Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  “It’s been a pleasure to meet you,” she said. She shook my hand and smiled warmly.

  When we drove away, Linda told me, “Helen hinted she might be back in the ambulance business.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You know everything that’s going on with the company up for sale. It is very political. The partners want to sell and they can get the most money if they can sell national. I think what she was hinting at was after the sale, the city’s going to step in and split the town up. And she and Santiago may be able to buy into Champion and run the south end.”

  “It’s too confusing to me.”

  “That’s alright. She said she’d hire us if it comes to us. Besides no matter who ends up running it, they’ll always have a need for people to fill the rigs.”

  Chapter 33

  Pat Brothers and I were sitting in 482 down by Bridgestone Tire at Albany and Main. It was seven thirty in the evening. We had the game on the radio. While Pat had taken to wearing Troy’s Yankees hat in honor of his friend’s forced absence, like me he was a diehard Red Sox fan.

  We were cheering a double off the wall by Mike Greenwell when we heard an unmistakable pop pop pop.

  “That was close,” Pat said. “Down at the Sands maybe. They’re starting early tonight. Let’s head that way.”

  The Sands was the public housing complex off North Main. Summers in the evening, people gathered on the balconies and by the cars in the parking lot to listen to rap music, drink their forties and stay out of the sweltering apartments.

  I put my seatbelt on, turned on the engine, but didn’t put it in gear.

  “Four eighty-two,” Dispatch called. “On a one. Male shot, sixteen-twenty Main. PD on the way.”

  “Come on, let’s roll,” Pat said.

  “We should wait for the cops. We roll now, we’ll be right in it.”

  I could hear sirens in the distance.

  “We’ll get there together.”

  “Okay, Troy,” I said. I shifted into drive.

  Pat laughed. “Let’s do some good.”

  We were out in less than a minute. No cops yet. Already a huge crowd had gathered. People spilled off the balconies. You can tell it’s going to be bad by the way the crowd moves. This crowd was hot and angry. I felt assaulted by a hundred glares.

  “Mothafucka move! Mothafucker that boy hurting. That boy hurt. Mothafucker you run like he your brother! Run like he your brother!”

  They pressed in against the ambulance. I was jostled as I went around to pull the stretcher. I threw the board on it and the oxygen tank.

  “Run, big man,” a tall young man shouted at me, his face contorted in anger. “Big man, move! That boy hurting, big man.”

  Pat knelt by the young man. He had his hand shoved down the boy’s mouth almost to the wrist, as he tried to manipulate an ET tube into his throat. He pulled his hand out, then wrapped white tape around the tube and around the boy’s head. There was blood and brains on his gloves. “On the board and out of here,” he said, calmly.

  We slid the victim onto the board. “Strap him later.” We lifted him onto the stretcher and pushed back through the crowd. I saw Pat doing compressions on his chest.

  “Just drive,” he said, as we lifted him into the back. “Just get us out of here nice and easy and quick.”

  I slammed the back doors. The ambulance was already encircled. “You let him die, I’m gonna get you big man. Big man, I’m going after you, you let him die.”

  The police had arrived in force. An officer had to push people to make way for me to reach the driver’s seat. I hit the sirens, but no one would move. They were beating on the sides of the ambulance. I saw someone get clubbed in the side mirror. I had a little opening and pushed the ambulance through it. The crowd parted. In the rearview mirror I saw Pat stick a needle in the boy’s chest. I switched to the C-Med radio and patched in. “We’re four minutes out with multiple gunshot, head and chest, CPR in progress.”

  “Is the patient intubated?”

  “That’s all done.”

  “What’s his rhythm?”

  “I don’t know. The medic is doing CPR so it can’t be good.” I dropped the mike.

  The young man was dead. They took one look at him under the bright trauma room lights and called it. “We may be good, but we’re not that good,” the doctor said. “We don’t do brain transplants here. Not that a brain would help him with a chest like that one. Sorry folks, that’s it.” The trauma team pulled off their masks and walked out of their room, their green scrubs unstained.

  “Couldn’t you just have thrown a sheet over him?” the doctor said.

  Pat stood there, his mouth half open. His arms and shirt were bloody. He had brain on his sleeve and boot. He looked at me and shook his head. Someone else might have come back with a smart answer, but that wasn’t Pat.

  “Hey, I just noticed, you’re not wearing your vest,” I said after he’d taken his uniform shirt off.

  “Don’t tell Allison. It’s too damn uncomfortable in this heat, though I was thinking about it when we on scene. But then I remembered I was wearing Troy’s hat—that’s makes me invincible, right?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  He laughed. “That was a rough group.”

  Outside the entrance to the ED a crowd began to form. “Don’t let my baby die,” a woman cried to the closed ER doors as others held her up. “Don’t let my baby die!”

  “We ought to get out of here before they turn their anger back on us,” I said. “Besides, we have to get you a clean shirt.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Pat said. We got in our ambulance and headed back to the office to clean up and resupply.

  The newspaper the next morning ran a story on the shooting. It was the fourth shooting in the last week, like many recently attributable to a turf battle between new dealers and some older dealers—victims of a crackdown five years ago—who were just now getting out of prison and were eager to take back their positions. The boy had been shot with an Uzi. The cops recovered twenty-seven rounds.

  “Listen to this,” I said to Pat. “Residents of the housing complex said the ambulance took at least ten minutes to arrive. Ten minutes. We were out in a minute. The whole time from dispatch to arrival at the hospital was six minutes. How can they write that?”

  Pat just shrugged and kept reading the sports pages. He never even showed interest in reading the article. On the news that night, they interviewed residents about the incident. “If he was a rich boy they would have been here faster, but this city don’t care about its poor,” one woman said.

  “I used to get pissed off,” Pat said. “Nothing seemed fair. No one understood. But that goes with the job. You’ll deal with blood, vomit, unpleasant people, a sensational press, low pay. So what? What are you going to do? Complain? This is a great job—you get to help people and have a three-day workweek if you want. So sometimes there are bitchy nurses and arrogant doctors, there are also truly awesome doctors and wonderful nurses. What would this job be without their smiles every time we come in the door? It’s like having a hundred sisters, some are sweet, some are moody, but I love just about every one of them. And except for a couple of satanic ones—they’re awesome. And I’ve had great partners. When Troy and I worked together—they paid us to have a ball. You can’t get better than that. This job is like a continual day at an amusement park. It’s like Playland.

  “Sometimes I think there is no other place in the world I would rather be. You know sometimes this job just gives you the feeling that you can’t be any more alive. It’s like you are life in the city itself. You never know where the wind is going to blow you, but you’re always there right in the vortex of life. People dying, babies being born, all the emotion in the world—love, hate, fear, joy—all right there before you, playing out. And you are a part of its fabric. A witness to life. That’s heady stuff.

  “And who cares about the paper. I mean, sometimes they even print a picture of you do
ing something good. I was on the front page once carrying a little girl in my arms out of house. I gave that one to my mother. She had it framed and hung it over the fireplace in the den. That beats a plaque that says you were the Jaycee of the Year or top salesmen. So they’re being hard on us now—they have papers to sell and maybe it’ll even focus some attention on EMS and keep everyone on their toes trying to prove them wrong. Next month, they’ll be going after someone else. They’ll go after the cops or fire or the sanitation department, or heaven forbid, the governor. In the end what does it matter? Just do your job. It’s like a football player complaining, ‘Gosh, coach, they’re trying to tackle me out there.’”

  “That’s an interesting way to put it.”

  “This job will eat you up if you don’t keep your perspective. You need a life outside of it. That’s why I’ve decided to get married.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Don’t tell anyone. I’m asking Allison on Friday night. I’m taking her to Carbone’s. I’ve already got the ring.”

  “That’s great. That’s really great.”

  “Life is great. That’s what’s great. Life.”

  “Have you told Troy yet?”

  “No, but I’m going to go see him tomorrow, if he’s not too busy with Veronica. Those two are like rabbits. ”

  “Do you think we’ll ever see him up here again?”

  “He’s going to be coming up in a couple weeks. He’s got that trial of Felipe Ruiz. He’s got to testify. We were going to get him drunk afterwards, and make him fill out a new job application and sign in blood that he’s coming back.”

  “Do you think that’ll work?”

  “I don’t know. One way or another we have to get him back. He says he doesn’t want to come back, but he does. This is where he belongs. The hardware gig is wearing thin. He’ll be back. They’ll find some kind of compromise about the diabetes stuff. We’ll look up and he’ll be here. And then I can stop wearing this damn Yankees cap.”

  Chapter 34

  I went out for a beer with Victor a few nights later at the Brickyard Pub on Park Street in West Hartford. He’d lost his medical control to practice as a paramedic pending investigation. He’d had an asthma patient go into respiratory, then cardiac arrest. He’d been unable to get the intubation. They suspended him because he’d spent too much time on scene. Medical control said if he hadn’t been able to get the tube on his second try, he should have just bagged the patient with a face mask while his partner drove to the hospital. At the bar, Victor told me how the first two times he went in for the tube, the cords were closed in a bronchospasm. The third time they were open, but he couldn’t maneuver the tube through the cords. He thought about cricking her—puncturing her throat with a large-bore needle, which produced an airway, though a small one, to ventilate through—but he held off. The fourth time he was sure he’d get the tube, but it just wouldn’t go in. Same with the fifth. By then it was too late. Even though he was ventilating her with the bag mask in between attempts, he wasn’t getting enough oxygen in. He’d made his stand and lost. He finally got the tube on his sixth try. With the aid of an IV in her neck and several rounds of epinephrine, he got the woman back, but she suffered brain injury from the hypoxia. No one would have thought anything of it, but she was the wife of a neurologist at one of the local hospitals, and he was making a case about it. He’d watched Victor’s struggle along with the other members of the dinner party. Of course none of it would have happened if she’d gone to the hospital when she first felt short of breath. Or if her husband had called 911 when after several puffs from her inhaler she wasn’t getting any better. But her husband didn’t want to leave the bigwig function they were attending. He’d waited till she was on the verge of collapse. She stopped breathing two minutes before Victor even arrived. He just didn’t get the tube in time. He admitted he screwed up. He should have cricked her, or at least reshaped the tube or repositioned her head when he went back in, something to give him a better chance. He was playing with no margin of error, and he’d let himself get rattled. That was the thing about this job. A major leaguer strikes out with the bases loaded or lets a ground ball go through his legs on national TV and he’s a goat, but a paramedic makes an error and someone dies or is disabled for life.

  Victor would have been all right if he’d just packaged her and bagged her and pumped on her chest as he made his way to the hospital. He never would have gotten her back, but he would not have faced the same scrutiny. Now with the suspension, he could still work on the ambulance, but not as a paramedic. Victor had to wear masking tape over his paramedic rocker. Many medics would have found the experience humiliating, but Victor didn’t let anything show. “Long as they’re still paying me,” he said. “Besides, I don’t even think I’m going to fight it. I need a life change anyway.” He nodded to the bartender to refill our mugs.

  “You shouldn’t do anything rash,” I said. I tossed a twenty on the bar.

  “That’s the same thing Ben said to me, but I’ve always been rash, and my problem is I haven’t been rash enough in my own life to be true to myself. I need to be rash. That’s who I am. That’s how I have to live. I should have divorced my wife two years ago when I fell out of love with her and I should have quit this job when I got tired of it. I’m thinking about becoming a bounty hunter. You can make some real money at that work.”

  “Bounty hunting?”

  “Yeah, you use your brain and your brawn. You’re your own man; all you have to do is bring in the bad guy. There’s good money in it. And you’re helping to keep the streets clean.”

  “Why don’t you just become a cop?”

  “Not with my past. Wouldn’t happen. They’d say thank you, and here’s the door.”

  “You should stay here. You’re a good medic. People will stand up for you. Maybe at worst you’ll be suspended for a few weeks. We need you out here.”

  “No, its time for me to move on. Times are changing. The old people—the people I started here with—are all leaving. I don’t want to end up like Nestor, with nothing else to do but remembering how it used to be. Life’s full of opportunities. I look on this as a break—a good one.”

  Pat and Denny Creer and a couple other guys who used to work for Capitol showed up and joined us at the bar. “I hope you don’t mind we invited some other people down,” Pat said.

  “The more the merrier.”

  Word of the party spread. As the night went on, we were joined by more and more of our fellow workers, past and present, in warm reunion. There was Rick Ortyl, Daniel Tauber, Jack Gartley and Tom Harper. Joe Stefano, Eric Brescia, and Bill Turner. Jeff Borgio, John Anderson, Chris Devine, Sean Kinkade, Bob Gionfriddo, Rick Scanlon and Todd Beaton. Howard Rapacky and Ed Basigalup came by. Kim Quinn and Quentin Babbitt. Jerry Sneed and Melody Voyer joined the party. Greg Berryman, Wayne Cabral and Bob Mosebach. Annette O’Callahan, Rod Furtado, Chris Dennis and Todd Lomento. Terry Braley, Adam Fleit, Danny Burgum, and Doug Savelli all stopped by to say hello. I remember Jeff Huffmire and Janice Mihalak, Faith Creer, Dave Fackleman, and Ed Grant. Eric Salisbury and Kathy Clapper. Glenn Killion and Shirley Lessard. Jeff Quinn and Rene Barsalou. Shawn Wood and Darren Barsalou. The Rynaskis and Dominas. Matt and Bruce Lincoln and Chris Bates. Mark Rosen, Chris Schmeck, Joey Roberts. Kim Butler, Joan Dow, Bob Ragusa and Tom Fitzgerald were there. Howard Jolly, Alan Goodman, Ransford Smith, Chris Ames and Dave Grimmiesen. Shannon Pratt, Tory DeNino, Ray Tierney, Mike Carl, Alan Sklar and Mike Kerr. Marissa Carriveau, Kate Below, and Jane Gordon arrived together. John Burrel and Jen Sabatini. Adam Waltman, Rebecca Drotch, Brian Brown, Kristin Shea and Wendy Albino. Craig Walton and Shelley Baesen. Pam Duguay and Art Gasparrini. It was good to see them all together along with so many others whose names deserve every bit as much mention as theirs. It was an honor to be among them all.

  A DJ played requests and people danced.

  In the newspaper that day they had run a profile of twenty of the city’s movers and shaker
s—all telling their experiences of Hartford. But I thought that night as I watched my coworkers live in their moment that in this room, in this bar, was a collective experience of Hartford that dwarfed what the papers had. These people’s lives were inextricably linked with the life of the city. They had been in its mansions and its tenements. They’d been to the top floors of the city’s tallest buildings to treat sick executives and they’d taken care of homeless men under the highway. They’d been on center court at the Civic Center to take care of injured athletes before crowds of thousands, and they’d been behind the counters at fast food restaurants for injured workers. They’d been to city hall, and on the floor of the state legislature, and in the dining room of the governor’s mansion. They’d worked thousands of morning rush hour MVAs and evening rush hour MVAs and lone car crashes in the middle of the night. They’d been in barber shops, nail salons, and massage parlors. They’d carried old men out of their lifelong houses for the last time, been in high school gyms and classrooms, seen card games in back rooms, done shootings in hallways, alleys and on street corners. Rich or homeless, it didn’t matter, your name got written on their trip reports. South End, North End, West End, Dutch Point, Bellevue Square, Barry Circle, Asylum Hill, Downtown, Charter Oak, Rice Heights, Stowe Village—this was their territory, their town, their ground, their land. Pick up the newspaper. Read about the accidents; they got the patients out of the cars. Read about the shootings; they were with them on the race to the hospital. Read the obituary papers; they were the ones who touched their cold stiff bodies and pronounced the time. They were the ones into whose arms came the crying infants, struggling to an uncertain future.

  I sat with Pat, Victor and Brian Sajack, who told stories of medics who hadn’t worked the streets for years, but who still existed as legends.