House of God

by Samuel Shem

  ‘Plugging? For what?’

  ‘For what? Why . . . why, for the Awards. Yes, keep plugging for the Awards.’

  I felt good. Maybe I even felt grand. My only twinge of regret was that I had stepped out on my own, leaving behind Berry and Fats, the ones who claimed to care, the ones I’d counted on to save me.

  17

  It was all the rage, that Watergate March, and many Great Americans took the opportunity to explode. Jane Doe, bloated and floated by the infusion of the VA antibiotic, started with a little squeeping fart caught on the Fat Man’s alert stopwatch, and then, with the rest of us watching, went on to rage at us with a great cacophony of orchestrated farts and then liquid farts and finally a blasting of her bowels and a continual gushing of what seemed like eternal stool. Richard Nixon, bloated by power and doubt, started with a little bark when named by Judge Sirica as an unindicted co-conspirator of the Watergate Boys, and went on to rage in a farting cornucopia on national TV, convincing almost every Great American by his overreaction and gushing paranoiac railing at other Great Americans that he was as guilty as anyone had imagined. We were all much relieved that no matter what else, we’d all have Nixon to laugh at and kick around for quite a good while longer. In some ways, after Vietnam, it was just what the country needed: a President so lacking in grace.

  In Gomer City, we terns exploded as well. First to go was Eat My Dust Eddie. Bent under his own sadomasochism, he broke. He took himself OTC on every gomer until his service was being run by his BMS, and Eddie would talk about gomers only in terms of ‘How can I hurt this guy today?’ or ‘Some of them want us to kill them and some of them don’t, and I wish they’d make up their minds ‘cause it gets confusing.’ The BMS couldn’t stand the strain and soon gave in to Eddie’s perverted thoughts, and one day when a particularly recalcitrant gomere shrieked PO-LICE! PO-LICE! for several hours, Eddie and his BMS borrowed uniforms and appeared at the bedside and said, ‘Yes, madam, this is Patrolman Eddie and Officer Katz. What can we do to help?’

  ‘Why are you tormenting them?’ Fats would ask.

  ‘’Cause they’re tormenting me,’ Eddie would say, ‘they’ve got me on my knees, do you hear me? ON MY KNEES!’

  When his wife started to have labor pains, all hell broke loose. The day his wife delivered, Eddie showed updressed in his black motorcycle gear: hat and boots and black wraparound reflecting sunglasses and black leather jacket with

  * * *

  * * * EAT MY DUST * * *

  * * * EDDIE * * *

  * * *

  in silver studs on the back, and went around to see his gomers with his flash camera taking portraits ‘to remember them by.’ The place came apart. Terrified, the gomers began to shriek. The ward began to sound and smell like a zoo. Every House Hierarchy sent a representative and we found Eddie sitting calmly in the on-call room, boots up on the desk, grinning ear to ear and reading Rolling Stone. To any inquiries all he would say was, ‘They’ve broken me. I’m OTC.’ Later, when he asked me if I thought he was being unreasonable, against my better judgment, thinking of what he’d said to me when I was banging on the elevator door, I said, ‘Unreasonable? Ha! I think you were giving them just what they always deserved.’

  ‘He’s crazy,’ I said to Fats.

  ‘Yeah. Delusional. A paranoid psychosis. It’s terrible to watch. Ah, well, Basch, they’ll have to give him a rest.’

  ‘They can’t,’ I said. ‘There’s no one to fill in for him.’

  ‘No one doesn’t need a rest,’ said the Leggo to the Fish, as they discussed what to do about Eddie. ‘No one at all. Why, look at poor Dr. Putzel. I’ll tell Eddie he needs a rest just like everyone else.’

  ‘And who will fill in for him?’ asked the Fish.

  ‘Who? Why, the others. My boys will all pitch in and help.’

  The next day Eddie was not at the cardflip, and when I called him at home he said, ‘I’m OTC for a while. I’m sorry to do this to you guys, but the Leggo won’t let me back into the House. He thinks if I stayed there any longer I might kill one of the gomers and the House would get sued. He might just be right.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘let’s face it: you were getting close.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea, though, would it?’

  ‘It’s illegal. How’s the baby?’

  ‘Oh, you mean the gomere?’ Eddie said.

  ‘The gomere?’

  ‘Yeah, the gomere: incontinent of feces and urine, unable to walk or talk, not oriented, and sleeping in restraints at night. The gomere. Room 811. I don’t know how she is ‘cause they won’t let me into the House to see her.’

  ‘They won’t let you see your own baby?’

  ‘Yeah. I told them I wanted to take some pictures and they took away my camera, so I’m temporarily OTC with my own baby gomere, too.’

  The Fish told Hooper and me that to pitch in and help take up the slack created by Eddie’s snapping, he and the Leggo had decided that we would be on call every other night for our last weeks on Gomer City but that we get special consideration.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ I said, ‘I hope it’s not “the toughies” again.’

  ‘Not the toughies,’ said the Fish. ‘The “preferential treatment.”’

  Preferential treatment was being skipped in the admission rotation once per day. This sounded good until it turned out that skipping a daytime admission resulted in our being awakened at three A.M. for the gomer beelining it in from the Mt. St. Elsewhere via the Grenade Room to Gomer City, courtesy of Marvin and the Blazers. Every other night, this three-A.M. special was the worst. After a week of the preferential treatment Humberto and Teddy and I were going almost as mad as Eddie. Teddy was first to go. His ulcer had started to act up. Muttering something about ‘the cramps,’ or maybe ‘the camps,’ he left.

  Next to go, for me, was Molly. Strained by Gomer City, my thing with Molly had been fading for months, and when the preferential treatment had me on call for thirty-six hours and off for twelve, outside the House all I did was sleep. Once in a while I’d see Molly on the upstairs ward, and it was clear that she was losing interest in me. One day I found Howard helping her to make up a bed. I was shocked. Hot oil and myrrh for Howie? I asked Molly what was going on.

  ‘Well, yes, I’ve been seeing Howard Greenspoon. He’s the tern on this ward now. I guess I can’t understand you anymore, Roy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve become so cynical. You make fun of these poor patients.’

  ‘Everyone makes fun of these poor patients.’

  ‘Not Howard Greenspoon. He treats them with respect. I mean, it’s like you’re making fun of what I do. Remember how you walked out of that arrest on the man dying from multiple myeloma?’

  ‘Yeah, but it was a big mess.’

  ‘Maybe, but Howard stayed right until the end.’

  ‘Howie? You and me used to make fun of Howie!’ I said.

  ‘Maybe so, but people change, you know. Look: I’ve had to work hard to get where I am. I can’t help it if things always came easy to you, and you just coasted into medicine. When you were getting patted on the head, I was getting whacked by the nuns. Do you know how big and scary a nun all in black is to a little girl? Probably not. Well, Howard says he does.’

  ‘He does?’ I said, thinking maybe Howie wasn’t a dumb shnook after all.

  ‘He certainly does. He’s sincere. No one could call you that.’

  ‘So I’ve got to hand in my gold cleats, eh?’

  ‘Oh, Roy,’ she said, remembering the loving, snuggling up to me, ‘I don’t know. I still care. I guess it depends on what Howie says.’

  Jesus! My myrrh depended on Howie! Howie, the tern who felt like a hero every time he put a feeding tube down someone’s demented grandmother, who puffed up with pride when he marched into an elevator filled with nondoctors and heard the whispers, ‘There’s one of them, a doctor.’ Howie, who bought the fantasy that doctors weren’t just people, doctors were ‘bette
r’ people. Howie, who would woo Molly and do all those sexual things he’d only imagined doing, with Molly, and think he loved Molly and get back at his parents by marrying Molly the shiksa nurse and have three kids and then, and then, fifteen years down the pike when Molly awoke and realized that by marrying Howie she was only getting back at the nuns, and what the hell, why not fuck with the macho guy who came to repair her washer-dryer and why not leave Howie, and then, fifteen years down the pike, Howie, awakening to the notion that as a husband-father-lover he’d been screwed by his fanatic dedication to medicine and that even in medicine he couldn’t ‘cure’ anyone of anything, he’d check into the motel room alone and for the first time in his life, in shock, have to haggle out his one real decision: whether or not to peg out painlessly with the five grams of phenobarb he’d lifted from the hospital pharmacy when he’d found out that his wife and kids had left. Should I fight? Should I challenge Howie for Molly? Nah, it was too much of an effort now, and she was right: I’d become too cynical, too destructive for her.

  Hyper Hooper and I cried differently from Eat My Dust. Although death and Hooper were still going steady and with Eddie on a pitstop at home Hooper was racing even harder for the Black Crow, under the stress of Gomer City Hooper had begun acting like a gomer. He’d gotten thin, almost scrawny, and neglected his personal hygiene. He began to rock, like a schizophrenic or an old Jew at prayer. Having lost his wife, he was now losing his pathologist. On occasion I’d find him sleeping next to Jane Doe in an armchair recliner, mouth in O SIGN, and when the Fish insisted we go on walk rounds, Hooper would slip into a wheelchair and wheel himself around, singing Jane’s chromatic scale. If the Fish reprimanded, him, he’d turn and say, ‘Physician, wheel thyself.’ The real problem arose when Hooper took to sleeping in the electric gomer beds in restraints, and one day when I came in and found him in an ankle cast and asked him what had happened, he said only GOMERS GO TO GROUND. He’d done just that, fracturing a small bone in his ankle, which enabled him to make rounds in his wheelchair every day.

  Our final explosion took place at one Sociable C. Rounds. Rocking, chattering, punning, laughing, Hooper and I managed to blast every House Hierarchy. We fought with Lionel over perverted Sam, the Man Who Ate Everything, who, when we’d found him eating our food stashes day after day, we’d TURFED directly out to the icy street, and refused to readmit. The Blazers had readmitted him to floor eight, trying to convince us to take him back. When Selma, amazed, asked Lionel who was taking care of him, with his diabetes and his sexual perversions, Lionel had said, ‘We are, the staff of HELP.’ ‘You?’ asked Selma. ‘HELP is treating his diabetes? That’s illegal.’ I perked up and said, ‘From what I know of those petunias in HELP, Selma, they may not know how to treat his diabetes, but they sure as hell will get off on his perversions.’ Lionel got up to storm out, and lying down on my back in his path, I cried out, ‘Help, Selma, heelllp! I looked up, and all I saw was Blue Blazers!’ We antagonized Salli and Bonni for stopping Eddie’s TURF of the Lady of the Lice—he’d neglected to put down on her three-part placement form who would meet her in St. Louis—mentioning in passing the word ‘cunts,’ which sent both of them and our female BMS flying out of the room. Finally the meeting turned to mayhem when Hooper and I began rocking in synch and muttering ‘autoeroticism, the only way.’ The Fish, eyes popping like a red snapper’s, took charge and organized a STAT field trip to Chinatown for lunch.

  How could we have known that during our happy Chinese lunch a rumble had begun in the House of God, and that this rumble had already begun feeding into older, deeper rumbles within the Leggo, our Chief. Each affronted Hierarchy had given the Leggo a buzz, and he was enraged. Returning to the House, fat and happy, imagine our surprise when we saw the Leggo appear at the far end of the corridor, rolling toward us. As he came closer and closer, we could see that he had a smile on his face that no one had ever seen before. Trembling, the Fish turned to Hooper and me and said, ‘You better watch out, guys, you’re really going to get it.’ Amazed and surprised, Hooper and I stared at each other. In his eyes was reflected my own incomprehension: why would the Leggo get us? What was so bad about what we had done?

  We braced ourselves for the shock. The stiff legs moved closer, the raging smile spread wider until itlooked as if it would split the tight face open and spill whatever hid under that purple birthmark right out onto the floor of Gomer City. When he was so close I could read the brand name on his stethoscope as it ducked down into the jungle of his genitals, in a bizarre fashion that might have been the MSG in the Chinese food, not one but two arms swiveled and two long hands reached out and came to rest on two scapulae, one of the Fat Man and one of the Fish. Staring at them, the Leggo demanded: ‘Who is responsible? Someone is responsible for these poor interns, for this disaster of a ward. It is my job to find out who. You two, come with me.’

  ‘It took all I had,’ said Fats afterward, ‘but I did manage to finesse him, at least most of him. Logically, he was trapped. He had two choices: take it out on you terns, or take it out on the ones responsible for you terns. Having already lost Eddie, it was clear that he couldn’t take it out on you. He had to take it out on those responsible. While I may be responsible for you, it is also true that the Fish is responsible for me, and guess who’s responsible for the Fish?’

  ‘The Chief.’

  ‘Exactly. So he was stuck. I managed to finesse that part, the logic, but I couldn’t finesse what the Leggo felt. You see, the Leggo didn’t mind what you’d done to the Lady of the Lice, or to Sam the hungry pervert, Putzel, the Blazers, the Nurses, the BMSs, to Tina or Harry or Jane or the Roses that Hooper keeps killing. He didn’t even mind your setting House records for lowest temperature in a living human being, most organs hit with a single needle shot, or most tests of the bowel run in a single night. In many ways, he thought you’d done a terrific job, especially as regards postmortems. But the thing that he was bullshit about was you guys not liking him. He can’t stand your being cool toward him. He suspects you even make fun of him behind his back—imagine that. When you show him you don’t like him, you hit a nerve, and when that happens, he goes ape. No one can finesse the ape.’ Pensively Fats went on, ‘Of course, for my share of the responsibility, he’s delaying writing my Fellowship Letter again. I keep worrying that it’ll be Samoa. The last thing he said to me was, “Whatever you boys do, don’t do anything else. Do nothing, understand?” Imagine him saying that to me.’

  ‘You told him, of course,’ I said, ‘that doing nothing was your greatest invention, the delivery of medical care?’

  ‘Right. Why stop at Samoa. Go for broke and get the Gulag.’

  Fats fell silent. Hooper left, and I asked Fats what was on his mind. ‘Well, maybe this is more serious than I think. Maybe this is trouble. All the way from Brooklyn, all those exams and scrabbling, all that effort to land me here in the bigtime, on the verge of the big Hollywood “Hello Fats!” and I just had the thought that maybe it’ll all fall down. I don’t like it. This may be good-bye L.A., good-bye dreams. Sometimes it seems like it just doesn’t pay, does it, Basch?’

  ‘Does what?’

  ‘To imagine. To dream.’

  Potts stood before me in the darkness of two A.M. in Gomer City, and mirrored in his gray face was, as always, the Yellow Man.

  ‘What are you doing here at this hour?’ I asked, but he didn’t reply, he just stood there staring. Again I asked what was going on.

  ‘The Yellow Man just died.’

  I felt a chill. Potts looked white and chill, and his eyes looked dull and dead, and I said, ‘I’m sorry. I mean, I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Potts, fidgeting as if he wasn’t really in the same world with me any longer, ‘yeah, well, he was going to die, it was just a matter of . . . of time.’

  ‘Yeah, he was,’ I said, and I thought about how much torment Potts had gone through every day that the Yellow Man had been alive. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Who, m
e? Oh, yeah, I am. It’s just a little hard . . . I didn’t ask for a post. I didn’t want to get one,’ said Potts, almost pleading with me that it was all right.

  ‘It’s OK. I know how you feel. I didn’t ask for a post on Dr. Sanders. Sit down and talk about it, eh?’

  ‘No, I think I’ll just go upstairs and see him once more and then maybe take a walk.’

  ‘Right. I’ll be down here if you change your mind.’

  ‘Thanks. You know, I should have given him the steroids.’

  ‘Stop it. Nothing would have helped.’

  ‘Yeah, well, steroids might have helped. Well, anyway, we sure had some fun the other night with Otis, didn’t we?’

  ‘Sure did, Wayne. We’ll do it again, eh?’

  ‘Yeah. Soon. If I can find the time.’

  As I watched him slip away down the corridor and disappear into the up elevator, I thought of the fun we’d had. I’d gone over to his house, and although it was depressing with the place a mess and with that loaded revolver by the bed, Potts and I had taken Otis out for a run in the March chill, and we’d talked about the South. Potts had told me about Mrs. Bagley’s Dancing Class held at the country club every Friday night. Mrs. Bagley, an immigrant, would come out in a chiffon dress with a cinched waist and pop the needle into the groove and out would come the Charelles. They learned to dance pressing a walnut between their noses, and the big event, year after year, was on the last Friday night when Potts and his less tame but still Old Family buddies would roll B-B pellets onto the polished oak floor during a slam-banging one two three one two three Roll Out the Barrel polka. I’d thought it strange, that day, that Potts hadn’t even mentioned his father’s recent violent death.

  I realized suddenly what was going to happen! Fool! I ran to the elevator and pounded on it, but it wasn’t moving, and I raced up the stairs to floor eight, and I kept cursing myself for not realizing it in time and praying that I had or that I was wrong.