Black Flies by Shannon Burke
A young man from Chicago’s suburbs – Evanston, no doubt – after graduating from Northwestern fails to achieve his dream of medical school. He follows his girlfriend to New York City, where she is starting med school herself. While he studies for another try at the MCAT, he becomes a paramedic with the NYFD in Harlem. “Black Flies” is Burke’s second novel, retracing the same territory as “Safelight”, weaving his real life background as an EMT with a coming of age story.
Ollie Cross enters the macho underground of ODs, stabbings, random shootings, and a broken medical care system, joining the third tour (four to midnight) out of Station 18. Set as a series of short vignettes depicting the staccato pace of ambulance riding medics who, more often than not, become as brutalized as the patients they find themselves repairing. This slim volume (you could read it in an afternoon or two) could well have worked as a fictional memoir, but Burke has overlayed a rather hackneyed moral journey.
Young Cross is surrounded by archetypes, not colleagues. A by-the-book station chief warns Ollie the partner to whom he owes allegiance. Verdis, an impossibly altruistic Vietnam Vet is overcompensating because, as a radio operator, he relayed orders which resulted in “hundreds of deaths”. A sadistic, macho, closet homosexual hides his failings under a veneer of threatened sadism. Rutkovsky, Cross’ partner, exudes confidence, stoicism, competence, and an almost complete dissociation from the horrors he rides through each shift. He provides the story’s main dilemma and resolution. Confronted with a case involving AIDS, crack, and an uncaring, almost oblivious parent, he snaps, and lets his inner frustrations guide his treatment choice just once. However, this twist comes almost 2/3rds of the way into the book, so until then, it requires a leap of faith that there will actually be any purpose to the collection of disconnected encounters Cross and his shift mates fight their way through.
Burke’s writing is spare, and unforgiving. He is much better at describing the work of the paramedics, and picturing the lives of their patients and the other locals, than he is at fleshing out the main characters as he marches them flatly through the tension and denouement he sets up so mechanically. But Burke does provide gut-wrenching immersion in one of our worst neighborhoods at one of its worst times, through the eyes of those who tend to the fallen there.