Berto's World_Stories

by R. A. Comunale M. D.

  Dr. Agnelli scribbled a phone number on his prescription pad and handed it to the preacher. Halloway took it and thanked him. Then he stared at me, those dark brown eyes mounted by thick eyebrows trying to fathom my role in life.

  “Boy, have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior?”

  Agnelli cleared his throat and carefully enunciated: “His name is Berto, Reverend.”

  “Uh … yes, of course, doctor. Berto, my boy, do you believe in God?”

  My mentor was standing behind him and nodding his head in a big yes.

  I took the hint and replied accordingly.

  “Good. Come by this afternoon. We’re having a call to the Lord at four o’clock.” He mentioned a vacant lot near the business district.

  “Make sure you call the heart doctor, Reverend.”

  The preacher left and Dr. Agnelli immediately sat down. He looked at me questioningly.

  “You think I was too hard on him, Berto?”

  I was eleven. Subtlety and political correctness were not part of my nature—still aren’t.

  “Uh … I think you think he has a problem, and I don’t think you like what he does.”

  “Ah, you don’t disappoint me, Berto. No, I’m sure the Reverend Halloway is a good man, an honest man. It’s just that I’ve seen some bad stuff done in the Lord’s name. I have a hard time separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.”

  “Is he really sick?”

  “Yes, but there’s not much I can do for him. If he were having chest pain I could give him nitroglycerin tablets. But this … this is a problem in how his heart beats. Maybe someday there’ll be some magic pills we can use. But now, well, I’ll be surprised if even a heart specialist can offer him anything but nerve medication.”

  Corrado, my friend, if you were alive today you would be amazed.

  That Sunday afternoon was all anyone could ask for: warm, mid-spring breezes, bright sun in a cloudless sky. I had snatched a quick lunch at home then ran out again to find my friends. But Tomas and Angie were nowhere to be seen. Sal sat on the stoop of his building, and I could tell that his father had just given him a beating.

  “Hey, Berto,” he said, weakly.

  I didn’t make an issue about it. It wouldn’t help. His old man was a mean drunk. It wasn’t until the demon hormones of puberty took hold of Sal that he got even. For now, he suffered and kept that big sloppy grin on his face.

  “Come on, Sal, let’s go save your soul!”

  “I ain’t got one, you big turd! Don’t you remember? The nuns all say I ain’t worth savin’.”

  “See, that proves you need to be saved. Let’s go listen to the Reverend Halloway. ‘Sides, it’s free!”

  That did it.

  He laughed and we jackknifed down the street hurling insults at each other.

  The big canvas tent filled the lot where an old office building had burned down years before. Sometimes we would play baseball there, if the rats weren’t too active. We approached the tent opening, and the man at gate told us to go away, but I said Reverend Halloway had invited us. He looked at me, unsure of what to do, when I saw the preacher inside and yelled, “Hello Reverend!”

  He turned to us.

  “Oh, hello, Berto,” he replied, smiling.

  That convinced the guy at the entrance, and we went inside.

  “I see you brought a friend.” He looked at Sal, and Sal grinned back. Then someone the reverend him away, so we grabbed seats as far back as we could.

  The tent filled quickly, and while we all waited, a three-woman choir sang “Amazing Grace” in amazingly ungracious, off-key voices. An acolyte took the podium and enumerated the various encomiums the reverend had earned and then, religious barker that he was, proudly introduced the Reverend Donald Halloway to the sounds of trumpets, tambourines, and “hallelujahs” from choir and audience alike.

  Sal belched, and I suppressed a giggle.

  I have to admit, the Reverend could talk—and talk and talk. We knew it was drawing to a close when his assistants picked up the offering baskets. Sal and I made a move to escape.

  “And that, my brothers and sisters in the Lord, is why you should give yourself, give till it hurts.”

  Sal clutched his side pocket and mouthed no way.

  “So remember my words, brothers and sisters. Follow the true way.”

  Then I heard him begin that signature phrase, the one he would become famous for:

  “The Lord will…”

  But he never completed it, because Sal had reached the tent exit and jumped with a start, yelling “SNAKE!”

  Sal didn’t like snakes.

  Apparently, neither did the congregation. We barely got away before the crowd erupted behind us like ants after spilt food. The place emptied like a burst dam.

  On my way out, I managed to catch a glimpse of the terror-inspiring reptile. It was a fat, black rat snake. Probably lived happily off the resident vermin. It beat a hasty retreat, too.

  A few weeks later, I was hanging around the clinic as usual. I had polished off a bottle of Moxie and the sugar/caffeine contentment had set in. My curiosity, however, was unabated.

  “Dr Agnelli, whatever happened to the reverend?”

  He looked at me then surprised me with a question of his own.

  “Did Salvatore do that on purpose?”

  “Do what, sir?”

  “You know darned well, young man. Yelling ‘snake’ inside that tent. Wish I had been there!”

  He laughed but stopped when he saw me staring at him.

  “Ah, yes, the Reverend Halloway. Seems that the loss of expected proceeds from that revival meeting forced him to move on. Not enough money here.”

  “Yes, sir. But what about his heart?”

  “I don’t know. He never went to see the cardiologist.”

  Dr. Agnelli grabbed another bottle of Moxie, tossed it to me, and sat down next to his cold coffee. He winked and said, “Berto, what have you learned from this?”

  My eleven-year-old voice did its best to imitate that unforgettable tenor.

  “The Lord will provide, if your wallets don’t hide.”

  He sipped his cold coffee and I guzzled down the Moxie.

  When a man’s an empty kettle

  He should be on his mettle

  And yet I’m torn apart.

  Just because I’m presumin’

  That I could be kind of human

  If I only had a heart.

  —E.Y. “Yip” Harburg

  The Nazi

  He who looks down his nose at others sees only his own crotch.

  —Mark Levin

  I hate May.

  Yes, I know, the trees are leafed out, the flowers are blooming, the grass is greening up, and the birds are singing their little heads off.

  But May also casts its cowl of grief and misery over my memory. The final month of medical school brought me an inverse Christmas gift list. I lost my fiancée, was nearly dismissed by the dean, and almost contracted syphilis.

  “Galen, take that patient in 510. Work him up, and get me the blood. I gotta present him at residents’ rounds tomorrow, so make it snappy.”

  I didn’t like the intern. He was unnecessarily obnoxious and enjoyed riding the backs of the students under his supervision. He was also incompetent and used our conclusions as if they were his own.

  Not that I bear grudges, but I must admit, years later when I learned that his license to practice medicine was yanked for shtupping too many of his female patients, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction.

  So, there I was, approaching my new patient. It was quite a sight. He was tied down to his bed with restraints on all four limbs. Despite that, he had managed to toss and turn enough to cast off all bed coverings. He lay there, glory naked, yelling at the top of his lungs.

  What crossed my mind at that moment? The same words found on “black-box” recorders recovered from crashed airplanes, the voices of the doomed pilots memorializing their final mom
ents.

  Okay, Galen. Go for it, kid.

  I stood next to the metal, crank-up hospital bed—and just missed getting spat on, as more profanity spewed from his gray-stubbled, unshaved face. He looked about seventy but, as I saw from the date of birth on his entry sheet, he was only in his mid-forties.

  I mentally composed the report I would write:

  Forty-five-year-old Caucasian male, disoriented X 3, cachectic with protuberant ascitic abdomen and pronounced widespread spider veins. Peripheral wasting with yellow sclerae. Fetor hepatis of the breath, dry fissured tongue…

  The magic doctor terms, drilled into me by four years of training, were this man’s living epitaph. He had severe alcohol damage to the liver, wasting of the muscles in his arms and legs, and a belly distended by ascites fluid brought on by collapsing cell failure. He was dying of self-induced liver disease.

  Still, that didn’t explain the wild-eyed stare and distorted grin or those demon-yellow, jaundiced eyes following my every move. No, this wasn’t the wild delirium of metabolic compromise or the apathetic quiet of the usual terminal cirrhotic patient.

  Once more I escape a dousing, this time as his bladder emptied in a weak stream of brown urine. I placed a small, rubber tourniquet hose around his left arm, felt for an almost-non-existent vein, and found it. I took the glass syringe from the tray I carried, wiped the skin over the vein with an alcohol-saturated cotton ball, and stuck the needle in.

  Ah, blood!

  Only those who must daily take samples from humans whose vessels have preceded the rest of their body to the grave can understand the satisfaction of seeing a successful, blood-drawing stick.

  I pulled back on the plunger, and trickles of dark-red liquid oozed into the syringe barrel. Piece of cake.

  Just then the bed shook, and I heard the impossible before I saw it. That wasted patient’s right arm managed to snap its restraint. Before I knew it, a cadaverous hand had reached over, grabbed the syringe out of its partner left arm and, as blood erupted from the venipuncture site, stabbed me in the neck.

  I yelled a “goddammit,” grabbed the syringe from the patient’s hand, and quickly set it down on the table. My man was dribbling from his lips and laughing, while I attempted simultaneously to put a patch on his arm and press the throbbing puncture wound on my neck.

  I quickly emptied the syringe into several tubes then almost ran back to the nursing station to get the samples out. I also had to report the needle stick.

  Even in those benighted days, before vacutainer tubes, HIV, and hepatitis C infections, it was still de rigueur to report needle-stick accidents. The dangers back then included a mysterious illness caused by something called Australia antigen—later renamed Hepatitis B—and above all the specter of syphilis.

  That was my greatest fear. My patient’s behavior was more typical of syphilitic paresis or brain damage. Today’s medical personnel fear HIV infection, but that is only an echo of the threat syphilis posed in my student days. The only good thing was it could be treated.

  I marked the test down along with the metabolic workup for delirium and went to the head nurse to submit the accident report. What happened next was a revelation.

  She burst out laughing.

  Okay, I admit I wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. My nickname, even among my best friends—my A-Team—was the Bear. The nursing staff respected my abilities as a student. They also knew that my girlfriend and fellow medical student, June, had dumped me the week before and—as women are wont to do—blamed me for not being more attentive to her. How could they know my inattentiveness was due to fatigue from working double shifts to buy June a ring?

  I stared at the nurse until she stopped. She surveyed me once more then yelled, “Get the chief resident.”

  To her credit, she gave one of the blood tubes to another nurse and asked her to hand-carry it to the lab for a syphilis blood test—stat!

  I headed for the doctors’ lounge behind the nursing station and slumped into a chair. I was emotionally drained, so much so that I must have dozed off, because I suddenly felt myself being shaken and looked up to see the chief resident standing over me.

  “Mr. Galen, I understand you got a needle stick. Show me.”

  I pulled down the side of my white tunic, and the resident repeated my earlier, aircraft-disaster-related words.

  The room had no mirror, so I couldn’t see the jagged puncture wound with secondary, fresh bruising spreading down the left side of my neck.

  “You ordered a syphilis test?”

  I nodded.

  The head nurse entered the room carrying a suspicious-looking, covered tray. She whispered in the chief’s ear, and he grinned and nodded.

  “Mr. Galen, stand up.”

  I stood up.

  “Your patient tested positive for syphilis. You know what that means don’t you?”

  I sat down again.

  Yes, I knew what it meant, and now I knew what was in the devil tray.

  Even today, one of the primary treatments for confirmed syphilis is a hefty dose of penicillin given through a Baltimore Harbor Tunnel-sized needle deep into the rump. Other available treatments are less onerous, but back in the year of my graduation penicillin in large doses was primo. If you were allergic to penicillin, you were forced to take equally large, oral doses of erythromycin guaranteed to cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

  “Mr. Galen, I said stand up!”

  One did not disobey one’s chief resident. I stood up again, sweat starting to form between my shoulder blades and slowly trickle down my back.

  “Drop trou’, Mr. Galen.”

  His wish was my command. I unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my white trousers, and let them fall to the floor.

  “Shorts down, too.”

  Boxers or briefs? Like a certain future president, I wore “tidy whities,” and they, too, dropped down around my ankles. I stood there, my legs spread apart, hands on the window ledge to steady myself for what was coming next.

  I was facing away from the lounge door. I had seen the resident close it and, since we were both guys and doctors, it wasn’t too embarrassing. I heard the lid of the metal tray come off. I felt the coolness of the alcohol-saturated cotton ball rubbed over my right buttock.

  There I was, bare bottom facing that hell-portal door, genitals swaying in the breeze of the air circulator, a shrunken pendulum responding to the fear-induced sympathetic nervous system.

  The chief resident barked, in what I thought was an unnecessarily loud voice, “Hold on, Galen!”

  The door flew open just as that stainless steel fire hose with a barb on the end penetrated my flesh. I tried to turn as the resident pressed on the plunger and the glue-like white goo spread through my gluteal muscle like liquid fire.

  “Hubba hubba! Way to go…” and other assorted, lewd comments emanated from the entire nursing staff crowding the doorway.

  I involuntarily jerked and said “unhh,” as the resident pulled out the needle. A few faint gasps and “hmmms” from the audience punctuated the motion. I took a deep breath and felt the flush rising up my neck to my face.

  “Okay, Galen, once more and we’re done.”

  I shivered as that cold alcohol wipe slid across my left rump. The crowd in the doorway began to chant, “Stick it in, stick it in!”

  Once more the fiery serpent spread, and this time my left gluteal went up in flames. Then with a yank the needle was out, and it was over. I pulled up my briefs to the accompaniment of whistles and “no, no, take it off, take it off!”

  Damned perverts!

  I pulled up my pants, zipped them, and turned around. Eleven pairs of hands clapped. Okay, I could play the game.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the next show will be in one hour.”

  I bowed, and they clapped louder.

  As I exited the lounge, a rather pretty young nurse winked at me and whispered, “Wow, eight inches!”

  I turned beet red again.

  A mal
e nurse, a retired army medic, also winked. I didn’t blush.

  I walked down the corridor, whatever dignity I once possessed now gone. I tried to exorcise the pain from my bottom. It didn’t work. I felt something wet running down the back of my legs and reached back—both hands were stained with blood. As I did so, a nurse came running up to me with a handful of paper towels.

  “Mr. Galen, you’re bleeding!”

  I grabbed the towels and ran to the bathroom. I wasn’t going to do another striptease in the hallway.

  Those large-bore needle punctures were perfect conduits for blood. The entire bottom of my trousers was stained with it. I stuck the paper towels in my underwear and went out to find the intern.

  “May I have permission to go and change into scrubs or get another pair of whites?”

  The bastard looked at my bloodstained trousers, then at me, and said, “No.”

  I worked the rest of the day enduring snide comments and questions about whether my cycle was early. One of my less-likeable classmates tried to get a rise out of me.

  “Hey, Galen, if you’re going to get syphilis at least have some fun.”

  I turned to the schmuck and flashed my best, angry-bear grin.

  He backed up a step.

  “Thanks, Murray, very thoughtful of you. Guess you don’t have to worry about things like that. I understand that sheep and goats don’t carry syph.”

  That evening at the apartment I shared the day with my roommate, Dave. I guess I groused and stomped so much he grew weary of it, because he got up and put his hand over my mouth.

  “Get outta those rags and take a shower, City Boy. You’ll feel better. Besides, you stink.”

  He was right. Blood does exude a unique odor as it ages.

  I lay on my bed, muscles loosened by the wondrous healing powers of running hot water. I was in fresh pajamas, and my Cecil’s Textbook of Medicine was open to the chapter on syphilis. I already knew most of what was in there, having read from Dr. Agnelli’s textbooks and seeing him treat patients at the clinic.