Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  “Other people got in the business. But they couldn’t compete with the old man. He lived it day and night. It was the Wild West then. They didn’t have assigned responder areas like they do now. It was first come, first serve. The unwritten rule was first company to pull their stretcher got the patient. It wasn’t unheard of to have fistfights over who got the transport. You didn’t think you could lick the other crew, you let the air out of their tires.”

  “You let the air out of their tires?”

  “Ever see the movie Mother, Jugs and Speed?”

  “No.”

  “You should check it out. It’s based on EMS in this town in those early days. Raquel Welch is in it. Larry Hagman. He plays the Sidney part. And Bill Cosby. The Bill Cosby character—you wouldn’t know it by the color of my skin, but he was based on me. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “Can’t say that I did. Who did Raquel Welch play?

  “They just threw her in there to add some sex appeal, not that there haven’t been any ambulance babes working these streets. You know, Hollywood—they changed things. Take my character. Made me a black man if you can imagine that. Then they set us all in California. Still the movie captured the spirit of EMS in the old days. It was about craziness and making money. We had to live by our wits in the early days of EMS. Sidney—that man knew how to make money. He’d give fruit baskets and prime steaks to nursing home administrators and their nurse supervisors. Get them to call us instead of the competition when they needed to send a patient out. Sidney used to drive around the city handing out bottles of Mad Dog and Thunderbird to the local drunks. Then he’d send the ambulance by to pick them up. Take them to detox at a hundred dollars a pop. We’d put four or five in the same ambulance. Talk about a racket.

  “We had any problems with the city, Sidney took care of it. A councilman had a complaint; Sidney would take him out to Carbone’s. Wine and dine ’em. No problem too big a veal marinara and some wine couldn’t solve.

  “He bought out all the competition—Eastern, T&C, Ace—all except Champion. I think he kept them in business just so no one could accuse him of having the monopoly. He had forty ambulances, fifty wheelchair vans and ten livery cars. We’re barely running half that now. We had this town locked down. We had all the nine-one-ones, ninety percent of the nursing homes, and forty dialysis patients—talk about cash in the bank. And Sidney was out there on the road every night, being driven around in his Cadillac with the red lights in the grille. You could hear his voice on the radio, ‘Where are you going Davey boy? You’ll be in China before you get to Clark Street the way you’re headed.’

  “He could be a bastard, but people liked working here. Every week, he took the crew that did the most calls out for a steak dinner. You had a sick kid at home, he’d palm you a fifty. Every Christmas he threw a big party—open bar, lavish buffet, everything from leg of lamb to chocolate-covered strawberries, door prizes like TVs and Caribbean vacations, and nice party gifts with the company logo. It was a big deal. He might not have paid us the best wages, but he knew how to make us feel special.

  “And he was the one who first brought paramedics to the city. The other companies were all running just EMTs, but he went out and got paramedics. I was in that first class. I worked the first ALS code in this city. I got a save too. Sidney put the paddles in my hand. He was ahead of his time. Now his legacy is on the verge of being obliterated up by the big corporations.

  “It’s funny, you think you’re going to be on these streets forever, but then before you know it, it’s over. If only he’d lived. He’s got to be banging on the lid of that fancy box they’ve got him nailed in, wanting to get out and straighten this place out. A fine mess it’s in now, with all the bullshit going on. New rules and regulations, fucking with our schedules, fucking with people’s lives, fucking up the place.”

  He stared at the tombstone. “I guess that’s how we’ll all end up—leaving behind a fucked-up world as if we’d never been here. Nothing to do but let the bugs eat us. A hell of a reward for your life’s toil.”

  Chapter 7

  We came in off the road at ten. I refueled, cleaned, washed, and restocked the ambulance, while Troy turned in the paperwork and narc keys. Troy’s pickup was usually long gone from the parking lot by the time I punched out, but tonight he and Pat, their uniform shirts off, stood sharing a six-pack, while the stereo in Troy’s pickup played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” “Lee, old pal,” Troy called. “You worked hard today. One of these Buds has your name on it.” He tossed me a can, which I caught, bobbling it slightly.

  “Thanks anyway, I don’t drink.”

  “Bullshit. I bet you could drink us both under the table. Come on out with us. We’ve been waiting for you. We’re all meeting at the Brickyard Pub.”

  “It’ll be good for you,” Pat said. “They’ll be a lot people there.”

  “Girls too,” Troy said, “You have a hundred-percent chance of getting lucky.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said, as I tossed the can back to him with an underhand toss. “But I need my beauty sleep. You two have fun. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Another time then,” Pat said.

  “Maybe. Have a good night.”

  “I told you he wouldn’t go,” I heard Troy said to Pat as I got into my car.

  “Always worth a try,” Pat said.

  I was staying in a small furnished apartment over a barn in Granby, a small rural town, a half hour north of Hartford. In return for keeping the yard up and doing minor house repairs for the elderly widow who lived in the farmhouse, I paid no rent. I liked it out there. It was quiet—a good contrast with the lights and sirens of the city.

  Tonight I walked up the side stairway to my apartment. I stripped to my shorts, skipped some rope, and then did bench presses, rows, lunges, squats, and curls, followed by the same hundred pushups and sit-ups with which I started my day. After I showered, I drank some cold water from the fridge, and then went to bed and looked out the window at the dark sky lit with stars.

  Chapter 8

  We were called for a violent psych, and dispatch hadn’t been kidding.

  “All you motherfuckers look out. I am the archangel. I’m a bad motherfucker!”

  Six-nine, three hundred pounds of prison muscle, naked except for a jock strap—the screaming man stood in the middle of the street whirling a child’s bicycle around and around over his head.

  There were two cops already on scene and they were calling for backup.

  “Come and get me. I’m on TV. I’m a bad man!”

  “You got any ideas?” Officer Denny Creer asked Troy. Creer used to work for Capitol Ambulance and had been one of Troy’s early partners. He had a shaved head and a weightlifter’s physique.

  “Shoot him in the knees,” Troy said.

  “What?”

  “If he charges, you’ll have to go for a shoulder shot.”

  “Forget I asked.”

  “We could try to reason with him.”

  “I think he’s out of his mind.”

  “Come on you motherfuckers! I am the archangel and I am a bad man!”

  Troy whispered to me, “Get the dart gun.”

  Just then the madman stopped spinning. His eyes gleamed. He spun around twice more, and launched the bike like a discus. The cops and Troy watched it sail up into a tree. The man charged. “Look out!” I shouted.

  He knocked the stunned cops over like he was Jim Brown running through a high school JV team. Troy tackled him hard around the waist, but didn’t bring him down. The man grabbed Troy and lifted him up. Troy punched him in the face. The man lost his grip. The cops were on the man now like dogs on a bear.

  “Ten-zero! Ten-zero!” I called on the radio just before a third car skidded into the intersection. One cop took a punch to the head. The man rose. Troy and Creer hauled the man down. He almost made it up again, but this time I joined the fray, driving my head and shoulder into his flank. I bounced off, scraping my a
rm on the asphalt. I looked up to see they had him contained now, a man on each limb, as the third cop had come to their aid.

  I got up slowly, feeling like I had no business playing the linebacker.

  “Rodney King! Rodney King!” the man screamed. “I’m on video! I know the score!”

  The recent arrival hit him with his nightstick to no effect.

  “Easy,” Creer said, “You never know.”

  “I’m a bad motherfucker! Get the video! I’m on TV!”

  “Hey, Butkus,” Troy called to me, “Get my narc kit and med pouch.” He was sweating. To the cops, he said, “This guy’s strong.”

  “I am a bad motherfucker! I’m on TV! I’m on video!”

  “Hurry up with it,” Troy said.

  Two more cops arrived. They relieved Troy on the man’s arm. They tried to flip him over and cuff him. He got in a few more shots and a head butt before they were able to get the cuffs on. Still they had to sit on him to keep him from kicking or gaining his feet.

  I handed Troy the narc kit. His hands shook as he opened it, took out a vial and drew up a drug with a syringe.

  “This’ll calm him down.” He swabbed the man’s bicep, then jabbed a syringe into the man’s skin.

  Within a minute, the madman was snoring. It took the cops several minutes to realize the man wasn’t playing possum. It took four of us to lift him up onto the stretcher.

  “I got to get some of that. Give it to my wife,” Creer said. “You want me to ride in with you?”

  “No, he’s not waking up any time soon,” Troy said. “You can uncuff him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s a sleeping rockabye baby. You could put a diaper on him, stick a rattle in his hand and take his lullaby picture.”

  I drove to Hartford Hospital on a three, no lights, no siren. I backed into the ambulance entrance, got out, walked around and opened up the back doors. There was the patient, snoring away on the stretcher. Troy was laid out across the bench seat, snoring just as hard. I gave him a little shake, thinking he might be just putting me on, making fun of our patient’s Three Stooges sawing-the-wood act. He didn’t rouse. I touched his forehead—cold and diaphoretic. I looked out the side window. There were no other ambulances in the lot. A security guard leaned against the wall, smoking.

  I was perspiring just as hard as Troy had been as I wrapped the tourniquet around his arm. I spiked the bag of saline, and hung it from the ceiling hook. I rubbed an alcohol wipe on the vein I intended to stick, then took out a twenty-gage catheter. I aimed straight for the vein, and did as Pat taught me, went right in, no wussy stuff. I felt the vein pop. Blood flashed back into the chamber. I was in.

  I carefully advanced the catheter over the needle, hooked up the saline line, and then taped it down. I hooked up the D50 and slowly pushed the thick syrupy water into his vein.

  When it was done, I looked at Troy. He was still out, but his color was better. I wiped off my brow with a towel.

  The back door opened. It was Pat. “Everything all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

  Troy raised his head and squinted at us. “Fuck,” he said, and then lay back down.

  “Good work,” Pat said to me. “What do you have here?”

  “A violent psych. Troy sedated him before he crashed himself.”

  “You have the paperwork?”

  I looked at Troy’s run sheet. The patient’s name and date of birth were legible, the rest looked like it had been written by a kindergartener.

  “Look, we’ve got a drunk in our rig. I’ll help you bring him in. Jim’s got our guy in a wheelchair. This guy’ll be my patient. Give Troy some time to take it easy.”

  When we came back out Troy was eating a hot dog and drinking a coke, talking to Denny Creer about the madman.

  “He’ll never acknowledge you helping,” Pat said.

  It was true. Every time I gave Troy D50, he’d wake up with that brutal look of disappointment that his own body had let him down. “Fuck you,” he’d say, and then sulk off.

  “Weakness isn’t easy to admit,” Pat said that day. “Especially for Troy.”

  Chapter 9

  The thing of it was: Troy’s diabetic episodes were almost entirely preventable. We all need sugar to survive. A diabetic lacks insulin that breaks the sugar down and transports it to the cells. Troy gave himself daily shots of insulin and carefully monitored his blood glucose level. He tried to keep his in the eighty to one hundred and twenty range—on the low end. Eighty to one twenty is fine, except some sudden bursts of energy and you could go down to fifty, and fifty was where Troy started to loose control. At forty, he was cold and diaphoretic. At thirty-five he was unconscious. Other diabetics kept their level higher in the one twenty to one sixty area. The higher the sugar level, the less likely you were to be affected by missing a meal or a sudden rush of energy. But the higher you maintained it, the sooner the disease would advance its nasty handiwork. Troy wanted his low because the lower he kept it, the better for his long-term health. “I’m really looking forward to the day my first toe falls off,” he said, as he pricked his finger with a lancet. “Then my foot, then the leg up to my knee, then I’ll go blind, I’ll need dialysis. I’ll get killer bedsores, open, seeping, pus-filled wounds. You’re in such good shape, you’ll still be here to cart me around, pick me up at Trinity Hill three times a week.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  He squeezed a drop of blood onto the test strip. “Yeah, I’ll have orderlies wiping my butt. Then my heart will fail, and they’ll find me cold in bed. You’ll be working with Linda, and after a quick initial exam of my corpse, she’ll tell you to go back to the ambulance to get a crow bar.”

  “A crow bar?”

  “Yeah, because after I’m gone, even though my toes and fingers have fallen off, they’ll still need the crow bar to beat my dick to death.”

  “You’re demented.”

  “Sugar’s fifty-three. Better give me one of those Baby Ruths.”

  I already had it in my hand.

  “Walking the thin line,” he said.

  “Eat your bar.”

  Troy always played it close to the wire. That might have been all right if he took better care of himself, but that wasn’t his style.

  “That man does two things,” Victor Sanchez told me. “He works and he parties. Him and his buddy Pat Brothers—the dynamic duo. Those two, they don’t go down to the corner for beers, they drive to Atlantic City or catch a plane to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras or Miami Beach or wherever the action is.

  “Three years ago they ran with the bulls in Pamplona. New Year’s—they’re at Times Square. Once they went down to Jamaica for some reggae festival. They come back and Pat’s got a picture of them smoking foot-long spliffs, hanging out with Rastafarians. Troy’s got his hair in miniature dreadlocks. Last year they went to the X Games—you know, the ones on ESPN. Troy comes back with his wrist in a cast and a medal. It’s not a gold or bronze or silver. It just says “Participant” on it. Still it was a medal. He was very proud. He entered the skateboard competition. Finished next to last, but he still participated. They’ve surfed the pipeline in Hawaii, gone scuba diving with sharks off the Great Barrier Reef, and hunted mountain goat in the Rockies. Most years they go to the Super Bowl.

  “One time one of our medics Kim Dylan was vacationing at Caesar’s in Las Vegas with her sister and her kids. The casino’s hosting an Elvis karaoke contest. She looks up at the stage and there’s an Elvis look-alike dressed in a white leather jacket, with a scarf around his neck, down on one knee, singing ‘You Gave Me a Mountain.’ She looks at him closer. She can’t believe it. It’s Troy. Not only is it him, but he wins. She runs into him again that night. He and Pat and two busty showgirls are at a craps table. He’s still in his Elvis suit along with his fake sideburns. They’ve parlayed the five hundred dollars he’d won in the karaoke contest into over twenty-five grand, every penny of which they lose, but
not until they enjoyed two days of comped suites, shows and ringside seats at a heavyweight title fight. They even got Kim’s rooms comped for her and got her tickets to Siegfried and Roy.”

  “That’s funny. Troy as Elvis. I can see it.”

  “Living large. The two of them can pack away the liquor, too, though Pat has tapered off lately now he’s got a steady girl. I drink, it goes right here on my belly. They stay lean; still, it’s got to take a toll. You reach an age, well, you know, how’s that song Nestor is always singing go? ‘Hangovers hurt more than they used to.’”

  Thursday mornings when our shift started, Troy always looked pale and haggard. He was a giant white candle, his eyes the burnt wicks.

  “You ever thought about maybe going a little easier,” I finally said one day after driving behind the Mobil Station on Washington Street so Troy could puke for the third time that morning.

  He wiped his mouth as he leaned against the Dumpster, then said, “Go to hell. Okay?”

  “What could I have been thinking?” I said.

  If he wanted to party and drink for days, it was his life. He knew what the disease was all about. He knew the complications and its inevitable course. We saw its handiwork nearly everyday.

  The address was a single-family home in the city’s south end across from a public housing complex. The white paint on the house was dull and peeling. The sideboards were rotting. The front gutter had fallen off and lay in the tall grass next to the garage. The cement walk that led to the front door was buckled and uneven, and made a rough ride for the stretcher. A sign by the door said “The Smiths.” A neatly dressed woman in her sixties met us at the door. “He’s in the den,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve been here before. He’s a diabetic. I came home early and found him.”