Spillguts hesitated at the bottom step of the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis, glanced disdainfully at the postcard in his left mitt. A ten o'clock appointment. He was late already. Well, screw them. Spillguts hated shrinks. He would have said he hated them more than anything in the world, but the truth was that shrinks were just one of the many things that Spillguts hated more than anything in the world. Truth was, he hated the world, period. He hated it the way it was, the way it was turning out, the way it carried on as if it would be a better place without him.
At least he was pretty sure the feeling was mutual. Every now and again he had his doubts, and had to go piss out the window into the street just to reassure himself. Yells and imprecations from below. Yup, the world hates me. So it went on. Then the postcard, calling his ass down to this creep joint so the quacks could give him the once over. Who did they think they were, exactly? Spillguts scratched his piles and leered at a pretty nurse leaving the building. She caught his eye, frowned, then turned on her heels and trotted smartly back into the building. Spillguts got a sinking feeling, right there. The white coats had his mugshot on file already?
Nothing for it. He slouched through the revolving door, into the main foyer. The nurse was talking in an urgent whisper to a smooth-faced, bespectacled man in a tweed jacket. Spillguts marched right up to them, clenching his fists in his trenchcoat pockets. The nurse stepped back, and Spillguts saw the man's name-tag. Benway, MD.
"I've seen this guy before," he thought. "But where?"
Doctor Benway smiled unaffectedly at Spillguts and offered his hand. Spillguts kept his fists in his pockets and thought of the shiv stashed in his left boot. Thought of the blade going into the Doctor's eyeball. It was a tasty thought, and Spillguts had to close his coat to cover up the bulge in his pants. The Doctor twitched an eyebrow, then gestured down the corridor.
"My surgery is this way, Mister Spillguts. After you..."
The surgery was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The Doctor took a seat behind a white enamelled desk, pulled a file out of the desk drawer and opened it in front of Spillguts who was standing awkwardly in the door frame. Spillguts felt a sudden chill in the bowels, like he needed the bathroom or more to the point needed a window in the bathroom he could climb out of and scuttle away down some trash-filled side-alley. Like someone walking over his grave, then emptying a coupla clips into the freshly turned burial mound just to make sure.
The Doctor smiled that home-produce, mother-knows-best smile and pointed at an uncomfortable looking chair in front of the desk.
"If you will, 'Mister' Spillguts...?"
Inverted commas around the "Mister" already. Jeez, the guy had a nerve. Spillguts coulda diced him right there, but something told him to hold off till he knew the whole deal. Like why the heck was he there, for one thing. And what was it with the test-tubes he'd seen an orderly wheeling down the corridor towards a green door at the end. Spillguts wanted to know what was behind that door. He parked his ass.
"Mmmmmmmmmm, Mickey Spillguts...Mickey Spillguts..." The Doctor 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 Spillguts 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. Spillguts felt the chill again, broke wind involuntarily. That angered him. He always made a point of farting on purpose, preferably in some dame's face if he could arrange it. And his damn piles itched.
"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 Spillguts had raised an objection, "Tuberculosis. Pn the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh infected...That is to say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected..."
The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy. Spillguts realised that he was expected to say something.
"That seems reasonable," he said.
The Doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddenly motionless. "Now we 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 phenomenon 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 Spillguts' face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion that Spillguts had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Spillguts 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 contempt went down, 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 himself back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Spillguts watched him appalled....
"The man is insane," he thought. The Doctor's face went blank as a gambler's. Spillguts 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, old man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as comfortable as possible. And that is precisely what we attempt to do in these cases."
Once again Spillguts 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 first love."
The Doctor's voice receded. He seemed actually to have gone away through an invisible door leaving 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 as bright and cold as snow in sunlight.
Spillguts shrugged: "None of my goddamn business...what I am wondering is why you have asked me to come here and why you feed me all this...this..."
"Bullshit?"
Spillguts was annoyed to find himself blushing.
The Doctor leaned forwards and placed the ends of his fingers together:
"You Private Dicks," he said indulgently, "Always in a hurry. One day perhaps you will learn the meaning of patience. No, Mickey - I may call you Mickey? - I am not evading your question. In cases of suspected tuberculosis 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 fluoroscope??? I may add that after talking with you I feel relatively sure that the result will be, for practical purposes, negative."
"Lissen, bud," Spillguts snarled, "I ain't never banged nothin' but dames, and I've banged more of them than you've irrigated colons, y'damn quack."
"Yes, Mickey, I know. And that is why you are here. A blood test to ensure your continued sexual uh well-being, this is reasonable, no?"
"Get to the point, I got hoods to blast."
The Doctor did not seem to hear. He drifted out of his chair and began walking around behind Spillguts, his voice languid and intermittent like music down a wintry 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 an on. He was talking about schizophrenia, cancer, hereditary disfunction of the hypothalamus.
Spillguts dozed off. He was opening a green door. A horrible smelll 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 floculation 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."
Spillguts yelled. He was ready.
"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 something special?" she snapped. Spillguts 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. Spillguts 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 surgery 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. "Something wrong?" Spillguts ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals.
"Let your hair down, chicken. You'll feel better." The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Spillguts' face like a great dangling tit.
"Go to hell!"
Spillguts 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?" Spillguts demanded.
"Oh nothing. Nothing at all."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"Well, Mickey," the Doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Spillguts' 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-Stanislouski test."
The Doctor tittered. "Oh dear no...you are getting ahead of me old man. You might have misunderstood. The Blomberg-Stanislouski, 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 colleague. Your KS seems to be..." He held the slip at arms 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.
"Mickey, 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..." Spillguts looked at the Doctor with overt distaste. "Yeah, sure," he said. "We all did."
"And now, Mickey, 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 he he he..." He suddenly leaned forwards fanning the photographs in front of Spillguts' face. "Pick a girl, any girl!"
Spillguts reached out with numb fingers and touched one of the photographs. The doctor put the photo back into the back and shuffled and cut and he placed the pack on Spillguts' file and slapped it smartly. He spread the photos face up in from of Spillguts. "Is she there?"
Spillguts shook his head.
"Og 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 Rorsach plate.
"Is that her?"
Spillguts nodded silently.
"You have good taste, old chao. 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. Spillguts could not be sure he had seen anything unusual. The Doctor's face opposite him was absolutely immobile and expressionless. Once again Spillguts experienced the floating sensation in his stomach and genitals of a sudden elevator stop.
"Yes, Mickey, you seem to be running our little obstacle course with flying colours...I guess you think this is all pretty silly don't you now...???"
"You're damn right."
"You are frank, Mickey. This is good. And now...Mickey..." 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....
"And so Mickey you will please oblige to tell me how many times and in 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. Spillguts 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 guys used to proposition me and sometimes...when I was blank..."
"Yes, of course, Mickey," the Doctor brayed heartily. "In your position I would have done the same I don't mind telling you heh heh heh...Well, I guess we can uh dismiss as irrelevant these uh understandable means of replenishing the uh exchequer. And now, Mickey, there were perhaps" - one finger tapped the file which gave out a faint effluvium of moldy jock straps and chlorine - "occasions. When no economic factors were involved."
A green flare exploded in Spillguts' brain. He saw Hans' lean brown body - twisting towards him, quick breath on his shoulder. The flare went out. Some huge insect was squirming in his hand.
His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion.
Spillguts got to his feet shaking with rage.
"What are you writing there?" he demanded.
"Do you often doze off like that??? In the middle of a conversation...?"
"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, Mickey?" The Doctor's voice reached him from a great distance.
"Out...Away...Through the door...."
"The Green Door, Mickey?"
The Doctor's voice was barely audible. The whole room was exploding out into space.
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The foregoing is in large part adapted from W. S. Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, with the opening section and some alterations / interpolations my own work.
I don't give a tinker's cuss about the feeble-minded individual behind Spillguts, but the character himself's a dull, swaggering homophobic asshole who had it coming.
Mickey Spillguts Says: "Geez, aren't you glad I'm a fictional character, Bnugle? I can't sue!"
In any case, the stuff2000 Family reminds you: Psychiatry is the medical fraud of the 20th Century. Let's set it running in the next millenium. Go to www.cchr.org for more information about this pseudo-medical bund which is ruining lives around the world.
Mickey Spillguts Copyright 1999 by R. Schreiber. Character used by Bnugle with retroactive permission.
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