It’s 8:34 p.m., and an elderly woman has fallen down in her home. We take the stretcher in past the evergreen bushes, the mailbox, and the Christmas lights, blinking through the cold darkness their message of suburban yuletide greetings, as the ambulance’s lights frantically spin and light up the driveway. The door’s open, so in we go, and she’s calling out from the living room, her hand holding on to the base of the railing, still trying to halfheartedly pull herself up.

There’s a good chance she’s broken her hip. That’s usually the case with a woman her age in a situation like this. You see it all the time.

The mantle in the living room has a row of pictures, and the fireplace below them is one of those fake electric ones. The picture in the middle is of a woman smiling, looking off somewhere else, not at the camera. She’s beautiful, blonde with shiny white teeth surrounded by maroon lipstick. She looks strikingly like my ex-wife, Carrie, except for the lipstick part. Carrie never wore lipstick, didn’t paint her nails, any of that shit.

I briefly wonder what she’s up to tonight. She’s probably doing something with that new husband of hers. Mike. Seems like a nice guy. She seems happy with him, anyway, and it’s been a few months, and it looks like they’re gettin’ along. You never can tell, though, I guess.

We get the woman in the stretcher, and she’s apologizing to us for putting us through all this trouble, and we tell her it’s our job, and that we’re glad she called us, because she looks pretty hurt. She talks about her granddaughter, who’s out of town, otherwise she would’ve called her. It sounds like it might be the woman in the picture.

We get her in the ambulance, tell her not to move around, and she’s gabby and pretty pleasant during the ride to the hospital. Bruce, the other EMT, gives her some pain killers, and she gets a little bit loopy and pretty funny, actually, talking about drinking when she was younger and the stuff they did back then when she partied as a younger woman.

She tells us how her husband shot a bear on a hunting trip, and had it turned into a bearskin rug. After it had been in their bedroom for about a week, he wanted to “christen” the rug by having sex with her on it, so they did, and she cackles with glee as she says they got pretty naughty that night, after a couple bottles of wine. The next morning, they woke up all covered in black dye; the taxidermist had died the fur to make it more consistent, and they were covered in the stuff. We all crack up at this, and it kind of makes my night.

About 10:15 we get a heart attack, and it’s not as pretty. Guy’s obviously thrashed about his little apartment, trying to get up or to the phone or something, and there’s crap everywhere, including a broken pint glass. He’s got a small cut on his forearm that probably came from the glass.

The cardiac part’s over, but we have to take him in for testing and all that to be sure, and he’s pretty shaken up, as scared as someone can be when they know they just about bought it. He’s fairly young, too, in his late thirties probably, so it is kind of freaky. Looks like one of those executive types that works down in the city, probably at an insurance company or something. He still has khakis on.
I used to walk in that world some. I was a VP at a company that made forms, like employment applications and stuff, a pretty big one. Successful. I made money for sure there, but worked a lot, late, sometimes on weekends. It was fun for a long time, buying whatever we wanted, having fancy cars, throwing parties and stuff. Good times.

But the long hours meant less time at home, and without time together, you drift apart, and that’s what happened with Carrie and me. We both ended up making some bad decisions along the way, and even though I quit the job and the life I was living to try and rebuild our marriage, it was too late; she’d moved on. I didn’t blame her. In her shoes, I probably would’ve done the same thing.

Bruce and I get the cardiac guy into intensive care. He’s silent the whole ride, clearly trying to understand what all of this means. It stinks when your body lets you down. We respect his silence and do our jobs. I say reassuring things here and there, uncertain as to whether he can even process them at this point. The hospital’s got good doctors, so he’ll be in good hands. This is the fourth heart attack this week, which is about average.

Quitting time. Bruce and I laugh about the bearskin rug story one more time as we punch out, I stick a couple of IVs in my duffel bag when Bruce isn’t looking, then I’m walking to my car through the light snow, shivering a bit. It smells like garlic. There’s a spice factory in town, and they discovered in the fall that they had a bunch of garlic salt they couldn’t use anymore, that had expired on them. Something like four tons of the stuff. So they gave it as a gift to the city, which has been using it to salt the roads when it snows. When it melts, it gives the whole city a garlic smell, so you can always tell right after the salt trucks have been out.

I kind of like the smell, actually, but you read a lot of complaints in the paper about it. People never seem to be happy. Probably saved them a bunch of tax money, but they still complain.

There aren’t a lot of people out on the roads this time of night, partly because of the snow, partly because it’s late on a weeknight. I head towards Oly’s, the bar I hit when I get off work. It’s a small hole-in-the-wall kind of place, nothing fancy, not a very good selection of beers, mostly just classic rock on the jukebox. They have bar mirrors and signs on the walls for beers they don’t even serve.

I walk in, and Mike, the bartender, and John, the only other guy in there, briefly take their eyes off the game to notice it’s me. The TV flickers and flashes in the corner, and you can mostly just hear crowd noise coming from it. I sit next to John, and Mike pours me a gin and tonic without even having to ask.

At the commercial, Mike turns to me and says, “So how’s things on the streets tonight? Anyone die?”
“Nah,” I say, “Pretty quiet. Heart attack. Old lady fell down and broke her hip. They’ll both make it.”
I tell them the bearskin rug story, and they laugh.

John talks a little about his son – you can tell he’s proud of the boy, the way he smiles when he’s talking about the kid’s grades and accomplishments, but there always seems to be something off, like the kid is more of a character in his life than a real person. I always wonder how often they actually see each other.

About halfway through my second drink, we’re making fun of the commercials and generally laughing at the idiots of the world. This is largely why I come here, to feel like I’m not alone in my understanding of people, that it’s not just me in a vacuum of damaged headspace, and that things can kind of make sense, even if it’s just for a few hours a night.

John falls off his stool when he gets up to go take a leak. He’s been here most of the night, and this isn’t unusual for him. He laughs it off, and Mike just kind of shakes his head a little bit, still staring into the TV.

By the time John gets back, the game is over, I’m on my third drink, and John asks for his tab. He pays in cash, probably so his wife doesn’t know how much he spends on booze, and possibly so she doesn’t know where he goes. It’s hard to tell with people sometimes. We tell him to drive safe, and he will – at this point he’s an experienced boozer, and knows how to find his way home without running into anything. Not a skill most people train for, of course, but it does come in handy from time to time.
Mike and I talk a little sports, and he tells me about the Springsteen concert he saw the night before. By this time, I’m a little bleary, and I can’t really recall which drink I’m on. The numbers rise and fall in my mind, depending on how buzzed I feel at the moment. Surely it’s five, but maybe it’s six now? I’m on autopilot, regardless, and can mostly maintain a conversation with Mike, but he glances at me every now and then in this knowing way he has, and it’s pretty clear he knows where I’m at. Which usually means it’s time to go.

I pay Mike and wish him a good evening, and he starts turning the lights out as I meander towards the door. It’s not technically closing time yet, but no one’s going to come in at this hour in this weather on a weeknight. I hear the register drawer opening up to be counted as the door to Oly’s closes behind me.

I’m in my apartment again before I know it, still shivering, still smelling garlic, “Born to Run” playing over and over again in my head. I blanked on the drive. The map home from Oly’s is ingrained in my DNA or something by this point. After getting ready for bed, I pull out one of the IVs I snagged from the hospital and set it up on the stand next to my bed. I have to be up at 5 a.m. to make it for the morning EMT shift, and the best way to be prepared for that without a hangover is to hydrate yourself silly, I’ve found, so I always give myself an IV before bed, and wake up feeling pretty good most of the time.

The needle hurts a little going in, like it always does, but I’m fairly numb, and pretty used to it.
The alarm will come all too soon, I’m sure, and the bed is rotating a little in my mind from all the gin, but I feel a nice level of contentment about things. I’m happy. This isn’t the life I would’ve chosen for myself when I was younger, of course, but it’s a good one. Tomorrow I’ll help people again, maybe give Carrie a call to see how she’s doing, maybe make some White Russians and watch TV.

I drift off, thinking about young passion and bearskin rugs, how people should probably talk to each other more, and how a heart attack could take it all away in a random stroke. The dripping of the IV reminds me of rain.