I like this front cover. Painted by Kurt Cobain, it cover his usual theme. Someone or something looking for love in an uncaring universe. But it’s not ALL uncaring out there. In fact, the world is teeming with unsung saints and unheralded heroes whose great acts have gone unrewarded or, much worse, unrecorded.
Therefore welcome to the inaugural installment of Street Saints™
, a column that celebrates these heroes nobody knows. I chose the name cuz if you say it fast/slur it drunkenly it sounds like Street Cents, the TV show from the ‘90s that taught my generation to hate capitalism. Today’s post is about a paramedic whose name I’ll never know but whose selfless act impressed me enough to make her/them/him our inaugural saint.
Here’s what happened.
He’s dead now, but my former heroin/fentanyl dealer was a man I’ll call John. John had a good heart and bad luck. In the span of eight months he suffered two life-threatening motorcycle accidents, one abduction that left him handcuffed naked to a bed (George Costanza-style if you remember that Seinfeld episode), and a near-fatal stabbing that I personally witnessed. The stabbing and the abduction both deserve their own posts, so I won’t go into them right now.
John’s second accident was the more serious of the two. He almost lost his left foot. The ER doctor, describing the injury, told John to “picture a brick of butter. Now imagine I took my hand and tore half of it away. The butter in my hand is the tissue you lost. What remains of the original brick is what’s left of your foot. You would have lost the whole thing if not for those leather boots.”
Even through the pain and the painkillers they gave him, John understood how lucky he’d been. And not just because he still had two feet. See, as he sailed through the air after getting hit from behind by a somnolent SUV driver, he was dimly aware that the left pocket of his cargo pants contained $1500 in cash, and another $1500 worth of heroin. For a mid-level dealer like John, losing $3000 would be ruinous. If he had lost the money and the drugs, he would have lost his $45-per-night motel room where he lived too, having no way to pay for it. He also wouldn’t have any way to get more heroin, destroying his livelihood.
Next to his hospital bed, his cargo pants and t-shirt were neatly folded on a chair. Suddenly remembering the money and drugs, he checked his left pocket and found it empty. His heart rate skyrocketed, causing one of the machines to which he was connected to bleat like a mechanical goat. A harried-looking nurse came in and fiddled with knobs while John took stock of his diminished life. He knew the chance of the money and drugs being in his other pockets hovered around zero. When the nurse finally left he checked his right pocket and everything was there. The money and the drugs, in the other pocket.
This means that the paramedic who found John unconsciously splayed out across Kingston Road, also found his drugs and money and put them back into John’s pants.
Now that is saintlike behavior.
Usually the kind of person whose moral code is such that they won’t steal money from a man who may not even live to spend said money is the kind of person who would notify police about the drugs. And John was carrying a large enough amount to be charged with trafficking, which carries an automatic prison sentence.
Who would do such a generous thing? What were they thinking?
Admittedly, times have changed. 2020 in particular has seen a massive shift in public perception of and attitude toward police and policing. But John’s accident happened well before the triggering incident of George Floyd’s horrific murder. Maybe this particular paramedic had had his own run-ins with the cops, maybe he was sick of them swaggering through traffic fatalities and making shitty comments. Maybe this paramedic was sick of how cops seem to hog all the cultural credit when it comes to first responders. After all, where are the TV shows glorifying paramedics? Why do cop shows like The Shield seek to normalize violent sociopathic racist policing methods?
I don’t know. I’m just speculating here. What I do know is that this paramedic saw a human being clinging to life on the street, with items crucial to his livelihood lying all around him, and felt a twinge of obligation. This person could have walked away with $1500 cash, plus a few beefy handshakes from a couple of cops delighted at the easy arrest, but thought okay…I’m not going to make this guy’s day any worse than it already is.
“Almost anybody would’ve swiped that money,” I said to John, when he told me this story after getting out of the hospital.
“Almost anybody would’ve called the cops!” he laughed, shaking his head in amazement.
But the unknown paramedic did neither. Which is why this person, whoever they are, is Better Days Are A Toenail Away’s inaugural Street Saint.
Amen.