I'm Your Huckleberry

Doc Holliday: It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds. 
Wyatt Earp: Doc you're not a hypocrite, you just like to sound like one.

The Fire Department hardly ever asks for emergent cover. Mostly, firefighters are twice my size, half my age and travel in packs. So when that call comes over the air - a combative patient - I put on the lights, warble my siren and stomp on the gas.

Their "patient" was a definite cross between Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday and Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow. He had the far away wild-eye thing one gets when marooned on an island with a one-shot pistol and rum. The accent.... Affected, to be sure. A little southern gentleman, a lot small town production of Our American Cousin. A doctor had authorized his involuntary transport to the hospital, but the doc wasn't there to get him on the pram without a fight.

I talked, he listened. He argued. I laid out his options - go quietly, go to the hospital.  Fight with me and go to jail. He said I was cute.

He got on the pram, told me he was sending me the ambulance bill and left with the firefighters. All the while sounding like he'd escaped from the play ongoing at the cultural center. I asked him where he was from. He refused to answer. I told him I am a writer and he'd likely be a character in a novel. He was skeptical.

Ye of little faith. I have, without a doubt, a ringside seat to the greatest show on earth. It is a writer's paradise.