A long pause. A hush in the hall. Lenny seemed half lost in reverie, in conjure, and maybe people began to feel uncomfortable because he could not seem to stop doing the voice. It was as if the voice had been crossed with his own. It was as if cross-voices were unavoidable, whether you knew it or not, whether you liked it or not, and maybe this old black man spoke in Lenny’s voice at times, alone, unknowing, in his room, on some level, hearing the bandy scales in his head, the push and shove of Lenny’s own fluted music, and Lenny did the old man’s, spoke in the old man’s, unavoidably.
“Then he looked at us, over on the side where we’re standing. We’re a black guy, a white guy and two white women, except one of the women has been in the street all this time looking for a cab. He looked at us briefly. Took brief notice. Seemed to know us in this brief look. Then he turned back to the original audience, these three lost people of the streets, these wastelings of the lost world, the lost country that exists right here in America. And he resumed his rap and they stood there listening.”
Lenny did the voice a little longer and when he finished he had to pause again to return to the stage, the hall and the audience.
“I wanted to give him my garment bag full of suits, my suitcase full of drugs, my house in the Hollywood Hills. We listened only eight, nine minutes. Less. A cab pulled up and we left and I won’t go back because—I don’t know why, I just won’t. Bugged out by the whole scene. His life, his rap. I ought to tell Polish lightbulb jokes.”
A laugh, finally.
“I ought to stand here doing Chinese waiter jokes.”
He did a Chinese waiter joke. Got a big laugh. He went through a medley of movie bits and they loved it. He did routines he used to do when he wore a polo coat, suede shoes and a muffdiver’s tickly mustache. They laughed, he moped. He did the old bits with suitable stinging irony but this only made them funnier and got him more depressed. They laughed, he bled. Lenny felt awful. He was supposed to be happy and revitalized but he wasn’t. They’d all survived a hellish week and he’d gone dragging through four club dates coast to coast in a state of graduated disarray and now it was over and he was safe and he was appearing in concert and he should have been standing here chanting We’re not gonna die We’re not gonna die We’re not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.
When he thought they were gonna die, he’d chanted the die line repeatedly.
But that was over now. He’d forgotten all that. There were other, deeper, vaguer matters. Everything, nothing, him.
“I came here tonight to be loved like no one was ever loved. Love me like you’ve never loved anyone before. Come rain or come shine.”
There was an unguarded plea in Lenny’s eyes.
“Parent, child or lover. I want to be washed in rivers of love.”
Return to seat Return to seat Return to seat.
The old material was making him feel bad. And the laughs were worse than the jokes. The laughs dashed and disheartened him. He switched more or less in midsentence to a bit he’d been thinking about before all this missile shit, sitting on the can in L.A. because that’s where his best ideas tended to drift into range.
In fact he’d made a casual reference to the subject earlier in the evening. Got a response that seemed to indicate they were interested and unnerved.
He decided to develop the bit on the spot.
Okay. An illiterate sad-eyed virgin lives in a whorehouse in a slum district of San Juan. She has a special talent that has nothing to do with sex per se. It’s a kind of parlor trick, okay. Men pay half a week’s wages to crowd into a bare room in the basement where the girl, smooth-skinned and innocent, lifts her dress, drops her panties, takes a lit cigarette from the madam and inserts it filter-first in her snatch. The men go wide-eyed. It’s a king-size Kent with a micronite filter. Then she contracts her labial muscles, or whatever, and sort of inhales vaginally, and removes the cigarette, and proceeds to blow a series of gorgeous smoke rings. A gasp from the men. Perfect round rings wafting up from her fleecy bush, still somewhat fine and sparse.
Lenny’s audience didn’t exactly gasp, as the men in the whorehouse had, but there was a certain disquiet in the hall, underscored by a smatter of nervous laughter.
Some people interpret the girl’s gift in a religious manner. They think it’s an omen, a sign from heaven that the world is about to end. God has selected a poor illiterate undernourished orphan girl to convey a profound message to the world. Because isn’t it possible that all these O’s coming out of her womb refer to the Greek letter that means The End? Others say, journalists, scientists, priests—these men have come to the bordello to witness the event and they say the rings she is blowing are not representations of the Greek letter omega. They’re just ordinary alphabet-soup O’s, however beautifully formed. These people say that when the girl is able to blow actual Greek omegas, with the horseshoe effect, dig, the little dipsy-doo at each end of the opening, then they’ll start believing in miracles.
This is Lenny Bruce material. This is what they came for, isn’t it? Who else does this material? If it’s disgusting, so much the better. If it’s insulting to you as an individual, get up and leave and take your crossword-puzzle husband with you.
So a rich American widower shows up one night, slumming with friends, and the girl stares proudly, con dignidad, right into his face. Then she inserts the tip of the filter in her snatch and blows a ring inside another ring and then a third tiny ring inside that. The millionaire is shocked at the tawdry spectacle but also secretly intrigued and he finds himself going back there night after night, alone, and it isn’t long before he falls in love with the girl, yes, her limpid eyes and dimpled knees and her sweet and fleecy pubes. He resolves to save her from this squalid life and more or less buys her from the madam for an enormous sum of money and takes her to his hilltop mansion overlooking the Hudson River, where he brings in teams of doctors, tutors, psychologists and nutritionists and where he watches the girl develop intellectually and grow into a healthy young woman who speaks four languages and shows a talent for the oboe.
Lenny paused here, pointing out that the end, the punch line, would have to involve some reversion to type, something the girl does that demonstrates the power of a single old and shocking habit over any number of civilizing influences.
Then he said, “No, yes, wait. We’ve got it backwards. It’s not the girl who reverts. It’s the man. Dig it. He’s the kind of cat who questions everything he does. Begins to ask himself. Was she a twisted child or an artist? Was she jailbait or saint? In other words did he make a terrible mistake bringing her here and educating her and banning cigarettes from her life? He begins to recall those delirious nights in San Juan.” Lenny gave the name of the city an authentic guttural rumble. “Yes, those nights in the basement of the stinking bordello where she performed. Admit it, fool. You’ve destroyed a strange, crude, beautiful and eerie perversion and replaced it with a boring oboe. Which she plays incessantly by the way. And which is anyway just a displaced version of the king-size Kent, normalized and concertized.”
Lenny stood sideways, mike in hand, stroking his jaw.
“He longs to see smoke rings come out of her puss, her nook. First the cigarette between her spindly legs. Then the rising rings. When he bought her from the madam, she was on the verge of intertwining the rings, which is either a symbol of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or it’s the Ballantine beer logo—Purity, Body and Flavor. Either way, imagine the rush he would have gotten.”
He looked into the wings, thinking.
“They marry in a smoke-free ceremony on the rolling lawn. On their wedding night, still a virgin, she stands in a negligee by the window facing west. He enters, in pajamas and smoking jacket, holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder, an unlit king-size Kent.”
But he wasn’t sure how to end it.
“He takes the cigaret
te out of the holder and extends it in her direction, glancing at the shadowy mound under her negligee. She steps back, horrified. She says, You must be mad. She says it in four languages. She says almost everything in four languages, a habit that’s beginning to piss him off.”
Then Lenny got a better idea, deeper, more challenging.
“Wait, listen, no. The millionaire is a myth, isn’t he? We stuck him in the story because we needed a rich weak do-gooder, what, a respectable self-deluding jerk who shows his corruption in the end. We made him up. Let’s tell the truth this time.”
He sensed a disappointment out there. They wanted the wedding night, the negligee, the boudoir, the casually cruel ending like the bit he used to do about the boy raised by wolves, found in the wild, fed, developed, educated, who graduates with honors from MIT and is killed a week later chasing a car down the street.
“Let’s tell the truth,” he said. “Nobody saved the girl from a life of perversion. She fled the whorehouse on her own initiative. She saved all the meager cash handouts the customers had been giving her and she took a plane to New York, the roach coach, in order to find her mother, who wasn’t dead at all—another easy myth.”
Shit, he was ruining their fun. He could feel the cooling all the way up to the cheap seats, where his teenage fans craved a final grossness, draped over the rails—some epic sicko finish.
“She never worked in a whorehouse at all,” Lenny said. “She never dropped her drawers or blew smoke rings from her pussy. Fact of the matter, she never lived in San Juan, baby.”
He loved to say San Juan. And yes, he was disassembling the whole structure. He felt their puzzlement and couldn’t blame them.
“Let’s make her human. She’s real like us. You take the subway to the South Bronx, where she lives with her junkie mother who can’t kick. She’s just barely old enough so that men are beginning to notice. Her mother comes and goes. Disappears, comes back. Phone company shuts off the phone. Landlord’s been coming around. Or putting dispossesses under the door because you never actually see him. He’s a corporation called XYZ Realty with a post office box in Greenland. The girl’s hiding in the empty lots, down the maze of back alleys, because her mother’s gone again and she thinks the landlord will have her arrested. Let’s make her human. Let’s give her a name.”
But he didn’t give her a name. He couldn’t think of a name. Not a real name. He went back to old jokes instead. He told a mother-in-law joke and they laughed because in fact it was funny. He told a Jewish mother joke, even better, and they loved it, they laughed, and he worked his way back to form, doing race, sex, religion, and it was funny and offensive Lenny and the night ended finally in booming waves of laughter and applause, in spirited shouts from the kids in the top tiers, and he stood on the great stage in his stupid white suit, small and remorseful, and then he turned and walked toward the wings.
NOVEMBER 9, 1965
Hours later I was still walking. I walked right past my hotel and kept on going, a nondescript building near Times Square, where they’d give me a candle and show me the door that led to the stairwell, but I wanted to keep on walking, and where I’d only have to climb five flights, but I wanted to walk into the night and see this thing.
I saw taxis with off-duty signs lit up but people took them anyway, just opened the doors and got in because the cabs were captive to the traffic and could not shy off and speed away and I raised the collar of my jacket and walked east a while and went past a huge crowd near the main library and finally realized it was a bus stop, six or seven hundred people at a bus stop, easily that many, massed and more or less orderly, packed along the sidewalk and up on the library steps, and the wind whipping down Fifth, and they were waiting for a bus.
I didn’t have a coat. My coat was in Evanston, Illinois. I hunched in my jacket and saw people walking across the Queensboro Bridge and they were taking over the bridge, they were walking eight or nine abreast, maybe fifty deep, followed by a sequence of crawling cars, then another band of pedestrians, and they were walking home to Queens.
That’s when I got the idea and felt the twinge of regret.
I stopped for dinner in a candlelit restaurant in the 70s, where they seated me with three others because it was shared tables tonight. There was only one subject, of course, at least for a while, and we wondered how widespread the blackout might be, and whether it was sabotage, and someone said, a book editor with a bow tie, that this was the title of an early Hitchcock film, with Sylvia Sidney, and he named the rest of the cast compulsively—a film that starts with the lights going out. We skipped dessert and coffee for the sake of those waiting on line and I had a drink in a bar nearby and thought Jerry was right, Jerry Sullivan, this was the twinge, the pinch of guilt—we ought to be going to the Bronx tonight, Jerry and I, not trying to commandeer a taxi but walking all the way, something crazy and emotional, a trek through a city gone dark and cold.
But then I thought stupid, no, forget it—we’d lose interest on the way or get in a fight with looters and muggers or just get tired, or Jerry would, and what happens after that?
A man directed traffic with a rolled-up magazine, a man of some girth but quick on his feet, dipping and gliding, addressing the major mess at 86th Street, a man who shrugged off beeping horns and did a hundred semaphores, extravagant of gesture, in a topcoat with a velvet collar, his glossy baton flashing and people pausing to watch, and there was a great and fervent feeling that attended his performance, which was conscientious and deft however befrilled by theater, and it spread among the people in the street.
But it would have been tremendous somehow too, a beautiful thing, I thought, walking up Manhattan and into the Bronx, as a gesture, a remembrance, and all the way to the old neighborhood, tonight of all nights, with the world coming down, but what would we do when we got there, at two in the morning?
People walked along listening to transistor radios because there were stations with auxiliary power and there were men wrapped in headscarves who sold flashlights and candles and there were candles in thousands of apartment windows and people on line for candles outside the five-and-ten and long lines at phone booths on every second corner.
The power grid gone. What did it mean? The whole linked system down. Or not linked sufficiently perhaps. Sylvia Sidney in the dark.
From certain vantages the city was all haunted silhouette, secret and recessed, its neon ego shut down. There was a sky tonight. The towers across the park were planed down to a kind of night velvet that was etched and deathly and lacking the static that makes the high nights throb.
I heard the sound of drums, drumbeats, not staccato shots but hand drums maybe, dull and soft-skinned, coming out of the park.
I was a stranger here. I knew Manhattan only at street level, fitfully, and felt a little isolated, and the place scared me with its knowingness, its offhand vaunt, a style of mind and guise that can be harder to learn than some dialect of the Transvaal. Everybody knew the same seven things. But it could take you years to work through the list and by that time the number would be different, or the whole list.
They came out of the park at 90th Street, a band of hippies on a candlelight march, with flutes, drums and tambourines, about fifty chanting people, and a man with a needle stuck in his protruding tongue, and a woman with a snake around her neck, and a haze of pungent smoke that had the whiff of some congenial misdemeanor, and there were kids walking along and babies in backpacks and slings, and the marchers chanted a sort of hummed syllable, a thing with a twang, it sounded to me like Bomb, a vibe with the gravid tone of prayer, repeated, repeated, but they wouldn’t be chanting an ominous word, would they, with infants strapped to their chests and backs.
And maybe Jerry had been correct. I didn’t have the right to refuse him. This tremendous thing of his, this trip to the Bronx—I felt guilty about slipping away and betraying a sweet idea.
I watched the marchers go south along the park edge. The streets began to darken, drained of traff
ic and headlights, and an odd calm set in, edged with apprehension. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands trapped in subways or aloft in packed elevators waiting. The always seeping suspicion, paralysis, the thing implicit in the push-button city, that it will stop cold, leaving us helpless in the rateye dark, and then we begin to wonder, as I did, how the whole thing works anyway.
I walked east on 96th Street. Going empty and dead, stores closed, bus stops deserted, phone booths unoccupied. Ego gone and vertigo too, a city without its merengue spin, and a car pulled up at the center stripe, anonymous sedan going the other way, and the driver stuck his head into the gusty wind and called across to me.
I said, “What?”
“Where you go? I take you. Cheap.”
I looked at him. I was glad I’d walked away from Jerry. It would have been deadly. It would have been crap. I wouldn’t have been able to listen to that crap. I got in the car and told the guy where my hotel was. I wanted to call Marian from my room, if the phones were working, Marian Bowman, and tell her what was happening here and ask what they knew about it there.
There was a hole in the dashboard where the radio should have been located. But I asked the guy if he’d heard any news.
“All out. State of Maine out. Boston, Massachusetts. Pennsylvania, my sister lives. Ontario, Canada. Very big, this thing.”
I sat back and watched the streets roll by and saw what I could see in the moonlight.