The house of God

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 her fetus COME ON DOWN, YOU BASTARD, COME ON DOWN!

Luckily, Eat My Dust Eddie came along and guide me to the cardflip. When I asked him if be though 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," 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 are 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 boobytrapped scope. Ka?boom." As he thought it over, Eddies eyes got big, and he licked his lips, and then he yelled, "KAA?BOOOMM!"

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 seeing 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, in 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 go

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 of 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.

"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 crackl HA!"