A Thousand Naked Strangers (7 page)

These are the endcaps to my first day, and when it's over, I don't want to leave. All I can think about when I get home is the start of the next shift. All I want to do is run calls, treat patients, drive the ambulance, stand in line at a convenience store in a rough part of town. This uniform, a light blue shirt with patches on the arms, opens doors. It conveys knowledge. The feeling is electric, being an insider, knowing that should anything happen, I'll be the one called out to fix it. Every word the radio breathes into the stale air of the station sets me on fire. EMS is
the greatest show I've ever seen, except it's not a show, it's all real. No, it's more than that—it's reality distilled and boiled down to its essence. It's life and (hopefully) death, and unlike the general public, I'm invited and allowed to wander freely amid the debris. So send me
anything
. I'm on a 911 ambulance. I'll run whatever you've got.

W
ithin a month Jerry has been fired. I walk into the station one morning to be confronted by two supervisors and the director of operations. They sit me down, say they need to ask a few questions. Someone asks if I want anything, and out of sheer panic, I say that water would be nice. The director of operations is short and bald, fat on an epic scale. We're in the bunk room and the fan is off. He's starting to sweat. From the next room we can hear ice plinking into a glass, the tap running. When the water comes, I drink half the glass.

I wonder why two supervisors and the director have come this far, why they didn't just fire me by phone. Maybe there's a chance I can talk my way out of this, whatever it is. Hell, I haven't been here long enough to do anything right, let alone something that'll get me fired. As for Jerry, well, he probably deserved to get fired. He has a shitty attitude toward patients, toward our supervisors, toward the job in general. How and why he got into EMS, I don't know, but he stayed too long. Every medic in the county knows it. Even I know it. And that's saying something. These last few weeks have been so disorienting, I hardly know my own name. It's been all I can do to keep from drowning.

Scarcely a minute has passed during which I haven't learned something new, something that could theoretically make the difference in someone else's life. How to talk on the radio, talk to a doctor, talk to patients. How to do all the things I learned in school—size up a scene, backboard, dress a wound—not just properly but quickly. How to start IVs in a moving ambulance, how to start them on the old, the sick, the injured, the nearly dead, even the clinically dead. I have no experience with any of this, so for the first few shifts, whatever Jerry says, I do. However, it quickly becomes clear that Jerry has lost his way.

As the crew of a 911 ambulance in Fulton County, we have a simple mandate: Transport everyone who calls. Whatever the reason. We can't say no. If they call, they get a ride. The woman who calls at three in the morning because she's had a nightmare? Transport. Toothache? Transport. The guy with back pain who's clearly faking and just needs a ride downtown? Transport. But Jerry doesn't transport. Not these people and, if he can help it, not anybody. One night we run a stabbing outside a nightclub. The place is going nuts like Mardi Gras in a strip mall. Two girls—dressed to party and drunk on cheap liquor—start fighting. Someone breaks a beer bottle and stabs our patient in the neck. It's not a throat-slashing kind of thing, but the wound is nasty, like raw hamburger, and after I bandage it, I tell the girl she needs to come with us. But she's not having it. She has no time for us, no time for a tetanus shot, no time for stitches, and certainly no time for the hospital. Before I can launch into all the reasons she needs to go, Jerry tells her if she starts walking away, we have no right to chase her down. We'll simply let her go. No hospital. No bill. No questions.

When I bring it up later, Jerry brushes me off. He says it's her
choice, and who are we to tell her what to do? Seems to me we're precisely the people to tell her what to do, but he rolls over and goes to sleep.

This is the story I'm waiting to tell the director and the supervisors, the one I assume they've all shown up to hear. Instead, the director says, “Tell me about his girlfriend.”

“This is about
her
?”

Jerry is dating a medic from Alabama, and he's been trying to convince her to come work with us. One day I show up at work and she's here in full uniform. Jerry says she's going to ride with us, see if she likes it. He's vague on whether this has been approved. I figure she'll ride for a few hours, then take off. But she never takes off; she stays the entire shift. That night she crawls into Jerry's twin bed in our little bunk room. The noises I hear after the lights are out—kissing, giggling, zippers and grunts and the gentle sway of a shitty mattress—are noises lonely people pay for. But I'm not lonely.

The director runs a meaty palm across his forehead and wipes the sweat on his pants leg. He says the ride-along was never approved, that he can't begin to imagine why Jerry would think he could just bring someone to work. “There are rules for a reason,” he says. “Valid reasons, safety reasons. You understand that, right? Say you understand it.”

What I want to say is
Look, I was just following Jerry's lead, and Jerry, well, he's one of those people who does what he wants
. But unlike Jerry, I want to keep my job.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

And really, I do. For an entire day, a medic who never applied to Rural/Metro, who was never interviewed, whose credentials were never verified, and who was never hired, rode an
ambulance and treated patients. Clearly, this sort of thing can't happen.

My ignorance saves me from being fired but not from getting chewed out. The director says I should've known better, should've asked, should've told somebody. He's sitting on Jerry's bed, and as he talks, it groans under his weight. The old familiar creak. I ask myself:
If I tell him about that night, about what happened on that mattress, will he see the humor?
Finally, he struggles to his feet—one final squeal from the overburdened mattress—and says, “Long story short, Jerry's gone. We'll get you a new partner.”

•  •  •

What I get is not a new partner but a parade of part-timers. They all ask what happened to Jerry, and when I tell them, they're not surprised. They nod, say they saw it coming. Maybe not the exact means of his undoing but something. People like Jerry, with a shitty attitude, they're common in EMS. To a person, each part-timer insists burnout is rampant. The long days and longer nights, the missed holidays, the missed birthdays, it all starts to add up. I am, my partners constantly remind me, simply an EMT, and that means I'm making eleven dollars an hour—about what people make at Starbucks. How many baristas are bled on or puked on or asked to save a life?

I'm told everyone gets burned out. That if I stick with this long enough, I'll burn out, be born anew, and burn out again. Most people eventually move on, though a few stay forever. Most who stay love it. But there are others—the ones who are here and wish they weren't, who are either too lazy or too lost to find something else. These people, like Jerry, become Killers.
Though I've seen Jerry in action and I know what to look for, these temporary partners, they're not satisfied. It's not enough to have seen it in Jerry, they say. I need to know the signs so I can spot the transformation years from now, either in another partner or, God forbid, in myself.

My education takes the form of late-night horror stories, the accumulated knowledge of an entire career distilled to its antithesis—here, then, is what a medic shall
not
be. I hear a thousand of these stories, all the careless, lazy, even mean things Killers have done. In the end, only one stands out. Like a good jab, the story is short and to the point and leaves you wondering what else might be out there.

An old man is found down, barely breathing and on the verge of death. He has cancer. He has heart failure, lung failure, kidney failure. He has no family and even less hope, and the medic who arrives at his house simply places a gloved hand over the patient's mouth.

There are stories and then there are
stories
. Maybe that's all this one is. Maybe not. I'm not certain Jerry would've gone that far off the rails, but thanks to his girlfriend—with her easy-to-open Velcro fly and that squeaky twin bed—I'll never have to find out.

I
'm getting better every day. Learning if still green. I'm not yet good—that comes with time—but I'm getting there. I'm told repeatedly that the way to learn is to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Just listen and absorb. Which is easy, because I listen to everything they say,
they
being my rotating cast of irregulars. As a group, they're better than Jerry but far from promotable. That's not to say they don't want to be here, just that they're here for reasons entirely their own. They're Tourists, and filtered through their strange and slightly out-of-focus perspective, that they're here for all the other things this job allows them to do—that for them practicing medicine is secondary—makes perfect sense.

My most frequent part-timer is Josh, a body builder with enormous teeth, big white monsters spread wide enough to walk through, and a body to match: six and a half feet tall, chest like a beer keg, shoulders wide as a doorway, a booming voice cradled in a South Georgia accent. His shirts look to be about my size, tattoo-tight and rolled up at the biceps. He is one of the nicest guys I've ever met—always smiling, always laughing—which I suppose is your prerogative when you're big enough to rip the arms off a bear. He's been a medic twenty years, and while he has
the skills to walk through any emergency with the aloof grace and silent speed of a Siamese cat, his specialty is old women.

They call every day for every reason imaginable, and his approach is always the same. There she is—nothing but bones inside a nightgown—and in he walks, subtle as a bull elephant. When he reaches her, he sits, regardless of where she is—the bed, the floor, naked in a half-filled bathtub—and he takes her little bird hand and talks as if the only reason he's shown up is to have a casual conversation. In his own way, he has a genius for it, although his mind is somewhere else.

In between calls, he devotes his full attention to bodybuilding magazines. He isn't just reading. There's something almost religious in the way he studies them, a thick finger marking off each word. Occasionally, he slaps the pages and flips back to cross-reference what he's just read with an article from the day before. He keeps the magazines stacked in a duffel bag, and at the start of each shift, he removes them with great reverence, not merely a subscriber but a holy warrior sitting down to pray the knowledge into his head. He reads for hours, consumed and silent until, without warning, he lurches out of his seat and crashes down next to me. He jabs a big sausage finger at the page and discusses whatever has caught his attention—how the heavy use of diuretics really cuts up your calf muscles, or the comparative benefits of various pre-competition body oils, or the superior aesthetics of a brown sun-given tan versus the orange hue of a tanning bed.

He carries another duffel bag dedicated solely to nutrition. Three times a shift, he yanks back the zipper and pulls out a blender, a big spoon, a huge plastic cup, and an enormous tub of whatever protein shake he's taking this week. In goes the water,
followed by two or three heaping scoops of white powder, a sprinkle of creatine or androstenedione, and then he claps on the top and mashes the puree button. He always offers me a cup, and when I say no, he gazes at me—just a poor, hopeless civilian—as if all I need is the right combination of baby oil, sunburn, and muscle shake to turn things around.

He's here because our schedule of one day on and two days off allows him time to train. Plus, there is the stress of being up all night, running around in the heat, the constant activity. He needs this lifestyle—along with the diuretics—to get lean, because tough as he is, he's powerless when it comes to food. He confesses that when he doesn't have a show coming up, his willpower gives out. “For lunch alone,” he tells me, “I'll eat a rack of ribs, three hamburgers, a couple pounds of fruit, and a block of cheese.” One night he devours an entire bag of jumbo marshmallows on the way to the hospital.

The body builder is memorable, but he's not alone. There is Jose, also a Tourist, though much quieter and a man who takes a while to open up. When he does, it's early evening, the sun setting behind a derelict apartment complex near the Atlanta airport. Planes rumble overhead. We're standing over the bloated body of a man who, judging by the smell, was shot a few days ago. There's nothing to do but wait. Wait for the medical examiner. Wait to make sure some kid doesn't stumble on him. Wait for the body to burst. Finally, after twenty minutes, Jose starts talking.

“I always drive with my window down,” he says, smiling. “If it's hot, cold, raining, doesn't matter. Fucking snowing. I always keep it open. It's because of this.” He tugs at the collar of his uniform shirt. “Girls love this shit.”

The girls, the ones who get excited by uniforms—who are
drawn to them, who can't resist—proposition him. In Walmart, at McDonald's, at the gas station. While he's transporting a patient. “Last girl pulled up while I'm at a red light and shouts, ‘I've never been fucked in the back of an amba-lance before.' ” Jose shakes his head. “That's freaky, right? People die back there. Love me a freak, though.”

Jose admits EMS isn't really his thing. It's a job, and as far as jobs go it's okay, but he's not going to retire a medic. “Shit, I would've quit like a year ago, but these girls, man? Damn. These girls.” For now he's good where he is.