The night I called 911

The night I arrived back in the US after my most recent trip to Oz I met up with my friends from Australia, Christian and Hedy. They were in town for only a short time, and for months we planned to spend a much more substantial time together than we did, but Blair's death (which is still such a surreal statement that it has no actual real-world meaning) meant that we really only had that night to actually hang out. So we did. We hung out. And hung out. And huuuuung out. So a million drinks later I bundle the pair of them in a cab and I'm walking home. I'm thinking about Blair; he's pretty much all the three of us talked about for the previous four hours.

I come around the corner of my block and the first thing I see is a guy about my age slumped on the pavement, with some chick about my sister's age (but FAR more immature) standing on the nearby stoop saying, "Sir...?... Sir....?... Are you okay?". This guy was clearly not okay. He could barely speak his own name, let alone answer as to whether or not he felt in complete control of his faculties. This girl was making an effort to see if he was okay, but not a particularly effective effort. (Like most people, myself included, this girl was sincerely concerned with the condition of her fellow man, but she tempered that with earnestly polite detachment).

I got some information out of him. His name was Danny and he lived in Brooklyn. That was about as useful as saying his name was Mr. Smith and he lived on Planet Earth. Then he passed out utterly; in the half hour that followed I checked he was breathing by watching his belly bloat in and out of his sweater.

I suggested to Jillian (the chick going "Sir...? Sir...?) that we call an ambulance, initially because I didn't want to be woken up at 9am by a coroner's ambulance screeching around my front door to pick up a gradually cooling alcoholic's corpse from the front step of the apartment building ten doors up. But perhaps more so, I suggested we call an ambulance because Blair's death had made me incredibly conscious of how I treated other human beings, and while I was never a callous person, I feel as though it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I would walk past a guy in obvious alcoholic distress rather than try to take some responsibility for the situation. It was 3am after all, and I was pretty hammered and emotional.

So I dialled 911. A first! But I passed the phone to Jillian because I wasn't confident my Australian accent could convey the seriousness of the situation to an unsuspecting American call-center person...

Imagine if I did:

ME: Oi want to reepoirt a possible alcah-hoilic een deestress.

911: ...A what, sir?

ME: An alcah-holic een deesTRESS!

911: ...I'm sorry, who's wearing this dress?

ME: Noie, an alcah-holic! Hee neids hailp!

911: ...an alcoholic with broken knees...?

ME: NOI!!! What's WRONG with youi?! There's a pissed bloike on the steps of this apaahrtment block who neids meidicahl attinshun! (Note how thick my accent has become in the heat of the moment).

911: Sir, if you've had an allergic reaction to some kind of shellfish, which has cause a thickening of your tongue thus making it unintelligible to my nuanced American ears, then perhaps it would prove beneficial to both our interests if you gave the phone to someone without a debilitating allergy.

ME: (To Jillian) She wants to talk to you.

So the call was made. It was an uncomfortable waiting period. Jillian was young, and I could tell that she didn't often encounter tall, dark strangers from overseas (i.e. she totally had the hots for me. Who could blame her LOL ^-^) I didn't know what to say to her. So I started with local knowledge... I recalled something my landlord told me in an uncharacteristically communicative moment: a few years ago an apartment building down the street burnt down because some kid was playing with matches and set a bunch of rolled up carpets on fire, resulting in his death and the destruction of the building. I was expecting polite enthusiasm for a gruesome story.

"That was my nephew," she said.

Awkward.

So I panicked. The only reason I was stopping for this passed-out drunk guy (or so I believed) was because of my good friend's recent death. I thought I didn't give a flying fart as to whether or not this pissed guy lived or died; I just wanted to make my own life worth living. So I told Jillian about Blair. I told her of his sudden death and his philosophy on life. I was wearing my "good times" badge and I showed her that. I didn't spend much time talking about Blair, but I just wanted her to understand that I wasn't an insensitive schlub making stupid conversation. The futility of the effort and the apparent duplicity of my motives hit me like a hammer and I cried in front of a stranger over the passed-out body of another stranger.

I calmed down. She made soothing noises from behind the gate on her stoop. Eventually an ambulance showed up. (It's important you know that an ambulance in the US is not like an ambulance in Australia: we take for granted that an ambulance will take you to a hospital; as far as I can tell, in New York, you're lucky if an ambulance takes you to the corner unless you can prove you have ample private health insurance).

"Is he going to be okay?" Jillian asked as the ambulance drivers slipped their gloves on and pulled Danny to his feet.

"Yeah, we pick him up almost every night," said one indifferent ambulance dude.

"He was in handcuffs last night," said the other, and they tossed him in the back of their ambulance van like he was a sack of potatoes and drove off.

Sigh.

I don't really know why I'm telling you this story. I thought initially it was going to be an uplifting tale of humanity helping humanity. Maybe that's what I wanted it to be, but it didn't turn out that way. Instead it turned into a fucked up story of me trying to do good in the name of my friend and a flawed healthcare system got in the way. But since I've written this story I've come to the conclusion that if I (or anyone) is going to truly, TRULY learn something from Blair's death, it's not going to come from twee yet contemporary morality tales of helping drunk munters on the street outside my apartment. It's going to come from thinking about Blair's fairly unique combination of passion and compassion. Of caring about life, and caring about others you encounter in your life. I can't say for 100% certain that Blair would have stopped in the street to help Jillian deal with Danny, but I can say that Blair had a great deal of concern for the people in his life. Their successes were his successes, their losses were felt just as keenly by him as by them. And he always came out the other end looking for the silver lining. I'm not sure yet what my silver lining was in this weirdass night, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.