Tommy Hazard - 'Takeaway' takes the form of a spoken ghostwritten memoir reminiscent of gangster memoirs and celebrity autobiographies, but gives the format over to a funny, cynical London ambulance driver

Tommy Hazard, Takeaway, Morbid Books, 2017.
excerpt


Takeaway is the story of a cynical, violent and politically incorrect Hackney ambulance driver who goes by the name of Tommy Hazard.


“Postcards sent from the sick soul of the city, Takeaway is vital. Hazard’s visceral depiction of ambulance life at the NHS frontline recalls Hogarth and Dickens in its depth and colour.”
- Benjamin Myers


"Takaway is a cynical low-life cocktail that will make you retch. I haven't read the book but I liked the monkey the publisher bunged me so much that I can recommend this and everything else they've put out. If you only buy one book this year then get something by me – but if you can stretch to two paperbacks then score this one as well!" – Stewart Home




There were three reasons this small, scarlet volume appealed to me. I love Hackney, I am always interested in any seedy tales of a city’s underbelly, and for a long time I harboured the wrong-footed wish to be an ambulance driver (I’ve never even owned a provisional licence).
Takeaway is a collection of anecdotes from the perspective of Tommy Hazard, an ambulance driver working in Hackney. It jumps with a sparky energy.
In these days of NHS crises, the book surely has a wide appeal, as it succinctly narrates dozens of mishaps of normal people, including more relatable characters and those who ‘but for the grace of god…’
On the back of the pocket-sized Takeaway is a recommendation from the writer Benjamin Myers, aptly describing the book as Dickensian: the characters the narrator meets in London’s streets and homes are diverse, and often society’s ‘outcasts’.
We meet NHS users deserving and otherwise, from casualties of drink, drugs and sex to a schoolgirl who swallowed a pin.
The short anecdotes become heavier in tone toward the end with suicides and suffering, yet all the while the book retains a sense of humour.
So you go in there, there’s somebody lying on the sofa. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t breathe. I can’t walk.”
“Who opened the door?”
“I did.”
People who do this think they are the first to have pulled this trick, but we see it every day.
Little escapes the wily eye of the narrator, giving an ‘inside scoop’ or conspiratorial feeling to the book. This feeling made me clean forget about ‘fiction’ label on the front: Tommy Hazard is believable because he is not without his flaws, trying to skive off or handle a morning shift with a hangover.
At first, his hard-line approach to triaging calls as either time-wasting or futile reads as unsympathetic, even righteous, but you soon begin to feel just as weary.
Tommy Hazard is the collective pseudonym of Lewis Parker and another writer. Parker is a poet, and is behind the independent publisher Morbid Books. Alongside Takeaway, Morbid Books puts out the political/literary magazine periodical A VOID.
It is unsurprising then that Takeaway has a literary finesse, with its numbered lines recounting poetry or even Bible verses. The red cover and layout is homage to the German publisher Reclam. One of Lewis Parker’s favourite books is Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a haphazard collection of stories with themes of addiction and alienation in the USA (Takeaway contains an epigraph from Johnson).
Despite the ‘fiction’ labelling, and like Jesus’ Son, a lot of the stories told by Tommy Hazard actually did happen.
The book also points to a wider truth about the uniquely spirited borough of Hackney that residents might relate to. As Hazard recounts, misfortune doesn’t discriminate: “It’s got nothing to do with how wealthy the street is, white or black, it’s a kind of mystical thing, a madness that sets in.” - Jade King
https://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2018/02/28/takeaway-tommy-hazard-book-review-morbid-books-ambulance-hackney-nhs/

This is a tiny book. A tiny red book. It’s described as a novella, but feels pleasingly like a monologue, or something in an oral tradition. As an object, I liked the book’s attention to detail: ‘Cover design and layout dedicated to Reclam, Universal Bibliothek’. Something ‘fuck you’ and something of the scholar. And there’s a playful comment by Stewart Home on the back, calling Takeaway 'a cynical low-life cocktail that will make you retch.’ Home is an artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist, who has dedicated years to punching up counter-cultural activity, though he is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002); also, you’ve got Ben Myers, award-winning author and one of the finest novelists working in Britain today, noting on the cover that ‘the depiction of ambulance life at the NHS frontline recalls Hogarth and Dickens in its depth and colour.’ Though Takeaway is a vivid, breathlessly done sketch and not a finely wrought artefact, we’re still not too far away from Gaffer Hexam in Our Mutual Friend, who makes his living plumbing the river for corpses, or the characters in Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, or Beer Street and Gin Lane.
Some might find this book shocking in its descriptions of dying and depravity. I do not. This may be because I’ve learned quotidian dark humour (and deploy it in all my writings) because I was surrounded by out-and-out weirdness from an early age, plus illness of all sorts, terrible deaths, sectionings, disappearances and other unexplained events. So you cannot shock me, Tommy. Even if you are a renegade Hackney ambulance driver who takes us through his shifts and his colleagues; the people who tell lies and those who are genuinely in need; the old people who’d still give you a kicking if they could - because ‘Selfish cunts get old too’ - and the man who purportedly has a lightbulb up his bottom. (He doesn’t, though he cannot explain where it went.) Tommy ‘worked with one paramedic who had his finger bitten off by a Guardian journalist. If he was some Benefits Street type character . . . he’d get eighteen months, but I think they let him off with a fine.’ I laughed, then thought I shouldn’t: guilty pleasures; bitter aftertaste.
The book looks at how or why someone might call an ambulance to try and get rid of an elderly relative and what might happen to someone who is an alcoholic and has been found accommodation in an old people’s home; at the activities of someone entirely wasted who goes back to their corporate world on Monday morning. It made me think, all this. About what people do. I see spectacular kindness all around me, but I also saw distant relatives appear when a dear older alcoholic friend was desperately ill; so nice, they were that they inherited everything and threw all her cheaper (but treasured) possessions in a skip in front of those who really, truly loved her. And I’ve been a carer and also been in and out of Mental Health services and seen some shockers. And I liked Tommy because, although he skives and dives and copulates once in the back of the truck with a ‘Nurse Shipman’ while she performs erotic near asphyxiation, he is funny and aware of what’s kind, how you should look after your mother if she’s covered in shit and where it’s best to die. He was lazy and rude, but he was decent and knowledgeable, too.
There are startling sections on when you know, immediately, if someone is dead or not (‘. . . there was no . . . structure . . .’); there are particular streets where the ambulance is called and streets where they often attend, and the provenance of these patterns remains a mystery. This passage, previously published in Hotel magazine, is about ‘The Zone’:
‘We were physically in the same borough of London, but we clearly had such radically different perceptions of the world that we were barely inhabiting the same place at all. We were in two different zones that overlapped geographically, but not psychologically . . . my crewmate and I spend more time in the zone than we do in our own lives . . . to show you the madness that goes on in this other zone, they reckon about a hundred people in London account for something like fifty percent of all the ambulance callouts. It’s like they want a gold membership card, or a special closeness with their god, the fear of death.’

Tommy wonders whether people think that if they cheat the NHS, they might cheat death; it is a weird but fascinating scenario. People are pathetic but also understandable when they come up against eschatological stuff. Though the book does not stint on somatic or psychosomatic symptoms, these are not belittled but approached practically, like Mr P’s fits on demand. The author is not mocking, although he does give short shrift to those who are too thick to grasp what’s going on. Neither does the text stint on suicide and its modes, sex, mental illness or other people’s cruelty. It shouldn’t have been funny that one Welsh lad had ‘Land of my Fathers’ on a loop, but I’ve learned to laugh in the oddest places.
Humour, even in its darkest reaches, is coping and a corollary of love and compassion. Irreverent, appalling, insensitive humour can be a form of generosity if it’s shared. There was one final scene best described as arresting and which I am sure plenty of people would find offensive. However, having seen a badly managed death which involved sheer terror for all, I might have a different insight here. There’s an ‘old girl’ who’s decided to die at home:

 '"You mum has decided to die at home," I said. "We should respect her wishes."
Because they want so badly to get her into hospital, they start making things up. Absurd things. Cruel things, about her spiritual belief and cognitive abilities.’

When the specialist nurse arrives, it’s a freshening air in a murky little flat and she wastes no time in making the old girl comfortable, propping her up with two pillows and popping her chin onto her chest:

‘. . . we’d never seen such empathy.
The nurse had suffocated her.’
There follows an extraordinary scene in the back of the ambulance with this nurse and ‘I guide her cold, white hands over my throat.’ Tommy has both some musings on the erotic and that ‘this mass of crippled souls needs euthanasia nurses more than it needs a mayor’. We are awake to unpalatable suffering here; that not everyone is cared for; that there isn’t always love or appropriate resource and that Eros and Thanatos hold hands.
Have a read; a quick read. A joke and a drink. There are shades of the Dickens and Hogarth, yes perhaps, but remember Denis Johnson, whose Jesus' Son is quoted as preface: 'What I write about,' Denis Johnson once said, 'is the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking why it is like this if there's supposed to be a god.'  - Anna Vaught

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/542/laughter-in-the-dark


“they reckon about a hundred people in London account for something like fifty percent of all the ambulance callouts. It’s like they want a gold membership card, or a special closeness with their god, the fear of death.”
Takeaway, by Tommy Hazard, offers an uncompromising look at the realities facing an NHS ambulance driver in contemporary London. The honesty is shocking in places so used have we become to expressing thoughts in language deemed acceptable by those who have made it their business to police such things. The tales told are refreshingly devoid of standard public censorship. Although at times derogatory it is to expectations and behaviours rather than people.
Written in the voice of an experienced ambulance driver, part of a team that has established an inner detector honing in on who may actually benefit from hospital treatment, the anecdotes recounted bring to light how often ambulance callouts are unnecessary. Prospective patients are drunk, on drugs, suffering indigestion or simply seeking attention. Families do not wish to deal with difficult or messy relatives. They want the problem of responsibility to be taken away. When a true emergency happens – a heart attack, attempted suicide or road traffic accident – sometimes the kinder action is to accept the inevitable. Those looking on increasingly expect a miracle, as seen on TV.
“we’re judged on how many of those dead people we can bring back to life. Most of those dead people are dead for a reason. Forty years of smoking, drinking a bottle of whiskey a day. […] Only five percent of people come back when we do CPR and the rest of it. Out of that, how many of them actually have a quality of life? A tiny amount. […] The natural way of dying is the heart stops beating, oxygen stops going to the brain, the brain cuts out. As you’re going through that dying process, your head is most likely producing some psychedlic, drug, and you imagine you see a tunnel of light or the gates of heaven. Imagine you’re going through that relatively blissful drug experience, and some [f- c-] starts trying to reverse it […] your relatively pleasant death is turned into this brutal forty-minute procedure […] I feel sorry for the people for whom it’s their last experience on this planet.”
The ambulance teams have regulars – patients with complex issues that cannot be sorted by a visit to A&E. The drivers must also circumvent a bureaucracy that values public perception, targets and adherence to listed procedures over what may be of longer term benefit to the patient. There are run-ins with the police, with violent criminals, and with privileged office workers on a night out who require protection from the effects of their own idiocy.
When an ambulance is called – say to pick up an elderly person who has fallen over because carers are not allowed to lift people, or because a woman is suffering vaginal bleeding (monthly?) – that vehicle becomes, for a time, unavailable. This is rarely a concern as callouts missed are unlikely to be time critical. Knowing this the drivers are not always rushing to get back to work.
Although trying to act in a calm and professional manner drivers are human and can become enraged by the way they and the services they offer are treated, especially when they decline to comply with self-entitled expectations and problem shifting.
Written as a series of short and fascinating examples of cases, this book provides mordant entertainment through attitudes and reactions to incidents. It is also food for thought about how each reader would wish to be treated should they one day require an ambulance team’s skills and services.
- Jackie Law goodreads


I’m going to open with a confession and acknowledge that I missed a stage in the continued growth of Morbid Books.

The last time said publisher made their mark here on Triumph of the Now was about a year ago, when L. Parker, the publisher, and I had a public falling out over the tone of a fiction chapbook they published, Sex with Theresa May and Other Fantasies. This falling out was exacerbated by me – while in a suicidal depression tbf so I was not making the best decisions (bet you want me to add: “like not actually killing myself lolol” but I won’t because I’m happier now) – publishing some email correspondence between myself and Parker. That mess has all blown over now, I think, but as Parker will be reviewing my poetry collection Bad Boy Poet for this site soon, we’ll know FOR DEFINITE. Anyway, whether he’s still seething daily about our opposing politics or not, Parker and his press have both been busy. Since last Spring, Morbid Books have released two issues of a journal, two poetry collections, a record, some clothing and also this surprisingly masterful paramedic novella, Takeaway by Tommy Hazard.

Takeaway is – or at least should be – a significant book, though I think Parker does the text as it stands no favours by describing its protagonist as “politically incorrect” in the blurb on his website. Parker is, I think, one of those people I read about in the New Statesman who decry the “mainstream liberal agenda” and see things like “political correctness” as “an erosion of free speech”. It’s not: I am happy to admit to being a “virtue signalling” “social justice warrior”, if what that phrase means is that I try to make an effort to be less of a dick and feel bad when I fail at that, which is what I think the phrase means.

On Twitter – when I first commented that I was enjoying Takeaway – Parker expressed surprise, stating that he thought I may have been too “squeamish” to enjoy the text. What he meant by this, I feel, is that he expected me to be offended by Takeaway in the same way that I was offended by Sex With Theresa May. I wasn’t, because this is a very different text. Although both of the books share a certain tone of dark humour, in SWTM that humour manifests in a proper alt-right-4chan-anything-goes-free-speech kinda style, whereas in this novella the humour is observational, realistic, and – to be blunt – no one is sexually assaulted.

Takeaway is an impressive, nuanced, text that is apparently based on events that have happened to real life paramedics. Whether or not that statement is true, certainly the writing within the book evokes truth, and having read the text I now feel surprisingly well versed on the gritty reality of the London Ambulance Service.

The book is beautifully presented in a deliberate nod to “the Reclam pocket editions of Germany and Austria” and the author, Tommy Hazard, is a shared pseudonym for Parker and “someone who knows a lot more about driving an ambulance”. The text is a series of episodic responses to reported emergencies: some are serious, but most are an utter waste of time. These episodes are narrated bluntly and engagingly in the first person, and show a certain disconnect from society that feels like a very likely response to mostly seeing people in heightened states.

Even though it is selling itself as an un-PC picaresque tract, Takeaway is a genuinely impressive piece of literature that provides a believable and engaging literary exploration of the life of paramedics in London. In contrast to the self-conscious poor taste of Sex With Theresa May and Morbid Books’ multiple Oulipo-inspired tight-theme haiku collections, this is a book that is accessible in both form and content. I was expecting Takeaway to be dehumanising and possibly even dismissive of empathy, but it’s not: this is a rich and moving piece of faux-reportage realist fiction that describes the problems and the importance of the ambulance service. Overworked, understaffed and plagued by near-full-time timewasters, the narrator and his friends may be tough, angry and skiving when they can, but there is a willingness and a dedication to care that doesn’t come from selfishness, but instead from a kinda loose awareness of duty. Yes, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and these men and women seem to accept that the said someone is them.

This isn’t a paramedic picaresque where unconscious patients are robbed or assaulted, this isn’t a paramedic picaresque where the vulnerable are exploited, and the only sex the narrator has is with a fellow member of NHS staff. The paramedics aren’t angels, sure, but nobody is – not me, not L. Parker, not anyone.

In capturing this sense of duty, the importance of the ambulance service and the repercussions of underfunding the NHS, a clear traditionalist pro-NHS narrative could be said to underlie the book. In fact, maybe it is this traditionalism that underscores Parker’s other work and bubbles out elsewhere in such – to me – unattractive ways. “Remember when we could joke about anally raping the Prime Minister?” isn’t a huge amount of steps away from “Remember when ambulance drivers were tough bastards?”, both of which – I think – are statement en route towards “Remember when everyone in the street was white?” In my opinion, traditionalism and conservatism are the same thing, and I don’t like it. No one is better than anyone else, for any reason: there are no indications of merit, we’re all just sophisticated animals. Do as we would have other do unto us, like.

So, I stand by my assertion of last Summer that there is no political justification for violent sexual assault fantasies, and even though he’s a bit of a bloke, a bit of a lad, the central voice in Takeaway is a caring, generous, persona and far removed from the destructive, sexually exploitative voice that controls Sex with Theresa May. This is valid, important, urgent, writing, and I commend Parker and his secret collaborator for making it. HOWEVER, if the intention of Takeaway was to shock and disgust and appall sensitive snivelly liberals like myself, then perhaps it’s not the piece it was meant to be: there is nothing unjustifiably unpleasant about this text.

A great book. Very very much worth a read. - scott manley hadley

https://triumphofthenow.com/2018/05/28/takeaway-by-tommy-hazard/







James Knight's review (pdf)