A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,9

Fuckers aren’t going anywhere.”

On and on it goes.

“Now, when it comes to fighting patients—”

“Wait, what?”

“What?”

“Fighting? You said fighting?”

He laughs. “You think all these fuckers are glad to see you? That they’re gonna hop on out to the ambulance for a quiet ride to the hospital?”

I ask why anyone—especially a person who presumably has called for my help—would attack me just for showing up. Pike shakes his head as though I’m almost too dumb to help, then ticks off a list that includes seizure patients, drug overdoses, violent psychs, drunks, head injuries, pissed-off family members, and those who, for no good reason, are simply pissed off at the world and to whom I represent a great place to start exacting revenge. “It’s all how I approach them,” Pike says, “the way I assert my authority.” He goes on to describe a tricky blend of rigidity and leniency—where he draws the line and what he does the moment they cross it—that determines the direction these calls will take.

“Handle it right and you’ll be fine. Fuck it up and you’re in for a long afternoon,” he says. He grabs a pack of patient restraints and asks if I know the proper way to restrain a patient. I don’t, but before he can show me, we catch our first call.

For the next few hours, I watch Pike and Wooten run calls from the close and inescapable confines of an ambulance. I’m mesmerized. We run calls in projects and high-rises and on the litter-strewn shoulder of I-85. We pick up a child with a fever, drop off a woman with abdominal pain, and bandage a man who’s been sliced open by his girlfriend during a domestic dispute. There is a fluidity to these medics’ movements that borders on grace. I don’t see how I could ever be this good.

Around midafternoon it finally gets quiet. There’s no scheduled downtime in EMS, no lunch hour, no bathroom breaks, no nothing, and when it’s busy, you just run. So you eat what you can, when you can. That afternoon we eat greasy chicken from a dirty fast-food restaurant, then fall into a stupor. I’m just starting to drift off to sleep when the ambulance starts moving. We’ve got another call.

I haven’t yet shaken off the fog of grease when the ambulance jerks to a halt and, for the first time all day, I hear Wooten’s voice: “Holy fucking shit.”

Strange things happen in this world. One of them happens today. A man none of us knows and whom we’ll never see again spent all last night bingeing on a strange mixture of cocaine and heroin known as a speedball—one drug to cut the trail for you, another to send you down it. Heroin, being what it is, calms while the cocaine fuels. The problem is that the heroin has a shorter life span than the cocaine, and so, out of nowhere, that smooth high suddenly becomes all sweat and frustration and grinding teeth. After his buzz turned sour, our patient spent the afternoon homicidally racing his car through the streets. Eventually he lost control, sped down a ravine, and smashed into a tree. The impact broke both legs, but he’s too strung out to notice. Confused and combative, he simply hopped out and took off running—and the broken bone ends immediately poked through his skin. By the time we arrive, the damage is so extensive that the upper and lower sections are jutting out in a grotesque sort of crisscross pattern.

For the first time all day, Pike is quiet. Wooten suggests perhaps we should get out. I stand next to them in front of the ambulance—heart pounding, pupils dilated—partially horrified, partially hypnotized, and totally unsure what to do. Once Pike has drawn up a sedative, we approach the patient like zookeepers sneaking up on an unruly bear. Our quarry sees us, hesitates, and squares his shoulders. Pike and Wooten recognize what’s about to happen. I do not.

They jump out of the way. I’m frozen. The patient—wild eyes, hulking mass, broken and scissoring leg bones—charges me. I never even react. Just before he plows me over, Wooten, more agile than his body bloat suggests, leaps out and knocks him down. Pike piles on top. I watch as the three of them roll around until Pike screams out in pain, whales the guy with a wild elbow, and yells for me to grab the needle. Somewhere in the tussle, he dropped the sedative, and it’s now out of his reach. This