I descended into a dark, lonely place. And it was a lonely place that was only made worse by being with other people. I avoided going to bars, avoided going to my mother’s, avoided even going to stores during busy hours. I became a night owl, staying up watching old movies, and sometimes reading books. I liked reading short stories, and thought the authors probably got a lot of chicks because they were so good at telling tales. I particularly like a book called Steppenwolf about a guy who walked around like me, a friendless ghost. I tried writing a few stories myself. I needed desperately to create a world I could understand. Some nights I just listened to classical music. Miss Broadbent had given me a list of the ten greatest works and I had bought them all. Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky. Dvorak’s New World Symphony remained my favorite. It haunted me. I felt like he too must have, at some time in his life, looked around at the world and wondered how he ended up where he did, like maybe we were both just bit players in a universe and world too daunting to comprehend.
I was glad when my shoulder was healed enough to go back to work without hurting too much. I’m back and it’s like people would say to me, “Haven’t seen you for a while. Been out?” “Yeah, I was out,” I’d say. “How about that,” they’d answer. No one is ever really missed. Meat in the seat.
I used to love the job, but now it didn’t take long for me to see something had changed. It just wasn’t the same anymore. The things I found fascinating before, no longer fascinated me.
I was in the EMT room, and one of the new EMTs was going, “You wouldn’t believe this call we had yesterday. We go screaming all across town, priority one for severe bleeding. We’re fighting through traffic, jamming the air horn, we finally get there and an old man answers the door.
“‘Ambulance,’ we say.
“‘Anderson?’ he says. ‘There ain’t no one named Anderson here.’
“‘No, no, AMBULANCE. Someone called for an AMBULANCE?’
“He goes, ‘Oh, oh, oh, wait a minute,’ then he gets his cane and goes wobbling into the back, and you hear a door open and some rap music, then this gangbanger comes strutting out, holding up his finger that’s got a little cut on and he asks us for a Band-Aid. I thought, you gotta be fucking kidding. ‘We don’t carry Band-Aids,’ my partner says. The guy just goes, ‘Oh, okay,’ turns around and walks back to where the music is coming from. We cleared it unfounded. Can you believe that, calling 911 because you want a Band-aid?”
I could believe it. You work two months in the city and that shouldn’t shock you. I was going on three years, and I was as tired of the stories as I was of what they were about. I mean, how many fucked-up, psycho, complete idiot or dead gross people stories are there in the world? “You wouldn’t fucking believe this call,” they’d say, “you wouldn’t fucking believe it.” Yes, I would, I’d say to myself and tune them out. Been there, done that, and didn’t like being there, doing that anymore. The only way being at work beat not being at work was that, at least being at work, I was getting paid for wasting the days of my life.
Everything was one mind-numbing, depressing routine. It wasn’t that I joined the ranks of the bitchers and complainers—I was beyond that. It was petty. I didn’t care if dispatch was boning my car, or if one of the supervisors was being a jerk, or if the new union contract didn’t have a big enough raise in it. All that seemed to matter was that I had a place to be—not a particular place I liked being, but it beat having to decide what to do with myself. They gave me a call, I went to it, did it, and took someone to the hospital, only to do it all over again, ten times a shift, seven days a week. Grinding out the calls, grinding out the days and nights.