A Thousand Naked Strangers (5 page)

That night I throw away my books and get drunk.

•  •  •

Two days later, Sabrina and I are in Paris. We've each been here before, though separately, and all the sightseeing that must be done has been done. We wander the Latin Quarter eating gyros
and sandwiches. We walk the Seine at night and eat Nutella-and-banana crepes under the Eiffel Tower. We drink wine all day and ride the Metro drunk just to listen to the gypsies play the accordion. At midnight on New Year's Eve, we're under the Arc de Triomphe. It's nothing but a celebration until 12:01, when the city shuts down the entire party and forces hundreds of thousands of people from the Champs-Élysées. We're drunk and cold and have nowhere to go. The night quickly devolves into a riot. We ring in the New Year cloaked in a rolling fog of tear gas.

Two weeks later, we return home to a stack of mail. Buried ten envelopes deep is a letter from the National Registry of EMTs. I have my numbers. I'm officially an EMT.

M
idnight. Early February 2004. Atlanta has frozen over, and the gravel parking lot surrounding FirstMed Ambulance is buried in frost. I'm half-asleep in the back of an ambulance. My partner and her girlfriend are drinking Malibu rum in the warm comfort of the office. Just a few months ago, when I was in school, I pictured this EMT gig going differently. I expected dedicated and earnest medics crowded around a dying patient, all of them pounding futilely on his chest while telling him he's not gonna die, not on their watch.

This is not that kind of place.

How I landed here, at FirstMed, is the punch line to a joke I'm not ready to laugh at. I text Sabrina—which is awkward because my fingers are numb—and tell her this isn't what I signed on for. In all caps, I type I AM DONE. She texts back. Says I signed on for the weird. This is weird.

I stuff the phone in my pocket, pull the blanket over my head, and swear to myself I'll quit in the morning. Just as I'm starting to drift off, the front door opens. I bolt upright. As in most FirstMed ambulances, the dome light doesn't work, so I can't see what's happening in the cab. I hear someone rifling through the glove box, the ashtray, the console. I'm waiting to hear the engine rattle to
life when the side door flies open and we're eye to eye—me on the stretcher with a blanket, he wearing two pairs of pants and a ripped pink jacket. He has one black eye, a few cracked teeth, and a wild beard braided just below the chin and strung with plastic beads. His hands are cracked and caked with grime, and he has plastic shopping bags tied around his shoes. He's half-drunk and fully homeless and takes me for a fellow traveler. After saluting my savvy sleeping choice and apologizing for waking me, he grabs a blanket and disappears into the night.

Where he came from and what his story is, I can't say. But my story—the one about how I graduated at the top of my EMT class and still wound up here, in this ambulance? Yeah, I know that one.

•  •  •

As soon as I passed the EMT exam, I quit delivering papers. After nearly a year of working late nights, seven days a week, it was good to be gone. I woke up the next morning and set about finding employment. I had high hopes, and why not? This was medicine, a field everyone will tell you is always hiring and has limitless possibilities, a career field where no two days are the same.

My first call was to Grady EMS. They said no, told me I needed experience, and suggested I try the fire department. So I did. I contacted every department in the area and was told by every receptionist in every municipality that they hired once a year and then only through a meandering process of forms and test dates and agonized waiting. The only remaining option if I wanted to run 911 calls was Rural/Metro Ambulance, which covered the parts of Fulton County not handled by Grady. I lived
in Fulton, I wanted to work 911, and this would help me get a job with Grady. It seemed like the perfect fit. I called. A woman answered and told me they'd just hired a bunch of people the day before but not to worry because they'd be hiring again soon. How soon? Six months. I told her I didn't have six months. She paused, then: “Maybe you should try the fire department.”

I left the house. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I'd quit my job, delivered newspapers, attended EMT school, passed an exam administered by a nationally accredited organization. All for nothing. I was unemployed and out of options. I stopped at a red light, closed my eyes, and rested my head against the wheel. Just as the car behind me started to honk, a beat-up ambulance breezed by. I flipped on my blinker. I had no idea where it was going but figured if I followed until it got there, then . . . What I'd do at that point was unclear, but what choice did I have?

Following the ambulance wasn't easy. After all, there were speed limits, traffic lights, stop signs, not to mention crosswalks and pedestrians, all things I had to navigate. Not the ambulance. It wasn't using the lights or sirens, clearly had no emergency to handle—the driver was simply indifferent to local traffic laws, maybe to all laws. I was sold.

A few quick turns and I found myself in another world. This was a new place, a new city, nothing but abandoned lots, strip clubs, burned-out buildings, shady car dealerships, and scrap yards hemmed in by corrugated steel walls. Weeds grew through the sidewalks until, without warning, the sidewalks ended. We drove on. More liquor stores, more pedestrians, more beat-up cars. A handful of run-down houses, the lawns nothing but clay littered with broken plastic chairs and children's toys. And then,
without turning on a blinker, without braking, the ambulance yanked a hard right and skidded to a halt in a gravel parking lot. I rolled by as slowly as I could. The sign above the front door said FirstMed Ambulance. The place looked near death, as though the building, the ambulances, the employees, everything needed to be put down. I pulled a U-turn and whipped into the lot.

The front door was the flimsy sort you usually find on a cabin or an outhouse and squeaked so loudly that everyone inside turned and looked as I walked in. The place was all cigarette smoke and daytime television. I was in shorts and flip-flops. Perhaps I'd acted a little hastily. A woman probably a decade younger than she looked peered at me from the other side of a long cigarette. She asked what I wanted. I shrugged. A job? A minute later, I was sitting in a small office with a giant man named Don. Don, too, was smoking when he handed me a single sheet of paper.

“Just write your name, phone number, address. All that stuff,” Don said as he crushed out one cigarette and lit another. “Do you, uh, do you have numbers?”

“Phone numbers?”

“EMT. You
have
passed Registry, right?”

I told Don I had passed Registry, though it wasn't until later that I realized, oddly, not passing wasn't a deal-breaker. Don simply nodded and talked about everything,
everything,
except the job. His love of sci-fi novels, his decade-old divorce to a woman he still lived with, and the recent household addition of his neighbor and her three young sons. When I finished filling out the application, he took the paper and tossed it atop a towering stack of folders and notebooks made more unstable by the occasional crumpled paperback.

“Welcome aboard,” Don said, making it clear that this single sheet of paper represented not only proof of my credentials but also a formal job offer and my acceptance thereof. Any questions?

Yes. In fact, I had tons. What job did I just accept, and when did it start? What did it pay? Was I supposed to wear something other than shorts and flip-flops? Don nodded and lit another cigarette. Some people loved this place, he said. There were employees who'd been there for a decade. Some didn't last a week. He himself had been at FirstMed twenty years, during which time he'd been fired and rehired, by his own conservative estimate, thirty times. Hours were flexible; so was dress. “Something that looks legit” was all he said regarding uniform. FirstMed also had the contract for the Georgia Dome, which meant I could volunteer to work Falcons games and sit on the sidelines.

It all sounded good. Then, checking to see that the door was shut, Don told me not to listen to the rumors. The accusations of Medicare fraud were a line of shit. FirstMed had been investigated multiple times, he said proudly, and each time the investigators came up short of having enough evidence to prosecute.
Maybe,
I thought,
this is my signal to run.
Job interviews aren't supposed to include assurances that your new employer, despite the rumors, despite nearly all the evidence, is not actively engaged in insurance fraud—as far as the government can prove.

But Don seemed nice, and I'd been offered a job. He asked if I could come in tomorrow. I said yes. What time should I show up?

He shrugged. “I don't know. Eight?”

A
t ten minutes to eight, I yank open the door and step into a haze of smoke. Sherry—parked in the same spot as yesterday, probably smoking the same cigarette—nods. Without taking her eyes off the TV, she motions to a neatly stacked pile of equipment.

“You're in 304,” she says, turning the TV up a notch. “Jonathan will be here eventually.”

I wander outside and look for 304, the ambulance that will carry me to my first patient, the ambulance in which I might actually save a life. In my mind, 304 is muscled and gleaming, smelling of disinfectant, a fully stocked diesel-powered extension of the modern emergency room. In reality, 304 is a piece of shit. It's unwashed and dented to hell. The antenna's broken, the tires are bald, and there's a piece of cardboard taped to the back window that reads
TAG APPLIED FOR.
I toss in the gear and look around. The upholstery is torn and stained—
stained
? Stained. My mind quickly moves beyond 304's aesthetics, its disrepair, its jagged corners—bristling with tetanus—to the terrifying reality that today I'm not here merely to watch and learn. I'm here to work. I look around, and it's all so foreign—the wall-mounted suction unit, airway devices, bandaging supplies, long backboards, traction splints, and rubber bag for ventilating patients
called a BVM—all of which I've been trained and signed off on but little of which I really know how to use. All the lessons from class—the acronyms, abbreviations, anecdotes, body parts—are running confused and frantic circles around my mind. I close my eyes, press my hands together, and say out loud, “Please God, let Jonathan know what he's doing.”

On cue, the side door flings open and Jonathan jumps in.

“Morning. I'm—”

“Go fuck yourself.”

I freeze, hand extended and wavering in the air. Without looking at me, Jonathan tosses a bag on an empty shelf and drops into the captain's chair. It's then that I see the Bluetooth earpiece. Relieved, I wave. He doesn't acknowledge me.

“Yeah. That's what I told him,” he barks into the air. “I mean, seriously. This is what it's come to? I gotta go to work and come home to my apartment, to accusations of fucking other guys? In our bed? And what did I do? I'll tell you. Not a fucking thing. Keep this up, though? I'll fuck every guy I see.”

Jonathan looks at me.

I blink away the sweat.

“I gotta go,” he says.

He hangs up. I hold my breath. Jonathan is a light-skinned black guy, easily six-four, probably 230. Every time he shifts his weight, the entire ambulance rocks with him. “We got everything?”

“Well, I grabbed what Sherry told me to get, but I'm not sure if it's everything. This is my fir—”

“Good. Let's get breakfast. I'm starving.”

•  •  •

A long line of eggs crackles on the griddle at Waffle House. Jonathan dumps sugar into his coffee. He dips his spoon in, stirs, nods to me. “You work yesterday?”

“Actually, this is my first day.”

“Off all weekend, huh?”

“No. First day first day.”

“Oh. Cool. How long you been doing this?”

“First day first day. First day.”

He stops stirring. Regards me closely for the first time. “Like your first day on an ambulance? As in never worked before? Ever?”

“Yup.”

“Why didn't you say something?”

His demeanor changes and suddenly he is talkative, smiling. He grabs his phone and calls the office, tells Sherry I'm a baby EMT, fresh out of the package. Give us any call that comes in. When the food comes, he talks with his mouth full. He claims, improbably, to be a med school dropout, a former cop, and an ex–marine reservist. EMS is the only thing that ever really suited him, he says, so here he is. He smiles. “Job sinks down into your bones,” he says. “You'll see.”

I ask him what exactly it is that FirstMed does, and he explains there are two types of ambulances. Obviously there are the 911 ambulances, but there are also the others: private ambulances whose sole purpose is to take the infirm to and from appointments. That's us. To work for a private service is to spend your professional life wandering through dialysis clinics and nursing homes, neither of which is pleasant. Dialysis clinics are sterile white rooms filled with the tang of bleach and the soft whirring of machines that slowly drain your blood like calibrated vampires so it can be scrubbed and then pumped back in.
Nursing homes are nursing homes—slow death in an industrial setting. I ask him why we have so much equipment if all we do is take patients to appointments, and he explains that dialysis is complicated and taxing on the body. Sometimes those patients simply die.

But there's something else, too, which is that nursing homes sometimes fudge their math. Think of it this way, Jonathan says. A nursing home patient slips and falls. If the staff calls 911, this suggests an emergency—something, anything, they can't handle on their own, which raises questions they'd rather not answer. If they call a private service, a non-emergency service, it suggests a small but concerning problem, something caught and handled early. He shoves food in his mouth and says: It's sleight of hand, but it works. And it happens every day.