In my late teens, a series of not-so-great decisions had culminated with me not being in school, not having a job, and living in a tiny closet/apartment for which I still had to somehow pay rent. This was in the early 90's (1990 to be precise), and the economy was pretty much in the toilet, which meant that, as someone with a high school diploma and not much working experience, I was looking at a job in the fast food industry. Then someone turned me on to this company that was hiring security guards without any experience, and, well, you can figure out the rest.
Flash forward to later in the year. It was just weeks before my 20th birthday. I was a "security officer" (not a guard, thank you very much) for possibly the most half-assed security company in history. I was between regular gigs, and had gotten an assignment to fill in at a small hospital in Portland for a week while they found a replacement for the regular guard, whom the client had fired for sleeping on the job. This was particularly awkward, because it turned out nobody had told this guy that he had been fired for sleeping on the job. You can imagine how surprised he was when I showed up to do his job and, thinking that there had been a mix-up at the office and they had assigned two of us to fill in, I told him that I was there to fill in for the guy who had just been fired for sleeping on the job. I then got to stand around awkwardly while he called in and confirmed that, yes, he had been fired by the client for sleeping on the job. Since he had only been fired by the client, not the security company, he was still technically getting a paycheck, so he got the extra-humiliating task of training me on how to do the job he had just been fired from. It was an extremely awkward ten minutes.
Fortunately for me, this was a tiny little hospital where they practiced osteopathic medicine. I had no idea what that meant; apparently, I was not alone, because nobody seemed to go there. This made my job pretty easy. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that it was located in such a shitty neighborhood, I don't think they would have needed a guard at all. As it was, a couple of nurses on the night shift had been assaulted while walking to their cars after work, so my primary duty was just to walk nurses safely to their vehicles in the wee hours of the morning. Aside from this, I really only had two other things to occupy my time. One was setting up the salad bar in the hospital cafeteria for the night crew. I have no idea why the security guard was in charge of this, aside from the obvious fact that no one else wanted to do it, and I had plenty of time on my hands. The rest of my time was spent "patrolling," which, for the most part, meant just wandering around the hospital all night. This was about as exciting as you would imagine, but I was determined to do a good job. I wanted to get another assignment after the week was up and, after seeing how the last guy had been fired, I was too paranoid to even sit down for a minute.
It was a long week, but I made it through without incident. Until, of course, the very last night. Now, as anyone who has had this job will probably tell you, being a security guard is one of the most boring jobs imaginable. My own career as a "security officer" (such as it was) consisted of loooong periods of boredom, during which I wished for something--anything--to happen, punctuated by crazy incidents that made me wish more than anything for nothing to happen so I could just be bored again. All week, I had been waiting for something to happen at my tiny hospital; after all, I had heard crazy stories from other guards who had worked at some of the bigger hospitals. One of these guys had confided in me that he always brought an extra shirt to work with him because he always got so much blood on him during his shift. So I was a little disappointed, but mostly relieved, when nothing happened.
So the last night arrived, and I was training the guy who would be taking over from me. Since I hadn't been fired for sleeping on the job, he was getting the luxury of a full night of training. Shortly after 2 o'clock in the morning--not coincidentally, around the time the bars were closing--we were on patrol, checking the outlying doctors' offices to make sure nobody had broken into them looking for drugs. (I mentioned this was a really bad neighborhood, right?) My trainee and I had split up, for no reason I can think of that makes any sense, when my pager went off. This was a voice pager, so the beeping was followed by the sound of the receptionist's voice telling me what they needed. Unfortunately, the doctor's office I was checking out was situated right next to a 7-11, where a mammoth semi truck was backing up, so between the incredibly loud diesel engine and the piercing beeping of his I'm-backing-up-so-get-the-hell-out-of-my-way signal, I couldn't hear a damn thing she was saying. Since a page usually meant that a nurse was getting off duty and needed an escort to her car, I wasted a precious minute looking around for my trainee.
The beeper went off again. This time, there was no mistaking a frantic note in the receptionist's voice. That, and the fact that she was yelling, lit a fire under my ass and I took off running back to the emergency room. Despite the small size of the hospital, the doctors' offices were a pretty fair distance away, so I was running full tilt for a couple of minutes before I arrived, huffing and puffing, at the ER.
It was covered in blood. Well, okay, it was liberally splattered with blood, but in my anxious state it looked like the inside of a slaughterhouse. There were two guys facing off in the middle of the room. One of them, the nursing supervisor, who was sort of my on-site boss, was covered head-to-toe in blood. The other guy was a big, beefy dude with a greasy black mullet and matching mustache. He was wearing a dirty wife beater that showed off his meaty, tattoo-covered arms, one of which appeared to be the source of the blood that had turned the ER into a Jackson Pollack painting. A large chunk of meat was protruding from one of his forearms, no doubt completely ruining an otherwise perfectly good tattoo. He was in the process of swinging this arm around in such a way as to distribute the blood as evenly as possible over the various surfaces in the ER, possibly unaware that in doing so he was making them completely un-sterile.
When I walked in the room, everything stopped. Everyone looked at me expectantly. I could almost hear them thinking, Oh, good, the security guard's here. He'll make everything all right again. I'm sad to say I disappointed them almost immediately. I did not take charge. I did not wrestle the large, profusely bleeding man-bear to the ground and subdue him. I just froze.
I should mention here that it was not entirely my fault that I was completely unprepared for this situation. I was not an armed guard. I had no gun, no nightstick, no taser, no pepper spray. I had been assured, when I took a job with the aforementioned half-assed security company, that I would never, ever, have to subdue anyone, under any circumstances and, moreover, I was under the impression that I would get in trouble for doing so. During that interminable moment when I was standing there in the entrance to the ER, desperately wishing I were somewhere else, I flashed back to something I had been told during orientation.
"Orientation," such as it was, had lasted for one whole day, during which I was shown, along with the other trainees, two videos--one was on the importance of being courteous in the course of our duties, and the other was on the importance of properly filling out the appropriate paperwork (daily activity reports, incident reports, etc.) on a daily basis. During the part where we were being reassured that we would never be expected to engage in the kind of physical combat I was now anticipating, one of the trainees asked Al, our elderly trainer, what the hell we were supposed to do if we were attacked by an armed maniac. I have never forgotten Al's response.
"I probably shouldn't tell you this," he said, gravely, "but this--" he held up his cheap, ballpoint pen, "--can be a deadly weapon." I had a feeling, right then, that I was--if you'll pardon the expression--screwed. But I really needed the job. And that, my friends, represented the full extent of my preparation for my present predicament.
The situation, as I understand it, was that the tattooed side of beef in question had come into the ER with his unpleasant boo-boo and had subsequently spotted a girl that he knew sitting in one of those little curtained off sections that ERs have, where a doctor was stitching up her hands. Apparently, there was some bad blood between them, because he decided that his next course of action should be to kill her. Naturally, the ER staff objected, and had (so far) prevented him from killing anyone. Their strategy, it seemed, had been to have the nursing supervisor (who was a pretty big guy himself) stay between the would-be killer and his objective. I actually thought that this staying-between-the-psycho-and-the-girl strategy sounded way better than a fight-with-a-large-scary-man-and-get-killed maneuver, so I took up a position next to the nursing supervisor that also put me between the girl and our bloody friend, in the hopes that the real police would soon show up and save my ass.
It quickly became clear to me that our friend was on something. He was raving nonsensically about why he needed to kill the girl (he mentioned that he couldn't go home because she had stolen his home), and he was paranoid, refusing to let anyone patch up the hunk of meat that was hanging out of his arm because they were "trying to trick" him. Most telling of all, my presence seemed to intimidate him. Let me repeat that: the terrifying killer who outweighed me by at least 50 pounds and who could have probably pulled my arms and legs off and beaten me with them (hey, is that becoming a theme for me? I think I said that about a guy in my last post, too!) was intimidated by the skinny nineteen-year-old who was desperately trying not to piss himself. Fortunately for me, all he saw was a shiny badge (at least they gave me one of those), which his addled mind interpreted to mean I was, at least on some level, sort of a cop. He even, at one point, actually pointed at me and said to the nursing supervisor, "He's in charge." This probably would have made everyone laugh if things hadn't been so tense. Unfortunately, his respect for my authority did not keep him from taking a few more swipes at the nursing supervisor's outstretched arm, which said gentleman was using to keep him back, further soaking him with blood.
I'm pretty sure the cops were there in less than ten minutes, but of course it felt like hours to me. During this whole time, my trainee was still wandering around somewhere among the doctor's offices, unaware of what was transpiring in our blood-soaked emergency room. I was really wishing he would show up because, unlike me, he had a flashlight. I should mention that a lot of the guards that worked for our company got around the prohibition against weapons by carrying flashlights--the really long, heavy, Mag flashlights that are made of metal and could probably crush someone's skull if you tagged them with one. I was really kicking myself right then for not having one.
Of course, eventually, after everyone had acquired a few more layers of blood, the real police showed up, made our suddenly not-so-scary friend let someone patch up his arm, and took him off to jail. My trainee showed up at this point, far too late to render any kind of assistance, and I filled him in. The nursing supervisor, who by this time looked like Carrie after the prom, turned to me and said, "Why didn't you take him down?" To my credit, I did not laugh in his face and remind him that I was making only slightly more than minimum wage (about $4.75 an hour, if I recall correctly), and what the hell was I supposed to do, take him out with a ballpoint pen (I can imagine the confused look on his face after that one!). Instead, I just shrugged him off. I got a fair amount of snide comments from other nurses and doctors that were present, confirming the one useful thing I had actually learned from old Al: when things go wrong, the security guard will get the blame, so you'd better cover your ass.
I finished my shift, and left that little hospital for almost the last time. I would return for one night almost exactly one year to the date after this little incident...but that's another story.
PS - I looked it up on the internet, it looks like this hospital went bankrupt around 2000, was bought by Reed College in 2004, and torn down. See ya!
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