Author Matthew Heneghan

There are moments in life where you feel like you’ve stumbled into someone else’s dream. Or nightmare, depending on the situation. Maybe a fever-induced hallucination stitched together by William S. Burroughs and scored by Beck.

This was one of those moments.

03:45 in the goddamn morning. That’s the hour when the world is supposed to be sleeping and still. But for those like me — a once hopeful paramedic turned caffeine addicted misanthrope, it’s the witching hour. For the overtired and the emotionally bankrupt, it was Tuesday. Witter, my partner and I were both and riding the tail end of a shift that already felt like it had lasted a lifetime. And then came the call.

Chest pain. Elderly female. Call Code Charlie Response.

Now, if you’re not in the business of scraping people off their carpets or listening to octogenarians confess their sins through phlegm and confusion, let me tell you: chest pain at 3:45 A.M. is either a real-deal STEMI or just a stuck fart and loneliness wrapped in pre-paid Canadian healthcare.

We pulled up to the house, an old wartime special tucked between two condemned middle-class dreams. Lights dimmed low, the glow of a flickering lamp casting crooked shadows across wallpaper that hadn’t been touched since Diefenbaker resigned.

She was waiting in the living room. Sitting calm in a tweed armchair like she’d been expecting us for tea instead of triage. Nicely dressed, hair coiffed, pearls. The kind of woman who looked like she could bake the shit out of a pie and also verbally assassinate you in front of your mother. Sweet, but definitely the type who’s asked to speak to a manager or two in her time.

Vitals were stable. BP like a yoga instructor if Beta blocker was downward dog. Heart rate smooth as a jazz riff. The 12-lead ECG looked like a textbook example of “not dying.” I turned to hand it to Witter — he was usually my second set of eyes when I was too tired to trust my own.

But he didn’t take it.

Witter was off in his own world, scanning a nearby bookshelf with his flashlight like Indiana Jones searching for the Ark of the Covenant. I looked too. At first, nothing unusual. Just your standard collection of Reader’s Digest, some Danielle Steel, maybe a Bible.

Then the titles started coming into focus. I blinked hard a couple of times.

“Boobie Trap.”

“Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle.”

“Anal Annie Does Albany.”

“Debbie Rides Again.”

The whole goddamn VHS porno section—the kind once reserved for the backroom at the video store—when video stores existed and optimism still felt real. Archived from carpet to ceiling. A wall of faded flesh and glory holes. A mosaic of porn. History you can’t unsee.

That’s when she spoke.

“Oh… you’re looking at the collection, are you?” she said, as casually as one might mention her orchids.

“I used to be in the business. Quite something I was. I’ll show you—”

Witter and I both flinched like we were dodging a lethal left hook.

“NO THANK YOU,” we barked in unison, as if trying to exorcise the thought from reality itself.

We left shortly after. She signed the refusal form with a smirk and a wink, and I swear to God, she was two-seconds away from saying: “Tell the boys at the hall, Candy says hi.”

She didn’t. I don’t think.

There’s no checkbox on the patient care report for “treated and released… also encountered geriatric porn empress.” No training scenario for that. Just another notch in the bedpost of a nightshift that never seemed to end.

Moral of the story? If you ever think your life’s weird, remember: A paramedic once stood in a room full of 1970s porn with a woman who probably knew Ron Jeremy before he was a cautionary tale.

…And I still had three hours left on my shift.