Naked Lunch

'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 misunderstood. 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 flat on it and leaned forward.

'Carl, when you were doing your military service... There must have been... in fact there were long periods when you found yourself deprived of the uh consolations 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 strictest confidence that some of these girls...' with gambler 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 incredible 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 experienced the floating 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...'

96

'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 superego 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.