Mike Scardino - Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance

May 1967

Next week I start my summer job working on St. Johns Queens Hospital ambulance. I have to do this to pay for Vanderbilt.

All Mom and Dad have done since I started school last fall is complain about how expensive it is. I told them I would go to Queens College. I told them Vanderbilt was too expensive for us. I told them I didnt want to pay to join a fraternity, either, but every time I tell them Ill quit, Mom says, Oh no, no, you need to be in a fraternity. This is the most bizarre good-cop, bad-cop game Ive ever heard of. The good cop and the bad cop are the same cop.

Shes the one who wanted to go to Vanderbilt. Shes the one with the friends and family in Nashville. She could have gone to Vanderbilt herself. But she lived within walking distance and wanted to be a resident student instead of a townie. So rather than commute, she refused to go at all. For years she told the story another way, that her father wouldnt let her go to college, period. So much for that. I hate to think that she wants me to go there so she can have bragging rights with her old pals in Nashville. Pride does have its price. And it looks like Im the one wholl be picking up the tab.

Everybody expects me to become a doctor. They think Ill just go to Vanderbilt and move right on into its medical school, and that will be that. They have no idea that Im already doing so poorly at school that any med school at all is a very dim prospect, much less Vanderbiltswhich takes a minuscule percentage of its own undergraduates. I can understand that. Its a good policy. I just didnt know about it before I enrolled. I didnt know about anything before I enrolled. Nobody on either side of the family ever went to college.

Dad has had the St. Johns ambulance account for gas and repairs for a few years. I already know most of the guys who work there pretty well. Pete, the boss, lives not far from us in Bayside. Dad talked to him, and Im in. Just like that. No one ever actually asked me, of course. It was a done deal by the time I heard about it.

At eighteen, Im not old enough to legally have the job. You have to be twenty-one to get a New York State chauffeurs licensewhich you need to drive an ambulance or a cab or a light commercial truck. So I probably wont be driving. Much. But no one seems concerned about me working as an attendant. I guess if you can enlist in the army at seventeen and see your friends get wasted in Vietnam, eighteen isnt too young to deal with total strangers getting wasted in the borough of Queens.

Ill be working fifty-six hours a week: forty straight time and sixteen at time and a half. Nights and days, whenever they need me. Thats good money, and its supposedly a plum job, by New York ambulance standards. It will pay for my tuition and Moms pride in full, every summeras long as I have to do it, which may be a long time. Unless my academic performance continues the way its been going, in which case therell be no more college to pay for.

Do you want to know what I think. Ill tell you anyway. I think Id rather be a Queens College student and have no financial Sword of Damocles hanging over me and be able to relax and enjoy myself during the summers. I havent had a real summer vacation since I was thirteen, when Dad first put me to work in the gas station.

I feel like Im going to end up with my salad days wilting before my eyes.

Id leave Vanderbilt and enroll in Queens College in a minute if it werent for the fact that I met Barbara the third day at school, and we intend to marry when thiswhatever this isis all over. I know I said pride has its price.

I suspect love is at least as costly. Or even more.

So here I am. I cant quit premed because Dad believes college is a trade school, and I might as well not go at all if its not to learn a trade.

I cant leave Vanderbilt because Im in love.

I cant quit college at all, because Ill almost certainly end up in Vietnam.

So Im going to work on a New York City ambulance. Wonderful. Ive heard a lot of the guys stories already. If you want to know the truth, Im afraid. I admit it. Im afraid, and I feel trapped, and I feel angry.

I feel like I have a fucking gun to my head, a fucking knife at my throat, and fucking shackles on my legs. Well, so much for all that. I have to do it.

How bad could it be.

First day on the job and so far, so good. Ive been on another couple of calls beforeride-alongs with Pete, the boss, and Jim, one of the drivers. A man with D.T.s and an elderly woman who died in her sleep, in that order. But today, its a full twelve-hour shift, and Im on for real. Ive been on since 5:30 a.m., and we havent had a single call.

Maybe this wont be as bad as I thought.

Its lunchtime now, and were dining in the ambulance and we get a radio call in Sunnyside. Its a possible DOA. Im told DOAs always come through like thatas possible. Even when we go there and see the corpse for ourselves, we can only write down ApparentDOA on the pink sheets we use to document calls. Only a licensed MD can officially pronounce someone dead.

Im told they once got a possible DOA that was a skeleton in a closet in a building being razed on Welfare Island.

I am partnered up with Big Al. Ive actually known him for a couple of years already, as a customer at Dads gas station. He and I are double-parked in the running ambulance near Roosevelt Avenue behind a public school, right up against a Sabretts hot-dog cart. Al is running a weenie tab. The hot-dog man is handing them through the open window to Al as fast as he can snuggle them into their warm buns. No sauerkraut, no mustard, nothing that could slow the flow. As far as Big Al is concerned, these dogs are so good they dont need any enhancements. I agree.

Al is passing me one Sabretts for every three he eats, usually in two bites. Al is enormous. Easily over three hundred. I dont have the nerve to ask him his weight outright. His entire football-shaped torso is hard as a rock, but not in a good way. I often think he wears some sort of support garment, like a corset, that firms him up like that.