There were two images jockeying for position in my head last night after a gruesome day at work.

Our first run of the day was for a possible pin job (automobile accident with people trapped in the wreckage). My position for the day was the Can/Nozzle, and at any kind of trauma incident, the job of this position is to grab EMS equipment and run with the Boss while the rest of the guys gather the tools we might need for the operation. As we got closer to the scene and began picking up radio transmissions we heard “confirmed person pinned under the truck”, and then we were at the corner around which the accident had occurred. I followed my lieutenant with an EMS bag in one hand, and a bottle jack in the other. The day was a steady rain and a bicyclist had made a turn onto Houston Street around a construction site, lost control of his bike and got his head crushed by a truck. We ran up, and there was this dead kid laying on the street (we later found out he was only 23). The top of his head was pinned under the heavy truck wheel, his bike helmet flattened and spit out to the side, his brains on the street and coming out of his nose. It was a horrendous sight. While the others chocked the truck’s tires and ascertained that the the brakes were engaged, I slid under the truck behind the wheel where the body was trapped, laid wooden plates on the street and placed the bottle jack on top, tight to the underside of the truck frame. Then I began pumping the bottle jack’s handle. Slowly the truck lifted and the body was able to be dragged free. Later in the day, with the police investigation concluded, we were called to stretch a hose-line to wash down the street of blood and brain matter. When the stream of water hit the rain-soaked street a red wave rose and poured along Houston Street for what seemed an unusually long time. That kid’s face, his crushed head, his lips grimacing back from his unbroken teeth, that strand of brain coming out of his nose… there it is again in my head.

The last call of the day was an EMS run for a person in possible arrest, and the stink hit as soon as we walked into the lobby. When we got to the apartment the putrid stench was horrendous. The door was locked so Anthony forced it open with his halligan, and an almost solid wall of smell rolled out to the hallway. The apartment was one of the worst Collyer’s mansions I’ve seen. (A Collyer’s mansion is the result of an occupant having a severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in which they fanatically collect and collect all sorts of shit.) We could barely get the door open enough to get inside. First Betta had to squeeze through, grab the top of the door and do a pull-up to climb on top of a huge stack of newspapers. Then Lt. Gordon managed to get in. They were searching the stink filled apartment unable to find the guy among the piles and piles of cluttered crap. Meanwhile, outside the door, we started a chain clearing newspapers and magazines out of the apartment, trying to make an easier access. Finally, somewhere inside the apartment Betta found the guy and Lt. Gordon called the rest of us inside. The whole apartment was just wall-to-wall six-foot-tall stacks and stacks and stacks of newspapers and books and gay porn magazines. We had to crawl across the papers, our heads at the ceiling, to get to where Lt. Gordon and Betta were. There he was, the guy whose apartment it was, or there were his feet anyway. The guy must have been crawling along his decades-long collected piles when the stack he was on toppled. He got swallowed into a hole in the magazines and was buried alive by the collapsing paper. All that was showing were two rotting, blackened feet sticking straight up out of the magazines. And Betta was working on digging him out. The rest of us climbed over to help, gagging on the festering stench, until the Paramedic said, “I can pronounce him from here. He’s dead. We’ll leave it for the coroner.” That was fine with us, and we couldn’t get out quick enough. The guy must have been dead for weeks. Man, the smell was fucking awful. And believe me when I tell you, smell has memory… and phantom wisps are seeping through my head.

[I feel almost shameful for having written this entry. I almost didn’t write it. Let the dead have their peace, and let them leave me in peace in the process.]