hers, a nurse from the MICU?Medical Intensive Care Unit?named Angel. Angel was redheaded, buxom, Irish, with wraparound muscular thighs and a creamy complexion. Working in Intensive Care, the Death Row of the House, was rumored to have intensified her sexuality, and it was said that year after year Angel gave intensive care not only to the sick, but also to the male tern. This talent, perhaps apocryphal, had at any rate yet to be experienced by anyone in our group.
'Molly,' I said, 'I'd like you to meet the new tern, the Runt.'
'Pleased to meet you,' said Molly. 'This is Angel.'
Craning his neck around, the Runt blushed, his
'Oh it's'?gesturing up toward the thin air?'nothing new for a'?gesturing toward herself?'nurse,' said Angel.
How strange that Angel had difficulty putting words together without gesturing, but it must have had something to do with her nervousness at meeting the Runt from the rear. Angel seemed to be having a hard time resisting the impulse to go to the Runt and run her creamy hands over his leering lumpy rump, his cheeks, his testicles, even the crenellations of his anus, why not? We settled on Angel delivering the dose of Valium, which she did with professional skill, finishing by planting a kiss on the spot. The nurses left, and we asked the Runt how he felt and he said fine and in love with Angel but that he was still scared stiff about starting with the toughies on the ward.
'Man, there's nothing to worry about,' said Chuck. 'Even though you inherit Potts's disasters, you inherit Towl too.'
'Who is Towl?'
'Towl? Towl, boy, you get in here stat!' yelled Chuck. 'Towl is the best damn BMS you ever saw.'
He was. In he walked: four feet tall with thick black glasses and thick black skin, with a voice gruff as a drill sergeant's and a vocabulary that was short and tough like him. The words Towl knew, he slurred, and his main gift was action, not talk. He was a locomotive from Georgia.
'Towl,' said Chuck, 'this is the Runt. He's gonna be your new tern, starting tomorrow.'
'Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm hi the Runt,' growled Towl.
'Boy,' said Chuck, 'you gotta run the Runt's service, just like you did Potts's. OK? Now, you tell him about it.'
'Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm twenty?two patients: eleven gomers, five sickees, and six turkeys who nevah shoulda been heah in the foist place. All in all, nine of 'em are on da rolla coasta.'
'Rolla coasta?'
'Right,' said Towl, making a motion with his hand like a car on a roller coaster, up and down, up and down, and finally up and flying out into space.
'He means TURFED out of the House,' I said.
'But what about the sickees?' asked the Runt. 'I'd better start seeing them right away?'
'Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm, nope. You don't have to. Ah takes care of 'em. I nevah lets the new tern touch 'em, not till I'm sure he knows what he's on about.'
'But you can't write orders,' said the Runt.
'Oh, I can write 'em, I jes cain't sign 'em. Go home, Runt, and come on back in tamarra. Well, gotta go finish mah shit on the ward so I can take off early.'
Despite our preparations, Jo and ward 6-South began to destroy the Runt. Jo, on call with him, took up where Mad Dog had left off, making the Runt feel that he never could do enough and that he never should do anything without first consulting her. Afraid to risk, the Runt didn't learn. Jo's aggressive approach to the gomers soon created for the Runt the sickest, most pitiful service on the ward. The Runt was completely disorganized, and, worse, if a patient did poorly, he thought it was his fault. If Lazarus bled, it was his fault. If a birdlike woman with intransigent bowels hadn't had a bowel movement, it was his fault. He began spending more time talking to his patients, and formed such an attachment to one old man that whenever the Runt showed up, the old fellow would grasp his hand, start to cry, kiss his hand, say that the Runt was his only friend, and when the Runt would try to leave, the old fellow would kiss his hand again, start to cry, and offer him, over and over, the same present, a used bowtie. Despite Chuck, Towl, and me, the Runt was being eaten up by guilt. We'd seen it happen to Potts and we didn't want it to happen again. Chuck and I decided that if the Runt could only get something going with Angel, he might gain some confidence. His poet, fed up with his being too preoccupied with medicine to read her runes, now demanded that he sleep out on the living?room couch. Yet the Runt was too unsure of himself to ask Angel out.
'Why don't you ask her out?' I'd ask. 'Don't you like her?'
'Like her? I'm nuts about her. I dream about her. She's beautiful. She's the kind of woman my mother would never let me go out with. She's what I watched my roommate Norman screw for four years at BMS. A centerfold.'
'So why don't you ask her out?'
'I'm scared she won't like me and say no.'
'So what? What have you got to lose?'
'The possibility-if she says no-that she might have said yes. Whatever I do, I don't want to lose that possibility.'
'Look, man,' said Chuck, 'you know unless you get your dick moving a little faster, you never gonna learn medicine at all.'
'What the hell does that have to do with it?'
'Who knows, man, who knows?'
And instead of asking her out, the Runt kept floundering in guilt on the ward and kept tossing and turning fitfully on the couch in the living room of the poet and kept going to the funerals of his dead young patients and kept letting Jo lop a bit off his schlong daily by telling him what he'd failed to do, and on top of all that, at his poet's suggestion, she being deep into the anal sadistic stages of her psychoanalysis, the Runt followed the path of cure that had warped his organ in the first place in his hyper-analyzed family and went back to the therapist he'd had throughout BMS to work out the torment he'd felt from his promiscuous roommate, Norman, who had had an electric organ and played only one song: 'If You Knew Suzie Like I Know Suzie'; that song because all of his girlfriends were named Suzie and each was oh so delighted when she knocked on Norman's door and he leaped to his organ, yelled, 'Come on in, Suzie,' and in the words of each Suzie, 'played my song.'
One horrendously hot and steamy night I was on call, and the Runt, working late, refused to leave a patient of his who was in serious trouble. I urged the Runt to go home, and then I urged him to call up Angel and ask her out, and he would do neither. Towl had gone home and so the Runt was at a loss about what to do with his patients, a particular problem being Risenshein, a LOL in NAD whose bone marrow had been wiped out by our cytotoxic agents and had failed to regenerate blood cells, which meant that she was bound to die. The Runt kept asking me what to do with her. Since I was busy with my admissions and with keeping track of the decompensating ward of 'toughies,' I blew my cool and said, 'Get out of here, damnit! I'll take care of things. Go home!'
'I don't want to go home. June's at home. If I go back there, we'll get into some argument about her anal sadism.'
'So long,' I said, walking off.
'Where are you going?'
'To the bathroom,' I said, 'I've got the flu.' I retreated to the sanctuary of the toilet, wrapped in the latest graffiti: WAS ST. FRANCIS ASSISI?
'What should I do?' wailed the Runt outside the door.
'Call up Angel.'
'I'm afraid. Why should I call her, anyway?' Receiving no answer, he struggled with the silence, and said, 'All right. Damn! I almost forgot?I'm late for therapy. I'll call her when I get back:'
'Nope. Call her now, and don't come back. I'm on call here, see?'
So he finally called her and asked her out and rushed off to talk it all over with the therapist, whom he was paying fifty an hour to take the starch out of his penis. I sat at the nursing station, worn out by a nagging influenza
