Bad Call Page 15

  Unfortunately, it’s not the solution to our patient’s long-term problem. She is going to require some extensive plastic surgery to replace the large patch of tissue missing from her forehead. With any luck, she’ll meet up with Dr. K. again.

  I am just about to head into the X-ray room to find a gurney to sleep on when four uniformed policemen march through the doors to the ER, headed right for me. I have the sudden urge to put up my hands, but I don’t think they’re here to arrest me. All they do is form a semicircle around me and start the third degree:

  Did you bring in [her name] this evening.

  Yes, I did.

  Did you notice if there was alcohol on the driver’s breath.

  Oh hell. So that’s what this is about.

  This ad hoc tribunal has all the hallmarks of the beginning of a major internecine brouhaha. It’s all perfectly clear. The girl is seriously disfigured, and it is going to take some bucks to fix that. The boy is the son of a police sergeant. She’s the daughter of a police captain. From different precincts, no less. So much for uniting the kingdoms.

  I did not notice, I say, without blinking an eye. And why shouldn’t I lie. These guys are putting me on the spot here. In fact, it’s their job to note if there is AOB, not mine. I’m there to treat the injured and not to collect evidence. My reaction is quick and certain, and I actually think I’ve put them on the defensive. I’m that pissed.

  You know, there were three patrol cars at the scene and you’re telling me not one of your guys happened to notice whether the boyfriend had AOB. That seems pretty odd to me.

  They know that I know this is going to be a precinct-versus-precinct, sergeant-versus-captain affair. Somebody wants to lay the blame on the boyfriend. It isn’t going to be me. I am in no position to say if he was drunk. It was a minor accident that could have happened to anybody. Accidents are happening all over the place tonight. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt—and the Beetle had them.

  I’m not sure if they’re buying the seat-belt part, but I am sure it’s not relevant in assigning culpability in this case. I do know that I hate it when people have belts and don’t use them. It’s not whether or not they’ll save your life in a really bad collision. It’s about minor fender benders like this one, accidents that can take off your nose or put out an eye or remove half of your teeth or something minor like that. Two seconds to snap that belt on might have saved our patient months of pain and suffering.

  Talk about extremes. The ecstasy of brilliant medicine and the agony of a down-and-dirty, intercop political street brawl all in one night.

  These officers know I’m right. They glare at me for a minute more, and without saying a word, they all turn at once and walk out. We’ll see what happens by and by. But for right now, I feel good about having held my ground. I feel great.

  Tomorrow I’m telling Dad I’m done with premed.

  Paperwork

  My Tennessee grandmother, Jessie, used to tell us spooky stories about all kinds of things, particularly insane people. She is not far removed from her Scots-Irish storytelling roots. She can tell a tale. The neighborhood where she lives, where my grandfather Pee Paw, a retired railroad man, built the house she lives in, is in an area of Nashville known as Sylvan Park. Visiting her in the fifties, via a railroad pass courtesy of Pee Paw, was always an adventure. You got on a sleeper train in the old Penn Station and traveled in comfort all the way. Looking out the window day or night, you saw…nothing. Nothing but fields by day and stars by night.

  Once in a while an anonymous hamlet would pass by in a blur. I wondered who lived there and what they might be up to. Especially late at night, in the pallid wash of old-fashioned streetlamps. In the morning there were pancakes in the dining car. As the years went by, we had to change trains more and more, until it was faster and easier just to go by car to visit Tennessee.

  Sylvan Park in those days was a time capsule of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were no sidewalks. Dogs ran loose in packs. People used fifteen-watt light bulbs; it was very dark at night. They burned their own trash in incinerators built in alleys that ran behind the houses. What they couldn’t burn was picked up by trashmen using a horse and wagon. There were railroad tracks not too far from Grandma’s house. There were genuine hobos. There was a lot of superstition and dread.

  People could git you if you weren’t careful. Or even if you were.

  The hobos could git you. Somebody in the alley could git you. A maniac could git you. It seemed like just about anything could git you. And I admit that considering Grandma’s background, at least, she had some right to be paranoid about life. She was the eldest of nine children, and their beloved baby brother had died at seven from tetanus—lockjaw—caused by: a rusty nail. If something like a rusty nail can git you, you ain’t safe nohow.

  Every night on the front-porch gliders, there were stories of death, sin, and retribution. The sin and retribution tales didn’t bother me that much, because I figured those people got what was coming to them. It was the stories about innocent kids waylaid in the bushes by crazy people that got my attention.

  Grandma and her neighbors and my mother all agreed that crazy people are endowed with the strength of seven men. Not one more or less. It was always seven. They seemed very sure about this number, and when I would ask how that could be true and, if it were true, how it was determined, they always slid past the question with a simple It’s a well-known fact, and that was that. They also all agreed that crazy people are completely impervious to pain.

  These front-porch stories permanently embedded two things about the insane in my mind. One, they could git you at any time, since you’d never know who they were until it was too late. And two, once they had you, they could crush you like a weevil.

  I don’t think this one could, though.

  We’re on a psycho call in Elmhurst. The patient is a petite, dazzlingly pretty young woman just a couple of years older than I am. We’re in a two-family house, up on the second floor, which is her family’s apartment. There are seven people crowded on the landing just outside the kitchen. I’m on with Eddie, and there are two police officers present.

  The mom and dad have paperwork on their daughter. She has been under inpatient treatment for schizophrenia. I think they give that diagnosis a lot when they can’t figure out what’s really wrong. She hasn’t been taking her meds, and she’s been acting up, they say. They want us to take her to EGH.

  She doesn’t want to go.

  So far, it’s a pretty meat-and-potatoes scenario. Usually these situations come to a head with the patient handcuffed to the stretcher until we have time to do a tie-down with our soft, padded restraints, so everything looks kosher. We’re not supposed to use handcuffs, which makes sense in theory, but when you have to immobilize someone fast, cuffs are the only way. We borrow them from the cops. A couple of the guys I ride with carry their own, but it’s frowned upon, if not actually illegal.

  We have other things, too, like straitjackets. My partners and I have screwed around with them a couple times in the yard, trying to see how difficult it would be to actually put one on a person. Three words for that: forget about it, even if the person is totally sane and actually cooperating.

  Suddenly I’m getting the feeling this call is not going to be as meat-and-potatoes as I thought. I’m looking at this girl. She’s not ranting incoherently or talking to herself or tearing out tufts of hair or trying to hurt anyone or doing any of the really obvious things the insane are thought of as doing when they’re symptomatic. She looks incredibly pissed off, but she sure doesn’t look crazy. I can hear Grandma saying, Well, that’s the thing, when you’re dealing with maniacs, isn’t it.

  So what happened. Did this girl sass Mom and Dad one too many times, and they’re using their get-into-jail-free card. Did she break curfew. Not do her chores. Date the wrong guy. Or girl. Something isn’t right here. She’s not causing any kind of disturbance that would normally trigger intervention. It looks
a lot like the folks simply want her out of the house. But every last line of the paperwork is in order. We don’t have a choice but to take her.

  It’s like an oven in here, and we’ve been busting our humps all day. My eyes are stinging with sweat. We’re all soaked. The humidity has to be close to 100 percent. Dear, can you please come with us.

  Fuck you. Fuck you, you fucking bastards.

  Pissed off is not the same as crazy, but when there are papers that say you’re crazy, it doesn’t matter.

  We’re positioning ourselves to take her arms, Eddie and I. She’s not a big person. Maybe five foot six and one hundred twenty. As Eddie takes one arm with both hands and I take the other, she turns into a rod of solid titanium. Absolutely rigid. With rage. It’s uncanny. Eddie and I have carried some really heavy people in our time, but she seems to have planted herself into the floor somehow. We can’t bend her or flex her, and we don’t want to manhandle her, at least not yet. One of the cops comes over to help, then the other.

  As soon as the cops put their hands on her, she goes totally bananas. She has an incredible grip, and she manages to use it to grab everything within reach. A pot off the stove. A kitchen chair. The doorframe. Half a handlebar mustache, provided by one of New York’s Finest. Oh Jesus, is she a fighter. Moments like this are the reason they give us clip-on ties.

  She’s kicking. She’s arching her back. She’s twisting. She’s absolutely silent all the while, with her teeth tightly clenched. Our hands are sweaty. She’s sweaty, too. We can’t get a good grip. We can’t get her on the stretcher. We’re in horribly close quarters and literally holding her right over the stretcher, but we can’t seem to get her down on the damned thing.

  I’m on the edge of collapse, and I’m wondering if we should ask the cops if they can call for EMS or at least another car. The cops are so busy trying to wrangle her they can’t even get their cuffs ready, much less on her. One of them looks at Eddie and then back over his shoulder at the cuffs on his belt. He’s nodding his head toward the cuffs. He wants Eddie to get them off his belt.

  I can see this, too, and I shift my grip so Eddie can grab the cuffs. When she sees them, she goes ballistic. I thought she was strong before. Now it’s like someone has plugged her in. While all this is going on, Mom and Dad are just standing in the kitchen with blank expressions. Sorry to be keeping you from your coffee and Danish, you guys. Be patient. We’ll get your problem child out of here soon enough.

  I’m starting to think maybe Grandma’s strength of seven men thing has some merit. I know for a fact that this girl has the strength of at least four—and really more than that, because she’s clearly winning. Doesn’t matter. It’s not a fair fight. The cuffs never lose.

  As soon as Eddie hands the cuffs off to their owner, the officer gets one arm immobilized. Then with two men on her other arm and one on her legs, we get the other flailing limbs hooked up to the aluminum structure of the stretcher. She’s yanking the cuffs like crazy against the stretcher, but she’s on it and she’s not going anywhere. Except, of course, to a mental hospital.

  I feel really bad for her. She’s completely powerless in all this. Is she condemned for life to be at the mercy of the paperwork. I hope not.

  I wish I could be out on the porch with Grandma and her circle of doom right now. I have something else for them to worry about gittin’ them. Something far worse than mere maniacs.

  It’s called paperwork.

  That paperwork will git you every time.

  Two Prisoners

  I’m having trouble visualizing ever not working on this damned ambulance. I started this job the summer after freshman year. I’ve been here every summer since. And winter vacations. Now I’m twenty-one, it’s three months since graduation, and I’m still here. I’m stuck. I enlisted in the New York Army National Guard a few weeks ago. I have no idea when they’re going to send me to basic training. That will mean another six months in suspended animation.

  Fred and I aren’t speaking even though we’re working together a lot these days. We have nothing to say to each other. Then again, we never did speak all that much. It seems like I’ve known him all my life.

  Each call is like a dream now. I have all the moves, the script, the techniques, down pat. Have I seen it all yet. Not even close, I’m sure of that. Am I interested in what the next bad one might be. Not on your life. I am dead from the neck up. It only took three years. I wonder how long it took Fred. It’s hard to imagine him ever not being burned out. I don’t think it’s possible for either of us to summon anything remotely resembling a normal human emotion. Whatever that is.

  Right now we’re going on a call to La Guardia. Last time I was here on a call we had to haul a screaming businessman off a plane. Kidney stones, he told me, between shrieks. That was last year. Or maybe the year before.

  This call came in as a man down, possible overdose. We’ll be more or less a taxi on this run. La Guardia is full of cops and medical types, and I bet they’re all over this already. Well, how nice; they saved us a parking spot at the terminal. Fred and I get the stretcher and go on inside with one of the cops who’s been waiting for us.

  He takes us to what looks like some kind of holding room, very bare. There’s a stretcher already in here with a man on it. A black male about thirty-five. He’s out cold but alive. His pupils are just a little bigger than poppy seeds. Bet you ten bucks it’s heroin, Fred. Fred just grunts. Of course it is. I’m just trying to get a rise out of him, I guess. I’m that desperate for entertainment. He and I both grunt as we heft Sleeping Beauty off of the airport’s stretcher and onto ours for the trip to Elmhurst General. We don’t bring cases like this back to St. John’s—overdosed prisoners, that is. For some reason, they don’t like it.

  Well, no shit.

  Before we start rolling, one of the cops bends down and cuffs our patient to the stretcher; both hands to the side rails. Two pairs of cuffs. He turns to look at me. This is a very bad boy, you know. He’s been drinking his own lemonade.

  He’s a dealer and he’s been sampling his own product. This guy was really holding, says the man in blue. Three keys, imported from Motor City. Like we don’t have enough on the street here. I’m too tired to do anything but nod. He’s obviously trying to impress me with hip cop jargon, but I stopped being impressionable a couple of thousand calls ago.

  This cop is the designated hitter to escort us and the prisoner to the hospital. In the back of the moving ambulance, he undergoes a sea change in personality. His cocky affability has turned to ice. He’s staring at me. Sizing me up. I have no idea why.

  When he starts to undress our patient, I sit up straight. Now you have my complete attention, Officer, that’s for sure. Not only that, but the guy on the stretcher has on some underwear I’ve never seen before and I’m sure I’ll never forget.

  Picture long johns. One-piece long johns made of bright red nylon. With short sleeves and short legs and white buttons all the way down the front. I guess you’d call them short johns. Really quite jaunty but not for me. Our police escort is searching the patient, which seems normal enough. He’s being very thorough. Maybe more thorough than he needs to be. When he starts unbuttoning the short johns, my mouth opens, but I don’t say anything. The cop sees this and gives me another one of those looks. He doesn’t have to say shut up, but that’s what I’m hearing.

  He’s pulling something out of the guy’s underwear, something long and flexible. For a split second, backlit against the bright light coming through the window, it looks like he’s removing a length of the guy’s intestines. But it’s not intestines. It’s a very long, thick, flexible money belt. It’s red nylon, too. I wonder if it was part of an ensemble, with the underwear.

  Fred knows something is up. I can see his beady eyes in the rearview mirror. He keeps looking back. For God’s sake, Fred, don’t let’s crash the stupid ambulance. I know the fact that he can’t see is making him very agitated: he always puts both hands at twelve o’clock on the whe
el when he’s agitated. Now they’re not only at twelve, they’re actually overlapping. Take it easy, ole Fred.

  The cop looks at me intently now. He knows I know this belt is full of cash. Lots and lots of cash. My guess: many thousands. I know why the cop is boring holes in my head. These are the days of the notorious and dreaded Knapp Commission. Internal Affairs is everywhere. Every cop on the street is paranoid, even the 100 percent honest ones. And there are plenty of honest cops out there, no matter what the Knapp Commission says.

  However, this particular cop has a good reason to be looking over his shoulder besides the Knapp Commission. It’s me. I’m a witness.

  And he’s a crook.

  He’s in the process of committing a major felony, good for significant time in the penitentiary. Maybe decades.

  A man might do a lot of things to keep from going to prison. Right now, I’m trying my best not to think of what some of those things might be.

  You know he ain’t gonna need this where he’s going, he says flatly, gently patting the money belt. At first I think he means the hospital, but of course he means Rikers Island and then probably Sing Sing. I don’t say anything.

  Fred is scootching up in his seat as high as he can to get a better angle in the rearview mirror, but he still can’t see anything. The moves he’s performing would normally make me laugh out loud.

  But I can’t laugh just now. I’m paralyzed. Officer Dillinger has locked eyes with me. I can’t look at Fred or anywhere else. I can hear the crinkle of new money. Without taking his eyes from mine, the man in blue puts something papery and crisp in my hand and leans in very close. You want a tip, don’t you. It is not a question and does not require an answer. I take the paper and put it into my pocket. I hope Fred hasn’t seen. I don’t see how he could have.