A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazzard Page A

the limits of good taste. Death cracks inside jokes that only we emergency workers—with our practical knowledge of the postmortem human—will ever laugh at.
    I learn, for instance, to leave the room immediately when a rookie cop starts to roll a bloated body, because it’s guaranteed to burst. And without having to be told, I know that when you fish a floater out of a pond, you should never hook an extremity—it’ll always rip off. Chris and I laugh at these things because we’ve watched them happen, and what we’ve seen once, we’re bound to see again. It is Santayana’s maxim turned on its head, then dunked in formaldehyde and filtered through crime scene tape: Those who know the lessons of decomposition are condemned to witness them repeatedly.
    There will always be another dead body, another fetid roach-infested house. We will never escape the smells, the fluids, the unwashable ick of people deep in the throes of a communicable disease. We’ve run these calls—the disgusting, the foul—and we’ll run them again. So when Darryl comes along, nobodycomplains. Not that it’s dinnertime, not that it’s been a busy day and we’re exhausted, not that it’s a Saturday during college football season and all the good games are about to start. We take him as a gift, payback for the roach-filled houses and the late-night calls and the three sweltering hours we recently devoted to hosing the ambulance clean of blood and bits left over from the guy who’d blown his brains out in his parents’ basement. Like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, we asked for a great call, and for our sins we’re given Darryl, a drunk redneck living in a black neighborhood who on this day has nailed himself to the wall.
    Darryl lives with Tammy, his common-law wife, in a duplex with yellowing plaster walls. The place is beat up and looks like it should be left to the possums. I grab the spotlight, point it at the tin numbers tacked to the door, and double-check them against the ones we’ve been given by dispatch. I always double-check the numbers. There’s a guy—well, there was a guy—who got called out to a person down. When no one answered after the second knock, he kicked in the front door only to find himself face-to-face with the patient’s very pissed-off neighbors.
    Even out in the street with the ambulance windows open, we can hear the yelling. There are different kinds of yells, each advertising a peculiar set of circumstances. The shrill yelling of genuine pain; the cracked-voice yelling of someone who’s been wronged; and the ghost moan of those left brokenhearted. And then there’s the angry, violent yelling of a domestic dispute. There’s nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than a domestic. A wife beaten half to death becomes a knife-wielding lunatic the second her husband is placed in custody.
    Still, we go in. Tammy—all sunburn and skinny legs and rolling, unapologetic belly—meets us at the door. She hooks agrimy thumb toward the house. “Jackass nailed hisself to the wall,” she says.
    Chris nods. “Well, let’s have a look.”
    We pick our way around piles of faded jeans, muddy sneakers, tool belts, and porn magazines—the grand total of Darryl’s existence—until we reach the bedroom. And there, as promised, is Darryl. Nailed to the wall. He instantly focuses his attention on us. “Please, sir, please. You gotta help me, sir. Please.”
    Darryl stands just inside the bedroom door, a single nail through his left elbow attaching him to the wall. There’s a nail gun at his feet. Tammy pokes her head in. “I already told you, Darryl. I don’t love you no more.”
    Chris taps the wall. The nail has gone through a stud. Darryl isn’t concerned about the wall. “Sir, can I talk to you? For a second, sir?”
    â€œDid you really mean to do this?”
    Darryl