No Laughing Matter by Joseph Heller & Speed Vogel

Author:Joseph Heller & Speed Vogel [Heller, Joseph & Vogel, Speed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Social Service: Per tel. discussion w. Dr. M. Bader, bed is provided at Rusk for Mr. Heller. Arrangements have been completed for Keefe & Keefe [ambulance]…to transfer Mr. Heller at 11 a.m. Tues. 01/26/82. He will be accompanied by his private duty RN. Patient's morale is greatly improved knowing he can go to Rusk w. definite date set. There is some appropriate anxiety w. determination to do well.

And along with the anxiety there were separation blues, strong mixed feelings about leaving Mount Sinai, which struck me ironically as analogous to the widespread ambivalence of children leaving home. (Most people I've met who have a penchant for reminiscing about their childhoods are looking back on unhappy ones.) You would have thought I'd had a good time there! And the boys seemed moody too at the impending loss of so convenient a club room. “You know, it's not bad here,” Julie Green would say again and again, each time as though in fresh discovery. Clearly, as if only yesterday, I can remember him leaning back in my wheelchair early in that week before the uncertainty about my going to Rusk arose, clasping his hands behind his head and saying to the others, with his tiny crooked smile and wistful voice: “What are we going to do for laughs when he gets out of this hospital?”

His candid question touched more than one nerve in Miss Valerie Humphries, who was not yet quite used to him and who was thoroughly outraged by the callous disrespect of a remark so entirely hostile to all her experience, but she kept her anger to herself. By the next morning her indignation had turned into something different. She was more than a little subdued at the beginning of the day, not in her usual good spirits, but patently dejected. She soon told me why.

“Yesterday, when your friend in the wheelchair, George, or what's his name—Joe Stein?”

“Julie Green?”

“Yes. When I heard him say what he did, ‘What are we going to do for laughs’ when you get out of the hospital, I couldn't believe it. I thought it was the most heartless thing I'd ever heard anyone say. I really wanted to tell him off. Then last night, when I was in my apartment, I began to wonder about me. And I asked myself, ‘What am I going to do for laughs when you leave?’”

I was touched and I was pleased. And all the more so when she went on to admit that she'd never had so good a time in a hospital as she'd had with us and did not know when she'd have so much fun in one again.

Well, touched and pleased though I was, I could not guarantee her another patient like me, I had to confess modestly. I'd already asked her to make the trip with me to Rusk in the ambulance, promising her a full day's pay if she would agree. She was offended I'd even had doubt, and she rejected my offer of money, saying she'd make up her day's pay by working the afternoon shift.

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