I loved my new job. I was working ninety to one hundred hours a week. I couldn’t get enough of it. It was like being on Cops or one of those TV trauma shows. I saw some weird shit.
A woman in a dress passed out in a hotel, who turned out to be a man. I did that call on my last day with Fred and I think the encounter permanently damaged his psyche. He was doing one of his full-body surveys when all of a sudden he jumped back like he’d stuck his hand in an electric socket. I made him give me ten bucks to tech the call because it was his turn, but he wanted no part of the she-man. “That’s fucked up,” he kept saying all day at odd times. “That’s fucked up.”
You never knew what your day held for you or what you would discover next. Nothing was as it seemed. You can hold no assumptions about the world. We went to a group home for a patient with a urinary tract infection. It was a fifty-seven-year old woman with a famous last name—a name of a prominent political family. She had no history other than suffering a bout of scarlet fever as a child, and coming out of her coma with the mind of a twelve-year-old girl who would never grow older. Her mental development was frozen in time. She was a delightful conversationalist in the way that twelve year olds are, and I was able to get from her the story of how she came to be in that home, while her family members partied on exclusive islands, promoted liberal social agendas, yet hadn’t been to visit her for years. “They are very busy, important people,” she said without a hint of irony.
The same day I responded to the house of a notorious scoundrel, a man who had defrauded thousands of area people in a stock scam, and was soon for prison. We found him calming his handicapped son, a boy with Down’s syndrome, who had fallen and broken his leg, the bone breaking through the skin. I will never forget that way he rubbed the boy’s hair, and whispered in his ear, calming the pain he had to be feeling long enough until Tom could give his son some morphine.
Appearances could fool you. I went into hole-in-the-wall restaurants whose kitchens were as immaculate as if they had scrubbed the floor with toothbrushes, and went into the kitchens of trendy restaurants where people were waiting in line to get in, but where, after seeing the caked grease on the walls and watching the roaches skitter across the floor as we treated a cook who had fallen and injured his shoulder, I would not have sent my dog in there to eat.
I saw lots of gross stuff. I had thought Fred was making some shit up when I listened to his stories before I had put the uniform on myself, but having been out there I could only say, you couldn’t make the shit up. I saw maggots growing out of people’s heads, a man chopped up by a mechanical hole-driller and turned into hamburger; I saw another man cut completely in half in an industrial accident. You learned there were good ways to go and bad ways, and all I could say was: take me in the night while I sleep, but not in a fire, but if it is in a fire, let the smoke kill me before the flames touch my skin. If hell was a real place (and sometimes I thought it was), if there was fire there and people knew what that would be like and that it would burn them, we would have no problems here on earth. There would be no need for police officers. And I would have no story to tell.