Clown Girl - Monica Drake [81]
He was cute, in a Boy Scout kind of way. “Working on your paramedic’s badge?”
He dropped the boobs against my chest. The demons hit me with their full sandbag weight. “I’ ve got to get to your heart.”
“Sir, you’re halfway there. Touch me again and it’s all yours.” I gave another big clown wink. Really, I wanted to make my exit, to be out of the ambulance, offstage and back in my room. If I could curl up on my bed with Rex’s costumes, a valerian tincture, and a bottle of pills, I’d be fine.
He cocked an eyebrow, took a breath, and pulled a radio off his belt. “I’m serious.”
“Just the way I like my medical men—serious.” Stand-up and one-liners are the clown version of whistling a happy tune. I’d work the crowd even if it was only a crowd of one.
The radio squawked out a rush of static. He held it close and said, “Patient appears to be stable, though there may be…” The last part was muffled as he turned away. “Appears to be in clown clothing…”—his voice dropped even lower—“…delusional…”
Delusional? Did I hear him right? “’Delusional’?” I said.
The paramedic put the radio down and turned back to me. “We’re going to give you a little oxygen.” He rammed two tubes up my nostrils. He pointed at the boobs. “Show me how this thing works. I need to hear your heart.” He unfastened one of the belts that held me to the bed. When he found the snaps at the cleavage, the boobs fell apart willingly and dropped to either side of my chest as two heavy weights.
He put the cold end of a stethoscope to my chest. His breath brushed my neck. I blushed, warm under a mask of greasepaint and soot. The oxygen was cool against my lip. I was scared.
I touched his shirt. W.C. Fields came to the edge of my vision, shook a leg, and said, “Don’t look now, but I think you’re taking a turn for the nurse.”
“Nurse?” I said, and coughed through the soot in my teeth.
“I’m an EMT,” the Boy Scout said. “Not a nurse.” He put a clip on my finger. “This clip measures your oxygen level.” He taped the ends of wires to my skin, hooked me up to a machine. “Now lay back.”
I looked to W.C. Fields for guidance, but he was gone. The Boy Scout spoke into his radio: “Seems to have sustained minor burns.”
Minor? The oxygen slipped from my nostrils with a cool rush of wind over my face. The scout used one hand to put the hoses back in my nose. “Patient may be in some sort of shock,” he murmured into the radio.
I drank in the oxygen. Slowly, I calmed. The pieces of my body came together again: arms, legs, head, heart. Skin, nerves, breath—everything that had been humming and crazed, it quieted. I pressed my weight into the Ass under my hips. By the time we got to the hospital, I was ready to walk in on my own.
DON’T SHOW UP IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM READY TO WALK in on your own. Don’t try to sit up, tug at the nylon straps that hold you to the gurney, and tell everyone you recovered real fast on the way over. Don’t say the fresh air did you good, or the company on the trip made it worth the ride. If you claim to be fine when you’re strapped to a stretcher—that’s hospital code for “crazy.” The fast track through the ER is chest pain. Say “heart trouble,” and you’re bumped to the front of the line. I didn’t have chest pain by the time we got there. Still, the paramedic told an intake nurse, “The patient complains of heart trouble. Difficulty breathing.”
Emphasis on complains.
I pressed my elbows into the gurney in an effort to sit up, with the Ass in the way. The straps pulled. The unsnapped boobs hung open like a waterlogged life preserver, heavy as cement, meant to sleep with the fishes.
“I’m OK now. I can breathe again.” One elbow slid on the slick industrial sheets and I fell back against the cot fast. My arm was wretched with burns that danced along the inside of my forearm, like a fry cook after a hard night.
The nurse, maybe seventy years old, rolled her eyes like any one of the prom girls in the hotel bathroom on our Charlie Chaplin gig night. It was her own mime routine. “Got it. We’ll take care of it,” she