Skels

Novel features EMS in NYC in late 1970s. The author was a 911 paramedic for more than 20 years in NYC. She weaves together a fascinating tale of paramedics, police officers, and homeless citizens (skels) with famous literature and music. I have no doubt that most of the patient encounters detailed in the book are true or loosely based on the truth. So much in EMS is beyond imagination - the injuries, how people live, the larger than life personalities - that little embellishing is needed to craft a fictional narrative. Most EMS literature is first hand accounts of working as a paramedic where the author is the main character and the plot is their life. The themes are the lessons the author learned working as a paramedic. Since Skels is a novel the author, Maggie Dubris, was able to write a plot with several twists, plant characters early in the book that play a central role together, and write about themes of counter culture, addiction, family, and moral ambiguity.

It's noir and hip and there's poetry and it made me laugh out loud. It starts out with the main character being thrown into the life of an EMS paramedic, dealing with co-workers' various schemes for escaping work, and supervisors' various schemes for catching them at it, amidst the murders and the "pick-ups" in the morgue truck. Then she stumbles upon an eerie plot, a sinister cop, and a source of poetry. It's a gritty, urban fairy tale but the scenes are realistic and sad, except for the drag queen, who is fabulous and not sad, and the details of NYC in the 1980s, which are very well done. The homeless encampments, the hipster hangouts, the smell of the subways. It's all here.

Dubris' tale of Orlie Breton, a New York paramedic, is an amazing work, full of street grittiness pulled off in such poetic language that it tempers it enough to make even the squarest reader see the beauty in the horror of urban decay and oppression. The author writes with the transcendant wonder of someone who is in love with the world, the city and humanity. This is reflected in the character, Orlie, as she moves through a world of suffering and madness. Also, in this story are some of the most lively and vivid characters that I have seen committed to paper in a long time. For instance, Weenie, b*tchy drag queen who stuff's his bra full of jell-o. Or Neal, a guy she dates who takes acid and flips out and disappears, only to show up later in the book camping out in a yellow sumarine he constructed on top of a building in Hell's Kitchen. Even the most minor of characters, like Cat, a sketchy drug dealer who lives in a tent city and only makes a couple appearances, is so menacing that he'll stay with you long after you read it. Things get progressively more bizarre as the story continues. Orlie's zeal for life gets her into many weird and twisted situations, both on and off the job. Things however, come to a crux after she saves the life of a cop who is out to kill a homeless street poet that she has befriended. Whom she take upon herself to hide and then help flee from the city. If you're looking for a self-indulgent book on work, read Bukowski's "Post Office". If you want something that is raw, yet empowering, read this. Dubris is truly a tremendous human being who has put herself through the darkest of nights as paramedic and found shimmering beauty in it all. I am humbled by her ability to take us there too.

Although I sometimes feel like I have fallen down the rabbit hole at my job in a big city library, I have nothing on writer Maggie Dubris, an EMS/ambulance driver in 1970's New York's Hell's Kitchen, Times Square and Harlem. Although Skels is fiction and has an eerie low grade current of magic realism running throughout it, I believe in the veracity of every single word of it. As I have often commented on my own work tales: you just can't make this up. The title comes from a word that she hears on the first day of her job in Harlem, and it is a term used to by the police and city workers to describe the panhandlers and homeless who live in the subway or abandoned buildings. She is unfamiliar with the word so when she goes home that evening she looks up the word in a dictionary. There wasn't any actual entry for "skel." I studied the closest thing I could find. SKELDER v. {a cant term of obscure origin} To beg; to live by begging, esp. by passing oneself off as a wounded or disbanded soldier Skelder. Skel. It seemed like the word had meant the same thing in medieval times. Until it fell from use and vanished like a coin in the river, lost in the muck for three hundred years, to suddenly pop up in the precincts and ambulance garages of Harlem. Although the subject matter is lurid, Dubris' writing is haunting, beautiful and pensive. This excerpt is after she retrieves a body of a drowned blind guitar player, a homeless regular who is originally from Georgia. Now I could see garbage floating in the sun's light; cans and soggy paper, and the black of the river was just sludge, suspended in the cold, poison water. Bodies floated under the current; gangsters who had crossed the wrong men, whores too old or too sassy, and drunks like Blind Samuels, who wandered too far from home and fell in one hot summer night. His guitar was in there somewhere, I knew it. Smashed to bits by the water. All the years of sweat and flaking skin washed away... I thought of Blind Samuels, rolling in the deep, and all of the other men down there, the toadies and the rats and the welshers, bricks tied to their feet, the current washing the tears from their sightless eyes.

writing at its best. a great read for anyone, not just the EMS community.Maggie Dubris is truely gifted in her writing. a true hard look at NYC and Paramedics in the early 80's from the eyes of a poetic soul.