’d settle for a nurse’s aide.
Chapter Four So, six months later, there I was -- twenty-three years old with polished black boots, a pressed navy blue uniform, with an American flag patch on my left arm, a state of Connecticut EMT patch on my right and a silver EMT badge on my chest. The badge wasn't company issue, but Fred said we were free to buy our own and wear them. He said it came in handy on rough scenes, made people less likely to tangle with you because the badge represented authority. And people feared if they messed with the badge they might end up where moldy bread was served and people got messed with in the shower.
My mother took Polaroid’s of me on my first day when I stopped by the house before going into work to give her her weekly slot contribution, and sure, for her to fawn over me and feel proud of the way I was planning to turn my life around. “Just one more,” she said.
“You’ve already taken five,” I said. They were laid out on the kitchen table, drying.
“Now smile in this one for your mother. You look so handsome.” She sobbed a little. "My baby boy, all grown up and helping people."
“Mom, I’m going to be late.”
“It’s like watching you go off to kindergarten all over again. You want me to make you some lunch? I have some leftover beef stew from last night. Do you have a microwave at work?”
“Mom, I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”
“It’s a mother’s job to worry.”
Just then my sister came in with the dogs and they sensed some excitement because they were yapping and jumping on me.
“Get away!” My mom swatted at them. “Look at them they’re getting hair all over you. Donna? Why did you let them in?”
“They wanted to say goodbye to their half-brother,” she said. “Boy do you look goofy.”
“He does not. He’s handsome.”
“It’s fine,” I said. So there was some dog hair on my pressed pants. By the end of that day, the pants would see worse. “I really have to go.”
She hugged me while my sister made charming faces at me. She was nineteen and still living at home. She hadn’t quite found herself yet.
“I love you mom,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“But I’m your mother.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
My mom was okay. She’d had a bad marriage, but she had stuck with us and no matter her nerves or failings, I was there for her. And my sister too. I hoped one day I could help them out more than I was able to now.
As I drove toward the base on that first day, I believed that I would be a good EMT. I had worked hard in my class, finishing number 3, even earning the respect of the teacher who said she was continually surprised by who her best students turned out to be. I passed the state exam on my first try, passing all of the practical stations and getting an 88 on the written. The day my cert came in the mail, I celebrated not by getting wasted, but by handing in my resignation at the cab company, shaking the owner's hand and thanking him for employing me. I had already been accepted at Capitol, pending the arrival of my cert. After two days of orientation, paperwork and a physical where I had to pee in a cup -- which was fine because I had given up pot smoking the day I decided to take the EMT class – my name was written in the schedule book. I was ready to go. I was on a mission.
They paired me with Fred. From the start he initiated me in his EMT ways of the streets and the pearls of what he called “The Idiot’s Guide to EMS.” "First rule of the road," he said, “Know you're ABC's."
"Airway, breathing, circulation," I said eagerly. That meant, before you could consider someone’s circulation, for instance, if they were bleeding, you had to make sure they were breathing, and before you could consider their breathing, you had to make certain they had an open airway – meaning that their throat wasn’t blocked up. There had to be an open pipe to get the air in. They drilled the ABCs into you in class.
"No! Gong! Wrongo!” Fred said. “The real world ABCs are Ambulate Before Carry. If they can walk, don’t carry them. Now I'm not saying don't carry sick people who need to be carried, and, believe me, you will do your share of fourth floor carry downs of people fatter than you can imagine, nasty fat people, people who are so fat, they can't get out of bed, people who lived up on the fourth floors of this city for years because they are too fat to get out of their rooms and walk down the flights of stairs. They have people carting their food up to them cause these people eat all the time they are so fat, people you will think must eat five pounds of bacon, three dozen eggs, four whole chickens, and a whole ham just for their midmorning snack they are so fat, people a skinny boy like you best never turn your back on cause they'll be fixing on you for a rib dinner.
"When I say ambulate before carry, I mean if they aren't dying and they can stand up, and their legs aren't broke, then they can ambulate themselves, with our holding them by the arm if we need to steady them, down all those fucking stairs because the hell if I am going to blow out my back carrying their lazy asses like they are the Royal Queens of Sheba and Rajas of India, you hear what I'm saying. If your stomach hurts, there's nothing wrong with your damn legs, so get up, get your shoes on, and let's get moving."
I was going to say that wasn't what Judy, my EMT instructor had told us, but I wasn't going to speak up, it being my first day, and my not having been on a call as an official EMT yet.
"Second rule of the city, you need to know Spanish."
"Hola amigo," I said. "Taco."
"You're going to need more than that. Now if you're a medic, you're going to have to know "Dolor," that means pain. You say "Dolor? Donde?" and they point to wear they hurt, but that's for medics. All you really need to know is this, "Zapatos, tarjeta medico, and andamos," which means, "Get your shoes, get your medical card, and let's get going," because for all the blood and guts, lots of times we're just a taxi service. We come flying there 911 lights and sirens flashing, charge up four flights of stairs and find Juanita Rosa Santiago Maria Perez Gonzales Diaz 's two-year old son Jose Pancho Ramon Rafael Victor Nunez Robles Martinez has a runny nose, we're not going to wait for her to finish putting on her makeup or watch the end of the Jerry Springer show or wait for her sister Rosa Nina Rodriguez Ortiz to get off the phone talking to her man Esteban. They called 911: 'Zapatos, tarjeta medico, andamos!’ Got it!"
"Right," I said,
"You learn those two rules today, I'll teach another two rules tomorrow unless a good call happens to illustrate one of the many rules you will no doubt know by heart before the month is out provided your wussy, newbie ass is still here. Speaking of newbie, rule number 3, Newbie's don't say shit until they aren't newbies anymore."
"Which is when?"
"Which is when you open your mouth and speak and people actually listen. You can't put a time on it. But even if you have the most excellent I was there dead bodies to the right, pit bulls to the left, 9 mm waving gang bangers behind you, and puking gross nasties coming at you straight on, all filmed by News at 11, you can't speak unless someone asks you too. Nobody wants to hear a newbie talking like a road warrior until they've all seen what you can do. Then, if you meet certain standards, you can speak. Otherwise anything you say is viewed as ‘Been there, done that, don't care to listen, you can't tell me anything I haven't already seen too much of.’ That'll take time, but you'll know it when it happens. In the mean time, zip it, just keep your eyes open, observe."
We were in area 3, parked outside Saint Francis Hospital.
“You’re nervous, aren’t you?” Fred said. “Waiting for your first call? I don’t blame you. I was nervous myself. First call: 500-pound lady, cardiac arrest, puked all over the place. Nasty. I was doing compressions. Every time I did a compression, puke would spurt out of her mouth. A medic finally got there and intubated her. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, ‘You got your first kill.’ I didn’t know he was joking with me and that was a common expression used to bust buckwheats. ‘Her airway was fucked up, you should have been doing mouth to mouth,’ the medic said. ‘Mouth to mouth, my ass,’ I said. He just slapped me on the back and said, ‘You’re alright, for a newbie.’ I’m telling you, you’ll see some fucked up shit.”
"453, Magnolia and Homestead for the Motor Vehicle. On a one,"
"Magnolia and Homestead," Fred answered the PD dispatcher. "You know where that is right?" he said to me.
"Dude, you're talking to a cab driver."
"Just checking. Making certain in the excitement of going to your first MVA, you haven't lost your bearings."
"I'm steady," I said, although my heart was racing.
"Let's do it then," Fred said.
We flew over the Woodland Street Bridge, nearly going airborne with Fred driving, blaring both sirens. He swung a hard right onto Homestead, causing the rear of the rig to fishtail.
"You owe me lunch," Fred said.
"Huh?"
"For leaving your fingernail marks in the dashboard.”
He howled and gunned it. "Too bad the company won't let us race these babies down on Ledyard, except they are little slow on the pickup."
"That's Magnolia," I said, “you just went by it."
He stopped hard, leaving brake marks in the road. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't see anything."
He backed up, and we saw two cars with no visible damage and a group of five people standing around yelling. "This must be it," Fred said.
The cops weren't there yet, which I was to learn wasn't unusual for a minor motor vehicle. The cops were always busy, so as Fred told me, the dispatch often used us as first responders at accidents, relying on us to get on the horn and call if the cops were really needed.
We stepped out of the rig.
"Take me to the hospital," a skinny woman demanded, and I recognized her almost immediately as a crack whore who had plied her trade in the back of my cab a time or two. Today she was just wearing a tee-shirt and jeans. "My leg is hurting. Take me to the hospital." She turned to the others as she, showing a mouth nearly empty of teeth, proclaimed, "Let's go get paid."
"My back hurts," an equally toothless man said. "He bumped me. I got whiplash."
"We going to the hospital. We going to get paid!" the woman shouted.
A man in a newer model Oldsmobile sat behind the wheel talking on a cell phone. I understood that he had bumped the other car, getting out of his parking space. I saw in the windshield a folder that identified him as a housing inspector.
"What happened?" Fred asked.
"He banged us, and now were going to get paid," the woman said. "My leg needs inspecting, and I hope they serving lunch soon, cause I could use a sandwich."
"Yea, right," Fred said. "Who else was in the car?"
"Just me and my girl," the man holding his back said. "And Charlie over there, he was in the car too."
"My back hurts something powerful," Charlie said, grinning.
"Don't forget about me," the other man said. "I think it’s my neck, I know it’s my neck."
Fred looked dubious. He knocked on the window of the Oldsmobile. The man lowered the window. "You all right? Fred asked. "Any injuries?"
"I'm fine," the man said. "I asked for the police."
"I'll check on them for you."
Into his radio, Fred said, "453 to HPD, I need an ETA on the officer for the MVA at Homestead and Magnolia."
"Is anyone hurt?"
"Well, let's just say several want to go to the hospital, so I may need another rig. I'll let you know. We’re just going to need an officer."
"He's on his way."
"Yo, they was in the car too," the man said, as two other man, who had come out of the crack house to see what was going on, now began holding their backs.
"The car doesn't fit six people," Fred said.
"We was trying for one of them Guinness Records. See how many we could fit when he slammed us."
"We all getting paid!"
"Okay, listen," Fred said, "If you're going to the hospital, here's how it’s going to happen. We're going to have to put collars on your neck and lay you down and strap you to a board. It’s protocol. You can expect to be on the board for a long time and for it to be uncomfortable, but if you're going that's how it’s going to be."
"Wait a minute; let me check my calendar," the man mimicked checking an invisible calendar book, then proudly announced, "All appointments clear!"
"We're going to need two more ambulances," Fred said into the radio, "Low priority." To me, he said, “Yank the stretcher. It’s board and collar time."
Board and collaring was all about c-spine immobilization. We had practiced it endlessly in our class. What you do is put a collar on a person’s neck, and then strap them very tightly to a hard spinal board in order to keep their spinal column in line. If they had a spinal injury, particularly in their neck, allowing them to move around before they got an x-ray to clear them of spinal injury could cause paralysis.
"Who wants to be first?" Fred announced.
"Ladies first, ladies first," the woman said.
"Okay, lay down on the board."
"Lay down? You got twenty dollars?" the man asked, while the others continued to laugh.
"That's all right," the woman said, "I'm going to get paid later. I'm going to get paid at the hospital. The city going to pay."
"Lay down," Fred said.
In class, if someone was up walking, we were taught to hold the board against their back, buckle it on them standing, and then lower them down. Fred just had her lay down on the board which lay on the stretcher. At his direction, I tied only two straps around her, instead of the five we used in class. He applied a commercial head bed, a device that held her head straight between two Styrofoam blocks, and then started to secure it with a long strip of duck tape.
"Wait, a minute," I said. I went in the back of the rig, and came back with two four by fours, which I placed over the woman's eyebrows, then nodded for him to apply the tape.
He looked at me like I was peculiar. "Not on this planet," he said. He removed the 4x4's, and then taped the duck tape right across the woman's forehead. He pressed the tape against her eyebrows. "We need to make it nice and secure," he said, and then he winked at me.
Okay, I get it, I thought.
"I'm going to get paid!" the woman exclaimed.
By that time, the second and third ambulances were arriving, along with a police car and a TV truck from Channel 30.
***
Ten hours later I had made it through my first shift. It had been an eventful day. Besides the motor vehicle, we had done two dialysis transfers, two drunks, a heroin overdose, a foot pain, a migraine headache and a cardiac arrest, where I got to do CPR for the first time. It was an old man found not breathing while sitting in his arm chair on his porch. He was flat line on the monitor, and slightly cool to the touch, but Tom Higgins, the medic who was there before us, worked him anyway, putting a tube in his throat, an IV in his neck and pushing lots of drugs. “Well, you killed your first patient,” he said to me later as we wrote up our paperwork. I was ready. I showed him my belt. “Already notched it,” I said.
“Hey, you’re all right,” he said. “You’re a sick fuck, but you’re all right.”
Before we left for the bar, Fred presented me with my very own “EMS in the Jungle” tee-shirt to wear. They wouldn’t let us wear our uniform shirts off duty, besides I had gotten puke on mine. “First rounds on you,” Fred said. “It’s a tradition.”
Later at the bar, Fred told the story of our first call, "I don't even know if any of them were in the car when the guy backed up,” he said, “but by the time we were leaving, they had half the neighborhood out there holding their backs, laying on the ground, flopping like fish, drooling, and shouting, "We going to get paid! We going to paid!’ Isn't that right, Timmy?"
And they all looked at me.
"That's right," I said.
"He was there. They were all shouting, ‘We going to get paid!’ Now tomorrow you can walk down Magnolia Street and see half the folks there don't have eyebrows."
"I didn't know you worked in the city?" Mindy said to me, the first words I think she had ever spoken to me. “I guess I should have known from your shirt.”
I muttered that I did.
"His first day," Fred said. "He's still a newbie, but he's got potential. He listens to me, he'll do fine, forget all the book crap they teach in school, and learn the way of the street. Hey, there we are now."
And up on the TV, there was the Channel 30 reporter standing in front of the scene, talking about an accident that had sent six people to the hospital, all fortunately with what turned out to be minor injuries. They showed me and Fred lifting one of our patients into the back of the rig.
Me on TV.
Chapter FiveWhen we covered downtown we often parked under the highway by the train station. It was cool and out of the sun and if you wanted to get in back and stretch out on the cot, you were out of public sight. Fred even used the ambulance as a shield to take a piss against the highway column. On the cement wall to our left guarding the entrance to the railroad underpass was a giant billboard of the governor. Beside his big grinning head was the slogan – “Thompson – Always looking out for you.” From where we were parked you could look past Union Station and the taxi stand and up the hill at the Governor’s office – the Capitol building – a massive gothic structure with a shiny gold dome.
“He’s a good dude,” Fred said. “My uncle knows him. He does handiwork on his cottage. Says he’s a regular guy. Drinks beer, plays poker, beats his wife.”
“Beats his wife?”
“I’m just kidding – that’s a load of crap the Democrats were trying to smear him with. I guess there was a 911 call or something and the paper wanted to get the tapes, but they couldn’t get them. Some Freedom of Information crap, I don’t know. They never proved anything. My uncle says he’s regular folks. They grew up in the same town. He says the man smoked pot in high school, had long hair, and liked to chase tail. That’s the kind of guy you want in there – not like the last guy – a millionaire who raised everybody’s taxes and cut all the programs.”
“Does he pay your uncle well?”
“He doesn’t pay him. My uncle works for a construction company and the company pays my uncle. My uncle says they don’t charge him.”
“There’s a deal for you. I should have asked them to rebuild my neighbor’s garage.”
“That’s right, you little pyro. I’m sure he’d rebuild it for you for free if you had juice like the governor. Always helps to have the governor in your corner. Uh-oh. Here comes Hershel. We got to split.”
An unshaven man with a dirty UCONN Lady Huskies jersey walked toward us. He came to my window as Fred turned on the engine. “I need to go to ADRC,” he said. “I need detox.” He had open sores on his arms and face. There was alcohol on his breath.
“You’ve got to call 911,” Fred said.
“I just asked an ambulance before and they took me. You got a radio right?”
“New rules. You have to activate 911.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“There’s one in the train station.”
“I got to call?”
“Yeah, we’re an on-line dedicated car. We can only go where they dispatch us.”
“Give me a quarter.”
“We’re broke. We don’t get paid till Friday.” Fred took a chug of his soda. “I’m sure someone down at the station can give you a quarter. “You call, and ask to go, and they’ll send someone.”
The man looked back at the station. “Just use your radio, man.”
“I might, but we’re on a call. Now stand back.” Fred hit the lights on, put the ambulance in gear, and then blasted the air horn as he rolled forward.
Hershel cussed. I saw him give Fred the finger in the mirror as we pulled away.
“That guy’s got scabies,” Fred said, “He’s not getting in my ambulance.”
“Where are we going?”
Fred turned up the hill where we approached the sprawling The Hartford Insurance Company – Hartford was the nation’s insurance capitol. He shut the lights down after we’d gone around the traffic at the light. He picked the mike up. “857, can we go to Saint Fran for a personal?”
“Okay, make it area 3. 843, go down to the tunnel.”
Fred laughed. “They’ll be happy when Hershel calls. Suckers!”
“857, you’re going to have to wait on that personal. I’ve got a call on Edgewood. Lift assist.”
Fred swore. “Not again. That lady needs to go a nursing home. I can’t believe this. We just picked her up yesterday.”
Mrs. Green was an old woman who lived by herself on Edgewood Street. She had elephant legs, and was always short of breath, despite her home oxygen tubing that she wore in her nose all the time. By her bed was a piss bucket. She wore a medic alarm around her neck. She was always falling, and needed help getting back into bed. After picking her up, you'd often find feces on your gloves. It was the fourth time I'd picked her up and I hadn't even been working there a month.
"Time for you to get into a nursing home," Fred said, standing over her, as he pulled on his gloves. "We can't keep picking you up like this."
Her right leg was splayed out to the side and shorter than the other one.
"Give me a hand," Fred said, when I didn't move to grab her under the arm like I had the other times.
"Look at her leg," I said. She was grimacing. I knelt down and pressed against her hips. She cried out. "I'm so sorry," I said.
Fred asked her to try to lift up her right leg. She couldn't do it.
"I guess we're going to need to transport," he said.
"Just help me now, please, I'm all right," the woman said. "Just help me up."
"No," Fred said. “I think you broke your hip. We need to take you in, besides you could use a checkup, maybe they can get you into a home. You shouldn't be living like this. Get the stretcher," he said to me.
I came back with the stretcher and a scoop, which was a metal contraption that came apart at the ends so you could get it under a person and pick them up.
"Leave it attached," Fred said, "just extend it a notch. We'll roll her on it." I was learning that the thing that bothered me the most in this job was not the broken bones, the stinks and smells or the people who gamed the system; it was simply the grimace of pain on people’s faces. This woman was not a wuss like some of our patients, whining and faking their pain. I could tell when we rolled her on the scoop she was hurting in a quiet desperate way. She wasn't comfortable on the cold steel, and we had to rock her some to get the straps in place because her girth hung off both sides of the scoop.
"Mercy," she whispered.
"I'm sorry for your pain," I said.
I thought about suggesting to Fred that we call for a medic, who carried morphine and could medicate her before we moved her to dull her pain, as I had seen Tom Higgins do on the one day I worked with a medic, staying late after my crew change because his partner had wrenched his back. But I didn't suggest it because I knew Fred saw it as a mark of weakness to have to call for help, even though we didn't carry the drugs like the medic cars did. Fred believed as long as you could get the patient to the hospital without their dying, you didn’t need to bother a medic; most of whom he said didn't like to be bothered.
Fred and I were still the best of friends and we had a ball together on the road and I was grateful for everything he showed me, but I sensed we had a different outlook on some things about the job. He had told me I was too new to speak up, so I always went along. Like Fred said, the street was different than the classroom.
That afternoon, we got called up the hill to the Capitol Building. No sooner were we dispatched when we heard the supervisor’s fly car sign on.
“Possible VIP call,” Fred said. “Be prepared to see some shit sniffing.” We were escorted into the building with its marble floors and high church like ceilings. The Capitol Police led us onto the floor of the Senate chamber, where we found another large aged woman sitting in a chair, surrounded by people in suits and other uniformed officers, who treated her in a deferential way. I got that she was one of the senators, and one of the higher ranking ones.
Just then Ned Martinson, our chief paramedic and Bob Falcone, the operations manager showed up. "I'll handle this one," Ned said to Fred. Ned was close to forty, a bald man with a red face of someone with high blood pressure. He wore the white supervisor shirt with the gold badge, instead of the navy blue shirts with the silver badge the rest of us road warriors wore. He knelt down by the woman, and talking gently, inspected her from head to toe. "I think you fractured your hip," he said.
"Oh dear, that's the last thing I need." She managed a laugh despite her grimace. "Will I be back to vote tonight?"
"You're going to need an x-ray to confirm, but I suspect you'll be spending the night at the hospital."
"Oh damn, you don't have anything for the pain, do you?"
"Are you allergic to any medicine?"
"Yeah, the Democrat's kind," she said.
And everyone laughed.
She got ten milligrams of morphine before we loaded her, and Ned rode in the back with her, while I followed behind in his fly car.
At the hospital, she went right into room one. They had to pull out the old man who was in there and put him in the hallway. Three doctors went in and the President of the hospital came down to say hello.
“It’s all about who you know,” Fred said, as I made up the stretcher, and then wheeled it back down the hall past the long line of patients on stretchers.
***
"Timmy and I took care of her," Fred told our assembled crowd at the bar that night, as the news flashed a picture of the Legislative Leader. "She was feeling no pain. She was so high, I asked her if she was going to declare today State EMT Day, she said, hell she'd declare it state EMT week. I should have slipped her a bill to sign pushing last call back an hour. I got a powerful thirst tonight. Mary Beth, another picture over here for my friends."
Just then I saw one of the girls who occasionally sat with us looking at me. She was a little on the heavy side, but she had a pretty smile, thick black hair in a page boy cut, and well, a chest that drew notice. I had the presence of mind and enough beer in me to smile back, and toss a daring wink at her, and I thought I saw her smile and blush, though she turned to talk to the girl next to her.
"You ought to ask her out," Mindy whispered to me. "Her name's Carrie. She’s breaking up with her boyfriend."
She left before I got the nerve, but I did notice her glancing back at me.
I hope it was not just the beer emboldening my imagination. I hoped through its haze there was actual possibility for me.
I felt my world changing.
***
Chapters Six to Ten
