“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 132
putting out for us. We kept them trapped in bed there for more than ten hours. We even
smacked their faces a little when they started to complain. Then we took away their
nickels and dimes and chewing gum and threw them out. Boy, we used to have fun in
that fraternity house,’ he recalled peacefully, his corpulent cheeks aglow with the jovial,
rubicund warmth of nostalgic recollection. ‘We used to ostracize everyone, even each
other.’ But Aarfy was no help to Nately now as the girl Nately had fallen so deeply in
love with began swearing at him sullenly with rising, menacing resentment. Luckily,
Hungry Joe burst in just then, and everything was all right again, except that Dunbar
staggered in drunk a minute later and began embracing one of the other giggling girls at
once. Now there were four men and three girls, and the seven of them left Aarfy in the
apartment and climbed into a horse-drawn cab, which remained at the curb at a dead
halt while the girls demanded their money in advance. Nately gave them ninety dollars
with a gallant flourish, after borrowing twenty dollars from Yossarian, thirty-five dollars
from Dunbar and seventeen dollars from Hungry Joe. The girls grew friendlier then and
called an address to the driver, who drove them at a clopping pace halfway across the
city into a section they had never visited before and stopped in front of an old, tall
building on a dark street. The girls led them up four steep, very long flights of creaking
wooden stairs and guided them through a doorway into their own wonderful and
resplendent tenement apartment, which burgeoned miraculously with an infinite and
proliferating flow of supple young naked girls and contained the evil and debauched ugly
old man who irritated Nately constantly with his caustic laughter and the clucking, proper
old woman in the ash-gray woolen sweater who disapproved of everything immoral that
occurred there and tried her best to tidy up.
The amazing place was a fertile, seething cornucopia of female nipples and navels. At
first, there were just their own three girls, in the dimly-lit, drab brown sitting room that
stood at the juncture of three murky hallways leading in separate directions to the
distant recesses of the strange and marvelous bordello. The girls disrobed at once,
pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and bantering all
the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long white hair and
slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty blue armchair
almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his companions welcome
with a mirthful and sardonic formality. Then the old woman trudged out to get a girl for
Hungry Joe, dipping her captious head sadly, and returned with two big-bosomed
beauties, one already undressed and the other in only a transparent pink half slip that
she wiggled out of while sitting down. Three more naked girls sauntered in from a
different direction and remained to chat, then two others. Four more girls passed
through the room in an indolent group, engrossed in conversation; three were barefoot
and one wobbled perilously on a pair of unbuckled silver dancing shoes that did not
seem to be her own. One more girl appeared wearing only panties and sat down,
bringing the total congregating there in just a few minutes to eleven, all but one of them
completely unclothed.
There was bare flesh lounging everywhere, most of it plump, and Hungry Joe began to
die. He stood stock still in rigid, cataleptic astonishment while the girls ambled in and
made themselves comfortable. Then he let out a piercing shriek suddenly and bolted
toward the door in a headlong dash back toward the enlisted men’s apartment for his
camera, only to be halted in his tracks with another frantic shriek by the dreadful,
freezing premonition that this whole lovely, lurid, rich and colorful pagan paradise would
be snatched away from him irredeemably if he were to let it out of his sight for even an
instant. He stopped in the doorway and sputtered, the wiry veins and tendons in his face
and neck pulsating violently. The old man watched him with victorious merriment, sitting
in his musty blue armchair like some satanic and hedonistic deity on a throne, a stolen
U.S. Army blanket wrapped around his spindly legs to ward off a chill. He laughed
quietly, his sunken, shrewd eyes sparkling perceptively with a cynical and wanton
enjoyment. He had been drinking. Nately reacted on sight with bristling enmity to this
wicked, depraved and unpatriotic old man who was old enough to remind him of his