House of God (15 page)

‘Amazing. Where I come from, it's just the opposite—you keep showing your pain so that people will lay off you. What do you think about that?'

‘What do I think? I think, fine, man, fine.'

On those rare days when Potts came out to play ball, it was embarrassing. He was clumsy and shy, scared of hurting someone and scared of standing out. Open for a shot, he'd pass. In a dispute, the other guy was right. He rarely yelled. As the maples began to do their reddening, as the touch-football games sprouted on the browning fields and as the dawn dew got more and more chill, Potts got worse and worse. Left out of Chuck's and my lives, left for weeks on end by his wife, worried about his golden retriever's growing whine, hounded by the Yellow Man and by Jo, Potts became scared of taking any risks. Since the only way to learn medicine was to take risks in those hard times when you were alone with your patient, Potts had trouble learning. Ashamed and afraid, in the computer rotation handed us on our first day, Potts moved on to his next assignment and left our ward.

His replacement was the Runt. On the day of his arrival, Chuck and I were sitting at the nursing station, our feet up, drinking ginger ale from large House ice buckets. Knowing how nervous he would be, Chuck and I had filled a syringe with Valium and taped it under his name on the blackboard, with a prescription: ‘to be injected into right buttock upon arrival.' The blackboard was the standard way that the House Privates communicated with the terns about their patients. Under my name was an insignia:

This cryptic insignia had begun to appear throughout the House. It was always the same, always only associated with my name, and no one knew who was writing it. Recently it had become known that it stood for Most Valuable Intern. The rumor was that there was a competition among the interns, sponsored by the Fish and the Leggo, for this award, the * * * MVI * * *. Since this insignia was associated only with my name, people began to address me as ‘the * * * MVI * * *' and often I was greeted with ‘here comes the * * * MVI * * *.' I asked the Fish whether I really was the front-runner for the * * * MVI * * *. He said he hadn't known there was an award. I told him that I'd heard the Leggo say that there was an award and that it was ‘part of the special tradition of the House.' I then asked the Leggo, who said he hadn't known there was an award, and I told him that I'd heard the Fish say that there was and that it was ‘part of the special tradition of the House.' I began to protest to the Fish that I didn't enjoy having my name plastered with * * * MVI * * * all over the House, and the Fish said he'd get House Security on the case, and for the past few days I'd glimpsed a bouncer dressed in fake West Point peering out from a corner, hoping to catch whoever was putting up * * * MVI * * * under my name.

And yet the ones most irritated by the * * * MVI * * * were the Privates, and of the Privates the most irritated of all was Little Otto Kreinberg, the Private whose name still rang no bell in Stockholm. Since Otto wouldn't talk to the terns, and since the blackboard was the only way of communicating with the terns, and since the * * * MVI * * * left no room for communication, it drove Little Otto wild. As Chuck and I sat, we watched Otto march in, curse, erase the * * * MVI * * *, write a note to me, and depart. Almost as soon as he was gone, when the bouncer's back was turned, there appeared under my name on the blackboard:

As the insignias continued to multiply, gnomes like Otto spent a greater and greater amount of time manning the erasers. And when the erasers disappeared, Little Otto got big in anger. As Otto got angrier, I got more and more angry with the Fish and the Leggo, protesting the abuse of my name. With my protests, they employed more and more bouncers to peer around more and more corners, and with all this attention given to the award, the other terns began to protest to the Fish and the Leggo that Basch, who spent so much time sitting with low-cut black-sneakered feet up drinking ginger ale could not possibly be the front-runner for the * * * MVI * * * which award may not have existed at all, ever, anywhere, except on the blackboards of the House.

‘
Hombre?
'

‘Hey, hey, Hazel,' said Chuck. ‘Come on in, gurl.'

Hazel from Housekeeping stood in the doorway. I'd seen her pushing mops and emptying trash, but I'd never seen her look like this: she wore tight white tights and a green uniform stretched tautly over her chest so that the buttons were tugging at the fabric, which parted to reveal enticing bits of black breast in white bra. Her face was marvelous: ruby-red lipstick on black lip, light-brown afro on head, mascara, eye shadow, false lashes, and a carnival of bangles. Her tongue lay like a cushion on the couch of her mouth. Her teeth were moonstones.

‘You got your hot water and clean sheets, Chuck?'

‘Great, Hazel, just great, gurl. Thanks.'

‘And your car? Maybe it needs some fixing?'

‘Oh, yeah, Hazel, my car's not runnin' well. Needs a lotta work. Gotta get my car fixed for sure, soon. See, my front end needs some looking at. Yeah that's it, my front end.'

‘Front end? Ho! You bad boy! And when do you want to put your car in the garage?'

‘Well, let's see—tomorrow, gurl, how about tomorrow?'

‘Ok,' said Hazel, giggling. ‘Tomorrow. Front end? Ba' boy.
Adíos
.'

I was astounded. I'd known that Chuck had been interested in Hazel, but I'd had no idea that things had progressed this far. Even after the Cuban Firecracker had left, her after burner—afterimage—seemed to remain in the air around us, real hot and red.

‘But Hazel's not a Spanish name,' I said.

‘Well, man, you know how it is. That's not her name.'

‘What's her name?'

‘Jesulita. And we ain't talkin' no auto mechanics, neither.'

Jesulita. And that was the other thing that had started to happen: the sexualization of the ternship. Without realizing it, perniciously, hand in hand with our growing competence and rising resentment at the way we were being drilled by Jo and the Slurpers, we had begun to, almost without knowing it, as Chuck said, ‘get it on' with those erotic ones of the House of God.

I thought about Molly, a beautiful woman who happened to have been disappointed in romantic love and who happened to have made an A in the straight bendover in her Catholic nursing school and about how I'd begun to get involved. It had started innocently enough with my finding her in tears one day at the nursing station, and when I'd asked her why, she'd said that she was scared she was going to die because she had this mole on her thigh—her upper thigh—that had started to grow, and I said Let me have a look and so we went into the on-call room like naughty kids and on the lower bunk bed she pulled down her pantyhose and let me have a look and Christ it was a marvelous thigh and of course I saw those wonderful garden-flowered panties on that bulging blond mons but sure enough it was a bad black mole and she was gonna die. But I didn't know anything about moles, and so I pretended to be a big shot and used my ‘Dr. Basch' title to get her to the derm clinic that morning, and the resident in derm slobbered all over himself because he would get to look at her mons and panties instead of the usual excoriated psoriatic lesions of the gomers and he took a little biopsy of it and within twenty-four hours he told her it was just a mole and completely benign and she was not going to die. Being saved from death by me made her grateful, and she had invited me to dinner. Dinner was a terrible casserole and I had tried to get her into bed that night but had managed only to get into her bed with her and with my hands on her almost little-girl breasts and long nipples and so hear the NO NO NO without the final scrumptious YES and to hear also the religious IF I GIVE YOU THAT I'LL HAVE GIVEN YOU EVERYTHING and so that was where the damn thing stood so far, perched erotically amidst the gomers and yet on that age-old and tantalizing ledge called the affair, the new lover versus the steady, the only one who could understand the pull to the lover being the steady, and yet to tell the steady before she found out would wreck it all. Inside the House of God Berry did not seem to exist, and even outside, when I was with Molly she didn't seem to exist either. And so it had become clear to Chuck and me that one way to survive was sexually. This was terribly puzzling and threatening to our sexual dud of a resident, Jo, for the only time she had dropped much below the top of the class at BMS had been in ‘Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality.' Her limbic was out to lunch. Our trump card with Jo could always be sex.

When the Runt showed up, he was so nervous—from having spent eight weeks with a Double O Resident named Mad Dog and with Hyper Hooper and Eat My Dust Eddie, from having heard about ‘the toughies' awaiting him on our ward, from living with the fear that he was gonna die from being stuck with a needle from the Yellow Man's groin, and also from his intellectual poet June, who was furious at him for spending time away from her—he was so nervous that he seemed to be flying, living three inches above the floor. His hair was frazzled and his mustache seemed to be alive, and he tugged first at one end and then at the other. Chuck and I tried to talk him down, but it was no use, and so we called for Molly to get the syringe of Valium.

‘OK, man,' said Chuck, ‘pull down your pants.'

‘Here? Are you crazy?'

‘Go ahead,' I said, ‘we've got things all ready for you.'

The Runt pulled down his pants and bent over the nursing-station desk. In walked Molly, with a friend of hers, a nurse from the MICU—Medical Intensive Care Unit—named Angel. Angel was red-headed, buxom, Irish, with wraparound muscular thighs and a creamy complexion. Working in Intensive Care, the Death Row of the House, was rumored to have intensified her sexuality, and it was said that year after year Angel gave intensive care not only to the sick, but also to the male tern. This talent, perhaps apocryphal, had at any rate yet to be experienced by anyone in our group.

‘Molly,' I said, ‘I'd like you meet the new tern, the Runt.'

‘Pleased to meet you,' said Molly. ‘This is Angel.'

Craning his neck around, the Runt blushed, his
bulbococcygeals
tightened, causing his
testes
to leap up in his
scrotum
like startled fish in an electrified pond, and he said, ‘Pleased to meet you. I . . . I've never met anyone in this position before. It's their idea, not mine.'

‘Oh it's'—gesturing up toward the thin air—‘nothing new for a'—gesturing toward herself—'nurse,' said Angel.

How strange that Angel had difficulty putting words together without gesturing, but it must have had something to do with her nervousness at meeting the Runt from the rear. Angel seemed to be having a hard time resisting the impulse to go to the Runt and run her creamy hands over his leering lumpy rump, his cheeks, his testicles, even the crenellations of his anus, why not? We settled on Angel delivering the dose of Valium, which she did with professional skill, finishing by planting a kiss on the spot. The nurses left, and we asked the Runt how he felt and he said fine and in love with Angel but that he was still scared stiff about starting with the toughies on the ward.

‘Man, there's nothing to worry about,' said Chuck. ‘Even though you inherit Potts's disasters, you inherit Towl too.'

‘Who is Towl?'

‘Towl? Towl, boy you get in here stat!' yelled Chuck. ‘Towl is the best damn BMS you ever saw.'

He was. In he walked: four feet tall with thick black glasses and thick black skin, with a voice gruff as a drill sergeant's and a vocabulary that was short and tough like him. The words Towl knew, he slurred, and his main gift was action, not talk. He was a locomotive. A locomotive from Georgia.

‘Towl,' said Chuck, ‘this is the Runt. He's gonna be your new tern, starting tomorrow.'

‘Rhmmmmm rhmmmm hi the Runt,' growled Towl.

‘Boy,' said Chuck, ‘You gotta run the Runt's service, just like you did Potts's. OK? Now, you tell him about it.'

‘Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm twenty-two patients: eleven gomers, five sickees, and six turkeys who nevah shoulda been heah in the foist place. All in all, nine of 'em are on da rola coasta.'

‘Rolla coasta?'

‘Right,' said Towl, making a motion with his hand like a car on a roller coaster, up and down, up and down, and finally up and flying out into space.

‘He means TURFED out of the House,' I said.

‘But what about the sickees?' asked the Runt. ‘I'd better start seeing them right away?'

‘Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm, nope, You don't have to. Ah takes care of 'em. I nevah lets the new tern touch 'em, not till I'm sure he knows what he's on about.'

‘But you can't write orders,' said the Runt.

‘Oh, I can write 'em, I jes cain't sign 'em. Go home, Runt, and come on back in tamarra. Well, gotta go finish mah shit on the ward so I can take off early. So long, Runt. Tamarra.'

Despite our preparations, Jo and ward 6-South began to destroy the Runt. Jo, on call with him, took up where Mad Dog had left off, making the Runt feel that he never could do enough and that he never should do anything without first consulting her. Afraid to risk, the Runt didn't learn. Jo's aggressive approach to the gomers soon created for the Runt the sickest, most pitiful service on the ward. The Runt was completely disorganized, and, worse, if a patient did poorly, he thought it was his fault. If Lazarus bled, it was his fault. If a birdlike woman with intransigent bowels hadn't had a bowel movement, it was his fault. He began spending more time talking to his patients, and formed such an attachment to one old man that whenever the Runt showed up, the old fellow would grasp his hand, start to cry, kiss his hand, say that the Runt was his only friend, and when the Runt would try to leave, the old fellow would kiss his hand again, start to cry, and offer him, over and over, the same present, a used bowtie. Despite Chuck, Towl, and me, the Runt was being eaten up by guilt. We'd seen it happen to Potts, and we didn't want it to happen again. Chuck and I decided that if the Runt could only get something going with Angel, he might gain some confidence. His poet, fed up with his being too preoccupied with medicine to read her runes, now demanded that he sleep out on the living-room couch. Yet the Runt was too unsure of himself to ask Angel out.