"Front end? Ho! You bad boy! And when do you want to put your car in the garage?"

"Well, let's see?tomorrow, gurl, how about tomorrow?"

"OIL," said Hazel, giggling. "Tomorrow. Front end? Ba' boy. Adios."

I was astounded. I'd known that Chuck had been interested in Hazel, but I'd had no idea that things had progressed this far. Even after the Cuban Firecracker had left, her afterburner?afterimage seemed to remain in the air around us, real hot and red.

"But Hazel's not a Spanish name," I said.

"Well, man, you know how it is. That's not her name."

"What's her name?"

"Jesulita. And we ain't talkie' no auto mechanics, neither:"

Jesulita. And that was the other thing that had started to happen: the sexualization of the ternship. Without realizing it, perniciously, hand in hand with our growing competence and rising resentment at the way we were beng drilled by Jo and the Slurpers, we had begun to, almost without knowing it, as Chuck said, "get it on" with those erotic ones of the House of God.

I thought about Molly, a beautiful woman who happened to have been disappointed in romantic love and who happened to have made an A in the straight bendover in her Catholic nursing school, and about how I'd begun to get involved. It had started innocently enough with my finding her in tears one day at the nursing station, and when I'd asked her why, she'd said that she was scared she was going to die because she had this mole on her thigh?her upper thigh?that had started to grow, and I said Let me have a look and so we went into the on?call room like naughty kids and on the lower bunk bed she pulled down her pantyhose and let me have a look and Christ it was a marvelous thigh and of course I saw those wonderful garden?flowered panties on that bulging blond mops but sure enough it was a bad black mole and she was gonna die. But I didn't know anything about moles, and so I pretended to be a big shot and used my "Dr. Basch" title to get her to the dean clinic that morning, and the resident in dean slobbered all over himself because he would get to look at her mops and panties instead of the usual excoriated psoriatic lesions of the gomers and he took a little biopsy of it and within twenty?four hours he told her it was just a mole and completely benign and she was not going to die. Being saved from death by me made her grateful, and she had invited me to dinner. Dinner was a terrible casserole and I had tried to get her into bed that night but had managed only to get into her, bed with her and with my hands on her almost little?girl breasts and long nipples and to hear the NO NO NO without the final scrumptious YES and to hear also the religious IF I GAVE YOU THAT I'LL HAVE GIVEN YOU EVERYTHING and so that was where the damn thing stood so far, perched erotically amidst the gomers and yet on that age?old and tantalizing ledge called the affair, the new lover versus the steady, the only one who could understand the pull to the lover being the steady, and yet to tell the steady before she found out would wreck it all. Inside the House of God Berry did not seem to exist, and even outside, when I was with Molly she didn't seem to exist either. And so it had become clear to Chuck and me that one way to survive was sexually. This was terribly puzzling and threatening to our sexual dud of a resident, Jo, for the only time she had dropped much below the top of the class at BMS had been in "Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality." Her limbic was out to lunch. Our trump card with Jo could always be sex.

When the Runt showed up, he was so nervous?from having spent eight weeks with a Double O Resident named Mad Dog and with Hyper Hooper and Eat My Dust Eddie, from having heard about "the toughies" awaiting him on our ward, from living with the fear that he was gonna die from being stuck with a needle from the Yellow Man's groin, and also from his intellectual poet June, who was furious at him for spending time, away from her?he was so nervous that he seemed to be flying, living three inches above the floor. His hair was frazzled and his mustache seemed to be alive, and he tugged first at one end and then at the other. Chuck and I tried to talk him down, but it was no use, and so we called for Molly to get the syringe of Valium.

"OK, man," said Chuck, "pull down your pants:"

"Here? Are you crazy?"

"Go ahead," I said, "we've got things all ready for you.

The Runt pulled down his pants and bent over the nursing?station desk. In walked Molly, with a friend of hers, a nurse from the MICU?Medical Intensive Care Unit?named Angel. Angel was redheaded, buxom, Irish, with wraparound muscular thighs and a creamy complexion. Working in Intensive Care, the Death Row of the House, was rumored to have intensified her sexuality, and it was said that year after year Angel gave intensive care not only to the sick, but also to the male tern. This talent, perhaps apocryphal, had at any rate yet to be experienced by anyone in our group.

"Molly," I said, "I'd like you to meet the new tern, the Runt."

"Pleased to meet you," said Molly. "This is Angel."

Craning his neck around, the Runt blushed, his bulbococcygeals tightened, causing his testes to leap up in his scrotum like startled fish in an electrified pond, and he said, "Pleased to meet you. I . . . I've never met anyone in this position before. It's their idea, not mine."

"Oh it's"?gesturing up toward the thin air?"nothing new for a"?gesturing toward herself?"nurse," said Angel.

How strange that Angel had difficulty putting words together without gesturing, but it must have had something to do with her nervousness at meeting the Runt from the rear. Angel seemed to be having a hard time resisting the impulse to go to the Runt and run her creamy hands over his leering lumpy rump, his cheeks, his testicles, even the crenellations of his anus, why not? We settled on Angel delivering the dose of Valium, which she did with professional skill, finishing by planting a kiss on the spot. The nurses left, and we asked the Runt how he felt and he said fine and in love with Angel but that he was still scared stiff about starting with the toughies on the ward.

"Man, there's nothing to worry about," said Chuck. "Even though you inherit Potts's disasters, you inherit Towl too."

"Who is Towl?"

"Towl? Towl, boy, you get in here stat!" yelled Chuck. "Towl is the best damn BMS you ever saw."

He was. In he walked: four feet tall with thick black glasses and thick black skin, with a voice gruff as a drill sergeant's and a vocabulary that was short and tough like him. The words Towl knew, he slurred, and his main gift was action, not talk. He was a locomotive from Georgia.

"Towl," said Chuck, "this is the Runt. He's gonna be your new tern, starting tomorrow."

"Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm hi the Runt," growled Towl.

"Boy," said Chuck, "you gotta run the Runt's service, just like you did Potts's. OK? Now, you tell him about it."

"Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm twenty?two patients: eleven gomers, five sickees, and six turkeys who nevah shoulda been heah in the foist place. All in all, nine of 'em are on da rolla coasta."

"Rolla coasta?"

"Right," said Towl, making a motion with his hand like a car on a roller coaster, up and down, up and down, and finally up and flying out into space.

"He means TURFED out of the House," I said.

"But what about the sickees?" asked the Runt. "I'd better start seeing them right away?"

"Rhhmmmmm rhmmmm, nope. You don't have to. Ah takes care of 'em. I nevah lets the new tern touch 'em, not till I'm sure he knows what he's on about."

"But you can't write orders," said the Runt.

"Oh, I can write 'em, I jes cain't sign 'em. Go home, Runt, and come on back in tamarra. Well, gotta go finish mah shit on the ward so I can take off early."

Despite our preparations, Jo and ward 6-South began to destroy the Runt. Jo, on call with him, took up where Mad Dog had left off, making the Runt feel that he never could do enough and that he never should do anything without first consulting her. Afraid to risk, the Runt didn't learn. Jo's aggressive approach to the gomers soon created for the Runt the sickest, most pitiful service on the ward. The Runt was completely disorganized, and, worse, if a patient did poorly, he thought it was his fault. If Lazarus bled, it was his fault. If a birdlike woman with intransigent bowels hadn't had a bowel movement, it was his fault. He began spending more time talking to his patients, and formed such an attachment to one old man that whenever the Runt showed up, the old fellow would grasp his hand, start to cry, kiss his hand, say that the Runt was his only friend, and when the Runt would try to leave, the old fellow would kiss his hand again, start to cry, and offer him, over and over, the same present, a used bowtie. Despite Chuck, Towl, and me, the Runt was being eaten up by guilt. We'd seen it happen to Potts and we didn't want it to happen again. Chuck and I decided that if the Runt could only get something going with Angel, he might gain some confidence. His poet, fed up with his being too preoccupied with medicine to read her runes, now demanded that he sleep out on the living?room couch. Yet the Runt was too unsure of himself to ask Angel out.