"You're not to go there," he said. "That's Rosenkranz, where mentals
are to be taken. And you're not to be social with attendants at Grove,
such as myself."
He looked straight ahead as he took his zigzagging, clanking, spastic
steps, and Stern was somehow convinced that this man was doing the most
important work in the world. That there was nothing of greater moment
than being the attendant for intestinals and being in charge of baggage
carriers. Despite his complicated legs, he seemed a terribly strong man
to Stern, who felt that even were he to flee to the Netherlands after
a milk and cookie infraction, getting a fifteen-hour start, the Negro
would go after him Porgy-like and catch him eventually. He wondered
if somehow he might not be able to enlist the Negro and his great jaw
muscles to fight the man down the street. He saw the man knocking the
Negro down seven or eight times and the Negro disgustedly wiping off
his clean intern's jacket, making clamp and gear adjustments, and
then, handsome face serious and determined, great jaw muscles bunched,
coming on to squeeze the life out of the kike man's throat.
They came finally to the end of the ramp and to a two-story dormitory,
which Lennie identified as Griggs. He pointed to a room right inside
the entrance and said, "One is not ever to enter the staff room. There
is to be a line outside for medicines and, later, for milk and cookie.
There'll be no leaving the grounds either; otherwise, strict penalties
will ensue."
Stern's room was on the second floor. It took double the usual number
of gear shiftings and fastener slidings for the Negro to mount the
stairs, and when he was up there his jaw muscles were lumped enormously
and his white intern's jacket was soaked. Stern said, "Thank you for
all your trouble," and the Negro, after opening the room door, said,
"One is to obey all rules here on the premises."
Stern's room was long and thin and rancid, as though aging merchant
marine bosuns with kidney difficulties had spent their lives in it. A
small middle-aged man with a caved-in chest and loose pouches under his
eyes sat on one of the two beds in the dim light and said, "Hey, what's
this?"
"What?" asked Stern.
The man had arranged his hands in a tangled way, as though he were
scrubbing them, and was holding them against a lamp so that a clumping,
knobby shadow showed against the wall.
"I don't know what that is," Stern said.
"See the dingus? See the wang-wang?"
"What do you mean?" Stern asked.
"You know. It's sexeroo. Screwerino."
Stern looked at the shadows again and, as the man manipulated his
fingers, Stern thought he could make out a rough picture of a pair of
sexual organs in contact.
"That's pretty good," Stern said.
"Check these," the man said, pulling a medallion out of his T-shirt and
beckoning Stern closer. Stern looked at it, a carving of a lion and a
deer, which turned into a pair of male and female genitals when tilted
at an angle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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