Team of Joy

We had nick names for everything and everyone, one was for the surgery team that consisted of five members, from the chief down to the intern and it was christened the “Team of Joy.” for it’s excellence as well as it’s party loving approach to being residents. I was elected the only honorary member of the team because of their feeling that I was really one of them (a surgeon disguised as a gynecologist).
The team consisted of the chief Joe, a brilliant guy, who was one of the first Blacks to finish from the Univ.of Texas. The 3rd year was Cy a super smart guy from Ohio State. The 2nd year was Jack and he had gone to Howard “ the genius” and the 1st year was Cup my best buddy who was a Meharry grad. The other ancillary members were Haircut from Texas and Henri from Meharry. The team was not always literally working together but more a loosely knit band of brothers. Some leaving and others joining.
We shared money that we stashed in the call room which we called “the turf fund” that was used to go out on the town. This was emergency money we could draw on and replace as needed.
The team had what we called break out nights in which every one stayed out all night and no one was allowed to go home even if they wanted to, so everyone was protected.
One of the perks of being a member of the team was we played poker every pay day in a flop room from Friday afternoon until the money ran out and then we bet on credit what we called “on the finger”. Many a time we busted a new player of his cash before he knew we were playing on credit. Our favorite game was Hi-Lo, the pot getting up to a hundred or more at times.
When you were chief your junior resident dare not call you from the game unless the patient was at death’s door or there would be hell to pay. One time I had lost all my money and was trying to get back and my wife had guests for dinner and kept calling me to come home. When I finally did come home my mood was pretty foul and she asked me to apologize to the couple, who I really didn’t like. So I just stormed out and went back to the hospital, borrowed some money and went “on the turf”. There was always a certain tension between home and hospital.
One of the things that happened in St. Louis in the late 50’s was the opening of Gas Light Square, an area that was filled with restaurants, bars and coffee houses planned to revive the area. Since St. Louis closed at midnight and on Sunday the coffee houses became a big draw by featuring Jazz (Quartet Tre’ Bien) and bringing in groups like Wes Montgomery and Cannonball Adderly. I was a personal friend of the Montgomery brothers from my days in Indianapolis. When the group had a 2 week gig at a club in the Square Wes was housed in a motel but his brothers Buddy and Monk needed cheap lodging. So I told them I could slip them into the hospital as visiting interns for their stay.( remember I was president of house staff with some pull). I slipped them up to the flop rooms on the 6th floor and told them when they came in at night to come through the ER and catch the elevator at the end of the hall. I also slipped them into the dining room for breakfast. During the day they slept or played pool or ping pong in our rec room. No one was the wiser.

One night about 4 of my friends and I went to the show as their guest and since it was a coffee house we carried a bottle to spike our cups. During a particularly melodic ballad Wes was playing some ones foot knocked over the bottle of booze and for all to hear it rolled clinking down the concrete floor of this old warehouse to the bandstand. Wes, Bud and Monk knew the source of the noise and all of us cracked up as the management looked around for whence it had come; since they could lose their license.
For years afterwards, when ever I went to see them play we had a laugh about them being interns and that incident in the club.
One sad story about the team of joy involved Cy. He had wed a young lady who was a social butterfly and could not wait for him to complete his residency. He came home after a long call weekend and she was gone with his little girl. His boy Henri, who was a jokester suggested that he look in the basement behind the furnace in case she was hiding. Any way Cy became very depressed and one day Henri stopped by as was his habit to pick him up one morning about 5 am and found him unconscious in the bath tub burning with a fever. He immediately got him to the hospital his temp was 105 and he was in septic shock with an abscess in his buttock. We all rallied to save Cy. They took him into surgery where a huge chunk of his gluteus was cut out. Then the infectious disease specialist advised that he be put on a very toxic new antibiotic called vancomycin. This had to be given IV around the clock so all of us took shifts giving it. Lingering at death’s door, Henri called Cy wife and asked her would she come and bring his little daughter to see him and she replied “fuck him” and hung up.
Cy recovered from the infection but never really recovered from the mental abandonment.
This took him on a spiraling path of drinking and we all worried about him. One day his car wouldn’t start and asked me for a push. That push ended with not going home for two days, running with him from bar to bar until we ended over in East St. Louis at Henri’s uncles bar Pudgies. There we found Henri who invited us to come home with him and get something to eat. We were walking down the path between his house and the one next door and he peeped in the window to see what kind of mood his wife was in. There she sat grim face with a shot gun across her lap rocking back and forth waiting on him. Naturally, we all promptly departed back to the safety of the “G’s” to sleep it off and allow the wives to cool off. There was one good thing about being a resident and that was you always had a place to sleep and eat.
Cy survived as did the “Team of Joy” to go on to be good friends to this day and when we all meet up to relive those days long past. It is our ritual that each night’s dinner is on one of the team who get to choose and pay for the meal.