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  MASH Mania – Richard Hooker

  POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  Copyright © 1977 by H. Richard Homberger

  Published by arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-22709

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Dodd, Mead & Company, 79 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-671-82178-4

  First Pocket Books printing February, 1979 10 9 87654321

  Trademarks roistered in the United States and other countries. Printed in the U.S.A.

  Table of Contents

  SPRUCE HARBOR MEDICAL CENTER. 3

  THE MIRACLE OF HARBOR POINT. 11

  THE RETURN OF BOOM-BOOM BENNER. 20

  DRAGONS. 31

  CHRISTMAS STORY. 40

  MEANSTREAK. 49

  THE MOOSE OF MOOSE BEND.. 65

  PSYCHOANALYSIS. 76

  SOCIAL SERVICE. 93

  SPRUCE HARBOR MEDICAL CENTER

  THIS BOOK is about Hawkeye Pierce, Duke Forrest, Trapper John Mclntyre and Spearchucker Jones. Their names are listed in order of their arrival at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea back in 1951. I was a Medical Service Corps officer in that hospital. I grew up in Port Waldo, Maine, where I went to high school with Hawkeye Pierce. Hawk and I, along with Me Lay Marston, my anesthesiologist, and Wooden Leg Wilcox, my Chairman of the Board, were classmates and fraternity brothers at Androscoggin College.

  I refer to Ezekiel Bradbury (Me Lay) Marston as "my" anesthesiologist because I am the administrator of what is known now, as Spruce Harbor Medical Center. My hospital, despite blights like its (I won't say "my") medical director, Goofus MacDuff, has been declared one of the three best hospitals in cities with populations of less than 50,000. I am proud to run this hospital. I am proud of my medical staff. My leading doctors are controversial, openly disliked and constantly attacked (until their critics need surgery) by outraged citizens and paramedical varieties because they have made a career of abusing leading citizens and paramedical varieties. Why is it? As soon as some guy in a town like Spruce Harbor becomes a leading citizen, he wants to run the hospital or anyway be on the board of directors. Paramedical varieties, who always feel unfulfilled, include psychologists. A "medical center" has to have a Mental Health Clinic. Therefore psychologists. A psychologist is defined by Hawkeye Pierce as a blivot. A blivot, he says, is two hundred pounds of wet manure in a hundred-pound bag.

  I believe that I have the best staff of physicians in a comparable hospital anywhere, certainly in Maine. There are family physicians on my staff, like Doggy Moore, but no one in my hospital does a damn thing in the specialty areas unless he is a certified specialist. My Chairman of the Board, Mr. Wooden Leg Wilcox, does what I, and my doctors, tell him, most of the time. Wooden Leg has a Board that does what he tells it. The Spruce Harbor Medical Center may not run like a Swiss clock, but as we say hereabouts, "it runs some good." I, most of my staff and my Chairman of the Board figure that our job is to serve the public. We know that the only way to do this is to have a highly trained, dedicated staff and an illiterate Board of Directors.

  "I don't want nobody on this Board can read or write too good," my Chairman frequently proclaims. So far the quality of our product and the fact that the hospital breaks even financially has kept the community wolves at bay. It's said that an honest hospital must lose money. This is true, but our situation is a little different. Wooden Leg Wilcox is not only Chairman of the Board. He is the owner of the Finestkind Fish market and the Finestkind Lobster Pound, which share Harbor Point with the hospital, the Finestkind Clinic and the Penobscot Mental Health Clinic. P "Wooden Leg," I said to my Chairman a couple years back, "how come the hospital finances seem so obscure, even to me, most of the time? How come one week I can barely meet the payroll and a month later we're showing a profit?"

  "I gotta buy lobsters ain't I? Hey look, boy. Don't sweat it. I need cash to buy everything around when the price is down, so I grab a little out of the hospital. Then when the price is right I unload. You make a little, I make a little. Don't I deserve something?"

  "Wooden Leg," I said, "you're a thief!"

  "I was a thief, this joint'd have to close up. So I put ii little Blue Cross dough into lobsters, maybe a trip nf nice haddock. Ain't that better'n beggin' from the government? I need working capital and the hospital gets most of the profit."

  The hospital, clinics and Wooden Leg's fish complex occupy Harbor Point about a mile from the center of town. The setting, with its view of Penobscot Bay and the Camden Hills, makes Spruce Harbor Medical Center an unusually pleasant place in which to get well or to die. A pleasant place to work, too. I'm the only hospital administrator in Maine who can relax, do my job, and do it efficiently. Of course, I do have problems. When I have them, they tend to differ from those of many, perhaps all, other hospital administrators. Most of my problems are ridiculous, often created by what some consider the eccentricity of my surgical staff. An example was my trouble last summer with the MCRL (that's the Maine Civil Rights League).

  I'd like to explain something here and now because so much of this book, directly or indirectly, expresses the opinions and documents the habits and contr ness of my chief surgeon, Dr. Hawkeye. Pierce. Hawkeye spent most of his life in or around Spruce Harbor, where we have a variety of ethnic groups, and h chosen, as his nonmedical associates, citizens fro what a local intellectual calls the rough-and-tumble element of our society. He has adopted and maybe enlarged upon the speech habits of this element. He often refers to blacks as niggers or coons, to French Canadians as frogs and lily pad jumpers and swamp canaries, to Italians as guineas, to Lebanese as camel drivers, to Jews as Hebes. Therefore he is automatically branded a bigot by certain people. "These folks are interesting," Hawk says. "They hear a colloquial ethnic designation and they have an alarm reaction. They think that the words automatically degrade the individual. They don't understand that under certain circumstances these same words establish a bond of understanding and even affection or, for chrissake, that half the people here or anywhere else don't know that colloquial ethnic designations are a departure from what the effete snobs consider proper."

  There are about a hundred blacks in Spruce Harbor. A newly arrived physician asked Dr. Pierce a few years ago why he did nearly all the surgery on the black population.

  "Because I don't keep them waiting in my office or stiff them on weekends any more than I do anybody else. They know I want to get paid if they've got it but will work for zip if I have to. They know they ain't getting no reverse Tom action from Hawkeye Picrce. Also, as I told the Reverend Johnson after I grabbed his gallbladder, you make a hole in a nigger, even a nigger preacher, you can't tell him from anybody else."

  In all of Maine we have about one thousand blacks, a couple thousand Indians and four thousand members (says Hawkeye Pierce) of the MCRL. Dr. Pierce believes that these four thousand include two thousand two hundred fifty Bad Hairs. A Bad Hair is anyone whose haircut extends beyond Hawkeye's crew cut. Most of the Bad Hairs are in college either as students or faculty. "The average Bad Hair," according to Hawk, "will never make as much money as any jig on a Detroit assembly line. His idea of how to bestow Civil Rights is to blow pot with the campus blacks. They're a bunch of jerks who cultivate the blacks because they hope the black cats are losing as bad as they are. They don't want to liberate the blacks. They just want to patronize them."

  And then, according to Hawkeye, there are, in the MCRL, 1747 Confused Wool. Ever since Hawkeye read Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins, he's been using that word "wool." This Confused Wool, he says, i
s about evenly divided between well-meaning but dumb Jesus Wool and Educated Wool. The Jesus Wool, like the Church of the Supreme Spirit, wouldn't know a nigger from an Armenian but would invite either to sit down and have some beans if he blew in on Saturday night. The Educated Wool is married to executives in toilet paper factories and power companies, and they've been to college, and their husbands' bosses say the broads gotta get involved, so they join the MCRL, and if they saw a nigger in the pool they'd drain it and start over.

  "That's 3997. What about the other three members?" Pierce is frequently asked.

  "Oh, well, nothing is 100 percent. There have to be three guys who understand what problems exist and who want to help. In Maine it's not so much racial as general. The Indians need help, but so do thousands of others. If the blacks are a problem, it's because if you put the thousand of them up against any thousand randomly selected Maine whites, the blacks come out ahead."

  My trouble with the MCRL began when Spearchucker Jones sank a fifty-foot eagle putt on the 18th hole to win the Spruce Harbor Country Club championship from Hawkeye Pierce. We have a new TV station here but not much news, so the last hole was on the sports show that night. Actually, since Jones is a former all-pro fullback, I suppose this was a newsworthy event. Unfortunately, after following the putt into the hole, the camera focused on Dr. Pierce to catch his reaction. First there was a look of incredulous dismay followed by the exclamation, "Why you unconscious nigger bastard!"

  Well, of course they cut out the sound, but all four thousand members of the MCRL are lip readers. This was a slow spell for infringements on civil rights. Apparently nobody's denied living space, or said an unkind word to anybody—black, red or white—for nigh on six weeks. The MCRL, restive from inactivity, mobilized. Had Spiro Agnew desecrated the grave of Martin Luther King, the heat of indignation could not have been more intense, except, as Dr. Pierce pointed out, with one thousand Confused Wool who'd never heard of Dr. King. Also, Pierce says, "There were six unconcerned Confused Wool at the Body of Jesus Tabernacle in Tedium Cove who were saving a pregnant girl. They were saving her by exorcising the devil out of her. That's religious talk for beating her up. She had two broken arms, two black eyes and bruises all over her body."

  The hue and cry from everywhere persisted for several days. Dr. Oliver Wendell (Spearchucker) Jones, interviewed on Spruce Harbor TV, offered the opinion that Dr. Pierce was "a bigoted racist honkie." The interviewer, the same gentleman who, on the sports, calls the Giants' leading pitcher Jew-Ann Marichal, didn't realize what Spearchucker had said till someone told him, and then he wasn't sure he understood it.

  The only voice raised in defense of Hawkeye Pierce was that of Gus Blue, the new black basketball coach at Spruce Harbor High. Gus, asked by the sports editor of the Spruce Harbor Gazette what he thought of "Dr. Jones's fifty-foot putt, stated, "That unconscious nif.ger bastard couldn't sink that putt again in a million years."

  There were demands that Dr. Pierce be suspended from the hospital staff. There were demands that he apologize publicly to Dr. Jones. A supercommittee of Bad Hairs and Confused Wool, headed by the Reverend Aaron (Buddy) Hamilton (Buddy hates only Catholics and booze and Jesus Christ, Superstar) tried to interview Dr. Pierce, whose harassed secretary finally appealed, "Hawkeye, I've got to tell them something. They demand some kind of an answer!"

  "Give them an evasive answer," counseled the surgeon. "Invite them to a snipe hunt."

  Finally I had to intervene and told both Hawkeye and Spearchucker that enough was enough. They'd have to do something. I was relieved and somewhat surprised when they agreed to meet the Reverend Hamilton and his committee two mornings hence, at ten o'clock, in my office. I should have known better. The two surgeons were already there when I arrived, my secretary having let them in. They were drinking my coffee and intermittently laughing and talking. Hawkeye had an old bull whip he'd resurrected from his father's barn, and he was saying, between giggles, "Chucker, if you time it right, let them get a look at the scene, that Christer will probably get up and stand in your way and you can take him out like he was a pygmy linebacker."

  "What are you two up to?" I demanded, knowing full well that it was a dumb question.

  "Step aside, Hook," warned Hawkeye, "I'm gonna start educatin' this nigger."

  Dr. Jones stepped two paces into the hall. As the Reverend Hamilton rose to greet him, Hawkeye appeared with the whip saying, "I'll teach you, Jones."

  Spearchucker yelled, "Oh, heh, man," and charged down the hallway toward the front entrance with Hawkeye swinging the whip at his heels. In passing the supercommittee, Chucker demonstrated to the Reverend Hamilton why he'd been an all-pro fullback.

  Waiting outside in the Jones family's station wagon, loaded with golf clubs and camping gear, were Evelyn Jones and Mary Pierce. The surgeons jumped in. "Drive," Dr. Jones ordered his wife. "Fast. Get us out of here."

  Drive they did, all the way to the golf course at Ingonish Beach, Nova Scotia, one of the finest anywhere. For seven hundred miles the surgeons drank beer, laughed and listened to dire threats from their wives, who claimed they'd face ostracism and social destruction upon their return.

  Well, incidents like this blow over. By the time Hawk and the Chucker got back from Nova Scotia, the Bad Hairs and the Confused Wool were abusing the Republican gubernatorial aspirant, State Senator Crazy Horse Weinstein, for selling clothes to the Indians at 50 percent of the wholesale price. The Bad Hairs and the Confused Wool were split down the middle on this one, Some of them claimed Crazy Horse was insulting his mother's tribesmen by offering charity, and others claimed he was a cheap Hebe for not giving the clothes for nothing. This got to be an issue in the state legislature, which debated it for days. In logical sequence, this led to an intensity of civil rights interest amongst Educated Wool wed to paper and power company executives. Their husbands told them, "The longer these rubes argue about Crazy Horse selling half-price clothes to the Indians, the less time they'llhave to think up ways to put us out of business. Keep it going, honey."

  My greatest problem as administrator of Spruce Harbor Medical Center, and it's chronic and recurrent, is the Penobscot Mental Health Clinic. Some of my staff, as well as my Board Chairman, are critical of its performance and go so far as to question its reason to exist. I recently received this letter from Dr. Hawkeye Pierce, who was disturbed about an incident which had occurred while he was covering the Emergency Room.

  Dear Hook:

  I'm increasingly annoyed, both at the absurdity of my having to cover your Emergency Room and at that ridiculous jerk, Rex Eatapuss, and his gaggle of useless psychologists.

  There has been an insurrection of staff members who claim that they are incompetent to cover the Emergency Room. I applied for membership in this group but was rejected on the grounds that I am competent.

  I offer, in rebuttal, a case history. On Saturday, November 6th, I was on Emergency Room duty. At approximately seven p.m., I was called and told that a 17-year-old boy had been brought in by his parents because he was nervous. It seemed that he'd been out in the family barn, participating in the milking of cows, when "something came over him."

  "He should learn to step back," I said. "You go for that milk pail any way but from the cow's right rear, surer'n hell something may come over you. Give him a bath."

  "No," said the nurse, "it's not that. It seemes he got very nervous. He's been seen in the Mental Health Clinic."

  "Well, hell," I said, "why don't you call one of them mental healthers if they've already seen this guy. As a thoracic surgeon I am ill at ease with nervous youths of the countryside."

  "We did," the nurse replied, "but they were busy coloring."

  "What the hell do you mean, they are busy coloring?" I asked.

  "All I know is what I was told," the nurse said brusquely. Obviously she was annoyed with me.

  I'll digress here. Later investigation revealed that the mental healthers could not respond to this call becausE they were devoting the
weekend to painting psychedelic colors on two thousand paper ducks they'd spent two1 weeks cutting out of Mental Health Clinic stationer The background of this is interesting. Mr. Spiro Agnew, in a speech before the American Psychiatric Association on October 15th, said, "Show me a psychologist and I'll show you a man who's softer than the back half of a duck."

  The psychologists, heretofore uncertain where they stood with Mr. Agnew and overcome by this burst of recognition, felt that Mr. Agnew's statement was a harbinger of continued and increased federal subsidization of their programs. Understandably, they could not abandon their Saturday night project for a nervous youth of the countryside.

  Nervously, I went to the Emergency Room, where I met the patient. He had long, greasy, shoulder length, black hair, a black leather jacket, snug Levis, black socks and back loafers with brown around the edges. (If he'd had white socks, I'd have figured him for a $7,500/year employee of the Department of Health and Welfare.) His facial expression suggested a lack of what the shrinks used to call "affect."

  The first principle in handling this sort of situation is to get everybody out of the room and establish rapport with the patient. Even a thoracic surgeon knows this. Therefore I ordered parents and nurses out and asked the sufferer, "What ails you?"