MASH 10 MASH goes to Miami

by Richard Hooker+William Butterworth

  The general manager of the opera came bounding down the stairs between rows of ornately uniformed troopers of the Garde Republicain to personally open the door himself.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, Doctor,” he said. “The maestro, Cher Boris, refuses to sing unless you’re in the audience.”

  Mrs. Waldowski looked suspicious again, and Dr. Yancey saw this.

  “You’ve got that wrong,” he said. “He simply didn’t want to begin until he was sure that his good friend Dr. Waldowski and his charming and beautiful wife and daughter were in the audience. If you will show the ladies to the Emperor’s Box, Dr. Waldowski and I will drop in on the maestro.”

  “Walter, did he say that you know Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov?” Mrs. Waldowski demanded.

  “That was Walter’s little surprise,” Dr. Yancey said. “He was saving that for last.” He grabbed Waldowski by the arm and propelled him into the opera house. Mrs. Waldowski, her mouth open, allowed herself to be led up the stairs.

  Dr. Waldowski was in that bemused state that sometimes comes upon people who have, in the words of Mrs. Waldowski, “spent the afternoon and early evening with the snout in a beer mug.” He allowed himself to be led, without protest, past a door guarded by gendarmes into the dressing-room area of the Opera. Two more, very large, policemen guarded another door, on which was painted a large gold star, the words BORIS ALEXANDROVICH KORSKY-RIMSAKOV, and, in somewhat smaller letters, UN TROVE OFFICEEL DE LA REPUBLIC DE FRANCE.

  From behind the closed door came a very loud voice.

  “I’m not going to sing unless Dr. Yancey is in the audience!” it said. “Can’t you get it through your thick Frog head that we are engaged in a medical experiment of the greatest importance?”

  “I see the foghorn’s in his usual good mood,” Dr. Yancey said to Dr. Waldowski as he walked past the policemen and pushed open the door.

  “Well, there he is,” the occupant of the room said. “No fault of yours.”

  Dr. Waldowski saw a very large (six-five, three-hundred-pound) bearded male human being reclining on a chaise longue. He was attired in the costume of Benvenuto Cellini and was sipping casually from the neck of an enormous bottle of champagne.

  “I am glad to see you, of course, Doctor,” Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov said. “And, as a fellow genius, I understand, of course, your odd behavior. But who is this fat bald man in the rented tuxedo, and how dare you bring him to my dressing room?”

  “He is a friend of mine, and he has a problem,” Dr. Yancey said. “How much of the bubbly have you had, Boris?”

  “I just this moment cracked the second bottle,” Boris said. He looked at Dr. Waldowski. “Fat, bald man, why are you staring at my mouth?”

  “Have you exercised?” Dr. Yancey asked.

  “Twice,” Boris replied. “If I sing superbly after one exercise and a glass or two of bubbly, how superbly —we may need a new adjective—am I going to sing after exercising twice and having twice as much bubbly?”

  “I recognize the cap on your incisor,” Dr. Waldowski said just a little thickly.

  “I have warned you once, you fugitive from a Polish wedding, to stop staring at my mouth!” Boris said to Dr. Waldowski. “What do you mean, ‘cap on my incisor’? Are you suggesting that I, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, whom this sainted man, this reincarnate Hippocrates, will tell you is the possessor of the finest body since Charles Atlas, have false teeth?”

  “Just a cap on the incisor,” Dr. Waldowski said. “Odd—it’s mine, but I don’t remember you.”

  “Who is this maniac you have brought into my dressing room?” Boris asked.

  Dr. Yancey shrugged his shoulders.

  “Were you ever in the army?” Dr. Waldowski pursued.

  “What the hell kind of an impertinent question is that?” Boris replied, getting to his feet, putting his hands on his hips, and glowering at Dr. Waldowski. “How dare you, fat little man, come into my dressing room and ask me a question like that?”

  “Well, were you?”

  “Tell him, Doctor,” Boris said.

  “He was in the army.”

  “Not only was I in the army, skinhead,” Boris added, “but I was very nearly as good a soldier as I am a singer. You are looking, sir, at the finest Browning automatic rifleman ever to grace the ranks of the finest regiment in the army, the 223rd Infantry.” He raised the jeroboam of champagne to his lips, drank deeply, and said, with deep emotion, “Here’s to you, my buddies, wherever you may be!”

  “At Chorwon,” Dr. Waldowski said. “In the Iron Triangle.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” Boris said, fascination in his voice.

  “And you were once a patient in the 4077th MASH, were you not?” Dr. Waldowski said.

  “This is absolutely incredible,” Boris said. He spun on his heel, snatched another bottle of champagne from a cooler, flipped the cork out effortlessly, and handed it to Dr. Waldowski. “You will, of course, sir, join me in a small toast to the finest medical facility ever to follow our beloved flag? I give you the 4077th MASH.”

  “The 4077th MASH,” Dr. Waldowski said. “The Good Ol’ Double Natural!” They took healthy swigs from the necks of the bottles.

  “How did you know about that?” Boris said, looking at him suspiciously.

  “About what?”

  “About it being the Double Natural. Here’s to the Double Natural!” They toasted the Double Natural.

  “I was in the Double Natural,” Dr. Waldowski said. “That’s how I know. That’s where I capped your tooth.”

  “You, sir,” Boris said angrily, “are beneath contempt. You are attempting, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, to represent yourself as something you are not and couldn’t possibly be.”

  “I’ll have you know, you big ape, that I was the dental surgeon of the Double Natural MASH,” Dr. Waldowski said.

  “Now I’ve got you, you revolting impostor!” Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov said. “As it happens, I was friendly with that distinguished practitioner of the dental arts. He was a tall, slender chap with a splendid head of curly blonde hair. The only thing wrong with him was his name. He had some impossible Polack name.”

  “At least I was using my own name,” Dr. Waldowski said. “Which is more than I can say for you.”

  Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov peered intently at Dr. Waldowski. Suddenly recognition dawned and he smiled.

  “My God, old buddy, you really have gone to hell over the years, haven’t you? You’re bald and you’re fat, and to judge from the cut of that waiter suit, you’ve been anything but a financial success. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.” He stepped up to Dr. Waldowski, picked him up by the shoulders, kissed him wetly in the middle of the forehead, and set him back down. “I, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, love you. Platonically speaking, of course.”

  “What was that Bob Alexander business?” Dr. Waldowski said. “I remember you as PFC Bob Alexander. You caught a piece of shrapnel in the mouth.”

  “I caught, to be precise, eleven pieces of shrapnel,” Boris said. “You can carry modesty a bit too far, you know.”

  “I remember the one in the mouth because it took the tip of your incisor off,” Dr. Waldowski said. “That’s when I capped it.”

  “I thought you molar mechanics had some sort of a set of ethics that’s supposed to keep you from broadcasting your patients’ most intimate medical secrets.”

  “I hate to break this up,” Dr. Yancey said, “but there are three thousand people out there waiting to hear you sing.”

  “To hell with that,” Boris said. “The Painless Polack and I, now that we’ve found each other, are going to have a couple of belts and scare up some broads, for auld lang syne.”

  “Including Mrs. Waldowski and their daughter,” Dr. Yancey said.

  “I suppose that does put a crimp in what seemed like such a good idea,” Boris said. “We’ll have to work something out for later
. How long are you going to be in town?”

  “Not long. I’ve got to get back for a dental convention in Miami.”

  “After the performance, you will be my guests for dinner, of course. You look like you could use a good meal.” He looked around the room. “Where’s the prince? He’s always underfoot, but when you need him, God knows, he’s off somewhere chasing broads.”

  “He’s with Mrs. Waldowski in your box, Boris,” Dr. Yancey said.

  “Be a good guy, Doc, and tell him to lay on a little party, will you, for afterwards? It isn’t every day that I bump into an old army buddy.” He tilted the jeroboam of champagne to his lips one more time, draining it, threw the empty bottle into a wastebasket, and did two quick knee bends.

  “I must now go sing and bring beauty into their drab lives,” he said as he swept out of the room. “Have Dr. Yancey tell you about all the sacrifices I made for my art, Painless, while I’m gone.”

  Dr. Waldowski sat down and noisily exhaled.

  “What’s the matter, Walt?” Dr. Yancey asked.

  “That was a lot to happen all at once,” Waldowski confessed. “A half an hour ago, I was about to be crowned with a two-gallon pickle jar for not being able to get tickets to hear the world’s greatest opera singer sing, and now it turns out he’s nothing more than a expatient.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Dr. Yancey said. “I think what we need is a drink.”

  “I wouldn’t dare leave now.”

  “Take it from me, Walt, your wife and daughter won’t miss you. Once old Lion Loins gets on the stage, every other man becomes invisible.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, I’m not. That’s what I’m doing in Paris. Trying to understand the phenomenon.”

  “You really are a doctor, then? I thought you were just saying that to help me out with the little woman.”

  “I’m really a doctor,” Yancey said. “Tell me, Walt, did you ever read The Book?”

  “The Book?” Dr. Waldowski said. “The Book? Oh, you mean, The Book. Sex and Health Through Constant Coitus?”

  “Right,” Dr. Yancey said.

  “Of course, I have, T. Mullins,” Dr. Waldowski said. ‘‘I make a real effort to keep up with the advanced thought of other branches of the healing arts.”

  “And what did you think of it?” T. Mullins Yancey asked.

  “Brilliant,” Dr. Waldowski said. “Absolutely brilliant. And the companion volume, the one about exercise.* Truly monumental works.”

  (* Dr. Waldowski here referred to Sexual Intercourse as Exercise.)

  “How kind of you to say so,” Dr. Yancey said shyly. Dr. Waldowski struck his forehead with his hand. Since he had a large forehead and a somewhat hammy hand, the sound was like that of a rifle shot. “How stupid of me! I should have connected the names. You are that Dr. Yancey! The sage of Manhattan, Kansas!”

  “I don’t think of myself as a sage,” Dr. Yancey said. “I was a simple family physician for a long time, and I still think of myself as one.”

  “I think I will have that drink,” Dr. Waldowski said. “This is all too much for me.”

  Dr. Waldowski and Dr. Yancey left the Opera by the stage door, walked back across the Place de l’Opera to Rue de Rivoli, and then on to Rue Danou and back through the swinging doors of Harry’s New York Bar.

  Over boilermakers, the two exchanged both confidences and fill-in background material on Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, a.k.a. PFC Bob Alexander.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Dr. Waldowski said presently, “but I’ve always wondered how you came to specialize in your area. I mean, I don’t know of any special program in medical school.”

  “I suppose you could say I’m a pioneer,” Dr. Yancey replied. “I mean Freud talked a lot about it. But he never recommended any treatment. He just had them lying there alone on the couch.”

  “But how did you get started?” Dr. Waldowski asked.

  “Well, there I was, in my little clinic in Manhattan,” Dr. Yancey began. “It had been a rough day. All morning I’d had a stream of perfectly healthy females in to see me, complaining about vague, imaginary illnesses. I suppose when you get right down to it, if I hadn’t had a couple of extra belts at lunch, I’d still be there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Her name was Agnes,” Dr. Yancey said. “I remember her quite well. She’d been coming to me for about three years, regular as clockwork, complaining of vague stomach distress, pain in the lower back, you know the routine.”

  “I play poker with a couple of guys who ran a G&O operation,” Waldowski said. “They’ve cried on my shoulder a lot.”

  “O.K. You know what I’m talking about. Well, as she sat there, reciting her litany of imaginary complaints, I knew what ailed her. Something, probably the booze, pushed me over the edge, and I told her not only what ailed her, but what to do about it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She got white in the face and told me she’d never been so insulted in her life and was going to bring me up before the county medical society.”

  “Did she?”

  “No. She apparently thought it over. She was back in three days, smiling from ear to ear. Brought me a half-gallon of twelve-year-old Scotch and told me she was sending her sister-in-law in to see me.”

  “It was as simple as that?”

  “It could have gone the wrong way. I was lucky, that’s all. I admit it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when Charley—Agnes’ husband—came home from the office and found Agnes lying on the floor in front of the fireplace wearing nothing but black mesh stockings and a mask, he at first thought she was plastered. But she was determined to go all the way— she was really desperate—and when he got on the phone to call their minister to come over and exorcise John Barleycorn, she got up and started to belly dance. That’s all it took. There was nothing really wrong with Charley. He hung the phone up just as the minister came on the line. From there on in, no problem.”

  “And that started the whole thing, huh?” Dr. Waldowski asked. “The Yancey Foundation? The Joyful Practices Publishing Company? Togetherness! Magazine?”

  “That did it,” Dr. Yancey said. “Agnes didn’t tell Charley about me, and what I’d told her, until they came back from their second honeymoon.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He was grateful. Pathetically grateful. It was old Charley who really encouraged me to give up my family practice and get into sex. He said it was a gift I had no right to deny humanity.”

  “He was right, of course,” Dr. Waldowski said. “Until I put your books into my waiting room, replacing the Reader’s Digest, my patients used to come into the chair so uptight I couldn’t get them to open their mouths. But since I put your books—and Togetherness! Magazine, too, of course—out there, why, T. Mullins, they walk in smiling, with their mouths open. They don’t even seem to know I’m working on them.”

  “I like to think I do some good,” Dr. Yancey said modestly.

  “You haven’t told me how you came to meet Boris,” Dr. Waldowski said.

  “At first, to tell you the truth, I thought I had some kind of nut on my hands,” Dr. Yancey replied. “You know, of course, that we have that ‘In My Experience’ column in Togetherness!, where the readers write in and share their experiences?”

  “I read it faithfully,” Dr. Waldowski said. “I’ve found it very educational.”

  “Well, I kept getting these . . . what shall I say? somewhat incredible pieces, unsigned, about—well, I remember one in particular called ‘Exercise in Pressurized Aircraft Above Thirty Thousand Feet.’ ”

  “I remember that,” Dr. Waldowski said. “I cut it out and saved it.”

  “Well, then, you know what I’m talking about. Would you believe a story like that, one man going through the entire corps de ballet of the Vienna Opera in a 747 enroute to Leningrad?”

  “Don’t take offense, Theosophilus, ol’ b
uddy,” Dr. Waldowski said, “but if it weren’t for the reputation of the Yancey Foundation—your own impeccable reputation—I’m afraid I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “I don’t publish a thing I don’t check out. I went to Vienna and checked that story myself. It was true. The girls still talk about it. Not only was it true, but it got better ... or maybe worse. The word got around, of course, and the girls in the Leningrad Opera Ballet said it was nothing but another empty capitalistic boast.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Boris said that he felt it was his clear duty as a member of the John Birch Society to squelch the rumor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov is probably the only member of the John Birch Society who is also a Hero of Soviet Art and Labor,” Dr. Yancey said. “They saved face, of course, by pointing out that with a name like that, he was obviously Russian.”

  “Is he?”

  “I heard that he’s descended, via someone called Grand Duke Vasily Korsky-Rimsakov, from Catherine the Great herself.”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t prove it. The Russians wouldn’t want to let anything like that out. But I did find out that Boris’ father, who insisted that the neighbors refer to him as Your Highness,’ did in fact emigrate from Russia in 1918. He was a doorman at the Stork Club. The family lived in Hoboken.”

  “He was quite a hero in Korea,” Dr. Waldowski said. “His sergeant, a Cajun, got hit going up Heartbreak Ridge. Alexander—I knew Boris as PFC Alexander —threw him over his shoulder and carried him down through a hail of mortar fire. Both of them damned near died. I remember them both very clearly. As Boris worked his way through the nurses, the Sergeant —the Cajun—set up a still in the laboratory. Best White Lightning I ever had.” He paused thoughtfully. “I’ve often wondered what happened to ol’ Horsey. “Probably went back to his swamp and never left again.”