Shiv-a-Git

When I was an EMT, sometimes, I would have accidents in the ambulance. And I don't mean that I would pee myself. The patients did that frequently enough, and they were always kind enough to do it on the stretcher, which was easily disinfected.

What I mean, of course, is that, when piloting the ambulance, sometimes I would hit things. They were always inanimate things, and I only did it three times in a year-and-a-half of employment. I don't know if that's a lot or a little, as compared to the average American emergency medical technician, but, for a guy who'd never previously driven anything larger than a Dodge Caravan and who had received a bogus Emergency Vehicle Operator's Certificate without ever having driven an actual ambulance, I think three minor accidents in seventeen months isn't bad.

The first accident I had was while pulling into a Sunoco gas station. It was the end of an eight hour shift that, due to a long-distance transport, had turned into a ten hour shift. I was exhausted, and I lovingly kissed a concrete barrier with the side of the truck. Actually, you could say that I Frenched it more than kissed it. The body damage on 251 was, you know, noticeable. And I had to take pictures of it with a little throw-away camera and fill out an accident report, replete with diagrams and the police were called. The officer took a look at the barrier and at the truck and drove away.

"You don't want this reported and put on your license anyway," he said to me. He was right. How did he know?

The second accident I had was while transporting a terminally ill patient to her luxurious home in my old neighborhood so she could die surrounded by her family and her collection of vases. I was extremely flustered because I knew the address, had been down the street hundreds of times growing up, but, for some reason, I could not find her house. And gently, almost imperceptibly, the ambulance drifted over to the right as I peered out of the driver's side window squinting for the right house number when there was a BOOM!

"Oh, fuck," I groaned softly, but loud enough, apparently, for my partner in the back to hear.

"You okay," he said, "just keep drivin', man."

I had swiped a big, white moving truck with the large, black plastic side-view mirror on the passenger side of the ambulance. An hour later, after we'd finally found the lady's house, we pulled into a vacant lot and I inspected the damage I had done to the rearview mirror. There was a large, undeniable white scuff all over the black plastic backing of the mirror.

"Well," I sighed, "there goes this week's paycheck." I picked up the radio mic.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa-- what are you doing?" my partner, an enormous African-American with a gap between his two front teeth the size of a block of cheese, asked.

"I damaged the truck, so I've got to let them know."

"Hold on, hold on, hold on," he said to me. He ran his fingers over his eight trouser pockets, and then across the breast pockets of his uniform shirt. He smiled and he un-Velcro'd his right breast pocket and pulled out a Sharpie marker.

"I keep this on me for emergencies, just like this," he said. He undid the cap and carefully colored over the white scuff mark until it was completely concealed. Even I had to admit it was a pretty good job. Undetectable from three-or-so feet.

"Wow," I said.

"No shit wow," he affirmed, replacing the cap on the marker, which he then presented to me. "Here," he said, grinning, "you're gonna need this. And let me tell you something-- you're gonna have a tough fuckin' time in this world if you let shit like this get you down, you know what I'm sayin'?"

I smiled dejectedly as I accepted the marker. I did know what he was saying.

Not only am I afflicted with an unquenchable desire to announce the wrongs I commit to the world, but I care so desperately about what people think of me, and wouldn't it be nice, I often think, if I didn't care so much. About that. About anything. About everything. And then I think-- but, if I didn't: who would I be?

Who would I be if I took a drink? Who would I be if I were sometimes late for things? Who would I be if I weren't as self-deprecating or as embarrassed or as uptight?

Would I be me?

When I was in college, and for a year afterwards, I worked at an optical store with an 80+-year-old guy named Jim. Jim came into work every day wearing the same shit he'd had on since Nixon was popular, and he was racist and homophobic and old fashioned and cantankerous, and he called women "Cupcake" and "Dolly" and he didn't know what types of glasses we carried or how much lenses cost, and he frequently made mistakes when cutting jobs, but I loved him. Jim was quaint and Catholic and he detested profanity, though he used it sometimes, and he had lots of catchphrases, but my favorite one was, "You know, I gotta tell you that, at my age, somebody doesn't like me or somethin' I think or say: I really don't shiv-a-git."

And every time I find myself freaking out about what someone else thinks of me, I try my best to remember my old friend Jim, and how he seemed to have mastered the ancient art of shiv-a-git-ness. It's an attitude that I seem only able to admire from a considerable distance, and I was reminded of that when I last crashed an ambulance as an EMT in 2007. We had just moved into a new base and I hadn't quite figured out the dimensions of the truck as compared to the new garage and, when bringing 402 out of the ambulance bay for the start of our shift, I ran the entire driver's side against the edge of the garage door opening, ripping off shards of the garage bay and damaging the right side of the roof of the ambulance. Four of my coworkers, and my partner, were watching and applauded. It was our first day at the new base.

"Hey, somebody's gotta have the first accident," my partner said as he climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door, "I'm glad it was you."

You Have Been Warned

There aren't a lot of things I miss about working the streets as an EMT. There are a few, though.

I miss my old partner. Sure, he had psoriasis all over the back of his neck and on his arms and knuckles and, when his flare-ups were really bad it kind of turned my stomach, and he was cheating on his wife with another employee of our company, and that kind of turned my stomach, too, but he was exceedingly nice to me. And, really, when you're in an ambulance with someone for forty hours a week, that's pretty much what counts.

I miss wearing a uniform and a badge. I remember the first time I ever walked into a Krispy Kreme establishment, ordered a coffee, and had my money refused with a smile and a wave-off from the clerk. "Holy shit," I thought, "now I see how the badge'd class can abuse their power-- it's so damn easy. And sometimes power tastes like coffee with cream and six sugars." I enjoyed the authority and the gravitas that a clean, pressed, professional-looking set of blues with a couple shoulder-patches and a badge can carry. It felt good walking around like you owned a hospital-- who was going to stop you from going anywhere you wanted?

And I'd be peeing on your face and calling it a sex-act if I told you that I didn't miss those red lights and that fucking siren. The first time I ever ran hot I thought I was going to get washed away from the massive swamp-ass I was incurring, and the black, plastic steering wheel was positively soaked with palm sweat by the time we reached the E.R., but, after a while, even I learned to relax a little bit during emergency runs and just... enjoy the ride.

The siren is a powerful tool inside an emergency vehicle. It has the power to instantly turn the brains of motorists in front of you into absolute clam chowder. They mean well, but they don't do the right thing. They slam on their brakes. They veer off to the left. They speed up. They turn in front of you. They freak. And I get it. I've done it. You panic and you want desperately to do the procedurally correct thing, the thing that you learned by reading your Driver's Ed manual on the toilet when you were fifteen years and eleven months old, and you inevitably end up fucking up. The siren warns you that something big and potentially dangerous is happening, right behind you, and you'd better get the hell out of the way.

My wife and I were fortunate enough to be in the car to hear another warning intonation yesterday. We were at the bank, about to deposit a check to stimulate our horny bank account, and a very leathery gentleman entered his Mercedes and put it in reverse. A back-up alarm, sounding very much like a child's bicycle horn, or the horn on Harpo's walking stick, sounded. And what warning did it send out to the masses? That an octogenarian was reversing in a 2009 Mercedes E-Class Sedan, thus creating a threatening situation in which a 3,740 pound mass of German engineering may very well injure you, cripple you, and/or terminate your existence had you the misfortune of perambulating across the Bank of America parking lot at that very moment.

And then it occurred to us: cars piloted by old fuckers ought to have alarms that sound, not just when they're backing up, but all the time.

I mean, sure, you can pretty much bet good cash money on the fact that a 1998 Toyota Camry (gray with gray interior) is being driven by someone whose varicose veins resemble the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on a full-zoom image from Google Earth, but why not just cut through the guess-work, save seconds and potentially save human life by forcing elderly drivers to drive cars that produce a high-pitched wail of warning as they barrel down the boulevard or meander across the double yellow line at seven miles-per-hour. That way, you wouldn't have to waste time looking for the pork pie hat or the teased-up blue hair peeking out from behind the driver's side headrest. You'd just know, because of the OFS (Old Fuck Siren).

The best part about the O.F.S. is that it does so much more than just warn you, the unsuspecting, fully-functional public, that some sag-ass named Milton is headed your way in a 1987 Lincoln Continental, its continual whine would actually remind the elderly sonofabitch that s/he is actually driving. You know how old people are-- they forget things, even whilst they're doing them. Sure, one moment they could be cognizant that they're driving a car, but the very next moment they could be convinced that they're on safari or at a burlesque show. The mind wanders. They get CVAs. The O.F.S. would pierce through their consciousness at all times with the unmistakable message: YOU ARE DRIVING A CAR. FO-CUS.

Because, let's face it: this is America. You can't take away a toothless hick's right to own a gun, you can't make nicotine-addicted blowhole necks stop smoking cigarettes, and you sure as shit can't stop guys from Altoona from fornicating with their sisters, so, in spite of all the research about brain atrophy and delayed motor responses, you're not going to take the keys to the Oldsmobile away from Cloris or Gaylord, so we might as well do all we can do to throw the rest of us a fucking bone, so we don't end up as the hood ornament on some old daddy Caddy.

Who's with me?

The Girdle Man

I went to have breakfast with my father on Thursday morning.


"We should do this more often," he said to me afterwards. "And you should be the one who is inviting me."


At least he didn't say that I'm the one who should be paying.''



My father always says what he is thinking. At least, I think he does. If he holds back, well, that would be scary, because I wouldn't want to know what is going on in his head if it contains a vault of things unsaid.



In dubious English.



He invited me to Saxby's, a burgeoning coffee chain that has franchise shops sprouting up like zits in this particular part of the world. The first time he asked me out to breakfast with him, he told me to meet him at "Sexboys." This was, to the best of my knowledge, an unintentional malapropism. Since he has been corrected, he persists in mispronouncing its name, but now does so cognizent of the error, and he now jokingly refers to our breakfast haunt as "Sexyboys," "Sexy's," and, most recently, "the Xylophone place." That last one I can't figure out for the life of me. My wife, in great consternation over this moniker, proffered, "Well, do they play xylophone music there?" In a stunning role-reversal, I put my hand on her shoulder and said,



"Honey, don't think so much."



When I pulled into Sexboy's parking lot, there was only one other car there-- my father's jet black BMW. I can't help but shake my head when I see this car. My father has a notorious hatred for cars, and they don't like him very much either. His first year in this country, he backed a car into a patrol car during a traffic stop for speeding. The next year, some maniac slammed into his car in a shitty section of Philadelphia. My father threw his car into drive and chased the guy for five blocks. At a red light, my father jumped out of his car and stormed up to the driver's side of the offending vehicle only to be greeted by the muzzle of a pistol being pointed at him. He wisely retreated.

Since the rockin' 1970s, my father has obliterated several other vehicles-- Oldsmobiles and Buicks, a Pontiac Bonneville. He's never killed a foreign car, so I guess it's good that, somewhere in the mid-1990s, my family decided somehow that it was too good to drive American cars anymore. Though a 1987 Volvo 740 GL quit on him in the middle of a snowstorm on the George Washington Bridge. My father took out his briefcase and stormed away from the car. "It abandons me? I abandon it! Fuck that!" he said when he got home two days later.



My father has always had a strained relationship when it came to cars. "A car is to get me from Poin' A, to Poin' B," is his most notorious vehicular catchphrase. Then what, you might argue, is a man espousing that philosophy doing behind the wheel of a BMW? Well, all I can say about that is, we're human beings. And what would we be if we weren't constantly contradicting ourselves? We wouldn't be being very human now, would we? Make too much sense and people will start calling you an animal.



Getting out of my car at Sexboys, I turned and caught a glimpse inside the window of my father's BMW. Thank God for cameraphones:

My father's BMW looks like a cubicle in a "Dilbert" cartoon. If you look really closely, you can see a sticky-note placed right in front of the speedometer. I guess this isn't really as dangerous as it looks: my father never looks at the speedometer anyway. He might as well have Post-Its covering the side and rearview mirrors, too.

I got my usual: meat, cheese, egg, bread-- coffee: whole milk and the sugar container upturned for forty-five seconds. He got his usual: light cream cheese on a sesame seed bagel-- coffee: black. When our food was on the table, I looked at the two disparate meals and wondered if I would be getting the bagel and black coffee someday, my unhealthy, poor-postured son seated across from me consuming copious amounts of sodium and sugar. Some day, maybe. Hopefully. I don't know.

Our breakfasts together are, well, unpredictable. I never know how they're going to go. Yes, there's always pontificating and swearing and at least some laughter. Or at least a derisive smirk and snort. There's always coffee. Ever the Israeli, he gave me my first taste of coffee when I was eight years old, and it flows through whichever veins of mine are not obstructed by pork detritus. Yes, I eat pork. And he eats shrimp. And God laughs at us, and at those who keep kosher. I think he's only ever really disappointed at the people who shoot each other in the world's alleyways, and when Joy Behar opens her mouth.

I told my father that I will be leaving my job in August to return to the streets as an emergency medical technician. It's funny-- I was afraid of telling my parents this because, as someone who holds a bachelor's degree (admittedly, it's in theatre, which is as useless as holding a bachelor's degree in strawberry cupcake development) and a master's degree, I was worried they would chastise me, maybe appropriately, for wasting my intellect and my life on a, well, manual career of certain poverty and servitude.

But, you know, my father rose to the occasion like the hairy, Israeli phoenix that he is. He didn't cut me down, or berate me, or make me feel guilty. He didn't tell me he was wasting my life. He was just my Daddy, and expressed his fears that I could be hurt in an ambulance accident, or be attacked by a psychopathic patient.

"Or partner," I chimed in, reminding him of the thick-necked paramedic who once tried to brain me with a clipboard.

He smiled. "Right. Or partner."

Lots of boys grow up thinking that their fathers are brilliant men. My wife's father, for instance, is a brilliant man-- and I suspect that being brilliant isn't easy, because my father-in-law takes forty-five minutes to put on a pair of pants and, if you go to "Target" with him and you're not careful, he will outright vanish-- possibly teleported to a Mensa meeting. A longtime friend of my wife's family described my father-in-law this way,

"He'll never look you in the eye. His eyes are always up, staring at some invisible chalkboard-- that only he can see-- and it's probably got all these complicated equations on it-- stuff you and me would never understand."

I don't know if my father is brilliant or not, and I'm not sure I remember ever thinking, when I was a boy, that he was. One thing I know for sure is that he and I are well-matched, in spite of the disparity in our command of the English language, and how different our breakfast choices may be. My wife's father has his invisible chalkboard. My father has his dashboard cubicle. It's all the same, really. More or less.

"What do I know?" he said to me one day, during a discussion about one of life's greater questions, "I'm just a girdle man." This he said with a twinkle in his eye, parrotting something I said to him years ago. He's the president of a company that makes undergarments for women-- and men-- and I said to him one day, not in anger, but definitely with great insensitivity, "Daddy, you're just a girdle man." I said it to him after he asked to see some piece of creative writing I'd done at age 12.

Just a girdle man. God, what an asshole I am. At least he's able to laugh it off now. Come August, I'll be "just an EMT." The son of a girdle man.

Praise be.

Speedwagon Rides Again

If I understood everything that went on in my brain-- every calling, every craving, every interest and every inclination-- I think I'd be a goddamned genius. Either that or I'd be a twitching, incomprehensible, foul-smelling, eye-booger-eating societal reject who finger-paints on the walls of his cell with his own diarrhea.

Fortunately, I'm neither a genius or a... that.

I made the decision that, when my contract at my small non-profit is up in August, I will return to the streets as an emergency medical technician.

Last night in the kitchen, my wife, looking very nonplussed, I am relieved to say, said in reply,

"Can I ask why?"

"It's been calling to me," I said with a shrug and an assuredly earnest look in my eye. "It's been calling to me ever since I left."

And it has. And I don't know why.

She looked at me with the same love that has been in her eyes since we 2003 and said,

"Then you need to do what you need to do. And I love you."

There are so many things that I miss about the job-- the pride of putting on a uniform. Being of service to an organization and to a people. Taking charge and taking care. Driving an ambulance, lights on or off. The back-and-forth with dispatch. The indescribable feeling you get when it's time fo flip on the auxillary battery and turn those red lights on. The smiles people give you when they see you come in for a cup of coffee, that coffee sometimes free. The feeling of importance, of meaning. Of applying knowledge that I have, of getting my skills back. Of being able to say, "I am an EMT" without having to add, "but I don't work on the street anymore."

I worked from May, 2005 to February, 2007 and they were some of the best months and worst months of my entire life. I remember the day my first steady partner threatened to kill me, throwing a clipboard at me in the front of the ambulance, shattering the windshield instead of my face. I remember the day I got him fired. I remember transporting suicidal alcoholics and paranoid schizophrenics and homeless people with City Paper underwear and cardboard shoes. I remember bringing leftover slices of my wedding cake to my co-workers at base. I remember educating my Ukranian coworker about the Holocaust in the parking lot of a hospital. I remember busting my supervisor's balls, moving his van while he was inside the base taking a leak, and changing the radio station from country to classical, and placing a male urinal on his gearshift lever. I remember sitting next to the same man in the same ambulance every single day for thirteen months. I remember the patients-- the obese ones, the severely malnourished ones, the diabetics, the congestive heart failures, the addicts, the prisoners, the women in emergent labor. I remember the one neonate I transported, and I remember how petrified my partner and I were that we would kill it. I remember driving down I-95 with my lights on, going 40 miles per hour, fearful that every pothole would break its brand new ribs.

I remember careening down that same stretch of road with my siren wailing, in a desperate attempt to get a fire-fighter to the hospital after he had collapsed at the station of a heart attack while lifting weights. I remember his wife in the seat next to me, sobbing and thanking me as I drove, sweat pouring down my brow.

I remember a lot. And perhaps I remember too much, and perhaps I remember it in that skewed way in which we remember unpleasant things after some time has passed. I remember reading "The Passing of the Armies" which is a memoir written by Brevet Major-General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain about his time rising through the ranks during the Civil War. He writes about war in a sympathetic, eloquent, flowing, almost romantic way-- the battles long cleansed of the blood and brains, smoke and horror over thirty or forty years. Maybe that's how I remember life on the street.

Maybe.

But, after a long time being chained to a desk, I find myself longing for an opportunity to jump into my car and roam, even if it's just to go to the post office to pick up mail from the P.O. Box. I would never call myself a wanderer, but I know now that I need to be out there, whatever "out there" means.

And, oh, I'm out there alright.

But I think you know what I mean.

For years and years I've struggled with what it means to work. Does a job need meaning? Does a job need to align with your perceived status or education level? Do you have some sort of familial or religious or societal obligation to seek a white collar job if it's what your parents sought, or your wife's family sought? Does being in possession of a Masters of Education degree obligate you to teach? Well, no-- just as my undergraduate degree in Theatre doesn't obligate me to whore myself out in the world of off-off-off-off Broadway or appear in local car commercials smiling while receiving the keys to some piece of shit Ford Focus.

I've come to understand that you've just got to do something, and it might as well be something interesting, engaging, rewarding, and maybe a little bit fun, even if it doesn't pay the best and you may run into elderly ladies who tell you they're going to "fucking kill" you as you're strapping them snugly into a stretcher and covering them with a blanket.

You'll Be Fine

A few long years ago, I was working at a small optical shop, selling glasses, scheduling doctor's appointments, throwing out the garbage, and laughing behind the backs of customers with my boss.

Then I got this crazy idea into my head that I was going to become a cop. So I wrote my boss a letter saying that I was going to resign from my $10.55/hr job to enter a municipal police academy as a police officer candidate. I was surprised when he didn't tell me that I was fucking crazy, because that's what my parents told me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said how proud he was of me, which is just what I wanted to hear from my parents about this decision, but didn't. And then he said something that rubbed me the wrong way, even though I think it was meant as a compliment.

"You'll be fine," he said to me.

"Look, you know it doesn't really matter what happens to you in there-- if you make it or if you wash out. You're handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious-- and you're a white male. Opportunities are just going to fall into your lap. I mean, shit: they fell into mine."

And I guess they did, for him. He grew up dirt-poor in a trailer in a shitty part of New Jersey. His father died early and his mother, still living, is a trembling, alcoholic wreck. Miraculously, my boss survived a long-haired, drug-hazed adolescence filled with unprotected sex and behavior of a dubious nature at best. He bummed around life and held a series of odd jobs-- landscaping, construction, house painting, and being a traveling soda vendor. A friend approached him and suggested he ought to stop peddling suds and start peddling sunglasses, and so he became a rep for a recognizable sunglass line. Another friend suggested that he buy an optical shop and, when the opportunity presented itself, as it invariably does to all handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white males, he did.

And, when he saw another handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white male at the age of twenty come into his shop with a quick joke and a shaky handshake, well, I guess he decided to return the favor. Well, kind of. He started me at $6.50 an hour, and my first job was to soap, rinse and dust each one of the approximately 2,000 pair of glasses that surrounded the store. It took me the entirety of my first week of work.

I was annoyed by my boss's assumption that things would turn out okay for me because of the color of my skin, or because I knew how to comb my hair or because I used uncommon vocabulary words like "effecacious" and "remuneration" in daily conversation. Were any of these facts sturdy enough to act as a cushion or a safety-net against homelessness, mental illness, depletion of cash, unemployment, accidents, or the hopeless, unstoppable failure that radically alters so many a promising life?

As we all know, my good looks and charming personality were not enough to keep me enrolled in the police academy. I left after two days, forty-eight minutes-- despite an acceptable sit-and-reach score, and a blistering mile-and-a-half run time. I soon learned that my combed hair or my impressive vocabulary was no help when it came time to lift the barbell.

Neither of these elements of who I am stopped me from seven months of unemployment, and they didn't help me the first time I tried to pass the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's EMT Practical Examination. Fortunately, I passed on the second try, and that lead to a year and seven months on the street with a transport ambulance company, alternately freezing or sweating my ass off for $11.00/hr, transporting spindly, 90-pound cancer sufferers to hospitals and hospice centers, or schlepping around 400-pound gorillas to MRI appointments or up three flights of stairs. Or down. I can't remember which anymore.

Promotions at the ambulance company that seemed like they would be open to someone of my liberal arts qualities-- positions in management or supervision-- were routinely given to others with lower education levels, lower communication skills, and probably lower chromosomal quantities.

So I left.

After two years in my current desk-jockey job, I am emotionally exhausted, burned out and apathetic, and I am, at 29, finding myself once again at a cross-roads in my life where I am wondering if what my old boss once said to me will turn out to be true or false.

"You'll be fine."

I never put much stock into what he said, unless it was funny, and I'm not sure I believe him now. I want to, of course. But I think he might have been prejudiced, and it's hard to believe what tainted people say.

If he is to be believed, though, and if I understand him correctly, some tantalizing plum will kind of just... fall into my lap. I just hope that, if it does, it doesn't break my balls.

Sti(cke)r Crazy

Bumper-stickers always kind of got on my nerves, and so I never thought, growing up, that I would become the kind of person who'd want to put any on my own car.

Turns out, I was wrong about that.

Not only do I have several bumper-stickers on my car, I actually had one custom-made, just for me, and I'm pretty convinced that, because it was an original creation, I'm the only person in the world who drives a PT Cruiser with a bumper-sticker that says:

"WARNING: Gilbert & Sullivan Freak Behind Wheel"

After all, I think it's only fair to alert other unsuspecting motorists in the immediate vicinity that the vehicle rolling near them is being operated by a less-than-sane Anglophile who might, at that very moment, be singing the patter song, "My Name is John Wellington Wells" at the top of his lungs and rolling his "Rrrr's" while driving.

It's probably more dangerous than texting, though I don't think enough empirical research has yet been done.

I have another sticker on the back of my car, and it is the Pennsylvania Department of Health seal, which only certified Emergency Medical Technicians are permitted to display. While I no longer work on an ambulance, I am still certified by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as an EMT until 2011, at such time I will either have to renew my certification or, I guess, peel that sticker off my car.

There are lots of reasons why I keep that sticker on my car, even though I quit my ambulance gig back in 2007. First of all, it lets people know that the PT Cruiser with the blue dashboard light flashing that stops at the scene of a fresh car accident is supposed to have that light, and is supposed to be there, and contains someone useful who can be of service. It says that if you've been hit by a car or you've been shot in the back or you've just had a stroke, that this is a car you can stumble over to and ask the driver for help-- and I'll give you whatever help I can remember how to give. I've got an emergency EMS bag in the back with some tools of the trade-- not many, though.

More than any of this, I display the sticker because I'm proud of the work I put in to become an EMT. In my class of thirteen, only two of us hung around long enough to get to the State Certification test, and I was the only one who passed. I worked for seventeen months for crap pay, got a bullshit performance evaluation that resulted in a disgraceful 33-cent-an-hour raise, suffered through an endless stream of incompetent, irrational, psychotic, delusional, violent, unpleasant, odoriferous partners and patients and only crashed one truck and, damnit, if I'm entitled to slap a sticker on my car's ass, well, I'm going to.

The other sticker on my car is from a non-profit organization that I support, financially and through my writing. It's the Officer Down Memorial Page (www.odmp.org) and it was started by a young man named Chris Cosgriff, approximately my own age-- a civilian who, like me, found himself deeply moved at a very young age over the tragedies of law enforcement fatalities in this country. On opposite ends of the country, he and I share a lot in common, and, in our twenties, we both decided to do something about it. I wrote a book, Chris created a non-profit. The ODMP features a small profile of every single police officer who has ever died in the line of duty (either of natural or felonious causes) since the first recorded police fatality in 1791. There have been over 16,000 since then, and the ODMP honors every one of them. They have also been very kind to me, keeping the ever-flagging, modest sales of my book on life-support by stocking my book on their online giftshop.

A lot of people probably think I keep the www.odmp.org bumper-sticker on the back of my car so I don't get stopped by the police, so they know I'm a friend-- but I don't give a shit about what people think. Besides, it doesn't work anyway. I got banged for speeding just this year, and the fine was as steep as Mt. Olympus.

The three bumper-stickers on the back of the car that used to be owned by my wife tell the stories of three very different, very important parts of my life, and I like all three of them very much. I'm very interested by the things people choose to slap on the back of their own cars, these little tidbits of information that tell us things about the driver.

"Keep Honking, I'm Reloading."

"Like My Driving? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT."

"YES, WE CAN!"

"Vote for Ron Paul"

"Abortion Stops a Beating Heart"

"Visualize World Peace"

"I <3 Jesus"

I wonder what Jesus thinks of "I <3 Jesus" bumper-stickers. No doubt he appreciates that there are deities out there who could benefit from publicity more than he. Even I know who he is. I say his name every time I hurt my knuckle on a doorway while carrying the laundry basket.

Without the Kiss

Yesterday morning, my wife and I were in a doctor's waiting room, watching "Good Morning, America." Dr. Sanjay Gupta, America's favorite Model-Minority Physician, was discussing the virtues of "compression-only CPR," and how it was carefully developed and greatly increases the chance of saving lives.

"Bullshit," I murmered in my wife's ear. "It increases the chances that people will actually perform CPR on some dirty hobo who collapses in front of them on the street, if they don't have to actually put their mouths on the stinking bastard."

That afternoon, after my wife went to work, I got a text message from her. It's very long, because we just got an unlimited texting plan, and she just got a brand-new phone with a QWERTY keyboard:

"You're right about comp. only CPR: they
developed it to increase the likelihood
someone will actually do it. Dr. Sanjay
Gupta admitted it on NPR. Love you!"

See? Sometimes there is even truth in my cold, cruel, cynical view on the world. Welcome to The Kiss of Life, without the Kiss.

Of course, I don't mind that they've developed a handy-dandy new way to do CPR, namely, with your handies, that's fine-- but I do have a problem with their couching it as a "better" or "more efficient" or "more lifesaving" way to do CPR. It isn't. One of the first things they taught us back in EMT school was that CPR has a less-than-2% success rate. 20 compressions to 2 breaths, 50 compressions to 2 breaths, 100 compressions to 2 breaths. 10 to 1. 12 to 2. Whatever-- it doesn't matter-- the guy's dead by the time you've started, and chances are he's going to stay dead.

And all you'll get is very fucking tired.

My CPR certification expires in two months. My EMT certification expires on October 1st, 2011. I suppose, soon, I'll have to start making decisions about whether or not I want to renew both, or just the CPR, or neither. I haven't tended to a patient in an ambulance or driven one since February of 2007. Yet, when my EMT certification was due to expire in 2008, I renewed it for three more years, taking a bunch of ridiculous online courses and practice quizzes. I know that, if I decide to renew my CPR certification, that they will have changed the procedures. They change them every two years which, coincidentally, is how often you're required to get re-certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Funny, that.

I have no doubt that, with the American Heart Association and the American Red Cross's PR blitz about compression-only CPR, they'll be pushing that hard during the 2009-2010 re-certs. And that's fine. I can remember getting certified in CPR for the first time in 2004 or 2005, I forget which. The instructor, a 6'3" red-faced, big-nosed, no-nonsense paramedic, said,

"Look, if you come up on some disgusting scumbag with a stoma spewing yellow shit all over the place, you're not going to put your fucking mouth on that, right? You're gonna do compression-only, because you'd be outta yer goddamn mind to kiss that foaming neck-pussy."

In my seventeen month career on the streets of Philadelphia, I never kissed any foaming neck-pussies, and I never performed CPR on anybody. Neither had my partner, who was a paramedic with many more years on the street than me. I found that out one day, when it was quiet in the ambulance, I turned to him and asked him if he ever had.

"No," he said, before very a-typically launching into a monologue, "but there was one time where I was real close. I had this patient, typical cardiac old lady, in the back of the truck and she was going to the hospital for chest pain, but she was talking to me, nothing weird going on on the moniter, and then she just looked at me, and I knew something was going to go wrong. Then, all of a sudden, she went stiff as a board on the stretcher and the cardiac monitor flat-lined, and I was like, oh, fuck, you know? Here we go. So I checked her pulse, nothing, then I straddled her, you know, I was down on my knees with one leg over top of her, I rolled up my fuckin' sleeves and, I swear to God, I was about to push down on her when her eyes popped open and she was fuckin' staring at me, on top of her with my sleeves up. And she goes, 'Is everything okay?' And I stared at her for a minute and I was like, 'Uh.. I think so. Is it?'"

Sometimes, during a particularly long transport, I would silently pray that my patient wouldn't code on me. I guess, I would have known what to do if it happened, but I was always panicked by the logistics of different things you had to do. Were you supposed to radio dispatch to report the code? Would they notify the ER for you? Were you supposed to call the ER? If you were on a Basic Life Support ambulance, staffed with two EMTs, were you supposed to call for an Advanced Life Support ambulance to meet up with you to provide higher intervention? I was never certain how many liters of oxygen you were supposed to give a patient through the bag-valve mask once compressions were begun. If you're on an Advanced Life Support ambulance, and you, the EMT, are in back with the patient who codes, should the paramedic driving pull over and jump in the back since he has the higher training and the goodie bag full of drugs? I just didn't know. And I had even read the employee handbook, cover-to-cover, confident that I was the only employee of our company ever so to do.

Early on in my career, I had a conversation with an elderly, black EMT nicknamed Strollin' Roland, for the lackadaisical manner in which he lumbered to and from his daily activities-- like a moose through Jell-o. He had a slow, melodic way of talking, and he spoke as if he were constantly on the verge of falling asleep midsentence.

"Have I evah been scared in this bizness? Yes, ah have... Have I evah had patients die on me? Yes, ah have... You get used to all that shit."

I got used to a lot of shit in that job-- incompetent supervisors, manic dispatchers, psychopathic partners, rude nurses, malingering patients-- but I don't know that patients dying under my care is something I could have gotten used to. I guess, of course, we'll never really know. Unless I do decide to renew that cert in 2011 and suit up in blue for one more round.

I'm thankful, though, that I got out of EMS before I ever had to do CPR on a patient, before having a patient die on my watch. I feel lucky, like the cop who retires with 25 years under his belt and never had to fire his gun. Maybe going back would be like tempting fate. Maybe the first call of the new chapter of my EMS career would be an unresponsive male or female or, God forbid, child. That is how God works, isn't it? That would show me I should have just let that cert go the way of an autumn leaf.

Then again, maybe it's just a rite-of-passage that I never got to experience, unlike all the rites I did go through: slamming an ambulance into our station's garage door frame on the first day at our new base, being part of a six-man crew called to lift and transport a 680 lb. patient, getting AIDS blood and pee on my uniform, having a nurse slip me her phone number, almost being killed by my partner with a clipboard, getting stranded in a broken-down truck in the middle of summer, having a 92-year-old nun scream "Heil, Hitler!" at me, complete with gestapo salute. But maybe, just maybe, you have to give CPR to a patient in order to be a lifer.

Me? I just left one cold day in February.

And, when I did, I bade my partner of a year-and-a-half a warm farewell before he unceremoniously patted me on the back, declared, "It's been a lot of fun, man," and walked to his car. I shook my supervisor's hand, and the hand of another paramedic who was in the office, and I walked to my car. And, in the parking lot, I stopped. I turned around, and walked back into the base. My supervisor was still having a conversation with the other paramedic. When they saw me, they stopped talking and they looked at me. I looked at them. Then, I grabbed my uniform shirt and pulled it way, way up, exposing my stomach and my nipples. I jumped up and down and screamed in a high-pitched voice, bugging my eyes out. I showed my supervisor my nipples, and then I turned to the other paramedic and showed him, too and, as they collapsed on the desk in front of them in hysterics, I ran out of the office, slamming the door behind me as I jumped into my car and skeedaddled out of the parking lot.

Well. No one ever said I didn't know how to make an exit.

And who knows? Maybe I'll return, and maybe I won't. One thing's for sure, though: whether I go back on the ambulance or not, I won't be putting my mouth on that foaming neck-pussy.

Autopsy Turvy

Tonight, Mrs. Apron and I slumped inertly on the couch and mechanically ate our dinner while watching a re-run of a "Jeopardy!" Teen Tournament. Our living room was stifling, the heat and humidity weighed down on us like a leatherpress, what else could we do? It was way too hot to initiate baby-making procedures in front of old Alex, so we just munched and zoned.

I remembered this episode in particular. During the usually painful interview section of the program, the slut on the right expressed her aspiration to be a doctor. She said that she had already witnessed lung surgery. "And I've held a brain!" she added with some enthusiasm.

Hmpf, I recalled, so have I.

In 2005, as I was nearing the end of my schooling, if you can call it that, to certify me as an emergency medical technician, there were three brief field stints I had to perform. First, logically, I had to complete one eight hour tour-of-duty on an ambulance. I did this at a Philadelphia hospital-based ambulance service, whose name I will neglect to mention so that I don't get sued for libel. I was positively giddy with excitement about my first real shift on an ambulance. Like most things I get positively giddy about in expectation, my shift on the ambulance didn't pan out exactly the way I had hoped.

It was a frigid day in February or thereabouts, and a layer of snow and slush covered the streets of Philadelphia. I arrived for my shift my customary twenty-five minutes early. I would have been even earlier, but I couldn't find the base. A security guard at the hospital directed me to the basement. Just so you know, if you're ever looking for a hospital-based ambulance company-- it's in the basement. There was a big conference table, but no one was sitting at it. There were four or five EMTs and paramedics all huddled around a smaller table atop which sat a fax machine. I soon gathered that they were all faxing their resumes to other ambulance companies.

The obese supervisor stepped in front of them and glowered at me, with my bright white EMT student polo shirt and my fresh-out-of-the-bag navy blue uniform pants and my stethoscope hanging around my neck. He hated me from the word "fag."

"Hi," I said nervously, "I'm, um, an EMT student."

He looked at me like he wanted to shit on his fist and hit me with it.

"Well, obviously," he replied, staring at my shirt.

"Oh."

He shoved a thick hand into his hip pocket and dug around. I assumed he had ringworm or something. He pulled his hand out and thrust a greasy key out in my face. "Move unit A-12," he commanded. "It's in the fucking way."

I took the key and navigated the complex stairs and halls of the hospital, getting lost three times on my way out to the alley where the ambulances were haphazardly parked as if they had been jumbled about by a tornado. In the fucking way of what? I wondered. They're all in the fucking way of... each other. Between the snow and the ridiculous way these things were parked, I didn't see how a single one of them could move anywhere. I arrived at unit A-12. A sorry excuse for an ambulance, it looked as if it had been gang-raped by a trio of 18-wheelers. When I opened the driver's side door, it almost fell off-- the hinges were rusted clean through. I hoisted myself into the vinyl driver's seat, which was carved up like a Christmas goose and I peered at the odometer.

289,600.

Well, I thought, at that rate, unit 12-A wouldn't be in the fucking way for much longer.

The second field placement I had to do was a tour-of-duty in the Emergency Room at the same hospital. EMTs often find gainful employment in emergency rooms across the country, where they go by the title "Critical Care Technician." Basically, they take vital signs on patients and do everything that nurses feel entitled to delegate to someone who makes considerably less money than they do, like lift up incredibly fat people and/or clean out bedpans and vomit basins. Fortunately, I didn't have to do any of that during my emergency room rotation, because I was completely and utterly ignored by the nurses. My presence was only marginally acknowledged upon my arrival (initial my time-sheet here) and upon my departure (initial my time-sheet here). I did finally manage to make my mark on the evening when a transsexual psych-patient locked herself in the bathroom and was refusing orders to come out. A nurse had gathered that not only was she probably doing drugs in there, but that she was armed with a knife. I was told to go get security but, just as I was passing the bathroom, she burst the door open and she bolted out of the exit of the hospital. Not thinking at all, I tore off in chase, racing down a dimly-lit Center City street after her.

"Stop right there!" I screamed at her, my brand-new boots pounding against the pavement.

"Jesus Christ! Stop!" I didn't realize that the security guard who yelled that out was yelling at me until I got within around four or five feet of her and he yelled, "Kid! Stop! Jesus, stop!"

So I stopped and doubled over, panting. I looked behind me and there was an elderly security guard, extremely overweight, about thirty feet back, his hands on his thighs, a nurse behind him, holding my stethoscope, which had flown off during the chase. The tranny turned down an alleyway whilst hooting and laughing and extending her middle finger in my direction.

"Kid," the huffing and puffing whale-of-a-guard said once he'd caught up to me, "once they're off the hospital property-- fuck 'em. She's the cops' problem now. God! You're fucking crazy-- she could have killed you. It's not worth it."

Last up on the field rotation: the autopsy. The rationale behind EMTs attending autopsies is that they ought to have empathy and compassion for the human condition, and attending an autopsy is also a good way to get seeing your first dead body up close and personal out of the way fast. It's kind of ironic that, in seventeen months on the street as an EMT, I never saw a dead body, except one in the ICU of a local hospital that was slumped half out of bed and half on the floor. The curtain hadn't been pulled shut yet and "The Golden Girls" was still playing on the patient's TV. But, yeah, if I had ever encountered a dead person, the autopsy would have been a good primer for that occurrence. Plus, it's a really awesome way to learn anatomy. Most EMTs-in-training, being dickheads in their early 20s, just think it's cool/sick/fucked up. The subject of the autopsy I attended was an elderly woman who had perished while in the hospital. I made sure to stare at her wrist bracelet, mostly so I wouldn't have to stare at any other part of her, but also because I wanted to remember how old she was.

Of course, that was four years ago, and I've forgotten now. She was either 78 or 87. Damned dyscalculia and Alzheimers.

Anyway, I don't know what other people remember about their first autopsy, but I remember the stench that infiltrated my nostrils upon the opening of the woman's bowels. That's a smell no amount of mental Snuggle can ever ameliorate. It was horrid, putrid and fetid. Basically, any adjective that ends with "id" would be accurate. I also remember the smell that emanated from the saw as it buzzed through the woman's skull. It was slightly burnt, slightly sulphuric, slightly nauseating. Once the attending coroner had cut her domepiece entirely off, he used a pair of long, thin scissors to cut through the glistening, gelatinous membrane covering her brain. He told me to cup my hands below what was formerly her head and I thought to myself, "Oh my God, in about six seconds, I'm going to be holding this woman's fucking brain, aren't I?" Then he made two final clips by her occipital lobe and *glorp!* I was holding this woman's fucking brain.

Can I go on "Jeopardy!" now?

Ladies & Gentlemen, Make Way for Robo-Medic

I first became worried that the robots were going to take over for you and me when they began installing self-check out lanes at the grocery store. Even though they still need a supervisor to be on-hand to scope out the scene for thieves and imbeciles, it's pretty much just you and the scanny-thingy. Although my interactions with grocery store clerks are often rote, formulaic and exasperating, we're still fostering the bonds of human interpersonal communication. Even the clerk who tried to talk to me about baseball was doing a yeoman's job of forging ahead with the luminous and lofty goal of human contact.

And good for him.

It's easy to forget, though, that robots have been around for a while. They've been pretty much building our cars for a while now. That cute little Roomba bastard is soon going to replace Consuela, the green-card coveting house-wench who has to take the bus to your 4br, 2ba brick colonial from her rickety rowhome en el barrio. And I'm quite sure that the Japanese are, right at this moment, working out the schematics for a life-sized, self-lubricating companion.

And good for them.

But if the preponderance of ATMs, automated car-washes, and cyber-waiters isn't enough to convince you that the era of human dominance is at an end, I present you with the Lucas 2.

Yes, ladies & gents: it's an automated CPR machine, and not only is it better than you, it's better than the Lucas 1.

Because I am an emergency medical technician living in the heady daze of street-retirement, I still sometimes get emails from a website called http://www.jems.com/, which is the official website of the Journal of Emergency Medical Services. They have interesting, engaging articles about medics who get into roadside brawls with state troopers, news about continuing education and re-certification, the latest advances in treating Diabetty and Heart Attack Jack and, yes, product announcements. Products like the coolest new blue whacker light-bar for you to put on top of your Dodge Caravan, or cool perforated leather gloves you can wear so your grip doesn't slip while you're lifting a stretcher containing 520-pound Bertha McSupersize. Products like the Lucas 2.

Folks, the era of automated, robotic CPR has arrived.

So, here's the deal. You're eating dinner at Windsor Palace. Sir Cerebral Strokesalot goes down while consuming his leg of mutton that is embossed with the likeness of Elizabeth II. The fire brigade is summoned but you, with your quick-thinking and cunning skills, notice a box on the wall that is marked "LUCAS 2: Break Glass Only In Emergency." You run over to it. Being British, you are consumed with guilt at smashing an object and causing a disturbance, so you gently tap on the glass with your shrimp fork until it shatters. You remove the Lucas 2, which looks very much like a pogo stick for midgets, and you race over to Sir Strokesalot. You plop the thing on top of his sternum and press the button that says "Press Here to Wake the Dead," and the Lucas 2 goes into action. Up and down that thing goes like a sonofabitch. There are horrified gasps from the crowd. Ladies swoon, and so do the men, because they're all English and gay and shit. The fire brigade finally comes and they're all like, "Oy! What's all this then!?" And you'll be all like, "Look! Me and Lucas 2 revived this twiggy motherfucker!" And then you'll be hanged for using language like that in front of the Queen, you bloody vulgarian.

Yeah. So, seriously-- there's a CPR machine.

Be afraid.

I don't know how I feel about it. Part of me is looking at it from the point of view of a collapsing civilian which, as an incurable hypochondriac, I'm always afraid of becoming, and the other part of me is looking at it from the perspective of a pre-hospital provider, which I was and, though inactively still am, and may one day be again. Who knows? The potentially collapsing civilian in me is very skeptical of this thing because, if a normal person doing chest compressions is liable to break a few of my brittle, ginger ribs, a fucking machine is probably going to break all of them.

The pre-hospital provider in me is skeptical of this machine because it seems like a very expensive way to do the same thing that human beings can do anyway. Yes, the machine doesn't get tired after thirty minutes of chest compressions like humans would but, realistically, if you're doing CPR on someone for thirty minutes either by yourself or with a machine-- stop and face facts: he's fucking dead, so what's the difference if the machine can go on and on for an hour and not get "tired?" Any pre-hospital provider who has a shred of honesty or intelligence will tell you that that CPR without the assistance of an Automated External Defibrillator has an extremely low/poor success rate-- so, why spend the money when you can just as easily send two EMTs to the scene making $11.00/hr to bang on somebody's chest? It's just one more thing that has to be inspected every year, can break and requires man hours to train people how to use.

I mean, forget the automatic chest-compression device. What would really be great would be an air compressor attached to a pair of robot lips so that you wouldn't have to put your mouth on some Herpes-scabbed homeless motherfucker. Now that's a CPR machine I'd support.

Of course, you know perverts would just buy it for their own sordid purposes.

And good for them.

The Famous & The Dead

David Carradine...

Farrah Fawcett....

Ed McMahon.....

and, the grand Daddy of them all...

The Queen of Pop.

June has been a pretty bad month for celebrities. I'm glad I'm not a celebrity. I wouldn't want to die in June, particularly this one. It would be a real bumfuck to die during one of the coolest Junes in recent history.

But, you know what they say about death: you don't get to choose. Unless, of course, you're a suicide. You don't have to worry about me on that score, though. Way too much to live for. Way too scared.

Though I'm by no means a suicide risk, I do have to say I'm not altogether too thrilled about waking up tomorrow and hearing people memorialize and mythologize Michael Jackson. My place of employ is going to be electrified with moronic, dunderheaded, pointless drivel about him, and I kind of wish I could spend tomorrow locked in my basement, just kind of let it all pass by without having to listen to any of it-- that would be seriously fine by me. I don't want to listen to people remembering practicing the "Moon Walk" in their parents' basement while wearing feet pajamas. I don't want to hear about some dickhead's first kiss to "Beat It." I mean, who would have their first kiss to "Beat It" anyway? I mean, I'm sure more than a couple pre-adolescent boys had their first kisses that way down at the Neverland Ranch, but that's their problem.

I wonder about the EMTs and paramedics who responded to the 911 call, though. I do wonder about them. I wonder how I would have behaved had I been summoned to render aid to Michael Jackson. It was obviously a critical emergency, and I'd like to think that I would have been all business, but, it's Michael Jackson. I mean, how can you actually tell he's dead? I guess that's where cardiac monitors come in. Can you just step back and picture yourself giving CPR to that man? I mean, fine, as a healthcare professional, you'd be using at least a barrier so your lips wouldn't have to directly touch Michael Jackson's dubious lips, but still... Just picture it.

Weird.

Also weird-- they're going to perform an autopsy on him, probably tomorrow. How'd you like to be the coroner in charge of that one? Wouldn't you be petrified of what you'd.... find.... in there? I mean, again, it's Michael Jackson. Who the fuck knows what's hiding in there? Maybe he had a titanium duodenum retrofitted, or a small, waterproof music box that plays "Black or White" during digestion. There could be small animals living inside there. Way fucked up. Couldn't pay me enough to cut that shit open and take a peek. Sorry.

As part of my EMT training, I was required to attend an autopsy at the morgue of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. The deceased was your typical old lady-- distended belly, pale, flabby skin. Her wristbracelet said she was 87. No toe-tags. I guess that's just in the movies. She died of cancer but, since she passed away in the hospital, I think an autopsy was required. The gentleman in charge of the morgue at Jefferson was conducting the autopsy, and he cautioned me about professionalism and decorum around the dead.

"A couple years ago, I had a bunch of EMT students in here observing an autopsy on a deceased gentleman. When I cut into the lining of the stomach, a small piece of feces popped out, sailed through the air, and landed on the head of the deceased. This one EMT student, who I later found out was at the top of her class and was certain to graduate with distinction, blurts out, 'Wow! I guess he's a real shithead!' Well, I threw her fucking ass out of my examination room and, when the autopsy was over, I called the head of your EMT program and had her kicked the fuck out. So, just so you know-- in here: you watch your ass, and your mouth."

Needless to say, I was a very, very quiet EMT student for this autopsy. With my mouth, as long as it's open, there's the risk of trouble, so it was firmly shut. I helped him weigh the various internal organs. I helped him saw through the skull to expose the brain. After the top of the skull was off, he told me to cup my hands beneath the deceased woman's head. He snipped around the brain a few times with the forceps and, before I knew what was happening-- plop! -- her brain was in my hands.

You never forget that, I expect.

The philosophy behind requiring EMT students to attend autopsies is, I suppose, to get them comfortable with death, or at least acquainted with it. As a healthcare provider, you're going to be exposed to death eventually, so it probably should be done first in a controlled environment, where you're not responsible for the demise of the individual who has passed on. Plus, it's an incomparable anatomy lesson-- far better than any ditto sheet or textbook illustration.

It does smell worse than textbooks and ditto sheets, though. If you think regular, live old people smell, and they do, try being around a dead one whose rectum has just been cut open.

They say that an autopsy robs a corpse of its dignity, but I think people who say that have never actually been to an autopsy, at least not one conducted by the chief coroner at Jefferson Hospital. This man treats his corpses, well, like patients, and that's not always an easy or expeditious thing for a coroner to do. I trust that the coroner who stands before the corpse of Michael Jackson will do likewise, though I'm pretty sure Michael Jackson's dignity was lost a long time before his final breath.

Sticky Ham & Other Profundities

They tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but isn't that what everybody does in Borders?

You also probably shouldn't judge pre-packaged ham by its expiration date, but that's what I did yesterday in my kitchen.

Shame on me.

I purchased a vacuum-sealed package of Primo Taglio hammy slices at the market yesterday morning and, as I was preparing my lunch like a good little poor boy, I opened the package. When I stuck my hand in to extract a slice or two of ham, I felt as if I had just lost my wristwatch up Slimer's asshole. My face contorted in displeasure as I said aloud, "What the fuck is that?" to no one in particular-- maybe the dog who was salivating below, hoping I would drop a bit of porcine pleasure onto the floor. I turned my gaze reluctantly towards the packaging and observed a very thick, mucousy film covering the ham and the inner packaging. It looked like Gollum had vomited all over my ham.

I immediately pulled out my hand, which now looked like I had been fistfucking sewer pipe, and washed it under scalding water with copious amounts of Dawn. I then thoroughly inspected the package for some kind of clue as to what this mystery goop could be. I carefully scanned the back of the packaging for words like "saliva" and "rubber cement" but I found no such ingredients. Turning it over to the front, I read the words, "Primo Taglio Sweet Maple Ham -- In Natural Juices." Hmpf, I thought. Whose natural juices? They looked, and felt a lot like my "natural juices." My horny juices. What was my ham doing covered in horny juice? And then I read the expiration date: August, 2009.

Oh, I thought. Phew. It's fine. And I finished making my sandwich.

After I came home from work, I told Mrs. Apron about my unsettling culinary experience.

"So, what did you end up taking for lunch?"

"Oh, the ham. I made myself a ham sandwich."

"You ate that? You ate ham that was covered in semen?"

"Yes."

"That's disgusting." Sometimes she's such a vegetarian.

"What? The expiration date says August, 2009."

Listen to me. "But the expiration date says!" What if the ham had been black? What if it had glow worms going to the bathroom on it? Would I still have eaten it if the expiration date said it was okay? What if the expiration date was a misprint? What if the meat was infected and infested with piggy-sicky and hoof and mouth and mad hammy disease? What would I have done if it smelled like dead chick pussy? Would I still have eaten it?

And, the sad, cold, hard truth of the matter is: I just don't know.

See-- I trust safety inspectors. When I see and expiration date, it's like a speed limit sign or a contract-- it is meant to be obeyed. Expiration dates don't lie. We once had milk in our refrigerator that had gone past its expiration date a couple days prior, and Mrs. Apron was still expecting me to use it in my coffee. Now, granted, I only put in about the equivalent of one tablespoon of milk in coffee, but I sniffed that shit like it was coke. I poured it gingerly, slowly, methodically into my cup, as if it were liquid nitrogen or holy water. And, all that day, I waited for the inevitable signs of food poisoning. But, see, the milk smelled absolutely fine. It didn't have semen in it. But, because the date was a couple days past, I was immediately suspicious.

The ham, though, was fine, because the numbers on the package said so.

This reminded me of my EMT training course. Our instructor was desperately trying to instill in his students a sense of moral responsibility, a feeling of duty, he was trying his best to create empathic, observant, intelligent, compassionate, competent emergency medical technicians. Of course, for all his efforts, I was the only one in the class who graduated, but that's beside the point. I remember one class he was teaching us about the pulse oximeter, which is a small, handy device that measures the oxygen saturation of a patient's blood, as well as their heart rate and respiratory rate. Ed was trying very hard to tell us not to be lazy EMTs, EMTs who just watched the numbers on the pulse-ox and never actually checked on the patient, as long as the numbers were good.

"Look," he said to us, "granmaw Edith can have great numbers on the pulse ox-- she can be satting at 99% on room air and have a pulse of 92 and respirations of 16, and that's all great, but look at her fucking face-- what if it's blue? Ask her how she's feeling every now and then, for Christ's sake. Don't just look at the numbers. A patient can have numbers that read fine and they can be dying right in front of you. So don't be an asshole, right? The numbers don't tell the whole story."

And ham can be very much expired, just like granmaw Edith, no matter what the numbers on the package say.

"Well," Mrs. Apron asked finally, "how did it taste?"

"Oh, it was great."

Hello, (Again), Treo

We all have watershed moments in our lives.

You know what I'm talking about-- those moments where time just stops, and we have a great epiphany, a realization about the world or, if we're 20somethings, about ourselves. 20somethings don't have realizations about the world, generally speaking, unless they're significantly enlightened or seriously cracked out.

Last year, probably at around this time, I had a watershed moment about myself. I came to the difficult and painful conclusion that the way I operated was no longer working for me. The way I "functioned" from day to day, well, it just wasn't cutting it anymore. See-- when the old Mr. Apron needed to remember to do something, he wrote himself a note on a tiny scrap of paper, and he put it in his right hip pocket. This scrap of paper, (it might have been a reminder to get the oil changed in the PT Cruiser, or that an allergist appointment was coming up, or there was a 9:10pm G&S audition tomorrow night) would join several other scraps of paper in the old Mr. Apron's right hip pocket. At night, while the old Mr. Apron snored the night away, the scraps of paper would all have a party in his trouser pocket-- they'd invite their friends Overdue Library Notice, Inhaler Prescription, Vacation Request Note and Random Scribbled Thing over to join in the nocturnal pocket merriment.

And, oh what fun they had.

The trouble was, the old Mr. Apron changed his trousers maybe twice a week, although he was admonished for this habit by his father ("Mummy, you have to stagger! If you're going to wear the same pants all the time, okay, but, Jesus-- stagger it! Wear the navy pants for a day, then the brown pants, then back to the navy, maybe for two days in a row, then back to the brown. I mean, if you don't stagger, people are going to notice.") and, although twice a week isn't much in terms of changing pants, the old Mr. Apron had to make sure that all of his little notes and scraps of paper made it from one pair of pants to the other, or else he'd never remember all the things he had to do.

Of course, he also had to remember to put his hand in his pocket every now and then, so he'd feel all the scraps of paper, which would then send a message to his brain that these scraps of paper were worth looking at, and then, hopefully, he'd look at them, and go get the fucking Cruiser's oil changed.

"Renew CPR certification." "Get Finley's ear medication." "Pay the PECO bill." "Haircut at 4:30 - Thursday." "Pick up supplies for work." "Email.... somebody."

Even unimportant losers have lots to remember-- it doesn't seem fair. I really used to be able to keep it all together. Really, I could. But, last year, I hit that watershed moment. I was flaking out on obligations, and with student loan payments and health insurance and other expenses, the bills I had to pay became too numerous to keep all in my head and in my pocket. So I panicked and I bought a Treo.

Now, because I'm an idiot, I didn't just walk into an AT&T store and buy one. I bought one on e-bay. It wasn't the newest of the new, either. (Apparently, brand-new, this thing cost $379.00-- which is a sum I won't pay for anything that isn't a home improvement.) It was a gently used Treo 650 and, while it has the proportions of a brick, it's by far the most technologically sophisticated piece of equipment I've had at my disposal since the Commodore 64.

I used this device from June of last year through November, when it started shutting off mysteriously, frustratingly, and constantly. I was very upset, not because I had spent a shitload of money on it (I got it for around $80.00) but because it was actually working for me. I was putting in appointments and events in the calendar, and I was actually looking at it! I was remembering to go to rehearsals and appointments and things were getting accomplished and I was feeling less harried and incompetent. But, as someone who did not have a landline, I needed a phone that would turn a cold shoulder to me whenever it felt tired or had a headache.

"That's it," I said to Mrs. Apron. "I've learned my lesson. No more cellphones from e-bay (I'd purchased three that way already). From now on, I'll just suck it up and get raped at the AT&T store and at least get a brand new phone." The only problem was, I wasn't eligible for a new phone. But my wife, who's had the same phone since 2003, was.

No problem, I'll just use her upgrade. Thanks, honey!

Turns out, something good actually came from entering the AT&T store. "Ask about employee discounts" a small sign implored.

"You don't give discounts to emergency medical technicians, do you?"

"Oh, yes," the woman with the unpronouncable name tag said, "15% a month off."

ZING!

Of course, I haven't worked on an ambulance since February of 2007, but I'm still certified as an EMT until October of 2011. I figure, I worked for a year-and-a-half for $11.00-an-hour, I got psychologically abused by a psychotic partner who threatened to kill me, I had to wake up every day at 4:30am for three months doing the 6-2 shift, I got pissed on, puked on, bled on, cursed at, Heiled Hitler'd at (by a 92-year-old nun, no less), so, you know, why not milk that shit?

Shit = Milked.

Yes, the phone I got had a calendar, but it wasn't the same. With a numeric keyboard, it took forever to insert dates and appointments in there, and I never looked at it. It wasn't helpful, and I started slipping again. A few days ago, I confessed to my wife, "I'm slipping again. I can't fucking remember anything. I'm totally useless."

"Well," she said, "why don't you try the Treo again. Maybe it just needed a rest."

So I slipped the SIM card in that bad boy and, cross your fingers, we seem to be back in business. I spent a good part of Sunday night putting all my important events and reminders in the calendar, and it's a wonderful thing to have a QWERTY keyboard, I must say.

I hope it helps. I hope it doesn't start turning itself off again. I hope I don't get addicted and then forever need a converged device like this just to keep myself afloat and operating like someone without early-onset Alzheimers.

Of course, I have to confess something to you. The greatest thing about having my Treo back isn't the keyboard, or the calendar, or the internet capabilities, or even the plethora of games (yeah, Coconut Fern!). It's the pictures that were saved on its memory, that I haven't seen since November.

I'm specifically referring to one picture in particular. It's a picture I took at great pains and great risk, at my barbershop. Of two ladies. Look closely at the woman on the right. Look at her left ear. Look closely.

Yes. Those are rolled-up dollar bills. The shampoo girl's tip.

Welcome back, Treo. I've missed you.

1st, Meditation. 2nd, Medication.

On Friday morning, some asshole in a gold Ford Taurus cut me off. He had an Emergency Medical Services license plate and whacker antennas all over his car.

"I probably know this asshole," I thought to myself as I sped up to see if I was right.

Turns out, I was kind of right. It was a d-bag from my old ambulance company, but I didn't really know him. I recognized him, but I didn't know him. He was wearing a white shirt, which indicated his position as a supervisor.

Supervisors at my old ambulance company are no different than supervisors at other jobs: they're generally incompetent, inefficient, ineffectual, slovenly, lazy, and borderline retarded. Put a white shirt on a guy and automatically deduct thirty IQ points. It's like magic.

Seeing this dumbass inspired me to pick up my cell-phone and call one of my old partners to check in and see how she was doing. I call Topia maybe twice a year, and we pick up right where we left off, like no time had passed at all. She and I were steady partners for around a month-and-a-half, and then worked together sporadically. I started on the truck with her when my partner got fired and her partner was out on disability after being tackled by a deranged psych patient who had broken free of his restraints.

Though we only worked together for a relatively brief time, we got to know each other very well, and became good friends. I helped her move from not one, but two apartments during the time I worked at the company-- the first time lifting enormous heavy black lacquer furniture that weighed as much as a small condominium. The only reason I helped her move the 2nd time was that she had gotten rid of that fucking furniture.

"Good," I said, "because if you think I'm moving that shit again, then you're one crazy, black dyke."

Topia is, in fact, an African-American lesbian. She's not especially crazy, though, but her girlfriend is. Topia has a huge, gorgeous smile, huge breasts and a huge, wild mane of beautiful curls. I don't know if the hair is real or not-- I don't exactly know how black peoples' hair works. Is it all weaves? I have no idea. I'm pretty sure the breasts are real.

Anyway, Topia was overjoyed that I called her on Friday.

"I can't believe you remembered my birthday!" she squealed.

"Um, I didn't," I admitted. I was a day late anyway-- she turned 29 on Thursday. She promised to call me on May 13th.

She caught me up on all the company gossip, which I absolutely love. It's like tuning in to a TV show you used to watch religiously, but don't always have time for anymore-- so you watch once in a while, just to catch up on your favorite characters.

George and Sarae, long-time partners on the street and in the bedroom, finally got married, after George sired Sarae's baby back in 2006.

"Did you go to the wedding?" I asked.

"No, they had it on a Tuesday at 5:30pm," she said.

"I didn't know you could get married on Tuesdays."

"Yeah, well, they probably did it because it's cheaper," Topia said. "Of course, I probably could have made it to the wedding because-- you know black people-- the thing didn't start until 7:30. Sarae was an hour-and-a-half late."

"Oh, they were on BPT," (Black People Time, a phrase I learned from Topia.)

"That's right," she said, laughing. "BPT."

I asked her how it was working with Brad. That's not his real name, but I'm calling him "Brad" because his voice is identical to that dunderheaded bass voice of Brad Garrett, the brother from "Everybody Assrapes Raymond." Brad is approximately 6'4" and has a streamlined, bald head shaped like a big, bloated bullet. Brad's a paramedic and I worked with him on several occasions and I always dreaded it. Brad always made me drive him to L.A. Fitness in the ambulance so he could go in and work out for an hour and leer at women. This was, of course, against company policy (the working out while on duty-- I don't think there was anything in the P&P manual about leering at women) and I was always paranoid that we would get an emergency call while Brad was in there pumping himself.

He would also relish in telling me all about how smart he was, how great he was with money, and how he had figured himself out emotionally. He also loved badmouthing his baby mama. He called their spits, spats and other assorted goingsons, "Baby Mama Drama."

"Brad?" Topia said, "Oh, Brad's great. He's big into self-actualization now. You know, all that bullshit. He's always reading Deepak Chopra to me, and mispronouncing all the key phrases and words. He's also big into meditation. He meditates all the time. And he has a new catchphrase, too," she said.

"Oh, yeah? I can't wait to hear this. What is it?"

"Judge not," said Topia. "Judge not."

"Right, I'll remember that."

Topia told me that Brad has been making meditation audiocassettes for some bullshit franchisee operation run by some phony Yogi who Brad pays to get a license to peddle his shit.

"I'm going to retire off this," he says.

"He plays these tapes while we're transporting patients," Topia said to me on the phone, as we were both cracking up, "I swear to God, he makes me play them while he's in the back with a patient. So I have to hear is big, stupid voice going, "Breathe deeply. Be calm. Judge not."

"He does this while someone's having a heart attack?" I asked, incredulous.

"Oh, no," Topia said. "Brad doesn't actually believe that these people are having heart attacks anymore. He thinks that they are having a poor mind/body connection and that they need to meditate."

"Oh, my God. Why doesn't he just quit being a paramedic and walk around in sandals, a turban and a blanket and just touch peoples' crotches and heal them?"

"That medic money's too good."

"Right."

She told me that, a week ago they were transporting a patient who was in the midst of an active myocardial infarction (at least, that's what normals would call it. Brad probably just thought the guy needed a chakra realignment). During the transport, the patient made the very ominous statement, "Uh.... I don't feel so good."

Now, when normal people in the course of their regular day say, "Uh.... I don't feel so good," that usually means that they've got vertigo or a headache or, at the very worst, they might throw up. When a patient in the back of an ambulance on 5 IV drips and a cardiac monitor says, "Uh.... I don't feel so good," you can pretty much start the countdown.

"You're fine," said Brad dismissively. I can just picture Topia's eyes bulging out of their sockets in the rearview mirror.

Two or so minutes later, the cardiac monitor made a noise that indicated that the patient probably wasn't fine. Brad moved over to the bench seat next to the patient, which he never does. He prefers to sit in the captain's chair and nap during most transports.

"When I saw him move over to the bench seat, I couldn't believe it. I thought he was about to start medic'ing this guy up. But he didn't."

"Listen," Brad said, "I want you to mediate with me."

"What?" the patient said, appropriately confused.

"Trust me, okay? You're fine. Just close your eyes and meditate with me. Breathe in slowly, and breathe out slowly. And go 'Uhmmmmmmmm.....' Uhmmmmmmmm...........' Come on, you can do it. Now, look at the light. Go towards the light."

"But I don't wanna go towards the light!" cried the petrified patient.

"No, not that light! The white light. The calming white light. It's a good light, not a bad light."

Because the patient was not cooperating with Brad's less-than-traditional methodology, Brad decided to try a different tactic.

"I guess I'll take your blood pressure."

Normal blood pressure is 120/80. This gentleman's pressure was 70/30, meaning that he was basically bottoming out. His ship wasn't sinking, it was fucking a coral reef.

"Oh, shit," said Brad, obviously surprised that his uhmmmmmmmming wasn't working its magic. He immediately discontinued the patient's nitroglycerin and administered another drug to boost the patient's pressure. Miraculously, he felt better.

When they delivered the patient, who was thankfully alive, to the cardiac cathertization lab, Brad gave a report to the nurses. I had assumed that he would have left out the part about where he tried to get to Nirvana with the patient, but he didn't.

"You... meditated with him?" one of the nurses asked, her eyes narrowing.

"Well, I tried-- but he wasn't into it. He wasn't ready."

"Well," said another nurse, "when all else fails, medication is always a good last-ditch option. Don't forget, you are a paramedic."

"Yeah," Topia said to me, "Brad's real popular with the nurses. Just yesterday we were taking a patient in the truck, and a nurse had to ride with us because the guy was on so many medications, and Brad was in the back having a high old time with the nurse."

"I'll bet."

"Yeah, he was telling her all about his baby mama and how he calls his kid "retard," and how he cured his high cholesterol with meditation-- oh, and Crestor. And I said, 'No, Brad-- that wasn't the meditation, it was the Crestor.' And he got all pissed, because I was embarrassing him in front of this nurse, and he said, 'No, Topia-- the the meditation allowed the Crestor to work on my body.' And then, everything was quiet for a minute, and he pipes up with, 'You know, I've had a vasectomy!'"

"WHAT?!" I howled.

"Yeah! Just like that! And the nurse goes, 'What is that, your pick-up line?' And Brad goes, 'Well, no-- but don't you find that attractive?'" And the nurse goes, "Uh, no, I don't.'"

Stupid bitch. Her chakra must be all fucked up.

Judge not.

Mother Apron

Lots of my bloggie pals participate in a phenomenon widely known as "TMI Thursdays" where they regale their readers with blush-inspired OMG, LMT offerings from their unfortunate days of yore. Because the vast majority of my blog entries already offer up what most people who don't live underneath cars would classify as too much information, I feel little reason to engage in the TMI Thursday clique.

That said, in recognition of rapidly approaching Mother's Day, I'll use today's Blog Entry #2 to chat about my mother, and to formally nominate her for whatever the Jewish equivalent of sainthood might be. "Jewhood" doesn't sound quite right-- I keep seeing images of gritty, downtown Yonkers.

And so, as much as I hate the idea of having my mind and my blog controlled by Hallmark, I wouldn't be a very good mama's boy if I didn't compose an eloquent paean to my mother dearest, so here we go:

I get a little overwhelmed when I try to think about something to write about my mother. Writing about my father is easy. His personality, his questionable grasp of the finer points of technology and the English language (paternal text message regarding dog-sitting: "Finley wasGREAT. He ate at 4;30. I know he slept good. He made a very healthy BB .i should have taken a photo and mail it to the art museum. R u on the way? love dad mcnab") make him pretty prime material. I mean, be fair: how can mom mcnab compete with that?

My mother is quiet wisdom. She doesn't speak much (because it's impossible to do so when my father is, and he usually is) but, when she does, it's memorable, important and funny. She's a Jewish mother, but she's not. She doesn't obsess about when we're having babies (she's never mentioned it to me or my wife once), she doesn't ply us with food ("Eat, nu?!") and she doesn't insist that we cook her recipies, although my wife makes me her chicken approximately thrice annually. She's traditional, but she's not. She couldn't care less that the man my sister is dating isn't Jewish, but she is very displeased about the fact that my sister is pregnant and unmarried.

She told me around ten years ago that all she ever wanted to be was a mother. She got her chance probably earlier than she would have liked, at around seventeen. Nobody but her really knows all the details, and I guess nobody but her really needs to. When my father came into the picture, and the other guy went distinctly out of the picture, my father adopted my sister and that, my friends, was that. It's funny-- she was married when she had her first child, but it didn't help. I suppose, if it's to the wrong man, marriage offers very little of the protection, security and comfort it advertises.

My father and my sisters and I have put my mother through a lot. He, without telling her, depleted their entire savings and pumped the money into his failing business in a psychotic effort to keep his feet from getting wet on the deck of the Titanic. That was almost fifteen years ago. Eventually, he broke and admitted to her what he'd done. She was furious, but they worked it out and, all these years later, his work phone still rings and the lights still come on. My sisters are a ripe pair. One has emotional issues stemming basically from day one, and spends her day endlessly obsessing about probiotics, product recalls and emergency broadcast system alerts-- the other one is, well, unmarried and pregnant.

And then there's me. I kept her consistently harried throughout my youth as I showed her mole after rash after mole after rash in a seemingly endless quest to identify a phantom life-threatening illness. I was constantly pestering her with the most bizarre interrogatives, such as,

"Mommy, if someone throws up into someone else's mouth, would the other person have a heart attack?" Age 5.

and:

"When did Zayda have his first thrombosis?" Age 7 or 8

and, the big winner:

"If two gay men kiss each other hard enough, do their mustaches fall off?" Age 6

I bothered her ceaselessly with questions about death, craving her knowledge, her opinions, her best time estimate of her own demise ("so I can prepare myself") and I even went so far as to ask her to speculate about what I might die of. She didn't answer. I think we all know I'm going to stroke out majorly.

I thought her life would come to an end on the day I announced that I was going to enter the police academy. And, you know what? It probably did. I guess it restarted when I dropped out.

I can remember one day in 2006 when I was sitting in the ambulance while my partner was asleep inside the fire station where he volunteered. It was snowing outside and I had the radio on the dashboard in case we got a call. My cellphone rang and it was her, checking in. I hadn't been on the streets for very long, probably a month or two and she wasn't very crazy about this particular line of work either. Uniforms and badges and lights and sirens are not for Jewish boys to play with, you know. I was curious about her feelings, as I always was as a boy. We always want to know what our mothers are thinking, and if they love us.

"Are you proud of me?" I asked. I wasn't fishing for compliments-- there was, in my mind, a very real possibility that she was disappointed in me for not becoming a writer, or an actor, or a teacher. There was a little sigh on the other end of the phone.

"I'm always proud of you," she said.

A couple years later, after I completed my Master of Education program, I got a chance to become a teacher for a month. A private, Catholic girl's school was looking for a substitute for an English teacher who was going out for a month to have surgery for cancer. It didn't look good, and there was a very real prospect that, if I did well, it would lead to a permanent appointment for eighth grade English. On a stellar recommendation from my employer, glowing references and a relatively un-awkward interview, I was hired to start May 1 and finish out the schoolyear.

I used my full bag of tricks from my M.Ed. program, as well as some tricks of my own. I had the girls singing Gilbert & Sullivan songs to boost their lackluster vocabularies. They did freewrites inspired by quotes from authors like William Blake and Mark Twain-- on subjects such as sacrifice, human nature, happiness and heroism. They did creative final projects that emphasized their multiple intelligences-- some drew comics, some did monologues or scenes, some did diary entries, some did formal reports. The girls excelled and flourished, and we had a solid rapport. They were so obsessed with structure and formality, with what color pen they were "supposed" to use, and I can remember one of them getting so worked up for handing me a freewrite with the paper chads still attached from her notebook.

"Relax," I said, "this is school, it isn't the military. I'm concerned with the content of your papers, not with whether or not you used black ink or purple ink. That doesn't change your ideas, does it?"

Of course not. But that was the culture I had entered-- where they were scared stiff to be different, themselves. I had no idea, for example, the unchartered, revolutionary waters I would be stirring by arranging the desks in a circle, as opposed to the rather Draconian straight rows. I can recall one or two of the girls gasping upon entering the classroom for the first time.

I admit that I felt a little out of my element in the affluent Catholic school, being neither affluent or Catholic, but I did fine. I couldn't stand the bitter, catty exchanges about the students that were favorite lunch-time conversation topics amongst the careworn old hagithas on staff-- so I often ate lunch alone in my room during a free period.

On my final day as their teacher, I asked the girls to write me some feedback. "It's my first time teaching," I told them, "and I have a lot to learn from you, too." I told them that their feedback, their critiques of our time together would be most helpful in my future teaching endeavors.

"It can be anonymous," I said, "though I can probably figure you all out by now by your handwriting." They laughed. I went home that day with my briefcase full of their comments, which I said I would read at home. I told them I would be back Thursday for their graduation ceremony.

The next morning, the Head Penguin called me at home.

"We've found something on your... your Google," she said to me. What? I didn't understand what she was saying. But then it became clear. Someone had been Googling me and had found a personal essay I wrote ten years ago, when I was single, dating, and horny. Foul language. You know me well enough by now to know the kind of stuff we're talking about.

"I don't think I need to tell you that you are not welcomed back here. I also understand that you have intentions of attending graduation. Do not return here."

I asked for an opportunity to speak, and she said, "Sure, say whatever you want."

"That piece of writing is a piece of fiction that is a decade old. I'm rather shocked to think that I am being judged and persecuted based on an old piece of creative writing. It has absolutely no bearing on my conduct at the school, which has been professional and of the highest caliber at all times."

"I have no evidence to the contrary," she said, "the girls have said only wonderful things about you. Goodbye."

And she hung up. And I sat in my desk chair for a solid hour, frozen. Horrorstruck. Blindsided. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Ridiculous. Destroyed.

Now you know why I write my blog under a pseudonym. Because this is the world in which we live.

I told my wife the day it happened, and she was furious at the school for crucifying me-- something Catholics know a lot about, I suppose. I told my best friend. I even told some not-so-best friends. The one I couldn't tell was my mother. I was too scared she wouldn't be proud of me anymore.

I kept it inside for almost a year. At every family function, every time I saw her, I wanted to cry and confess what had happened to her-- because I can't lie to my mother. But I couldn't do it. I made up some story about how they decided to hire someone else for the following school year. Whatever. It didn't matter.

Finally, one day a couple months ago I drove to my mother's house when I knew she would be home in the middle of the day. She and I were sitting in the living room talking and she got up to go to the basement to do laundry.

When she comes back, I said to myself, I'm just going to tell her.

And I did.

"You know," she said, "I'm not surprised. That's how those people are."

"Aren't you ashamed of me?" I asked.

"They're the ones who should be ashamed, not you. You just did something naive-- stupid. They did something cruel and malicious. They don't care about protecting those girls. They care about protecting their goddamn money."

She shook her head.

"You're probably the best teacher those girls will ever have at that fucking school."

The 60 or so sheets of feedback from those girls, written in their pens of purple and pink and green and red, chads hanging off some, little hearts floating above the "i's" on some, would seem to concur with her. I know that no matter how zealous I get about spring cleaning and minimalist living, I'll never throw those papers out. Never.

I think it's very telling that what I was afraid of most from this whole sad affair was not losing my position at that school, or not being psychologically prepared to enter a classroom again, or obscuring my online identity so that I could continue to write with honesty and humor, but it was my stomach-rattling fear of disappointing my mother.

I said to my wife one day a while ago in reference to this incident that I didn't think I would be able to truly move on from it until I 1.) told my mother about it and 2.) wrote about it. I couldn't do the latter without achieving the former, and I have my patient, perceptive, supportive, surprising mother to thank, as always.

Happy Mother's Day.

This Deadened Soul

I just spent a full hour standing in front of a photo-copier at Staples.

I feel like my soul has been effectively deadened by the experience.

It should have been more exciting. After all, I was commiting a federal crime: illegally photocopying musical libretti.

Look out, Gotti.

There are times in my workaday life where I feel like I'm making a difference in peoples' lives, but those moments are pretty fleeting. Most of the time, I feel like I am standing in front of a photo-copier at Staples, even if I'm not. It's a feeling I can get almost anywhere, a feeling that I'm stationary, that I'm a cog in a not-so-great wheel, that I'm, well, Xeroxing.

I realize that, working for a small non-profit, there are lots of unglamorous jobs to be done, and few exciting jobs to be done, and I do them all. I empty the trash and Lysol the can. I sweep. I clean up vomit.

I Xerox.

I have a funny, ambiguous non-profit title that doesn't mean anything. Program Specialist, Project Coordinator, Program Assistant, Program Coordinator, Staff Assistant, Project Manager, Assistant, Associate, etcetera, etcetera.

What these titles all mean is:

"Will photocopy until nauseated and then will clean up his own vomitus for $30K-a-year or less."

Of course, I'm pretty thrilled that I actually have any job to speak of in this economy, when so many people are unemployed, sitting around trash-can campfires and roasting their old shoes for sustinence. Believe me, I know enough to be grateful that I'm not sitting around jobless, homeless and stricken with Swine Flu. Still, bitching about one's job, especially on a blog, is pretty much human nature, and obligatory.

As I was standing in front of the copier this morning for an hour, illegally Xeroxing manuscripts, I could not help but feel that there were better ways to spend my time. I don't particularly mind working for peanuts-- because, like most people who work for non-profits, the absence of benefits and any recognizable salary or potential for upward mobility is supplanted by the warmfuzzie sensation that you're a do-gooder, like Robin Hood, only less gay looking. In my occupational existence, I've worked for two for-profits and two non-profits, and I always felt better about myself when I was working for the non-profits. I felt like I was sacrificing something, and I like that. Just nail me up on that old cross, boys-- it's quite a view from up here.

I just wish there was less Xeroxing involved-- but you can't have everything.

There are things about every job I've ever had that I didn't like, that I felt deadened my soul or wasted my time or insulted me in one way or another. When I was an EMT, one of those tasks was washing the ambulance. I could empty all the pee-filled foley catheter bags on the planet, schlep walruse-shaped invalids up and down dimly-lit, rickety staircases, clean thick goop from peoples' neck-holes, look at blood and poop and puke all day, make the stretcher nice and tidy five or six times in a shift-- but tell me to wash the truck and I would roll my eyes and do basically anything to get out of doing it. I suppose it comes from my own personal reluctance to wash my own car. Why? Doesn't it still drive the same if it's dirty? It's not like somebody rubbed feces all over the side of the thing-- why do I have to bust my ass to make it all shiny-- especially in the winter when it's just going to get filthy again in a matter of minutes? In the wintertime, we were supposed to wash the truck once a week. This notice, put out in writing on the Magic-Erase white board, was promptly riddled with ridicule and obscene protest comments from my coworkers. It was nice to know I wasn't alone.

When I was an optician, my first job out of college, the indignity that I avoided and dreaded was vacuuming the store. It wasn't hard, or taxing, or dangerous-- it just was something that, for one reason or another, I felt deadened my soul a little. It didn't help that my boss seemed to put the vacuum in my hand directly after I would return from a three-day-weekend or some other unusual time off, so that I equated being told to vacuum with punishment. I always did a shitty job vacuuming, too. I never tried to do a bad job, but I wouldn't say I ever especially tried to do a good job either.

As I stood at Staples, the warmth of the Xerox machine warming my crotch and legs, as page after page after page got spat out from the side of the great, whirring, rectangular object, I thought about all the soul-deadening things I've done for extraordinarly miniscule amounts of money. I tried to think about what soul-deadening things lay in wait for me in my jobs of the future, but my brain refused to let me watch that preview. Must be pretty bad. Could it be an unending, painful scene laden with collating, filing, sorting, organizing, paper-clipping, stapling, and being second-guessed, underminded, critiqued and patronized?

Oh my.

As Stephen Sondheim once said: heigh-ho the glamorous life.