'I don't know if I can stand trying to figure o what to do for these women in my Clinic.'
'Do? You mean you try to do something?'
'Sure, don't you?'
'Hardly ever. I do my best nothing right in Clinic. Wait?don't go in there yet,' he said, pulled me aside, hiding behind the door. 'See crowd there?'
I did. There was a crowd of people in the waiting room, a melange looking like a bar mitzvah at United Nations.
'My outpatients. I do nothing medical for the and they love me. You know how much booze, merchandise, and food there's gonna be in that crowd as Hannukah and Christmas presents for me? And', because I don't do a goddamn medical thing.'
'You're telling me again that the cure is worse the disease?'
'Nope. I'm telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of illness in this world is the doctor's own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can. It ain't easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that the body is fundamentally flawed and about to self?destruct. People are afraid they're on the verge of death all the time, and that they'd better get their 'routine physical' right away. Physicals! How much have you ever learned from a physical?'
'Not too much,' I said, realizing that this was true.
'Of course not. People expect perfect health. It's a brand?spanking?new Madison Avenue expectation. It's our job to tell them that imperfect health is and always has been perfect health, and that most of the things that go wrong with their bodies we can't do much about. So maybe we do make diagnoses; big deal. We hardly ever cure.'
'I don't know about that.'
'Whaddaya mean? Have you cured anyone yet? In six months?'
'One remission.'
'Terrific. We cure ourselves, and that's it. Well, let's go. You're gonna lose me in that crowd, Basch, so MEEE?RYY CHRISTMAS and always watch out for where you stick your finger next.'
Puzzled once again and feeling that he'd shaken my brain like he usually did and that he was probably right, I stood there for a moment and watched him approach his crowd. When they saw Fats, they shrieked with delight and engulfed him. Many of them had been coming to him every week for a year and a half, and almost all of them knew each other. They were one big happy family, with this fat doctor as its head. Smiles were smiled, presents were presented, and Fats sat down in the middle of the waiting room and enjoyed himself. Occasionally he'd take a kiddie on his knee and ask what he wanted for Christmas. I was touched. Here was what medicine could be: human to human. Like all our battered dreams. Sadly I went into my office, a kid not invited to play at the Fat Man's house.
And yet, having been primed by the Fat. Man, I was surprised to find my Clinic being fun. Relieved to think that my compulsion to try to cure was the only real disease in my patients, I sat back and let them, as people, bring me into their lives. What a difference! My basketball?playing arthritic black woman, when I, ignored her aching knees and asked about her kids, opened up, chatted happily, and brought her kids in to meet me. When she left, for the first time she forgot to leave a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet. Many of my other patients brought me gifts: my LOL in NAD with the taped?up eyelids brought me her niece, a knockout sabra with a tanned face and shoulders like a fullback and a smile as enticing as a Jaffa orange; my artificial breast brought a bottle of whiskey, and my Portuguese artificial foot brought me a bottle wine. These gifts were for 'helping' them. The only way I'd helped them was by not TURFING them elsewhere. That was it: with the delivery of medical care this swiftly revolving door, with every doc on the planet frantic to BUFF and TURF elsewhere, the people had gotten expert at finding a static center and hanging on. They could spot a Fat Man a mile away, These people didn't give a damn about their 'diseases' or 'cures'; what they wanted was what anyone wanted, the hand in their hand, the sense that their doctor could care.
I did. I brought my patients to the Fat Man's affair.
In the E.W. as well, the jolt of feeling human refused to fizzle. I felt good, proud of my skills, excited. I didn't resent going to work, and outside the House, I could bear to think about inside the House. Sitting in the E.W. was like sitting on a bench in the Louvre: a human tapestry, ever unraveling under my eyes. Like Paris, the E.W. was a place unlimited in time: I'd 1eave it, and it would go on without me until I returned. An immense, humbling eternity of disease. With the luxury of the TURF, I began to live the fantasy 'doctor' of my father's letters, competent to handle whatever unraveled at the end of the ambulance ride and came at me through those doors.
One Saturday afternoon before Christmas, in the lull before the Saturday?night storm, Gath and I sat at the nursing station. Crazy Abe had disappeared for two nights, and everyone was a little discouraged about his absence. The nurses were snappier, and even Flash, the orderly, used old parts of his brain, in irritation. Heavy wet snow had fallen, and I'd already treated the first of several expected myocardial infarctions, as the middle?aged out?of?shape suburban fathers shoveled their driveways clear. I told Gath that he looked kind of down, and he said, 'Yeah, I am. It's Elihu?he don't know his ass from his elbow, so I'm supervisin' all his work. Suturin'. A man of my skills, suturin'. But if I let Elihu loose, it'd be a slaughterhouse down here. It'd be like when we had the old Chief of Surgery, Frannie. You know what they said about him?'
'What?'
'Killed mo' Jews than Hitler. Ah we're not gettin' the big stuff in heah anymo'. No gunshots, accidents, it's all belly pain, suturin', and twats. Makes me sick.'
The nurse handed us each a clipboard. Gath glanced down, and wearily covering his eyes with his hand, said, 'You know what's on heah, boy? A twat. A sick twat. I may be a racist 'Bama cracker, but for Chrissakes, Lord, give me some big stuff fo a change. Alt this sick twat is ruinin' this po' boy's sex life.'
On my own clipboard was a thirty?three?year?old white toothpick brought in from the streets outside the public library where he'd gone to use the toilet. Zalman was six?four and weighed in at eighty?two. Looking concentration?campish, he was all buttock, rib, and law, too listless to do anything but talk: he didn't want to eat meat because animal souls transmigrated like humans, he was an unemployed philosopher, the world was full of incompetence, his typical dinner was a single seedless grape. Fascinating. TURF to psychiatry. My call to the psych resident was interrupted by my second snow?shoveling MI, about to die. Gath and Elihu and I trundled him back to life.
During the time it had taken to save the snow shoveler, the clipboards had piled up. The first nonswimmers, caught in the incoming Saturday?night tide. As I picked up some charts and headed back into the rooms, I was stopped by a balding guy my age, dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck.
'Dr. Basch, I'm Jeff Cohen, psych resident. I've just said hello to your anorexic, Zalman.'
'Glad to meet you. The policemen have told me a lot about you. Yeah, Zalman?he's incredible. He needs your services.'
'Tell me about him,' Cohen said, sitting down, interested.
'I don't have time right now,' I said.
'OK, later. We want him, but not yet. We don' touch patients until they're cleared medically. We never touch patients physically.'
'You don't? Never? You never touch bodies?'
'You're surprised. No physical contact?it inflame the transference. Well, I see you're hassled, and I'm on my way upstairs to do some reading. Let's talk about him later, if you've got the time. Male anorexica are rare, and fascinating. Just page me, OK? See you later.'
I watched him go. He was different: he listened. the House of God, like in other Jewish houses, when someone talked, no one listened. I got the feel Cohen had been interested in what I had to say. Like the Fat Man, but without the Fat Man's cynicism. And he was interested in his patients! I could see that Zalman's bones were nowhere near as interesting as his story. Even I had listened, enthralled. And Cohen had time to read while on call? Far?fucking?out.
I reentered the revving?up Saturday night. A young woman was brought in from a party, over her boyfriend's shoulder, not breathing, turning blue. In a twinkling?PRESTO?Gath and I metamorphosized her from a Dead on Arrival overdose to a puking hysterical underdose, TURFED to Jeff Cohen. As I attended a Santa with acid indigestion, I saw Gath coaxing a young man farther inside the doors. The young man stopped and stood there,
