“Happy Hal parked the truck on the street and he and Cathy walked up the carpeted stairway to the 4rd floor, then down the hall to the Mertz’s door with the framed DesiLu emblem hung above the peephole glass. Cathy knocked. Fred opened the door, Ethel right behind him. “Hey kiddo! Glad you could make it!” He kept his voice raspy – William Frawly all the way – on 50’s TV night. He stepped back and ushered them in. “And I guess this’ll be your partner.”

Cathy did an over-the-shoulder introduction as she walked in. The living room was already half full. Maggie Cobbler sat on the couch with Peach. They both wore gigantic pink house coats and pink house slippers and both had their hair wound up in big pink plastic curlers. Friend To Animals sat beside one of the windows, dressed the way she always did, in khaki pants, plaid shirt and work boots. But her hair was trussed up in the sort of red bandana that Lucy always wore. Three college-age kids that Cathy didn’t recognize sat on metal folding chairs chattering happily to each other. The two guys weren’t dressed for the occasion, but the girl had bright red lipstick, red nails, high heels and wore a yellow frilled apron printed with white tulips. Cathy thought of the many calls she’d been on that involved bodily fluids of all kinds where an apron like that would have been just the ticket.

Standing next to the record player against the wall, Dumb Fuck Kid was sliding an LP out of an album cover. He set the cover aside, placed the record on the turn table and eased the needle down. The violins got it started, then Perry Como was singing, Dream Along With Me. Cathy thought that he somehow managed to look both amused and shocked at the same time. When he saw Cathy he pointed theatrically at Ethel and mouthed the words, “She made me do it!” So Fred and Ethel had either heard about the outing incident and didn’t care, or the incident’s shock wave spreading out from Chinatown hadn’t yet made it across the river.

Cathy was thinking that she and Happy Hal looked pretty incongruous in their blue uniforms and hand held radios. Then one of the college kids pointed at them and sang ”Car 54, Where Are You?”

“See?” Cathy said to Happy Hal, “We fit right in.”

Fred brought them folding chairs, got them settled in and then came back with two TV trays. “You’re in luck,” said Fred. “Ethels’ made fish sticks tonight, with tartar sauce. And a nice iceberg lettuce salad with thousand island. And coffee cake for dessert.”

“How does that work with the cherry coke?” Cathy asked.

Ethel said, “It’s iced tea tonight, dear. Don’t be frivolous.”

Fred said to the room, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s schedule. We’ll get started with an episode of Lucy, as usual. Then an episode from the ‘59 season of 77 Sunset Strip. And we’ll finish out the proceedings with ladies’ choice. Leave it to Beaver, or Ozzie and Harriet?”

Cathy’s arm shot up and waved around. “Ooh! Ooh! Ozzie and Harriet!”

Peach Cobbler said, “Ricky’s just the dreamiest.”

“Mmmm mmmmm” said the college girl.

“I hate fish sticks” said Happy Hal in a low voice.

“I don’t even know what they are,” said Cathy.

Ethel brought plates out to Cathy and Happy Hal and set them on the TV trays. “We’re glad you could make it, dear. We were afraid you’d be too busy saving lives.”

“Fingers crossed,” said Cathy.

“39,” said the radio on Happy Hal’s belt. Happy Hal let out a sigh, rolled his eyes and answered. “39. Go ahead.”

 

 

If it weren’t for liquor and cigarettes, Cathy and Happy Hal would have been out of work along with all the other paramedics. Almost everything that can suddenly go downhill fast enough to cause a 911 call will fall into one of a handful of obvious categories that paramedics are trained to handle. These include chest pain, trouble breathing, stroke, car wrecks, gun shot wounds, wife beating, and a few others. Any of these things can happen naturally, of course, through the random bad luck associated with factors like diet, genetic heritage and choice of husband. But in order to pump out emergencies on the industrial scale seen in all metropolitan areas, emergency after emergency, day after day, year after year, to the point where it’s necessary to scatter dozens of paramedic teams throughout the city just to keep up, random bad luck alone is inadequate. Powerful help is needed, and cigarettes and alcohol are the help people turn to, to get the job done. Alcohol is perfect for car wrecks, gunshot wounds and domestic assault, while cigarettes are just the thing for strokes, heart attacks and all kinds of lung problems.

There is an additional category of paramedic calls. It’s only ever used by dispatchers. No one calling 911 uses it because it isn’t a phrase in normal life. It means that whoever called 911 wasn’t sure what exactly happened, but they saw someone in a public place who used to be upright and isn’t any more. And as everyone knows, people aren’t supposed to be horizontal in public. This dispatch category is “man down.” “Man down” could turn out to be anything. Or nothing. Sometimes the medics arrive and there’s no one to be found, up or down. In the case of a skid row call, the originally intended aid recipient may be any one of a dozen derelicts lying around who all look more or less equally down. The medics, when they arrive, try to guess which one, if any, the caller meant. Drugless Riggs, who considered any intervention beyond the taking of a pulse to be “doctor shit” exceeding the paramedic’s mandate, was legendary in his ability to walk up to an area beneath a bridge or overpass and instantly point out the one guy in a crowd of horizontal stew bums who would turn out to be dying right that minute and not, like the others, next month. For all the other medics, a man down call means that nobody knows anything yet, so why get your adrenaline going unnecessarily until you get there?

If you are man-down curious and would like to experiment with being a man down yourself, it’s almost as easy as it sounds. If you’re good at falling without hurting yourself, you’re 90% of the way there. But since most people aren’t, and because all the best places for being down in public are hard surfaces such as sidewalks, strip mall parking lots or supermarket aisles, you will need to go horizontal discreetly and then wait to be discovered. For this, some patience is required and the aspiring man down has to be willing to work within the confines of the situation.

Even more important than patience is posture. Posture is key. Lying face down with your limbs at odd angles – nothing extreme – is best. Lying on your side is also a good strategy. If you lie on your back with your feet together, your hands at your side and your face pointed up, you will look like someone who for some reason just decided to lie down on the sidewalk, or wherever you’ve chosen, for a nap. People will judge you, certainly, and probably harshly. But no one will call 911.  A perfect example of incorrect posture was the young man lying on the sidewalk in front of Happy Donuts.

As Happy Hal turned left off of Hawthorne onto 39th with lights and siren, Cathy was pensive. Eventually she said, “We never get calls for a woman down, do we?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just my point. Women can go down too, yet it’s always ‘man down.’ I wonder why that is?”

“Men and women are different is all.”

“So you paid attention in paramedic school after all.”

Happy Hal rolled his eyes. “Stew bums are men and bag ladies are women. Different kinds of things happen to them, is all. Stew bums go down. Bag ladies don’t.”

“Seems a little simplistic, don’t you think?”

“When’s the last time we got a call on a woman down?”

“Sexist nomenclature is what that is.”

“Jesus.”

On the sidewalk just in front of the entrance to Happy Donuts, a small theater-in-the-round had been set up with a small intimate audience of about a dozen. On stage a tall policeman stood over the body of a young man who lay face up with his eyes closed. Neither cop nor horizontal man was moving. The only action was the extras who circumambulated the audience, coming in or out of the donut shop.

Happy Hal parked next to the cop car. Cathy climbed out and walked toward the cop, then looked at the young man, groaned, and shook her head. “Faaaaake!” The cop looked at her curiously. She went up to the man down and bent over him with her hands on her knees. “Because of you, whatever it is that fish sticks are, I’m missing them. And I also didn’t get any lunch.”

Happy Hal walked up with the medical kit, took one look at the man down, pivoted around and took it back to the truck.

“He’s all yours,” Cathy said to the cop.

“Ah… OK. You’re not planning on … like a blood pressure or anything?”

“Nah. Nothing in the world wrong with him.” They were standing on either side of the man. Cathy looked down at him and raised her voice. “Because he’s faking it!”

“He is?” the cop said doubtfully.

“He is. First hint: notice how the patient’s got his eyes squeezed shut against the sun. Unconscious people don’t squint. Second hint: the patient is lying with his ankles crossed. Guys always cross their ankles when they’re relaxing on their back. Unconscious guys never lie with their ankles crossed like that. So when you see this guy doing it, you know,” and she looked down and raised her voice again, “that he’s faking!”

At which point the young man leapt to his feet and began yelling non stop at Cathy and the cop. Due to the high volume and rapid cadence, it was a moment before Cathy was able to follow the thrust of the man’s reasoning. Which was that it was unacceptable for law enforcement and medical responders to minimize the danger of unconsciousness and that to egregiously belittle unconscious persons was both morally and ethically repugnant.

 

Fred and Ethel opened the door and Fred grinned happily. “Say! You two don’t dawdle when you go out to save a life, do you?”

The living room was packed. Three more students had joined the three already there and Peach and Maggie were talking to a woman in a house frock that Cathy recognized as a mug-hanging regular at the Three Sisters. On the tiny TV screen Lucy and Ethel were in the kitchen scheming on something, and everyone was watching and eating their fish sticks. Fred had grabbed the remaining two folding chairs and was looking for a place to set them down while Ethel held two plates full of food.

Dumb Fuck Kid slid his chair and TV tray to the side to give Fred room to place the chairs. They unfolded their TV trays and Ethel put down the plates. When she came back with iced tea Cathy was working on her first mouthful of fish sticks and smiling. “Where have these been all my life?”

Then Happy Hal’s radio spoke again. “39.”

Cathy, who had been too absorbed in a fish stick-induced euphoria to hear the summons, saw Happy Hal roll his eyes and take the radio off his belt. “Nooooo!” she moaned through a mouthful of fish, breading and tartar sauce sludge.

“39, man down in front of the church at SE 16th and Poplar. This is a possible stabbing. Police are en route.”

“Fucking hope so,” Happy Hal said under his breath and into the radio said, “39 copy.”

“Nononono! I didn’t even get lunch!”

They pulled out from the apartment building onto Hawthorn and lit up. Cathy waited to turn on the siren until they’d gone a block. She was driving with a paper plate with fish sticks and a big blob of tarter sauce balanced on her right knee.

“If the cops aren’t there yet I’m not getting out,” said Happy Hal. “I’m not getting stabbed.”

“Ehh! Nobody gets stabbed in Ladd’s Addition. Nobody’s ever got stabbed in Ladd’s Addition. What would the neighbors say?”

She turned left on 16th and could see the corner towers of the church a few blocks down the street. Behind them a patrol car took the corner onto the 16th and then gunned past them. As she approached the church she saw a second patrol car running down 16th from the opposite direction with lights and siren and behind it, another paramedic unit – a kind of mirror image of her own two-vehicle caravan.

In front of the church two men lay on the sidewalk while a third was hugging one of the alder trees that flanked the walkway into the church entrance. The cop was already herding the clot of neighbors and pedestrians out of the way. Cathy carefully set her paper plate of fish sticks between the two seats as she pulled up and parked in the space the cop had just cleared.

Ignoring the tree hugger for the moment, Cathy and Happy Hal grabbed the equipment box from the back and stepped over to the largest man Cathy had ever seen outside of a sports arena. Her initial guess – because he was so big she couldn’t help but take a stab a some numbers – was six foot seven and a little less than 300 pounds. He was leaned back on his elbows. There was a large, deep horizontal slice on the side of his neck and out of that a fountain of blood spurted in fast regular pulses. He looked confused and unhappy. Several of the onlookers called out, quite reasonably as far as Cathy was concerned, that the man was bleeding to death.

Happy Hal knelt down at his head and laid several fingers of his bare hand on the wound and pressed down. The bleeding stopped immediately and the man turned his head toward Happy Hal and said, “Thanks, man.” “No prob” said Happy Hal as he opened the equipment box and started putting together a dressing with his free hand and his teeth.

Just as Cathy reached the second man lying on the sidewalk, the second patrol car and paramedic unit arrived. She pointed them to the tree hugger. The man was lying on his side and snoring peacefully. She could see the plunger of a hypodermic needle in his breast pocket. She heard another siren approaching. Probably an engine company, which was good because guys in fire trucks like it when there’s something for them to do at the scene of a medical emergency, which there sometimes isn’t, and the man mountain with the sliced carotid artery was going to need a lot of lifting.

She started to carefully roll the man onto his back so she could look for wounds in front. He snorted, mumbled and sat up. He looked around, saw five vehicles with lights flashing, cried out “Oh shit!” and began flailing wildly at his chest until his hands found the needle which he grabbed from his pocket and flung into the hedge that bordered the sidewalk.

Cathy looked at the hedge, then at the man. “I’m gonna tell.”

He started to stand but she put a heavy hand on his shoulder. “In a minute. First, are you hurt?”

“Hurt?” He gave her a bewildered look. “I’m not hurt.” He looked down at his chest and legs and patted himself down. “Am I?”

“Why were you lying here?”

“I just sat down for a minute ‘cause Huey and Tiny looked like they were gonna keep arguin’ until God knows when and I was tired.”

“And real drunk?”

“And real drunk, if I’m gonna be honest with you.”

“That needle you just tossed, was it still loaded?”

“Shit yeah. I never got a chance to use it before I fell out.”

“Woulda been kind of a waste, huh?”

“You got that one right. You aren’t gonna arrest me are you?”

Cathy tilted her head in the direction of the huge man. “I guess that must be Tiny?”

“Yeah. What’re they doin’ to him?”

“Got his throat slit open.”

“Oh shit, no! Did Huey do that to him?”

At this point the second cop walked up. Cathy stood up. “Have you ever had fish sticks?” she asked him.

If he thought it was an odd way to be debriefed by a uniformed medic he didn’t let it show. “Of course. When I was a kid. Why?”

“Oh, I just missed lunch is all. And then I was trying to eat dinner, which was fish sticks, which I’ve never had. It’s a long story. Anyway, this guy’s fine. Ask him to tell you about Huey and Tiny.” And she walked back to where Happy Hal along with Tim Toole and Drugless Riggs, the second paramedic crew, and the crew of the engine company were gathered around Tiny, who was sitting up with an IV tube attached to his right arm, and listening to the other cop explain patiently to him that if he didn’t calm the fuck down and cooperate he was going to be cuffed and sent to jail.

“Gonna kill that motherfucker!” said Tiny, staring straight ahead and ignoring the cop. “Kill that motherfucker!”

“Guy’s probably got his own zip code,” said the Lieutenant from the engine company. “Hope he can walk to your truck.”

Happy Hal said, “After I stopped the bleeding he started to nod off on me. The guy who was hanging out at that tree over there said he’d shot up just before getting sliced. I didn’t know whether he was nodding off from the heroin or …”

“So you gave him some narcan and now that the smack’s been neutralized his bubbly personality is coming out…” And she stopped in mid sentence, stared into the distance for a moment and then said, “That’s it! I’ll bet that would work.”

And that was how, ten minutes later, Cathy and Happy Hal came to be driving back to Fred and Ethel’s in a truck featuring an empty, Tiny-free stretcher. She had accomplished this by simply offering to give Tiny to Tim Toole and Drugless Riggs. It wasn’t a hard sell. Tim Toole would get to stick with his blood-soaked patient with the cool and gory sliced carotid artery, which is something even paramedics don’t see very often. And Drugless Riggs would be out of service while he drove to the ER, and so not be available to respond to the next urine-soaked stew bum who went horizontal in public.

Fred and Ethel answered the door again. “Hey, you two really do work fast.”

“I guess the fish sticks are probably…”

“Sorry, kiddo. But hey! there’s still plenty of coffee cake left.”

Cathy smiled and tried to look excited.

The episode of “77 Sunset Strip” was on pause while dessert was being passed around. Dumb Fuck Kid had put a 45 record on the turntable and he, Maggie and Peach and two of the college students were singing along.

Running Bear loved little White Dove
With a love as big as the sky
Running Bear loved little White Dove
With a love that couldn’t die

Happy Hal said, “Don’t get too comfortable; we’ll probably get another man down.”

“Mom!” Peach didn’t exactly yell. It was loud but the tone curled up at the end. It was the tone of voice you’d use if you saw someone about to walk in front of a bus and you figured they saw it but weren’t sure. “Mom!?”

Cathy looked over and saw Maggie Cobbler, sitting on the couch and looking straight ahead. She either hadn’t heard Peach call her or had decided to ignore it. Peach was now touching Maggie, stroking her forehead. “Mom?” she said more softly.

Between the aggregate 575 pounds of Maggie and Peach there was no room on the couch, so Cathy knelt on the floor and took Maggie’s hand. It was cold and sweaty. “I don’t feel so good,” Maggie said in a whisper, moving her head right and left a bit.

Happy Hal came up, took a look at Maggie and headed for the door. Cathy told Dumb Fuck Kid to take a few of the students and go help her partner carry up the stretcher and equipment. She stood, bent over Maggie and said in her ear, “Just so happens we’ve got a truck loaded up with all sorts of goodies for what ails you.”

“I don’t feel so good,” Maggie said again, and Peach looked at Cathy and her face looked even worse than Maggie’s.

 

Saturday Sam was pretty sure he wouldn’t like working a Thursday swing shift. But since he’d never done it before he had not taken the trouble to develop a negative attitude about doing so. True, he reasoned, there was a kind of economy of scale involved: once all the effort to develop a bad attitude about working a Thursday had been expended, the negativity could then just as easily be applied to any other non-Saturday that he might have to work, should such a thing ever come to pass. Still, it was too much trouble to be negative ahead of time. So when he had to pay back a shift to the doctor who’d covered one of his own Saturday mornings, he just disliked it spontaneously and without preparation when the day arrived.

The shift had begun mercifully. He’d found a year-old copy of Field And Stream in the admitting office and had made it all the way through the product review of compound bows and was well into the one on hunting blacktail deer on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula when a sprained ankle showed up, followed by a delightful little old lady out of a nursing home, very dehydrated, who needed only a bag of IV fluid to make her feel like the bee’s roller skates again and who seemed authentically interested when Sam started sharing what he’d learned about compound bows while they whiled away the time waiting for her lab work to get back. Then it was back to blacktail deer.

It was beginning to get dark when a paramedic team radioed that they were on their way in with a cut carotid artery on a heroin user. When the paramedic unit and a cop car pulled up in front of the ER entrance, the driver of the ambulance got out, came in and got a wheel chair and parked it at the rear doors of the truck. Then the driver of the cop car opened his door and stood up. His uniform shirt was covered with so much blood that for a second Sam thought he had been shot. Then the second medic stepped down out of the back of the truck. His uniform shirt and pants were also covered with blood. He and the cop then helped out the the truck the one of the largest human beings Sam had ever seen and crammed him rather unceremoniously into the wheel chair. The man’s t-shirt was also soaked with blood and there was a blood-stained dressing on the right side of his neck. It took both the medics to move the wheel chair, with Tim Toole keeping one hand bearing down on the cut, to keep it from spurting.

“I can hardly tell which one of you’s the patient,” Sam told the four of them as he led them into one of the rooms where a couple of nurses were waiting.

“Meet Floyd Johnston,” the cop said. “’Tiny’ to his friends. We can’t be completely sure yet but it looks like it was neck vs. straight razor. Guy with the straight razor didn’t stay around to assist in our enqueries.”

“Don’t got to worry any about him! I’m gonna kill that motherfucker! ” Tiny looked at the wall and scowled, his fists in a ball. “And I know my rights, too!” To Sam it looked as if the man must have lost about half a barrel of blood and yet he didn’t look all that bad. In Sam’s experience people who’ve had their throats laid open with something like a razor tended to be quite weak and to look like hell. Floyd Johnston just looked really pissed off and full of energy.

Sam looked at the medics and instead of assuming the worst and yelling “Where the hell is this man’s IV?” instead asked, “And Mr. Johnston didn’t get an IV, it looks like?” just as if it didn’t really matter all that much and he was just curious.

“He tore out the IV on the way in,” said Tim Tool. “And took off his dressing and tried to leave through the back door. Officer Hren helped us keep him inside. ”

“Ah! That would explain your uniforms. Never mind, here we are at the bed. And now, Mr. Johnston if we can just help you onto the bed.” And added to himself, “Which might or might not collapse.”

“Don’t wanna get on any table.”

The cop said, “Floyd, will you just give these folks a break? Your throat’s cut. They need to fix it.”

“No. I’m gone. I know my rights.”

“You’ve got a right to die. You want to exercise that right too?”

Tiny refused the bait. “Am I under arrest?”

“No.”

“Kill that motherfucker!”

Sam asked, “Anybody know what else he might have on board? Besides the heroin?”

“Bunch of booze. God knows what other than that,” said Tim Toole.

Sam said, “Well, God’s not saying. Could be anything, or nothing. Mr. Johnston, what am I going to do with you? That’s a huge cut on your throat. You might bleed to death if you don’t let me stitch it up.”

“You ain’t gonna do nothin’. I’m the one’s got something needs doing.”

Then suddenly he stood up. It was like watching a 20-year time lapse movie of a redwood tree growing. Tim’s hand was no longer bearing down on the wound. Sam looked at the cop and the cop shrugged his shoulders and said, “Free country. Nothing I can do.” Tiny walked to the door opened it up and let it swing shut behind him.

As the cop turned around to follow him, Sam said, “I’d like to do an over-and-under on how far he’ll get but I don’t think there’s going to be time for that. That young fellow stood up way too fast.”

 

Happy Hal pulled into the ER entrance and parked next to the paramedic truck and patrol car already there. The fire truck stopped behind them – they were going to need all three fire fighters to deal with the stretcher that had an oxygen tank, an IV bag, a portable ECG machine and all of Maggie Cobbler on it. As Happy Hal walked around to the rear of the truck, the entrance door to the ER treatment area slid open. Just inside the threshold a man gigantic enough to make Maggie Cobbler look like a child lay writhing in slow motion on the floor, a huge gash on the side of his forehead where he had toppled onto the floor. He was mumbling loudly – Hal couldn’t make out what he was saying. The linoleum flooring was smeared with blood. Two nurses, two security guards, Drugless Riggs, and two men that might have been Tim Toole and one of the cops from the slicing call, though it was hard to tell from the blood all over their uniforms – all of them were trying to somehow move Tiny Floyd Johnston’s uncooperative and barely conscious body onto a large wood backboard. The effort didn’t seem to be going very well.

Saturday Sam walked out the door and met Happy Hal at the rear door of the paramedic truck. “You’ll have to excuse the chaos,” he said. “They’re filming a horror movie.”

 

Dumb Fuck Kid held a hammer and was tacking two blankets over the big livingroom window – now without its glass – that looked out onto Hawthorn Blvd. The fire department’s crane truck that had lifted Maggie out the window onto the sidewalk had stayed on after the departure of the ambulance and the hose truck, so that the crew could clean up the considerable amount of broken glass that had fallen onto the street. The students had cleaned up the TV trays, vacuumed up the window glass that had fallen onto the floor, hugged Ethel and left. Friend to Animals had gone back downstairs to her own apartment. The mug-hanging Three Sisters regular had driven Peach to collect Cherry and Apple and then take them to the hospital. Peach had just called a few minutes before with the news that Maggie had almost certainly had a heart attack but it was too soon to know much more than that. She’d been taken up to the cardiac care unit, where the daughters were in the waiting room holding vigil.

When Dumb Fuck Kid was done covering the broken window with the blankets he came over to where Fred and Ethel were sitting on the couch, holding hands, staring ahead at nothing. It was just the three of them now. “Can I do anything else? Get you anything?”

Fred shook his head. “Thanks, kiddo. We’re alright. You might as well call it a night.”

Ethel said, “You were sweet to help out, Honey.” Then her lips began trembling. Tears made their way down her cheeks. “I don’t like real life,” she said and then began to sob quietly.