We found him sitting on the curb, crying, drunk, and surrounded by firemen.
"They kicked me!" he howled, "like I'm not even a person."
I looked at him and thought, well, you are a drunk...
The fire department lieutenant looked at me and smirked. "Yeah," he said, "one of my guys gave him a little shot in the ribs to, you know, make sure he was still alive and everything. We found him passed out on the sidewalk...Now he's saying something about having chest pain."
I nodded and motioned for the man to stand up. I find that with drunks it is easiest to grab them with two hands, one on the belt, another on the collar. You can control their movement that way. Especially if they're really hammered, you can kind of throw them onto the stretcher and prevent them from falling. I grabbed him and helped him into the bus.
"Twenty years ago," he sniveled indignantly, "no one would have ever dared to kick me."
Oh yeah, right, back in the good ol' days, I thought.
I had never picked the man up before, which is something of a rarity with drunks, especially homeless ones. The man was Puerto Rican, named Jose, and the 14th of 14 children. He had served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and been a Corrections Officer for most of his life. I was moved by this, but not surprised. I had met two retired Corrections Officers--that is, prison guards--on the job, and they were both trainwrecks.
A lot of EMTs want to be cops, and sometimes it's easier to get a job as a prison guard than a regular cop. I beg them with my eyes not to take the job, not to volunteer for prison duty. Prison engulfs you, it cages your soul and estranges you from the world outside. It's not just a place but a state of mind, and come-and-go as you might, your mind stays there, trapped.
Jose keeps crying and whining about being treated like a dog. I ask him if he had ever kicked anyone while he was in prison. No, he said, he would never do that. I was dubious, and looked away.
At the hospital, he thanked me profusely for being so kind, as drunks tend to do. He offered me his hand, but I didn't want to touch it. I was afraid it was dirty, that maybe he had wiped his ass with it or jerked off in the morning. That's what I told myself at least.
I shook his hand nonetheless, and wanted to wash it immediately. It really wasn't the grime that bothered me so much as his humanity. By touching his hand and accepting his thanks, I had to recognize him as a person, not just a drunk. I didn't care about him, really, or at least I didn't want to. He was just another fucking drunk with a story. I hate fucking drunks. Kick 'em all you want, FDNY, it's fine with me. But in touching his hand and meeting his eyes, I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the guy. He had worked at an honorable, if thankless, job his whole life; he had served in the military and gotten shot in the knee; and now, here he was, drunk and homeless in New York City.
I felt uncomfortable, perhaps a little guilty.
A long time ago, when I was 18 and I had just become an EMT, I thought I was gonna save the world. I remember one day I went over to People's Park, where all the homeless slept, and offered them whatever medical assistance I could.
Jesus, I think to myself now, what was I doing.
Medicine--EMS--has changed me, made me less sympathetic to the world. I try to remember how I thought about the world and about people before I was in EMS, and I can barely remember it. That person that I was seems so foreign, so distant from who I am today.
When I first started working as an EMT, I would tell my friends how much the job makes me appreciate the fragility of my own life and how much it compels me to adopt a Carpe Diem outlook on life.
Yeah, that phase is over. Don't get me wrong, I still love my job, but I'm not a bright eyed kid anymore. I look at patients with one eye and another fixed on the cold calculus of self-preservation. I could care about you, but that would mean giving some of me to you, and I don't have that much of myself to go around. Empathy is dangerous--it can get inside you, remind you of the you you might become. It can make you imagine your father's heart attack or your sister's suicide. It can make you feel like you might be a patient, and that's all well and good when you're a kid with heart and love to spare. But I ain't that kid anymore. And here, today, on my stretcher, you're just another fucking drunk and I don't have time for your bullshit.
I know this post isn't as polished or dramatic as my usual writing, but it's the straight shit, it's how I feel, unedited, and the thing is, I want to be a good person and I still want to make the world a better place. But sometimes, I don't. Maybe I'm a bad person for feeling this way and thinking these things, but surely, I'm not alone.
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