Diamond in the Rough

by Peter Canning

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

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

  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. 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 like a ballerina, 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 her 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 pocketbook some. Technically I was looking for any prescription meds she might have been on or any other medical clues that might help with the diagnosis. 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 were two crumpled napkins with guys’ names and phone numbers on them. I found another napkin in there and wrote down my own name and number. I crumbled up the other napkins and tossed them in the trash bin. I was shocked by what I had done, but at the same time impressed with my quick thinking. Maybe she’d actually call me. 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 the sort of the thing a pervert might do, so I put it back, feeling guilty for having invaded her privacy. I even considered taking the napkin back out of her purse, but I didn’t.

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

  “Real nice,” I said. “First rate.”

  I wasn’t, of course, looking at her titties. I hadn’t exposed them. 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 public lavatory. If she ever called me and we actually went out, we’d spend the evening in 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. At times he was subject to fits of rage. If he thought someone was messing with him, he got right in their face, and so I avoided upsetting him if I could. 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, Jerry Sneed 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 7

  I hadn’t been there two months when Tom Spencer 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. 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. 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 toothache, 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 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. Fred, as I’ve said, liked to give people a hard time. 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 hand, except on rare days, 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-r
oom versus a third-floor-carry-down, rectal-bleed, vomiting-blood, three-hundred-pound person who codes on you halfway 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 a while.”

  “Are you having a cramp right now?”

  She nodded. “It feels 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.”

  “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 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 from between the legs of that teenage 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 the baby Jesus. Tom let me cut the cord, 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 downstairs, 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 8

  “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. Oh, by the way, Mr. Thompson had a stroke.”

  “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. Fred 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 Durabolin. 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 wi
th 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 one hundred and fifty 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 9

  I loved my new job. I was working ninety to one hundred 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 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.”