Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2010/07/10/a-lucky-man-episode-1/
I. [Note: This is a story from my book, In and Out of the Working Class. I am posting it in episodes, so stay tuned! And I'd love to hear your opinion of the story.]
Sometimes a random event can change a person’s life. Clyde Yassem was sitting in the firehall drinking stale coffee and sneaking a look at The Daily Racing Form when the emergency phone rang. He answered it, thinking that this would be his first crisis call.
“Fireman Yassem here,” Clyde said.
A woman’s voice said, “A pallet of glass fell on a guy down here in Packing. He’s hurt bad. Get here quick. Park the truck by the first aid room.”
Clyde recognized the woman, one of the nurses. Her sister was a nurse too, at the hospital. While he was waiting for his first kid to be born, she’s brought out a black baby and told Clyde it was his son. Thought it was a great joke.
Clyde ran down the steps and jumped in his truck. He hit the siren, drove down the road in front of the fire hall, and entered the plant at an opening a few yards from the river. He snaked his way though the dimly lit corridors and stopped near a large overhead crane, beneath which was a large pile of shattered plate glass and where a large group of workers surrounded a man slumped on the floor. Clyde ordered someone to help him with a stretcher. The nurse was cleaning wounds on the man’s head and arms. He was unconscious and his body was contorted into a grotesque position that reminded Clyde right away of wounded men he had seen in the war. The nurse said she had called the local hospital and they would be waiting outside the emergency room for Clyde’s truck. Clyde and several of the men lifted the man as carefully as they could onto the stretcher, tied him in, and hoisted him into the back of the ambulance. One of them agreed to go along and stay in the back with the injured worker. Clyde started the engine and raced out of the plant and to the hospital as fast as he could. He was nervous and gingerly hit the siren and pressed his foot down hard on the gas pedal.
The hospital was three miles away. Clyde only remembered the noise of the siren and the lights of the swerving oncoming traffic as he changed lanes to keep up his speed. As he sailed through a traffic light, he suddenly remembered who the man on the stretcher was. A friend of his, Ed Smolen, one of the boys he’d enlisted with in 1941. He delivered Ed to the emergency entrance, signed some forms, and hung around the waiting room for awhile. Ed’s wife arrived, and Clyde tried to comfort her. She kept saying. “What are we going to do if Ed can’t work.” A doctor came out and told him that they were performing surgery. They wouldn’t know for a few days if Ed would recover. He might as well go back to the factory.