The Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, with its mahogany-colored counters, forest green walls and carpeted hallways, is designed to look like a classy hotel. It is the third-safest hospital in the country. Every weekend, Christopher Harley checks in and out for his 3 to 11 p.m. shift as a security guard.
He’s a tough 5 feet 11 inches, but he’s not intimidating. He’s huggable and friendly and has a contagious smile and joking manner that put people at ease. And when he’s talking about dealing with people crying, bleeding, fighting and dying at the hospital, his joking manner puts himself at ease.
No one but his parents, employer and landlord call him Chris. To all of his friends, he’s known as Harley. His coworkers call him Abe because of his thick chinstrap beard, although his hair is a reddish blond that, along with his fair skin, screams Irish heritage.
Harley is a sweet guy who loves his pet cat, helps his roommates plant flowers in the backyard and move furniture, and takes his little sister to punk rock shows and history lectures in New York City. He’s a 22-year-old Rutgers-Newark student double-majoring in anthropology and sociology. And on the boring days at work when he’s assigned to 31, the parking garage post, and sitting in a booth for eight hours, he thinks about all the places in Africa, New Zealand, Jamaica and Ireland that he wants to travel to and the people he will encounter there.
One time when Harley was bored and trying to stay awake, he started doing his own little jiglike dance, a sort of shuffle, hopping from one foot to the other with his arms akimbo or swinging. His roommates know this dance from when he’s impatiently waiting for food to cook in the kitchen or excitedly talking about an ancient civilization he’s learned about. But this one time the security camera where he was posted caught him doing it on tape, and his coworkers had a good laugh with him over it. Harley tends to fidget like that and gesture a lot when he’s talking.
Harley looks up at the ceiling with his arms crossed and says: “It’s stressful sometimes, but it’s also just the environment you’re in for that eight hours. When I first started working there, I’d think about it a lot. You’d see kids coming in, being hurt and dying sometimes. Then you’ve got to deal with the parents. They’re all upset, and that’s crappy. And you’re sad at work, but then after work you’re like,” he shrugs his shoulders and sighs, “because then the next week or next day you go to work and nothing’s changed. You kind of leave it at work and not let it get you too bad.”
He shifts in the chair he’s sitting in. He chews on the drawstrings of his hoodie when he tells the story of how he comforted a woman who was screaming at nurses after her son died. “I walked her to a quiet room and put my arm around her, and we sat down. She talked for a while and cried a lot. I sat with her for like 15 minutes, and it was really hard because this person was really upset, and I started getting upset. And then her son and more of the family came over so I went to the bathroom and washed my face. It was tough.” Later that woman wrote a letter to the security department praising Chris. “That was cool,” he says. “And I got a coupon for free coffee in the lobby so, you know, it was worth it.”
Harley starts cracking his fingers. The tougher the memories and subjects get, the more he shrugs with his palms to the ceiling, repeatedly ending with “but what’re you gonna do?” He adjusts the brim of his black baseball hat that has the skull logo of his favorite band, Kill Your Idols, embroidered on it and says, “You’re just kind of thrown into these situations, like with that lady I had to comfort, or a guy that you have to stop from beating up his ex-wife because he thinks her new husband tried to kill his daughter.
“I feel okay most of the time ’cause I’m distracted by schoolwork and television. But it’s still disturbing thinking about a little girl getting strangled. Or a guy just showing up dying. Or a guy who wants to kill himself because his girlfriend died of an overdose. Or a crazy guy who has voices in his head that tell him to kill his neighbors.”
Harley is sensitive to and curious about the people he encounters in the ER. Homeless people come in, and he listens to their stories about traveling around the country. He mentions but doesn’t talk much about the amount of blood he has seen in the emergency room. If he is deeply affected by it, he tries not to show it and tells his stories in as humorous a way as possible. This is his way of coping.
Learning how to deal with it is an important lesson to know for daily life or in case you ever meet someone who’s crazy, he says. “I chalk it up to personal experience. It’s cool. It’s a fun job. You learn a lot of new stuff about people. Like one time this lady in the baby unit had just had a baby and just started going crazy, talking like, ‘Jesus, take this baby!’ She didn’t recognize her mother and this veteran security guard who is her cousin. We had to restrain her and bring her to psych ER, and she was screaming. It’s like a TV show, kind of, but you’re living it and it’s just odd.”
Relating what he has seen on his shifts to television seems to help him distance himself from the drama that his job involves him in. He helps keep people safe from each other and from themselves. He keeps restricted areas restricted and helps other members of the hospital staff get their jobs done safely and calmly. Then he goes home and tells the stories so that he can let go of them.
“It’s interesting,” he says of what he observes. “It’s the human drama.”
Stephanie Steward is a journalism and media studies major at Rutgers-Newark. Posted August 2005.
