House of God

by Samuel Shem

  ‘No foolin’. I used to be in great shape, and look at the mess I’m in now. Pitiful, man, pitiful.’

  ‘She says it’s anger, that all of us are so pissed off we’re beginning to do strange things. With you, she says it’s all oral. She’s worried that you’re turning into an alcoholic.’

  He parked the car like an alcoholic, orthogonally to the House white lines. We got out and in unspoken defiance peed on the House lot. The two clouds of steam were a comfort.

  ‘So Berry’s a little worried about me, huh?’ asked Chuck.

  ‘Yup. More than a little. Hey, I’m worried about you too.’

  ‘Well, Roy, tell you a little secret: so am I, man, so am I.’

  The alarm went off. I separated myself from the hothouse under the covers with Berry. I groaned. Potts’s father had died and Potts had left for the funeral in Charleston and Eat My Dust Eddie was covering the ward for Potts and I had to cover for Eddie in the E.W., a twenty-four-hour shift. The morning was so cold that despite my bundling, when my ass hit the seat of the car the chill made me shake and chatter, and as I shivered my way down to the House, I thought about Wayne Potts.

  The strange thing about Potts was that he wasn’t acting strange. Perhaps he’d grown more quiet, more withdrawn. One night I’d found him sitting in the nursing station with a dazed look on his face, like that of a child at a funeral. ‘Oh, hi, Roy,’ he’d said. ‘You know, I just went to see the Yellow Man and I could have sworn he looked right at me and knew me, but then, when I looked again, he was the same as ever, eyes closed, comatose.’

  Potts plodded along. With his wife having multiple orgasms of power as an MBH surgical intern, Potts spent a lot of time alone. We’d get together, and I’d grown to like him. His Southern roots resonated with my love of the rootedness of England, of Oxford with its cameo pieces of strawberries and cream and champagne served on the smooth lawns in the fifteenth-century courtyards. We became friends partly through a shared contempt for the competitive Slurpers of the North, and a shared longing for permanence, for a solid past. We’d sit at his house talking and listening to blues and gospel, Potts’s favorite ballad being Mississippi John Hurt, on dying:

  When my earthly trials are over, cast my body down in the sea; save all the undertaker’s bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.

  One day we’d talked about how we’d gotten into medicine.

  ‘Well, I remember one summer at Pawley’s Island, I was about twelve. Mother had kicked Daddy out, and that summer my brother and my mother and me went to the shore. One day I spilled hot oil all over my hand, burned it real bad, and Mother rushed me back into Charleston to our family doc. His office was just these two big old rooms all mahogany-paneled with brass knobs and fixtures, apothecary drawers, urns, you know? He dressed my burn and said, “Boy, you like fishin’, don’t you?” “Yessir,” “What do you like to cetch, boy?” “Sea bass and bluefish, sir.” “Are the bluefish runnin’ yet?” “No, sir.” “Well, you see if we don’t have you back fishin’ by the time those bluefish are runnin,’ eh?” So I went to him every couple of days for him to change the dressing. He used some special ointment on it, and I remember once, after a week or so, he said to me, “Well, I’ve run outta that ointment, and I called up the company that makes it, New Jersey, but they say that some government bureau has banned its use in human beings, ‘cause it harmed some white mice. Now, there ain’t nothing wrong with that ointment, boy, and I know, ‘cause I’ve been using it for almost twenty years. So what I did was go out to my farm and get some I’ve been using on my horses. Works on them, reckon it’s gonna keep right on working’ on you.” Well, of course it did, and I healed up fine. I was catching bluefish that summer, just like he said. I drifted into hanging around with him, doing things on his rounds with him. The things I saw! Wherever he went, people opened their doors to him. He’d be up all night in a Negro shack delivering twins, and then his next call’d be at the grandest house on the East Battery, washing himself with their scented soap and served chickory coffee by the butler on the Bahamas porch, the sea breeze from Fort Sumter mixing with the honeysuckle from the garden in back. I did a lot with him, saw a lot, and wanted more than anything to be like him.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Oh, he’s still there. He’s waiting for me to finish up here and come on down and join him for a while, till he retires and I take over. I suppose it could be as soon as next year.’

  ‘Sounds great. Is that what you want to do?’

  ‘Yeah, but I guess it’s just a dream.’

  ‘Why just a dream?’

  ‘It’s not the kind of medicine I’m learning here, is it? I wouldn’t know one end of a twin delivery from another. And my wife doesn’t want to move away from the surgery program at the MBH. She doesn’t want to move to the South at all.’

  At the Leggo’s party, Berry had asked me which one was Potts, and I’d pointed him out. He was the only one without a name tag, and Berry asked me why that was.

  ‘He lost it.’

  ‘He didn’t get another?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound too healthy. Unless he’s being flamboyant.’

  ‘Potts flamboyant? No way.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like he cares too much about himself.’

  ‘You’re much too analytic,’ I said, getting irritated.

  ‘Maybe, but I’d worry about him, Roy.’

  ‘Thank you for your expert diagnosis. I’m not losing any sleep over Potts.’

  I had been wrong. One night I’d found myself lying awake thinking about him. I thought of his disappointments: his wife, his too-academic internship, his withering dream of going home to Charleston to be a doc there, his sad dog. I began to feel nervous. A few days before, Potts and I had been watching the Crimson Tide of Alabama roll over Georgia Tech on his TV in his bedroom. Next to his bed was a revolver, an unholstered loaded forty-four.

  I parked in the House lot and hurried toward the E.W. When I’d told Potts over the phone that I was sorry about his father’s death, he’d said, ‘I’m not. He died in the gutter after a fight with some other drunk. I figured it would end this way. I feel kinda relieved.’

  ‘Relieved?’

  ‘Yeah. You’ve got to understand, Roy: for years he used to walk into my bedroom when he thought I was asleep, and stand there in the dark staring at me. And every once in a while I’d see a glint of light off the barrel of the revolver he carried in his hand. I’m just going to the funeral to see Mother. Sorry you’ve got to cover for me. I’ll make it up to you.’

  And so it was a bone-chilling Sunday in the middle of the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, and I expected, in my twenty-four-hour shift, few major traumas and more the small stuff trying to get into God’s House for the warmth. How shortsighted, to think that on that Sunday I’d see only the products of that Sunday. Two thousand years previously Christ had bit the dust, hundreds of years ago some Renaissance red hot had thought up hospitals, fifty years ago some Jewish red hot had thought up the House, two months ago God had reincarnated winter, a few days ago some TV programmer had switched off a spine-tingling pro-football game to put on a return of that Teutonic grenade Heidi, elevating male blood pressures across the land, and one night ago, two crucial events had taken place: first, in the interest of ‘educating the public,’ there’d been a TV show on ‘the signs of heart attack’; second, it had been a Saturday night in a city gone sour. They were gonna get me. The question was how, and how bad.

  Even at eight A.M. the waiting room was full, mostly female, mostly black. Crazy Abe, jumping up and down amidst these women, screamed at me YOUR PROBLEM IS YOUR CIRCUMSISED YOUR PROB . . . At the nursing station, things were out of whack. Howard Greenspoon, looking pale, was sitting with Gath, Elihu, Cohen, and the two policemen, and Howie was drinking a cup of coffee, something I’d never before seen him do, since his IBM cards showed a positive correlation between cups of coffee and cancer of the bladd
er. Howie was telling the crowd what had happened:

  ‘I went into the bathroom on the second floor an hour ago, and I was in the toilet, and a guy opened the door, poked a shotgun in, and demanded my money. I gave him three bucks, and then I did a really stupid thing—I gave him my college ring. How could I? I loved that class ring, I really did. He didn’t even ask me for it, and I offered it to him. Why? WHY?’

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Gilheeny, ‘but better it gone and you here than vice versa.’

  Howie left, but the policemen stayed on, and Quick, explaining, said, ‘It is a season of terror, and we have been asked to serve another eight hours, until four P.M. Sixteen hundred in the military convention, is it not, Naval Officer Gath?’

  ‘Aye, aye, mutha,’ said Gath. ‘I shore wish we’d get some of that big stuff in heah, instead of all this vagitch. I feel so mean I could go bear huntin’ with a whip.’

  ‘A remarkable statement, and no less so than the night just past,’ said Gilheeny, ‘when Quick and I were summoned on police radio to a naked bar for an alleged shooting. We entered, the music stopped, all heads turned to us. The Law. Silence. “Too calm,” I whispered to Quick as we watched the barkeep slowly mop the floor and deny any shooting in his establishment. Then Quick supplied the clue.’

  ‘The slop the barman mopped was red. Beer is not red, and yet red blood is,’ said Quick.

  ‘I then spotted three men sitting too close together against the wall, and commanded them to move. They did, and the man in the middle fell over, dead. Such was their surprise that we refrained from having to “stick them” with our lead nightsticks, thus avoiding many months of work with Cohen around the gnawing question of guilt. A dangerous time.’

  ‘The raw red time when words give way to acts,’ said Quick.

  ‘We must all take care,’ said the redhead. ‘With luck we shall see you again at sixteen hundred in the fine post meridian. Good-bye.’

  They were gone, and fear and gloom coated my mind. The charts were already piling up, the main themes being anxious men who’d seen the TV special on ‘How to Have a Heart Attack’ and women with Sunday-morning belly pain. Picking up a chart, I ventured into the crotch of the day, my head ringing with the words COMPASSION and HATRED. There was no ‘big stuff,’ there was no humor, there was only the clear translation of black rage into, as Cohen put it, ‘the body ego.’ The main translation was into the abdomino-genito region, and I heard the chief complaint of ‘pain in my stomach’ over and over again, until there were quarts of urine to be looked at, tens of pelvic exams to do, and do carefully, for every once in a while there could be a ‘keeper.’

  With one particular woman came disaster. Having done the total work-up, and finding nothing, I’d gone back into the room to tell her I could find nothing wrong with her that I could treat. She accepted that, and began to put on her clothes, but her boyfriend did not, and said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, man. You mean to tell me you’re not going to do anything for her? Nothing?’

  ‘I can’t find anything I can treat.’

  ‘Listen, dude, my woman is in pain, real pain, and I want you to give her something for it.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s causing her pain, and I don’t want to give her anything, because if it gets worse, I want to know about it, and have her come back. I don’t want to mask what’s going on.’

  ‘Damn you, look at her, she’s suffering. Now, you gotta give her something for her pain.’

  I said I would not. I went back to the nursing station to write up my findings. The boyfriend pursued me, and although the woman was embarrassed and stood near the door wanting to leave, he would not, and began to use the crowded E.W. as a forum: ‘Goddamn you, I knew we wouldn’t get any help here. You just want her to suffer, ‘cause you enjoy it. You honkies don’t give a shit, as long as we get the hell out.’

  My temper rose, and I felt that warm limbic flush creeping about my ears, my neck. I wanted to jump the counter and beat the shit out of him, or have him beat the shit out of me. He couldn’t have known that I shared his sense of being a victim, his sense of despair about the wrecking of black women by forces out of control, his frustration with disease, with life. I even had grown to share his paranoia. I couldn’t tell him, and he couldn’t hear. Paralyzed by rage, both of us, the same rage that put bullets into the Kennedys and King. I ground my teeth and said, ‘I told you all I can tell you. That’s all.’ The nurses called House Security, who stood around flashing their fake West Point medallions until the man, tugged by the woman, left. I sat there shaking, drained. I couldn’t write up the chart; my hand was trembling too much. I couldn’t move.

  ‘You’re white as a sheet,’ said Cohen. ‘That guy really blasted you.’

  ‘I don’t know how I can take twenty-three more hours of this.’

  ‘The secret is to decathect. Withdraw your libidinal investment in what you’re doing. It’s like putting on a space helmet, and going around on autopilot. Emotionally, you withdraw, so that you’re not really there. Survival, eh?’

  ‘Yeah. I wish I did have a space helmet.’

  ‘Not a real space helmet. Decathexis is an inner space helmet. Almost all jobs are decathected, you know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause all jobs are boring, except this one. Try it.’

  I donned my imaginary space helmet, put myself on autopilot, and decathected like crazy. I waded through gallons of urine and immersed myself in the steady stream of frightened men from sixteen to eighty-six who’d seen the TV show and whose chief complaint was ‘chest pain.’ This TV show had served the primary purpose of confusing the American male about anatomy, since none of the chest pain was chest pain, but stomach pain, arm pain, back pain, groin pain, and one valid pain, in a big toe, which turned out to be gout. Wading through these normal EKGs, I felt a deep contempt for ‘educating the public’ about disease. Some TV. Evangelist was trying to hock ‘heart attacks’; terns across the country were being broken. The only MI I did see that day was a man my age, Dead on Arrival. My age. And here I was spending my few remaining pre-MI years trying to deaden myself, to survive.

  Midafternoon. Lull. Breathing a little easier inside my space helmet, thinking I might just make it. Suddenly the doors slammed open. I and Gath and Elihu were thrown into that surreal hyperacute time sense brought about by real disaster. Sirens blared, lights flashed, and there, carried by a priest on one side and Quick on the other, in came Gilheeny, sheet-white, the right side of his body all blood. We jumped up and in an instant were in the major-trauma room. Gilheeny was alive. In shock. As the nurse cut off his clothing and we put in the big lines and went over his vital parts—head heart lungs—we heard Quick, shaken, tell us what had happened:

  ‘There was a robbery at an ice-cream shop. We chased the thief, and he turned on us and emptied a shotgun into Finton.’

  ‘Officer Quick,’ said Gath, ‘you bettah leave the room.’

  I felt hyperalive, and found myself doing five things at once. Despite my concentrating on Gilheeny, I felt amazed that on a Sunday afternoon of the coldest day of the year, not only should some bastard rob a store, an ice-cream store, but that it should be done armed, and with a shotgun? How much cash could there have been in an ice-cream store on a freezing Sunday afternoon in winter? As I looked at the bloody mess that was the right side of the policeman’s body, I wanted to have the robber in the room, to beat the shit out of him.

  Gilheeny was lucky. His leg might not work right ever again, but it didn’t look like he was going to die. Gath, shaky as the rest of us, trying bravely to make a joke, told Gilheeny that OPERATIONS ARE GOOD FOR PEOPLE and that the redhead was about to have one. I sat with Gilheeny while he waited to go to the OR, making sure that nothing bad could happen. Quick came in, shaken, and sat down, and then in walked the priest and the biggest policeman I’d ever seen, with four stars on each shoulder, braids on his blue coat, a big gold badge, gray hair, and elegant orange tinty glasses.

  ‘To
p o’ the mornin’ to you, brave Sergeant Finton Gilheeny.’

  ‘Is it the Commissioner?’

  ‘None other. The young doctor says that with the aid of an operation, with the usefulness of the scalpel being demonstrated, you will survive.’

  So this peculiar speech pattern comes from the very top. I wondered how many years the Commissioner had served in God’s House.

  ‘Dr. Basch, I believe that I now have no need of the last rites. If so, could the priest depart? He scares me in the memory of how close to heaven or that hot other place I came.’

  ‘And is there a message for the little woman, the wife?’ asked the Commissioner as the priest left.

  ‘Ah, yes. Don’t call her, for you see, I told her always I would send someone by, and if you call her instead, she will think I am dead, and with the epileptic daughter and the wife continually having the nervous breakdowns, it would be a sorry mistake. So send someone by the house, sir, if you could.’

  ‘I will go myself. Oh—the robber has been caught. Yes,’ said the Commissioner, cracking his knuckles, ‘and after apprehending him, we asked him to “step outside for a moment for a private interrogation,” if you catch my drift. A long and careful “private interrogation,” for you are a dear policeman to us. Sure, and didn’t I myself hit him with a few hard interrogations? Ah, well, all the best, boyo and I’m on my way to your wife and will soothe her with my boyish good looks and TV-cop mien. Good-bye, and for the young scholar here who saved your fine red life, SHALOM and God bless.’

  Savage, all of it, savage. Gilheeny went to his operation, and Quick sat with us the rest of the day, shocked and drained. Abe, who had witnessed most of these events, went apeshit. Despite Cohen’s efforts, he kept screaming over and over I’M GONNA KILL THEM I’M GONNA KILL THEM and he was finally put in four-point restraints and carted off to the State Facility.