A Thousand Naked Strangers (15 page)

“I mean, all I said, really, it was only two words.” I'm stammering, hands up in a defensive posture. “Unless you want to be technical, because
technically,
it was eighteen words. Give or take.”

Her mouth slips open like she's forgotten it's there.

I clear my throat. “See, it was, um, it was Sunday morning. And you know how those are.”

Of course she knows. We all know. Sundays are easy. Working a Sunday is a gift to EMS. A small thank-you for the long hours, for carrying fat people down stairs, for stepping in the still-warm turd your patient dropped in the hallway, and what's more, for never mentioning it. Sundays are a reward for remaining calm despite being outgunned and remaining on duty despite residing—permanently—on the lowest rung of the caregiver pay scale. Sundays are relaxing, and so long as nobody dies in church, Sunday is a good day. But Sunday can also be boring.
Most of us are at Grady because Grady is always busy. We never stop, we're up in the middle of it all—the city, the trauma, the excitement, everything. Until Sunday. When it gets slow. And there's nothing but the quiet of a phone that never rings, the boredom of a call that isn't dispatched. Time stretches on forever. And we wait.

And wait.

And waiting isn't necessarily a good thing for someone who's wired to never stop moving. They say idle hands are the devil's workshop, but what they don't say is when it comes time to explain yourself, the devil's never around to help. So I'm alone, explaining the inexplicable, and basically, the story goes like this.

The day it all happens, I'm working an eight-hour overtime shift. I'm paired with an EMT I get along with, so right from the start, we're in a good mood. When we go in-service, dispatch sends us to the southeastern corner of the city. There's nothing down here but a handful of housing projects and some rowdy apartments, but it's early when we roll in, and it'll be a few hours before they get out of bed and start acting up. We park across the street from the federal penitentiary.

Forget the barbed wire and guard towers, the searchlights, the guns, the unspeakable past of its inmates, and Atlanta's federal pen isn't menacing. It was built in 1902 and has a precise, austere beauty. From our spot across the street, it looks less like the onetime home of Al Capone than a branch of the Federal Reserve. We sit for a while in silence. The stereo doesn't work, and the gas station doesn't have any newspapers. We talk until we run out of things to say and then, almost absentmindedly, I pick up the radio mike. Some of the newer trucks don't have this feature, but on the older ones, there's a switch that turns
the radio into a PA. Flip it to radio and I'm talking to the dispatcher. Flip it to PA and I'm talking to the world. I don't have a plan, this isn't thought out, and I have no intention of making a statement. I just flip it on. Key up and let go, key up and let go, sending little metallic clicks out into the morning.

After a few minutes, I key up and whisper a long and dreamy hello. At the beginning, everything seems innocent, so we keep it up—whispering, singing, issuing commands in a heavy, almost indecipherable Scottish accent. When this, too, gets boring, we set it down. But no calls come out, and there's nothing to do, and it's just sitting there, waiting. What harm could possibly come from going back one more time? I switch the radio back to PA and key up the mike. The speaker clicks on and I pause, broadcasting dead air and my own breath out into the neighborhood. And then—on a quiet Sunday morning not even a block away from the federal penitentiary—I tell everyone within earshot the worst has happened.

“May I have your attention, please? There has been a jailbreak. I repeat, there has been a jailbreak.”

For a few seconds nothing happens. There's no panic. No stampede. No sign at all that anyone has heard us. And then, across the street, a door opens. A skinny little hipster bolts out onto his porch. At first I don't pay him any mind. It's eight in the morning, we're in a bad neighborhood, and this guy's got a pirate flag hanging from his house. I don't see him as the type who wants to be taken seriously. I'm wrong.

He darts down the steps and stomps barefoot across the street. We pretend not to see him even as we watch him march over. “He headed our way?” I ask, mouth barely moving. My partner nods, turns off the PA. This should be fun. The guy
stomps up to the driver's-side window and starts yelling. No hello, no nothing. Yelling. My partner, God bless him, smiles through the glass. He holds a hand to his ear and says, “I can't hear you.”

This infuriates the little guy. “Unroll it, then!”

My partner reaches up and presses the window button, slowly lowering the window with a loud, rubbery squuuueeeeaaaaakkkk. He smiles. “What's up?”

The guy rails on for five minutes, mostly about us waking him up at eight on a Sunday morning but with a heavy emphasis on the fact that people live here. He says he's heard everything we've said, every word, from his house across the street. I ask, because I can't help myself, which house is his. “The one with the pirate flag?”

His hair catches fire.

He opens his mouth, then stops. He turns and marches off, and right about then my partner and I decide it's a good time to leave. We don't make it half a block before we catch a call. We flick on the lights and head over, and almost immediately, we forget about the hipster, the PA, even the jailbreak. But the hipster remembers us. Before we leave the scene of our call, a white supervisor's truck pulls up. The supervisor gets out and walks over. He asks if we had an argument with a resident. I nod. “Yeah, some guy over by the prison. Why?”

“Did you say something about a jailbreak?”

It occurs to me, for the first time and clearly too late, that while sitting in an official-looking vehicle, I'd announced there'd been a jailbreak. Over a PA system. A block from the federal penitentiary. This was probably a bad idea.

The supervisor pulls his keys from his pocket. “After you guys
drop that patient off,” he says, hopping into his truck, “go ahead and come by my office. We need to talk.”

It's a very long transport.

As soon as we walk through the door, our supervisor drops it on us. “He wants to press charges.”

I've been standing, but once this is said, I sink down into a chair. While we were out running that last call, the hipster went ape shit and called every number he could find, all the way up to the CEO of the hospital. Thankfully, it's a Sunday, and the only person he could get is the supervisor sitting before us. Not that he's terribly happy with us at the moment.

“Reckless endangerment.” The supervisor slips his glasses on, reads from a notepad. “He thinks what you said, coming from a city truck, near the pen, was official enough to make it like yelling
fire
in a crowded theater.”

I'm in disbelief. “Is he serious?”

“He wants you arrested.”

“That's pretty serious.”

“I'd say so.”

“What now?”

The supervisor shrugs. Says for us to go about the rest of our day like nothing's happened. “What'll happen tomorrow, when everyone returns, I don't know.”

That's the story, and what happens now, on Monday, is what I'm here to find out. The director of EMS operations is silent. I clear my throat.

“Look, this was my fault. My partner, he was there, but I said it.” I rock back on my heels. “If anyone's getting fired, it should be me.”

She nods, which, when you think about it, could mean a
lot of things. She closes her eyes, and we settle into an awkward silence. Then, almost imperceptibly, the bottom corner of her mouth twitches. That's followed by another twitch, then another, and soon her entire mouth breaks out into a huge grin. She tries to regain her composure, to look serious, but it's too late. At last she laughs. I laugh. She cocks her head. I shut up. A deep breath in, a long exhale, and then—

“Did you really say that?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Another smile. “You know you're an idiot, right?”

“That's what my wife says.”

“Get back to work. I'll take care of this guy.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

Then, as I'm leaving: “Mr. Hazzard?”

“Ma'am?”

“No more PA.”

“Done.”

•  •  •

So this is how I make my mark, the way people finally learn my name. Not because I ran a tough call and did a commendable job but because I did something stupid. Something funny. Something nobody's ever done. I'm no longer just a newbie. I'm the wiseass who came
this close
to getting arrested.

S
even months at Grady, and I'm already on my third full-time partner. My first month I worked with someone different every shift. It wasn't bad, but I was happy when an EMT was given the spot permanently. Of course,
permanent
is a relative term here at Grady, and after six months he moved on. My next “permanent” partner lasted under a month. This is how it goes here. Grady has so many different shifts—different days, different hours, different lengths—that when we first arrive, everyone's thrashing around in the dark, trying to find something that works. I've gotten lucky with partners so far: nobody burned out or incompetent or all that annoying, even. This last point—that no one's been annoying—is the most important thing. Spending so much time in close quarters with a stranger—no personal space, plenty of pressure—can be bad enough when we get along. But if we don't like each other? Unbearable. So I'm always a little nervous when I show up for the start of a new shift.

My new partner's name is Marty, and we've been working together a few weeks. We'd never met before we started working together. All I knew was that he's a medic, so theoretically, working with him should've made my life easier. I was hopeful, practically excited, that first day. Now . . . not so much. We
became partners toward the end of the summer, and from day one the city was jumping. Almost before I knew Marty's name, we were dispatched to a couple of cardiac arrests and a bicyclist hit by a car. We ran some very sick children, a stroke or two, a man found beaten unconscious who had his gold chain but not his wallet, his toupee but not his teeth.

They say the closest bonds are formed in situations of incredible stress, though frankly, that hasn't been the case here. This city has thrown everything it's got at us, and still I'm not sure about Marty. He's not a bad guy, just hard to read. He's younger than I, young enough to have a girlfriend who's in college. This semester she's studying abroad, and in his mind, she's not taking advantage of a great opportunity but
taking a break
. He's always moping, and our interactions are flavored by the indifferent taste of depression—he speaks without making conversation, he laughs without smiling. Until his phone rings. It's
her,
it always is, nobody else calls him. He'll whisper into the phone for twenty minutes, giggling and giddy, only to slip back into a funk the moment she hangs up. When I do get him to talk, it's always about Ohio. People from Ohio are like New Yorkers, always bragging about their hometown, except New Yorkers actually have something to brag about. Marty goes on and on about the Browns, the Indians, Ohio State. He talks about Lebron—my God, he never shuts up about Lebron. He'll also talk about the film
Top Gun,
and worse, he loves rock ballads. Think Air Supply, ELO, and Journey, all sung at a barely audible whisper.

I could look beyond all of this if it weren't for the birds. Because I'm not gonna lie, the bird thing is weird. The first time I noticed it, we were walking through a vacant lot when a car horn startled a couple dozen pigeons. They took flight and were
on us, a dirty blanket of fluttering wings. I was annoyed; Marty was terrified. He stood frozen in place, arms locked at his sides, eyes closed, chin tucked to his chest. When I asked about it, he said it was nothing, but after two or three times, he could no longer deny it. “Yes, fine,” he yelled. “I'm afraid of birds.”

Afraid of birds.

He says the beaks are scary, but what really freaks him out is a bird with an erratic flight pattern. Hawks, with their slow and easy glide? No big deal. But a pigeon? Or a parakeet?
Petrifying
. I laugh. He gets indignant. “It's not that weird.”

I disagree. He Googles his particular affliction to prove it's been recognized by the Internet-based medical community. It's called ornithophobia. According to Wikipedia, Scarlett Johansson has it. “It may be irrational,” he insists, “but it's real. Says so right there.”

So he's afraid of birds. Every day it's the same: strange conversations and small talk, long pauses—the monotony of the jilted psyche—punctuated by the occasional call from Her. This is how it is right now. We're in an ambulance, idling outside a Kmart on Cleveland Avenue. He's whispering into the phone. I'm next to him, silent, pretending not to listen. It's tough, in an ambulance, to give even the appearance of privacy. I stare out the window. The Kmart is a freak show. Bargain hunters arriving in half-dead Mercury Sables, homeless men digging around the trash, hookers limping out of the Palace Inn and across the parking lot in search of more business. Today there's a guy with a pressure washer and a huge drum of water strapped to a trailer hitched to his van. He's set out cones and a sign advertising car washing and hand-detailing. At only fifteen dollars, it seems like a steal.

“Baby girl,” Marty whispers into the phone, “I know you're having fun, but at least when the semester's over, you'll be coming back to me.” Silence. Then, “Right?”

I press my face to the glass and pretend I'm not here, not listening. I watch a man wander across the parking lot. He walks up to the car washer. They talk for a moment, it's animated like old friends catching up, and then, suddenly, a gunshot. The car washer pulled a gun so fast, I never saw the motion. There was just the pop. Just like that—
POP
—and we've seen a man get shot.