A Thousand Naked Strangers (10 page)

Zone Three is forgettable.

Chris and I are in Zone Two, which is the busiest in the entire county, north or south. We serve a large residential population, but Zone Two is defined by two streets: Godby Road and Old National Highway.

Godby is short and filthy and crowded end to end with old housing projects slowly sinking into the clay. Old National is a busy four-lane crowded with shady check-cashing huts and fast-food chains. The Red Lobster is always packed. At night Club Twenty Grand and its neighbor, the Ice Palace, take over, and the street fills with pimped-out cars and motorcycles smoking their tires.

From the perspective of my Rural/Metro colleagues, Zone Two is the worst posting in Fulton, but Chris and I love it. We never sleep, never go to the station. We prowl the streets at cruising speed, not only waiting for calls but daring them to happen. We troll the projects late at night or idle outside one of the clubs. We buy a disposable camera and, at every opportunity, hop out and take our picture with whatever oddity we come across. The guy in the Uncle Sam costume dancing outside of a tax office, a singing junkie who's just gotten a fix, the hookers who wander over to ask for Band-Aids or gauze or a couple of spare bedsheets.

Every crew carries a clipboard, and in it, aside from paperwork, is the patient pen. We never touch the patient pen except
to clean it. Patients never touch our pen. When a document needs to be signed, we open the clipboard and offer them the patient pen. We found ours at a gas station. It was in a rack up front, in a clear plastic box filled with gag gifts. It's supposed to be a big fat finger—long and fat and fleshy pink—but it looks more like a penis, and every time we hand it to people, they pick it up tentatively, holding it as if it might explode. Which it does. It's a farting pen, a play on the old pull-my-finger joke. When you grip it, the pen lets out a long electronic fart. Watching a person's face when he grabs this dildo-shaped writing utensil and hears its flatulence is too much. Especially at two in the morning.

Because we're always moving, we're within striking distance of everything, and if a decent call drops anywhere near us, we jump on it whether it's in our zone or not. One afternoon we're miles into Zone Three—Chris has to crap and is starting to sweat, but he's partial to the bathroom in Target—when a call goes out for a man who's collapsed on a roof. It sounds exciting. Chris forgets about the toilet and grabs the radio to tell the crew we'll handle it. Scaling buildings and shuffling along rooftops is more of a fire department thing, but we arrive first. So we pare our equipment down to the absolute necessities and climb up. Turns out the guy is a diabetic passed out from low blood sugar. Crouching on the hot shingles, I start an IV as Chris runs the medicine through a bag of saline fluid. It's the highlight of our day—a sick patient, a nervous crowd of onlookers two stories below, the inherent danger of practicing medicine on a roof—and we decide we'll never again let a good call go without at least making an attempt to get there.

Most crews don't mind being told they can go back to sleep or keep eating or doing whatever it was they were doing, but
occasionally someone complains or a supervisor asks how we could possibly be so close to a call so deep into someone else's zone. These are questions that could lead to trouble, but Chris is a made guy, a rising star in the organization, and we take advantage of his status as former supervisor and friend of the director. We slip in and out of our zone with impunity, always driving, two sharks patrolling the ocean, ignoring every rule that could slow us down.

“I
just put my hand in brain.”

“What'd it feel like?”

“Squishy.”

Old National—the four-lane road in our territory—is congested and dangerous because no one pays attention to the pedestrians. It consumes everything on two feet, rich and poor, like a bear gone mad with hunger. It has an open median down the middle, and one night the median claims two for itself.

The setup is simple, one of those things you'd never think about until it happens, and once it does, you wonder why it doesn't happen more often, why it's never happened to you. Two people cross the road. It's late, midnight, and very dark. They don't use the crosswalk. They simply wait for a break in traffic and start going. Halfway across, in the median, they stop and wait for another opening. It never comes. A car preparing for a left turn swings into the median and slams into them both. The driver reacts, but it's too late. They're hit, they're broken, they're tossed in the air. They—and the various bits of them—land here and there.

Chris and I are the first to arrive. A loud, fast, screaming response. The rule for scenes with multiple patients is first in, last
out. As first in, the carnage is ours to survey. It's up to us to call in the appropriate resources, to determine whose injuries require treatment and who can be left to die. Triage is a brutal process of deciding who can't be saved so resources can be focused elsewhere. Any patient found without a pulse will remain pulseless; we'll leave him and move on. Sometimes that person we found twitching, eyes wide and not breathing, the one we left for dead, sometimes he starts breathing again. Startled but not surprised, we upgrade him from dead to critical and he gets transported. No hard feelings, my friend. Sometimes life finds a way.

There's no such confusion tonight. The first patient we come across, horribly injured and, in all likelihood, doomed, is alive. Chest like a bag of gravel—ribs, sternum, collarbones, all broken. Her lungs are punctured, and huge pockets of air are filling the void. We jab two long, wide needles in, a vain attempt to let some of the trapped air out, but it's just an afterthought. The legs are also broken, probably from the bumper. They do that, bumpers—snap the bones so they flop and fold like a doll's legs.

Help arrives and the first patient is spirited away—alive, but how long that will last, well . . .

The other patient isn't. Isn't alive, isn't a patient, isn't someone to be treated. He was launched over the hood, struck his head on the driver's-side corner of the windshield, and was thrown back down. He's lying in the glare of the headlights, skull open, face obscured by scalp. There's nothing to do but look. Which we can do. Because of the headlights. From the car. Which has a driver.

Shit
.

I walk over to the passenger side and signal for the driver to roll his window down. He's behind the wheel, unblinking eyes
staring out through the punched-in windshield. He's frozen, he's silent. He's covered in hair. This man—whose only crime was to be behind the wheel when someone else made a poor choice—has killed two people and now sits covered in their hair. How long will he feel the prickly stab of shorn hair on his exposed skin? It's a horrible situation for everyone involved, and this guy is in need of some sort of attention.

“Are you okay?”

He looks at the form slumped in the glare of his headlights, at his punched-in windshield, at the hair. He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. I want to tell him it isn't his fault, that it could've happened to anyone, that he's the unlucky winner of the worst lottery ever. I put my hand on the roof, start to lean in the window, and realize I'm touching not cold steel but, rather, a warm, wobbly bowl of Jell-O—except it isn't. It's a brain, and I've put my hand right in it.

I stand up. Peel off my glove. Thank God for gloves. Then I walk over to Chris, a little pale, a little repulsed, a little amused. He crinkles his forehead as if to say,
What?

“I just put my hand in brain.”

I
n a job where it's possible to scoop up a stranger's brain, it's important to have levity. But after a while, I lose the ability to judge which stories to tell my friends and which go beyond the limits of good taste. Death cracks inside jokes that only we emergency workers—with our practical knowledge of the postmortem human—will ever laugh at.

I learn, for instance, to leave the room immediately when a rookie cop starts to roll a bloated body, because it's guaranteed to burst. And without having to be told, I know that when you fish a floater out of a pond, you should never hook an extremity—it'll always rip off. Chris and I laugh at these things because we've watched them happen, and what we've seen once, we're bound to see again. It is Santayana's maxim turned on its head, then dunked in formaldehyde and filtered through crime scene tape: Those who know the lessons of decomposition are condemned to witness them repeatedly.

There will always be another dead body, another fetid roach-infested house. We will never escape the smells, the fluids, the unwashable
ick
of people deep in the throes of a communicable disease. We've run these calls—the disgusting, the foul—and we'll run them again. So when Darryl comes along, nobody
complains. Not that it's dinnertime, not that it's been a busy day and we're exhausted, not that it's a Saturday during college football season and all the good games are about to start. We take him as a gift, payback for the roach-filled houses and the late-night calls and the three sweltering hours we recently devoted to hosing the ambulance clean of blood and bits left over from the guy who'd blown his brains out in his parents' basement. Like Martin Sheen in
Apocalypse Now,
we asked for a great call, and for our sins we're given Darryl, a drunk redneck living in a black neighborhood who on this day has nailed himself to the wall.

Darryl lives with Tammy, his common-law wife, in a duplex with yellowing plaster walls. The place is beat up and looks like it should be left to the possums. I grab the spotlight, point it at the tin numbers tacked to the door, and double-check them against the ones we've been given by dispatch. I always double-check the numbers. There's a guy—well, there
was
a guy—who got called out to a person down. When no one answered after the second knock, he kicked in the front door only to find himself face-to-face with the patient's very pissed-off neighbors.

Even out in the street with the ambulance windows open, we can hear the yelling. There are different kinds of yells, each advertising a peculiar set of circumstances. The shrill yelling of genuine pain; the cracked-voice yelling of someone who's been wronged; and the ghost moan of those left brokenhearted. And then there's the angry, violent yelling of a domestic dispute. There's nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than a domestic. A wife beaten half to death becomes a knife-wielding lunatic the second her husband is placed in custody.

Still, we go in. Tammy—all sunburn and skinny legs and rolling, unapologetic belly—meets us at the door. She hooks a
grimy thumb toward the house. “Jackass nailed hisself to the wall,” she says.

Chris nods. “Well, let's have a look.”

We pick our way around piles of faded jeans, muddy sneakers, tool belts, and porn magazines—the grand total of Darryl's existence—until we reach the bedroom. And there, as promised, is Darryl. Nailed to the wall. He instantly focuses his attention on us. “Please, sir, please. You gotta help me, sir. Please.”

Darryl stands just inside the bedroom door, a single nail through his left elbow attaching him to the wall. There's a nail gun at his feet. Tammy pokes her head in. “I already told you, Darryl. I don't love you no more.”

Chris taps the wall. The nail has gone through a stud. Darryl isn't concerned about the wall. “Sir, can I talk to you? For a second, sir?”

“Did you really mean to do this?”

Darryl nods. “Okay, sir. Okay. I ain't even gonna lie to you, sir. I ain't even gonna lie. I been drinking. Had me two beers.”

Two beers, incidentally, is the magic number. Every staggering homeless man, every puke-covered lawyer, every passed-out college girl, they all have one thing in common: They've had exactly two drinks today.

Darryl burps, swallows hard. “It's a weakness, but I'm working on it. I been askin' the Lord to help me out with it.”

Tammy's back. “You better ask the Lord to help you get your stupid ass unnailed from that wall! Otherwise you'll be stuck here watchin' me and Todd consummate my new life!”

And there it is. Tammy has met someone new and wants Darryl gone. Drunk and unable to let go of the skinny-legged, sunburned love of his misguided life, Darryl nailed himself to
the wall. Given the choice between a nail through the elbow and being an unwilling spectator at the Tammy and Todd Show, I'm not sure which I'd choose. If not for us, Darryl, the poor bastard, would've gotten both.

As engrossing as all this is, there's only one option: Fire up a saw and cut him out. Darryl overhears us talking and starts shaking his head, his voice trembling. “No, sir. No way in hell. You can't cut this wall. This wall cannot be cut. This wall is like the bond of love, and there ain't nothin' can cut through the bond of love!”

Twenty minutes later, the fire department has cut through the wall. Now we have other problems. Darryl, drunk as hell and suddenly free, is stomping around with a three-foot-by-three-foot section of Sheetrock nailed to his arm. The cops tell him to relax, to sit down and shut up and go to the hospital. “Get that thing off your arm,” they say. “Sober up and sort this out tomorrow.” It's sensible, but Darryl is in no mood for sensible. The cops are invited, cordially, to suck his dick.

And here come the cuffs.

I could have predicted what happens next: Darryl refuses to go peacefully, and Tammy—the woman who threatened to sleep with another man while her nailed-to-the-wall common-law husband watched—experiences a change of heart. She is now Darryl's defender. She punches a cop.

When it's all over and the screaming has stopped, when the clouds of pepper spray have drifted off into the night, the final score looks something like this: Tammy is melting down in the back of a patrol car; two cops, having wandered into the cloud of pepper spray, are crying and staggering around; the neighbors—all black, all amused—have turned out to see what
the crazy crackers are up to; and Darryl? He's in the back of our ambulance, the three-foot-by-three-foot section of wall still nailed to his arm. He's sitting quietly on the stretcher.