Eating Cookies and Saving Babies
Or, A Typical Day In The Life of an EMT
My friend Lou Noble has a lot of crazy stories from his days as an EMT.
The following is one of them.
Harbinger
By Lou Noble
“There’s a man about to throw his baby into traffic!”
The lady at my window was frantic…but my mouth was full of cookies, so I kept chewing as I looked at Randy with my big puppy-dog eyes. His mouth was also full of cookies, and it was clear he loved those cookies far more than I did. He’d taken his hands off the steering wheel, was using both of them to hold tight to his remaining bites of white chocolate macadamia nut. “Fine, I’ll go.”
“You sure?” Through his mouthful of cookies.
“Yeah…I’ve got more cookies in the bag. Kim, stay with Randy.”
“But I want to see a guy throw his baby into traffic.”
“Randy, tell Kim the story about that guy we worked with who stole pills from patients.”
“We should’ve gone straight back to the station.”
“We should’ve gone back to the station. Kim, make a note of this. This is what hubris gets you.”
I hopped out of the ambulance, followed the woman across the street, down the block.
We were at the end of our shift, were supposed to be headed home, but…it had been a long day. We deserved a cookie break. We’d watched two people die, which is a lot for one day. One we’d spent ten minutes with in the ambulance, Kim and I trading off doing CPR. Sweated right through our uniforms. We’d transported a woman to the ER who had a strange fever and spoke no English, who didn’t understand what was happening to her. An interpreter was coming, but hours away. Her eyes broke my heart. A cancer patient, a brain cancer patient, every movement was torture, but we had to carry her down from her third floor apartment. A very long day. We were supposed to be done. We should’ve grabbed the cookies and eaten them on the way back, but…lots of days, the job was slow. A few calls, taking someone from a convalescent home to the hospital, or the other way around, easy. But on this day, we needed a little quiet. A few minutes to sit in the ambulance and eat some delicious cookies.
But damned if the frantic lady hadn’t perfectly described the situation: a guy standing on the sidewalk, wild-eyed, holding his baby in one hand, arm starting to cock back, about to toss said baby into the street. People were idling nearby, but no one was doing a goddamn thing. They were waiting to see what happened. They all got excited when they saw me walking up, maybe expecting violence. I was already missing my cookies. “Hey there, man…how you doing?”
“My wife, she’s been in the hospital for 365 days, and I’ve been awake for 365 days, I’ve been staying awake so I can be with her but I’m very tired.” He was sweating, but also shivering, his eyes were darting around so much it was making me nauseous. Not fast, but often. Not dangerous, but not altogether Here. His hair was dry, like straw, there were little bits of food on his shirt. I looked down at his shoes, shoes always told me a story. Clean, if not new. No wild scuffs. Normal. Meant he probably wasn’t living on the street.
“Yeah, totally understand that. Is this your baby?”
“Of course, this is my daughter, that i had with my wife, who has been in the hospital for 365 days, she’s here at UCLA medical center for 365 days and I am so tired I have been waiting for her to be released but they say she is still sick so i am here waiting but my daughter is so heavy and without her parents she will be all alone and I cannot bear the thought of her all alone in the world so I…”
“Why’s she gonna be alone, man?”
“Because when I fall asleep I will die and then she will be without parents and I cannot bear the thought…”
“Her mom’s still alive though, right?”
“Of course! Of course she is still alive I cannot imagine her not being on this planet we have been married for so many years and have made this beautiful daughter together but I am so tired I have been awake for 365 days and…”
“How’d you stay awake for so long? That’s really cool of you to be there for your wife.”
“Thank you I have been snorting amphetamines for 365 days so I can be awake and alert for when my wife wakes…”
“How’d she end up in the hospital?”
“I do not remember, but she is very sick and I have been awake for…”
“That baby looks pretty heavy, why don’t you put her in her stroller while we talk?”
“Of course. But I don’t want her to live in a world without us…” He started to crank his arm back, the crowd held its breath.
“Just for a minute, though, let’s put her down for a minute, we’ll talk, and then you can do whatever you were going to do.”
And he did it, put her down in the stroller, buckled her in, turned right back to me!
“So how’d your wife end up in the hospital?”
I was keeping tight eye contact with him, but the blue shirt behind him caught my attention. I saw Randy over his shoulder, the question in his eyes. I gave a little nod, Randy headed back to the ambulance. There were people watching, but only that. Nobody else had thought to call 911, they were mesmerized by this guy, twitching at the corners of his mouth, his eyes never settling on one place to look, shifting from foot to foot. Their faces as they watch aren’t so different. “Better now, yeah? Not having so much weight on that arm?”
“Of course! But I am so sad!”
“Why’s that, bud?”
“She’s going to be all alone because I am going to die and my wife is going to die and my daughter will be all alone…”
“Why’s your wife going to die?”
“Oh the end is coming tomorrow I saw it while having a waking dream in the waiting room they let me stay there while i wait for my wife to wake up she is asleep and i am awake but she wants to be awake and I want to be asleep…”
“Yeah, but why is the world ending?”
“Because the whole world is asleep but wants to be awake and this is a dream we are all having together but the world is so awful this must be a nightmare not a dream and…”
“So your wife is asleep but she’s really awake…because we’re all asleep, right?”
“Of course! We are all asleep but when we wake up the world will end but we will not all wake up at the same time you will see what happens as we wake up one by one and two by two and three by three and…”
“And what happens when your wife wakes up?”
“She will not wake up because she is going to die and i have been awake…”
“Why is she going to die?” Later I’d pat myself on the back. See, that’s the same shit usually drove me nuts, we’d get psychiatric patients, they seem reasonable at first, but once you got a little ways into a conversation, oops, now you’re in a loop, stuck, they’re not making sense anymore, just going around and around. It felt good, flip that around.
There was one lady, I couldn’t shake her out of her little story, she was having a party, and she was having butterflies deliver the invitations…and the butterflies were coming out of her vagina, and it was very important that I not kill them. No matter what I said, couldn’t move her off that idea that there were butterflies sailing out of her vagina, delivering party invites to all the celebrities.
Maybe it was fitting, me being the one laying down the circular tracks, this time, leading him around and around until the police arrived. And this guy was white, so once they got there, they calmly put the cuffs on him and walked him very politely to the squad car. “They gonna take the baby back to her mom?”
“Good job here…but this baby was reported kidnapped about twenty minutes ago.”
“So…no wife in the hospital?”
“Not as far as we know.” Few minutes later someone from child services arrived to take the baby. I’d made up a bottle from the formula, little girl was content as they took her away. The small crowd dispersed, disappointed it had all gone so smoothly. Randy and Kim were waiting for me at the end of the block. “Shame you didn’t get to see me work, Kim.”
“Was he really going to throw his baby into the street?”
“Of course.” Then I walked back to my cookies.
Oh, you’re a hero, people say…but all I did was talk to the guy. Any of the people standing around, mouths agape, could’ve done the same thing. But they didn’t.
“Because the whole world is asleep but wants to be awake and this is a dream we are all having together but the world is so awful this must be a nightmare not a dream and…”
Kinda tough to gauge sometimes who are the ones having an issue with reality and who are the ones really tapped into something. Maybe we're all just a few degrees from figuring it all out. I mean, attempts to throw a stolen baby into traffic aside.
Also, my new band name is "Stolen Traffic Baby," so thank you for that.