City Hooper had begun acting like a gomer. He'd gotten thin, almost scrawny, and neglected his personal hygiene. He began to rock, like a schizophrenic or an old Jew at prayer. Having lost his wife, he was now losing his pathologist. On occasion I'd find him sleeping next to Jane Doe in an armchair recliner, mouth in O SIGN, and when the Fish insisted we go on walk rounds, Hooper would slip into a wheelchair and wheel himself around, singing Jane's chromatic scale. If the Fish reprimanded him, he'd turn and say, 'Physician, wheel thyself.' The real problem arose when Hooper took to sleeping in the electric gomer beds in restraints, and one day when I came in and found him in an ankle cast and asked him what had happened, he said only GOMERS GO TO GROUND. He'd done just that, fracturing a small bone in his ankle, which enabled him to make rounds in his wheelchair every day.
Our final explosion took place at one Sociable C. Rounds. Rocking, chattering, punning, laughing, Hooper and I managed to blast every House Hierarchy. We fought with Lionel over perverted Sam, the Man Who Ate Everything, who, when we'd found him eating our food stashes day after day, we'd TURFED directly out to the icy street, and refused to readmit. The Blazers had readmitted him to floor eight, trying to convince us to take him back. When Selma, amazed, asked Lionel who was taking care of him, with his diabetes and his sexual perversions, Lionel had said, 'We are, the staff of HELP.' 'You?' asked Selma. 'HELP is treating his diabetes? That's illegal.' I perked up and said, 'From what I know of those petunias in HELP, Selma, they may not know how to treat his diabetes, but they sure as hell will get off on his perversions.' Lionel got up to storm out, and lying down on my back in his path, I cried out, 'Help, Selma, heelllp! I looked up, and all I saw was Blue Blazers!' We antagonized Salli and Bonni for stopping Eddies TURF of the Lady of the Lice?he'd neglected to put her down on her three?part placement form who would meet her in St. Louis?mentioning in passing the word 'cunts,' which sent both of them and our female BMS flying out of the room. Finally the meeting turned to mayhem when Hooper and I began rocking in synch and muttering 'autoeroticism, the only way.' The Fish, eyes popping like a. red snapper's, took charge and organized a STAT field trip to Chinatown for lunch.
How could we have known that during our happy Chinese lunch a rumble had begun in the House of God, and that this rumble had already begun feeding into older, deeper rumbles within the Leggo, our Chief. Each affronted Hierarchy had given the Leggo a buzz, and he was enraged. Returning to the House, fat and happy, imagine our surprise when we saw the Leggo appear at the far end of the corridor, rolling toward us. As he came closer and closer, we could see that he had a smile on his face that no one had ever seen before. Trembling, the Fish turned to Hooper and me and said, 'You better watch out, guys, you're really going to get it.' Amazed and surprised, Hooper and I stared at each other. In his eyes was reflected my own incomprehension: why would the Leggo get us? What was so bad about what we had done?
We braced ourselves for the shock. The stiff legs moved closer, the raging smile spread wider until it looked as if it would split the tight face open and spill whatever hid under that purple birthmark right out onto the floor of Gomer City. When he was so close I could read the brand name on his stethoscope as it ducked down into the jungle of his genitals, in a bizarre fashion that might have been the MSG in the Chinese food, not one but two arms swiveled and two long hands reached out and came to rest on two scapulae, one of the Fat Man and one of the Fish. Staring at them, the Leggo demanded: 'Who is responsible? Someone is responsible for these poor interns, for this disaster of a ward. It is my job to find out who. You two, come with me.'
'It took all I had,' said Fats afterward, 'but I did manage to finesse him, at least most of him. Logically, he was trapped. He had two choices: take it out on you interns, or take it out on the ones responsible for you terns. Having already lost Eddie, it was clear that he couldn't take it out on you. He had to take it out on those responsible. While I may be responsible for you, it is also true that the Fish is responsible for me, and guess who's responsible for the Fish?'
'The Chief.'
'Exactly. So he was stuck. I managed to finesse that part, the logic, but I couldn't finesse what the Leggo felt. You see, the Leggo didn't mind what you'd done to the Lady of the Lice, or to Sam the hungry pervert, Putzel, the Blazers, the Nurses, the BMSs, to Tina or Harry or Jane or the Roses that Hooper keeps killing. He didn't even mind your setting House records for lowest temperature in a living human being, most organs hit with a single needle shot, or most tests of the bowel run in a single night. In many ways, he thought you'd done a terrific job, especially as regards postmortems. But the thing that he was bullshit about was you guys not liking him. He can't stand your being cool toward him. He suspects you even make fun of him behind his back?imagine that. When you show him you don't like him, you hit a nerve, and when that happens, he goes ape. No one can finesse the ape.' Pensively Fats went on, 'Of course, for my share of the responsibility, he's delaying writing my Fellowship Letter again. I keep worrying that it'll be Samoa. The last thing he said to me was, 'Whatever you boys do, don't do anything else. Do nothing, understand?' Imagine him saying that to me.'
'You told him, of course,' I said, 'that doing nothing was your greatest invention, the delivery of medical care?'
'Right. Why stop at Samoa. Go for broke and get the Gulag.'
Fats fell silent. Hooper left, and I asked Fats what was on his mind. 'Well, maybe this is more serious than I think. Maybe this is trouble. All the way from Brooklyn, all those exams and scrabbling, all that effort to land me here in the bigtime, on the verge of the big Hollywood 'Hello Fats!' and I just had the thought that maybe it'll all fall down. I don't like it. This may be good?bye L.A., good?bye dreams. Sometimes it seems like it just doesn't pay, does it, Basch?'
'Does what?'
'To imagine. To dream.'
Potts stood before me in the darkness of two A.M. in Gomer City, and mirrored in his gray face was, as always, the Yellow Man.
'What are you doing here at this hour?' I asked, but he didn't reply, he just stood there, staring. Again I asked what was going on.
'The Yellow Man just died.'
I felt a chill. Potts looked white and chill, and his eyes looked dull and dead, and I said, 'I'm sorry. I mean, I'm really sorry.'
'Yeah,' said Potts, fidgeting as if he wasn't really in the same world with me any longer, 'yeah, well, he was going to die, it was just a matter of . . . of time.'
'Yeah, he was,' I said, and I thought about how much torment Potts had gone through every day that the Yellow Man had been alive. 'Are you all right?'
'Who, me? Oh, yeah, I am. It's just a little hard . . . I didn't ask for a post. I didn't want to get one,' said Potts, almost pleading with me that it was all right.
'It's OK. I know how you feel. I didn't ask for a post on Dr. Sanders. Sit down and talk about it, eh?'
'No, I think I'll just go upstairs and see him once more and then maybe take a walk.'
'Right. I'll be down here if you change your mind.'
'Thanks. You know, I should have given him the steroids.'
'Stop it. Nothing would have helped.'
'Yeah, well, steroids might have helped. Well, anyway, we sure had some fun the other night with Otis, didn't we?'
'Sure did, Wayne. We'll do it again, eh?'
'Yeah. Soon. If I can find the time.'
As I watched him slip away down the corridor and disappear into the up elevator, I thought of the fun we'd had. I'd gone over to his house, and although it was depressing with the place a mess and with that loaded revolver by the bed, Potts and I had taken Otis out for a run in the March chill, and we'd talked about the South. Potts had told me about Mrs. Bagley's Dancing Class held at the country club every Friday night. Mrs. Bagley, an immigrant, would come out in a chiffon dress with a cinched waist and pop the needle into the groove and out would come the Charelles. They learned to dance pressing a walnut between their noses, and the big event, year after year, was on the last Friday night when Potts and his less tame but still Old Family buddies would roll B?B pellets onto the polished oak floor during a slam?banging one two three one two three Roll Out the Barrel polka. I'd thought it strange, that day, that Potts hadn't even mentioned his father's recent violent death.
I realized suddenly what was going to happen! Fool!
I ran to the elevator and pounded on it, but it wasn't moving, and I raced up the stairs to floor eight, and I kept cursing myself for not realizing it in time and praying that I had or that I was wrong.
I was not wrong. While I'd been cradled in his reminiscences of Mrs. Bagley's, Potts had taken the elevator
