Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance

by Mike Scardino

Overview

An adrenaline-fueled read that will stay with you long after you turn the final page, Bad Call is a "compulsively readable, totally unforgettable" memoir about working on a New York City ambulance in the 1960s (James Patterson).

Bad Call is Mike Scardino's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York.

Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, young Mike spends his days speeding from one chaotic emergency to another. His adventures take him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers are suffering, and dying, in unimaginable ways. Learning on the job, Mike encounters all manner of freakish accidents (the man who drank Drano, the woman attacked by rats, the man who inflated like a balloon), meets countless unforgettable New York characters, falls in love, is nearly murdered, and gets an early and indelible education in the impermanence of life and the cruelty of chance.

Action-packed, poignant, and rich with details that bring Mike's world to technicolor life, Bad Call is a gritty portrait of a bygone era as well as a bracing reminder that, though "life itself is a fatal condition," it's worth pausing to notice the moments of beauty, hope, and everyday heroism along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316469616
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	07/17/2018
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	545,492
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mike Scardino is a native of Elmhurst, Queens. In order to pay for college, he worked on a New York City ambulance as a teenager, which led to his decision not to pursue medicine as a career. Mike eventually found his way into advertising, where his ambulance experience proved to be an unexpectedly useful fit. He is married to the woman he met on his third day at college and has three daughters. He currently resides in South Carolina.

Table of Contents

How Bad Could It Be 3

First Day on the Job 7

The Rule of Nines 13

The Napoleon 18

Mr. Bubble 22

On a Wine-Dark Sea 27

Beer 31

Breakfast of Champions 38

Boudicca Goes Soft 45

Death of a Cynic 51

A Date for the Prom 56

The Whirlpool 61

Jesus Speaks 70

The Least We Can Do 78

Silence Is Golden 89

Those Guys 94

A House Like Mine 99

I'm a Daddy 105

Suppertime 114

At! it Takes 123

What Friends Are For 129

To All a Good Night 135

The Worst Thing You've Ever Seen 144

Spare Change 151

Candy 156

Don't Blink 160

Somebody Else's Shoes 165

Erosion 170

Sure Fooled Me 177

Omaha Beach 183

The Sight of Blood 191

Done 198

Paperwork 205

Two Prisoners 212

A Visit from a Friend 218

Bon Voyage, Scumbag 230

Go Figure 236

The Bear 242

The Park Is Good 250

Still Life with Prostitute 262

JFK 269

On a Day Like Today 277

A Cold Day in Hell 282

Acknowledgments 291

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/21/2018
In this fresh and powerful debut memoir, Scardino looks back on his summers during college in the late 1960s when he worked as a New York City hospital ambulance attendant. Working 56 hours a week—“Nights and days, whenever they need me”—Scardino recounts in short chapters the many emergencies he witnessed and assisted in that showed him “the entire catalog of horrifying things that can happen to a human body.” From accidental deaths to suicides, Scardino writes with the detail of a crime reporter (“What had been his left side had grown into the carpet. Just coalesced with the carpet.... Instead of a face, there was a flat oval plane covered with maggots”). Scardino admits that what bothers him “more than seeing how people die, is seeing how people live”: in one example, he describes a diabetic woman whose legs are gangrenous below the knees, who weighs over 400 pounds, and who needs somehow to be carried down from her second-floor apartment. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned on the job,” he writes, “it’s that any call, anywhere, can always get worse.” Scardino’s unsparing memoir offers an empathetic look at human pain and suffering. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Bad Call is a compulsively readable, totally unforgettable memoir that recounts a sensitive college student's experience working on an emergency ambulance in hell, aka New York City."—James Patterson

"[A] fresh and powerful debut memoir...From accidental deaths to suicides, Scardino writes with the detail of a crime reporter...Scardino's unsparing memoir offers an empathetic look at human pain and suffering."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"This remarkable memoir, a vivid and gruesome record of his experiences...are like a punch in the gut. Even when a patient survives, there is always suffering, which Scardino captures with empathy and outrage."
—National Book Review

"In the late 1960s, Mike Scardino took a summer job on an ambulance crew in New York City, offering him a strange, macabre, and compelling insight into a part of city life seldom seen...Morbid and entertaining: a snapshot of life and death in the big city of a bygone era."—CrimeReads

"A laugh-till-you-cry look at 1960s New York through the eyes of an ambulance driver who saw the city at its most vulnerable and bloody. Scardino, who worked in a Queens ambulance for four summers in the 1960s, encountered the grotesque and the ludicrous daily and shares his tales in hilarious and harrowing detail. A fun slice of NY life that is not for the squeamish."—NY Post

From the Publisher

2018-04-30
Ambulance work is not for the squeamish, and neither is reading about it.In the late 1960s, Scardino worked on a New York hospital's ambulance crew in order to pay for his college tuition. He started on the pre-med track, but by the end of his ambulance job, he had no interest in becoming a doctor. "The truth is, I don't want to be around the injured, sick and dying any more than I can help it," he writes. It's easy to see why the job soured his stomach for medicine. In one gruesome passage, he describes a body barely recognizable as such: "Where his hair ought to have been, there appeared to be long gray and white filaments of mold. Instead of a face, there was a flat, oval plane covered with maggots. No sign of a nose. Just one wet, gray surface with its seething, ivory-colored veneer of larvae." Readers may wonder if Scardino took detailed notes or wrote the entire book decades ago. The latter seems doubtful; it doesn't seem likely that an admittedly poor student would have had such command over his material as a teenager and then decide to let it sit for decades. Perhaps he told these vivid stories often enough that somebody persuaded him that there was a book in them and he re-created the stories from memory. The author claims that he could never forget them, and readers will have trouble doing so as well. There's a baby thrown from a window, a drug overdose, morbidly obese people who had to be maneuvered out of apartments and into ambulances, and one crashed-and-burned airplane. Scardino, who has since pursued a career in advertising, emerges as a different person at the end of these experiences than he was when he began the work. "Something in me had changed, not for the better, but surely forever," he writes.Some say that everybody has a book in them, and this author has found his in this memorable, often grim work.

Kirkus Reviews