Black Flies by Shannon Burke

Author:Shannon Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593762544
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

When they signed the Fugees to play at the Harlem Street Festival they were a local hip-hop band, but by the time of the concert that July the Fugees had the number-one album in the country. The city expected three or four thousand spectators. Twenty thousand showed up, all of them packed together in a two-square-block area around Lenox and 125th Street, the whole thing surrounded and contained by food stands. Rutkovsky and I were assigned to stand by at the concert at three in the afternoon. The crowd first charged at three-thirty when an M-80 was mistaken for a gunshot. Everyone scattered, then crammed together again, jockeying for space. Rutkovsky called the Borough Command, asking for more EMS units, more police, but the chief told him they’d assign more units as needed. “They’re needed now,” Rutkovsky said, but the chief refused. Rutkovsky hung up the phone and said, “Fucking assholes. Get your popcorn. Show’s about to start.” We stood on the roof of the ambulance in the slanting summer light watching agitation ripple up and down through the tightly packed crowd. At six a fight broke out and the crowd surged and was then calmed. At seven they had to be calmed again. At seven-thirty two teenagers pulled out handguns and opened fire and the crowd scattered, spread, rippled out from the shooting, trampling each other, crashing through the food stands. Boiling oil splashed. Glass shattered. Thousands of people stumbled in toward our flashing lights. In a minute Rutkovsky and I had at least thirty patients—lacerations, abrasions, burns, broken bones, asthma, women in labor, people trampled, and about twenty scared, lost kids who did not know where else to go. We called for help and units came from all over the city. The television crews arrived, the helicopters, and the mayoral brass. About a hundred police cars. At one point all the tour three medics from the station were set up on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street.Verdis and Marmol had two blankets laid out on the concrete and ten asthmatics sitting in two rows, all of them with nebulizers, Verdis going to each of them methodically, taking their heart rates, checking their lungs, Marmol bellowing, “We got a lot’ve fuckin noise already. I don’t want any of you opening your yaps!” Down the block, LaFontaine treated four guys lacerated with broken glass. There was blood on LaFontaine’s gloved hands and down his shirtfront and on his pants and shoes. He loved that. He bandaged quickly, expertly, yelling to Hatsuru, who set out the gauze, the tape, the trauma dressings, the oxygen masks, LaFontaine doing all of the real treatment. Rivett strode up and down Lenox among the wreckage, screaming at the other lieutenants, ordering us to transport to one hospital or another. It was horrible, but also—I have to admit this—for a while, as we treated, as we were surrounded by patients, I was filled with a weird, chaotic joy. I was in the middle of all that wild shit.

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