great voice:'
'I know it. Be cool, Roy, be cool.'
It was hard to be cool in Gomer City that night. The usual horrendous things had gone wrong with gomers. At midnight I was hunched over a Rose Room Rose, slamming the bed with my fist and hissing, I HATE THIS I HATE THIS over and over again. But it was Harry the Horse who did me in. Humberto and I had planned carefully: assuring Harry he could stay, we planned that night to zonk him with Valium and the next morning drive him to the nursing home ourselves. We had told no one of this, not even Fats. Early in the morning I was awakened by the nurse saying that Harry was in a crazy cardiac rhythm having a chest pain and looking like he was dying and should she call a cardiac arrest? I yelled, awakening Humberto from the top bunk, shot to my feet, started to race out the door with Humberto following close behind, stopped suddenly so that Humberto slammed into me like a Keystone Kop, and said to him, 'Stay here, amigo. At your stage of training you shouldn't see something like this.' I raced to Harry's room, where he was saying HEY DOC WAIT and clutching his chest, and eye to eye with him I screamed, 'Who told you, Harry? Who told you you were going back to the home?' Knowing that now he could stay in the House, Harry said:
'P . . . P?p?p . . . Putzel.'
'Putzel? Putzel's not your doctor, Harry. Little Otto is your doctor. You mean Dr. Kreinberg, right?'
'No . . . P?p?p?p . . . . Putzel.'
Putzel? And so Harry had succeeded in infarcting just enough more of his ventricle to stay in Gomer City for another six weeks, which was two weeks longer than me or Eddie or Fats or Hooper, and so he'd have fresh new terns and residents whom he could fool much more easily because they probably would inform him when he was about to be TURFED out and he could go into his infarcting rhythm with plenty of time to spare. I had lost. Harry the Horse had won.
On the way back to bed I passed the room with Saul the leukemic tailor. My tormenting him with my attempt, against his will, for a second remission had made him much worse. Comatose, by most legal criteria he was dead. He would not recover and yet I could keep him alive for a long time. I looked at the pale form. I listened as the pebbles of phlegm ebbed and flowed in his waves of breath. He could no longer beg me to finish him off. His wife, suffering and spending their retirement income, had become bitter, saying to me, 'Enough is enough. When will you let him die?' I could finish him off. I was tempted. It was impossible to shut out. I hurried past his doorway. I tried to sleep, but the phantasmagorical night whirled on, and by dawn so many things had happened to shatter me that I found myself standing at the elevator door waiting for it to come down so I could go up to Gomer City for the day's cardflip, enraged, and about to blow.
The elevator wasn't moving. I waited and bashed on the button and still it wasn't moving. All of a sudden I went kind of nuts. I started banging on the elevator door, kicking the polished metal at the bottom, and hammering the polished metal at the top and screaming; COME ON DOWN, YOU BASTARD, COME ON DOWN. Part of me wondered what the hell I was doing, but still I kept banging and kicking and screaming like an acromegalic cretin in labor screaming her fetus COME ON DOWN, YOU BASTARD, COME ON DOWN!
Luckily, Eat My Dust Eddie came along and guide me to the cardflip. When I asked him if be though I'd gone off the deep end he said, 'Deep end? Ha Roy, I think you were giving that elevator just what the fucker always deserved!'
That morning at the cardflip, thinking of how Putzel had putzeled my discharge of Harry the Horse, I decided to counterattack, to start a rumor. I asked Eddie if he'd heard the rumor about how some tern had threatened to assassinate Putzel, to put a bullet through his brain, and Eddie said, 'Hey, high?powered medicine! Just what the fucker always deserved!'
'Why a bullet?' asked Hyper Hooper. 'Wire his sigmoidoscope: when he presses the starter button, it explodes!'
'Listen to me, you guys,' you've got to lay off Putzel. Kill this rumor right here and now.'
'You worried about your fellowship?,' I asked, taunting him.
'I'm worried about my A Team. If you keep doing what you are doing, you're not going to make it through. Believe me, I know. I was there.'
'Go for the jugular,' said Eat My Dust, as if he hadn't heard a word Fats had said, 'go for the boobytrapped scope. Ka?boom.' As he thought it over, Eddies eyes got big, and he licked his lips, and then he yelled, 'KAA? BOOOMM!'
Two nights later, when I was on call again, Berry insisted on coming in. Concerned with what she called my 'manic' behavior and my 'borderline' descriptions of what the gomers were doing to me and I to them, she thought that seeing for herself might help. She also wanted to meet Fats. Humberto and I took her around Gomer City. She saw them all. At first she tried to talk with the gomers as she would human beings, but recognizing the futility, she soon became silent. After our last stop, the Rose Room, where I insisted she listen through my stethoscope to the asthmatic breathing of a Rose, she looked shell?shocked.
'Hey, a great case, that last Rose, eh?' I said sarcastically.
'It makes me sad,' said Berry.
'Well, the ten?o'clock meal will cheer you right up.'
At the ten?o'clock meal she watched as we interns played 'The Gomer Game,' where someone would call out an answer, like 'Nineteen hundred and twelve,' an answer given by a gomer, and the rest of us would try to come up with questions to the gomer that might have produced that answer, such as, 'When was your last bowel movement?' or 'How many times have you been admitted here?' or 'How old are you?' or 'What year is it?' or even 'Who are you?' 'Who am I?' and 'Yippeee?'
'Sick,' Berry said afterward in a somber, almost angry tone, 'it's sick.'
'I told you the gomers were awful.'
'Not them, you. They make me sad, but the way you treat them, making fun of them, like they were animals, in sick. You guys are sick.'
'Ah, you're just not used to it,' I said.
'You think that if I were in your shoes I'd get that way too?'
'Yup.'
'Maybe. Well, let's get it over with. Take me to your leader.'
We found Fats on Gomer City doing a manual disimpaction of Max the Parkinsonian. Double?gloved and surgically masked to filter out the smell, Teddy and Fats were digging at the endless stream of feces in Max's megacolon, while from Max's huge purple-scarred bald head came an endless stream of FIX THE LUMP FIX THE LUMP FIX THE LUMP. From Teddy's radio poured Brahms. The smell was overpoweringly fresh shit.
'Fats,' I said from the doorway, 'meet Berry:'
'What?' asked Fats, surprised. 'Oh, no. Hello Berry. Basch, you
'I'm here to see,' said Berry, 'tell me what you're doing.'
She went in. Fats began to tell her what they were doing, but when the waves of smell hit her, Berry covered her mouth and rushed out of the room.
Fats turned on me angrily. 'Basch, sometimes you act like a marine at `brain rest,' a retard. Teddy, finish up. I've got to talk to the poor woman saddled with young numbskull Basch.'
When Berry came out of the Ladies', she looked like she'd been crying. Seeing Fats, she said, 'How . . . how can you? It's disgusting.'
'Yeah,' said Fats, 'it is. How can I? Well, Berry, when we get old and disgusting, who's gonna doctor us? Who's gonna care? Someone's got to do it. We can't just walk away.' Looking sad, he said, 'Seeing you react this way brings back just how disgusting it is. It's awful; we're forced to forget. So? So come on,' he said, putting his thick arm around her shoulders, 'come on into my office. I got a special stash of Dr. Pepper. At times like this, a Dr. Pepper helps.'
They started for the on?call room, and I followed, saying, 'Great case, Fats. You know, Berry, most people are like you and me, they hate shit, but Fats loves it. Going into GI work himself.'
'Stop it, Roy,' Berry snapped.
'When a GI man is looking up the barrel of a sigmoidoscope, you know what you got?'
'STOP IT! Go away. I want to talk with Fats alone.'
'Alone? Why?'
