Daniel José Older's Blog, page 9

Who Is Ghost Star?

Brooklyn-based soul quartet GHOST STAR mixes old blues, classic jazz, funk and alternative to create a sound that is soul uplifting, heartbreaking and hip swinging. Bassist/composer Daniel José Older draws from his experience as a science fiction writer and 911 paramedic to write edgy, poetic ballads and frontman Akie Bermiss leads the group with his blues-infused vocal and piano stylings.   As Artists In Residence at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Ghost Star created a live multimedia rockumentary project called City Of Love & Disaster. The performance featured shadow play, original music and choreography and archival research to explore the Manhattan race riots. Ghost Star has been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, The Puffin Foundation and The Brooklyn Historical Society.

The Crate

Originally published in Crossed Genres

When you first stood up in that board meeting your long black and gray locks dropped like a waterfall all the way down to your ass and your stony serious face looked like it would forever refuse to smile. I liked that about you. Never had time to tell you, but it was that ferocity that got me. You were short and slender, but clearly a mountain. A lone black woman at the head of a table of comely white folks in a giant white marble castle. The only African thing around less than 400 years old, not counting my half-black ass.

You welcomed me and gave me a stunning introduction but you never let on that you were happy I was there. Never creased your mouth, didn’t even show your teeth. As I watched you I put the pieces together. I could sense a glint of excitement in your voice, a tiny, restrained pep in your step. Wasn’t a detective for nothing you know. It wasn’t the board’s idea to bring me in and it wasn’t my connections or my impressive list of scholarly work that sealed the deal. It was you. Working every angle, letting each party believe they were taking the initiative. Threading us all along like a master criminal.

I gave my presentation and wowed the shit out of them even though I was only half there. My mouth was rattling out the same old words I been saying to audiences for the past ten years since I retired from the Department, but my brain was back in investigation mode, working its way along each step of your crafty plan like a pilgrim along the stations of the cross.

At the cheesy reception after the meeting, we both played the part. By that time, I was already your co-conspirator without even so much as a whispered conversation. Perhaps you knew this would happen, but I’d like to imagine you were pleasantly surprised at how smooth I slid into my role. Or did you know I’d been waiting for more than two decades for you to come along and set everything into motion? I sure didn’t. Not till it happened anyway.

I shook hands and grinned. It’s a grin I’ve perfected over the years, makes white people very comfortable- a grin that says, we’re both in on the joke, and it’s okay. When the room cleared and you and I stood there all alone, silence was our friend. It was not the pregnant, obtrusive silence that pesters the vaguely acquainted but mutually attracted- it was the soothing quiet of a warm night shared between two satisfied lovers. I could almost feel the breeze, even through all those layers of marble.

Always the designated trickster, I mocked you lightly about such a bigdeal job-head of a museum and whatnot- and for a second thought I’d touched a nerve. You shot me the killer face- the face that if we’d have ever made it into the bedroom would’ve become a running joke between you and me, right up into our bedpan nursing home years. Then you finally smiled, perhaps for the first time ever, and it almost knocked me over. Knowing you, it was probably on purpose, getting me off guard with those angry eyes and then letting that shine loose on me.

We were both trying to ignore the Eshu. At that point, he was in a crate about three floors beneath us. Imagine putting Eshu in a crate- what a ridiculous and inadequate container for a vibrant child of God. The very idea is absurd. Almost as absurd as putting it on a pedestal for tourists to gawk at. But it is that very lack of irony that has again and again shaken the lofty halls of white culture, so there’s a certain charming inevitability to the whole thing.

Even after folks cleared out, we still made banal small talk as if there were inquiring ears nearby. Felt safer that way. I kept chuckling even though nothing was that funny, and you, surely against your better judgment, channeled the giddy school girl you’d long since left behind. Eshu’s long hands must’ve been reaching all the way up from his crate, past the glassy-eyed sarcophagi and foaming Chinese dragons, and right into our armpits for a long overdue tickle.

We settled into a comfortable rhythm, might as well have been two palm trees rustling back and forth to each other in the night. Both knew we were just passing time to let the building clear out. Laying in wait for a whole other kind of alone. Shifting your weight playfully from one foot to the other, you told me how you used to be a community organizer until the non-profit dependency dance drove you to museums; a similar dance with different steps. Maybe I told some dumb stories from my days walking the beat to get you juiced up, the way I used to with young ladies at parties. You didn’t seem all that impressed though.

When the security guard passed by and waved goodbye amiably (almost like he was in on the whole thing), we knew we were alone. Well, Doctor, you said with a sardonic grin and a slight bow, would you like to see the magnanimous stone that you have come to enlighten us about?

I would enjoy that, yes. Smooth. To my utter shock, you offered me the empty space between your elbow and your body. We walked arm in arm, like husband and bride, through the marble halls and down into the basement.

I almost wished we’da had the opportunity to put the thing on display, complete with big horror movie style subway ads and autographed copies of my glossy book. Imagine the shock. Eshu is, after all, just a big rock. This one was as strong and vibrant as any I’d ever seen- or would be when it finally woke up- but still: tourists prefer a smiley face on their exotic primitive art exhibits.

It was laughing inside us, louder and louder as we got closer to it. It probably didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but it could smell freedom coming. I took out the rum and said a combination of prayers I’d learned over the course of my study. Prayers that slipped as easily from my lips now as casual conversation. Old old words that I infused with my own hopes and fears and whispered out into that dusty storage room.

First nothing at all happened. Not a damn thing. I don’t even think we were breathing. Then I felt, rather than saw or heard, the Eshu stirring from its three hundred-year slumber. Grudgingly at first, the crate began rocking back and forth. Then I heard it splinter and the wood planks cringed and then shattered. Your fingers wrapped around my arm. I could feel your smile on the back of my head. Could feel the Eshu’s smile rising like a sun, encompassing the whole room. I think that’s when the little piece of it lodged inside of me. The stone shimmied and tumbled forth as we jumped out of its way.

Immediately, the air felt staticy and crisp around us. You could taste the heat of all those electrons rubbing against each other. We ran lovingly after the old god, two little kids chasing an ice cream truck, and found ourselves in the first floor lobby- the one with all the towering dinosaurs, but our Eshu was nowhere to be found.

“He’s been here,” you said softly. “But he’s moved on.” A crash came from the Egypt Room and you grabbed my hand and yanked me along. Now we were thirteen, escaping to the roof of the PJs on Marcy Ave to stare at the sky and make out. The floor of the museum was rumbling and soon the alarms would go.

“Was there any plan for this part?” I asked when we paused to catch our breath at a stairwell.

“No plan,” you panted. “Eshu is the plan.”

We both laughed and hoped we had taken all our vitamins earlier.

We caught up to it bouncing against a wall in the Hall of Modern Art. Everything had been destroyed. Shattered glass oceans sparkled across the floor. “We have to let him out or he’ll tear apart the whole building.” But the police were already nearby; you could hear their furious yells and boot-stomps between Eshu’s thundering wall-smashes.

I wonder sometimes if this part was in your plan too. When the cops rounded the corner, all they found was me. They came on in a rage- that exasperated cop rage I remember so well from my years on the street. I let my body fall loose to the blows and grabs, gave in to the manhandling and tried to keep the smug grin off my face as I imagined you and the Eshu tumbling out the back fire exit. Truth is, I’d never felt so free in all my life.

From the clippings you’ve sent me, I see our little plan was a success. The Eshu is raining a solid supernatural ass whupping on most of our city’s corrupt institutions. And some of the non-corrupt ones too. I thought the take over of the school system was a nice touch- clearly they needed to start from scratch. And yes, you’ve proven your point about that Audre quote you always mention with the master’s tools. I can just see you trying to hold back that smug smile. Imagining you’ve gone underground. I also found the hidden message you put in the crossword puzzle clues and I’m flattered you plan to break me out of here, because after two and a half years, the excitement is definitely wearing off. That little piece of the Eshu stayed with me and every day I feel it growing and laughing inside me. Now I am its crate, a ridiculous, inadequate little container for a vibrant child of God. And this cell- this cell is my crate. It is ridiculous and inadequate too, and I am a vibrant child of God. Please come get me soon.

AFTER

A lot of my posts end with some variation of this: “And then we zipped off into the night…”

Right. That’s because that tends to be the moment when our active part of the story ends. But what happens after all that frenzy? On the way, we’re keeping things in order, check and rechecking things. Often we’re climbing over each other, grabbing whatever hand holds we can while the bus screeches around a corner. Sometimes there’s a cop back there, looking puzzled. We’re taking blood pressures, making sure EKG leads are still on, squinting at monitors, maybe getting another IV. Jobs can be so dynamic: you can start with one kinda mess and wind up with a whole other one in a matter of seconds, and the body has so many ways of reacting to trauma. Sometimes a seizure is a seizure, sometimes it’s a sad grasp for attention, sometimes it’s the first moment of cardiac arrest. People turn so many different colors for so many different reasons.

Then we finally pull up to the bay, the beep beep back up and the bump against the tire holders. There’s a final scramble to get everything disconnected and loaded onto the stretcher and then we flood inside, sometimes one riding the stretcher, pumping up and down on the guy’s chest as two others guide it through the linoleum hallways into the waiting arms of trauma surgeons, interns and anesthesiologists. There’s the hectic, fragile inbetween time, as the care for the patient goes passes from us to them, and their machines and protocols whirr into effect and we tit for tat back and forth, summarizing the past wild half-hour in a 30 sec soundbite (not unlike the elevator pitch, now that i think about it…)

Some doctors make a point of not giving a fuck. They talk over you, look away as you give the report, roll their eyes, ask you the same question five times. Even with EMS being what it is, still seems a hard concept for some doctors to grasp that, if we do our job right, a patient who was critical ten minutes ago is chilling by the time they show up at the ER. So sometimes we have to explain ourselves very explicitly, sometimes we do our best and then walk away shrugging. Other docs are extra EMS-happy, all up in our process, how’d it go, what was the apartment like, what did witnesses say, all that, which is great of course, more for the patient than anyone else, because some of those details can make the difference between life and death.

We step back while the hospital takes over.

You get curious – put so much work into getting someone there in one piece, you wanna know what happens. But I’ve learned sometimes it’s better to step away. I’ve felt that rush of frustration when you know they’re not putting their all in and things go sour. Watched situations spiral out of control, and there’s nothing we can do from our end. So you step away. You watch, you learn, and then you step back, smile or shake your head, finish the paperwork and go get dinner.

This Week In Other People’s Disasters

There’s an ebb and a flow.
months and months will pass and you’ll only bring in chronic neck pain, chest colds, the occasional migraine and the same five drunks again and again. A minor MVA will seem exciting. These are the months i want to quit and never see an ambulance again in my life. Then, just when you’re starting to drop your guard and accept that you’re really just a glorified taxi for the inept and accident proned and chronically vaguely unwell, some real ass shit goes down.
And while you’re still marveling that anything worthwhile happened at all, it happens again. And then you’re pivoting and splicing your way through a whole barrage of megacodes, epic disasters, medical mysteries and whatever other series of other people’s misfortunes the world has to offer. Fun!

These past two weeks were in that vain. First a perfectly healthy looking fifty-year old just up and died for no apparent reason in the West 4th Street train station in the middle of the mid-afternoon rush home. So death became a spectator sport because let’s be honest, who wouldn’t stop and stare at such a sight: A team of firemen, EMTs and medics pumping up and down on the guy’s chest, yelling commands, disagreements, possibilities, drug administration numbers, semi-coded curseouts, intubating, sticking in IVs, glancing at monitors…All that. The gapers irritate me, but the truth is i’d watch too.

He came back. And well he should’ve, young fellow like that, plus he dropped in public, which means everything happened fast and speed is everything in those situations. Still, you never presume someone will come through. Well, I don’t. But yes, there was that bounding pulse at his neck and then we heaved him up four flights to ground level and loaded him onto the bus and lo behold, the pulse was gone. Crap. Did some shit, got things ready to move and enroute he came back, good strong pound pound and a solid blood pressure to boot and last time I checked he was still at it.

Then some dude who’d been coughing for like six weeks called from around the corner from the hospital because he was “coughing a lot.”

Ok.

Then was the 40 year old that nearly passed out in a swank uptown bistro. She’d had a sudden bout of unfathomably intense abdominal pain ( did she say “unfathomably?” maybe not. But her face did. ) and when she went to the ladies room everything got bleary. She slid down the wall and we found her sobbing, holding her tummy and with no blood pressure at all. No blood pressure, unless there’s a good healthy reason for it like you’re an athlete or extraordinarily chill or a yoga master, is a very very bad thing. It usually means you’re about to die. Your heart should be zooming at that point, to compensate, pumping as much blood as it can and if it’s not you’re really really about to die. So, her heart wasn’t going that fast, another bad thing.
Why do people have no blood pressure? Either their blood vessels have suddenly opened up wide to fight off a perceived threat, like with an infection or a allergic reaction, or the heart isn’t pumping right, usually this would be a massive heart attack or someone with a cardiac problem already in the works, or you’re losing blood or massively dehydrated. Since she’s not febrile or breaking out in hives it’s not the vessels, and she’s not having chest pain or a cardiac patient so it’s almost definitely not cardiogenic shock, so we’re left with the fluid. She’s not visibly bleeding out, she hasn’t been shot, so the bleed is internal. Usually, these are in the GI tract and they eventually find their way out in the form of blackish tarlike poop. No fun. Sometimes it comes out all fresh and bri…you get the point.
Anyway, ok, that’s a good possibility here, but there’s another piece of the puzzle to consider. The patient’s last menstrual period was two months ago — she could be pregnant. Anytime you have a hypotensive, almost passing-out woman with sudden onset lower abdominal pain and any possibility at all of being pregnant you pretty much have to assume she’s having an ectopic pregnancy. This is when the egg fertilizes in the fallopian tube and then ruptures, causing massive internal bleeding. Which is exactly what happened with our lady.
There’s not much we can do for that prehospital. We put a huge IV in to replace as much fluid as we can as fast as we can. We throw an oxygen mask on her, we lean her back and move fast, plowing rudely through the shocked diners and whispering waiters. We haul ass to the bus and then haul ass to the hospital and let ‘em know what we comin’ with so they have fluids and surgeons standing by.

Then some lady called for her grandad, he was having “chest pain”, even though he hasn’t spoken or moved any of his extremities since 1998, still, he was having chest pain. And difficulty breathing. And he had to go to the hospital. Right.

Then a slew of drunks. All familiar.

Then an old guy laid out in his own piss, squirming, moaning, writhing. Home Health Aid epically unhelpful, but still, he’s a diabetic so we just go head and check his sugar figuring that’ll be that. And it’s low! So low the monitor just says “LO” which is great for him, because sugar is a thing we can fix up, so we do. Except then he’s still not with it. And his blood pressure’s insanely high, 240/130 or somesuch disasterness. This is all very bad. It means he’s having a stroke and there’s absolutely nothing we can do except move fast, and even in the ER they’ll be pretty helpless because with stroke treatment, timing is everything and since we can’t get a straight story from the HHA, who’s probably high and definitely…not bright, we don’t know the onset time. So, grandpa is basically on his own as far as healing. We package him up, drop a most difficult and delicate IV in one of the meandering little slipstream veins hiding along his forearm and go go go, knowing all the while the deal is basically done.

Dead Guy In An Elevator

maybe I should start having more chipper names for these posts… Maybe that’d be deceitful though. I dont want people coming here thinking it’s gonna be all care bears and unicorns and then getting traumatized when people keep dying. Yeah, okay. *keeps title*

ANYWAY: job comes in as “MAN ACTING WEIRD, DIZZY IN ELEVATOR” and the address is an old people home on East 128th Street. Apparently by “acting weird” they meant “dead” because when we get there there’s a crowd of geris staring at an open elevator door and inside there’s a guy lying there on his back, dead. Well, damn near dead, I should say, because just as we roll up he takes one, final gurgly breath (gurgley? Gurgle-y? …whatever) and then he’s really dead. 
Oy. 
We gently, respectfully and very quickly drag him out because when you’re working up a cardiac arrest the last place you want to be is in a cramped little elevator. We park him right in front of the door and start a round of compressions.
Now normally, i think i’ve probably said this before a bunch of times here but there it is, normally when you have a cardiac arrest they send two units so the EMTs can pump away at CPR while we get our advanced life support on, intubation and IV meds and electricity, but here since the job came in as “acting weird” they just sent us. So, there’s a lot going on. I can’t even tell you the exact order of things happening, because there’s a few moments in there where your hands just move in automatic pilot, compressing the chest and tearing open packages and setting up IV lines and tubes and compressing the chest more and getting the oxygen tank and tube in order. At some point the elevator door opened again and a gaggle of elders was traumatized and then the elevator door closed and we pulled the guy a little further into the lobby.
We called for backup but they were still a few minutes out. The only other person around with less than a century of living was the security guard and he was about 12 with the wispy beginnings of a ‘stache just starting to make an appearance at the edges of his mouth. 
I ask him if he knows CPR.
“No,” he squeaks. 
“Well, time for a free lesson, c’mere.”

I gotta give the kid credit: he jumped in even though he was clearly boggleyed at the whole situation. 
Push right here, I said, pointing to the sternum. Just like on TV.
He did some kinda timid, halfassed finger dips and I told him he had to put some back into it, which he did. The ugly truth about CPR is that usually if you’re doing it right it means you’re breaking some ribs, a dull crunching with a little extra give that you actually get used to pretty quickly, but probably less so when you’re bar mitzvah age and have never done it before. 

Cardiac arrests always feel like you’re fourteen steps behind, because every second that something isn’t done yet is another second that the guy is dead and not getting the oxygen or circulation he needs. Still, it’s not stressful in the way paperwork or organizing concerts or meeting deadlines is. You know you can only move so fast with precision, and you move just that fast. Yes you feel behind but once you’ve done em for a while you also know you’re never nearly as far behind as you feel. It always starts with a flurry of movement: There’re so many things that needs to happen right off the bat and then as shit falls into place I always take a second to step back and say out loud what’s going on. 

75 year old male — i mumble — cardiac arrest, asystole on the monitor IV in place with cold fluids running and epi, vasopressin and dextrose on board intubated with CPR in progress for 10 minutes no change on monitor unknown history allergies meds…hmmm…

By this time the EMTs have arrived and relieved the anxious security guard just when he was getting the hang of things. I’m thinking we might have to call this one. There’s no point in transporting a dead body to the hospital just so they can pronounce him there and he hasn’t had any changes in his rhythm since we started. Plus he’s old, and the older you are the smaller you’re chances of popping back around after you code. I tell them to hold compressions and check a pulse. One of the EMTs is getting into it with the cluster of ancient onlookers, (“Keep it moving people, nothing to see here” riiiiiight…whether from Alzheimers, non-English speaking or just not giving a fuck, they all just stand there, mouths hanging open). She gives up and puts her fingers on the guy’s neck and says “Oh! Pulse!”

We recheck and indeed, the man has his very own pulse and, it turns out, a halfway decent blood pressure to boot. Then things happen fast. They have to, because people don’t necessarily stay back when they come back and we’ve already emptied half the med kit into this guy. We do a cursory wipedown/cleanup, load the guy onto the stretcher, careful not to pull out any IVs or disrupt the tube and take off in a blaze of screeches and lights.