The World of Jimmy Breslin by Breslin Jimmy

Author:Breslin, Jimmy [Breslin, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453245538
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-02-13T23:00:00+00:00

7

In Which He Sees the Dark Side of Life

BRESLIN DEALS IN EMOTIONS the way some columnists deal in issues. They are the stuff of his writing and his articles gain or lose an audience by how well the public can identify with his private responses to the world. When he and they differ on what is funny, he has written a bad column.

He has a particular aptitude, though, for dealing in tragedy, pathos, and sorrow. A competitor once called him “a male sob-sister,” which is somewhere near the truth because he manages to deal with emotions most papers leave to female writers. The difference is that he does his work with an odd mixture of restraint and emotionalism that manages to capture the mood of sorrow in its varying shades.

When President Kennedy was killed, Breslin was on the first jet from New York to Dallas. He knew it was his story. He became so wrapped up in it that, after filing “A Death in Emergency Room One,” he went out, re-did all the research that he had gathered in the first place, and tried to file the story again. When he finished covering the Kennedy funeral in Washington he was unable to talk to anyone for several hours.

A Death in Emergency Room One

Dallas

The call bothered Malcolm Perry. “Dr. Tom Shires, STAT,” the girl’s voice said over the page in the doctors’ cafeteria at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The “STAT” meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital’s chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And Shires, Perry’s superior, was out of town for the day. Malcolm Perry looked at the salmon croquettes on the plate in front of him. Then he put down his fork and went over to a telephone.

“This is Dr. Perry taking Dr. Shires’ page,” he said.

“President Kennedy has been shot. STAT,” the operator said. “They are bringing him into the emergency room right now.”

Perry hung up and walked quickly out of the cafeteria and down a flight of stairs and pushed through a brown door and a nurse pointed to Emergency Room One, and Dr. Perry walked into it. The room is narrow and has gray tiled walls and a cream-colored ceiling. In the middle of it, on an aluminum hospital cart, the President of the United States had been placed on his back and he was dying while a huge lamp glared in his face.

John Kennedy already had been stripped of his jacket, shirt, and T-shirt, and a staff doctor was starting to place a tube called an endotracht down the throat. Oxygen would be forced down the endotracht. Breathing was the first thing to attack. The President was not breathing.

Malcolm Perry unbuttoned his dark blue glen-plaid jacket and threw it onto the floor. He held out his hands while the nurse helped him put on gloves.

The President, Perry thought. He’s bigger than I thought he was.

He noticed the tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband’s blood all over the front of the skirt.

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