Conversations in the Ambulance

I’ll leave the outcome till the end, though a short story that takes place almost entirely inside a travelling ambulance will have plenty of narrative direction without withholding the outcome.

I was avoiding anxiety by trying to nap on Blaise’s couch, with the dogs, of course, when Anna, my middle daughter, came up the walk rather white-faced and out of breath and told me that her friend Sal had just gone over the handlebars and had hit the street headfirst and was currently lying in the ditch not moving. Bleary, I grabbed the keys and my boots and we drove out the driveway. Sal was only a hundred yards up the road, lying in a circle of locals. One was supporting her neck, and another was probing her all over in a sort of informed-looking way. Accidents alter people’s behavior. Most people shift toward brusque officiousness, like they’ve suddenly been deputized as crossing guards. Their speech becomes clipped and executive, their faces become stern and a bit pinched, and long-latent procedural wisdom surfaces. The first thing I heard as I approached from the truck was a young, normally soft-spoken woman bark, at one of the self-appointed EMTs, “Do NOT let her neck twist. Severe spinal injury could result”. Even in my somewhat disoriented and concerned state, the instruction-manual diction and first-responder tone of her voice struck me as amusing, even worthy of later mockery. But I’m not writing this to mock. I’m trying to be a good reporter. Besides, I am grateful that my neighbors responded as carefully and selflessly as they did.

Kolob is a very small town. There is no doctor, and we are lucky to have a second-hand ambulance and a couple of certified EMTs. Turns out that someone had called 911, and in a couple of minutes the ambulance showed up. Looking at Sal, I was fairly sure she was going to be ok. No blood, good color, coherent, strong pulse, no acute pain beyond what you’d expect after landing on the pavement without a helmet. My laissez-faire parenting style has always suggested that accidents are good for kids. As long as they’re not permanently harmed, they learn valuable things about pain and suffering and toughness and the importance of protecting the head. So I stood there looking at Sal and thinking things would turn out ok, and then I approached Handy Weiskopf, one of the EMTs, and I asked him quietly and respectfully, taking care to remove all crisis-talk from my voice, what he thought. His rather curt reply, as he shouldered around me, was “Take her to Ditchfield”. Ditchfield has the nearest proper hospital, and is over 100 miles away over twisting mountain roads. I groaned. Over his shoulder, as he began his ministrations and they unloaded the gurney, I asked about other options. He explained that only the child’s parent could overrule the mandatory ambulance ride, and Sal’s parents were in Salt Lake and we were out of cell range and running out of time.

They rolled Sal onto the gurney. Anna and I loaded into the ambulance to go with her. Anna sat in back to hold Sal’s hand. The EMTs sat with Sal, and began their tests and put her in an oxygen mask and strapped her down. I sat up front with the driver, Denny Mussolino, a Bronx transplant of notorious temperament, who was fuming at the delay, muttering about everyone’s incompetence. I plugged in my phone and settled in for what I figured would be a long and unpleasant ride. I tried to clear my head and gear up for Denny’s crushing negativity and what I imagined would be a night under fluorescent lights in a hospital waiting room with a tired and hungry and worried daughter. I began to worry about Sal’s parents’ reaction and my liability as the adult in charge.

We drove off slowly into one of our outrageous Kolob sunsets. The spinning red and white lights reflected off the shot-up signs. We twisted up into the mountains, keeping watch for deer and elk. I fiddled with my phone, trying to get reception, though I knew it would be another 25 miles before I could place a call.

Denny spoke up: “It’s always at night we get these calls. Lucky I was right there. We have the best response time in the County.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard.” I had heard no such thing, but I was determined to be agreeable.

“It’s always the two-wheeled conveyances: your bikes and your motorcycles.”

“Yeah. Two-wheeled conveyances at night. Bad recipe”, I agreed.

“Always some dumbass taking a corner too sharp, hitting the patch of gravel and donating his middle-aged organs.”

“Like that one last year up at the summit.” I really didn’t want to talk about this, but I always feel shamefully eager to please when older men want to talk. I even felt my thoroughly westernized accent revert to the blue-collar Boston accent I sometimes do to try to hide my academic background. I felt an urge to seek solidarity with Denny.

“That one was particularly messy”, Denny continued. “Guy was completely wrapped around this yoodge pine, and when we finally get him unwrapped, we find half his fairing in his lap. Not a pretty sight.”

“Jeez”.

“Don’t know how he survived. Took him as far as Lesbian Ledge and Life Flight got him. Sent me a postcard a month later and was doing ok, about to get out of the wheelchair. Miracle.”

“Jeez”.

We talked a while like this. I hoped Sal and Anna couldn’t hear us. I kept feeling an urge to pitch in with some comparable story, to establish my working-class bona fides, but I resisted. I worried that Denny would find me aloof or arrogant for not really engaging him. Then I got cell reception and started making my calls.

After several tries, I got through to Sal’s mother, who did a good job of remaining calm, and who actually thanked me for taking the conservative approach of going along with the ambulance ride. She was grateful Anna and I had gone with Sal, to keep her company.

About this time the EMTs’ phones got reception, too, and they spoke with a doctor, who advised them to go to a smaller clinic in a much closer town. Things were looking up. I wrote some notes in my journal about what had happened, along with times, and asked Denny to corroborate the times, so that if the insurance company asked questions we would have some basis for agreement. I couldn’t stand any more trouble in my life.

At the small clinic, Sal saw the same doctor who had stitched the end back on my finger a couple of summers ago. A good, warm, quiet man who had been a combat surgeon in Viet Nam, I think. He quickly ruled out concussion and spinal injury. I felt my shoulders unhunch. I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been. But he also said he could not rule out internal injuries, and noted that Sal felt sharp pain around her spleen and the clinic isn’t equipped with diagnostics for such an injury, so he ordered her to Ditchfield. We got back in the ambulance for another two hours’ winding through the hills.

Denny started in again: “Lucky I never ended up in the back of one of these” he patted the dashboard “when I was that age”.

“Wild kid?” I asked.

“That understates it.”

“Back in New Yok?”

“The Bronx.”

I was silent. He has a habit of correcting everything with his tone. People always say you can never say anything right around Denny.

“Racing cars. I drove a ’64 Chevelle. Offset quads, barely legal.”

“Fast car”, I said, hoping to sound impressed.

“Fast don’t start to describe it. It was dangerous, that car. 427, posi, 4-speed. Over 400 horses. Get the front end off the ground in second.”

“Jeez.”

“Anyways, we used to race all over. Two cars on the freeway up front side by side, then the rest of us blocked traffic, one car in each lane behind, so those two had space to race. Coppers couldn’t do anything about it because it’s a divided highway and on our side it was all traffic jam at maybe 30 mph where we were holding them back like a dam so two could race.”

“Wow. Cops must’ve hated that.”

“Couldn’t do shit about it.”

“Jeez.”

“Anyway, so later I rebuilt a ’55 Bel Air. Bored, blown, and polished. Was gonna do nitro, but I ran out of money when I went to school.”

I jumped on this possible change of topic: “What’d you study?”

“Got certified as a phone and radio operator. Worked for the transit authority doing security cameras. Worked on the Narrows Bridge for a year, and up on the towers. All union. Good money. And when I worked the towers I got high time.”

I wished I knew what high time was. It sounded so uniony and blue-collar. “What’s high time?”

“It’s like overtime, but based on risk of a serious fall instead of on working too many hours.”

“So, like, you climbed these towers and got more pay for the risk?”

“Exactly. We used to buy spots on the high-time list from the supervisor. Later he worked for Spitzer, probably taking kickbacks from the girls for all I know. Every supervisor in NYC is a crook. That’s just how business gets transacted in the city.”

“Yeah”, I agreed, more out of exhaustion than from any first-hand familiarity with the workings of big city graft.

“Anyway, so, we would buy high time at about ten cents on the dollar, go up the towers, make as much as a doctor, and spend it on booze and girls and cars.”

What else? I imagined all these burly, literally blue-collared young men carousing and talking about cars and drinking in bars watching Mets games.

“I had a ’67 Nova SuperSport”, I volunteered, truthfully. “In high school.”

“That’s a cherry ride”, he actually said. “350?”

“327.”

“What’d you do to it?”

“Not as much as I wanted”, I said, again telling the truth. I had, indeed, had dreams of having the fastest car in Tucson High School. “Glass packs, headers, opened up the air filter.”

“Four on the floor?”

“Yep.”

“So how come you drive that piece of shit now?” This said aggressively, with no hint of humor.

“Money.”

“I hear ya.”

“Yeah.”

Silence for a while, and then:

“After the Bel Air I was drinking too much and stopped getting high time so I drove just stock for maybe ten years. Hard to get laid driving stock, being a drunk, and having no money, as well as a shitty basement apartment.”

“Yeah.”

“You been there?”

“Nah. I been lucky.” Hearing myself I felt ashamed, but I couldn’t stop this charade. What would someone else do? I always want to be liked.

“Well, anyway, then I said ‘Fuck this’, and I sobered up and saved some money and then opened a furniture restoration shop. Had thirty, forty employees. Drove a nice old Camaro, a ’69, clean and restored, to the clubs on weekends and had a couple of real nice lady-friends.”

“Turned it around?”

“That’s an understatement. One hundred and eighty fuckin degree turnaround.”

“Wow.”

We went on and on like this for two hours, interrupted only by a phone call from Sal’s mom, who was rushing to Ditchfield from Salt Lake to spend the night with Sal. I reported this to Sal in the back, and she cheered up. Handy, the EMT in charge, then said, flatly, “There’s motels all around the hospital. Should be easy to find a room.”

“You’re not driving back to Kolob tonight?” I asked.

“WE are. But you’re not allowed to ride the ambulance back to town. Only to the hospital. County policy.”

“Shit.”

I called Blaise, back in Kolob, and asked if she could come and get us, but it was too late. She was tired. I resigned myself to a long night and ruined plans.

Denny spoke again: “Liability. Common decency says you ride home with us, lawyers say no. This is all about the insurance companies and the lawyers and the regulators. I left the city to be in this paradise and next thing I know the lawyers are here, too, fuck everything up.” He swerved around a ghostly buck, standing dumbly at the white stripe.

“Yeah.” Silence for a minute. “The deer look like hell this spring.”

“Hard winter”, said Denny. “You’d think they’d look pretty glossy after all the hay they ate in Kolob this winter.” He has a way of adding bitterness to things. He doesn’t farm, but the deer eating hay in Kolob he takes as an injustice committed against him and against decency. The deer and the lawyers seem to be wrecking everything.

“You getting your buck this fall?”, I asked, again wincing at my self-conscious everyman phraseology.

“Nah. Don’t hunt. On account of the cruelty.”

This surprised me. Hot rods and booze and broads and blue-collar credentials are usually part of a parcel that includes hunting, or at least an attitude amenable to hunting.

“Can’t stand to shoot an animal and watch it bleed”, he continued. “I’m a softy, maybe ever since Bambi.” He guffawed, sort of a hoarse bark, like he wasn’t used to mirth. “I eat meat, though.”

I took all this as a confession of some kind, or maybe as an attempt to meet me halfway between his staunch working-class milieu and my thinly-disguised educated liberalism, or whatever it is. “How do you square that?”, I ventured, and noted my heartbeat speed up. I felt nervous to be challenging him like this.

”Square it? I’ll tell you how I square it. Basically, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you have an idea of complicity that says that if you believe something is wrong, like I believe hunting is wrong, then you believe you should avoid it altogether and that if you, say, eat meat while believing that hunting is wrong you are guilty of complicity because you are depending on someone else’s sin, the hunting being the sin in this case. But I believe in something like karma, so that a person who hunts is acting according to his own conscience and is not really sinning if he feels ok about what he’s doing, etcetera. So if I buy and eat meat from a happy hunter, I am not forcing him to do anything bad, I am not complicit in any sin because he is not sinning, because he believes hunting is ok, because that is his karma. So I eat meat, but I don’t feel guilty about it the way I’d feel guilty if I personally pulled the trigger. I just don’t buy the Judeo-Christian concept of complicity, is why I eat meat with no qualms.”

I was a bit taken aback by this explanation, coming from Denny. I had maybe underestimated him, or mis-categorized him as a more or less unreflective brute. The good thing is that the didactic tone of his lecture, even given in that Bronx accent and with its problematic conflation of the Buddhist notion of karma with what I took to be an ethnic Italian Catholic understanding of sin and guilt, somehow gave me permission to ease back into my natural way of talking. I slipped out of my blue-collar guise, and ventured: “So, how do you understand economic ethics? I mean, if everyone acts according to his karma, and those who abhor hunting eat meat, then aren’t we creating a system in which great harm is done that we, the consumers, feel no responsibility for? Aren’t we complicit in a worldwide system of harm, even if we believe that individual people, like your hunter, for example, are blameless?”

“No fuckin way. That’s your educated liberalism or whatever showing. You can’t spend your whole life all stressed out about where everything comes from and how much suffering and shit is involved in everything you buy and consume. I refuse to live my life that way. What? Like I’m supposed to every time I want to buy a fuckin can of tomatoes hold it in my hand a weigh all the harm and suffering involved in getting it to my pantry or my plate or whatever? No fuckin way.”

“But people less enlightened than you do real harm to each other and to the world all the time so they can put food on the table and when we buy their stuff we are aiding and abetting their crimes, or unethical actions, don’t you think?”

“Of course we are, but we don’t need to wreck our lives about that, worrying about everything. That can of tomatoes I bought that paid some small part of, say, some mafia hit in Bayonne or whatever? That doesn’t change the fact that the tomatoes are delicious and nutritious.”

“No, but wouldn’t the world be a better place, especially for poor people, if we bought only from people who practice something like our own values?”

“Sure, but this misses the point, which is that what would really make the world a better place for poor people is if there were fewer of them. I mean six point five billion of us is wrecking the world no matter how much we stress about the route a can of tomatoes took from the third world to our plate.”

“Overpopulation.”

“For sure. Absolutely.”

“Should I even ask what the solution is to overpopulation?” I asked.

That mirthless hacking bark of a laugh again. “No. You better not.”

We finally arrived in Ditchfield, unloaded Sal, and stood in the emergency-room hall. A fastidiously-groomed, unsmiling doctor said he’d run some tests to check for internal injuries. I called Sal’s mother again. She was only minutes away. She must have driven over 100 miles per hour to get there that fast. Handy, the EMT, came up and said we could ride back to Boulder with then in the ambulance, rules and lawyers be damned. I was grateful. It was after 1:00 in the morning, and I was exhausted. Sal’s mother arrived, barely acknowledged me as she ran past, and we left.

This time I sat in the back so the junior EMT could have a more comfortable seat up front. I sat in the side-facing bench with Handy. Anna buckled in on the gurney and soon fell asleep.

I tried to get back into endurance mode. Handy has a reputation for craziness. I barely knew him, and was a bit scared that he’d say something crazy and my natural affability with strangers would rope me into seeing things his way, or appearing to. I hoped he’d go to sleep, but he swung one leg up onto the bench to face me, and started talking right off.

“She’ll probably get released tomorrow. Didn’t look more than bruised to me, but we always need to play it safe and be all conservative and shit and follow the freakin checklist and above all else not use our judgment because that is what this system is designed to do is relegate us the non-lawyers to the role of robot to serve and perpetuate the system, so, me, I just keep my food-hole shut and do my job and hope I never end up taking a ride in this thing on that gurney.” He pulled off his Nascar hat and aggressively scratched his thinning mullet.

I sat there nodding, finding myself agreeing with the content, if not the sort of free-associative tone of Handy’s diatribe.

“Furthermore”, he continued after a couple of quick breaths, “the global socio-economics of this kind of situation are totally beyond the pale in which we have those Chilean miners or what have you or any other third-world sad sack getting what is basically zero medical attention of any kind and eating the same freakin thing every meal until they die young while here we have little suburban missy fall off her bike and get driven by five people in a $100,000-dollar ambulance over 100 miles each way so she can get her ibuprofen and whatever during which we are guzzling like 20 gallons of diesel, which, as old Denny would say is complicit in who knows what kind of damage worldwide.”

“Yeah”, I said, feeling the inevitable tug of wanting to appear agreeable, of wanting to be liked.

After some silence, in which I had taken out my journal to appear to be busy and Handy had fidgeted and scratched and stretched and drummed his fingers, he spoke up again: “Ok, so here’s the scoop: people like me move to a place like Kolob to escape what we, they, perceive as the tiresome and intrusive meddling of the government and neighbors and what have you, to a place that is supposedly free of such things in the middle of nowhere, where you can just mind your business and grow your food and do what you want without all their cameras looking and disapproving all the time. And then they show up wanting their pound of flesh as they say: the IRS, the FBI, the ATF and freak knows what else acronymized agencies of government coercion, not to mention the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints of which I used to be a tithe-paying member. The only way to escape their long arm of regulation is to be a total hermit, preferably in the deepest canyon in Mexico, because believe-you-me they will track you down and make you life a living hell.”

“They are everywhere”, I agreed. This felt like an acceptable and anodyne kind of agreement, one unlikely to get me roped into paranoid delusion.

“You believe so?” he asked, looking at me intensely.

“Well, I mean, they do seem to be able to track you down. I mean, as long as you have an address and pay taxes I guess they know where you are and…”

“I don’t care if you’re homeless and dealing strictly in barter, they own you.” This said with a kind of vehemence and pointedness that I started feeling trapped there in the back of the ambulance.

As it happens, I’ve recently had some unpleasant and surprisingly intrusive dealings with the IRS, and I felt a moment of kinship with Handy. I started nodding.

He continued: “Check this out: so I owned a bookstore in San Jorge, right? I specialized in rare and out-of-print stuff on Mormonism and Utah and the west as it was before the interstates and television, and this didn’t pay so good so I rented the space next door too and rented videos out of there and never threw out anything so we had 15, 20 thousand titles of videos and got listed as like one of the best video stores in the country and this was when San Jorge was, what? maybe 10,000 people? I mean, we were like bigger than any other store between the coasts, more titles, I mean like the entire oeuvre of the French New Wavers, all the great Italians and shit years before the Criterion Collection and what have you, and we were like mail-order filling orders from San Francisco and even New York for titles you just could not find anywhere else. Also, I had another shop with hard-to-find ammo, which I sold to people all over the intermountain because we are a gun-shooting culture, no doubt, and sometimes you cannot walk into Cabela’s or whatever up in Provo, and find, say .257 Roberts in soft point or .17 Hornaday, or .338 Lapua or even good old .222 Hornet for that matter, so I was making money hand over fist while I sat there in my first shop with old moldy Mormoniana which I sold to basically mostly the crowd you’d expect: old clean-cut Mormons who were looking to nourish their faith, or, as it were, confirm their biases, as well as some so-called scholars from BYU, which is not by any stretch a place of actual scholarship unless also madrassas count as universities or what have you. So, there I was running my little businesses when up shows a suit with papers and I am getting summoned, which is a deceptively gentle term for the coercion it really is, to Federal Court in Salt Lake to answer charges, a more accurate word, for what turned out to be tax evasion and running guns and what have you, which was about 90% not at all freakin true. Do you know what happens to a small business when its owner is in court for a month? It goes to shit. And the ATF took all my ammo and stored it in what must have been a swimming pool because when they finally allowed me to collect it a year later it was ruined and all the Lapua was missing, and that shit is like five bucks a round wholesale. I mean, you have to sell like ten shelf-feet of Mormoniana to pay for one case of Lapua wholesale, even if you can find someone in Finland who will sell it direct. Well, when I got out, I was thinking I should sell what remained of my businesses, which I should have said now included two other video stores in the state and one in Vegas, so I was actually raking in the currency, which they will always print more of, so I put everything up for sale and long story short I sold it for what I was asking and retired at the age of 30, but that was later, because when I first got out of federal custody I was home one night and the bishop and the ward clerk or some such come by midweek mind you in ties and coats which was a warning right then and handed my another summons, ecclesiastical this time, to a church court for charges of conduct unbecoming of a Mormon or some such shit, which I refused to attend, and so they excommunicated me in absentia, which means they must have been pretty sure I was guilty of what the feds were not able to prove I was guilty of, because I never had anything to do with weapons, just with ammo, all of which was legal until you load it into 30-round clips and start doing violence. I did not ever sell any assault weapons of any kind, regulated or no. And certainly didn’t cross any state lines to do it. Anyway, the church thought otherwise and excommunicated me, which in Mormonism basically means you are damned unless you express enough contrition to get let back in, which I was not going to do and humiliate myself in front of the church court which was basically made up of guys like me who I used to go boating with and hunting and stuff, so no way was I going in there and shedding the obligatory tears and besides, like I said I didn’t even do what they accused me of, so no way.”

“Wow.”

“Anyway, that barely scratches the surface of my beef against the church and the government. I am basically a cliché, I know: Western uneducated provincial type who mistrusts the government and wants to maintain his ostensible independence and whatever.”

“I was Mormon for a while. Joined back in high school.”

“I thought you was from Boston.” He said this like it’s some sophisticated, highbrow place, which in some ways it is.

“I am. I needed some structure in high school, and the missionaries showed up and baptized me.”

“Sounds pretty freakin passive of you just to get baptized by these Elders like that.”

I chuckled agreeably, while feeling sort of grumpy that he could take these liberties with me in our first conversation.

As we climbed up out of the green May valley above Brickdale, finally heading over the mountain to Kolob, it started snowing. We slowed more and more as deer and elk moved out of the woods and onto the pavement. They seemed mesmerized by the blinking lights. Diesel fumes started wafting into the ambulance, and the tires hissed on the pavement, a sound that always fills me with nausea and dread, for reasons I can’t remember. It took considerable effort to stay engaged with Handy’s near-monologue. I just wanted to lie down in fresh air and sleep.

“You serve a mission?”

“Um, yes, I did. I was in Mexico.”

“Serious? Shit! I had no idea.”

“How ‘bout you?”

“Yup. South side of Chicago and Urbana.” He smiled, apparently at the fond memory. “I loved it. Best two years of my life, as most of us veterans say.” He smiled again. “You?”

“I loved it and hated it. I mean, I felt like I was doing the right thing, and I felt that more clearly than I ever have since, but I was tired and hungry all the time, and bored, honestly, and I missed girls and my buddies back in the states.”

“Bingo.”

We were easing down off the last fold of mountainside, into the valley of Kolob. The air was stale. Denny flipped on the harsh overhead lights. I felt sallow and greasy and my back spasms were starting. Handy yelled up to Denny: “Hey, Denzel, man! I got a new best friend and compadre back here!”

Denny yelled back: “He seemed pretty normal to me. What criminal secrets do you two have in common?”

“Mormonism!”

“No shit?”

“No shit!”

We pulled into the town garage. Anna and I stumbled out. It was freezing. I thanked everyone for their help. We felt a kind of solidarity after being forced together for all these hours around an unfortunate event. Denny gave us a ride home, in his ancient truck full of cans of paint stripper and inscrutable tools. Anna and I made French toast and she went up to bed. I went out and sat in the yard with a glass of wine for a while, looking at the stars. The next morning Sal called Anna, and reported a stiff neck and some bruises, but nothing too bad. We took it easy that day.