I'm No Superhero, I'm Just Ambulance Man
After an eternity somebody managed to answer the door.
The guy failed to acknowledge our presence, turned his back, left the door open and said, “The ambulance men are here.”
We were led to a small bedroom where a little boy and his nightlight waited.
The kid looked me in the eye, gathered up his courage and asked, “Are you real?”
You bet I’m real. I’m as real as they come, especially when I’m at the side of a sick 6-year-old kid living on the third floor of a crummy tenement house in one of the worst sections of Providence. A kid who sees his world full of arguments, gunfire, screaming and neglect. A kid who lives in the house on the corner where a 15-year-old girl was gunned down in broad daylight the day before she was to testify against a neighborhood drug dealer. A kid who looks forward to going to school because school is safer and more fun than the dump he calls home.
Yeah, I’m real. I am Ambulance Man.
But maybe I should be Batman. If I was, I’d clip the kid onto my utility belt, fire my grappling hooks out the window and onto the top of the building across the street, hit a switch and get him out of there in style.
Maybe if I was Superman, I could just put him on my back and fly him away.
Or I could be Captain America and use my shield to protect him from the people who brought him into this existence, and let him live in squalor, and call 911 when he has a fever because they use the money the government gives them not for clothing, nutrition and medicine, but for cigarettes, heroin and booze, and a dozen tattoos.
(Continue Reading: I’m No Superhero, I’m Just Ambulance Man)
