A Thousand Naked Strangers (11 page)

After the door closes, he smiles, crosses his legs like he's in a lounge chair instead of an ambulance, and shakes his head. He asks me, “You got you a woman?”

I nod.

“Treat her right, man. Treat her right. Ain't nothin' in the world like a good woman. Not a damn thing. And I oughta know. Got me the best one there is.”

T
hat Darryl makes us laugh, even though it's
at
him and not
with
him, means he's one of the good guys. For all the nonsense, the yelling, the rolling cloud of pepper spray, it was fun, and as far as I'm concerned, Darryl's all right. Call any time, brother. But for every Darryl, there are a thousand others who yell, curse, spit, or—just as bad—sit on the floor and demand to be carried down the stairs because they have a cold and we're here to serve.

Chris is always saying he prefers dogs to humans. Dogs are loyal, humans are a pain in the ass. I tend to agree. Still, it never occurred to me that I'd be dispatched to save a dog. Until today.

It's late June, not even ten in the morning, and already I'm sweating. This is nothing: Atlanta is a steam engine in the summer, nothing but humidity, and whatever today brings is a mere suggestion of what's to come in August. It's been a quiet morning, and no sooner do I say this—as if in punishment for even thinking the thought—than our radio chirps.

“Seven-oh-four, I have a call for you.”

We're flying down the road, sirens wailing. The dispatcher is giving us constant updates, and her voice, normally calm and indifferent, is just this side of shrill. We've been dispatched to a two-year-old actively choking. Nobody likes running calls
on kids. Not only are they young and innocent, they're small, and working on a child is like writing with your left hand—essentially the same act but awkward and much more difficult than it has to be.

We're a few minutes from the address when the radio crackles again and the dispatcher says we can cancel. The patient, the one who's choking, it's a dog. I flip off the siren. The lights. We slow down. Chris is looking at me, and I know what he's thinking:
I like dogs more than I like most people.
Why not?

We pull up to a run-down little house, unpainted, with a sagging roof. There's no grass; the front lawn is nothing but clay. Weeds fan out for acres from the other three sides. Standing on the porch in a housedress and slippers is the smallest, oldest woman I've ever seen. We hop out. She's nervous but not overly excited and tells us she tossed a T-bone to her dog, JJ, and he swallowed it. Whole.

Chris looks around. “How big is JJ?”

“Pretty big,” she says.

There's a doghouse in the middle of the yard, and next to it is a four-foot stake driven two feet into the clay. A chain thick enough to tow a barge is wrapped around the stake and pulled tight. It stretches across the yard and disappears into the weeds.

“He on the end of that?” Chris asks.

“ 'Less he broke it again.”

“He can break that?”

“If he has a mind to.”

“He mean?”

“Depends.”

And just like that, the chain goes slack. JJ is coming home. I start to sweat. Chris backs up. JJ bursts through the weeds
like a rampaging elephant. A gray pit with the head of a tiger shark and the muscled shoulders of a Spanish bull. Every ounce of ninety pounds. We're well within his perimeter, and there's no time to react. He's on us before we even hear the rattle of his heavy chain. He jumps and—to both our relief and our shock—lands on his side, just short of us, with a heavy thud. He digs furiously at his mouth with his front paws, scrambles to his feet, eyes wild, then throws himself down again. He knows he's dying, and he's terrified.

Choking is a scary thing. Imagine being wide awake but unable to breathe, fully alert and fully aware that this is it. To find a comparably miserable death, you'd have to be eaten or beaten or burned alive. Choking is violent and desperate right up until the moment it isn't—that moment being death.

JJ's not there, but he's close. We have to do something, but we have no idea what. Were he a person and not a dog, this would be so much easier. I'd simply place a hand on his shoulder and ask, “Are you choking?” Seriously. That's the first step of the Heimlich, to approach the patient and make sure he is, in fact, choking. Imagine the look of abject terror on the choker's face temporarily being replaced by the shocked and put-out expression of pure frustration. If he can manage a grunt or a wheeze—even if he says, “I'm choking”—he's not choking. For those who are choking, whose airway is so blocked that they can't squeeze out so much as a syllable, we start the Heimlich. If the patient is human. Which JJ isn't. He's a dog. A big one.

And so how do you save a creature that might, once saved, tear you apart? I look at Chris. He looks at me. There's no manual for saving dogs, no canine Heimlich, no precedent of any kind for how to deal with a giant choking dog. But he's choking.
I drop the bag, fall to my knees, peek into his huge mouth. Beyond the muscular jaws, beyond the rows of teeth, beyond the enormous flapping tongue, I can see the bone. He swallowed it whole. Imagine a T-bone divested of meat. The thick crossbar running sideways up top, the long, skinny shaft curving down. The shaft is in his throat, and the crossbar is stuck at the back of his mouth. He's desperate and furious, and getting it out means reaching into the area most likely to do us serious damage.

Chris doesn't want to do it. Neither do I. JJ is massive. That mouth, those teeth. But he's panicking. And choking. We inch closer. At our approach, JJ—still on his side—thumps his tail against the clay. We're obligated to help. Maybe not as medics but as people. Chris grabs the forceps, asks how we're going to do this.

“I thought you had a plan.”

“Do I look like I have a plan?”

“You have the forceps.”

He holds them out. “You want 'em?”

“No.”

JJ is back up, head shaking, desperate. He flops down and tries to get up again but can't. How much time we have, how blocked his airway is, we don't know. We also don't know how he'll react to us shoving our hands in his mouth. He spins frantically in the clay, and the old woman whimpers. Since we have no plan, we don't bother discussing it. I simply jump on JJ, straddle him, and try like hell to hold him still. It's like wrestling a freight train. Chris reaches in with the forceps. I hear the clink of metal on teeth, a garbled cough, the furious thump of tail against clay. The old woman is praying now—“Praise Jesus! Thank you, Lord Jesus!” JJ's eyes go wide and zero in on me. Chris can get up at
any time and run. I'm in the compromised position of spooning a totally freaked-out ninety-pound pit bull whose mouth, at any moment, will be violently set free. I have no exit strategy.

Chris grunts, swears, jumps to his feet, and yells for me to get up. I don't think, I just move. I'm on my feet and backpedaling almost before I realize it. “Did you get it?”

“No.”

“Is he still choking?”

“I don't think so.”

JJ is up, legs wide, panting, head swinging from side to side. The T-bone is out of his airway but stuck in his mouth. An improvement but not a cure. And that's as good as it's gonna get. I ask the old woman if she has a vet. She nods. We dust our pants off while she starts the car, and once she's ready for us, we grab JJ. He dips his head toward his left shoulder like he's going to play. His tail wags. A truce. I ease over, grab his collar, and unclip the chain. Then we walk him to the car, lift him up, and put him in the back. With two quick hops, he's plopped down in the passenger seat.

“JJ! Get in the back!” the old woman yells.

But JJ isn't budging. He almost died, and now that he hasn't, he's going to soak it all in. It's the front seat or nothing from here on out.

C
hris has just eaten Chik-fil-A, and it's starting to talk to him. Gas, cold sweats. Evidently the cramps have begun, because he's fidgeting now. He's gotta go. But he can't.

“How long do we have to stay?” he asks, practically levitating in the passenger seat.

“According to the memo? It's gonna be a while.”

We're one of two Fulton County EMS crews assigned to participate in a disaster-preparedness exercise. Someone has set off a dirty bomb. We're surrounded by radiation, and the casualties—the dead, the dying, the slowly melting—are everywhere. It's all fake, part of some federally mandated program to see how well we've incorporated the lessons of 9/11. In short, should the worst (re)occur, how will the first responders respond?

Not well, evidently. Communications are nonexistent, and at least three different people have claimed to be in charge. Patients are scattered about, and no effort has been made to separate them by severity. Worse yet, every medic, cop, and firefighter taking part in the exercise has either willfully or accidentally wandered into the radiation cloud. We're all melting.

None of which concerns Chris. “I mean, seriously. Who
stages an event like this without giving any consideration to a bathroom?”

I shrug. “Surprise, surprise, the government shit the bed.”

“Yeah, well, I'm about to shit my pants.” He swings his door open. “I'm going to the dollar store. Anybody wants to see a real mass-casualty incident, tell 'em I'll be in the men's room. Third stall. Show these idiots what a dirty bomb really looks like.”

After he leaves, things only get worse. The fire department's decontamination tent collapses. Half the patients get bored and wander off. A car chase lures away nearly all the cops providing crowd control. And then, finally, the mess becomes a full-fledged clusterfuck.

“Where's Chris?” Our supervisor is sweating and agitated, screaming like this isn't a drill but the real thing.

“Bathroom.”

“Bathroom? What the hell's he doing in the bathroom?”

“Well, uh, I believe he said he had to—”

“Get him back here! Now!”

Turns out the first ambulance to leave the scene—stuffed with more than a dozen patients—has broken down. Now our supervisor can't find it, can't make radio contact, nothing. It simply disappeared. Chris is laughing when he emerges from the bathroom. He laughs as we load our own batch of radioactive patients. And he keeps laughing until we reach the hospital, where, abruptly, he stops. Nearly every nurse, doctor, and janitor on staff is in the parking lot. They are scared, angry, and confused. Evidently no one has told them this is just a drill, that the county is staging a disaster, and that they, the ER staff of the closest hospital, will receive the patients. For them today was just another day until words like
dirty bomb
and
radiation
and
mass casualties
began crackling over their med radio. Suddenly, ambulances were on the way with something horrible, something they weren't prepared for.

When it's all over, after we've been chewed out by the doctors, after the fire department has officially given up on their decon tent, after the radiation cloud has drifted off and killed the entire city, we're released. On our way back to the station, we pass the missing ambulance. It's strapped to the back of a tow truck like a sad, wounded animal. What became of the patients, I have no idea.

•  •  •

A week later, we receive our grade: room for improvement, but overall, not bad. Though we aren't prepared to save ourselves, let alone anyone else, we're good enough. That government at all levels is rubber-stamping disaster response and sentencing our preparedness to death by mediocrity isn't surprising. In fact, it's so much like
M*A*S*H,
I can't help but laugh. So long as it remains in the abstract. Though nothing ever does.

A few months later, Sabrina and I visit New York City and go to the 9/11 museum at Ground Zero. A sign at the door says soldiers, police, and firefighters are given free admittance. I ask the girl at the ticket counter if EMTs, too, get in free. She shrugs and says no. Free admission is only for people whose sacrifices on that day—and every day since—the museum is meant to honor. And she has a point.

I don't fight fires, and I'm not in the military. I've never been deployed. Never taken incoming rocket fire. I've never fired a shot in anger or been forced to watch my friends die. And though on occasion I've narrowly escaped death, it's not a daily
threat. And so I'm not a warrior, wounded or otherwise. I don't have a medal, a prosthetic, PTSD.

What I do have is a scuff on the toe of my right boot. It's a reminder. Not of the kid who was shot dead. Not that it was done execution-style and we found him facedown on the grass. Not that it was a large-caliber handgun that punched in the back of his skull and erased his forehead. Not that when I rolled him over, his face flopped down like congealed cheese off lukewarm pizza. Not that his brain slithered out into the wet grass. It's a reminder of the curb, the one I nervously but gently kicked when his father came out. The one I dug my foot into as this man staggered over, vomited, and collapsed onto the driveway. The one I hid behind when he rose to his knees and wailed—bone-deep and pitch-perfect, humanity's enduring anguish. I got that scuff there, barely three miles from home and four hours from the end of my shift. I got it waiting for a father swallowed up by his own grief to calmly and, in a voice I could understand, tell me his son's full name. I got it because death, even horrific death, requires paperwork. I got it because it happened on my shift, and it was my job to get it.

Sabrina is as offended as I am. And why not? It's her husband who, well intentioned but unprepared, will wander into a radioactive cloud. That some of us who wore this uniform never made it home is personal for her. More than I realized. And in her mind, if their sacrifice doesn't merit free admission, they should at least be remembered.