Underworld

  First you laugh, then you dance.

  The room was called El Patio and the mambo music from the lounge kept seeping in. Lenny was surprised to spot some old people in the crowd, a few canes propped against the chairs, but he decided not to do any cripple bits. Not because he was getting cautious and soft. No, there was only one subject tonight and it was central to his existence.

  “We’re less than two hundred miles from Cuba. I know you know this. And I know this. But I still have to say it. Those missiles are just over my right shoulder, dig. A range of one thousand kilometers, which is redundant from our viewpoint but which disturbs me anyway because we haven’t even lost the war yet and we’re already on the metric system.”

  And he stood nodding his head, looking semi-jetlagged, a little paranoid, a little overmedicated, his voice subdued and his eyes murky with lunar gloom.

  “And we won’t get killed for being Jewish. That’s the tricky part. They’ll kill us for being American. How do we feel about that?”

  What a way to begin a night of entertainment. There was a long lugubrious silence. Then Lenny did a standing left turn, posed a moment like some discus Greek and finally shot his upper body forward and pounded the floor with his fist.

  A college kid laughed.

  “What I love are the names of our protectors. Check it out, Jim.”

  And he took a clutch of newsclips from the side pocket of the ratty car coat he was wearing. Mumbled some lines of text, made a few Mort Sahlish comments, dropped a clipping and kicked it, speaking briefly in his Transylvanian voice.

  “All right, these men are deciding our fate. They’re going in and out of solemn meetings all day and night. White shirts, cuff links, striped ties. But their names are where it’s at. Adlai Stevenson. Adlai. Gases you right down to your Capezios, right? It’s so exclusive it has no gender. This little boy is so special we don’t want anyone to know he’s a boy. Because, ultimately, dig, being a boy or a girl is so fucking common. And if anyone else uses this name within a five thousand mile radius of our Adlai, we’ll pay to have him killed. And all his progeny. Completely extinguish the line. Because this is our family thing. That’s it, you see. La cosa nostra. Only they don’t have to do it with extortion and murder. They do it with names that no one else could ever think up.”

  The divorced women laughed. There were lowlifes from the dog track in attendance. Musicians on their night off. Pool boys and out-of-work dancers. There were two tables of travel agents on a junket from Toronto—they thought Lenny was a Scottish comic who did impressions of the royal family.

  “All right, dig. Dean Rusk. Dean. Born to lead, to advise and instruct. Born to be bald. No, yes, wise but also tough and shrewd. Look out for men with one syllable in each name. Unyielding motherfuckers. But here’s my favorite, okay. You know what I’m gonna say, don’t you?”

  An old lady laughed.

  “That’s right. McGeorge Bundy. McGeorge. How do you survive childhood with a name like that? Was his name reversed at birth? A mistake at the hospital? Of course not. They did it. They marked him for greatness. Besides, he had a grandmother named McMary.”

  The old lady loved it.

  Lenny took a while to riffle through the strips of newsprint, mumbling something.

  “Yes, no, here’s one. Roswell Gilpatric. Roswell. It’s not a put-on. It’s real. Look, shown here in the cabinet room. Captured on film. The secretaries, the assistant secretaries, the undersecretaries, the deputy undersecretaries, the advisors on Russian affairs. Alexis Johnson. Alexis. Bromley Smith. Bromley. Llewellyn Thompson. Llewellyn. Four l‘s in Llewellyn. Takes balls, baby. Secretly, see, I have to admire them. Because they understand the logic of how to conduct yourself unsentimentally in the world. W. Averell Harriman. Averell. This is a man who has his own exit on the New York State Thruway. And here’s us, a stone’s throw from Cuba. They’re not drawn here but we are. Because the atomic bomb is Old Testament. It’s the Jewish bible in spades. We feel at home with this judgment, this punishment hanging over us. Illness and misfortune. Speak to us, sweetheart.”

  But Lenny’s paranoia and sense of tragedy may have had a more immediate source. He’d been tipped off at the airport that the Dade County police had planted Jewish detectives in the audience. Yes, Yiddish-speaking fuzz who were prepared to glom onto every vile syllable he uttered in the mother-in-law tongue.

  “You want names, I’ll give you names. My name is Leonard Alfred Schneider. What was I doing when I took the name Lenny Bruce? I was moving toward the invisible middle. I’m just like you, mister. Don’t bug me, man, or insult my ancestors. I’m just another Lenny. Just another Bruce. But that’s not what the ordained people do. McGeorge, Roswell, Adlai. They remove themselves from any taint of the big middle. And that’s a genius thing. Doesn’t matter where they go to church. Their name is their church. They’re not only not like Leonard Alfred Schneider. They’re not like Lenny Bruce. And I don’t blame them, frankly.”

  He’d spoken quietly, conversationally, in his nasal slant, and didn’t expect the large laugh. He put away the papers he’d been waving. The Latin music began to pound the walls and a heckler started talking to Lenny, a drunk with a rolled-up racing form, but Lenny only lifted the mike off the stand and blessed the man.

  Then he did an impression of the Queen of England ordering Chinese takeout over the phone.

  The travel agents loved it.

  “If your name is Roswell or Bromley, you have a real father. Only the most responsible parents give their kids that kind of name. If you’re a Roswell, you don’t have a father who comes around twice a year and gives you a novelty toy when he leaves. Here, kid, a little something to deepen our relationship. You study the item. It’s a rubber vomit blob. Here, kid, put it on your mother’s bed.” Lenny snapped his fingers and did a shoulder curl. “So happens the Office of Civil Defense is stockpiling rubber vomit in fallout shelters all over the country. They’re in a frenzy right now, man. Get those shelters built and stocked. Sanitation kits, medical kits. Phenobarbital, to sedate you. Penicillin, I don’t know, for bomb rash. When the radiation makes you too sick to vomit, they hand out rubber vomit, for morale. After the mass destruction of a nuclear exchange”—he looked at his watch—“they’re gonna wanna rebuild. And all this cold war junk is gonna be worth plenty, as quaint memorabilia. Those yellow and black signs you’ve been seeing everywhere but never really noticed until six days ago—Fallout Shelter. Collector’s items. All the stuff that’s stashed in the storage rooms and laundry rooms that are designated shelters. Drums of drinking water. Saltines. Chapstick, for the flash. Cardboard toilets that double as salad bowls. Incidentally,” he said.

  A waiter dropped a tray of drinks.

  “The Navy boarded a ship yesterday at the quarantine line. First ship boarded. Armed boarding party. Bet your ass it was tense, baby. Turns out the ship’s not carrying missiles. Carrying truck parts and toilet paper. See, there it is, ordinary life trying to reassert itself. That’s the secret meaning of this week. The secret history that never appears in the written accounts of the time or in the public statements of the men in power. Those beautiful bombs and missiles. Those planes and submarines. Ever see anything so gorgeous? The weapons get the best engineering and the most poetic names. Meanwhile some old grubby farmer in Cuba is waiting for a carburetor for his beat-up tractor. And he’s been wiping his ass with the lettuce crop. They’re reminding him he has to be patient, yeah, while they work out their big-power relationships.” Lenny did a dip and swivel. “You remember the way your mother talked to you when you were on the potty. Make, sweetheart. Make for mommy.” He did a pivot and spin. “And you cops on special duty. The linguists in the crowd. There’s something you oughta know. The word smack, or heroin? Comes from the Yiddish shmek. You know this, experts? A sniff, a smell, like a pinch of snuff. Dig it, he’s got a two hundred dollar shmek habit. Next time you bust a junkie who’s a coreligionist”—the word gets a little barking laugh from the college kids
—“and you stick your rubber glove up his ass to check what kind of stash he’s got in there, that smell you smell is shmek, my friend. Which is just another name for ordinary life.”

  The detectives did not laugh.

  A sea breeze blew through the room and the band was playing chachas now. A woman sitting down missed her chair. Dancers appeared at the far end of the bar, they were spilling out of the lounge, one-two cha-cha-cha, and Lenny rolled his shoulders and dipped his hips. The travel agents took a vote and decided to order another round. The music drilled the wall like tamale farts and a couple of college girls got up and danced in place among the crowded tables. The original dancers moved in a boxer’s crouch, advancing down the bar in pastel skirts and white guayaberas while test missiles in California were reprogrammed with Soviet targets.

  Lenny seized the mike and cried, “We’re all gonna die!”

  They laughed and half wept. He led them in a chorus of the chant. The cha-cha music poured into the room and the dancers followed in beautifully balanced twos and the men and women at the tables got up and danced in place, making pugilistic motions with their hands. One-two cha-cha-cha. They kicked off their shoes and spilled their drinks. Lenny did a monologue in Spanglish and they loved it and laughed and half wept and a young man majoring in Wardrobe Management chugalugged a glass of straight scotch, a stone’s throw from Cuba.

  It’s fabulous, it’s marvelous, it’s Miami.

  6

  * * *

  OCTOBER 18, 1967

  Marian Bowman was talking to her mother. They were in the living room of her mother’s house, her mother and father’s house, where she’d grown up, and there were sprays of baby’s breath in most of the rooms and in bud vases on hall tables, small white flowers in branched clusters, a plant her mother liked to display in its starkness, free of the customary larger arrangement, for whatever reason a mother might have, with the elms going yellow and the red oaks blazing on a fine fall day in Madison, Wisconsin, and students running wild in the streets.

  “So you’ve been keeping secrets.”

  “He’s not a secret,” Marian said.

  “You’ve known him all this time and I’m only now hearing. That’s a secret.”

  “I’ve known him technically all this time.”

  “And now you know him how?”

  The mother smiled first, then the daughter.

  “Untechnically,” Marian said. “And he’s not a secret. There hasn’t been much to say, that’s all.”

  “There’s always something to say. What do I sense about this relationship? I think you’re very uncertain. You have a tendency. You always did. To act against your misgivings. Because—well, I don’t know why you do it exactly.”

  They heard the voices more clearly now, ripping from stereo speakers set in the windows of A-frames along Mifflin Street.

  “I wasn’t aware. Have I expressed misgivings.”

  “Yes. And it’s clear I’m meant to notice. And it’s clear you want me to argue against the man.”

  “This is totally. No no no no,” Marian said mildly.

  “You can’t bring yourself to argue against him. You want me to do it.”

  “And you sense all this, sort of.”

  “Not sort of. Hard and clear.”

  “And what happens when you argue against him? Do I say thank-you mother you’ve saved me from a fate worse.”

  “Of course not. You defend him. You stand up for him.”

  “She stands up for her man. And you what, you infer all this from a little bitty talk in which I said practically nothing about him.”

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” her mother said, “and I’ll make every effort to believe you.”

  Her mother turned toward the window showing a faint annoyance. They were running in the streets. They were probably throwing bricks and starting fires. There was a bullhorn voice mixed in with the music that ripped from the speakers.

  “They have what they call the riot season.”

  “Did it ever occur to me,” Marian said, “that Chicago would seem peaceful and decent?”

  “I don’t know if this is the riot season or not. Maybe it’s just a block party that the police are trying to contain. Although, no, that can’t be right. They have block parties in the spring.”

  “I’ll come back for Thanksgiving if you’ll make them stop that noise.”

  Her mother said, “Is he married?”

  And instantly regretted it. Marian saw the self-reproach in the tilt of her mother’s mouth. Yes, a rare lapse. It diminished the authority of her earlier remarks and was totally unthought-out, a lapse, a tactical mistake, and the color in her mother’s face went flat. Because if he were married, one, why would Marian talk about him without saying so; and, two, why would she talk about him at all?

  “No, of course not.”

  “Of course not. I know that,” her mother said.

  Marian went upstairs feeling better. She loved her old room. She loved coming back because the quiet streets were here, in theory, and the houses with screened sunporches, and the elmed esplanades and university buildings, and because her room was here, kept safe for her, spare, unspecial, unfussed over, but a place no one could see as she did, containing a sizable measure of what is meant by home.

  She started packing for the trip back, taking some winter things out of the closet, and then stopped just long enough to turn on the radio. She found WIBA, Up Against the Wall FM, because she wanted to know what was going on out there, just as a point of exasperated interest, and because the noise was getting louder.

  It was too soon to pack but she did it anyway. Home is the place where they have to take you in, said the poet, or said Marian’s father paraphrasing the poet, and home is also the place you can’t wait to get the hell out of.

  She had a job in Chicago she hated. Only she didn’t really hate it—she’d acquired gestures of discontent because this seemed to be a thing you were supposed to do. She was twenty-five and saw no future doing backroom work in a brokerage house. But the job was okay in a way because it forced her to be disciplined and involved and unsloppy, and anyway there was nothing else she wanted to try just now.

  The radio said, DowDay DowDay DowDay DowDay.

  She rummaged through the dresser, finding a couple of old sweaters that might be passable, still, and a number of bright stocking caps that were funny and dumb.

  The dresser was the one object in the room worth a second look, outside the text of personal reference—an oak piece fitted with a tall scuffed mirror that was hinged to swivels in a graceful trefoil frame.

  The radio said, PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.

  She began to understand that some of the noise in the streets, the music and voices ripping from speakers that students had placed in their windows, was coming from the station she was tuned to.

  She packed and listened.

  The radio said, Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

  She began to understand that this was Vietnam Week on campuses across the country. And this was Dow Day here in Madison, a protest against Dow Chemical, whose recruiters were active on campus and whose products included a new and improved form of napalm with a polystyrene additive that made jellied matter cling more firmly to human flesh.

  Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

  She thought, Small wonder. Because it sounded as if the students were tearing up the campus and it looked as if, earlier in the day, with Vietcong flags on Linden Street and mimes in whiteface tussling with police on Bascom Hill—it looked as if what?

  The station was reporting Dow Day and seemingly taking part.

  The radio said, PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.

  It looked as if something had happened in the night to change the rules of what is thinkable.

  She began to understand that the riot out there, if that’s what it was, was being augmented and improved by a simulated riot on the radio
, an audio montage of gunfire, screams, sirens, klaxons and intermittent bulletins real and possibly not.

  She found the old coat she thought she’d lost—how do you lose a coat, everybody said—five years ago at the lake.

  The radio said, Take your belt and wrap it around your fist.

  When her mother served pork loin last night her father muttered, “Off the pig,” and somehow it wasn’t meant to be funny although when Marian laughed he did too, a little bitterly.

  The radio said, There’s an ANFO bulletin coming up.

  She was supposed to go to school at night but wasn’t, to learn stocks, bonds, debentures and other instruments of material wealth available for the production of more wealth, but wasn’t because she just wasn’t, but would, and soon, knowing what she knew, that she needed outside forces to counteract her tendencies.

  She wanted to call Nick but knew he wouldn’t be there.

  The radio played recorded gunfire, car crashes, lines of gritty dialogue from old war movies.

  Her mother called her remiss and indifferent. She suffered from disambition, said her mother.

  Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

  She listened to this because it was happening here but she also tuned out intermittently, let her attention wander, as a form of self-defense. There was a kind of tiredness to it all. It had that wearying insistence that made her want to tune out.

  She packed and thought of calling, even though he wasn’t there, to leave a message with someone in the school office, clever and sexy, and he wouldn’t like that at all but she thought she might do it anyway.

  ANFO seemed to be an acronym for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.

  She put the sweaters back in the dresser. She’d pick them up at Thanksgiving if she thought she needed them and if she didn’t change her mind about their passability, which she was in the process of doing.

  The radio said, Kafka without the f is kaka. Yes, we are talking about waste, we are talking about fertilizer, we are talking about waste and weapons, we are talking about ANFO, the bomb that begins in the asshole of a barnyard pig.