“I’m twenty-three years old,” she said. “I’m single. I guess my problem is that I’m afraid of men. Like they don’t turn me on the way I guess they should. And a couple of men have told me that I’m, well, that I’m frigid. I guess I’m afraid I might be.”
“You mean ya never been laid?” Little Gat asked.
“I’m not a virgin. But I don’t seem able to enjoy sex with men.”
“How about with women?” Fat Tits looked interested.
“Oh, I could never!” The blonde girl shuddered. Within the hour the group would label her “Iceberg.”
“All right. Now you.”
Archer realized the doctor was talking to him. His mind had strayed from the blonde girl and he’d been staring. He’d been staring at the toilet across the room. He’d been staring at it and wondering how he could manage to wait thirty-nine hours. Maybe if he didn’t eat or drink anything . . . He’d been staring at it the way a condemned man can’t stop himself from staring at the gallows being built outside his jail-cell window.
Archer forced himself to look away from the toilet and at the doctor. But his fears were written plainly on his face. Dr. Baariasol noted them and commented.
“Going to the bathroom is the most basic thing that people ado,” he told Archer in a voice that was filled with gentle understanding and yet struck Archer’s ear as strangely ominous. “Privacy in such matters is merely a false value imposed by society. Our aim here is to get down to the nitty-gritty.”
“Is it really necessary for the nitty to get quite that gritty?” Archer wondered aloud. ,
“Believe me, it’s one of the most efficacious means of accepting people and being accepted by them. You’ll see. Now tell us about yourself.”
“All right.” Archer sighed. “I’m a junior executive with a pharmaceutical company. I’m married. I play golf.” He looked around at the others helplessly, not knowing what else to say.
“What’s your problem?” the doctor prodded him.
“Problem? I don’t have any problem.”
“Then why are you here?” Fat Tits asked.
“The Company sent me. I’m not quite sure why.”
“Well, then they must think you have a problem,” Iceberg said softly. “What do you think they think it is?”
“I just don’t know.” Archer spread his hands helplessly.
“I think you do know,” Dr. Baariasol rumbled like artillery in the act of moving into position. “But you’re just not ready to talk about it yet. Well, there’s no pressure. We have plenty of time. We’ll come back to you.” He indicated that the man seated on the mattress on the other side of Archer should speak.
He was a man in his forties, pudgy, balding, with a face that could only be described as ugly. When he spoke, his voice was a high whine. “I used to be a successful businessman,” he told the group. “But I lost my business; I manufactured dietetic soft drinks. When the government banned cyclamates, everything went kaput. I used to be married. The day my business went bust, I came home and found a note from my wife. She’d left me. She took my Cadillac, which was paid for, and left the house, which was mortgaged to the hilt. The bank took the house. The day before I moved out, I tripped on the back steps and broke my ankle. The house was still in my name, but my homeowner’s policy didn’t cover the back steps—only the front steps. When I got out of the hospital, I learned that my hospitalization had been automatically canceled when the business went under. And that’s how it's been. From bad to worse. This morning I broke a shoelace and I didn’t have an extra one. Yesterday a passing car went through a puddle and sprayed the only suit I have left with mud. I feel like I’m up to my nostrils in manure and somebody up there’s making waves.”
“Maybe you’re just accident-prone,” Fat Tits said.
“Prone. Standing up. Sitting down. Walking on my hands. You name it. If there’s an accident looking for a place to happen, I’m the place. It’s been like that all my life.”
“Listen, ya not here to talk about ya troubles,” Little Gat told him. “Ya here to getcha head right. Whyncha quit cryin’ an’ tell us what’s really buggin’ ya? Psychologically, ya know?”
“I put three teaspoons of salt in my coffee this morning. I had two flat tires on the way over here. And I slammed the door on my finger coming into this very room. And you want me to play Freudian games?”
“You sound like Job,” Archer ventured. And “Job” was what they called the ugly little man after that.
“I agree that you’re avoiding the deeper problems,” Dr. Baariasol told Job. “We’ll come back to them.” He nodded to Fat Tits to speak.
“Mine is a classical case of Oedipally-induced ego repression,” she ‘said glibly, her mammoth mammaries jiggling like gigantic mounds of jello. “Sublimating my love for my father, and concomitant hatred for my mother, into oral patterns, I’ve evolved a neurotic pattern which expressed itself by the well-known syndrome of overeating. Hopefully the encounter experience will enable me to effect a transference to my analyst which will in turn result in my redirecting my libido toward other satisfactions than the ingestion of foods.”
“Phew!” Little Gat looked at her in awe.
When nobody else commented, the doctor indicated that the red-haired girl who’d followed Archer into the room should speak. Everybody looked at her. She was something to look at.
She was about five-nine with a figure that would have been a plus in the Copa chorus line. Long, silky legs, pear-shaped, melon-sized breasts with wide pink pips that pointed skyward, hips flaring out like old-style Caddy fins, a derriére plump and firm as a bisected basketball, a flaming triangle at the base of her flat belly to match the short, curly red hair that topped her sultry face—all put together like a living testimonial to the fact that glamour lives — that was the redhead. Now, as she spoke, add the throaty sort of voice that goes with a lowdown blues trumpet, painted lightbulbs of low wattage, and silk sheets embossed with scenes from the Kamasutra and smelling of Arabian perfume. Her words were something else again-—
“I have this insatiable yen —
“To bed down each man that I meet--
“To make love again and again-—
“My problem’s I’m always in heat!”
“Jeez!” Little Gat said admiringly, “I’d like ta compound ya problem.”
“Why do you talk like that?” Archer asked her.
“What’s wrong with the way
"I say what I say?"
“Do you always talk in verse?”
“I speak in rhyme
“All the time.”
“Why?” Archer wondered.
“With me rhyme’s compulsive!
“With me rhyme’s obsessive!
“Like my uncontrolled lust,
“Rhyming words is a must!”
“Obviously you’re an addictive personality,” Fat Tits told her. “You’re addicted to sex and poetry. It’s merely another manifestation of the same neurosis that causes heroin addiction, or alcoholism.”
“Yeah. Whyncha try taperin’ off,” Little Gat suggested. “On da poetry, I mean,” he added.
“One step at a time.” Archer picked up on the idea. “You could start out by using free verse instead of making everything rhyme.”