Yossarian sighed. "You know all that about me now?"
"I hear things in my work, Mr. Yossarian."
"Who else do you work for when you hear things about me?"
"For whoever will pay me, Mr. Yossarian. I don't discriminate. We have laws now against discrimination. And I don't play favorites. I'm always objective and don't make distinctions. Distinctions are odious. And invidious too."
"Mr. Gaffney, I haven't paid you yet. You haven't sent me a bill or discussed the fees."
"Your credit is good, Mr. Yossarian, if the credit rating companies can be believed, and you can get that mortgage anytime you want. There are excellent lakefront properties available now in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and good seashore values too in Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Long Island. I can help you with the mortgage forms, if you like, as well as with your DNA. This is a good time for a mortgage and a very good time to buy."
"I don't want a mortgage and I don't want to buy. And who was that friend you mentioned before?"
"Of your nurse?"
"'I have no nurse, damn it. I'm in excellent health, if you're still keeping track, and by now she's a friend. Melissa."
"Nurse MacIntosh," Mr. Gaffney disagreed formally. "I am reading from the records, Mr. Yossarian, and the records never lie. They may be mistaken or out-of-date, but they never lie. They are inanimate, Mr. Y."
"Don't dare call me that!"
"They are not able to lie, and they are always official and authoritative, even when they are in error and contradict each other. Her friend is the nurse in the postoperative surgical recovery room you expressed a desire to meet. Her given name is Wilma but people are prone to call her angel, or honey, particularly patients as they emerge from anesthesia after surgery, and two or three physicians there, who now and then entertain ambitions of, as they put it, not I, getting into her pants. That may be a medical term. You may be joined by Miss Moore."
"Miss Moore?" Yossarian, with senses awhirl, was finding (t still harder to keep up. "Who the hell is Miss Moore?"
"You call her Moorecock," reminded Gaffney, in a dropped tone of admonition. "Forgive me for inquiring, Mr. Yossarian. But our listeners have not picked up sounds of sexual activity in your apartment in some time. Are you all right?"
"I've been doing it on the floor, Mr. Gaffney," answered Yossarian steadily, "below the air conditioner, as you advised me to, and in the bathtub with the water running."
"I'm relieved. I was concerned. And you really should call Miss MacIntosh now. Her telephone is free at this moment. She has troubling news about the Belgian's blood chemistry, but she seems eager to see you. I would predict that despite the differences in your respective ages-"
"Mr. Gaffney?"
"Forgive me. And Michael is just about finishing up and making ready to return, and you might forget."
"You see that too?"
"I see things too, Mr. Yossarian. That's also essential to my work. He's putting on his jacket and will soon be back with his first sketches of this new Milo Minderbinder wing. You'll permit Señor Gaffney that little wisecrack? I thought you might find it funnier than my first one."
"I'm grateful, Jerry," said Yossarian, with no doubt left that he was finding Mr. Gaffney a jumbo pain in the ass. He kept to himself his temper of hostile sarcasm.
"Thank you amp; John. I'm pleased we are friends now. You'll phone Nurse MacIntosh?"
"No fancy lingerie yet?" Melissa taunted when he did. "No Paris, or Florence?"
"Use your own for tonight," Yossarian bantered back. "We ought to keep seeing how we get along before we take off on a trip. And bring your roommate, if she wants to come."
"You can call her Angela," Melissa told him tartly. "I know what you did with her. She told me all about you."
"That's too bad, I think," Yossarian said, taken somewhat aback. With these two, he saw, he must keep on his mettle. "For that matter," he charged, "she told me all about you. It must be a nightmare. You could enter a convent. Your antiseptic terrors are almost unbelievable."
"I don't care," Melissa said with a hint of fanatical resolution. "I work in a hospital and I see sick people. I'm not going to take chances anymore with herpes or AIDS or even chlamydia, or vaginitis or strep throat or any of those other things you men like to pass around. I know about diseases."
"Do what you want. But bring that other friend of yours. The one that works in the surgical recovery room. I might as well start getting friendly with her now."
"Wilma?"
"They call her angel, don't they, and honey?"
"Only when they're recovering."
"Then I will too. I want to look ahead."
BOOK SIX
17 Sammy
Knee-action wheels.
I doubt I know more than a dozen people from the old days who might remember those automobile ads with the knee-action wheels, because I don't think there's more than a dozen of us left I could find. None live in Coney Island now, or even in Brooklyn. All that is gone, closed, except for the boardwalk and the beach and the ocean. We live in high-rise apartment houses like the one I'm in now, or in suburbs in traveling distance of Manhattan, like Lew and Claire, or in retirement villages in condominiums in West Palm Beach, Florida, like my brother and sister, or, if they have more money, in Boca Raton or Scottsdale, Arizona. Most of us have done much better than we ever thought we would or our parents dreamed we could.
Lifebuoy soap. Halitosis.
Fleischmann's Yeast, for acne. Ipana toothpaste for the smile of beauty, and Sal Hepatica for the smile of health.
When nature forgets, remember Ex-Lax.
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot
(When I drink it, how I fot).
Twice as much for a nickel too.
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.
None of us wise guys in Coney Island then believed this new drink Pepsi-Cola, notwithstanding the "Twelve full ounces, that's a lot" in the original ditty of that musical radio commercial, stood a chance in competition against the Coca-Cola drink we knew and loved, in the icy, smaller, sweating, somewhat greenish glass bottle with the willowy ripples on the surface that fit like balm into hands of every size and was by far the prevailing favorite. Today they taste to me identically the same. Both companies have grown mightier than any business enterprise ever ought to be allowed to do, and the six-ounce bottle is just about another extinct delight of the past. Nobody wants to sell a popular soft drink of just six ounces for only a nickel today, and nobody but me, perhaps, wants to buy one.
There was a two-cent "deposit" charged on every small soda bottle, a nickel on sodas of larger size that sold for ten cents, and none of the members in all of the families on that West Thirty-first Street block in Coney Island were inattentive to the value of those empty soda bottles. You could buy things of value for two pennies then. Sometimes as kids we'd go treasure hunting for deposit bottles in likely places on the beach. We would turn them in for cash at the Steinberg candy store right on my street at the corner of Surf Avenue and use the coins to play poker or twenty-one for pennies once we knew how, or spend them at once on things to eat. For two cents you could buy a nice-sized block of Nestle's or Hershey's chocolate, a couple of pretzels or frozen twists, or, in the fall, a good piece of the halvah we all went crazy about for a while. For a nickel you could get a Milky Way or Coca-Cola, a Melorol or Eskimo Pie, a hot dog in Rosenberg 's delicatessen store on Mermaid Avenue or at Nathan's about a mile down in the amusement area, or a ride on the carousel. For two cents you could buy a newspaper. When Robby Kleinline's father worked at Tilyou's Steeplechase we got free passes and with a few cents could usually win a coconut at the penny pitch game there. We learned how. Prices were lower then and so was income. Girls skipped rope and played jacks and potsy. We played punch-ball, stoopball, stickball, and harmonicas and kazoos. In the early evening after dinner-we called it supper-we might play blind-man's bluff on the sidewalk with our parents looking on, and all of us knew, and the parents saw, that we not-so-blind boys were using the game mainly as a chance to fumble with the titties of the girls for a few seconds every time we caught one and felt around pretending we were not yet set to identify her. That was before we boys began to masturbate and before they began to menstruate.