In the late 1960s, Mike Scardino worked on a New York City ambulance crew to pay for college—which as he recounts here, led to his decision not to pursue a medical career. Fueled by adrenaline and hot dogs, Scardino's adventures took him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the site of a plane crash at JFK airport, and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers suffered and died in unimaginable ways. Scardino encounters a man who drank Drano, a woman attacked by rats, and a guy who inflated like a balloon, even as he falls in love, nearly gets murdered, and learns about the impermanence of life and the cruelty of chance.