3311

THIRTY-THREE ELEVEN

San Bruno, California (near San Francisco), 1975

(Or, How discovered what I was meant to be for the rest of my life …)

            “Thirty-three eleven, code-three injury accident on 280 at Eastmore exit.”

Translation: ambulance number 3311, get into service pronto, lights and siren… it’s an emergency.

            “Ten-four, thirty-three eleven’s ten-eight.” (Got it, rolling.)

            Mike, the dispatcher, our wall-eyed manager who’s the son of the ex-motorcycle-cop owner of our private ambulance company, is, as usual, trying to toughen-up his high-pitched voice with a fake baritone. It doesn’t come off. Jim and I give each other a glance.

            “Thirty-three eleven.” (His acknowledgement that we’re on it.)

            Thankfully, there isn’t much traffic on this early Sunday morning, meaning I can concentrate more on doing my job instead of watching my ass as the oblivious idiots speed by. It’s pretty easy to spot the two crushed cars and the whirling cop car flashing lights on the otherwise empty five-lane freeway, one of the two main drags into San Francisco from the south. Jim jerks the van over into the left lane, downstream of the crushed cars. Unconscious move for our protection. The cops are directing traffic, waiting for us to take things over. They’re always happy to hand off the injury stuff – uncomfortable, messy, not their job. I note a woman cop leaning over a little girl sitting on the pavement in the middle of one of the fast lanes, and I’m guessing she wishes that she’d paid a bit more attention in first aid class right about now.

            I grab the plastic fishing tackle case full of my tools of the trade from behind the passenger’s seat, van still rolling to a stop. Jim, my driver, grabs the radio microphone and says, “Thirty-three-eleven, ten-twenty-three,” telling Mike we’ve arrived at the scene. He slams the mic back into it’s cradle, jerks the shift handle into park, causing the van to lurch—his familiar signature move—and leaps out his door, leaving the motor running and lights flashing. He takes one step, sees the little girl, eyes wide, sitting cross-legged and staring blindly at us, turns on his heel and reaches back into the van. The lights blink off. He’s got his grim smirk on. He always does on these jobs. That’s as opposed to his arrogant smirk, which he wears at all other times. The male cop’s face, also grim mouthed but without the smirk, turns his mirrored sunglasses towards me. My twenty-one hours a day of sitting around bored to death, feeling like a jackal waiting for something to die or get hurt or sick or start bleeding is over.

            I scan the scene. Remember to breathe. A crumpled, bloody young woman tilts crazily out the smashed driver’s door, arm dangling. Her nice blue dress is splotched black from the blood. Ruined. (hospital scrubs are blue or green because it changes the color of blood to black. That way it’s not so scary looking).

            Paramedic school flashes into my brain–Doc McElroy telling a story about the cardiac surgeon training new surgeons on what they should do when entering the surgical theatre for the very first time; “Take your own pulse first!

            Nearby, surrounded by the vast grey landscape of pavement is the little girl, choking back tears, hair a wild mess, her eyes fixed on the woman. Okay, I think. Stay detached. I hear her voice. “Mommy? Mommy?” She’s wearing a pretty little pink dress, white socks, one shiny black shoe, the other flung away by the impact, a blanket over her shoulders. The woman cop is crouching over her, whispering into her ear. The girl’s face looks strangely grown-up. My chest hurts all of a sudden. Stop it, you’ve got work to do dammit!

            Whoooosh. Two feet away, a car speeds past at seventy miles an hour, punctuating the weekend silence, the keening wails. Pay… attention.

            The wails emanate from a casually dressed guy near the farther, overturned car. Matted hair. Blood on his face, dripping off his chin. He’s sitting on his heels on the pavement, about twenty feet away. Might as well be in another galaxy. The car next to him is crumpled in the front, lying easily on its roof, as if this was perfectly normal. His hands cup his head, red and sticky. His pants don’t look too soggy from here, no spreading red pool below him. He’s rocking back and forth, staring at the indifferent sky, moaning and sobbing and crying out, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Oh God, nohohohoooo!”

            Experience and instinct lead me away from the two talkers and towards the other–the silent one. Focused, in no rush. Two feet away and still coming in, I switch from scene assessment and triage to individual humans who need help right now. Choices have been made.

            “Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?” Nothing.

            “Ma’am, my name is Jeff. I’m a paramedic. I’m here to help.” I pause a fraction of a moment as I reach her, then gently but firmly grasp her bare arm, initiating my routine. Partly hi-I-mean-you-no-harm, partly diagnostics—skin temp, consciousness level, reaction to touch. “Honey, can you hear me?” The unconscious ones are always so much easier. Sometimes, though, I really wish they’d respond. Like now.

            Cool. Not cold, but, well…too cool. Solid, thick. Not the rigor mortis feel of synthetic rubber over ice-cold steel that always makes me cringe, but... shit.

            Life and death feel different. I can always tell right off. It’s the difference between grabbing lightning, or a rock. Shit shit shit.

            I feel for a pulse, going through the motions. Eyes open and dead, pupils dilated, hair matted in back. The matted part draws my free hand. I touch stagnant, thickening blood. A massive head wound like this should be pouring blood. If her heart were beating, that is. My hand expects solid, round skull but it’s like a broken piece of pottery… crumply bits and pieces, like ice in a bag. My other hand stays on her carotid. No pulse.

I ask the male cop over my shoulder, “How long since you got here?” He growls, “Fifteen minutes, maybe more. She’s been like that since we got here.” His voice sounds kinda funny to me. I glance up. Arms folded, typical aggressive cop stance—legs spread, feet splayed, those typical mirrored sunglasses. But the voice, the pursed lips, the exaggerated frown give him away. Not the usual boredom. Human, after all. Probably got a wife and kid back home himself.

            “Didja try for a pulse when you got here?”

            “Yep” he says. “Nuthin’.” I don’t push it.

            Whoooosh.

            All the while, cars whizzing by, real fast—white noise—and that fucker kneeling over there crying and screaming, “Ohhh, I’m so sorry, oh my God….help me!”

            I would really like to stride over there and kick the shit out of that motherfuckin’ bastard. The cop’s jowl muscles bulge. Him too, I guess.

            I leave the mom. She’s nice looking, well dressed. Church, maybe, or a party.

            I shake my head clear, trajectory now towards the child. I glance up at the billowy clouds giving weight to the sky above.

            New disguise. Teacher mask. Bus driver, maybe? Uncle, that’s it. She rocks and whimpers, eyes locked on the blue dress. My bones ache.

            The woman cop’s face meets mine. Again those mirrored sunglasses. Good trick, I’ll have to remember that. She steps back, gives me room, yet super attentive. Mother wolf, cub in a trap. Whew.

            She’ll fall apart later, alone at the kitchen table. For now, she is solid fucking ground.

            I lean over the girl. Get the tone right, now. “Hi, darlin’. My name’s Jeff. What’s yours?”

            “Sarah.” Her answer is almost a question. Her eyes are green and beautiful. She’s seven, maybe eight.

            “I’m here to help, Sarah. Can you tell me where it hurts?” My mask smiles.

            “My arm.” Pouting, she offers it up. As I reach, her look pierces clean through my camouflage. “Take care of mommy first.” A too grown-up command, then right back to little girl again, softer… “Is she okay?”

            I can’t lie to her. I’ve tried that many times, it just never works. They see right through me and a bond is broken. “There’s a nice policeman over there with Mommy, Sarah. Can I take a look at your arm, Sweetheart?”

            This’ll be easy, medically anyway. Broken forearm—radius, ulna. Nothing through the skin, no deformity. Good pulse in the wrist. A quick check, and its clear all she’s going to need medically is a splint and transport to the hospital. What comes after is not my job.

            I glance at Jim, who’s waiting for me to tell him what to do. He hasn’t said a word, as usual, and is chewing gum, as usual, since he can’t smoke when we’ve got patients. He can’t be thirty yet, but already he’s got diabetes, smokes too much, drinks too much, eats doughnuts all day long, has a potbelly. Total attitude. He refuses to do mouth-to-mouth under any circumstances, which always leaves me in a fix. As the senior medical staff, I should be doing the CPR. I’m real good at it, plus it keeps me nearer the defibrillator and medical kit and radio to the ER doc. Doesn’t matter. If I don’t do the breathing, it won’t get done. We don’t like each other much, but we share a certain professional respect. He knows I know my shit, I know he knows these streets in his sleep and can drive real fast but still keep four wheels on the ground and not slam into anything. We spend forty-eight hours together at a time, day and night, but with separate beds. Like a fucked-up marriage.

            “Jim, can you get out the inflatable arm splint and splint-up Sarah’s arm for me?” He moves towards the ambulance. I turn to the screamer. The woman wolf-cop returns to her pup.

            Brace yourself. Be professional.

            “Sir, my name’s Jeff. I’m a paramedic. Does anything hurt? Are you hurt anywhere?” Curt, maybe, but within limits. I smell the booze. It’s Sunday morning for Crissakes.

            “Oh God Oh God Oh God help me help me help me I didn’t mean it I didn’t mean it Oh God Oh God!”

            Too late now, you fuck.

            “Sir, can I please check for injuries?”

            “Oh God Oh God I’m sorry I’m sorry help me help me ohhhhhh!”

            Why the hell is it always the drunks that are the least hurt. Back at the ambulance shack, we muse that they get hurt less because they’re so loose. Too bad. I cringe, like I’m touching something dirty, check his hands, prying them off the knees of his pants, glued by congealing blood.  Some cuts, not too bad. I check his head, a little too hastily. More blood but not much, a small cut on the scalp. Obviously his heart’s beating and he’s breathing. He ignores me and wails while I do my perfunctory physical.

            “He won’t give me permission to do a medical. Not much I can do.” I shrug to the male cop. He says, “Go ahead and take the little girl to the hospital. We’ll take care of the guy and the bod…. the woman.”

            Jim and I are glad to drop off the girl at Saint Mary’s ER. Her dad’s not there yet. I couldn’t look him in the eye anyway. Let somebody else do it. We sneak away. Cowards.

            The rest of the day is uneventful. Transfers, minor injuries, nothing. Jim and I communicate just enough to get the job done, as always. We arrive back at the ’50s-era, dilapidated stucco home-base, all depressing peeling paint and broken ceiling tiles and trashy green linoleum. Whoever is on night shift sleeps in the lumpy bunk beds in the back room. Some guys from the other crews lounge on the ratty old couch and a couple of cheap metal folding chairs. The other crew’s day shift is finished. They’re drinking beer and watching a porn video, not wanting to go home to whatever it is that’s waiting for them. Some are silent, absorbed in the action, some cheer. They know what’s happened on our end. They all, like myself, listen eagerly to the CB radio in their own vehicles for entertainment. We can all tell not only what anyone’s “call” is for, but can read between the lines, get the nuance from words and subtleties in the crackly voices on the radio. I glance at the screen long enough to notice a fat old guy who reminds me of an insurance salesman sodomizing a tiny, young, dark-haired girl. They always try to make them look young, and by their youngness­—innocent, which for these jerks is seductive. She may or may not really be eighteen, but I bet some of these guys love imagining she’s not, either way. They steal a quick glance at me, then back at the screen. They know me by now, and don’t invite me over or interrogate me. I walk past them into the dark abyss and crawl into my second-tier coffin. I have to try to get my own little girl’s eyes out of my brain, the feel of the wet, broken glass off my hands.

            Well after midnight, I drift off, wondering how this all started. Why am I living in a city instead of climbing in the mountains where I belong? Somebody’s made a colossal mistake…

            Maybe I should have continued on to Alaska instead of selling the converted slant-six schoolbus I was living in in the Tetons, all woodstoves and skylights and coiled climbing ropes and freedom. Maybe moving into Dad and Mom’s house in LA and getting a job as an EMT wasn’t exactly the sharpest career move. Or maybe it was an okay “career move”, just total shit in every other way.



Prelude; Santa Monica, California, 1973

Our converted hearse-cum-ambulance is shiny from constant cleaning and polishing. My partner, Gregg and I have nothing better to do most of the time while praying for one of the scarce paramedic schools to take our sorry asses in, hardly likely over a multitude of firemen with seniority and connections and big muscles. Finally, our very first code-three call comes. Off we go, lights and siren, excited and wound up tight.

            We approach a cluster of fire engines and cop cars deep inside a thick crowd of rubberneckers on the sidewalk, spilling over the curb. You’d think all that blood and death on the TV would’ve given them enough gore so they’d just walk on by and leave these poor souls be.

            A fireman parts the mob, waves us through. We hop out, trying to look oh-so professional. I grab my brand spankin’ new fishing tackle box filled with cool first aid gear. Mostly some bandages, tape, scissors, thermometer. Nothing all that fancy actually—we’re just EMTs after all. But my tackle box looks nifty, draws appreciative glances. I pretend not to notice. We jog over to the tight little knot of uniforms—the obvious epicenter. There seems to be a great deal of interest in something at their feet.

            Someone taps a shoulder and the pack dissolves, all eyes on us. A middle-aged guy is splayed on the sidewalk, on his back, eyes halfway closed, mouth halfway open. Not all that old, really. Middle Age to someone in their twenties can be anything over forty. Nice clothes. I put my case down near his head, drop to my knees and lean over, putting my ear to his mouth to listen for breathing, look for chest movement. Do NOT screw this up in public! Nothing. I give him five quick breaths—no airway mask, just smack him right on the lips. I’d been wondering if I’d be disgusted, but it’s not too bad. I feel for a carotid pulse in his neck. Nope. Time to start CPR. My first real CPR. The uniforms are impressed–radios crackle. My first lesson on the connected world of Sophisticated Men With CB Radios Club.

            Gregg takes over the mouth-to-mouth, I move to compressions. I can’t help staring at the guy’s feet while pumping away. Earth Shoes. I think that’s pretty cool, especially for an old guy. Yoga pants. Huh. You wouldn’t think a guy wearing Earth Shoes and Yoga pants would have a heart attack.

            This is the beginning of a ritual—obsessing on trivialities, everydayness, anything distracting within striking distance. Coping 101.

            We get one of the firemen to take over the breathing. He’s not real happy about it, doesn’t actually touch the guy’s lips, which is of course totally useless. Gregg gets the gurney out, we stop CPR long enough to load him. The firemen and cops are tired of all this. Some free coffee would be nice, boys, hmmm? We take off for the hospital, where they promptly pronounce our man dead as a doornail.

            One would think we’d be depressed or something. Not us. We go out for doughnuts and celebrate our first dead guy. When we return to the converted auto mechanic shop, everyone on the other crews want to hear all about it. I whistle while I’m washing the hearse down. I hear they might replace it with one of those cool new vans.

            Mostly what we end up doing all day is transferring old folks from hospital to nursing home, home to hospital. I spend a lot of time reminding myself why I’m doing this. The crew calls them lizards. Too rarely we get a car accident or heart attack.

            What keeps us going is our dispiriting search for a paramedic school with an opening. Paramedics is a brand-new field, with a must-see TV series no less. We make inquiries to the fire department, where most of the accepted students are coming from. There’s a two-year waiting list—then you have to get seniority. Then you can apply for paramedic school.



            We’re jerked from our stools at Dunkin’ Donuts by a code-three. Gregg’s not in a good mood. It’s late, maybe midnight. We’ve been talking about what we’re gonna do after we quit. Tires squeal as we peel out of the parking lot. The radio crackles.

            “Possible heart attack.” Pssshhht. “2164 Sequoia Street, Santa Monica.” Pssshht. “Fire is on the scene.”

            Usual routine. Grab the LA street guide from under my seat, look up the address, shout just-in-time directions to Gregg over the siren while he drives really fast. He doesn’t slow at red lights anymore. Twice we’ve nearly been T-Boned. I no longer give a shit.

            The house is pretty obvious. Fire truck with flashing lights out front and the usual milling of bulky uniforms with big hats. We lope in. A polite fireman holds the front door open for us, two more crowd the living room. They’re on their knees, looking at the old gentleman in his pajamas sprawled on the carpet. They have first aid training, but it’s not their job. Female sobs and moans come from the room to my right, along with a soothing male voice.

            I lean over the man on the floor. No breath. I tilt his head and try again—still nothing. I bring my lips to his.

A fireman offers “He just dropped in front of us, maybe three or four minutes before you got here.” His chest rises with each of my hard puffs, like trying to blow up a tractor-tire inner tube with your mouth, thick and slow. I put my fingers on his Adam’s apple and slide them into the valley along the side. No pulse. I shift to compressions. Gregg kneels down next to me and listens for my five-count to fit breaths in.

            The manual says they have four to six minutes after their breathing and heart stop before irreversible brain damage. If you bring them back after that, you get a vegetable. Maybe, just maybe, if they’re very young and if they’ve been immersed in cold water, like maybe a drowning, you might have a little more time. For us, it’s usually old guys with heart attacks, getting there after someone calls the cops, then the cops call the firemen, then they call us. Three or four minutes.

            I hear a dull thump behind me. The fireman with the soothing voice from the other room yells out for help. Now the wife’s collapsed, too. They look at me, but I’m kinda busy.

            “You guys’ll have to do it. Or call another ambulance. We can’t stop now.”

            None of them are CPR trained. At least nobody’s willing to admit it.

            Fifteen minutes later, way too late, the other crew rushes in, stops dead in their tracks. The look on their faces says, What the hell are you two jokers doing here? I say out loud “No, not this guy. His wife’s on the floor in the next room over,” and toss my head in that direction. They scurry into the next room. A few seconds pass, then we hear the counting “One and two and three and four and five…one and two and…”

            I routinely check for a pulse every few cycles. A pulse! I involuntarily exclaim “Whoa!” This has never happened for me before. Excited, Gregg runs out to grab the gurney with one of the firemen. Several of us lift our living, breathing patient onto it, and rush out to the hearse cum ambulance. The other EMTs are right behind us, running their own gurney with their own lady to their own hearse. No time to chat. Both ambulances take off, top speed, one behind the other, racing for the hospital. Radios buzz, sirens wail. Screeching to a halt in front of the ER door, we unload, rush in while frantically explaining the details to the nurses, shift our man onto their gurney, then step back, glance into each other’s eyes, and breathe.

            That’s usually when all the steam sort of goes out of it. We’re done, not supposed to stay and watch, no questions to the desk nurse allowed about how the patient is doing. Gregg and I turn to go, dully change the sheets and blanket on the gurney, silently walk back to our separate sides of the hearse, drop into our seats. Gregg looks at me, and I back at him across the vast expanse of our thoughts. Before he can start it up, a nurse leans into my open window.

            “He’s gonna make it. Good job.”

            I glance back at a hugely smiling Gregg, then back to the nurse.

            “Wow! Great! Thanks so much... What about the wife?”

            She frowns, looks down at her feet, shakes her head, walks away.

            Fuck.

            Gregg pulls out. The other ambulance pulls out behind us. We glide onto Santa Monica Boulevard, they pull up next to us at a red light. They too know what the cards have dealt. It’s two in the morning. Everyone’s expression shows the strain. We all glance at each other, faces shrouded, stare straight ahead into the darkness. Motors hum, begin to rev.

            The light turns green, tires squeal and burn, pedals to the metal. The heavy old hearses’ rear ends weave and bob, bald tires attempting to gain purchase on the asphalt. I turn on the flashing lights, not the siren. They follow suit. Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. Street lights flash by, wop wop wop. Gregg’s face is set, serious. I wear a lopsided grin, and watch for the inevitable garbage truck or bus or lady with a cane at each intersection. Miraculously, none appear.

            Bang! Loud, from underneath the chassis. I see something go cartwheeling off to my right, across someone’s lawn, coming to rest in some bushes just shy of a picture window. Power gone, we slow, pull over to the side. The other hearse rockets ahead and is gone, a solitary arm pumping the air outside the window. They flick their lights off before disappearing.

            We look at each other. Get out, look under the hearse. No drive shaft. I leave Gregg lying under the vehicle so I can radio it in, then nonchalantly stroll back to retrieve the shaft from the bushes about a half a block back, whistling to myself.



            Queen of Angels Hospital Paramedic School is supposedly one of the best in the country. This school is moving from LA to Sacramento. Not so easy for a career fireman to move, thus, there happen to be a few fleeting spaces in the class. Gregg and I sign on—brothers in arms. I’d already typed up my resignation, all I have to do is alter the reason. We ask no questions about why the school is moving.

            We should’ve asked.

            Sleep, eat, shit, study, 24-7. Anatomy, medical lingo, injections, IVs, EKGs, drugs—all the cool stuff. Super-advanced first aid, plus all the new-fangled toys like mobile EKG’s.

            I ace every test, a far cry from being the class clown like in high school. Personal motivation and real devoted instructors as opposed to bored disciplinarians make all the difference in my attitude. Doc McElroy, the head of the UCLA ER, is a frequent lecturer. He and I and his friend the school nurse/co-teacher Marianne become tight and share dinners when he’s in town. Six years from now, when metastatic cancer hits me at twenty-six, he will save my life.

            Over beers, and in bed with Marianne, I get educated in another sort of way. Plus I get lots of valuable school scuttlebutt, including that Doc Lewis, Queen Of Angel’s owner and our chief lecturer, has made enemies. Short, trim moustache, wired taut, he knows more than you do, thus—Enemies. Actually he knows a lot more—whatever your hierarchical position happens to be—thus, Powerful Enemies. He pushes hard for what he believes in, which happens to be paramedics, which is good for us. But the other side of that coin is that paramedics are new. Doctors and nurses have their own particularly rabid set of politics, which translates into getting their dander up any time their authority or egos are threatened. Paramedics happen to fit that bill real damn good. This is not making things any easier on us. A lot of Doc’s political LA enemies happen to be pretty tight with the medical politicos in Sacramento, thusly the Sacramento County officials are making it difficult for his school to get licensed there. Which just so happens to be correspondingly jeapordizing our freaking futures too.

            “Everything will be just fine,” says Marianne, pulling on her slip. My grades seem to likewise be slipping as well, mostly because our relationship is taking up too much of my limited male attention. All of a sudden I’m second in class to Sandy. Ego threatened, Marianne and I terminate our extra-curricular activities with just a couple weeks left in the classroom. In the end my friendly rival Sandy and I share final honors. Next up, hospital clinicals.

            The LA County Coroner’s office is an hour’s drive from Mom and Dad’s, where I moved in after selling my schoolbus, where I had been living in an empty, windswept dirt lot just off highway 5 in the San Fernando Valley. We never hear about how Doc Lewis finagled getting us our clinicals back in LA, and we didn’t particularly care. We just want to be licensed Paramedics, whatever it takes.

            Early morning bumper-to-bumper traffic, heading downtown over Cahuenga pass for my shift, Lay Lady Lay on the radio. After the song ends, a brief news flash informs me that yet a gang-banger named Johnnie Rodriguez was found dead in some dirty East LA alley last night. Shot seven times. The news moves on to Nixon’s latest lies, my mind wanders.

            Metal doors with tiny wire-mesh windows at the LA county coroner’s give way to a hallway lined with steel gurneys, extending into eternity. Dozens and dozens of them under the glaring fluorescent lights, which throw a shadowless glare on grotesque clay shapes that not so very long ago were talking, breathing, struggling. White sheets half-draped and carelessly scattered, naked carcasses sprawled, frozen in obscene caricature. Impassive faces stare at the thickly painted ceiling, ignoring monstrous wounds, disregarding stares of passers-by, aloof to shame, in no hurry.

            Old and young, black and white, with a fair amount of purple and gray. A tag on each big toe, like cutlet stickers at a butcher shop. Arms not yet crossed placidly on chests for the mourners, assuming there are any. Limbs akimbo, as if gesticulating over something important. A youngster in fetal position. A woman draped half-off the gurney. Attractive face but for the purple blotches on her face and dishevelled blonde hair. She wears an amazed expression, like she simply can’t believe it. I woodenly wend through this carnage from one to the next: a boozy face with a bulbous veined nose, half smiling. A huge black guy—must’ve been a bodybuilder. A skinny fellow with tattoos all over.

I walk past them all as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Just meat. Nobody home. Damaged manikins.

            The generic autopsy goes thusly: rip right down the center of the torso with a pointy saw, from upper chest through stomach, rough and obscene, body jerking with the saw. Yank out all the organs, take bits of this and bits of that and place each in labelled jars of formaldehyde. Take pictures. Finally, dump the remaining odd bits and pieces back into the gaping cavity, helter-skelter—just make them fit. Jiggle them a little with your gloved hand until they settle. Sew the flayed torso back up like a burlap sack, using heavy twine and massive needles. It’ll all be covered by a nice dress or suit, either way.

            A half-dozen gurneys, coroners and their assistants hunched over them. Disassembly line. The coroner is dedicated to his charming work. He is sticking two-foot long metal wires into tiny red holes in a chest, poking them in and out, manipulating them in semi-circles, trying different angles out, until “Ahhh,” says he, as one goes in a foot or so, hits bottom. He explains over his shoulder, sweating with pleasure, “This tells ya the trajectory of the bullets.” Once he’s done, the guy on the gurney has wires sticking out of him like Fourth of July sparklers.

            The coroner steps away from the table, appreciating his work. He faces me, crouches down into a linebacker stance, arms bent in readiness, hands curled into pistol shapes, index finger and thumb out. He’s really excited.

            “See. He was probably like this or something. Cornered. All the bullets went in at this angle like he was leaning forward and crouched down like this. See?”

            Yeah, I see. He returns to his macabre work. I work my way to the feet, flip the toe-tag over. Johnnie Rodriguez.

            They’ve wheeled the big black guy into the next stall. A scalpel cuts a line around the back of his head, a few quick, chef-like cuts along the temples.

            “Watch this,” the butcher says to me, smiling broadly. He pulls the guy’s scalp up and over the top of his head, rolls it down over his face, inside out, hiding the drowsy visage from view. Gotta love your work.

            “Won’t leave a mark this way for the funeral.” I nod appreciatively. He points at the newly exposed skull. Jigsaw puzzle. Pushes the tiny pieces in here and there for emphasis, indenting the skull a half-inch or so like testing for ripeness.

            “Motorcycle accident. Last night. Probably would still be alive if he’d worn a helmet.” He seizes a buzzing tool reminiscent of a dentist’s drill only with a tiny cutoff wheel, skillfully cuts through the skull, peeling pieces of it off, exposing a puddle of pinkish jelly with bits of cheese. Not much point in continuing. Cause of death: brain trauma. He replaces the bits of skull carelessly after taking a few photos, rolls the scalp back into place, pats it all down nice and neat, sews it up.

            The days roll on in similar fashion. In a special room, the embalmer hacks away like he’s boning a carcass while I watch through a window from the hall, the body lifting off the gurney with each stroke. He jams the ends of plastic tubes onto the ends of large blood vessels sticking out of the torso like fat worms, clamps them down, flicks a switch on a grey machine straight out of some old Frankenstein movie. Motors hum, wheels whir, lights flash, pink and grey liquid swirls through tubes. Make that meat last a long time, for what purpose I cannot comprehend.

            I elbow Alph. He and I were roomies during classes in Sacramento. Calm by nature, he’s my giggly co-conspirator. We select a clean scalpel from one of the trays and walk over to the body of a pretty young woman. Drowned. No marks. We lean over her exposed neck, practice feeling for the right place on her trachea to practice an emergency tracheotomy. I look over at Alph, arching an eyebrow.

            It was simply one of the coolest things we’d learned. The female coroner said it was okay to try to do one when I asked her.

             “You go,” says he, and I carefully slice her neck an inch across. Her airway is now exposed. We lean over, gape, look into each other’s faces, about six inches apart, smiling broadly.

            A shout comes from behind us. “What are you doing!” The furious coroner shoves us aside.

            “What have you done!”

            “But… I just asked you five minutes ago. You said it was okay.”

            “Shit! Not on her! She had no wounds! Now we’re gonna have to cover her neck up for the funeral, goddamn it!” She turns to her assistant and instructs him to sew it back together as nice as he can. Muttering something about a scarf, she stomps away, ignoring us peasants.



            “I just found a doctor willing to let you observe an operation.”

            “When?”

            “Right now. You interested?” The nurse is excited on my behalf.

            “You bet. I’m in!”

            “Get gowned up.”

            I’m off to my first surgery, a hysterectomy, UCLA hospital OR. Three days more of clinical in the surgical ward, all hustle and bustle.

            I mask up and enter the beeping, glistening, electronic surgical suite. A patient lies on the gurney, center stage. Doc’s eyes, just visible over the mask, glance up at the clock. I am invisible.

            “Okay. Fastest hysterectomy ever. Gonna beat the record. Everyone ready?” He looks around at the other eyes above the masks. Heads nod. The second hand moves towards the top. As it hits twelve, his mask poofs out in a muffled, “GO!”

            And they’re off. “Scalpel…sponge…clamp…suction.” Smooth and efficient—not rushing like kids running down the hallway at the bell, but with focus and obvious experience, but still, really moving. My mask covers my dropped jaw. My head is moving to and fro like I’m watching a tennis match, and I’m starting to get seasick. A nurse’s hand touches my elbow. “You all right?” she says. “Want some air?” Her eyes are crinkled with a grin.

            “Um, no. Thanks. I’ll be okay.” She hesitates, then goes back to work, keeping an eye on me. I close my eyes, willing myself over it, but failing. I focus on the beeping heart monitor.

            Right off they’d cut a vertical slice, belly button to pubic hair. Four inches. The skin, the fat, then the meat. There’s the uterus, looking like a gourd. He slices it off, just like that, hands it to one nurse while another clamps the “bleeders.” Mphhh. He jams in a sponge, starts sewing everything back together.

            Holy shit! He forgot the sponge!

            They finish up. One last stitch and all faces turn up towards the clock.

            “Seventeen minutes! Beat it by two minutes! New record! Congratulations everybody.” Applause, smiling eyes.

            He jams his hand in between her legs and pulls the sponge out of her vagina, red and dripping as I sprint out the door, hand over my mouth.



            Doc Lewis threatened to sue LA county, and they rolled. After all the worry, they’ll now allow us to take the paramedic test to get certified. One chance. No do-overs. The caveat is that we’ll have to get an LA County Fire Department or private ambulance sponsorship. Pass this test and we finally achieve our coveted paramedic license.

            Everyone scrambles to find an in-county job. Everyone, that is, except Eric and me. We refuse to work in LA, simply because we hate LA. More lobbying, this time just for us two. They’ll go as far as acknowledging our test scores. That’ll just have to do. But first we have to pass. Eric and I get jobs with a private ambulance company in Daly City, south of San Francisco—Mercy Peninsula Ambulance. They’re just starting their paramedic program, and are keen to have Eric and me aboard. They claim to have all the right equipment. The permits and accreditation are supposedly in process. Good salary. San Francisco, flowers in our hair and all that. The aura of the sixties lingers for surfer boy Eric and me, the shorn hippie. It’s not LA.

            We former classmates gather on the intimidating steps of the vast marble LA county building, a family congregating one final time. Happy chatter fills the air, all warm handshakes and tales of internships on scattered paramedic ambulances all over the southern half of California.

            We’re brought into an imposing auditorium, seated apart, three empty seats between each of us, separated by empty rows. Tests are handed out. Stern men in crisp uniforms sit glaring on the podium in front of us, or walk around silently, arms sternly crossed behind their backs, eyes peeled. Rules are explained, suspected cheaters warned, we begin.

            Thankfully there’s lots of EKGs, which happens to be my forte. I can do this. Might not even puke like I did on the steps of grade school every day throughout kindergarten and first grade. Anger and defiance, familiar companions, carry me along. These bastards have a beef with arrogant Doc Lewis, but it’s us bearing the brunt. First done, as usual, I hand in my test with a scowl and walk out. Sandy meets me on the steps soon after, sharing a smile and a high five. It’s all over but the waiting, and I’m feeling pretty good about myself.

            Two days later, Marianne is on the phone. She sounds very, very cheery.

            Bad sign.

            “You all passed! Best scores ever! You had the highest of anyone ever!”

            “Wow! Awesome! I can’t believe it!”

            Pause…

            “Um. Just one thing.” My right eyebrow rises.

            “They think you cheated.”

            Doc Lewis won’t pick up. I don’t blame the son-of-a-bitch. While Doc and Marianne battle it out on our behalf with the county yet again, I take long walks along dirty, hot, crowded city streets. I don’t even want to know.

            Finally, a few days later, Marianne calls with the verdict. We can re-test. Different tests. Hand tailored, special, just for us. If our grades aren’t at an equal level to the previous ones, there will be court action against Doc Lewis for cheating, our careers are fucked as accomplices, and I’m back to washing dishes to pay for my climbing gear.

            Back at the county building to test again, I am splendidly pissed off. A county man appears and ushers us into the same auditorium. The air is thick. Again, we’re separated by empty rows and seats, a lost tribe of fifteen. There is one overseer for each and every one of us. Some of them wear security-cop uniforms.

            “There will be no talking amongst any of you from this moment until everyone is done with the test and has left the auditorium. Understood?” All nod but me. I just stare. “No one will leave the room until everybody’s done. You have exactly one hour, after which your test will be taken from you, finished or not. Unfinished answers count as wrong. Break any rule and you will be immediately disqualified. Understood?”

            Tests are handed out. The sound of rustling paper, familiar smell of freshly sharpened pencils. EKG strips. Harder ones. Half the ER doctors in the county probably couldn’t read them. But I sure as shit can.

My heart rate slows. I nod to nobody in particular, smiling a tight smile. For a moment I am high up on the cliff face, the natural tension between solid flat ground and verticality behind me, one world exchanged for another. That welcoming wave of certainty that comes only when facing absolutes. As a fellow top notch climber on the other end of my rope once said to me, the moment before making a rather dicey move under a rather intimidating overhang; “The minute you question your assumptions, it’s all over.” After which he made it look easy, of course. A flicker of that bracing memory steals in, I softly chuckle. My neighbour glances at me, puzzled but obediently silent.

            We sit in silence while scores are tallied, right then and there in front of us. Motherfuckers are so hoping we crash and burn.

            Three guys are furiously poring over our tests, glancing at each other, unsmiling, leaning in hard and mean. An hour passes, I smell sweat—theirs. We glance at each other, then back to the inquisitors. Their agitation grows. I am smiling, in a sort of fuck-you kind of way. Not particularly helpful, but rather satisfying. They start whispering. Their obvious leader, adjusting his coke-bottle glasses, reluctantly lifts his gaze, clears his throat, and speaks.

            “It seems you’ve all passed.” Nothing more.

            I stand up. Point my finger directly at him…

            “You mean, AGAIN!” The perfect acoustics of the hall complement and amplify the sound, like a glorious symphony.

            A scowl, glances down at his papers. “Mr. Aronson?” He looks around for a Mr. Aronson. No one speaks or moves. I remain standing, fists on hips. “Yeah, that’s me.”

            “You got only one wrong out of a hundred. I’ve never encountered that before. Miss Templeton?” Sandy got two wrong.

            “Whooohooooooooooo!”

            I guess that was my voice. Oh yeah, and my fist pumping the air.

            Which morphs into an emphatic middle finger high in the air aimed right at those assholes as I stride outside to smile at the gloriously clear cobalt blue sky.



My tiny little Honda 600’s twelve-inch tires nearly scrape the fenders—the springs are that flat. The first car Honda ever made, tinier than a Mini-Cooper, get’s 56 mpg. Not on this trip though. My old futon is laid over the roof to protect it, and on top of that are our backpacks, skis, surfboard, climbing gear and duffels piled in a pyramid, tied down with cheap yellow twine and a hundred knots. Fine style. We crawl over Tejon Pass, heading north on Highway 5 towards our new home in San Franciso. People laugh and point as they pass us trundling along at 50 miles an hour, taking pictures and high fiving the air. We smile and wave. Next morning, after showering in our new digs in a run-down stucco apartment on the Pacifica beach-front, close to Eric’s surf waves, we eagerly drive to Mercy Peninsula to meet our new bosses and colleagues.

            Mike—dispatcher, manager, boss’ son—pumps our hands in an overly enthusiastic greeting. He’s cross-eyed, and wears mirrored sunglasses all the time, even inside. This is good, since when he takes them off, it’s hard to figure out which eye to look at. He seems to enjoy playing with us, switching from eye to eye. Mike’s dad, the big boss and owner, is an ex-motorcycle cop. Bullet-head, with what I call “The Stance”—legs splayed, feet pointed out, hands on hips—deliberately intimidating. Some of the crew are there to greet us, all dressed in company red blazers. Bob Riegle, dark hair, pouty lips curling around a heavy Brooklyn accent. Dave—big, happy-go-lucky and friendly—he will drive for Eric. And Jim, short and hard, my new driver. He has a smirk under his pencil-thin moustache as he steps forward stiffly to shake my hand, eyes averted, then steps back, crosses his arms, and looks up at something really interesting in the far corner of the ceiling.

            “You got our best drivers,” says Mike. Dave and Jim look uncomfortable, the others’ faces cloud up. As we take a tour of the depressing facilities, my spirits deflate. ’50s blandness, just like the other ambulance places we formerly worked for as EMT’s. The fortunate and singular exception is that we have brand-spanking new vans instead of converted hearses. We check out their hind ends, our new realms. No radio. No IVs. Empty cabinets. I look at Eric; we glance at Smiling Mike.

            “Oh, don’t worry about that. All that stuff’s on order.” (It ain’t.)

            They hand us our fancy red company sport jackets and name tags. Jeffrey Aronson, MICU PARAMEDIC. We’re supposed to buy our own black slacks and shoes.

            We drive in silence to our apartment in foggy Pacifica. Eric offers to his windshield, “Didja notice their faces?”

            “Yep. They don’t like us much.”

            “Interlopers.”

            “Troublemakers.”

“Buttinskis.”

            He holds up the red sport coat. “Maybe we shoulda become firemen and stayed in LA.”

            Off hours, Eric surfs his brains out, LA born and bred. Meanwhile I get lost walking along the intimate, foggy beach. I like the sound of the close but hidden surf, the edge of things, all to myself. Birds dive into and out of my little world, emissaries of solace. It doesn’t take long before Eric meets sexy, exotic Monique. Doc McElroy introduces me to her friend Jeannie, older than us, well dressed and cultivated, thin, attractive, long-legged, curly dark hair, works at a public hospital. Between forty-eight hour shifts and our new lovers, we don’t spend a whole lot of time in our bleak apartment.



            Jeannie and I are having brunch in up-scale Sausalito at trendy Fred’s Coffee Shop, morning sun shining through the gauze curtains. Suave background musak, genteel conversations over lattés. Jeannie and I, tousle-haired and in jeans, enjoy an omelette and latté. A discussion between two well-dressed women sitting behind me filters into my brain...

            “Check this out, Jill. A whole river pouring out of a cave in the Grand Canyon!”

            “Wow! Would ya look at those falls! Fantastic!”

            Jeannie doesn’t like me being childish, but I can’t help it. I turn towards the women with a smile.

            “Um, sorry, mind if I take a look at that article?” They hand it over, glancing at each other.

The caption reads: “Thunder Falls, pouring into a magical side creek called Tapeats in the Grand Canyon”. The photo shows a waterfall pouring out of a cleft in a desert cliff, mist veiling lush, green vegetation gripping the surrounding precipice, set in burnt red walls reaching to the sky. An outlandish fecundity of emerald framed by verticality. The improbable stepped waterfall gushing out of an otherwise barren cliff in striking contrast. I can hear it roar, like my future coming at me.

            I return their paper to them, turn to Jeannie, chin on fist, staring out the window.

            “Says you can climb into the cave and follow the river inside” I say mostly to myself.

            She blinks.

            The choices I tend to create in my life are not boring. Truth is, the enabling legislation for San Francisco and San Mateo counties is indeed in the works, it’s just that it’s not done yet. Politics have invaded my world, not for the last time. Fire wants it for themselves. Which means Eric and I are trained as paramedics, but cannot fully utilize said training. We still have a lot of tricks up our sleeves, even without the drugs and IVs, but we have to wait for the legislation to actually pass in order to legally use all the rest. We will wait and wait and we will eventually give up.

            Mercy Peninsula is trying to jump into the game first, claiming they have a Mobile Intensive Care Unit Paramedic on duty twenty-four seven, which they do. We just can’t do most of what we’re trained for. We’ve been here before; hoping reason prevails, trusting in our futures and other’s good intentions. This is not, however, about reason. It never is. Fool that I am, it will take me a while before I get that picture.

            Apparently, one of the main reasons my driver Jim works here is so he doesn’t have to go home to his wife every night, an oddly repetitious theme in our field of work. It’s like a lot of these guys were mechanics and truck drivers, dreaming of something a tad more exciting that paid a little better. Some of them fake shifts, winking at us, are picked up out front by buddies or girlfriends.

            Since Eric and I are the celebrities, we at least don’t have to do nursing home transports anymore. Nice for us, but there is muttering.

            We get a lot of heart attacks, car accidents, the good stuff. A fair few strokes, some bad asthma attacks, diabetic comas. Nice to be doing some good, anyway. We occasionally go to fires, too, but more often than not it’s to transport someone who’s already croaked. Smoke inhalation, usually—an aphorism for suffocating from seared tracheas and lungs. Jim informs me point-blank that he will absolutely never do mouth-to-mouth. Finger jabbing my chest, he finishes with his trademark “Eh!”, shrugs his shoulders, one hand out like maybe he’s really sorry but maybe not. These gestures, all put together, mean Fuck you. So, on CPRs, I’m stuck at the head. At least I have a plastic mouthpiece. In any case, unless someone on the fire crew is willing to suck face, I can’t do compressions. They never are.



            Eric gives up first and leaves for LA, and I never hear from him again. Most of the others on the crew consider this a solid win. One down, one to go.



            Jim is sick. He takes his first day off since I got here. He’ll probably drop dead someday, all at once. I hope so, anyway. It’s a fine spring day. Bob Riegle is my replacement driver. His nickname is “Wrong-Way Riegle,”.

            He sees me drive up for our shift, and is immediately all over me. “Hey. How ya doin? Don’t you worry bout nuthin. Everything’s gonna be hunky-dory.” He grabs my hand and pumps it up and down. What is with this goddam hand-pumping thing?

            “Great. Yeah. I’m lookin’ forward to it.”

            He shares with me how glad he is not to have to spend so much time drivin’ “lizards” around. Takes a breath, looks me in the eyes. “Ya know, dey call me ‘Wrong Way Riegle.’ I don’t get it, ya know. I know dis place like the back of my hand, ya know. Every side street, every address.” He looks at his palm, for effect. He’s driving with one hand, fast and weaving, looking from me to his palm but not at the road all that much. I covertly pull my seat belt tighter.

            We pull into a McDonald’s drive-in around midday, in back of a long line of cars. More cars pull in behind us. Perfect storm. The radio crackles…

            “Thirty-three eleven. Code three, heart attack…”

            I turn to Bob, hand on the door handle, ready to tell him I’ll jump out and get the people in front of us to move out of the way. But he’s already flipped on the lights and siren, wildly honking his horn, greasy hair flying, eyes bugging out. Smoking is against the rules, so Bob keeps an unlit cigarette between his teeth when he’s driving, and at the moment it’s moving up and down like the handle on a hand-pump on a gushing water well. He rolls down his window, frantically waves his arms, yelling for people to “Get outta da friggin’ way, ya know!”. I scrunch down in my seat.

            Oh, but do they ever get out of the way. Responsible looking sedans jolt and jerk up and over the curbs, high-siding themselves in the process. Engines gun and tires screech and cars spread apart like buckshot. Bob jerks and brakes and spins wheels and backs up, lurches forward, backs up again, trying to negotiate the havoc he’s caused. My hand is gripping the dash as he jounces the van over the gutter, exits the parking lot, pops a wheelie in the middle of the side street and takes off, tires squealing and smoking.

            I lean down to grab the map. Wrong Way does not approve.

            “Ey! I told ya I know this place like the back of my hand, ya know!? Don’t worry ‘bout a ‘ting. I know exactly where we’re goin’.”

            I place the book gently back on the floor, grip the armrest, watch the scenery fly by.

            We spin and squeal around a few corners, through three red lights, nearly hitting two cars. People jump, tires screech, Demolition Derby. We careen around a corner into a narrow side street choked with parked cars, maybe the equivalent of one and a half lanes free between them. He guns it. One hand leaves the wheel and thumbs back to the street sign a hundred yards behind us and fading fast.

“See, Stinson Street. Told ya I knew where we was goin’! He-he-he.”

            A hook and ladder fire truck appears at the far end of the street, the kind where there’s a second driver way back there in the rear end. They’ve cornered towards us and are coming on fast—solid, red, heavy and full of momentum. My hands and feet place themselves on the dash. As the hurtling metal whizzes by, taking out our side-view mirror, I see a fireman standing on the back bumper, pointing emphatically back where we just came from, shaking his head. Upon reaching the next corner, Wrong Way slams on the brakes, doing a perfect doughnut, just like in the movies.

            The guy’s dead. Did our tardiness make a difference? Hard to say. Jim’s back next day. For the first time I’m actually glad to see him.



            Hit and run. The circle of firemen part to expose a little girl, lying in the middle of a neighbourhood street. They always seem so out of place, lying there on the dirty pavement with nice clothes on, maybe a purse or grocery bag nearby. Very scared, very silent adults hover. The little girl was chasing a ball. It’s a few feet away, just sitting there in the gutter.

            She doesn’t look too bad at first. Almost talkative, apologetic. I check her vitals—within normal limits, maybe a little fast on the pulse. I glance at the mom and dad, attempt a small smile for courage. We put her on the gurney, the parents insist on riding along. I make them ride up front with Jim. I direct him to just use just the lights, not the siren—keep the folks calm. Advise him to get on the radio to let Saint Mary’s ER know we’re coming in silent. A half-sneer, half-question contorts his face in the rearview mirror. I nod, he flicks off the siren, grabs the mic. I can see his eyes, clouded in concern, constantly checking me in the mirror.

            Things go south real quick. Her blood pressure drops out, she goes unconscious. On his next glance, I spin my finger in a circle. Now I’m scared. He flips the siren back on and the carriage jolts.

            We hit the hospital in maybe three minutes. I’m doing CPR on a little kid in a bouncing, swaying van. The parents clutch one another. We bang through the swinging ER doors and the nurses and doctor rush to meet us, lab coats and skirts flying, already masked and gloved-up. I fill them in as we slam into the exam room, easily lifting her tiny body onto their gurney. They dig in furiously. We withdraw, slowly walk back out to the van.

            Jim never says a thing. He’s pissed off, his catch-all emotion. Next call, a minor injury requiring stitches back at Saint Mary’s, we enter the ER, which on the surface seems business as usual, but not quite. Faces are shrouded, movements mechanical, talking subdued. We drop the guy off and walk back towards the exit. A conference door opens, and a grim-faced doctor emerges. Behind him, I see the back of a priest. Wailing comes from inside the room. I turn my face to the floor and I never look up.

            I run it through my brain a million times. The lights were on. Jim wasn’t stopping at traffic lights, going full-tilt boogie as usual. But no siren. We maybe lost sixty seconds, if that. Maybe it made the difference …. I’ll never know for sure, but it doesn’t matter. Some things can’t be taken back.

            Some things will never be right.



            Jim’s gone for good. Health problems. Big Dave drives for me now. His nature is friendly, amiable, a nice change. Jeannie’s dumped me, probably because I embarrass her when we’re out with her friends and colleagues. I dip my tortilla chip straight into that big bowl of salsa in the middle of the table, get a look. Don’t care to share that I’m a super-cool paramedic, shrug my shoulders and respond “not much” when asked what I do for a living, another look. Bobbie, my high school buddy, has escaped to California from our Jewish suburb of Skokie. It was the kind of place where until I left at 17, I thought most people on earth were Jews. We move in together. He considers me his saviour—his mother Silvia, however, considers me the devil. They’re both wrong. He’s my saviour. We rent an apartment a block from Golden Gate Park. Hours of solitary walks amongst the gnarled old trees keep my head above water. Not quite buoyant—just afloat. I pick up my beat-up old guitar and tinker with Rocky Raccoon in the darkened living room, dreaming of my mountains.



            Code Three, possible heart attack, middle of a bright, clear day. The firemen are unusually agitated as we pull up, frantically pointing inside. “He just dropped! He just dropped right in front of us! Get on it, quick!”

            It’s uncommon for an ambulance crew to get to do CPR on someone within the brain-death time limit. Someone drops, someone freaks, they call the cops, the cops call fire, fire calls us, we jump in the van, find the address on the map, drive, jump out, grab a gurney, run in. By the time we get there they’ve typically been down for ten, fifteen minutes. You’re a vegetable after four to six. I’ve done hundreds of CPRs, but only one where the guy came back to life. Joe Blow on the street has a better freaking chance of bringing them back than I do.

            We jump right in, me doing compressions for a change. Though I’m out of practice after working with Jim, I’m still pretty good at it. “One…and…two…and…” As usual, I feel the sickening crackle of gristle and ribs. Can’t be helped. I hope he wakes up and feels the pain. With the firemen’s help, we start transport. On the short trip to the hospital, I check the eyes. They remain responsive to light, barely. Oxygen is apparently finding its way to the brain. Some, anyway.

            We screech to a halt outside the ER doors, sling the gurney out the back, hit the pavement running. Dave’s wound up. He hasn’t gotten to do much of this real shit. A doc and a gaggle of interns and nurses wait at the doors, holding them open like bellboys at a fancy hotel. We barge through; the doc paces me and whispers conspiratorially.

            “Whadya think? This one viable?”

            I wheeze, “Yep, doc. We were on him within a minute. I’ve been doin’ real good CPR on him for less than ten minutes. His eyes are equal and responsive.” Puff, wheeze. “We got a live one.”

            “Okay” he says. “Thanks. We got him.”

            Pandemonium. Nurses, interns and residents like ants on a disturbed nest. Dave heads to the wall, where he watches the action, mouth open, fascinated. One of the young interns takes over on the chest compressions, elbowing me out of the way with a sneer. I join Dave and his wall. The intern’s not quite tall enough for the high gurney, so he’s working at a forty-five degree angle, thus is compressing the ribs off the side of the sternum. I can hear ribs cracking from where I stand. I stride back to the gurney and reach in to take over again, not gently. He shoots a pudgy but dangerous look… translation: Fuck off.

Another intern is practicing jamming an endotracheal tube down the patient’s throat, while the resident observes, scowling. It goes down the wrong pipe, the esophagus. Another young intern in scrubs has grabbed a railroad spike–sized needle full of adrenaline. He looks up to the resident for the okay, but the resident is rather occupied at the moment. He’s given up on the intern with the tube and has taken matters into his own hands. He grabs a smaller tube from the tray and slides it down the trachea in three seconds. In an instant precious oxygen is flowing into lungs—too late. The intern with the railroad spike makes up his own mind, fingers searching for the right spot on the chest but getting it all wrong, jams the foot-long needle in anyway, pulls it out, back in again, trying for the sweet spot into the ventricle of the heart. He looks like he’s basting a turkey. Finally, with a look of frustration, he just pumps the adrenalin in wherever, then looks up to see who’s watching. Just me. He withdraws the needle.

            Dave’s backed up in the corner, eyes bugged out, hands clinging to the wall. He looks like a newt. I’m next to the gurney, furious. Twenty minutes. Twenty precious, irretrievable minutes. Can’t ever take ’em back. Worthless CPR, no endo tube, holes in the heart and lung. They’ll go back and debrief their fucking class with pats on the back. Meanwhile, our guy is headed for the basement.



            On the rare occasion we get a call to the East Bay, Dave likes to drive up MacAurthur Boulevard in Oakland, loves whooping his siren at the black prostitutes. They smile and wave. It’s a good place to people watch. Long, shapely legs. Or not. Afros, beehives, spikes, Mohawks, tinted every color of the rainbow. Ultra-mini skirts, sequins, Indian moccasins. Observing this bizarro tragi-comedy helps me to shake things off… sometimes. Chin cupped in hand, elbow out the open window, I dream, though not of doomed whores…

            Where’s Denny? Shit, last time I saw him was over a year ago, still in LA. We took a long weekend and drove up to Yosemite to climb Washington’s Column. It was so great to be back with my bestie, healthy adrenaline pumping, poised and fit, high up on the perfect granite, baking in the sun, joined by a nylon umbilical cord. Sharing the leads and feeding out rope, inserting protection at unsafely long intervals, not talking much—no words needed, drinking celebratory beers on the all-night-long drive home to LA in my Beetle. Warriors. Immortals. Me doing the finesse moves, him strong-arming the cracks and mantles. The Jew and the Irish Catholic, brothers in arms.

            He’d written me about a year ago, telling me about a beautiful redhead he’d met in Yosemite. Southern gal. He was going back to Alabama to meet her folks. Sounded serious. She Climbs! Haven’t heard from him since.



            Goddamn clanging relentless Bell Of Death. Dave and I start from our beds. We step into our new jumpsuits (for use especially on the night shift; the same stupid red as our sport coats, but quicker to get into when dragging our asses out of the cot—Mike’s bright idea, of course) and stagger to the van. Mike’s sleepy voice comes on the radio in response to my “Thirty-Three-Eleven, Ten-eight.”

            “Code Three 1422 Elway, San Francisco. Possible heart attack.”

            “Ten-four.”

            We pull up to a modest single-story apartment complex and find an older gentleman waiting in his robe and slippers on the little cement front stoop, holding the screen door open, looking scared, like they always do. We enter, and he nods over to a woman lying on the couch, sucking the air in, forcing it back out, blue. I walk over, tell her my name, begin my thing. She’s struggling to stay coherent, to be strong for her man. I will watch my mother do the same in a not so distant future. The woman’s husband watches from behind. Her trusting, pleading eyes follow me as I ask her and her life’s partner questions, take vital signs. Swollen ankles. Each attempt to breathe exhausts her, each too-weak heartbeat leaves blood pooling down low, far from her brain and vital organs.

            “Sir, does she have a history of heart problems?” Yes. “Have you ever heard the words congestive heart failure?” He nods. I sit her up, slowly. It helps. Confirmation. I have no diuretics, no IV to get in before her veins collapse and make it impossible. I do, however, have oxygen in the van. I don’t have to say anything; I just give Dave The Look. He’s picked things up quick. We move in sync with focus and speed. No mistakes.

            She codes anyway, just out back of the van. One minute she’s looking into my eyes with hope and fear. Next minute, she’s floated away somewhere, her expectant gaze replaced by that glazed look, as if she was seeing something rather unexpected and surprising. No longer struggling, she’s passive, accepting.

            Unlike me.

            “Shit! Drop the head of the gurney. Quick!”

             The moment she’s flat, I yank her robe off, find her sternum, and give her a quick thump with my fist, right between the breasts. I feel the carotid—no pulse. We throw her into the back, she’s featherlight. I start CPR. Dave flips on the lights and siren, tires squeal. With a quick glance out the back windows, I see a figure on the curb, standing there in the dark in his worn slippers and plaid robe, growing smaller and smaller as we race away.

            CPR isn’t that easy to do good under the best of circumstances, and it’s damn near impossible in the back of a swerving van going sixty. Five crazy minutes pass, we screech to a halt at Saint Mary’s ER. Two a.m., they’ve been warned. The nun-nurses stand at the open doors, arms crossed, all Godly Business. Dave flings the van doors open, I leap out. We grab the gurney, yank it out, wheel her in at a run. Taking advantage of the momentary break in CPR, I put my fingers on her neck.

            A faint pulse!

            As we reach the doors and the waiting nurses, I give them the rapid fire lowdown. The head nurse is there–Mother Superior. She likes the night shift; it let’s her get some work done without having to deal with petty earthly hassles or damned Protestants and heathens. She detests us.

            We pile into the ER, slide our gal onto the table. Mother Superior sticks the EKG pads on her chest. The other nurse turns and grabs the defibrillator.

            “Whoa!” I say. “I just felt a pulse. Check the EKG first. It’s only been a few minutes since she dropped… I got a weak pulse.”

            Mother Superior gives me a venomous look. The doctor comes in. I recognize him right off as the hospital’s gynecologist. Nobody else wants the night shift. They’re supposed to take turns, but he does most of them. This’d be one of the first times he’s got something big. He doesn’t look too sure of himself.

            The other nurse turns on the EKG, and the paper starts to crank out. My gal starts to convulse. I take this as yet another sign that her heart is beating. I squint my eyes at the readout. Come on, come on. What I see is all over the place, the needle jumping and scratching and bouncing around along with her. But I can also see, in between the unreadable bits, a normal sinus rhythm—a regular heart beat. My breath sucks in.

            The doc yells, “Get the defibrillator paddles!”

            “No! No! Doc! She’s got a normal rhythm! Don’t. Please!” I can’t help myself. Mother Superior is driving in with the paddles, scowling dangerously in my direction. I flinch. She might use them on me first.

            “Don’t you EVER tell a doctor what to do! Get out!”

            I’m staring at the doc, cold and dark, one hand on My Lady’s heaving shoulder, the other on her kicking leg, trying to steady her from convulsing right off the table, protecting her from the witch, hoping for a readable section of tape.

            “Doc. I’m tellin’ ya. Take another look. Please. I was top of my class in reading EKGs. Please. Trust me.”

            He hesitates. Looks at Mother Superior, lost. The clock ticks.

            “Doc. You need to get her intubated. One step at a time. We gotta get some oxygen in her. She was blue when I got to her, and then she coded. Her heart’s beating again, but her brain does not have enough oxygen. That’s probably why she’s convulsing.” Pause. “Doc?” I wait for him to respond, clutching the sides of the gurney hard, my arms around My Lady in a vise.

            God’s instrument—the Wicked Witch—screeches, “I told you to shut up! You get out of here this very minute!”

            “Wait a second,” says the Doc. Our eyes meet. “Can you try and hold her a little steadier?” He’s seen it now, too. The spaces in between the jumps are easier to read with me vising her to the table—there are heart attack pings, but otherwise the rhythm is normal. The room is dead fucking silent but for the beeping machines and the EKG whirring paper. The doc looks like he’s wishing he’d stuck to genitalia instead of pulling extra cash for night call.

            Later, the Mother Superior will probably stick needles in a little doll wearing a red jumpsuit, but I’m not going to let that stop me from saving My Gal. “Steady, Doc. IV. A tube and some OH-Two. Come on. Some Lasix for her lungs. Maybe some Enalapril, too.” The doc just looks at me. Mother Superior is shouldering me out the door, leaning hard into my chest. I struggle against the devil-nurse, pushing her hands away. I suggest he calls the on-call internist, and suddenly his eyes change. Saved! He can share his pain, relinquish some responsibility. He steps over to the phone on the wall. My Lady is still convulsing on the table, but quieter now, almost serene.

            The doc calls, tells the internist on the other end of the line what’s happening. He’s professional, voice sounding confident. He deletes any mention of me.

            “Uh-huh. Yep. Got it. Thanks.” He hangs up, tells the nurse to get him an endotracheal tube and to start an IV right away. She stops pushing me, crucifies me with one last, piercing look, then dutifully turns to obey. I stand transfixed. Five minutes and they’ve got the tube down her throat, the oxygen hissing away full blast. Five minutes later the IV is in. An order for Lasix and Enalapril.

But it’s all too late.

I stagger out, head down. Dave follows. Wordlessly we fix up the van and drive back to base. An hour is left before the dawn. I sit in a cracked plastic chair in the remains of the dismal kitchen, lights out, staring into the pitch blackness of my life and hers.

            Saint Mary’s, the following day. The usual midday hubbub, we drop off a patient. I ask Dave if he’ll wait for me; I need to check on something. I tell the nun-nurse at the desk I was the ambulance driver that brought that lady in last night. Her lips tighten. She is an ally—just not mine.

            “Can you please tell me how she is?”

            “She’s alive.”

            “Can you tell me what room she’s in, please?”

            “That’s none of your business!” she snaps. I smile and thank her and go, not out the doors to the van, but in towards the front desk. They give me her name and room number as the phone rings. I turn to see my previous roadblock at her desk down the hall, on the phone, glaring at me. I had hoped for Intensive Care unit, first floor. I get the third floor, the nursing home ward. The nurse’s eyes follow me as she listens to the voice on the phone, expression changing. Too late, bitch.

            There’re two patients in the room, both asleep. Or unconscious. I turn to one, a man. The other bed holds My Gal, Lois. She’s breathing deeply, eyes closed, mouth slack and drooling.

            I gently touch her shoulder. “Lois? Lois? Can you hear me? Lois?”

            Nothing. Eyes on the floor, I slowly walk out.



            “Whadya think, Dave?”

            “Hey man, those fuckers screwed up. They made her a vegetable, man. Fuck ’em.”

            “Yeah. Well. What can I do? I mean, this’ll be the second person they screwed up on.”

            “Whadya mean?”

            “You know…the guy they were practicing on?”

            “Oh. Yeah. Right. I forgot about him. So? What’re we gonna do?”

            I like that “we” part. Makes me brave.

            So I say “Well, I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe if we wrote a letter describing what happened, maybe suggest some changes?”

            “What changes?”

            “Well, the way I see it, if they had some procedures in place, some sort of written protocol, then if we brought in a viable patient they’d have something to fall back on, and so would we.”

            “Yeah. I like it.” His head nods approvingly.

            “And the other thing I was thinking is that they should never have a doc on call at night in the ER unless they’re trained in emergency medicine.”

            “Right!”

            “So… If I do this, you’ll back me up?”

            “Absolutely, brother. I’m right behind you. A hundred percent, my man.” He slaps my back.

            It takes me two full weeks on a typewriter. Editing, angrily crumpling it up, starting all over. I’m not much of a writer. Not yet, anyway. I want this to be constructive, not a rant. Solutions, not complaints or threats. Maybe if I do this right, someone down the road will be okay. When I can’t look at it any more, I show it to Dave.

            “Great man, perfect.”

            “So, uh, will you sign it with me?”

            Long pause. Head down, hand to chin.

            “Well. I don’t know. Do you really think that’d be necessary?”

            “Well. I don’t know. It wouldn’t hurt. Might help.”

            “Mind if I think about it?”

            What can I say?

            The next day, Dave says, “Look, man, I just don’t want to get in trouble, you know? But hey, I’ll still back you up. For sure.”

            “Yeah. Okay. Sure. Fine.”

            One last check to make sure it’s all there. Accurate details. Check. I’ve said four times I have no intention of making anything public or legal, all I want is to discuss solutions to a problem. Check. I’m sure they share my concerns. Let’s work together to help people in the future. Three copies: one for the Gyno that was on call, one to Mother Superior, one for the Hospital Administrator. On my next visit to St. Mary’s, I drop them off, sealed in envelopes, one by one. They are delivered in silence, received similarly.

            I await the storm. Which doesn’t take long at all.

            The next day, I’m called into Mike’s office. His wall-eyes observe my progress across the street, down the driveway, flicking back and forth, left-right-left. His ex-motorcycle cop daddy is there. This is the first time I’ve seen him since he made his appearance, all business and smiley, when Eric and I first arrived. Not this time. Mike’s right behind him and to his left, absurdly mimicking daddy’s Cop Stance.

            “Who the hell do you think you are?” His bellow greets me at the door. “Who the fuck are you, anyway? Just a fuckin’ ambulance driver. A little boy! What the fuck do you have to say for yourself?” He stabs his thick finger into my chest.

            The rest of the crew is outside the window, blatantly watching like spectators at the Colosseum. Masks off now, arms crossed.

            “Well, sir. Have you seen my letter?”

            “I don’t have to see your fuckin’ letter! Who the fuck do you think you are?!”

            “Well, sir, I did what I felt I had to do. My letter simply went over two incidents that happened at the hospital where I thought that the staff’s actions ended up hurting my patients. All I did was suggest some changes that might help prevent those things from happening again.”

            He slaps his forehead, half turning to his son, who grimaces at my stupidity along with Daddy. “Your patients!!??” He harrumphs. “YOUR patients!?”

            “And my partner, Dave?”

            “He’s asked to be transferred to another car.” He smiles, menacing, and continues, “You don’t get to make suggestions. You work for me! Do you have any idea what kind of shit I’ve had to go through because of this?” I start to open my mouth. “Shut the fuck up! They’re accusing you of using drugs on patients. Did you know that!?”

            I’m stunned silent.

            “Yeah! Using illegal drugs when you’re not even licensed as a paramedic in this county! And they’re accusing you of molesting a patient, too!”

            “Wha…”

            “That lady you brought in that night. They’re saying you snuck into her hospital room, gave her some drugs, and molested her.”

            A fly buzzes, tapping manically against the window, trying to escape the very room it just deliberately flew into.

            “I’m not going to fire you, asshole. That’d be like admitting I’d made a mistake hiring you in the first place. No. I’m going to keep you here, and I’m going to make your life a fucking hell. Just you wait. You’re going to pay for this, you son-of-a-bitch!”

            He turns on his heel and leaves. Troops dismissed. Mike glares at me with his left eye, then his right, trying to look tough.

            “Go wash all the vans!” He commands.

            I remove my stupid red sport coat and hand it to him after taking off my name tag and putting it in my pants pocket. Then I turn around and walk out. As I pass Dave; he never looks up from picking something off his pant leg.

“Wash the fucking vans yourself, coward.”



            One fuzzy afternoon, after lying in bed most of the day like I’ve done for the last two weeks, I call Denny’s dad’s house in LA. Maybe his dad knows where in the world he is. Maybe he’d like to go climbing in Yosemite for a couple of weeks. It’ll do me good to be with my brother after all this time, in our beloved mountains, get scared about something real.

            Nobody’s home. No answering machines in those days. I take an afternoon stroll, survey a long, wide swath of our Golden Gate neighborhood. Before I know it, the sun sets, the streetlights begin their sentry duty. I shake out of my brooding, finding myself amid shadows.

            Did I do the right thing?

            The next morning, Bobbie’s making breakfast. I waltz into the small kitchen in my underwear, glance at his cornflakes.

            “Mornin’.”

            “Yeah. Mornin’.” I brush by, grab a spoon and bowl out of the drying rack next to the sink. Bachelors.

            “Hey, someone called for you last night while you were out walking. Left a message.”

            “Mmm. Yeah?” I grab the milk out of the fridge. Those cornflakes look okay.

            “Yeah, um…Danny, maybe?”

            The arc of the milk carton halts midair.

            “You mean…Denny?”

            “Yeah! Yeah. That’s it. Denny. Said something about being at his dad’s house in LA. Wanted to know if you want to go climbing in Yosemite for a coupla weeks or somethin’.”

            Denny’s been envious of my well paid, “exciting”, career. He’s been climbing with his redheaded southern gal, having a ball. Me?... I no longer have a career.

            “Wow, man. Sorry to hear that. Hey, you know, you might be interested in this. I just did a whitewater school.”

            “A what?”

            “A whitewater school. They teach you how to row rivers.”

PROLOGUE



I was a student at a Minnesota Outward Bound school in 1971, sixteen years old, senior year of high school. I thought I was going canoeing, in January at 60 below. That was my intro to cross country skiing, as well as a deep friendship with a fellow student named David Cross. The class clown, he burned, broke, or lost pretty much every piece of equipment they gave him. You’d glance at him around the campfire in six feet of snow, and the snow around him would be a tad whiter than the rest… until you realized he was actually surrounded by the white feathers that had floated out of his burnt sleeping bag… or he’d come downhill at you fast on one leg looking like an expert ski ballerina, until you realized he’d broken his other ski in half and couldn’t stop.

We ended up calling each other Boris and Igor, laughing while we held our frozen noses in our bare palms to get the blood flowing again, dragged the ski-sled “pulk” through 6 feet of deep powder winding amongst the thick lodgepole pines… Comradeship.

            After the course, we felt a burning need to have another adventure together, only this time on liquid water. We’d just graduated, and my folks were moving to Los Angeles so my dad could play cards with all the other male Aronson family members who’d already left Chicago’s snow, and be able to golf all year ‘round. David and I made a plan to hitchhike to Jackson Hole, somewhere in the northern Rocky mountains of Wyoming, where his mother’s boyfriend was guiding float trips on the Snake river. He’d teach us how to raft, then we’d find the headwaters of this mighty river that flowed out of the Rockies we’d heard about called the Colorado, build a raft Huck Finn style—hatchets, hemp rope, logs—and float to the ocean.

            No shit, as they say.

            On the way to LA in the Pontiac, dad was on a mission. We never stopped at any of the usual tourist attractions along old Route 66, until mom forced him for just one detour to have a look at the famous American Icon called the Grand Canyon. Can’t pass that one up.

            I, the bored long-haired hippie teenager, grumpily exited the car parked in the gravel, and wandered over to what seemed like the edge.

            Some time later, I awoke to mom’s urgent shaking my arm and calling my name…

            “Jeffrey!! Jeffrey Alan!! Are you okay?? What’s wrong with you!?”

            Apparently I’d been standing there frozen looking out over Vishnu Temple and Tanner Rapids and the Palisades of the Desert and that tiny brown trickle way way down there for some time, mouth open, eyes glazed and unblinking. Edge, indeed. It was hard to breathe. My heart thumped so loud I could hear it inside my ears like a bass drum, the whooshing sound of my surging blood sounded like the wind. Her frantic worry brought me out of my reverie just enough to shake my head, lift my arm and point in the general direction of The Void. Then I managed to speak a profound truth which I’d never known before, one which, as it turned out, would never release me.

“THAT.” Pause… “THAT is where I’m going to spend the REST of my LIFE, living… working… playing.” As I lowered my arm, staring into some inner vastness, she just looked at me, silent,  puzzled, blinking. We continued our journey to LA and my life’s compass.

            In the end I shipped my homemade tipi from LA to Jackson after killing my girlfriend’s parent’s lawn with the waterproofing, and lived in it on the banks of the Snake river for the next two years. David never showed after having changed his mind, telling me on the phone that “There’s some dams on that river!” (“So what, we’ll walk around them!”) “You need a permit to run some parts of that river!” (“Yeah, right… so some random ranger is gonna find us out in the middle of nowhere, swim out and give us a ticket.”). In the end, he became a chicken farmer in Minnesota, I became a mountaineer in the Tetons, and that dream receded… for a time.

            

Back to Denny and me…

“Yeah. Some company called ARTA. American River Touring Association. Incredible guides. We did a bunch of rivers up in Oregon and California. Did this river called the Rogue, and met this other group that was on the river. Etcetera. ETC. Environmental Traveling Companions. They do volunteer river trips for handicapped kids in the Sierra foothills. I’m gonna volunteer for them this summer. Learn how to raft and kayak and run rivers and stuff.”

            The sound of Bobbie chewing corn flakes pauses, I feel his hand on my back. “You okay?”

            Softly into the phone, “Count me in, bro.” Jackson Hole, David, that moment on the Rim at Desert View Tower float back…

            “No pay, man. Volunteer.”

            “They give us a place to stay? Food?”

            “Yep.”

            “In. Definitely.”

            “Ya-hoo my brother!”

            I admit how surprised I was that next spring when they rolled the rubber raft out of the back of ETC’s “Red Truck”, me fully expecting logs, hatchets and rope. By the end of the day, I knew without any doubt whatsoever what I was meant to be for the rest of my life. By the end of the year, I was kayaking my first of 160 trips of a 50 year career down the Colorado in the Grand Canyon.



EPILOGUE: SEVEN YEARS LATER, GRAND CANYON, 1982

            Unremarkable river trip. No flips, no rips. My second full season as a guide in Grand Canyon with AzRA. We catch up to another AzRA trip on day ten at Havasu, park our rafts in the same eddy and hike up that magical side canyon together, catching up on stories about the “peeps” and our runs. Some guides hang back at the boats in the shade of the cliffs, taking the day off, “harbor-masters”. Others—as usual including me—take the folks hiking up to Beaver or Mooney Falls. One of the guides on that other trip is Kevin. Long blond hair, enthusiastic, brilliant, sarcastic and funny, superb boatman, great “pard”. Later that afternoon everybody returns to the rafts and we shove off to our separate camps.

Three days later, at Diamond Creek take-out, mile two hundred twenty-five, journey’s end. The usual chaos with trucks and buses and goodbyes and heat and rolling rubber and loading tons of gear in a rush to get out of that hellhole of a gravel bank and back to some rest and cool in Flagstaff, in the pines at seven thousand feet.

            The clients leave in the rusty old Hualapai Indian bus. We douse them with buckets of water through the open windows. Hualapai air conditioning. Kevin strolls up.

            “Hey, Rain, isn’t your real name Jeff? (Hippy nickname… long story.)

            “Yeah. Why?”

            “We had a lady on our trip that knew you.”

            “Huh, yeah? What was her name?”

            “Jane I think. Can’t remember her last name. But she said she recognized you from when you were a paramedic in San Francisco. Worked at some hospital named after a saint.”

            I stop packing my bag. A gust of cool air momentarily captures the sound of the river behind the diesel trucks and brings it whistling into my ears.

            “Saint Mary’s?”

            “Yeah! Saint Mary’s. That’s the one.”

            Deep breath, staring into the gravel at my feet. “And?”

            “Yeah. She came up to me after we saw you guys at Havasu and asked me if I knew the name of the guy with the handlebar moustache and the big straw hat. I told her yeah, that’s Rain. She asked me if you had another name. Then I remembered. She stopped and just stood there. Weird. Like she’d seen a ghost or something.”

            A truck horn honks. Everyone’s Jonesin’ to get home, smellin’ the barn.

            “Then she says, ‘Jeff… Aronson?’ And I tell her yeah and she says, “Amazing. He just disappeared off the face of the earth.” And I say, ‘No…he’s right here, guiding in the Grand Canyon.’ And she goes, “Unbelievable.” Then, like she was talkin’ to herself almost, she says, “You know, a long time ago he was a paramedic and worked with an ambulance company back home. They came into our ER a lot. Wrote a letter to the administration one time about some screw-ups that hurt some people. I heard they really reamed him out and he got fired or something.”

            “And I said, ‘Yeaahhhh…I remember him telling me something about that I think.’” His hands go on his hips, one flip-flopped foot forward, head cocked for emphasis, very Kevin-like.

            The diesel engine revs.

            “Huh. I forgot I told you that story. I don’t talk about it much.”

            “Well, she sure knew you! Said to tell you that after you left, the hospital completely revamped the ER. It had been a laughingstock. Now they get awards for being the best ER in the Bay Area. Said to send her regards, and to say thank you.”

            The truck lurches over the boulders in the streambed. Hualapai dozer hasn’t had time to clean it up properly since the last flash flood. No air conditioning, we’re packed like sardines in the cab, some drinking beer, some trying to doze, or jabbering about this or that client, their run in Lava, checking their mail from the last two weeks, brought in by the driver. I’m slumped in my seat, elbow out the window, mirrored sunglasses hiding my eyes.