“You see my apartment. Right there. Impressive building, right? And over there. The hospital. That look familiar? There’s the Cotton Club. There’s the Apollo sign. And Yankee Stadium ... I used to love it up here. This used to be a great neighborhood. But it went to shit like everything else.”
“I don’t mind it,” I said, and he gave me a look.
“You like it as a novelty. As someplace where fucked-up shit happens. You have no idea, Cross. 1979. It used to be a nice place.”
“Maybe it’ll get better again,” I said, and he shook his head.
“I won’t be around to see it.” I looked at him, as if to say, Where’re you going, and he just looked away. “Ain’t happening tomorrow. I won’t be around to see it. I know that.” He held the radio up. “You ready?”
“I’m always ready.”
“Right,” he said.
He kept his head turned, said nothing more, and put us into service.
Pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, apple pie, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, green beans, cream spinach....
It was Memorial Day, and the table in the common room was full of pots and pans and scraped glass containers. Medics and EMTs sat around with legs stretched out, paper plates on their laps, radios propped up with the sound low, everyone monitoring the Manhattan North frequency. I set my equipment down and took a rosemary chicken wrapped in tinfoil from my backpack. I’d been cooking it all day in my little studio apartment. I placed it on a paper plate and set it up on the table. I got a plate for myself and five minutes later I was standing near the doorway, plate of food in one hand, plastic fork in the other, when Lieutenant Rivett wandered in and eyed me silently, then said, “What’d you bring, Cross?”
“Nothing. I decided to leech off everyone else,” I said.
Verdis spoke up quickly.
“He’s kidding, L.T. He brought a whole chicken.”
“Wasn’t bad, either,” LaFontaine said. “For a rookie.”
“Just checking,” Rivett said, not unpleasantly, liking it that I gave him shit. “Gotta teach these young guys. You go to other stations, they don’t have any picnic dinner like this.”
“They might do half the work and get paid the same,” LaFontaine yelled out. “They might all still have girlfriends and wives and a real life. But, hey, we get a picnic dinner. So it’s worth it.”
“This is Harlem,” Rivett said. “We take care of our own here.”
“Or LaFontaine takes care of em,” Marmol yelled out.
Everyone laughed and when a spot opened up I sat at the long table. A peaceful moment, all of us eating the potluck dinner together, joking around, like a big family. I noticed that everyone gave Rutkovsky space, that he sat to the side, eating on the windowsill, separate from everyone else, quieter than everyone else, including me. I noticed I was more a part of the group than Rutkovsky.
The swanky row of houses was along tree-lined Convent Avenue. Rutkovsky and I walked through a door with stained glass, past a marble staircase, and into a dining room with an enormous wooden table, lamps with shades of colored fabric, and a guy, maybe seventy, on all fours on the floor next to a toppled wineglass. A woman in her mid-fifties in an expensive blue dress stood over him, flitting about, saying, “He’s got heart failure. Doctor said no salt. No salt! But Horace, oh, he’s stubborn. He had to have those chips.”
Rutkovsky lifted the guy, saying,“Open the chair,” but I’d already done it. Rutkovsky sat the guy in our folding chair. He turned for the drug bag, but I’d already torn it open and handed Rutkovsky the BVM. He gave the guy a few breaths while I attached the BVM to the oxygen tank, and listened to his lungs, and he started to ask what I’d heard in the lungs, but before he did I said, crackles three quarters of the way up.”
Sitting up, the guy could breathe on his own and while I got a blood pressure, Rutkovsky reached for the IV kit, but I’d already set it out for him. I got the blood pressure, then gave a nitro, and Rutkovsky nodded in approval, and kept on with the IV I took the dirty needle from him and stored it in the needle bin. He turned for the Lasix, but I’d already set that out, too. He gave the Lasix. I took another pressure, then gave another nitro and strapped the guy into the chair and started to bring him out as Rutkovsky called the hospital. The whole thing took less than five minutes. Three months before it would have taken fifteen. By the time we lifted the guy into the stretcher, his skin was a golden color and he was breathing slower and through the oxygen mask he was yelling at his wife, saying, “Oh, shut up. Enough about the chips.” Inside the ambulance Rutkovsky rifled through the drug bag, until he saw I was holding the extra Lasix out to him. He looked like he’d say something, but he didn’t. He just took the Lasix from me and put it in his front pocket. “Thanks. Good work,” he said. I would have told him he did a good job, too, but I knew he hated it when I said anything like that. He knew what we’d done without me saying it. We were working well together. We’d saved the guy’s life. No need to mention it.
The patient went on arguing with his wife. We went on to the hospital.
It was early June, I’d started to recognize medical conditions quickly, to diagnose and treat, to bandage, to give medications in the proper dose, to intubate. I was learning. No one could deny that. I was becoming a better medic. But the skills I was learning as a medic jumbled with the very specific, academic information on the MCATs. It slowed me down. And I was always tired. That was something I hadn’t anticipated. Between the station and my studies I was putting in eighty or ninety hours a week. And it was hard to retain information when I was getting four hours of sleep a night. But I had no choice. I had to study. I had to do better. So, I strained. I pushed myself. And without knowing I was doing it I took a more terse, cut-and-dried tone with everyone, including Clara. She wasn’t used to that at all. I’d always been the nice guy, the one in the relationship who said she was right, who gave in. I’m pretty sure that’s why she’d gone out with me in the first place. She was competent and competitive and I wasn’t and we fit together that way. Or we had before. But now, with every week, I was becoming more abrupt and stubborn and prickly. And as I changed we started arguing. We made up. We argued again.We spent a week not talking to each other. Then on a warm day in June, a few days after she’d gotten the glorious results from her finals, we met for lunch, and celebrating, we started drinking and went on drinking all afternoon and back at my apartment that night we were kissing and sort of wrestling around, kind of passionate, and kind of rough, too, when she said, “Mister Tough Guy,” and pushed me. I pushed her back and a dark, excited feeling rose up in both of us—like passion or anger. We started kissing again, and then she pushed me and I pushed her, hard, so she fell and hit her head against the wall. For a moment she looked stunned. “Ollie, that hurt,” she said. “Sorry,” I said, and laughed a fittle. “I was kidding,” I said. “That hurt,” she said again. The dark feeling subsided bit by bit. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t even realize ourselves what had happened. But we were wary of each other afterward, and that night we slept on opposite sides of the bed.
The next morning Clara borrowed a car to go shopping and on the way out of the city she dropped me off at the station and as she did she saw Rutkovsky leaning against the brick wall near the entrance to the station. She’d heard a thousand stories about him but she’d never seen him and for a moment I saw Rutkovsky through her eyes—his military crew cut, his stern, guarded manner, his rumpled uniform, his old work boots with the frayed laces—and in every gesture that veneer of suspicion, of alertness, of resentment. She frowned immediately and I think she saw or imagined she saw Rutkovsky’s influence on me. Rutkovsky saw Clara and he understood in an instant that she judged him, and that in some obscure way, she blamed him for something she did not like in me. He immediately took on a defiant manner, swinging his arms carelessly as he walked over, a manner that was more natural to LaFontaine than him. He looked down at Clara, who was dressed for shopping in a blue print
top, pearls, and little white shoes. Her leather briefcase rested in the backseat with her neatly stacked medical books. Precise, cut-and-dried, practical Clara.
“Hello,” she said quietly.
“You must be Clara,” he brayed, a way he never spoke.
“I am. And you’re Rutkovsky”
“Right. I’m not Gene. I’m Rutkovsky” Then, “They’re holding jobs, Cross.You might wanna pick it up.”
“Nice meeting you,” Clara said.
Rutkovsky glanced at her briefcase in the back, set, just so, between a folded change of clothing and backpack, and just walked away.
“Well, that was rude,” Clara said once he was gone.
“He thought you judged him,” I said.
“It was him judging me,” she said.
“You were judging each other.”
“I wasn’t judging him. I was being nice ... And why are you defending him?”
“He’s my partner.”
“I’m your girlfriend,” she said.
I started to say something smart, but I didn’t. I bit my tongue, but she could see that I was on Rutkovsky’s side. She looked at the overflowing biohazard Dumpster, at the dirty bricks of the station, at the listing wire fence surrounding the parking lot. It was worse than she’d imagined. I got out of the car. I looked at her. She looked at me. I told her I had to go. I kissed her good-bye, and turned and before I’d taken a step I heard the car accelerate behind me. I walked on to find Rutkovsky waiting just around the corner.
“So that’s Clara,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s her. Is she what you expected?”
“Exactly what I expected,” he said. It was obvious by his tone that all his worst expectations were fulfilled. “Have fun while you can. She won’t stay with you.”
“Why not?”
“Look at her,” he said. “She’s soft. She’s not one of us.”
Rutkovsky talked about it all day on the ambulance. With his four wives, he thought he was an expert on the subject and he talked with more passion and interest and pent-up anger than I’d ever heard from him.
“Have you met LaFontaine’s new girlfriend?” he asked. “She’s a beast. A cop in the three-two. Been brought up twice for abusing prisoners. She’s worse than LaFontaine. She’d probably kick my ass. That’s the sort of girl for people like us. Some skelbeating beast. Not that I could ever go for a girl like that. I’m like you, Cross. I like a feminine woman. One who doesn’t have anything to do with this shit. But it doesn’t work. You start talking about what we do, how we feel, fuck that. She’s not going to understand. She’s going to hold it against you. You got anyone else? A girl on the side?”
“No.”
“Well, you should. She’s probably fucking someone else right now.”
I just looked away. I didn’t bother answering. After a moment, I said, “What about Verdis? Is his wife like ... you’re saying?”
That pissed him off.
“Better not think of Verdis, because you’re not him.”
Ninety percent of deliveries are normal. The other 10 percent are complicated due to an unusual position of the infant, or the size of the pelvis, or the placement of the infant in the uterus. These complications involve the same problem: getting the live infant from the uterus into the outside world without harming it. Newborns are removed directly by caesarean, eased from the birthing canal with a surgical widening of the vagina, and sometimes pulled out with the help of an enormous clamp that grips the newborn, firmly, around the head.
I heard the footsteps in the hallway and opened the door to see my father, my mother, and my younger sister Lizzie standing right outside my door. They were on a college scouting trip, in town for the day. “Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad. Lizzie,” I said.
“So, this is it,” Mom said.
“Nice place,” Dad grumbled.
They all shuffled in and each of them gave me a hug. I hadn’t seen any of them since the year before, the summer after I graduated from Northwestern. At that time I’d been a good student, a college grad, with high hopes for medical school. Now they were seeing me in my hovel in New York. They stood in the doorway, surveying the chipped plasterboard walls, the barred windows, the peeling paint. Dad was silent, gruff, suspicious. Mom was smiling too much, trying to pretend she wasn’t intimidated.
“Oh, look. You have a geranium,” Mom said. “Pretty. Let me get it some water.”
“I’m sure Ollie can water his own plants,” Lizzie said.
Mom took the plant into the bathroom. I heard the water go on and then I heard a scrubbing sound—her cleaning the sink—and Lizzie rolled her eyes.
“Mom’s cleaning your bathroom.”
We had to wait for her to finish cleaning before we went. The whole time Dad just stood in the doorway, mouth shut tight, eyes going around the small room.
A half hour after that we were in the station wagon heading north on Lenox Avenue and I was pointing out the windshield, saying, “I had a double shooting right there. A girl jumped off the roof over there and just before she did it she carved Life Sucks into her belly with a knife. On that corner I had someone with an SVT.”
“What’s that?” Dad asked.
“It’s an irregular heart rhythm.”
“Was it because of drugs?” he asked, and Lizzie nudged me.
“He asks was it because of drugs? Good question, Dad.”
“Legitimate question,” he said back.
A squad car with sirens zoomed past.A kid on the curb motioned angrily at the cops and stepped right in front of our car. Dad hit the brakes. The kid waved his arm at us, like, What’re you doing? and Dad said, “These people do not respect traffic.”
“These people,” Lizzie said. Then, “Why don’t you get out and say that to him, Dad?” Dad didn’t say anything. He eased around the guy, who slapped the side of the car. Dad kept driving. Mom saw Dad’s expression, and turned in her seat, and said, “Do you get to see Clara much?”
“She hasn’t booted me yet.”
“She probably loves it that you’re a paramedic,” Lizzie said. “She’s the good one now. She can sacrifice for you.”
I elbowed her and she elbowed me back and then I pressed my head to the window. The blue bricks of Harlem Hospital loomed.
“Slow here,” I said. “This is where I work. Down that block.”
Dad stopped at the corner of 136th Street and Lenox and they all peered out to see the old, rundown station, the blowing paper garbage in the street, the graffiti. A moment passed. Not one of them said anything. A homeless guy doddered off the curb and bent to peer in the window, holding out a cupped hand.
“You can go,” I said.
Dad hit the gas, a little too quickly. Tires squealed.
“I just wanted to show you,” I said, and Dad went on driving without talking and less than an hour later I was standing on the curb in front of my apartment on 28th Street, Mom hugging me for about ten seconds and saying, “Whatever happens, remember we’re here for you.”
“Keep studying,” Dad said gruffly. “You’ll make it out of this. You’ll see. Just a matter of time. Let us know if you need anything.”
“Later, Ollie. Hang in there,” Lizzie said. “It’ll get better.”
“It’s fine now. I like it,” I said.
She just gave me a look. She didn’t believe it. None of them did. They all got in the car and pulled away and I stood there watching them, then went back up the stairs and into my little studio apartment and got in bed and put a pillow over my head and lay there for about an hour. I wasn’t ashamed of what I was doing. I was becoming a competent paramedic. I was proud of that. But I knew how it looked to them. They remembered me like I’d been in college and I wasn’t that person anymore. I was changing. I knew I was. I liked how I was changing, but I also knew it would be easier with them not seeing it.
Mid-June, near dusk, and a six foot six, athletic-looking black guy stood in front of the Harriet Beecher Homes on Powell Avenue,
punching at the air, grabbing for the women. I walked toward this guy. Rutkovsky had stopped behind me. He yelled, “Go on, Cross. You can take ’im.” Then, “That’s Mitch Green.”
“Who?”
“Don’t you read the papers? Mitch Green. He was supposed to fight Tyson for the heavyweight title. He was number two in the world ...”
Six weeks before the scheduled title fight in 1992 Green and Tyson met in a music store in Harlem, got in an argument, and Tyson broke his hand on Mitch Green’s face. The title fight was postponed, but then Tyson was arrested on rape charges and the fight never took place. A year after that, in 1993, we found Mitch Green stumbling around on Powell Avenue, drooling on himself, grabbing at women as they went by.
“You know who that is?” a kid leaning in a doorway asked.
“Mitch Green,” I said.
“You got it, right. Damn, white boy knows his stuff.”
“Yeah, you can’t get anything by me,” I said, and Rutkovsky let out a puff of air.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked the kid.
“He was at a party. Dusted.You know. Dust. And then he started making a play for the woman, like, caveman style, know what I mean? Had to send him out here.”
Rutkovsky stood on his heels, grinning.
“So you gonna take him?” the kid asked me.
“Oh yeah, definitely.” I said. Then, to Rutkovsky, “Think we should call for backup?”
“You don’t wanna do it yourself?” Rutkovsky said, and then he called for backup.
Ten minutes later there were six medics and twelve cops surrounding Green, but no one closer than thirty feet. A police lieutenant walked up to the youngest cop, a Hispanic guy with a crew cut.
“Go arrest him,” he said.
The other cops laughed.
“That’s an order. Go get him.”
Black Flies Page 7
