.... He he he... Say, Archy boy, some night when you get caught short with a rusty load drop around and have a drink of Yohimbiny with me.' "'I'll do that, Doc, I sure will. It'll be just like old times. "So I went on back to my place and heated up some water and mixed up some paregoric and cloves and cinnamon and sassyfrass and give it to Liz, and it eased her some I reckon. Leastwise she let up aggravatin' me. ... Well, later on I went down to Doc Parker's again to get me a rubber... and just as I was leaving I run into Roy Bane, a good ol' boy too. There's not a finer man in this Zone than Roy Bane.... So he said to me he says, 'Arch, you see that ol' nigger over there in that vacant lot? Well, sure as shit and taxes, he comes there every night just as regular you can set your watch by him. See him behind them nettles? Every night round about eight thirty he goes over into that lot yonder and pulls himself off with steel wool.... Preachin' Nigger, they tell me.' "So that's how I come to know the hour more or less on Friday the 13th and it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes half an hour after that, I'd took some Spanish Fly in Doc's store and it was jest beginning to work on me down by Grennel Bog on my way to Nigger town.... Well the bog makes a bend, used to be nigger shack there.... They burned that ol' nigger over in Cunt Lick. Nigger had the aftosa and it left him stone blind.... So this white girl down from Texarkana screeches out: "'Roy, that ol' nigger is looking at me so nasty. Land's sake I feel just dirty all over.' "'Now, Sweet Thing, don't you fret yourself. Me an' the boys will burn him.' "'Do it slow, Honey Face. Do it slow. He's give me a sick headache.' "So they burned the nigger and that ol' boy took his wife and went back up to Texarkana without paying for the gasoline and old Whispering Lou runs the service station couldn't talk about nothing else all Fall: 'These city fellers come down here and burn a nigger and don't even settle up for the gasoline.' "Well, Chester Hoot tore that nigger shack down and rebuilt it just back of his house up in Bled Valley. Covered up all the windows with black cloth, and what goes on in there ain't fittin' to speak of.... Now Chester he's got some right strange ways.... Well it was just where the nigger shack used to be, right across from the Old Brooks place Hoods out every Spring, only it wasn't the Brooks place then... be- longed to a feller name of Scranton. Now that piece of land was surveyed back in 1919.... I reckon you know the man did the job too.... Feller name of Hump Clarence used to witch out wells on the side.... Good ol' boy too, not a finer man in this Zone than Hump Clarence.... Well it was just around about in there I come on Ted Spigot ascrewin a mud puppy." Lee cleared his throat. The Clerk looked up over his glasses. "Now if you'll take care, young feller, till I finish what I'm asaying, I'll tend to your business." And he plunged into an anecdote about a nigra got the hydrophobia from a cow. "So my pappy says to me: 'Finish up your chores, son, and let's go see the mad nigger....' They had that nigger chained to the bed, and he was bawling like a cow.... I soon got enough of that ol' nigger. Well, if you all will excuse me I got business in the Privy Coun- cil. He he he!" Lee listened in horror. The County Clerk often spent weeks in the privy living on scorpions and Montgomery Ward catalogues. On several occasions his assistants had forced the door and carried him out in an advanced state of malnutrition. Lee decided to play his last card. "Mr. Anker," he said, "I'm appealing to you as one Razor Back to another," and he pulled out his Razor Back card, a memo of his lush-rolling youth. The Clerk looked at the card suspiciously: "You don't look like a bone feed mast-fed Razor Back to me.... What you think about the Jeeeeews... P" "Well, Mr. Anker, you know yourself all a Jew wants to do is doodle a Christian girl.... One of these days well cut the rest of it off." "Well, you talk right sensible for a city feller.... Find out what he wants and take care of him.... He's a good ol' boy." INTERZONE The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif's chauffeur, which is not af- fectation or perversity on Keif's part, but a useful pre- text to break off relations with anyone he doesn't want to see: "You made a pass at Aracknid list night. I can't have you to the house again." People are always black- ing out in the Zone, whether they drink or not, and no one can say for sure he didn't make a pass at Aracknid's unappetizing person. Aracknid is a worthless chauffeur, barely able to drive. On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody, dead baby in the street, and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woman for a violation of the Sanitary Code. Aracknid is a grimly unattractive young man with a long face of a strange, slate-blue color. He has a big nose and great yellow teeth like a horse. Anybody can find an attractive chauffeur, but only Andrew Keif could have found Aracknid; Keif the brilliant, decadent young novelist who lives in a remodeled pissoir in the red light district of the Native Quarter. The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive: "Two thirds of one percent. I won't budge from that figure; not even for my bumpkins." "But where are the bills of lading, lover?" "Not where you're looking, pet. That's too obvious." "A bale of levies with built-in falsie baskets. Made in Hollywood." "Hollywood, Siam." "Well American style." "What's the commission?... The commission.... The Commission." "Yes, nugget, a shipload of K.Y. made of genuine whale dreck in the South Atlantic at present quaran- tined by the Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego, The commission, my dear! If we can pull this off we'll be in clover." (Whale dreck is reject material that accumu- lates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found any use for it. ) Interzone Imports Unlimited, which consists of Mar- vie and Leif The Unlucky, had latched onto the K.Y. deal? In fact they specialize in pharmaceuticals and run a 24-hour Pro station, six ways coverage fore and aft, as a side line. ( Six separate venereal diseases have been identified to date. ) They plunge into the deal. They form unmentionable services for a spastic Greek shipping agent, and one entire shift of Customs inspectors. The two partners fall out and finally denounce each other in the Embassy where they are referred to the We Don't Want To Hear About It Department, and eased out a back door into a shit-strewn vacant lot, where vultures fight over fish heads. They Hail at each other hysterically. 'You're trying to fuck me out of my commission!" "Your commission! Who smelled out this good thing in the first place?" "But I have the bill of lading." "Monster! But the check will be made out in my name." "Bawstard! You'll never see the bill of lading until my cut is deposited in escrow." "Well, might as well kiss and make up. There's noth- ing mean or petty about me." They shake hands without enthusiasm and peck each other on the cheek. The deal drags on for months. They engage the services of an Expeditor. Finally Marvie emerges with a check for 42 Turkestan kurds drawn on an anonymous bank in South America, to clear through Amsterdam, a procedure that will take eleven months more or less. Now he can relax in the cafes of The Plaza. He shows a photostatic copy of the check. He would never show the original of course, lest some envious citizen spit ink eradicator on the signature or otherwise muti- late the check. Everyone asks him to buy drinks and celebrate, but he laughs jovially and says, "Fact is I can't afford to buy myself a drink. I already spent every kurd of it buying Penstrep for Ali's clap. He's down with it fore and aft again. I came near kicking the little bastard right through the wall into the next bed. But you all know what a sentimental old thing I am." Marvie does buy himself a shot glass of beer, squeez- ing a blackened coin out of his fly onto the table. "Keep the change." The waiter sweeps the coin into a dust pan, he spits on the table and walks away. "Sore head! He's envious of my check." Marvie had been in Interzone since "the year before one" as he put it. He had been retired from some un- specified position in the State Dept. "for the good of the service." Obviously he had once been very good looking in a crew-cut, college boy way, but his face had sagged and formed lumps under the chin like melting paraffin. He was getting heavy around the hips. Leif The Unlucky was a tall, thin Norwegian, with a patch over one eye, his face congealed in a permanent, ingratiating smirk. Behind him lay an epic saga of un- successful enterprises. He had failed at raising frogs, chinchilla, Siamese fighting fish, rami and culture pearls. He had attempted, variously and without success, to promote a Love Bird Two-in-a-coffin Cemetery, to corner the condom market during the rubber shortage, to run a mail order whore house, to issue penicillin as a patent medicine. He had followed disastrous betting systems in the casinos of Europe and the race tracks of the U.S. His reverses in business were matched by the incredible mischances of his personal life. His front teeth had been stomped out by bestial American sailors in Brooklyn. Vultures had eaten out an eye when he drank a pint of paregoric and passed out in a Panama City park. He had been trapped between floors in an elevator for five days with an oil-burning junk habit and sustained an attack of D.T.s while stowing away in a foot locker. Then there was the time he collapsed with strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed up a live monkey in him, and he was gang- fucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderlies stole the penicillin substituting Saniflush; and the time he got clap in his ass and a self-righteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot, sulphuric acid, and the German practitioner of Technological Medicine who removed his appendix with a rusty can opener and a pair of tin snips (he considered the germ theory "a nonsense.") Flushed with success he then began snip- ping and cutting out everything in sight: "The human body is filled up vit unnecessitated parts. You can get by vit one kidney. Vy have two? Yes dot is a kidney.... The inside parts should not be so close in together crowded. They need lebensraum like the Vaterland." The Expeditor had not yet been paid, and Marvie was faced by the prospect of stalling him for eleven months until the check cleared. The Expeditor was said to have been born on the Ferry between the Zone and the Island. His profession was to expedite the delivery of merchandise. No one knew for sure whether his serv- ices were of any use or not, and to mention his name always precipitated an argument. Cases were cited to prove his miraculous efficiency and utter worthlessness. The Island was a British Military and Naval station directly opposite the Zone. England holds the Island on yearly rent-free lease, and every year the lease and permit of residence is formally renewed. The entire population turns out, attendance is compulsory, and gathers at the municipal dump. The President of the Island is required by custom to crawl across the garbage on his stomach and deliver the Permit of Residence and Renewal of the Lease, signed by every citizen of the Island, to The Resident Governor who stands resplen- dent in dress uniform. The Governor takes the permit and shoves it into his coat pocket: "Well," he says with a tight smile, "so you've decided to let us stay another year have you? Very good of you. And everyone is happy about it?... Is there anyone who isn't happy about it?" Soldiers in jeeps sweep mounted machine-guns back and forth across the crowd with a slow, searching move- ment. "Everybody happy. Well that's fine." He turns jovi- ally to the prostrate President. "I'll keep your papers in case I get caught short. Haw Haw Haw." His loud, metallic laugh rings out across the dump, and the crowd laughs with him under the searching guns. The forms of democracy are scrupulously enforced on the Island. There is a Senate and a Congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction. For a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century, they had been allowed to con- trol the dept. of Baboon Maintenance but this privilege had been withdrawn owing to absenteeism in the Senate. The purple-assed Tripoli baboons had been brought to the Island by pirates in the 17th century. There was a legend that when the baboons left the Island it would fall. To whom or in what way is not specified, and it is a capital offense to kill a baboon, though the noxious behaviour of these animals harries the citizens almost beyond endurance. Occasionally someone goes berserk, kills several baboons and himself. The post of President is always forced on some par- ticularly noxious and unpopular citizen. To be elected President is the greatest misfortune and disgrace that can befall an Islander. The humiliations and ignominy are such that few Presidents live out their full term of office, usually dying of a broken spirit after a year or two. The Expeditor had once been President and served the full five years of his term. Subsequently he changed his name and underwent plastic surgery, to blot out, as far as possible, the memory of his disgrace. "Yes of course... we'll pay you," Marvie was saying to the Expeditor. "But take it easy. It may be a little while yet...." "Take it easy? A little while!... Listen." "Yes I know it all. The finance company is repossess- ing your wife's artificial kidney.... They are evicting your grandmother from her iron lung." "That's in rather bad taste, old boy.... Frankly I wish I had never involved myself in this uh matter. That bloody grease has too much carbolic in it. I was down to customs one day last week. Stuck a broom handle into a drum of it, and the grease ate the end off straight away. Besides, the stink is enough to knock a man on his bloody ass. You should take a walk down by the port." "I'll do no such thing," Marvie screeched. It is a mark of caste in the Zone never to touch or even go near what you are selling. To do so gives rise to suspicion of retailing, that is of being a common peddler. A good part of the merchandise in the Zone is sold through street peddlers. "Why do you tell me all this? It's too sordid! Let the retailers worry about it." "Oh it's all very well for you chaps, you can scud out from under. But I have a reputation to maintain.... There'll be a spot of bother about this." "Do you suggest there is something illegitimate in this operation?" "Not illegitimate exactly. But shoddy. Definitely shoddy." "Oh go back to your Island before it falls! We knew you when you were peddling your purple ass in the Plaza pissoirs for five pesetas." "And not many takers either," Leif put in. He pro- nounced it ither. This reference to his Island origin was more than the Expeditor could stand.... He was draw- ing himself up, mobilizing his most frigid impersona- tion of an English aristocrat, preparing to deliver an icy, clipped "crusher," but instead, a whining, whimpering, kicked dog snarl broke from his mouth. His presurgery face emerged in an arc-light of incandescent hate.... He began to spit curses in the hideous, strangled gut- turals of the Island dialect. The Islanders all profess ignorance of the dialect or fiatly deny its existence. "We are Breetish," they say. "We don't got no bloody dealect." Froth gathered at the corners of the Expeditor's mouth. He was spitting little balls of saliva like pieces of cotton. The stench of spiritual vileness hung in the airs about him like a green cloud. Marvie and Leif fell back twittering in alarm. 'He's gone mad," Marvie gasped. "Let's get ont of here." Hand in hand they skip away into the mist that covers the Zone in the winter months like a cold Turk- ish Bath. THE EXAMINATION Carl Peterson found a postcard in his box requesting him to report for a ten o'clock appointment with Doctor Benway in the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophy- laxis.... "What on earth could they want with me?" he thought irritably.... "A mistake most likely." But he knew they didn't make mistakes.... Certainly not mis- takes of identity.... It would not have occurred to Carl to disregard the appointment even though failure to appear entailed no penalty.... Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion.... Carl walked through the Town Hall Square.... Nickel nudes sixty feet high with brass genitals soaped themselves under gleaming showers.... The Town Hall cupola, of glass brick and copper crashed into the sky. Carl stared back at a homosexual American tourist who dropped his eyes and fumbled with the light filters of his Leica.... Carl entered the steel enamel labyrinth of the Minis- try, strode to the information desk... and presented his card. "Fifth floor... Room twenty-six..." In room twenty-six a nurse looked at him with cold undersea eyes. "Doctor Benway is expecting you," she said smiling. "Go right in." "As if he had nothing to do but wait for me," thought Carl... The office was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The doctor shook Carl's hand, keeping his eyes on the young man's chest.... "I've seen this man before," Carl thought.... "But where?" He sat down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette.... He turned to the doctor a steady inquiring gaze in which there was more than a touch of insolence. The doctor seemed embarrassed.... He fidgeted and coughed... and fumbled with papers.... "Hurumph," he said finally.... "Your name is Carl Peterson I believe...." His glasses slid down into his nose in parody of the academic manner.... Carl nodded silently.... We doctor did not look at him but seemed none the less to register the acknowledgment. ... He pushed his glasses back into place with one finger and opened a file on the white enameled desk. "Mmmmmmmm. Carl Peterson," he repeated the name caressingly, pursed his lips and nodded several times. He spoke again abruptly: "You know of course that we are trying. We are all trying. Sometimes of course we don't succeed." His voice trailed off thin and tenuous. He put a hand to his forehead. "To adjust the state -- simply a tool -- to the needs of each individual citizen." His voice boomed out so unexpectedly deep and loud that Carl started. "That is the only function of the state as we see it. Our knowledge... incomplete, of course," he made a slight gesture of depreciation.... "For example... for example... take the matter of uh sexual deviation." The doctor rocked back and forth in his chair. His glasses slid down onto his nose. Carl felt suddenly uncomfortable. "We regard it as a misfortune... a sickness... certainly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than say... tuberculosis.... Yes," he repeated firmly as if Carl had raised an objection.... "Tubercu- losis. On the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations, cer- tain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authori- ties concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of incon- venience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh in- fected.... That is to say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected.... We do not find obligatory vaccination for smallpox an unreasonable measure.... Nor isolation for certain contagious dis- eases.... I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hurumph what the French call 'Les Maladies galantes' heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily." The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy.... Carl realized that he was expected to say something. "That seems reasonable," he said. The doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddenly mo- tionless. "Now to get back to this uh matter of sexual deviation. Frankly we don't pretend to understand -- at least not completely -- why some men and women prefer the uh sexual company of their own sex. We do know that the uh phenomena is common enough, and, under certain circumstances a matter of uh concern to this department." For the first time the doctor's eyes flickered across Carl's face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion that Carl had ever experienced in himsef or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Carl suddenly felt trapped in this silent underwater cave of a room, cut off from all sources of warmth and certainty. His picture of himself sitting there calm, alert with a trace of well mannered con- tempt went dim, as if vitality were draining out of him to mix with the milky grey medium of the room. "Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hurmph symptomatic." The doctor suddenly threw him- self back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Carl watched him appalled.... "The man is insane," he thought. The doctor's face went blank as a gambler's. Carl felt an odd sensation in his stomach like the sudden stopping of an elevator. The doctor was studying the file in front of him. He spoke in a tone of slightly condescending amusement: "Don't look so frightened, young man. Just a profes- sional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as com- fortable as possible. And that is precisely what we attempt to do in these cases." Once again Carl felt the impact of that cold interest on his face. "That is to say reassurance when reassurance is necessary... and, of course, suitable outlets with other individuals of similar tendencies. No isolation is indicated... the condition is no more directly contagious than cancer. Cancer, my Brst love," the doctor's voice receded. He seemed actu- ally to have gone away through an invisible door leav- ing his empty body sitting there at the desk. Suddenly he spoke again in a crisp voice. "And so you may well wonder why we concern ourselves with the matter at all?" He flashed a smile bright and cold as snow in sunlight. Carl shrugged: "That is not my business... what I am wondering is why you have asked me to come here and why you tell me all this... this..." "Nonsense?" Carl was annoyed to find himself blushing. The doctor leaned back and placed the ends of his fingers together: "The young," he said indulgently. "Always they are in a hurry. One day perhaps you will learn the meaning of patience. No, Carl... I may call you Carl'? I am not evading your question. In cases of suspected tubercu- losis we -- that is the appropriate department -- may ask, even request, someone to appear for a fluoroscopic examination. This is routine, you understand. Most of such examinations turn up negative. So you have been asked to report here for, should I say a psychic fluoro- scope? I may add that after talking with you I feel relatively sure that the result will be, for practical pur- poses, negative.... "But the whole thing is ridiculous. I have always interested myself only in girls. I have a steady girl now and we plan to marry." "Yes Carl, I know. And that is why you are here. A blood test prior to marriage, this is reasonable, no?" "Please doctor, speak directly." The doctor did not seem to hear. He drifted out of his chair and began walking around behind Carl, his voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street. "I may tell you in strictest confidence that there is definite evidence of a hereditary factor. Social pressure. Many homosexuals latent and overt do, unfortunately, marry. Such marriages often result in... Factor of infantile environment." The doctor's voice went on and on. He was talking about schizophrenia, cancer, here- ditary disfunction of the hypothalamus. Carl dozed off. He was opening a green door. A hor- rible smell grabbed his lungs and he woke up with a shock. The doctor's voice was strangely flat and lifeless, a whispering junky voice: "The Kleiberg-Stanislouski semen fioculation test... a diagnostic tool... indicative at least in a negative sense. In certain cases useful -- taken as part of the whole picture.... Perhaps under the uh circumstances." The doctor's voice shot up to a pathic scream. "The nurse will take your uh specimen." "This way please...." The nurse opened the door into a bare white walled cubicle. She handed him a jar. "Use this please. Just yell when you're ready." There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him. Some coy little message stitched on like: "If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store." Ignoring the K.Y., he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up against a glass brick wall. "Old Glass Cunt," he sneered, and saw a cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights. He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants. Something was watching his every thought and move- ment with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed, a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair. He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skull-less, eyes like burning pus. "Something wrong?" said the nurse indifferently. She was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked up the jar with obvious distaste. The nurse turned to him: "Are you waiting for some- thing special?" she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. "Why no...." "You can go then," she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door. "Do I have another appointment?' She looked at him in disapproving surprise: "You'll be notified of course." She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression. As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow. "Some- thing wrong?" Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench be- side a bronze faun with cymbals. "Let your hair down, chicken. You'll feel better." The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl's face like a great dangling tit. "Fuck off you!" Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen's spayed animal brown eyes. "Oh! I wouldn't be calling any names if I were you, chicken. You're hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute." 'What do you mean by that?" Carl demanded. "Oh nothing. Nothing at all." '%"Well, Carl," the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl's mouth. "I have some good news for you." He picked up a slip of blue paper off the desk and went through an elaborate pantomime of focusing his eyes on it. "Your uh test... the Robinson-Kleiberg floculation test..." "I thought it was a Blomberg-Stanlouski test." The doctor tittered. "Oh dear no.... You are getting ahead of me young man. You might have misunder- stood. The Blomberg-Stanlouski, weeell that's a different sort of test altogether. I do hope... not necessary...." He tittered again: "But as I was saying before I was so charmingly interrupted... by my hurumph learned young colleague. Your KS seems to be..." He held the slip at arm's length. "...completely uh negative. So perhaps we won't be troubling you any further. And so..." He folded the slip carefully into a file. He leafed through the file. Finally he stopped and frowned and pursed his lips. He closed the file and put his hand Hat on it and leaned forward. "Carl, when you were doing your military service... There must have been... in fact there were long peri- ods when you found yourself deprived of the uh con- solations and uh facilities of the fair sex. During these no doubt trying and difficult periods you had perhaps a pin up girl? Or more likely a pin up harem? Heh heh heh..." Carl looked at the doctor with overt distaste. "Yes, of course," he said. "We all did." "And now, Carl, I would like to show you some pin up girls." He pulled an envelope out of a drawer. "And ask you to please pick out the one you would most like to uh make heh heh heh...." He suddenly leaned for- ward fanning the photographs in front of Carl's face. "Pick a girl, any girl!" Carl reached out with numb fingers and touched one of the photographs. The doctor put the photo back into the pack and shuffled and cut and he placed the pack on Carl's file and slapped it smartly. He spread the photos face up in front of Carl. "Is she there?" Carl shook his head. "Of course not. She is in here where she belongs. A woman's place what??" He opened the file and held out the girl's photo attached to a Rorshach plate. "Is that her?" Carl nodded silently. "You have good taste, my boy. I may tell you in strict- est confidence that some of these girls..." with gam- bler fingers he shifts the photos in Three Card Monte Passes -- "are really boys. In uh drag I believe is the word?" His eyebrows shot up and down with incredi- ble speed. Carl could not be sure he had seen anything unusual. The doctor's face opposite him was absolutely immobile and expressionless. Once again Carl experi- enced the Hoating sensation in his stomach and genitals of a sudden elevator stop. "Yes, Carl, you seem to be running our little obstacle course with flying colors.... I guess you think this is all pretty silly don't you now... ???" "Well, to tell the truth... Yes..." "You are frank, Carl... This is good.... And now ...Carl..." He dragged the name out caressingly like a sweet con dick about to offer you an Old Gold -- ( just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow) and go into his act.... The con dick does a little dance step. "Why don't you make The Man a proposition?" he jerks a head towards his glowering super-ego who is always referred to in the third person as "The Man" or "The Lieutenant." "That's the way the Lieutenant is, you play fair with him and he'll play fair with you.... We'd like to go light on you.... If you could help us in some way." His words open out into a desolate waste of cafeterias and street corners and lunch rooms. Junkies look the other way munching pound cake. "The Fag is wrong." The Fag slumps in a hotel chair knocked out on goof balls with his tongue lolling out. He gets up in a goof ball trance, hangs himself with- out altering his expression or pulling his tongue in. The dick is diddling on a pad. "Know Marty Steel?" Diddle. "Yes." "Can you score off him?" Diddle? Diddle? "He's skeptical." "But you can score." Diddle diddle "You scored off him last week didn't you?" Diddle??? "Yes." "Well you can score off him this week." Diddle... Diddle... Diddle... "You can score off him today." No diddle. "Not No! Not that!!" "Now look are you going to cooperate" -- three vicious diddles -- "or does the... does the Man cornhole you?" He raises a fay eyebrow. "And so Carl you will please oblige to tell me how many times and under what circumstances you have uh indulged in homosexual acts???" His voice drifts away. "If you have never done so I shall be inclined to think of you as a somewhat atypical young man." The doctor raises a coy admonishing finger. "In any case..." He tapped the file and flashed a hideous leer. Carl noticed that the file was six inches thick. In fact it seemed to have thickened enormously since he entered the room. "Well, when I was doing my military service... These queers used to proposition me and sometimes... when I was blank..." "Yes, of course, Carl," the doctor brayed heartily. "In your position I would have done the same I don't mind telling you heh heh heh.... Well, E guess we can uh dismiss as irrelevent these uh understandable means of replenishing the uh exchequer. And now, Carl, there were perhaps" -- one finger tapped the file which gave out a faint effluvia of moldy jock straps and chlorine- "occasions. When no uh economic factors were in- volved." A green Hare exploded in Carl's brain. He saw Hans' lean brown body -- twisting towards him, quick breath on his shoulder. The Hare went out. Some huge insect was squirming in his hand. His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion. Carl got to his feet shaking with rage. "What are you writing there?" he demanded. "Do you often doze off like that?P in the middle of a conversation... P" "I wasn't asleep that is." "You weren't?" "It's just that the whole thing is unreal.... I'm going now. I don't care. You can't force me to stay." He was walking across the room towards the door. He had been walking a long time. A creeping numbness dragged his legs. The door seemed to recede. "Where can you go, Carl?" The doctor's voice reached him from a great distance. "Out... Away... Through the door..." "The Green Door, Carl?" The doctor's voice was barely audible. The whole room was exploding out into space. HAVE YOU SEEN PANTOPON ROSE Stay away from Queens Plaza, son.... Evil spot haunted by dicks scream for dope Bend lover.... Too many levels.... Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia... like burning lions... fall on poor old lush worker scare her veins right down to the bone. ...Her skin-pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware.... Look down, look down along that line before you travail there.... The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.... -- Queens Plaza is a bad spot for lush workers.... Too many levels and lurking places for subway heat, and impossible to cover when you put the hand out.... Five months and twenty-nine days: sentence given for "jostling," that is, touching a Hop with obvious intent.... Innocent people may be convicted of murder but not of jostling. Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, old time, junkies and lush- workers of my acquaintance.... The old 103rd street klatch.... Sailor and Irish hanged themselves in the Tombs.... The Beagle is dead of an overdose and the Fag went wrong.... "Have you seen Pantopon Rose?" said the old junky. ..."Time to cosq," put on a black overcoat and made the square.... Down skid road to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special.... The gangster in concrete rolls down the river chan- nel.... They cowboyed him in the steam room.... Is this Cherry Ass Gio the Towel Boy or Mother Gillig, Old Auntie of Westminster Place?P Only dead fingers talk in Braille.... The Mississippi rolls great limestone boulders down the silent alley.... "Clutter the glind!" screamed the Captain of Moving Land.... Distant rumble of stomachs.... Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern Lights.... The reservoirs are empty.... Brass statues crash through the hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city.... Probing for a vein in the junk-sick morning.... Strictly from cough syrup... A thousand junkies storm the crystal spine clinics, cook down the Grey Ladies.... In the limestone cave met a man with Medusa's head in a hat box and said, "Be Careful," to the Customs Inspector.... Freezed forever hand an inch from the false bottom.... Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the fairy hype.... (The Hype is a short change con.... Also known as The Bill....) "Multiple fracture," said the big physician.... "I'm very technical...." Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticos slippery with Koch spit.... The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper by the urine of a million fairies.... This is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.... COKE BUGS The Sailor's grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup -- mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor's level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait.