I met the first Roslyn a year or two after I started working in Manhattan. The first time we went to her apartment she had accidentally broken a crystal vase and had cut both of her hands significantly. One wound on her wrist was bleeding badly enough that she thought she may have severed an artery and she was very distraught about it. Despite being upset, she was polite and mostly friendly. There was a lot of blood in her modern living room which had sweeping views of the East River. As I started the paperwork I leaned on her grand piano and glanced at the framed photos on display. They illustrated an enviable life. There were photos on safari in Africa, skiing photos in what looked like Switzerland and several happy pictures of friends and family. In one photo it appeared that a young Roslyn had gotten some kind of award riding horses. There was also a wedding photo with a handsome man. The man was not present and when it was time to go to the hospital she was asked if they could notify her husband.
“Oh no,” she replied, somewhat bitterly.
We took her to the hospital and while we were waiting to be triaged another crew of EMTs, who were leaving, saw her and said hello, using her name. She said hello back in the embarrassed kind of way a person does when they think they’ve been mistaken for someone else and are just trying to be polite.
“Do you know her?” I asked later.
“Yeah, sure,” they said. “She’s a regular.”
Really? Most of our ‘regulars’ are either homeless or have chronic medical conditions requiring frequent hospitalizations. Our homeless regulars are, almost without exception, people with substance abuse issues. She didn’t seem to fit either of those categories. What could make Roslyn a regular?
“You’ll see,” they said. “She calls all the time.”
She calls all the time? For what? Is she accident-prone?
I had forgotten about it until the next time we were summoned to her apartment, which was not too long after. This time her apartment was messy. It wasn’t ransacked but it looked more like someone hadn’t picked up after themselves in a long time. The wedding picture was gone and some other things looks slightly different but I couldn’t tell exactly what.
Roslyn was intoxicated and rambling about having things stolen from her apartment. Her statements didn’t go together and went off on tangents that had to do with her job or her family, both of whom she hated at that moment. A long time was spent deciphering everything she said but eventually it was determined that the missing items were taken by her now ex-husband thanks to a “misogynistic, two-bit, loser judge” who had sided with him in the divorce. It wasn’t clear what she had called for since she didn’t want to go to the hospital and there was nothing actually ‘stolen’. The police abandoned their report but stayed on to assist us in taking her to the hospital as she was in no position to make an informed decision to refuse. She was furious about going to the hospital. We were accused of working for her ex. Our previously friendly and polite lady had turned into a cursing, spitting lunatic.
Each trip to Roslyn’s home for the next year or so also involved alcohol to some degree of another. There were stints in rehab, relapses, and long periods when she was sober, when she’d call 911 for relatively minor things every now and then. On these types of calls, I think she thought of us more as company and tried to serve us food and played the piano for us. She told us about her stressful job that she liked, despite a boss who had gotten promoted over her. She complained about her ex, who she felt had made out too well in the divorce. She gossiped about her neighbors. And once, when I admired a painting in her hallway, she mentioned she had painted it, saying that her first dream was to be an artist and that someday she was going to try again. Getting to know her during these sober periods made it all the more heartbreaking as we watched her decline years later.
Eventually we were called to her home when she had relapsed and discovered she had acquired four new roommates-other alcoholics who were clearly taking advantage of her. At some point she had lost the job she loved when the same man who had been promoted over her fired her. She told us of her struggle to find another job even though, she said, she didn’t need one. It was just something she wanted to do because she was good at what she did. I suggested that she could now pursue being an artist and she berated me. There was a huge personality difference between sober Roslyn and drunk Roslyn.
She may have misjudged how expensive Manhattan living is or perhaps her roommates had drank her savings away, we could only speculate, but sometime later we ran into Roslyn at a different hospital, on the west side, where we found out she was living somewhere else. She had lost her modern apartment with the East River views and was temporarily staying with a friend until she got back on her feet. She was genuinely optimistic and I desperately hoped she would be able to improve her situation soon.
Every once in a while we would see her again in different places. If we were driving around and spotted her we’d get her some food or give her a blanket. She was very well known by most of the EMTs who worked in midtown and we’d hear updates from each other after periods of not seeing her. Sometimes when we did see her, she acted like we were long lost friends. Other times when we picked her up she didn’t recognize us. And many times she was extremely mean and abusive. Knowing her backstory led me to be more sympathetic towards the many other alcoholics we dealt with on the job, who were similarly frustrated and angry at anyone whose existence validated their fear that they didn’t have control over their day to day life.
I would eventually leave Manhattan to go to paramedic school and after that I worked in Brooklyn. I never saw Roslyn again. At the time I left, Roslyn had used up all of the favors her friends owed her and was now exclusively living on the street. It had taken only the short time that I knew her that she had gone from having what seemed to be a fabulous life of the rich and privileged to becoming one of the many overlooked and forgotten people living in the street begging for change. It is my great hope that she eventually did turn things around.
There was another Roslyn I remember from my days in Manhattan, also. The second Roslyn’s trajectory went in a decidedly opposite direction. She also became a semi-regular during the time I knew the first one. This Roslyn had only called 911 for herself once, after her leg was injured by a bicyclist as she sat on a curb begging for money. Roslyn Two became familiar to us because many other people called 911 on her behalf.
A very large percentage of calls to 911 for people living on the street are made by a sympathetic or concerned person who sees something that bothers them without often knowing the whole situation. Calls come in for ‘unconscious’ people who are sleeping or ‘not breathing’ when they definitely are. Despite the large number of these calls leading to interactions with people who take their annoyance out on you for being woken up or interrupted I still found it a redeeming quality of humanity that so many people were concerned enough for strangers to have someone check up on them.
People called for Roslyn because they thought she was abused. Our second Roslyn had a discoloration on her face that could be construed as a black eye if you only looked at it quickly. She seemed to have parlayed this birthmark to her financial advantage.
The first time I met her we were responding to a 911 call for a woman who was beaten up and left in a garbage bag. The location given was in an area of high tourist traffic near Rockefeller Center. When we arrived we saw a small woman wearing a black garbage bag as a dress. There were cut outs for her arms and she had shorts on underneath. She also had a cup that she used to solicit donations. When she saw us coming she ran up to us and asked “Did someone call for me again?”
When we said yes she said that she felt that someone who had given her money may have called. She apologized for inconveniencing us and assured us she was OK and did not need an ambulance. The garbage bag, she said, served to garner her more sympathy and had gotten her more ‘tips’ which is how she referred to the money she made panhandling. We made the call an unfounded but came back again later when yet another call came in fitting Roslyn’s description.
When we returned, she apologized again and reaffirmed that she did not want to go to the hospital or anywhere else. The man I was working with was very curious about her panhandling lifestyle and Roslyn was happy to talk with us about it. She said she could “take a break” but even while ‘off the clock’ and talking to us several people went out of their way to put money in her cup anyway. The ‘tips’ she was getting were not in coins, but in bills of $10 and $20. She told us this kind of donation was typical and that the summer months were very lucrative for her. During the Christmas season, however, she made much more, enough to pay her rent for the entire year.
We met her several times after that. Each time she let us know she as OK and each time she offered to buy us coffee for our trouble.
We learned much more about her enterprise when the bicyclist ran over her leg and she went to the hospital. She didn’t want to go initially but we convinced her by suggesting a cast and crutches could be helpful to her career. Her face lit up and she immediately hopped in our truck. As we wrapped up her leg she told us more about herself.
For a while she had lived in subsidized housing getting every government benefit available. She was very proud of the fact she no longer was, and that her kids went to private school. She said she had someone who helped her manage her income and that she had a diverse portfolio that included a 401K heavily invested in municipal bonds. She had worked it out that she only had to ‘work’ for 10 more years and at that time she would be moving to Florida to retire. She would be 38. Asked if she would continue to panhandle in Florida she said wouldn’t and was looking forward to picking up some hobbies like ceramics and painting.
A few months later I ran into the second Roslyn off-duty. I was out with some friends ‘in the city’ and as we were walking along a sidewalk she was there, sitting in front of a closed storefront with her outstretched cup. She looked very sad, almost in pain, as we approached she asked for some assistance. She didn’t recognize me without my uniform and with my hair down.
“Hey, it’s me!” I said. “EMS.”
Her whole demeanor changed. “Hey there, Nancy. Good to see you!”
“How is business going?” I asked.
“Pretty good,” she said. Then she winked and said “But it could always be a little better!” She stretched out her cup.
“I should be asking YOU for money”
She laughed and admitted that was probably true. I introduced her to my friends and made a little joke about how in a few years we’d run into her in Florida, sipping fruity cocktails with little umbrellas in them
“I’ll be in Florida all right,” she said. “But no fruity cocktails. I don’t drink. Ever. Drinking killed my father and I’ve never touched it. I’ve seen what it can do.”
I thought of the other Roslyn and agreed with her about the devastating effects it can have.
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