Samuel Shem: The house of God

"What made you decide to go to medical school?"

"Same thing, man, same ezact thing. In my senior year, I got this postcard from the University of Chicago: WANT TO GO TO MEDICAL SCHOOL AT CHICAGO? IF SO, FILL OUT AND RETURN THIS CARD. That was all. No Medical Board tests, no application, no nothing. Full scholarship, four years. So there it is, and here I am."

"And what about the House of God?"

"Same thing, man, same exact thing. Senior year, postcard: WANT TO BE AN INTERN AT THE HOUSE OF GOD? IF SO, FILL OUT AND RETURN THIS CARD. There it is. Sumthin' else, huh?"

"Well, you sure put one over on them."

"I thought I did, but you know, seeing these pitiful patients and all, I think those guys sending me the postcards knew all along I was tryin' to fool them by gettin' all this, so they fooled me by givin' it all to me. My old man was right: that first postcard was my downfall. I shoulda joined the army."

"Well, you got to read a good story about the killer ants."

"Yeah, I can't deny that. What about you?"

"Me? I look great on paper. For three years after college I was on a Rhodes Scholarship to England."

"Damn! You must be some ath?a?lete. What's your sport?"

"Golf."

"You gotta be kiddin'. With those little white balls?"

"Right. Oxford got fed up with the dumb Rhodes jocks, so they went in more for brains my year. One guy's sport was bridge."

"Well, man, how old are you, anyway?"

"I'll be thirty on the Fourth of July."

"Damn, you're older than all of us. You're as old as dirt."

"I should have known better than to come to the House. My whole life has been those goddamn number-two pencils. You'd think I'd learn."

"Well, man, what I really want to be is a singer. I got a great voice. Listen to this."

In falsetto, shaping the tones and words with his hands, Chuck sang: "There's a . . . moone out toonight, wo?o?o?ooow, and I know . . . if you held me tight, wo?o?o?owww . . ."

It was a lovely song and he had a lovely voice and it was lovely, all of it, and I told him so. We both were real happy. In the face of what faced us, it was almost like falling in love. After a few more drinks we decided we were happy enough to leave. I reached into my pocket to pay, and came out with Berry's note.

"Oh, shit," I said, "I'm late. Let's go."

We paid and walked out. The heat had disappeared under an umbrella of summer rain. Soaking wet, with the thunder blasting and the lightning rattling, Chuck and I sang through the car window to Berry. He kissed her good?bye, and as we left him, walking toward his car, I yelled out: "Hey, I forgot to ask you?where are you starting tomorrow?"

"Who knows, man, who knows?"

"Wait?I'll look," and I fished out my computer schedule and saw that Chuck and I would be together for our first ward rotation. "Hey, we're gonna work together."

"That's cool, man, that's cool. So long."

I liked him. He was black and he had endured. With him I would endure. July the first seemed less frightening than before.

Berry was concerned about my lacing my denial with bourbon. I was silly and she was serious, and she said that this first forgetting to meet her was an example of the problems we might have during the year. I tried to tell her something about the B?M Deli, and could not. When I, laughing, told her about Harry the Horse and the farting Jane Doe, she didn't laugh.

"How can you laugh at that? They sound pathetic."

"They are. I guess denial didn't work:"

"It did. That's what your laughter's about."

In my mailbox was a letter from my father. An optimist, he was a master of the conjunction, his letters patterned in the grammar of: (phrase) conjunction (phrase):

I know there is so much to learn about medicine and it is all new. It is fascinating all the time and there is nothing more amazing than the human body. The hard physical part of the job will soon become usual and you must watch your health. I had an eighty on Wednesday afternoon and am putting better . . .

Berry put me to bed early and went back to her place, and I was soon wrapped in the velvet robe of sleep, heading toward the kaleidoscope of dream. Pleased, happy, no longer scared, with a smile I murmured "Hiya, dream," and I was soon in Oxford, England, at lunch in the Senior Common Room of Balliol College, a Septcentenary Fellow at each elbow, eating dull food off bone china, discussing how the screwy Germans, after fifty years' work on their vast Dictionary compiling all the Latin words ever used, had gotten only up to the letter K, and then I was a kid running out into the summer dusk after supper, baseball mitt in my hand, leaping up and up in the warm twilight, and then, in a whirlwind of dread, I sighted a traveling circus falling from a cliff into the sea, the sharks savaging the succulent marsupials as the drowned clown's painted face dissolved in the cold inhuman pickling brine . . .

It must have been the Fat Man who first showed me what a gomer was. The Fat Man was my first resident, easing my transition from BMS student to intern in the House of God. He was wonderful, and a wonder. Brooklyn?born, New York City?trained, expansive, impervious, brilliant, efficient, from his sleek black hair and sharp black eyes and bulging chins through his enormous middle that forced his belt buckle to roll over on its belly like a shiny fish, to his wide black shoes, the Fat Man was fantastic. Only New York City could have bounced back from his birth to nourish him. In return, the Fat Man was skeptical of whatever wild country existed to the west of that great frontier, Riverside Drive. The only exception to this urbane provincialism was, of course, Hollywood, the Hollywood of the Stars.

At six?thirty in the morning of July the first, I was swallowed by the House of God and found myself walking down an endless bile?colored corridor on the sixth floor. This was ward 6?South, where I was to begin. A nurse with magnificently hairy forearms pointed me to the. House Officer's On?Call Room, where rounds were in progress. I opened the door and went in. I felt pure terror. As Freud had said via Berry, my terror was "a straight shot from the id."

Around the table were five people: the Fat Man; an intern named Wayne Potts, a Southerner whom I'd known at BMS, a nice guy but depressed, repressed, and kind of compressed, dressed in crisp white, pockets bulging with instruments; the three others seemed eager, and this told me they were BMS students doing their medicine clerkship. Each intern was to be saddled with a BMS, each day of the year.

"It's about time," said the Fat Man, biting a bagel. "Where's the other turkey?"

Assuming he meant Chuck, I said, "I don't know."

"Turkeys," said Fats, "he'll make me late for breakfast."

A beeper went off, and Potts and I froze. It was the Fat Man's: FAT MAN CALL THE OPERATOR FOR AN OUTSIDE CALL, THE OPERATOR FOR AN OUTSIDE CALL, FAT MAN, RIGHT AWAY.

"Hi, Murray, what's new?" said Fats into the phone. "Hey, great. What? A name? Sure sure yeah no problem hang on." Turning to us, Fats asked, "OK, you turkeys, what's a catchy doctor's name?"

Thinking of Berry, I said, "Freud."

"Freud? Nah. Gimmee another. Stat "

"Jung."

"Jung? Jung. Murray? I got it. Call it Dr. Jung's. Great. Remember, Murray, we're gonna be rich. Millions. Bye?bye:" Turning back to us with a pleased smile, Fats said, "A fortoona. Ha. OK, we'll start rounds without the other tern."

"Great," said one of the BMSs, leaping to his feet. "I'll get the chart rack. Which end of the ward do we start on?"

"Sit down!" said Fats. "What are you talking about, chart rack?"

"Aren't we going on work rounds?" asked the BMS.

"We are, right here"

"But . . . but we're not going to see the patients?"