SNAKE TOWN

 Metal Skeleton

I was supremely unfulfilled at my warehouse job, obviously. I wanted to change things up but I didn't want to go to school. I found out EMT was a thing I could do with very limited school. I could take a few month course and get a license, so that's what I did.

Jobs were nearly impossible to get, as it turns out, and the jobs I was offered paid so, so little. On a whim, I went to the small town Fire Department right by where I lived. They hired me on the spot as a call EMT and firefighter, so it wasn't some nonsense volunteer thing. If I did something, I got paid. I went through actual training for fire stuff: full-gear scaling walls, repelling off buildings, ladder drills, put in a shipping container with burning pallets. The heat burnt my burn-proof jacket. Real-life stuff.

Now, this is a small town, but people still die, or almost die, all the time. Most stuff was pretty mundane, but because it's a small town, only two full-time guys are on duty. If something happens, call guys are expected to show up. Let's say a call comes in for a fella who is afraid of the color yellow. No call guys are rushing to the station to do that. Unless there are other guys just hanging around, the two heavily trained and educated full-timers have to go to that call, meaning that the station is empty when the second call for a cardiac arrest comes in. So a couple of bumbling buffoons go to that until real help arrives. I was the bumbling buffoon plenty of times. I was in over my head on more than one occasion. Sometimes there could be a bunch of try-hard losers on the scene with no clue what to do.

My Wife Is Gonna Be Sore With Me

I was hanging around the station waiting for something bad to happen. A call came in for a potential broken arm. There’s a tone that goes out over all the fire radios, then a quick description of the incident as told by the 911 dispatcher. So: broken arm on a guy in his fifties or sixties. I go with a full-timer. This is a ‘no big deal’ type situation. We pulled up to the house and there's a guy sitting on his front steps. Blood everywhere. I was thinking the bone came through his arm, but I've seen that-never this much blood. The bone normally blocks most blood from pouring out.

We rushed up to this guy and he's calm as hell. He just kept saying things like, “I'm such an idiot.” “I can't believe I did this.” “My wife is gonna be sore with me.”

This dude was using a log splitter, which is a machine that does exactly what you think it does. It splits logs. He said a log was jammed so he pushed it out and the machine clamped down, crushing his arm and leaving him trapped. He quickly tried the emergency shut off but it just froze the machine in place, so he had to turn it back on. He used an ax to reach the button to start it back up and free his arm, then walked in the house, called 911, and waited for us on the steps.

He lost several fingers but I heard he kept the arm. 

Poland Ave.

Everyone knew the address of Poland Ave. and what it meant. There's addresses that you memorize because they are frequent flyers or it's a drug house, a nursing home. Yadda yadda. Poland Ave. was the world's fattest man. He was a tick under 800 pounds. That's no exaggeration. He was married with kids and was one of the worst human beings I've ever encountered. He was, of course, bedridden and wore several diapers that were just placed strategically around where they needed to be. He was wrapped in sheets for clothes and confined to the living room on a reinforced bed. There were piles of soda bottles as far as the eye could see. Orange Crush, mainly. When a tone came out for him there would have to be additional tones for manpower. Shockingly, this day he had chest pains. We had to call in a double-wide ambulance from the big city. There were probably ten of us. We wrapped him up in a tarp, like a burrito, took the front door off and threw this guy in the back of the double-wide. The entire time the guy was complaining in the most whiney voice imaginable. Dude, don't weigh 800 pounds and a lot of these problems go away. Off he goes.

Few days later the tone comes out again, this time to put this fucker back in the house. Repeat the whole process. Door off. Burrito. Tons of complaining.

Another Poland tone a few days later. I was already at the station and just so, so unhappy at my misfortune. We went with less guys, cause fuck this guy, no one wants to go. We got there: dude was stone cold dead. He died overnight and his family slept in bed with his body and called us around noon on this 400 degree July day. That room smelled like there was an 800-pound dead guy in there because there was an 800-pound dead guy in there. Repeat the whole god damn process but this time there's crying family members and that terrible smell. He's dead dead so he was going right in a hearse. We got him on the porch and set him down to figure out just how we were gonna do this. His bawling wife comes out, pulls the sheet off his face, and just starts kissing him on the mouth. I'm the smallest guy there so I was elected to be at his head, get in the hearse and pull as everyone else pushes. I got trapped in the hearse with this guy and someone needed to open a side door so I could get out. When I was pulling I was inches away from his now-exposed dead face, and there was dead air coming out of his mouth so it sounded like he was still groaning and complaining. We had to roll him on the conveyor belt like they would with coffins.

We got him to the funeral home and had to get him on the autopsy table. There are straps and cranes in there so a mortician can work alone and be a fucking weird mortician. He's too fat. The straps didn’t fit around him, so we needed to move his fat rolls to really get in there and make the straps fit. The dude next to me moved a fat roll. From under that roll escaped a demon from the depths of hell. The smell was overwhelming. We all put Vick's VapoRub under our noses and got him on that table, crane bending and all. I hate that fucking guy.

Shogun

I remember being in the shower and hearing my radio tone out. I didn’t know the call. Once I got out, a second tone went off for a second call. Stomach pain and the address is between my house and the station. You're always supposed to report to the station first unless you drive by the scene en route to the station. Even then they don't want you doing that. So I got on my radio and said, “I'm reporting right to the scene and will be there in one minute.”

My radio name was P-9. The dispatcher says, “P-9, be advised patient is eight months pregnant.” Fuck fuck fuck. I don't want to go to that now, but I said I would, so I have to. I can't say, “Oh, never mind.” Another guy radios me and says he'll meet me there in the ambulance. We pulled up at almost the same time. Inside, a distressed young man says his girlfriend fell getting in the tub. We went in the bathroom and there she was, laying on her back completely naked, yelling and crying. My partner ran back out to the truck to get more equipment and I was there with the girl. I saw she had some bleeding and grabbed a towel and tried to situate it near her without pushing on her girl parts. Then I see that she's crowning. There was a fucking baby's head. I put the towel under her and she let out a scream.

My partner came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You good?” He, not knowing the full extent of what was happening. 

I said, “Uh... we got a baby here.”

“Oh fuck.” 

She screamed again and out came a human baby into my towel-covered hands. I pulled a little bit and it just came right out. My partner suctioned its face. It started crying. He cut the cord as I clamped it and wrapped the baby in a space blanket then took off to the ambulance. I was still in the bathroom kneeling on the floor just watching all this gross pregnancy goop come out of this girl and she said, “What happened?” I told her she just gave birth and the baby seemed good and was in the ambulance. Other guys showed up and helped me lift her onto a stretcher and get her on the ambulance. She started shaking badly and was going into shock, but seemed stable. The ambulance blasted off out of the driveway and everyone dispersed. I was still in the house and dazed by what happened. Then I just got in my car, covered in blood, drove home, and got back in the shower.

They named that baby Shogun because they were anime nerds with throwing stars and shit on display. That was a weird day.

Bones

It was late fall or early winter, just cold enough for the roads to be slick due to the misty-type rain. Almost a black ice situation, not full-on winter. Tone goes out for a single-car accident. Car vs. tree. There were a fair amount of guys hanging around so a good-sized crew headed out. Multiple trucks. We came upon the scene and, yup, car vs. tree. Car was in pretty rough shape. Went off the road on a turn and slammed into a tree. Two passengers, and they were both pinned in. We were going to need to cut the roof off to get them out. I got in the back seat of the car and held the driver's head still to help prevent neck injuries while they cut the roof off with the jaws of life. It's rather loud and intense. For these types of extractions, we normally put the patient in a KED vest, which is like a bulletproof vest with straps that loop under the hips to stabilize the spine and pelvis. It makes it easier to pull someone out without wrecking their potentially damaged spine. So roof off, KED being put on. I jumped out and went to the passenger side. Dude was pretty relaxed and said his arm was bothering him. I cut open his jacket to take a look and the bone was protruding out. I said, “Yup, your arm is fucked.” When the bone breaks the skin you have one shot at pushing it back in. If you leave it exposed, the bone could be cutting off circulation and you could lose the limb. But if you fuck it up, you could lose it too. So, one shot in the field then let surgeons do the rest. I tell the dude I'm gonna do it and it's gonna be terrible but he'll get some relief if I do it right. This other guy sprayed a painkiller in his nose which makes him numb for a few seconds and I pushed. You can't be a pussy about it, you have to push like you mean it. I'd never done this. I pushed, he screamed, and I felt the bone slide up and back into his muscle and skin. It seemed like I did it right. I took his arm, slid it under the vest and I pulled the straps as tight as I could to stabilize his arm and slow the bleeding. We got them out of the car and into the trucks. The feeling of pushing an exposed bone is one that I'm not in a hurry to feel again.

I Don't Remember

Call for a confused man bleeding from his head on the side of the road. I went with two other guys. Head wounds, even small ones, bleed a lot. There's a lot of blood vessels that just bleed and bleed, so sometimes a tiny cut can look bad. This dude looked very bad. Blood running down the back of his head with blood all over his shirt and hands. He was in his mid-twenties and was disoriented. I asked him what happened and he said he didn't know, he couldn't remember, and he didn't know where he was. It was obvious the guy had a concussion. He also seemed sort of high, but that could just have been the concussion. He had a split lip and small cuts on his hands and face. The cops showed up and started asking questions. He was so out of it he just handed his wallet to them while I was bandaging his head. The cops left with the wallet, then came rushing back over and cuffed him, face down on the ground, frisked him and pulled a pretty gnarly knife from his pocket.

This kid was from the big city and broke into his ex-girlfriend's place, high on meth. She was home and he stabbed her. He then bailed in her car, made it about thirty minutes away, crashed the car, ditched it, ran through the woods, fell down a big hill, and cracked his head again on a tree. Then he stumbled out on the road. Someone passed by him and called 911.

So we made a trip to the hospital with a police escort with our friend here in a neck brace, handcuffed and cuffed to the stretcher. Even more police were waiting for us at the hospital. The girl who got stabbed was probably fine.

Is He Gonna Be OK?

Call for man in the water for undetermined amount of time. This place was more of a shit-bog than a lake or pond. Why anyone would swim here was beyond me. Seemed like Leach City or maybe even Snake Town. It was very out of the way. We couldn’t get an ambulance down close so we grabbed anything we could carry and hoofed it down this shitty path to a shitty bog. We got to the spot and there's a whole family there. Right as we are making our way down, two teenage kids were dragging an old larger gentleman out of the water. We rushed down and helped pull him onshore. He was fucked. Definitely not breathing. He was all blue and veiny. A couple of guys were getting the defibrillator ready so I started chest compressions. Every time I did a compression, black sludge came out of his mouth. Leaves and bog water. The whole family, kids and everything, were all around, screaming. I knew he was dead but if I kept doing compressions I didn’t need to look at or talk to children and tell them Grampy’s gone to the big bog in the sky. Everything we were doing at this point was all for show ‘cause he wasn’t coming back. We eventually got him on a backboard and carried him to the ambulance. He didn't come back.

I guess he was always on oxygen and took it off to go out on a pool raft while his grandkids were fishing. He slipped off and didn't have the strength to get back on the raft. Cool way to die.

Calling All Heroic Try-Hards

I had one or two people I'd consider 'close to a friend' at the department. I didn't like most of the guys. I didn't grow up playing with fire trucks or even wanting to do this stuff. I didn't pretend to be some sort of hero or act like I was at ground zero on 9/11. A lot of these guys thought they were real-life firefighters. Most weren’t, but that didn't stop them from getting 9/11 tattoos or posting “firefighter life” shit on Facebook. I disliked the majority of guys I’d have to rely on in a sticky situation in a burning building.

The biggest fire while I was there was this old asylum that was converted to apartments. It was a couple days before Christmas at around one am and the classic ‘Christmas tree fire’ engulfed this place. There was a wheelchair-bound young girl and her younger brother carried her outside in the snow in his pjs with no shoes. That kid was one of the few reasonable people at this fire. He ran back in to get his hamster. That kid was cool.

The building went up so fast. Nobody inside was hurt but the building was lost, so the situation became defensive. I was on a ladder just dumping water and got frozen to the metal ladder. Then out of nowhere, the plan changed. I don't know what happened but I guess over an hour into things there was word someone might be inside. People, including the chief, went in. Which is stupid. Anyone in there was dead and the chief can't be going in, he's supposed to be running operations. Now communication was all fucked up, nobody knew what was going on. This is how inexperienced, fake firefighters die. 

They all went in and came back out. Luckily there wasn't anyone in there but firefighters could have died.

We'd been at this for about five hours. Hard work in freezing temperatures when I should have been sleeping, and I still needed to go to my actual nine to five job. We were basically done and just hitting hot spots. I was asked to go into the building to knock down a pesky spot. Only about fifteen feet, easy to bail if need be. Normally you want at least three guys on a hose. Everyone was beat so I only had one young kid with me. I could not stand this kid. He was a legitimately stupid person and only wore firefighter shit. I'd never seen him do an actual thing at a scene. We went in and I was not feeling great about it. The fire was a bit more than expected but nothing too serious. Visibility wasn’t great from all the smoke and steam. I knew the kid was gonna be nervous. I told him that I was gonna hit the fire in the corner and it would jump up but “do not freak out.” I hit it, it jumped and he freaked out, dropped the hose, and bailed. The hose had about 100 lbs. of pressure. I was at the nozzle so I controlled about five lbs. The other guy is supposed to carry the rest of the pressure so I can control where I am pointing the water. When that kid dropped the weight it was like ninety-five lbs. of unexpected force slamming into me. It knocked me into a wall. I turned off the hose and went outside, found the kid a few feet away from the entrance, and tried ripping his mask and helmet off so I could murder him. He fell right to the ground and I told him he could have killed me and that he was a coward. The next day that son of a gun posted pictures of himself at the fire on Facebook. So, between the lack of good direction and all these try-hard losers, I became disillusioned with this firefighter business. Don't get me wrong, I'll die doing something cool and be fine with it. Dying in an asylum converted into apartments on a basic clean up job isn't cool.

We had some big meeting after this fire about changes that would have to come but I had already checked out and it was words, words, words.

Metal Skeleton is from nowhere, and enjoys minor league baseball. He has done some things but getting something published was not one. Until it became one.