Diamond in the Rough (Draft)

Preface/Warning

2006-01-24T07:12:00.000-08:00

This is just a draft. It is a complete draft, but not a final product.

This novel is based on a true incident, and grew out of a challenge I gave myself to find out why someone did what they did, and to try to write a story that might explain how someone would come to do such a deed. However, this is a work of fiction and while inspired by a true story, it does not depict nor is is based on any real persons. All of the characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblence to real people is entirely coincidental.

I do have a strong concern about the book, and that is, unless written carefully, it may reflect badly on EMS as a profession. There are characters in this book (particuarly Fred) who do things that I do not obviously endorse. My main character (the narrator), who I hope will be viewed as ultimately symphathetic, will do things that are clearly unacceptable. Because the lead characters are certainly not role models, I am hoping that I will be able to find ways, either through the character's self-realization or by adding a more positive character or two, to at least show how EMS should be.

Thank you all for reading.

Chapters One to Five

2006-01-24T06:29:00.000-08:00

Chapter One

I know what I did was wrong. I just want people to understand I didn’t set out to become a thief. I was just looking for love.

It was a fact. I was no Tobey McGuire. I stood five-nine, one hundred twenty pounds. I had a shaved head, bad teeth, bony arms, and was so skinny people made TB and tape worm cracks about me. I was twenty-three, living in a boarding house, working as a maintenance man for a cab company and doing my best not to get my ass kicked. I had a flaming skeleton devil head tattoo on my right arm that I had gotten to make myself look tougher, but people even made fun of that. I had wanted a menacing specter, but people said my devil looked more like a goofball than one of Satan’s crew. Sadly, it was true, and once you are branded with indelible ink, it doesn’t come off easy.

I cleaned the offices and garage at Yellow Cab, washed, vacuumed and changed the oil on the rides, and when one wasn't signed out to a regular driver, the owner let me work the streets. I worked mainly at night, and split everything I took in with my boss. It wasn't the best deal, but it helped pay off the money I owed for burning down my neighbor's garage. They were never able to prove I had done it deliberately -- they thought I had in retaliation for my belief that he had poisoned my dog -- but since I agreed to pay the bastard back, they decided that was punishment enough, and it kept my adult record clean, my juvenile stupidities already purged on my eighteenth birthday.

I liked driving, working the Hartford streets, both the customer contact and the knowledge of the roads, which came in handy for my later employ. If people wanted to talk, I was more than happy to converse with them. If, which was most often, they wanted me to just to drive, I easily assumed the role of the invisible man.

My mother didn't like me working at night, particularly in the North end, but she didn't complain when I kicked some cash her way every week for her Monday bus trip down to the casino. Our unwritten deal was if she hit the slots jackpot, I would receive an equal share, but any profit she ever made on any particular visit just went back into her general slot fund, which was always eventually returning to zero. That was all right. At least I got a motherly kiss and an I love you after Sunday dinner, which was more action than I was getting from women of my age.

The closest I came to any sex was the business that went on in the back seat of my cab. I'd pick up old men at the elderly housing and take them for a ride down Ashley Street, where a crack whore would get in the back and give them the business for ten bucks. Sometimes the whores would just take the cash and bolt. Then I'd get stiffed because the poor old guys wouldn’t pay me the fare, blaming me that they'd been ripped off as if I were the pimp. Hell, I wasn't even getting a commission, not that I had the nerve to ask for a percentage nor the desire to profit from such trade.

Those crack whores were mean, nasty women, who no doubt had mean nasty upbringings that had dragged them to that point where they had sold their souls to the rock which made them do what at some point in their life must have been unthinkable acts. After awhile I learned which whores to avoid. The rip off artists, the ones who'd spit their exchange back out on the seat, and the ones who looked like cops. I promised not tell what the one who showed me a badge said to me. Let's just say silence is expensive and talking even more so. Everybody’s got a racket.

On Saturday nights I cruised downtown, particularly by the train station where all the young high school and college lovelies were dollied up and out drinking at the bars. One night a young redhead and her man came out of the Pig’s Eye pub and hailed me as I came slowly down the street. She was skinny, blue eyed with a freckled nose. She looked real cute in her lime green sun dress. She couldn’t have been old enough to drink. He was older, maybe mid-twenties, broad-shouldered wearing a white shirt with a loosened red power tie, carrying a suit jacket. He looked like he had a good job and could have whatever woman he wanted. He asked to go up to Girard Street.

They hadn’t been in the back long enough for me to write their destination down on my manifest when she straddled him, and started tugging at his belt. All that shifting around and groaning and in no time she was bouncing off him and telling him to keep doing what he was doing. When she’d arch her back I could feel her long hair against my head.

I was embarrassed and leaned forward to avoid letting her hair touch me, but then I admit I kind of got excited myself. I don’t consider myself a pervert – I mean the only porn I ever bought myself was an occasional Penthouse or Playboy – a guy has to get by when he can’t afford the cover charge, a beer and tips at the tittie bar – but hearing her say over and over what she was saying, well, I tried to imagine she was saying it to me. Her hair had a wonderful scent -- like bubble gum and strawberries. She was young and wild and crazy and I imagined she wanted me like girls in the movies want the hero. I drove as slowly as I could, then instead of parking right in front of the apartment; I pulled a little bit past to a spot not under a street lamp. I heard a groan then, and she tried to keep riding, but he said, his voice changed, “Easy.”

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “Play that song for me.” She kissed his neck, and as she did, his eyes met mine in the rear view mirror. He looked irritated.

“I’m tired,” he said to her.

“I’ll get you going again.”

“Ow,” he said, “No, I need to sleep.” He sort of pushed her off him.

“What?” she said.

“I’m sorry, I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

“That’s it?” she said as he buckled his pants.

He reached into his wallet and handed me twenty bucks. The meter only read “$5.45.” “This ought to cover it with a tip. Take her where she needs to go.”

“That’s it?” she said again.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been fighting a migraine all night. He’ll take you back downtown. Here’s my card. Call me. We can hook up another night.”

He handed her the card. She took it, and then threw it back in his face. “I can’t believe you. I just made love to you and that’s it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Get out,” she said. She hit him. “You fucking jerk!”

He looked at me as he stepped out of the car like she was the crazy one and maybe I might have some male sympathy for him. I just shook my head. I couldn’t believe it either.

“I agree with you on that one,” I said to her.

“What!”

“I agree he’s a jerk.”

She just grunted.

What I wanted to say was something smooth, something soothing, and maybe a little funny, something to make her feel alright and maybe see me in a different light – as a man, not as a witness to her humiliation. I didn't think anything I could think of would work. I told you I was no Tobey McGuire, because if I was she would have ended up home with me, not in my boarding house, but in my mansion over the city.

“Where can I take you?”

“Back downtown.”

She turned her face to the window.

I was silent as I drove her back to the Pig’s Eye Pub where I waited while she went in, only to see her come out, and look around like a lost little girl.

I called to her. “You going to be all right?”

She looked at me at first like she was going to blow me off, like what kind of creep was I to be stalking her. But she had no friends at that moment. “They left,” she said.

"Where do you live?" I finally asked.

"What do you care?" she demanded.

"I'll drive you there."

"I have no money."

"It's on me," I said. "I'm done for the night anyway," which I wasn't. “Get in.”

I hit the meter off. “You can sit in the front if you want.”

“I’m fine back here,” she said.

“Okay, your preference.”

I put the radio on. Bob Seeger. “Night Moves. You like this?” I asked. “This is a great song.”

She didn’t answer. I keep glancing up in the rear view mirror as I drove. She was crying, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, and decided silence was best. If I couldn’t be the hero, I’d best not be a fool.

She lived about fifteen miles away in Glastonbury, in a big house at the end of many dark roads. When I approached the drive, she said, “Right out here is fine.” She got out, closed the door and tottered up the long drive, not a word to me.

Instead of going to Cousin Vinny's on West Service Road where I sometimes went to see the dancing girls, I went home, and lay in my single bed and dreamed I had a different life. I dreamed that I lived in a big house at the end of a dark road, and that I was handsome and brave, and that at night, I made love to my cute red-headed wife who slept with her cheek on my strong chest knowing I would always keep her safe.

Chapter Two

Fred Waters and I went to high school together. We were best pals. Some called us Beavis and Butthead. I didn’t care for it, but in high school, you don’t choose your handle. We were motor heads -- into cars -- even though neither of us had one unless our moms let us use the family auto, which was rare after we got busted for underage drinking while watching the street racing down behind Bulkley High School. Believe me we would have been too embarrassed to drive their rusted station wagons down there where souped up Civics and Mitsubishis ruled.

Fred had more luck with the girls than I did, though, and he wouldn’t have had any luck at all without grape juice and gin, which made Fred's ascension into a chick magnet more remarkable. Instead of juice and gin now, he had stories -- and good ones.

Fred was an EMT and worked for Capitol Ambulance in the city. He lost the bad haircut, got a military buzz cut, and started lifting weights. He got his sights set on becoming a paramedic firefighter and hooking on with a city pension job in East Hartford. So in the meantime, while he applied to medic school, he was just pounding out the hours on the ambulance, making good pay with the unlimited overtime -- pay enough to afford his own apartment, make payments on a new pickup, and have cash to spend on the ladies.

A couple nights a week when he'd get off work, I’d meet him and some of the guys he worked with at the Brickyard Pub on Park Street for beers and pizza. There was a regular crowd of women there, particularly on Thursday nights, and we often ended up with tables pushed together and pitchers of beer lined up on the table with plates of nachos, buffalo wings and potato skins. Fred would be wearing his black boots and navy blue "EMS in the jungle" tee-shirt, showing a medic swinging on a vine over the city rooftops on the front with HARTFORD EMS on the back. Looking at his biceps, I was thinking a little time in the gym would do me well, but then again Ronnie Meyers – Fred’s partner was as scrawny as me and he always had a girl sitting on his lap. I thought what really made the difference were the stories they told, how they were always the center of attention. He and his buddies would tell their incredible tales, and the chicks would dig it. Me, I just sat like a little grinning idiot, happy if on any given night when they'd push the tables together, a girl would be stuck next to me, and I could at least go home with the scent of perfume on me.

"So we get called to Edgewood Street," Fred goes, as a blonde named Candy refills his beer, and the brunette Mindy, a hairdresser from down the street who has been his choice of the month, rubs his neck. "We go to Edgewood Street for the shooting. The address is the same one where we did that triple heroin overdose I told you about last week-- the one where Higgins shoots one guy with the narcan, wakes his ass up and has him do CPR on one of his buddies while I pounded on the chest of the other, and Higgins tubed them both while we waited for backup. That building is like EMS Central Training Academy. Shootings, overdoses, presumptions, assaults, fires, even a baby delivered there, but listen to this -- this one tops them all. We go charging in there because the junkie who met us out front is going nuts, and you know junkies never get excited about anything except getting their stash ripped off. We go flying up the stairs with the cops right behind us.

”I get up there and I see this guy lying on a mattress holding his groin. The guy's going "My dick! My dick!" The cop behind me shines his mag light on him, and where his dick should be there's nothing but a crater, a crater filled with blood.

”’He hit 'em with a shotgun,’ the junkie who led us up there declares. ‘A shotgun -- Boom, right in the fucking nuts!’

"’My dick! My dick!’ the guy screams.

”And you can see it laying there, hanging by a tiny piece of tissue, like he almost shot it completely off, floating in the bloody crater like a dead whale.

"’Who did this?’ the cop demands. ‘Was this over drugs?’

"’Drugs?’ the junkie goes. ‘He shot him in the dick!’

”Ronnie's running down to get the scoop stretcher so we can carry him down the stairs. I'm calling for a medic on the radio and dispatch is asking ‘What do you have? What do you have?’ I want to say, ‘He’s shot in the dick!’ but in deference to the FCC, I just say, ‘Shotgun blast to the groin!’

I put some gloves on. I don't mind a little blood, but this is nasty land and a guy needs to be careful. I wrap a couple trauma dressings around him, and Ronny comes back with the scoop and some straps, and then we are carrying the guy’s screaming ass down the cranky stairs. I'm thinking to myself I hope his dick doesn't fall completely off and drop to the floor, cause I'm imaging the scene in the trauma room where the doctor is going to say ‘Where's his dick?’

“I don’t know, doc, it was right here.’

“Well, go back and get it so we can sew it on!”

Then we have to go back and find his dick so they can reattach it. We get there and see a big rat making off with the wiener. We chase the rat all over the house, up and down the creaky stairs, trying to get the guy’s dick away from him. Next thing I know we’ve both fallen through a hole in the floor and are in the basement where these giant rats are sitting around a table playing poker. These rats are like state fair pig size rats – they’ve gotten so big from feasting on dead junkies and homeless people. They see us, and its snack time. Except they get in an argument about which one of them gets to eat us, so they start fighting each other, slamming their snouts into the others’ bellies and its like a shark rat frenzy, blood and guts splashing everywhere while we Speedy Gonzales it up the basement stairs and out of that crazy place. No thank you! I’m not going back for anyone’s dick unless it’s my own.”

He has them rolling with laughter, and the girls are turning red, trying both to be ladylike and not to pee themselves because the way he is telling it is really funny.

"We get him in the ambulance, and I shout to Ronnie to drive because the only medic who is clear is coming from cross-town, and Saint Fran is just up the road.

”The guy is going, ‘Are they going to be able to save it? Are they going to be able to save it?’

”I say ‘Dude, you've got to worry about them saving your life. I mean first things first here.’

”And he gets all frantic and screams again ‘My dick! My dick!’

”We get to the hospital, and already there's a crack whore there. She’s got a swollen bloody face and she's yelling at him, ‘You don't know nothing, remember that, you know nothing! No one did this to you but yourself. It was an accident, you tell them!’

"’But he shot me in the dick,’ he protests.

"’I love you, but you shouldn't have gone boasting your mouth.’

"’He shot me in the dick!’

Then Ronnie stands and points to the TV, and there it is on the news.

Right there over the bar on the big TV, a shot of the Capitol ambulance, and Ronnie and Fred wheeling the patient into the back, surrounded by cops. Then the ambulance, red lights flashing, pulls away into the night. The announcer says. "The patient is in serious condition with unknown gun shot wound."

"Unknown," Ronnie says to laughter. "He got shot in the dick!"

Everyone laughs, and the two of them are like superheroes. This isn't the first time they've told their stories, and ended them just as the news confirms their tale. Amazing.

"So they couldn't really put it back on, could they?" Mindy asked.

"No, it’s probably back on by now," Fred said. "A couple inches shorter maybe, but they were going to put it back on."

"That's incredible."

"Many years from now,” Fred says mock solemnly, “when my grandchildren ask me what I did on the great streets of Hartford, well, after tonight, I will never have to say, I didn't save dick."

And everyone cracks up again.

When the evening is over and the barmaid is wiping down the counter, and Fred and Ronnie are off with their women, and everyone else has paired off, the chubby barmaid approaches me, and says, "That's it for tonight. It's time to go home. Time for bed." She says it in such a disinterested way that is clear to me she doesn’t even see me as someone who might even in her dreams, take her home to bed. I’m just another obstacle to her night ending, someone to be shooed away in the same manner as the bar wiped down and the chairs put up on the tables. She pulls the plug on the Doom video game I am playing.

“Com’on!” I protest.

She takes my quarter full mug of leftover beer off the table, and turns her back on me. I sit there shaking my head at the callousness of it all, then head out into the night, and walk the twelve blocks to my boarding house alone.

Chapter Three

That night I dreamed it was me, telling the stories. I stood six foot four, a muscled two hundred twenty, with tattoos on both my arms, screaming skulls who feared no one or thing, and as I held forth, the table was not the mixed motley crew of the regular Thursday night, but all the dancers I had seen at the Electric Blue and Cousin Vinny's and Kahoot’s and the Culinary Kitchen down on the Turnpike, and they looked at me like I was the bouncer who kept them safe, and loved them true, and they all held a secret wish to marry me and bear my children. The dream ended badly of course, with my waking up to find the bar emptying out and Mindy saying "Have fun jerking off," as she and Fred exited arm and arm, or arm and shoulder, or arm and her humongous bosom. Later I sat out back by a campfire with the animated incarnation of the smiley skeleton head on my arm, and he was laughing at me so hard, he actually did pee enough to put the campfire out. "You are such a loser,” the jolly flaming skull said, "Why I hang with you? I don’t know."

"What does it take to get on at Pro?" I asked Fred when he stopped by the taxi office when he saw me out front, washing the owner's white Cadillac de Ville.

"A pulse," Fred said.

"No, I'm serious."

"Hey, dude, we're hurting for bodies. You've got a pulse and a driver's license; they'll put you in the seat. That and an EMT card."

"How do I get that?"

"The Fire department's holding a course two nights a week starting in September. It’s free if you volunteer out there, riding a shift a month. That's how I got in it. It isn't that hard. You passed high school, you can pass the EMT. It might take you a time or too, but you have half a brain, so it shouldn’t be too hard. It’s good money with the overtime. I'm doing eighty hours a week now, and could do a hundred if I wasn't so busy getting laid."

"Maybe I'll look into that," I said.

"Let me know, I'll put in a word for you. You'll love it. It's a gas. Plus I'm going to go for my medic next year. I get there, put in a year in the city, and then you're talking fire department medic; you're talking a whole other class of broads when you get that. You get that, you get yourself a nurse who wants to do nothing but take care of you, and then you learn to play golf, retire after twenty years with a city pension. That's the gold mine. That's where I'm headed."
He had me thinking, I’ll admit that. And it wasn't about the golf, or the pension. I just was thinking maybe, just maybe if I could get a job on the ambulance, I could get some stories of my own, get a little notice, get a girl. Maybe things would start going my way. I wasn’t picky, I’d settle for a nurse’s aide.

Chapter Four

So, six months later, there I was -- twenty-three years old with polished black boots, a pressed navy blue uniform, with an American flag patch on my left arm, a state of Connecticut EMT patch on my right and a silver EMT badge on my chest. The badge wasn't company issue, but Fred said we were free to buy our own and wear them. He said it came in handy on rough scenes, made people less likely to tangle with you because the badge represented authority. And people feared if they messed with the badge they might end up where moldy bread was served and people got messed with in the shower.

My mother took Polaroid’s of me on my first day when I stopped by the house before going into work to give her her weekly slot contribution, and sure, for her to fawn over me and feel proud of the way I was planning to turn my life around. “Just one more,” she said.

“You’ve already taken five,” I said. They were laid out on the kitchen table, drying.

“Now smile in this one for your mother. You look so handsome.” She sobbed a little. "My baby boy, all grown up and helping people."

“Mom, I’m going to be late.”

“It’s like watching you go off to kindergarten all over again. You want me to make you some lunch? I have some leftover beef stew from last night. Do you have a microwave at work?”

“Mom, I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”

“It’s a mother’s job to worry.”

Just then my sister came in with the dogs and they sensed some excitement because they were yapping and jumping on me.

“Get away!” My mom swatted at them. “Look at them they’re getting hair all over you. Donna? Why did you let them in?”

“They wanted to say goodbye to their half-brother,” she said. “Boy do you look goofy.”

“He does not. He’s handsome.”

“It’s fine,” I said. So there was some dog hair on my pressed pants. By the end of that day, the pants would see worse. “I really have to go.”

She hugged me while my sister made charming faces at me. She was nineteen and still living at home. She hadn’t quite found herself yet.

“I love you mom,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“But I’m your mother.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

My mom was okay. She’d had a bad marriage, but she had stuck with us and no matter her nerves or failings, I was there for her. And my sister too. I hoped one day I could help them out more than I was able to now.

As I drove toward the base on that first day, I believed that I would be a good EMT. I had worked hard in my class, finishing number 3, even earning the respect of the teacher who said she was continually surprised by who her best students turned out to be. I passed the state exam on my first try, passing all of the practical stations and getting an 88 on the written. The day my cert came in the mail, I celebrated not by getting wasted, but by handing in my resignation at the cab company, shaking the owner's hand and thanking him for employing me. I had already been accepted at Capitol, pending the arrival of my cert. After two days of orientation, paperwork and a physical where I had to pee in a cup -- which was fine because I had given up pot smoking the day I decided to take the EMT class – my name was written in the schedule book. I was ready to go. I was on a mission.

They paired me with Fred. From the start he initiated me in his EMT ways of the streets and the pearls of what he called “The Idiot’s Guide to EMS.” "First rule of the road," he said, “Know you're ABC's."

"Airway, breathing, circulation," I said eagerly. That meant, before you could consider someone’s circulation, for instance, if they were bleeding, you had to make sure they were breathing, and before you could consider their breathing, you had to make certain they had an open airway – meaning that their throat wasn’t blocked up. There had to be an open pipe to get the air in. They drilled the ABCs into you in class.

"No! Gong! Wrongo!” Fred said. “The real world ABCs are Ambulate Before Carry. If they can walk, don’t carry them. Now I'm not saying don't carry sick people who need to be carried, and, believe me, you will do your share of fourth floor carry downs of people fatter than you can imagine, nasty fat people, people who are so fat, they can't get out of bed, people who lived up on the fourth floors of this city for years because they are too fat to get out of their rooms and walk down the flights of stairs. They have people carting their food up to them cause these people eat all the time they are so fat, people you will think must eat five pounds of bacon, three dozen eggs, four whole chickens, and a whole ham just for their midmorning snack they are so fat, people a skinny boy like you best never turn your back on cause they'll be fixing on you for a rib dinner.

"When I say ambulate before carry, I mean if they aren't dying and they can stand up, and their legs aren't broke, then they can ambulate themselves, with our holding them by the arm if we need to steady them, down all those fucking stairs because the hell if I am going to blow out my back carrying their lazy asses like they are the Royal Queens of Sheba and Rajas of India, you hear what I'm saying. If your stomach hurts, there's nothing wrong with your damn legs, so get up, get your shoes on, and let's get moving."

I was going to say that wasn't what Judy, my EMT instructor had told us, but I wasn't going to speak up, it being my first day, and my not having been on a call as an official EMT yet.

"Second rule of the city, you need to know Spanish."

"Hola amigo," I said. "Taco."

"You're going to need more than that. Now if you're a medic, you're going to have to know "Dolor," that means pain. You say "Dolor? Donde?" and they point to wear they hurt, but that's for medics. All you really need to know is this, "Zapatos, tarjeta medico, and andamos," which means, "Get your shoes, get your medical card, and let's get going," because for all the blood and guts, lots of times we're just a taxi service. We come flying there 911 lights and sirens flashing, charge up four flights of stairs and find Juanita Rosa Santiago Maria Perez Gonzales Diaz 's two-year old son Jose Pancho Ramon Rafael Victor Nunez Robles Martinez has a runny nose, we're not going to wait for her to finish putting on her makeup or watch the end of the Jerry Springer show or wait for her sister Rosa Nina Rodriguez Ortiz to get off the phone talking to her man Esteban. They called 911: 'Zapatos, tarjeta medico, andamos!’ Got it!"

"Right," I said,

"You learn those two rules today, I'll teach another two rules tomorrow unless a good call happens to illustrate one of the many rules you will no doubt know by heart before the month is out provided your wussy, newbie ass is still here. Speaking of newbie, rule number 3, Newbie's don't say shit until they aren't newbies anymore."

"Which is when?"

"Which is when you open your mouth and speak and people actually listen. You can't put a time on it. But even if you have the most excellent I was there dead bodies to the right, pit bulls to the left, 9 mm waving gang bangers behind you, and puking gross nasties coming at you straight on, all filmed by News at 11, you can't speak unless someone asks you too. Nobody wants to hear a newbie talking like a road warrior until they've all seen what you can do. Then, if you meet certain standards, you can speak. Otherwise anything you say is viewed as ‘Been there, done that, don't care to listen, you can't tell me anything I haven't already seen too much of.’ That'll take time, but you'll know it when it happens. In the mean time, zip it, just keep your eyes open, observe."

We were in area 3, parked outside Saint Francis Hospital.

“You’re nervous, aren’t you?” Fred said. “Waiting for your first call? I don’t blame you. I was nervous myself. First call: 500-pound lady, cardiac arrest, puked all over the place. Nasty. I was doing compressions. Every time I did a compression, puke would spurt out of her mouth. A medic finally got there and intubated her. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, ‘You got your first kill.’ I didn’t know he was joking with me and that was a common expression used to bust buckwheats. ‘Her airway was fucked up, you should have been doing mouth to mouth,’ the medic said. ‘Mouth to mouth, my ass,’ I said. He just slapped me on the back and said, ‘You’re alright, for a newbie.’ I’m telling you, you’ll see some fucked up shit.”

"453, Magnolia and Homestead for the Motor Vehicle. On a one,"

"Magnolia and Homestead," Fred answered the PD dispatcher. "You know where that is right?" he said to me.

"Dude, you're talking to a cab driver."

"Just checking. Making certain in the excitement of going to your first MVA, you haven't lost your bearings."

"I'm steady," I said, although my heart was racing.

"Let's do it then," Fred said.

We flew over the Woodland Street Bridge, nearly going airborne with Fred driving, blaring both sirens. He swung a hard right onto Homestead, causing the rear of the rig to fishtail.

"You owe me lunch," Fred said.

"Huh?"

"For leaving your fingernail marks in the dashboard.”

He howled and gunned it. "Too bad the company won't let us race these babies down on Ledyard, except they are little slow on the pickup."

"That's Magnolia," I said, “you just went by it."

He stopped hard, leaving brake marks in the road. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't see anything."

He backed up, and we saw two cars with no visible damage and a group of five people standing around yelling. "This must be it," Fred said.

The cops weren't there yet, which I was to learn wasn't unusual for a minor motor vehicle. The cops were always busy, so as Fred told me, the dispatch often used us as first responders at accidents, relying on us to get on the horn and call if the cops were really needed.

We stepped out of the rig.

"Take me to the hospital," a skinny woman demanded, and I recognized her almost immediately as a crack whore who had plied her trade in the back of my cab a time or two. Today she was just wearing a tee-shirt and jeans. "My leg is hurting. Take me to the hospital." She turned to the others as she, showing a mouth nearly empty of teeth, proclaimed, "Let's go get paid."

"My back hurts," an equally toothless man said. "He bumped me. I got whiplash."

"We going to the hospital. We going to get paid!" the woman shouted.

A man in a newer model Oldsmobile sat behind the wheel talking on a cell phone. I understood that he had bumped the other car, getting out of his parking space. I saw in the windshield a folder that identified him as a housing inspector.

"What happened?" Fred asked.

"He banged us, and now were going to get paid," the woman said. "My leg needs inspecting, and I hope they serving lunch soon, cause I could use a sandwich."

"Yea, right," Fred said. "Who else was in the car?"

"Just me and my girl," the man holding his back said. "And Charlie over there, he was in the car too."

"My back hurts something powerful," Charlie said, grinning.

"Don't forget about me," the other man said. "I think it’s my neck, I know it’s my neck."

Fred looked dubious. He knocked on the window of the Oldsmobile. The man lowered the window. "You all right? Fred asked. "Any injuries?"

"I'm fine," the man said. "I asked for the police."

"I'll check on them for you."

Into his radio, Fred said, "453 to HPD, I need an ETA on the officer for the MVA at Homestead and Magnolia."

"Is anyone hurt?"

"Well, let's just say several want to go to the hospital, so I may need another rig. I'll let you know. We’re just going to need an officer."

"He's on his way."

"Yo, they was in the car too," the man said, as two other man, who had come out of the crack house to see what was going on, now began holding their backs.

"The car doesn't fit six people," Fred said.

"We was trying for one of them Guinness Records. See how many we could fit when he slammed us."

"We all getting paid!"

"Okay, listen," Fred said, "If you're going to the hospital, here's how it’s going to happen. We're going to have to put collars on your neck and lay you down and strap you to a board. It’s protocol. You can expect to be on the board for a long time and for it to be uncomfortable, but if you're going that's how it’s going to be."

"Wait a minute; let me check my calendar," the man mimicked checking an invisible calendar book, then proudly announced, "All appointments clear!"

"We're going to need two more ambulances," Fred said into the radio, "Low priority." To me, he said, “Yank the stretcher. It’s board and collar time."

Board and collaring was all about c-spine immobilization. We had practiced it endlessly in our class. What you do is put a collar on a person’s neck, and then strap them very tightly to a hard spinal board in order to keep their spinal column in line. If they had a spinal injury, particularly in their neck, allowing them to move around before they got an x-ray to clear them of spinal injury could cause paralysis.

"Who wants to be first?" Fred announced.

"Ladies first, ladies first," the woman said.

"Okay, lay down on the board."

"Lay down? You got twenty dollars?" the man asked, while the others continued to laugh.

"That's all right," the woman said, "I'm going to get paid later. I'm going to get paid at the hospital. The city going to pay."

"Lay down," Fred said.

In class, if someone was up walking, we were taught to hold the board against their back, buckle it on them standing, and then lower them down. Fred just had her lay down on the board which lay on the stretcher. At his direction, I tied only two straps around her, instead of the five we used in class. He applied a commercial head bed, a device that held her head straight between two Styrofoam blocks, and then started to secure it with a long strip of duck tape.

"Wait, a minute," I said. I went in the back of the rig, and came back with two four by fours, which I placed over the woman's eyebrows, then nodded for him to apply the tape.

He looked at me like I was peculiar. "Not on this planet," he said. He removed the 4x4's, and then taped the duck tape right across the woman's forehead. He pressed the tape against her eyebrows. "We need to make it nice and secure," he said, and then he winked at me.

Okay, I get it, I thought.

"I'm going to get paid!" the woman exclaimed.

By that time, the second and third ambulances were arriving, along with a police car and a TV truck from Channel 30.

***

Ten hours later I had made it through my first shift. It had been an eventful day. Besides the motor vehicle, we had done two dialysis transfers, two drunks, a heroin overdose, a foot pain, a migraine headache and a cardiac arrest, where I got to do CPR for the first time. It was an old man found not breathing while sitting in his arm chair on his porch. He was flat line on the monitor, and slightly cool to the touch, but Tom Higgins, the medic who was there before us, worked him anyway, putting a tube in his throat, an IV in his neck and pushing lots of drugs. “Well, you killed your first patient,” he said to me later as we wrote up our paperwork. I was ready. I showed him my belt. “Already notched it,” I said.

“Hey, you’re all right,” he said. “You’re a sick fuck, but you’re all right.”

Before we left for the bar, Fred presented me with my very own “EMS in the Jungle” tee-shirt to wear. They wouldn’t let us wear our uniform shirts off duty, besides I had gotten puke on mine. “First rounds on you,” Fred said. “It’s a tradition.”

Later at the bar, Fred told the story of our first call, "I don't even know if any of them were in the car when the guy backed up,” he said, “but by the time we were leaving, they had half the neighborhood out there holding their backs, laying on the ground, flopping like fish, drooling, and shouting, "We going to get paid! We going to paid!’ Isn't that right, Timmy?"

And they all looked at me.

"That's right," I said.

"He was there. They were all shouting, ‘We going to get paid!’ Now tomorrow you can walk down Magnolia Street and see half the folks there don't have eyebrows."

"I didn't know you worked in the city?" Mindy said to me, the first words I think she had ever spoken to me. “I guess I should have known from your shirt.”

I muttered that I did.

"His first day," Fred said. "He's still a newbie, but he's got potential. He listens to me, he'll do fine, forget all the book crap they teach in school, and learn the way of the street. Hey, there we are now."

And up on the TV, there was the Channel 30 reporter standing in front of the scene, talking about an accident that had sent six people to the hospital, all fortunately with what turned out to be minor injuries. They showed me and Fred lifting one of our patients into the back of the rig.

Me on TV.

Chapter Five

When we covered downtown we often parked under the highway by the train station. It was cool and out of the sun and if you wanted to get in back and stretch out on the cot, you were out of public sight. Fred even used the ambulance as a shield to take a piss against the highway column. On the cement wall to our left guarding the entrance to the railroad underpass was a giant billboard of the governor. Beside his big grinning head was the slogan – “Thompson – Always looking out for you.” From where we were parked you could look past Union Station and the taxi stand and up the hill at the Governor’s office – the Capitol building – a massive gothic structure with a shiny gold dome.

“He’s a good dude,” Fred said. “My uncle knows him. He does handiwork on his cottage. Says he’s a regular guy. Drinks beer, plays poker, beats his wife.”

“Beats his wife?”

“I’m just kidding – that’s a load of crap the Democrats were trying to smear him with. I guess there was a 911 call or something and the paper wanted to get the tapes, but they couldn’t get them. Some Freedom of Information crap, I don’t know. They never proved anything. My uncle says he’s regular folks. They grew up in the same town. He says the man smoked pot in high school, had long hair, and liked to chase tail. That’s the kind of guy you want in there – not like the last guy – a millionaire who raised everybody’s taxes and cut all the programs.”

“Does he pay your uncle well?”

“He doesn’t pay him. My uncle works for a construction company and the company pays my uncle. My uncle says they don’t charge him.”

“There’s a deal for you. I should have asked them to rebuild my neighbor’s garage.”

“That’s right, you little pyro. I’m sure he’d rebuild it for you for free if you had juice like the governor. Always helps to have the governor in your corner. Uh-oh. Here comes Hershel. We got to split.”

An unshaven man with a dirty UCONN Lady Huskies jersey walked toward us. He came to my window as Fred turned on the engine. “I need to go to ADRC,” he said. “I need detox.” He had open sores on his arms and face. There was alcohol on his breath.

“You’ve got to call 911,” Fred said.

“I just asked an ambulance before and they took me. You got a radio right?”

“New rules. You have to activate 911.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“There’s one in the train station.”

“I got to call?”

“Yeah, we’re an on-line dedicated car. We can only go where they dispatch us.”

“Give me a quarter.”

“We’re broke. We don’t get paid till Friday.” Fred took a chug of his soda. “I’m sure someone down at the station can give you a quarter. “You call, and ask to go, and they’ll send someone.”

The man looked back at the station. “Just use your radio, man.”

“I might, but we’re on a call. Now stand back.” Fred hit the lights on, put the ambulance in gear, and then blasted the air horn as he rolled forward.

Hershel cussed. I saw him give Fred the finger in the mirror as we pulled away.

“That guy’s got scabies,” Fred said, “He’s not getting in my ambulance.”

“Where are we going?”

Fred turned up the hill where we approached the sprawling The Hartford Insurance Company – Hartford was the nation’s insurance capitol. He shut the lights down after we’d gone around the traffic at the light. He picked the mike up. “857, can we go to Saint Fran for a personal?”

“Okay, make it area 3. 843, go down to the tunnel.”

Fred laughed. “They’ll be happy when Hershel calls. Suckers!”

“857, you’re going to have to wait on that personal. I’ve got a call on Edgewood. Lift assist.”

Fred swore. “Not again. That lady needs to go a nursing home. I can’t believe this. We just picked her up yesterday.”

Mrs. Green was an old woman who lived by herself on Edgewood Street. She had elephant legs, and was always short of breath, despite her home oxygen tubing that she wore in her nose all the time. By her bed was a piss bucket. She wore a medic alarm around her neck. She was always falling, and needed help getting back into bed. After picking her up, you'd often find feces on your gloves. It was the fourth time I'd picked her up and I hadn't even been working there a month.

"Time for you to get into a nursing home," Fred said, standing over her, as he pulled on his gloves. "We can't keep picking you up like this."

Her right leg was splayed out to the side and shorter than the other one.

"Give me a hand," Fred said, when I didn't move to grab her under the arm like I had the other times.

"Look at her leg," I said. She was grimacing. I knelt down and pressed against her hips. She cried out. "I'm so sorry," I said.

Fred asked her to try to lift up her right leg. She couldn't do it.

"I guess we're going to need to transport," he said.

"Just help me now, please, I'm all right," the woman said. "Just help me up."

"No," Fred said. “I think you broke your hip. We need to take you in, besides you could use a checkup, maybe they can get you into a home. You shouldn't be living like this. Get the stretcher," he said to me.

I came back with the stretcher and a scoop, which was a metal contraption that came apart at the ends so you could get it under a person and pick them up.

"Leave it attached," Fred said, "just extend it a notch. We'll roll her on it." I was learning that the thing that bothered me the most in this job was not the broken bones, the stinks and smells or the people who gamed the system; it was simply the grimace of pain on people’s faces. This woman was not a wuss like some of our patients, whining and faking their pain. I could tell when we rolled her on the scoop she was hurting in a quiet desperate way. She wasn't comfortable on the cold steel, and we had to rock her some to get the straps in place because her girth hung off both sides of the scoop.

"Mercy," she whispered.

"I'm sorry for your pain," I said.

I thought about suggesting to Fred that we call for a medic, who carried morphine and could medicate her before we moved her to dull her pain, as I had seen Tom Higgins do on the one day I worked with a medic, staying late after my crew change because his partner had wrenched his back. But I didn't suggest it because I knew Fred saw it as a mark of weakness to have to call for help, even though we didn't carry the drugs like the medic cars did. Fred believed as long as you could get the patient to the hospital without their dying, you didn’t need to bother a medic; most of whom he said didn't like to be bothered.

Fred and I were still the best of friends and we had a ball together on the road and I was grateful for everything he showed me, but I sensed we had a different outlook on some things about the job. He had told me I was too new to speak up, so I always went along. Like Fred said, the street was different than the classroom.

That afternoon, we got called up the hill to the Capitol Building. No sooner were we dispatched when we heard the supervisor’s fly car sign on.

“Possible VIP call,” Fred said. “Be prepared to see some shit sniffing.” We were escorted into the building with its marble floors and high church like ceilings. The Capitol Police led us onto the floor of the Senate chamber, where we found another large aged woman sitting in a chair, surrounded by people in suits and other uniformed officers, who treated her in a deferential way. I got that she was one of the senators, and one of the higher ranking ones.

Just then Ned Martinson, our chief paramedic and Bob Falcone, the operations manager showed up. "I'll handle this one," Ned said to Fred. Ned was close to forty, a bald man with a red face of someone with high blood pressure. He wore the white supervisor shirt with the gold badge, instead of the navy blue shirts with the silver badge the rest of us road warriors wore. He knelt down by the woman, and talking gently, inspected her from head to toe. "I think you fractured your hip," he said.

"Oh dear, that's the last thing I need." She managed a laugh despite her grimace. "Will I be back to vote tonight?"

"You're going to need an x-ray to confirm, but I suspect you'll be spending the night at the hospital."

"Oh damn, you don't have anything for the pain, do you?"

"Are you allergic to any medicine?"

"Yeah, the Democrat's kind," she said.

And everyone laughed.

She got ten milligrams of morphine before we loaded her, and Ned rode in the back with her, while I followed behind in his fly car.

At the hospital, she went right into room one. They had to pull out the old man who was in there and put him in the hallway. Three doctors went in and the President of the hospital came down to say hello.

“It’s all about who you know,” Fred said, as I made up the stretcher, and then wheeled it back down the hall past the long line of patients on stretchers.

***

"Timmy and I took care of her," Fred told our assembled crowd at the bar that night, as the news flashed a picture of the Legislative Leader. "She was feeling no pain. She was so high, I asked her if she was going to declare today State EMT Day, she said, hell she'd declare it state EMT week. I should have slipped her a bill to sign pushing last call back an hour. I got a powerful thirst tonight. Mary Beth, another picture over here for my friends."

Just then I saw one of the girls who occasionally sat with us looking at me. She was a little on the heavy side, but she had a pretty smile, thick black hair in a page boy cut, and well, a chest that drew notice. I had the presence of mind and enough beer in me to smile back, and toss a daring wink at her, and I thought I saw her smile and blush, though she turned to talk to the girl next to her.

"You ought to ask her out," Mindy whispered to me. "Her name's Carrie. She’s breaking up with her boyfriend."

She left before I got the nerve, but I did notice her glancing back at me.

I hope it was not just the beer emboldening my imagination. I hoped through its haze there was actual possibility for me.

I felt my world changing.

***

Chapters Six to Ten

Chapters Six to Nine

2006-01-24T05:32:00.000-08:00

Chapter Six

I knew pretty early on that I was going to have some problems with Fred as a partner. What I liked best about the job – aside from firing up the lights and sirens and parting the traffic like Moses himself – was when I would come into a house and find a sick person there in need of help, and see them look up at me like they were seeing an angel. I felt needed. I was there to help -- no matter who they were of what had happened to them. There was an instant connection between me and the patient that had nothing to do with anything either of us may have done in our lives. It didn’t matter who we were, where we were from, or how we felt about anything. We were bonded by the simple need for help and by the basic human desire to help. Then Fred would go and make some rude comment like, “Did you call your Doctor?”

Now I know a frustrating part of the job was that too many people used us as a taxi ride to the ER whenever they had a sniffle instead of making an appointment and taking a cab to their private doctor if they had one, which many didn’t. But why embarrass a sick old grandmother in front of her family, particularly one who feels awful and is vomiting up her breakfast. Fred seemed to get off on an EMT power trip like he had some kind of authority over these people. I did not like watching as he made an old woman walk or wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom if she needed too. “You called 911. Let’s go. We came here lights and sirens. You have an emergency, you’re going now. You’re not the only sick person in town. There’s people getting shot, having strokes, heart attacks, cars wrecking, even babies not breathing. They call for an ambulance. Sorry, Charlie. They’re all busy. We go now or we don’t go at all. Make up your mind. Capice? Now let’s go. Chop chop.” I guess I was more in the “Why make it harder on someone than it is?” camp than in the “Bust them because you can” modus of operation. Still I kept my mouth shut because I was the newbie. Kept it zipped.

“483, Pig’s Eye pub, on a one for the unconscious.”

“Someone had too much beer,” Fred said, “Let’s hope it’s a frauline.”

Fred got his wish. We were led to the ladies room where we found a young woman passed out in a stall. I recognized the red hair and the lime green dress. It was the girl I’d driven home in my cab that night. She’d puked a fair amount, and her freckled face was pale, cool and wet, but I thought she was still pretty. She moaned as we picked her up. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. If she was a dancer, even I could have lifted her above my head by myself and twirled her around though I suppose in her present state she wouldn’t have appreciated it. I caught Fred taking a glance up her dress as we moved her to the stretcher. He raised an eyebrow at me.

We wheeled her through the crowded bar with all the people drinking with the music blaring, and not one person coming up and claiming to be her friend.

“Mind if I tech this one?” Fred asked, as I lifted the stretcher wheels up and he pushed the stretcher into the back. We were supposed to alternate and it was my turn to be up.

I jumped in. “It’s my tech,” I said.

“Your tech? What kind of gratitude is that? After all I’ve done for you,” he said, and then added, “Check her out good. She ain’t wearing panties.”

I ignored him.

“Like they say in EMT class,” he said. “You’ve got to expose. Check for injuries. Be a good EMT now.” And he shut the back door leaving me alone with her.

She was out cold, her head on the pillow, moaning softly. She didn’t resist as I took her arm and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around it.

“I’ll take a few spins around the block,” Fred called. “I’ll try not to get to the hospital too soon.”

Her vital signs were all fine – she was just drunk. I moved her into what they call the Sims’ position on her side in case she vomited. She didn’t even seem to know I was moving her. I sat there on the bench looking at the poor girl. I tried to imagine myself as her boyfriend, watching her sleep at night, wishing I could curl next to her, her back into my chest, as I kissed her behind the ear and told her things would be all right, told her that she’d feel better in the morning. Of course I would have made her drink water and take Tylenol before helping into bed.

I had to dig through her purse to get her ID. I wrote down her name. Sarah, along with her address. I admit I did look through her pocket book some. She had twenty dollars and two credit cards, an ID from Glastonbury High School, a library card, her license, a fake ID that said she was twenty-one, a small pack of Big Red gum, several things of lipstick and other makeup type stuff. There was some crumbed napkins with names and phone numbers on them. I thought about taking out those napkins and replacing them with one with my name written down on it along with my number. Maybe she’d find it and call me sometime. It’d be nice just to hear her voice on my answering machine. For a moment I fingered her little vial of perfume. I opened it up and smelled it. I thought about taking it, and keeping it by my bedside. But then I thought that would be sort of the thing a pervert might do, so I put it back, feeling guilty for having invaded her privacy.

“How’s her titties?” Fred called back.

“Real nice,” I said. “First rate.”

I wouldn’t have minded seeing them, but not that way.

After the call Fred asked me for all the details of what she looked like.

I gave him a line of bull, which caused him to cackle, and slap me on the shoulder. “You owe me good,” he said.

I admit to being depressed about it. If she had hooked up with me, she’d never be passed out alone in some ladies lavatory. We’d have spent the evening in the style. A nice dinner, wine, maybe I’d pay for the violin guys to come around and play for her. We could have a flaming desert, and go for a nice walk afterwards. She wouldn’t even have to let me kiss her. She’d say, “You’re different from the other guys I’ve known.” And she’d ask to see me again. I could close my eyes and hear her say that just like it was real.

“I knew she’d have nice titties,” Fred said, still cackling. “I should have come in back and gotten a look.”

At least he was in a decent mood, as at times he was subject to fits of rage. If he thought someone was fucking with him he got right in their face, and so I avoided upsetting him if I could, as I didn’t like confrontation and he’d gotten big enough in the gym that any battle between him and me wouldn’t have been pretty. They even suspended him for a week for throwing a fellow employee up against the wall when he thought the guy had called him an ass when the poor guy in fact hadn’t even been talking about Fred. He would have gotten fired, except he was a good employee in the sense that he showed up to work and put his butt in the seat for twelve or more hours a day most days of the week.

I enjoyed working with other people in his absence. EMTs like Faith Creer and Eddie Bozigalup made me feel much better about the work, made me believe you could actually see it as a profession. They didn’t bitch, they didn’t complain; they treated people with respect. I wanted to be more like them. I needed a new partner and role model.

Chapter Seven

I hadn't been there two months when Tom Higgins approached me about being his partner. "Herb's out permanently with his back," he said, "I could use someone with a cool head who knows his way around, and doesn't talk too much," he said. "Looking at you, I didn't think you'd be a good lift, but you look like you're putting some muscle on. I've heard no complaints about you."

I jumped at the chance to work with him. While I told him, I'd have to check with Fred first, which was a commonly recognized courtesy, I was excited, and Fred told me to go for it. I think he was aware of the occasional tension between us, and was looking forward to a break from me. Besides he had his eye on another new hire -- a plump pretty girl named Terry, who every time we saw her, he told me how much he would like to poke her.

Working with a medic meant, I'd tech the bullshit calls, the medic would do all the serious ones. I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the medicine side of the job. As a basic EMT, all I could really do was put the patient on oxygen and hope my partner drove like hell to the hospital if a medic wasn't available. Working with a medic, you actually saw drugs being given. The patient would get put on the heart monitor, Tom would do an intravenous, through which he could give drugs which he carried in a hard black suitcase called a Biotech. If the patient wasn't breathing, or was having a very hard time, he could put a breathing tube down their throat. All of these required a smart partner to assist him. I wanted to be that -- a good partner.

We got a call for abdominal pain. Eighteen-year old girl. Fat, two hundred twenty pounds. Meets us at the door. Now we get lots of BS calls. People calling the ambulance for a tooth ache, calling for a runny nose, calling cause they cut their finger and need a Band-Aid. People call because they don't know better or they do, but they call because they use the ER as their private doctor and they know if they call 911, they'll get a free ride courtesy of their state card, and the ride will come within a couple minutes. Freddy, as I’ve said, liked to give people shit. You called an ambulance for this? Do you know how much it costs the state to transport you? My fucking tax dollars. Blah, blah, blah. Tom, on the other, except on rare days, had had learned it wasn't worth getting worked up about. Now I would not consider him to be a man of great compassion – he was as cynical as the next guy, but he was after a number of years on the job, a realist. "Give me the choice between a bullshit, walk'em out to the rig, sit them on the bench, drive to the ER, and walk them into the waiting room versus a third floor carry down, rectal bleed, vomiting blood, three hundred pound person who codes on you half way down, I'll take the BS call," Tom said. "I mean, I get paid by the hour, not by the pound or by the number of times I stick them with needles."

Tom sees the girl, and just says, "What hospital?"

"Saint Francis."

He says to me, "She's all yours."

We walk her out to the ambulance, she steps up in back as I say "watch your head, and "be careful," then I get in next to her, and grab the BP cuff. Tom is already driving to the hospital. At first I used to get annoyed that he didn't even wait for me to take the blood pressure before he started, but over time, it forced me to get better at taking pressures, preparing me for real life situations when hopefully one day as a Medic, I'd be taking pressures on critical patients, while going down the road, hurtling over the bumps and potholes at seventy miles an hour.

"Tell me about the pain you're having?" I asked.

"It’s real crampy," she said. "It comes and goes, but it’s been coming quicker and lasting longer."

"Cramps?" I said.

She nodded.

"When did you have your last period?"

"It hasn't come for awhile."

"Are you having a cramp right now?"

She nodded. "It feel like I've gotta go to the bathroom. I think I just wet myself."

There was a dark wet splotch growing around her groin, and it didn't smell like pee or shit.

"Tom!" I called.

"What?"

"Get back here."

"I thought you had it."

"Oh, I think she's having a baby," I said.

"Oh, Christ!"

He pulled over and joined me in the back. I had already moved her from the bench to the stretcher, and after covering her with a blanket, with her help, started pulling down her pants.

Tom and I looked and there was a head coming out from between her legs.

"When's your due date?" Tom asked.

"Due date? I don't owe any money."

"Due date. You're pregnant. You'd didn't know that?"

She looked like she didn't understand.

"You're having a baby!" Tom shouted at her.

"That can't be. My boyfriend said not to worry."

"Well, I've got news for you, he was wrong."

Tom, who'd gloved up, delivered the head, then the shoulder. I stood there, useless as tits on a bull. What a sight it was. A crying baby boy born out of between the legs of that teenage fat girl. She didn't even know she was pregnant, but when Tom put the baby on her breast, she looked at that infant with a smile of wonder like I believe Mary must have looked at baby Jesus. Tom let me cut the chord, my hand was shaking. I even had tears in my eyes. "Just cut it already," he said.

He made sure the baby was kept warm. He wrapped the baby up in towels and taped them together so the baby looked like he was in a papoose. He told me to drive the rest of the way, while he made certain everything was fine with the mother and child. At the hospital, when I went around back to pull the stretcher, Tom was telling her, “You have to name the baby Thomas Timothy in honor of the two of us. It’s the law you have to name the baby after the paramedics if you delivered in an ambulance. It’s also good luck. You can call him Tommy Tim for short."

"Okay," she said, "But he look just like Shariq."

"Too bad for Shariq," Tom said.

But she didn't hear him. She was looking in the baby's eyes like there was a magnetic field between the baby's eyes and hers.

Two weeks later we got called for an unknown. The mother found a newborn baby in the toilet. Tom did CPR on the baby and breathed in its mouth as he carried him down to the ambulance. He passed a breathing tube into the baby's mouth, and turned that blue baby nearly pink. Another girl who didn't know she was pregnant.

"They either need to improve the schools around here, which they do, or else God is in this city and working in mysterious ways. If he is going to be knocking these chicks up, he's got to tell them they're carrying a child, not just getting fat from too many Big Macs," he said.

I certainly was getting a view of life -- the view of seeing the rich and seeing the poor as just people, people who had to deal with their bodies failing them, people who would all one day die. That was the great equalizer.

One evening I even went to the top of City Place where coat and tie security men led us to the office of a powerful man who’d lost his bowels sitting at his mahogany desk looking out over the lit up city. I saw his shame and fear; but I did not mock him. Millionaire or pauper, I treated everyone the same. I laid a fresh sheet on the stretcher, put the oxygen on his pale face, patted his clammy hand, and told him not to worry. When we got down stairs, we paused before we wheeled the stretcher out into the wet street where 452 idled, the red and white lights reflecting in the dark street puddles and the glass of the building across the street. I pulled the wool blanket up to the man’s neck, draped a white towel over his head and tucked it under his chin like it was Mother Teresa herself I was protecting from the rain. And I drove smooth and steady over the city worn streets, while Tom did his job in the back, giving the man IV fluids, medicine and attaching him to the monitor to check his beating heart.

Chapter Eight

“I can’t believe how you’ve changed,” my mother said. “You seem like a grown man and it’s been a while since we’ve had one of those in this house. I’m not even sure we did when your father was here. You know you are welcome to move back in. Mr. Thompson had a stroke you know.”

“I know. I heard that. But that’s okay. I like where I’m at.”

“You just don’t want me to meet your girlfriends.”

“You are so astute,” I said.

“I knew it. Are you using a condom because…”

“Mom, I’m not seeing anyone right now. I’m just working a lot.”

“You’d bring your girl to meet me, wouldn’t you? You’re not embarrassed of me?”

“No, now why would you say that? Of course, I’d bring her here.”

“And we’d have Sunday dinner together. That will be so nice.”

I did not want to move back. I had dreams of moving into an apartment of my own. I hoped in another year to be done paying on the garage -- even though old Man Thompson was in a nursing home, his daughter was monitoring my payments. An apartment and a car -- small things to some people, but to me they were stepping stones, out of my immediate reach, but clearly someday attainable.

I had decided that the way to get ahead was to focus and work toward those goals with steadfastness. Paying off my debt, an apartment, a car with a nice stereo, maybe go to medic school, and of course the one that consumed me the most, find a good woman, get a home, have a family of my own.

Three mornings a week, I worked out in the backyard of my boarding house, lifting cinderblocks. Ben had given me some routines I could do: presses, curls, squats, step-ups onto the picnic table. I liked walking around in sleeveless tee-shirts when I was off duty. For the first time in my life, I had muscle definition. I liked posing for myself in the mirror. I began to believe that I might be attractive to women. I had seen that girl Carrie a few more times at the bar, and while I still had not spoken to her, I knew that one day I would, but I needed to be careful. I didn’t want to appear desperate. I had faith my opportunity would arise.

“Dude, you’re looking okay,” Fred said, “But if you really want to get pumped up, I’ve got the shit for you.” He showed me a little vial. “Deca-durbolin. I inject twice a week. Man it gives you monster workouts. Check out my guns.” His arms were massive with veins bulging out of them like ropes. I didn’t say anything but his head was bigger than it had been. It looked almost swollen.

“I’m not injecting myself with anything, I don’t like needles.”

“It’s not just the muscles, but the sex drive. I’ve got three broads I’m doing now, and a waiting list. I’m telling you this shit pumps you up.”

I didn’t say anything to Fred, but I had read about that stuff, and while I heard it could increase your sex drive, in the end it caused you to grow breasts and made your nuts shrink. I wasn’t that desperate -- at least, not yet. I had faith in my own plan.

I got up every morning, and if it wasn’t a day to lift weights, I ran. That’s right I ran. I started out going maybe 150 yards, worked it up to a half mile, and before I knew it I was running three miles a day. I was eating well, and I was working all the time. My existence was like that of a soldier. Sleep, exercise, work, and occasionally drink lots of beer with the guys.

Chapter Nine

I loved my new job. I was working 90-100 hours a week. I couldn’t get enough of it. It was like being on Cops or one of those TV trauma shows. I saw some weird fucking shit.

A woman in a dress passed out in a hotel, who turned out to be a man. I did that call on my last day with Fred and I think the encounter permanently damaged his psyche. He was doing one of his full body surveys, when all of a sudden he jumped back like he’d stuck his hand in an electric socket. I made him give me ten bucks to tech the call because it was his turn, but he wanted no part of the she-man. “That’s fucked up,” he kept saying all day at odd times. “That’s fucked up.”

You never knew what your day held for you or what you would discover next. Nothing was as it seemed. You can hold no assumptions about the world. We went to a group home for a patient with a UTI. It was a 57- year old woman with a famous last name – a name of a prominent political family. She had no history other than suffering a bout of scarlet fever as a child, and coming out of her coma with the mind of a twelve year old girl who would never grow older. Her mental development frozen in time. She was a delightful conversationalist in the way that twelve year olds are, and I was able to get from her the story of how she came to be in that home, while her family members partied on exclusive islands, promoted liberal social agendas, yet hadn’t been to visit her for years. “They are very busy important people,” she said without a hint of irony. The same day I responded to the house of notorious scoundrel, a man who had defrauded thousands of area people in a stock scam, and was soon for prison. We found him calming his handicapped son, a boy with Down’s Syndrome, who had fallen and broken his leg, the bone breaking through the skin. I will never forget that way he rubbed the boy’s hair, and whispered in his ear, calming the pain he had to be feeling long enough until Tom could give him some morphine.

Appearances could fool you. I went into hole-in the wall restaurants whose kitchens were as immaculate as if they had scrubbed the floor with toothbrushes, and went into the kitchen of trendy restaurants where people waiting in line to get in, but where after seeing the caked grease on the walls and watching the roaches skitter across the floor, as we treated a cook who had fallen and injured his shoulder, I would not send my dog in there to eat.

I saw lots of gross stuff. I had thought Fred was making some shit up when I listened to his stories before I had put the uniform on myself, but having been out there I could only say, you couldn’t make the shit up. I saw maggots growing out of people’s heads, a man chopped up by an mechanical hole driller, and turned into hamburger, I saw another man cut completely in half in an industrial accident. You learned there was good ways to go and bad ways, and all I could say was take me in the night while I sleep, but not in a fire, but if it is in a fire, let the smoke kill me before the flames touch my skin. If hell was a real place and sometimes I thought it was, if there was fire there and people knew what that would be like and that it would burn them, we would have no problems here on earth. There would be no need for police officers. And I would have no story to tell.

The worst thing I saw a police officer later told me was called anthropophagi. You could look it up in the dictionary, or wait a moment and figure it out for yourself from what I will tell you. The story comes in two parts. Part one, we are called for weakness. It is a nice house in a middle class neighborhood in a suburban town. The door to the house is locked, but with the dispatcher communicating with the caller over the phone we learn there is a key under a flower pot outside the front porch. “The key under the flower pot routine,” I say to Tom. “I should have thought that. Forgive me.”

“Don’t let it happen again,” he said, and cuffed me on the back of the head.

We open the door and are met by two dogs, a tiny white poodle and a larger mixed breed. They bark, then turn and head down the hall, just as we hear a female voice from the end of the hallway, say, “I’m down here.”

The house is dirty and with the empty feel of someone who has moved out, but not cleaned up yet. There is missing furniture, partially filled boxes, take out cartons of Chinese food and pizza boxes on the table in front of the TV, some beers cans, cigarette butts overflowing their trays. The carpets smell of urine.

She is lying on a mattress on the floor. A skinny woman maybe in her mid thirties with long blonde hair and the most beautiful blue eyes, eyes that grab you even though she is skanky, eyes that make you see the beautiful woman she was once. You could imagine her younger at a bar or a party on the arm of some charismatic bad boy who no doubt led her down a wrong path, and then left her. “My back hurts and I can’t get out of bed,” she says. “I’m out of my pain meds. I need to go to the hospital. I can’t take it anymore.”

I can see the track marks on her arms. She is just wearing a thong and a loose armless tee-shirt. I can see Tom despite himself, is checking her body out. I am too. I guess if I was a skanked out heroin addict, I could see myself spending the afternoon shooting up with her.

We help her up on to the stretcher, and get her bundled up.

“You have someone to take care of the dogs?” Tom asks.

“No, I just got rid of my boyfriend,” she says. “I’m all alone. I haven’t fed them for a couple days, but as soon as I get my meds, I’ll get to the store and take care of that. Maybe you could check their water bowls for me?”

Tom filled their bowls and teched the call, even though he didn’t do any ALS. I wondered if it was just her eyes or if maybe he was dog enough to be angling for something else. Tom had more women than I could imagine, but it seemed he was never satisfied.

“She was a skank,” he said, “when we cleared the hospital. “A drug seeking skank.”

“Is that why you teched the call?”

“She’s got the virus,” he said.

“There went your dinner date.”

“Ha ha. I was just protecting you in case she offered to service you for a ten spot. I know it’s been awhile since you’ve had it, and she had that desperateness in her eyes.”

I never pretended Tom was my friend, but I looked up to him, and it hurt when he ranked on me. Other people I didn’t mind.”

“I know you’re not like your pal Fred,” he said, “But I can’t be too sure. Better safe than sorry.”

I just looked out the window. Was I that desperate for companionship that it showed so clearly?

A week later we were called to the same house on a welfare check. We didn’t realize it was the same house until we found ourselves standing at the doorway with a police officer, unable to get in. He was calling back the dispatcher for information about how to get in when I announced, “The keys under the flowerpot.” I lifted the pot up and produced the key. The cop was impressed.

“He’s clairvoyant,” Tom said.

“Well, Mr. Kreskin, what are we going to find inside?” the officer asked as I turned the key in the door.

I looked down and saw the little white poodle with a splotch of red on his cheek.

“Nothing good,” I said, and then the smell hit us.

The floor was littered with dog shit. We stepped gingerly as we went slowly through the house looking for the source of the odor, which we knew too well was a decomposing body. Suddenly down the hall I had a quick glimpse of big dog darting past – almost like a wolf in a scary movie. There one moment, then next gone.

“She’s down there,” I said. “Pointing to the end of the hall. “That’s where she was when we were here before.”

I followed the officer down. He had his hand just a few inches from his holster. I have to say there was a good deal of suspense as we tiptoed down that hall like we were trying to sneak up on death itself, which we were, although it, as always, had a surprise for us.

The officer swore, and then turned and left the room retching. I stood in the doorway and stared. Tom who despite being an absolutely top of the line medic, had a weak stomach when it came to dead bodies. He usually let me handle the presumptions, relaying on me to alert him to the borderline calls. There was nothing borderline about this call. The woman wasn’t just dead. She looked like a character from Raiders of the Lost Arc. Her head was a skeleton. It looked just like one of those bony skeletons that used to hang in the classroom. Where her pretty eyes had once been there was nothing. Her face had been eaten off so much that the back of her head had fallen away like a ripped bag. You could see tufts of her long hair scattered about the room. I imagined the dogs ripping the hair off her head.

The officer stood beside me now. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You think there’s foul play in this?”

“More like canine play,” I said. “I think they just hadn’t been fed for awhile. She was a junkie. We’ve picked her up before. She probably shot up and died, and they were just trying to get her up so she could get them some food. That’s why they pulled her hair off. I guess they were just really hungry and she was the only food they could get. “

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“Of course, I suppose it could be a crime. It wouldn’t have been a burglar because there’s nothing to steal here. Maybe her ex-boyfriend came back, strangled her, and smeared puppy chow on her face.”

“You’re sick,” he said.

“She had the most beautiful eyes,” I said, remembering, and I thought about them now, rolling around inside one of those dog’s stomachs, and I confess I felt a little nauseous myself.

Tom gave me the monitor and let me run a strip for him. I found her name on a state welfare envelope. While we wrote up the paperwork, a couple other officers and animal control had arrived. They were trying to corral the dogs. The little dog they already had in a small cage. The big dog was more of a problem. The animal control officer held a pole with a noose around the end. The police officer, his hand shaking, held out a dog biscuit.

The dog growled, showing his teeth.

He didn’t appear interested in the biscuit.

For a long time afterwards I wondered what the woman of the house was thinking as she looked down on what had happened or looked up from the hot seats. Would she be horrified? Watching as her loved pets ripped her face apart? Or would she have some empathy for them, understanding that they had done what they had done to fill a basic need – the need to survive, and maybe even being glad that she had been able to keep them alive in their days alone in the wilderness that house had become. I like to think that she was in place where she knew no pain, where her face showed no sign of the hardships of her life, and that there was mercy in her beautiful eyes.

Chapters Eleven to Fifteen

Chapters Eleven to Fifteen

2006-01-24T04:40:00.000-08:00

Chapter Eleven

"Tell'em about your call," Freddy says, "The one you did with Tom Hutchins."

And everyone around the table looked at me. I looked at Fred, stunned that he was asking me to speak.

"Go, on," he said. "You were the stud. Tell it."

"Okay, I guess," I knew I was blushing, but I saw people looking at me now with interest, plus the girl, whose name I learned was Carrie, was sitting there with her girl friends, and I saw the way she was looking at me like she really was interested, or curious at least to hear me."

"Not much to tell," I said. "Me and Tom, my partner were driving down Collins Street in 453 after leaving Saint Fran. I saw something that didn't look right, so I said, "Hold it a minute. Shit," I said, “There's smoke coming out of the window. The building's on fire.” Tom called it in on the radio and I got out and started shouting at people to get out of the building. The front door was open so I ran in went up and down the halls banging on doors, shouting "Get out, get out, the buildings on fire.” I went upstairs, and that's where it was smoky. I'd been in the building before, so I knew how the hall hooked to the right once you got on the second floor. I was just shouting and banging, and people were yelling back, but once they heard what I was saying, they all came out, and went out and got in the front yard. I helped one lady with her kids, and when we got outside the fire was just pulling up, and I looked up and I could see flames flying off the roof."

"Flying," Fred said, "the place was completely engulfed. I was there by then and I saw him come out of the holding that little girl. You're one crazy fucking dude, I'll tell you to go charging up the second floor of a building smoking like that. He saved that family's life, not to mention everybody else in the building, a bunch of fucking drugged out, liquored up lazy ass welfare families, but still he saved their lives. I won't be surprised if he gets a medal, for it. You done well there. And I take full credit for bringing you into the trade. Raise our glasses. Tim, my brother, you're the man tonight!"

They raised their glasses and toasted me, and said kind things, and I didn't tell anyone of them that immediately after I had hidden in the back of the ambulance and cried because I had been scared, running through that building with the smoke suddenly so thick, I could hardly see my feet, and it got so fucking hot in there, and hearing the woman cry, and banging into her, and feeling the girl, and lifting her up into my arms, and being so thankful to see the stairs again, and making it back out alive, watching the mother crying as she took the girl from me and held her. I knew I never would have done it if I had known what it would have been like. I had only done it because I hadn’t know better. My heroism was, in fact, a fraud.

A little while later, when the news came on, it was the lead story. "Firefighters rescue city dwellers as building burns. Four Hartford families were lucky to be alive tonight as emergency personnel's quick response helped evacuate the building..." And a TV news crew happened to be driving by as well, and they filmed me coming out with the girl in my arms, looking dazed.

A cheer went up and they saluted me again.

Later, Carrie came over and introduced herself to me, asking if she could sit down next to me. "My name's Carrie," she said.

"I know, I've seen you around. I'm Tim."

"I know you said. What you did was great."

"I just happened to be driving by. I didn't know it was going to go up so fast, I don't know if I'd have gone in there."

"They're lucky you did."

"It worked out, I guess."

We talked some small talk. She said she worked as a secretary in a real estate firm in Windsor Locks. She was a year older than me, and said she had just broken up from her boyfriend, and wasn't seeing anyone, just hanging out with her girlfriends.

"Would you like to go out sometime?" I impressed with my ability to keep cool, while my heart was racing.

"A date?"

"Well, yeah," I said.

"Sure." And she gave me her number.

When she left with her friends, she turned back and waved. I waved back.

"You are the man," Fred said, having watched it all.

"She likes to put out, too," Mindy say.

"You are in luck," Fred said.

That night I slept with her number pressed against my heart.

Chapter Twelve

The next Friday -- the day of our date -- I came in early and worked a transfer car for eight hours so I could get off by three in the afternoon.

"What's the big occasion?" Ned Martinson said when I handed him the keys and radio for 462. "It’s not like you to get off early."

"Check please?" I said, holding out my hand.

He sat at his desk, and flipped through the stack of payroll checks. "Rumor has it that you actually have a date."

I wasn't commenting. "Da me, por favor," I said, when I saw him pull my check out.

"Let me give you some advice," he said. "Women will do you in in the end. Enjoy it while it lasts."

I snatched the check from his hand. "I intend too," I said.

"Good luck, just be sure you're on time tomorrow."

I took the check straight to the bank, and instead of depositing any of it, I asked for it all in cash. The teller counted out seven hundred dollars, fifty seven cents.

My first stop was the Tuxedo Store off Sisson Avenue, where I had already measured and fitted for a black tuxedo, cummerbund, bow tie and cufflinks. At first they had tried to sell me the certain latest style they were pushing, but I said I wanted to look just like Dean Martin, and it cost me more, but I wanted to do it up right. The old Italian guy at the store got a kick out of that. "Say hi to Sammy and Frank," he called after I'd paid out the eighty nine bucks, and took the wrapped tuxedo off the hanger, and the box of shoes under my arm. "Don't forget to bring it back before your turn into a pumpkin." I just smiled and nodded. I heard him say to his wife, "That boy a gotta class,"

I went to the florist and paid $45 for the white orchid corsage I had them specially make at the florist's suggestion. "This is a classy girl," I told her, "I want something beautiful, but not overbearing, something that she'll tell her friends about and her mother, and they'll think wow, what a thoughtful, sweet guy."

"I have just the thing," the florist said. "A white orchid."

I had never been to a prom. I know that had disappointed my mother, so I called and told her I had a date, and could she help me get ready, make certain I had everything in order. She had the Polaroid out again. "When are you going to introduce me to her?" she asked. "She could come over for dinner on Sunday."

"Not yet, Mom, I don't want to scare her away."

"Are you embarrassed about me?"

"No, no, It’s just this is our first date. Eventually, sure, but I don't want to rush anything."

"I'll do that meatloaf, and make a chocolate pie, and if she doesn't like dogs, we'll just lock them up in the backyard. You look so handsome, I know I say that all the time, but you are and I'm so proud of you."

"He looks like a freak," my sister said.

"He does not."

"Watch it," I said, "I'll freak your butt all the way up to your room."

"I'm scared."

"You know I wouldn't hurt you, unless you really pissed me off."

She laughed. "You do look okay, just strange seeing you in a suit. Where are you taking her McDonald's?"

"Carbones," I said.

"Carbones," My mother said, "I've always wanted to go there. The food and the service. That's classy."

"I figure go first class or don't go at all."

I looked at the clock. It was seven. On cue, I heard a knock on the door, and it was an older gentleman in a tuxedo as well. My limo.

"I've got to run, mom."

"Are you forgetting something?"

"Your slot money. I'm still going to give you that on Sunday."

"No, no, a kiss for your mom."

But of course, and I gave her a quick twirl like she was a dancing girl, and kissed her on the cheek. "Wish me luck."

"What kind of luck, do you mean?"

"Don't worry, I will be a gentleman."

She's going to think your rich, you have to have protection."

"Please."

"I just worry. I know what young women are like, I was one."

On the limo ride over to Carrie's house, I thought maybe I should have covered that angle. I laid out everything I might need, and I never even thought about condoms. No, I wasn't expecting that anyway, not on the first date. I didn't want her to get the wrong idea about my intentions anyway. That would come in time, when she was ready.

The limo was great. I had wanted a stretch, but then I thought that would be ostentatious not to mention, more per hour, as it was the three hour rental was going to cost nearly $300 bucks with the tip thrown in.

I directed the driver to the address she had given me, a condominium complex in Bloomfield, where she rented a room in her friend's condo.

I had told her to dress up, but I think she was overwhelmed at my tuxedo. She stood there with her mouth open, "My god, look at you."

I smiled and pinned the corsage on her red dress. "Nothing but the best for you," I said. "I'm taking you out."

She looked pretty good herself. She wore a strapless dress that showed a fair amount of cleavage, and her perfume enriched my nostrils that had too rarely smelled such scent in the circumstances of a date.

The limo driver, held the door for us, and Carrie was incredulous at it all. I had a bottle of champagne on ice in the back, and we drank it on the ride, with the sky roof open, though with all the city lights you couldn't see any stars.

"What do you know someone who works for the limo company?" she asked.

"Don't you worry, about the arrangements, I just want you to have a good time, a toast to a beautiful woman and to the evening. Here's to being young and alive."

And we clinked glasses and drank, and with each growing moment, I saw her begin to look at me in a way no woman had ever looked at me before, like I was a man with real class.

At Carbone’s they gave us a booth near the kitchen, and I ordered steak Diane for us, which they prepared enflambe at tableside. And as we ate and drank our wine, she opened up to me about her life. She told me that night she had been engaged to a police officer, who had broken it off a month before the wedding.

"His mistake," I said.

She cried some, but said it was good to be back dating.

"I'm surprised you didn't have a line of gentlemen callers at your door."

She nearly spit her wine out. "There's always guys who will fuck you," she said, "but guys who want a relationship is a different story."

"It’s a shame," I said. "They'd be crazy not to see you for more than that."

"It just hasn't been my luck."

I raised my glass and clinked with her as I said, "Well, here’s to your luck changing."

For desert we had another flamish dish, bananas jubilee. The preparer set the flame so high for a moment, I thought it would hit the sprinkler and douse all of us, but we made it. I spooned some of the desert and Carrie ate it from my spoon. I paid the bill by laying two one hundred dollar bills on the waiter's bill holder without even checking to see the price. I had in fact earlier, added up what it would cost so I knew with tip, the two hundred would take care of it.

"What do you own a diamond mine?"

"No, I just believe in enjoying life, some things are worth spending money on more than others."

She sat close to me on the limo ride home, and rested her head on my shoulders. I walked her to the door, and I was set to just kiss her good night, when she looked back at the limo driver, and said, "Are you going to send him home?"

"Huh?"

She reached for the back of my head and moved my head toward her, and I felt her tongue in my mouth. She kissed me hard and long, and then said, “Send him home. I'm just going to use the bathroom a moment.”

I walked back out to the curb, my hand shaking as I gave the driver the last of my money, three hundred and fifty bucks. He winked at me, and cracked his first smile of the evening. Instead of a handshake he offered me his closed fist to bump. “You the man,” he said, before peeling off.

When I came back in the house and walked through the door she had left open for me, I stood in the living room, hands in my pockets. I tell you I was nervous. My legs were shaking. I could hear her in the bathroom. I started to sweat.

She came out in a nightgown, and nodded for me to follow her. We went down the hall to her bedroom, where there was a queen-size bed with a jungle colored bedspread, a mirror on the ceiling and posters on the wall of male underwear models. “You don’t have any pot, do you?” She asked, as she reached for my bow tie.

“No, no I don’t,” I said. “Not on me.”

“That’s all right. I just enjoy it sometimes, but I’m feeling all right as it is.”

“Me, too.”

She untied my bow tie, unbuttoned my shirt, then pulled the tie on her bathrobe, and took my hands and brought them up to the breasts that were now revealed to me. My heavens, I thought. I knew then for sure I was going to get some.

What can I say? She was a wildcat, and I more than held my own. I may not have been the smoothest lover, but I knew then that as an old man I would look back on this night, and know that my dick didn’t let me down in my moment of need. We went for hours. There is little in the world as nice as finding yourself suddenly with a woman, who presses her pelvis against you, smothers your face in her breast, and when she kisses you, nearly suffocates you with the passion and force of her desire for you. Oh I was crazy for it all.

I left at three in the morning, and walked the two miles to my apartment. It was quiet; a half moon illuminated the night sky. While I knew that like everyone born, I would one day die on a day not of my choosing, I felt that I had much to live for. It didn't matter that I didn't have a penny left in my wallet. I had the scent of a woman on my skin.

Chapter Thirteen

The first time I stole was a month later. I can tell you I did not walk into that dormitory expecting to embark on a spree of crime. We were called for an overdose. A campus security guard led us into a dorm room where a student sat sobbing with his head in his hands.

“He told me he took a handful of pills and drank a shit load of beers,” his roommate said. “He said he wanted to die.”

“Why did you call?” the student said angrily to his roommate, his speech slightly slurred. The student had long hair and wore a tee-shirt that said “Fuck War.” “I just want to be left alone.”

There were posters of rock bands on the wall. U2 and Dave Mathews. I looked at the expensive stereo equipment. Someone was loaded.

“What did you take?” Tom asked.

“I didn’t take anything,” the student said. “I just drank.”

“His prescription bottles are in his bureau,” the roommate said. “He’s on antidepressants. This isn’t the first time he’s tried to kill himself.”

“Go check them out,” Tom said to me.

As the roommate led me into the bedroom, and showed me where the prescriptions were, I heard Tom ask, “Why do you want to off yourself?”

“None of your business. I wish you’d all leave me alone.”

The roommate answered, “His girlfriend broke up with him.”

“Fuck her,” Tom said. “You want to get her back, go fuck someone else, don’t take pills, she’ll think you’re a weenie.”

Tom had his own method.

As I was sorting through the meds, which were in the first dresser drawer – the dresser itself was littered with empty bottles of Corona, I saw several small film canisters in the tray and I opened one. I knew right away it was weed. It was filled to the brim. I glanced over my shoulder, saw I was alone -- the roommate had returned to the main room -- and just like that, I recapped the canister and slid it in my pocket even before my heart started to pound. It was that fast.

What went through my mind? I was thinking about Carrie, and how pleased she would be if I brought her this little gift. She’d lamented how much she liked a smoke, but that she’d been out since she’d broken up with her old boyfriend – the cop.

“How’s it coming in there?’ Tom looked in the bedroom. “What are you finding?”

“Valium, Prozac, Wellbutrin. There’s just a couple valium missing. No empties.”

“Well, one way or another, you’re going to the hospital. You bought yourself a ticket by saying you want to die, bought yourself a charcoal shake.”

I was by now feeling pangs of conscience, and would have returned the vial to its proper place, but two police officers appeared, and Tom was giving them a quick rundown, including showing him the prescription bottles, and saying, “It doesn’t look like he took much, but we’ve got to take him in. Get his sneakers and a jacket, and let get going.”

The roommate was in the room now gathering what Tom had requested, and I was called back in the main room to set the stretcher up.

The roommate rode in the front with me as I drove to the hospital. He kept looking back at Tom and his roommate. Tom was lecturing the guy on how to handle women.
“The way to keep your woman is brute fucking force. I’m not talking about smacking her around, I’m talking about TCB -- taking care of business. Every time – every time you are in the sack with her, you give her everything you got and more. That’s all that matters. You must conqueror her. All this sensitive crap might work at first, but once a woman has had a true man – a champion sire, she is yours at the ring of a bell. You can not call her for a year, then give her a little ringaling and suggest a little get together and she is there. That should be lesson number one in college. Study history. The arms race. The side with the best weapons wins. No surrender. The Gattling gun. Blitzkrieg. The Allied army on D-Day. The H bomb. Desert Storm. Overwhelming power. It’s the American Way. TCB. Taking Care of Business. You might want to look into it. ”

I was glad Tom’s show was keeping the roommate from suddenly remembering that they kept their stash right where my thieving little hands had been.

“Is he always like this?” the roommate asked me.

I nodded.

“I know he’s your partner,” the guy said, “But what a fucking asshole.”

I just shrugged. Who was I judge? Tom may have been a little burned out and full of himself at the same time, but he was entertaining, and at least he wasn’t a fucking thief. And I had to hand it to him—from the way his pager was always ringing -- he seemed to have the ladies at his beck and call.

***

“Why are you so jittery?” Tom asked once we cleared the hospital.

“I’m not jittery.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re the type to try to off yourself if a girl pulls one on you?”

“No.”

“We’ll see.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“How a man acts in adversity is the mark of character. Soon as your squeeze puts the hurt on you we’ll see how you act. You’ll turn into a blubbering fool. You’ve got to be a man and go out and bang someone else before twenty four hours are up.”
“She’s not going to put a hurt on me.”

“She’s not, huh?”

“Nope, not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m a fucking conqueror,” I said. “TCB.”

That cracked him up. “You’re all right. I’ve taught you well. Still…we’ll see.”

***

That night I stood on Carrie’s doorstep, and was thrilled again to be pulled in through the door, and given a deep kiss, and to feel her hand groping for me.
I lightly pushed her away. “I have a surprise for you?’ I said.

“Where is it?”

“In my pocket.”

“I see.”

“It’s not what you think it is.”

“Really, is it better?”

“Well, maybe not better, but you’ll like it.”

I took the film canister out of my front pocket and handed it to her. “Open it up.”

She opened it and raised it to her nose and sniffed.

“Oh, all right! You’re the man,” she said.

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Com’on, let’s fire it up.”

We went into her room, and she took a bong out of her closet. “Where’d you get it?”
“I have my sources.”

“Is it good shit? I could use some good shit.”

“Fair to middling,” I said.

“Let’s hope its better than that, but hey, at least it is what it is.”

She filled the bong with water, put some of the crumpled dope in the holder, put end of the bong around her mouth, her thumb on the hole in back , used her lighter to lit the leaves, then took a deep long inhale that caused the water to bubble as the smoke passed through it, then clouded up the tube. At last she released her thumb and the smoke shot up into her mouth and lungs, she sat back, smiling, holding her breath as her eyes grew large, and then slanted. I was silent as she held it in, held it in, until I sear it looked like it was starting to come out of her eyes, then she started to let it out slow. It streamed out of her nostrils like a bull snorting on a cold morning.

“Good?” I asked.

“Fan-fuckingtastic,” she said. “Let me set you up.” And she handed me the bong.
Now it had been awhile since I had smoked. I’d given it up when I’d decided to be an EMT. I was used to just smoking out of shitty little pipes or poorly rolled joints. I don’t know if it was the bong or my abstinence making me sensitive, but I was floating on the ceiling.

Sex—Sex while high. Oh my goodness. I was in a slow motion movie, a 3-D surround a feel slow motion full length picture. I was in heaven.

When at least our movie reached its climax, and the credits began to roll, instead of nudging into my side and pulling my arm and leg over her laying at my side before falling quickly asleep with her soft gentle snoring, she was back up with the bong, lighting up another mega-hit.

“Good dope, you’ll have to get some more.”

“Anything for you.”

I felt peaceful like I was a benevolent ruler, and everything in that room was my creation. We passed the bong back and forth.

“They ought to make this legal,” Carrie said. “The President and all the world leaders smoked this, we’d have no wars.”

“Maybe they do smoke it and think they can do anything,” I said.

“You have a point. Any rate, I'm glad to have a new connection."

“I’m glad to make the connection.”

“Look at you, you horny devil. I’ve got a connection for that.”

And we were back at it.

And I was thinking I fucking rule. TCB.

Chapter Fourteen

The weed went over so well, I knew I had to come up with an encore performance. The meager supply I’d stolen had lasted barely a week. The pressure was on for more. Carrie did not appreciate it if she was out and I came over empty-handed. “What you don’t want me anymore? I thought you said you had connections?”

“I do,” I’d say. “I’ve just been busy.”

“Thinking about getting some for you, but not for me. You’re a typical man. Well, did you bring me something to eat? Chinese? Not Chinese again?”

***

I turned to Fred, and for a month he kept me in supply, selling me skinny joints for $5 each.

“Can you get me a larger amount?” I asked Fred at the bar.

“Dude, why don’t you show some initiative and get some of your own? The city is your garden.”

“Huh?”

“Just fucking steal it. Don’t tell me you haven’t been on calls where it’s just laying there for the taking. All the ODs we go to, its not like they always hide their stash before they hit up.”

“I don’t want heroin.”

“Where’s there’s heroin there’s dope, just like where there’s alcohol, there’s dope. The President’s right -- it’s the gateway drug.”

“But I smoke and I’d never do heroin.”

“You’re still a young man. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you, standing on the corner, strung out, your life belonging to the needle. I think you’ve got that kind of addictive personality. I mean look at you with you girl. She’s got you by the balls. Someday heroin’s going to get you the same way. Mark my words.”

“I don’t want heroin, just a little dope for the little lady.”

“You need a lot of dope for your not so little lady.”

“Well, can you get me some?”

“You should be getting some for yourself. It’s all over the place. You got to learn to pat down your patients. That’s where all my dope comes from. Why buy what you can get free?”

“Stealing?” I said.

“It’s not stealing, its asset forfeiture. Finder’s keepers. Possession of the law is 9/10s. It’s a well documented legal principle. If the shit wasn’t illegal in the first place, you’d win in court, and because the shit is illegal, they can’t take you to court. It’s just like why we’re going to war in the desert. We’re not going there to save the towel heads, we’re going for the oil and the plunder. It’s there for the taking. It’s the American Way. Christopher Columbus did it. The old guy Roosevelt in the wheelchair did it. Bush is doing it. No reason we can’t. It’s an American tradition going back to the days of Genghis Khan.”
“I don’t know about stealing.”

“It’s getting you laid isn’t it?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t tell me Carrie doesn’t like the weed. How do you like her big bong?”
“How did you know about that?”

He looked at me like he often did – like I was an idiot. “She and Melinda are pals. We were over there a year ago, she got out that bad boy and we passed it around.”

“So can you get me some?”

He reached in his pocket and just like that handed me a couple joints. “These are only because you’re my friend, but I want to see you out there getting your own. Give a man a fish and you’ve feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you’ve fed him forever. Besides, you’re soon to be on your own. I’m going to be leaving for more lucrative pastures.”

“What are you talking about?"

He pointed to the TV where the newscaster was speculating about when the country was going to invade Iraq. “I’m thinking about enlisting.”

“Enlisting.”

“Yeah, my brother’s in the service. Since 9/11, a man in a uniform is a pussy magnet. You think medics are pussy magnets? Army Ranger, it’s a whole other exponential power there.”

“But they’d be shooting at you.”

“Comes with the territory. Besides there’s treasure there—treasure for the taking.”

“Oil?”

“Gold – that’s what my brothers says. This is not going to be desert fighting, we’re going into Baghdad. We’re going to be occupiers. We’re going to be rich, and I intend to take my game to a bigger scale.”

I didn’t know what to say. I thought he was crazy. I knew one thing, I wasn’t one to put myself in harm’s way any more than I could help. Besides Carrie was almost more woman than I could handle I hardly need anyone else.”

“Gold and pussy,” Fred said, “makes the world go round. Now cough up the $10 you owe me.”

Chapter Fifteen

We were called for an unconscious male at 45 Barber Street. A woman led us to the apartment at the end of a dark hallway.

"He out cold,” she said.

We found a black male in his early twenties supine on the bed. He was still warm and had a pulse. I handed Tom the blood pressure cuff, but he reached into the house bag and took out the yellow med kit instead.

It was then I noticed a wicker basket by the foot of the bed. It contained what looked like about thirty plastic baggies filled with crushed dark green leaves and twigs. I looked at it closer. In another house, I might have thought it was green potpourri, but it was clear to me – it was weed. The woman was out of the room, making noise in the kitchen. My partner strapped a tourniquet around the man’s bicep. I remembered Carrie had said she liked to smoke, but had lost her connection when her ex had split. I plucked an ounce bag from the pile and stashed it in the side leg pocket of my work pants.

“Stand back!” Tom warned, suddenly.

The man sat bolt upright, spewing vomit. I tried to jump out of the way, but the projectile splash caught my pant legs and boots.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Tom said. He still held the syringe in his hand.

The man was looking all around trying to figure out what happened to him. “Fuck,” he said. “You didn’t give me that narcan shit. Motherfucker, why?”

“Your friend said something about being late for your 10:30 appointment.”

“What?”

“I may have misunderstood. Now that you’re up, can we take you to the hospital?”

“Fuck no.”

He spewed again.

“Suit yourself then.”

***

I gave the whole bag to Carrie that night. I didn’t tell her where I got the dope, although I did tell her about the call. “He yacked all over me. He looked like Daffy Duck in one of those Bugs Bunny cartoons where he’s just gotten knocked on the head and he’s looks all around going ‘Which way did he go? Which way did he go?”

She knocked my hand away from her breast. “I can’t believe that the man playing with my breasts is talking about drug addicts, yacking and Daffy Duck in the same sentence.”

“You really have beautiful breasts,” I said. “I don’t know what I did to deserve such a beautiful girlfriend.”

“Well, I’ll give some credit for keeping me in supply here, although I admit you’ve been stringing me out some lately. I was thinking about finding a new supplier.”
“Supplier of what?” I asked.

She laughed. “ You’ve bought yourself some time today. This ought to last a good month.”

“I should hope.”

“I do thank you for it.”

"I've got a few ideas how you can thank me."

"I'm sure you do, but before I thank you, you've got to pay rent yourself. I want you to visit Mrs. Landlord," and she pointed between her legs.

And I got down on my knees, and waddled over and assumed the position. I didn't mind, even when she squeezed my head so hard, I was worried, my brain fluid would end up splattered on the ceiling and walls like an exploded pumpkin. She really really liked it, and I'd bring her around, not just one time, but two and three, until she was so sensitive she could no longer and even bear the touch of my tongue. But give her a minute then, and she would grab me and want me inside, and the romp would begin all over again.

"You're the best lover I've ever had," I'd tell her when we lay exhausted across the couch or the bed if we ever made it there.

"Probably the only one you've had." But then she'd see the hurt in my face and say, "ah, you're not to so bad for your age. You've got a nice tongue. That's a start."

It was a start, but where it was going to end, at that time I did not know.

***

Chapter Fifteen 1/2

Carrie had her moods. And the dope I bought or the beer I'd bring over didn't really help. Me, I'm a happy drunk, a silly pothead. We'd watch Saturday Night Live and Will Ferrell would come on and tell a joke or do something funny, and I'd start laughing and my laughing would turn into a coughing fit, and it would get so snots were coming out of my nose, and I'd be struggling to keep from pissing myself the laughter would be so much. I laughed so hard sometimes my chest wall would hurt. Carrie would look at me like I was from another planet.

"I'm going to call animal 911 if you don't control yourself better," she'd say, as she refilled the pipe. "Just don't pee on the carpet.

"I'm sorry," I'd say, "Will Ferrell kills me. Did you see Austin Powers when he was the Number 2's assistant, and they dropped him in the pit but he wasn't dead?"
"No."

"That was a funny movie. We should rent that."

"Speaking of rent."

She looked at me and gave me a little nod for me to come to her like I was her trained lap dog. I thought for a moment, just a few months before, if you asked me if I had any problem at all being naked on a Saturday night, smoking dope, drinking Bud Lights and having as my company, not some hot chick's picture in a magazine, but a real live, breathing, not unattractive woman who was also naked, and who's breast completely occupied and fascinated me, and that she would be sitting there on the couch, spreading her legs and inviting me over for a taste, well, I would have had no complaint at all, and thinking that right now, I thought, so she likes to throw barbs at me, it isn't all that bad. At least I’m not having to duck bullets to get it.

"Just make certain, you wipe the snot off your nose before you start in on me," she said, then laid back and looked up at the ceiling.
I don’t know what it was – her tone probably, but in a second – as quick as I had pocketed the dope – I was standing and putting my clothes on.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"I'm tired of your fucking cracks. I'm nice to you, you ought to be nice to me."

"Nice to you. We're in my fucking apartment watching my fucking TV, and you’re playing with fucking breasts. Tell me who's being nice to whom. You don't even have an apartment."

"If you're going to be in one of your moods, I don't want to be near you."

"Good, go leave then. I don't want you here anyway. You're a fucking loser."

I just held up my hand. I know my neck and face were turning red. I was angry. I felt rising up in me for the first time the trait that must have come from my father -- the desire to hit a woman. I did not relent to it, though I was sickened that I felt it there. I dressed quickly, and left in my huff without saying goodbye, or even saying I would call.

"Don't fucking come back, creep!" she called.

Halfway home I started feeling bad, and thought about turning around. I couldn’t believe what had happened – it had been so sudden. I imagined her laying there on the couch alone, sobbing and asking herself what she had done, driving away a man who loved her. And it was true I did, for all the shit she gave me, I did love her, I couldn't help it. I saw the good in her, and knew that she just hid it well. But I did not want to go back, because I did after all have some pride.

I went to Uncle Frank's instead. I even paid ten bucks for a lap dance. The girl put her hand behind my had, and slowly brought my head forward until my lips were just inches from her swollen nipple at the end of her large breasts, and while her breasts were much more attractive in the normal sense than Carrie's, I couldn't escape the fact that I wished I was back there with Carrie, and that I could lean my head forward that last inch and open my mouth and lick and kiss and suck Carrie's nipple, while hearing her sweet moaning, instead of being unable to go any further with the bored but attractive dancer, with Motley Crew playing on the juke box, and a three hundred pound bouncer standing nearby, ready to pound my head against the wall, then throw me out the door if I so much as gave a soft whisper kiss to Juliet’s nipple.

I shook my head and began to cry, and Juliet looked at me strangely, then shrugged, and moved on to the next customer.

I was a wreck.

By three am I was too drunk to drive home. I couldn't even stand. I was on my knees barfing in the parking lot, and I guess even for awhile passed out against the wheel.

I was lucky when they called the ambulance, Fred and Mary were the ones who responded. "I should have taken you to Hartford," Fred told me the next day when he stopped by to see how I was doing. "Imagine waking up in the tube station with a posey on, strapped to a recliner sitting next to Papa Lopez, and Jimmy Schmidt and with having to listen to Al Bork babble on with everyone in the company stopping by to see you there."

"I appreciate your taking me home," I said. "I hope you didn't get in trouble for it,"

"No, anything for a pal. Though you keep it up, you may be seeing me for an intervention.”

“An intervention?”

“Yeah, I think your brain’s getting scrambled. That girl’s got you wrapped around your finger her, or more likely got your head in a vice grip – and that isn't good for your brains."

I looked at him, wondering how he knew.

"She's got a bit of a reputation. Take my advice, get out while you can. If you want I can call dispatch and we'll take you down to Cedar Crest for a couple weeks, they've got a secret unit for pussy detox there."

I would have taken him up on it, but like the addict I was, I was already planning how to get my next fix, how to patch things up, so I could be back there in her warm arms, hearing her moans, knowing I was the source of her happiness. I needed it bad.

Three days later I knocked on her door wearing my Dean Martin tuxedo, holding a dozen roses, and a box of Whitman's chocolates. "I've been a fool," I said. "I'm a sorry for the way I acted."

The roses got trampled into the carpet, the chocolates squished, and I got cum stains on the tuxedo pants that I had to pay ten dollars extra for.

But there I was again, desperately moving my head from side to side to keep some pressure of it, and have to breathe, as I burrowed in, imagining I was a miner, burrowing toward her heat, toward her heart. Who would have thought a human had such need?

Chapters Sixteen to Twenty

Chapters Sixteen to Twenty

2006-01-24T03:59:00.000-08:00

Chapter Sixteen

"You say you love me," she said one night, "but I think you just love humping me."

"That's not true, I mean I do love humping you, but it’s because I love you," I said.

"When you were trying to get in my pants, you were escorting me to dinner in a limo, now al the best you can do is Chinese take-out and an occasional scrawny little joint. I'm starting to get the message."

"I'm working on it."

"Sherry's boyfriend just took her to Max's for stuffed lobster, and for appetizers they got oysters from all over the world, laid out on ice in layered silver trays, stacked almost to the ceiling on ice."

"I'm working on it already," I said.

I had paid off the garage, and then went out and bought a Honda Civic, and put $1000 stereo system in, slapping it on my new credit card. I had factored in the cost on insurance and local taxes, so I was looking at a cash crunch again, particularly because my mom had also hit me up for a 500 loan to get her car rebuilt. Here I was working 80 hours a week, and I was barely scrapping up enough to pay for take out and a movie.

I could say that financial pressures drove me to crime, but it was more complicated that that. It was love and greed and youth, and plain not thinking things through.

***

"463, man shot Martin and Capen on a one."

"463, copy."

"Wait for PD."

We arrived to find a near riot. The cops were trying to hold the crowd at bay, while the man lay bleeding on the street corner."

"Let's get him on the board, and get out of here," Tom said as we pulled up, and I did just as he said. As soon as the ambulance stopped rolling, I jumped out, ran around to the back, hauled out the stretcher, threw a board, and collar on it, and came around to meet Tom, who had his hand shoved down the man's mouth, as he passed an ET tube. He grabbed the ambu bag, gave a couple squeezes, and said, "On the board and out of here."

The man was shot several times in the chest and wasn't breathing. We lifted him on the board, put the board on the lowered stretcher and raced back to the ambulance. A second EMS unit had arrived so the other medic jumped in with Tom, and I hit the lights and sirens on, and we headed to Saint Francis.

They did CPR in the back. Tom had me do the patch, and he'd taught me well. Short and sweet he said.

"Male approximately 18 to 20, shot three times in chest, CPR in progress, four minutes out."

They worked him hard at the ER, even cracking his chest open so the doctor could massage his heart, while they tried to fix the hole in it, but he was done for.

I went back to the ambulance to begin the cleanup. The back was littered with IV wrappers, suction tubing, bloody trauma dressings, and the man's 76ers jacket that had been cut off him. When I picked up the jacket with my gloves hands, a roll of cash fell out along with a couple dime bags of heroin.

My first thought was the heroin. I imagined bringing that over to Carrie, saying "okay woman, me and Mr. H are going to make you feel fine. I had heard that heroin gave you erections that lasted for days, and of how it turned women into love slaves. Instead of my paying a visit to Mrs. Landlord, I'd be her landlord, and she'd be my grateful tenant. But it was only a passing fantasy. You only need to work this job a week to see the destruction heroin does, turning people into skanks, their arms covered with track marks, their bodies wasted away by disease. Besides I still heard Fred’s warning and the fact that he even had mentioned it, even if it might have been a joke, scared me straight off any possibility of even a sample.

I wrapped the heroin up with the bloody dressings and put them all in a red biohazard bag Then I picked up the bloody roll of money. I felt its heft. I slid off the elastic. The outer bills were a one and a couple twenties. Inside was all hundreds. There must have been two grand there easy. I looked around and saw no one but myself. I peeled off eleven unstained hundreds and stashed them in my pocket. I put the elastic back on the rest and placed the roll back in the jacket, which I brought into the trauma room.

The room was empty now except for his body and the blood pooled on the floor. I didn't feel too bad about taking his cash. It was drug money, and it wasn't like he was going to be needing it where he was headed. It’s not like you can buy off the worms.

Chapter Seventeen

Carrie and I caught the 6:00 AM Amtrak to New York. She slept most of the way down. I had to nudge her a couple times when she started to snore. The train was filled with business people. She woke up outside of Stamford, and I went to the cafe car and got her some coffee and Danish. I was too excited to eat. The only time I had been out of Connecticut before was to go down to Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island for senior skip day in high school. While the ocean was pretty amazing, it was nothing compared to what I was seeing outside the window now as we approached New York City. Though I worked Hartford's city streets, I felt like a country hick. There were no mountains or hilltops or parks, just streets and buildings, endlessly to the horizon, streets and buildings as vast as the ocean. It made me feel like a grain of sand in the desert. Carrie read her Cosmopolitan beside me. I put my hand on her leg, but continued to stare at the new world I saw before me.

When we stepped out of Penn Station, I felt like I was in a TV movie. If I had had a hat I'd have thrown in it in the air, and spun around in circles like Mary Tyler Moore on that old show I used to watch with my mom. The city bustle, street vendors, taxis, skyscrapers, it was the big time. Carrie had been before, so it was nothing to her, but to me, it represented something significant, a turning point, a broadening of my world.

"You want to impress a chick," Tom told me, "You take her to New York City for the day. She'll never look at you the same afterwards."

He mapped out a complete itinerary for me. "This is the Tom Higgins guaranteed to keep her pussy open to you tour. I have used this or variations of the this tour on three separate broads and everyone of them I could call up right now, and tonight, I'd be hearing their happy time moans, and having them cook me steak and eggs for breakfast."

"You know where you're going?" Carrie said. "You look lost. I wish you'd tell me what you have planned."

"Leave it up to me," I said, "I've got it all under control." I stepped to the curb. "Taxi!" I called.

I held the door for Carrie, then slid in beside her. "The Museum of Modern Art," I said.

She looked at me, as she would often that day, with wonder as if she was seeing a side of me for the first time, and it was causing her to reassess me in a most positive way. I felt her grip tighten on my arm.

"Now when you go to a museum, the last thing you want to do is wander around aimlessly from room to room, after awhile you’re tired bored and everything looks the same and you wonder why you even went in the first place other than to just you've gone. Here's what you do. You go see one painting -- one famous memorable painting. And if you're going to the Museum of Modern Art -- that painting is Vincent Van Gogh. Starry Starry Night. You show her that painting and you tell about how Van Gogh was this haunted young man, tortured by all his feeling for the world, who eventually killed himself, but how this painting captured the beauty of his vision, and then you sing a few lines of the song "Starry, starry night," in her ear, and tell her that that song is about Van Gogh and this painting. And she will melt. This whole trip is going to be like she is on Let's Make a Deal, and she thought you were this little booby prize box, but then Monty lifts the box up, and inside the box is a sign that says 'Door Number 3.' And up comes door number three and it's this great prize, and the prizes and surprises keep coming. At the end of the day, she is going to want to have your baby."

She loved the painting-- the blues and yellows and oranges and swirls. She had actually seen pictures of the painting before, but to actually see it in person. "It’s so rich and alive," she said.

"It’s worth millions of dollars,' I said. "It’s priceless."

"Duh," she said, though she squeezed my hand, then added, "I had no idea you loved Van Gogh."

"There's a lot you don't know about me," I said, "But there plenty of time to learn," and I squeezed her hand back.

At the gift shop, I bought her a scarf with the painting on it, as a memento.

"We'll come back here again another time," I said, "But now we have someone waiting for us outside just up the block."

I led her out, and we walked up to 59th street where just as Tom said, there was a waiting horse and carriage. For $34, we got a twenty minute ride through Central Park. The only problem was the horse stunk, but Carrie was still in such a good mood that when the horse farted, she laughed and said, "I feel like I'm right at home. What is he your brother?"

"Hey, yours don't smell like roses," I said. "Let's be fair."

I gave the guy a five dollar tip, then said, "Time for the highlight of our trip."

"Why does that give me dread?"

"We're going to the famous umbrella room for lunch."

"The umbrella room?"

"Yes, noted for its fine cuisine. People come from all over the world to eat at the umbrella room." We were standing on the street corner, and I pulled out my wallet and said to the hot dog vendor. "A hot dog for me and one for the misses, with the works."

"This is the umbrella room?" she said, looking at the green umbrella over the man's cart. "You brought me to New York to come here?"

"You go to New York, you've got to try the local tube steaks," I said, handing her the steaming hot dog covered with relish, mustard and onions. "Fake out," I said, "Dinners coming later. Eat up, we have another appointment."

We caught another cab and I took her to a salon on 7th Avenue, where I had made an appointment for her to have a massage, facial, and pedicure. "I'll be back to pick you up in two hours," I said. "Don't worry, it’s all paid for."

And the farting horse and the tube steak were forgotten. I winked at her as I went out the door.

While she had herself primed and beauty, I went to an arcade and played Doom for a couple hours. On my out I saw one of those old fashioned gunslinger machines, where you put your fifty cents in and had to outdraw the cowboy. I killed him on the first draw. "Aww, you got me," he said. "There must have been sand in my eyes."

And for a moment I thought about the sponsor of our trip, the nineteen year old drug dealer who'd caught a round in the heart. I wondered if maybe there had been sand in his eyes. I touched my chest and pointed to the ceiling, then nodded. "Thank you, brother," I said.

We had an early dinner at a French restaurant, where the waited poured a small amount of wine in my glass, and I did as Tom had told me, swirled it around, sniffed it, then tasted it. "Very good," I said to the waiter, "Most excellent!"

He nodded his happiness at my approval and he poured Carrie's glass then filled mine.

The highlight of the trip for me was the next cab ride, when I got in, and the driver looked back at me for direction, and I looked at Carrie and smiled, then simply said, "42nd Street, Broadway!" and when the driver still looked at me, I added, "The New Amsterdam Theatre."

"We're going to a show?" Carrie asked, her face lighting up.

"Indeed we are, my little lion princess," I said.

"No," she said.

"Yes."

And to see her face when she looked up at the dazzling marquee. "The Lion King."

So we were in the balcony and not on the orchestra floor, but she held me the entire show, often looking in my face with delight. When we walked out of the theatre, she had a bounce in her step and was singing "Hakuna matata," and even got me to join in.

We had an hour to kill before the last train left. She held my arm and leaned against my shoulder as we strolled. With her sweet scent filling my dreams, I believed we would find happiness together as bright as those Broadway marquees.

Chapter Eighteen

Life was good. I was over at Carrie's house five nights a week, and every Sunday was our day to do something. We were for the first time a couple in the public sense. She would hold my hand when we walked through the mall. We went to the parties at her friend's houses, arriving and leaving together, and for my part, she kept a protective eye on me to make certain I'd didn't flirt too much with friends, and I was always attentive to her, getting her a drink, or her coat before we left. She even talked about taking me to visit her mother in Massachusetts.

I did what I could to maintain the post New York glow, and that meant taking her out to dinner more or on trips. We went down to Noank and had Lobster at Abbot's in the Rough and up to Springfield to eat at the Student Prince. I even took her on a trip Boston where we went on the Swan Boats and saw a baseball game at Fenway Park.

It did of course require that I supplement my income when I saw the opportunity. Instead of just taking dope, I needed cold hard cash. I didn't steal from everyone. I was selective. I could only take from people who wouldn't miss the money, and I could only take it when I felt no one was looking.

Drunks were my favorite target, provided they hadn't already been rolled before I got to them. We'd toss a drunk on the stretcher, and I'd pat him down looking for bottles, weapons, any injuries or in my case hidden cash. Once Tom would start driving to the hospital, I'd fish their wallet out on the pretense of getting their ID and medical information, and a twenty here and a twenty there, and pretty soon, you're talking some money. I preferred the high class drunk, the businessman on a bender to the homeless drunk on the street I took $200 off a stockbroker, who was babbling about his fuck wife taking everything off him in the settlement. Well that was $200 she wasn't going to get.

One night we got called for a car into a house. An old lady was watching The Dukes of Hazard reruns when a Ford pickup came barreling through her living room wall, stopping three feet from where she was sitting. We found the intoxicated driver still behind the wheel, honking his horn, and shouting, "Make way, make way, coming through, coming through." Once we got him out of the car and on our stretcher -- he didn't appear hurt, we were just taking him in as a precaution, Tom had me crawl back into the car to see if the steering column had been crumpled at all. As I was checking it, I saw on the floor, a bank envelope the kind the drive-though teller gives you when you cash your paycheck. Three hundred sixty bucks. I figured what did he need bar money for, he was going to be spending the next two weeks in detox.

Dead drug dealers were my jackpot. There was a turf war raging between the city's rival gangs over various neighborhoods, and I was ready to profit on it. Respond to a shooting, Tom and I would throw the patient on the stretcher. I'd hop in the back with him briefly. My job was to cut the clothes off to expose for any injury, while Tom got his equipment out, then jump in the front and drive as fast as I could. I'd carry the bloody clothes in afterwards, along with any personal effects, always after levying my surcharge. In one bloody night, I took $600 off a dealer shot at the corner of Enfield and Capen, and then two hours later got a grand off one who met his end at Albany and Deerfield. As a bonus, he had an ounce of reefer on him too.

I was growing bolder, but even I had my limits. Two masked men robbed a bank on Blue Hills Avenue. The alert teller hit the silent alarm, and the cops were pulling up as soon as they came out of the door. In the resulting foot chase, a good Samaritan tackled one of the robbers, upsetting the bag of cash. The robber punched the man in the head and kicked, then grabbed handfuls of the packets and tried to escape, when a police dog tore into his side. When we arrived to treat the two men, there were packets of bills scattered all around us. I had never seen so much money. The area was taped off and police officers stood by. A TV camera crew was there. I spotted one packet in the robber’s front pocket. I figured there might be ten thousand dollars there. With that money, I could buy Carrie a car to replace her clunker, I could get her a big wedding ring with enough left over to take us to Hawaii. On the other hand, I saw the footage on the evening news, my hand reaching for the money, my hand going into my pocket, another hand grasping my hand, iron cuffs being placed on my hand, then I saw a thick massive hand grabbing my hand, and all of a sudden I was in a small cell with bars over the sunshine, with a roommate named Big Smoke, who smiled at me, and said, "I always wanted a nice wife with a tight like butt. Bend yourself over now, sweet thing."

Scratch the reservation at Carbone's.

Chapter Nineteen

“Are you okay?” I asked when we found her on the floor again, for the third time in two weeks.

“Just my pride is hurt,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve had a bit of an accident.”

“I’ll say,” Tom said.

She had soiled herself. A trail of feces led from the bathroom to the side of her bed where she had again managed to knock the phone off the nightstand to make the emergency call.

“You know you really ought to either get a nurse to sit with you overnight or else get one of those medic alarms to go around your neck. Push the button and say ‘Help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’”

“I suppose I should.”

“You can’t drag yourself to the phone who’s going to find you? How often are the visiting nurses coming in?”

“Once a week. And the grocery service comes once a week, but on the same day.”

“You fall the day after, no one finds you for a week. Look at you now, imagine you after a week.”

“I guess I see your point.”

Tom made a point of snapping on his gloves. “Time to get you up.”

“Hold on,” I said. “We can’t put her in bed like this.”

“You have another plan?”

“We have to clean her up.”

“I don’t do clean up.”

“I really don’t want to be a bother.”

“Do you have a towel I can use from the bathroom?”

“Yes, go right ahead.”

“I don’t believe you,” Tom said.

I got a towel and ran warm water on it. We lifted her up to her feet, then removed her gown. Tom had her hold onto her walker. Once she was balanced, he said, “I’ll be down in the ambulance.

I didn’t answer.

“You’re awfully sweet to do this,” she said, as I toweled her off, scrubbing at the dried stains. I didn’t like the smell much and fought back a gag when I caught too heavy a whiff.

I felt a shaking in her body and saw that she was sobbing.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You’ll be done in a jiffy.”

“It’s not okay,” she said. “It’s humiliating. I’m sorry. You are kind. Forgive me. Don’t get old. ”

I cleaned her off in silence, not knowing what to say. Mozart played on her stereo. I had to use a fresh towel and warmer water to get off all the stains. I draped a bathrobe over her, and then as she directed found a fresh nightie in her drawer. I pulled the bedspread back for her and helped her in, then pulled the cover up. I thought of Tom sitting down in the ambulance and while I knew he would tease me, I thought fuck him. I would do what needed to be done.

I made her some tea, and then sat by her side. I knew what it was like to be lonely.

“I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you,” she said. “I’m sure there’s other people who could use your assistance.”

“It’s not a trouble at all. Our jobs not just about shootings and car crashes.”

“You have a good heart. That’s rare.”

“What about him?” I asked. I pointed to the picture of the man in the straw hat.

“No, no he didn’t,” she said. “But he was handsome.” She laughed, and then she looked wistfully at the ring on her finger.

“Were you married?”

“No, no, we never did.”

“What happened?”

“Life happened…Life happened.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’

“Don’t be, but tell me about your girls. I remember you said you had several. Are they pretty?”

“I pretty much just have one. She’s okay looking.”

“Does she please you?”

“Yeah, she does all right in that department.”

She laughed. “Good. Do you love her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then don’t tell her you do.”

She started crying again and I felt terrible. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, and said, “You are a beautiful woman, Mrs. Broadbin.”

She took my hand and held it to the side of her face. I felt her warm tears on my skin. She held it there for the longest time. I just sat and listened to the Mozart and looked at the diamond ring she wore and tried to imagine just what it was that had happened to her and broken her heart so long ago. After about fifteen minutes, she had closed her eyes and lightened her grip and while I don’t know if she was truly asleep or just feigning it so I could leave, I slipped my hand out, turned off her light, gave her another light kiss on the cheek and left.

***

“I can’t believe you wiped her butt,” Tom said to me when we got back in the ambulance. “That is just not in the job description.”

“I couldn’t leave her there covered in shit.”

“I could. Roll down the window. You stink of that lady.”

I rolled the window down.

"And what the fuck where you doing up there for so long? “

“I was just talking to her.”

“Talking to her. I don't know about you sometimes," Tom said, "I just don't know. I think you might be some kind of freak."

I thought I was a good partner. I did whatever he said and I never ratted him out when he screwed up, which wasn't often or when he was inappropriate. Just that afternoon, tired from picking up a repeat psych patient who’d tried to slash his wrists by cutting himself horizontally, Tom had grabbed the razor and said, 'Look, you want to do the job right, Cut this way. Vertically, down the length of the artery, split it wide open, not this sissy cut you're doing. Either fucking get serious about it or quit wasting our time.' He stormed out and I had to tech the call. Another EMT might have reported Tom, or if the patient, complained, ratted him out.

The last thing a medic wanted was a partner who didn't watch his back, and Tom knew I had his. Maybe I was just being sensitive, but on this night, his words hurt me. I didn't feel he said them in an endearing way, but in a way that made me feel he really did think I was odd, and not in a good way.

Chapter Twenty

We got a late call that night so I didn’t have time to stop by my apartment to shower and change before meeting Carrie at her place. She generally didn't like me showing up in my EMT uniform. I didn't understand that because we always ended up naked on the couch anyway unless her roommate was home, which was rare because she worked the night shift. Some times I'd come over in the slacks and polo shirt, she had bought for me, and I wouldn't have even made it to the couch and we'd have our clothes off and we'd be humping on the carpet with her leaning over the ottoman. Maybe it was the aftershave she had given me. One day I just put the aftershave on as a quick shower, but she scolded me and said, this is not the shower, it is for after the shower. She had a bit of sensitive nose, and I might have done just as well to risk her wrath being late as risk it coming unshowered.

But I had promised to pick up dinner and a video, and she'd agreed to watch the watch the new Denzel, which in addition to being a promising movie, always got her horny, so I just want to get over there.

“Something smells,” Carrie said after I’d been sitting next to her on the couch for a few minutes.

"I think it’s the Mu Shu Pork," I said. "Its good though, let me make you one.”

"No, it’s not Mu Shu Pork. Most definitely, it’s not. It smells like dog shit. Did you step in something and not check your feet?”

I started sniffing. I still smelled the old lady, but I thought it was just a memory smell. Sometimes you smell something bad and it just hangs in your bones all day. Its why most EMTs who come to the job with mustaches, ended up shaving theirs. "I just smell Mu Shu Pork," I said.

"Oh, gross. Oh get out of here. Oh, Jesus! Get right up right now. You have shit on your leg." She jumped up, and in doing so knocked over her sweet and sour chicken, and she swore again, and looked at that mess, then looked at the brown streak I now saw on the back of my leg, and she screamed so tears were coming out of her eyes. "You brought shit into the house and you got it on the couch. Oh gross! Get out of here. I can't believe you,. That's so disgusting."

I stared at my pant leg. At the brown smear on the back of my pant leg, some of which had already transferred onto the couch fabric.

“I can’t believe you. That is so gross. You go home. Go home right now. And don't come back until you've showered and scrubbed and changed. Oh, I feel sick."

"Can't I clean up here? I mean, what about our dinner? What about Denzel?"

"Get out! Get out now. I’m going to puke if you stay. Oh, how am I going to clean this up?"

"I'll do it. Just get me a paper towel."

"Now, you're just to get it over everything else. Where else do you have it. It is dog shit, isn't it? It’s not human shit. Oh, it is. It’s human shit. Oh it’s probably diseased."

I don't remember everything else she said, but I got out of there. I went home and put my pants in a plastic garbage bag and showered, and scrubbed and loaded on the aftershave, and put on the nice clothes she liked me to wear, but when I got back in my car, I was just thinking how she was just going to get all in my case again.

I was so ticked at her, I drove to Uncle Frank's instead. I hadn't been back since the night I got so shit-faced, they had to call the ambulance for me. They had a new crop of women working there. Instead of sitting at the bar, I took a seat in the couch area, and ordered a beer. A dancer and came over and I took a crisp twenty out of the stack I'd gotten at the bank that afternoon when I'd cashed my paycheck, and I laid it on the table next to the big arm chair. A lap dance only cost $10, "But I just looked into her eyes and said, double the fun."

She was all over me. We were in a dark corner and she had her back to the door and the bouncer who was supposed to keep things clean. I'd had lap dances before, but not like this one. She blew hot air in my ear and rubbed her breast up against my face. He hips were grinding into me and I felt her hand on my groin, and I know she was feeling me. All the time, she was whispering to me. I tell you I was thinking about Carrie, but not like in the past, instead of missing her I was thinking fuck her. I was into this, into it in a big way. I was close to blowing my load, and if I did, she could have reached in my pocket and taken everything and I would have been happy.

"I'll be in the back in ten minutes, you want to party some more."

"Huh?"

"Back past the ladies room, there is a door."

"I didn't think."

"Talk to Jimmy," she said, and nodded to the bouncer. His eyes met hers, and then he looked at me like he was looking me over and then he nodded at her.

She did another dance, then walked past me and blew me a kiss. I waited a few minutes, then got up to follow. Jimmy the bouncer stepped in my way.

"Where you going?" he said.

"The back," I said, tentatively.

"You going to shake my hand?"

"Yeah, I was." I reached as discreetly as possible into my pocket and crumbled a twenty up into my palm, then shook his hand with it.

"One door past the lady’s room," he said.

It was really not much bigger than a walk in closet. Vicki was there washing her hands in the sink. "Have a seat,” she said, gesturing to the one wooden chair. "Eighty bucks," she said. “The condom is on me."

I would have given her hundred, whatever I had, not because I really wanted it, but because I was just going with events now.

"Drop'em first," she said, "then sit."

I dropped my pants to my knees. I was at full attention. She gave it a quick wash with a wash cloth, then slid a condom over in. She got down on her knees and put her mouth on me. I didn't think about Carrie at all. I just thought about this new woman and I imagined her as my wife , and how whenever I would come home she would take care of me and how it great it was. I thought that for about the forty five seconds it took, then she was pulling the condom off, tossing it in the trash, and up on her feet, and at the sink, washing her face. "I'm here Fridays and Tuesday," she said.

I stood awkwardly and pulled my pants back up. I hoped that she would give me a hug, but I knew that was unreasonable. I just got an empty smile. "Go on now," she said. And I left.

I didn't go back to my seat. I avoided Jimmy's leer. I went right out into the parking lot and got into my car. I sat out there in the parking lot and cried. I cried because I was pathetic, because my girlfriend didn't really care about me other than as someone to boss around and to fuck her provided I was showered and smelling clean. I cried because my partner thought I wasn't right. I cried because I spent $140, and for it felt puny and empty. I cried because I saw myself in fifty years, a pathetic old man taking cab rides into the north end to get $10 blow jobs from crack whores.

I lay in bed listening to the phone ring. It rang a couple times, not a few minutes apart, and then it rang no more.

***

The next day I was desperate. I had no will power. I had lasted all day without calling, but then when evening came around, the thought of being alone was too much for me, so I called.

"Hello," she answered. Her voice was confrontational. She had caller ID so she knew it was me.

"I wanted to apologize for my unfortunate oversight last night. I am terribly sorry."

“How come, you didn’t come back over?” she said. "Where did you go?"

"I was angry,” I said. “I didn’t want you tossing me again.”

“But I called and you weren’t home.”

“I was asleep.”

"Don't fucking lie to me. I know when you're lying."

"Okay," I said. "I went to a bar. I was angry."

"And then what."

"Nothing, I went home and went to bed."

"Let's go back and talk about the bar."

"What's there to talk about."

"What bar did you go to?"

"Just a bar."

"How about Uncle Frank's?"

"So?" I didn't like where this was going.

"So I heard you got a lap dance."

"That's not illegal."

"You don't want to get me started."

"Look I was angry. I went to the bar. I got a lap dance. I had a few beers and went home."

"That's not what Jimmy told Mike."

"Mike?"

"Mike, my old fiancé, and you know who Jimmy is?"

"Your old fiancé. You trust him. He never lied to you before?"

"You taking me out to Carbone's tomorrow night?"

"I'm a little short this week."

"I should say you are. Why don't you just do me a favor?"

I hoped I was getting off easy. "What? Anything."

"Next time, call me and tell me you're not coming so I can make other plans."

"Okay."

"Asshole!" Then all I heard was dial tone.

I tried to call her back to apologize again and tell her that I loved her, but no one answered.

Chapters Twenty-One to Twenty-Five

Chapters Twenty-One to Twenty-Five

2006-01-24T02:49:00.000-08:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Love and life are topsy-turvy my mother always says, and a volatile relationship such as mine and Carrie's, certainly was. I rarely knew whether I was coming or going. After the Uncle Al's incident, I thought I was done for, but it was not to be the case yet.

One afternoon, Tom and I got called into the office. That was rarely a good thing. Usually it was Tom getting us into trouble. While he was an awesome medic in the skill and medicine sense, his bedside manner left much to be desired, that and his quick temper, which often spurred complaints from nurses, police, firefighters, anyone who got in his way or challenged him.

Ned Martinson sat us both down, and with a very stern look on his face, said, "Gentlemen explain yourselves."

"I didn't do it," Tom said. "I categorically deny everything."

"I was there the whole time," I said. "I never saw any of it."

Ned smiled. "You two kill me, you really do. If we didn't need cars on the road, you both would have been ridden out of here long ago. Higgins for your general attitude, and you Tim for being Hear no Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil. Someday you are going to get us in a lot of trouble, but today, you've both gotten a temporary Get out of Jail Free Card."

Tom and I looked at each other quizzically.

"That's right, a surprise. I don't have you in here to paddle your backsides. We just got notice from the Governor's office, you're getting both Lifesaver Awards for the Collins Street Fire. I know you were out of your assigned area when you happened to spot the fire, but people's lives were saved, and the city is going to recognize you for it."

Tom had a big grin on his face. He turned and we slapped high-fives. He put his feet up on Ned's desk. Ned walked around and knocked them out. "Don't get carried away. All this means is you’re staying employed until the banquet, unless you really fuck up."

"What banquet?" Tom asked.

The state is holding an awards banquet, and you each, as well as a date are invited, along with me, my wife, and the boss and his misses.

"A date?" Tom said. "How am I going to decide who to take? They are all going to want to go."

"That's your problem."

Tom looked at me. Since you've been back with hand, maybe you can give up your date to me. I know two women who don't mind sharing me."

"Please, I don't even want to hear it," Ned said.

"No," I said.

"Who are you going to take? Your mother?"

"He can if he wants," Ned said. "And the other thing you should know is the guest speaker will be the Vice President of the United States."

"Woo," Tom said. "That might move my date into Doctor territory."

"You obviously will all have to be on your best behavior. I'll need to know in advance, who you’re bringing so we can get security clearances. Let me know by next Friday. That will be all."

Tom kept hitting on me to give up my seat, and while I committed nothing, I was considering it. As much as I knew my mother would like to go, I didn't want people to think I couldn't get a date. I hadn't talked to Carrie in three weeks. She would never pick up the phone when I called, and I didn't think Vicki from Uncle Al's would go, though I ran through the scenario briefly in my mind. I'd go down to Uncle Al's, she'd come over give me a lap dance, ask me where I'd been, and I’d say, I'd been too busy saving lives to stop by. And she’d say why don't you come in the back and tell me about it. And then instead of giving her $80, I'd show her the invitation, and instead of me walking out alone five minutes later with my head down, I'd come out carrying her in my arms. We'd walk right past Jimmy, and she'd say, "Jimmy I quit. I got a new man now." I'd carry her down to my car, as all the patrons would stand and applaud, and together we'd drive off, but that's where the fantasy ended because I had nowhere to drive to. My landlord at the boarding house didn't allow visitors, and I didn't even have cash for a hotel because with Carrie out of my life, I'd slowed down my side acquisitions almost entirely.

Not three days later, I got a phone call. It was Carrie.

"I'm surprised to hear from you," I said.

"Well, I've been thinking," she said.

I waited.

"I may have been a little too harsh. I know you were angry."

There was another period of silence. I let her off the hook.

"I've been thinking too," I said. "I tend to overreact and do things I shouldn't."

More silence. She was waiting for me now.

"I shouldn't have done what I did."

"You're right, you shouldn't have."

Now I waited for her. I needed another concession from her before I poured my heart out.

"I'm willing to give you...give us another chance."

"I'd like that," I said. "I've missed you."

"And I've missed you."

That night, I was hearing her love cries and she was hearing mine. The passion of making up is one of the great joys in life. I made love like a man famished, like a man who was worried he would never have the opportunity to eat again, and was now at lavish all-you-can-eat-buffet, but not quite so secure that he wasn't worried the waiter might not grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him out through him through a side exit. Carrie's lovemaking seemed a little more restrained except when she got into the actual physical heat of it. She was a very sexual creature.

When we lay exhausted after our second effort, the first being followed only by the briefest interlude because at that young age I needed very little rest before my enthusiasm was renewed, she looked at me, and said, "So what's new with you?"

"Same old stuff," I said, intending to hold off on my real news for a little bit so as not to make it seem I was too excited about it. Nonchalance was good I had decided.

"I heard you won some kind of award," she said. "What's that all about?"

It was starting to come clear now. Maybe I was paranoid, but I knew her well. This was the prize that brought me back to her arms. That was okay. Better to be on the ins than back in my single bed alone. I spilled.

"You want to go with me?" I asked, after I'd told her everything.

"I'd love to," she said. "Are you going to be wearing that dashing tuxedo of yours?"

"Oh, no, I'll be in dress uniform. It means I'll have to shine my boots, and the company's going to give us ties to wear."

"What do you think I should wear then?"

"You look nice in everything."

"I should probably get a new dress. I'd like to look good for you. I suppose they'll be taking lots of pictures. We might even get on TV with the Vice-President coming."

When she said that, my suspicions were confirmed. I had never mentioned the Vice-President.

The next day, another drug dealer was gunned down on Lawrence Street. I bought Carrie her new dress.

Chapter 22

Tom had taken the day off so I was just working BLS with a new employee. We got called for a person screaming in Stowe Village, which was one of the housing projects, and was probably the worst of them.

We happened to be close by, heading south on Main Street just having crossed the Hartford line from Windsor, where we'd returned a gorked out old man to a nursing home. We banged a quick right up Kensington Street and we were out. We could hear the howling from the parking lot. We ran up the stairs, and there was a crowd of neighbors around an open door, and what was spooky was they were quiet, not yelling and causing a commotion like you normally saw in the projects. We pushed through the door, and in the dim light of the apartment, a room that smelled like rotten hamburger and marijuana, a crying woman lay on her knees holding something tight to her. I saw two men on the sofa, who looked to be sleeping. A TV was on soundless. I stepped closer and saw it was a child, not bigger than an infant. "What's going on?" I asked.

The woman didn't even look at me; she just continued wailing.

I stepped nearer. The child did not appear to be moving. I put a hand on her shoulder, which was rocking. "May I see the child?"

She looked up at me then. She was thin, emaciated – with the wild eyes of a crack addict. She handed me the baby. It was cold and stiff – lifeless as a doll.

"Oh fuck, oh, fuck," I must have said. I looked at my partner and he looked scared shitless. The people in the door were looking at me. They seemed to see now what I held.

"Is he alive?” “That baby dead” “Do something! Do something!"

I raised the baby to my mouth and kissed its cold lips, blowing in air, but the baby was as stiff as a plastic doll. I started toward the door, relieved to see two police officers cutting through the crowd. They saw my terror.

"I'm going to Saint Francis," I said. I was kissing the baby and moving my fingers on its dead chest.

"That baby dead. He dead! Run boy! Run. Help that baby! Help that baby! Fucking crack head mother! She should be in jail!"

I went through the crowd and out to the ambulance. My partner, shaking visibly, got in the back to help me, but I just said, "Dude, just drive, drive fast!"

I didn't even know what I was doing. The baby was dead, beyond dead, but there I was breathing air, doing mouth to mouth. I never even grabbed the ambu-bag we had, never put the baby on a board, I was just breathing into a doll, the dead baby's eyes open and lifeless.

We were lucky we even made it to the hospital. My partner was so nervous, he never even turned on the lights, so we were barreling through intersections with just a siren. I came into the ER, holding the baby cradled in my arm, doing CPR and still breathing in its mouth.

The nurse took the baby from me, and laid it on the bed. I kept doing CPR, until she gently eased me away. The doctor looked at the baby, felt its ice cold skin, and looked at me, the tears rolling now down my face. I laid the baby down on the table, and as others gathered around it, I stepped away. A nurse hugged me and I sobbed uncontrollably.

Ten minutes later one of our crews brought in a twenty-one year old man in cardiac arrest from a heroin overdose-- one of the men on the couch. The other was roused with narcan. A third ambulance brought in the mother. Half the police department must have been at Saint Francis. They interviewed me a couple times to ask what I had seen when I got there, but all I could say was the mother was holding the baby and wailing.

The story that came out was most disturbing. The mother had come back from a night out -- a night spent looking for crack, and doing what it took to get it. She'd left her baby with a friend, who'd shot up when his buddy came over. At some point the baby had been sodomized. They apparently hadn't realized why the baby was now quiet.

The day I kept thinking what kind of world did we live in where you could look out at an apartment window and see beautiful office buildings, where people made hundreds of thousands of dollars and drove fancy cars back to their homes in the suburbs, and yet at the same time look around and see poverty, neglect and the results of illiteracy and a broken down social system. I mean what kind of chance did that little girl have? How come we couldn't protect her? I found out Tom and I had revived each of those addicts before. Maybe we should have just let them die. Maybe if we hadn’t done our jobs, that baby would still be alive. Maybe instead of letting crack whores ply their trade in the back of my cab, I should have driven them out to the country, and put a bullet in their heads, and thrown them in a shallow grave. The city would be terrorized by the prostitute killer, but that baby would have had to have gone through what it did. Maybe the fear of the prostitutes I didn’t kill would send them running for a convent. Hardly likely. The rock was too strong. And people without hope had no chance against it. But how could we give them hope? If a baby in a mother’s arms couldn’t do it, what could a country do? These questions tormented me.

**

Carrie’s dress was gorgeous -- long and sleeveless, a chiffon blue that matched her eyes. The dress hid her rounding figure and yet showed off her ample cleavage.

The event was held at the Sky view Ballroom out near the airport due to security for the Vice-President. He was running late so they held us out in the hallway for two hours. It was baking hot, the air conditioning wasn't working, but at least they had an open bar. Carrie made the most of that. I think she felt nervous on account of how good looking Tom's girlfriend was. Tall, slender blonde. A skinny bitch, as Carrie used to call that type. She started in with her talking and her voice got really loud, and I had to shush her a few times. After that, I gave up. I figured what the hell after awhile. I didn't want to put her down in public, and besides, the company owner seemed to be enjoying looking at her boobs too much. He'd look down at her cleavage, then look at me and give me a wink like I was okay, like boy I must have fun sticking my nose in there.

I was doing my best to keep smiling and show her a good time, but I was distracted and feeling out of sorts due to the baby call I had done. In the back of my mind I was formenting a plan to talk to the vice-president about my day. I was going to ask him about the world that let something like that happen, I was going to be the voice of that little girl. All the free drinks, and the fancy dinner they were going to serve, and at the same time there were more little girls out there right now in that city and in cities all over the country, someone needed to help them. I mean what was the point of patting ourselves on the backs as supposed heroes when we couldn't even help a baby like that.

They finally let us in, after making us go through metal detectors. All the badges and buttons people wore, they were having to do those hand held detectors. We sat at a table near the back. The Vice-President showed and gave a short speech, reading from a teleprompter, while cameras from all the networks filmed. They had the twenty of us who were getting awards, get in a line, and we came up as our name was called, and then hung medals around our necks. It didn't look like I would have a chance to say anything. The Governor shook my hand, and then the Vice-President shook my hand, and then another guy – I think he was a Congressman – put a medal around my neck as I smiled and nodded.

Carrie gave me a kiss when we got back to the table. Ned and the boss shook my hand. The Vice-President left as soon as he’d hung the last medal, walking out with fingers flashing the peace sign, and then the Congressman made a long windy speech that I don’t remember anything from I was so caught up in my thoughts. I just sat there quiet while Carrie yapped away and sucked down the wine like it was water. I just kept thinking I had let that little baby girl down. I should have grabbed the mike, and said, Listen people, listen people, there’s something bad going on out in our streets, something real bad. I imagined them all listening, and then behind me a video playing of sights from the streets, while Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On? Came over the sound system. And maybe I sang karoke along with it, or maybe I sang just like Marvin, deep and soulful, and still being a white guy. And the whole world would change, at least until investigative reporters dug into the life of the man who dared stand up for children in front of the government muckety-mucks, and they would discover that I was a common thief, and instead of being praised, I would be shamed, hounded by the press, and even common people. Barked at by dogs, kids would point their fingers at me and taunt. And I would leave, forever a phariah.

Driving home, Carrie wore my medal around her neck. I said nothing as I drove.

She attacked me as we came in the door, and I went along with it, by my mind was still off somewhere else. As soon as she had her orgasm, she lay forward on the ottoman and passed out. I got up and went to the bathroom, and she was there on her knees, head asleep on the ottoman, snoring. I put a blanket on her, turned on the TV to mute and sat on the couch. She got up, said she was dizzy, as she made her way to the bathroom, and then I heard her puking. When I checked on her in the bathroom, it was coming out both ends. I got her in the shower and cleaned her off, then made her drink water and take some Tylenol, then carried her, dragged her to her bedroom, when I tucked her in, and stuck a teddy bear in her arms, and pulled the sheet up to her shoulder. I made certain she was on her side, so if she puked in her sleep, she wouldn't choke.

I went out and sat on the porch and stayed there till the sun came up.

Chapter Twenty-Three

My mom called me. "I saw you on TV," she said.

It was early in the morning and I had worked till two the previous night. "Was that the accident out on 84? It was pretty spectacular, but no one was hurt."

"No, no, you're in a commercial. They have you getting the medal. You look so handsome."

"What are you talking about? Slow down. I'm not even awake yet."

"You know Senator Bellow. They have him putting the medal around your neck. You're in his commercial. You know he's running for election. They have this symphony type music and pictures of people and the flag and it’s very inspiring, and you’re in it. I saw it twice already. Do you think you can get me a copy or I suppose I could just keep the tape in the VCR and hit it when it comes on next, but the VCR isn't recording so well. I really need a new one."

"Mom, mom, mom. I have no idea what you are talking about."

"Didn't you know you were going to be in his commercial? I'm so proud of you. It’s like my son is a movie star. I can't wait to go to work and hear what everyone says."

"Look, I'm going back to bed."

"Okay, honey. I'm sorry to disturb your sleep. You need your rest. You know you're my little, I mean my big hero."

”Okay, okay."

"I love you, Timmy."

"I love you too mom, now I'm going back to bed."

When I got into work, I heard more of the same. They hit me as soon as I walked in the crew room.

"Hey, it’s Mr. Big Shot."

"What are you doing here? I heard you were going to be on Third Watch? and then making a movie with Bruce Willis called Die Hard and Do-fuss. Just kidding? What did they pay for that?"

"I don't know what anyone is talking about," I said. "And nobody paid me anything."

"Honoring heroes, fighting for freedom."

"Hey, my sister is having trouble with her Social Security, maybe you can put in a call to your friend."

"Yeah, I'm having trouble with the IRS, maybe you can make them go away."

I just collected my ambulance keys, and portable radio. "I know nothing," I said.

It continued all day. At the hospital on scenes.

"There's America's hero," a police officer said when we pulled up on scene where a drunk lay on his side, an empty bottle of Listerine in his hand. "Where's the TV camera's? Oh, wait they're waiting for you to actually fucking save someone."

"I don't know anything," I said.

Tom was miffed he wasn't in the shot. "You're telling me, they didn't pay you. Did you pay them? That's the only way I can see they would put your ugly mug up there and not mine."

We were on scene in an elderly apartment complex, Betty Know Village near Saint Francis. A visiting nurse was there and her patient, an eighty-three year old woman wasn't responding. Tom was checking her sugar. It was 44. I was spiking the bag of fluid to hang while he put in an IV so he could give her some glucose to wake her up when I saw the ad come on the TV during a commercial break from the soap opera.

"Senator Joe Bellow, fighting for Connecticut..."

They showed an energetic Senator in front of a podium with a flag in the background.

"Helping the elderly..."

He smiled as he assisted an elderly woman into a door

"Fighting for the young,"

A shot of him in a classroom,

"Honoring America's hometown heroes...”

And there he was putting a medal on my bowing head. I wasn’t on there but a second. Blink and you would miss me.

”Joe Bellow, always there for you and for America.”

A picture of the man gazing off into the distance, the flag furling behind him. Three fighter jets shot though the sky.

"I need that line," Tom said.

"Just a minute, sorry."

I fumbled to finish spiking the bag, while Tom waited impatiently. I finally got the line flushed and handed it to him, then got the D50 out of his yellow med kit. He pushed the thick syrupy medicine through the line, and within a minute the woman was waking up, as Tom was saying "Good Morning."

My Dad called me that night. Now he and I generally don't speak. I took my mother's side in their dispute, though I recognized that he had had a hard go. She was no easy person to live with, and he had needs of his own, much less take care of hers, but that's what a husband and father are supposed to do. They divorced when I was six. He lived in Enfield now and worked part-time as a gas station attendant. He was eighty percent disabled due to an accident at the mechanic's garage where he worked. "How can you support that fuck? His office has been giving me the run-around for years on my disability. He's a fuck who doesn't give a shit about anything but himself."

"They didn't ask me," I said. "They just used my picture."

"Well, you can sue him then. Sue him for a lot. I'll give you the number of my lawyer. It'll show him right. They didn't give you any cash prize for getting that medal?Did they? By the way, congratulations. You're mother told me; I just didn't get around to calling."

"Thanks," I said. "I just got the medal."

Carrie thought I should sue, too. "He's gaining from your heroism, and he didn't do anything. He should have to pay you. Maybe you can get a settlement because they don't like bad press? Just have a lawyer call him up and say, we're going to sue you for a million dollars, but then he can settle for maybe fifty thousand. They'll just cut you a check you go away. And then we can get married, go on like a two week Hawaii vacation or something like that. We can use the rest for a down payment on a condo of our own."

"You'd want to do that?"

"Well, I'm not getting any younger."

I fell into a stunned silence.

“But maybe you’re not the marrying type,” Carrie said, her tone suddenly becoming biting.

“I don’t think you can say that.”

“My friend Sherry at work got engaged this week,” she said. “She’s got the biggest ring. It positively glistens. I could see it all the way from the Xerox machine. Her boyfriend spent seven thousand dollars.”

“Seven thousand dollars! You’re shitting me.”

“No, seven thousand isn’t so much for a wedding ring. It shows he loves her. It’s a symbol of their love she can look at for the rest of their lives. He worked six months overtime to pay for it – that’s true love. I’d like to have a man like that someday, someone who thinks about the future.”

“I think about the future all the time.”

She laughed. “All you think about is your job. Besides, I think you make up half those stories anyway.”

“I’m no bull shitter.”

“You say you love me when you’re grunting and sweating all over me, but I don’t see nothing on my finger.”

“Remind me to buy some Cracker Jack next time I go to the store.”

She knocked my hand away from her breast again. ”I think you need to grow up.”

“I was just joking. I thought we were teasing, having a good time.”

“I’m twenty-six years old and I need to start getting serious about my future and who I will be spending it with.”

"You're not wasting your time with me, I'll guarantee that. I will surprise you."

She just grunted.

I admit I was confused. One day I thought she loved me, the next she was somewhat miserable toward me, which I guess was just her moods. This was the first she had mentioned marriage. As much as it was an end that I desired, I was by no means ready, not with her.

She caught my reaction. "I really don't care what the fuck you do. It's your life. Its just you shouldn't let someone take advantage of you, without getting something in return. That's the way the world works. It’s something I am always aware of. So take that how you may."

***

Ned Martinson called me into his office the next day. "I'm hearing rumblings that you are upset with being in the commercial. I hope you don't do anything stupid to embarrass yourself or the company."

"I'm not doing anything," I said.

"You're not."

"I'm not political myself, but my mother is proud of me."

"She doesn't know you like we do."

I just looked at him, coldly. I know he was trying to make a joke."

"Well, anyone tries to get you to anything stupid like complain about being it, don't. It's advertising for the company, and for you. You never know when an important person can help you out. They can certainly make life miserable for you if you cross them. Besides, everyone who went to the banquet signed a release agreeing to be photographed."

"Like I said, I'm not doing anything."

"You know, deserved or not, you are something of a role model. You need to uphold that. You shouldn’t be doing anything that might embarrass that. Are we clear?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“All right. Well, get back on the road then."

The whole episode sort of soured me in general. The way I felt about politicians was no one cared about anyone but themselves, and that was sort of the way I felt about people. Everyone looked out for number one. Me, I just wanted to go through my day and be left alone.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“I have the name of a lawyer, if you want to call one,” Carrie said. “I really think it’s worth a shot, at least talking with someone.”

“Not going to happen,” I said. “I’m a role model, and …”

“You shouldn’t let them take advantage of you.”

“Not going to happen.”

“But…”

“End of discussion.”

She put on that pouting face, but I had had enough. I just wanted it to go away.

“Where are we going to dinner tonight?”

“Let’s just get Chinese and eat in,” I said.

“Chinese. That’s all we ever do.”

“I’m running a little tight on dough lately.”

“All the more reason to call the lawyer. You don’t get many opportunities to get a quick payday.”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t want Chinese.”

I was tired of listening to here, but I didn’t want to argue. “Tell me where you want to go.”

“Red Lobster is having a shrimp special. You say it in TV. All you can eat. Only $14.99.”

“Fine, whatever,” I said.

“Don’t get huffy with me.”

“No, I’m just tired.”

“All the more reason to have a good meal,” she said.

So we went out and I ate bologna at work the rest of the week.

Being a role model, sort of curtailed my activities.

We did a presumption of an old man, who died at his desk while playing with his coin collection. He had some old silver dollars on his desk that probably would have fetched some money at coin dealers, but I could just see how it looked in the papers. Decorated hero caught stealing silver dollars from old dead guy. And a picture of me being led away in handcuffs, my head bowed. I doubted Carrie would visit me in jail, or bake me a cake with a file in it. She’d dump me like the stale bread they’d be serving me, stale bread and alphabet soup with the only five letters in it. L-O-S-E-R.

“When are you going to bring your girlfriend over for dinner?” my mom asked. “How about for Thanksgiving. Are you doing anything then?”

“I’m working that day, mom.”

“You can’t get Thanksgiving off to spend with your family?”

“Someone has to work on Thanksgiving. People don’t stop having heart attacks and strokes or stabbing people because all the EMTs are home eating turkey with their families.”

“But it’s your family.”

“I can come by and have Thanksgiving breakfast.”

“What if we start dinner at noon?”

“No, I go in at ten. You get double time and half on Thanksgiving too, and I need the money.”

“You don’t have to contribute to the slot fund that week. Besides, you work so much as it is. You need a rest.”

“Can’t do it, Mom.”

“Well, at least bring her over some night. Check with her on what a good night is and we’ll set it up. I’ll do lasagna.”

“Okay, but she’s busy too.”

“Are you embarrassed about your mother?”

“No, no, not at all. Its just I’m so busy.”

I don’t know why I didn’t bring Carrie over. When we first started going out I would have loved to show her off, but now with the cutting comments she often made, I didn’t want to risk having her on bad behavior in front of my mom. Carrie was going through some family issues of her own. Like mine, her dad had left her and her mom when she was young and her mother was very cold and had never shown her much affection. Now she was on psych meds, and causing Carrie lots of problems, always needing her to help out with things, but never thanking her. Carrie was feeling very used.

I was only going over there now two nights a week, because she had things she needed to do with her mother or extra projects from work, she had just gotten a promotion, which she labeled as more work for the same pay. I didn’t mind. I just worked longer hours myself, trying to earn money the old fashioned way – good old long hard work.

Chapter Twenty-Five

857 was sent to the corner of Main and Hudson for an unresponsive/possible ETOH. Tom and I were bored so we headed in that direction to back them up in case they needed a medic. They were on the other side of the ambulance when we pulled up. Tom’s cell phone rang then and since it was one of the girls he was after, he took the call, and told me to come get him only if the other crew needed him. see if they needed him and to let him know. I got out and went around the ambulance just in time to see Fred pop the man in the nose with his fist. His partner pulled him off before he could hit him again, and I rushed to block the man’s friend from jumping on Fred.

“That ain’t right! That ain’t right!” the man protested.

“You saw him. He came at me,” Fred said.

I could tell by his partner’s eyes that Fred was not blameless.

“Calling you a dickhead, ain’t no reason for you to punch a defenseless man.”

I looked at the man on the ground. His nose was spattered wide open. He reeked of alcohol.

“Shut the fuck up or I’ll take care of you, too,” Fred said.

“Get in the front,” I said. “Right now. Get up there.”

I couldn’t believe Fred. I’d seen his temper, but not like this.

I think maybe he realized what he’d done because he let me bully him away from the other man who was calling for the police now.

“Jack will stick by me,” Fred said. “Jack will tell him.”

I worked with Jack to get the man up and on the stretcher. A police car was already coming down the street at a slow crawl, and the other drunk was flagging him down.

We had the man in the back and had staunched the bleeding from his nose. The cop wanted to know what the story was.

“He popped him right in the face, hit a defenseless man,” the other drunk said to the officer, who held up his hand, and said, “Just back off.”

“ETOH,” I said. “He was a little combative, and fell on his face. He’s okay, just a bloody nose. They’re taking him to Hartford, you want to catch them there.” I stepped out and tried not to be too obvious about standing between the cop and his view of the patient. “I was just helping them out.”

The cop looked like he knew something was up, but he didn’t look like he wanted to follow it up.

“I’m making a complain,” the drunk said. “I am making a complaint.”

“You can call this number,” I said, and gave him the supervisor’s phone. “That’s our supervisor. He’ll investigate.”

“Investigate my ass. I want the police and the state investigating. This is cold blooded wrong.”

The cop ended up getting a statement from me, then went up to the hospital to interview Fred and his partner.

“What the fuck was that all about?”” Tom asked when I got back in the rig, finally hanging up his phone call.

“You don’t want to know,” I said. “Fred popped a drunk and his buddy told the cop.”

“Did he pop him good?”

“Broke his nose.”

“Did he deserve it?”

“Probably not, but...”

“Well, he’s a drunk, his story will be no good, but someone has to talk to Fred. He’s giving us a bad name. He’s wound to tight these days.”

The supervisor came down to the hospital and suspended Fred on the spot. He talked to me and to Jack, Fred’s partner, and I told him I hadn’t seen anything, but said the man was drunk and combative and probably did slip.

When the supervisor told Fred he could go home, Fred cursed him up a load and gave him the finger as he walked away. I thought for certain he’d be fired, but he wasn’t

The next day, while Tom and I sat in our ambulance on a street corner, Fred showed up in his private car and tried to get Tom to get the union to appeal his suspension. “Appeal? You’re lucky you haven’t lost your cert, you crazy psycho. You need to just chill the fuck out,” he said.

“Com’on, he was just a fucking drunk!”

“Com’on, you’re a fucking EMT! You’re not supposed to hit people, drunk or not.”

“You’re the union President, you’re supposed to represent me.”

“Listen for all the crap I have pulled, I don’t come close to representing you. You want your union dues back? I’ll take a collection. People will be happy to donate to get you gone from our brotherhood. Here’s five dollars. That’s my donation. Now get fucking lost!” And he rolled up the automatic window.

Fred just stood there like he had been slapped, then head down, he walked back to his car. He sat in there with his head on the wheel. It looked like his body was shaking.

**

A couple nights later, we were at the Brickyard sitting at the bar. Fred had exiled himself from the merriment. Though he hadn’t worked that day due to his continuing suspension, he still wore his work pants and boots, along with his EMS in the Jungle tee-shirt.

“At least you’re standing by me,” he said. “Still it ain’t right.”

He nodded up at the TV. They were showing over and over again the video tape of US troops pulling down Saddam’s statue. “I should be fucking there, beating some Iraqi Al Queda Slurpy head instead of stuck fucking here.”

“Count your blessings. You’re alive. You still have your job.”

“I don’t fit the profile. That’s what they fucking told me. They were so happy when I walked in to sign the papers. I just had to get a physical, take a couple tests -- all routine. Then they fucking tell me I don’t fit the profile. Hell, they let that guy who killed those two fucking clerks go and they don’t let me.”

“But after they found out he killed those people, they put him in jail.”

“He had a gun charge. I don’t have any gun charges.”

“I feel bad for you.”

“I’m willing to kill. Why won’t they take me? They said I was unstable. How could you send someone stable? You need someone whose not going to hesitate. You get fucking ambushed. Pow! I’d shoot first, answer questions later. That’s the kind of guy you need. I’m perfect. Now all this bullshit with the state – that’s not going to help. I’m done for good now.”

“At least no one is shooting at you. You’re safe here.”

“Tonight, instead of being here, I’d be at Saddam’s Palace. There’s going to be a party there, you better believe that. It’ll be like a James Bond type orgy. The big round bed surrounded by a moat, fountains coming out of the wall, mirrors on the ceiling. You can better believe we’d be raiding the liquor cabinet and the woman – all those horny pent up Iraqi women -- haven’t had it in so long. Well, off come the veils! Talk about a strip tease. I’d be fucking there in the middle of it.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Huh! This was going to be my moment. I mean talk about topping that story. You’d all be sitting here around the bar and looking up at the TV. And there’d be old Fred pulling down the statute, and then flashing you all the peace sign. You’d have to wait for the video of “Girls! Girls! Girls! Iraq!” to see the party of course, but I’d be there front and center. Instead here I am here drinking with you. Life isn’t fair sometimes.”

“I guess not,” I said.

Chapters Twenty-Six to Thirty

Chapters Twenty-Six to Thirty

2006-01-24T02:10:00.000-08:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

“463, Fern Street. West Hartford. Signal 17, for the sick call, Priority one, but they request a silent approach.”

“That’s bullshit,” Tom said. “I hate that. You either get lights and sirens or you don’t. What they’re worried their neighbors are going to see. Maybe we should have unmarked ambulances for the rich so as to maintain appearances. Fuck it. They want us on a one. They want us to put ourselves at risk, hurtling over here, I’m using the sirens right up to the front door.”

And he did. He used both sirens with the air horn for emphasis. People on the street were holding their ears as we passed. We raced down that residential street like we were going to a train wreck. Tom could be a dickhead when his buttons were pushed. I usually tried to moderate him, but sometimes it was just best to be silent, like him work his rage out.

There was only a cop car out in front. If it was at all serious they would have sent the fire department. That got Tom even more ticked. “Sick call,” he muttered. “They can’t give us better info than that. They knew enough not to send fire.”

He backed into the drive, without hitting off the backup alarm and left the lights, whirling for good measure. “We’re taking everything in,” he said. “Take the suction, too.”

“The suction?”

We never took the suction in.

“The suction.”

Already, I could see concerned neighbors standing at their front doors. Some walking over to see what was going on.

A woman about fifty met us at the front door. “Really, you don’t need the lights and I told them not to send you with sirens. You just need the stretcher and one of those chairs.”

“They just gave it to us an emergency,” Tom said. “We came as quickly as we could. You did call 911.”

“Yes, but…”

“Well, here we are. What’s going on?”

“My mother is ill. She has a fever and has been vomiting. The doctor wants her admitted to the hospital.”

Tom grunted. “Any trouble breathing? Any chest pain?”

“No, she just has a fever.”

“Well, we’ll check her out. Where is she?”

“Upstairs.”

I was going to put the equipment back in the truck, but Tom gestured for me to bring it. I followed them into the house. I wiped my boots on the mat, even though Tom didn’t. He could be such a dick.

The woman was in a bathrobe lying in bed. I saw trouble when I recognized the man standing over her. He was one of the town selectmen. This was his mother. The officer there tried to give Tom a knowing nod that said special treatment required.

Tom felt her forehead, and she recoiled from his hand.

“You’re hand is so cold.”

“Sorry, You feel a little warm. What’s her temp?”

“101.3,” the woman said. Dr. Collier wants her seen at Hartford.”

“Tim, get the stair chair, and a Johnny top.” To the family, he said, “We’re going to do a few things before we go.”

“It’s really not necessary.”

“No, it is,” he said. “You called for a paramedic. My job is to do a thorough assessment for the hospital. It helps them determine where to place the patient. In a bed or in the waiting room.”

“Dr. Collier said she’s going to be admitted.”

“I’ll be sure to tell them that. The ED will get enjoying that tidbit. Now we need to get this bathrobe off. I’m going to take your blood pressure now.”

“But I’m warm like this.”

“Please.”

”Let him do his job, mother,” the selectman said.

She wasn’t happy when Tom had her take the robe and pajama tops off so he could put her in a Johnny gown. At least he let the daughter put it on her, while the rest of us averted our eyes. He did a thorough assessment all right. Lung sounds in eight fields, abdominal palpation—all nine sections. Orthostatic vitals. 12 lead. He put in an IV, drew blood, checked her sugar, and her pulse SAT, which was 98%. “That’s good. No oxygen necessary for you,” he said. “You’re getting better oxygen than me. Of course I’m a smoker. I run triathlons, but I smoke.” He was just talking out of his butt, trying to be both professional and a dickhead at the same time. I think he thought he was just being a dickhead professional, but you could make the case that he was instead trying out to be a professional dickhead. “12- lead’s good, vitals are good. Just a little fever. Nothing that some aspirin and some fluids won’t cure.”

“The doctor’s worried she may have pneumonia,” the daughter said.

Tom stared at her a moment too long. “Is he?’ he said.

“Yes.”

If we had have done this call in a housing project in the north end, he wouldn’t have brought anything in. He’s have said, “Zapatos! Tarjeta medico! Vamanos! Get the fuck up, let’s go!” and walked her down four flights to the ambulance. But on the other hand, they probably would not have sent us lights and sirens or even sent a cop.

She was a big woman, maybe two hundred and eighty pounds. We bundled her up in the stair chair. I took the feet. Tom who was taller than me should have taken it, but the lady said she was nauseous and he had a thing about getting puked on.

“Keep your hands in,” I said, as I secured the straps around her. “Don’t reach out when we go down the stairs.”

We were half way down, and I was struggling a little because they had paintings on the stairway wall, and I liked to brace myself with one shoulder against a wall as I walked backwards down the stairs to support myself. I didn’t feel I had my balance quite right.

Suddenly, the woman reached out for the railing. Tom wasn’t paying attention, and it threw us off balance. I was just stepping backward. I leaned hard against the wall, knocking a painting off, and I jerked my right up to counter balance the movement or we were going to loose her.

“Don’t reach out,” Tom shouted.

But I had already felt a rip in my shoulder.

Tears were running down my eyes it hurt so much.

“Are you all right? The cop asked. I should have been spotting you.

“We told you not to reach out,” Tom shouted at the woman.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were going to drop me.”

“I think I hurt my shoulder, I moaned.

The cop had to come slide past the woman, and take the chair, which I had balanced on my knee as I leaned against the wall.

I couldn’t lift my arm.

We had to get another crew to come out and help Tom with the call, while a supervisor drove me to the hospital. I’m not a sissy, but I could have used a medic to get me some morphine for the pain.

They gave me some at the hospital, along with the news I had torn my rotator cuff, and would need surgery. On top of that I would be out of work for up to two months or longer.

They gave me some percocet and sent me home. The percocet made me nauseous. I called Carrie to see if she could bring us a prescription the doctor had given me over the phone to cure my vomiting, but she wasn’t home and wasn’t answering her cell phone. I didn’t want to bother my mother.

Fred stopped by in the ambulance to see how I was doing. In addition to going and picking up my prescription, he left me half a bag of dope he said he’d picked up on Garden Street. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who as finding things on calls.

The dope helped take away the pain and the nauseous, and I lay in bed trying not to think how being out of work was going to change my life.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I missed work. Once you get into something so hard, you inevitably go through withdrawal. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who was always hanging out at the office, or stopping by every time I saw one of our rigs on the roads. You think you are a part of things, but then you go out and it’s like you were never there. The world goes on. You get lucky enough to come back and it is like you never left. People see you or they don’t. You’re not indispensable. You’re just a body in the seat. Someone to do the calls, someone to talk to. Not indispensable. Sort of visible and invisible at the same time.

I thought maybe I would hang out with Carrie more. I was getting worker’s comp, but no overtime so I was really short on dough. I figured I could make it up to her by offering do projects about her house, things I could do with one arm. I offered to paint her room, and did a nice job at it. It just took me awhile. I still only got to stay there two nights a week.

“You need to go home by five,” she said when she got home from work. “It’s not fair to my roommate, you’re being here all the time.”
“But she’s at work tonight.”

“That isn’t the point. You don’t pay rent here. She does.”

“Ask her, I’ll paint her room too, the bathroom the hallways everything.”

“I’m sure she’ll like that, but she specifically told me I could only have overnight guests two nights a week, and we’ve abused that a bit in the past. I just want to be fair to her.”

So I painted by day, and went home to my room at night. Even the two nights I stayed seemed to lack their usual vigor. I was living on Vienna sausages and bologna to be able to afford to take her out once a week, and do Chinese the other night.

“You look like you’ve got a tape worm,” Carrie said, “I don’t understand you’re losing weight with all you eat when you’re with me.”

I was losing weight because I’d stopped weightlifting and wasn’t getting enough protein to support what muscle I did have. I was starving myself. The only other good meal I got was at my mom’s, and she said the same thing. “You look terrible.”

They had a big explosion one day at the civic center, they had ambulances in from all over, and I had to watch it on TV wishing at was there. Over a hundred people were hurt, sixteen died. I saw all the old faces on the news—there was Fred doing CPR on a child – and saw plenty of new people I didn’t know. I heard everyone in the company who was on that day got an accommodation from the mayor.

Thanksgiving dinner I was able to make it after all. My mom, my sister and myself. It was depressing.

“How come you didn’t bring anyone?” my sister asked.

“Because I didn’t invite anyone?”

“What about your girlfriend?”

“She’s having dinner with her family.”

“She didn’t invite you?”

“Don’t you have anything nice to say?”

“She didn’t want to come. You could have brought your partner.”

“Are you talking about Fred?”

“No, not that dufus. I’m talking about that Tom guy you work with, the good looking one.”

“What do you know about him?”

“I saw him at the Wendy’s. He was in there getting a burger. I told him I was your sister. He said he’d take me down to the casino some night.”

“Stay the fuck away from him.”

“I can see whoever I want.” And she stuck her tongue at me.

“Suit yourself then. You’re twenty. You can wreck your life, see if I care. Enjoy your veneral disease.”

“Mom!”

“Stop it the both of you. This is a family meal.”

At least I got a decent meal out of it. Afterwards we all watched Groundhog Day together. I spent the night on the couch. My mom came down in the middle of the night and wrapped a blanket on me. I pretended to be asleep. She must have sat there an hour watching me sleep.

***

I was getting strange vibes from Carrie some nights when I’d call her just to say hi, maybe hoping to finagle an invitation over on an off night. She acted like she didn’t have time to talk to me. “What is going on with you? Do you have someone there?’

“Yes, some friends from work. We’re doing a project, having pizza and trying to get our deadline met. Things have been hectic.”

“I guess they have. Are we still on for tomorrow?”

“Yeah, why don’t I just meet you at the Olive Garden?”

“All right.”

After we ate that night, she said she was all of a sudden not feeling well, and went home alone. I laid out sixty bucks for dinner and wine for her and got nothing by a good night peck on the check in return.

One night I decided to stake her house out. She usually arrived home from work at four-thirty to five depending on whether she stopped at the store. I let Freddy use my car in exchange for his tinted window Camaro. I backed in to a space on the far side of the parking lot, but with a good view of her front door. I had a pair of my dad’s old Binoculars, a 64 ounce Coke from the 7-11, a notebook to write down any thoughts, and a couple cans of Vienna sausage in case I got hungry.

At ten after five, I saw her grey Yugo pull in to her assigned spot. She got out, and went around to the passenger door, and took out three bags of groceries. I saw a loaf of French bread sticking out. She was cooking pasta no doubt. She always bought French Bread when she cooked for me, which she’d a fair amount of in the beginning when we were first seeing each other, but hadn’t for awhile. I also saw her take out a box of wine. She liked to drink red burgundy.

I waited. Who was coming over? She usually told me seven when she was cooking. It gave her time to smoke a little reefer if she had it, make the sauce, cleanup the house, and take a long bubble bath, which was where she would start in on the wine. She always liked to have a good high going when I got there. I could taste the wine on her breath when she’d put her tongue in my mouth as soon as I came through the door. Just thinking about the way she used to greet me, the passion coming off of her, passion for me I believed, got me excited sitting there. And it made me feel like a pervert, hiding behind tinted glass, spying.

The living room blinds were partly in, but I couldn’t see in from where I was. I wondered what would happen if I waited a little longer until she was in the tub, then cracked the door and went in. Would she be surprised to see me? Would she scream and call the cops, or we she say come here lover boy, and rub my face over her soapy breasts like I was a human luffa pad.

A seven on the button, a big black Chevy truck pulled up, and I got nervous as a tall muscular man I knew to be a Hartford cop got out, ran his hand through his hair. He was carrying what looked like a six pack of beer, and headed straight for her door.

He rang the bell. Waited, looked at his watch, then I saw the door open and the dread sight. Carry in her bathroom, grabbing him by the neck and pulling him in the door.

Call me a masochist, but I got out of the car, walked slowly to the apartment. No, I wasn’t going to knock on the door, but what I did is inch up close to the house and peer in the window. I saw them. He had her already sprawled out over the ottoman, and I could hear her cries through the window -- her cries of pleasure, her calls of encouragement.

I walked back to the car. When I opened the door, I saw the crow bar in the back seat. I thought about getting and doing a number on his car, smashing the windshield, the front lights, calling him out, calling him out to fight mano a mano or because he a good eighty pounds on me, mano a crow bar, Instead, I just took a bottle of sprite. I walked over to his car, spun off the gas tank, and poured it in like it was STP. Asshole.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“So, what are you up to?” I asked over the phone.

“What do you mean ‘What am I up to?’”

“Simple question ought to get a simple answer.”

“I’m not up to anything except talking to you and wondering what the fuck you are talking about.”

“I was just curious.”

“Curious about what?”

“About what you’ve been up to. I call you and instead of hey, how you doing, let’s get together, I get these weird vibes from you that make me wonder what you’ve been up to, hence the question, what have you been up to.’

“I’m going to hang up now.”

“Why would you do that. Maybe you don’t want to answer the question.”

“Do you have something to say to me?”

“Yes, I do. Who the fuck was that over at your apartment last night?”

“What?”

“Don’t what me. You know what I’m talking about, the guy who had you against the ottoman. I could hear your grunting from the front door.”

“I can’t believe you.”

“You can’t believe me. I can’t believe you. You give me all these lame excuses why I can only come over two nights a week, my roommate, my work projects, and it turns out, its because I a whore, and I’ll take it from as many guys as I can get to come over and do me.”

“Fuck you! Maybe it’s because I want a real man, not some skinny horny little runt who can hardly even afford to take me out to a decent dinner.”

“Really, what dinner did you have last night? Where did he take you out? Carbones, Le New York Restaurant, Max’s Oyster House. No he went to Carrie’s Clam shack and you went to Big Boy’s Hot dog stand.”

“You are so immature.”

“Yeah, a least I’m not a phony.”

“Phony. That’s a laugh. You think you’re this big bad EMT. You with that ridiculous fake badge of yours. How much did it cost you $5? Did you get from a catalogue or the back of a comic book?”

She knew where to put the knife and how to turn it.

“The guy I was seeing last night is a police office with a real badge and gun.”

“Yeah, he’s got the gun all right.”

“Yeah, he’s got a gun, and he’s a good job and a pension, something you’ll never have.”

“I’ve been putting money away. I’m investing in our company’s 401K plan. I have a diversified portfolio I’m putting together.” Oh course I was lying, just parroting comments I’d heard Tom make to another medic.

“A diversified portfolio? You’re pathetic. And a peeping tom to boot. How low. I can’t believe I ever even went out with you. I can’t believe you spied on us. What a creep.”

“I wasn’t spying. I was just missing you so I was just going to leave some flowers in your door. That’s when I heard the grunting and I happened to see in the window. Now I know why they call cops pigs. The two of you in there making bacon.”

I got a dial tone. I stayed there holding the phone in my hand. I wasn’t going to try to call back. I knew I had fucked it up for good. That tone was the end. The tone rang in my brain. How was I going to be able undo that damage. I wasn’t going to be able to just show up on Friday night like nothing had happened. Everything had happened. I had basically called her a slut, which she was, but you can’t call someone that and expect nothing to change. Besides, she was right. He was a cop and his badge and gun were real. I was just some fucking doofus who been lucky to stumble in her path when she was down and out, and I was just a pretender and I had been found out.

I lay down on my bed. My head was spinning. I didn’t know how I was going to live. I was a nobody and everybody would know it. Loser.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I was consumed with the idea of revenge. I was not a powerful person, but I was resourceful. When my neighbor poisoned my dog because he barked too much – he tossed him some poisoned meat I am sure. I set a delayed fuse in his garage. It was a simple device. I cut off the heads of fifty matches, and rolled them together in a paper towel like they were tobacco and the towel was a cigarette wrapper. I waited until he left as he always did around seven forty to hit the liquor store before it closed for the night. He was a drinker, cracking open his first beer at three-thirty when he got home from his job at the aircraft plant. I snuck in the garage through the side door by jimmying the lock. I set the fuse with a cigarette – a Camel- his brand, then tossed the cigarette under his lawn mower, which he had just used to cut his scraggly quarter of an acre. I had soaked some rags in gasoline and left them nearby. The delayed fuse I lay across the lawnmower and extended it ten inches to the top of a small stack of newspaper, again pretreated with gasoline from the stack of recycled newspapers he kept nearby. He stored fireworks in his garage that he set off every forth of July – bottle rockets and firecrackers that he boasted he’d bought five years before in South Carolina on his trip to Florida. I knew where he kept them. In one of those safes that anyone can pick just by the feel of their fingers – You spin it left, spin it right, then back left again real slow until it clicks. I opened the safe, took out some firecrackers and bottle rockets and left them on the shelf above the newspapers. I put a second delayed fuse connected to their fuses. My plan was simple. The first delayed fuse would start a good fire that would stoke the second fuse, setting off the firecrackers and bottle rockets. To fire investigators I guessed it would look like he had accidentally ignited the hot lawnmower with a poorly tossed cigarette and the blaze would be aided by the gasoline rags, and then further fueled by the poorly stored fireworks that he had taken out to look at in anticipation of the upcoming holiday. I wasn’t trying to burn the garage down, just trying to get him to dial 911, and then have to admit he was out driving, when it was clear he was shit-faced. Just some small mischief. He’d know it was me, but wouldn’t be able to prove it, and I’d have an alibi, as I was helping my mom make cookies at the time, and had only gone out for a minute to use the bathroom. I’d made certain I had an excuse, by drinking about three gallons of grape juice, giving me massive diarrhea.

Anyway, the plan worked just great, except the fire took so quickly and was spread by the bottle rockets igniting what was already a great fire hazard all the junk he had, and instead of calling 911 himself, he had tried to put the fire out when he got back and found his garage ablaze, that by the time the fire department arrived, it was too late. My mom and I watched it all. He pointed the finger at me, and the cops gave me a grilling, but they couldn’t prove anything. The only way they were able to make me pay for the garage was they found some of his fireworks in my bedroom, which I had lifted, and the choice was get busted for theft and have the judge go hard on me or pay $10,000 that I did not have, but could work off. I also had to move out and agree not to take any more actions against him. If I had had a good lawyer, I would have probably not even had to that, but I didn’t have a lawyer, and was sort of strong-armed. Live and learn.

With my past, anything to do with fire was out of the option. I was happy to see the next night he came to Carrie’s, he wasn’t in a pickup, but in a loaner from Winthrop Chevy. I went down to the Winthrop lot and saw his Chevy parked by the service door. Maybe the sprite had done its job, but I wasn’t satisfied.

I had a yahoo email address I used on my mom’s computer, not having one of my own. Sometimes Carrie had sent me jokes or funny pictures which she sent out in mass to her friends. I saved a few, so I scoured the list of other addresses and found one I thought was her new guy. RSCop. I also went to the city web site for the police department he belonged to and found a picture of him, which I saved to the computer. I then a search of gay personals, and found a web page where I listed his email, posted his cop picture and wrote a description describing all the kinky things he wanted down to him by other men. I also listed Carrie’s phone number. I was cracking up as I wrote it. I did all this not on my mom’s computer, but at the city library so they couldn’t trace if tack to me.

Revenge kept me busy, kept me from feeling sorry for myself, made me feel like I had some control in the world. I had a host of tricks in my bag. I went down to the public library and collected subscription cards from every magazine that had in their collection, which was over 200. I filled them all out with his name and address, which I had also gotten on-line. It would take a while for them to arrive, but it would be a pain for him to deal with that was for sure.

I sent Alcoholics Anonymous literature and Anti-drug literature to him at work, and marked it personal and confidential. I called hotlines and left his work number.

Everyday I tried to think of a new trick to add. I made up a bumper sticker that said “I hate guinea wops,” that I stuck on his condo door, then had pizzas delivered to his house from every pizza parlor in town. I watched as they’d arrive, ring his doorbell and no one would answer. I left my own message on his answering machine to go with all the others I’m sure he had. In a heavy Italian voice I swore, “Hey, whassamatta you stupid fuck. You mess with my fucking business, I mess with yours. Dey say revenge is best serve cold, I serve it to you hot.” I even went so far as to buy a mackerel at the city fish market, wrap in newspaper and leave it on his doorstep.

I get a call from Carrie.

“Hey, how are you doing?” I said. “Long time no talk to, what are you up too.”

“You stop it right now, you don’t know who you’re messing with.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Don’t play stupid. I know its you, and you don’t want Bob coming after you.”

“Bob, is that the name of your new friend? Bob? Sounds kind of gay.”

“Oh, that’s a good one. I had to have my phone line changed all the calls I’ve been getting.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Its funny I was thinking of you just last night. I was at Carbone’s with my new girl friend, Rosie deGarmo, nice girl, and what a cook, comes from a big Italian family. I went to pay, and it turns out her uncle is in business with Carbone’s. It didn’t cost me a dime. I looked around for you, and I didn’t see you.”

“Bob is coming after you. I told him it had to be you. He’s too nice of a guy to have enemies.”

“Have you been drinking? Are you high?”

“Stop t, and don’t say you weren’t warned.”

The next day I was driving down the street, and I got pulled over.

It was Bob.

“License and registration,” he said.

I gave it to him.

He came back and handed me a ticket $180 for traveling 30 mph in a 25 mph zone.

“You’re Bob,” I said. “I recognize you know. Carrie told me about you.” I laughed. “She kills me. She calls you Little Bob. Why is that? Is that why you’re giving me a ticket? You’re jealous you can’t match me.”

“Listen you little shit,” he said. “Two can play this game”

“What are you going to do, give me a ticket for breathing?”

“That’s not a bad idea. Hold on a minute.” He walked behind my car, and then I heard a smash. He’d hit my taillight.” He came back to the window. “How’s $60 for a broken taillight, instead.”

“You’re a funny man, Bob.”

“We’ll meet again soon, I’m sure,” he said, “Unless you make yourself scare, get my point.”

“Yes, sir, I do.” I said.

“From now on, I see you, I own you. Your license gone. Your registration forget about it. Give me any trouble, you’re in the lockup, understand? You don’t want me as your jailor because you will wipe my ass, if I ask you. You will suck my dick if I tell you. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, sounding as scared as I could. “Mr. Policeman, sir.”

“That’s it. I like it when you show some respect. Dickhead.”

That night I played the tape back for him on his answering machine:

“You’re Bob. I recognize you know. Carrie told me about you.” Laughter. “She kills me. She calls you Little Bob. Why is that? Is that why you’re giving me a ticket? You’re jealous you can’t match me.”

“Listen, you little shit. Two can play this game”

“What are you going to do, give me a ticket for breathing?”

“That’s not a bad idea. Hold on a minute.” Smash sound. “How’s $60 for a broken taillight, instead.”

“You’re a funny man, Bob.”

“We’ll meet again soon, I’m sure. Unless you make yourself scare, get my point.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“From now on, I see you, I own you. Your license gone. Your registration forget about it. Give me any trouble, you’re in the lockup, understand? You don’t want me as your jailor because you will wipe my ass, if I ask you. You will suck my dick if I tell you. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Policeman, sir.”

“That’s it. I like it when you show some respect. Dickhead.”

Carrie called me the next day. “You better not play that for anyone else.”

“I don’t intend to, but I have done nothing wrong here. I’m an innocent man, and I won’t let you or your boyfriend blame me if someone else is fucking with you. I’m not a dumbshit.”

She was quiet. “All right, I’m sorry,” she said. We just thought it might be you.”

“Please.”

Then I hung up, giving her the dial tone.

I won’t lie. For the first time I felt good about her dumping me.

Chapter 30

The glow from getting back at her didn’t last long. It was replaced inevitably by the loneliness I felt. And it was a loneliness that was only made worse by being with other people. I avoided going to bars, avoided going to my mother’s, avoided even going to stores during busy hours. I became a night owl, staying up watching old movies, and sometimes reading books. I liked reading short stories, and thought the authors probably got a lot of chicks because they were so good at telling tales. I particularly like a book called Steppenwolf about a guy walked around like me. I tried writing a few stories myself, but it never came out like it happened, or if it did, when you read them, you just didn’t get that live feeling. Some nights I just listened to classical music. Mrs. Broadbent had given me a list of the ten greatest works and I had bought them all. Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky. Dvorak’s New World Symphony remained my favorite. It haunted me. I felt like he too must have at some time in his life looked around at the world and wondered how he ended up where he did, like maybe we were both just bit players in a universe and world to daunting to comprehend.

I was glad when my shoulder was healed enough to go back to work without hurting too much, but a funny thing happened. I used to love the job, but now it didn’t take long for me to see something had changed. It just wasn’t the same anymore. The things I found fascinating before, no longer fascinated me.

I was in the EMT room, and one of the new EMTs was going. “You wouldn’t believe this call we had yesterday. We go screaming all across town, priority one for the severe bleeding. We’re fighting through traffic, jamming the air horn, we finally get there and an old man answers the door. Ambulance, we say. Anderson, he says, there ain’t no one named Anderson here. No, No, AMBULANCE. Someone called for an AMBULANCE.

He goes, “oh, oh, oh, wait a minute, then he gets his cane and goes wobbling into the back, and you hear a door open and some rap music, then this gang banger comes strutting out, holding up his finger that’s got a little cut on and he asks us for a Band-Aid. I thought you gotta be fucking kidding. We don’t carry Band-Aids, my partner says. The guy just goes, oh, okay, turns around and walks back to where the music is coming from. We cleared it unfounded. Can you believe that, Calling 911 because you want a band-aid.”

I could believe it. You work two months and the city and that shouldn’t shock you. I was going on three years, and I was as tired of the stories as I was of what they were about. I mean how many fucked up, psycho, complete idiot or dead gross people stories are there in the world. You wouldn’t fucking believe this call, they’d say, you wouldn’t fucking believe it. Yes, I would, I’d say to myself and tune them out. Been there, done that, and didn’t like being there, doing that anymore. The only way being at work beat not being at work was at least being at work I was getting paid for wasting the days of my life.

Everything was one mind numbing depressing routine. It wasn’t that I joined the ranks of the bitchers and complainers – I was beyond that. It was petty. I didn’t care if dispatch was boning my car, or if one of the supervisors was being a jerk, or if the new union contract didn’t have a big enough raise in it. All that seemed to matter was that I had a place to be – not a particular place I liked being, but it beat having to decide what to do with myself. They gave me a call, I went to it, did it, and took someone to the hospital, only to do it all over again, ten times a shift, seven days a week. Grinding out the calls, grinding out the days and nights.

We were given a transfer – a patient with a festering bedsore that needed debriefing. I couldn’t believe it when I entered the room and looked at the patient and then looked at the W10 the nurse had handed me. Joe Rothesburg – my stinking neighbor – the man who poisoned my dog. He didn’t recognize me. He didn’t recognize anything. His mouth was open and his eyes just wandered around inside his head. He had a feeding tube and a Foley catheter, and he stunk of infection. I thought for a minute that this was my dream come true. I could empty his Foley catheter and slowly drip urine into his open mouth. Or I could put a cockroach in his ear, and then block it in with cotton, and sit there and watch as the cockroach walked through his head and peered out through his eyes. I loved my dog, and I knew if he was looking down from doggie heaven he would be woofing with delight urging me to take my vengeance, but I couldn’t do it. He wasn’t the same man who had stuffed poison inside hamburger meat and lobbed it over the fence. He wasn’t the same man who insisted I pay him back for his burned down garage even though he had no proof that I had done it. I can still feel his spit on my face as he threatened to take my mom’s house away from her and get his cop buddies to see I did time and that I got fucked up while I did it. He wasn’t even a man anymore. I was gentle with him when we moved him over to our stretcher. I pulled the blanket up to his neck and wrapped a towel over his head against the afternoon rain. I talked to him, telling him what I was doing when I took his blood pressure or felt his pulse, but I didn’t identify myself, just in case he could hear and process inside that body of his. I was alive and he wasn’t. I had no need for revenge. Sorry Old Boy.

Chapters Thirty-One to Thirty-Five

Chapters Thirty-One to Thirty-Five

2006-01-24T01:21:00.000-08:00

Chapter 31

I was coming off a ten-thirty AM to ten-thirty PM shift when the supervisor said I had a phone call.

I thought it was strange because no one ever called me at work and it was sort of forbidden unless it was an emergency.

“Hello.”

“Yo, dude, you won’t believe whose here?” It was Fred.

“Where are you?”

“At the Brickyard, man.”

“Why are you calling me? It’s supposed to be emergencies only.”

“This is an emergency. I told the fucking supervisor. You have been on one long downer that is about to end, and that’s serves everyone’s interest. Now, guess again, whose here right now, now, nosing about no doubt for you?”

“I have no idea.”

“No idea. You’re worse than I thought. Get your butt down here now.”

“Why?”

“Because Carrie’s here.”

“So.”

“So, here’s the scoop, her fiancé dumped her. She was telling me, she was letting him sleep late when she went to work. She comes home early one day because she left a file at home she was working on, and she finds him banging her roommate Bobbie against the ottoman. Seems he was getting her on the night shift and her roommate coming in on the dayshift. She had to move out, get her own place. She’s looking good, I mean she’s still chunky, but she’s showing cleavage, and wearing a nice perfume. She’s definitely not going home alone, but I think she needs the consoling of an old friend more than she needs a toss in the hay. Get down here before last call and your long nightmare may be over.”

“Or just beginning,”

“Don’t be so fatalistic. I know that girl rocks your socks off. Now I’ve got to get back to the table. I’m on the news tonight.”

I knew it was a mistake, but I also felt a stirring from my atrophied loins. I knew Carrie and knew if what Fred said was true, she would be all over me before the night was over. My nose filled with the ghost scent of her skin. My heart began to race. My hands began to shake. While my brain said hold on, my heart lifted with possibility. Call me a sucker, but I was lonely, desperate and a dreamer.

I went in the side door so I could get a good view of the layout before I went in. I wanted to be casual, cool. I needed to look like I didn’t care about anything. I was just dropping for a beer after a hard day at work. I saw Carrie sitting with some girl friend’s, there table pulled over to the others. It looked like things were starting to wind down. I walked in in such a way that she would see me if she was looking toward the bar, but I wouldn’t have to notice her.

I ordered a draft, and lit up a cigarette, and was just making conversation with the bartender. I wasn’t there two minutes when I felt her presence beside me, I smelled her.

“Hey, stranger,” she said.

“I turned and looked at her with practiced cool. “Hey, how are you?”

“Good. I wasn’t expecting to see you here. They said, you don’t come around much.”

“Hey, once in awhile I come in for a draft. How about you, how’s Big Bad Bob?”

She made a face. “Don’t ask. I always end up going out with losers.”

“That makes me feel good about our time to together.”

“I wasn’t including you.’

“That’s good. You still living on King Street.”

“No, no, I just moved. I got a new place in Windsor, my own apartment, its small but its home.”

“Good, good for you.”

“How about you?”

“I’m still at the boarding house. I’ve been saving up money, though. I’m thinking about moving to California.”

“California?”

“Yeah, I hear the sun shines out there damn near everyday. I’m getting tired of the snow, plus nothing wrong with seeing the world, you only live once.”

“That’s right.”

I was trying hard to stay cool, but sitting there looking into big green eyes, smelling her perfume, seeing her cleavage; I was really having a hard time controlling myself. I wanted to put my tongue in her mouth so bad.

“You want a drink?”

“I was going to be going, but sure.”

“I’ll give you a ride home if your friend needs to go.”

“Okay, let me just talk to her.”

I saw her go over and talk to her friend. I saw her friend, crack a smile and look over at me.

We had a beer and made small talk. “I’m not dating cops anymore,” she said. “It’s like they put on a badge and it’s all about them. It’s like I’m special only because I’m with one of them. It’s bullshit. I’m my own person. You disrespect me, that’s it. I’m done with you. It’s given me time to think about what’s important.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear it. I dated for awhile,” I lied, “Now I’m just chilling. I know what I what I want, and I don’t need distractions.”

I got her coat, when they said it was last call, and held it for her as she slipped her arms in. We walked out to my car, and I held the door for her. I put on a Saggy tape, but with low volume as I drove. She directed me. I pulled up opposite her door, and we looked at each other.

“I sure appreciate the ride,” she said.

“My pleasure.”

She didn’t go for the door. Our eyes held each other. There was a slow lean into a kiss, and then I don’t know who grabbed whom first, but we had a deep slow movie kiss going on. One thing you can say about us is there was always an animal magnetism.

“You want to come in?” she asked.

“I’d be delighted to.”

When we got in the door, she pulled me to her and we kissed again, our hands running against each other, and then she pushed me away. “You just got off work.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, take a shower and meet me in the bedroom when you’re done.”

I was a little put off, but I did it, scrubbing myself up good, and when I went into the bedroom, it was dark, but she had tiny red candles burning, and she lay there in her white Victoria Secret negligee. She gestured with one finger for me to enter. I knew I had no control of my own. I might as well face it.

Chapter 32

People are stubborn. They hate to give up bad habit. The gambler returns to the slot machine, alcoholic returns to the bottle, the drug addict to the needle -- all in search of that elusive high. So I always returned to Carrie despite all the bullshit. I kept dreaming of the highs, the moments of passion, the look in her eye that made me believe there was something there for me. I was a moth circling the light, a fly circling a giant flytrap plant, a mouse in the paws of a cruel cat.

Why did I put up with the way she treated me? Maybe it was because I thought it had something to do with her upbringing and not with her soul. Maybe she was just holding me down so it would make her feel better about her own low opinion of herself. She hadn’t had the easiest go of it. Her father had abused her, her parents divorced, and her mother had to work three jobs to raise her and her sisters, and they’d moved around quite a bit, from house to smaller house, to apartments and worse apartments. She had some issues of her own and maybe down deep had better qualities I just hadn’t seen. We fell into the same pattern, fighting, making up, me only seeing her two nights a week. She denied it, but I knew two guys she was seeing on the side, and neither of them would even take her out.

Why did I stay? How could I even lay with her at night, knowing what I knew? It was because I needed it, I needed it to get me through the night. My life was empty and without direction. All I had was hope that she would reward me in the end, and that she would find a worth in me I could not find in myself.

Because she took me for granted, I had to try harder. I applied for a couple police and fire departments, but with my bad shoulder I couldn’t pass the physicals. I thought about getting out of public safety entirely, but with only a high school education, there was nothing else I could do that would pay me as much.

I might be able to make more per hour in another line of work, but nowhere had overtime like the ambulance. I needed every dollar I could make or pick up, although even that was losing its appeal – I knew what I was doing was wrong and my continual denial of that fact was fraying quite badly.

Chapter 33

I awoke with a fever, my sheets soaked through. It was 4:30 A.M. I was due in at work at seven. I couldn’t get up, I was nauseous, dizzy. I felt a retch, and then the next thing I knew my mouth was full of vomit. I tried to keep my mouth closed to keep from spewing on the floor until I could get to the hallway bathroom, but I couldn’t hold it back. It went all over my blanket and the floor. I managed to fall out of bed and half crawl to the waste basket where I retched again. I could barely hold my head up. The room started spinning. I thought I was dying.

I crawled across the hot desert sands. The sun blistered my back. My tongue was swollen. My heart was racing even though I knew I had to be dreaming. A conveyor belt with people on it went past me. There were old ladies and old men, people I had known, patients I’d had. The belt has small clouds under it, and gradually the belt went up into the sky, into the far distance, and I looked up and I saw a hotel up there and I knew it was heaven where they were all going.

Not me. There I was crawling on the hot sand, crawling past horned young men wearing bandoleer gun belts and Chicago Bulls jackets sitting in beach chairs and drinking umbrella drinks. They gave me the thumbs down as I crawled past. AC DC’s “Highway to Hell.” blared from the speakers. Carrie sat in a life guard chair. She was naked, but her whole body was devil red. Her breasts were huge and she had two devils sitting on each knee of hers, licking her breasts while she smiled and turned her nose up at me.

I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me I was having problems with guilt.

I woke up again at 6:25. I was still on the floor. I had a horrendous headache and felt parched. I tried to get up, but my head spun even worse than before. I knew I had to call work, but I didn’t think I could reach the phone on my desk. I tried to stand and I threw up again.

The phone rang. I managed to get it. I tried to hold myself against the desk, but I was too weak. I curled back down to the floor.

“Where the hell are you? You’re on the schedule. Get your slacker butt in here. We’re getting killed this morning.”

“I’m sick,” I said.

“Sick? No, you’re not, not unless you call in four hours ahead of time, you’re not sick, you’re tardy. Now get in here.”

“No, I’m really sick.”

“Out fucking drinking, you ought to know better. You’re a young man; you can work with a hangover. I did all the time in my day.”

“No, no, I’m really, really sick.”

There was silence on the other end.

“What do you want me to do about it? Are you telling me you’re not coming in? It’s an unexcused absence.”

“I’m sick.”

I guess my voice sounded puny enough that he took some notice.

“Are you all right? You’re never sick. You got a broad there?”

“No, I’m sick. I’ve got a fever.”

“All right, since you never book off, I’ll let this one go. Be here tomorrow or call in. Four hours notice. I’m cutting you slack this time.”

I hung the phone up.

I had some aspirin and some ginger ale. I took four aspirin. I had the worst headache of my life. The ginger ale was flat.

I guessed I had some kind of twenty-four hour bug, and the best thing would be to just lay there and let it pass. I didn’t have a thermometer, but I knew I had a really really bad fever. My head was spinning so much I just prayed I could sleep and wake up and be better.

I thrashed. I felt like I was on some kind of mind-altering drug. I was back in my dream crawling across the sands when all of a sudden I came across a set of feet. They were old with long nasty toenails that hadn’t been cut for years, thick, curved brown and green fungusy nails. The legs were thick and edematous, elephant like legs. I looked up and saw an old woman sitting in a wheel chair. She shook her head. “Shame, Shame. I am so disappointed in you. You were such a nice young man.”

“Help me,” I said. “Water? Water?”

“What have you done to deserve a drop?”

”I’ve got to drink. I’m dying.”

“Hold yourself now, grab hold of my leg.”

I hesitated.

“Go on, grab and hold on for your life!”

I grabbed and held on and suddenly I was being whisked through the air. I don’t know if I was more scared of falling or getting stuck to her legs, my arms sunk into her edematous skin as I held on. I was so parched I lapped the beads of moisture on her legs. She swatted the top of my head. “I didn’t say you could drink!” We flew through a spinning psychedelic tunnel. I saw the pages of a calendar fly off like in the old time travel movie, the pages going backwards, November, October, September, August July, June. May. April, March, February, January, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1994, 1989, 1982, 1977, 1971, 1963, 1957, 1952 and then we popped on in the spring of 1949. There were flowering Dogwood Trees. We were on the streets of Hartford, in the North End except the houses were all beautiful, freshly painted with flower garden, and children playing in the yards, birds singing.

“Recognize that house?” she said.

I did. It was the house on Ridgefield Street. It had a fresh coat of light robin blue paint. The grass was a thick green and a giant oak tree grew in the yard that was surrounded by a white picket fence. “It’s Miss Broadbent’s House,” I said.

“It’s the Broadbent family’s house,” she corrected me. “Mr. Broadbent’s at work at the typewriter factory. His wife’s in at the Wadsworth Museum attending a lecture. That’s me in the kitchen, preparing the dinner – I was employed there for nearly twenty-five years, and up in the bedroom there...”

And the next thing I knew I could see right into the bedroom, “There’s young Terry Broadbent. Look at that smile on her pretty face.” She lay on her freshly made bed, staring at the ring on her finger, a big diamond engagement ring. “She’s twenty-three years old.” She had such a beautiful clear complexion. She looked like she was in a trance.

“Isn’t she look like she’s the happiest girl in the world,” my escort said. “Young man took her out last night, proposed, gave her that ring, and well, gave her a little bit more than her mommy and daddy know. Young people today aren’t any different from what they were back then. They all have those needs. I did myself at a time, if you can believe that. Look at her staring into the diamond. What do you think she sees? It’s s shame, life don’t work out, isn’t it?”

“What happened to her fiancé?”

She chortled, and then said, “We’ve got more stops to make, grab on again.” And whoosh we sped toward the downtown, I was holding on to her ankles. We, and banging over the city streets. We stopped at a bar on Main Street and rolled right through the front door. There in the bar, several young men laughed raucously as the waitress brought them another round of drinks.

“So you gave her a ring,” one said.

“Yes, I did and that was it. She couldn’t say yes soon enough after all these evenings of saying no, if you know what I mean.”

“You didn’t?”

“It was unbelievable. She was a hellcat. I’ve got claw marks in my back. You think she looks nice in a dress? Seeing her naked...my god.”

“A ring, isn’t that a lot just to get there or are you really going to marry her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, certainly not for a couple years, I told her I had to get my business up and going, and of course I have my business trips. I am a freeborn man if you follow.”

“You are a cad. What did the ring set you back?’

“Nothing. I got it off a dead lady.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I went to see a client. No one answered the door. It was open so I went in calling her name. Found her dead on the living floor. Cold and stiff. Eight-seven, she just dropped. I saw the ring there nice and shiny and thought, ‘Hey now, there’s my ticket.’ She didn’t have any relatives so I knew no one would miss it.”

“That’s too much. That’s evil.”

“Well, she’ll never know. And I tell you if there’s evil in me, there some devil in her. She keeps doing me like she did me last night, I just might go ahead and marry her.”

“What a snake,” I said to my escort.

“That’s right, and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”

“He gets struck by a bolt of lightning.”

“You read this story before?”

“No, I was just guessing.”

“Let me do the telling.”

“Was it a bolt of lightning?”

“No, No.” She shook her head. “He went to jail for twenty years for theft.”

“For the ring?”

“No, they never found out about that. He was embezzling company funds. They sent him to jail, and he died there of consumption within three years.”

“Does she know that?”

“Yes, she does, but all she’ll tell people is he died in a crash before they could marry. She found out about the other women, too, but she felt he loved her above them, she felt like if only they married, everything would be fine.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No, people believe what they want. The good part of their souls believes in the good part of other people’s, in the possibility of their redemptions. You see the heart wants to be loved. The heart wants always to be believed. That’s why it’s so easy to steal.”

I woke up vomiting again. My head was exploding. The phone rang.

It was Carrie. “Where the hell are you? Are we going out?”

“I’m sick.”

“Sick. You have another broad there?”

“No, I’m vomiting, I’ve got a fever. I ache all over.”

“You do sound sort of sick. I hope you didn’t give it to me. You could have called earlier. You sure you don’t have a girlfriend there?”

“I’m sure. I just need to sleep.”

“All right, I’ll see you Friday then. You let me know sooner if you can’t make it so I can make other plans.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, and lay my head back down. My head was throbbing. This was no ordinary virus.

I lay wondering if she had wished that I was feeling better. I decided that she had. She’d said it, but I hadn’t heard it. I wished I’d asked her to come over and bring me some more ginger ale, but I was too weak to call her back. Not that she would have come over with her fear of getting whatever I had.

Then there I was again, back in dream hell, my mouth full of sand. I was face down in the hot desert. “Get the fuck up boy!” A gang banger kicked me in the ribs with his Nike high-tops. He wore a Chicago Bull’s jersey, and had gold chains dangling around his neck. “Yo, I ought to just cap you right now for what you did, stealing my roll like that. That was cold. My momma could have used that change. I got fo kids could have used that change. I was their only pro-vider.”

“I’m sorry, man,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. Everybody knows they just try to hide it from theirselves. Grab onto my Nikes, I got some things to show you.”

I touched his red shoes and the next thing I knew I was whistling through the air as Air Drug Dealer flew me over housetops, and tree tops, and judging from the roads I saw where we were headed – Carrie’s.

We went right through the walls – into the living room, where Carrie was bent over getting it from behind from a man I did not know. I saw his badged uniform and gun slung over a chair. He still wore his boots and leather pants. “That woman likes cops, don’t she?” he said. “Why’s she hang out with you. You’re just a petty thief. Is that her bad side or is this her bad side?”

“Please, do I have to see this?”

“That girl got some back. And noisy. I bet the neighbors complain.”

“I’m going to be sick,” I said.

“You don’t want to hang around. The officer’s buddy’s on his way over. He called for backup not long ago.”

I threw up.

“She’s a nasty girl. What do you think she’s looking for? A good time? A big stud or true love? Wipe your mouth now. I personally think its true love, but she won’t find it here. We don’t find what we’re looking for here. Life isn’t about that – it isn’t about the finding. You found my roll and you thought you’d found the answer. You didn’t find nothing but a load of trouble.”

“Can we go?”

“Yes, but we ain’t done. We got another stop.”

And I rode back into Hartford on his red heels and we landed on the roof of Miss Broadbent’s house on Ridgefield Street, and we hung upside down looking in the window. I saw her there in bed.

“Does that turn you off?” the demon said. “You don’t find that arousing”

“No,” I said.

“Old people just the same as you and me.”

She was done, but she didn’t look happy. She lay there and cried. She cried and she cried. Her little dog barked and tried to jump up on the bed. She ignored him. She looked lost in her mind.

“I wanted to take you to see my children and my momma, but the man who makes the schedule don’t give a shit about them either. He don’t seem to think their suffering matter.” He whooped me on the side of my head. “But it matters. It do, you little shit, it matters.”

My head was pounding when I awoke. I did not know whether it was day or night. I was spinning.

I saw a specter at the foot of my bed. It was the old man from who I had stolen those fifty dollars. He looked at me somewhat kindly and that surprised me. “Come, young man,” he said. “Take my hand. I have a place to take you.” But we didn’t go anywhere. The room changed though. The paint peeled from the walls. Cobwebs like it was a forgotten attic. I looked at my hands. They were old and veined. The man held up a mirror and it was me, but I was eighty year old, bald, wrinkled. My joints hurt, I was short of breath. I felt tightness in my chest. I looked over at the desk and saw ten pill bottles and saw I was on a medical bed. I felt my penis. I had a catheter in me. By the bed side there was a picture. It was of Carrie, but she didn’t look old. She looked just like she did today. The door opened and I saw two EMTs saunter in.

“He’s cold,” one said, touching me. “Some rigor in the jaw.”

They put electrodes on me. “Asystole. All three leads. What time is it?”

“10:42.”

The other one wrote it down on his pad. “10:42 it is. What a fucking place to end up. No family, I’d guess. I wonder where he keeps his dough? Check under the mattress.”

I tried to move, to wake up to startle them, but I couldn’t. I was dead. Stone cold.

Chapter 34

I heard them come into the room. They hovered over the bed. “Dude, you’re burning up.”

I groaned.

“We’re going to have to take you in.” It was Fred.

“Just take me home,” I said.

“You are home. Do you know what day it is?”

“Tuesday,” I said.

“Man, you are out of it. You didn’t come to work today. Third day in a row. That’s not like you. I thought we were going to find you dead.”

“I told them I was sick.”

“Yeah, two days ago. I could cook a steak on your head. You’ve got puke all the over the floor. I hope you didn’t shit yourself.”

“I’ll get the stair chair,” I heard a voice say.

“You’re going to clean this place up,” the landlord said.

“Maybe when he gets out of the hospital. Can’t you see he’s sick?”

“Rent’s due today.”

“He’ll pay you. How long has he lived here?”

“Three years.”

“Don’t you know this man’s a recognized hero. He’s good for it, right now he’s sick so back the fuck off.”

I felt his hand on my wrist. “You are tacking out. Are you in any pain?”

“No, I’ve just got a headache. What are you doing here? I told them I was sick.”

“Don’t you remember what I said? This is the third day you’ve been out. The supervisors sent me over here to check on your. Your phone is off the hook.”

I vaguely remember them lifting me out of bed and into the stair chair. “Just don’t hurl on me.”

They carried me down the narrow stairs and out to the ambulance. I looked up at the dirty ceiling as we went to the hospital. I could hear the sirens, felt the bumps in the road. They had an oxygen mask over my face. I heard Higgins’s voice, and felt a sharp stick in my arm, then felt a coldness running into me. I heard the crackle of a radio a voice saying, “Go ahead hospital’s on.” And then the words, “Burning up, heart rate 172, BP 80/30, running saline wide open.”

Looking at the ceiling, I saw the faces of my patients, my escorts looking at me shaking their heads. I’ve done the best I could I thought. I never meant to hurt anyone. I never meant to cause harm.

I woke up three days later in a hospital bed with two IVs still running into me, and a gaggle of medical students staring at me while a doctor was droning on about staphylococcus something or other. It seems I had gotten an infection in my bloodstream that had almost killed me.

There were flowers and a Teddy Bear from my mom and little sister. Fred and Tom came by and left me some porno magazines hidden inside People magazine covers. Nothing from Carrie.

I had to stay for ten days while the IV antibiotics did their work. I was able to go outside in my hospital pajamas, hauling an IV pole around. I’d sit out on the benches and smoke. If ambulances were in the loading area, the crews would come over and talk to me.

I was emaciated. All the muscle I’d built up looked worn away. People probably thought I had HIV, TB and diseases not yet discovered. The doctor said the staph infection I had was a common disease everyone had on their body, it was just when it got in the blood stream it became virulent. Plus some strains were very resistant to drugs. If they hadn’t found me, I would have for certain died.

The whole experience was very humbling for me. I had a vague memory of being summoned to a very bright place and kneeling before a big walnut desk where a man in a three piece suit and a trimmed white beard asked me if I thought I deserved another chance.

And I had just cried, cried like a baby. And he just snickered at me like I was nothing.

Along about the sixth day of my stay, I broke down and called Carrie.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “I thought you skipped town.”

“I’m in the hospital,” I said. “I got an infection and almost died.”

“What kind of infection?”

“A blood infection. Its staphylococcus.”

“Can it spread to someone else?”
“Yeah, but not easily. If I had given it to you, you’d be sick already. I mean, they don’t need to wear masks and stuff. I just got a high fever and was delirious, but I’m better now. I just have to keep getting IV drugs for another four days.”

“You’re okay?”

“Yeah, I should be out by Saturday. They said I need to rest for another week, then should be well enough to go back to work.”

“That’s good.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m all right. It’s been busy at work.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too. You sure you’re okay?”

“Well, I’m just tired, but I’m okay.”

“You don’t want me to come visit you, do you?”

“No, that’s fine. I don’t like people seeing me sick and feeling sorry for me. We can get together when I’m better.”

“You’ll call me and tell you when you’re coming home?”

“I will.”

“Okay, I’m sorry you were sick, but I’m glad you’re better. I was worried I hadn’t heard from you.”

“Carrie?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to tell you that I am sorry if I have not treated you right.”

“Huh?”

I was fighting back the tears. “I just wanted you to know, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I know you and I have had our fights, and I want to apologize if I haven’t been everything I should have been.”

“That’s all right. I’m not the perfect girlfriend. I can be a bitch.”

“I know.”

“What?”

“I mean, I just wanted to say, I will be better in the future. Getting sick has taught me what is important, and I aim to do right by you.”

“That’s so sweet.”

“I love you,” I said.

There was silence.

I waited.

“I love you, too,” she said, and I thought I heard real sweetness in her voice.

I was determined to turn over a new leaf, to seize the chance to be good, to make the most of my new lease. I wanted to be deserving.

Chapter Thirty -Five

I had been saving money over the course of the last year. Call it my rainy day fund, I feared that a time would come when I would need cash and not have any, and that crisis would precipitate me toward even more dangerous thieving. Who knows? In desperation, I might even throw a ski mask over my head and run into a bank with a toy gun, or knock a Brink’s truck driver over the head with an oxygen cylinder, or paint my face black and wear a ninja outfit and try cat burglary. I was worried that the bad seed in me would spread and multiply, traveling throughout my body like a metastized cancer -- all to feed my habit-- to keep my girl in style-- to keep me in her good graces, in the fire of her bed.

My self-control was precarious. I saw the cops knocking me to the ground, a German Shepard tugging at my leg, as the cop kneeled on my back and wrenched my arms around behind me and cuffed me. They would throw me roughly into the back of the squad car as the film crew from Cops caught my pathetic desperate tough guy loser what the fuck happened to me look. If I was lucky, they’d get a good shot of my tattoo and then the whole world would see his smiling Virginia Slims smoking wussy laugh. They’d put me in the cell. It would be cold. All I’d have was a thin yellow plastic paper blanket that contained no warmth at all. I’d be there shivering. All I’d get to eat was the Burger King meal they’d deliver twice a day, a cold cheeseburger, small fries, and a small coke. My arm would swell up from where they’d grabbed me. I’d ask for medical help. The paramedic would come and check me out, pressing against my arm. I’d wince, and then he’d say, it doesn’t look broken, just bruised. You’ll be all right. They’d close the door back up. I’d hear them laughing about how prisoners were always trying to get to the hospital so they wouldn’t have to spend the long weekend in the can.

No one would come bail me out. My mom wouldn’t have the money. Not that I would use my phone call on her, I’d try to keep my situation from her. I’d foolishly call Carrie instead. She would answer the phone, and said, “Tim? Tim who? I know no one by that name” and hang up. I could call Fred, but he’d have heard I was in, and know from the caller ID, it was me calling and just wouldn’t answer because bailing me out would mean no date and fuck money for him that weekend. I knew he had no reserves. Plus what was I even thinking, they’d set my bail to high anyway. They’d look at me, and think, that boy knows what’s waiting for him in the pen. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s wife. He’s going to be a flight risk for sure.

My trial would be short, a bored public defender and a busy judge. Down goes the gavel. Off I go to jail. My choice there will be simple. Wear my hair in braids and affect a lisp, and resign myself to being someone’s girlie bitch or else just be a complete psycho. First guy who tries to make me blow him, I bit his dick off. Course I’ll probably get AIDS, but at least I’ll have some dignity. Don’t go near him, he’s a crazy motherfucker. He done chomped on Big Smoke, like he was a Hannibal Lector. They’d make me wear an iron mask, and pretty FBI agents would come visit me for help in uncovering all their most psycho cases. That was the best case scenario. I figured I’d probably end up like that guy who proposed to Miss Broadbent, dying of consumption in the state pen, being buried in a potter’s field, except I wouldn’t be leaving a grieving fiancé. Carrie wouldn’t think twice about me. She’d find someone else stupid enough to be her lap dog, and take her out to eat all the time. Tim who?

As insurance against desperation, once I had paid off the garage, I started to put $50 a week into a savings account. I had dipped into it only twice, during dry thieving spells, but replenished it later. On one occasion when I struck another lode with a dead drug dealer, I made an $800 deposit. I had run the balance up to nearly $3,000. However, being sick again and missing nearly three weeks of work, in addition to accumulating some serious medical bills put a hurt on me. I tried to apply for worker’s compensation on the grounds that I had caught the fever on the job, but they just laughed at me. My claims were rejected. Prove it, they seemed to say. Well, I couldn’t.

Tom who was big in the union, told me to forget about it. “This fight has been fought and lost before. It’s best to just not even try. There’s a guy from downstate got hepatitis, and he needs a liver transplant now. He was carrying a guy down the stairs and that guy had diarrhea on him. His arms were all scratched up from clearing shrubbery and the shit got on his arms. The guy had hepatitis and died a few weeks later. He filed a case. They rejected it. And he’s got three kids. Wrenching your shoulder carrying someone down the stairs -- that you can prove. Getting shit on or bled on, and catching hepatitis or AIDS, you’re out of luck. The insurance companies don’t give a shit. Anything to save them money.”

The thing of the health care system was here we were working our tails off, taking people to the hospital, many for nothing serious at all, and to pay, they would just wipe out their state card like it a Visa or MasterCard – only the card never came due for them. We on the other hand, worked hard just to pay our bills, and if it wasn’t one person, it was another, getting sick, going out of work, and being stuck with bills an honest person would have trouble paying. Jan Dempsey got breast cancer, lost her house. Jason Roberts woke up one morning with his legs paralyzed, and almost died as the disease spread to his chest before it was stopped. Even the smallest medical problem put a hurt on a person. And we had insurance. What was the point in working? You had to just hope you stayed healthy.

The hospital was willing to put me on a repayment plan if I gave them $1000 right off the top. I decided to just pay it all at once. I had been through that payment with interest route and did not want to go there again. I figured I would just start from scratch, hope that luck worked in my favor. After I emptied my account, I had just $50 to my name. I went in and signed up on the schedule sixteen hour days five days a week, and two twelve hour days on another two. Those were my Carrie nights, and I knew she wasn’t going to go for Taco Belle.

I was worried the thieving,which I had sworn off, was going to start back in earnest. I just had to hope I was strong.

“40 Bilings Road for the high fever,” Dispatch said.

Billings Road was the Ellsworth, one of my most fertile lifting grounds. Rich old people living in fine apartments with Persian rugs and antiques, and cash spread randomly about on tables and dressers like pennies were spread out on mine. Their wallets and purses were often stuffed with fifties and hundreds while I had only crumpled ones in my billfold. The only problem was there was usually a nurse there who had called, but she was usually too busy writing up the medical information to notice or even suspect an angel of mercy might grab a quick bill off the bureau or riffle a purse. Sometimes a cop was there if they had called 911 and the local ambulance had been unavailable, but having a cop there added another layer of protection. Who would even think of stealing with a cop right there?

Sure enough, there was a money clip on the table by the door, along with a stack of New York Times. Tom attended the patient, the nurse wrote on the chart, the cop watched the pretty newscaster talking about an accident on the highway. I put the clip in my pocket. I didn’t count it but I figured it was good for a couple nights of dinners. I was surprised at how easily I had lifted it.

The man was delirious with a fever of 104 and had urinated on himself. The nurse said he had no family to speak of, and they would probably be moving him to the nursing unit when he was discharged from the hospital. He was ninety years old. From the pictures on the wall, I could see he had traveled the world, Japan, Europe, Africa. He had no doubt given to charities all his life. Maybe his leaving that money out, well, maybe that money was meant for me. I was a charity case.

Tom wanted to just put him on the stretcher, soiled pants and all, but I insisted we take his pants off and put them in a plastic bag that we brought with us. “He’ll be more comfortable,” this way,” I said, “Not having to lay in wet clothes till the hospital can change him.”

“That’s a good idea,” the nurse said.

Tom just rolled his eyes at me. “Mr. Compassion,” he whispered somewhat derisively. “Mr. Shit.”

“Just doing my job,” I said.

I counted it at the hospital. $143. The clip was monogrammed, and I was sure it could fetch a pretty penny at a pawn shop, but probably was more in sentimental value alone to its owner. I went back to his hospital room, and found his clothes bag, and put the now moneyless clip in the pocket of his soiled pants.

I guessed I wasn’t half bad.

But I was.

There was a crowd in the waiting room, watching the TV. I couldn’t see what was going on, there were so many people. What I did see was a wallet bulging out of the back pocket of a man in a suit, one of the hospital executives. I felt someone bump me from behind and in the moment I brushed against the man, and muttered, “hey, watch out,” to one man and “excuse me” to the other. I found I had his wallet in my hand, then quickly secreted it my in my jacket under my left arm. He didn’t seem to notice. I moved to the periphery of the crowd. I could now hear the newscast and see a part of the picture. “The resignation of the Governor is a stunning development – the result of an ongoing federal corruption investigation into bribes and other illegal activities in the state’s highest office.”

“What a fucking asshole, I always knew he was a crook.”

“Stealing from poor folks, the same as voted him in. That’s disgraceful.”

“What goes around, comes around. I always said he was a crook.”

I headed out the door, walked across the street, and went into the rest room. I counted my haul. Five hundred seventy-two dollars. What kind of person besides a drug dealer carries around that kind of cash? I thought. The president of the hospital. I thought well maybe this is money he stole from me. Maybe they overcharged me. Maybe this was meant for payback. I was sort of a Robin Hood for myself.

Robin Hood. That was a joke. These people saved my life and so what if they overcharged me. They also took care of a lot of people who could never pay them back. And maybe they overpaid their President, but they had a lot of other nice people who worked there. And there I sat in the rest room, a rat just like the fucking governor. What goes around comes around. I wondered when the bill was going to come due for me? When would they knock on my door?

Chapters Thirty-Six to Forty-Five

Chapters Thirty-Six to Forty-Five

2006-01-23T18:02:00.000-08:00

Chapter Thirty-Six

That night I brought Carrie roses. She met me at the door all done up and ready to go out.

“Flowers, how thoughtful,” she said. “I guess this makes up for your being twenty minutes late. I was going to give you a half a blow job to titillate you during dinner, but it’s going to have to wait, I made reservations at Max’s Oyster House.”

“I canceled them,” I said.

“What. I brought some oysters to you instead.” I showed her the bag of seafood I had.
“Fresh from City Fish. I’m the chef tonight, and you will eat what I’m dishing out.”

“But I really wanted to go out.”

“I’ve got everything. Wine -- your favorite kind -- A California Pinot Noir. I’ve got lobster, oysters, jumbo shrimp with your favorite cocktail sauce, crabmeat, its raw bar city. And for later, I have candles, body lotion, cinnamon flavored, chocolate covered strawberries, and a special gift, all for you.”

She was touched I could tell. She didn’t know what to say. Which was rare.

“Here’s how it’s going to go,” I said. “I’m going to open a bottle of wine for you. You go sit in the other room, I’m going to dim the lights, light a candle. I bought a CD for you. Joan Osbourne’s latest. I know you’ve wanted it, and you sit there and smell the candle and sip the wine and listen to the music, maybe loosen a button of your blouse there, and give me a little time in the kitchen to set this all up, and I will come out and join you in a seafood feast and major league love-in all for you because you are so special.”

She looked at me like she wasn’t certain I was serious, but I could see she guessed, she hoped and maybe even thought I was, and maybe if I thought that, maybe she was special. I know I wasn’t the only guy she was doing, I rarely had ever been, but the reason I hung around was she saw I treated her better than any of the rest, and it was sinking in.

I walked her into the living room, dimmed the lights, lit a candle, set the CD in the player, opened the wine, poured her a glass, let her take a sip, and then had her sit back. “A little something to hold you while I labor in the kitchen,” and I unbuttoned her shirt, released her bra, and slowly sucked on her breasts, then laid her down, and unspread her legs apart, and pulled off her dress and panties off and kneeling, took care of her in the way she liked to be taken care of. And I didn’t just bring her around once. I stayed and did it twice, and then a third time till she was all tingling and exhausted. And then I kissed her on the cheek and whispered her in ear, “I love you, you sexy, gorgeous woman.” I left her there sprawled on the sofa and returned to the kitchen to prepare the feast.

I wet some of her plates, and then put them in the freezer to give them a cold frosting. I spread ice cubes in a large serving tray and draped on top of them the cooked lobster, shrimp, crab and smoked trout I had purchased. I opened oysters and clams, and laid them on the tray. She loved raw bar and I had learned to love it as well. She said it was an aphrodisiac. That maybe true I thought, but I had another ace in the hole in that department as well on this evening.

Earlier we had gone to the apartment of a diabetic, whose landlord had found him in a coma due to low blood sugar. We had been there before on many occasions. It was a routine call. Tom would check his sugar, confirm that it was low, then put in an IV, and give him an amp of dextrose. He’d wake up and refuse to go to the hospital. We’d clear after he signed the refusal and Tom rechecked his blood sugar to make certain it was back to normal.

On this day, while Tom pushed the Dextrose. It took awhile because it was thick and syrupy and the man had small veins. I went into the bathroom to take a leak, and while I was doing that I opened the medicine cabinet. The last time we were there, I’d discovered the man was on Viagra. He didn’t have a girlfriend, just a stack of porno magazines he kept by the bed. I had been thinking about it ever since. Now I had no problems in the hard department, but I heard Fred talking about it. And he swore, even if you were a lead pipe, Viagra would turn you titanium. If you really wanted to impress a girl, he said, get yourself a little blue pill. It wasn’t medicinal, it was promotional. Your dick would thank you, and your girlfriend would be your love slave.

I popped the pill I had stolen and tossed it down with my beer. Fred said it took about thirty minutes to an hour. I figured after eating, then with a little back rub, I’d be hitting it just at the right time.

When I went back in the living room, carrying the ice tray of seafood, she was curled on the sofa, her huge breasts looking glorious to me. I refilled her wine and hand fed her the seafood.

“This is so decadent,” she said.

“Eat up. My pretty,” I said. “It’s all for you.”

For every bite I had, she had four. I dipped the lobster in hot butter, I held the oysters and listened as she slurped them down. She’d slurp an oyster, then put her tongue and the oyster in my mouth and we would kiss and share the taste. I had removed my pants and was serving her in just my underwear when she reached down and felt me. “My God, you’re excited,” she said.

“Always with you,” I said.

“It feels like you have a baseball bat down there. What’s got into you?”

“Oysters, raw seafood, and a dazzling sexy beauty.” I kissed her neck, and so much for the backrub portion of the evening. She pulled me to her and we were going at it.

My God Fred was right. I felt like my sword was Excalibur. Carrie was breathless. She liked it when I pounded her and I pounded her till she was panting. She’d catch her breath for a moment, and we’d go again. She’d groan and cry out and clutch me tight. It was quite simply the best sex we had ever had. It was to another level – an eleven. She looked at me and I felt a change. Instead of Carrie who was the dominant lover, it was now me. She cowered before my strength. I felt her submit. I exhausted her.

She liked to talk dirty when we made love, and if I had had a tape recorder, and wanted to go into the recorded porno line business with it, I would have won a porno Grammy with that recording -- such language she used. .

“That was soo good,” she said. “That was the best, the best I’ve ever had.”

We went all night. “It’s my love, my love for you,” I whispered. “It’s inexhaustible, and it’s all for you.”

“Oh, F-me!,” she cried.

What a night! I was a god.

I awoke a four in the morning, and instead of seeing her asleep next to me snoring, I saw her looking at me. It was like she was thinking, always reassessing me.

“What?” I said.

“Did you mean what you said?”

“What’s that?’

“That you loved me?”

“I did,” I said.

I felt her hand rubbing against me as she looked at me.

I stirred.

She put me back in her and rode me, slow and steady, looking at me the whole time, like she was trying to figure out if I was real or if I was just another fraud.

Yeah, I was a fraud. But as frauds go, on that night I was a Triple Crown winning stallion of frauds.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I had sworn that I would never steal again, that I would follow the straight and narrow, but leave some cash on a dresser and it would end up in my pocket. Patients thought I was the nicest, sweetest young man because I’d see that their soiled clothing was removed and they were tucked into fresh warm sheets, all the while, I’d be casing the joint. It got so I was afraid to work during thunderstorms, afraid there was a bolt of lighting being manufactured by one of the blacksmiths up in heaven that had my name on it. I imagined God holding the thunderbolt in his hand, feeling the grip, admiring its heft and balance. Yes, my blacksmith, good work, this one will smoke that little shit’s ass for good. I imagined being pinned to the wall just as my hand reached out to lift a fiver off a kitchen table. I imagined a bolt of lighting going right through my heart, and winging me right through the earth, till I broke through into hell, and slammed against a giant dartboard in Satan’s chamber. Stapled on my chest would be a note. “Yo, Satan, Here’s another little weenie for your barbeque, your pal, G.”

Tom and I went back to the diabetic’s apartment, but this time we were too late. He lay cold and stiff on his bed, a Jugs magazine spread out next to him. “He probably used up all his sugar jerking off,” Tom said. “Or else just had the big one. Look at him. Coming and going at the same time.”

I went into the bathroom, found his bottle of Viagra, which to my delight had just been refilled. A twenty count bottle, probably 18 of 19 pills in there. I figured seeing Carrie twice a week, my superstudom would last two and half months – plenty of time to find another mark. I emptied the pills into my shirt pocket. I thought about leaving a few in the bottle, then realized if any one checked the refill date it might pose a question, so I just took the whole bottle. Besides rigored as he was, he had no use for Viagra any more.

Yes, I was a fraud.

“Maybe you could come over another night a week,” Carrie suggested. “I think we’re ready for another stage of intimacy, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, quickly calculating that would reduce my supply to a month. “Yeah, I could do that.” I wasn’t too worried about running out immediately. I had a foreboding that I wasn’t going to last the month anyway. Someone was going to catch me. I was too brazen. Inside, like they say about some crooks, maybe I even wanted to be caught.

“Something wrong with you,” Tom asked one morning, after I’d spent my third night at Carrie’s. “You look exhausted and you’re limping around like your dick hurts.”

“Let’s just say I’m a little raw this morning.”

He looked at me almost with approval. “You horny little dog,” he said.

“That’s me.”

A dog anyway.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“You heard from Fred at all?” the supervisor asked me when I came to work that afternoon.

“We were drinking at The Brickyard last night.”

“Was he so shit-faced he wouldn’t be able to make it out of bed for his noon shift?”

“No, he wasn’t that bad.”

“Well, he’s on the schedule and he’s not answering his phone. Can you and Tom swing by there and shake his ass out of bed?”

I couldn’t say it wasn’t like Fred to sleep past his shift. He’d done it many times in the past. When it came to drinking, he didn’t have the shutoff valve that most of us had. Me, I’d reach a point my body would signal my brain, wooow, partner, one more and you will have a nasty hangover in the morning, one more past that and you will puking, that’s for certain, so shut it down now. Three sips max and you are done. That is not to say there weren’t occasions where I overrode that voice, when I said, dude, I know, but in my own lack of self esteem way, I desire both the hangover and the puking to punish my no good puny self, and if you get hurt in the barrage, well, I’m sorry, that’s just collateral damage.

“You go in and check on him,” Tom said, holding his cell phone away from his mouth for a moment. He was talking to another one of his girlfriends.. He was trying to explain to her why he didn’t see her last night like he had promised, but was hoping to see her tonight. This after just talking to another girlfriend telling her what a great night he had last night, but how he couldn’t see her tonight like he had promised.

Fred lived in a room over the garage of his grandmother’s house. His parents had divorced when he was ten and neither of them wanted him or his brother. His grandmother had her own business selling insurance and had at first worked out of her house. By the time Fred was in high school, her business had really picked up and she had her own office on Main Street, and wasn’t around much, but she had always been nice to me.

Fred’s car was in the drive. I walked up the outside stairs, and knocked on the door. When no one came, I looked in the window. I could see him sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. I knocked again. He didn’t move. The TV was on. “Fred, hey open up! It’s me. You’re on the schedule. Open up. What’s going on?” I was gripped briefly by panic. I tried the door. It was unlocked. “Fred! Fred?”

The room was trashed. The wall punched in in several places, the stereo speakers toppled. A broken chair, a smashed mirror. There was a large bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him, but it had hardly been opened. A shot glass was full in front of him.

“Fred, are you okay? What happened man?”

He looked up at me then. His eyes were red. He looked like he’d been through the ringer and back again. On his face was a look of complete devastation.

“Fred, what happened? What’s wrong?”

He didn’t say anything. He just sobbed.

I finally got the story out of him. He’d found out last night when he’d come home. His brother had been badly injured when his Humvee was blown up by a roadside bomb, and then they come under attack by small arms fire. His brother was still alive, but in a coma. He’d lost both his legs, and was being evacuated to a medical hospital in Germany.

I called dispatch and had them take us off-line for awhile, and then I helped Fred get a hold of his grandmother in New Orleans where she was at a convention, and then got him a plane ticket to Germany. I promised I’d come back in a few hours and take him to the airport

When I came back out, Tom was still on the phone to a girlfriend. “I suppose you wiped his butt up too?” he said.

“Fuck you,” I said. “We’re heading in.”

I wouldn’t tell him why. We got back to the base, I talked to the supervisor, then punched out. I picked Fred up, drove him to the airport and waited with him until he went though the gate.

All I will say is he was shellshocked.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“463, 270 Capen Street for the fall, possibly lift assist, the back door should be open.”

“Your old girlfriend,” Tom said. “Though I suppose with the way you’re hobbling, you won’t have any leftover for her.”

“Very funny. You’re a funny man.”

“I was thinking. I think I’ve got your angle. You’re buttering her up in hopes that when she kicks, she’s going leave her fortune to you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You’ll inherit some old records, a pile of old newspapers, and some stained pajamas.”

“You’re a funny man.”

“Why are you so defensive? There must be something there.”

“Please.”

We pulled up in front of the house. I just brought in a refusal. Tom stayed in the car.

I found her as normal beside her bed, but the room was much dirtier than normal, and she looked like she hadn’t bathed in a few days. .

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“Are you hurt at all?” I asked her.

“No, no, I just can’t get up.”

“Have you aides been coming in?”

“I sent Hattie on an errand so we could have some privacy.”

”Okay...” I said, looking at her strangely.

I got her in bed, got her water and crackers, and then sat by her side while I slowly wrote my refusal.

“How much longer are you going to work for your boss?” she asked. “When are you going to strike out on your own?”

“What?”

“You know what my father said. You have to show you can support me. I told him you had ambition.”

“I like this job just fine,” I said. “for now.”

“But you’ll need a better position. A girl’s father has to know his daughter will be taken care of.”

There was a haze in her eyes.

I reached over and touched her forehead. She didn’t have a fever.

“I’ve been waiting patiently.”

“I know you have,” I said.

“Patiently…” she said again.

I didn’t know what to say to her. I finished writing the run form and brought it over for her to sign. She wrapped her hand around mine and together we wrote her signature, an then she looked up at me, and I confess to you for a moment I thought she was seeing her long lost lover’s face in mine and it freaked me out, although, for a moment I wondered what she would do if I leaned down and gave her a big kiss. In my perverted way I might have, but her breath was really bad tonight.

“Impress my father,” she said, “He wants me to be taken care of.”

“I will,” I said. I pulled the cover up to her neck.

“Turn the light off, will you on your way out.”

“I will, but tell me your aide is coming in tomorrow.”

“Hurry, before Hattie returns. Steal away,” she said.

“Yes, mame.” I hit the light off by the door and made my way down the creaky stairs, and let myself out the back door.

I was disturbed by what had transpired and wondered if I should have tried to get her to go to the hospital or if maybe I should check back there in the morning to make certain her aide came in. She was clearly starting to lose her mind, and it made me sad and sort of sick. I felt like I might have an obligation where I didn’t want one.

“Was she good?” Tom asked.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Why are you so hostile?”

“Don’t go there.”

“Psycho.”

I just looked out the window.

Sometimes this job was more than I wanted to deal with.

Chapter 40

The headline in the paper had the President’s popularity dropping with the war going so badly. His opponent was ripping him every night on the news, but the opponent was getting attacked in turn for being a two-faced coward. I didn’t like either of them. Fred was over there with his brother for nearly a month. He called me one night drunk and crying and babbling about how he ought to just kill his brother he was so fucked up. I wondered how many other brothers were going through what he was and how many more would have too. The newspaper said the war was costing billions of dollars everyday and despite that the cost of gas was still going up, which I thought was the secret reason we had gone to war in the first place. You had to wonder if maybe the whole think hadn’t been a mistake. America couldn’t seem to win, but we couldn’t retreat either. How did they say it? We had to stay the course? There would one day be light at the end of the tunnel? It was like with me and Carrie, too. Things were often miserable, but I guess you just had to keep plowing ahead and hope the sky didn’t fall in on you.

I had my problems. I could tell myself all I wanted that I would go straight, that I was done stealing, but nothing seemed to stop me -- not ghosts of patients, not high fevers, not even my own panging conscience. The bottom line was the money was there for the taking, and I took it. I took it because I felt I needed it. I never stole from the poor that I could tell, never stole from those who needed it directly that I could tell. So I was making excuses. Lay the money before me, and as soon as heads were turned, it was in my pocket. I had obligations. I had to keep Carrie happy. I knew she wasn’t good for me, but like the President, I didn’t see any retreat. I had to kick some money to my mom for her casino trips. I needed to save for the future, and now I needed to buy Viagra. If patients had it, they were more careful hiding it than they were with their cash. I looked everywhere, under mattresses, inside towel bowl lids, even in cookie jars. I couldn’t find any. One of the EMTs was running a market in it, selling pills at $20 a piece, claiming his supplier paid $10, although I worked with him one day on overtime and saw his lift some sample packets from a doctor’s office supply closet when we had been sent there for a patient with diarrhea. When I went back to the doctor’s office the next week for an asthma patient, I checked the cabinet, but there were now a lock on it. $20 was a lot for one pill, the truth is I would have paid $50. It kept Carrie satisfied, kept her from feeding her desires elsewhere – or at least I hoped it did.

“463, Shooting Edgewood and Homestead, on a 1.”

“Whoo—hoo!” Tom said, as I lit up the ambulance.

“Whoo-hoo!” I echoed.

He was excited because he was a spark at heart and loved trauma, loved the chance to be quick on the scene, and get the patient to the trauma room, tubed and with two lines to the acclaim of the trauma team, and the nurses who doted on him.

I was excited because drug dealers were my bread and butter. One too-bad homeboy a month kept me in Carrie’s bed, and our relationship in style, flowers, nice dinner, some wine and some of the old in-out with my titanium dick.

I spotted a body lying on the street corner. People were still running every which way. A cop car was ahead of us, and the officer was out gun drawn looking in several directions. I thought I heard more shots fired and the cop ducked down behind his car. A lone body was good – it meant no one had had time to roll him before I got to him.

“There’re still fucking shooting,” Tom said.

“Hi, ho silver,” I said, “Let’s get him loaded and get him out of here.”

I spun the ambulance up on the curb between the direction the cop was pointing his gun and where the body lay.

“You’re a crazy motherfucker,” Tom said. He was on the exposed side.

“Crawl out this way,” I said, rolling out the driver door. He followed me. I had the stretcher pulled, and yanked out a board. Tom was already tubing the guy, using his perfected digital style. He always carried a number 8.0 ET tube he kept in his side pant leg pocket. It was the quickest way to intubate someone, open their mouth and using your fingers, manipulate the tube down and shove in between the chords by lifting up the epiglottis at the same time, you used your middle finger to give the tube an upward shove.

The tube in, we rolled the patient on the board, lifted up on the stretcher, heard a few more rounds, then slammed into the back. I hopped in the back, made certain to cut his jacket off, then while Tom popped in an IV, I bounced into the driver’s seat, slammed the ambulance hard into reverse, spun the back around, and then floored back up Homestead. In and out in two minutes.

The guy didn’t make it, but we had an awesome scene time, and I scored over two grand – my biggest payday in three months.

“You are a crazy motherfucker,” Tom said again after he’d finished writing his form.

“What are bullets when you have a job to?” I said, “When you have a living to make.”

He looked at me like I was crazier than even he thought.

All I was thinking about was Carrie smothering me with her love.

I was a hopeless pathetic addict.

Chapter Forty

The headline in the paper had the President’s popularity dropping with the war going so badly. His opponent was ripping him every night on the news, but the opponent was getting attacked in turn for being a two-faced coward. I didn’t like either of them. Fred was over there with his brother for nearly a month. He called me one night drunk and crying and babbling about how he ought to just kill his brother he was so fucked up. I wondered how many other brothers were going through what he was and how many more would have too. The newspaper said the war was costing billions of dollars everyday and despite that the cost of gas was still going up, which I thought was the secret reason we had gone to war in the first place. You had to wonder if maybe the whole think hadn’t been a mistake. America couldn’t seem to win, but we couldn’t retreat either. How did they say it? We had to stay the course? There would one day be light at the end of the tunnel? It was like with me and Carrie, too. Things were often miserable, but I guess you just had to keep plowing ahead and hope the sky didn’t fall in on you.

I had my problems. I could tell myself all I wanted that I would go straight, that I was done stealing, but nothing seemed to stop me -- not ghosts of patients, not high fevers, not even my own panging conscience. The bottom line was the money was there for the taking, and I took it. I took it because I felt I needed it. I never stole from the poor that I could tell, never stole from those who needed it directly that I could tell. So I was making excuses. Lay the money before me, and as soon as heads were turned, it was in my pocket. I had obligations. I had to keep Carrie happy. I knew she wasn’t good for me, but like the President, I didn’t see any retreat. I had to kick some money to my mom for her casino trips. I needed to save for the future, and now I needed to buy Viagra. If patients had it, they were more careful hiding it than they were with their cash. I looked everywhere, under mattresses, inside towel bowl lids, even in cookie jars. I couldn’t find any. One of the EMTs was running a market in it, selling pills at $20 a piece, claiming his supplier paid $10, although I worked with him one day on overtime and saw his lift some sample packets from a doctor’s office supply closet when we had been sent there for a patient with diarrhea. When I went back to the doctor’s office the next week for an asthma patient, I checked the cabinet, but there were now a lock on it. $20 was a lot for one pill, the truth is I would have paid $50. It kept Carrie satisfied, kept her from feeding her desires elsewhere – or at least I hoped it did.

“463, Shooting Edgewood and Homestead, on a 1.”

“Whoo—hoo!” Tom said, as I lit up the ambulance.

“Whoo-hoo!” I echoed.

He was excited because he was a spark at heart and loved trauma, loved the chance to be quick on the scene, and get the patient to the trauma room, tubed and with two lines to the acclaim of the trauma team, and the nurses who doted on him.

I was excited because drug dealers were my bread and butter. One too-bad homeboy a month kept me in Carrie’s bed, and our relationship in style, flowers, nice dinner, some wine and some of the old in-out with my titanium dick.

I spotted a body lying on the street corner. People were still running every which way. A cop car was ahead of us, and the officer was out gun drawn looking in several directions. I thought I heard more shots fired and the cop ducked down behind his car. A lone body was good – it meant no one had had time to roll him before I got to him.

“There’re still fucking shooting,” Tom said.

“Hi, ho silver,” I said, “Let’s get him loaded and get him out of here.”

I spun the ambulance up on the curb between the direction the cop was pointing his gun and where the body lay.

“You’re a crazy motherfucker,” Tom said. He was on the exposed side.

“Crawl out this way,” I said, rolling out the driver door. He followed me. I had the stretcher pulled, and yanked out a board. Tom was already tubing the guy, using his perfected digital style. He always carried a number 8.0 ET tube he kept in his side pant leg pocket. It was the quickest way to intubate someone, open their mouth and using your fingers, manipulate the tube down and shove in between the chords by lifting up the epiglottis at the same time, you used your middle finger to give the tube an upward shove.

The tube in, we rolled the patient on the board, lifted up on the stretcher, heard a few more rounds, then slammed into the back. I hopped in the back, made certain to cut his jacket off, then while Tom popped in an IV, I bounced into the driver’s seat, slammed the ambulance hard into reverse, spun the back around, and then floored back up Homestead. In and out in two minutes.

The guy didn’t make it, but we had an awesome scene time, and I scored over two grand – my biggest payday in three months.

“You are a crazy motherfucker,” Tom said again after he’d finished writing his form.

“What are bullets when you have a job to?” I said, “When you have a living to make.”

He looked at me like I was crazier than even he thought.

All I was thinking about was Carrie smothering me with her love.

I was a hopeless pathetic addict.

Chapter 41

After we’d cleaned up, dispatch gave us a transfer, an old woman being discharged from the Saint Francis ER, going out to Alexandria Manor in Bloomfield after having her clogged G-tube repaired. It was a strictly basic transfer, but since we needed to go back and resupply some items after the shooting -- it was all right. There was little chance of having to use the needed gear on a transfer. Dispatch said if we did the transfer, then we could grab some dinner, come in and resupply. By then some more evening cars would be on and there would be little chance of getting whacked with another call.

As we were exiting the nursing home, we saw in the lobby they were selling roses for $3 each with the money benefiting the resident’s arts and crafts fund. I guess I was in a good mood imaging the love Carrie was going to shower down on me. I saw us going back to Boston. We’d have a nice lobster dinner at Legal Sea Food, go to the Comedy Club at Fannuel Hall, and then come back to our suite at the Ritz-Carlton and rock the joint. Oh, yeah, baby.

I bought her a rose. “On our way back,” I said to Tom. “I want to stop by her place, and pop in and leave her the rose. She goes nuts for romantic stuff like that. I figured since we were in the area.”

“You just want to pop in and bang her?”

“Well, she grabs me by the neck and pulls me in, I guess it will be hard to say no.”

“You sure you don’t want to call her first, give a little heads up?”

“Now, she’s just right around the corner. I want to be spontaneous.”

“Spontaneous is great, but you should call.” He nodded to the pay phone by the door.

“I don’t have a quarter,” I said.

I was smelling the rose, smelling good times, thinking of nothing but the brownie points I was going to be making.

I directed Tom to her apartment complex. I could see the light was on in her apartment.
“Here, take the radio,” Tom said, “Just don’t be too long, and don’t let her wrap her legs around your head so tight you can’t hear dispatch calling.“

I looked at him and smiled, thinking he had no idea that in fact when she wrapped her legs around my head, I doubted I could even hear an atom bomb going off. All my senses would be geared toward hoping my head didn’t explode and my eye balls pop out in her vice like grip of ecstasy.

“If I don’t come out when they call, hit the air horn.”

“You dog.”

“It’s not like I haven’t had to side outside certain apartment complexes in the half the towns we cover while you’ve run in and had extended lunches.”

“You got me on that. I still think you should call first, give her a few minutes to freshen up.”

I figured the first thing she did when she came home was shower, so she probably was good to go. With my luck – and I was feeling lucky – she’d answer the door in her bathroom, with her hair up in a towel, smelling of special shampoo.

I heard the sound as my hand my moving forward to rap on the door. I heard it too late to slow the downslope of my hand on the brassknocker. It was unmistakable. Her cries of love, her rhythmic groans. I stood there in terror. I could hear her swear, and then I heard her say, “Hey, I’m not getting the door. Its probably just the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Avon calling. Keep going.” From the sound I knew she was in the living room, probably against the ottoman, not twenty feet from the front door. I stood there frozen in pain. What a fool I was. What a fool. I listened to her grunt. Maybe I liked to suffer. Maybe that was why I hadn’t called. Why I set myself up. She had never explicitly said we were exclusive since we’d gotten back together this time. I had my three nights a week, up from two. Things were going well. I was number one on her list I was sure, number one because I cared about her, took her out, but that didn’t mean I was the only one. She just had an appetite. That was who she was, but that fact didn’t make me any happier, standing there like an idiot on her front step, holding a three dollar rose.

I was pale, lifeless when I walked back to the ambulance. “Dude, I’m sorry,” Tom said. “But I told you, you should have called first. Always call. Particularly her.”

I looked at him then, eyeing him in a new way.

“Don’t go there,” he said.

And I listened to him this time. She’d done everyone else, why not him, too.

I was a fool.

I let the rose drop out the window.

“Don’t hold it against her too much,” he said. “She is who she is. You’ve always known that. We all are who we are.”

Chapter 42

I found myself that night back at Uncle Frank’s, but I had no interest in the lady’s breasts. I sat at the bar, and had a few beers. Jimmy the bouncer came over and sat next to me. “She broke my heart, too,” he said. “A few months ago I went over there to give her some comfort. I’d heard she’s broken up with Paul. Took me two weeks to get up my nerve to call her. She says sure come on over. The next thing I knew we were all over each other. I told her I loved her and she laughed at me.”

I looked at him for a moment, shocked. Here was this big muscular bouncer who had his pick of any of the dancers, and he goes over to her house and because of the way she makes it with him, he says, “I Love you.”

I thought so I am not the biggest loser.

“Next night I stop over unannounced,” he says. “I bring her flowers and chocolates, and Victoria Secret underwear. I knock. No one comes to the door. Then I hear her. I thought maybe she had taped us and was playing it back because those were the same sounds I heard. I look in the window, and it’s you, your skinny little butt it humping the shit out of here.”

“You were peeking in on us?”

“I’m sorry, dude, it was nothing personal and believe I did not linger beyond the moment of shock at the confirmation of what I was seeing. I went home and took and shower. If I could have washed my eyes with soap, I would have. I apologize, but I can see by the way you look that is why you are here because she broke your heart again.”

I am amazed. I thought I was the only one.

“Dude, that girl has a great big whole in her life that she needs to fill. It made me feel small that I couldn’t satisfy it. Some women they just need. The bad thing was she made me believe. These girls here, they’ll fuck you for a ride home, but they don’t make you feel like you are the one, then blow you off. You know where you stand with them. Let me buy you a beer.” He gestured to the bartender. “A round for my friend.”

I had a few beers with him, and while it didn’t make me feel too much better, it made me feel a little alone, a little less like I was the one who was lacking.

“You want I’ll set you up with Jenny,” he said. He nodded to the girl on the bar now, shaking her breasts in another patrons face. “Just a tip for her.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got to be going.”

“Any time you need it, I’m working here, you got one on the house.”

“Okay.”

I left a twenty for the bartender and left.

It was an odd, strange world.

Chapter 43

I was supposed to see Carrie that night, and I thought all day about what I would do. I imagined several scenarios.

In one, when she opens the door, I fan out the five thousand dollars, using both hands like a magician fanning a deck of cards, then as she smiles and reaches for it, I step back and say, “Babe, this could have been yours. A Vacation in the Bahamas, all-inclusive, drinks with umbrellas in them, snorkeling trips, fresh fish cooked on the beach by native chefs, shopping, hot tub Jacuzzi, watching the sun go down on the beach. It could have been New York City riding in a limo with the top open, looking at big buildings, drinking champagne, going through a spin through central park, as I pleasured you till you exploded my head. It could have Paris, London, Roma. It could have been the world, but No! IF three nights a week isn’t enough to satisfy you, and you’ve got to go out and get extra on the side, then I’m taking my $5000 and finding a nice woman who appreciates a hard working man who provides. Sayonara, Hasta La Vista, Chow, Ourvow, Kiss My butt!” And I walk away, as she tries to grab me by the ankle, sobbing. I drag her half way across the parking lot, before she finally loses her grip, and I am a free man at last.

In two, She grabs me at the door, pulls me to her. Her tongue goes deep in my throat. I grab her breast. Her bathrobe comes off. I leave my boots in the foyer, she tears at my shirt and pants. I have her against the ottoman, pounding away, then she forces me out and turns over and I go down as I always do. Just how she likes it, and she arches back and I work it hard, getting her right there, right there where her clitoris is hard and beginning to shake, and its just a little more work, just a touch more till I have her whole body shuddering, then I stop. She says, “Hey what are you doing? What’s going on?” I’m up and putting my clothes back on. “’Sorry’ I say. ‘I forgot I have an appointment with another broad across town.’” That’s when I show her my roll. “We’re going out on the town. Going to spend some dough. Whoo! Hoo!” “Hey!” she says, “Wait, come back!” But I am out the door, out the door so quick I don’t even close it, keeping it open, so she can see me get in my car and peel out, gone for good. See you later. I’m gone.

In three, I don’t show. I call and say I’m going to be a little late. I call again a half hour later and say, I’m still running late, but I hope to be there. I keep on with the calling with the excuses, getting her more and more annoyed. Then her doorbell rings, and by now she’s know whether to belt me or jump me hard, and she opens the door with this big angry look, but its not me, it’s the Pizza guy and he’s got a box of Pizza, but there’s only one slice in it, and that slice has a bit in it, just one big mouth size bit, and there’s a note it, and the note says, “Carrie, I just have too big of an appetite to come over. I’ve eaten so much p--- tonight, I mean pizza, yeah pizza, I just couldn’t finish off any more, and the thought of trying to stuff down the slice of your p---, I mean pizza, I just couldn’t take it. It was enough to make me want to puke. Vomit. Hurl. Sincerely, Tim. P.S. Oh, by the way you and I are done. Through. Kaput. Over and Finished. Good Bye. Good bye to you. P.S.S. Oh also, the pizza guy is gay so you’re shit out of luck tonight.”

I had anger toward her obviously. I’d gone and risked everything again by swiping the five grand from the dead drug dealer and was so looking forward to spending it with her and enjoying the bliss of her happiness that I didn’t know what to do now with the money. I just didn’t know.

Then we got dispatched to a home on Magnolia Street in the north end. Eighty eight year old woman lives alone with her retarded sixty-nine year-old daughter, the daughter has Parkinson’s in addition to her retardation. She has fallen and the woman cannot pick her up. She hates to bother us, but she didn’t know what else to do. The apartment is bare. There is a picture of Jesus on the wall next to one of John Kennedy and one of Martin Luther King. We help pick her daughter up and she is blessing us, and thanking us, and I am looking at Jesus and Martin Luther and JFK and at the poor surroundings, and its like all of a sudden I think I am not worthy, not worthy of her thanks and her bless yous and worthy of these men. While Tom gets her to sign the refusal of transport form, and I am getting the med list of the refrigerator door, where it is held by a magnet so I can write it on the paperwork as is required, it comes over me. When I put the med list back up, I take a twenty and stick it under the magnet and tack it up there on the refrigerator. They’ll find it when they come back in the kitchen after we have left, and they’ll wonder how it got there, what spirit blessed them. I repeat to the amazement of myself, I took twenty dollars out of my pocket and put it on the refrigerator. I did not take. I did not steal.

As we left. I crossed myself as I had not done since I was last in church as a small boy when my mother and father still lived together and my mother believed in the church. I crossed myself.

“What the fuck are you doing?" Tom asked.

“Such language.”

“You are getting weirder by the day.”

“Life is full of surprises,” I said.

Chapter 44

I guess my plan was to dump her. It was my plan. Dumping is not a sensitive enough word though, because I felt like things were changing. I was no longer angry. I felt serene, a calmness had come over me. I was feeling almost a holiness, not that I deserved any rewards, rather than I felt had been taken over by a force that made sense, that was righteous and kind, and that kept me from anger and replaced it with kindness and understanding, almost love.

I took Carrie for the person she was, no better no worse. She had goodness to her, as I had to me. We just weren’t meant for each other. I was going to go in there, and say, Carrie, I think we need to part. As much as I love you, yeah, even lust after you, its time to set those lusts aside, and out of love, acknowledge that our relationship has gone astray.

I showered, shaved, brushed my teeth and put in fresh clothes. I looked at the bottle of Viagra by the sink. I thought about it, I did. Suddenly it was like the devil was coming back. Just go on, have one last good hard fuck, then afterwards, you can tell her you love her, but… But I had will-power, and the Viagra remained unopened. I even went so far as to think about dropping the pills in the toilet and flushing them, but that was too much commitment to something I was largely committed too, but not completely convinced entirely of, entirely meaning 100 percent with no room for change of mind. Instead, I tossed the pills in the small waste basket, where they would remain till I returned home, and then I could decide about flushing them or, putting them back on the counter. So I guess you could say I was keeping all my options open, while trying to move toward bliss.

On the way there I made all sorts of fancy speeches in my head, but when I knocked on the door, and she answered all sweet and smelling of shampoo and pulled me to her, I didn’t know what to do. We made out, her tongue in my mouth, and she pulled my hand to her breast, and massaged it when she felt my unexplained, but still slight resistance. “Oh, baby, I’ve missed you,” she said, licking at my face and neck. “I’ve missed you so.”

“Ho ho,” I said. “Whooa.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Let just go in and sit for a minute.”

“You don’t want me? What’s the matter?” She felt my groin. “Where’s Mr. Louisville Slugger.”

And despite my resistance, despite not taking my secret pill, Mr. Louisville Slugger said, “I’m right here, honey. Let’s get it on, Darling!”

“There he is,” she said. “How’s my precious?”

And by now we were on the couch and she was talking to precious up close and personal, and I was doing all I could do gather strength to fend her off. But I couldn’t. I was weak. I lay back and found joy of another kind that what you would call holy.

“You liked that?” she said, when she was done. “I suppose we can alter our pattern every now and then, as long as Big Boy is ready to go again soon, and I know your sweet tongue is never tired. She climbed up on me, but I sat up. “We have to talk,” I said.

“Talk? I just did some talking. Now it’s your turn to talk to me.”

And I did. I was not strong.

I finished her off, her those familiar cries, felt the familiar pressure of her thighs squeezing me like a nutcracker. But where I normally pictured my eyes popping out of my head, I was thinking about someone standing outside the window looking in, and that someone was me, and I started to feel the anger coming back.

“I want you in me,” she said as soon as she shuddered, and she grabbed me, but I was not ready this time.”

“Hey, what’s the matter? What’s wrong with you tonight?’

“Nothing,” I said. “We just need to talk.”

She looked at me and I saw concern in her face, concern like a little girl is afraid she’s going to have something she wants taken away. “About what?”

“About all this. All this sex and where are we going with it?”

“Where do you want to go with it?”

“Its just seems like its just sex and I could be anyone.”

“Are you unhappy with me?”

“No, I just want more?”

“Are you going to ask me to marry you?”

“Huh?”

“A girl wants more too. My mother used to warn me, Men won’t marry the cow when they can get the milk for free. You’ve been sucking on my tits to be figurative for awhile now.”

I almost said, but it hasn’t been for free, when I saw her glance at the clock. It was barely more than imperceptible, but it caught my attention.

“If I married you, how would I know you wouldn’t get tired of me? I mean the same applies for a man. You’ve been milking me this bull for awhile and what have I got?”

“First off all, bulls don’t produce milk.”

“I know that but.”

“But nothing. I take care of you like you have never been taken care of before. You want more, its going to cost big. You’re going to have to make a bigger commitment because I’m tired of this too.”

She looked at the clock again.

”Maybe you should think it over,” she said. “Maybe you should just leave and not come back until you’ve thought it over.”

“I get it,” I said. “You want to boot me out now, thinking you may still have time to call one of your other boyfriends, so you won’t to be alone.”

“That’s not true.”

“Don’t lie to me. I saw you last night.”

“What? Are you doing your peeping Tom again.”

“No, I stopped by to give you a rose I bought because I thought of you, and I come to the door and oh, my god, the rumbling, I though the same Francisco earthquake was hitting Connecticut.”

“Get out,” she said. “Get out of here now!”

“I’d be glad to,” I said, pulling on my clothes. “I’d be fucking glad too.”

And I was out the door with her yelling at me, calling me a soft cocked weenie.

I blushed as a pretty girl was just at that moment walking toward me from her car, as I walked to mine. She smirked.

A soft cocked weenie. That was cold.

Not that it had gone the way I had planned, but at least I was done with her. Or so I thought.

Chapter 45

“You dumped her or she dumped you?’ Tom asked.

“She dumped me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

“What do you mean, you think so?”

“Yeah, I dumped her. I told her I was tired of her BS.”

“Did you do her first?”

“Huh?”

“Before you dumped her, you had sex, you got it one last time.”

“No,” I lied. “I just went over and said ‘No more.’”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“You went over, and she pulled you down on her, and you didn’t have the backbone to dump her till after you did it.”

“Okay, but I meant to dump her first.”

He smiled, and held up a high five for me. “You dog,” He said.

I slapped his hand half-heartedly. Despite everything I did feel for her. I worried about her at home crying her eyes out, but then I thought she was probably with the milkman right at that very moment.

“You’ll be back with her in a week anyway, but sometimes you have to show them who’s boss.”

“Yeah, right.” I said. “She knows I’m the boss.”

“Sure you are. Maybe you’ll be the one crying to her.”

“Not likely.”

Tom could get most any woman he wanted it seemed, and he treated them at first like they were special, then as soon as he was in, he treated them like shit. He said they ate it up, and from the number of times his pager went off, it seemed that way. Me, I wasn’t like that. I could pretend, but it would never be me.

I wanted to be a good person. Still feeling the glow from the twenty I had left on the refrigerator of the old lady on Magnolia Street, I left another twenty on the bed table of an elderly diabetic on Enfield Street. I slipped twenty dollars to a homeless man who’d had a seizure, but refused transport to the hospital. All he needed he said was a drink to get himself under control.

I’m not saying I was a saint, but when they say better to give than to receive, I saw some of their point. I felt a glow an aurora around me.

I felt that each time I gave, I grew as a person. A little of the weak me left and slowly, a stronger foundation was built. I walked a little taller. I told no one about the gifts, never let Tom see my generosity. I probably shouldn’t say generosity because after all the money was stolen in the first place. Still finders keepers, possession is 99% of the law. The money was mine now, and I didn’t have to give it, but I did.

I gave a hundred to a mother with an asthmatic child, a fifty to an elderly woman in a nursing home. There were taking donations at work for a fellow EMT whose husband was dying of cancer. I put two hundred in a blank envelope and dropped in the contribution box. I never told anyone. We transported a baby who needed a heart transplant to Boston, along with his young parents. I put a hundred in the mother’s Bible, when she set it down to sign the transport form for Tom.

Sure, I could have held on to the money, and used it to help hook me up with another woman, get some impressive first date, but I was tired of that game, tired of having to pretend I made money I didn’t. I thought again about going back to school and getting a degree. I went down to the community college and inquired about the nursing program. Maybe if I had a degree I could get someone who didn’t care about how much money I could spend on her.

One day we did a call on Martin Street where some volunteers called Habitat for Humanity were building a house. One of the volunteers -- a pretty twenty-six year old -- smashed her thumb using a hammer. We took her to Saint Francis. All the way there I asked her about the project and she said it was a volunteer thing. It was about helping people afford their own homes. She told me how I could volunteer. When I asked her for her number as I filled out my run form, she looked at me a little funny like I was asking her out. It’s just for the billing department, I said. You don’t have to give it to me. She smiled and gave it to me. I thought about calling her later to see how she made out at the hospital, but thought that might be too forward.

“She was a fox, huh?” Tom said. “I was feeling sorry for you that was the only reason I let you tech it.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

“You going to call her? Because if you don’t I will.”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right, don’t say I didn’t give you a shot.”

I didn’t call her, but I did take a day off and went down to Martin Street to volunteer to hammer nails for a day. I was hoping she’d be there and we could strike up a conversation again, and then I could ask her out in a better way, but she wasn’t there. I ended up spending most of the time talking to an old retired guy who told me about his sick daughter. I ended up putting a twenty in his jacket pocket.

That Sunday I went to church for the first time in nearly fifteen years. I put another twenty in the collection plate. And when we all stood and sang, I sang along as best I could. I truly wanted to be a decent person.

I did.

Chapters Forty-Six to Fifty-One (End)

Chapters Forty-Six to Fifty-One (End)

2006-01-23T16:34:00.000-08:00

Chapter Forty-Six

“227 Duke, violent psych possibly armed,” the dispatch said.

“That’s Fred’s house,” I said.

“If that’s Fred and he’s armed, I’m not getting near it. That boy’s sick and he’s not taking me with him,” Tom said.

“He’s just upset about his brother and he’s probably drunk. It’s just around the corner. I’ll go in and talk to him.”

“I’m staying in the ambulance and we’re staying around the corner until the cops say it’s clear.”

“Fine.”

“Hey, where are you going?” Tom shouted as I went out the door. “You’re as crazy as he is.”

I knew Fred and I knew the cops, and that was a bad combination. The cops hated Fred because Fred wanted to be like them but wasn’t. I ran through the back yard and out onto Fred’s street. I could hear the sirens in the distance. I looked to my left and saw Tom, instead of staying where we’d been had come around the corner and was waving at me to get back in the ambulance. I saw Fred’s car in the drive and the light on up in his room, so I went right up the stairs. Fred had been terribly moody and angry since he came back from Germany.

The door was open. Fred had a revolver in his mouth. He sat at the kitchen table.

“Don’t!” I said.

He looked up at me with eyes I not seen before. There were wild and scared.

“Give me the gun. Give it to me now. The cops are coming. Man, what are you doing?”

He took the gun out of his mouth and very slowly pointed it at me. “How about I blow your face up?” he said. “How many people’s faces should I mess up before we can get a law passed allowing people who want to die to die? How about I just start messing up everyone’s faces. Pow! Pow! Pow! Maybe then we get a movement.”

I held my hands up. “Fred, come on.”

Behind him I could see the history channel was on TV, Allied planes dropping bombs on Germany.

“Fred, your brother wouldn’t want this. I know your upset, but we can get someone to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

I glanced to the window and saw the lights of the police cruisers. The shades were open. I went right to the window and pulled them down. I didn’t think Fred would shoot me, but if the cops saw him holding a gun on me, he’d catch a sniper shot between the eyes. That was for sure.

“You shouldn’t be moving around when I’ve gun pointed at you,” Fred said.

“You shouldn’t be pointing a gun at me. Now give it, give it here.” I walked right towards him. His hands were shaking. “Give it up. There’s a better way to handle this.”

Suddenly he pointed the gun at his temple. I kept walking right at him. Fred wasn’t the smartest guy and I didn’t think he’d have time to think out what to do. Besides if he really wanted to kill himself, he would have done it.

I reached him, reached up for the gun and he let me take it. I put it in the side leg pocket of my work pants. I put my arm around him, and he laid his head on my shoulder and cried. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“It’s not fucking fair,” he cried. “It isn’t right.”

“It’s all right. It’s all right.”

“He and I should be out drinking beer....”

“Look we’ve got to take you in. I can’t leave you here, but we’re going to get someone to talk to you.”

“I don’t want anyone to see me.”

“Look, here.” I took off my EMT jacket and had him put it on. “You still have to come in, but just follow me.”

We walked out together. They had cops behind cars with rifles pointed at us. We held our hands up, and the cops frisked Fred. I told them he had admitted he was distraught over his brother’s death, and was coming voluntarily. I knew I was treading on thin ice, but I didn’t want Fred to be branded as a freak. I knew he was just upset by grief, and maybe the antidepressants he was on were fucking with him. He liked women and beer too much to want to off himself. I wanted to protect his reputation as much as I could.

I rode with him on the way in. At the hospital, he and Tom stood at the triage desk just like two EMTs. You’d never know he was a patient. I told the triage nurse he was distraught and had threatened suicide, but was willing to talk to someone. She nodded, and instead of putting him in the pschy unit, got him a private ER room. A couple hours later we took him over to the IOL.

“What’s in your leg pocket?” Tom asked when we came out of the institute.

“Nothing,” I said.

“It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Drive over to East Hartford,” I said.

“What?”

“Don’t clear, just do it.”

Something in the way I said it, made him follow my directions. I had him stop on the bridge over the Connecticut River. I got out and went over to the side. I waited until no cars were approaching, then took the gun out and dropped it down into the river below.

Tom looked at me when I got back in.

“I may underestimate you,” he said.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Carrie called me. It was late at night. I wasn’t usually home till after midnight, but since I had spent the day volunteering at the homeless shelter, I had gone home at ten, and was about ready to turn the light out.

“You’re home?” she said.

“Ye-ah, this is where I live.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Going to bed. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I was just calling to see what you were up to.”

I could tell from her voice she’d had a couple glasses of wine, not drunk, but not sober either, not that she ever was at this time of night. It occurred to me that maybe she was calling me because her plans had fallen through, and it was getting late and she didn’t want to be alone.

“I haven’t talked to you for awhile. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sure dandy,” she said, sounding a little annoyed, like she wanted to say, “All right? I’m calling you at ten at night, drunk because I’m lonely and not happy.”

“Good, glad to hear it.”

“You want to come over?” Her voice cracked a little, and that crack went like an arrow right into my heart. She wanted me.

Don’t do it, my brain said. Don’t even think about it, but my heart said, don’t listen to him, she needs you, she’s learned that, all that cheap sex she doesn’t want it, it’s not what she needs. She needs someone who cares, someone who understands the pilgrim soul in her, a decent man. That decent man is you. And then my dick piped in. Whoa dude, remember me. What are you nuts? Within a half hour, I’ll be kissing her cervix. Don’t exercise me, I’ll grow soft and flabby and shrink like all those old men’s penius’s in the nursing homes. I’m out of shape. Boot camp calls. Let me work it. Yeah, let’s work it.

Two against one.

“Okay,” I said. “I can come over and talk.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

Instead of pulling my mouth to her opening mouth and plunging tongue, she just hugged me, hugged me and then led me in by the hand. She sat me down beside her on the couch, and said, “I’m so glad you could come over. I’ve missed you.”

When I said nothing, she said, “I’ve really, really missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” I said, as non-committably as I could.

She started sobbing. She leaned her head on my shoulder and sobbed uncontrollably. I held her, held her while she cried. I patted her back. She kissed my neck, but I did not submit. Not yet.

“It’s just, it’s just been so hard,” she said. “There are a lot of jerks in this world. I don’t know why they are all attracted to me.”

I felt like saying, gee, I suppose you include me in this company. Maybe she felt me stiffen a little, then she laughed and said, “Not you of course. You the only one who’s ever really cared, ever really treated me right. It’s not like you just want to fuck me.” She laughed again as she wiped her eyes. “Not that you don’t mind it.”

“It’s is a perk of seeing you,” I said.

We both laughed, and she wiped another tear, then she locked onto me with her eyes, locked on and stared and I was caught. She reached around to the back of my neck and slowly pulled my mouth toward hers, and then we were going at it, our tongues wild for each other, her hand held my wrist so my hand was rubbing her breast, then she tugged at my belt and we were back half on the floor half on the Ottoman, and she was grunting and groaning and I was doing some of the same.

We fucked that night like we had not fucked in years. I had not even taken a Viagra, but it did not matter. My pent up lust was natural and I performed at the peak of my powers. She did not take her eyes off me.

That night I lay next to her, listening to her snore. I was not certain what I felt. It was good to be back with a woman at my side, but I feared after the novelty of reuniting was worn off, we would fall right back into the same old patterns. I wondered if people could really change. If you were selfish, you would always be selfish. If you were hateful, you would hateful. If you were easily deceived, wanting to believe the best, would you ever change. If you were without backbone, would you ever grow one. And if at heart, you just wanted people to be happy and loved, would you ever find it yourself.

I did not know where we were going, but at least for that night, I was less alone.

Chapter Forty-Nine

“I don’t believe you,” Tom said, the next morning. “I just do not believe you.”

“What?”

“You horny little dog.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your neck is covered with hickeys again.”

“So, what if it is?”

“You are a glutton for punishment.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’m going to take you to ADRC. Put you through rehab. See if we can’t get you dried out altogether. You looked like you had gone straight, but I could see it, I could see the little shakes and twitches behind your alter boy persona of these last week’s. You’re a junkie, a junkie for that chick’s evil hoodoo. We’ve got to set you straight. Either that or buy you some chains so you can keep her caged in. Hell maybe you ought to marry her, that way you’ll always have it to come home too, but then again, I don’t know if you can domesticate those kinds of urges.”

I just tried to ignore him. Though the truth was I knew that I needed some kind of answer, some kind of solution to the Carrie situation. I spent my life living day to day and I knew I needed a longer-term outlook. I had to make a break one way or the other.

“463, 220 Capen Street for the unknown,” came over the radio. “Possible welfare check.”

“220 Capen,” Tom said. “Your lady friend. We haven’t heard from her for awhile. Were you on the outs with her too? This is turning into reunion week for you.”

As we pulled up, we could see the pile of newspapers at the door, five days worth. The mail man, who met us out front, said he had called. “She hasn’t picked up her mail this week. I almost called yesterday. It’s not like she hasn’t let a few days slide in the past, but I’ve never seen her go this long. Usually the visiting nurse brings it in. I don’t know why she hasn’t. Maybe she went out of town. It’s just unusual.”

Tom and I looked at each other. “You first,” he said. “If she’s home, one way or another, it’s going to be stinky.”

We went in through the back door. The house always had a musty aged smell to it. Miss Broadbent and her health aides didn’t always clean up after her dog. The air today was heavier with a hint of a familiar rotting smell. The closer we got to the stairs, the more pronounced it became. “I better get the monitor,” Tom said.

If that was her, he was right, all that we would need was a six second strip and to write down the time.

I started up the stairs. Smells didn’t affect me like they did Tom. He was a great paramedic and fearless, but he had a weak stomach when it came to dead bodies. He carried around Vick’s crème in his bag that he sometimes put under his lip to ward off the smell. I just tried not to breath through my nose. Upstairs, even I had a hard time with it. I looked in the bedroom. She wasn’t in the bed. The bathroom door was open. I glance in. There she was.

She looked like she’d fallen off the throne some time before. She was leaned up against the radiator, which was slowly baking the flesh off her. It looked like the dog had eaten some of her leg. It was dark raw and ripped open. She’d had to have been dead five days. Her body was swollen with gas, and if I hadn’t known she was white, I would have thought she was black.

“You find her,” Tom called from downstairs. Then I heard him gag. I heard him heave, and then swear.

“Yeah, I found her,” I said.

“Do I need to come up?”

“No. You don’t even need a run a strip. She’s long gone.”

“Fuck, I’m going outside. And I heard him retch again.”

I stood there looking at her, thinking how sad it was what our lives come to, what her life and all the dreams she’d once had had come to – this, rotting alone in a bathroom, being nibbled on by your own dog, no family or friends to look after you. I wondered why the visiting nurse of home health aide, hadn’t found her sooner. Maybe they’d thought she was out of town too when they knocked and no one came to the door. It was a shame.

I thought about how her family had come to the end of its line. I looked down and saw the dog standing next to me, looking in at her too. I thought about giving him a good kick, but then I thought, a dog like a person has to eat, has to do what it has to do to get along, to survive.

That was when a gleam caught my eye. It came from under the radiator. I went in and got down on my knees and looked. I knew what it was. It was her ring, her diamond ring. It must have fallen off her skinny finger when she died, and rolled under the radiator.

I reached down and picked it up. It was a beautiful ring. I imagined how she must have felt when she first received it. A ring like that had seen a lot itself, from the day it was clinked out of a wall in some South African mine. It had arrived at her house and glimpsed a young beauty, and then every day had seen her slowly age, and now rot. I wondered where it would go now, and if it would ever see the face of another young woman, and then it dawned on me.

The ring had been a curse to her. She’d be etter off without it up in heaven, where she could be free to find a new man. And the ring, maybe it needed a new start to, a new chance to delivere on its promise. Plus, it was a big diamond took big to go back in the earth. She had no family, no one to pass it on too.

I put it in my pocket. Who the hell would ever know?

“She good and dead?” Tom said.

I nodded.

“So what do I write.”

“Found pulseless, and apneic in advanced state of decomposition.”

“Advanced state of decomposition. That works for me.”

I was quiet most of the rest of the night.

“My condolences,” Tom said.

“For what?”

“For your grief.”

“My grief.”

“On the passing of your old gal. Don’t fret too much. There are plenty of other old ladies out there who I’m sure would like the companionship of a younger man, someone to pick them up when they fall, wipe the shit off their butts.”

I just looked out the window, much more serious thoughts on my mind.

Chapter Fifty

I looked at myself in the mirror. I was twenty-six years old, but I felt forty. In two years on the road I had seen people at their best and their worst. I knew that death waited for all, from the lone man in the nursing home to the crying baby birthed on the bathroom floor. It might take awhile to get the baby, but it would get all of us in the end. It could be as sudden as a bullet to the brain or as slow as a metastizing cancer or steady decline of Alzheimer’s. I had no doubt that someday I would too, would be in a nursing home, left to die an undignified death. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to suffer, wouldn’t have to lay paralyzed in a stroked out crippled body, unable to speak or move, but fully aware of the hell around me. The question was what kind of life would you have in the meantime?

I was no Superman, that was for sure. No George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi. No Mother Teresa.

And in the looks department I was hot shot either. My mother told me I was handsome. No girl ever did. Two years back I would never have imagined I would have had the kind of relationship with Carrie I did. Never imagined that sex could be so consuming, not the emotional turmoil so great.

I was who I was. I had as I mentioned started going back to church, but would not have been surprised should I be struck by a car killed that I would find myself directed southbound when I came to the great junction on that death road. Sorry, buddy, not every one gets to head north, and you, ah hem, you have some stains on your record, though I do note a few stars.

And if God were to appear before me or his son Jesus and ask me to explain my life, I would simply tell them I was prepared to accept whatever punishment or tender mercies that had in mind for me.

Yes, I stole a diamond ring off the finger of a dead woman, but it was a ring that had fallen off on its own, and I had after all, taken care of the woman who had owned it, and in a way, I may have been the closest living person she had had left as a sort of family. I believe that she wanted the best for me.

I stood on Carrie’s doorway and rang the bell. When she opened the door, I could smell her lasagna and the marinara sauce that came from a recipe of her mother’s. I had asked her to cook dinner for us, and she had agreed on the condition I do all the dishes. She wasn’t a bad cook, but she had never learned to clean the kitchen as she went. I on most occasions preferred to go out, even if it cost me money, just because it took so long to clean up the kitchen after she had cooked.

I wouldn’t go through again, our love administrations, played out so many times before, against the ottoman, on the carpet, and against the couch, and who did what to whom. Suffice to say we sat naked at the dinner table, eating our lasagna, which was quite good, while Carrie finished off the bottle of wine and started another. I only sipped at mine. I wanted to keep my head clear, make certain of my intentions, and make certain that I saw clearly what I was about to do.

After a dessert of strawberries and brownies, which we ate on the couch while watching a Chris Rock video that had Carrie in hysterics, I drew her a hot bath, and massaged her back. She was starting to get horny again, but I asked her to wait, to show patience. I had brought a candle and it gave a red glow and nice scent to the bathroom. I excused myself a minute and came back with my hand behind my back. While she asked me what I held, I knelt before the tube and looked her over in all her large warm nakedness.

“I want to ask you something, but I want you to think it over. You don’t need to answer right now.”

“What?”

“Wait a minute, I have a little speech I have prepared.”

“You’re not going to ask me something kinky are you?”

“No, no. Just relax and listen. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and I’m just saying I want you to think about it as well. I don’t need an answer right now.”

She was looking at me like what kind of trick question was I going to ask her.
“Like I said, I don’t need an answer now,” I told Carrie, “But I’d like you to try this on.”

And I pulled out the ring, and slipped it on her finger as she held her stunned hand out, her mouth wide open.

“My God,” she said.

“Carrie, I’d like to you to make an honest man out of me. Will you marry me.” And I was shaking like a boy asking for his first kiss.

“Oh, Tim,” she said, “I don’t know what to say.” She looked at me, and her face changed completely, and I saw tears come from her eyes, and she reached for my neck and hugged me to her, hugged me like I was a teddy bear she would hold onto forever. “No, I do know. Yes, yes, I will. I will,” she said.

Later, after we had made love in her bed, a long slow love with her looking at me like I was a new man, and she rolled on her back and stared at that ring on her finger, she said, “Where did you ever get the money?”

I hesitated a moment, and then said, “Some things are best kept secret. I have been working a lot of hours.”

“I never thought anyone would marry me, that anyone would ever want to actually marry me. I’m a bitch you know, and yet you still want to marry me.”

“I do,” I said, though I felt a little trepidation like maybe I had forgotten something I should have remembered.

She just stared at that rock like all her luck was changed for the better. And I wondered what I had gone and done.

Chapter Fifty-One

I would like to say that we lived happily ever after, that fate had meant for me to see the glint of that ring under the radiator, and to put it in my pocket, and to take it home with me, and place it on the finger of a good woman, who would become my bride, the mother of my children, and fire and light of my life. I remember how that night Carrie looked at the ring with such hopeful eyes, as if she were seeing in the ring uncomplicated love, children and a happy old age in a nice house surrounded by a fence, she saw a world that was fair and just, one that brought love to every little girl no matter how damaged or cold or cynical they had become.

We were married three months later in a small ceremony at Cheffries Lake side up in Windsor. We had family and a few friends. My mom, my sister, they even let my Dad out of jail to come attend, though he and my mom sat at different tables. Carrie’s mom was there and she got drunk, but Carrie was too drunk herself to notice. It was a nice deal. I rented a tuxedo just like the one I had rented the first night we went out. We had the same limo driver. I invited a few friends, Fred, who was able to get permission for a day release from the Institute of Living, and Tom were there. Fred was my best man, and made a nice toast how I was the kind of guy who would give the shirt off his back to anyone who asked. Fred and Tom, like most everyone else, had their share of beers. I had a few myself. I figured what the hell. A wedding is supposed to be a celebration. Fred ended up taking off all his clothes and jumping in the lake. They had to call the fire department to get him off the fountain. It was quite a party.

For a honeymoon we went to the Bahamas. They had a nice charter than ran out of Hartford, flew you right down there, where ten minutes after landing you were walking into the resort and they were handing you a Bahama Mama – a drink we had plenty of in the four days we were there. We’d sleep late, eat the breakfast buffet and head to the beach, a short ten minute bus ride, where we’d lay on the sand and drink. A native woman braided Carrie’s hair for her and I admit it looked very sexy on her. We’d go back to the resort around five, drink more Bahama Mamas hanging out around the pool and volcano shaped Jacuzzi. Later we’d go to the casino where we played slots and had a game where you dropped fifty cents in the machine and bet on these mechanical horses that raced around the track. The waitresses brought us free drinks as long as we were gambling.

Back in Connecticut, I moved in with Carrie and predictably I guess we had our quarrels. It was harder for me to storm out not having anyone where to go. I worked a lot, probably too much, but I was determined to pay off the credit card debt she had accumulated along with the bills from the wedding and our honeymoon.

I was used to working and could easily lose my own problems in those of others. When you work the ambulance enough, when you see the sun rise, and the sun set, when you see the changing seasons, spring, summer, fall, and finally winter, all from behind the windshield of an ambulance, when you see babies born, and so many people die, when you know every road and street and apartment and restaurant and building and back alley and highway, when the work is a part of you, you almost stop being a person, and become a part of the city, a part of the rhythm of life. There is a comfort in that, a comfort I came to seek. Seeing the hurt in so many others tends to dull your own.

You probably saw the end before I did, though I would not be so foolish as to not have imagined it when considering the possibilities. We are who we are. Carrie was who she was. I rehurt my shoulder one night, and arrived home early without calling. I heard the sounds before knocking. I went sat up on a hill overlooking our apartment. The moon was full that night, and the autumn air was crisp. You could breathe in and your lungs liked it. Though my life was not what I would have wanted, I was at least happy to be alive to have my senses. I waited until her company had left, then I waited an hour more, before I came down the hill.

She was in good spirits that night, acted happy to see me. She had a cold beer waiting for me, and a frozen pizza, cooking in the oven. She never even saw me take the pills they’d given me for my shoulder pain. After I showered, we got in bed, and she took care of me, as I looked up at the ceiling, thinking about what I was going to do with my life. She curled her back up against my side and wished me good night. I saw her looking again at the ring as she always did at night. She saw that ring and felt like she had made it in the world. I saw that ring now and just smelled a dead old person.

Carrie and I separated after a year of marriage. I still work the ambulance, but I don’t steal anymore.

Looking back on everything that happened, I guess it would be all too easy to blame my whole sorry episode on my influences, on the people around me. Maybe I was intoxicated by the power I had -- the ability to take people’s money and possessions without repercussion. But the truth is it isn’t hard to look inside yourself and to know right from wrong. I had done wrong and I regretted it.

Some nights now when I sit up in the darkness and listen to Dvorak’s New World Symphony, I wonder what will happened to me. They tell you, if you work hard enough and you believe in yourself, you can grow up to be anything. A doctor, a lawyer, a fireman, a baseball player, a soldier, or even President of the whole country. And what’s better is that even if you fail, this is a country that will offer you a second chance, many people have picked them selves out of the dirt and gone on the Oprah Winfrey show to celebrate their recovery and triumph. Yet I look around and I see so much sadness. It seems to me that we are an imperfect people, many blinded in our intentions, ruled by desires, and rarely satisfied to just perservere.

I know I will never be anyone great, but I just want to be somebody good, someone who can make a difference in people’s lives in my own small way. At work now I ride the transfer car. It’s not a bad gig -- 9-5 Monday through Friday -- running dialysis patients and people back and forth from the hospital and the nursing home. We get to see the same people over and over again, and get to know them pretty well. We exchange Christmas and birthday gifts. Some of the patients, who still live at home, will bake us cookies or have their spouses make us hot chocolate on cold days. We have attended more than one funeral of departed friends.

I go to the community college at night.

-The End-