A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,11

restaurant with my little group of five. We drink, we laugh, we reminisce about this strange bubble we’ve been living in for the last eight months. Nothing about tonight feels final until the tab is paid and we’re drifting out the door one by one. Life is a series of cycles—each nothing but new people, new memories, and eventually, a new ending.

That weekend Justin and I drive to Savannah to take our exam. We don’t leave much time to spare on the drive down, and rather abruptly, we go from sitting in the car to sitting in a medical annex building, staring at a test booklet. I finish in an hour, and even as I’m walking out, I can’t remember a single question. We have dinner, sleep, wake up, and take our practical exam.

In contrast to the written, the practical portion is agonizingly slow. There are five stations and a hundred testers. We sit for hours in a stuffy room waiting our turn. Finally, everyone cycles through and it’s over. We line up outside a door and enter the room one by one to see who passed and who failed. More waiting, more waiting, holy fuck, the waiting. Justin goes in first. He emerges shaking his head—he’s failed and will have to retest. Things have just gotten real. I go next, close the door, and smile at the five assembled faces. Someone asks my name. He shuffles through a stack of papers and nods. “You pass. Congratulations.”

That night I throw away my books and get drunk.

• • •

Two days later, Sabrina and I are in Paris. We’ve each been here before, though separately, and all the sightseeing that must be done has been done. We wander the Latin Quarter eating gyros and sandwiches. We walk the Seine at night and eat Nutella-and-banana crepes under the Eiffel Tower. We drink wine all day and ride the Metro drunk just to listen to the gypsies play the accordion. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, we’re under the Arc de Triomphe. It’s nothing but a celebration until 12:01, when the city shuts down the entire party and forces hundreds of thousands of people from the Champs-Élysées. We’re drunk and cold and have nowhere to go. The night quickly devolves into a riot. We ring in the New Year cloaked in a rolling fog of tear gas.

Two weeks later, we return home to a stack of mail. Buried ten envelopes deep is a letter from the National Registry of EMTs. I have my numbers. I’m officially an EMT.

6

A Job at Last

Midnight. Early February 2004. Atlanta has frozen over, and the gravel parking lot surrounding FirstMed Ambulance is buried in frost. I’m half-asleep in the back of an ambulance. My partner and her girlfriend are drinking Malibu rum in the warm comfort of the office. Just a few months ago, when I was in school, I pictured this EMT gig going differently. I expected dedicated and earnest medics crowded around a dying patient, all of them pounding futilely on his chest while telling him he’s not gonna die, not on their watch.

This is not that kind of place.

How I landed here, at FirstMed, is the punch line to a joke I’m not ready to laugh at. I text Sabrina—which is awkward because my fingers are numb—and tell her this isn’t what I signed on for. In all caps, I type I AM DONE. She texts back. Says I signed on for the weird. This is weird.

I stuff the phone in my pocket, pull the blanket over my head, and swear to myself I’ll quit in the morning. Just as I’m starting to drift off, the front door opens. I bolt upright. As in most FirstMed ambulances, the dome light doesn’t work, so I can’t see what’s happening in the cab. I hear someone rifling through the glove box, the ashtray, the console. I’m waiting to hear the engine rattle to life when the side door flies open and we’re eye to eye—me on the stretcher with a blanket, he wearing two pairs of pants and a ripped pink jacket. He has one black eye, a few cracked teeth, and a wild beard braided just below the chin and strung with plastic beads. His hands are cracked and caked with grime, and he has plastic shopping bags tied around his shoes. He’s half-drunk and fully homeless and takes me for a fellow traveler. After saluting my savvy sleeping choice and apologizing for waking me, he grabs