Diamond in the Rough

by Peter Canning

  ***

  Carrie’s dress was gorgeous—long and sleeveless, a chiffon blue that matched her eyes. The dress hid her rounding figure and yet showed off her ample cleavage.

  The event was held at the Sky View Ballroom out near the airport due to security for the Vice President. He was running late so they held us out in the hallway for two hours. It was baking hot, the air conditioning wasn’t working, but at least they had an open bar. Carrie made the most of that. I think she felt nervous on account of how good-looking Tom’s girlfriend was. She started in with her talking and her voice got really loud, and I had to shush her a few times. After that, I gave up. I figured what the hell after a while. I didn’t want to put her down in public.

  I was doing my best to keep smiling and show her a good time, but I was distracted and feeling out of sorts due to the baby call I had done. In the back of my mind I was forming a plan to talk to the Vice President about my day. I was going to ask him about a world that no longer saw the fallen sparrow. I was going to be the voice of that little girl. All the free drinks, and the fancy dinner they were going to serve, and at the same time there were more little girls out there right now in that city and in cities all over the country. Someone needed to help them. I mean, what was the point of patting ourselves on the backs as supposed heroes when we couldn’t even protect a baby girl?

  They finally let us in after making us go through metal detectors and then getting pat downs. We sat at a table near the back. The Vice President gave a short speech, reading from a teleprompter, while cameras from all the networks filmed. They had the twenty of us who were getting awards get in a line, and we came up as our names were called one after the other. It didn’t look like I would have a chance to say anything. The Governor shook my hand, and then the Vice President shook my hand, and then another guy—I think he was a Congressman—put a medal around my neck as I smiled and nodded.

  Carrie gave me a kiss when we got back to the table. Ned and the boss shook my hand. The Vice President left as soon as he’d hung the last medal, walking out with fingers flashing the peace sign, and then the Congressman made a long windy speech that I don’t remember anything from, I was so caught up in my thoughts. I just sat there quietly while Carrie sucked down the wine like it was water. I just kept thinking I had let that little baby girl down. I should have walked up to the podium, grabbed the mike, and said, “Listen people, listen people, there’s something bad going on out in our streets, something real bad.” I imagined them all listening, and then behind me a video playing sights from the Hartford streets, while Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” came over the sound system. And maybe I sang karaoke along with it, or maybe I sang just like Marvin, deep and soulful. And the whole world would change, at least until investigative reporters dug into the life of the man who dared stand up for children in front of the government muckety-mucks. They would discover that I was a common thief. Instead of being praised, I would be shamed, hounded by the press and even common people. Dogs would bark at me. Children would point their fingers at me and taunt. And I would leave the city, forever a pariah.

  I was expecting a conquering hero’s night of passion, but after stopping in the bathroom to pee, when I came out, I found Carrie passed out on the couch with my medal still around her neck. I put a blanket on her, turned the TV to mute and sat next to her for a while. I had another one of my bad headaches that night and I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the porch and stayed there till the sun came up.

  Chapter 22

  My mom called me. “I saw you on TV,” she said.

  It was early in the morning and I had worked till two the previous night. “Was that the accident out on 84? It was pretty spectacular, but no one was hurt.”

  “No, no, you’re in a commercial. They have you getting the medal. You look so handsome.”

  “What are you talking about? Slow down. I’m not even awake yet.”

  “You know Senator Bellow? They have him putting the medal around your neck. You’re in his commercial. You know he’s running for re-election. They have this symphony-type music and pictures of people and the flag and it’s very inspiring, and you’re in it. I saw it twice already. Do you think you can get me a copy? I suppose I could just keep the tape in the VCR and hit it when it comes on next, but the VCR isn’t recording so well. I really need a new one.”

  “Mom, Mom, Mom. I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “I’m so proud of you. It’s like my son is a movie star. I can’t wait to go to work and hear what everyone says.”

  “Look, I’m going back to bed.”

  “Okay, honey. I’m sorry to disturb your sleep. You need your rest. You know you’re my little, I mean my big hero.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I love you, Timmy.”

  “I love you too, Mom. Now I’m going back to bed.”

  When I got into work, I heard more of the same. They hit me as soon as I walked in the crew room.

  “Hey, it’s Mr. Big Shot.”

  “What are you doing here? I heard you were going to be on Third Watch? And then making a movie with Bruce Willis called Die Hard and Doofus? Just kidding. What did they pay you for that?”

  “I don’t know what anyone is talking about,” I said. “And nobody paid me anything.”

  “Honoring heroes, fighting for freedom.”

  “Hey, my sister is having trouble with her Social Security disability. Maybe you can put in a call to your friend?”

  “Yeah, I’m having trouble with the IRS, maybe you can make them go away.”

  I just collected my ambulance keys and portable radio. “I know nothing,” I said.

  It continued all day. At the hospital. On scenes.

  “There’s America’s hero,” a police officer said when we walked up on scene where a drunk lay on his side, an empty bottle of Listerine in his hand. “Where’s the TV cameras? Oh, wait, they’re waiting for you to actually fucking save someone.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said.

  Tom was miffed he wasn’t in the shot. “You’re telling me they didn’t pay you. Did you pay them? That’s the only way I can see they would put your ugly mug up there and not mine.”

  We were on scene in an elderly apartment complex, Betty Knox Village near Saint Francis. A visiting nurse was there and her patient, an eighty-three-year-old woman, wasn’t responding. Tom was checking her sugar. It was 44. I was spiking the bag of fluid to hang while he put in an IV so he could give her some glucose to wake her up when I saw the ad come on the TV during a commercial break from the soap opera.

  “Senator Joe Bellow, fighting for Connecticut...”

  They showed an energetic Senator in front of a podium with a flag in the background.

  “Helping the elderly...”

  He smiled as he assisted an elderly woman into a door.

  “Fighting for the young…”

  A shot of him in a classroom.

  “Honoring America’s hometown heroes...”

  And there he was putting a medal on my bowing head. I wasn’t on there but a second. Blink and you would miss me.

  “Joe Bellow, always there for you and for America.”

  A picture of the man gazing off into the distance, the flag furling behind him. Three fighter jets shot though the sky.

  “I need that line,” Tom said.

  “Just a minute, sorry.”

  I fumbled to finish spiking the bag, while Tom waited impatiently. I finally got the line flushed and handed it to him, then got the D50 out of his yellow med kit. He pushed the thick syrupy medicine through the line, and within a minute the woman was waking up, as Tom was saying, “Good Morning.”

  ***

  My dad called me that night. Now he and I generally don’t speak. I took my mother’s side in their dispute, though I recognized that he had had a hard go. She was no easy person to live with, and he had needs of his own, much less having to take care of hers, but that’s what a husband and father a
re supposed to do. They divorced when I was six. He lived in Enfield now and worked part-time as a gas station attendant. He’d been in and out of prison for years for small-time cons. He was eighty percent disabled due to an accident he’d had at his old factory job. “How can you support that fuck? His office has been giving me the run-around for years on my disability. He’s a fuck who doesn’t give a shit about anything but himself.”

  “They didn’t ask me,” I said. “They just used my picture.”

  “Well, you can sue him then. Sue him for a lot. I’ll give you the number of my lawyer. It’ll show him right. They didn’t give you any cash prize for getting that medal? Did they? By the way, congratulations. Your mother told me; I just didn’t get around to calling.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I just got the medal.”

  Carrie thought I should sue too. “He’s gaining from your heroism, and he didn’t do anything. He should have to pay you. Maybe you can get a settlement because they don’t like bad press? Just have a lawyer call him up and say, we’re going to sue you for a million dollars, but then he can settle for maybe fifty thousand. They’ll just cut you a check so you go away. And then we can get married, go on like a two week Hawaii vacation or something like that. We can use the rest for a down payment on a condo of our own.”

  “You’d want to do that?”

  “Well, I’m not getting any younger.”

  I fell into a stunned silence.

  “But maybe you’re not the marrying type,” Carrie said.

  “I don’t think you can say that.”

  “My friend Sherry at work got engaged this week,” she said. “She’s got the biggest ring. It positively glistens. I could see it all the way from the Xerox machine. Her boyfriend spent seven thousand dollars.”

  “Seven thousand dollars!”

  “Seven thousand isn’t so much for a wedding ring. It shows he loves her. It’s a symbol of their love she can look at for the rest of their lives. He worked six months overtime to pay for it—that’s true love. I’d like to have a man like that someday, someone who thinks about the future.”

  “I think about the future all the time.”

  She laughed. “All you think about is your job. Besides, I think you make up half those stories anyway.”

  “I’m no bullshitter.”

  “You say you love me when you’re kissing me, but I don’t see anything on my finger.”

  “Remind me to buy some Cracker Jack next time I go to the store.”

  She punched me in the shoulder, hard.

  “I was just joking. I thought we were teasing, having a good time.”

  “I’m twenty-six years old and I need to start getting serious about my future and who I will be spending it with.”

  “You’re not wasting your time with me, I’ll guarantee that. I will surprise you. I am more than you think.”

  She just shook her head.

  I admit I was confused. One day I thought she loved me, the next she was somewhat miserable toward me, which I guess was just her moods.

  She caught my reaction. “I really don’t care what you do. It’s your life. It’s just you shouldn’t let someone take advantage of you without getting something in return. That’s the way the world works. It’s something I am always aware of. So take that how you may.”

  ***

  Ned Martinson called me into his office the next day. “I’m hearing rumblings that you are upset with being in Senator Bellow’s commercial. I hope you don’t do anything stupid to embarrass yourself or the company.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” I said.

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m not political myself, but my mother is proud of me.”

  “She doesn’t know you like we do.”

  I just looked at him coldly. I knew he was trying to make a joke.

  “Well, anyone tries to get you to do anything stupid like complain about being in it, don’t. It’s advertising for the company, and for you. You never know when an important person can help you out. They can certainly make life miserable for you if you cross them. Besides, everyone who went to the banquet signed a release agreeing to be photographed.”

  “Like I said, I’m not doing anything.”

  “You know, deserved or not, you are something of a role model. You need to uphold that. You shouldn’t be doing anything that might embarrass that. Are we clear?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  The phone rang. Ned answered it. “What? You’ve got to be kidding. Again? So are they upset that he got shot or that someone stole his money? How much this time? Really? And how would they know how much he had on him? What was the call? Saturday night. Enfield Street? All, right, we’ll check it out and get back to you. You want the answer now? I know, I know. No one here has quit and moved to Tahiti. At least not that I know of.”

  After he hung up, I said, “What was that about?

  “This job,” he said. “The calls I get. Police department calling again saying a drug dealer’s family is complaining that their son, who was shot dead, had his roll pick-pocketed. What are these people thinking? Your son is a drug dealer. If he has money on him, it’s going to be impounded if it hasn’t been lifted by the first person to reach him. After the bullets stop flying, I imagine it’s finders keepers in that part of town. The PD says they just have to report it. Due diligence. I tell you, I catch anyone who works for me taking even a dollar, that’s the last they’ll work here, drug dealer or not. We have ethics here. Not that you should worry, Mr. Just Being a Good Citizen. Some of your fellow employees I worry about.”

  Everything he said, of course, left me flabbergasted. Sometimes I felt like I was living in an experimental world and I was the experiment. They were just letting me run around and every so often a scientist would pick me up by my rat tail and apply an electric shock to my head just to fuck me up more.

  “All right, then,” Ned said. “Back on the road with you.”

  Chapter 23

  We got a late call that night so I didn’t have time to stop by my apartment to shower and change before meeting Carrie at her place. She generally didn’t like me showing up in my EMT uniform. I didn’t understand that because we always ended up naked on the couch anyway unless her roommate was home, which was rare because she worked the night shift. Sometimes I’d come over in the slacks and polo shirt Carrie had bought for me, and I wouldn’t have even made it to the couch and we’d have our clothes off.

  On this night I had promised to pick up dinner and a video—the new Denzel. She was more interested in Denzel than getting my clothes off so I was still fully clothed when she said, “Something smells.”

  “I think it’s the Mu Shu Pork,” I said. “It’s good though, let me make you one.”

  “No, it’s not Mu Shu Pork. Most definitely, it’s not. It smells like dog shit. Did you step in something and not check your feet?”

  I started sniffing. I still smelled the old lady we’d taken in one our last call who’d had bad diarrhea on her clothes and sheets, that I’d done my best to clean up. I thought it was just a memory smell. Sometimes you smell something bad and it just hangs in your bones all day. It’s why most EMTs who come to the job with mustaches end up shaving theirs. “I just smell Mu Shu Pork,” I said hopefully, but I knew as soon as I said, it wasn’t convincing.

  “Oh, gross. Oh, get out of here. Oh, Jesus! Get right up right now. You have shit on your leg.” She jumped up, and in doing so knocked over her sweet and sour chicken, and she swore again, and looked at that mess, then looked at the brown streak I now saw on the back of my leg, and she screamed so tears were coming out of her eyes. “You brought shit into the house and you got it on the couch. Oh, gross! Get out of here. I can’t believe you. That’s so disgusting.”

  I stared at my pant leg—at the brown smear on the back of my leg, some of which had already transferred onto the couch fabric.

  “I can’t believe you. That is so gross. You go home. Go home right now. And don�
�t come back until you’ve showered and scrubbed and changed. Oh, I feel sick.”

  “Can’t I clean up here? I mean, what about our dinner? What about Denzel?”

  “Get out! Get out now. I’m going to puke if you stay. Oh, how am I going to clean this up?”

  “I’ll do it. Just get me a paper towel.”

  “Now, you’re just going to get it on everything. Where else do you have it? It is dog shit, isn’t it? It’s not human shit. Oh, it is. It’s human shit! Oh, it’s probably diseased.”

  I don’t remember what else she said. I got out of there. I went home and put my pants in a plastic garbage bag and showered, and scrubbed and loaded on the aftershave, and put on the nice clothes she liked me to wear, but when I got back in my car, I was just thinking how she was just going to get all on my case again.

  I was so ticked at her, I drove to Uncle Frank’s out on the West Service road. Instead of sitting at the bar, I took a seat in the couch area and ordered a beer. A dancer came over and I took a crisp twenty out of the stack I’d gotten at the bank that afternoon when I’d cashed my paycheck. I laid it on the table next to the big armchair. A lap dance only cost ten dollars, but I just looked into her eyes and said, “Double the fun… and there’s more where that came from.”