April 2009      Kabul, Afghanistan

It took awhile to edit this one, written originally while I was riding the edge of insanity, near the end of a one-year stretch in the ‘Stan.  I did not change the tone of it, just filled in a little of the background.  It is not a short story, but it is probably my last on this topic.  I was not free to post it on these pages at the time due to the discomfort it might cause back home.  Here you go:

“Get your Gear on.”

That was an optimistic order  – I have little of what this unrehearsed mission called for:  a reliable rifle, enough body armor, a helmet, pistol, six magazines of ammunition, hand grenades, a radio, a harness to carry it all, and a personal medical kit strapped to the leg – I had none of that.  There were a few other details I found lacking:  our beat-down underpowered thin-skinned microvan acting as an ambulance, no additional shooters on board, no GPS tracker on the vehicle or on me, no dedicated Quick-Reaction Force (QRF) to escort us, no license for our weapons, no night-sights, no twin-.50 cal gun turret swiveling around up top.  So I grabbed what I had: a not-recently-tested AK-47 made in 1963, stuck the one spare magazine in my pants pocket, a single hand grenade in the other pocket, grabbed a headlamp and strapped on the single 30-pound body armor vest we owned, and why not  – my camera, to document the carnage maybe for this page someday.  Good to go.  Send me in, coach!

Earlier that morning, Dan the other medic, and his girlfriend Fiona had helicoptered down east to Jalalabad to work on a new contract.   There were no return flights, so we sent Shafiq the driver down to pick them up and drive them back, leaving Jbad no later than 1500 for the three-hour return trip.  Security had been bad on that route that connects Kabul with Pakistan. An ambush in August left ten French troops dead and twenty-one wounded, at the same site where Clinton and I had responded to a road wreck a month earlier.  After that, ISAF cracked down hard and it was relatively safe again.  But even the Afghans rarely drove that route at night, due to the possibility of Taliban tollbooths.   We expected our crew back no later than 1800, before nightfall.

A note on Dan – he is a hard man, twelve years in the Australian Special Air Service as a combat medic and a dive medic, and he knows risk assessment.  He hates being unarmed, but we generally drove the streets that way (at least during the day,) because as a start-up, we lacked the money for armored cars, body armor, a QRF contract, properly tested weapons and the $100,000 Afghan government shake-down for a company gun license.  This license fee goes straight into some dirty fat bastard’s pocket of course.  A note on Fiona -  in the real world, she could be described as jovial and outgoing, though I might throw in dopey, naïve, simple, lazy and clueless.  In an active war zone, I would classify her as nothing less than dangerously stupid.

She insisted on going to Jalalabad for the sight-seeing and photos, which I understand, but she would not hear the warnings about the risk involved.  If night fell before they returned and the Filthies stopped the car, they might pop Dan and Shafiq, who were out doing their job. But she had no business on that trip and would have a much worse time as a guest of the Talib, up in some cave in the mountains, indefinitely.

This was not my problem or my decision to make.  Off you go then, girl.  They boarded an elderly Russian helicopter and flew out at 0900.

Later that evening, I was at a residential compound across town, having dinner with a big group of South African helicopter pilots and their Russian mechanics.  Afterward, I had a dozen of them scheduled for a basic medical history and assessment, part of the process of getting this new contract started.  While taking notes on the sixth guy, I took a phone call – it was the boss, Marcus: “Need you here now.”  Click.

Oh, alright then.  I did not know what was going on, but it was clearly Go Time.  Mass casualties?  A  residential compound attacked? I dropped the paperwork and split, jumped in the waiting ride and arrived at our steel gate to find Marcus pulling it open, “bombed-up” as they say.  Headlamp on, mesh vest full of field medic gear and a row of 30-round magazines across his chest, AK-47 in hand, a defective old Russian pistol strapped to his thigh, throwing bags of medical gear into both ambulances, and on the phone requesting a Quick Reaction Force immediately.   Our crew was 2 ½ hours overdue, and not answering the phones.  “Get your gear on,” he said.

I did not say a word, just nodded and bolted past the dogs and the housekeeper, up the stairs. The power was out again, all the house lights were off, and ill will was in the air.  While fetching my feeble gear, I had a few moments to think.  We had never rehearsed this, or even run through any verbal rehearsals, though Marcus seemed to have things flowing nicely right now.  All of us were comfortable with weapons and willing to use them.  I came here aware of the risk of death and accepted that as part of the deal.  I do not think I was spiking a high blood pressure at the moment, just wishing primarily that this was a daytime response, which would make it a lot easier for me to kill some of them and maybe make us a more difficult targets than exiting vehicles into the darkness, backlit by our own headlights.  Night vision goggles would have been a nice asset right about now.

In retrospect,  this was a scatterbrained assignment, similar to jumping overboard into icy cold water to save someone who fell in:  good luck with that.   Right now, what was the task at hand?  Re-establishing phone contact and then…Search and rescue?  Hostage recovery?  Finding the bodies?  Changing their flat tire? Assaulting a cave complex?  We were not suited for any of the above, but I was not at all inclined to refuse the mission.

Then a quote that has stuck with me for ten years resurfaced, part of a Sebastian Junger dispatch from, coincidentally, Afghanistan, printed in 1999 in Vanity Fair magazine I think.  He was traveling with Shah Massoud’s men of the Northern Alliance, outnumbered, outgunned and outfunded by the Taliban, doing battle in the Panshjir Valley.  They did not have much long-term chance, fighting an enemy backed strongly by our great allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but Massoud was a genius and they fought the good fight.  One day, taking cover under a rock ledge while on the receiving end of a 155mm artillery barrage, Junger apparently had serious misgivings about being there and asked a Northern Alliance fighter about getting the hell out. The Afghan looked at him incredulously and asked “What are you doing here, if you are not prepared to die?”  A fair question that was, but I had my reasons, and they made sense at the time.

Right now, my co-worker Dan was out there, which obligated me to try to find him.  This was very different to me than volunteering as a tactical medic for night convoys through the Badlands, though the risk was about the same.  I am not sure if I can explain that, because it puzzled me at the time.  It was simply much more acceptable to become a casualty while carrying out an obligation than to lose a limb while volunteering to carry out some dirty work, especially if volunteering partly out of visceral spite for the enemy.

I faced the moment, test-fired a quick burst from my ancient AK into the front yard, and jumped into one of our ramshackle ambulances, which was ghetto even by Afghan standards.  Two civilian ambulances, two Afghan drivers, and no additional shooters:  far from ideal.   Fortunately the QRF was on the way, doing us a large favor.  This added two more armored SUVS, eight guys bombed-up thoroughly, heavier weapons, night sights, GPS trackers and radio uplinks to the US military for close air support, if it came to that.

It did not.  Munir opened the gate for us and we drove east, over the dark broken roads of the capital.  Then the phone rang:  It was Dan, they had just driven back into cell-phone coverage, out of the deep narrow valley and back into the outskirts of Kabul. There are parts of the road so narrow that cars have to stop to let opposite truck traffic pass, so trucks move west during the day and east during the night.  They had been stuck in a traffic jam for hours on the two-lane road because as always, the police were taking bribes from truckers who paid to go against the flow of traffic, in order to get back to Pakistan before sunup.   And that was that.

Funny enough, our lost patrol actually had a good time while stuck out in that gorge along the Kabul river.  They told us that the Afghan men had turned on some music, locked their women in the vehicles and  man-danced the night away in the middle of the road in the headlights of their parked vehicles.  There is no denying it, Afghanistan is an amazing place.

You may wonder why I did not take the next flight out of there. I wonder that now. The goddamn startup company owed me a lot of back-pay at the time, but I had committed to myself to stay for a year, and fleeing would have cost me my tax-free status and a good deal of self-respect.  Like so many other Westerners out there, I was well on the way to losing my mind, and self-medicating nicely just to get by. Other than that epic northern road trip, I hated every day in Afghanistan, but I do not regret the experience one bit.   I even miss the photography and writing experiences throughout the country.    I counted down the thirty days remaining and went on a bit of a rampage back in the USA upon arrival.

Since leaving, home invasions have occurred throughout Kabul and the rest of the land,  seven of my friends or work associates have died or been killed, and my man Mick is on death row in Kabul, for killing someone who needed killing.  The US is ringing up a $100,000,000,000 tab this year for that war alone, or $1,000,000 per soldier per year.  2,134 ISAF troops killed to date, and possibly a larger number of contractors, but nobody officially tracks that, due to the political cost.

All of that to help shore up a society that publicly values this: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/29/INF21F2Q9H.DTL

There must be an easier way to blow up Al-Qaeda training camps anywhere in the world than the way we are doing it now.  None of the 9/11 hijackers were Afghans, and none of them learned how to fly commercial airliners inside that rotten corner of the world.  Nation-building is not our job, and nobody has ever won a war there.  Taliban funding is coming from outside of that primitive sump of a country, not from within (other than the opium trade.)  This war is not worth the ever-increasing effort that we are putting into it, and we all know that it will sink right back to a medieval brawling mess once we pull out, thousands of casualties from now.

San Francisco     December 2006

Wikipedia definition:  In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.  Responding to a troll’s provocations is commonly known as ‘feeding the troll’ and is generally discouraged, as it can encourage their disruptive behavior.

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Fa-la-la.

Last night I was out with my girlie Jen B from college; I was her beard for a company Christmas party because her fiance was unavailable.  The party was funereal, so I grabbed the scotch and self medicated a bit.  Much.  On the way back to the city, I clowned her the whole time, asserting that it is against God, nature and all that is holy to have sex during pregnancy.  Obviously this is having sex much too close to the baby, ick, and can have grave repercussions on the future sexual orientation of the child.  Everybody knows this.

This “debate” was so off the wall that Jen re-phrased and posted it on craigslist the next day, positioning it as a legitimate plea for information.  She is my favorite troll.

I awoke to this email, and watched it all unfold.

“Anyway dude, I went to work on a write up for CL about your fucking-while-pregnant phobia, and attributed it to my man.   Then I posted it to the community discussions forum.  Here you go:”

I am a 35-year-old educated female and am getting married this year. My fiance and I are talking about having kids and are excited to start a family. Here is the problem. When we talked about getting pregnant, I told him how supposedly the woman gets really dog-horny come the second trimester. He said he doesn’t want to have sex during the pregnancy at all because he doesn’t think it is normal to essentially be “hitting the baby”. He thinks it is almost like fucking (excuse the profanity but that is what he said) the developing fetus. He thinks the baby could, quite possibly, become gay this way.

He is a smart guy, I mean, we live in Marin and do really well, but this just seems ridiculous. I explained to him I have a cervix keeping his parts from the little sack holding the baby and that he won’t actually touch the baby.  He doesn’t buy it, thinks the baby boy would be gay and that if was a baby girl, she would be a total slut. I love this man dearly, he is wonderful, but he actually said that.  I’ve waited this long to say yes and I really can’t believe he feels this way.

Then I started wondering… does anyone really know if sex during pregnancy can make people gay? Seems like an old wives tale, but hell, I doubt anyone has actually studied this. I guess it’s possible. Thoughts? I personally don’t care if we end up with a gay baby, but he is worried.”

Actual Craigslist reactions:

HA HA HAAAAA!!!!! You may be a troll, but this is goddamn funny. I wouldn’t be surprised, actually, that someone would believe this. People can be so incredibly stupid. He needs a crash course in anatomy 101 if he thinks he’s getting anywhere near that fetus, I mean unless he has a foot-long schlong. Tell him if he won’t have sex with you, you’ll go elsewhere to get it, and then the baby will be fatherless because you won’t be married to him anymore…what a freak!

And that thing about it making the baby gay or a slut…that’s the most bizarre theory on why people are gay that I’ve ever heard! First of all, he’s not going to be having sex with the fetus! Second of all, nobody really knows why people are gay, but having sex during pregnancy is NOT one of possibly reasons! Think about it: most pregnancy experts say it’s Ok to have sex during pregnancy and there’s no risk of harm to the fetus, so that means a hell of a lot of people have had sex during pregnancy (especially if pregnant women in the 2nd trimester are horny; most men, when confronted with a horny wife, are going to take advantage of it, pregnancy or no pregnancy), and gay people are a vast minority, so it makes no sense.

Thirdly, what’s wrong with being gay?

Fourthly, how come it doesn’t make boy babies sluts, too? What, only girls can be sluts??

Tell him you found evidence that NOT having sex during pregnancy makes kids drug abusing alcoholic jobless layabouts, see what he says then.

I don’t know this guy, but just from this story he sounds like a) a bigot and b) an idiot. I think the kid’s biggest risk (assuming this is a true story) is going to be having this guy for a dad.

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I don’t know who’s dumber!, your fiance for believing that having sex while the woman is pregnant will make the baby gay (if it’s a boy) or a slut (if it’s a girl) OR you, for believing him. You two should get married, you’re made for each other….but please don’t have children.

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“I mean, we live in Marin and do really well” WTF? Honey, you’re just demonstrating how pretentious most residents of Marin really are. Pretentious and basically clueless. And based on your fiancee’s comments….get ready to spend the rest of your life with a dope.

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“Honey, you’re just demonstrating how pretentious most residents of Marin really are. Pretentious and basically clueless.”

Oh please. Take your issue with Marin outside…this post is not indicative of anything other than someone being young, kinda dumb and naive.

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This is incredibly stupid but, unfortunately, the stupid do live among us. One of my cousins was married to a guy who wouldn’t let their son be *near* anything pink because it would “turn him gay”. Sad but true… This guy’s probably for real.

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C’mon people, stop being mean. This woman has done nothing to insult anyone here on CL, and yet you reply to her post with insults. WTF? Did she ever call anyone here “stupid”? Did she ever attack any of you?

What’s with all these unwarranted insults against her? If you’re really annoyed with her post, then just ignore her. What’s so difficult with that?

If you really feel compelled to reply to her post, then just simply say, “No, I think you’re wrong.” There’s no need to insult her.

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I guess Craig didn’t see the humor -  he yanked the posting from the website after a few days.  Meanwhile, local feminazis roamed the streets with torches, calling for my head.

- Muckraker

Well this is about it, folks – I am out of stories for now.   I have taken up a clean, comfortable  and strangely predictable existence back here in the First World, and that does not often lead to colorful accounts of nasty behaviors dredged up from the cultural slums.  I expect to be short of material for these odd pages until I blow a fuse and decide to relocate to a filthy primitive sandbox of a country, or go fall off tugboats in the Bay again or even start riding public transit every day.   Sorry about this!

Well, there might be one more tale next month.  Meantime, here are the last of the San Francisco paramedic stories:

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One night in the Mission District, we were leaving the scene of a non-emergency, after the drunk lady who called for medical help then decided to refuse transport.   I do not have much tolerance for drunk patients for a lot of reasons, maybe because we had so many of them.  Or because I have sometimes been that guy.  Anyway, I was loading the empty gurney into the rear of the ambulance, when a young drunk guy stumbled up towards me. He stopped, pointed large new red scrape on his forehead, and said “Should I do anything about this?”

I could not stop myself.  I said, “Yeah, quit getting punched in the head.”

He quickly responded “Fuck you! I’ll punch you!”  dropped the beer and charged unsteadily towards me.

Oh, I was quite primed for this.  We squared off, and exchanged unkind words.

I do not think he expected me to take him up on the offer, so he hesitated, cursed again, and staggered away. What a tease.  I think I could have gotten away with that action, but treating him afterwards and then writing up the report might have been awkward.  For him.

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We picked up a 60-year-old woman from Chinese Hospital, for a transfer to a post-op recovery facility.  She was happy to see us.  She told me that the beds were too small and that she was “the only white person in the whole place,” but that the nurses and the service were great.  I could have told her that.  However, she wanted to hit a Burger King drive-through in the ambulance during the transfer between hospitals.  She explained, “The food was awful. Last night for dinner was chicken-eyeball soup.”

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Denial is a powerful element.  We responded to ATT park, the baseball stadium, during the off-season.  Where to exactly?  Home plate.  Corporate event planners sometimes rent the park and a pro baseball celebrity or batting coach to fulfill the dreams of some suits who have watched Field of Dreams a few too many times.  The problem this time was that the group was from Wisconsin, possibly the most overfed state in our bloated Union.

We rolled the gurney right down the third baseline, and found a 350-pound Cheesehead sitting directly on top of home plate, with one leg twisted outwardly at an unnatural angle.  It was cold outside, but he was sweating freely.  (No, Fatty had not just swatted a homer and run the bases.)  We shot him up with a nice dose of morphine, then with much bystander assistance, grunted him up onto a seated position on the gurney. He appeared to have both a dislocated knee and a broken ankle.

The whole way to General Hospital, he repeated his mantra “I can’t believe this happened….How did this happen?”  I bit my tongue hard rather than draw a swollen stick-figure of him and explain the physics involved with applying such a vast amount of torque to a planted extremity.  The last time he swung at a ball was probably 200 pounds ago.

Healthcare costs are soaring?

So is our Gross National Density.

Tax the Fat.

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A 91-year-old man fell out of bed and could not stand up.  He was sharp as a tack and indignant about the sudden weakness, and not being able to dress properly to receive us.   He told me he spent his best 25 years in the Army, “Back when a cavalry unit meant horses not helicopters,” and that “The reason I’ve lasted so goddamn long is this!” pointing to a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Two ounces every goddamn night!”   I wanted to go out bar crawling with him just to see if I could keep up.

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Another routine transfer.  This time it was an 80-year-old black woman, clearly on her deathbed.  Tubes, wires, hoses, anxiety.  Two-word sentences, breathing through a stoma (surgical hole through the lower throat), respirator-assisted, really just hoarse whispers in gasps.  My partner Kevin and I disconnected her from all of the hospital equipment and reconnected her to ours, then slid her wispy frame easily onto the gurney.

At this point, I could tell she was trying to tell us something, so we all stopped and listened. She focused on me, pointed a bony, crooked finger and said “You are….fine…….You got….a wife?”   The nurses loved this, and Kevin fell out into the hallway.

I turned a bit red I think and said “Ma’am, are you propositioning me?”

She replied “Nope…….I’m a lesbian.”

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An 88-year-old man, bedridden in a cheap public nursing home.  The staff were not managing his diabetes well, and he probably never did. After a stroke three years ago, he was known to have only three words left in his vocabulary:  “What?”  “No!” and “Fuck!”  Sometimes he could muster up a “Christ!”

I would be mighty belligerent in that condition, too.  I am sure that I will be.  But I hope somebody has the sense to unplug me, especially in a place like that.

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A 94-year-old Japanese lady, weak and confused, maybe from a stroke or a cardiac incident.  She had been sitting alone on the floor for at least a day, before someone came to see why she had not shown up for work.  She was 4′ 11”, maybe 90 pounds, but every day walks her full-time job, as a Judo instructor.  As I understood it, she is the world’s first and only woman to achieve a ninth-degree blackbelt.

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Emergency inter-hospital transport. A 32-year-old woman was set for natural delivery childbirth of her full-term firstborn.  After three hours of hard labor and then sudden heavy bleeding, she delivered by emergency C-section.  The bleeding would not stop, something about her clotting cascade not activating.  After six more hours in the delivery room, after twenty units of blood infused, after both the baby and the mother had separately coded and been resuscitated, they finally removed all of her reproductive organs and stopped the flow.

The delivery room looked like nothing I would see again until Afghanistan.  The hospital staff and her family were all wrecked, but I am pretty sure that both patients recovered after some time.

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While standing outside an operating room filling out paperwork, other medics and a cop wheeled in a prisoner from an outlying state prison. He was in leg irons, but did not seem well enough to make a break for it. The night before, he had been stabbed in the chest by his charming cellmate, who then pried his ribs apart and sexually raped the knife-wound.

The spaces between the ribs are very narrow, so I would have not imagined this possible, and pondered whether this had ever before happened in all of human history.  The prisoner had a collapsed lung and a deep pulmonary infection, coughing up all manner of material.  The surgeon of all people had the odd comment of the night, out of the patient’s earshot:  “Ribbed, huh?  I thought that was for her pleasure.”

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Pictured above:  The 1976 dark comedy “Mother, Jugs and Speed.”  Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel, with plenty of inappropriate paramedic behavior: work-related injuries, drugs, fights, Raquel, bribes, corruption, gunplay, drinking on the job and steady harassing of nuns.

December 2009     San Francisco

Arriving back in San Francisco last summer, I took a break from the medical work.  I found a company involved in local shipping, maritime logistics and tugboat operations, and started over at the bottom.  As usual, the bottom involved long hours, odd scheduling and repetitive menial tasks.  But the pay was very good and I figured that this work would lead to bigger and better things.  At the very least, it uncovered another American subculture:  the antisocially-employed maritime man.

The setting and location were great:  a dozen different working boats and a great big warehouse full of tools and heavy machinery, in downtown San Francisco. The place smelled of diesel fuel and machine oil, seaweed and welding fumes.  There was a wonderful lack of throw-pillows and fashion magazines.

My first night, I muddled my way into the engineering section of the warehouse to start the sandblaster.  I came across a sallow old man in blue coveralls who unfortunately looked much like Bill Wyman, the elderly drummer of the Rolling Stones.  I think he may have been deposited on our dock by the tides decades ago.  Too late, I noticed the one sticker on his battered old hard hat.  Small print, all caps, front and center: “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME.”  The two-foot long crescent wrench in his hand further encouraged me to keep walking and ask someone else. I never did see that mortician speak or smile, but I hoped to squeeze a story out of him someday.

The next night I worked with Frankie “The Rat Whisperer.”  It is not so much the neck and knuckle tattoos that separated him from the others, no, that was commonplace.  It was his marksmanship. Frankie brought a pellet rifle to the workplace to stalk the vermin that share our wharf.  That night, he picked off thirty-eight rats, and pinned them to a pegboard in the shop.   Frankie opted to not shoot any of the resident raccoons, possibly out of respect for their own complete disregard for our presence.  At night, massive schools of sardines swarmed under the dock lights, bigger fish and swimming birds snacked on them, and sea lions  erupted now and then to capture the striped bass.

It did not take long for this lifestyle to wear me out.  It was not so much the 0430 showtime at the dock, it was more the physical risk and the social drought that working on a tugboat involved. The captain that I worked for might use fifty words in a 12-hour shift, most of which were “Hey!” and “Fuck!”

There was not much conversation generally, and I did not tell any of them where I had been or what industry I came from.  Usually I just said “I’ve been away for awhile.”  Eventually it occurred to me that around the docks, that meant I had just got out of prison.  No wonder there were few follow-up questions.

The work was dangerous – dark and slippery decks, rolling on the waves of the foggy Bay.   There were a lot of trip hazards and pinch points, hot exhaust manifolds, greasy decks, tow-lines under high tension, and sometimes high winds and rain.  I noticed one guy with a crippled arm, another on his second disability for a lower back strain, one deckhand who was coming back after two broken ankles after falling off an upper deck, and some missing fingers here and there.  I got blunt advice on this topic:  “Don’t put your fingers where you wouldn’t put your dick.”  Thanks, dude.

Some of the guys were interesting, and the sights while out on the water were amazing.  More than once we pulled up alongside a moving ship in the middle of the night, to extract a well-armed Coast Guard tactical team from a rope ladder hanging down the hull.  Those were always random searches of oil tankers arriving from Muslim countries, now how about that?  Other guys were not as interesting, just counting the hours on the clock each day.  One captain named Dave, he probably won that prize.  We had taken an American crewman back to a ship anchored nearby, and on the way back, I mentioned that the crewman actually lived in Thailand now.  Dave looked perplexed and said “Thailand? Who the fuck would want to live there?  Ain’t that place like Mexico?!?  Shit…”

The work was scenic but uninteresting, and my time here would be limited.  I came mighty close to sinking a whole tugboat one night while crossing the Bay (they handle a lot differently than other boats, I quickly learned.)  Another night I actually did fall off a slippery barge while climbing up onto it.  Fortunately, I fell squarely down onto the deck of the tugboat below, not into the cold water or across a moving winch.

The last straw was after a four-hour transit up the Bay, crawling along at eight knots, loaded with pallets of gear and food for a ship at anchor.  I got a firm talking-to afterwards for reading the newspaper during that crossing, instead of….instead of what?  Tightening all the screws I could find?  The next day, I actually did tighten all the screws, collected a paycheck full of overtime and got the hell out of there.  It was good while it lasted, but I sure do not miss it.

Photos:  http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=chrisgilsenan&target=ALBUM&id=5479149607086291233&authkey=Gv1sRgCJbthaCL08_XqwE&feat=email

I. Rockmonkeys

Almost two years into the remodel of a 2,000 square foot, $3,000,000 house, and finally we were ready for the stonemasons to arrive and wrap the house with rock. From the beginning we could not stop laughing at them – coarse, foul mouthed and abusive to anyone in their sight. They were great guys, just not well socialized. We called them rockmonkeys, or The Savages. On the caveman scale, the stonemasons rate about an 8 out of 10. Ironworkers and piledrivers might score a 9.  Merchant shipping sailors often earn a 10/10, but more on that later.

One day, a skinny hippie mason named Todd was grouting rock pieces onto the second floor balcony, which we now know is twenty-two feet above the sloping dirt backyard. Todd swung out onto the scaffold…and then the scaffold swung away from the house. The stucco guys failed to wire the scaffold to the house before quitting time the previous day; they just set it up and left it there.  This is an epic failure.  Todd felt it the whole structure coming away from the house with him standing on top, all thirty feet and 1000 pounds of scaffold.   He quickly turned, jumped free, and run away before it came crashing down on top of him.  He almost made it cleanly, but there was a six-foot post firmly planted in the ground below. Todd landed within about eight inches of skewering himself right up the middle, instead catching it under his arm as he hit the ground running.

After we calmed him down and looked him over, it still took us five minutes to convince him to let us bring him in to the hospital.  He refused to consider an ambulance, though his upper arm was swelling rapidly.

Driving him down to the ER, I learned why this was no big deal to him. To paraphrase: “Man, this ain’t nothin. I’ll be back to work tomorrow….yeah, well let me start way back – I guess I’ve had over 100 stitches and staples in my head…..broken a dozen bones, mostly fingers and toes….I was shot through the leg with a .22 pistol, shot through the arm with a nailgun, set on fire twice, (once solo,) …..at the age of seven I got hungup by my ballsacks while climbing over a cyclone fence to get away from my brothers (7 stitches to his “ballsacks”), a shit-ton of concussions, I don’t know…” Last month he had seven teeth pulled because he had not visited a dentist in ten years.

Todd is 26.

Todd  is a Savage.

He was ok after a few weeks, having torn and separated part of his bicep, but was almost fired for not inspecting the scaffold first.  We fired the scaffold guys.

II.  X marks the spot

Our next Savage is a merchant sailor, one of those guys who  spend months and years out at sea, working on the cargo ships and oil tankers that run the world’s economies.  More importantly, shipping helps keep these guys out of circulation from humankind. Here we will see two examples of what happens when they escape from the isolation of the sea and reappear on land,  mixing with polite society.

Our man Brad M. bears a striking resemblance to the gentleman pictured above.  He considers anyone living north of I-10 a Yankee, but was invited to a fellow merchant’s wedding in Virginia.  It is worth noting that many of these rough guys have had a respectable upbringing and a solid education, but then veered off towards a rowdy, risky but high-paying lifestyle.  After much food and drink at the rehearsal dinner and before the all-night bar crawl/sailors’ reunion, Brad found himself in the elevator with none other than the bride’s grandmother, a couple of her female cousins and the bride’s aunt.

Brad was well turned out and polite-looking, until the grandmother turned to him and said “And where are you from, Bradley?”  Brad smiled  broadly and said ”I’m from Alabama.  Here, let me show you…”  He swiftly set aside his beer, unzipped his pants, fully presented his ballsacks, pointed proudly, and said “You see this freckle right here?  That there is Mobile, Alabama.   You take this vein here, south on I-98, and then east on that vein there to Gulf Shores and that’s where I hail from.”  The poor captive women mashed the elevator buttons and erupted onto the very next floor whichever it was, leaving our man Brad beaming, fully exposed, and reaching for his beer.

His performance did not end there.  The next day at the church, right before the wedding ceremony began, the womenfolk were primping and arranging the bride and her maids, clucking, gushing and re-arranging the gown.  Brad and a  couple of other guys who had been out all night came rushing in to the church to get seated before the doors closed.  But first….the door to the henhouse was open a crack, and after all that time at sea, how could he resist?  Brad threw open the door, stepped in, and loudly offered his services: “Are any of you bitches ready to get your   %#*(#*%&#    *$&#(##$^*  tonight???  Cause I’m ready to oblige!!”

Then he went and calmly sat down in the church, as if all was well with the world.  A massive falling out between friends followed these events.

Brad is back out at sea.  Brad is a savage.

III.  Hot Sweet Vinyl Love

Not everyone who ships out is mentally stable.  On one particular voyage, delivering a shipload of coal from Capetown to Rotterdam, a crewman named Wayne lost his mind.

Wayne was a nasty little man who spent much of his off-duty time on shore chugging from the fountain of vermouth, and generally wenching his way around the world.  But on this night, he literally could not get laid in a whorehouse.  Each  brothel refused him service, maybe due to his poor hygiene or hostility.  Dejected, drunk on wine and cheap street drugs, Wayne decided to do things his way and to hell with everyone:  he went into a sex shop and plunked down a wad of cash on the best blow-up doll he could find.  Grinning, singing and chugging screw-top wine,  he carried his lovely young bride back to the ship.

With the glee of a kid on Christmas morning, he unwrapped his new lover, inflated her firmly and named her, cleverly, Layla.  But Wayne did not think that drugs, pot, booze and sex with a vinyl girlfriend might not mix.  He turned on the porn video, got to work with his girl, finished and immediately passed out cold.  What a man’s man.  This was all a fine romantic conquest, but when he awoke hours later, instead of a rosy afterglow, he found that he had dried into place inside his new bride.  Stuck, and painfully so. He could not withdraw without risking a skin-peel.  What to do, what to do?

Enraged, Wayne stood, stepped out of his spartan cabin and strode down the passageway wearing nothing but tattoos, a determined look and a smiling plastic girlfriend.

Poor Miss Layla did not have much say in the matter, fully impaled as she was.  Our maritime Manson burst into the empty galley, grabbed an 8″ chef’s knife, and pinned his once and former lover to the table.  He plunged the knife into Layla’s chest, just as the 2nd Engineer entered the galley for a cup of coffee.  Imagine walking in on a skinny white naked version of OJ, wild-eyed, slaughtering his lovely mistress.  The engineer thought the better of the coffee, wheeled and silently exited the area, as Wayne continued to plunge the knife again and again into Layla in a desperate bid to free his trapped part.

Wayne successfully freed his abused manhood and was promptly discharged from that ship at the next port of call.  Don’t worry, he is still out at sea, where he belongs.

Wayne is a Savage.

April 2005     San Francisco

I have to preface this account of living low on Haight St with the story of why I was out on disability for a little while.  At the time, I was working as a carpenter doing a $1,000,000 remodel on the highest house in San Francisco, right under Sutro Tower.  Here is a condensed version, originally entitled “Gravity 1, Chris 0″ :

I got another big break!……except this one is in my leg.   I was at work, adding a piece of trim under the eave of a new section of roof. This involved standing on a ladder atop a lower section of roof, and leaning it against the outside of the wall I was working on.  Suddenly the ladder slipped out from under me.  I followed the ladder down and bounced off the roof, then slid ass-first under the safety rail, followed by the 10-pound electric sawzall.

Having foreseen this possibility, I spun in the air and attempted a controlled two-footed landing.  I would have walked away from it laughing like the stunt man I am Hahahahahhahahaha if I had not landed in a yard with a 30-degree pitch to it.

Snap.  My ankle rolled and I heard the fracture.  All of my other parts checked out ok, and the sawzall and ladder stuck in the ground and not into me.  Fortunately I did not land on the concrete stairs or the wooden fence nearby.

The Mexican roofing posse up above were yelling down to me to not move, while my boy Mick climbed off the scaffolding and around to the neighbor’s garden that I had dented, almost twenty feet below. He was calling in the three digits until I told him to “Hang up that f-ing phone, I am not paying $1500 for a short ride in the meat wagon. Put me in the f-ing truck.”  I was so bitter about getting injured again, first thing Monday morning.

Fortunately the hospital was only a mile away, so off we went for the first day of my new 6-8 week vacation and even further reduced wages.  I am tired of the illegal immigrant existence that I lead and I will be happy to graduate and move on to a less hazardous line of work.

UCSF found one fractured heelbone and the trauma center at SFGH found two more ankle fractures, all on the right side.  The left leg got off easy with sprains, swelling and bone bruises.  For those keeping score at home, these are bones #19, 20 and 21.  Blackjack!  Still, that means I have only splintered 11% of my rickety skeleton so far.

- Splint Eastwood

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On to Love and Haight:

Fortunately I had worker’s comp and health insurance, but that is not the case for everyone.  Being out of work can lead to a downward spiral, and mine began with colorful interactions with the locals of Lower Haight Street.

I was leaving Nickie’s BBQ (bar) late one night, with my buddy Adam who was ahead of me trying to find a cab to take us somewhere else.  I was on crutches crossing the street when an old black woman emerged from a bus shelter and shamelessly accosted me.  “Son, you don’t need a cab, I got what you need.”   I laughed and tried to crutch around her. “Baby, I just want to suck yo’ dick.  How much?”  Being on disability pay and sensing opportunity, I immediately started negotiating how much she would have to pay me for the favor.  We settled on $100.  American.   She must have been too cracked out to see that I was pulling a reverse on her, though I could barely keep a straight face while negotiating this oral agreement and watching traffic drive around us.

She would not show me the money, so I attempted crutch off.  Nope – she was planted right in front of me, and I could not get around her.  Cornered in the middle of Haight Street, what do you know, she got her hand into my pants, and changed her sales pitch to “Baby I want to suck it for free, let’s go over there”  and tried to lead me there with a firm grip on my unit. Taking advantage of the handicapped – seriously, I had a crutch in each hand, she was keeping me off balance, cars passing on each side, my gear in a chokehold, laughing so hard and loud that I thought I would fall down,  asking her “Why me?”  The crusty old derelict must have had a fetish for cripples.

Then she dropped this line: “Wow, you hung like the state of Florida.  C’mon and gimme some of that.”  That is how I knew she was on heavy drugs.  She was a  crooked salesman;  she was lying like a dirty rug.   I pulled away, dragging the 27th state in the Union with me, and attempted to clamber into the cab that Adam finally hailed.  Old Miss Cracky-pants tried to get in with us, offering free helmet all the way, until I paid her off with a dollar and crutched her out the door.

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You know you are scraping bottom when even the local neighborhood bums start cracking on you. Several times each year I have the pleasure of getting into The Mud Falcon and finding that a homeless dude has invited himself inside. Usually it is because I have left a back door unlocked, but twice it cost me a window. Why my ride? I do not know. It is a banged up 14-year-old urban econobox, but for some reason the junkies must believe that I have four kilos of Afghani Brown heroin under the seat and a case of screwtop wine in the trunk.

The bastards did break in and steal my disco ball once. Amazing. What is the street value on a used 3″ disco ball? Last week, I found my car ransacked again, smelling not-so-fresh,  and the trunk wide open because they never close it completely.  They missed the parking meter change under the floormat again. Dummies. I did get a perverse sense of satisfaction from the bum’s apparent frustration, though: he had found a permanent marker, lowered the  driver-side visor and written across it, as if I did not know this:

“BROKE BITCH”

Ah, the ghetto life.

March 2006     San Francisco

I worked my way through paramedic school by doing remodel construction here in San Francisco.  The demolition phase was  always hard and a little dangerous, but sometimes it involved a bit of urban archaeology.  Every now and then items emerged from behind the walls or under the floorboards:  coins, tools, hand-written prescription bottles, a stash of bourbon, eleven mummified cats over one garage ceiling, and a rusty loaded handgun.  Often there was a carefully stashed newspaper, just to mark the date that the walls were finished.  The one in my house on Haight St was from 1874.  Money?   Sure, sometimes that might appear, but that was not the kind of score that people shared or talked about.

One of our projects involved a ballet studio on Polk street; the owner wanted a sound studio created beneath the dance floor.   Building nothing below something is not the natural order of things, so it must be done carefully.  The first phase was not complex, just unbelievably dirty and labor-intensive:  excavating a several hundred cubic yards of dirt and debris from underneath the occupied structure before making a useful space out of it.  Who else to turn to but the day-laborers?  We hired six of the shortest, hardest-working guys we could find, gave them plenty of five-gallon buckets and switched out the dumpster every other day.

They would disappear down below, mole away and hand fifty-pound buckets of mostly sand up to the sidewalk level all day long.  Slowly they lowered the floor until there were lightbulbs overhead, salsa music blaring, and a place to cook lunch.  After almost two months of this, they were down eight or nine feet, exposing the support columns and the original basement brick walls.

I had not given much thought to why this had been backfilled with sand if it had already been a useable space at one time.  Slowly the hombres uncovered a layer of ash and charred timbers.  Over the next few days, twisted wires, a pulley, melted kitchen utensils, melted copper, an axe-head, and broken dishes began to re-surface.  Then broken, warped window glass and a mass of melted bottles. More charcoal, and finally a stack of newspapers, sheltered by some stonework.

It was a large, fragile stack of ashes, completely oxidized but intact.  The San Francisco Chronicle it was, reduced to the darkest shade of gray, while the ink had burned to a shiny, pure black. I read whatever I could – it was all legible, but rarely a whole story or page.  Just as one might expect – local politics, advertisements, cable car hits horse carriage, obituaries, a visiting delegation from Japan, etc.

Then a date from the top issue:  December 12, 1905.  Nice, I finally knew when this place changed…no actually it burned…why did they fill it in with sand?…Why are there still belongings here?…1905?…Oh, yeah…the Earthquake hit four months later.  I remembered reading that all of the city north and east of here burned to the ground, and that the Army dynamited all of Van Ness Street (the next street over,) so the firemen could then use it as a firebreak.   Their actions saved the rest of San Francisco from burning, but it seemed that this house was on the wrong side.

The next day the amigos called me over to show me a find – a porcelain doll’s head, obviously with a higher melting point than the bubbled window glass attached to it.  The head was all that remained of the doll, but she still had her teeth and the German maker’s imprint on the back.  Probably a well-kept doll for a well-kept girl who must have left home in a great big hurry, if she got out at all.

Photo by Jason Chinn.

Tagged: urban archaeology ]]> http://housefly.us/2010/03/04/survivor/feed/ 0 . http://housefly.us/2010/02/03/night-shift-part-two/ http://housefly.us/2010/02/03/night-shift-part-two/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:56:24 +0000 . http://housefly.wordpress.com/?p=267 ]]>

San Francisco     Fall 2007

I am not working as a paramedic these days, just moved into a related line of work that will not yield any of the stories or photos usually flung upon these pages.  Ah, well.  Almost went to Haiti for a month of earthquake relief work – that would have been a trove of disaster stories, but the new work schedule prevented that.  Here is a second batch of memorable cases taken from working the night shift in the city.

One night we were assigned to pick up a “5150” patient, code for a person under 72-hour psychiatric hold due to the possibility of harming himself or others. Simply a transfer from the hospital he had walked into, over to a proper psych ward across town. Though he was calm and glassy-eyed with sedation, we strapped his ankles and wrists firmly to the gurney for the ride. I jumped into the back with him and read his file while keeping an eye on him. The ER had stitched up his wrist and abdomen for self-inflicted knife wounds, but there was more to the story. I always question these patients because there is no telling what kind of answers they might have.

He said he had been hearing voices again, which is why he chose to get on a MUNI bus, pull out a “big knife” and decide which riders to kill (I wish I had asked if it was the 22-Fillmore.) The driver hit the brakes hard, jumped up and threw Vlad the Impaler out the door. This must have been a large driver, because the offender was not a small guy. Vlad went home, stabbed his cousin in the shoulder, then cut himself up and walked to the ER.

The SFPD did not know this guy’s whereabouts, but hopefully he is in a cage now.  Probably not though.  Hard to verify this one anyway, partly because he was crazy but also because there was no mention of it in the paper, for what that is worth.  Following up on interesting patients is not easy – always another call, a different hospital, shift changes, discharge, etc.

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An upscale mom was in the kitchen with her six-month-old baby strapped to her chest. She slipped on the wet floor and fell, striking his fat head on the dishwasher. He had a skull fracture, but was calm and feeding when I saw him. He would recover fully and quickly.

The awkward moment for all came when we delivered them to the pediatric unit of the hospital and the newborn across the hall was not responding to resuscitation efforts.  I think it was a heart defect.

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We left at midnight for a three-hour ride far out in the country to pick up a premature baby who would do better with intensive care here in San Francisco. On arrival, the neonatal nurse we brought with us went to work on the unstable critter, switching the hospital’s equipment and incubator to her own portable gear and incubator. The baby was hatched in his 26th week, and resembled a reddish-purple Cornish game hen to me. He had a softball-sized head and I do not know why he arrived so early. I think he was 3 ½ pounds, and would easily fit inside my old lunchbox, with maybe room for some chips.

While I was visualizing him riding shotgun with me and chewing the fat on the long drive home (“So how was it in there, dude?”) a thin young woman in a hospital gown appeared at my side.   Oh good, I thought, the mom is coming with us, but she should dress warmer for the return trip. Then I noticed her handcuffs and leg irons, and saw the large woman in the sheriff’s uniform behind her.  Mom said goodbye, maybe for the last time, and she and the baby went off to the back of their respective vans. I never was able to find out why momma was in the pokey, but maybe it had to do with this area’s fame as methamphetamine lab  hotspot.

Our nurse did shed a little light on it though: This was her seventh pregnancy and fourth child. Mom was 23 years old.

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You might not want to drink too much scotch and then chop a watermelon, because you might lose a whole pinky. Worse, neither of the medics would beat the other out of $10 because they both wagered (correctly) that this call involved a meat cleaver.  Odds were in favor of successfully reattaching the digit, but not for the microsurgery which might restore full function, because he had no insurance.

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Police activity, not directly witnessed or verified:

Good shooting I guess:  While apprehending an armed local street gangster, a cop fired nine bullets and hit the thug eight times.  Somehow the guy was shot only in the arms and legs and will live to drain your tax payments for several more decades.

Not good shooting:  two policemen each fired a whole clip at an armed robber outside a McDonalds.  That is 30 bullets, and each one missed completely except a ricochet which hit a bystander in her collarbone.

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Dog versus two-year-old. This is a nasty baby-trauma story, and I recommend not reading it at all if you have kids.  Then again, there might be a lesson here.

Two of my co-workers were sent one hour south to move a patient from a hospital there up to San Francisco for microsurgery. It was a severely disfigured toddler, one that had been a cute Mexican girl. A few hours earlier, the girl had been playing on the kitchen floor when the family dog turned and attacked her. It was a pit bull.  Amazing, I know.

The beloved pet tore and punctured one lower leg, one forearm, and one shoulder blade before getting a hold on her lower lip, and tearing it completely off, along with all the flesh below it, down past the chin. Nothing left but lower teeth and jawbone to look at. Fortunately El Badass  did not bury her lip in the backyard, he just left it there on the floor, where the responding paramedics recovered it.

They quickly transported the girl and the box of ice with part of her face in it up to the specialty center. The avulsed piece was reattached in surgery, and the largest local artery reconnected. Interestingly, leeches were then applied to the entire border of the wound. The blood-sucking at the edges works to pull fresh oxygenated blood from the central artery across that entire area which would not otherwise be well supplied. I am not sure about the predicted odds of recovery, but reattached parts do not always  successfully re-implant. Often they do not regain actual function, or else they fail completely.

Ten days later, dropping off a different patient at the microsurgery hospital, there was the girl. It could only have been her, and the reattachment was obviously rejected. All of her bottom teeth were visible, and the lower part of her face looked like a burnt marshmallow, or a charcoal briquette. Puffy, oozing, black as tar. She was back here to have it removed, but then what? Probably graft a full piece from her backside, maybe tattoo a lower lip on it, but that will not regrow any of the muscles that control the area.

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Photo above: Nicholas Cage zombies along while his partner thrashes the ambulance in Scorsese’s “Bringing Out the Dead.”

Tagged: MUNI, paramedic work, urban blight ]]> http://housefly.us/2010/02/03/night-shift-part-two/feed/ 0 . BringingOuttheDead3