The Hospital Page #5

about your father's religious conversion.

You miss the point.

Not my father's conversion, mine.

You see, I'd been hitting the acid

pretty regularly at that time.

I had achieved a few minor sensory

deformities, some suicidal despairs...

but nothing as wild

as fluency in an obscure Apache dialect.

I mean, like, "Wow, man!"

Here was living afflatus

right before my eyes!

Within a week, my father had closed

his Beacon Hill practice...

and set out to start a mission

in the Mexican Mountains.

I turned in my SDS card

and my crash helmet, and I followed him.

It was a disaster, at least for me.

My father had received the revelation, not I.

He stood gaunt on a mountain slope

and preached the Apocalypse...

to solemnly amused Indians.

I masturbated a lot.

We lived in a grass wickiup...

ate raw rabbit and crushed pion nuts.

It was hideous.

Within two months, I was back in Boston.

A hollow shell, disenchanted

with everything, and dizzy with dengue.

I turned to austerity, combed my hair

tight, entered nursing school.

I became haggard, driven...

had shamelessly incestuous dreams

about my father.

I took up with some of the senior staff there.

One of them...

a portly psychiatrist, explained...

I was generated

by an unresolved lust for my father.

I cracked up.

One day, they found me walking to work

naked and screaming obscenities.

There was talk of institutionalizing me.

So I packed a bag and went back to join

my father in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

I've been there ever since.

That's three years.

My father is, of course, as mad as a hatter.

I watch over him,

and have been curiously content.

You see, I believe in everything.

What was that all about?

I thought I was obvious as hell.

I'm trying to tell you,

I have a thing about middle-aged men.

I admire your candor.

You've been admiring a lot more than that.

You're wasting your time.

I've been impotent for years.

Rubbish.

What the hell is wrong with being impotent?

Kids are more hung up on sex

than the Victorians.

I got a son, 23 years old.

I threw him out of the house last year.

Pietistic little humbug.

He preached universal love,

and he despised everyone.

Had a blanket contempt for the middle class,

even its decencies.

Detested my mother

because she had a petit bourgeois pride...

in her son, the doctor.

I cannot tell you how brutishly

he ignored that rather good lady.

When she died,

he didn't even come to the funeral.

He felt the chapel service was an hypocrisy.

He told me his generation

didn't live with lies.

I said, "Listen, everybody lives with lies."

I grabbed him by his poncho...

and I dragged him the length...

of our seven-room, despicably affluent...

middle-class apartment,

and I flung him... out.

I haven't seen him since.

You know what he said to me?

He's standing there on the landing,

on the verge of tears.

He shrieked at me:

"You old fink.

"You can't even get it up anymore."

That was it, you see.

That was his real revolution.

It wasn't racism...

the oppressed poor, or the war in Vietnam.

The ultimate American societal sickness...

was a limp dingus.

My God.

If there is a despised,

misunderstood minority in this country...

it is us poor, impotent bastards.

I'm impotent, and I'm proud of it.

Impotence is beautiful, baby!

- Power to the impotent! Right on, baby!

- Right on!

You know...

when I say impotent,

I don't mean merely limp.

Disagreeable as it may be for a woman,

a man may lust for other things...

something a little less transient

than an erection.

A sense of permanent won'th.

That's what medicine was to me,

my reason for being.

When I was 34...

I presented a paper

before the annual convention...

of the Society of Clinical Investigation...

that pioneered

the whole goddamn field of Immunology.

A breakthrough.

I'm in all the textbooks.

I happen to be an eminent man.

You know something else?

I don't give a goddamn.

When I say impotent...

I mean I've lost even my desire to work.

That's a hell of a lot

more primal passion than sex.

I've lost my reason for being.

My purpose.

The only thing I ever truly loved.

It is all rubbish, isn't it?

Transplants, antibodies...

We manufacture genes.

We can produce birth ectogenetically.

We can practically clone people

like carrots...

and half the kids in this ghetto

haven't even been inoculated for polio!

We have established the most enormous...

medical entity ever conceived...

and people are sicker than ever!

We cure nothing!

We heal nothing!

The whole goddamn wretched world...

is strangulating in front of our eyes.

That's what I mean when I say impotent.

You don't know

what the hell I'm talking about, do you?

Of course I do.

I'm very tired.

And I hurt.

I've got nothing going for me anymore.

Can you understand that?

Of course.

Can you also understand...

that the only admissible matter left is death?

Sounds to me like a familiar case

of morbid menopause.

Christ.

It's hard for me

to take your despair seriously.

- You obviously enjoy it so much.

- Bugger off!

That's all I need now, is clinical insight.

Some cockamamie 25-year-old acidhead...

is gonna reassure me

about the menopause now!

I'd like to be alone.

Why don't you just beat it?

Close the door and turn off the lights

on your way out.

Mr. Blacktree disapproves of my miniskirt...

but it was the only thing I had

to come to the city with.

Back at the tribe,

I wear ankle-length buckskin.

Swell. Close the door and turn off the lights.

What're you shooting?

Leave me alone.

Potassium.

You take enough of this stuff, it'll kill you.

I thought I might have read you wrong, that

you really were suicidal, so I came back.

Who asked you?

Leave me alone!

Why can't you leave me alone?

Leave me alone.

Why didn't you let me do it?

I'll see you.

Do you have a match, Doctor?

You wouldn't be awake?

- What time is it?

- Almost 7:
00.

I swiped this for you

out of the nurses' locker room.

I'll make good on your dress.

I'm afraid it was torn beyond repair.

I'll buy you a new one, or give me the size

and I'll send it on to you.

I wanna talk to you about that.

- Talk to me about what?

- Your father.

You really shouldn't take him out of here

in his condition.

I've just been looking at his chart.

There's no reason to presume brain damage.

You can't predict anything

in these instances...

but he could come out of that coma

at any time.

I think you should leave him here.

I'll personally look after him.

Is this your way of saying you'd like me

to stay in town a few more days?

That would be nice, too.

What do you say, Miss Drummond?

I expect you can call me Barbara...

considering you ravished me

three times last night.

- Three times?

- Look at him pretending he didn't count.

You were as puffed up as a toad about it.

Punched a couple of holes in your crusade

for universal impotence, didn't it?

I think we're on first-name basis now.

I'll call you Herb.

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