OUR LUNCH WITH BRICE
by ardavenport
"Roy."
John Gage took off into the Rampart General Hospital cafeteria with his tray, weaving through the tables. It was a little early for lunch, not too crowded, but filling up.
"Hey Bob. Brice." Gage smiled as he greeted his fellow paramedics at a small round table by a wall.
"Hi Johnny. Roy." Bob Bellingham spoke through a mouth full of hamburger. Brice finished chewing and swallowing before greeting them.
"Hi Bob. Brice." Roy slid his tray onto the table and took his plate, silverware, napkin and glass of milk off of it. Johnny caught an annoyed glance from his partner as they both sat down and briefly narrowed his eyes back. Sure Roy didn't get along with Brice, but that wasn't any reason why couldn't eat together.
And this was the first time he had been able to see Craig Brice and Bob Bellingham together since the two had been paired up as paramedics with Station Sixteen. They put the empty trays on a nearby table.
"Hey, could you pass me the ketchup?"
"Sure." Bob handed Johnny the bottle and he put some on his own fries.
"Well, that was a pretty good talk." Roy smiled and put a napkin in his lap.
It was their day off and they all wore civilian clothes.. They had come in for a talk from some paramedics from the Midwest who were visiting LA. Johnny and Roy had dressed casually, jeans and long sleeve shirts. Known as the department's biggest slob, Bob had dressed appropriately to his reputation in loose jeans with holes in the knees, dirty tennis shoes and a stained USC sweatshirt. Brice, fastidious to a fault, wore shined shoes, slacks, a tan sports jacket, pressed shirt and a dark blue tie.
So, why, Johnny wondered, did these two get along?
Frowning, Brice shook his head and adjusted his glasses.
"I really don't think that this has been worth our time. I mean, there was very little that was relevant to our work."
Bellingham shrugged. "I thought it was pretty interesting." Brice glanced at his partner, but didn't seem to mind the disagreement.
Johnny took a big bite of his own hamburger. "Well, what was wrong with it, Brice? It thought it was pretty interesting, too." Brice looked critically back at him.
"I really don't see what relevance skyscraper rescues or frostbite kits could have for our work here."
"Well, we still have a few tall buildings here in LA, Brice. And Roy and I once had to rescue a guy who got stuck in an ice house. Things like that can happen." Johnny ate a ketchup covered fry.
"Those scenarios are highly unlikely to occur. Our learning time should be organized for maximum efficiency . . . ."
Johnny tuned out most of Brice's lecture after the words 'learning time' as he continued to observe the two men across the table from him. The first he had heard of the surprisingly successful pairing was when Captain Stanley had come to visit him in the hospital when he was recovering from a hit-and-run accident. Brice had been his replacement and after only a couple of shifts he was driving Roy nuts with his ultra-precise ways of doing everything. Then Bellingham had filled in for Roy after he was injured in a fire. After only one shift, Captain Stanley had asked Roy to temporarily trade shifts with another station so he could keep Brice and Bellingham together.
- - - "I wouldn't have thought it possible, but they get along. So, I asked Roy to switch with Evans for now until Sixteen's Captain can get Brice transferred to his station permanently. But he told me to tell you that he'll come by tomorrow if he can't make it today."
- - - "Okay." Johnny sat dumbfound, his broken leg propped up in the bed, and listened to this stunning development. Brice and Bellinghan worked well together and the Captains of three different stations were working to arrange the fastest transfer in department history to get Craig Brice assigned permanently as Bob Bellingham's partner.
- - - "Let me tell you I didn't have to ask Roy twice about it. I think he's had all he can take of Craig Brice. I mean, the only reason why we got him on such short notice to fill for you is because his partner was threatening to transfer out of there and his Captain was more interested in keeping him than Brice."
- - - "Uh huh." It made no sense to Johnny when he first heard about it.
And now, months later, he wanted to see it for himself.
A fry got knocked off of Bob's plate. He bent down to pick it up.
"You know Bellingham, even hospital floors have bacteria counts measured at up to five thousand per square inch."
"Hmmm. That's good to know, Brice." Bellingham smashed the retrieved fry onto the ketchup smear on his plate and ate it.
No, perhaps there was no mystery at all about why Bob Bellingham got along with Brice. Chet Kelly had explained his theory to Johnny on the first day he'd been back to work after his accident.
- - - "It's simple, Gage. He's Bob the Slob. He doesn't care if things are messy. But he also doesn't care if things are neat, either. It's all the same to him. So, if Brice wants to alphabetize the drug box or lock the doors on the squad, Bob's not going to care. He'll just go with the flow."
Both Roy and Bob disagreed with Brice about what 'optimal efficiency' meant. But while Brice argued back with Roy, he just shrugged off Bob's statements even when they were about the exact same things.
Perhaps the real mystery was why Brice got along with Bob. In the all-male environment of a firehouse there was always going to be a certain amount of bad breath, smelly feet and farting. Bob 'The Animal' Bellingham was known to exemplify all of these traits. So, why hadn't Bellingham driven Brice crazy with his stray toenail clippings and occasional nose-picking?
"It is quite irresponsible for St. Louis to neglect earthquake contingency planning."
"What?" Roy put down his tuna sandwich. "Because it's St Louis, Brice. They don't have earthquakes there."
Brice shook his head. "Not true. In 1812 the New Madrid earthquake destroyed the town of New Madrid, for which it was named, along with a number of houses in St Louis itself. It even affected the course of the Mississippi river. . . ."
Roy went back to his sandwich, but Johnny caught a brief annoyed glance of 'Why did you want to sit here?' Gage had to admit that after a few days of looking at that smug expression he would have been willing to strangle Brice, too.
Next to him, Bob licked a greasy finger before finishing the last bite of his burger. Only Brice used the white paper napkins on the table between them when he wiped his fingers off after every time he touched his egg salad sandwich.
Back on that first day at work after his accident, Roy had offered his own explanation about why Brice and Bob could work together.
- - - "It's Brice. From his point of view, we're ALL slobs. Bob is just a more serious case than the rest of us and he really doesn't care what Brice thinks. I mean I feel a little bad about him getting Brice for a partner. Bob's a nice guy . . . . . . but I'm still real glad that I don't have to worry about getting stuck with Brice again." Roy grinned broadly and patted him on the back.
"Well, it's still interesting, Brice. I mean, sometimes you just don't know what you're going to get when you go out on a call. For example, we get a lot of calls from these movie studios and they come up with all kinds of things." Johnny used his fingers to count the possibilities. "They've got people in funny costumes, dangerous stunts, sets with all those lights and cables. Anything can happen with all that."
Roy agreed. "We've gotten calls for lions, tigers and bears."
Bob laughed at that. A bright green bit of lettuce flew out of his mouth onto the table. But the 'Wizard of Oz' reference went completely over Brice's head and he started in on ways of forcing the movie studios to be more efficient by coordinating their disasters with the fire department in advance.
"Huh?" Johnny couldn't think of which was more unbelievable. That Brice thought that movie studios could pre-plan their emergencies. Or that he hardly looked when he captured the speck of green from Bob's mouth with a napkin with no comment. He had arranged all the used napkins in a neat pile by his plate. They were crumpled into balls that were all nearly the same size.
Captain Stanley and Marco Lopez were sure that Brice and Bob had bonded somehow.
- - - "It was on the first shift. We get a call just after we turned in. Someone lit a fire in a bathroom in a bar. And almost as soon as we walk in, some drunk punches Brice right in the stomach." Stanley, sitting at the kitchen table over dinner, pointed at himself to show where Brice had been hit. "Well, you know Brice: he's never been in a fight before. He gets the breath knocked out of him and he's just standing there; he doesn't know what to do.
- - - "Bob just calmly gets behind him, shoves Brice's arms down to his side and tells him to breath out. He does it a couple times more and suddenly Brice can breath again. After that Bob is Brice's best buddy."
- - - Marco confirmed the story. "Cap's right, John. I saw it, too. After that, Brice was actually treating Bob like a human being. It's like that story with the little kid taking the thorn out of the lion's paw and they're friends after that."
- - - Roy had trouble with that metaphor. "I don't really picture Brice as a lion."
- - - "Maybe when it comes to memorizing regulations, he is." The dinner conversation moved on to other topics after that last comment from the Captain.
"I don't know Brice, sometimes things just happen." Bob licked one finger clean before sticking it in his ear to scratch it.
Brice sighed. "I suppose that's true." His plate clean, he put his last perfectly crumpled napkin aside with the others.
"What?" Johnny gaped. "You've just accepting that from Bob when we've been arguing about it for the past five minutes?"
"What precisely have we been arguing about, Gage?" Those cold, emotionless eyes behind those wireframe glasses looked back at him with all the sympathy that a doctor might have for a germ. Johnny was now amazed that Roy had been able to stand Brice for as long as he had.
"You've been trying to tell us that people can just make appointments ahead of time for their calls to the fire department and we've been trying to tell you that's impossible."
Brice started putting his used napkins onto his plates. "Well, you've just confirmed to me why this conversation has been so unproductive. That was not what I was trying to say. Was it, Bellingham?"
Bob shrugged. "I thought you were talking about efficiency again." He produced a toothpick from a back pocket and started picking his teeth with it.
Brice nodded back, satisfied. "Exactly. And if the movie studios in this county concerned themselves more with their own efficiency instead of indulging in more and more dangerous stunts, we might get fewer calls from them." He picked up his plate and glass. "I think this conversation is over." He looked down at his partner.
Bob took the toothpick out of his mouth. "I"ll catch you back in classroom for the next talk."
"I'll see you there." Brice's casual tone turned more formal when he turned back to them. "Gage. DeSoto." He curtly nodded and left. Johnny waited until he had gotten all the way through the now crowded tables of the hospital cafeteria before turning back and leaning toward Brice's partner.
"How do you stand that, Bob?"
"Yeah, after a few days with Brice I was seriously thinking about fratricide."
Bob shrugged. "Yeah, I know he gets on people's nerves. But it's not all bad. I don't mind if Brice wants do all the work and keep everything neat."
Johnny still didn't understand it. "But doesn't he complain if you don't do it, too?"
"He complains more if I do, because it's never the way he likes it and he just ends up rearranging everything anyway. And I never have to look anything up. I can just ask Brice. He's got a photographic memory, you know."
"Funny how that kind of thing doesn't make you a better human being." Roy took a bite of his pickle.
Bob put the toothpick in his back pocket. Gage wondered how many meals that same toothpick had been through.
"Well, in the end, Brice has always got my back in a fire. And I've got his. That's really what matters. Even Brice knows that."
That didn't really explain to Johnny why Brice would not mind Bob's habits, but . . . . the brotherhood of firefighters included both of them and maybe that was enough.
Roy extended his hand over the table. "Well, you're a better man than I am, Bob."
Bob accepted the handshake with a smile. Even after using the toothpick, he still had a bit of food caught in his teeth. He took his plate and cup and left. A couple of smears of ketchup remained where his plate had been.
Johnny ate a couple fries. "Wow, I just don't understand how those two can get along like that."
"Is that why you wanted to sit here? So you could ask Bob about being partners with Brice?" Roy sounded peeved.
"Well, yeah. It certainly wasn't Brice I wanted to talk to."
Roy took a bite of his tuna sandwich. "Well, next time give me a little warning. I can take small doses of Brice, but only if I have time to prepare. You're not planning on inviting Brice to dinner or anything are you?"
"Nyah." Johnny picked up the last half of his burger. "I've seen enough."
^^^ *** ^^^ *** ^^^ END ^^^ *** ^^^ *** ^^^
Disclaimer: All characters belong to Mark VII Productions, Inc., Universal Studios and whoever else owns the 1970's TV show Emergency!; I am just playing in their sandbox.