GRAVEYARD WALTZ

Hey everyone- just published a short fiction piece about ghosts, graveyards and gentrification on this groundbreaking web journal, The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction! Here's the link:

http://tinyurl.com/yact6yy

BUSY WEEK ON THE BUS

MOOD: slightly tipsy, it’s true

MUSIC: Erykah Badu

She was pregnant and lying in a pool of blood. There were 2 others, deeper in the deli, but a quick glance letme know they weren’t nearly as bad. The project across the street was already emptying out, folks screaming and yelling, breaking towards us at a run as PD scrambled to control the scene. Bright lights bouncing across the brick buildings. Utter chaos.

While my partner and an EMT strapped the patient to the long board, I set up an IV and liter bag of saline fluid so everything would be ready when they loaded her in.

The thing about most shootings: they’re a) usually not THAT bad- a in and out tib/fib shot or a hand, and b) the patients are rarely surprised to have been shot. Always wanna act like they saw it coming, like it’s just some of run of the mill shit, bla dee bla. Or like the guy two months ago who wanted us to take a picture of him for the cover of his album (Sweartogod). But this lady was both very near death and very afraid. She had no blood pressure, because she barely had any blood- what she hadn’t left on the corner store floor was quickly soaking through the bandages, and she kept teetering in and out of consciousness.

My partner put one IV in and I yelled to the driver to go, but not go crazy – cuz mofo’s will drive like hotholy hell on jobs like these and make things much worse- and we speed off. There’s no trauma center in North Brooklyn. If we’re any further up than we were we usually haul ass over the Williamsburg Bridge to Belleview but were slightly closer to Kings County, so off we went, slipping along through the rainy night towards Atlantic Ave, then Eastern Parkway. She had a juicy vein along her forearm, so we dropped the second IV there, bouncing along with the Brooklyn potholes and stubborn, non-clearing stopngo early evening traffic.

She wakes up some with the fluids flowing through and wants to know if she’s going to die, if her baby will make it.  The truth is, it’s looking good for her but there’s no certainties with jobs like this. I tell her as much, but with a more positive spin, and give as clear and update as I can while I try to staunch the bleeding and not fly across the ambulance. We screech around a corner, the cop in the back with us looks like he might lose his lunch at any moment, and then we roll up the hill into the County ER bay.

The other two victims roll in soon after us, one in handcuffs from a previous warrant---dang imagine gettin’ shot and arrested in 5 minutes for separate shit… And the hospital staff jump into their frantic dance.  When we leave, I’m happy to say, our patient is stable and the baby is out of danger.

Later that night, we’re in the train station, looking at an elfish Puerto Rican pothead who’s pretending to have chest pain. When we get him away from the cops I raise an eyebrow at him: Really, dude?

He sighs. “No, I just smoked A LOT of herb.”

How much?

“No, bro, I can’t even. No. Too mothafuckn much.”

I won’t write it down on the paperwork, I swear.

“Well,” he laughs hysterically for a few minutes and we wait for him to collect himself. “Three grams. Plus I tripled up on my antipsych meds. Hehehe…”

Damn.

“Yeah, son.”

Hungry?

“You have no idea.”

Chest pain?

“Nah. I was just…you know.”

You just want somewhere to take a nap.

“Basically.”

No problem.

Then, two nights later, we’re chilling in Marcus Garvey Park, whiling away the night, when the cardiac arrest comes over. Everything happens fast and efficiently: we’re there in two minutes along w/ the BLS, the dude is 41 with no medical problems lying dead on his bedroom floor. Wife and 3 kids looking stunned, staring in at us from the doorway as we setup our shit. I pass my partner and the student the tube kit and they get to work putting an airway in him. The EMTs start chest compressions and pull out the oxygen. I throw the EKG pads on and take a look.

Quick cardiology lesson for those that don’t know: when you’re heart stops beating, it doesn’t necessarily mean all the electrical activity stopped. When that happens, you get the flatline. But sometimes there’s still a ridiculous little floppy line of current running through- it’s called ventricular fibrillation. It’s rare and usually fleeting but if you catch it you can sometimes shock it back into a nice normal working rhythm.

When they stop compressions so I can get a look, I see our guy’s in a rare form of v-fib called Torsades de Pointes. It’s pretty, a windy, spiraling squiggle. “Clear away from the patient,” I say, charging up the monitor. Everyone takes a few steps back, I hit the button and the patient flops up in the air, his inanimate limbs jolting around eerily. When he lands, we do another round of compressions and check again. A  few gimpy complexes float past on the monitor before it settles into a nice steady regular rhythm. We check a pulse and voila- miracle of miracles the man has a beating heart. The tube is in, we drop an IV and begin setting up for transport. We’re exchanging glances but trying not to get all excited cuz the shit could fall apart at any given second and usually does.  Even in the rare case that folks DO come back, they almost never come back to be anything beyond total vegetable.  But there’s always a chance.

Our guy stays quite stable throughout transport.

He coded and was revived twice more in the hospital (where a tox screen revealed large amounts of cocaine in his bloodstream) and at last check was still comatose but expected to pull through.

THE SINGING HEART ATTACK

Fire men were standing in their usual confused huddle around a bench outside the Myrtle Ave projects. One of them came and met us on the walkway. “Um, he’s having chest pain, we think and he had a…seizure…maybe…”
And?
He looked nervous. “And he’s…singing.”
Indeed, the slurred, drunken strains of I’ll Be There were wafting out from the center of the firemen’s circle and we knew it was Singin’ Joe.
This dude calls every couple days when he’s lonely or cold or just too drunk to get home. He was sitting jauntily on the bench, looking back and forth at the confused FDNY dudes, singing at the top of his lungs thru his oxygen mask and punctuating his song with the occasional scream of “OH MY HEART!! OW! OW!...I’ll be thaayayare!!”
“Whatsa matter Singing Joe?”
“Oh I was at dis ol party on the second flo’ and I caught a heart atta- no wait I caught seizure. I caught a seizure. JUST REMEMBER…Yeah!”
“So you came down stairs?”
“Uh huh, I’ll be thaaaayaaaree!”
I wave at Fire. “You can take that oxygen mask off.”
One of the boys goes to pull off the little plastic piece and Joe rolls his eyes back and starts twitching, his great big fro waving back and forth like a peacock tail. The fireman jumps back, horrified. “I’m ca-a-a-tchin a see-e-e-e-iz-ure a-a-a-aga-a-a-ai-n!!! Oh my chest, FUCK!”
I’m biting my finger not to laugh. “Just get on my stretcher, Joe. Seriously. You can finish your seizure on the bus.”
He obligingly brings his shaking to a dramatic close and climbs up onto our stretcher (Singing Joe is fucking tiny, by the way- more fro than dude.)

All the ER nurses turn and smile when we wheel Joe in. He’s crooning at the top of his lungs again, waving at his adoring fans like the drunken king of Brooklyn.

THE GREAT ACID RAIN STINK BALL of 1995

It was 5:40 am and we get off at 6. They wanted us to go get a “DIFFBREATHER” on Nostrand and Lexington and I wasn’t mad at it cuz it was on the corner and corner jobs are usually grabngo.
As we roll up a little Mexican dude and wiley haired black guy are waving to us frantically. They both look happily trashed, neither is strugglin’ to breath, (no surprise there).
-You guys are heroes, the Mexican tells me in Spanish.
-Gracias, I say. Why are we here?
He points to the other dude, who’s either completely fucking Blitzed or completely fucking nuts.
-He came into my corner store, he tells me as if that explained it all.
-And?
-He looked…well, look at heem.
Whatever. We put the dude in the truck and the Mexican told us we were heroes again and went on his merry drunk way.

My partner Mr. C was lookin edgy but I didn’t know why cuz I was standing outside the ambulance on the bumper.
-Whats the problem today, sir?
-Where you in New York City in 1995? The guys asks Mr. C.
-Uh…no.
He looks at me. –What about you? New York City, 1995?
-nope.
The dude looked crestfallen.
-Why you wanna know?
-Acid rain.
That’s when I stepped into the ambulance and it hit me: a thick wave of the WORST most stankiest foulest most nastiest stanky stink E V E R was hovering like a brown cloud of shitstain. The guy smelled like the asshole of an armpit. I steadied myself with one hand.
-Alright what hospital you go to?
-He goes to the hospital we can get to fastest, Mr. C said.
I concurred and literally jumped out the back the ambulance. The dude picked something out of his ear and looked at nothing in particular with those big boggly eyes.

I was feelin kinda bad about leaving Mr C back there but then i hopped up front and realized the smell was not contained to the back cabinet. The foulness fucking surrounded me, demolished my whole sense of self for a few seconds until I cleared my head. I looked down and watched the milk in my coffee curdle (Ok, that’s not true- i never put milk in my coffee…)
All the windows on the ambulance rolled down simultaneously. I switched my heavy duty lights and get-the-fuck-out-my-way sirens on, hung my head out the drivers side window and hauled ass to the hospital past wilting flowers and dying squirrels. Made it there at 5:51, panting, and spent the last nine minutes of tour airing out ambulance.

ON WRITING 1: Just Tell The eFfin' Story

It's funny because it was blogging bout the ambulance messes that re-opened up the writing part of me. Spittin out these weird little vignettes that I'd throw together from memory in 20 min btwn calls reminded me of a simple rule of writing: just tell the fucking story.

Seems so obvious but I see how not remembering that caused some real blockage in my creative output over the years. Get so damn caught up in angles and analysis and voice---nothing happens. My big overeducated head a dang boulder on the path.

So it makes sense that I'd start throwing in some thoughts on the craft of writing among these twisted true life tidbits. The ambulance work feeds me, literally and literarily, because what better fodder for a writer than night after night of humanity's tiny disasters? Even the boring shit's a nice little packaged short story (repeating again and again...) and rather than falling in 2 the cliched role of passive observer that we writers are prone to, the medic is unavoidably, irrefutably and literally arm deep in the shit.

So these notes on writing won't b as gory or ridiculous as the ambulance ones but they will b curse-laden and spiritually engaging. Yes, spiritually.  And they'll be clearly marked so u gorehounds can disregard @ will...

So Today’s Topic: Just Tell the eFfin' Story. Much as I believe in the other timeless wrtier's rule: Ass In Chair, I’ve logged many a-blank stared hour in this chair and wound up with blank pages. Or the inverse: pushed hard and cranked out pages and pages of utter uselessness. I believe in freewrites something fierce- it’s the best way 2 dislodge that thought-fraught brain and clear writer’s block. But for me, thrusting forward towards a word or page goal isn’t the way 2 go.  (For other writers, wordcounts are the beesknees: http://thewordsofawriter.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-love-goals-for-writing.html )

I am though, a big fan of the Outline.  Right behind me, winding across my wall in a serpent of post-it notes, is the outline of the novel I’m deep into. (A sample: http://tidepoolfiction.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/flatbush-spirit-dance/)  Actually, there’s two intertwined strands, one a completed work and the other a completely different strand of that forking off at page 30. It’s a roadmap- guarantees that each time I sit down to write, I’ll know where I’m going, where I am and where I been. That way, the work on the story itself happens all the time, on the train, in the ambulance, in the shower, while I’m treating a patient- whatever, and gets scratched into my handy blackberry, spat onto my wall and then the writing time allows me to throw away all other concerns and Just Tell the Fucking Story.

Which is what writing is all about.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE

It’s amazing how many calls we get for old men that wanna complain about the “tiny little guys” running around their apartments. There must be an infestation of freaky leprechauns in the city. I know it’s gonna turn up in 1 of my short stories soon…

But anyway, that’s not today’s topic. Today’s we’re here to discuss the little dude that makes sandwhiches at one of the delis of 125^th St in Harlem. He called because he was having pain all up and down his left side (came over as a CARDIAC job, because they included the chest in “all over”…smh). So he’s 32 years old, no medical problems, no medications and he’s basically rocking back and forth and going “OOOh it feels so WEIRD! It feels SO Weird!”

what’s weird?

My whole left side of my body!

Does it hurt?

No! I can’t feel it! Or it’s like pins and needles! Aiiiii!

How long it’s been going on?

Since the day before yesterday…

Anything else wrong?

Yeah, when I poop: blood comes out…

Oh boy…how long THAT been going on??

Since about…well, matterafact since the day before yesterday!

What the hell happened the day before yesterday?

I fell down the stairs.

How many stairs you fell down?

Shit…all of ‘em.

…And you’ve been shitting blood ever since?

Yep.

And you can’t feel half your body?

Uh huh. You think Imma be alright?

NO I DON’T THINK YER GONNA BE ALRIGHT! …jeeeeeze…(aside: do you really need me to tell you that?)

So you think I should go to the hospital?

No, I think you should’ve gone to the hospital 2 days ago when you ruptured your internal organs and severed your damn spinal cord but now u HAVE to go to the hospital…

Sigh….okay let’s go…

That is all.

2 CRAZY GERIS

TWO CRAZY GERIS

One of the crappiest parts about this job is the fact that no matter how fucked up your night was, no matter how tired you are, how many chests you pumped on or IVs you started or whining buttheads you dragged 2 the hospital, you can still get hit with an assignment right up until the minute you get off. So at 6:59 am, after a 12 hour tour, we can end up driving all the way up town for some nonsense. And the rule seems to be that those late jobs are always one form of clusterfuck or another- like, somehow, something always goes wrong.

Okay, not always. Sometimes we do a grab n go:

:::ambulance screeches up to Slightly Intoxicated Mexican dude with no shirt on:::

Me: Get in!

SIM: My neck feels funny…

Me: Get in the bus. We talk inside.

::::he gets in::::

Me: What hurts?

SIM: My neck, it doesn’t hurt but it feels funny.

Me: for how long?

SIM: Like, 2 weeks, guey.

Me (to my partner): Go go go!

:::ambulance screeches off::::

And then, sometimes we actually get home on time.

Last month, we got the job for the UNCONCIOUS at 6:30, which could’ve been a quickie but it was a old lady up in a apartment, so you know it’s gonna be slow. Most of the time, theyre really not unconscious, they’re either napping or felt a little woozy, unless they’re in a nursing home and then they’re usually dead.

This lady wasn’t in a nursing home and she wasn’t unconscious, in fact, she wouldn’t shut up. We heard her yelling from down the hall and us comin inside only made it worse.

“Me not going to the hospital! Just wanna drink me tea! Leave me ‘lone I tell you!”

It was one of these get gramma out the house for whatever reason things, probably cuz she’s won’t stop yelling, so call 911 and have us deal with her. We get that a lot towards the weekends…

Anyway, she also kinda had to go anyway, cuz she had like fourteen billion medical problems, was borderline insane and her toes were rotting off.

But she wasn’t having it. Her poor husband was actually dying of cancer in the other room, but I think he really just needed a good nights sleep. Then the daughter showed up and started cursing out the old lady “Just go with the goddamn ambulance people, ma, you always do this, ma, seriously, we go through this every FucKING WEEK!” and then to us: “I’m so sorry, boys, really…”

But without her tea it was a no go.

We sent someone to put the kettle on, but really it was a battle of wills. You could tell she was starting to cave when she got pouty and stopped yelling and carrying on- the non-logic of tea over amputated feet had been barreled over by the sheer strength of her daughter’s curseout.

“But I can get up me own self,” she insisted after finally relenting. “If I can make it to bathroom on me self and make it to kitchen to make me tea, why you think me can’t go to ambulance me self?”

Far be it for me to tell someone that I don’t have to carry their ass- I’m usually the first to agree. Unfortunately for everyone though, grammy’s feet were wrapped in leaking, yellow stained bandages that hadn’t been changed in…weeks at least. Damn near had to wrestle her onto the chair and she actually took a swipe at me as we carted her out, but all in all, granma made it to hosp and everyone else breathed a sigh of relief.

Then last week- we came for the DIFFBREATHER on top of one of those pjs along marcus garvey. The man was ancient! Skin like crinkled up paper, long boney legs bent into an antique wheelchair.

“did you ask for the police to come to?” he wanted to know when we came in. I put a message over the radio for them.

-what’s wrong today sir? You feel okay?

…yes. Yes feel alright.

The apartment was dusty and mostly empty.

-Do you wanna go to the hospital?

-Yes…Yes I think I do.

Ok…Any pain anywhere? Any trouble breathing?

No. None at all.

That’s nice. Why did you, ah…call…911…today…sir?

Lemme get back to talkin’ to my daughter for as sec, he says, indicating an empty corner behind him.

I was about to be able to explain the whole weird episode away as a oh he’s bonkers but then i saw the phone sitting there off the hook. I passed him the receiver.

No- he says- no, dear, it’s just something i have to do. I can’t stand him being here anymore. No, he’s out now. No…I know…It’s just the way it’s gotta be. Okay…alright.

He passed me the phone to hangup.

Popo couldn’t get much more outta him than we could.

Basically, the cop says, you just wanna go to the hospital but nothings wrong?

That was the gist of it. When I went to help him up from his wheel chair and into ours, he reached one long arm into the pillow behind his back, retrieved a 10” butcher knife and handed it nonchalantly to my partner with a curt: hold this for me.

“Uh…ok…” she gingerly placed on the dust covered kitchen table and we wheeled him the fuck out the door.