A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,19
from Alabama, and he’s been trying to convince her to come work with us. One day I show up at work and she’s here in full uniform. Jerry says she’s going to ride with us, see if she likes it. He’s vague on whether this has been approved. I figure she’ll ride for a few hours, then take off. But she never takes off; she stays the entire shift. That night she crawls into Jerry’s twin bed in our little bunk room. The noises I hear after the lights are out—kissing, giggling, zippers and grunts and the gentle sway of a shitty mattress—are noises lonely people pay for. But I’m not lonely.
The director runs a meaty palm across his forehead and wipes the sweat on his pants leg. He says the ride-along was never approved, that he can’t begin to imagine why Jerry would think he could just bring someone to work. “There are rules for a reason,” he says. “Valid reasons, safety reasons. You understand that, right? Say you understand it.”
What I want to say is Look, I was just following Jerry’s lead, and Jerry, well, he’s one of those people who does what he wants. But unlike Jerry, I want to keep my job.
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
And really, I do. For an entire day, a medic who never applied to Rural/Metro, who was never interviewed, whose credentials were never verified, and who was never hired, rode an ambulance and treated patients. Clearly, this sort of thing can’t happen.
My ignorance saves me from being fired but not from getting chewed out. The director says I should’ve known better, should’ve asked, should’ve told somebody. He’s sitting on Jerry’s bed, and as he talks, it groans under his weight. The old familiar creak. I ask myself: If I tell him about that night, about what happened on that mattress, will he see the humor? Finally, he struggles to his feet—one final squeal from the overburdened mattress—and says, “Long story short, Jerry’s gone. We’ll get you a new partner.”
• • •
What I get is not a new partner but a parade of part-timers. They all ask what happened to Jerry, and when I tell them, they’re not surprised. They nod, say they saw it coming. Maybe not the exact means of his undoing but something. People like Jerry, with a shitty attitude, they’re common in EMS. To a person, each part-timer insists burnout is rampant. The long days and longer nights, the missed holidays, the missed birthdays, it all starts to add up. I am, my partners constantly remind me, simply an EMT, and that means I’m making eleven dollars an hour—about what people make at Starbucks. How many baristas are bled on or puked on or asked to save a life?
I’m told everyone gets burned out. That if I stick with this long enough, I’ll burn out, be born anew, and burn out again. Most people eventually move on, though a few stay forever. Most who stay love it. But there are others—the ones who are here and wish they weren’t, who are either too lazy or too lost to find something else. These people, like Jerry, become Killers. Though I’ve seen Jerry in action and I know what to look for, these temporary partners, they’re not satisfied. It’s not enough to have seen it in Jerry, they say. I need to know the signs so I can spot the transformation years from now, either in another partner or, God forbid, in myself.
My education takes the form of late-night horror stories, the accumulated knowledge of an entire career distilled to its antithesis—here, then, is what a medic shall not be. I hear a thousand of these stories, all the careless, lazy, even mean things Killers have done. In the end, only one stands out. Like a good jab, the story is short and to the point and leaves you wondering what else might be out there.
An old man is found down, barely breathing and on the verge of death. He has cancer. He has heart failure, lung failure, kidney failure. He has no family and even less hope, and the medic who arrives at his house simply places a gloved hand over the patient’s mouth.
There are stories and then there are stories. Maybe that’s all this one is. Maybe not. I’m not certain Jerry would’ve gone that far off the rails, but thanks to his girlfriend—with her easy-to-open Velcro fly and that squeaky twin bed—I’ll never have to find out.