That night I dreamed it was me telling the stories. I stood six foot four, a muscled two hundred twenty, with tattoos on both my arms, screaming skulls who feared no one or thing, and as I held forth, the table was not the mixed motley crew of the regular Thursday night, but all the dancers I had seen at the Electric Blue and Cousin Vinny’s and Kahoot’s and the Culinary Kitchen down on the Turnpike, and they looked at me like I was the bouncer who kept them safe, and loved them true, and they all held a secret wish to marry me and bear my children. The dream ended badly, of course, with my waking up to find the bar emptying out and me again left alone. Later I sat out back by a campfire with the animated incarnation of the smiley skeleton head on my arm, and he was laughing at me so hard, he actually did pee enough to put the campfire out. “Loser,” he said, making the L sign on his jolly flaming skull head.
“What does it take to get on at Capitol?” I asked Fred, who had stopped by the taxi office when he saw me out front, washing the owner’s white Cadillac de Ville.
“A pulse,” Fred said.
“No, I’m serious.”
“Hey, dude, we’re hurting for bodies. You’ve got a pulse and a driver’s license; they’ll put you in the seat. That and an EMT card.”
“How do I get that?”
“The Fire Department’s holding a course two nights a week starting in September. It’s free if you volunteer out there, riding a shift a month. That’s how I got in it. It isn’t that hard. You passed high school, you can pass the EMT. It might take you a time or two, but you have half a brain, so it shouldn’t be too hard. It’s good money with the overtime. I’m doing eighty hours a week now, and could do a hundred if I wasn’t so busy getting laid.”
“Maybe I’ll look into that,” I said.
“Let me know, I’ll put in a word for you. You’ll love it. It’s a gas. Plus I’m going to go for my medic next year. I get there, put in a year in the city, and then you’re talking Fire Department medic; you’re talking a whole other class of broads when you get that. You get that, you get yourself a nurse who wants to do nothing but take care of you, and then you learn to play golf, retire after twenty years with a city pension. That’s the gold mine. That’s where I’m headed.”
He had me thinking, I’ll admit that. And it wasn’t about the golf or the pension. I just was thinking maybe, just maybe if I could get a job on the ambulance, I could get some stories of my own, get a little notice, maybe even get a girlfriend of my own.