SKELS

Paramedic with a poetic soul cruises Manhattan’s mean streets, circa 1978, and gets an education.

When small-town girl Orlie Breton moves from her native Ohio to the East Village, it’s culture shock enough; landing a job as a paramedic in Harlem puts her on sensory overload. Orlie’s brittle first-person narrative puts the reader right over her shoulder in the ambulance, with gruff but easygoing partner Rodale, a.k.a. Rodie. He warns her that none of his partners last, but the duo gets along okay (and shares an affinity for Kerouac), the only tension coming from Rodie’s ex-partner, Miss Montalvo, who resembles a staid schoolmarm but relates to Rodie as a lover. Book’s title dates back to the 16th century (Orlie provides sources) and refers to street people. In Orlie’s new world, the foremost of these are a ubiquitous poet known as the albino, whose provocative verses appear on walls all over the city with increasing frequency, and an expansive drunk called Blind Samuels. On the home front, Orlie’s roommate Kim prowls the nightclub scene with her boyfriend Weenie, trying to advance her rock-music career. Orlie does well enough in Harlem to be promoted to Midtown and morgue duty. Dealing with corpses is only marginally better than dealing with the injured (a call to the subway tracks leads to a man cut in half but alive). At least her new partner, Jones, is more amiable than Rodie, who happens to be his cousin. Orlie earns a nickname—Little Bit—and through a strange series of events is reunited with high-school acquaintance Charlene, then a loser, now “adult” star Melissa Mounds. Orlie’s one brush with fame, via a heroic act, endangers the albino and adds suspense to the finale.

Dubris (Weep Not, My Wanton, 2002, etc.), who spent 20 years as a 911 medic, serves up a heap of those proverbial eight million stories with smoky nostalgia for pre-sanitized Manhattan.