Diamond in the Rough Read online

  “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 creaky 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 it’s 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 it’s 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 Fred and Ronnie 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 gunshot wound.”

  “Unknown,” Fred 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, a rotund 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 it 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 is 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 3

  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 me again left alone. 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. “Loser,” he said, making the L sign on his jolly flaming skull head.

  “What does it take to get on at Capitol?” I asked Fred, who had 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 two, 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, maybe even get a girlfriend of my own.

  Chapter 4

  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 Polaroids 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 an
d 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 your ABCs.”

  “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 where 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 three: newbies 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, 9mm-waving gangbangers 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 to. 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 meantime, 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: five-hundred-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 all right, 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 Street, 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 we’re going to get paid,” the woman said. “My leg needs inspecting, and I hope they serving lunch soon, cause I could use a sandwich.”

  “Yeah, right,” Fred said. “Who else was in the car?”