The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman (25 page)

***

“Let’s
grab lunch.”

“
It’s
7 o’clock, dude. At this point I think we can call it
dinner.”

“Whatever,
Innis. I’m starving. You want Mcfatty’s?”

“Jesus
no, man. Their burgers taste like they’re made from yoga mats.”

“Let’s
get Booger Fling then. I’m buying.”

“No.
You know I don’t like fast food, Carl.”

“Well
it’s the only decent thing we pass on the way to the station. It’s either that
or that little Pakistani store with the deli and I can’t eat there. You
remember last time when I got their chicken wings and threw up in the truck? I
had to walk around with puke on my uniform for the rest of the shift. Only good
thing about it was that it was mine instead of a patient’s.”

“Fine,
Carl. I’ll have the number four and we’ll listen to our arteries grind to a
halt, okay?”

***

Me
and Carl had been going nonstop since we came on at 6 AM. After a
near-drowning, a few shootings, some fevers, and an Alzheimer’s patient who
swore I was her dead Uncle Shamus, we felt like a couple of whipping boys. All
we wanted to do was grab something to eat on the way back to our station. Maybe
snag a nap so we could deal with whatever tomfoolery the night had to offer.

It
was 7 PM. We still had eleven hours to go until crew change and we were praying
for daylight. Booger Fling was in our sights when another call came in:

DISPATCHER:
“Nine-eighty.”

ME:
“You diseased WHORE!”
Clicking mic.
“Nine-eighty—go.”

DISPATCHER:
“Nine-eighty: got a call for a patient with uncontrolled bleeding. Says he
can’t stop it. Patient is a white male in his early 50s. States he’s alone and
‘needs help.’ Patient says there’s been no violence but won’t say where he’s
hemorrhaging from or why. Patient has specifically requested a male ambulance
crew.”

Carl
and I looked at each other in astonishment.

ME:
“A
male
ambulance crew? Did you tell the patient that in an emergency
you don’t get to pick and choose who shows up?”

DISPATCHER:
“Sure did, Innis. Just so happens you and Carl are the closest truck I have. Everybody’s
tied up on other calls. Address is fourteen-thirty-eight Darwin Lane in
Pleasant Oak. Let me know if you need police.....”

Ten
minutes and a scad of profanity later, we hit Darwin Lane with rumblies in our
tummies.

***

Pleasant
Oak was an upscale mixture of Caucasian, Middle Eastern, and Asian residents
with some Korean families scattered throughout. Wheeling into the caller’s
circular driveway, we saw a manicured lawn with rose bushes lining the
perimeter of the brick structure. Fanned water patterns on the front walk told
us the timed sprinklers had recently retreated back into the St. Augustine.
Hanging pots sporting a gang of brightly-colored plants dripped from the eaves,
separated by white marble pillars. A wooden, heavy-looking front door donned a
lily-covered wreath on its face. Beige vinyl siding started at the attic floor
and went to the roof—and none of that cheap shit, either; anybody in the know
could tell this was custom-made. The shingles had to be brand new. A Mercedes
SUV parked in the open-air carport looked to be more expensive than my house at
the time. Fred would’ve had a ball playing with the two lawn jockeys in the
middle of the yard. (One was black, the other was white. Yay for equality.) All
in all, a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood.

On
every call—but especially ones such as this where the details were shady—crew
safety is the top priority. We got out of the truck and did a quick assessment.
The tidbits of information we were given sounded ominous.

I
was ready to stab a motherfucker with my medic’s shears should the need arise.

Enroute
to the emergency, our dispatcher said the patient wanted us to enter through
the carport door, saying it would be unlocked. When we finally got our
stretcher and equipment around, I knocked. The door creaked open a few inches.
I stuck my head inside to see an exquisitely decorated kitchen, painted blue
with delicately placed bric-a-brac on the shelves.

I
shouted, “Hello?! Ambulance!”

“Oh,
thank God! I’m back here in the bedroom!” The voice was deep and full of
anxiety.

We
trundled our two hundred pounds of shit over the threshold and wound the
corners toward the sound of the man’s voice. The hallway was so slim we had to
walk in a straight line—me first, the stretcher in the middle, then Carl
trailing behind. When I got to the doorway of the bedroom, my jaw hit the floor
and my eyes got wide.

“What’s
wrong, Innis?”

Nothing.

“Dude,
what is it?”

I
didn’t answer. Carl couldn’t mask the impatience.

“
Coxman!
What the fuck is it, man?”

I
stood with my mouth open trying to speak but my vocal chords failed me.

“For
God’s sake, Innis!”

Carl
squeezed between the wall and the stretcher down to my position in front of the
bedroom.

“Coxman,
just tell me what the hell’s going-” He leaned around the door jamb and fell
silent as well. Nothing could’ve prepared us for what we saw.

There,
on a king-sized bed with no sheets or blankets, was a man on his knees with his
ass in the air pointed straight at us. A shitzooka of surprise. He looked like
he was ready for a good pumping, but judging from the blood running from his
cornhole it appeared as though someone had already tagged him. From our
standpoint, we could see that he had no underwear, not even around his ankles.
Just a white t-shirt and a pair of brown dress socks. He had his face buried in
a pillow, head turned to the side to talk. A cordless phone lay inches from his
salt-and-pepper hair. Blood flowed down his taint and dripped from his balls
onto the bare mattress, forming a huge puddle that had begun to coagulate. From
the looks of it, he’d been there a while.

A
faint buzzing sound could be heard from somewhere in the room, though it
sounded.....muffled.

***

Carl
and I were still frozen in the doorway when he spoke. “I’m not gay!”

I
shook my head to collect my senses. “Um.....what, sir?”

“I’m
not gay! Before we go any further you need to know I’m not gay! Whatever you
think of me, just know that I’m
not gay!
”

Of
the two of us, Carl was the more professional; I had a million jokes to run but
sonofabitch if he didn’t defuse my whimsy. He wedged himself out of the hall
and walked into the bedroom to
browneye
eye the situation, getting on
his knees to speak to our patient and find out what in the fuck-all was going
on.

I
remained standing just inside the bedroom with my hands shoved in my pockets,
gazing at a crucifixion portrait of Jesus on the wall above the man’s dresser.
The Son of God had acted as silent witness to whatever in the hell had taken
place in that bedroom. I felt that whatever the patient had to tell us was
going to be so far out of left field, we couldn’t even begin to fathom it.

In
the picture, the Messiah’s eyes were rolled back in his head, looking skyward
as if to say, “Sheeit. Y’all ain’t gonna be
lieve
what this idiot did.”

And what is that buzzing?!

***

“Sir,
what happened?” asked Carl.  

The
guy kept screaming his mantra like a chant at a political rally. “I’m not gay!
I am not—gay! I’m a pastor at First Baptist! I don’t believe in homosexuality! For
the love of the Lord, I AM NOT
GAY!
”

Carl’s
professionalism quickly took a backseat.

He
screamed in the man’s face, “We don’t give a fuck if you’re gay, Pastor! Tell
us what happened!”

The
congregation leader gathered his aplomb and enamored us with a saga of
heartache and misplaced reconnection.

“Look,
fellas, it’s like this: my wife left me. After thirty years of marriage, she
walked out. After
thirty years!
She said she was tired of living a
‘constricted life with a holy-roller.’ Can you believe the nerve?!
”

“I’m
sorry to hear that,” Carl said gently, his relaxed demeanor coaxing the pastor
along to get the cause of his injury.

“And,
well, she’s been gone a week. It’s been agony. Torture! I miss her so much!” He
began crying into his pillow.

“It’s
okay. It’s okay, sir.” Carl patted his back in a gesture of reassurance.

God,
he had more patience than me.

The
man gathered himself. “Alright. I’ve been lost without her. I wanted to feel
close to her. I’ve just missed her so much. And, well, I found her vibrating
dildo, and I stuck it up—you know,
there.
It was fine at first. I felt
her here with me. But it got sucked in and I can’t get it out!
Oh my God I’m
going to Hell!
”

That’s
when the cleric lost it. He broke and started wailing into the pillow. Whether
it was from the pain of his separation or a perforated colon, I’ll never know.
It most likely was a combination of the two, though the smart money would be on
the latter.

Carl’s
eyes got bigger than when he saw the salad shooter from the doorway.

At
least the mystery of the nebulous
buzzzzzz
had been solved.

Carl
took his hand from the pastor’s back and reclined to sit on his feet.
“Ooooooooh! Ooookay. Okay. Well then, uh.....

…..

…..

…..

…..o
kay.
”

Good
ole professional Carl.

That
fuckin’ putz.

He
turned and gave me a look that said, “Let’s load him up and get the hell out of
here.”

And
that’s what we did.

***

When
we rolled our patient into the emergency room the ER doc looked at us with a
sardonic grin on his face. The two of us had had plenty of interactions with
the physician ever since we’d gone to work in the field so he felt comfortable
questioning our mode of positioning.

“Hey,
Carl, Innis.....” He brought us over to a corner of the trauma room, away from
the horde of nurses bustling around the patient.

“Why
is he like that?” he asked Carl.

“Like
what?”

The
doc scoffed. “I
mean,
why is his ass sticking straight up in the air,
boys?”

Carl—being
the more professional of the two, remember—slapped a palm to the back of his
neck and began rubbing in an uncomfortable manner.

“Well,
Doc,” he said, “when I called to tell the nurse what we were bringing in, she
hung up before I could finish telling her the whole story.” He then beguiled the
doc with the patient’s mechanism of injury. It was all the esteemed healer
could do to hush his snickering.

“So
you see, Doc, we had to bring him in like that. He couldn’t have-”

“
Sit
to save his
ass!
”

“Dude!
What the shit, Innis?!” Carl looked like he wanted hide under a rock.

Fuck
everybody. I’d withheld my barbs the entire call and it was time to cut loose.

***

The
rest of the night dragged. We barely noticed. Any time we felt tired or ran a
bad call, we just reminded ourselves of the Baptist preacher who’d jammed a
plastic flesh weasel in his rectum.

We
brought in a fall-down-go-boom around 2 AM. Some old lady with twenty cats and
four useless relatives in the house. On the way back to my rig, I passed the
trauma room where we’d left the pastor. He was still there—his ass in the air
and bandaged to the nines from his waist all the way to the backs of his knees.
When I asked the doc what they did about his predicament, he said they were
still waiting on a proctologist for consultation and a special surgeon for
removal of his impromptu romance device.

I
couldn’t help myself.

Christ,
I’m such an asshole.

I
went into his room. He was lying with his face turned to the side, tubes and
IVs running everywhere, sipping grape juice from a little carton.

“How
you doing, sir?”

“Oh,
I’m good. Thank you so much for coming to help me. I don’t know what I would’ve
done without you guys.”

“You’re
welcome, Pastor. But could you do me a favor, please?”

“Anything,
son. Anything.”

“I’m
sorry about your separation. I truly am. But if you ever decide to get married
again and that one fizzles as well, don’t stick an object in your ass that
reminds you of your old lady. Your next wife could be a sword swallower.”