Saturday, December 11:

Roy's Place

Johnny showed up at Roy's house a little past 8:00 a.m. to help scrape and paint the windowsills as he had promised the previous day. Roy rubbed the last vestiges of sleep from his face as he answered the door. Johnny greeted him with an exuberant "Morning!" as he bounded through the doorway. "Got any coffee on?"

'Where does he get all that energy?' Roy wondered for at least the millionth time as he followed more sedately into the kitchen.

Five minutes later the two friends were hard at it. As they worked, they bantered back and forth on various topics of no consequence. The mood between them was light and easy.

At mid-morning, Joanne brought out a tray with iced tea and cookies. "Can I interest you boys in a break?" she called out to them.

"Sounds great!" Johnny scrunched his shoulders up and down and rotated his head in an effort to relieve the kinks in his neck that the awkward angles of scraping and painting around windows had created.

Roy did the same thing, accompanied by little snapping and crackling sounds. Johnny started laughing. "I heard that all the way over here! You are getting old, man!"

"Yeah, tell me about it. Thank you, sweetheart," he said to Joanne, giving her a quick peck and a squeeze.

Joanne sat down to chat for a few moments and then announced that she still had work to do inside the house. After she left, Roy sat silently, staring into at his iced tea, swirling the ice around in the glass. "Johnny? There's something I need to tell you."

Johnny raised his eyebrows questioningly over the rim of his glass. "What's that, Roy?"

"I want to apologize for believing you failed the exam."

"What the hell for? Even I thought I had flunked the exam."

"But I should have known better. I know you. And I know all the weird things that happen to you. You gotta admit, if anything wacky is going to happen, it'll happen to you." Roy grinned and then added more seriously, "I should have done something."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Just something. What would you have done if it had been me?"

Johnny laughed. "It would never happen to you, Roy."

"What if it had?" Roy persisted.

Johnny considered his friend for a moment before replying soberly, "I probably would never have believed it. You're too good. Too experienced. No one would have believed it."

Both men became lost in their own thoughts. Johnny broke the silence. "There's something I should probably tell you. When I first found out that you passed and I didn't, I, uh … well, I'm sorry about the way I've been acting."

Another silence ensued, during which the two stewed in private thoughts best left unspoken. Roy broke the silence this time. "Well, let's get back at it while the sun is still shining, eh Junior?"

"Right behind ya, Pally! Did I tell you I have to be gone before 2:30? Hey, are you going to watch the Minnesota-Miami game tonight? It should be really good. I think the Vikings are going to use the Dolphins to wipe up the field …" Johnny rushed to start talking about football before Roy could inquire too closely as to why he needed to leave early.


LACoFD Headquarters, Psychiatrist's Office

Johnny was still in a good mood when he entered the office. Dr. Wilson noticed and commented on it.

"Yeah, well, I've been up and I've been down. Up is better."

While Dr. Wilson was pleased to see Johnny's improved attitude, he also wanted to make sure the paramedic was grounded in reality. "Right now it's kind of like a pendulum. You'll have really good days, like today. And you'll still have a few bad days, until you regain your equilibrium. As long as you recognize what's going on, you can deal with it." Dr. Wilson's past experience with this young paramedic coupled with his evaluation of progress made thus far led him to believe that when the pendulum stopped swinging, it would stabilize well into the territory of the good days.

This day's session was nowhere near as emotionally intense as the first meeting had been. First they talked about how the previous day's shift had gone. Johnny told about how surprised he was to hear himself saying those words to the trainee. And even more surprised to find that he believed them. They discussed the personality traits associated with perfectionism and how these could work both for and against a paramedic. They talked about the destructiveness of anger. They talked more about the nature of forgiveness and its power to heal.

As they shook hands at the door, Dr. Wilson did not feel the need to reiterate his usual stress-relief instructions.

"So, I don't look like a dead tuna anymore?"

"Nah. A live carp, at least."

However, the doctor did extend the invitation to call or come by again at any time.

After Johnny had left, Dr. Wilson sat down behind his desk to prepare for the next appointment. As he reviewed the case file, he couldn't help but consider the two men whose lives were intertwined. While he was fairly certain that one man was progressing along the road of emotional and spiritual health, he was more pessimistic about the other man's development. This other man was extremely angry, unwilling to confront ugly truths about himself, unable to change. In fact, Dr. Wilson thought that the man's anger had jumped the firebreak into rage. Barnes seemed to have forgotten that he wanted to be a firefighter or a paramedic; inflicting pain on another person had become more important. In trying to get even, he was destroying his own career. Anger could be dealt with; rage was a mindless madness with which there was no reasoning. Dr. Wilson feared that unless he could make significant headway in helping Toby Barnes to lower his emotional temperature, he would probably have to recommend that the man be discharged