Ambulance worker's memoir on NYC's
I N 1968, college sophomore Mike Scardino was working his second summer as a New York City ambulance attendant. He took a call from a woman in Jackson Heights, Queens, about her mother, an old, religious Italian woman who wasn’t taking her pills and, according to the caller, wasn’t acting right.
The daughter had legal paperwork stating that if she felt her mother needed to go to the hospital, the woman legally had to go. She couldn’t refuse help.
But walking into the house filled with religious iconography, Scardino found a strong-willed woman too proud to be seen by her neighbors riding away in an ambulance.
Scardino and his partner eventually walked the reluctant woman to the ambulance, prying eyes seeing all. Once inside, he began asking for her personal information when she suddenly spoke to him in “a firm, loud” monotone.
“I AM THE VOICE OF JESUS CHRIST. LET GO A THIS WOMAN RIGHT NOW. SHE AIN’T GOT NOTHING WRONG WITH HER. LET GO A THIS WOMAN RIGHT NOW.”
Scardino attempted to continue. “Dear, when is your birthday?” “I AM THE VOICE OF JESUS CHRIST. DO NOT INTERRUPT.”
As his partner unsuccessfully attempted to stifle his laughter, Scardino tried again, asking her age. The woman, noticing they were passing under an elevated subway track, doubled down.
“I AM THE VOICE OF JESUS CHRIST,” she said. “IF YOU DO NOT LET THIS WOMAN OUT I GONNA MAKE THESE TRACKS FALL DOWN AND KILL ALL A YOU.”
At that point, Scardino lost it, completely breaking down in laughter — but not before throwing a quick glance at the subway tracks, just to make sure they were staying where they belonged. CARDINO’S new memoir, “Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance,” (Little Brown) recounts his days S working on an ambulance for St. John’s Queens Hospital from 1968 to 1971 on summer breaks from studying medicine at Vanderbilt University.
He once took a call in Elmhurst from an elderly couple whose 30-year-old son had a history of psychiatric commitment and was refusing to speak or eat. They wanted him brought in for observation.
The young man was “at least 6foot-6 or even taller,” weighing not much more than 130 pounds by Scardino’s estimate.
“He looks like the pictures of the guys who were on the Bataan Death March,” Scardino writes, adding that the man’s fingernails were “grotesquely long . . . all curly and [with] alternating light and dark growth bands.”
His name was Jimmy, but his mother asked Scardino to call him “Little Jimmy.”
At first, Little Jimmy was too weak to even walk. Scardino propped him up by one arm, and a cop on the scene took the other.
“We help him get up, very slowly and gently,” Scardino writes. “He feels brittle, like something could break off if we don’t handle him right.”
As they slowly walked him through the house, the policeman released his grip on Jimmy for just a second so they could fit through a narrow door. At that moment, Little Jimmy showed he wasn’t so brittle after all.
“Jimmy, in one fluid motion, reaches on top of the fridge to my left and grabs a pair of editor’s shears — the kind with the really long blades that people use to cut out newspaper articles — and raises them over his head,” Scardino writes. “Holy s--t. Little Jimmy’s going to kill me, right here in his mom’s kitchen.”
Scardino saw, in what felt like slow motion, “Jimmy’s hand go up high and then start down, headed right for where my neck meets my chest.”
Noticing a sickly grin on Jimmy’s face, Scardino had the door frame at his back, so he was trapped. He did his best to compress himself, and the shears sliced his left shirt pocket. Jimmy’s limited energy now depleted, the police officer subdued and handcuffed him. C ALLED to a motorcycle accident just off Queens Boulevard, Scardino arrived to find a calm scene. Two Harleys were neatly parked off to the side and two policeman were there, but there was no obvious sign of any crash or trouble.
One of the motorcycle riders, Hank, was sitting in the street. He recounted the night’s events for Scardino in such a leisurely manner that Scardino started to believe he was called for nothing.
Hank said it was such a lovely night that he and his friend decided to ride around the city, taking in the night air.
He said that as they came to a stop, he bumped against his friend’s exhaust pipe and thought he might have bruised his ankle.
“I couldn’t have been going more than two or three miles an hour, max,” Hank said. “It was just a tap. It don’t even hurt that much. But I don’t think I oughta walk on it, do you?”