by Neil Strauss
“My dick, bench-pressed three fifty,” Francisco and Rob were shouting out the window, now at a blonde in a black Mustang.
Rob flipped on the siren to impress her.
The stress exposure Alwood had promised hadn’t exactly materialized. So far we’d been to a retirement community, where an elderly woman was experiencing shortness of breath. We’d been to a bus stop, where a plus-sized twelve-year-old had wiped out on a skateboard. And we’d been to the home of a schizophrenic teenager in a Def Leppard jersey who said she felt like someone invisible was choking her.
Though I’d practiced my new skill set by controlling bleeding, administering oxygen, strapping on a spinal collar, and attaching EKG leads, the experience exposed me more to human nature and suffering than to stress and adrenaline.
“What’s your dream call?” Francisco turned and asked as we drove away from the hospital after dropping off an elderly man who’d passed out in his bathroom and defecated all over himself.
“It would be amazing to deliver a baby,” I said.
“I’ve done that a couple of times. But my dream call is a bus full of Hawaiian Tropic girls crashes, and I have to triage all of them.”
On most of the remaining calls that shift, we learned that the Rolling Stones were right when they sang, “What a drag it is getting old.” Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, the suffering, humiliation, and loneliness of a human being can now be extended for years.
And perhaps that’s how it’s supposed to be. In my EMT class on delivering babies, as if I needed any more evidence for my Fliesian beliefs, I’d learned that one way to make sure a newborn is healthy is to see if it’s grimacing. If we come into this world smiling, something is wrong with us. So we might as well leave life just as miserable as we enter it.
This may sound cynical, but all the talk I’d heard of apocalypse, war, murder, cannibalism, and genocide over the last few years was starting to get to me. It’s hard to be optimistic when you know you’re going to die.
Though I enjoyed speeding through the city’s backsides to find people who needed our help, all I really learned from the experience was that living to the end of my life span—77.8 years for the average American—will be a lot more pleasant if I’m surrounded by people who love me than if I’m alone. So, in addition to fitness and health, I’d have to add family to my survival stockpile. Though, unlike my other supplies, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have one set in Los Angeles and another in St. Kitts.
On the way to class one night, I saw a motorcycle lying on the shoulder of the highway with a man slumped next to it. Every car blew past, paying him no attention. I pulled onto the shoulder, called 911, unzipped my bug-out bag, grabbed the emergency first-aid kit, and raced to his side. He wasn’t badly hurt, so I pressed a two-by-four-inch piece of gauze against his arm to stop the bleeding, then secured the gauze with a roller bandage while waiting for the paramedics.
Something in me was beginning to change. I’d never stopped to help a stranger before. I’d always assumed someone else would do it—and better than I could.
Despite this, I still lacked the stress inoculation I needed. Maybe I’d just chosen the wrong ambulance crew to ride with. So, before our final EMT skills exam, I asked the guy who sat in front of me how to join his search-and-rescue team. Maybe with them I’d get the experience I needed.
Later that week, I finally received the e-mail I’d been waiting over a year and a half for. “Your application for citizenship has been approved,” Maxwell wrote, “and we are now submitting your title document to the ministry of finance in order to obtain your citizenship certificate and subsequently your passport.”
I couldn’t believe it had finally happened. Tears of relief rushed to my eyes. If he was to be believed, and this wasn’t just another stalling tactic, the backup plan I’d set in motion well over a year ago was nearly complete. I was almost a citizen of St. Kitts.
If any police officer ever gives you flak, get his name, then come to me.” Detective Mike Fesperman, head of the Devonshire police homicide division, was speaking in the roll-call room. It was my first time inside a police station. I always imagined I’d be entering in handcuffs, not as a potential reserve officer. “As far as I’m concerned, when you’re out there, you have the same status and respect as any police officer working the scene. I have tremendous respect for what your team does.”
The team was the search-and-rescue unit I’d asked my EMT classmate about, California Emergency Mobile Patrol (or C.E.M.P.), a forty-six-year-old non-profit on call around the clock for the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department. As instructed by the team’s applicant coordinator, I was wearing a white button-down shirt, black pants, and black boots. At the end of the meeting, I had to present my case to the group and then either be accepted or rejected as an applicant.
Fesperman was telling us about a body he’d found the previous week. It belonged to an artist who’d toured Europe with his work but lived as a vagrant in the park because he didn’t like confined spaces. A few days earlier, he’d bought beer for some teenagers. An argument ensued, he called one of their girlfriends a bitch, and the guys returned later and stabbed him.
It was one of the most violent stabbings Fesperman said he’d seen. To determine the date of death, a maggot was removed from the body and sent to the coroner’s office, where an insect expert pinpointed the murder time based on the life cycle of the larvae.
Fesperman wiped a hand across his brow. He was thin and bald, with taut skin and small, serious eyes that had seen the extremes of man’s inhumanity. He’d been a homicide detective for over a quarter century, as had his father.
If learning wilderness survival had thickened my skin, joining C.E.M.P. would certainly harden what lay beneath. Beyond the exposure to stress and violence, there were survival advantages I hadn’t anticipated: dozens of hours of rescue and police training; relationships with fire chiefs, police captains, and park rangers; field trips to the 911 call center, the coroner’s office, and the rest of the city’s emergency nerve center; police-blue uniforms, shiny metal badges, police radios, and cars with flashing lights and sirens that would get me past official roadblocks much better than my CERT uniform; and access to the government’s Wireless Priority Service program, which would give my cell phone precedence over other calls during an emergency when the network was tied up. Even Spencer couldn’t buy all that.
Three nights before, C.E.M.P. had helped Fesperman secure a crime scene. In this case, a fifteen-year-old girl had told her eighteen-year-old brother she’d found a rifle buried in the park. She led him to the spot and showed him where to dig for it.
But there was no gun. Unbeknownst to him, he was digging his own grave. When it was deep enough, his sister began stabbing him in the back. “What are you doing?” he cried out. “I’m your brother. I love you.” Suddenly she had a change of heart, stopped, and called 911. He was brought to the hospital in critical condition.
When asked why she’d done it, she simply told the police it was time for him to die.
“Human beings are animals,” Fesperman told us, scanning the room. “They’re vicious animals. Some of the things I’ve seen them do I could never even have imagined before I started this job.”
I thought my outlook on human nature was dark when I began learning survival. But the people I’d met along the way were far more Fliesian than I was—and they were in surprisingly good company. No less an authority on human nature than Sigmund Freud believed something similar. “I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole,” Freud once confessed in an interview. “In my experience, most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all.”
Fesperman spent the next half-hour teaching newer members of the group how to preserve a murder scene. He told us not to touch the victims. Not to cover them with a blanket or sheet. Not to outline their bodies in chalk, despite wh
at we’d seen in movies. Not to smoke, spit, or chew tobacco at the scene. And not to let anyone touch cigarette butts, bloodstains, or drag marks. All these things will contaminate DNA evidence and give the defense lawyer an opening to create doubt in the minds of jurors.
These rules, Fesperman continued, were especially important since, in a few months, the State of California planned to begin taking DNA samples from every person arrested within its borders.
I looked around the room after Fesperman said this, but no one else seemed disturbed. The official reason for inserting radio-frequency identification chips in passports and putting cameras on street corners and creating databases of people’s DNA, facial features, fingerprints, and irises is to aid investigators and to reduce crime and terrorism. But these measures come with an uncomfortable potential for abuse. At the press of a button, a government could turn these surveillance tools against its own citizens in ways that would make fascist regimes of the past seem permissive in comparison. Anonymity is a dying art.
“I look at every murder the same way,” Fesperman was concluding. “Whether it’s a celebrity or a vagrant, they’re still someone’s son or daughter.”
When the meeting ended, I was interviewed by the team about why I wanted to be a member and the skills I had. After I told them about everything I’d been learning and the hands-on disaster experience I was seeking, they went silent.
“Am I in?” I asked.
“We’ll let you know.”
Their words traveled into my ear, formed a lump in my throat, and stopped in a knot in my chest. I had no idea if I was the kind of person they were looking for. And I wanted, more than anything, to be part of the team. Not just for the experience, uniform, and siren. I wanted to belong.
Before entering the roll-call room of the Devonshire police station that day, I was alone and adrift in a world of panicked people. But in that room, there was a community of skilled men and women with a sense of purpose and mission. Unlike the paranoid PTs and the stockpiling survivalists, these were people who weren’t just trying to save their own lives. They had the resources, they understood the system, they knew the authorities, and they possessed not just the skills but the heart to help others survive in the cruel world Fesperman had described.
I walked to the police officer’s break room to await the team’s decision. Above the snack machines, World’s Wildest Police Videos flickered on a small television set.
A few minutes later, the applicant coordinator, SR77—no one here used names, only numbers—appeared in the doorway. “Welcome to the team,” she said. “I don’t know why they just didn’t tell you on the spot instead of making you suffer like that.”
I broke into a wide, relieved smile. Up until now, I’d sponged knowledge wherever I could find it. This was the first time I’d felt like part of something.
When I returned to the roll-call room, I was briefed on my responsibilities, a long list of team rules, and the minimum hours I was expected to put in every month. “In an emergency like an earthquake, your first priority is the safety of your family,” SR33, the team’s medical officer, sternly informed me. “When that’s taken care of, your next priority is the safety of your neighborhood. After that, your next priority is C.E.M.P.”
I didn’t realize it until that moment, but this wasn’t just a survival training decision. It was a life decision. As of that evening, I was no longer Neil to these people. I was an alphanumeric sequence. I was SR14a:
But rather than feeling like I’d lost my individuality, I felt like I’d gained a network.
It wasn’t long after joining C.E.M.P. that I experienced my first natural disaster.
Since being accepted as an applicant, which entailed six months of training followed by a three-month probationary period, I’d bought my first ham radio. WTSHTF, if both land and mobile lines went completely dead, I’d need some way to connect to the outside world to find out what was going on, what areas were safe, and, if necessary, call for help.
Katie didn’t like the radio, especially when I left it on the earthquake channel. The station was completely silent because it was hooked up to a machine that detected seismic activity. If it started emitting tones, this meant the machine was picking up tremors and anyone listening should immediately duck, cover, and hold.
“It’s like another presence in the room I can’t see,” Katie complained. “What if we’re sleeping at night and this static comes on, and all of a sudden we hear a creepy voice saying ‘I’m watching you’?”
I laughed. I actually thought she was kidding. My mistake.
“You probably think it’s totally unrealistic. But, honey, it could totally happen. It’s scary.”
“Have you ever realized how much your life has suffered because of your fears?” I needed to do something to help Katie. If she continued like this, she’d end up as a crazy old spinster sealed in a house full of cats. Except she wouldn’t even have cats to keep her company, because she’d be afraid they’d sit on her chest and steal her breath while she slept. “You’re always fighting with your sister because she resents driving you everywhere, and you’re constantly canceling plans and job interviews because you can’t drive anywhere by yourself.”
“I guess you’re right about that.” She took off her reading glasses and put down The Fear Book by Cheri Huber, which I’d bought in an attempt to help her. “I would take a taxi, but I don’t trust taxi drivers.” The book clearly wasn’t working.
“Or you could take driving lessons.”
“I don’t know. I’m scared I’m going to turn the wheels the wrong way and hit things. And I’m worried about other drivers crashing into me.”
“That’s why you need to learn about a car before driving it. In order to engage in life fully, we sometimes have to subject ourselves to small, calculated risks. And though we can’t control anyone else’s behavior, we can learn to control ours to minimize those risks.”
I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. Somehow, during all this, I’d actually stopped acting like a whiny, clinging child and grown up.
When it came to driving lessons, Katie resisted for a couple of days. But when her sister forgot to pick her up one afternoon and she missed an interview for a job she wanted at a television production company, she relented and agreed to face her fear.
The following afternoon, an elderly Hispanic man with a white beard picked her up for her first driving lesson. Katie peered into the car, then turned to me. “I trust him,” she said. “He reminds me of Lola.”
Lola was our goat. She’d arrived earlier that week—affectionate, curious, and very pregnant. Katie had named her Lola after the showtune lyric, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”
“She’s a pretty little goat, and we will spoil her like we never spoiled Bettie,” she explained.
While Katie wreaked havoc on the streets of Los Angeles, I drove to Santa Ana and took my FCC Technician Class exam, which enabled me to receive this license, a call sign, and authorization to broadcast on ham radio:
The day after my license was granted, I was home alone with the radio on the earthquake channel while Katie was taking another driving class. Suddenly, a warbling pitch emerged from the speaker.
I dove under a desk in the room and gripped its sides. As I did, the house began to shake as if a giant hand had taken hold of it and was rocking it more solidly into its foundation. Then it stopped. Its magnitude was 5.4 on the Richter scale.
No one was hurt. Nothing fell off the shelves. But it was humbling nonetheless. I thought of the analogy I’d heard so much from environmentalists: that we were fleas on the back of the earth, which was itching to get us off.
Since I was safe, I called Katie to make sure she was all right. Then I walked outside to check on Lola and ensure the neighborhood was secure. Next I called C.E.M.P. and asked if they needed me.
It felt good to know what to do.
It was a minor miracle: Katie was actually driving me to the UPS Store, wh
ere I needed to get fingerprinted for my EMT license. She was self-conscious behind the wheel, hesitant about controlling an object much heavier and more powerful than her, but she had done it. On her third try, she’d passed her driving test and received a license.
“I feel like my entire life has changed,” she gushed. In the last week she’d re-enrolled in school and driven herself to half a dozen job interviews. “Now, instead of having to depend on everyone, I can depend on myself. It’s like freedom.” She paused to make a wide, sloppy turn onto Ventura Boulevard, then continued. “It’s weird, though. When someone wants me to meet them somewhere, my first reaction is to get stressed out and think, Fuck, I can’t.”
“So what do you do to get over that?”
“I just get in the car and drive,” she said, as if the solution had been that simple all along.
“But why are you able to do that now when you couldn’t before?”
“Because now that I’ve had more practice driving, I’m confident,” she answered as she careened over a speed bump and landed with a thump in the parking lot. “I trust myself now.”
Funny, I thought—that’s exactly how I felt after practicing the survival skills I’d learned. Though, hopefully, I was a better survivalist than she was a driver.
At the UPS Store, I watched as a college student wearing white gloves rolled my fingers, one by one, onto the scanner of a computer. I watched as my fingerprints appeared, one by one, on the screen. And I watched as he clicked on the submit button. Within seconds, my fingerprints were on file with the United States Department of Justice forever. They now had identifying information I couldn’t simply change with a new document.
And all in exchange for this:
“You’re on their records now,” the student said afterward. Even he knew I’d just done something irreversible.