“I am.”
“Good of you to come down.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the man either. It wasn’t just that he looked like Troy; he looked familiar in another way. I looked at his big hands and then I saw the World Series ring.
“My god,” I said. “You’re Pete Johnson.”
“I’ve been known by that name.”
“I saw you play in Fenway Park. I was in high school. It was in September. You hit three home runs that day, and the catch you made in center on Yastrzemski’s blast, I’ve never seen anything like it, the way you leapt and twisted your body. I thought the ball was in the bullpen, but you brought it back down into play.”
“I told you I had game,” he said to Troy, who slapped him a high five.
“How come you didn’t tell me he was a Yankee?”
“Because you’re a Red Sox fan. Can you believe that, Dad? They actually made me work with this guy.”
“Troy doesn’t like to brag,” the father said. “He knows once he started talking about me, he wouldn’t stop, ain’t that right, son?”
“In your dreams maybe.”
“I bet he hasn’t told you about his own exploits.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“He broke every record I ever set at Thorton High—football, baseball, basketball, track. He might not have kissed as many girls as I did, but of course he doesn’t have his dad’s looks.”
“Dream on, old man,” Troy said. “I got you on that record too.”
Pete Johnson—he was a sports legend. A local Connecticut kid. He’d signed with the Yankees out of high school, but had been drafted, did a tour in Korea, played a few years in the minors, then came up one year in September, hit .500, and helped the Yankees to the pennant. Hit seventeen homers in thirty games, including two in the World Series. He was the toast of the town. A handsome guy, he made the tabloids with his whirlwind romance with Marjorie Thetis, the actress. The papers said he was out of shape when he’d reported to camp the next spring, but I remember seeing pictures of him, and he’d looked great. The second week of training he tripped over a sprinkler head and wrenched his knee and was never the same. When he got off the injured list, he hit .230, a couple homers, and then suddenly retired.
Sitting at the restaurant table with Troy and his dad, I was like a babbling fool. I recounted over and over again every memory from that day I’d seen him at Fenway. Troy’s dad I knew was flattered by my praise. And I could see how much it meant to him for Troy to hear as well. Troy clearly loved his father and I could tell he was proud as I gave my account.
“You didn’t want to come back?” I asked.
“I thought about it, but Troy was a baby then, and his mother, who was ill, wasn’t able to care for him. It wasn’t that important to me. And of course, they didn’t pay the millions then that they do now.”
“I can’t tell you how I respect that,” I said.
“Troy came out okay, nothing that a good beating every now and then didn’t fix.”
“That’s a good one,” Troy said. “Since when were you ever able to catch me with your gimpy leg. Even when I was three I was too fleet-footed for him.”
“Well, on those occasions, I didn’t catch him, he knew he had to spend the night out in the doghouse, which may explain his terrible manners.”
After Troy’s dad left—he had an appointment wiring a house—we had a last beer, and then Troy insisted on paying the tab. In the parking lot, we shook hands goodbye. In the distance we heard the wail then yelp of an ambulance. I saw then the loss in his eyes.
“Good of you to come by,” he said.
“I’ll see you again soon.”
He looked like he doubted it. “You ever want paint,” he said. “I’ve got the best deal in town.”
Chapter 27
I worked regularly with Andrew Melnick. He was a good kid, who took a lot of ribbing from others, but gave it back as good as he got it. Like a lot of medics he had his cocky side, but he wasn’t above learning from his mistakes.
A small girl with the picture of a rose on her white T-shirt answered the door and led us up the dark wooden stairs to the third floor. Her mother lay on the unmade bed in the dim room. There was no bulb in the lamp. The ceiling was water-stained and peeling. Andrew felt the woman’s forehead. “Warm and dry,” he said. She was only breathing at a rate of four a minute. He shined a light in her right eye. “Pinpoint. Draw me up some narcan.”
“It’s going to be all right,” he said to the girl. “I’ll take care of your mother. I’m going to give her a little shot and she’ll be awake and talking to you in a minute. Don’t worry.”
I handed him the syringe. He swabbed her bicep with an alcohol prep, gave the syringe a little twirl between his fingers, then plunged the needle deep into the muscle. “Count to ten, and your mommy will be wide awake.”
The girl just stared at him. He looked back at the mother, rubbed his knuckles lightly in her chest, then a little harder when she still wouldn’t rouse. “Hello, wake up now, wake up.”
He said to the girl, “She needs a little more time to wake up. Don’t worry.” He rubbed his knuckles in her chest again, harder this time. No reaction.
“Maybe another dose?” he said to me.
“I don’t see any track marks or a needle,” I said. A crucifix hung by the door. The room was spare, neat.
“Maybe she was trying to quit and had a little lapse.” Andrew looked back at her pupils. First the right pupil. “Still pinpoint,” he said. He looked at the left. He swore. “It’s blown. She’s stroking out.”
“And she just stopped breathing,” I said.
He swore again. His hands shook.
“Four thirty-six,” I said into the portable. “We have a working one hundred.” To Andrew, I said. “Let’s get her on the floor.”
Andrew looked at the girl. He had paled. I saw the pain on his face.
“Come on, Andrew. Let’s go,” I said. To the police officer who’d just come in the room, I said, “Get the girl out of here.”
Andrew and I moved the woman to the floor. He was focused now. The next five minutes he performed as I had never seen him before. He intubated the woman on his first try and put an IV in the jugular vein in her neck. He gave the woman epinephrine and atropine and before our backup crew arrived he had a pulse back and a blood pressure on the woman, although she was still not responding. We strapped her to a long wooden board and carried her downstairs. I saw the girl looking out at us from a neighbor’s door as we went down the stairs.
A CAT scan at the hospital showed a massive bleed in the woman’s brain. “You didn’t give her the bleed,” I told Andrew afterwards. “You did what you could. You brought her back.”
“Hardly, she’s on a ventilator. I should have been on it quicker. I only looked at that one pupil.”
“She was going to code no matter what.”
My words didn’t help.
After that call, he was in a funk for days. I knew he and his girlfriend were fighting again, and that always affected him. He had a loud cell phone so whenever he answered it, I could hear the person talking to him. I usually got up and got out of the ambulance if we were parked to give him his privacy. Sometimes I couldn’t get out of the car. We were driving to area eight when he dialed his girlfriend.
I heard her voice answer. “ER.”
“It’s me,” he said. “You want to do something later?”
“No, I have other plans.”
“I really want to see you.”
“I can’t see you tonight. I have plans.”
“Can we talk or have a drink?”
“No, it’s over. You had your chance. You wanted to do this.”
“Okay, fine,” he said, and hung up.
Not two minutes later, his phone rang. “Calling back to apologize?” he said, but when he saw the incoming number, his smile wore off. “Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Andy, I thought maybe we could go out to dinner
tonight. I know you like the Outback Steakhouse. I want to treat you. We could use a little celebration.”
“Not tonight, Mom, I’m really not feeling well.”
“Are you coming down with something? You haven’t been yourself.”
“No, I’m just tired.” He struggled to keep his voice from breaking. “Maybe this weekend we could go out.”
“That’d be nice. I’ll have dinner in the oven for you when you get home.”
When he put his phone into his backpack, his eyes were wet. “Can we go back to Saint Fran?” he asked.
“No problem,” I said.
I waited in the ambulance for him. After ten minutes he came back out and sat heavily in the passenger seat.
“They want us covering from Kenney Park,” I said.
He nodded.
A few minutes later he said. “I just talked to ICU. They turned her machine off.”
“I’m sorry. Don’t take it out on yourself.”
“It’s not that. I know she was going to die anyway. It’s that little girl that’s killing me.”
“It was out of your hands.”
“I shouldn’t have told her.”
“You meant well.”
He sobbed quietly. “It’s just this time of year. My dad died in spring. I was eight. I never got to say goodbye to him.”
“You gave her the chance you never had.”
“It doesn’t make it any better.”
“He was a firefighter, right?”
Andrew nodded.
“I’m sure he’d be proud of you.”
We spent the next two hours at Kenney Park. Andrew sat on a bench by the pond. A Canadian goose and her seven fluffy goslings marched down to the water. An old woman tried to feed them bread, but the goose led her brood out into pond, where they swam to the far side. Occasionally I could hear the voices of children playing in between the sound of cars and buses passing on Vine Street. Andrew put his arms across his knees and laid his head down on them. He didn’t move for the longest time.
Chapter 28
“You won’t believe it,” an EMT said to me outside Hartford Hospital. “Troy Johnson’s in Cedarcrest.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just saw him. We did a psych transfer. I swear to God I saw him. We were at the desk, turning over the paperwork for the new admit, and I saw him in the community room playing Chinese checkers. He had his back turned to me, but it was him. I know it was him.”
“Yeah, I heard about that this morning,” another EMT chimed in. “A friend of mine works on the ambulance down on the shore. He said they got called to Troy’s house. He’d set a big bonfire in the yard and was yelling and waving a machete. It took three cops to take him down with a stun gun.”
“It wasn’t his sugar talking?”
“No, they said his sugar was fine. Troy Johnson. Can you believe it? In the psycho ward?”
I was stunned.
“He was always freaking crazy,” the EMT said.
I walked away.
The stories started almost immediately. He’d taken over the psych ward by sheer force of personality. They said he cured half the patients of their disabilities. A mute spoke his first words. An anorexic woman began to order second helpings. An unkempt man shaved. One weekend, people said, Troy led an escape of fourteen patients on his floor and took them up to Gloucester in rented limousines where they went on a whale watch. Troy entertained them by leaping into the water, and riding a humpback whale until the Coast Guard fished him out. Another story had him sneaking out with a blonde nurse with bright red lipstick and movie magazine cleavage. They were later arrested at the Wadsworth Atheneum for posing naked as statues in the Modern Art wing. It seems a schoolteacher complained to the befuddled management about the full nudity on display.
None of the stories were true, of course. I think people were just challenging themselves to come up with the wildest exploits for their hero—the man they most wanted to be like if they could live his life without its consequences. I picked him up on the fourteenth day—he’d called me from a pay phone on the floor—and drove him home.
“They thought I was going to harm myself and that was that,” he said. “Fucking cops. I mean, why would I want to hurt myself? It isn’t like I don’t have a great life. I mean, look at me. I’m too pretty. I’m the king of the world, the fucking hardware czar of a three-town area. I’ve still got game.”
He didn’t say another word the rest of the ride.
Pat called me that night. “How is he?” he asked. “He didn’t have much to say when I called.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He really didn’t have much to say to me either.”
“He called you to come pick him up?”
“Yeah. Maybe he tried you and your line was busy. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, I was on the phone a lot today. Thanks for getting him.”
“No problem,” I said.
I could tell from the disappointment in Pat’s tone that it had hurt him that Troy had called me and not him. But where he and Troy were best friends, Troy and I were partners, and partners kept failings between themselves.
Chapter 29
Troy’s dad invited Pat and me down for a surprise cookout for Troy’s birthday. On the drive down Pat told me about how Troy’s time in the service and how he came to work for Capitol Ambulance. “Troy was a natural soldier,” Pat said. “He loved everything about it—the challenge to be the best. He was in SEAL school and broke training records that had stood for years. Then one night he punched one of his commanders in a bar. They threw him in the brig. They thought he was just drunk. It wasn’t the alcohol, it was his sugar. He almost died. Instead of shipping out with his team, he’s getting off a Greyhound bus in small-town USA dressed in civvies, a medical discharge in his pocket.
“He came home, did nothing but hang around the house. I was worried about him. Here the two things he’d loved—competitive sports and the military—were gone from his life. I’d try to get him down to the Y for pickup games. He could still shoot the lights out, but here he’s playing against middle-aged men with beer bellies and braces on their knees and hotshot kids who like to gun. It seemed meaningless. There were no crowds. Nothing was at stake. He was morose all the time.
“One day I say, come with me to work. I’d just started working for Capitol. When I got out of college, I was a salesman for a book publisher. So much for an English degree. I wasn’t bad at it, but it did nothing for me. I thought I’d try the EMT stuff to see if I had the stomach for medicine. Maybe go back to school. Maybe even try for medical school. I loved the job. It seemed a natural for Troy.
“First night he comes out we do a shooting to the head, a double fatal on the highway, and a major MI. Troy signed up for EMT class the next day. He doesn’t always get the applauding crowds here, but when he walks in the house they look up at him like he is a god. You’ve seen that. This is his battleground. This is where he is who he is. They’ve taken that away from him now, and he has nothing left. I don’t know what to do. He’s keeping a good face, but obviously he’s hurting.”
Troy and his dad lived in an old farmhouse on ten acres of pine forest. In the backyard was a three-quarter basketball court his father had built for Troy when he was a kid. There was a pitching mound, sixty feet from a home plate. His dad grilled us New York steaks and split lobsters rubbed with mesquite seasoning. He roasted quail on a spit, and shucked fresh oysters and clams. He had a giant ice chest filled with bottles of a local pale ale. Six months before I wouldn’t have touched a beer, but I had had a few now and then with Kim, and I had managed to keep it in control. I didn’t say no when Troy handed me one. We ate, drank, played cards and told stories.
Listening to Troy and Pat tell their tales made me feel young again.
“You want another beer or are you drifting off?” Troy asked, holding a cold bottle up for me.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll take it.
Thanks.”
We clinked our beers all around. The earth spun through the night. The Milky Way lighting the sky above us.
Chapter 30
That summer our call volume soared. Not just the routine bullshit, but heavy-duty calls. Shootings, major car wrecks, cardiac arrests. Chaos had free rein. The city’s gangs chewed up each other and plenty of innocent bystanders with their street gun battles.
Gang warfare wasn’t the only problem. A nasty heroin hit the streets. It started in the north end, and within a few days was clear across the city. People were dying with the needles still in their arms. The city hired a van to patrol the streets with a megaphone warning of the dangers of the drug. The deaths just seemed to increase. Every medic in the company carried two prefilled narcan syringes in his pocket. Andrew Melnick could twirl them in his fingers like six-guns.
An arsonist in the south end took out ten buildings in two weeks, killing eight people in one fire. A freak tornado whipped through the city, toppling trees, crushing several cars, tearing the roofs off three homes, killing four. I remember a woman who was carried across the parking lot and smashed into the ground, breaking nearly every bone in her face. Her eyes were swollen-purple shut. Blood poured from her nose. Sixty years old, she screamed, “I can’t see, I can’t see, Lord help me, I can’t see.”
Making matters worse, the newspaper was all over us again. There was a plethora of stories about late response times. “Shooting Victim Waits Twenty Minutes for Ambulance.” “Ambulance Gets Lost, Man Dies.” “Lucrative Transfers Take Priority over Emergencies.” “Man Refused Ambulance Dies at Hospital.” An editorial cartoon showed two ambulance drivers laughing at a mangled man in the road. One EMT said to the man, “Take a cab, buddy.” The editorial board said a private company had no business handling 911 calls and the fire department should take over. They failed to mention the city was broke and didn’t have enough money to staff the schools, fix the city’s pothole-ridden streets or hire enough cops to put a quarter of the bad guys, away much less hire fifty paramedics.
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