Lynn sat with his head in his hands.  Even this simple thing seemed to be hard for him because he was wearing a neck brace at the time.  The brace elongated his neck so that his chin seemed just out of reach if he placed his elbows on his knees.  It was a picture of pathetic misery compounded by discomfort.  I was working a particularly distasteful shift that began at 05:00 in the morning.  This required me to get up at 03:30 to be at work on time.  No human being should be required to do something that absurd.  Ever.  So there I was, stumbling drearily to my horrid shift.  And there was Lynn, experiencing difficulty in the simple act of being sad.

“What’s wrong, man?”

“Oh, hey Buck.  You might as well be the first to know.  I just got fired.  Not only that, I got fired by fucking email.”

*               *               *

Lynn used to be the most feared of all the supervisors.  The stuff of legend.  He was an angry ex-military man who had lost an eye that had been replaced with glass.  New employees were scared of him and all sorts of rumors floated around about how he had lost it.  One particularly wild rumor had him losing it on a secret mission in Vietnam.

He was not without a sense of humor though.  He loved to play jokes on new people who had just been hired.  His glass eye looked pretty good, and it usually took a few days for new people to notice it.  Orientation classes were always fun because after a few days one of them would invariably venture forth with a timid query, “Ummm, I was just wondering, does that supervisor over there have a prosthetic?”

“No. Of course not.  He just has a lazy eye, and he is sensitive about it.  I’m going to tell him you asked about it!  How rude!”  We were all in on the gag.

“No, please don’t!” was always the response.

“Well…I’ll let it pass this time.  But you owe me one. Glass eye.  Sheeeesh!”

And then Lynn would do the gag.  His usually accomplice was an old training officer name Danno.  They would both wait for an unsuspecting new recruit to be headed towards the bathroom.  “Goddamnit Lynn!  I told you to get out of my way.”

“Oh, yeah!  What’s your fuckin’ problem, punk?”  Lynn would always say this nice and cool.  Standing up straight and motioning with his hands to ‘bring it.’

“I’m fixing to tell you what my goddamned problem is you ugly mother fucker, if you don’t shut that hole of yours and get out of my way!”

“Oh yeah?  What you gonna do about it?  I don’t think you have the balls.”

By now the new recruit is usually looking around for some sort of help, wondering if she should run and tell someone about the fight in the hallway.

“Oh I got balls,” Danno would yell, “you’ll see ‘em in a minute when I rip out your eye and skull fuck you!”

“Oh yeah?” Lynn would yell, “What are you waiting for?”  At this point he would tear his glass eye out of it’s socket and bend over so Danno would have easier access.  It never failed to produce a squeal of terror.

Another variation that he employed when Danno was not around was to wash his eye off in the water fountain and put it into his mouth.  Then he would wait for an unsuspecting new recruit to walk down the hall.  He would fly around the corner and bump into them.  Immediately he would throw his hands over his eye and scream in pain.  The recruit would feel terrible and bend down to help him.  That’s when he would remove his hands and show them the empty socket.  While they were screaming in horror he would pretend to vomit his eyeball into his hand.  I actually saw a girl run screaming out of the building after Lynn had done this to her.

“Damn.  I hope she doesn’t freak out like that when she gets a bad patient,” Lynn said while he was washing off his eye in the water fountain.

*               *               *

Lynn was known as the strictest supervisor.  He had fired many people, and he was the first to tell you if you were on his list.  For the first year of my career I was a goody two-shoes and everyone knew it.  It wasn’t until a bit later that my subversive personality came to the forefront.  But for that first year I didn’t mess with Lynn, and because I stayed out of trouble he didn’t mess with me.  Until I got Don as a partner that is.

I was still an EMT at the time.  Don and I were given a special assignment in a new district.  We had just acquired a hospital contract in a far flung suburb and our mission was to be at that hospital’s beck and call.  Problem was they never called.  We would often go 24 hours without turning a wheel.  So we got bored, and occasionally turned to mischief.  Our so-called station was in a building across the street that housed a few doctors’ offices and a physical rehab clinic.  We were housed in what was previously an orthopedics office, and the station was a bit odd.  There were still desks, exam rooms, gurneys, and x-ray lights on the walls.  We also had the keys to the rehab clinic and would sneak in there at night to have wheel chair races around the walking track.

The trouble began one day when I mentioned that I liked cigars.  We were sick of playing Earthworm Jim on the Sega and Don decided we needed a couple of giant cigars to round out the evening.  We couldn’t smoke them inside the building so we started to set up shop out on the second floor landing.  I mentioned that we should be careful not to get our uniform shirts smoky and he agreed.  We laid out our shirts on the reception desk and looked at our new set of station keys that had been made for us today.

“Which one of these is for the door?”  I asked.  This particular set had just been cut today at our request so that we could both have a set.  The door locked when it shut and I wanted to be sure I had the new key.

“I think it’s this one,”  Don said and I put that key in my pocket.

We went outside and smoked for about an hour.  The breeze was cool.  The company was good, and the cigars were fantastic.  When it was time to turn in I fished the key out of my pocket and put it in the lock.  It wouldn’t turn.

“What the hell?”  I said, “This new key is crap.  It doesn’t work.  Oh well, let’s see yours.”

“Uh, I don’t have it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have it.  You had the new one, so I left mine inside.”

A wave of panic spread over us both.  We were out of uniform.  We were at least 30 miles from the base station.  We were locked out of our station, and all we had was a tone pager.  This was back before cell phones too, so we didn’t even have that.

“Crap!  What do we do?  What do we do?  What do we do!”

Don got a sly smile on his face and said, “I guess we are going to have to call a supervisor.”

“Do you have a fucking deathwish?”  I looked at him in horror.  Oddly enough, Don was calm and smiling.  Don always did this when he was about to get in trouble.  He just smiled like an idiot.

After trying for about 30 minutes to take the door off the hinges using my Gerber tool we decided that the station was indeed safe from break ins, including our efforts.  So we went down to the truck, flipped on the master and used the radio to call for help.  As it just so happens, Lynn was on duty.

I had heard of the verbal beatings that Lynn gave.  His anger was legendary.  Some said that his prosthetic was good up until he got angry.  Then his eye would spin free and wild in his head while he yelled at you.  The madder he got, the more it spun off track.  There were those that said if it spun freely in his head like a slot machine you were sure to get fired, or at least get a month off without pay.

When he arrived it was like a storm blew in.  It was past midnight.  He slammed the door to the supervisor van.  He slowly walked over to the two of us standing in the parking lot.  For a few moments he said nothing.  He just stood there.  He took it all in.  The wind was staring to kick up and our pant legs would flutter against our calves occasionally.

“Maybe one of you idiots can tell me why I’m here instead of in my bed sleeping.”

“Because we screwed up?”  I offered.  I figure it was just best to own it.

“Thank you, Buck.  At least I know this is going to be an honest conversation.  I agree.  YOU SCREWED UP!”

I tried desperately to see his eye, but it was too dark.  It looked like it wasn’t spinning, but I couldn’t be sure.  What followed was a verbal lashing the likes of which I had never known.  Don tried to open his mouth and explain something occasionally, but Lynn would just hold his hand up and yell, “Shut your hole!  Does it look like I’m done chewing your ass?”

At the end of it he walked up to me.  There he was.  Nose to nose.  Mano a mano.  Now I could see his eye.  It wasn’t spinning, but it was off kilter.  One eye was boring into my soul.  The other was pointed at the restaurant across the street.  “What does this mean?” I thought to myself, “What does this mean!”

“Buck!” There was a long silence while he stared me down.  “Here is the freaking key to the freaking door.  Don isn’t the keeper of the key.  You are.  You hear me.  You keep the key!” Now he turned to Don, “And YOU!  Don’t you dare contaminate him with your useless bullshit.  Now get you goddamned shirts, and get back in service!”

He got in his van and drove away.

“Suck-up,” said Don.

“Blow me,” I said.

*               *               *

As time went by I became a paramedic, and then a field training officer, and then a critical care paramedic.  And I found that Lynn became less and less of a feared supervisor, and more a confidant.  I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime over the course of the next few years I stopped living in fear of him, and started to take long smoke breaks and bounce ideas off him.  I also became part of the inner circle that knew the real story about his eye.

“When I got out of the army I thought I was still all that and a bag of fucking chips,” Lynn once told me over the course of a Camel Light.  “I had my papers, but was still in.  I was in my class A’s when I was attending this big whoop-tee-do downtown.  A lot of big wigs were there and there was free champagne.  So I started knocking a few of those back.  I was young and dumb, and that shit doesn’t taste like anything, so I start getting pretty numb.  Well, I was holding one of those flutes when I got too drunk to stand and when I fell the glass actually broke into my face, and I screwed up my eye.

My buddies loaded me into a car and drove me down to Parkland down the road here.  Keep in mind that this was back in the day when insurance mattered and people withheld treatment.  They found out I was a serviceman, and worse than that I was technically out.  They made some phone calls and I had no insurance.  The doctor came in my room and talked to me about it.  They couldn’t do the surgery.  They would patch me up and stitch up the hole, but getting an eye surgeon to save it was out of the question without insurance, so I woke up the next morning wearing an eye patch.”

Lynn confided other life lessons to me.  He used to manage a couple of Subway sandwich shops and was famous for firing his own wife from one of the stores.  His work ethic has always been hard core and over the top.  He also once told me the horrific story about him being an army medic who was sent with a group to clean up the Jonestown massacre.  He was part of the operation that investigated and cleaned up 918 dead bodies which was something that still haunted him.

*               *               *

A few days before his termination Lynn came out with a group of us to lunch.  He had recently had some trouble with his neck that was also related to the original fall that injured his eye so many years ago.  He had recently underwent surgery to fuse two vertebrae in his neck.  He had been wearing the neck brace for about a week, everyone loved to screw with him.  We were all seated at a table and he was directly across from me.

“Goddamn, that is one fine looking woman,”  Jimmy said under his breath looking beyond and behind Lynn.

I looked up and saw no one, immediately catching onto the gag, “Oh yeah…those are nice,” I said softly while looking at my plate.

Lynn started to look around but had to turn his whole body.

“Lynn!  What the hell are you doing, man?  Play it cool.”

Damnit,” he muttered going back to trying to drink without a straw from his water cup.

Jimmy let a few seconds go by before doing it again.  “Oh my God,” he said under his breath looking over at me, “she has got to be in pornos or something.  If she bends over like that again I am going to have a heart attack.”

Lynn’s eyes got wide.

“Don’t you do it,” I told him, “you’ll ruin it for the rest of us…OH…did you see that?”

“Goddamnit,” Lynn said, “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to look!”  He turned his whole body around to find two ladies in their 60’s and a small child.  “Fuck you guys.”

*               *               *

“So why did they fire you?  What the hell?” I was only halfway surprised at Lynn’s termination.  He had recently been taken out of his Field Supervisor position and given the new position of Support Services Supervisor.  This sorry consolation prize was supposed to be a hint to start looking for another job, but Lynn didn’t get it.  He looked at it as an opportunity to gut the whole place and make it run with new efficiency.  But the writing was on the wall.  AMR had come in and bought our little company, and started streamlining us to death.  Half of the supervisory staff had been let go prior to this.  Everyone saw the writing on the wall except the angry, one-eyed man with a bullet proof work ethic.

“You know what?  I don’t even know why they fired me.  No one had the balls to tell me.  I got the details of a severance package in an email this morning.  I have just been sitting out here smoking and wondering what the fuck to do with myself.”

This may have been the only time in my life where I had ever seen him vulnerable.  We talked for a while and theorized that the job of firing him had probably been delegated down the chain of command a few times until so much time had passed that HR had sent him a severance package.  I asked him what he was going to do, and he said, “You know what?  I have no fucking clue.  I guess I’ll go home and be with my wife.  That’s what’s been important all these years.  You know, after all the death and destruction, after all the dead bodies, after loosing my eye, after having my neck fucked up, after all the stress and blood and puke and stupid people…the thing that always kept me sane was that short period of time every night when I go home to her.  We always make a snack, get in bed, and watch some TV together.  We laugh, we complain, and we carry on.  I have always worked so much that most days about an hour or two of that is all I have to look forward to.  And all these years it’s been enough, believe it or not.  Those mother fuckers can take my eye, and they can fuck up my neck, and they can take my job, but no one’s ever taking her away from me.  I was thinking about sticking around and giving these bastards a piece of my mind.  But instead I think I’ll go home and catch my wife before she goes to work.  She can play hooky with me today, and tomorrow I’ll try to see if anyone wants to hire a pissed off old man with one eye, a neck brace, and a paramedic cert.  It was nice knowing you Buck.”

 He slowly stood up, and walked off.  I never saw him again.