The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Tough: Very good.

  Tough changes: Hard times.

  Tube, the: Television.

  Turn on: To get high. Also, to become interested in something. “I got turned on to Stendahl in high school, and I dig him out, man, he’s too much.”

  Twisted: High. “Straight.”

  Uncool: Dangerously uncautious.

  Up tight: In a difficult position.

  Viper: Marijuana smoker.

  Wasted: Very high. Also, to inflict physical damage on someone is to “waste” him. “He got into his violent bag, you dig it? so I told him ‘Don’t come on with me, Jim, I’ll do up your head’ so he did anyway, so I wasted him.”

  What’s shaking?: What’s happening?

  Wheels: Car.

  Wig: Mind. “You can’t stop his wig, man, he’s got ideas!”

  Wig, to: To flip happily. “I told him the good news, and he wigged out.”

  Zonked: Very high, stoned, twisted, wasted, turned around, smashed, boxed.

  How to Speak Hip, 1961

  Lenny Bruce

  (1925–1966)

  Lenny Bruce didn’t write, he talked. At first he talked like his mother, Sally Marr, who worked as a stand-up comic and impressionist. But the more he talked the more he turned into Lenny. He worked as an emcee in strip clubs, in real dives. Biographer Albert Goldman noted that it was precisely the barrel-bottom nature of his gigs that allowed him to completely escape his inhibitions and riff where no one had riffed before. Bruce was the first free-association comic rock star, and he never met a subject he shrank from, even as his candor earned him arrests. Here he tells the terrible truth about drugs. Lenny did “Pills and Shit” almost fifty years ago. In it he predicted pot would be legal in ten years. He was off by forty years. And he was dead at forty.

  Pills and Shit: The Drug Scene

  OH! I got busted since I’ve seen you. I’m going to lay that on you first. I got two arrests. One: illegal use and possession of dangerous drugs—which is a lie. They’re not, they’re friendly.

  Lemme get serious with that for a moment. That’s how weird I am: I could never discuss or support anything I’m involved with.

  I don’t smoke pot at all. I don’t dig the high. The reason I don’t smoke shit is that it’s a hallucinatory high, and I’ve got enough shit going around in my head; and second, it’s a schlafedicker high, and I like being with you all the time. So therefore I can talk about pot, and champion it.

  Marijuana is rejected all over the world. Damned. In England heroin is alright for out-patients, but marijuana? They’ll put your ass in jail.

  I wonder why that is? The only thing I can think of is De Quincy—the fact that opium is smoked and marijuana is smoked, and there must be some correlation there. Because it’s not a deterrent. In all the codes you’ll always see, “Blah-blah-blah with all the narcotics except marijuana.” So the legislature doesn’t consider it a narcotic. Who does?

  Well, first: I think that there’s no justification for smoking shit. Alcohol? Alcohol has a medicinal justification. You can drink rock-and-rye for a cold, pernod for getting it up when you can’t get it up, blackberry brandy for cramps, and gin for coming around if she didn’t come around.

  But marijuana? The only reason could be: To Serve The Devil—Pleasure! Pleasure, which is a dirty word in a Christian’s culture. Pleasure is Satan’s word.

  CONDEMNING VOICE: What are you doing! You’re enjoying yourself? Sitting on the couch smoking shit and enjoying yourself? When your mother has bursitis! And all those people in China are suffering, too!

  GUILTY VOICE: I’m enjoying it a little bit, but it’s bad shit, anyway. And I got a headache and I’m eating again from it.

  IF WE were to give Man A three glasses of whiskey a day, and Man B were to smoke the necessary amount of marijuana to produce a euphoria like that the alcohol brings, and we do this now for ten years straight, stop them cold one day—Pow!

  The guy who juiced will suffer some absence syndromes—he’ll need a taste, physically need a taste. The guy that smoked the pot will suffer no discomfort. He is not addicted. Healthwise, the guy who juiced is a little screwed up; and the pot smoker may have a little bronchitis. Maybe.

  SINCE MARIJUANA is not a deterrent, no more than cigarettes, it seems inhumane that they schlep people and put them in jail with it.

  “Well, maybe marijuana’s not bad for you, but it’s a stepping stone. It leads to heavier drugs—heroin, etc.”

  Well, that syllogism has to work out this way, though: The heroin addict, the bust-out junkie that started out smoking pot, says to his cell-mate:

  “I’m a bust-out junkie. Started out smoking pot, look at me now. By the way, cell-mate, what happened to you? There’s blood on your hands. How’d you get to murder those kids in that crap game? Where did it all start?”

  “Started with bingo in the Catholic Church.”

  “I see.”

  NOW LEMME tell you something about pot. Pot will be legal in ten years. Why? Because in this audience probably every other one of you knows a law student who smokes pot, who will become a senator, who will legalize it to protect himself.

  But then no one will smoke it anymore. You’ll see.

  DO ME a favor. I don’t want to take a bust. The code reads that I talk, you smoke, I get busted. So don’t smoke—drop a few pills, but don’t smoke.

  DID YOU see the Post reviews? It said that

  “His regulars consist of mainlining musicians, call girls and their business managers.”

  Isn’t that a little bit libelous?

  I KNOW that Californians are very concerned with the modern. Seven years ago there was a narcotics problem in New York, fifteen years ago in Los Angeles. Now in L.A. it’s been like this:

  They have a rehabilitation center, and they got this group to attack these narcotic drug addicts. Now, this group is attacking, and getting good at attacking. They mobilize. They get good at it, and better and better and better. First they learn the orthodox way to attack. Then, by hanging out with these deterrents, these felons, they learn unorthodox ways. They become bitchy-good attackers—unorthodox, orthodox—and they’re wailing their ass off.

  Suddenly:

  CALIFORNIA LOSING ITS WAR AGAINST DRUG ADDICTS

  There are eighteen hundred empty beds at the rehabilitation center.

  “Schmuck, you’re winning!”

  “No, we’re losing. We gotta fill up the beds!”

  “You didn’t make one win? In fifteen years?”

  “No. We’re losing, we’re losing!”

  Well, I assume there’s only one junkie left.

  NARCOTICS? Now they’ve finished with heroin—I think in 1951 there were probably about fifty narcotic officers and seven thousand dope fiends in this state. Today, probably, there are about fifteen thousand narcotics officers and four dope fiends. Fifteen thousand Nalline testing stations, loop-o meters, and they got four dopey junkies left, old-time 1945 hippies.

  O.K. One guy works for the county, undercover; the other guy works for the federal heat. O.K. So, finally, finally they went on strike:

  JUNKIE: Look, we donwanna use dope any more. We’re tired!

  AGENT: Come on, now, we’re just after the guys who sell it.

  JUNKIE: Schnook, don’tya remembuh me? Ya arrested me last week. I’m the undercover guy for the federals.

  It’s like Sambo, running around the tree. He works for the federals, he works for the county.

  AGENT: Look, we’re after the guys who sold it to you. O.K.?

  JUNKIE: But nobody sold it to me. I bought it from him, I told you that . . .

  AGENT: Well, will ya just point out one of the guys?

  JUNKIE: Don’t you know him? There’s four of us! I told ya that.

  AGENT: Just tell us the names of the guys. Cooperate now. Tell us everybody.

  JUNKIE [gives up]: O.K. He was a Puerto Rican. Drove a green Buick. Hangs out in Forster’s.

  AGENT: We’ll
wait for him.

  JUNKIE: O.K.

  Three days with the investigation:

  AGENT: Is that him?

  JUNKIE: No, I think it’s, hm, ah, I think he was Hawaiian, anyway.

  AGENT: O.K. Don’t forget. If you hear from him—

  JUNKIE: O.K. I’ll call ya the first thing.

  AGENT: O.K.

  So now they’ve finished up that nonsense, and the guy says:

  “You mean to tell me that you guys are gonna screw up our rehabilitation program? If you’re not using any dope, you certainly know some people that need help.”

  JUNKIE: We don’t know anybody. We don’t know anybody. Please. I can’t use any more dope. I don’t like it any more.

  AGENT: Well, you really are selfish. You don’t care about anybody but yourself. Do you know we have a center to rehabilitate people with fifteen hundred empty beds?

  JUNKIE: I know, I’m shitty that way. I’ll try.

  I LOVED that when he got arrested. He was a dope fiend—Bela Lugosi. It was the worst advertisement for rehabilitation: he was a dope fiend for seven years; he cleaned up; and dropped dead.

  THERE’RE NO more narcotic drug addicts, so we’re moving now to dangerous drugs. Dangerous drugs—no opiates, nothing to send you to that lethal mania, but the mood elevators, the amphetamines.

  The big connections of the dangerous drugs are Squibb and Park-Lilly, Olin Mathison and Merc and Wyeth. Do they know that? Does the legislature know that? I wonder why they’re not apprised of that situation. Dangerous drugs—that’s the legal phrase—relates to all these medications that are mood elevators, not made for sores or boils. They are made not in Guatemala, but in factories and for a purpose.

  Then I said, “These senators, they come from the South. Southerners don’t take pills. Nor do Southern doctors prescribe pills.” I’ll bet you that when all those people were dying of spinal meningitis at Moffitt Field—and heretofore sulpha drugs had worked—you wondered what happened. Guys are dying there:

  “They’re spitting out the pills!”

  “They’re what? Whatsa matter with you guys? You’re dying and you’re spitting out the sulpha drugs!”

  “Look. I’m a Lockheed worker, and I read all about it in the Herald Express, about those dangerous drugs. I’m not filling my body fulla those poisons! I got spinal meningitis, I’ll get rid of it the natural way—take an enema, I’ll sweat and I’ll run around. Not gonna take none of that horseshit.”

  O.K. NOW, dangerous drugs. Now, the insanity in that area is that the reason that heroin is verboten is that it’s no good for people. It destroys the ego, and the only reason we get anything done in this country is that you want to be proud of it and build up to the neighbors. And if the opiate schleps all that away, then the guy goes up to the guy who builds a new building and he’ll say,

  DETACHED HIPPY VOICE: Hey, that’s cool.

  And that’s it. So it’s no good. And that’s why it’s out.

  YOU KNOW what I’d like to investigate? Zig-zag cigarette papers. Yeah. Bring the company up:

  DEEP AGGRESSIVE VOICE: Now we have this report, Mr. Zig-zag . . . Certainly it must have seemed unusual to you, that Zigzag papers have been in business for sixteen years, and Bugler tobacco has been out of business for five years! . . .

  This committee comes to the conclusion . . . that the people are using your Zig-zag cigarette papers, to . . . roll marijuana tobacco in it.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “That’s right. Lots of it—rolling it and smoking it.”

  DIG. THE beautiful part about it is that so many neighborhood grocery stores have been kept in business for years—the schmucks don’t know that, right?

  YOUNG VOICE [trying to sound nonchalant]: O.K. I’ll have Delsey toilet tissues, and, ah, another six cans of soup, and a broom, and, ah . . . some cigarette papers.

  OLD JEWISH VOICE: I dunno, ve stay in business so long, it’s terrific. All the markets—but ve screw em, we chahge top prices, and the people come in here anyway. They like me.

  O.K. Where does this go on? At a place called Alfie’s. Alfy’s. Open 24 Hours. Cigarettes, cigars, old Jewish man behind the counter:

  YOUNG WISE GUY: Pa?

  ANCIENT JEW: Yuh?

  WISE GUY: Pa, do you sell many cigarette papers here?

  OLD JEW: Uh.

  WISE GUY: What do you assume that people are doing with the cigarette papers they’re buying?

  OLD JEW: De’re rollink cigarettes.

  WISE GUY: They’re rolling cigarettes? In these flamboyant times you assume people are rolling cigarettes?

  OLD JEW: Uhhh, so vut are you doink mit cigarette papuhs?

  WISE GUY: You don’t know?

  OLD JEW: No.

  WISE GUY: They’re rolling pot!

  OLD JEW: Vus?

  WISE GUY: Pot.

  OLD JEW: Vus machts du pop?

  WISE GUY: Marijuana, schmuck!

  OLD JEW: Marijuana? Hey! Uh, agh, vus? Hey—

  Always talking to some schmuck in the back who’s not there.

  —you heard dot? Marijuana. All dese years I never knew dot. Marijuana. Sig-sag papuhs, marijuana, roll the marijuana, meschugenah, marijuana.

  Next an eighty-year-old pensioner walks to the stand:

  OLD PENSIONER: “Hullo? Hullo? Solly, in the bek? Hullo? Ding-alingalingalinga?”

  OLD JEW: Hullo.

  PENSIONER: Listen, gimme a peckege Bugler’s and some Sigsag papuhs.

  OLD JEW: Vus? Sig-sag papuhs? Justa momunt . . . [Aside] Hullo, policeman? Is gecamein a junkie!

  All right. The kid, six years old, played by George McCready:

  “Well, let’s see now. I’m all alone in my room, and it’s Saturday, and Mother’s off in Sausalito freaking off with Juanita, so I’ll make an airplane. Yes. What’ll I do . . . I’ll make, ah, an Me-110, that’s a good structure. I’ll get the balsa wood . . . cut it out there . . . there we go . . . rub it up . . . Now, I’ll get a little airplane glue, rub it on the rag, and, uh, uh, . . . hmmmmmm, I’m getting loaded! . . . Is this possible? Loaded on airplane glue? Maybe it’s stuffy in here. I’ll call my dog over.

  “Felika! Felika, come here, darling, and smell this rag. Smell it! You freaky little doggy . . . smell the rag Felika . . . Felika! Felika! IT WORKED! I’M THE LOUIS PASTEUR OF JUNKIEDOM! I’m out of my skull for a dime!

  “Well, there’s much work to be done now . . . horse’s hooves to melt down, noses to get ready . . .”

  CUT TO, the toy store. The owner, Albert Wasserman. The kid walks in:

  tinglelingleling!

  KID [affected innocent voice]: Hello Mr. Shindler. It’s a lovely store you’ve got here . . . Ah, why don’t you let me have a nickel’s worth of pencils, and a big boy tablet, hm? A Big-Little Book? Some nail polish remover, and, ah, [voice changes to a driven madness] two thousand tubes of airplane glue!

  OWNER [old Jew]: Dot’s very unusual! Ve haff nefer sold so much airplane glue before. I’m an old man—don’t bring me no heat on the place! And save me a taste, you know? I vouldn’t burn you for no bread, you know?

  Cut to Paul Cotes, Confidential File:

  “This is Paul Cotes, Confidential File, and next to me, ladies and gentlemen of the viewing audience on television, is a young boy who’s been sniffing airplane glue. Could be your kid, anybody’s kid, whose life has been destroyed by the glue. I hope you can sleep tonight, Mr. LePage. Pretty rotten, a young kid like this. What’s your name, sonny?”

  “I’m Sharkey, from Palo Alto.”

  “Well, it’s obvious that Sharkey feels a lot of hostility for the adult world. Sharkey, how did it all start, kid? How did you start on this road to ruin? With airplane glue.”

  “Well, I foist started chippying round wit small stuff—like smellin’ sneakuhs, doity lawndry, Mallowmar boxes . . .”

  “A little Kraft-Ebbing in there . . . That’s very interesting, Sharkey. You’ve been sniffing it for si
x months?”

  “At’sright.”

  “Are you hooked?”

  “No. I’m stuck.”

  THIS SCHMUCK here was hooked on morphine suppositories. Like that? Honest to God. If heroin is a monkey on the back, what’s a morphine suppository?

  When I was in England all these faggots were strung out on sleeping pill suppositories. Emmis. So I says to this cat, I says, “Do they really make you sleep, man?”

  He says, “Are you kidding? Before you get your finger outta your athth you’re athleep, Mary.”

  That’s a beautiful ad:

  BEFORE YOU GET YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR ASS—YOU’RE ASLEEP!

  nebyaltal

  “What is that? What did he need that for?”

  “He’s weird, that’s all. He’s on it, that’s all. He’s on it.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You can tell when they’re on it. He’s standing on it right now. He has to have it. They gotta have it. They kill their mothers for it in the mornings. They got the strength of a madman.”

  How does he take it?

  [Deep bass voice, with pride]: “I take it in the suppository form.”

  Haha! I got high just before the show:

  [Urgently] “Get it up there, Phil!”

  “O.K.”

  “Hurry up! Hurry up! Somebody’s coming!”

  Now the reason why I take it in the suppository form is that I have found that even with the most literate doctors, it’s not the substance, it’s the method of administration, because if this man would take a ton of opiates through a suppository, the imagery is: “If he takes rubicane in the arm, it’s monstrous; but the guy takes it in the ass—what can it be? The tuchus . . .”

  THIS IS a benzedrex inhaler. I know the inventor, who invented amphetamine sulphate, which was originally used for just shrinking the mucus membrane, you know, the air passage, but some fellows found out that you could crush these benzedrine inhalers and—you’ve done it—and put them in coca-colas, and it would become a cerebral depressant. So, somehow they took out the benzedrine and put in benzedrex.