“Uh ... yeah, I guess,” Jim replied.
“And then I started thinking that I want that feeling of comfort to be with me while we’re out on tour and shit. While we’re flying in airplanes, while we’re performing on the stage, while we’re banging local gash in the hotel rooms after the shows. That’s when I got the idea to hire you to be the tour medic. The very next day I called up that weasel motherfucker that counts the beans for me and told him the plan and he did the math and started putting things together. Everything is pretty much arranged, dude. All you have to do is say yes.”
And so, he said yes. And now, here he was, about to start his first day on his new gig.
The large rollup door for the rehearsal warehouse was now standing open. Jim, per instructions he had been given several days ago, drove his car through it, to the inside of the building. All of the band’s gear, all of the lighting and scaffolding, the miles of cables and wires, even the stage itself, were all gone, presumably in Tacoma being set up in the Tacoma Dome for tonight’s opening show. Parked inside already was a black Mercedes sedan, a Corvette, a 5-series BMW, and a Lexus. Sitting in folding chairs around a card table near where the sound board had once sat, were Matt’s band members—Austin Jefferson, the bass player; Steve Calhoun, the drummer; and Corban Slate, the young, baby-faced rhythm guitarist. Matt himself was nowhere to be seen. Sitting in another chair, well away from the band members, was a mid-forties man wearing a suit and tie and keeping a leather briefcase close by him. Jim had never met this man before, but he had been told that their road manager would be traveling with them. His name, Matt had told him in a previous conversation, was Greg Cahn, or Grand or something like that.
“He’s a back-stabbing, ass-sucking, Book of Mormon thumping hypocrite who would probably kill his own grandmother for a little sniff of my blow,” Matt had advised. “Never trust him about anything, and always keep your ass firmly covered when he’s around.”
Not exactly a glowing character recommendation, Jim thought, eyeballing the man nervously.
He parked next to the Corvette and got out of his Nissan. He walked around to the back and opened the trunk. Inside was the single suitcase he had been instructed to bring. Inside of it were all of the jeans and most of the t-shirts he owned, eight pairs of underwear, ten pairs of socks, a couple of sweaters, a winter coat, his shaving and toiletries equipment, and about a dozen of his favorite books. He set the suitcase down on the floor and then closed the trunk again. He was trying to figure out what to do with his keys when the man in the suit walked over to him, a large grin on his face.
“You must be the paramedic that Matt hired,” he said.
“That’s right,” Jim said, keeping his voice monotone.
“I’m Greg Gahn, the road manager,” he said, holding out his right hand.
Jim shook with him. “Jim Ramos,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Of course, of course,” Greg said, his grin getting wider. “Welcome to the crew. I’m very excited to be working with you. It will be nice to have a paramedic on standby to help supplement the medical treatment that I sometimes have to carry out.”
“You do medical treatment?” Jim asked carefully. “You’re not a doctor, are you?”
“No no,” Greg said, chuckling. “I’m not a doctor. My education is in entertainment production and religious studies. I do, however, have a fairly extensive informal training in advanced first aid and various pharmacological treatments.”
“I see,” Jim said, wondering exactly what he meant by ‘informal’.
“Anyway, if you’ll just put your car keys on the front seat of the vehicle and leave the door unlocked, I’ll take you over to your ‘football’, as Matt calls it, and we can go over what is in it.”
“Uh ... wait a minute,” Jim said. “Just leave my keys in the car?”
“It will be perfectly safe,” Greg said. “National pays for a service that will come in after we depart. They will hook all the vehicles up to trickle chargers to keep the batteries healthy and they will secure the keys at that time. They will also come in weekly to dust off the vehicles and check on their status.”
“No kidding?” Jim said. “There are people who get paid to do things like that?”
“Yes, of course,” Greg said.
“Interesting,” Jim said, and then shrugged. He opened the car door and tossed his keys inside. “I guess any thieves wouldn’t bother much with my car with all of yours sitting here anyway.”
“I would think not,” he said. “Now, shall we go see your football?”
“I guess we should.”
His football was a medium sized suitcase that looked pretty much like any other piece of luggage. It had an extendable handle and wheels on the bottom so it could be rolled from place to place instead of carried. It latched shut with a simple locking mechanism that required a four-digit code be input. Currently, that code was set at 0000. Greg dialed it in and then opened the case.
“This is everything that you requested for this assignment,” Greg told him, waving at the inside of the case.
The largest piece of equipment inside was the LifePak 10 monitor/defibrillator; the exact model that SMS equipped their ambulances with. There were two batteries installed in the monitor and four spares, along with a plug-in battery charger. Jim turned the machine on and watched as it went through a brief series of self-checks before gracing him with a flat line rhythm since it was not currently connected to a human body with a heartbeat. He picked up the paddles that would be used to defib Matt if such a thing became necessary, set the output to one hundred joules of energy, and then pressed the charge button. A high-pitched whine sounded as the machine powered up. Once fully charged, Jim pointed the paddles away from each other and pressed the two thumb buttons, releasing the charge harmlessly into the air. He then opened the zipper pockets on the LifePak’s case, finding multiple packages of electrodes and a large bottle of conducting gel. He zipped everything back up and then turned the machine off, satisfied.
Next, he inspected the other supplies in the football. Matt had told him to write out a shopping list of everything he would conceivably need, focusing primarily on the guitarist’s heart issue and not so much on basic first aid. He saw that everything he had asked for was there. Three one-liter bags of normal saline for intravenous fluid. Six sets of IV tubing. Ten each of 18, 20, and 22-gauge IV catheters. Ten commercial IV start kits. A bag valve mask. A laryngoscope and three 7.0, 7.5, and 8.0 endotracheal tubes. Three commercial ET tube fasteners. A dozen each of 10-milliliter, 5-milliliter, and 3-milliliter syringes. A dozen needles of varying gauge to put on the syringes. And then there were the drugs. Five prefilled syringes of epinephrine, three of atropine, two of sodium bicarbonate, six of lidocaine, two of calcium gluconate, two of magnesium sulfate, and two of Narcan. In addition to the prefilled syringes, there was a premixed bag of dopamine, twelve vials of Adenosine, and six vials of Versed.
It was the Versed that brought a little bit of Jim’s nervousness about the legality of this gig back to the forefront of his mind. Versed, a potent benzodiazepine, was a Schedule IV controlled substance with high potential for abuse. On the ambulance, the Versed and the morphine were both carefully tracked from medic to medic, shift to shift, with both oncoming and offgoing medic required to sign for possession of it and keep it inside a lockbox that was, in turn, kept under a separate lock and key inside the ambulance. When the drugs were used, a complex form needed to be filled out to replace it and a copy of that form was then forwarded to the DEA. Just having six vials of the shit sitting in this football with no one really accountable for it did not seem right.