‘You kidding me? Two miserable fuckers in one joint? I don’t think so. I need privacy.’
‘You sure that’s a good idea?’ But he ignores my question, or he’s too deep in thought to hear. A second later we’re interrupted by a call to Victoria Street anyway.
No time to manage our own shit, no time for resolution.
Always another call, another call, another call …
On approaching the scene we see there’s a man lying in the middle of the road outside the Holiday Inn. He’s surrounded by the ‘circle of death’, a ring of curious bystanders, none of whom are actually assisting him. The man is spread-eagled and not breathing.
‘Old-fashioned heroin OD,’ says John, pulling back the man’s eyelids to show me pinpoint pupils.
Once, in 2000 when I was posted to Paddington for a roster, there was so much heroin on the streets we’d often run out of Narcan, the opiate antidote. Some days we treated half a dozen people for heroin overdoses back to back, reviving them in back alleys scattered with used needles, in dingy share houses and brothels. One particular case back then rattled me so much I had to leave the job for a while. A sixteen-year-old Indigenous girl we’d treated for overdoses two nights in a row wound up dead three weeks later in a doorway. It was unclear if she’d overdosed again and not been found for some time, or if someone had killed her. Her death was a real wake-up call for the health and social services that had failed her.
When the Kings Cross medically supervised injecting centre opened in 2001, driven by the need for a practical and compassionate harm-reduction measure, heroin deaths plummeted. Ambulance calls to the area for overdoses dropped by eighty per cent. It couldn’t have come at a more important time.
John draws up Narcan from the drug kit and injects the man’s deltoid while I ventilate his lungs. As I’m doing this I suddenly sense a gust of cold air creep down my collar. I look up and see a lanky man with reptilian features staring at us. It’s a hot summer’s day but he’s wearing a black velvet cloak, black gloves and hat. For some strange reason I convince myself the man is Death himself, come to pick up another soul. I’m mesmerised for a moment, but soon the spell is broken by a moan from our patient, who starts to wake up. The stranger in black gives a guttural snarl and takes a step forward. His voice is croaky and he lets out a sarcastic growl: ‘Fucken heroes, saving junkies!’ He spits on the ground in disgust. Then with a flourish of coat-tails he turns on his heels and walks down the road. We watch as our patient, now conscious, follows behind.
John says the man was just a local weirdo; he’s seen him before. He tells me I’ve got an active imagination. And he reckons he isn’t scared of death, but I don’t believe him. A while ago he told me that all of his basketball team in the eighties died of complications from AIDS, except him, and that he always expected he’d be next. He might’ve been scared of death back then, he admits. He can’t believe he survived. He still wonders if he’s invincible, or ‘unkillable’, as some of us describe a patient whose survival, or repeated survival, defies explanation.
‘Would you ever do heroin?’ I ask John.
‘Of course I’d do it! Just don’t like the idea of injecting it.’
‘You know you can smoke it.’
‘We all know that. Stop tempting me.’
‘So you’d take heroin knowing you’d become a slave to it?’
‘Right now I don’t give a shit. Make me a slave.’
‘It’ll ruin your life.’
‘What life?’
For a few minutes John sits quietly in thought. Then he breaks the silence with his own question for me.
‘Would you consider a hot-shot of heroin if you wanted to kill yourself?’
I nod. ‘Probably.’
‘Right, so don’t get on your high horse.’
I apologise.
‘Problem is,’ says John, ‘if you wanted to end your life that way, you’d have to come down to Kings Cross here and loiter around like a junkie trying to score off some dodgy scumbag.’
‘You’d lose momentum.’
‘Exactly. You’d loiter around and get jack of it and go home, and feel twice as suicidal for fucking up your own suicide.’
Losing momentum might apply to impulsive suicides. But some people plan their deaths as carefully as others plan weddings.
‘Let’s change the subject,’ says John.
‘Good. Come stay at my place,’ I say.
‘No chance,’ he says. ‘I’ve got shit to sort out.’
Just off Riley Street, a cleaning lady has found a dead man. He’s maybe forty years old, tubby, with a moon face. He looks Italian, maybe Greek. He’s lying sideways on a cream shag-pile carpet and is wearing giant headphones. The room is cluttered with oil paintings, sculptures, piles of books, sheet music and cans of food. It’s a tableau of isolation.
‘Death by loneliness … what d’you reckon?’ I say to John.
As soon as I’ve said it I know I shouldn’t have. Not when he’s about to move out on his own. But he doesn’t react. He just stands and stares at the body for half a minute before going off to comfort the cleaning lady, who’s crying in the hall. Watching John put his arm around her makes me think of the New York paramedic from Martin Scorsese’s film Bringing Out the Dead who described himself as a ‘grief mop’. John’s the grief mop today, and God knows he isn’t in any condition for it.
The dead man’s skin is mottled, and the intense pungency in the room suggests he might’ve been dead for days. When I go to put a sheet over his body I can hear a symphony playing at full volume through the headphones still firmly on his head. The dial on the stereo is tuned in to Classic FM. What exactly was he listening to as he breathed his last, I wonder? What orchestral piece played while his heart petered out? How lucky this man would’ve been if his death had been accompanied by a gentle, angelic lullaby.
We park on the side of Stanley Street near the famed Italian restaurant Bill & Toni’s so I can write up the case sheet. John spies one of his friends leaning against a four-wheel drive. The man has a big, bushy beard and hairy forearms. It’s the fuzzy look so many gay men are going for these days. When John returns to the ambulance I’m pleased to see him looking brighter.
‘That’s Terry. He was just in a gay bar up the road, says he was hit on by a bloke in a Ned Kelly helmet. I told him only ugly gays wear helmets.’
I laugh. ‘I’ll remember that.’ I tell him about my own family’s history with the Kelly gang in Victoria, and he smiles. I wonder if Ned Kelly ever imagined he’d become an Australian gay icon a hundred and fifty years later.
On the way back to the station we drive along Oxford Street and I see one of Kaspia’s friends, Gypsy Wood, a burlesque dancer from Sugartime, walking up the road. Her mother named her after Gypsy Rose Lee, the American striptease artist of the forties, and she does a great routine as the absinthe fairy with green feather fans. John knows Gypsy too. They met last week, when we stopped by a pool party at the Bondi share house where she lives with dancers from the Australian Ballet.
As we pass Gypsy, I whoop the siren at her. She spins around and lifts up her skirt to flash her underwear. Kaspia would’ve done the same, I know that. How quickly I’ve forgotten her sense of fun, especially in public. She spontaneously dances and sings in the street at the top of her voice and can imitate anyone, her impressions always spot on. Her laughter is raucous.
John blows Gypsy a kiss, and she waves as we pass.
After a couple more cases we’re dispatched to Ken’s of Kensington, a sauna for gay men south of the city. Behind the chocolate-brown entrance is a world unknown to most passers-by. It’s a dim and foggy maze of partitioned cubicles, with men young and old wearing little red towels and pairing off for sex. While waiting for a partner many men loiter about completely naked, openly flaunting Viagra-charged erections.
John has been here before, sent on a job, he insists, never for pleasure. While drugs of abuse are banned at these venues, we’re often cal
led to accidental overdoses on gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, which most of us refer to simply as ‘G’. This liquid intoxicant popular among gay men enhances sensuality, but doses are difficult to measure and the drug can easily put people in a coma.
The manager who meets us at the door is a hyperactive German with a military buzz cut who looks like a classic Tom of Finland sketch. He leads us to the patient, cursing all the way.
‘Olvays I tell zem, no drucks! No drucks in here! If zey take ze drucks, I kick zem out. Zis guy, I am bannink him from Ken’s. I’ll make sure of zis. Dirty drucks is not vot Ken vonts.’
The body of our patient is slippery with fluids I dare not contemplate. When I lift his arm for a blood-pressure check it slides right out of my grip. John seems more adept at handling the man and dries him off with the little towel that was, until moments ago, tied around his waist like a loincloth. None of the other punters seem the least bit inclined to cease their activities. As one of their own lies critically ill, the grunting and groaning goes on. We work to this soundtrack while men keep arriving and departing around us. Hungry eyes stare down and I feel we’re a sideshow, another live act in this fantasy-land. On a screen in the corner there’s a film being played: two thrusting chefs, both covered in pasta. There’s so much going on around me that it takes more than a minute to see the floor we are on is made of perspex and fully transparent, allowing a view to the level below where musclebound men cavort in a pool.
When I get home I take a shower and wash off the smell of the sauna. I realise I’m too tired to cook, so I just make some toast and hunt for a beer. There’s none in the fridge, and I’m in no mood to go out again. I pour myself a whisky and put on a record. It’s one Kaspia left behind, or rather one I kept when she left me: Björk’s Vespertine. It was on high rotation in 2001, when we first fell in love. Now I’m next to the turntable and play ‘Hidden Place’, the song she loves most, and I play it again and again, until it’s not Björk anymore but Kaspia singing.
CHAPTER 5
John doesn’t turn up for his shift the next day. Instead when I walk into the station I find Jerry in a headstand position, a yoga asana, wearing nothing but jocks. I tiptoe around him, not daring to disturb his deep nasal breathing, his intense meditation. He was once a self-described ‘pothead’ before he turned into a yogi. Now he does yoga before every shift, sometimes even during. The headstand is Jerry’s favourite pose. He says it’s good for stress and depression, being upside down.
I make my tea as quietly as I can. When Jerry’s done and his feet are back on earth, he says, ‘I’m John for the day, in case you didn’t notice.’
‘John would never stand on his head,’ I reply.
‘Half his problem,’ says Jerry, rolling up his mat.
‘Did he call in sick?’
‘A late swap. He’s run out of sickies, taken too many. I spoke to him round midnight. He was packing the car. Totally pissed, of course. He’s moving into one of Mick’s units.’
Mick, a paramedic from Randwick, owns a few properties in the area. He got into real estate a decade ago, before the prices shot up. One of his flats in Bondi Junction is between tenants, and he offered it to John on a temporary basis.
‘How did he sound?’
‘Who? John?’
I nod.
‘Like shit.’
We’re a tight-knit team at Bondi, but Jerry’s closer to John than I am. They occasionally swim down at Clovelly together, do laps of the inlet where people go snorkelling.
Jerry’s a man of contrasts. He’s a larrikin who hates the rulebook, but his shirts are always pressed. He adores his wife and children, but flirts with other women, even his elderly patients. He’s committed to his yoga, but loves the football too. He’ll read books on philosophy, then study the racing form guide. He knows how to stir and crack people up as well as John does.
We head out for coffee. Our favourite barista Dan is on shift at Gertrude & Alice, a bookshop café.
‘What a fabulous day!’ announces Jerry. ‘Who’d call an ambulance on a day like this? Tell me, would you get out of bed on such a glorious morning and look out the window and think, Ya know what? I’d like to spend my day in hospital while the doctors decide what to do with me.’
That’s Jerry all over. He puts a smile on your dial and keeps it there. If only John was rostered with him. Jerry’s just the man he needs right now.
Before we can order coffee we’re diverted to a guy sitting on a park bench, still drunk from the night before. Weekend mornings often start this way, with comedowns and hangovers.
The paralytic man snores on the stretcher beside me as we drive him to hospital, cruising past the beach to check out the surf. I gaze through the tinted windows, watching the swaying palms go by. At the next set of lights I see a woman in a yellow bikini waiting to cross.
Jerry calls out to me from the driver’s seat, ‘Who’s that Latino Hollywood actress? You know the one. With the big bum?’
I can’t think.
‘The girl at the lights there looks just like her, I swear it’s probably her. Jennifer someone …’
The patient stirs beside me for the first time. With eyes still closed he croaks, ‘Lopezzzzz,’ then drops back unconscious, or so he’d have us believe.
‘That’s it! Lopez!’ Jerry snaps his fingers. ‘Don’t you reckon the girl at the lights looks like Jennifer Lopez?’
‘A little bit,’ I say.
Normally Jerry tries getting out of working Saturdays because he hates missing the horseraces. But he’s here for John, filling in for his mate who’s doing it tough.
It’s a big race day, too. Jerry asks me to drop him off at the TAB when it opens so he can lay a few bets. A TAB is not a ‘licensed establishment’, he insists when I question him about wearing his uniform into a gambling joint. Like John, he doesn’t care for spoilsports.
Race days with Jerry are painful. As if driving with a siren wailing in one ear and race commentary in the other isn’t distracting enough, Jerry cheers the horses and punches the air beside me as we go.
‘Bastard! I had fifty on that Cream Cake,’ he curses as I mount another median strip and narrowly miss a bus. The passengers are probably thinking he’s cursing the traffic.
Thankfully, later in the morning, Jerry wins a bet on a horse called Course Ya Can, which settles him down.
‘Knew I’d get lucky with that one,’ he says.
‘How’s that?’
‘You know, when patients ask me, “Can I come to hospital?”
I always say, “Course ya can!” and if they say, “Can I have some morphine?” I say, “Course ya can!” too. It’s the kind of man I am. That’s why I picked the horse. Terrific name, isn’t it? Sometimes a name just clicks, you know? I’ll pick a horse for that reason.’
After waiting fifteen minutes outside another TAB, I say, ‘What about blackjack? Will you ask me to stop at the casino next?’
‘Casino? We need to wait for a call to the casino first,’ says Jerry. ‘It’s out of our catchment. Discretion is everything.’
‘Discretion? Like parking an ambulance outside a TAB?’
‘Fair cop, but casinos are different. What ya gunna do? Go up the escalators, push through the poker lanes, wait till the Chinese are only four deep at the table? No way. Ya can’t do blackjack on the job. Too risky. We’re an emergency service.’
‘Least you might win something at blackjack. How much have you made today? Three dollars?’
Jerry’s annoyed I’ve mocked his small win, so he goes and puts two hundred on a horse called Happy Choo-Choo. It’s racing at 2 pm, but at 1.57 pm we get a call to a ‘female collapsed’. Jerry knows he’ll miss the race and he curses.
On a kitchen floor surrounded by crumbs lies Marjory, eighty years old. She fainted while taking a tray of Anzac biscuits out of the oven. She’s got no idea an important horserace is happening.
‘My cookies …’ she murmurs as she comes to.
Marjory’
s daughter scolds her mother with a finger raised. ‘Just let the nice men look you over, Mum. Forget about the cookies!’
But I find myself assessing Marjory alone. Jerry hovers by the patient’s daughter and I overhear him saying, ‘You know I’m very much a betting man and, ah, I happen to have some money on a horse today …’
‘You do?’ she replies. ‘That’s nice.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. It’s called Happy Choo-Choo, the horse. A handsome horse. A strong horse, strong and fast. In fact, it’s running any second now.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes, it is. Any second. You wouldn’t mind if I, ah, turned on this here television to see if Happy Choo-Choo wins the race?’
How readily and happily Marjory’s daughter obliges him. Moreover, after switching on the TV set she makes a cup of tea for Jerry and brings it to him, along with a biscuit on a little blue plate. Meanwhile I’m taking Marjory’s blood pressure, blood sugar, temperature and ECG. I try getting a history but my voice is drowned out by the shrill racing commentary overlaid by Jerry’s emphatic cries of, ‘Yes, Happy Choo-Choo! Go, Happy Choo-Choo, come on Happy Choo-Choo, go, damn it, Happy Choo-Choo! Go, you bloody beauty! Yes, yes, YES!’
And just as Marjory regains her colour, Jerry wins eight hundred dollars.
In the early afternoon there’s a call about a cardiac arrest a block from the station. The patient’s name is Harry, and he’s seventy-five years old. His distraught wife recounts his final words before he fell unconscious: ‘Damn this stupid cough!’
Harry has been down too long. We try reviving him but he doesn’t respond. I’m hardly surprised. We rip a man’s shirt off, jump on his chest, snap off some ribs, stick tubes down his throat, and for what in the end? All this action to have him stay dead, as most of them do. The whole song and dance, when survival’s out of reach, insults a dignified life.
I tell Harry’s wife that her husband has died and she covers her face with her hands and cries. She speaks to him through tears: ‘Oh Harry, don’t go, please … You were here just now. You said you’d give up drinking and smoking, said you’d look after us …’
The Gap Page 5
