The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman

by R. P. Lester

  Now granted, it probably sounds like an uncompassionate line of reasoning to most of you, but for medics with thirty years of service behind them, it’s the principle that keeps them on the job.

  This could’ve been the change I was looking for, but I thought long and hard before taking the necessary steps to obtain my EMT certification. The average “lifespan” of an EMS worker is five years—I beat the median by two—and I had to make sure I could hack it before I spent the time and money on training:

  Shit—all I have to do is wade the deepest chasms of human suffering as blood, guts, and ass whirl about in a torrential tornado of gore? I did that when I was a husband.

  I was in.

  ***

  Once I took all the exams and earned my credentials I went straight to work. My seven years in the field were spent working on twenty-four hour trucks, and while I took away many relationships and memories from the experience, I was glad to close that chapter of my life.

  Hollywood and reality television have led everyone to believe that ambulances run nothing but gruesome calls twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days a year. Three-hundred-and-sixty-six on a leap.

  Don’t believe the hype.

  It’s all a pack of lies.

  Those emergencies do come in, but it’s not balls-to-the-wall like many think.

  In my time on the truck, I was called for shootings, stabbings, assaults, patients in house fires, chemical burns, hostage standoffs, DOAs, terrible wrecks, cardiac arrests, seizures, stroke patients, and on one occasion, a dogfight in which the winning canine turned on its owner.

  I was also roused out of a dead sleep to go tend papercuts, skinned knees, a fallen grandmother with five people in the house who could’ve gotten her off the floor, fakers claiming mental health issues for a mandatory three-day vacation, family members concerned for a drunk cousin passed out in the corner, true psychiatric patients running amok when their meds ran out, and the all-time apogee in what was the most useless, squanderous, infuriating waste of resources I’ve ever been disprivileged to be associated with: goddamn fucking lice…..

  ***

  George Carlin once said, “(People are) just another failed mutation.” There’s validity to his statement.

  Deep thinker, old George was.

  ***

  I began to agree with his assessment of the species. That’s when I knew it was time to get out. I grew to hate dealing with patients and all the bullshit that went along with the work: total strangers screaming at me, people who told me how to do my job based on medical advice they’d gleaned from WebMD, and jovial professional duties such as telling a father why his three-month old son died in his sleep.

  I didn’t mind dealing with the quiet patients, however. The quiet patients were my favorite patients. Unfortunately, the quiet ones were usually either dead or about to die. In the end, that only behooved us to work harder so they might as well have been up and talking. If they were chatterboxing, you could sit behind them listening to their insipid questions, twiddling your thumbs and praying that your partner at the wheel got you to the hospital before your boredom led to a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

  If my time in EMS taught me anything, it’s that the human race is not long for this world, man. There were plenty of days on the truck when I wondered why I didn’t just stay home and count my sumptuous pubes. But occasionally, a call came in with comic relief that boggled the mind—clear proof that truth is stranger than fiction—that in the hollow of tragedy, you can find an unpolished diamond of mirth in the form of a pink, ten-inch dildo.

  ***

  “Let’s grab lunch.”

  “It’s 7 o’clock, dude. At this point I think we can call it dinner.”

  “Whatever, Innis. I’m starving. You want Mcfatty’s?”

  “Jesus no, man. Their burgers taste like they’re made from yoga mats.”

  “Let’s get Booger Fling then. I’m buying.”

  “No. You know I don’t like fast food, Carl.”

  “Well it’s the only decent thing we pass on the way to the station. It’s either that or that little Pakistani store with the deli and I can’t eat there. You remember last time when I got their chicken wings and threw up in the truck? I had to walk around with puke on my uniform for the rest of the shift. Only good thing about it was that it was mine instead of a patient’s.”

  “Fine, Carl. I’ll have the number four and we’ll listen to our arteries grind to a halt, okay?”

  ***

  Me and Carl had been going nonstop since we came on at 6 AM. After a near-drowning, a few shootings, some fevers, and an Alzheimer’s patient who swore I was her dead Uncle Shamus, we felt like a couple of whipping boys. All we wanted to do was grab something to eat on the way back to our station. Maybe snag a nap so we could deal with whatever tomfoolery the night had to offer.

  It was 7 PM. We still had eleven hours to go until crew change and we were praying for daylight. Booger Fling was in our sights when another call came in:

  DISPATCHER: “Nine-eighty.”

  ME: “You diseased WHORE!” Clicking mic. “Nine-eighty—go.”

  DISPATCHER: “Nine-eighty: got a call for a patient with uncontrolled bleeding. Says he can’t stop it. Patient is a white male in his early 50s. States he’s alone and ‘needs help.’ Patient says there’s been no violence but won’t say where he’s hemorrhaging from or why. Patient has specifically requested a male ambulance crew.”

  Carl and I looked at each other in astonishment.

  ME: “A male ambulance crew? Did you tell the patient that in an emergency you don’t get to pick and choose who shows up?”

  DISPATCHER: “Sure did, Innis. Just so happens you and Carl are the closest truck I have. Everybody’s tied up on other calls. Address is fourteen-thirty-eight Darwin Lane in Pleasant Oak. Let me know if you need police.....”

  Ten minutes and a scad of profanity later, we hit Darwin Lane with rumblies in our tummies.

  ***

  Pleasant Oak was an upscale mixture of Caucasian, Middle Eastern, and Asian residents with some Korean families scattered throughout. Wheeling into the caller’s circular driveway, we saw a manicured lawn with rose bushes lining the perimeter of the brick structure. Fanned water patterns on the front walk told us the timed sprinklers had recently retreated back into the St. Augustine. Hanging pots sporting a gang of brightly-colored plants dripped from the eaves, separated by white marble pillars. A wooden, heavy-looking front door donned a lily-covered wreath on its face. Beige vinyl siding started at the attic floor and went to the roof—and none of that cheap shit, either; anybody in the know could tell this was custom-made. The shingles had to be brand new. A Mercedes SUV parked in the open-air carport looked to be more expensive than my house at the time. Fred would’ve had a ball playing with the two lawn jockeys in the middle of the yard. (One was black, the other was white. Yay for equality.) All in all, a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood.

  On every call—but especially ones such as this where the details were shady—crew safety is the top priority. We got out of the truck and did a quick assessment. The tidbits of information we were given sounded ominous.

  I was ready to stab a motherfucker with my medic’s shears should the need arise.

  Enroute to the emergency, our dispatcher said the patient wanted us to enter through the carport door, saying it would be unlocked. When we finally got our stretcher and equipment around, I knocked. The door creaked open a few inches. I stuck my head inside to see an exquisitely decorated kitchen, painted blue with delicately placed bric-a-brac on the shelves.

  I shouted, “Hello?! Ambulance!”

  “Oh, thank God! I’m back here in the bedroom!” The voice was deep and full of anxiety.

  We trundled our two hundred pounds of shit over the threshold and wound the corners toward the sound of the man’s voice. The hallway was so slim we had to walk in a straight line—me first, the stretcher in the
middle, then Carl trailing behind. When I got to the doorway of the bedroom, my jaw hit the floor and my eyes got wide.

  “What’s wrong, Innis?”

  Nothing.

  “Dude, what is it?”

  I didn’t answer. Carl couldn’t mask the impatience.

  “Coxman! What the fuck is it, man?”

  I stood with my mouth open trying to speak but my vocal chords failed me.

  “For God’s sake, Innis!”

  Carl squeezed between the wall and the stretcher down to my position in front of the bedroom.

  “Coxman, just tell me what the hell’s going-” He leaned around the door jamb and fell silent as well. Nothing could’ve prepared us for what we saw.

  There, on a king-sized bed with no sheets or blankets, was a man on his knees with his ass in the air pointed straight at us. A shitzooka of surprise. He looked like he was ready for a good pumping, but judging from the blood running from his cornhole it appeared as though someone had already tagged him. From our standpoint, we could see that he had no underwear, not even around his ankles. Just a white t-shirt and a pair of brown dress socks. He had his face buried in a pillow, head turned to the side to talk. A cordless phone lay inches from his salt-and-pepper hair. Blood flowed down his taint and dripped from his balls onto the bare mattress, forming a huge puddle that had begun to coagulate. From the looks of it, he’d been there a while.

  A faint buzzing sound could be heard from somewhere in the room, though it sounded.....muffled.

  ***

  Carl and I were still frozen in the doorway when he spoke. “I’m not gay!”

  I shook my head to collect my senses. “Um.....what, sir?”

  “I’m not gay! Before we go any further you need to know I’m not gay! Whatever you think of me, just know that I’m not gay!”

  Of the two of us, Carl was the more professional; I had a million jokes to run but sonofabitch if he didn’t defuse my whimsy. He wedged himself out of the hall and walked into the bedroom to browneye eye the situation, getting on his knees to speak to our patient and find out what in the fuck-all was going on.

  I remained standing just inside the bedroom with my hands shoved in my pockets, gazing at a crucifixion portrait of Jesus on the wall above the man’s dresser. The Son of God had acted as silent witness to whatever in the hell had taken place in that bedroom. I felt that whatever the patient had to tell us was going to be so far out of left field, we couldn’t even begin to fathom it.

  In the picture, the Messiah’s eyes were rolled back in his head, looking skyward as if to say, “Sheeit. Y’all ain’t gonna believe what this idiot did.”

  And what is that buzzing?!

  ***

  “Sir, what happened?” asked Carl.

  The guy kept screaming his mantra like a chant at a political rally. “I’m not gay! I am not—gay! I’m a pastor at First Baptist! I don’t believe in homosexuality! For the love of the Lord, I AM NOT GAY!”

  Carl’s professionalism quickly took a backseat.

  He screamed in the man’s face, “We don’t give a fuck if you’re gay, Pastor! Tell us what happened!”

  The congregation leader gathered his aplomb and enamored us with a saga of heartache and misplaced reconnection.

  “Look, fellas, it’s like this: my wife left me. After thirty years of marriage, she walked out. After thirty years! She said she was tired of living a ‘constricted life with a holy-roller.’ Can you believe the nerve?!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Carl said gently, his relaxed demeanor coaxing the pastor along to get the cause of his injury.

  “And, well, she’s been gone a week. It’s been agony. Torture! I miss her so much!” He began crying into his pillow.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay, sir.” Carl patted his back in a gesture of reassurance.

  God, he had more patience than me.

  The man gathered himself. “Alright. I’ve been lost without her. I wanted to feel close to her. I’ve just missed her so much. And, well, I found her vibrating dildo, and I stuck it up—you know, there. It was fine at first. I felt her here with me. But it got sucked in and I can’t get it out! Oh my God I’m going to Hell!”

  That’s when the cleric lost it. He broke and started wailing into the pillow. Whether it was from the pain of his separation or a perforated colon, I’ll never know. It most likely was a combination of the two, though the smart money would be on the latter.

  Carl’s eyes got bigger than when he saw the salad shooter from the doorway.

  At least the mystery of the nebulous buzzzzzz had been solved.

  Carl took his hand from the pastor’s back and reclined to sit on his feet. “Ooooooooh! Ooookay. Okay. Well then, uh.....

  …..

  …..

  …..

  …..okay.”

  Good ole professional Carl.

  That fuckin’ putz.

  He turned and gave me a look that said, “Let’s load him up and get the hell out of here.”

  And that’s what we did.

  ***

  When we rolled our patient into the emergency room the ER doc looked at us with a sardonic grin on his face. The two of us had had plenty of interactions with the physician ever since we’d gone to work in the field so he felt comfortable questioning our mode of positioning.

  “Hey, Carl, Innis.....” He brought us over to a corner of the trauma room, away from the horde of nurses bustling around the patient.

  “Why is he like that?” he asked Carl.

  “Like what?”

  The doc scoffed. “I mean, why is his ass sticking straight up in the air, boys?”

  Carl—being the more professional of the two, remember—slapped a palm to the back of his neck and began rubbing in an uncomfortable manner.

  “Well, Doc,” he said, “when I called to tell the nurse what we were bringing in, she hung up before I could finish telling her the whole story.” He then beguiled the doc with the patient’s mechanism of injury. It was all the esteemed healer could do to hush his snickering.

  “So you see, Doc, we had to bring him in like that. He couldn’t have-”

  “Sit to save his ass!”

  “Dude! What the shit, Innis?!” Carl looked like he wanted hide under a rock.

  Fuck everybody. I’d withheld my barbs the entire call and it was time to cut loose.

  ***

  The rest of the night dragged. We barely noticed. Any time we felt tired or ran a bad call, we just reminded ourselves of the Baptist preacher who’d jammed a plastic flesh weasel in his rectum.

  We brought in a fall-down-go-boom around 2 AM. Some old lady with twenty cats and four useless relatives in the house. On the way back to my rig, I passed the trauma room where we’d left the pastor. He was still there—his ass in the air and bandaged to the nines from his waist all the way to the backs of his knees. When I asked the doc what they did about his predicament, he said they were still waiting on a proctologist for consultation and a special surgeon for removal of his impromptu romance device.

  I couldn’t help myself.

  Christ, I’m such an asshole.

  I went into his room. He was lying with his face turned to the side, tubes and IVs running everywhere, sipping grape juice from a little carton.

  “How you doing, sir?”

  “Oh, I’m good. Thank you so much for coming to help me. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you guys.”

  “You’re welcome, Pastor. But could you do me a favor, please?”

  “Anything, son. Anything.”

  “I’m sorry about your separation. I truly am. But if you ever decide to get married again and that one fizzles as well, don’t stick an object in your ass that reminds you of your old lady. Your next wife could be a sword swallower.”

  ***

  “I can’t take this anymore, man.”

  “What?”

  “This, Carl. People crying all the time, strangers screaming and cursing at us, not getting pa
id what we’re worth to see horrible shit, leaving our shifts looking like a couple of zombies because we didn’t get any rest.....I think I’m going a tad mad.”

  “Well if you gotta leave you gotta leave, Innis. I’m not gonna argue with that. Plenty of people have gotten out for the exact same reasons. But what are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, man. That’s the problem.”

  “You still write your stories, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve always written no matter what was going on.”

  “Well, what about that? Haven’t you always wanted to write for a living? I know it’s a plunge into shaky ground, but you’ve gotta get happy, Coxman. You’re almost thirty-seven and you’re fucking miserable.”

  “I know, man. I know, I know, I know.”

  “Look, if you want my advice, take your woman and your kid and move to Texas like you’ve always wanted to. It’s all I’ve heard you talk about for the seven years I’ve known you. Once you’re there, you can chill and write your first book without any of the bullshit from this goddamn job. And with the city you’ve wanted to live in? Hell!—there are lots of writers and musicians over there! You’ll be happier, Innis. I think you should do it.”

  “My ‘first book.’ That has a nice ring to it…..

  “…..ya fuckin’ putz.”

  Coxman’s Log: 1:29 PM

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “So they say.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, why do you drink so much?”

  “That’s personal.”

  “You’re not going to answer the question?”

  “I drink because I’m a writer.”

  “What do you write about?”

  “Drinking.”

  “That’s a smartassed answer.”