L.2: 'Sorry, chief. I am after being stationed in Pigeonhole.' P.L.: 'Don't go near Benway.' (Aside: 'I wonder if this will go down. You never know how primitive they are....') 'Confidentially he's a black magician.' 63
L.l: 'He's got this resident djinn.'
'Uhuh... Well I got a date with a high-type American client. A real classy fellah.' P.L.: 'Don't you know it's shameful to peddle your ass to the alien unbelieving pricks?'
'Well that's a point of view. Have fun.'
P.L.: 'Likewise.' Exit boy. 'They're hopeless I tell you. Hopeless.' L.l. 'What's with this serum?'
P.L.: 'I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything.... Turn a massacre into a sex orgy....
'Or a joke.'
'Precisely. Arty type... No principles...'
AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE (opening a box of Lux): 'Why don't it have an electric eye the box flip open when it see me and hand itself to the Automat Handy Man he should put it inna water already.... The Handy Man is outa control since Thursday, he been getting physical with me and I didn't put it in his combination at all.... And the Garbage Disposal Unit snapping at me, and the nasty old Mixmaster keep trying to get up under my dress.... I got the most awful cold, and my intestines is all constipated.... I'm gonna put it in the Handy Man's combination he should administer me a high colonic awready.'
SALESMAN (he is something between an aggressive Latah and a timid Sender): 'Recollect when I am travelling with K. E., hottest idea man in the gadget industry.
''Think of it!' he snaps. 'A cream separator in your own kitchen!'
' 'K. E., my brain reels at the thought.'
' 'It's five, maybe ten, yes, maybe twenty years away. ...But it's coming.'
''I'll wait, K. E. No matter how long it is I'll wait. When the priority numbers are called up yonder I'll be there.'
'It was K. E. put out the Octopus Kit for Massage Parlors, Barber Shops and Turkish Baths, with which you can administer a high colonic, an unethical massage, a shampoo, whilst cutting the client's toenails and removing his blackheads. And the M.D.'s Can Do Kit for busy practitioners will take out your appendix, tuck in a hernia, pull a wisdom tooth, ectomize your piles and circumcise you. Well, K. E. is such an atomic salesman if he runs out of Octopus Kits he is subject, by sheer charge, to sell an M.D. Can Do to a barber shop and some citizen wakes up with his piles cut out....
'
'Jesus, Homer, what kinda creep joint you running here? I been gang fucked.'
''Well, landsake, Si, I was just aiming to administer our complimentary high colonic free and gratis on Thanksgiving Day. K. E. musta sold me the wrong kit again....' ' MALE HUSTLER: 'What a boy hasta put up with in this business. Gawd! The propositions I get you wouldn't believe it.... They wanta play Latah, they wanta merge with my protoplasm, they want a replica cutting, they wanta suck my orgones, they wanta take over my past experience and leave old memories that disgust me....
'I am fucking this citizen so I think, 'A straight John at last'; but he comes to a climax and turns himself into some kinda awful crab.... I told him, 'Jack, I don't hafta stand still for such a routine like this.... You can take that business to Walgreen's.' Some people got no class to them. Another horrible old character just sits there and telepathizes and creams in his dry goods. So nasty.' 64
The bum boys fall back in utter confusion to the brink of the Soviet network where Cossacks hang partisans to the wild wail of bagpipes and the boys march up Fifth Avenue to be met by Jimmy Walkover with the keys to The Kingdom and no strings attached carry them loose in your pocket.... Why so pale and wan, fair bugger? Smell of dead leeches in a rusty tin can latch onto that live wound, suck out the body and blood and bones of Jeeeeesus, leave him paralyzed from the waist down.
Yield up thy forms, boy, to thy sugar daddy got the exam three years early and know all the answer books fix the World Series.
Slunk traffickers tail a pregnant cow to her labor. The farmer declares a couvade, rolls screaming in bullshit. The veterinarian wrestles with a cow skeleton. The traffickers machinegun each other, dodging through the machinery and silos, storage bins, haylofts and mangers of a vast red barn. The calf is born. The forces of death melt in morning. Farm boy kneels reverently --his throat pulses in the rising sun.
Junkies sitting on the courthouse steps, waiting on The Man. Red Necks in black stetsons and faded Levis tie a Nigra boy to an old iron lamppost and cover him with burning gasoline.... The junkies rush over and draw the flesh
