by Samuel Shem
We sat, finishing the bottle, as the Runt drifted off into his thing, sex. Identifying him, isolating him from the trauma of the ternship and the hurt he felt inside, his sloshing around in genitalia at times got out of hand. At one point I’d found him on the phone, red in the face, screaming into the receiver: ‘No I haven’t been home for a while and I’m not going to tell you where I’ve been staying. It’s none of your business.’ Capping the phone, the Runt had grinned his hall-of-mirrors grin and said it was his parents, and went on, ‘How’s my analysis going? I quit . . . June? I quit her too . . . I know she’s nice, Mother, that’s why I quit her. I got a nurse now, a hot one you should see her . . .’ I’d promised myself that if the Runt started to tell his mother what Angel did with her mouth, I’d grab the phone and take over. ‘Goddamnit, Mother, stop it! . . . All right, you wanna know what she does? Well, you should see what she does with her—’
‘Hello, Dr. Runtsky?’ I said, snatching the phone from the Runt. ‘This is your son’s friend Roy Basch.’ Two doctors’ voices said hello. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, folks, Harold is doing just fine.’
‘He seems very angry at me,’ said Dr. Mrs. Runtsky.
‘Yeah, well, it’s just a little primary-process stuff,’ I said, thinking of Berry, ‘just a little regression. But what the hell, eh?’
‘Yes,’ said the two analysts en chorale, ‘that must be it.’
‘I know this nurse, she’s very nice. Don’t worry. So long.’
The Runt had been furious at me, saying, ‘I’ve been waiting to do that for ten years.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Why not? They’re my parents.’
‘That’s why not, Runt, ‘cause they’re your parents.’
‘So?’
‘So you can’t go around telling your parents about some nurse sliding around on your face!’ I’d screamed. ‘Christ Almighty, don’t you use your higher cortical centers anymore at all?’
The Runt had become pure testosterone. Neither Chuck nor I wanted to hear the latest thunderous Harold Runtsky fuck, and so we started to leave. Before he left us, the Runt asked if we noticed anything different about him. ‘I’m not yellow,’ he said. ‘It’s been over six months since I got stuck with the needle from the Yellow Man, and I’m not yellow. The incubation period’s passed. I’m not going to die.’
While it cheered me to think that Runt was not dying, except at the rate we all were dying, I thought of Potts and what a terrible time he was having. The Yellow Man was still in coma, neither alive nor dead. Potts had suffered one disappointment after another, the most recent being his having to handle his mother as she raged at his father’s funeral. Last time I’d seen him, he’d said he was down, that he felt like he used to feel as a kid when his family closed up the Pawley’s Island summerhouse for the winter, with his mother emptying his room of all the things he loved, and him looking back before leaving, at the bare floor, the sheet over his chair, his one-eyed doll propped up on the brass railings of his bed. Although he was contemptuous of the North, he was too polite to put his bitterness into words. He became more quiet. My questions, my invitations, seemed to echo in his empty rooms. He made it hard to be his friend.
Leaving Chuck in the MICU, I said, ‘Hey, you got a great voice. Not a good voice, Chuckie baby, a great, great voice.’
‘I know it. Be cool, Roy, be cool.’
It was hard to be cool in Gomer City that night. The usual horrendous things had gone wrong with the gomers. At midnight I was hunched over a Rose Room Rose, slamming the bed with my fist and hissing I HATE THIS I HATE THIS over and over again. But it was Harry the Horse who did me in. Humberto and I had planned carefully: assuring Harry he could stay, we planned that night to zonk him with Valium and the next morning drive him to the nursing home ourselves. We had told no one of this, not even Fats. Early in the morning I was awakened by the nurse saying that Harry was in a crazy cardiac rhythm and having a chest pain and looking like he was dying and should she call a cardiac arrest? I yelled, awakening Humberto from the top bunk, shot to my feet, started to race out the door with Humberto following close behind, stopped suddenly so that Humberto slammed into me like a Keystone Kop, and said to him, ‘Stay here, amigo. At your stage of training you shouldn’t see something like this.’ I raced to Harry’s room, where he was saying HEY DOC WAIT and clutching his chest, and eye to eye with him I screamed, ‘Who told you, Harry? Who told you you were going back to the home?’ Knowing that now he could stay in the House, Harry said:
‘P . . . P-p-p . . . Putzel.’
‘Putzel? Putzel’s not your doctor, Harry. Little Otto is your doctor. You mean Dr. Kreinberg, right?’
‘No . . . p-p-p-p. . . . Putzel.’
Putzel? And so Harry had succeeded in infarcting just enough more of his ventricle to stay in Gomer City for another six weeks, which was two weeks longer than me or Eddie or Fats or Hooper, and so he’d have fresh new terns and residents whom he could fool much more easily because they probably would inform him when he was about to be TURFED out and he could go into his infarcting rhythm with plenty of time to spare. I had lost. Harry the Horse had won.
On the way back to bed I passed the room with Saul the leukemic tailor. My tormenting him with my attempt, against his will, for a second remission had made him much worse. Comatose, by most legal criteria he was dead. He would not recover and yet I could keep him alive for a long time. I looked at the pale form. I listened as the pebbles of phlegm ebbed and flowed in his waves of breath. He could no longer beg me to finish him off. His wife, suffering and spending their retirement income, had become bitter, saying to me, ‘Enough is enough. When will you let him die?’ I could finish him off. I was tempted. It was impossible to shut out. I hurried past his doorway. I tried to sleep, but the phan-tasmagorical night whirled on, and by dawn so many things had happened to shatter me that I found myself standing at the elevator door waiting for it to come down so I could go up to Gomer City for the day’s cardflip, enraged, and about to blow.
The elevator wasn’t moving. I waited and bashed on the button and still it wasn’t moving. All of a sudden I went kind of nuts. I started banging on the elevator door, kicking the polished metal at the bottom, and hammering the polished metal at the top and screaming COME ON DOWN, YOU BASTARD, COME ON DOWN. Part of me wondered what the hell I was doing, but still I kept banging and kicking and screaming like an acromegalic cretin in labor screaming at her fetus COME ON DOWN, YOU BASTARD, COME ON DOWN!
Luckily, Eat My Dust Eddie came along and guided me to the cardflip. When I asked him if he thought I’d gone off the deep end he said, ‘Deep end? Ha! Roy, I think you were giving that elevator just what the fucker always deserved!’
That morning at the cardflip, thinking of how Putzel had putzeled my discharge of Harry the Horse, I decided to counterattack, to start a rumor. I asked Eddie if he’d heard the rumor about how some tern had threatened to assassinate Putzel, to put a bullet through his brain, and Eddie said, ‘Hey, high-powered medicine! Just what the fucker always deserved!’
‘Why a bullet?’ asked Hyper Hooper. ‘Wire his sigmoidoscope: when he presses the starter button, it explodes!’
‘Listen to me, you guys,’ said Fats, ‘you’ve got to lay off Putzel. Kill this rumor right here and now.’
‘You worried about your Fellowship?’ I asked, taunting him.
‘I’m worried about my A Team. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re not going to make it through. Believe me, I know. I was there.’
‘Go for the jugular,’ said Eat My Dust, as if he hadn’t heard a word Fats had said, ‘go for the booby-trapped scope. Kaboom.’ As he thought it over, Eddie’s eyes got big, and he licked his lips, and then he yelled, ‘KAABOOOMM!’
Two nights later, when I was on call again, Berry insisted on coming in. Concerned with what she called my ‘manic’ behavior and my ‘borderline’ descriptions of what the gomers were doing to me and I to them, she thought that s
eeing for herself might help. She also wanted to meet Fats. Humberto and I took her around Gomer City. She saw them all. At first she tried to talk with the gomers as she would human beings, but recognizing the futility, she soon became silent. After our last stop, the Rose Room, where I insisted she listen through my stethoscope to the asthmatic breathing of a Rose, she looked shell-shocked.
‘Hey, a great case, that last Rose, eh?’ I said sarcastically.
‘It makes me sad,’ said Berry.
‘Well, the ten-o’clock meal will cheer you right up.’
At the ten-o’clock meal she watched as we interns played ‘The Gomer Game,’ where someone would call out an answer, like ‘Nineteen hundred and twelve,’ an answer given by a gomer, and the rest of us would try to come up with questions to the gomer that might have produced that answer, such as, ‘When was your last bowel movement?’ or ‘How many times have you been admitted here?’ or ‘How old are you?’ or ‘What year is it?’ or even ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Yippeee?’
‘Sick,’ Berry said afterward in a somber, almost angry tone, ‘it’s sick.’
‘I told you the gomers were awful.’
‘Not them, you. They make me sad, but the way you treat them, making fun of them, like they were animals, is sick. You guys are sick.’
‘Ah, you’re just not used to it,’ I said.
‘You think that if I were in your shoes I’d get that way too?’
‘Yup.’
‘Maybe. Well let’s get it over with. Take me to your leader.’
We found Fats on Gomer City doing a manual disimpaction of Max the Parkinsonian. Double-gloved and surgically masked to filter out the smell, Teddy and Fats were digging at the endless stream of feces in Max’s megacolon, while from Max’s huge purple-scarred bald head came an endless stream of FIX THE LUMP FIX THE LUMP FIX THE LUMP. From Teddy’s radio poured Brahms. The smell was overpoweringly fresh shit.
‘Fats,’ I said from the doorway, ‘meet Berry.’
‘What?’ asked Fats, surprised. ‘Oh, no. Hello, Berry. Basch, you schlemiel, you don’t want her to see this. Get out of here. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
‘I’m here to see,’ said Berry, ‘tell me what you’re doing.’
She went in. Fats began to tell her what they were doing, but when the waves of smell hit her, Berry covered her mouth and rushed out of the room.
Fats turned on me angrily. ‘Basch, sometimes you act like a marine at “brain rest,” a retard. Teddy, finish up. I’ve got to talk to the poor woman saddled with young numbskull Basch.’
When Berry came out of the Ladies’, she looked like she’d been crying. Seeing Fats, she said, ‘How . . . how can you? It’s disgusting.’
‘Yeah,’ said Fats, ‘it is. How can I? Well, Berry, when we get old and disgusting, who’s gonna doctor us? Who’s gonna care? Someone’s got to do it. We can’t just walk away.’ Looking sad, he said, ‘Seeing you react this way brings back just how disgusting it is. It’s awful; we’re forced to forget. So? So come on,’ he said, putting his thick arm around her shoulders, ‘come on into my office. I got a special stash of Dr Pepper. At times like this, a Dr Pepper helps.’
They started for the on-call room, and I followed, saying, ‘Great case, Fats. You know, Berry, most people are like you and me, they hate shit, but Fats loves it. Going into GI work himself.’
‘Stop it, Roy,’ Berry snapped.
‘When a GI man is looking up the barrel of a sigmoidoscope, you know what you got?’
‘STOP IT! Go away. I want to talk with Fats alone.’
‘Alone? Why?’
‘Never mind. Go away.’
Angry and jealous, I watched them walk off, and I yelled after them, ‘You got shit looking at shit, that’s what!’
Fats turned and angrily said, ‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘Hurt your feelings, Fats?’
‘No, but it hurts hers. You can’t use our inside jokes with the ones outside all this, the ones like her.’
‘Sure you can,’ I said, ‘they need to see—’
‘THEY DON’T!’ yelled Fats. ‘They don’t need to, and they don’t want to. Some things have to be kept private, Basch. You think parents want to hear schoolteachers making fun of their kids? Use your damn head. You got a good woman here, and believe me they’re not easy to find and keep, especially if you’re a doctor. It makes me angry to see the way you treat her.’
An hour later they paged me to come in. It felt like a military tribunal. Berry said she and Fats were worried about me, about my bitter sarcasm and rage.
‘I thought you told me to express what I feel,’ I said.
‘In words,’ said Berry, ‘not in acts. Not in taking it out on patients and doctors—Fats told me about your rumor about Dr. Putzel.’
‘They’ll get you, Roy,’ said Fats, ‘you’ll get it in the neck.’
‘They can’t do anything to me. They can’t run the House without interns. I can do whatever I want. I’m indispensable. Invulnerable.’
‘It’s dangerous. Externalization is a brittle defense.’
‘Here we go again,’ I said. ‘What’s externalization?’
‘Seeing the conflict as outside of you. The problem isn’t outside of you, it’s inside. When you see that, something’s going to snap.’
‘That’s the way it’s gotta be, to survive.’
‘It’s not. Look at Fats—he’s got a healthy way of dealing with this incredible situation. He uses compassion, humor. He can laugh.’
‘I can laugh,’ I said, ‘I laugh too.’
‘No you don’t. You scream.’
‘You’re the one who used to call him cynical, sick. And he’s the one who taught me to call these nice old people “gomers.”’
‘He hasn’t killed off the caring part of himself. You have.’
‘Look,’ said Fats seriously, ‘let’s stop, eh? We can’t tell him what to do. If you can imagine it, last year I was a helluva lot worse than him, and nobody could tell me anything. Even last July I was worse. This year is yours, Roy. I know how it is—it’s hell.’
‘This Putzel thing scares me,’ said Berry. ‘Why him?’
‘Because every day he stands in front of his mirror, and straightening his bowtie, he says to himself: “You know, Putzie-poops, you are one great physician. Not a good physician, no. A great physician.” I hate him. You think you’re scared? You should see him. Shaking in his shoes! Ready to crack! HA!’
‘It’s not Putzel, it’s you,’ said Berry. ‘You hate something inside of you. Get it?’
‘I don’t, and it’s not. Fats knows what an asshole Putzel is.’
‘Don’t do it, Roy,’ said Berry, ‘you’ll only hurt yourself.’
‘Fats?’
‘Putzel’s a turkey,’ said Fats, ‘a money-grubbing, incompetent piece of dreck. True. But he’s not the monster you make him out to be. He’s a harmless wimp. I feel sorry for him. Lay off. Whatever you’re planning, don’t do it.’
I did it. I’d given the rumor a week to gnaw on Putzel. My time had come. I found Putzel holding a Rose’s hand, and I crept up in back of him. I whispered in his ear: ‘I’ve had it with you, Putzel. Within the next twenty-four hours, I swear it, I’m going to do you in.’
Putzel leaped up off the bed, gave me a panic-stricken look, and ran out of the room. I walked out into the corridor and watched the little emperor of the bowel run, keeping his back to the walls and intermittently ducking into doorways as if he were afraid of a bullet, race off down the hall. I ambled off toward rounds.
I never made it. Two Bouncers from House Security attacked me, twisted my arms behind me, and carried me into the on-call room. They stood me up against the wall and frisked me for a weapon and sat me down facing Lionel, the Fish, Fats, and, quaking in a corner, Putzel. ‘Hey, what the hell’s going on?’ I asked. Everyone looked at Putzel until he said, ‘I heard a rumor about some intern was going to kill me and then . . . and then he whisper
ed in my ear that in the next twenty-four hours he was going to do me in.’
I waited until the silence had become unbearable and then in a calm voice I said, ‘What did you say?’
‘You said you were going to . . . to do me in.’
‘Dr. Putzel,’ I asked incredulously, ‘have you gone mad?’
‘You said it! I heard you say it! Don’t deny it to me!’
I denied it to him, said that anyone who thought that an intern in the House of God would threaten to kill a Private Doctor of the House of God had gone mad and told the Bouncers to let me go.
‘No! Don’t let him go!’ screamed Putzel, hugging the wall like a terrified maniac.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m just an intern trying to do my job. I can’t take responsibility for that nut. See you later, eh?’
‘NO! NOOooo!’ wailed Putzel, rolling his eyes like a nut.
‘What do you think we should do?’ the Bouncers asked the Fish.
‘I don’t know,’ said the Fish. ‘Fats?’
‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said Fats. ‘One thing’s for sure: Dr. Putzel is acting mighty strange.’
‘It’s the strangest thing,’ said the Leggo, as I sat in his office, which was the only place they’d decided it was safe to send me, ‘yes, the strangest . . .’ and he drifted off into that place out his window where the answers to strange things might be found. ‘I mean, you didn’t in fact threaten to kill—no, of course you didn’t!’ said the Leggo, his consternation turning his horrific birthmark even more purple.
‘How could I have, sir?’
‘Exactly. It’s extraordinary.’
‘Can I speak in confidence?’
‘Fire away,’ he said, bracing himself for yet another shock.
‘To me, this means that Dr. Putzel is a sick man.’
‘Sick? A House Private sick, Roy?’
‘Overworked. Needs a rest. And who doesn’t, sir? Who doesn’t?’
The Chief paused, as if perplexed, and then brightened and came up with the answer: ‘Why, no one doesn’t. No one doesn’t at all. I’ll tell Dr. Putzel he needs a rest just like everyone else. Thanks, Roy, and keep right on in there plugging.’
