It’s another beautiful Jacksonville day; bullet-ridden corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. Partly sunny, partly cloudy, partly bloody. There’s blood in the streets tonight. It runs down the gutters and washes into the sewers, back out to sea again. The river runs red with this city’s blood.
-SJR, 912: The Private Side of EMS (publishing soon)
“Two people were shot at Washington Heights Apartments on West Moncrief, followed by five more a few hours later on nearby Aubrey Avenue.”
“Calling the number of police shootings in Jacksonville over the last two years “astronomical” and “atrocious,” the state president of the NAACP called Wednesday for a investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
“There were 18 police-involved shootings in 2007 and there have been 28 so far in 2008, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Of the 46 suspects, 41 were African-American.”
There have been 136 homicides in Jacksonville, Florida in 2008. The ‘Ville is the murder capital of the sunshine state. The police have shot three times as many suspects than any other county in Florida.
From the forthcoming book, 912: The Private Side of EMS by S. Joaquin Rivera
The night stretches into day with the sun and moon blurred by the streetlights and cold stares of passersby. I do not sleep any longer. I cannot. I drift in and out of people’s nightmares, sometimes as a spectator and others as an active participant. They never know my name and I rarely bother to mention it. It’s not important.
I spill blood on the floor only to clean it up in an endless ritual that serves to benefit no one. I wander the same hallways and look at the same portraits on the walls – the same stale corporate art. I walk past the same grieving rooms every night and hear different families sobbing over the same death.
I see them all lying there beyond the walls and doors, beyond plain sight, waiting to be catered to and carried away. Everyone that bursts through the doors is on their own planet. Some of them I recognize and others I do not. We are all the same and we are all different. We are all on the same collision course and we all dance with death.
I’m fat now, washed up, doped and glassy-eyed from an overdose of fast food and too many Cokes and coffee. Despite the fact I have easy access to narcotics and sedatives it seems the only thing that will do is a hit of the most powerful drug: sleep, but I have long given up on that elusive whore.
I am confused and beaten down. I feel greasy and unfettered. I deal with liars and monsters and the living dead. There is of course the occasional “patient” but they are too few and far between to matter. There are far too many needful parasites that crave attention like a drug and they all seem to crave it in the middle of the night.
I can see them for what they are underneath the surface of their skin. They only want me for what I can give them and for where I can take them. It’s like a slow-motion revolving door. When all the giving is done they depart back into the night and I forget them just as quickly as I discovered them.
The emergency room is bathed in a sanitized fluorescent light that reflects off of the blood puddles on the tile below. There is a cacophony of curse words and medical jargon; prayers and last rites. Death hides behind every curtain with a dagger in one hand and a consolation prize in the other.
Though I’ve walked through this place a thousand times it always manages to look just a little different. There are always new faces with the same old stories to tell. I watch as the double doors swing open and two large policemen haul a broken and bloody pulp of a man into the room. He is shirtless and still has barbs and small wires sticking out of his chest, fresh from who knows how many jolts of electricity.
The two men slam him down into a chair and handcuff him to a rail on the wall. “This one’s just begging for more,” one of them says. They high five each other and walk out the doors again. I can hear their laughter and footsteps fade just as the sound of a helicopter from above drowns them out.
The bleeding man sits there with his chest heaving and face swollen. He spits and curses at anyone dumb enough to pay him any attention.
The fan swirls above everything in slow motion, carrying with it the scent of death and failure from the people lying in beds that no one gives a fuck about. No one notices the dead leaving the room. They are motionless and silent underneath the sheets.
Another man sits in the corner, handcuffed to a chair, awaiting his fate but he already knows what’s coming. I have seen him before. I have seen him often in my dreams. He is the key-holder to the morgue downtown. He is black as burned leather and with eyes a mixture of white and red. His smile reveals receded gums and rotten teeth. His skin is a stark contrast to the white shirt he wears and the blood red cowboy boots.
He grins at me and laughs to himself in a high-pitched giggle; the kind of laugh that tears at the fabric of sanity. He does not stop for the entire time we are there. You can hear his laughter down the hallway and out into the bay.
The janitor next to the man drags the mop across the floor endlessly into the morning and we all wait until the ritual is through. We all wait among the laughter and dried blood. We wait until we can walk away and forget the last few hours. We all wait until it starts again.
© S. Joaquin Rivera, Broken Sword Publications, 2008. All Rights Reserved.
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