My partner gives her a deep sternal rub, shakes her shoulders. Her eyes open, and she stands up, startled, off balance. I grab her by the shoulders to keep her from falling. “Get away from me,” she says. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
“You need to go to the hospital,” I say.
“I think not,” she says. “I think not.” Her words are slurry and she totters.
“No, you really need to go.”
“Fuck off,” she says. She swings at me. I grab her wrists and hold them. She kicks at my shins. I manage to avoid her thrusts. I start in with the voice, quickly. “It’s okay,” I say. But I fear I have already lost her. She looks at me with disgust.
I want to soothe her, I want to say, sweet, sweet girl. You may think the world hates you, but I see the beauty in you, the sweetness at your center. I want my words to wrap around her like a lover’s arms, hold her, warm her, drift her off, make her feel secure. Let the voice hold you.
“You fuckin’ bastard,” she screams. “Unhand me, I know my rights. I know this tune. Been there. Done that.” Her black fingernails are out like cat claws, but she can’t break loose from my grip.
“Calm down, my friend, it’s okay. You don’t need to fight. We want you to be okay. We want you to be all right.”
“Then leave me the fuck alone.”
“How many pills did you take? I need to know.”
“I didn’t take any. I’m sober as my tits.”
“Okay. Did you do heroin tonight?”
“Fuck you. I know my rights.”
“You’re going to the hospital,” the cop says. She breaks one arm free from me and turns to claw him. He grabs her from behind. I grab her legs and we carry her kicking, screaming, and clawing down the stairs.
“Let me go,” she screams. “I’m calling the cops. I know my rights.”
“He is the cops,” I say, as we go out the front door. “And he is going to handcuff you if you don’t stop kicking.”
“Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure.”
We get her in the back of the ambulance, seated on the bench seat. She has stopped fighting for the moment but still refuses to cooperate. I tell her I need to get her to lie down on the stretcher so I can take her blood pressure and give her some medication. This immediately sets her off again, and now the four of us, my partner and I and two cops, are wrestling with her, tying her arms and feet to the stretcher with pillowcases. She is spitting and clawing and kicking. “Your mother sucks cock for crack!” she screams.
“Holy shit! Where’s this blood coming from?” the cop says, and immediately lets go of her arm. She clocks me in the face. I grab her hand and press it to the stretcher. The pillowcase around her wrist is absolutely soaked through with blood.
“She’s got HIV,” the cop says. “Be careful. I know her. She prostitutes herself.”
I try to figure out where the blood is coming from. I think she must have cut herself on the stretcher, but I can’t find a mark. I remove the soaking pillowcase and see a deep horizontal gash at her wrist that is bleeding profusely. Holding her arm down with my knee, trying to avoid her biting me, I wrap a trauma dressing around it. It turns out it is a week-old scar from when she tried to slash her wrists.
We finally get her tied, and she lies there, glaring at me as if I am evil itself. I meet her stare as I tell my partner we can go to the hospital now. I am soaked with sweat, my glasses have been knocked off my face, I can only imagine what my hair looks like. Still staring at her, I take my jacket off, then open the biotech. I take out a three-cc syringe and a bottle of Narcan.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Narcan,” I say.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“I am going to stick you with it.”
“No, you’re not, like hell you are.”
I don’t think I really need to give it to her. I know she has done some heroin, and there is always the possibility of her nodding back off. She probably has also done some cocaine, that excited her once she was aroused. The 1.2 milligrams I draw up will wipe out what is in there. It might even make her puke. I draw it up deliberately. I feel like a principal taking out the paddle, the executioner tying the rope or loading the gun.
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t you stick that in me.”
I think: You bitch. My words meant nothing to you. You knocked my glasses off, spit in my face, insulted the memory of my mother, and worse, exposed my vanity.
I jab her in the shoulder with the syringe. She screams and breaks loose from one of the restraints. I plunge the syringe in, but she knocks it loose and we wrestle over it. She is about to bite my neck when I slam her with my shoulder, knocking her chin away. I grab the syringe and toss it out of reach. I get hold of her arm and retie her.
She spits and again insults my mother.
“You can be more original than that,” I say.
She pants and then I feel the fight go out of her. “I feel sick,” she says.
“It’ll pass,” I say.
By the time we reach the hospital she asks to look at the wound on her arm. I untie her arm and show her. She nods sadly.
“I did that a week ago,” she says.
“Can I take your blood pressure?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says.
I mark down the pressure and her pulse. I tell her we’re going in, and she needs to stay calm. She nods. I leave the one arm unrestrained.
At triage Alison looks me up and down. “What happened to you? You look like a wreck,” she says.
I tell her the story. Alison looks over at her and says she knows her. She’s been there before. She assigns her to room eleven.
In the room I tell the girl, as staff comes in to help, that we can go through the whole routine again—the fighting, kicking, clawing, spitting, swearing, wrestling—and the result is going to be the same. She is going to end up on the other bed, so please (sweet girl) just move over for us peacefully when we release the restraints.
“I know my rights,” she says. “I’m checking myself out.”
One of the male nurses says, “Let me handle it.” He tries his version of the voice. A poor imitation of mine, I think. “So what do you say, just move over for us,” he says.
“I think not,” she says.
“Put your gloves on,” I say. “Watch out for the spitting. Don’t take personally what she’s about to say about your mother.”
I step away. Their show.
As soon as I am out of the room, the battle begins. “Your mother sucks cock for crack!” More security race into the room.
I go and sit in the back EMT room to write up my report.
“What were you saying about restraints?” my partner says.
“Don’t go there,” I say.
I call dispatch for times, and Susy gives them to me, then says she wants me to take one out of room 105 going to the Cedar Crest psychiatric hospital, a man in restraints. The same guy we brought in earlier. “Great,” I say. “I sweet-talked him into coming peacefully, and they tied him up. He’s going to be happy to see me.”
“Is that a problem for you?” she asks.
“No, I’ll face it,” I say. I know they’re short of cars and I’m right there.
The nurse in 105 says we may need restraints. He was a wild man, she says. If the medication wears off, you best be prepared. I look at him. He is all doped up on Ativan, sleeping. En route to Cedar Crest, I keep the lights dark in the back. He doesn’t even know I’m there. He mumbles, tosses a little, trying to get comfortable. I watch over him. Rest, I whisper. Sleep. He turns on his side, tries to find comfort. The words come softly. The voice. Golden slumbers fill your eyes. Zippity, hombre, do not cry, and I sing a lullaby.
RECOGNIZE
Who is shaping them, nurturing them, directing them, loving them? And even those who get love and direction, what will happen to them in the world they live in?
Girls
The call is for difficulty breathing on Nahum St
reet. We pull up, get out carrying our equipment, and head toward the building. Several high school–age girls are watching us. One shouts, “How come you ain’t running? She having a hard time breathing. You run. You hear me, you run.”
We keep walking toward the building.
“You run or I’m going to kick your ass. You hear me?” They laugh.
We knock on the door. It opens and in the room there are another eight high school girls, all laughing.
“Who’s sick?” I ask.
“She is, she’s got asthma.”
A girl, maybe sixteen, sits in a chair, a little short of breath. I listen to her lungs and hear a slight wheeze. “What happened?” I ask.
“I was fighting and I got short of breath. It happens every time.”
“You fight a lot?”
“No, but I always get short of breath when I do.”
“You should look at her, she got cut,” another girl says and points to a shorter girl with a shirt that’s cut open near the breast.
I look at her while Art gets a treatment going for the girl with the wheezes.
There’s a superficial cut on the top of her breast. “She was trying to take my babies off,” the girl says. The others all giggle. “Look at Keshia’s nose, she the one hurt the worst.”
A girl comes out of the kitchen holding a wet paper towel on her nose. I have her remove it and there are deep jagged teeth marks there. “What happened to you?”
“Girl bit me. That Kamona, she always biting. Second time that bitch bit me. Last month she took a gob out of my arm. She nasty that way.”
“She always biting,” another girl says, “that’s her style.”
“She got you good this time.” Another girl laughs. “She latch on to your nose and hold on like a pit bull.”
They all laugh and giggle.
“How many of them were there?”
“Just three,” the girl with asthma says, “but when we jumped them, they all got knives, so they whipped us this time, though Karisse come away with one of the knives.”
The police come to take statements, and the girls identify the other girls, but readily admit they were the aggressors because one of the other girls was flirting with Latisha’s boyfriend.
“He don’t even like you, Latisha, look what trouble you causing everyone,” the girl with asthma says, and they all laugh. The girl starts coughing, she’s laughing so hard. Arthur and I and the cop just shake our heads. None of them end up going to the hospital.
“The youth of today,” Arthur says as we walk back to the 471.
Fidel
A man doing yard work across the street shouts at the woman who has come to the door to let us in. “What are you doing? What kind of trouble are you causing now?”
“The boy is sick,” she mumbles as she lets us in. “The boy is sick.”
Inside the house it is sweltering. There are three children sitting in the front room. We walk into the kitchen. Steam rises from four huge pots on the stove. All the windows are closed. It has to be over a hundred degrees. The sick boy, a nine-year-old, is kneeling in the bathroom, trying to vomit.
He is pale. He looks up at me, expressionless.
I hear shouting. The man from across the street is in the kitchen. “Woman, I’ll send you to the hospital,” he says.
“Come with me,” I say to the boy. I want to get him out of the house.
In the kitchen, the man is still shouting at the woman, and she is muttering, “The boy is sick.”
“Where are you going with him?” the man says to me. “Everything is all right here. He just has an upset stomach. No need for the ambulance.”
“I’m just going to take him outside where it isn’t so hot, so I can check him out. No big deal,” I say.
He looks at me suspiciously.
“I’m just going to check him out,” I say. “Are you his father?”
“No,” he fumbles. “No.”
“She his mother?”
“No, she’s just watching him.”
“Okay, I’m just going to check him out.”
It is a relief to be outside. I call on the radio and ask for a police officer.
The boy nods when I ask him if he is okay.
“What’s your name?”
“Fidel,” he says, looking at the ground.
“Who are these people?” I ask.
He shakes his head again like he doesn’t know.
“Where are your parents?”
He shakes his head.
I slowly get the story from him, though he volunteers nothing. His mom dropped him off at a baby-sitter’s and the baby-sitter dropped him off here. He doesn’t know where any of them are and he has not eaten since last night. He doesn’t know any of the other three kids either. He sits on the grass looking down at the dirt. The cop comes and I tell him the story. He goes in the house.
“You want something to drink?” I ask the boy.
He looks at me and says nothing. He reminds me of a wild animal, starving, but uncertain whether to trust a man.
I take a fruit juice out of my small cooler and open it up. I hand it to him, but he won’t take it. I put it on the ground. “Go ahead, drink it.”
He picks it up, takes a sip, then puts it back.
“Drink,” I say.
He has a few more sips, then sets it down.
The cop comes out of the house. There are beads of perspiration on his head. “It’s hot in there,” he says.
His sergeant shows up and starts questioning the cop about what he has done. Then they both go in and talk to the woman.
I stay out there with Fidel. “Drink,” I say. He has a few more sips, then sets it back on the ground but still eyes it.
The cops come out with the other three kids marching behind them like ducklings. The woman stands at the door watching. “Come on, boy,” the cop says to Fidel. “We’re all going down to the station.”
He follows slowly.
“See you,” I say.
He doesn’t turn.
No Kin of Mine
We’re sent to a call in a public housing complex. In the yard, Arthur points out the carcass of a small dog against the building. Flies circle about it. It has been there long enough to smell. “These people,” Arthur says. “Can you believe that?” Kids are playing nearby. “What a shame,” he says.
In early 1995 the governor of Connecticut, John Rowland, appoints a new commissioner to the Department of Children and Families, and pledges to wipe out child abuse in the state. The deaths and abuse cases keep coming: child rapes, deliberately inflicted burnings, abandonment. In 1997, the emotionally drained commissioner resigns for personal reasons. The governor acknowledges the problem may take longer to solve than he believed. He appoints the agency’s chief critic, the head of the office of child advocacy, as the new commissioner. The new commissioner declares, “I want the families to be treated like my family. I want the children to be treated like they were my own children.”
Nice sentiments, but how do you translate that into action, into something real?
We get called for a maternity with complications in Stowe Village. On the third floor, a woman seven months pregnant complains of abdominal pain and cramping. She looks like hell. “I was up all night,” she says, taking a drag on her cigarette.
“Can you please put that out?” Arthur says.
She crushes it out on the top of a beer can.
“Do any drugs or drinking?” I ask.
“I had a couple beers and did some base.”
“Oh, that’s good for your baby.”
She glares at me.
At the hospital, I give the report to the nurse in labor and delivery. “She was up all night, drinking and doing crack,” I say.
“I didn’t do crack, I did base,” the woman says.
“Big fucking difference,” I say.
The America I grew up into believed in the Horatio Alger myth. Any kid could become president. America was red, white, an
d blue, number one. If man could walk on the moon, he could do anything. Right wrongs. Cure sickness. Stop war. Government service meant serving your country. Being good and decent. Doing for the U.S.A., not for you. And all that noble rhetoric.
Nowadays I try not to even watch the news. If it isn’t boilerplate campaign ads proclaiming Mr. Dudley Good Citizen as a miracle worker and Mr. Snidely Opponent as a plague-ridden-pusher-down-the-stairs-of-old-ladies-in-wheelchairs, it’s boilerplate spin written in interchangeable cut-and-paste outrage or acclamation. I just get tired of all the posturing. Day after day of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal drags on. Did he have sex with her in the specific definition? Did he commit perjury? Did he try to get her a job? Did he try to obstruct justice? Was he entrapped? I listen to both sides till I want to scream. Day after day. No end in sight.
Two things I know. The life kids in the inner city are born into is a disgrace to everything this country stands for, and it seems the politicians aren’t even on the same planet.
We are in the elevator of the Sands apartments, a crummy ten-story apartment building off North Main Street, next to the Bellevue Square housing project. The elevator stinks of urine and jerks as it goes from floor to floor. We were sent for a drunk and found a jaundiced man lying on his side on the mattress in his bare apartment, his pants stained with dried urine. A friend of his was concerned about him and called us, but the patient didn’t want to go and we couldn’t make him. He wasn’t drunk; he was lying in his own apartment; he knew what day it was. He just wanted to be left alone.
The elevator stops on the third floor and two little kids get on. They look like brothers, the older probably seven. He holds the younger, maybe four, roughly by the neck.
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