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MANAGER: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What's that?' A. J.: "It's an Illyrian poodle. Choicest beast a man can latch onto. It'll raise the tone of your trap." MANAGER: "I suspect it to be a purple-assed baboon and it stands outside." STOOGE: "Don't you know who this is? It's A. J., last of the big time spenders." MANAGER: "Leave him take his purple-assed bastard and big time spend some place else." A. J. stops in front of another club and looks in. "Ele- gant fags and old cunts, God damn it! We come to the right place. Avanti, ragazzit" He drives a gold stake into the floor and pickets the baboon. He begins talking in elegant tones, his stooges filling in. "Fantastic!" "Monstrous!" "Utter heaven1" A. J. puts a long cigarette holder in his mouth. The holder is made of some obscenely flexible material. It swings and undulates as if endowed with loathsome reptilian life. A. J.: "So there I was Hat on my stomach at thirty thousand feet." Several nearby fags raise their heads like animals scenting danger. A. J. leaps to his feet with an inarticu- late snarl. "You purple-assed cocksucker!" he screams. "I'll teach you to shit on the floor!" He pulls a whip from his um- brella and cuts the baboon across the ass. The baboon screams and tears loose the stake. He leaps on the next table and climbs up an old woman who dies of heart failure on the spot. A. J.: "Sorry, lady. Discipline you know." In a frenzy he whips the baboon from one end of the bar to the other. The baboon, screaming and snarl- ing and shitting with terror, climbs over the clients, runs up and down on top of the bar, swings from drapes and chandeliers.... A. J.: "You'll straighten up and shit right or you won't be inna condition to shit one way or the other." STOOGE: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself up- settin' A. J. after all he's done for you." A. J.: "Ingrates! Every one of them ingrates! Take it from an old queen." Of course no one believes this cover story. A. J. claims to be an "independent," which is to say: "Mind your own business." There are no independents any more. ... The Zone swarms with every variety of dupe but there are no neutrals there. |
