Samuel Shem: The house of God

"HAA?BUMPH! HAAA?REMMM!"

The Fish was clearing his throat. He did not like this talk about suicide and was clearing his throat of it.

"?and even year after year right here in the House of God we do see suicides="

"Thank you, Dr. Frank," said the Fish, taking over, greasing the wheels of the meeting again so that it could roll on to the last medical speaker, a representative of the House Private Doctors, the Attendings, Dr. Pearlstein.

Even at the BMS, I'd heard of the Pearl. Once the Chief Resident, he had soon abandoned academics in pursuit of cash, had snatched the beginnings of his own practice from his older partner when the latter was away on a Florida vacation, and with a quick entry into computer technology that fully automated his office, the Pearl had become the richest of the rich House Privates. A gastroenterologist with his personal X?Ray machine in his office, he serviced the wealthiest bowels in town. He was the retained physician of the Family of Zock, whose Wing of Zock jackhammers would make us throw our stethoscopes away. Well?groomed, glittering with gems, in a handsome suit, he was a master with people, and in a few seconds he had us in the palm of his hand:

"Every intern makes mistakes. The important thing is neither to make the same mistakes twice nor to make a whole bunch of mistakes all at once. During my internship, right here at the House, a fellow intern, eager for academic success, had had a patient die, and the family had refused permission for the postmortem. In the dead of night, this intern wheeled the body down to the morgue and did the autopsy himself. He was caught and punished severely, being sent to the Deep South, where he practices in obscurity to this day. So remember: don't let your enthusiasm for medicine get in the way of your feeling for people. It can be a great year. It started me on the way to what I am and what I have today. I look forward to working with each and every one of you. Best of luck, boys, best of luck."

Given my aversion to dead bodies, he needn't have bothered to warn me. Others felt differently. Sitting beside me, Hooper, a hyperactive tern whom I'd known as a classmate at the BMS, seemed to get off on the idea of doing the autopsy himself. His eyes gleamed, he rocked back and forth in his chair, almost quivering. Well, I mused, whatever turns you on.

The token humanitarian statement having been made, we turned to computers, the Fish passing out our day?by?day schedules for the year. A large?breasted adolescent stood up to guide us through the maze of paperwork. She spoke of "the major problem you will face in your internship: parking." After going over several complex diagrams of the parking in the House, she passed out parking stickers and said, "Remember: we do tow, and we love it. With the Wing of Zock going up, you'd better put your stickers on the inside of your windshield, because the past few months the construction workers have ripped off all the stickers they could find. And if you're thinking of riding your bikes, forget it. Every night the teen gangs rip through this place with bolt cutters. No bike is safe. Now we fill in our computer forms, so we can get paid. You all brought your number?two pencils, right?"

Damn. I'd forgot. My whole life has been trying to remember to bring those two number?two pencils. I couldn't remember when I'd ever remembered. And yet someone else always did. I filled in the circles of the forms.

The meeting ended with the Fish suggesting "you might want to go to your respective wards to get acquainted with your patients before tomorrow." Although this sent a shiver through me, since I wanted to continue to deny that it exists, I filed out of the room with the others. Lagging behind, I found myself on the fourth floor walking from one end of the corridor to the other. Ten yards down the corridor were two armchair recliners, in which sat two patients. One, a woman with bright yellow skin signifying severe liver disease, sat with her mouth open to the fluorescent lights, her legs spread apart, her ankles puffed and her cheeks gaunt. There was a bow in her hair. Next to her was a decrepit old man with a frantic thatch of white hair spilling over his veined skull, who was yelling over and over:

HEY DOC WAIT HEY DOC WAIT HEY DOC …

An intravenous bottle was running yellow stuff into his arm, and a Foley catheter was running yellow stuff out of his vermilion?tipped schlong, which lay across his lap like a pet snake. The caravan of new terns had to wend its way single file past these two lost ones, and by the time I got to them there was a traffic jam and I had to stop and wait. The black guy and the black motorcycle guy waited with me. The man, whose name tag said "Harry the Horse," kept yelling: HEY DOC WAIT HEY DOC WAIT HEY DOC . . .

I turned to the woman, whose name tag said "Jane Doe." She was singing, a chromatic phonetic scale of increasing intensity:

0000?AYYY?EEEE?IYYY?UUUU. . .

In response to our attention Jane Doe made motions as if to touch us, and I thought "No, don't touch me!" and she didn't but what she did do was squeeze out a long liquid fart. Smells had always gotten to me, and that smell did then, and I felt like vomiting. Nope, they weren't going to get me to see my patients yet. I turned around. The black guy, whose name was Chuck, looked at me.

"What do you think of this?" I asked.

"Man, it's pitiful."

Looming over us was the giant with the black motorcycle gear. He put on his black jacket again and said to us: "Guys, in my medical school in California, I never saw anyone as old as this. I'm going home to my wife."

He turned, walked back down the corridor, and disappeared into the down elevator. On the back of his black motorcycle jacket was spelled out in shiny brass studs:

***EAT MY DUST***

***EDDIE***

Jane Doe farted again.

"Do you have a wife?" I asked Chuck.

"Nope."

"Me neither. But I can't take this yet. No way."

"Well, man, let's go have a drink."

Chuck and I had poured a good deal of bourbon and beer into our bodies, and had gotten to the point of laughing at the farting Jane Doe and the insistent Harry the Horse asking us to HEY DOC WAIT. Having started by sharing our disgust, we proceeded through sharing our fear, and were in the process of sharing our pasts. Chuck had grown up dirt?poor in Memphis. I inquired as to how from this humble beginning he'd gotten to the pinnacle of academic medicine, the BMS?affiliated House of God.

"Well, man, you see, it was like this. One day when I was a senior in high school in Memphis, I got this postcard from Oberlin College, and it said: WANT TO GO TO COLLEGE AT OBERLIN? IF SO, FILL OUT AND RETURN THIS CARD. That was it, man, that was all. No College Board tests, no application, no nothin'. And so I did it. Next thing I know, I get this letter saying I'd been accepted, full scholarship, four years. And here the white guys in my class were all trying like crazy to get in. Now, I'd never been out of Tennessee in my life, I didn't know anything about this Oberlin, 'cept I asked somebody and he told me they had a music school there."

"Did you play a musical instrument?"

"You gotta be kiddin'. My old man read cowboy novels as a night janitor, and my old lady cleaned floors. Only thing I played was roundball. The day I was supposed to leave, my old man says, 'Son, you'd be better off joinin' the army.' So I take the bus to Cleveland and then I was supposed to change for Oberlin, and I didn't know if I was in the right place but then I see all these dudes with musical instruments and I say yup this must be the right bus. So I went to Oberlin. Majored in premed 'cause you didn't have to do nothing, read two books?the Iliad, which I didn't dig, and then this great book about these red killer ants. See, there was this dude trapped, tied down, and this army of red killer ants came marchin' and marchin'. Great."