Working as a paramedic for 10 years on New York's toughest streets, Joe Connelly learned to recognise most medical symptoms instantly. It has taken him months, however, to diagnose his own current condition.
"At first I thought I had the flu or something," he says, "Now I realise it's just happiness. I'm happy." The word sounds foreign, newly acquired. And Connelly sounds exhausted. His gravelly voice is still that of the dazed night shift worker, a fact partly explained by the nocturnal demands of his two-year-old son. "It's just like being a paramedic," he laughs, "The patient screaming in the middle of the night, lots of bodily fluids."
When Connelly briefly retreated from New York to the Maine coast last week, however, he was escaping not work or family but sudden celebrity. Bringing Out The Dead, Connelly's autobiographical novel published in 1998, is now a Martin Scorsese film and Hollywood's magic wand has turned the skinny 35-year-old writer into an unlikely star.
"Watching my life being played out by Nicolas Cage is strange," Connelly agrees, "But he's not playing me. He's playing Frank Pierce, a Christ-like figure who suffers for all my sins." Cage's performance as Pierce, the haunted young paramedic who describes himself as "a grief mop," is widely regarded as one of the actor's finest. Certainly Connelly's novel of suffering and redemption on the city's mean streets might have been written (but was not, its author insists) with director Martin Scorsese in mind.
According to Time magazine's normally restrained critic Richard Schickel, Bringing Out The Dead is "exactly what Martin Scorsese was put on Earth to do".
Joe Connelly also regards his novel and Scorsese's vision as a match made in heaven - or rather in Hell's Kitchen. "There's really no plot," he observes, making the comparison with Scorsese's Taxi Driver, "There's just Frank Pierce witnessing all that pain."
Well not quite. There is also desperate longing, black humour and chaotic drama all delivered at a frenetic, emergency-room pace. Reading the opening pages of Bringing Out the Dead is like being hijacked by a crazed paramedic. Connelly throws you into an ambulance, floors the accelerator and roars around Hell's Kitchen for three nights of mayhem that includes the odd miracle.
The tour begins with a 3 a.m. cardiac arrest. "Larry was crunching down violently on the man's chest," Connelly writes, "I heard one of the ribs crack, like deep ice in a winter lake." A few pages later, you realise that Paddy Burke's heart attack is one of the easy calls.
Burned out and on the verge of collapse, Frank Pierce, the 26-year-old narrator, fortifies himself at dawn with whiskey-laced coffee and dreams about becoming a consultant on slasher movies. In his world, 4 a.m. is noon and the disembodied voice of the emergency dispatcher is his conscience: "At 45th and Lex, in front of the shelter over there, you got a 40-year-old male in a wheelchair complaining of leg sores, vomiting, rectal bleeding and seizures. Enjoy."
One of Frank's colleagues beats up patients in the back of the ambulance. Another keeps a snapshot album of mutilated bodies. "Frank's partners are composites of guys I worked with," Connelly explains, "A lot of them were Vietnam veterans and they sometimes compared the job to the war. Especially the feeling you have that it's 4 a.m. all day long. That you can't wake up and you can't fall asleep."
The job involved physical as well as psychological risks. Bringing Out the Dead is set in the late 1980s when Times Square had yet to be Disneyfied, drug wars raged and the AIDS and crack epidemics were at their peak. "The pay was terrible, there was a shortage of money and equipment," Connelly recalls. He worked as a paramedic for Saint Clare's, the city's "Irish hospital," where his parents met at a dance (his mother was a nurse, his father a bus driver) and where he was born.
But Connelly's sudden desire to drive an ambulance came to him in Ireland, at the end of a six-month visit to Dublin. "I had been working as a bartender," he explains, "The owner of the pub would go on benders, then be carried upstairs and we would serve pints to the sound of his screams." For light relief the young American read Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. Then he returned to New York hoping to save lives. And he did. "That's what kept me going for 10 years," he explains, "Waiting for those great calls that save your life too. Like the young girl who had overdosed, lying on a dance floor. I knew I had a few seconds to get the tube into her lungs and watch the life going back into them."
Connelly cannot forget the bad calls that far outnumbered the good. But when he tried to write a memoir, he discovered that his imagination would not return him to the nights when everything went wrong. "The body's analgesic power is so great that everything I wrote seemed false somehow," he recalls, "But when I turned it into a novel I could push Frank Pierce farther than I had ever been."
Taking a writing course at Columbia while he was still working on the night shift, Connelly met Colin Harrison, deputy editor of Harper's magazine, who was so impressed by the 50 or so pages that the paramedic had compiled over three years that he found him an agent. Bringing Out the Dead was sold to Knopf in 1996. When producer Scott Rudin optioned the novel in 1997 for a film by Paramount, Connelly quit his job. "So this book about getting people into the ambulance got me out of the ambulance," he observes.
He recently climbed back in, however, this time as the film's technical adviser and with Nicolas Cage as a partner. Working a night shift together, their first call was to treat an acting teacher who was hyperventilating. "And in walks Nicolas Cage," Connelly laughs, "Her performance went downhill fast."
Bringing Out the Dead makes the emergency vehicle in your rear-view mirror appear more sinister than ever. But Connelly and Scorsese have also made that ominous, flashing apparition seem more human. "The job has changed, everything is computerised now, maybe there are fewer mistakes," says Connelly, "But what Scorsese shows us is how mortal and how beautiful we were once, before we figured it all out."
For Connelly, it is an oddly wistful reflection. This is, after all, the writer who has Frank Pierce reply "Lima beans on a pizza" when he is repeatedly asked about the worst thing he ever saw. But Connelly the veteran now views past adventure and future responsibility from the perch of current celebrity. Happily working on his second novel, Crumbtown, the writer is also anticipating the arrival of his second child, an event he will attend purely as an observer. "I'm terrible at births," he explains.
Scosese's film, Bringing Out the Dead opens in Ireland on January 7th. The book, published by Warners, is out in paperback on January 20th