A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,57
whips the ambulance up to the shelter and groans. It’s massive and in the middle of the city, long ago condemned but, inexplicably, still open. It specializes in loitering. During the day, hundreds of men crowd the surrounding blocks, arguing, fighting, pissing, getting high, getting arrested. It’s worse at night. Those who fail to get a bed, those who got a bed but now want out because their skin is crawling and they need more, those who never wanted a bed, just another hit, they’re all wandering the streets. They crowd the vacant lots, pour from the surrounding crack motels, and creep through the shadows of Renaissance Park.
There are only two entrances to the shelter. Marty grabs the radio and asks the dispatcher which side our patient is on. She isn’t sure and tells us to stand by. We’re hoping to hear he’s by the main entrance. The main entrance leads to the upstairs, where there are fewer people. The upstairs is also home to a strange vortex—a large open room divided into plywood cubicles serving as permanent residences for a lucky few. There are truths in this universe so confounding, they were never meant to be revealed. How a man becomes a permanent resident of a homeless shelter—is he still homeless?—is one of them. So I don’t ask. But the front door is in and out; it’s quick and painless and as easy as a call here can get. The side door is something different altogether.
The dispatcher comes over the air. “Use the side entrance,” she says. “Someone’s waiting for you there.”
Shit.
We weave down the steep slope of the side street—taking care not to run over any of the jaywalkers—then step out of the ambulance and onto the stained pavement. We’re immediately assaulted by a wave of sounds and smells, a flowing river of humans living but just barely. Here the double doors are swung wide, but it’s so dark, we can’t see beyond the airless threshold. A man in a black shirt that says ENFORCEMENT leans against the wall smoking. He is probably our guide, but it’s hard to say. He ignores us—uniforms, ambulance, all of it—until we enter his personal space and confirm that we’ve arrived because someone called 911. He nods and finishes his cigarette, then crushes it out. “Yeah, all right,” he says. “Y’all follow me.”
A few seconds later, we’re in the dayroom. Hundreds of men sleeping in chairs, playing cards, talking to themselves. Some spend their days arguing, others—feverish sentries—stand guard over their bags. The careless few will have their prescription drugs stolen by the sharks who prey on the weak. The lighting is dim, and everything’s made of crumbling concrete. The air is heavy with stink and activity. We can hardly see to pick our way through.
Every few feet someone yells, “Here go your patient!” to the delight of his friends. Others shuffle up alongside us, ghosts in the musty air, and ask about boils, cuts, abscessed teeth, gangrenous fingers. We push on into the dark, past the yelling, laughing, cussing, and horrible tubercular coughing. Past the makeshift altar where a chubby preacher shouts over the noise: “And you must say unto Him, Lord Jesus, I give myself over to You, for Thou art King!”
We do a quick sweep of the dayroom, the bunk room, and the showers. Enforcement has a radio in his hand, and he’s talking into it, but whoever’s on the other end has no better idea where our patient is than he does. Finally, he stops and says, “Guess he’s in the basement, then.”
Lucky us.
And so we descend, step by step, into the black nothing. We weave through halls stinking of mold and filthy bodies, boots sticking to the floor with each step, telling ourselves, as if we need reminding, that this is not how we wanted to start the day. On the stairwell, weighed down with forty or fifty pounds of equipment, we pass a ghost—bone-thin and wearing ragged clothes—who shakes his head and says, “Motherfucker don’t look good at all.” Anticipation is usually the most dramatic part of a call, but sometimes when we get there—especially when our escape route is this treacherous, the onlookers this curious—the moment lives up to its billing. Like today. Our patient is sprawled on the basement floor, violently convulsing. He’s surrounded by a crowd of gawkers and medical theorizers: I seen that shit before. That shit right there AIDS.