A Thousand Naked Strangers (17 page)

When Marty asks if our patient does drugs, the friend, shocked and terrified, just stares. Marty flips on the suction unit and asks again, louder. The friend feels a police report coming and shakes his head, backing up, eyes locked on the vomit and spit swirling around the clear suction tubing. It's right here that most EMS crews begin ignoring the bystander or maybe get mad at him and start yelling. Marty shrugs. “Okay,” he says, voice casual as if he might fall asleep midsentence. “Well, your buddy here? He's dead.”

The friend goes pale and sweaty.

“I could probably do something,” Marty says, “maybe even save him, if I knew what happened.”

The friend's getting antsy because we're not doing anything, just waiting, so he asks if being high, is, well, if it's illegal. Marty grabs our ventilator and connects it to the oxygen as I reach into
the drug bag and grab the Narcan. Marty tells him it's not illegal to be under the influence, just in possession. The friend turns to me, because I'm holding the canvas bag.

“If he stays dead,” Marty says as he puffs a much needed breath of air into our patient's lungs, “the police will come. But if we know what's wrong and we treat him? Then we go to the hospital and the cops are none the wiser. You feel me?”

The friend feels him and it all comes gushing out. Everything we need to know plus a bunch more we really don't. We get to work in earnest but keep listening, because how addicted our patient is affects what happens next. What we need to know now is whether he's a casual user, once or twice a week, or does he do this every day? Because the guy who does this every day may well go into withdrawal and start seizing—from which he could die—if we totally remove the drug from his system. Which is what the Narcan does. So we need to know. Do I give him a lot and wake his ass up right now, or do I give him a taste, enough so he starts breathing but not enough for the brain to freak the fuck out? It's delicate, this part. Most people rush in and slam the Narcan, seizures be damned. Not Marty. He just waits.

“Once or twice a month,” the friend says. “Maybe less.”

Marty nods and thanks him, and I plunge a big thick needle into the rubber top of the Narcan vial and draw out two milliliters.

While I draw up the meds, Marty keeps ventilating. Though it would be easier and more effective to intubate him, we don't. The problem is, once we give him Narcan, he'll wake up. Narcan is a wonder drug, instantly and completely reversing the he's-not-breathing effect of narcotics. We've all heard stories of brand-new medics who've intubated patients and then given
Narcan. BOOM! The motherfucker jumps up, eyes wild, heart pounding, and takes off—with the ET tube crammed down his throat. What it must feel like to chase down a guy with an ET tube sticking out of his mouth—fearing that he'll outrun you, you'll lose him, and you'll have to explain it for the rest of your life—I can't begin to imagine.

Next I start an IV. Marty is proving himself a genius with the overdose, but I know damn well he can't start an IV. I drop to my knees, find a vein that hasn't been ruined by heroin, and slip the needle into our patient's yellow skin. Once I confirm the IV is good and tape it down, Marty tosses the BVM and grabs the patient's wrists. He winks at the friend. “Go ahead and back up, because it's about to get real in this little bathroom.”

I depress the plunger, and two milliliters of Narcan disappear. In a few seconds there will be no heroin, just a sweaty patient, confused and ready to vomit. Marty starts the countdown as we wait for the freak-out.

One Mississippi, two Miss—

“WHOAWHATTHEFUUUUUUUUCK!!!”

Marty smiles. One more white boy saved from oblivion.

M
arty
and I keep running calls, and each time I wait for the genius to shine through again, but it never does. Inexplicably, he has mastered nothing but the OD. The rest of the time, he's new and clueless. As for me, I don't have a specialty. At least not a medical one. What I have is a belief. It's probably misguided and definitely flies in the face of logic, not to mention the (usually) overwhelming evidence, but it's there all the same. I believe I can talk my way out of anything, diffuse any situation, talk anyone off any ledge. I always believe my patient—the one who's angry and violent, who's tearing up his mother's apartment—won't attack me. I may believe this, but Marty's skeptical, so I'm alone in the ambulance with Cordell.

Half an hour ago we got called out to a psych patient, possibly violent. We drove to the Greyhound station—a plate-glass eyesore oozing vagrants, addicts, and the occasional lost traveler into Atlanta's already beleaguered downtown—and realized we weren't here for just
any
violent psych patient.

“Tell me that's not Cordell,” Marty said as we pulled up.

“Maybe he's calm tonight.”

Cordell is a schizophrenic, a regular. He's chronically noncompliant with his meds, and when he goes off his meds, his
mind catches fire. Even with our windows closed, we could hear him screaming.

Marty nodded. “Doesn't sound calm.”

“No,” I said. “He doesn't.”

Marty wasn't in the mood for games. He wanted to call the cops and the fire department, wait for help to arrive, and then, with numbers, take Cordell down. Marty thought it'd be easier if we tied him to our stretcher and drowned him in a river of sedatives so he'd be snoring by the time we reached Grady. And we'd be well within our rights to do so. Cordell was screaming at passing cars and parked buses, at bystanders, the night sky, everything, at nothing. He'd attracted a crowd and was lashing out. Eventually, he'd hurt someone, maybe himself. Still, I thought we could handle this ourselves.

Cordell heard my door shut and turned. I was one of a dozen people standing around, but this uniform, this ambulance, they imply authority. Cordell stopped yelling. I'm not terribly big. Cordell is big. Three hundred pounds, six and a half feet tall, with bull shoulders that block out the light. Dressed in a windbreaker and dirty khakis, feet stuffed into size-fourteen sneakers with the heels crushed down so they're not sneakers anymore but slippers. A wild beard and an Afro bristling with lint and dead grass. He stomped over, angry and massive, a rhino escaped from the zoo.

He threatened us, threatened everyone. Told us to do whatever it was we came to do, because he wasn't cooperating. Marty, growing anxious, was ready to pull the trigger. But these calls require patience, and I'm nothing if not patient. I'm the steady drip that bores through stone. Calm down. Cooperate. Come with us. Or else.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Cordell turned and charged us again. When he stopped a few feet away, we were in his shadow. He leaned forward, and Marty rocked back on his heels. Cordell blinked, and the sharp focus in his eyes softened to a dreamy haze. “Let me get my things.”

So now we're in the ambulance, me writing a report, Cordell surrounded by a half-dozen overstuffed grocery bags. It's hard to say what calmed him down. I've come to think that all but the most unstable people know something's not right and, however reluctant, want to be helped. Sometimes I'm wrong. Last month we handled a woman whose body was right here in the Bluff but whose mind was in outer space. A cop had picked her up for walking in the street, and I climbed in the back of the cruiser next to her. Without warning, she pulled out a ten-inch butcher knife and tried to stab me. We were hip to hip in the backseat, her slashing wildly with the knife, me wiggling and scooting and trying not to get disemboweled.

Still. Cordell needs help, and tonight he agrees. There's only one place we can go. Thirteen.

Any patient who says he's crazy or that he wants to hurt himself or hurt somebody else or who talks about the government jamming microphones under his skin, he goes to Thirteen. The psych floor. Some buildings don't have a thirteenth floor, but here, in Atlanta, at Grady—one of the South's largest public hospitals—Thirteen's where they house the insane. Thirteen: two magical syllables spat out in contempt or spoken with reverence or whispered in fear.
Thirteen
.

Cordell says he's hearing voices. “I can't listen to them anymore,” he says.

“What are they saying?”

He looks away, nodding and bobbing his shoulders, and the ambulance rocks like a small boat. He hears what I'm saying, but he can't focus—he's carrying on two conversations now.

You're worthless and stupid. Just a piece of shit. Your mama hates you, everyone hates you. So why are you still here? Why are you still talking? Why are you still alive?

“Have you been taking your medicine?”

Why haven't you killed that cracker-ass medic? Seriously. Nobody would care. Do it. Just do it. Right now. And when you're done, when he's dead, open the back door. Leap out of the ambulance. Splatter yourself all over the highway.

“Cordell . . .”

Do it.

Now.

He blinks and returns to the ambulance.

“What are they saying, Cordell?”

“Bad things. Mean things.”

“Are they telling you to hurt yourself?”

He nods, and the ambulance crests another wave.

“They telling you to hurt other people?”

He shrugs. Looks away.

If he doesn't want to talk specifics, fine. There's nothing between us but a seat belt. No sense poking the bear.

“Can I ask you this, though?” I glance at the clock. “I'm guessing this didn't start now. It's probably been going on a while. So, it's what? Eleven-thirty? What changed to get you so worked up?”

“I'm rotting inside. I have to be ripped open so the foul can come out. I have to be relieved of this burden. To purge.”

There's not a whole lot you can say to that.

“But they want me to wait.”

“The voices?”

Another nod. “They said wait until midnight.”

It's now 11:28. I shift in my seat. “You know, I'm guessing the doctors aren't gonna want that to happen.” I shrug. “I don't want that to happen.”

“If you tried to stop me, I'd have to kill you.”

The next fifteen seconds pass in silence. Cordell doesn't sense my unease. That I've picked him up four or five times, that we've talked and joked and extended to each other a certain degree of mutual respect, doesn't, in his mind, preclude sudden senseless violence.

Up front, Marty stops at a red light.

It's 11:29. We have thirty-one minutes.

While we wait, Cordell crosses his legs so the untied size fourteen on his left foot dangles in midair.

“You got a little gum on your shoe, Cordell.”

He shakes his head. It's not gum. It's a plug. “They're putting gasoline in my body. Every night. It goes in through that hole.”

“Who is
they
?”

“Remove the gum and you can see all the way to my brain.” He lets his foot drop back to the floor.

Eleven-thirty-three. Twenty-seven minutes and counting.

We're a few blocks out from Grady when my phone rings. Cordell strains against the seat belt. “Who's that? I said no one back here but us!”

Cordell reaches for his seat belt, and my stomach plunges. I yank out the phone. “Look! It's my phone. Just a phone. It's just us.”

He stares at my phone while I tighten my grip on the heavy
laptop in my hands. If he attacks me, I'll raise this computer and bash in his head.

Cordell nods and settles back into his seat.

It's a relief when Marty finally pulls up to the ambulance ramp at Grady. I stand, lean over Cordell, and unbuckle his seat belt. He smiles, then grabs his bags and squeezes through the side door. We walk in, pass through triage, and head for the elevators. I move at a brisk pace. Cordell lumbers along behind me. He's got a slight limp and veers almost imperceptibly to the right, a battleship with an engine out. When we hit the elevators, it's 11:42. Eighteen minutes.

Grady is always crowded, and everyone wants to go up, down, anywhere but where they are, so no elevator is ever empty. Random people pile on, and eleven of the thirteen buttons between here and our final destination are pressed. After a prolonged interval during which I'm distracted by Cordell's hulking mass, we arrive at Thirteen.

Fifteen minutes to spare.

Outside the elevators, we're met by a security guard who sits alone at a table. One at a time, patients walk up and dump the contents of their mobile lives onto her desk. She sorts through crumpled bus maps, loose cigarettes, lighters, butter knives, old lottery tickets, broken sunglasses, and dirty underwear. Anything sharp, anything that can be broken and become sharp, anything someone can strangle himself with, anything that can be swallowed, it all gets confiscated.

The patients fuss and grumble, accuse her of stealing their stuff.
Last time I lost my paper clips. Last time you smoked my cigarettes. Last time that fat bitch stole my bra.

Next to the table is a metal detector, and beyond that are the
double doors leading to the psych wing. There's a man on the other side, visible only as a lone finger tapping on the glass. He's asking to be let out so he can smoke a cigarette. Just one. Real quick. After that he'll come right back. He promises.

I ask Cordell how he's doing, but there's no response. He rocks back and forth, both hands gripping his belly, fingers digging into the skin.

“Okay. Well, you just be cool and they'll get to us soon.”

The next six minutes pass in a frustrating, clock-watching blur.

The guard is still checking bags. “Take everything out,” she says over and over. “Your pockets, too. I have to see everything.”

All the while, the man on the other side of the door keeps tapping on the glass, keeps asking to go out for a smoke, real quick, because after that he'll be right back. He promises.