A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,8
their spit-polished but rusty counterparts in the fire department.
I’m brand-new and all but useless. I feel nothing but intimidation.
Finally, two Grady medics emerge from the shadows in cobbled-together uniforms—more utilitarian than official, more mercenary than medic. They nod and tell me to get in, and before I know it, before I’m ready, I’m sitting in the back of an ambulance rumbling through the heart of a sleeping city.
All ambulances carry the same smell, a dizzying cocktail of disinfectant, plastic, and diesel fuel mingled with scents leaking in from the outside world. But there’s something else, a smell you can’t quite put your finger on and which, in truth, doesn’t exist. It comes not from any physical source but from the knowledge that people have sweated, bled, and died in here. The fact that so much has happened in so small a space will immediately dispel the notion that those who die in violent or sudden circumstances forever haunt the site of their demise. An ambulance, at its most spacious, is a five-by-ten rolling memorial to the abruptly and tragically dead. How many have slipped away in any one of them is simply unknowable, and yet not one story exists of lonely and angry specters whispering threats to frightened paramedics.
My rumpled preceptors wear all this death with style. The job has changed a good deal over the years, and the two guys I’m paired with, Pike and Wooten, came up in the brawling Wild West days when Atlanta was the murder capital and surviving the daily parade of shootings and stabbings required a hard-bitten and ruthless approach. Pike is wiry, rangy, with a thick goatee straight out of the Civil War; he chain-smokes and pounds coffee with the manic energy of a guy who never sleeps. Wooten is silent and bitter, his thickness a testament to the poor diet so common among public safety workers. While Wooten sits silently in the passenger seat, Pike drives like a madman, talking without stop, without prompting. “This whole area, everything you see,” he says, waving his arm indiscriminately at all we pass, “is a fucking shithole.”
The shithole he’s referring to is an area known locally as the Bluff—five square miles of drug houses, flophouses, abandoned buildings, squatters, drugs, violence, desperation, and the constant woop-woop of sirens. The Bluff is Atlanta’s answer to Compton, to Chicago’s South Side, and to the Heartland’s countless and nameless meth-riddled trailer parks. It is where all of Atlanta’s heroin is sold and most of its crack is consumed. People here live in aging projects or derelict bungalows; when they aren’t getting into trouble, Pike says, they’re calling 911. He stomps on the gas and tears open the air with a long, loud burst of siren.
Wake up, motherfuckers!
• • •
My father-in-law spent a year of his life in Vietnam, an experience that affected him deeply and about which he’s generally tight-lipped. There are some topics, however, he is willing to discuss, one of them being the futile efforts of the 1960s-era army to prepare its conscripts for jungle warfare. For instance, he loves to tell how he trained with an M14, never even laying hands on an M16—the weapon with which he was expected to fight and win a war—until after he was already in Southeast Asia. And he’ll laugh as he describes the World War II–style combat tactics taught to him by his drill instructors, men who’d never seen a jungle and who never once addressed the unique difficulties and strategies of jungle warfare. All of the skills he eventually acquired for keeping himself alive came from war-weary nineteen-year-old kids who’d gotten there a week before he did.
EMS training is not nearly as inadequate, but the very nature of practicing medicine in streets, bathrooms, living rooms, elevators, construction sites—literally anywhere—renders obsolete many of the rigid procedures drilled into our heads during school. And so Pike is standing next to the ambulance, a cigarette dangling from his lips, rattling off a list of techniques I’ve learned in school that aren’t only poorly suited for the streets but could, in some cases, get me or my partner hurt.
“Backboarding,” he says. “Do it like they show you, straps running crosswise over their body? Fuckers’ll slide right out.”
“Slide out?”
“What happens when you got ’em strapped like that and you try carrying them down stairs?”
“They slide out?”
“They fucking slide out.” He takes a heavy drag, followed by a languorous exhale. “Run those straps between their legs,” he says, “and crisscross them over their chest.