House of God

by Samuel Shem

  There was dead silence. No one knew what to say, until Howie, puffing and smiling, said, ‘Damn good idea, Chief, but maybe it should be a trip to the American Pathological instead.’

  ‘I don’t think it should be the most posts,’ I said, sure that the Leggo was joking, ‘I mean, after all, wouldn’t that put a premium on death? The tern with the most deaths would probably win, and that would make us lay off treatment, or, even worse, kill off patients to win the prize.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Eddie, ‘why not make it a percentage of deaths?’

  The Leggo and the Fish didn’t laugh, and as the meeting broke up, no one was sure whether they’d been serious or not.

  ‘Of course they’re serious,’ said Hyper Hooper, ‘and I’m gonna win it. The Black Crow! Atlantic City, here I come. Saltwater taffy, strolling along the boardwalk.’ He grinned, and started to sing to us: ‘Under the bo-o-orrdwalk down by the seee-eeee . . .’

  And so if they were serious the Black Crow Award came into being, at least as much being as the * * * MVI * * *. Hyper Hooper, the tern who got off on death, really got off, and we others, who still didn’t like death and were repulsed even more by autopsies, felt that once again the odds were getting stacked against the living, and that we had to work even harder to protect the poor unsuspecting patients who came, trusting, into the House of God oblivious to that incentive for their deaths and posts, the Black Crow. Hooper didn’t waste any time, for the next afternoon as I was dictating a discharge summary, from the next cubicle I heard his familiar voice: ‘The patient was admitted in good health except for a urinary-tract infection . . .’

  I went on dictating, but tuned back in a few seconds later:

  ‘. . . the temperature rose to 107 and a resistant strain of Pseudomonas grew out of the spinal-fluid culture . . .’

  Spinal fluid? I thought it had started in the urinary tract?

  ‘. . . the intern was called to see the patient and found her unresponsive. She expired three hours later. Permission for the postmortem was obtained. Yahoo! This is H. Hooper, M.D.’

  As he was rushing out I caught his arm and asked him what had happened, and he said, ‘The usual, Death City. And I got the post. Atlantic City, here I come, Black Crow, Black Pants, and all.’

  ‘But she came in healthy.’

  ‘Yeah, and then she boxed, and I get credit for the post. The Black Crow’s gotta go. So long.’

  ‘That award’s a joke. They couldn’t mean it.’

  ‘It’s no joke. Autopsies are the flower—no, the red rose—of medicine. The Leggo wants more posts so he looks good.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘Who cares? With that awful birthmark, he’ll try any cosmetic procedure. Hey, I gotta go. The little woman and I are going to the Eucalyptus Room again tonight. Trying to float the M off the R. Ciao!’

  And so the intern first out of the starting blocks for the Black Crow Award sped off down the hallway, out of the House of God, with that same glitter in his eye that the Fat Man had had over his food and his Invention and that Chuck and I had seen in the Runt’s eye when he talked pornographically about Thunder Thighs, and the same glitter that Chuck had had when he’d made mincemeat of Ernie on the court or talked about Hazel, and the same glitter that I had whenever I thought of Molly.

  Whenever I thought of Molly, I thought of her bendovers and her lacy underwear and the tears that she’d shed when she knew she was going to die when she pulled down her panties to show me the mole on her thigh. Whenever I thought of Molly, something rolled over in my pants and I felt younger than I was, and I got a glitter in my eye and I thought about my first love, and that bittersweet chaos of fumbling with hooks and belts and zippers and parents on couches on front seats on back seats on movie seats on rocks and everywhere except on beds. I imagined Molly as young and innocent and fun.

  Young and innocent? How could I have known that that preceding figment had been brought to me through the courtesy of my imagination? Feeling guilty about trying to seduce this young and innocent fun, I tried my hardest to seduce her. In the House, I would touch her, when we worked together, putting a hand on her shoulder, on her hip. She would brush my arm with her breast, she would leave her dress unbuttoned, and in addition to the bendover, she showed more of her repertoire, including what Fats had called the ‘flash sit down,’ where in the instant between the sit down and the leg cross, there’s the flash of the fantasy triangle, the French panty bulging out over the downy mons like a spinnaker before the soft blond and hairy trade winds. Even though, medically, I knew all about these organs, and had my hands in diseased ones all the time, still, knowing, I wanted it and since it was imagined and healthy and young and fresh and blond and downy soft and pungent, I wanted it all the more.

  So finally she asked me to go out with her and some other nurses, and we went to this bar where the rock music blasts off only the ossicles of those, like me, over thirty, and leaves unshaken the under-thirty, who want the volume turned up, and then she taught me to do a dance I’d never heard of to music I’d never heard of, and then we went back to her apartment she shared with a toothpick of a nurse named Nancy, and Molly asked me if I’d ever seen her place before and I lied and said No and she started to show me and we wandered in on Nancy undressing and Molly said, I was showing him the place, and Nancy, remembering that I’d been there before, said, He’s seen the place before, and Molly looked me in the eye and I gulped and said, Yup, I’ve seen the place before, and she said, Well, let me show you my bedroom.

  Delight delight. She showed me her bedroom with her little girl trinkets, furry toys and an alive furry kitten and Halloween masks and temple bells from the Far East and a make-up kit with backstage-type light bulbs and the usual prints and strewn panty hose and bras and then in a fit of romance I feared I was too old for, we embrace, and I fumble with her bra hooks and then I get caught up in things so I don’t notice what I’m fumbling and after a little bit of protest from her with my mouth all over her long nipples and my hand on her own furry thing we are kind of wrassling, she gets on top of me, in the middle of a NO she says OOPs and in I slip, and she shows me her secret, which is that she fucks not like a young innocent little girl but like a moaning Byzantine courtesan, all gold and warm oil and myrrh.

  ‘Now you know my weakness,’ Molly said the next day in the middle of the nursing station, holding a Fleet’s enema in her hand like a pistol.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m very physical.’

  ‘How is that a weakness?’

  ‘It just is.’

  ‘Not if you can handle it.’

  ‘What do you mean handle a weakness?’

  ‘You wouldn’t call it a weakness in me, would you?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s different, you’re a man.’

  ‘You’re not going all sexist on me, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it’s not a weakness in you any more than it is in me. You’re just going to have to learn how to handle it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said in a way that confused me, since I couldn’t tell if she were concerned or not, ‘I guess I just will.’

  Only later, when it became obvious that both of us loved the sex and, in a loose way, each other as much as we did, when the moaning mons had moved out of the little-girl bedroom into the on-call bunk bed whenever I could get rid of the Bruiser, and then moved into the ward bathroom for a five-minute one sitting on the can, and even, late one night, crooned to by the gomer band of renown, moved to a darkened corner of the ward standing up with our orgasms racing against the appearance of the patrolling night supervisor, only then did Molly—who called the feeling of making love the feeling of having a centipede walk through wearing gold cleats—only then did she tell me that she didn’t give a damn about my havin another woman, a steady woman, that she had been hurt by ‘involvement’ and hurt by the nuns with their spiritual whips and that what she was ‘into’ was ‘freedom in relationships,’ which I thought w
as terrific and too good to be true until I wondered whether someone else with the old gold cleats was hearing those chuckles and moans and glittering rainbows of orgasms when I was with my long love, Berry.

  Berry must have suspected something was up. She’d remarked on my changed mood, on how suspicious I’d become of her, accusing her of going to bed with other men when I was on call in the House. She must have known that my jealousy came from my guilt, my fury from my jealousy of who was with her or with Molly when I was not. Things became strained, although at first the least strain was the emotional one. I was having a fantastic time making love to two women on the same day, enjoying the way that I could separate which aching muscle group went with which woman’s moves. The real strain was how to hide Molly from Berry. What contortions I went through, as Molly began to come to my place, to hide her traces—her hair on the pillow, her spoor on the sheets, her hairpin on the bureau, her earring left on the bathroom shelf, her perfume in the air. I began to spend all my time doing laundry. I dreaded the ringing of my phone. Yet I couldn’t tell Berry. I cared too much. I was too ashamed. I had too much to lose.

  Berry and I had thought that we might try living together, but when we found out that my being on call turned me into a snarling bear, we’d decided that it was not a good idea. We’d also decided that we’d not see each other the night after my night on call, because all we did was bicker and bitch. That left only one night in three, the night that I was supposedly not exhausted. With our contact decreased, with Molly zinging through my rectus abdominus and ball-tingling cremaster muscle groups, with Berry the Clinical Psychologist off into mind and with me off into body, we began to drift apart. I began to think her cat hated me.

  We tried hard to enjoy the fall. We went to a football game, but instead of the bright cheeriness I remembered from going to football games in college, the day turned cold and wet and somber, filling us both with the dread of winter. Exhausted, more or less in silence, skin catching on the rough edges of our love, we dragged back to my apartment, and Berry, feeling woozy with the flu, curled up in my bed with her cat. A safe warm fetal ball, she slept. Her cat, eyes closed to me, purred. She snored. I felt so much in love with her with protecting her from the flu and the world and my fury and guilt, that I was filled with joy. But as my joy for what had been and could be showed itself, my sadness for what had happened to us crushed it. What a terrific turd I was.

  She awoke, we talked. We talked about the gomers and about how furious Jo and the Fish and the Leggo were making me, and about how Berry couldn’t possibly understand.

  ‘You know what your problem is?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got no role models. You can’t look up to any of them.’

  ‘What about the Fat Man?’

  ‘He’s sick.’

  ‘He’s not,’ I said, starting to get angry. ‘Besides there’s Chuck and the Runt and Hooper and Eat My Dust. And Potts.’

  ‘Oh, sure, there’s the camaraderie, and you’re right, the only reason men go to war is to die with their buddies, but it seems to me that what’s happening to you is the total institutionalization of the internship, á la Goffman.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked as evenly as possible, swallowing my rage at her high-ass theory of my pain.

  She started to repeat it, and seeing that the words weren’t registering, said, ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Why never mind?’

  ‘Because you could care less. Damnit, Roy, you’ve gotten so concrete. You won’t talk about anything except the internship.’

  Feeling swamped with words, I found myself shouting like sewerman Ralph Cramden on TV, ‘Goddamnit, I don’t want to think, ‘cause when I do, I think of the disgusting things I do every day and it’s so awful I want to kill myself. Get it?’

  ‘You imagine that talking about your feelings would destroy you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s a fantasy.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A fantasy. Why don’t you get some help?’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘Therapy.’

  We fought. She probably knew we were fighting about Dr. Sanders’ long dying and about the illusion in my father’s letters and about my plethora of absent role models and the blossoming idea that the gomers were not our patients but our adversaries, and most of all we were fighting over the guilt that I felt for having Molly in a dark corner of the ward standing up, this Molly, who, like me, wouldn’t stop and think and feel either, because if she ruminated on what she felt about enemas and emesis basins, she’d lose faith even in her centipede and want to kill herself too. Our fight was not the violent, howling, barking fight that keeps alive vestiges of love, but that tired, distant, silent fight where the fighters are afraid to punch for fear the punch will kill. So this is it, I thought dully, four months into the internship and I’ve become an animal, a moss-brained moose who did not and could not and would not think and talk, and its come like an exhausted cancerous animal to my always love, my buddy Berry, and me—yes it’s come to us: Relationship on Rocks, ROR.

  9

  ‘Fats?’ I blurted out in amazement.

  ‘The Today Show!’ said the Runt, eyes popping.

  ‘The Today Show?’ I yelled.

  ‘Fats!’ said the Runt.

  My mind did a swan dive.

  ‘But did you actually see him on The Today Show?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope,’ said the Runt, ‘but somebody said they saw him disguised as Dr. Jung, and Barbara Walters was interviewing him about some crazy thing called—’

  ‘The Anal Mirror. I know all about it.’

  ‘They say Barbara was giggling all the time. Hey, Roy, you wanna hear what she does with her mouth.’

  ‘Barbara Walters?’

  ‘No, Angel. See, she takes her lips and wraps them around my—’

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘First I want to find Fats.’

  I knew I’d find him eating, for it was lunchtime, and although he’d been farmed out to the Mt. St. Elsewhere, he’d made some special deal—as he always made some special deal—with Gracie from Dietary and Food which allowed him to eat in the House of God for free. With my stomach flip-flopping, I sat down with this Gargantua of medicine.

  ‘What a delicious rumor,’ said Fats, laughing. ‘I wish it was true. I sometimes daydream about a spot interview with Cronkite on the CBS nightly news.’

  ‘Why Cronkite?’ I asked, reeling from the bizarreness of fatherly Walter Cronkite springing Dr. Jung’s Anal Mirror on millions of Americans expecting only war and jowly Nixon.

  ‘Supposedly he has an anal fissure. Much of the disease in the world is reflected in the anus, you know, and I keep thinking that, somehow, packaged right, the reflection of the diseased anus could make me rich. Just think: if there was an Anal Mirror, and if Nixon owned one, every day he’d get a good look at exactly what he was. It’s just the money, you know. I just want to be rich before Socialized Medicine kills me off. It’s like what Isaac Singer said.’

  ‘Singer the writer?’

  ‘No, Singer the sewing machine. He said, “I don’t give a damn for the invention, it’s the dimes I’m after.” But listen, Basch, that laetrile idea the other night was dynamite. There’s money there.’

  ‘Laetrile? It’s a hoax. Worthless. A placebo.’

  ‘So what’s wrong with placebos? Don’t you know about the placebo effect?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Well, there you are. Placebos can relieve the pain of angina. If you’re cooling from cancer, placebos are hot stuff. Like dyspareunia.’

  ‘How?’ I asked, my mind spinning around the simile.

  ‘You know what they say: It’s better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Imagine: we get the laetrile from apricot pits from Mexico, by bartering the Anal Mirrors for apricots.’

  ‘You’d try to sell Dr. Jung’s Anal Mirror t
o the Mexicans?’

  ‘Of course not Dr. Jung’s. Dr. Cortez’ Anal Mirror. Lotta diarrhea in Mexico. You know how a Mexican knows he’s hungry?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘His asshole stops burning. Ha! But we’d have to be careful in Mexico—might get sued for malpractice.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Well, even though we’d translate the warning into Spanish, there’s always the danger that some jerk would use the Anal Mirror outdoors on a bright sunny day, and you know what happens then?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, the lens concentrates the sunlight and it bounces back through the two mirrors and WHOOSH you get one flaming asshole, I’ll tell you. Suit City. Demand their money back and all the rest.’

  ‘And where would the money for all this come from?’

  ‘From the raffle and the research project.’

  ‘What raffle and what research project?’

  ‘Well, at the Mt. St. E., I’m thinking of running a raffle, like they did in a Vegas hospital. If you’re scheduled for surgery on Monday, and if you come in on Friday instead of Sunday night, you get free tickets to a raffle for a cruise. That way the Mt. St. E. fills its beds and I get a cut. If you win the raffle but die in surgery, the cruise goes to your estate.’

  ‘And what about the research project?’

  ‘I’d rather not say. It would come out of your tax dollar, and it’s completely illegal.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘My next rotation is the VA Hospital. Everybody knows how crooked the old VA is, eh? Big-time Watergate-style graft. Graft City.’

  ‘This is all fantasy, right?’ I asked, thinking of what Berry might say. ‘To feed your idling mind? I mean, you wouldn’t do any of this, would you, Fats?’

  After a pause that sent a shiver through me, he said, ‘Money is not shit. It is nothing to be ashamed of. This great country has a long and glorious history of graft and corruption and exploitation. Just think of what we’ve done to whole continents and entire little countries chock full of underdeveloped little people we’ve treated like rodents, let alone what we do to individuals. Why should I—or we—hold back? Did that anti-Semite Henry Ford hold back? Did Spiro Agnew? Did Joe McCarthy or Joe DiMaggio—you know that Yankee Clipper is hocking instant coffee on TV these days—or Marilyn Monroe hold back from letting any subway grate in the world blow up her flimsy dress and whistle around her frigid genitalia? Did Norman Mailer ever, on anything? Did the CIA or the FB-fucking-I? The hell they did, Basch, the hell they did. You just gotta do it, flush it, and pick up the money you get for it.’