Skels

The 2004 novel Skels by Maggie Dubris evokes life in the seedy, lively Manhattan of the late 1970s through the eyes of an emergency paramedic with poetic aspirations. Drawing on her own experiences of more than two decades as a full-time 911 paramedic in the Times Square district of New York City, Dubris combines her protagonist’s realistic first-person slice-of-life depictions of medics and the homeless that are the majority of their patients, and surreal anachronism as the narrator imagines the nineteenth-century poets she idolizes existing alongside them.

In June of 1979, Orlie Breton leaves a small town in Ohio, moving to Manhattan’s East Village with a vaguely poetic goal. To make ends meet, she gets a job as a paramedic in Harlem and is immediately overwhelmed by the culture shock of her new life. She experiences firsthand the “mean streets” she’s heard so much about, where violence and confusion mix with wonder; where the emergency personnel she works alongside aren’t that different from the “skels”—indigent homeless people—whom they mainly treat.

In one of the book’s many flights of fancy, Orlie explores the origins of the word “skel,” or street person, following its evolution from the Latin scelus, or wicked deed, to the Dutch schelm, or rascal. From there, it enters English in the sixteenth century as skelder, or grifter, a word that slowly gains its present-day meaning in part because it happens to have a seemingly meaningful assonance with the differently-derived word “skeleton.” Knowing this infuses Orlie’s interactions with skels with deeper connection—she loves combing the past for pieces of personal significance, and this fits the bill.



Orlie’s first ambulance patrol partner is the brusque but generally amiable Rodale, who goes by Rodie. It seems like an inauspicious beginning since all of his previous partners have quit, but they quickly discover a shared enjoyment of Jack Kerouac, which smoothes their interactions. However, this friendliness earns Orlie the animosity of Rodie’s ex-partner Miss Montalvo, a prim and unpleasant woman filled with jealousy.

As Orlie and Rodie cruise around their beat, Orlie draws parallels between what she is seeing in the writing of her favorite nineteenth-century poets and novelists, including Jack London, Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain. She pictures them living in 1970s Manhattan—most vividly Arthur Rimbaud, whom Orlie envisions in his most stereotypical guise, as a figure of youth, recklessness, and experimentation. Orlie fantasizes about getting the chance to meet Rimbaud at his lowest ebb and then being able to save him from his self-destructive tendencies.

But Orlie doesn’t need to imagine encountering a long-dead poet for long—an unidentified poet known as the albino by other skels has been putting his words on walls throughout the city more and more frequently. In a riff on Moby Dick, the albino poet is the obsessive focus of a cop named Officer Morgan. Echoing Captain Ahab’s relentless search for the white whale, Morgan wants to find the albino because he has decided he can only cope with his partner’s death on duty by punishing anyone who could have witnessed it.



Other colorful street characters include Blind Samuels, an alcoholic guitarist from Georgia who ends up drowning in the river, John-Paul Saint-Brick, a skel who fakes seizures, and Charlene, a high school acquaintance of Orlie’s who has now become “adult” star Melissa Mounds.

Orlie’s life in her East Village apartment also plays a part in the novel. She is roommates with Kim, an aspiring rock musician who is trying to get a foothold in the industry by getting nightclub gigs. Alongside for the ride is Kim’s boyfriend Weenie, a drag queen creating ever more impressive theatrics. Orlie also hooks up with an artist who creates enormous public art installations—one projects three-dimensional holograms into the street.

Eventually, Orlie has racked up enough successes in her Harlem job to be promoted both geographically and in job rank. She lands in the morgue in Midtown, which is supposed to be a better post since dealing with corpses is easier than tending to the injured. Still, there are horrifically gruesome things to be endured—particularly memorable is a man who has been cut in half after falling into the subway tracks, who is still alive when Orlie gets to the scene. Other things are also upgraded in the morgue: Orlie’s new partner is Jones, who is a slightly nicer version of Rodie, who is coincidentally Jones’s cousin; Orlie gets a nickname—Little Bit—which marks her as one of the in-crowd.



The novel ends on a suspenseful note, as Orlie accidentally endangers the albino and puts Morgan ever closer to finding and killing him.