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 Yankee 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 40's and stay out of the sweltering apartments.
I put my seatbelt on, turned on the engine, but didn’t put it in gear.
“482,” Dispatch called. “On a one. Male shot 1620 Main P.D. on the way.”
“Com’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 its 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 rear view 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 rooms 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 work week 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 doing 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 dam Yankees cap.”
