When we covered downtown we often parked under the highway by the train station. It was cool and out of the sun and if you wanted to get in back and stretch out on the cot, you were out of public sight. Fred even used the ambulance as a shield to take a piss against the highway column. On the cement wall to our left, guarding the entrance to the railroad underpass, was a giant billboard of the Governor. Beside his big grinning head was the slogan: “Thompson—Always looking out for you.” From where we were parked you could look past Union Station and the taxi stand and up the hill at the Governor’s office—the Capitol building—a massive gothic structure with a shiny gold dome.
“He’s a good dude,” Fred said. “My uncle knows him. He does handiwork on his cottage. Says he’s a regular guy. Drinks beer, plays poker, beats his wife.”
“Beats his wife?”
“I’m just kidding—that’s a load of crap the Democrats were trying to smear him with. I guess there was a 911 call or something and the paper wanted to get the tapes, but they couldn’t get them. Some Freedom of Information crap, I don’t know. They never proved anything. My uncle says he’s regular folks. They grew up in the same town. He says the man smoked pot in high school, had long hair, and liked to chase tail. That’s the kind of guy you want in there—not like the last guy—a millionaire who raised everybody’s taxes and cut all the programs.”
“Does he pay your uncle well?”
“He doesn’t pay him. My uncle works for a construction company and the company pays my uncle. My uncle says they don’t charge him.”
“There’s a deal for you. I should have asked them to rebuild my neighbor’s garage.”
“That’s right, you little pyro. I’m sure he’d rebuild it for you for free if you had juice like the Governor. Always helps to have the Governor in your corner. Uh-oh. Here comes Hershel. We got to split.”
An unshaven man with a dirty UCONN Lady Huskies jersey walked toward us. He came to my window as Fred turned on the engine. “I need to go to ADRC,” he said. “I need detox.” He had open sores on his arms and face. There was alcohol on his breath.
“You’ve got to call 911,” Fred said.
“I just asked an ambulance before and they took me. You got a radio, right?”
“New rules. You have to activate 911.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“There’s one in the train station.”
“I got to call?”
“Yeah, we’re an on-line dedicated car. We can only go where they dispatch us.”
“Give me a quarter.”
“We’re broke. We don’t get paid till Friday.” Fred took a chug of his soda. “I’m sure someone down at the station can give you a quarter. You call, and ask to go, and they’ll send someone.”
The man looked back at the station. “Just use your radio, man.”
“I might, but we’re on a call. Now stand back.” Fred hit the lights on, put the ambulance in gear, and then blasted the air horn as he rolled forward.
Hershel cussed. I saw him give Fred the finger in the mirror as we pulled away.
“That guy’s got scabies,” Fred said. “He’s not getting in my ambulance.”
“Where are we going?”
Fred turned up the hill where we approached the sprawling Hartford Insurance Company. He shut the lights down after we’d gone around the traffic at the light. He picked the mike up. “857, can we go to Saint Fran for a personal?”
“Okay, make it area 3. 843, go down to the tunnel.”
Fred laughed. “They’ll be happy when Hershel calls. Suckers!”
“857, you’re going to have to wait on that personal. I’ve got a call on Edgewood. Lift assist.”
Fred swore. “Not again. That lady needs to go to a nursing home. I can’t believe this. We just picked her up yesterday.”
Mrs. Green was an old woman who lived by herself on Edgewood Street. She had elephant legs, and was always short of breath, despite her home oxygen tubing that she wore in her nose all the time. By her bed was a piss bucket. She wore a medic alarm around her neck. She was always falling, and needed help getting back into bed. After picking her up, you’d often find feces on your gloves. It was the fourth time I’d picked her up and I hadn’t even been working there a month.
“Time for you to get into a nursing home,” Fred said, standing over her, as he pulled on his gloves. “We can’t keep picking you up like this.”
Her right leg was splayed out to the side and shorter than the other one.
“Give me a hand,” Fred said, when I didn’t move to grab her under the arm like I had the other times.
“Look at her leg,” I said. She was grimacing. I knelt down and pressed against her hips. She cried out. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
Fred asked her to try to lift up her right leg. She couldn’t do it.
“I guess we’re going to need to transport,” he said.
“Just help me now, please, I’m all right,” the woman said. “Just help me up.”
“No,” Fred said. “I think you broke your hip. We need to take you in; besides, you could use a checkup, maybe they can get you into a home. You shouldn’t be living like this. Get the stretcher,” he said to me.
I came back with the stretcher and a scoop, which was a metal contraption that came apart at the ends so you could get it under a person and pick them up.
“Leave it attached,” Fred said, “just extend it a notch. We’ll roll her on it.” I was learning that the thing that bothered me the most in this job was not the broken bones, the stinks and smells or the people who gamed the system; it was simply the grimace of pain on people’s faces. This woman was not a wuss like some of our patients, whining and faking their pain. I could tell when we rolled her on the scoop she was hurting in a quiet desperate way. She wasn’t comfortable on the cold steel, and we had to rock her some to get the straps in place because her girth hung off both sides of the scoop.
“Mercy,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry for your pain,” I said.
I thought about suggesting to Fred that we call for a medic, who carried morphine and could medicate her before we moved her to dull her pain, as I had seen Brett Salafia do on the one day I worked with a medic, staying late after my crew change because his partner had wrenched his back. But I didn’t suggest it because I knew Fred saw it as a mark of weakness to have to call for help, even though we didn’t carry the drugs like the medic cars did. Fred believed as long as you could get the patient to the hospital without their dying, you didn’t need to bother a medic; most of whom he said didn’t like to be bothered.
Fred and I were still the best of friends and we had a ball together on the road and I was grateful for everything he showed me, but I sensed we had a different outlook on some things about the job. He had told me I was too new to speak up, so I always went along. Like Fred said, the street was different than the classroom.
That afternoon, we got called up the hill to the Capitol Building. No sooner were we dispatched than we heard the supervisor’s fly car sign on.
“Possible VIP call,” Fred said. “Be prepared to see some shit sniffing.”
We were escorted into the building with its marble floors and high church-like ceilings. The Capitol Police led us onto the floor of the Senate chamber, where we found another large aged woman sitting in a chair, surrounded by people in suits and other uniformed officers, who treated her in a deferential way. I got that she was one of the Senators, and one of the higher ranking ones.
Just then Ned Martinson, our chief paramedic, and Bob Falcone, the operations manager, showed up. “I’ll handle this one,” Ned said to Fred. Ned was close to forty, a bald man with a red face of someone with high blood pressure. He wore the white supervisor shirt with the gold badge, instead of the navy blue shirts with the silver badge the rest of us road warriors wore. He knelt down by the woman and, talking gently, inspected her from head to toe. “I think you fractured your hip,” he said.
“Oh dear, that’s the last thing I need.” She managed a laugh despite her grimace. “Will I be back to vote tonight?”
“You’re going to need an x-ray to confirm, but I suspect you’ll be spending the night at the hospital.”
“Oh damn, you don’t have anything for the pain, do you?”
“Are you allergic to any medicine?”
“Yeah, the Democrats’ kind,” she said.
And everyone laughed.
She got ten milligrams of morphine before we loaded her, and Ned rode in the back with her while I followed behind in his fly car.
At the hospital, she went right into room one. They had to pull out the old man with yellow eyes who was in there and put him in the hallway. Three doctors went in and the president of the hospital came down to say hello.
“It’s all about who you know,” Fred said as I made up the stretcher and then wheeled it back down the hall past the long line of patients on stretchers.
***
“Timmy and I took care of her,” Fred told our assembled crowd at the bar that night, as the news flashed a picture of the Legislative Leader. “She was feeling no pain. She was so high, I asked her if she was going to declare today State EMT Day. She said, hell, she’d declare it State EMT week. I should have slipped her a bill to sign pushing last call back an hour. I got a powerful thirst tonight. Mary Beth, another pitcher over here for my friends.”
Just then I saw one of the girls, Carrie, looking at me. She was stout, but she had a pretty smile and thick black hair in a page boy cut. Normally she was there with Jimmie Winslow, a Hartford cop we sometimes saw on our scenes. I had the presence of mind and enough beer in me to smile back, and toss a daring wink at her, and I thought I saw her smile and blush, though she turned to talk to the girl next to her.
“You ought to ask her out,” Mindy whispered to me. “She just broke up with her boyfriend.”
She left before I got the nerve, but I did notice her glancing back at me.
I hoped it was not just the beer emboldening my imagination. I hoped through its haze there was actual possibility for me.
I felt my world changing.