PA

Today would’ve been my dad‘s 81st birthday and since I had written this already I felt like he was inappropriate day to post it. I miss you Dad..

In another post I talked about my dad’s work schedule when I was growing up, and I mentioned how he used to pick up an extra shift at Rikers Island on Wednesdays to earn some additional money. That was one of his side gigs. But he had another one that was even more unexpected, and this one happened in the early nineteen nineties.

To set the stage, my dad was a trained physician assistant. A physician assistant is not a doctor, but at least in New York State at the time, you went through two years of medical training and then did about ninety five percent of what a doctor could do under the supervision of a physician. Or at least that is how my dad always described it, and it sounded close enough to the truth that I never questioned it.

He worked in trauma, and he was calm under pressure, steady handed, and very good with anything involving scalpels, needles, or anything sharp.

Which brings me to his second side hustle: piercing.

And not ear piercing. He specifically described it as “below the neck” piercing. That is all we are going to say here.

This was the early nineties. Piercing culture existed, but it was nowhere near as common or mainstream as it is today. My dad somehow got connected with a jewelry shop in the Village in New York City. It catered to a particular clientele who wanted this service, and the fact that he was medically trained, used sterile equipment, and could offer local anesthesia made him the right person for the job.

He only worked by appointment and only on Sundays. He would drive into the city, he never took public transportation (except once for me that may be another story), and set up in the back of the shop. He had the same portable television he used to bring to Rikers. This was before phones, before streaming, before anything digital, so that little TV was his entertainment. If it was winter, it was football. He would do a piercing, then sit back and watch the game, then another appointment, then more football. A very strange rhythm to imagine now, but that was his Sunday routine.

He told me once that almost no one ever used the anesthesia. He always offered it, had it ready, and every time the person said no. Apparently people just wanted to get in, get it done, and get out.

I remember once, when some college friends were visiting, we stumbled across his instructional video. Not his own tape, but the training material he was given when he started. Let us just say it covered a very broad range of below the neck locations. We did not watch the whole thing. We did not want to. But it definitely confirmed that my dad’s side gig was… let us call it unique.

He did that job for years, purely for extra money. It helped when my sister was in college and then when we both were. When he no longer needed the income, he stopped. He never seemed emotionally attached to the job. It was work. It paid well. It did what it needed to do.

Today, piercing is everywhere. You can walk into a studio in almost any city and find people who specialize in it. Back in the early nineties, though, it was niche, edgy, and far less common. Which means, in a very unexpected way, my dad was absolutely ahead of the trend.

At least in that particular area.

When I was growing up, basically from first or second grade through high school, my dad worked in an emergency room. He worked there before and after that too, but that stretch of time is the one I remember most clearly. And at some point during those years he got promoted and became the group leader for the physician assistants. Which meant he controlled the schedule.

That schedule was, looking back, kind of wild.

He technically worked only two days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays. But those two days were monsters. He would get up around six thirty in the morning, head out. I rarely saw him in the mornings. He wouldn’t get home until eleven or eleven thirty at night. Eighteen hour days. He would get home long after everyone else was asleep, put on the TV for a bit to unwind, and eventually go to bed. The only reason I know this was because my bedroom was near the living room, so I would hear him come in sometimes.

Those two huge days added up to about thirty six hours a week, and then he had administrative office hours scattered elsewhere. That part was whenever he wanted, so the rest of his week was essentially free time. He used to tell me he loved those early morning drives. He would throw on scrubs, be out the door in minutes, and the roads were empty. We lived in Queens near the Throgs Neck Bridge and he worked in the Bronx, so it was a quick trip. From the way he described it, he was not overly committed to speed limits, and because of his job, I do not think any police officer ever gave him trouble. Then coming home late at night was the same thing. Empty roads, easy ride. He really liked that routine.

Later on, when my sister went to college, he picked up a side job on Wednesdays to help cover tuition. That was at Rikers Island. His hospital had the medical contract there, so once a week he did a four to twelve shift at the prison clinic. He hated that job. They would literally lock him into the clinic area for his own protection and he would sit there with a tiny portable television, because this was the late eighties and entertainment options were pretty much nonexistent. If something happened, they would either bring an inmate to him or escort him out to whoever needed care. He did it strictly for the money, and he knew the exact week he was planning to quit because that was the moment he would no longer need the extra income our college tuition’s.

When I got older and went off to college, he still had the same overall routine. I would call my parents on Sundays for the usual check in, but if I wanted to talk specifically to my dad, I would call him on Wednesday mornings before he left for Rikers. He told me once that I was one of the only people who ever called him on Wednesdays. Everyone else avoided him because he was grumpy about going to that job and made sure the whole house knew it. But I always knew he would be home on those mornings, and for whatever reason, I never minded calling then.

Eventually he moved out of the emergency room entirely and into a more administrative role. More of a normal nine to five thing. That was sometime toward the end of my college years, and there is another whole story about how he got that job, but that is for another day.

When I was really young, my dad used to volunteer at the local ambulance corps. That is not what this story is about, but it helps explain something about him. Before he became a physician assistant, he had been an EMT, and he always loved the excitement of being out in the field. He loved the show MASH. More on that another time, unless I already wrote about it. He loved that whole world of organised chaos. But as he got older and settled into his work in the emergency room, he did not really go out into the field anymore. He just got his daily adrenaline fix from being inside the trauma room.

Except for one time.

This was in the late nineteen eighties or very early nineties. There was an accident right outside the hospital where he worked. A man had been hit by a bus. Literally right in front of the building. When that happens, you do not wait for an ambulance to arrive. The emergency room staff goes outside. They are already there, so they just run out and start helping.

My dad was part of the group that went outside that day. They found the man pinned underneath the bus, stuck with his little shopping cart beside him. My dad ended up crawling under the bus with him and staying there until they could free him and get him into the emergency room.

There was a news clipping about it. I am pretty sure I still have it somewhere, or at least a photo of it. I want to find it before I actually post this publicly. But yes, that really happened: my dad was literally under a bus helping rescue someone.

The part he always remembered most was what happened afterward. The man was an older guy on his way back from the market. His groceries had spilled everywhere. Milk had burst open, but somehow the cookies survived. So after all the chaos, my dad said the man kept offering cookies to everyone. Just sitting there, grateful to be alive, handing out cookies.

From what I remember, the man survived and did fine. And for my dad, it was one of those rare moments where he got to go back into the field.

Not everyone can say their dad once crawled under a bus and then celebrated with cookies, but apparently that was just a normal Tuesday in his world.