Life in the Hot Seat

Maybe you and I have already spoken, but we didn’t exchange names. Or maybe you told me yours, but mine never came up. You may have yelled at me, or begged me to hurry, or passed out in my ear. You may have told me something really personal. I might remember it, or I might not. I may glance at your house as I drive to the store or to pick up my daughter, but I won’t slow down. I don’t necessarily want to know people’s secrets, I just do.

If I write about you sometime, it’s nothing to get worried about. I’ve forgotten your name, or changed it, and I’m just getting it all out. If you left something with me, maybe I’m just trying to give it back. If I left something with you, I hope it was good. Maybe I was there when you had your worst day ever. Maybe it was my worst day too, until the next one.

One thing’s for sure: If you saw me on the street, you would never know me. You couldn’t thank me, if that’s what you might want. You couldn’t smack me in the face either.

My family worried, when I left the newspaper, that I wasn’t going to be a writer anymore. But the day after Dori Swanson died, I started writing about it. I had to tell someone about her, what she did to herself, and then what she did to me. I kept on writing because I wanted to do something to record all of the other Dori Swansons I was meeting in this new life of mine.

Maybe someday, I’ll get it right. I’ll explain what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a shitty, insane, life-changing call, and I’ll do it justice. I’ll figure out how to make you understand what it’s like to be staring at a crossword puzzle and trying to think of a six-letter word for “run rapidly” one minute, and the next, asking a twelve-year-old girl what kind of a gun her mother just used to blow her own head off. Someday I’ll figure out how to make you feel it, and then maybe I’ll win the Pulitzer Prize; or maybe you’ll hate me for it.

Every day that I sit down at a console in the 911 center, I tell myself that today could be the day. If I don’t, I’ll forget and get lazy. Today could be the day that I take a call that will change me a little bit forever. It could be the day that a bell gets rung that I can never un-ring. Someone could die in my ear today and take a piece of me with him. Someone could tell me something unimaginable, and I’ll have to imagine it.

Still, I can relax. Statistically, it’s probably not going to happen today. What’s likely today is that I’ll watch a little TV and make a lot of small talk with the dispatcher at the console next to me. What’s also likely is that I will become intimately familiar with whatever word game or crossword puzzle has been downloaded to my computer by some other dispatcher, and that even though I’ll play it on and off for the next seven to eight hours, I’ll still suck at it by the end of the shift.

There will be plenty of 911 calls, but most of them won’t be anywhere near as interesting as most people believe.

“You’re a 911 operator? Wow! I bet you’ve got some stories.” I get that at parties a lot.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. Then in the space where you would expect me to start telling one of those wildly interesting stories, I usually draw a blank and start sipping meaningfully on my Diet Coke.

The most interesting stories are also the saddest. And you only think you want to hear them until I tell them to you. Then you start sipping meaningfully on your Diet Coke and you don’t know what to say.

They are the stories where mothers and fathers fail their children. They are the stories where friends and lovers do awful things to hurt each other because of drugs or alcohol, or worse, for no real reason at all. Or they are the fascinating ways that some people lose their grip on reality. Interesting? Yeah, but not amusing. And I don’t always want to tell them to you at a party because I might try to make them amusing just because I think that’s what you want to hear.

One night, surfing the Internet for books about 911 dispatching, I found a single book, meant to be funny, packed with wacky, real-life stories about 911. The lone review warned potential buyers that the book wasn’t funny at all, just depressing.

But death and chaos aren’t the only events that make the 911 phones ring. Most of the calls are actually pretty routine. By routine, I mean that they are routine to us. Maybe not to you, though.

“My husband slipped out of his wheelchair. Can somebody help me lift him?”

“Someone broke into my car.”

“My sixteen-year-old son is smoking pot.”

“My neighbors are shooting off fireworks again.”

“Somebody egged my house!”

Those are the calls we get by the hundreds and thousands. It’s hard to feel anything much for those people, not because they don’t deserve it, but because there are so many. It’s especially hard to listen to the ones who want to act like getting their cell phones stolen out of their cars is the BFD of the century. Listen, if you leave it on the seat in broad daylight with the doors unlocked, then get ready to kiss it goodbye. And don’t expect me to cry a river over it either. Just give me your name, number and location so I can send out the cop, who will be equally apathetic, to take a report. And when the cop doesn’t wail and gnash his or her teeth over your cell phone either, you’ll think we’re all a bunch of insensitive bastards. Think whatever you want, I guess. Just lock your door next time.

The problem is, if I cry over your cell phone, then I won’t have anything left for the calls that need me. The night that Dori Swanson died, I cried. But I waited until the end of the shift.

“911?”

“My mom just killed herself!”

“How did she kill herself?”

“She shot herself. Oh my God.”

“Where’s the gun?”

“It’s in her hand.”

“Is she still alive?”

“I don’t think so. Oh God! No. She’s dead.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twelve.”

I would never trade places with the cops who had to go out to Dori Swanson’s trailer that night. I would never say that I have a harder job than the medics who had to treat her dead body while her three kids wailed and screamed outside. I would never want to be the police chaplain who had to try to comfort them. But I will say this: At least they had a minute or two to get ready.

Three seconds ago, I had a chair under my ass and a word puzzle in my hand. Then the phone rings, and suddenly I have been transferred, shot out, struck in the chest.

I talk to the daughter, who is hysterical. Lots of people use the word “hysterical” when they really mean that a person is just very upset. My caller is hysterical.

Then I talk to her stepfather, who is neither upset nor hysterical.

“Is she breathing?” I ask.

“I’m not in the room with her,” Dad tells me. “I don’t want to be blamed for anything.” Then, with me still on the line, Dad’s cell phone rings. He sets me down and answers it. To whomever is on the line, he says, “Dori shot herself. . . . Yeah. Yeah, no shit. . . . I gotta go. Bye.”

There are many people in the world just like this man. I never knew that until I took this job. The tough part, the longer you do this job, is remembering that most people aren’t like him.

For the next four minutes, I try to convince Dad to keep his three children out of the room where their mother lies dying (or already dead). They can’t help her; at this point they can only endanger themselves. Despite my efforts, all I hear are screams overlapping screams; I am no more in control of this scene than I am of the moon in the sky.

At last, the cops and medics arrive, call a Code 4 (meaning okay, for now), and just like that, I’m disconnected from 874 Langer Drive. It’s like I’ve been dangling twenty feet in the air, hoping to be let down. Then somebody cuts my cord, and I’m bracing for the fall.

That’s the moment I first notice that my body is on fire. I am completely hot from head to toe. Kristen, the lead dispatcher, stands up at her console and tells me I did a good job. She tells me I stayed calm. 

I did? I don’t remember.

My hands and face are burning. My head is thick. Though I quit smoking about three months ago, I bum a cigarette off someone and head outside. It’s fifteen degrees out, and I don’t take my coat.

The cigarette tastes like shit to me. It’s been too long. I would put it out and go inside, but if I don’t take at least a few more minutes out here in the cold, Kristen will probably send me back out. Just relax, she’ll say. Take ten minutes. As if a full ten minutes is sufficient to wipe Dori Swanson’s mess off me.

I think, What a bitch. Who does that? Who blows their brains out in front of their kids? This is ridiculous. I never even met her. I gotta get back to work.

When I return to my seat, I’m hot and shivering at the same time.

The phone rings. I stare at the blinking line a moment before I pick it up. I remember a reporter I used to work with, before I worked at 911, who would look at his ringing desk phone and say, “What fresh hell awaits?”

If he only knew.

“911?”

“Hi. My neighbor’s clarinet is keeping me up. It’s 8:30 pm, for God’s sake!”

“What’s your name?”

“I mean, don’t you think that’s ridiculous?”

“Yes, ma’am. I do. What’s your address?”

And so on, until it’s time to go home.

Later, the shift is over and I’m sitting on my couch. I think of what it must be like at Dori Swanson’s house. I envision a cramped mobile home, maybe one of those single-wide jobs with the rotting wooden siding and the redwood deck, about six by eight. I see the kids’ bikes that never got put away for the winter, now partially snow-covered.

Outside of the fact that she lived in a trailer, I really don’t know any of this. But I took the call; I’m involved. So I put myself there. I imagine it as it must have been, so I can grieve it, then maybe let it go.

Inside, I see the dirt-soaked beige carpet and the second-hand furniture of the Swanson family living room. I see the TV that’s always on. I see the overflowing ashtrays, and the filth, and the empty box of wine the chaplain later told me that she drank that day. I see kids’ drawings taped onto the harvest gold refrigerator. I see five lives that will never be the same. Six.

I see the bedroom where Dori killed herself, just briefly, but I don’t stay there long. I wonder if what the cops saw at the scene is more or less horrifying than the image in my head.

I check my stepdaughter and my husband in their beds, asleep. I wait for my husband’s chest to rise and then fall. I do the same with Lucy. I look around at my own family room, then at my kitchen. I scan Lucy’s drawings on the white refrigerator door.

I never met Dori Swanson, but I wish she had found something worth living for in that trailer. I cry on the couch in my living room, so I won’t have to cry in bed and wake up my husband.

I think about her boy, who is in his early teens. The chaplain said he called her a bitch just before she died. We’ll hear his name again, I’m sure. He will be what we call a “frequent flyer.”

Before I left, one of the other dispatchers gave me a hug and reminded me that we can’t change free will, and that we should pray for the kids. Before I drift off to sleep I think of the kind of gun Dori used: a double-barreled shotgun.

I think of a six-letter word for “run rapidly.”

Sprint. 

Caroline Burau is a 911 dispatch operator for the police and fire departments in White Bear Lake. She previously worked in a similar position for Ramsey County, where the episodes recounted in this excerpt took place. Names have been changed to protect individuals’ privacy.