House of God (20 page)

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 to 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.'

‘For fraud?'

‘For dreaming the American Dream. In this case, the American Medical Dream.'

The Runt and Chuck sat down with us, and the Runt, like a TV serial that you couldn't turn off, rolled out the latest thrilling episode of
Thuunnnn-der
Thighs: ‘She was her usual voracious self. We were watching TV, she rubbed the inside of my thigh, the news finished, she took off all her clothes, she walked into the bedroom. She didn't want to mess around with a lot of foreplay, and the first time, she said something—it got me so turned on I was short-circuiting left and right.'

‘Well, man, what'd she say?'

‘I'm not sure, but I know it had the word “cunt” in it. She's a gold mine. I'd been poring over her body quite a bit, and it was getting to the point where she was going to have to do some poring over mine. I'd been nibbling at her
labia
—they're fine and thin, like puppy dog's ears—and since I've had this fantasy that she was knocked up in high school and had a kid, I was trying to get in there to have a good look for an episiotomy scar, but I got too close, and my eyeballs got all steamed up. Ha! We were really building up to something big—we were in this crazy contortion sort of the Reverse Dog with her sort of sitting on my face like my old roommate Norman's women used to do to him and she was bending over fiddling with my cock and then I did it. I sort of gave her one big slurrp and gently nudged her head down between my legs and I'm telling you she . . . went . . .'

We all stopped chewing.

‘. . . bananas!'

‘Bananas?' asked Fats, jaw slack.

‘Very bananas,' said the Runt. ‘HA! It was animal. We were all over the bed. She was moving around on my face and I could feel her teeth on the base of my dork. Wow! those girls my mom liked, they'd scream whenever my pants would get lumpy at the sock hop. And do you know what she said this time, when I was inside her?'

We did not know what Angel'd said with the Runt's penis inside her.

‘She said, “Oh, Dr. Runtsky, you're soooo big!”' and the Runt did look kind of big, sitting there before our eyes. ‘This morning she handed me a toothbrush, and when I went to the bathroom, mine was the third toothbrush in the rack.'

The Fat Man had stopped eating at about the time that Thunder Thighs had put her lips on the Runt's penis, and staring at him as if he were loony, Fats said, ‘What the hell's been going on with you guys up there anyway?'

So we told him. We told him about Chuck and Hazel and about me and Molly and about how the Runt with the help of Towl and Thunder was getting bigger. We told him about the Golden Age, where we were legendary in our ability to care for ‘the toughies' and legendary in our liaisons, which, because of Hazel, had produced clean sheets and bug-free bedding and, because of Molly, had produced snappy instant nursing care. We told him how we were as high as the golden leaves riding the crests of the October maples, falling through the gestating skeleton of the Wing of Zock.

‘There's only one thing missing,' I said, ‘placement. We still can't get the gomers placed. Anna and Ina are still there.'

‘No problem,' said Fats, ‘placement is as easy as pie. Who's responsible for placing the gomers?'