Ambulance Chasing

"When darkness fell, excitement
kissed the crowd and it made them wild
In the atmosphere of freaky holiday."
~Simon and Garfunkel, "Save the Life of my Child"

Image credit: Photo by freefotouk on Flickr

When I was working my very first real job out of college, a man walked in to a building down the street from my office. He pulled a gun out of a bag he was carrying and started shooting. My coworkers and I heard the sirens, and rumors flew about what was going on and whether or not we were safe. One of my coworkers, a guy named Pete, thrilled at the thought of adventure on a dull day in the office, wanted to chase the sirens, and I wanted to go along. "Oh, don't go! It's dangerous! There's a gunman running the streets," another coworker begged, although she didn't know any better than we did.

Pete and I set off in high spirits, laughing and happy to be out of the office and bravely face the danger that we assumed (correctly it turned out) had long been controlled by police at this point. The sun was shining and crowds were pressed up against police barriers, as if we were all waiting for a rock star rather than a glimpse of bodies being moved toward the flash and glare of the waiting ambulances. Police with bullhorns barked at us to keep back. The mood was electric. But there wasn't much to see other than the tens of people who, like us, had braved the scene of the crime to break up their own workdays. Eventually the ambulances pulled away and the crowd wandered off. Nothing more to see here.

That night I heard on the news that several people had died, and later learned that one of them was the wife of an old family friend. My holiday jaunt to the crime scene, to enjoy the sunshine and the excitement of the crowd, made me sick with shame. And each time I had to face this friend or people who knew him, I held on to the sick secret that I spent that day unwittingly enjoying the voyeuristic thrill of his wife's death. Maybe he was there, in that sea of faces that day, with an entirely different set of emotions than mine. Maybe he hated the people who, like me, were there without any emotional investment, just breaking up a boring workday. Maybe he saw me laughing.

Sex scandals work the same way as my trip to a crime scene: a voyeuristic public gets high on the excitement of someone else's pain. They get to feel lucky, as I did, that they're alive and breathing in the sunshine. They can revel in the illusion, as I did, that they're favored by the fates or God or their own superior judgment and character: that they're somehow (secretly) better than the folks who didn't make it.

So perhaps you'd think, that with a surfeit of grief and a horror for the crowd's vicarious thrill at the expense of someone like me, I'd avoid the scene of the crime now. Yet when sex scandals hit and the crowds gather around Eliot Spitzer or John Edwards, with that atmosphere of freaky holiday, I still go out to stand among them. I talk to the other onlookers and I speculate. Why? As Jay asked, why does it even matter?

Maybe it doesn't matter to other people. Maybe it shouldn't matter to me. Maybe it's still a sick and shameful thing to do: something born from an empty, aching need that can't be filled the way I'm trying to fill it. But it's where I am. And it does matter to me, deeply.

I stand in the crowd now knowing there was a day not long ago when I was the one being carted out to an ambulance or when I was one of the faces in the crowd who was waiting in agony for word on a loved one. Now I yearn to jump those barriers and touch the people who are screaming and tell them it's going to be ok.

I want to tell the people on holiday that they are not immune to this horror and help them recognize the signs that a gunman is coming for them. I want them to stop and think, for just a moment, before they write off faceless participants in the drama. I want to tell them what my experience taught me about what may be unfolding behind the doors the police have barred, because that experience opened a passage to compassion that was closed to me before. I should have been concerned for the people who were being gunned down, regardless of whether I knew them or not, but I wasn't. I should have felt compassion for Bill Clinton before I knew he was a sex addict, but I didn't.

And as I look on, I'll admit, I yearn to see similarities too. Because I feel relieved (God, so relieved!) to know I'm not alone, that I'm not the only one who has gone through this: that there's someone, even someone I've never met or never will meet (from Hillary Clinton to Christie Brinkley), who understands what it feels like to have their safe world torn apart one sunny afternoon, like mine was.

In many ways, that's what this blog is too: people come watch me suffer in elegant prose, and traffic peaks and crowds gather when I bleed out my agony. There are people who will idly wander by looking for cheap thrills, and there are those, like all of you wonderful regular readers, who are here because you are emotionally invested and you do care. And in many cases, you are embracing my pain because you've been there too, on the other side of the police lines, and you know exactly what it feels like; and my pain helps you understand your own, and in the shared conversation that happens, yours helps me understand my own too.