MASH 09 MASH goes to Vienna Read online

  They had gone but fifty or seventy yards when the air was rent with a bloodcurdling scream, a piteous wail of abject horror. The swamp buggy skidded through a U-turn, raced up to the main entrance and skidded to a halt. Its passengers leaped down from it and raced inside the hospital.

  (* It would not do, of course, to have the Professional Personnel Locator Board (more popularly known as the Doctor Board), which was on prominent display In the hospital lobby, publicly announce that one or more healers were hoisting a beer in the Bide-a-While Pool Hall, or even chasing a small white ball around the grassy expanse of the Spruce Harbor Country Club. Certain euphemisms were employed: the Country Club was known on the Doctor Board as "The Board of Health,” for example, and "Board Meeting*' meant that the follower of Hippocrates had been in the office of the chief of surgery and was more than likely in no condition whatever to practice any kind of medicine requiring sober judgment. "The Laboratory," of course, was the bar of the Bide-a-While Pool Hall/Ladies Served Fresh Lobster & Clams Daily Restaurant and Saloon, Inc.)

  Chapter Two

  Taylor P. Jambon, famous television gourmet and animal lover, had indeed journeyed all the way across the country from Hollywood, California, to Spruce Harbor, Maine, to see America’s most beloved actress, Patience Throckbottom Worthington, in (or on) her bed of pain. But, there was a certain element of enlightened self-interest in the sage’s journey. His journey was not, as he announced on his show, “a humble homage to kneel at the feet of America’s most beloved thespians.” (He pronounced humble homage “umble omage,” as a good Harvard man should.)

  As he confided to his crony and silent partner, Senator J. Ellwood “Jaws” Fisch (Moralist-Liberal, Calif.), there were few things in all the world which would get him out of Beverly Hills, California, and off to Spruce Harbor, Maine, the very plebeian syllables of which were an affront to the ears of a refined sybarite and arbiter of good taste such as himself.

  “The cold truth of the matter, Jaws ... he said.

  “I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again, Taylor P.,” the senator replied, “I would rather that you didn’t call me ‘Jaws.’ ”

  “That’s what that ‘model’ called you when you bit her on the thigh,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “And with good reason, according to the photographs I saw.”

  “How did you get to see the photographs?” the senator inquired.

  “Who do you think bought them from the photographer? Santa Claus? Sometimes, Jaws, your naiveté beggars description. I’d hate to tell you what they cost APPLE*!” He paused and then went on righteously: “No, I think you should know.” He told him.

  (* APPLE is the popular acronym for the Association of Pup and Pussy Lovers in Earnest, Inc., which body Mr. Jambon had founded and in which he served as executive director.)

  “That much?” the senator asked, with mingled doubt and pride.

  “It isn’t every day that the newspapers of this country are given a chance to run a front-page picture of some long-legged female with a senator’s teeth marks on her thigh,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “Think about it.”

  “But you fixed it? The pictures have been destroyed?”

  “Let’s say they are out of circulation,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “The photographer, too. He has retired to a sunny Greek island. He bought it with what I gave him for the pictures.”

  “Well, APPLE’S got the money,” the senator said, practically. “What’s the difference?”

  “Before you so rudely interrupted me,” Taylor P. Jambon said, “I was going to bring that up.”

  “Get to the point, Taylor P.,” the senator said. He was getting a little bored with all this. He had a busy day planned. First a luncheon meeting in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, during which he would give stock speech B-2, “Television Is Ruining Our Children’s Morals,” and following which he was returning to Washington, D.C., aboard an Air Force Sabreliner provided by the grateful taxpayers and in company of a young woman who had told him she would “do anything to get into government.” The senator was looking forward to plumbing the depths of the young woman’s dedication.

  “I’m afraid of you, Jaws,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “That’s the bottom line.”

  “You’re afraid of me? You know full well, Taylor, that I am a sworn foe of violence of any kind. That includes fistfighting.”

  “I’m not talking about fistfighting, you cretin. I’m talking about your public image!”

  Senator Fisch examined himself in the mirror. He found nothing wrong with his bushy eyebrows, his prominent cheekbones, and the full set of flashing, gleaming choppers which had given him the “Jaws” nickname, even before the unfortunate incident with the nibbled thigh.

  “What’s wrong with my public image?”

  “When the TV stations run our APPLE Crusade spots, I want all the folks out there in TV-land to have mental images of starving pups and starving pussycats, not a mental picture of you taking a bite out of some bimbo’s upper leg.”

  “You really know how to hurt a guy, don’t you, Taylor P. Jambon?” the senator replied, somewhat plaintively.

  “Of course, I do,” Taylor P. replied. “There’s no place on the professional gourmet circuit for sissies.”

  “Huh!” The senator snorted deprecatingly. “Don’t try to hand me that. I’m a U.S. senator, you know.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of sissy, you idiot,” Taylor P. said.

  “Oh,” the senator replied. “So what’s on your mind?”

  “Patience Throckbottom Worthington,” Taylor P. Jambon said, pronouncing each syllable very carefully.

  “Jesus, Taylor P., sometimes you’re really weird! She’s old enough to be my mother. She’s old enough to be your mother!”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter, Jaws, and listen to me,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “I’ll take it from the top.”

  “I’m all ears,” the senator said.

  “We’ve got a good thing going with APPLE,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “If we don’t drop the ball, it’ll go on forever. There’s always going to be puppies and pussycats. No smart ass is going to come up with a cure for that. Look what happened to the March of Dimes. Everything was going along great, all peaches and cream, and then, out of the blue, some wise guy in a white jacket jerks the whole disease out from under them. They had to do some fast and fancy footwork to find some other disease, or the whole thing was over.”

  “I still don’t know what this has got to do with Patience Throckbottom Worthington,” the senator said.

  “I’m going to use her instead of you, Jaws, for the commercials,” Taylor P. Jambon said. He said this as a flat statement of fact. It wasn’t a suggestion; it was an announcement.

  “Now, wait just a minute,” the senator said. “Me doing those commercials was part of the deal.”

  “Before you bit the broad it was part of the deal,” Taylor P. said. “It’s a whole new ball game now, Jaws.”

  “People see me up there on the tube, begging money for pussycats and puppy dogs, and they vote for me,” the senator said. “It makes them think of me as a kindly father figure, concerned about their problems.”

  “You should have thought about that before you tried to eat that dame’s leg,” Taylor P. Jambon said.

  “We all make mistakes,” the senator said. “Even you make mistakes, Taylor. You’re the guy who told his viewers to marinate roast beef in gin. That set kitchens on fire from coast to coast.”

  “Be that as it may,” Taylor P. Jambon, stung to the quick, said.

  “What about Rice Pilaf a la Jambon? You said two quarts instead of two cups, and you had rice running all over the floor of two hundred thousand kitchens.”

  “Shut up, Jaws,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “That’s neither here nor there.”

  “If you think I’m going to give up making those commercials, getting on television screens all over the country two and three times a day, on prime time, you’ve got another think coming, Taylor P. Jambon.”
r />   “I’ve already had my other think. Patience Throckbottom Worthington does the commercials.”

  “Or?”

  “Or Mrs. Fisch gets full-color eleven-by-fourteen-inch prints of the bimbo’s leg, Jaws,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “Purple teeth marks and all.”

  “On reflection,” the senator intoned, “perhaps you have something, Taylor P.”

  “That’s better,” Taylor P. Jambon replied. “Now, nothing is really going to be changed much if you keep your cool. You keep Congress off my back, and APPLE will keep you on the payroll as a consultant.”

  “If I’m not going to get to go on television with the APPLE Crusade commercials, I think we had better renegotiate my consultant fee. Fifty thousand a year isn’t fair compensation for the consulting services of a U.S. senator, Taylor P., and you know it.”

  “You still own thirty-five percent of the Pup and Pussy Hospitals,* Jaws,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “You’re forgetting that.”

  (* One of the many good works of APPLE was the free spaying service. Pet owners could bring their dogs and cats to any of the eleven Pup and Pussy Hospitals for the procedure, absolutely free of charge. On a production-line schedule, the procedure cost the Pup and Pussy Hospitals $2.75 per animal. They were compensated for this service by APPLE at $7.50 per operation, for a net profit of $4.75 per operation. The Pup and Pussy Hospitals were operated by a Mr. Homer Walton, who happened to be Mr. Taylor P. Jambon’s brother-in-law.)

  “I know that,” the senator replied. “But what I’m worried about is Patience Throckbottom Worthington. What’s she going to cost us?”

  “A lot less now than before,” Taylor P. Jambon replied confidently.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She fell off an airplane in Maine and broke her leg,” Taylor P. said. “That means she’s out of a job. We can get her for peanuts.”

  “How many peanuts?” the senator pursued.

  “Look at it this way, Jaws,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “The old bag is regarded by most of the idiots who send us money as really something special. For thirty years, who has done The Night Before Christmas bit on the tube on Christmas Eve? Patience Throckbottom Worthington, that’s who.”

  “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “She’s everybody’s saintly grandmother, Jaws. When she starts talking about starving pups and pussycats, there won’t be a dry eye in America. And, oh, how the money’ll roll in!”

  “You really think so?” the senator asked.

  “Trust me. Jaws,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “Don’t worry your pretty head about it. You just make sure some damned honest politician doesn’t start snooping around.”

  “Not to worry,” Senator “Jaws” Fisch said. “They’re all too busy investigating each other.”

  “See that it stays that way,” Taylor P. Jambon said, “and we’re home free. In six months, no one will even remember what that broad said about you.”

  And so, steeling himself for the journey into the hinterlands with a half pound of beluga caviar washed down with a jeroboam of Piper Heidsieck ’51, Taylor P. Jambon left his Beverly Hills, California, pied-d-terre and headed for Spruce Harbor, Maine.

  It was a ghastly trip. Some incompetent in the public-relations department of the airline had screwed things up. There was a complimentary seat in the first-class compartment of the plane, of course, but just one seat, when the airline should have known full well that trying to squeeze Taylor P. Jambon’s hind quarters into just one seat was like trying to squeeze toothpaste back in the tube. Even worse than that, the necessary orders had not been issued to the airline’s commissary department, and at chow time Mr. Jambon was forced to partake of the same barbarous slop (filet mignon, baked potato, cherries jubilee and cafe royale) served to the other first-class passengers. (Mr. Jambon didn’t even like to think about what the peasants back in tourist class were being fed.)

  And when he arrived at Spruce Harbor Medical Center, he was bluntly informed that Miss Worthington was in medical isolation and could not receive visitors.

  “My dear young woman,” he had said, “I am Taylor P. Jambon!”

  She had stared at him with mild curiosity.

  “The famous gourmet and animal lover,” he went on. Incredibly, she had never heard of him, and worse, said so.

  “Certainly,” he had said, just a shade hysterical, “there must be someone, even in this domestic Siberia, with a modicum of culture and refinement, who will understand that when Taylor P. Jambon wishes to visit America’s most beloved thespian, Taylor P. Jambon gets to visit America’s most beloved thespian.”

  “I think you’re wrong about that, pal,” the receptionist said.

  “Wrong about what?”

  “She likes men. Oh, boy, does she like men! We have to send the ward boys in there in pairs. For their own safety. Even hung-up the way she is.”

  At that point, fortunately, confirming Taylor P. Jambon’s long-held belief that there was a divine purpose to his life, the hospital administrator, one T. Alfred Crumley, happened to pass through the hospital lobby, past the receptionist’s station.

  “Oh, my!” Mr. Crumley had said, clapping his hands together in something like ecstasy. “Can it really be Taylor P. Jambon, America’s most famous gourmet and animal lover, here in my little hospital?”

  “Indeed it is,” Mr. Jambon replied. “And who, sir, are you?”

  “I am T. Alfred Crumley, Sr., administrator of the Spruce Harbor Medical Center. And how may I be of service, Mr. Jambon?”

  “I have come to pay ’umble ’omage at the feet of Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington,” Taylor P. Jambon said.

  “How utterly gracious of you!” Mr. T. Alfred Crumley, Sr., replied. He turned to the receptionist. “What is Miss Worthington’s room number?”

  “Not a chance, Crumbum,” the receptionist said.

  “What do you mean, ‘not a chance’?” Mr. Crumley snapped. “And that’s Mr. Crumbum. I mean, Mr. Crumley.”

  “Hawkeye says no visitors,” the receptionist said. “And no deliveries of food, booze, or anything else. And when Hawkeye says no visitors, food, booze, or anything else, he means no ...”

  “And where is Dr. Pierce at this time?” Mr. Crumley replied, shutting her off.

  “In conference. And you know that when Hawkeye’s in conference, he doesn’t like to be disturbed,” the receptionist said, adding, sotto voce, “Especially by you, Crumbum.”

  Mr. Crumley looked a trifle disturbed for a moment. Then he straightened his shoulders.

  “Mr. Jambon,” he said, “I’m sure that an exception can be made in your case. If you would be good enough to come to my office with me, I will speak with Dr. Pierce on the telephone. And while we’re there, perhaps you would be good enough to autograph my copy of The Taylor P. Jambon Gourmet Guide to Gustatory Goodies?”

  “For you, Mr. Crumbum,” Taylor P. Jambon replied, grandly, “without charge.”

  Five minutes later, Mr. Taylor P. Jambon gently pushed open the door to the hospital room of Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington. He withdrew it quickly, and just in time, to avoid a stainless-steel bedpan which came flying through the air. It hit the door and crashed to the floor.

  “Miss Worthington,” he cried, “it is I, Taylor P. Jambon!”

  “How dare you, you bleeping creep, walk into my room without so much as a bleeping knock?” Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington, America’s most beloved thespian, screamed.

  “Dear lady,” Mr. Jambon replied from behind the safety of the heavy hospital door, “there is apparently some slight misunderstanding. It is I, Taylor P. Jambon, famous gourmet and animal lover, come to pay ’umble ’omage at your feet.”

  “Then why the bleep didn’t you say so, you bleeping ignoramus?” Miss Worthington asked. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a little snort with you, do you?”

  “As it happens, dear lady,” Taylor P. Jambon said, reaching into the breast pocket of his chartreuse sports
coat and coming up with a silver flask. He extended the flask beyond the edge of the door so that it could be seen. “I do happen to have some spirits with me. In case of emergency, of course.”

  “If this isn’t a bleeping emergency, I don’t know what one is,” Miss Worthington said. “You may enter.”

  Taylor P. Jambon entered the room and walked up to the bed. America’s most beloved thespian was in a hospital bed, the back of which had been cranked up. Her right leg was in a cast from the ankle to the groin and her left arm in a cast from the wrist to the shoulder.

  “Dear lady!” he said. “What have they done to you?”

  “What the bleep does it look like, you bleeping jackass?” Miss Worthington replied. “They’ve got me in a bleeping cast from my ankle to my (---)*. Not to mention what the blaps did to my bleeping arm. Hand me that bleeping flask, will you, Fatso?”

  (* Miss Worthington here used a somewhat scatological term for a portion of her anatomy which has no place in a morally uplifting tome like this one and has been deleted.)

  Mr. Taylor P. Jambon handed over the flask. Miss Worthington took it with her good arm, removed the cork with her teeth, spit the cork out, and then tipped the flask up to her lips. She drank half of its contents with a steady gurgle-gurgle, finally removed it from her lips, belched mightily and looked at Mr. Taylor P. Jambon.

  “Never look a gift horse in the face, I always say,” she said. “What’s on your bleeping mind, Fatso?”

  “I came, dear lady,” Taylor P. Jambon said, “the moment I heard of your tragic accident.”

  “Stop right there, Fatso,” Miss Worthington said. “It wasn’t a bleeping accident. It was a bleeping assassination * attempt, and I know which bleeping blap was responsible for it. The minute I can get out of this bleeping bed ...”

  (* Miss Worthington believed that the stewardess of the aircraft from which she fell was fully aware, when she advised Miss Worthington to “watch her step,” that no portable stairway had been pushed against the aircraft door and that the step Miss Worthington took without looking was thirty- two feet straight down. Further, she had somehow gotten the idea that Mr. Wesley St. James, the producer of the television series in which she was to star, was responsible. Both Mr. St. James and the stewardess involved invoked the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution when questioned by police.)