Scene 6

Marley Printing Corp., 2010ce

Long Island City

There’s really only one newspaper for your EMS communist crazy talk and that paper is “the Banshee” and its editorials rant along the lines of:

“They say there’s no rest for the wicked, but I haven’t done anything that truly bad in quite some years. These streets will run you ragged. Bleed you dry if you’re inclined to let the reaper take you.

But on a long enough time line everyone is going to die.”

Oh, Technician Adon sing the blues:

“Our mission, in so far as our misnamed, disheveled, brow beaten lot; can call the nature of our trade a profession with a mission; is that when you die you may do so in warm bed, surrounded by Ivory doctors, West Indian nurses, attentive and curious, cute, young residents keeping their hands off except to hand things, and of course your family, all around you pouring out that thing called love before your long kiss good night.”

“It has been said that on a long enough timeline our kind will lose all ability to feel. That one of our number might stand above a mass of splashed and splattered organs, avulsed intestines scattered across a black tarmac in the glow of streets cast upon our troop; to then light a cigarette, make a stupid fucking joke; and then take a camera phone picture of your son’s dismembered corpse. There are rules against such conduct, but not a one in our number would turn away. If your son’s body lay splayed across the freeway, before that thing called god one at least or more would say a silent prayer, reach down their blue gloved hands and wrap a hospital sheet shroud over the body, close his eyes. And perhaps the one of us with the camera phone might say something crude or racist, normally to cop doing crowd containment, to show our compatriots he or she felt nothing. But when your son or daughter fell, ingloriously in a bloody heap it was us who carried their bodies off that street, it was us who had gang rushed, blaring in that dead of night racing brave to save them. And we’d do anything in our means to bring them back to you for just one moment more.

We don’t want you to try and call us heroes. We just want you to know that we have given everything to our trade, every drop of our sweat, every ounce of our blood drained; to our or third or second marriages, to our child support bills, to our black lungs and swollen livers, before we find pension we’ve poured out upon these streets our humanity for you in the 25 years of servitude to our city of many, many lights.

We don’t want a Daily News two page Spread on the four through six; and I don’t think you’d buy a calendar of us topless in our PPE out-city, ‘heat resistant’ post-911 fireman pants to raise money for our fallen soldiers. Well maybe of you would. We don’t need their medal ceremonies, their cheap metal bars to pin about our blue collared breasts. We just want you to know we exist, and that we’re coming as fast as we can, and that we’ve sacrificed ourselves completely, become a people changed trying to help, and remember; you called us.”

So read the preamble ramble, the editorial of the Banshee Newspaper, Issue 4, the only rank and file controlled EMT-Paramedic Newspaper, released on February 13^th, 2010.