A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,20
better every day. Learning if still green. I’m not yet good—that comes with time—but I’m getting there. I’m told repeatedly that the way to learn is to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Just listen and absorb. Which is easy, because I listen to everything they say, they being my rotating cast of irregulars. As a group, they’re better than Jerry but far from promotable. That’s not to say they don’t want to be here, just that they’re here for reasons entirely their own. They’re Tourists, and filtered through their strange and slightly out-of-focus perspective, that they’re here for all the other things this job allows them to do—that for them practicing medicine is secondary—makes perfect sense.
My most frequent part-timer is Josh, a body builder with enormous teeth, big white monsters spread wide enough to walk through, and a body to match: six and a half feet tall, chest like a beer keg, shoulders wide as a doorway, a booming voice cradled in a South Georgia accent. His shirts look to be about my size, tattoo-tight and rolled up at the biceps. He is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met—always smiling, always laughing—which I suppose is your prerogative when you’re big enough to rip the arms off a bear. He’s been a medic twenty years, and while he has the skills to walk through any emergency with the aloof grace and silent speed of a Siamese cat, his specialty is old women.
They call every day for every reason imaginable, and his approach is always the same. There she is—nothing but bones inside a nightgown—and in he walks, subtle as a bull elephant. When he reaches her, he sits, regardless of where she is—the bed, the floor, naked in a half-filled bathtub—and he takes her little bird hand and talks as if the only reason he’s shown up is to have a casual conversation. In his own way, he has a genius for it, although his mind is somewhere else.
In between calls, he devotes his full attention to bodybuilding magazines. He isn’t just reading. There’s something almost religious in the way he studies them, a thick finger marking off each word. Occasionally, he slaps the pages and flips back to cross-reference what he’s just read with an article from the day before. He keeps the magazines stacked in a duffel bag, and at the start of each shift, he removes them with great reverence, not merely a subscriber but a holy warrior sitting down to pray the knowledge into his head. He reads for hours, consumed and silent until, without warning, he lurches out of his seat and crashes down next to me. He jabs a big sausage finger at the page and discusses whatever has caught his attention—how the heavy use of diuretics really cuts up your calf muscles, or the comparative benefits of various pre-competition body oils, or the superior aesthetics of a brown sun-given tan versus the orange hue of a tanning bed.
He carries another duffel bag dedicated solely to nutrition. Three times a shift, he yanks back the zipper and pulls out a blender, a big spoon, a huge plastic cup, and an enormous tub of whatever protein shake he’s taking this week. In goes the water, followed by two or three heaping scoops of white powder, a sprinkle of creatine or androstenedione, and then he claps on the top and mashes the puree button. He always offers me a cup, and when I say no, he gazes at me—just a poor, hopeless civilian—as if all I need is the right combination of baby oil, sunburn, and muscle shake to turn things around.
He’s here because our schedule of one day on and two days off allows him time to train. Plus, there is the stress of being up all night, running around in the heat, the constant activity. He needs this lifestyle—along with the diuretics—to get lean, because tough as he is, he’s powerless when it comes to food. He confesses that when he doesn’t have a show coming up, his willpower gives out. “For lunch alone,” he tells me, “I’ll eat a rack of ribs, three hamburgers, a couple pounds of fruit, and a block of cheese.” One night he devours an entire bag of jumbo marshmallows on the way to the hospital.
The body builder is memorable, but he’s not alone. There is Jose, also a Tourist, though much quieter and a man who takes a while to open up. When he