A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,12

a blanket and disappears into the night.

Where he came from and what his story is, I can’t say. But my story—the one about how I graduated at the top of my EMT class and still wound up here, in this ambulance? Yeah, I know that one.

• • •

As soon as I passed the EMT exam, I quit delivering papers. After nearly a year of working late nights, seven days a week, it was good to be gone. I woke up the next morning and set about finding employment. I had high hopes, and why not? This was medicine, a field everyone will tell you is always hiring and has limitless possibilities, a career field where no two days are the same.

My first call was to Grady EMS. They said no, told me I needed experience, and suggested I try the fire department. So I did. I contacted every department in the area and was told by every receptionist in every municipality that they hired once a year and then only through a meandering process of forms and test dates and agonized waiting. The only remaining option if I wanted to run 911 calls was Rural/Metro Ambulance, which covered the parts of Fulton County not handled by Grady. I lived in Fulton, I wanted to work 911, and this would help me get a job with Grady. It seemed like the perfect fit. I called. A woman answered and told me they’d just hired a bunch of people the day before but not to worry because they’d be hiring again soon. How soon? Six months. I told her I didn’t have six months. She paused, then: “Maybe you should try the fire department.”

I left the house. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I’d quit my job, delivered newspapers, attended EMT school, passed an exam administered by a nationally accredited organization. All for nothing. I was unemployed and out of options. I stopped at a red light, closed my eyes, and rested my head against the wheel. Just as the car behind me started to honk, a beat-up ambulance breezed by. I flipped on my blinker. I had no idea where it was going but figured if I followed until it got there, then . . . What I’d do at that point was unclear, but what choice did I have?

Following the ambulance wasn’t easy. After all, there were speed limits, traffic lights, stop signs, not to mention crosswalks and pedestrians, all things I had to navigate. Not the ambulance. It wasn’t using the lights or sirens, clearly had no emergency to handle—the driver was simply indifferent to local traffic laws, maybe to all laws. I was sold.

A few quick turns and I found myself in another world. This was a new place, a new city, nothing but abandoned lots, strip clubs, burned-out buildings, shady car dealerships, and scrap yards hemmed in by corrugated steel walls. Weeds grew through the sidewalks until, without warning, the sidewalks ended. We drove on. More liquor stores, more pedestrians, more beat-up cars. A handful of run-down houses, the lawns nothing but clay littered with broken plastic chairs and children’s toys. And then, without turning on a blinker, without braking, the ambulance yanked a hard right and skidded to a halt in a gravel parking lot. I rolled by as slowly as I could. The sign above the front door said FirstMed Ambulance. The place looked near death, as though the building, the ambulances, the employees, everything needed to be put down. I pulled a U-turn and whipped into the lot.

The front door was the flimsy sort you usually find on a cabin or an outhouse and squeaked so loudly that everyone inside turned and looked as I walked in. The place was all cigarette smoke and daytime television. I was in shorts and flip-flops. Perhaps I’d acted a little hastily. A woman probably a decade younger than she looked peered at me from the other side of a long cigarette. She asked what I wanted. I shrugged. A job? A minute later, I was sitting in a small office with a giant man named Don. Don, too, was smoking when he handed me a single sheet of paper.

“Just write your name, phone number, address. All that stuff,” Don said as he crushed out one cigarette and lit another. “Do you, uh, do you have numbers?”

“Phone numbers?”

“EMT. You have passed Registry, right?”

I told Don I had passed Registry, though it wasn’t until later that I