by Luke Boyd

“Oh, well we can do this another night then, Bill. Go on in and give her hell and I’ll just see you around.”

“Heh, you just hang on and listen here!” He puts a blue-veined chicken wing arm around me and I can feel his swamped underwear soaking through my pants. “With women, and especially my wife, they can always wait. In forty-two years of marriage there’s an awful lot of waiting, so what’s another fifteen minutes? So let’s you and I go in and have a drink and smoke a cigar. And I’ll show you the new movies.”

I don’t exactly get up on time the next morning. Really I don’t actually get out of bed until two. After we finish off Bill’s cognac we’re so whacked that we start right in on my vodka. It’s so bad you need to have a bottle of something else down first to make it go alright. It’s what you might call “mixing vodka” except Bill’s got nothing to mix it with. So there we are, and it goes down straight. But it hurts the next day. So there I am back at my place in bed with the lights off at two in the afternoon, with a glass of water I can’t bear to drink because my head hurts so damn bad every time I move. Because I’m dehydrated. Because I should be pounding water like there’s no tomorrow. But I can’t. Because of my headache. Because I’m dehydrated. But I do have lots of police chase video shows to watch. All in all it’s not so bad.

The problem with these police shows is the problem with about everything else, too. The idea of sirens and lights signifying trouble is pretty outdated. For starters, what exactly constitutes an emergency? An emergency for me might be that I’m just getting off the highway and I really need to take a shit. I drive eighty the rest of the way home, through the city, running lights, grimacing behind the wheel. That’s my emergency. So where are my sirens?

The college kids across the street, they have different emergencies. They’re having a big party. More people come than are expected. It’s about a quarter-to-two and they’re about out of beer. Someone’s got to haul ass down to the bar with a load of drunks and get some six packs. Or else the party’s over. That’s their emergency. And if they make it just a few minutes late the bouncers will be herding everyone out and these college kids will be trying to squeeze their way in, and they’ll try to get six packs and the bartender will say, “Sorry, I can’t serve you anymore. It’s after two.” So why can’t the most sober kid just step up and say, “Sorry we’re late but we need that beer. It’s an emergency.”

This brings us to the next part, and the very core of who I am and what I do.

Listen up.

Things start out well-intentioned. There are firetrucks, ambulances, police cars—because when things go wrong you need them. Then there are alarm clocks, air raid sirens, horns, bells, and signs in neon. They take away from the original purpose of the emergency lights and the emergency sirens. Then we add terror alerts, warning lights, power-standby lights, breaking news bulletins, and construction signs. People are bombarded on all sides by warnings and notices.

Stop—Hurry Up—Forget It, Just Move Over.
Look Over Here—No, Over Here
Stay Inside—Listen Closely—No, Not To That, To This.

When I started working for Mercy Hospital I don’t think I realized the problem. I got up every morning or afternoon (depending on the shift I was working) and drank two cups of coffee while I checked the news. I was looking for the accidents and tragedies that had happened while I slept. There was always something—a jackknifed tractor-trailer spilling toxic chemicals, a domestic shooting at South Garden Apartments, some kid stuck in a sewer tunnel or storm drain. These were the kinds of calls that came pouring in to Mercy, the calls that sent me flying out of the emergency bay all sirens and lights, dispatched to fly like a madman to the scene of someone’s accident, slip-up, disease.

Two years of driving an ambulance and I knew the city. I was beautiful, I was miraculous—there was blocked traffic on Linden, I swung onto Ninth and barreled through the park—lives were saved. By day or by night people moved when I came, like a screeching terror I blew through intersections, parking lots, industrial parks. Then I started to see patterns in the kinds of people I was saving. They weren’t people like me or like Bill. They weren’t people who would ever (or could ever) return the favor. They didn’t deserve the sirens and lights.

Murderers.
Junkies.
Rapists.
Lowlifes.
Scum.

I would charge the wrong way down one-way streets, weave through pedestrians, pass on blind turns—I’d pull up at outside a Denny’s to find some cokehead lying in a pool of his own piss, sweating and muttering to himself about the Cosby Show.

I would cut off a school bus, narrowly slice past some kids at a crosswalk, crush a wayward squirrel under my churning wheels—I’d roar into the lot of some apartment complex to find a shiny BMW full of bullets and blood, behind the wheel some teenaged kid with gold capped teeth sobbing with his hands full of guts. Maybe a bicycle laying over on its side with his kid brother under it, his own little pool of death spilling out around him.

So I made a decision. And I started, it was sometime around Christmas I remember. I was just dropping one off at Mercy, a heart attack, when my radio started screaming. Shots fired with multiple injuries. 400th block of Pendleton. Suspected drug activity. Police en route.