House of God

by Samuel Shem

  ‘What? That goes against all I’ve just said.’

  ‘I know, sir, but he’s in psychoanalysis and that’s what his analyst keeps telling him and he keeps telling me,’ and I found myself wondering who—when both Agnew and Nixon got thrown into the slammer at the same time—who would take responsibility for the rich pageantry that was America.

  ‘And you’re telling me you believe what the Fat Man said?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir. I’ve only been an intern four months.’

  ‘Good. Because if everyone felt the way he does, there wouldn’t be any internists at all.’

  ‘Exactly, sir. There’d be no need. Fats says that that’s why internists do so much, to keep medicine in demand. Otherwise we’d all be surgeons or podiatrists. Or lawyers.’

  ‘Nonsense. If he were right, why in the world would sensible men like me and all the other Chiefs believe in medicine? Eh?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, seeing Dr. Sanders oözing his blood from his nostrils into my lap, ‘what else can we do? We can’t just walk away.’

  ‘Right, my boy, right! We cure, do you hear, we cure!’

  ‘Four months here, and I haven’t cured anyone yet. And I don’t know anyone who’s cured anyone yet, either. Best so far is one remission.’

  There was an ugly pause. The Leggo turned back to the window, took a few deep breaths to blow the Fat Man from his nose and oropharynx and lungs, and satisfied that he’d proved something turned to me again: ‘Dr. Sanders died, and you didn’t get the post, why not? Did he ask you not to have a post done on him? Sometimes people—even physicians—are squeamish.’

  ‘No. He said I could do a post if I wanted.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t want to see his body ripped to shreds downstairs.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I loved him too much to have his body dissected.’

  ‘Oh. Well, you don’t think I did too? You know Walter and I were buddies? First Nigro in the House. We were interns together. Gosh did we have times. Those electric moments in medicine, you know? When a warm thrill goes right on through you. Fine man. And with all of that,’ said the Leggo, turning to me with a papal humility, ‘with all of that, let me ask you, do you think I’d be afraid to get the post?’

  ‘No sir, I don’t think so. I think you would get the post.’

  ‘Damn right I would, Basch, damn right I would.’

  ‘Can I say something, sir?’

  ‘Of course, my boy, shoot.’

  ‘Are you sure you can take it?’

  ‘I didn’t get where I am by not taking it. Fire away.’

  ‘That’s why your boys don’t love you.’

  We loved them, and since I was leaving ward 6-South in a week to start my new assignment in the Emergency Ward, we decided that the only thing to do, given the third toothbrush, was to show them our love, and to do it in the bastards’ House. And so Chuck and I and that four-dimensional sex fiend the Runt—who by that time was assaulting everything in skirts, including a pubescent Physical Therapist with the face of a chubby eight-year-old and the body of a chubby fifteen, whom he enticed by ordering PT six times a day on his gomers and whom he fondled amidst the parallel bars and artificial limbs while she was distracted by trying to teach his gomers to walk—ruminated on how in the world we could show three big women like Angel and Molly and Hazel and maybe even another big woman like Selma how much we loved them and how we appreciated their part in making us into dynamite terns on a dynamite ward of the House.

  It was colorful and it was illicit. In an on-call room of the House where we were not supposed to be, the Runt and I awaited the others. Halfway snickered on bourbon and beer, dressed in a House nightie with a wig to make me look like a gomer, I lay on the bottom bunk while the Runt babbled about pubescence and hooked me up to a cardiac monitor. As the monitor flashed its green BLEEP into the red-lighted room, I thought that all we’d need was a yellow blinker and Chuck would think he was back home on a street corner in Memphis. When I’d told Berry that Dr. Sanders had died, she’d asked, Where is he? and I’d said, He’s only in us, and I’d thought of how his life had fluttered round me like a butterfly in dying autumn, chilled, beating against my lashes, frantic, calling me to still the birth of winter. What had been in my father’s latest letter?

  . . . Winter is coming and you are undoubtedly becoming accustomed to the hours and the stresses. You have a great opportunity to learn medicine and start dealing with people . . .

  There was a knock at the door, and then two more, which was our code. There, in nursing uniform, were Angel and Molly. I watched Thunder Thighs throw her arms around the Runt and kiss him. He seemed embarrassed, and she said, ‘Hi’—gesture toward the Runt—‘the Runt. Howthebellareya?’

  ‘Hello, Angie Wangie,’ said the Runt shyly.

  Angie Wangie took his hand and put it under her skirt, cupping it around her stormy ass. The Runt looked at Molly, wondering how she would take this openness. Molly went behind him and started to kiss his neck and run her hands up and down his front between his clavicular notch and his crotch. In a gomer falsetto I wailed HALP NURSE HALP NURSE HALP and they came to me. They flung back the curtain covering the lower bunk and bent over me, and the fronts of both their dresses were open, showing four elastical fantastical breasts in a sea froth of lace with two clefts in between. Oh, to nuzzle there, to lay my angry grieving head nuzzling in there and nuzzle and guzzle like a thirsty dumb horse muzzling water. To suck. One two three four nipples. When I tried to do that they pushed me back down and decided that I was a gomer and that since GOMERS GO TO GROUND I needed to be restrained, and they began to work hard to do it.

  . . . You will look back on this period of hard work and the experience will stay with you for life, for who else but man would do it? . . .

  Restrained, struggling, I was to be given an alcohol sponge bath. I struggled enough to rip open Molly’s dress almost to her waist, and I reveled, as they pushed me down again, in her glossy yet transparent French bra that flowed like silk over iced nipples, the kind of bra that lets breasts jiggle as they stroll down the Champs Elysées so the horny Americans can gape. Asking how long were her nipples, I began to be a gomer with an erection. They started to sponge me, with Angel discreetly covering my risen rod and my happily bounding balls. I saw both the Runt and Angel ogling Molly’s breasts, and I thought that the third toothbrush might just be Molly’s, why not? The stimulation was intense—tied down, helpless, with two half-naked women bathing my hot in vaporous alcoholic cool that rolled me back toward the fevers of childhood. My BLEEPS rose like a skyrocket to about 110, and with my impending explosion the Runt dragged Angel away.

  Heaven. Molly sponged me up and down, kissing me lightly but not letting me out of the restraints, and every time she came near I’d make a motion to get at her, and my BLEEPS went to 130. She passed the damp sponge up and down against the corpus spongiosum, the erectile tissue on the underside of my penis, and then began to nibble and nip and nosh and suck, cradling my testes like eggs in a velvet glove. I begged her to let me out of the restraints, but she kept giving me these little bites and fondles. Well, that was it. Up and down and bites and boobs, and just before I blasted off she slipped out of her dress, took down her panties, straddled my face, her lips on my penis again. My olfactory lobe seized up and our machine, spewing camshafts hubcaps and. racheted gears slammed out into the wild blUE YONDERRR!!

  . . . Political news is overwhelming with Nixon a maniac liar and I hope he will get it but good . . .

  We lay with each other until the bleeper had detumesced down onto the scale and was breathing a bit easier, and then she got up. She kissed me and slipped out through the curtain. She came back and I asked her to let me out of the restraints now for Chrissakes. Saying nothing, she started back in on my cock and soon it wasn’t weeping anymore but standing up straight singing a good Old Testament-fashioned Maccabean Army Song and she straddled me and took the
tip of it and put it against that midget helmsman in her rowboat, her clitoris. Electric sparks slashed the dark and her snuggling labiae embraced me and let me squishy-squish on in. At that point I decided, Oh, what the hell, if I’m going to be a gomer, except for my putz I’ll be a gomer, and I relaxed. She moved around on me slowly, rhythmically, as only women, laced into their own rhythms, can move, and then, starting to go off, bent down to me.

  ‘Angel?’

  ‘Roy.’

  ‘Roy!’

  ‘Angel.’

  . . . Hope you are your usual self and not working too hard . . .

  ‘I thought I’d’—gesture toward sky—’thank you for’—gesture toward curtain—’sending me’—gesture toward floor—‘the Runt.’

  So she did, by moving up and down and making little noises that I didn’t hear too well and as she sat up and grabbed the springs of the underside of the top bunk she said with gestures more than with words how this was like making love on a night train in Europe, and she bounced around like a kid in a jungle gym, and then she stopped.

  ‘Whats the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘I think there’s someone’—gesture toward heaven—‘up there.’

  We listened, and sure enough there was:

  ‘Oh Jesu Jesu Chuckie HAAY-ZUUUU—’

  Thunder Thighs untied me, and as soon as my arms and legs were free I wrapped every one of them around her with me inside her and outside her all at once and then like a gomer who’d gotten the Ponce de Léon Rejuvenation Treatment—Fat Man scenario?—I rolled her over on her back and really started doing what a crude person might call fuck and as I bashed away like a Leon I thought of smashing the Leggo in the nose and then Angel started groaning and saying something that sounded, without gestures, like Fuck my cunt baby fuck my cunt and the BLEEPS shot off the scale again and my coronary arteries got all pinched and protesting and BAM BAM BAMMmmmm there it was again.

  . . . Hope you are well and we will get to see you soon . . .

  Later, with all of us more or less huddled and humming nice tunes and Chuck singing ‘There’s a moone out too-night’ while we hummed the ‘Dooo-wahhs’ there was a knock on the door.

  ‘A raid!’ screamed Hazel.

  But there were two more knocks, and there was Selma, who said, ‘Sorry I’m late, kids,’ and joined in.

  Things melded. I remember seeing the Runt cuddling in Selma’s lap, and also Molly and Angel and Selma snuggling together, and as I floated in a sea of friendly genitalia feeling this and poking that, I thought that the third toothbrush could have been male or female and that these women were more liberated than any of us and more fun, and right at the end we all remarked upon what a nice party and sang in a sort of tickertape dulcissimo:

  WHAT A GRAND GOOD-BYE, TO THAT COLORFUL GUY

  THE SEXUAL* * * MVI * * * DOCTOR ROY G. BASCH.

  10

  ‘. . . floozy.’

  ‘Huh?’ I asked.

  ‘Roy, don’t you ever listen to me?’

  It was Berry. Where were we, who knew? I was eating an oyster. I hoped I was in France, in Bordeaux, eating a Marenne oyster, or in England, in London, eating a Wheeler’s oyster, but feared that I was in the United States, eating a Long Island oyster, fearing America because America contained the House of God, and most of the time the House of God contained me, and the times I was out of the House were more unbearable now, for their succulence, than the times I was in. I said to Berry that I did ever listen to her.

  ‘I saw Judy the other day, and she said that whenever she sees you out with anyone else, it’s with some floozy.’

  An American floozy, an American oyster.

  ‘What the hell,’ I said, ‘they’re American oysters, aren’t they?’

  ‘What?’ asked Berry, looking at me strangely, and then, realizing I was elsewhere, turning sympathetic eyes on me, saying, ‘Roy, you’ve developed loose associations.’

  ‘Not only that, but according to Judy, I’ve got floozies, too.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Berry, putting the tines of her fork through the juiciest part of an oyster, ‘I understand. It’s all primary-process stuff.’

  ‘What’s primary process?’

  ‘Infantile pleasure. The pleasure principle. The floozies, the oysters, even me—any pleasures at all, and all pleasures at once. It’s all pre-Oedipal, a regression from the Oedipal struggle with your father and your mother, to earlier, infantile concerns. I just hope there’s enough of the secondary-process Roy left to include me in his narcissism. Otherwise, it’s curtains for us, for sure. See?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, wondering if she meant that she knew about Molly. Should I bring that up? Things with Berry had reached an uneasy equilibrium bound by what she called ‘limits,’ and floating on an unspoken shared acceptance of the other one’s freedom, for now. I wouldn’t say anything. Why should I?

  ‘Where do you work next? What’s your next rotation?’

  ‘Next rotation?’ I asked, seeing myself as an asteroid, rotating around Venus. ‘The Emergency Ward, tomorrow. From November first until New Year’s Day.’

  ‘What will that be like?’

  At that, my mind turned back to England, to one of the heightened moments in my formless ‘loitering years’ at Oxford. That first summer of Mary Quant’s miniskirt, I was idling on a busy street corner when suddenly there was a flurry and then the WEE-AWW of an ambulance approaching. The world stopped, curious and apprehensive, as the ambulance raced by, giving each of us a glimpse of the drama inside. Life or death. Chilling. And I’d thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be the one at the end of the ambulance ride?’ That thought had turned me around and had gotten me back to America with its oysters and Mollys and BMSs. And Houses of Gods. Although that thought remained intact, to Berry’s question I could only say, ‘In the E.W., I don’t think they can hurt you as bad.’

  ‘Poor Roy, afraid to hope. Go ahead, have as many as you want.’

  With each new Watergate bombshell, Americans were realizing that Nixon’s ‘Operation Candor’ was one terrific lie. On the day that Leon Jaworski was appointed special prosecutor to replace Archibald Cox, just about the time that Ron Ziegler was rejecting Kissinger’s suggestion that Nixon make a speech of contrition by saying ‘Contrition is bullshit’ I entered the House through the E.W. automatic doors. The waiting room was empty but for a sharp-eyed old buzzard standing in one corner rocking, a bulging shopping bag at his feet. Good. Only one patient to see. The stillness of the circular tiled E.W. was peaceful but ominous. A happy buzz, sprinkled with laughter, was coming from the central nursing station, where several people sat: the Head Nurse, named Dini; a black nurse named Sylvia; two surgeons, the uppermore, the resident, a gum-chewing Alabama native named Gath, and the lowermore, the intern, named Elihu, a tall beak-nosed Sephardic Jew with a frizzy Isro-Afro, rumored to be the worst surgical intern in the history of the House.

  Gilheeny and Quick, the two policemen, also sat, and as they saw me come in, the redhead boomed out, ‘Welcome! Welcome to this little bit of Ireland in the heart of the Hebrew House. Your track record for the naughty upstairs ward has preceded you, and we know that you will amuse all of us with stories of passion in the long chill nights to come.’

  ‘Am I about to hear another story about the Irish and the Jews?’

  ‘And with the High Holy Days just past, I heard a wonderful tale,’ said Gilheeny, ‘a story about the Irish maid coming to work in the Jewish household, do you know?’

  I did not.

  ‘Ha! Well, this fine Irish woman sought employment at this Jewish household about the time of the Rosh Hashonah, the New Year, and asked the doorman what the employment in the house was like. Well, said your man, it’s all right, my darlin’, and they celebrate all the holidays, for instance during the New Year there’s a large family dinner, and the head of the household gets up in front of them all, and in gratitude blows the shofar. So your woman the maid’s eyes light up and she says, He blows
the chauffeur! Ach, mon, but they do treat the help well here, now, don’t they?’

  When the laughter had died down, I asked whether the patient with the shopping bag in the waiting room was surgical or medical.

  ‘Patient? What patient?’ asked Dini.

  ‘Oh, he means Abe,’ said Flash, the E.W. orderly. Flash was a dwarfish young man with a harelip and a scar that started at his lip and disappeared down into parts unknown. He looked as if he had suffered severe chromosomal damage as a child. ‘That ain’t no patient, that’s Crazy Abe. He lives out there, that’s all.’

  ‘He lives in the waiting room?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Dini. ‘His family gave big bucks to the House years ago when they died off, and now he doesn’t have a home, so we let him stay here. He’s OK, except that he doesn’t like the waiting room to get too crowded, and he goes a little apeshit around Christmas.’

  How kind, to let a poor old man live in the waiting room. The two policemen, their tour of duty over for the night, arose to leave.

  ‘Being policemen of the night,’ said Quick, ‘spending much of the dark cold night in this light warm room drinking coffee, safe from the dangers of the night, when our shifts coincide, we will meet again. Good morning and God bless.’

  Leaving, Gilheeny said, ‘Soon you will meet the resident in psychiatry, Cohen. A Freudian.’

  ‘A textbook in himself,’ said Quick as the door closed behind them.

  Dini took me and Elihu on a tour of the premises. Although she was attractive, there was something disturbing about her. What was it? Her eyes. Her eyes were hard blank disks showing nothing in back of them. She had worked this beachhead for twelve years. She showed us the different rooms: gynecology, surgery, medicine, and then, last, room 116, which she affectionately called ‘The Grenade Room.’

  ‘Dubler named it, years ago. Grenade Room Dubler. The worst of the screaming gomers get put there. One night, with three of them in there, Dubler called us around, took a grenade from his pocket, opened the door, pulled the pin, tossed in the grenade, and waited for the explosion.’