The house of God

"You're right," I said, thinking how every part of my life had suffered from my experience in the House of God, and how, from all the awful venerealia, even my sex life had curdled and quit.

Things got only worse. At the New Year's Eve party which I had to leave early because I had to report, for the last time, to the House E.W. at midnight, and at which I got pretty drunk, Berry blew up at me: "I hardly know you anymore, Roy. You're not like you were before."

"You were right about this time of year," I said, leaving. "It's sick, and it's crazy, and it sucks. So long."

I walked out the door into the bitter cold, through the frozen snow and over a snowbank turned black from the city dirt, to my car. That terrifying empty space between what was love and what is no more loomed large. I sat there disgusted, alone, the blue mercury arc lamps adding to the surreal night. Berry appeared, trying to pull me back to the human. She leaned in through the window, hugged me, kissed me, and wished me a Happy New Year, and said, "Look at it this way, the New Year means you're halfway through."

Feeling that I'd been cheated, promised a life and then saddled with death, I went into the E.W., drunk, searching for whoever it was who had cheated me. At precisely midnight, as the old year rolled over and showed its white underbelly and the new year starting sucking at its first black morning, a naked drunk celebrated by vomiting something awful into his lap. I sat at the nursing station surrounded by the futile attempts of the nurses to make a party out of the place. As I watched Elihu do a hip?swinging, clog?clacking campy rendition of the horah with Flash, I thought of "The Follies" at Treblinka. And then I thought about the pictures of the camps, taken by the Allies at liberation. The pictures showed emaciated men peering through the barbed wire, all eyes. Those eyes, those eyes. Hard blank disks. My eyes had become hard blank disks. Yet there was something in back of them, and, yes, that was the worst. The worst was that I had to live with what was in back of them, and what I had to live with, the rest of the world must never see, for it separated me from them, as it had just done with my former best friends and with my one long love, Berry. There was rage and rage and rage, coating all like crude oil coating gulls. They had hurt me, bad. For now, I had no faith in the others of the world. And the delivery of medical care? Farce. BUFF 'n TURF. Revolving door. I wasn't sitting at the end of the ambulance ride, no. There was no glamour in this. My first patient of the New Year was a five?year?old found in a clothes dryer, face bloodied. She had been hit by her pregnant mother, hit over and over with a bludgeon of pantyhose stuffed with shards of broken glass.

How could I survive?

14

I had high hopes that the Fat Man would save me.

Chubby, pumped up, bubbling with all the fresh optimism of a baby rocking in the cradle of the New Year, the Fat Man was back, ward resident in the House of God. During his long swing through the various Mt. St. Elsewheres and the Veterans Administration Hospital, I had missed him. Of course he had loomed large always, and in frantic times, his teachings had pulled me through. For months we had been in touch mostly through rumor. According to Fats, things were going great. Yet, the more I got to know him, the more contradictions there seemed to be. While laughing at a system that cherished Jo and the Fish and Little Otto and the Leggo, Fats seemed not only to be able to survive but also to use it for himself and even to enjoy it.

Among the rumors that had floated in from Fats's long road trip were several about Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror, including one that allegedly had Esquire publishing its listing of "The Ten Most Beautiful Assholes of the World." Yet whenever the Fat Man talked about his invention, it was always in the subjunctive tense, "would" and "could," not "will" and "can." Gregarious inside the House, when Fats left it, he disappeared. In spite of my offers, I never saw him outside. Although inside the House he was doing something erotic with Gracie from Dietary and Food, there was no word of female relationships outside. Ambitious, Fats wouldn't let women stand in his way. Even his goal in life, to "make a big fortoona," was complicated: whenever I'd ask him how it was going, he'd get a wistful look in his eye and say, "I'm just not crooked enough," and tell me that he'd passed up opportunities that would have made ten fortoonas in the past year alone. "If only I had the hearts and minds of the Watergate Boys," he'd sigh, "if only I was G. Gordon Liddy."

I knew for sure that he was going into a GI Fellowship, that he was the only graduate of Brooklyn College ever to make it to the House of God, and that he was the only true genius I'd ever met. Now, fat and snappy and with a small gold ring on a fat finger of a fat hand and a sparkling gold chain around a huge rubbery neck that barely existed at all, given the way the fat, sleek, black?haired head seemed to rest entirely upon the rolling mound of shoulder, now the Fat Man's good cheer seemed a strange contrast to the searing winter that held the city in its frozen tongs from January until the thaw. I knew from what other terns had said that this ward?ward 4?North?would be the worst. With Fats as our resident, I hoped that it would not be the worst.

"This ward will be the worst," said Fats, chalk in chubby fingers scrawling THE WORST on the blackboard of the on?call room. "This ward has taken fine young men and broken them." BROKEN THEM went up. "And yet, last year, I made it through, and this year, with me for these three months, you guys will make it through OK."

Hyper Hooper one of the other terns, asked, "What makes this ward the worst?"

"Name it," said Fats.

"The patients?"

"The worst."

"The nurses?"

"Salli and Bo

"The Visit?"

"The Fish."

The third tern, Eat My Dust Eddie, let out a long slow groan of despair. "I can't stand it," he said, "I can't stand having the Fish. He's a gastroenterologist and I can't stand anymore talk of shit."

"To hear you," said Fats, "you'd think no one ever shits in California." Then, getting serious, he leaned forward and said, "That reminds me?my Fellowship Application. I'm trying to get my GI Fellowship for July the first. The Leggo still hasn't written the crucial letter of recommendation. He says he's waiting to see how I run this ward. Don't screw me on that letter, hear? This is a 'Protect the Fat Man's Fellowship' ward rotation, see?"

"Where do you want to go for your fellowship?" asked Hooper.

"Where? L.A. Hollywood."

Eat My Dust groaned and covered his face with his hands.

"The Bowel Run of the Stars," said Fats, stars sparkling in his dark eyes.

Fats was into money. He'd grown up poor. His mother, during the High Holy Days, even though there wasn't anything to make soup from, had put pots of water on the stove to boil, so that if anyone dropped in, the illusion of soup would be there. Nourished by his family as being a true genius, he'd shot up like a Flatbush meteor, barreled through Brooklyn College in science, cutthroated through Einstein Med, and arrived at the best internship of the Best Medical School, the House of God. Now, as he said, he was "going all the way to the top," and it seemed that from Flatbush, the top was Hollywood: "Imagine doing a sigmoidoscopy on Groucho Marx?" he'd said, "on Mae West, on Fay Wray, on Kong! On all those stars who think that the colon is filled with cologne."

I tuned back in as Fats was saying, "This ward is a GI Man's Heaven, and even for a GI man, it's Hell. How are you terns going to survive?"