burned out. The coolest zone by far is Five. It includes Fulton Industrial Boulevard, which is nothing but factories, truck stops, strip clubs, and cheap motels. The factories and warehouses provide plenty of trauma, and the truck drivers provide everything else imaginable. If Fulton Industrial is any indication, long-haul trucking must be a lonely and strange existence. The truckers attract drugs and hookers—cheap, mean, toothless hookers carrying box cutters and strange tropical diseases. The hookers attract more drugs, mostly meth, and that attracts dealers and users and stickup men and drifters.
Zone Three is forgettable.
Chris and I are in Zone Two, which is the busiest in the entire county, north or south. We serve a large residential population, but Zone Two is defined by two streets: Godby Road and Old National Highway.
Godby is short and filthy and crowded end to end with old housing projects slowly sinking into the clay. Old National is a busy four-lane crowded with shady check-cashing huts and fast-food chains. The Red Lobster is always packed. At night Club Twenty Grand and its neighbor, the Ice Palace, take over, and the street fills with pimped-out cars and motorcycles smoking their tires.
From the perspective of my Rural/Metro colleagues, Zone Two is the worst posting in Fulton, but Chris and I love it. We never sleep, never go to the station. We prowl the streets at cruising speed, not only waiting for calls but daring them to happen. We troll the projects late at night or idle outside one of the clubs. We buy a disposable camera and, at every opportunity, hop out and take our picture with whatever oddity we come across. The guy in the Uncle Sam costume dancing outside of a tax office, a singing junkie who’s just gotten a fix, the hookers who wander over to ask for Band-Aids or gauze or a couple of spare bedsheets.
Every crew carries a clipboard, and in it, aside from paperwork, is the patient pen. We never touch the patient pen except to clean it. Patients never touch our pen. When a document needs to be signed, we open the clipboard and offer them the patient pen. We found ours at a gas station. It was in a rack up front, in a clear plastic box filled with gag gifts. It’s supposed to be a big fat finger—long and fat and fleshy pink—but it looks more like a penis, and every time we hand it to people, they pick it up tentatively, holding it as if it might explode. Which it does. It’s a farting pen, a play on the old pull-my-finger joke. When you grip it, the pen lets out a long electronic fart. Watching a person’s face when he grabs this dildo-shaped writing utensil and hears its flatulence is too much. Especially at two in the morning.
Because we’re always moving, we’re within striking distance of everything, and if a decent call drops anywhere near us, we jump on it whether it’s in our zone or not. One afternoon we’re miles into Zone Three—Chris has to crap and is starting to sweat, but he’s partial to the bathroom in Target—when a call goes out for a man who’s collapsed on a roof. It sounds exciting. Chris forgets about the toilet and grabs the radio to tell the crew we’ll handle it. Scaling buildings and shuffling along rooftops is more of a fire department thing, but we arrive first. So we pare our equipment down to the absolute necessities and climb up. Turns out the guy is a diabetic passed out from low blood sugar. Crouching on the hot shingles, I start an IV as Chris runs the medicine through a bag of saline fluid. It’s the highlight of our day—a sick patient, a nervous crowd of onlookers two stories below, the inherent danger of practicing medicine on a roof—and we decide we’ll never again let a good call go without at least making an attempt to get there.
Most crews don’t mind being told they can go back to sleep or keep eating or doing whatever it was they were doing, but occasionally someone complains or a supervisor asks how we could possibly be so close to a call so deep into someone else’s zone. These are questions that could lead to trouble, but Chris is a made guy, a rising star in the organization, and we take advantage of his status as former supervisor and friend of the director. We slip in and out of our zone with