The boy, the GameBoy, and the Shawshank Redemption.

The boy was about 11 or 12 as my memory recalls. Time has pushed back his exact age to the point where I can only make an educated guess. He lived in Bushwick, a section of Brooklyn known for some very good Spanish restaurants, a small Italian section with a particular coffee shop that made a mean espresso and cappuccino, as well as some incredible pastries. Bushwick was also known for the squalor in which too many of its residents lived. Such was this boy's situation.

It was around the holidays in 1995. A medic I worked with had become involved in the Santa's Workshop project with the Post Office. You've probably heard of this. Kids write letters to Santa at the North Pole, the P.O. collects the letters, and then volunteers take them and try to grant the wishes of the kids who wrote them. the letters range from the predictable to the heartbreaking. Kids who want toys, to kids who want their mom or dad to have a job. My co-worker brought in the letters, and let us choose which ones we wanted. For some reason, this one kid's letter hit me.

It seemed like a simple and predictable request. The kid wanted a Nintendo Game Boy, something that was all the rage at the time. What struck me though, was the neatness of the handwriting. it wasn't the usual kid scrawl. Something told me that this kid paid attention in school. I couldn't say what it was exactly, just intuition. I was the end of the letter though that raised my eyebrows a bit: "My mom can't afford presents this year." I decided that this was the kid I wanted to help out.

I bought the Game Boy after much scouring, as he had a specific type in mind. it was such a hot item that year, it was almost impossible to find, and as the Web was just in its infancy, Amazon.com was not an option. I finally found the one he was hoping for, and wrapped it up along with a card from "Santa." While I would deliver it personally, I would not be telling him it was from me, though I am sure his mom would know it was me that bought it. Dad it seemed, was not in the picture, not an uncommon occurrence in this area of Brooklyn, where the family unit was often supplanted, or replaced entirely by gangs. I don't know where this kid stood in relation to that, but for now it seemed as though he was still on the straight and narrow, or at least I hoped so.

I got out of work a little late on that night in December. Don't ask the exact date, as I can't remember it. Driving to Bushwick was pretty much out of the way for me on my usual route home. I knew the street where the kid lived, having responded into this neighborhood on a regular basis. I parked the car in front of the brownstone building that had stood there for probably a century. The building was a memory vault. One could imagine hoards of kids back in the Depression playing stickball in the street outside of its entrance, or stoopball on its steps. Milkmen delivered their product to the apartments, when milk came in glass bottles, and you needed to skim the cream off the top of it. The building had seen better days. Now, it looked far more worn, and there was evidence that its upkeep was not something the current owner was overly concerned with.

The current owner installed an intercom system, and I rang the apartment buzzer that had the last name of the boy on it. A woman's voice answered, a heavy Hispanic accent with traces of suspicion. I just said "EMS," as anything else might have resulted in my not being let in. I was in uniform, as I didn't always change in the locker room, but wore my uniform home so I could wash it along with the others, especially if it was the last day of the work week.

I walked up to the second floor where the boy's apartment was, knocked on the door. I could see the inside cover of the peephole in the door sliding back, then the clacking sound of a police-style "Fox lock" being unbolted. The door opened a crack, and a thin Hispanic woman peered out. I introduced myself, and asked if she remembered her son writing to Santa at the North Pole. A bright smile then came over this face that appeared to have known nothing but hardship and sorrow and in mildly broken English, she told me she did. I told her, whispering as I didn't want her son to hear, that I had the Game Boy, and asked if I could give it to him? she called his name, and out of a back room came this slightly pudgy, animated boy.

"I understand, " I said without telling him my name, "that you made a request of Santa for a specific present."

Slightly bewildered, not quite sure of what I was getting at, he shook his head and said, "Yeah."

"Well, Santa has instructed me to give this to you, but not to open it until Christmastime."

The look on his face was only surpassed by the quiet "Oh wow" that came out in his astonishment. He thanked me, along with his mom, and I left, Lone Ranger-like, with my work there done.

Now, you may be wondering why I am relating a holiday story with almost three months to go until then.

A friend lent me the book, "Different Seasons," by Stephen King. In it is the novella "Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption," which the movie "The Shawshank Redemption" was based on. I had only seen the movie in bits and pieces, and wanted to read the novella first. I always enjoyed most of King's work, but enjoyed his non-scary pieces even better. This was no exception. "Shawshank" is a masterful story of the human spirit, and how kindness in the most terrible of circumstances is often repaid in ways we don't always anticipate. Such was what happened with the boy and the Nintendo.

In the novella, Andy Dufrense was in a physical prison as well as a mental one, and learned to break free of both. Such was the same in many ways for me while working in Brooklyn. While I could go home at night to the comfortable surroundings of my Westchester apartment, mentally I carried around Brooklyn at all times. Giving that kid the Nintendo was one way of dealing with that, and hopefully rendering a kindness at the same time. Dufrense escaped his insanity when he knew the time was now or never, and I escaped from the insanity that I found myself in as well.

I only hope the screws don't find out about me.

Da Boids. (Brooklyn version)

Blackie 1: "Hey, whattya wanna do?"

Blackie 2: "I dunno. Whattya you wanna do?"






Blackie 3: "Hey, anything dead down there?"

Blackie 4: "Nah. Everything's movin."

Blackie 2: "Hey, youse guys hoid about Blackie?

All: "Nah, what happened?"

Blackie 2: "He got whacked by da Falcons da udder day."

Blackie 3: "Da Peregrine Gang?"

Blackie 2: "Yeah, doze guys. "

Blackie 1: "Hey, I'm gonna get some road kill take-out. Wanna come?"

All: "Yeah, ok sure."

Madness......

Not again.....Please not again..........

In my last post, I mentioned how Brooklyn had been eating itself alive in the time I spent there. This was from the mid 1980's to the mid 1990's. Crack had taken the entire city by the throat. During the summer months, you had a hard time distinguishing the gunshots from the firecrackers. In the summer of 1991 however, Crown Heights exploded with a wave of racial violence that pitted Jew vs. black, religion vs. race. This was a full year before the LA/Rodney King riots in, and while not on the same scale in terms of size, it was just as ugly. (The Wikipedia article is pretty good, and explains things well.)

Everyone was afraid that these riots would spread. If you worked EMS in that area during that time, you put large swaths of tape over the driver's side and passenger side windows of your ambulance if you had to respond to a call in there. If someone were to throw a projectile into them, the hope was that the tape would minimize the spray of glass particles. You just had to hope no one put something through the windshield.

When riding through Crown Heights back then, it was as if you stepped into a Czechoslovakian revolution. Riot police were everywhere, being taunted by Orthodox Jews and blacks alike. Madness had gripped Crown Heights; madness that was just as potent as the small white rocks that were smoked in glass pipes in alleyways and homes. The old prejudices of fear, religion and race were stoked, and the fires that blazed from the overturned cars and trashcans made you wonder if perhaps a mini-Armageddon was being witnessed.

Everyone was fair game. EMS, police, FDNY, what-have-you. An EMT unit from my station had a brick thrown through the driver's side window of their ambulance. ("Bus," in NYC-EMS vernacular.) The tape did its job, and the both of them escaped without injury. I got lucky, and nothing happened to me during that time, save for being screamed at by protesters when being escorted by police into a building on a call.

If there was any good that came out of the insanity of those days, it is that the Hasidic and black communities started talking to one another after the violence ended. It took a long time, but good relations were established, and it appears as if the report today of the Hasidic boy that was assaulted and robbed was the victim of a gang initiation as opposed to the start of a wider display of hatred. (At least, this is what the video report from NYC Ch. 2 would seem to suggest.)

I hope so. The very idea that the Heights would return to the old bigotries is not something I would like to hear about.

New: Then again, I might be wrong.... http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/26/crown.heights.ap/index.html

Wringing out the mop....

I still shake when I think about it. I still wonder if I will ever screw up the courage to confront it. Do I read it, or see it? Which choice is the lesser of two evils? I know what I am facing, or what I will be faced with. It will force me to relive certain things that I have only recently come to terms with.

In 1996, Joe Connelly wrote "Bringing Out The Dead," a novel based on his experiences as a paramedic in Hell's Kitchen, the area around Times Square. Frank Pierce, a burnt out paramedic is haunted by the life of an asthmatic he could not save. Frank is a symbol for many of us who worked EMS in NYC, myself included. He is a fictional character that by all accounts, based on what friends of mine that have read the book said, is as true-to-life as it gets. The book was made into a movie with Nicholas Cage, directed by Martin Scorcese.

When it first came out, my first thoughts were, 'Oh, great. Someone else thinks they know how to show what it is like to work the streets.' I must admit I was a bit jaded. There was a book that I reviewed ("Paramedic.") for the professional journal I wrote for back in the 90's, and while it was non-fiction as opposed to fiction, it was a piece of garbage, and I said so in the review. I was not expecting much when I heard about this book, but then, snippets of opinion from colleagues started filtering in. They were all positive, and I was encouraged to read it.

I chose not to.

My reasons were simple. I lived the life. I did not need to relive it in a book. I did not need to know about a paramedic who was on the verge of suicide because of events that haunted him. I already knew a paramedic that went over the edge, in no small part due to the job.

In 1992, six NYC paramedics/EMT's committed suicide. One of them was a guy I worked with. We were not steady partners, but I knew him well enough. He had a monkey on his back from the age of 15. He already took time off once to get clean. We thought he had really beaten it back this time.

Then I got to work one morning, and the first thing I was greeted with was that Bill was found on the side of the FDR Drive with a needle in his arm. Devastation is too mild a word to describe how we all felt. There were those who said it was an accidental overdose. Those of us who knew Bill knew better.

I worked Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. As bad as Hell's Kitchen might have been, Brooklyn made this section of Manhattan seem like a suburban house party. Brooklyn was a war zone back then. Brooklyn was Beirut. Brooklyn was Belfast. Brooklyn was LA 2019.

What we all had in common was the sheer volume of calls that would descend upon us during a given tour. It also had the effect of wiping any naiveté from you very quickly. The young EMT's that would come in, full of that "I am here to save the world" attitude had it chipped away. There are those that could adapt, and there are those that never could. I watched some come through my hospital and stay 6 months or less; they simply could not cope.

"I realized that my training was useful in less than ten percent of the calls, and saving lives was rarer than that. After a while, I grew to understand that my role was less about saving lives than about bearing witness. I was a grief mop. It was enough that I simply turned up."

The above was what Frank comes to realize about what his job was all about. (I found the line on IMDB, from the movie, but I believe it is in the book as well.) It sums up what I did, what Joe did, what we all did in a way I have never seen expressed before. It is exacting, and painful at the same time.

This book/movie has become my Balrog. It is the thing I have yet to face. It is the demon from the depths of my brain that while I have contained, I have not yet conquered. Even if I do face it, what will it do for me? Will it help me come to terms with my own set of memories that still haunt me as they did Frank? Will the fiery whip come and pull me down again into the pit that I fell into once before? I made a promise that I would never venture down into that hole again.

I'm forced to wonder though, if one day I will have no choice but to face that Balrog once and for all.