The house of God

Berry and I had thought that we might try living together, but when we found out that my being on call turned me into a snarling bear, we'd decided that it was not a good idea. We'd also decided that we'd not see each other the night after my night on call, because all we did was bicker and bitch. That left only one night in three, the night that I was supposedly not exhausted. With our contact decreased, with Molly zinging through my rectos abdominus and ball?tingling cremaster muscle groups, with Berry the Clinical Psychologist off into mind and with me off into body, we began to drift apart. I began to think her cat hated me.

We tried hard to enjoy the fall. We went to a football game, but instead of the bright cheeriness I remembered from going to football games in college, the day turned cold and wet and somber, filling us both with the dread of winter. Exhausted, more or less in silence, skin catching on the rough edges of our love, we dragged back to my apartment, and Berry, feeling woozy with the flu, curled up in my bed with her cat. A, safe warm fetal ball, she slept. Her cat, eyes closed to me, purred. She snored. I felt so much in love with her, with protecting her from the flu and the world and my wry and guilt, that I was filled with joy. But as my joy for what had been and could be showed itself, my sadness for what had' happened to us crushed it. What a terrific turd I was.

She awoke, we talked. We talked about the gomers and about how furious Jo and the Fish and the Leggo making me, and about how Berry couldn't Possibly understand.

"You know what your problem is?" she asked.

"What?"

"You've got no role models. You can't look up to any of them."

"What about the Fat Man?"

"He's sick."

"He's not," I said, starting to get angry. "Besides there's Chuck and the Runt and Hooper and Eat My Dust. And Potts."

"Oh, sure, there's the camaraderie, and you're right, the only reason men go to war is to die with then buddies, but it seems to me that what's happening to you is the total institutionalization of the internship, a la Goffman."

"What did you say?" I asked as evenly as possible, swallowing my rage at her high?ass theory of my pain.

She started to repeat it, and seeing that the wordsweren't registering, said, "Never mind."

"Why never mind?"

"Because you could care less. Damnit, Roy, you've gotten so concrete. You won't talk about anything except the internship."

Feeling swamped with words, I found myself like sewerman Ralph Cramden on TV, "Goddamnit, I don't want to think, 'cause when I do, I think of the disgusting things I do every day and it's so awful I want to kill myself. Get it?"

"You imagine that talking about your feelings would destroy you?"

"Yeah."

"That's a fantasy."

"A what?"

"A fantasy. Why don't you get some help?"

"Help?"

"Therapy."

We fought. She probably knew we were fighting about Dr. Sanders's long dying and about the illusion in my father's letters and about my plethora of absent role models and the blossoming idea that the gomers were not our patients but our adversaries, and most of all we were fighting over the guilt that I felt for having Molly in a dark corner of the ward standing up, this Molly, who, like me, wouldn't stop and think and feel either, because if she ruminated on what she felt about enemas and emesis basins, she'd lose faith even in her centipede and want to kill herself too. Our fight was not the violent, howling, barking fight that keeps alive vestiges of love, but that tired, distant, silent fight where the fighters are afraid to punch for fear the punch will kill. So this is it, I thought dully, four months into the internship and I've become an animal, a mossbrained moose who did not and could not and would not think and talk, and it's come like an exhausted cancerous animal to my always love, my buddy Berry, and me?yes it's come to us: Relationship On Rocks, ROR.

9

"Fats?" I blurted out in amazement.

"The Today Show!" said the Runt, eyes popping.

"The Today Show?" I yelled.

"Fats!" said the Runt.

My mind did a swan dive.

"But did you actually see him on The Today Show?" I asked.

"Nope," said the Runt, "but somebody said they saw him disguised as Dr. Jung, and Barbara Waiters was interviewing him about some crazy thing called?"

"The Anal Mirror. I know all about it."

"They say Barbara was giggling all the time. Hey, Roy, you wa

"Barbara Waiters?"

"No, Angel. See, she takes her lips and wraps them around my?"

"Later," I said. "First I want to find Fats."

I knew I'd find him eating, for it was lunchtime, and although he'd been farmed out to the Mt. St. Elsewhere, he'd made some special deal?as he always made some special deal?with Gracie from Dietary and Food which allowed him to eat in the House of God for free. With my stomach flip?flopping, I sat down with this Gargantua of medicine.

"What a delicious rumor," said Fats, laughing. "I wish it was true. I sometimes daydream about a spot interview with Cronkite on the CBS nightly news."

"Why Cronkite?" I asked, reeling from the bizarreness of fatherly Walter Cronkite springing Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror on millions of great Americans expecting only war and jowly Nixon.

"Supposedly he has an anal fissure. Much of the disease in the world is reflected in the anus, you know, and I keep thinking that, somehow, packaged right, the reflection of the diseased anus could make me rich. Just think: if there was an Anal Mirror, and if Nixon owned one, every day he'd get a good look at exactly what he was. It's just the money, you know. I just want to be rich before Socialized Medicine kills me off. It's like what Isaac Singer said."

"Singer the writer?"

"No, Singer the sewing machine. He said, 'I don't give a damn for the invention, it's the dimes I'm after' But listen, Basch, that laetrile idea the other night was dynamite. There's money there."

"Laetrile? It's a hoax. Worthless. A placebo"

"So what's wrong with placebos? Don't you know about the placebo effect?"

"Of course I do."

"Well, there you are. Placebos can relieve the pain of angina. If you're cooling from cancer, placebos are hot stuff. Like dyspareunia."

"How?" I asked, my mind spi

"You know what they say: It's better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all."

"Imagine: we could get the laetrile from apricot pits from Mexico, by bartering the Anal Mirrors for apricots."

"You'd try to sell Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror to the Mexicans?"

"Of course not Dr. Jung's. Dr. Cortez's Anal Mirror. Lotta diarrhea in Mexico. You know how a Mexican knows he's hungry?"

"How?"

"His asshole stops burning. Ha! But we'd have to be careful in Mexico-might get sued for malpractice."

"Why is that?"

"Well, even though we'd translate the warning into Spanish, there's always the danger that some jerk would use the Anal Mirror outdoors on a bright su

"Nope."

"Well, the lens concentrates the sunlight and it bounces back through the two mirrors and WHOOSH you get one flaming asshole, I'll tell you. Suit City. Demand their money back and all the rest."

"And where would the money for all this come from?"

"From the raffle and the research project."

"What raffle and what research project?"

"Well, at the Mt. St. E., I'm thinking of ru