Free A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazzard Page A

what’s that make you?”
    He says it without looking, without breaking stride. What’s that make you? It’s not a question but an accusation. I want to explain that I’m here to have fun, to watch. A Tourist. But I realize in that instant how vacant the words are. The man on the bed is real, and so are all the devices keeping him alive. All of this is real. Except me. I’ve been sleepwalking through someone else’s life.
    This isn’t new. Since graduating from college, I’ve been merely working a job. I’ve been present but never invested. There’s been no passion, no professionalism, no dedication. I arrive on time and do what’s required but nothing more. That attitude has carried through to EMS. Though I spent eight months in school, and though I nominally understand the responsibilities I’ve taken on, I’ve been going about my tasks without full commitment. I play along without joining up, I treat without caring. In not aiming to be better than good enough, I’ve been merely gawking. I’m a Peeping Tom.

11
The True Believer
    U ltimately, it’s Chris who leads me out of exile. Chris is a career medic, equal parts junkie and devotee. He’s an EMS proselytizer, a True Believer. There will be no Tourists on his bus.
    He’s a member of the small but powerful contingent of medics who came of age in the back of an ambulance, which is an odd place to learn about the world. Chris, like all True Believers, is something of a savant. He can quickly and with great certainty determine whether a patient’s shortness of breath is caused by asthma or congestive heart failure. He can also control a crowd, deliver a child, and stop even the heaviest of bleeding—but he can’t find Norway on a map.
    â€œNo matter,” he says. “I’m not here to save Norwegians.”
    He grew up wanting to be a medic. His first job after high school was with a tiny fire department in a rural county south of Atlanta. Chris drove the county’s lone fire engine. It was so rural and the service was so small that it relied almost entirely on volunteers. When Chris was working, he’d be the only paid member on duty, meaning that once he relieved the guy who’d worked the day before, he’d be by himself in the fire station. He would eat, clean, watch TV, and sleep alone. He would also show up to calls alone, never knowing how many volunteers, ifany, would arrive to help. He stayed there for a while, then went to paramedic school.
    When he started working in the city in the mid-1990s, Atlanta was still a very rough place. The Olympics hadn’t arrived yet, and the first wave of scorched earth–style urban development and gentrification policies hadn’t occurred yet. All of the city’s housing projects were still open, so at six P.M. the businessmen fled the city, leaving it to the homeless, the hookers, the drugged out, the violent, and those too poor to escape. Drug dealers were so in control, so brazen, that they’d set up shop anywhere they chose. On more than one occasion, medics would emerge from an apartment only to find a drug deal going down on the hood of their ambulance. The medics would watch idly as the dealer exchanged brittle crack rocks for damp and crinkled dollar bills, then wait until the junkie shuffled off and the dealer swaggered back into the shadows before loading their patient. One night a dozen Atlanta police officers crowded into an ambulance, drove it to a project, and carried out a surprise raid. This temporarily broke the truce between EMS and the community, and for the better part of a year Chris wore a bulletproof vest to work.
    Whatever the dangers, the job was everything he’d hoped for. One afternoon he found himself lying on the highway, slipping a breathing tube down the trachea of a badly injured patient. He paused to take stock of his situation—the wail of sirens, the dizzying smell of