I had been saving money over the course of the last year. My rainy day fund. I feared that a time would come when I would need cash and not have any, and that crisis would precipitate me toward even more dangerous thieving. Who knows? In desperation, I might even throw a ski mask over my head and run into a bank with a toy gun, or knock a Brink’s truck driver over the head with an oxygen cylinder, or paint my face black and wear a ninja outfit and try cat burglary. I was worried that the bad seed in me would spread and multiply, traveling throughout my body like a metastized cancer—that my end was already foretold—that I was terminal.
As insurance against desperation, once I had paid off the garage, I started to put fifty dollars a week into a savings account. I had dipped into it only twice, during dry thieving spells, but replenished it later. On one occasion when I struck another lode with a dead drug dealer, I made an eight hundred dollar deposit. With other bonus deposits, I had run the balance up to nearly three thousand dollars. However, being sick again and missing nearly three weeks of work, in addition to accumulating some serious medical bills, put a hurt on me. I tried to apply for worker’s compensation on the grounds that I had caught the fever on the job, but they just laughed at me. My claims were rejected. Prove it, they said. Well, I couldn’t.
Tom, who was a steward in the union, told me to forget about it. “This fight has been fought and lost before. It’s best to just not even try. There’s a guy from downstate got hepatitis, and he needs a liver transplant now. He was carrying a guy down the stairs and that guy had diarrhea on him. His arms were all scratched up from clearing shrubbery and the shit got on his arms. The guy had hepatitis and died a few weeks later. The medic filed a case. They rejected it. And he’s got three kids. Wrenching your shoulder carrying someone down the stairs—that you can prove. Getting shit on or bled on, and catching hepatitis or AIDS, you’re out of luck. The insurance companies don’t give a shit. Anything to save them money.”
Some health care system this was. We were working our tails off, taking people to the hospital, many for nothing serious at all, many who could have just as easily walked or taken the bus to the hospital or better yet a doctor’s. In the winter we were often sicker than our patients, matching them cough for cough. You wouldn’t believe the number of EMTs who need breathing treatments or even IV fluids during the shift just to get through. Partners treating partners. Why? Because no one could afford to be out of work, and with our shitty insurance, no one could afford doctor’s bills. On one shift I gave Tom two liters of fluid (he showed me how to do the IV) and two doses of Phenergan. He kept the IV lock in his arm and would lie down in the back and hook himself up in between calls. Meanwhile we are both coughing up lungs while having to carry people down three flights of stairs because they were “sick.” In the back of the ambulance, the patients would whip out their state card like it was a Visa or MasterCard—only the card never came due for them. We, on the other hand, worked hard just to pay our bills, and if it wasn’t one EMS person, it was another, getting sick, going out of work and being stuck with bills honest people had trouble paying. Jan Dempsey got breast cancer, lost her house. Jason Roberts woke up one morning with his legs paralyzed, and almost died from Guillain-Barre Syndrome as the disease spread to his chest before it stopped. Even the smallest medical problem put a hurt on a person. And we had insurance. What was the point in working? You had to just hope you stayed healthy.
The hospital was willing to put me on a repayment plan if I gave them one thousand dollars right off the top. I decided to just pay it all at once. I had been through that payment-with-interest route and did not want to go there again. I figured I would just start from scratch, hope that luck worked in my favor. After I emptied my account, I had just fifty dollars to my name. I went in and signed up on the schedule for sixteen-hour days five days a week, and two twelve-hour days on another two.
I was worried the thieving, which I had sworn off, was going to start back in earnest. I just had to hope I was strong. It didn’t take long before I learned the answer to that question.
“40 Billings Road for the high fever,” Dispatch said.
Billings Road was the Ellsworth, one of my most fertile lifting grounds. Rich old people living in fine apartments with Persian rugs and antiques, and cash spread randomly about on tables and dressers like pennies and nickels were spread out on mine. Their wallets and purses were often stuffed with fifties and hundreds while I had only crumpled ones in my billfold. The only problem with Billings from a thief’s perspective was that the on-duty nurse had usually been called to the apartment and was there with the patient, giving us the story and writing up the patient’s medical history and medications for us. The silver lining of course was the nurse was often too busy doing that to keep her eyes on the angel of mercy who was grabbing a quick bill off the bureau or riffling a purse. Sometimes a cop was there if they had called 911 and the local ambulance had been unavailable, but having a cop there also added another layer of protection. You’re saying I stole money? Who would even think of stealing with a cop right there the whole time? Give me a break!
Sure enough, there was a money clip on the table by the door, right next to the patient’s keys and morning New York Times. Tom attended the man. The nurse wrote on the chart. The cop watched the pretty newscaster on TV talking about an accident on the highway. I put the clip in my pocket. I didn’t count it but I figured it was good for a couple nights of dinners. I was surprised at how easily I had lifted it.
The man was delirious with a fever of 104 and had urinated on himself. The nurse said he had no family to speak of, and they would probably be moving him to the nursing unit when he was discharged from the hospital. He was ninety years old. From the pictures on the wall, I could see he had traveled the world: Japan, Europe, Africa. He had no doubt given to charities all his life. Maybe his leaving that money out, well, maybe that money was meant for me? Maybe I was a charity case? You could say I was doing some serious rationalization.
Tom wanted to just put the old dude on the stretcher, soiled pants and all, but I insisted we take his pants off and put him in some fresh clean clothes. “He’ll be more comfortable this way,” I said. “Not having to lie in wet clothes until the hospital can change him.”
“That’s a good idea,” the nurse said.
Tom just rolled his eyes at me. “Mr. Compassion,” he whispered somewhat derisively. “Mr. Shit.”
“Just doing my job,” I said.
“What a thoughtful young man,” the nurse said after I asked where the bathroom was so I could moisten some washcloths to help clean him up.
In the bathroom, I couldn’t help myself. I counted the money. One hundred and forty-three dollars. The clip was monogrammed, and I was sure it could fetch a pretty penny at a pawn shop, but probably was worth more in sentimental value alone to its owner. It was then I looked in the mirror and saw the devil himself. He was grey with beads of sweat on his brow, and his hands were trembling. Now, here’s the thing of it. It wasn’t just me looking at myself and seeing that I was pale and grey. I was pale and grey, but I also had horns and a tail. I felt like I was in a movie. Now this was not the first hallucination I had experienced. Since I had been sick, I’d been having them with increasing frequency. I had been trying to ignore them as merely tricks of my mind. I did not mention them for fear people would think I was stranger than I was. I just let myself go with it. So I was the devil—it wasn’t hard to understand. The sad part was, if I was going to be evil, couldn’t I be evil without all the guilt? It was destroying me. The devil is supposed to be a badass, not some shaking little guilty wimp. And then before I could stop myself, I lost my nerve and I put the clip and the money into the plastic bag with the dirty clothes and tossed them in the hamper. I came out with only the washcloths and a basin of soapy water. As I washed the filth off the old man’s body, I had a vision of a giant one day washing me off the sands of the earth like I was fungus, scrubbing me till the land was pristine again as it had been before Eve had eaten the apple. I had a bad, bad feeling. I wondered if maybe I ought to quit at the end of the shift and take a plane to Calcutta and throw myself on Mother Teresa’s mercy. Put Calcuttan rags on me and cleanse my soul. Save me from my inevitable doom. Then let me help others.
After we packaged the man up all wrapped in clean sheets and strapped cozily to our stretcher and we were going out the door, I heard the nurse said “Wait!”
We stopped and looked back.
“Wasn’t there a money clip by the door here?” She looked to the policeman. “Officer? Officer? Didn’t you see it when you came in? It was right here.” They all looked at me, even Tom.
I must have looked like a deer in headlights. I was so stunned I almost forgot I no longer had the money.
“Oh, yeah, the money clip,” I said. “It was in the bathroom. It is in his pants pocket in the hamper. It fell out of his pants, I didn’t want to leave it on the floor, so I put it back in the pants. It’s in the hamper.”
They all looked confused by my answer, but the nurse went and checked and came out with it. “I could have sworn it was by the door,” she said.
“You might want to see that it gets locked up, officer,” I said. “You never know these days.”
“Mr. Honesty,” Tom said later. “For a minute I was worried you had it in your pocket.”
“Well, that would be wrong,” I said.
***
Now those of you pulling for me, believing that this strange and too-close-for-comfort episode marked a change in my life’s course, don’t celebrate my rehabilitation too quickly. I was like the alcoholic who goes a month without a drink, for whom staying sober each day is a heroic achievement. Even if I didn’t steal, the impulse was always there. Money was still never safe around me.
Not a week later, I encountered an unusual crowd in the hospital waiting room. They were gathered around the big screen TV that hung from the wall. I couldn’t see what was going on, there were so many people. What I did see was a wallet bulging out of the back pocket of a man in a suit. I felt someone bump me from behind and in the moment I brushed against the man, and muttered, “Hey, watch out,” to one man and “Excuse me” to the other. I found I had his wallet in my hand, then quickly secreted it in my jacket under my left arm. He didn’t seem to notice. I moved to the periphery of the crowd. I could now hear the newscast and see a part of the picture. “The resignation of the Governor is a stunning development—the result of an ongoing federal corruption investigation into bribes and other illegal activities in the state’s highest office.”
“What a fucking asshole, I always knew he was a crook,” a man on crutches said.
“Stealing from poor folks, the same as voted him in. That’s disgraceful.”
“What goes around, comes around. I always said he was a crook.”
I headed out the door, walked across the street, and went into the restroom. I counted my haul: five hundred and seventy-two dollars. What kind of person besides a drug dealer carries around that kind of cash? I looked at the patient’s driver’s license. The president of the hospital. Oh, my goodness, I thought. What have I done now? But then another thought crossed my mind. Maybe it was the money that had come from me in the first place. My bill had been outrageous. Two hundred dollars they had tried to charge me for an aspirin. Maybe this was meant for payback. I was sort of a Robin Hood for myself.
At first, I avoided the mirror. I knew it would not have shown me dressed in green with a quiver of arrows on my back and a sturdy bow in my hand. Robin Hood. That was a joke. These people saved my life, and so what if they overcharged me? They also took care of a lot of people who could never pay them back. And maybe they overpaid their president, but they had a lot of other nice people who worked there. I cast a quick furtive glance in the mirror and was not at all surprised that I saw a big furry rat with bad teeth. I was a rat just like the fucking Governor. Except I was still free. A part of me wanted it all to be over. Let the trap fall on me and break my neck. Put me out of my misery.