Man's 4th Best Hospital

Samuel Shem is a novelist, playwright, and a member of the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. His novels include The House of God, Mount Misery, Fine, and The Spirit of the Place . He is coauthor with his wife, Janet Surrey, of the hit Off-Broadway play Bill W. and Dr. Bob , the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (winner of the 2007 Performing Arts Award of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence), and We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Men and Women .

I had always wanted to be "the one at the end of the ambulance ride." Now I figured that even if I might have my usual trouble working in big hierarchical systems, I would never doubt my competence in, and caring about, what I at best called "healing." And with Fats again? Driving into Man's 4th Best, I mused on a kind of medical heaven. I parked in a six-story lot and got lost. I had been here often during med school, but everything had changed. On the crest of a hill, the glorious Art Deco Pink Building and garden and the 1816 neoclassic granite Blue Building were darkened by skyscrapers. I forgot the building name and asked Information for the office of hospital president Jared Krashinsky. "Oh, that's your Twitter Building." She handed me a map, as complex as linguine. A whispering rocket ride to floor 40 and out. Staggered by the sheets of morning sunlight backlighting a panorama of sea and threads of bleached clouds and then nothing but magical realism blue. The meeting was in the dimly lit, hushed board room, leather and chrome. On a giant bright screen was a slide. As my eyes adjusted, I saw, at a square glass table as big and blocky as my Prius, the Fat Man in a florid and horrific Hawaiian shirt. Beside him was Humbo, a young, compact Hispanic guy in a short white doctor coat. And then what he'd called his "A Team" from the House of God: Eat My Dust Eddie, Chuck, Hyper Hooper, the Runt, and Gath, an Alabama cracker who'd been a surgical resident. A nurse, Angel Jones, the Runt's wife, sat beside him. I hadn't seen most of them for many years. Also, a woman doctor, I guessed from India. I slipped into a seat. Panting, wiping off sweat. Way late. Jared Tristram Krashinsky, of the Lithuanian Krashinskys, Man's 4th Best president and titan of industry, stood at a lit screen in dim light, a power suit reading a PowerPoint: "-this slide shows Core Concept One: Mobile Self-Management. Notice the two-headed arrow. I manage up, and I manage down. Man's Best Hospital uses world-class managerial material of the BBS-the Best Business School. I use both hard and soft power. I go down hard. I come up soft, and-" "Hraaak-a-hraaak!" coughed Eat My Dust Eddie, our giant, red-haired, wild-man master of irony, straight from a lucrative Newport Beach cancer practice and wife-lucrative divorce. He kept fake-hraaacking and, doubled over, exited. The Krash stopped. Pissed at Eddie? Nope. He was staring at the screen calmly, with eyes closed, smiling, sucking on something. He was a short, fit-looking guy with a handsome face-lips plump, dimpled cheeks, and, for Lithuania, a reasonable nose. Silky dark hair carefully cut, combed over. Appealing, in a boyish way. He was what my immigrant grandmother, Molly, had called me, in Yiddish, a "zeesa boyala"-a sweet boy. I looked around. My guys had been sitting there listening to him for a while. They did not look happy, rolling their eyes at one another and me. Krash shifted the sucking into a pouch of a cheek. "You may be wondering why I'm waiting, as if I'm doing nothing. I'm not. I'm doing Core Concept Two: Maximum Meditative Mindfulness. Man's Best Wellness Program, directed by Bernard, Llama Llassi. Nickname, Mango. Mango Lassi." No one laughed. Click. And there he was, Mango Llassi: shaven head, a diamond in his nose, looking like everybody's Uncle Louie. "What if my religion prohibits meditation?" asked Runt. He'd come into the internship mortally scared of doctoring. In Denver Runt had become an orthodox Freudian psychoanalyst. Now he was wearing a lime green bicycle helmet, as if a lid for his id. "What if it prohibits Mango Lassi?" "Why, then, you, so to speak"-Krash smiled, a boyish smile meant to be friendly-"choose your poison. Or none at all." "Y'mean, man," Chuck said, "if the sacred ain't sacred to you at all?" He was black, a gentle soul, a magical basketball player and singer, from a poor