“That’s the thing about this job. You think you’ve seen everything, then something like this happens.”
“Something like this!” Papi repeated.
We pulled up alongside the woman. She didn’t say a word to us, but understood that we were there for her. She got in the ambulance more or less amicably while the men crowded together on the hot street, jeered and complained that we’d ruined their fun, threw empty beer cans at the ambulance. We heard them clinking against the outside as we strapped the naked woman into the stretcher. We put a sheet over her. She tore it off. We put it on. She yanked it off. We shrugged and left it off.
“Are you on drugs? Do you have a psychiatric history? Have you taken your medications?” the puppet asked. The naked woman didn’t answer any questions. Just sat there with her eyes wide and dull, jaw moving in circles, like a cow. We brought the woman into the Harlem psych ER. There was a new intern triaging.You could see he hadn’t been in New York long. He had a kind of openness and eagerness that you didn’t see in anyone who’d been there for any amount of time. I walked in first, before the woman, and said, “We got a good one for you. Thirty-year-old female—”
“Why’d you bring her to psych?” the intern cut me off.
“She was walking naked down Broadway.”
“It’s hot out,” he said. “It’s natural not to want to wear any clothes. Maybe we should all be naked at this time of year.”
I just laughed. There was nothing to say to that. Marmol walked in with the woman at his elbow. She lumbered over and sat in front of the intern: naked, tangled hair crawling with lice, rolls of grime-covered fat on her belly, black toenails, sweat running in clean rivulets down her filthy skin.
“Can you tell me your name?” the intern asked her in his most polite, understanding voice. Then again, “Can you tell me your name?”
She didn’t answer, just sat there moving her mouth around, then reached between her legs, dug around a moment, pried out a dark, rotten, leafy vegetable of some sort, and began eating it. The intern looked wild. I was stunned myself. Rutkovsky turned away and kicked at the wall with his boot. He kicked again and then again, eyes tight knots of skin, like he was trying to kick the image out of his head.
Meanwhile, Marmol stuck his hand around the corner, and with the puppet, said, “I think you should discharge her. I mean, she’s only eating. It’s natural, isn’t it?”
“There are two periods of crisis in the career of a paramedic. The second comes gradually, over ten or fifteen years. The second is the body and mind wearing out, telling you they’ve had enough. There may be a way to put off this sort of weathering—meditation, long vacations, hobbies, satisfying home Life—but in my experience, whether it’s ten years or twenty, this second crisis always comes, and the smart thing is to listen to your body and take yourself out of service. The other crisis, the first crisis, the one most of you will be experiencing soon, is more abrupt, and in some ways, more dangerous. It always comes in the first year. It comes unexpectedly. And it usually comes with a mistake or a rash act. Most of you will do something you regret. And the real question isn’t so much what you do or even what detrimental effect it has on you, but how you pick yourself up afterward. Some people are stronger afterward. Others never really recover. A few do not make it through at all.”
When they signed the Fugees to play at the Harlem Street Festival they were a local hip-hop band, but by the time of the concert that July the Fugees had the number-one album in the country. The city expected three or four thousand spectators. Twenty thousand showed up, all of them packed together in a two-square-block area around Lenox and 125th Street, the whole thing surrounded and contained by food stands. Rutkovsky and I were assigned to stand by at the concert at three in the afternoon. The crowd first charged at three-thirty when an M-80 was mistaken for a gunshot. Everyone scattered, then crammed together again, jockeying for space. Rutkovsky called the Borough Command, asking for more EMS units, more police, but the chief told him they’d assign more units as needed. “They’re needed now,” Rutkovsky said, but the chief refused. Rutkovsky hung up the phone and said, “Fucking assholes. Get your popcorn. Show’s about to start.” We stood on the roof of the ambulance in the slanting summer light watching agitation ripple up and down through the tightly packed crowd. At six a fight broke out and the crowd surged and was then calmed. At seven they had to be calmed again. At seven-thirty two teenagers pulled out handguns and opened fire and the crowd scattered, spread, rippled out from the shooting, trampling each other, crashing through the food stands. Boiling oil splashed. Glass shattered. Thousands of people stumbled in toward our flashing lights. In a minute Rutkovsky and I had at least thirty patients—lacerations, abrasions, burns, broken bones, asthma, women in labor, people trampled, and about twenty scared, lost kids who did not know where else to go. We called for help and units came from all over the city. The television crews arrived, the helicopters, and the mayoral brass. About a hundred police cars. At one point all the tour three medics from the station were set up on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street.Verdis and Marmol had two blankets laid out on the concrete and ten asthmatics sitting in two rows, all of them with nebulizers, Verdis going to each of them methodically, taking their heart rates, checking their lungs, Marmol bellowing, “We got a lot’ve fuckin noise already. I don’t want any of you opening your yaps!” Down the block, LaFontaine treated four guys lacerated with broken glass. There was blood on LaFontaine’s gloved hands and down his shirtfront and on his pants and shoes. He loved that. He bandaged quickly, expertly, yelling to Hatsuru, who set out the gauze, the tape, the trauma dressings, the oxygen masks, LaFontaine doing all of the real treatment. Rivett strode up and down Lenox among the wreckage, screaming at the other lieutenants, ordering us to transport to one hospital or another. It was horrible, but also—I have to admit this—for a while, as we treated, as we were surrounded by patients, I was filled with a weird, chaotic joy. I was in the middle of all that wild shit. I was helping. I was doing a good job.And looking over, I saw Rutkovsky wrapping a trauma dressing around a fat woman’s cut leg, I saw him setting an IV on a pregnant girl, splinting a kid’s wrist, working quickly, madly, and I could see he felt the same as me. He was interested, engaged, happy even. I realized it was one of the only times I ever saw him look like that. He was like a lot of old-timers, the way all the veteran medics became. He only felt alive in a crisis.
After the riot Rutkovsky called in sick for three days and over all that time I worked with LaFontaine. Basically, everyone knew LaFontaine was a nut and so if you were without a partner you always ended up getting stuck with him. On the third day the two of us picked up Rolly Terry. We all knew him. He was a homeless guy with legs so swollen he couldn’t wear shoes and instead wrapped rags around his feet and covered them with plastic bags. He was always hanging out in the park at 140th and Lenox during the day, talking up the homeless women, sometimes playing with the kids. At nights he drank two-dollar bottles of vodka and then called 911. By law, EMS was required to respond to all calls equally, so every night Rolly got loaded on vodka then called the ambulance and got a free taxi ride to a free place to stay with a free dinner and breakfast. He had over 320 ER visits that year. We’d all taken him in dozens of times. As soon as we saw the location—140th and Lenox—we knew it was Rolly. That night LaFontaine and I walked up to see Rolly sprawled out on the sidewalk, doing his best impression of someone in the postictal phase after a seizure. LaFontaine nudged him with his foot.
“Get up, Rolly.”
He groaned.
“Rolly. It’s me. You know what I’ll do if you don’t get up. So you better move it.”
Rolly sat up quickly. He pointed to a scratch on his forehead.
“I don’t need no hospital. I just want a Band-Aid.”
“A Band-Aid?” LaFontaine said.
“It’s a medical emergency,” I said.
LaFontaine looked like he’d get pissed off, then shrugged, and said, �
�I’ll tell you what, Rolly. We’ll bandage you here and let you go. But you have to let us bandage you our own way. And you have to keep the bandage on all night.”
“I don’t care if I keep it on all week,” he said.
That made LaFontaine laugh.
“Yeah, all right.” Then to me, “Lucky you’re working with me tonight.”
“Why am I lucky?”
“You’ll see,” LaFontaine said.
LaFontaine went into the ambulance and came back with an enormous trauma dressing that covered Rolly’s entire head. LaFontaine secured the thing with stretch gauze, and while he did, I held it steady, noticing that the bandage was wet. LaFontaine finished tying it off, and said, “Now you can R.M.A. Rolly, but, remember, you have to leave that on all night.” Rolly signed the refused medical attention form, said, “Thanks. You guys are the best,” and wandered off down Lenox Avenue. LaFontaine stood there with his arms crossed, shaking his head.
“So, he’s the one who thanks me. Can you believe it? I almost regret it now.”
As I rehung the chair inside the ambulance I saw a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the garbage. We kept it around to wash bloodstains from our uniforms. I realized the dressing was wet with peroxide, not water. LaFontaine saw me looking at the peroxide, and said, “You got a problem, Mother Teresa?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “No one likes a rookie who opens his mouth.”
For the next month Rolly wandered up and down Lenox Avenue, the only homeless man in Harlem with brilliant orange hair.
It was the weekend after the riot and I was at the desk in my little studio on 28th Street, MCAT guide set out, notebook open to a blank page, when the door buzzer rang. Since I’d stopped talking to Clara, no one ever came by. I thought it was a mistake. I sat there. It rang again. I thought, It’s Clara. It must be. I jumped up, but when I pushed the intercom I heard, “Hey, it’s Reggie. Reggie Verdis. From work. Can I come up?”
“Yeah, yeah, come up,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed.
I shoved clothes into a closet, stretched a blanket over the bed, tossed shoes into the corner, and opened the door to see Verdis in a green fisherman’s hat, a tan-colored cowboy jacket complete with tassels on the arms, and blue jeans with oval-shaped leather patches at the knees. For a moment I thought it was some joke and I had to turn my head to hide a smile. I’d never seen Verdis out of uniform and I realized that was just the way he dressed. This dorky, do-gooder guy from Harlem was wearing a cowboy jacket.
“Hey, Verdis. Come in, come in.”
Verdis shuffled in and knocked a pot off the stove with his elbow. The pot clattered, and the lid, which was glass, struck the floor and cracked.
“Oh Lord,” he shouted.
He fumbled, retrieving the pot. I waved him off and put the two pieces of the lid on the stove and took his backpack and set it near the door, then turned to find him in the open space in front of the door, afraid to move. There was only one chair, and Verdis was so self-effacing that he wouldn’t take the chair until he saw that I could sit on the bed. I sat, he sat, a moment of silence between us, and then, “I was right below. I thought I’d come up and say hello. I thought ...” It was obvious he’d come for a reason. We hardly knew each other. “I was thinking about Rut,” he said finally. “How’s he doin?”
“Great. He’s a great medic. And he’s a great teacher.”
“I know he is. But he’s been quiet lately.”
“He’s always quiet.”
“But it’s different now, don’t you think? Three days off.”
“I don’t know. He seems fine to me,” I said.
Verdis was a good guy. But I could just imagine Rutkovsky hearing I’d talked to Verdis about him. Rutkovsky would hate that. So, I said, “He missed a few days. Big deal. The guy’s a fucking rock. He’s fine.”
Verdis nodded and said, “Good to hear,” and in a mournful, melancholic way, he went on about how hard the job was, how we had to look out for each other, how he’d known Rutkovsky for fifteen years and if someone needed help we had to get together and give it. I agreed in a general way, and we went on to other subjects—how hot the summer was, how many hours we had to work, who’d take the overnight shifts that week—and when I thought Verdis had forgotten about Rutkovsky, he leaned forward, and said, “You gotta watch out for your partner, Cross.” He clenched my forearm with thick, square edged fingers. “Keep an eye on him.” And then the moment was over. Verdis looked away. He was smiling again, reaching for his bag. I walked with him down to 28th Street, which was all wholesale flower shops.There were bouquets and tied bunches of daisies and roses and sunflowers and potted plants. Verdis started off, but before he’d gone ten feet, I called to him: “Hey, Verdis. Don’t say anything to Rutkovsky about this.You know how closed up he is. He’d hate to think anyone was talking about him behind his back.”
“You got that right. But keep a lookout,” he said, and he meandered off down 28th Street, getting in the way of workmen carrying enormous bunches of flowers tied in bundles, kicking a potted plant. I had a hundred other things to worry about. The MCATs, my applications, college loans. It wasn’t like I was obsessing about Verdis or what he’d said or why he’d come. But that visit stayed in the back of my mind, and from time to time I thought of how he’d gripped my arm, how he’d looked at me so seriously. It was unusual. It wasn’t what I expected from Verdis. And it turned out he was right about Rutkovsky.
A few weeks later, early August, the hot, muggy, dead days of midsummer, and Rutkovsky called and asked if I wanted to go to Rockaway Beach with him. We were friends on the ambulance and at the station, but we’d never seen each other outside of work. He asked offhandedly, as if it was no big deal, as if he called me all the time, but I knew he’d ask once, and if I said no, he’d never bring it up again. I had nothing better to do. I wanted to see him. And so the next day I found myself on Rockaway Beach with my physics book open, sprawled out next to Rutkovsky.
I always thought of Rutkovsky as a big guy, but it was more the way he carried himself than his size. With his shirt off I saw he was slender, with tight, stringy muscles over his bony chest, but the skin was loose and wrinkled around his knees, and his legs looked like an old man’s. He saw me looking and raised his right leg from the sand and showed me a long thin purple scar that ran from his foot to his knee.
“During the war,” he said. “It was a bad break. They weren’t sure I’d be able to run again. While I was in the cast I did the medic training.”
“Got you off point?” I said.
“Not for long,” he said. “And not that I wanted that. I was an idiot back then. I volunteered to go on point. Always wanted to be a hero.”
“I bet you were a good soldier,” I said.
He let out a puff of air—an exasperated sound.
“Are you kidding? I sucked,” he said.
He waited for me to argue with him. He looked away as though he didn’t care what I thought. Small waves curled and flattened on the wet sand. After a moment he took something from his shoe and tossed it on my towel. It was a chain that he wore around his neck—his dog tags, and around the tags a Silver Star Medal fashioned into a necklace. I looked at it. A fucking Silver Star.
“Jesus,” I said, and he took it back.
“Not that it means anything now. And not like I’m into telling any bullshit stories, but yeah, I was good soldier.”
“How long did you work as a marine medic?”
“Two years.”
“And then you came back and got the job with the city?”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Glutton for punishment. I thought I ought to do anything other than this. But this is what I knew. And one thing led to another.”
“Now you regret it?” I said.
“Why would I? Medic for life. That was shrewd planning, right?”
“I think I’ve had that same planning,” I said, and he looked at me seriously and said, “You’ll go
to medical school, Cross.You’ll get your experience and get out.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever get into medical school,” I said. “Clara pretended she believed in me, but I know she thought I wouldn’t.”
“Oh, fuck her,” Rutkovsky said. “She was pissed because you were acting like a man. Sticking up for yourself. So she wanted to think that any change in you meant you’d always be a medic. Bullshit.You’ll get in. And if you don’t, don’t stay here. I mean, you can see what it’s like. Marmol with his puppet. LaFontaine dyeing Rolly’s hair. Verdis with his garden, shaking everyone’s hand. This place sucks ...”
“I like it.”
“Well, stop liking it, Cross. Liking it is how you get sucked in. Take your experience. Get out.”
He practically yelled this. I waited for him to say more, but he just brushed sand off his hands and stood. I stood, too. We walked down the beach toward Breezy Point. As we went on I could feel him calming down. We stopped and watched the waves smash into a breakwall—water rising up, clattering down. We stood there side by side, watching it, not saying anything, and I started to get the feeling he had something more to say. I waited. He didn’t say what it was, but I was sure there was something on his mind. We walked back to where we’d sat before. He still didn’t say anything, but he was distracted and distant for the rest of the afternoon. At five we gathered everything up and finally, on the way back to Manhattan, on the A train, he told me what was on his mind.
“Did I tell you about Nancy?” he said.
“Your wife?”
“Ex-wife,” he said. Then, in an offhand, almost jovial tone, “She’s getting remarried. Moving to the West Coast.”
Black Flies Page 9
