and Jo blasted him to bits. As an example of Potts's failings, Jo cited the Yellow Man.
7
Having been pushed around for five steaming weeks with Jo, Chuck and I had learned a lot. One of our main skills was how to put a terrific BUFF on any chart to satisfy Jo, who could thus satisfy the Fish, who could thus satisfy the Leggo, who could thus satisfy whomever he had to satisfy. In addition, Chuck and I had learned to hide what we were actually doing with the gomers from Jo, since what we were actually doing was doing nothing, more intensely than any other terns in the House. Time and again, reading about our prodigious efforts on the gomers in their charts and then seeing how well the actual gomers were doing, Jo would turn to Chuck and me with pride and say, 'Good job. By God, that's a damn good job. I told you that the Fat Man was nuts about patient care, didn't I?'
Without realizing it, Chuck and I were hanging ourselves. On our rounds with Jo, our charts looked so terrifically BUFFED that when Jo on her rounds with 'the Fish displayed them to him, and when the Fish on his rounds with the Leggo displayed them to him, all were amazed. This was it: the delivery of medical care. These footnotes! These cures! And so the Leggo decided that Chuck and I should be rewarded.
'How will they be rewarded?' the Fish asked the Leggo.
'We'll give them the greatest reward any intern could wish,' said the Leggo. 'When I was an intern, we used to fight to get the toughest cases, to show our Chief what we could do. That will be their reward, to let them show me what they can do. We'll give them the toughies. Tell them that.'
'We'll give them the toughies,' said the Fish to Jo.
'They're giving you the toughies,' said Jo to us.
'The toughies?' I asked. 'What are they?'
'The toughest admissions to the House.'
'What? Why?'
'Yeah, man, what all did we do wrong?'
'That's just it,' said Jo, 'Nothing. It's the Leggo's way of saying thanks, to challenge you with the toughies. I think it's great. You should see the cases we're going to get now.'
Soon we saw the cases we were going to get then. They were the worst. They were the House of God disasters, mostly young men and women with horrible diseases just past cure and just our side of death, diseases with rotting names like leukemia, melanoma, hepatoma, lymphoma, carcinoma, and all the other horrendomas for which there was no cure in this world or in any other. And so Chuck and I hung ourselves, and created, in 6?South, the toughest ward in the House. Without realizing it, without choosing it, and in fact choosing the opposite at every turn, we had to learn to handle the worst disease the House could dish up. We sweated and we cursed and we hated it, but we used each other?him using me for the facts and the numbers and me using him for the nuts and bolts?and we risked, and we learned. Given the increasing concentration of the dying young, the number of bowel runs for headache decreased, and the traffic in gomers went down, with Rokitansky getting sent back to his nursing home and Sophie getting driven back to her house in Putzel's Continental. Ina and Anna, the residua of our mistakenly aggressive approach, were still on the ward, slowly returning to their cradling dementia. Dr. Sanders turned out to have Hodgkin's disease, advanced and incurable, and had been started on chemotherapy and sent home to arrange his last fishing trip with his brother in West Virginia. The Yellow Man lay in his bed, flat and still, as withered as the first yellowing leaf of the fall.
When Chuck and I found out how much we each loved basketball, we began playing every chance we got.Two out of every three nights Chuck and I would be off call together, and we'd help each other finish our work, evade Jo, sign out to Potts, shove our black bags into our lockers and take out our jointly owned regulation basketball and our black low?cut sneakers, which, as we laced them, sent hot memories of the times before the big games racing through us, change into our green surgical scrub suits, jog down the corridor of the House and out into the street with that 'school's out!' feeling that we'd known for a quarter of a century. At the public playground, if it was just the two of us we'd go oneon?one, caught up in that electric moment of making the slick move that would fake your best friend out of his jock. At times, in pickup games, we'd play on the same team, and we'd have that thrill of playing together with just the right blend of dazzle and unselfishness, playing against a strange mixture of strabismic Jewish BMSs and tough ghetto kids, running and yelling and breathing hard and worrying about chest pain meaning heart attack, throwing sharp elbows and playing dirty under the boards and getting into all?out screaming arguments with fifteen?year?olds about disputed calls, the elbows in fact thrown at Jo and the Fish and the Leggo and the deaths and diseases and wasted healthy moments spent cooped up in the House of Gad. Afterward we'd go to bars or to Chuck's apartment, which looked, with its garish furniture, like a TV commercial, and we'd sit and drink bourbon and beer and watch the ballgame or, with the tube sound off and stereo playing Chicago soul, watch a movie. We began to understand each other. Turned into ten?year?olds by the pressures of the House, we became friends as only ten?year?olds can, and one day something happened that made me realize what I'd always suspected: my new friend's studied indifference was only and all an act.
Chuck and I found ourselves in a basketball game with some BMSs who thought they were hot?shit ballplayers. With the same kind of ferocious competitiveness that had gotten them into the BMS, these guys started to play rough?hand?checking, fouling, calling us for the slightest foul and disputing calls?as if they were making an A in surgery if they won. Chuck's opponent was the worst, the kind of kid whose arrogance had oozed through the umbilical cord and breast and had always been the part of him that his mother loved, the kind of kid whom everybody hated and who played for the fans and not for the game, even when there weren't any fans to play for. Every time Chuck had the ball, this kid would foul, him, and every shot the kid took, he'd call a foul on Chuck. Despite the fact that Chuck was taking a beating, he never called a foul. Finally, on one outrageous call that even had his own team telling the wiseass to 'jest play ball, Ernie, all right?' Ernie said to Chuck, 'Hey if you didn't foul me, why don't you say so?' and all Chuck said was, 'Fine, fine, let's play,' and he handed over the ball.
Something in that 'Fine, fine' was ominous, and from then on Chuck began to play. He'd stay outside and bomb for hoops, and he'd take Ernie inside and overpower him despite the fouls, and he'd fake the shot from outside and slip past, and he'd fake the drive and stop and pop, and as he did all this, scoring point after point, wise Ernie got madder and madder and fouled more and more, but it had about as much effect as a fly on a racehorse. It became a ballet of strength and smarts and finesse. The game turned into a one-on?one, played out in a raging intense silence. Chuck made a fool of Ernie until finally somebody said it had gotten too dark to see the rim. Chuck asked Ernie for our ball, and Ernie threw it into some bushes. A hush fell. I wanted to smash Ernie in the teeth. Chuck said, 'Well, Roy, I guess I better go get our ball, now that we won this game,' and, smiling, arms around each other's sweaty shoulders, proud of winning, we left.
Later, drinking with him, I said, 'Damn, you are some ballplayer. Did you play in college?'
'Yup. Small College All?American, my senior year. First team.'
'Well, I found you out,' I said. 'Your indifference is all an act. You care about everything you do:'
''Course it is, man, 'course I care.'
'Well, why do you pretend that you don't?'
'On the street, it's the only way to be. If'n you let on what you are and who you are and what you got and how someone can use you, you get yourself used worse. Like Potts with Jo. I may be painin', man, but nobody's gonna know it. Being cool is the only way of stayin' alive.'
'Amazing. Where I come from, it's just the opposite?you keep showing your pain so that people will lay off you. What do you think about that?'
'What do I think? I think, fine, man, fine.'
On those rare days when Potts came out to play ball, it was embarrassing. He was clumsy and shy, scared of hurting someone and scared of standing out. Open for a shot, he'd pass. In a dispute, the other guy was right. He rarely yelled. As the maples began to do their reddening, as the touch?football games sprouted on the browning fields and as the dawn dew got more and more chill, Potts got worse and worse. Left out of Chuck's and my lives, left for weeks on end by his wife, worried about his golden retriever's growing whine, hounded by the Yellow Man and by 70, Potts became scared of taking any risks. Since the only way to learn medicine was to take risks in those hard times when you were alone with your patient, Potts had trouble learning. Ashamed and afraid, in the computer
