by Lenny Bruce
We miss him, and the nerve-fraying, jazz-digging, pain-hating, sex-loving, lie-shunning, bomb-loathing life he represents. There are times when I wish he would settle in Europe, for long enough at least to realize that capitalism—from which so many of his targets derive—is not necessarily a permanent and unchangeable fact of human existence. But even if he died tomorrow, he would deserve more than a footnote in any history of modern Western culture. I have heard him described, somewhat portentously, as “the man on America’s conscience.” Hyperbole like that would not appeal to Lenny Bruce. “No,” I can hear him dissenting, “let’s say the man who went down on America’s conscience . . .”
FOREWORD TO THE 2016 EDITION BY HOWARD REICH
Time magazine called Lenny Bruce “the sickest of them all.”
As if his riffs on the hypocrisies of religion, war, government, law, sex, race, money, and more proved he was the one with the problem. As if the social injustices and cruelties he railed against meant that something must be wrong with him, not with the world he dared to confront—at a rather high personal cost.
The society he chastised so fearlessly, and with such piercing humor, did not take kindly to his assaults, which he launched from the stage and, of course, in this devastating memoir. Bruce’s punishments came famously in the form of obscenity trials and drug busts, trumped-up charges and stacked juries, humiliations in the press and wherever holier-than-thou authorities sought to make an example of a comedian who was so much more than that.
And yet Bruce continued to unleash his eyes-wide-open social commentary, a torrent of words that terrified some and thrilled many. The man was hell-bent on proclaiming the absurdities he saw but others didn’t or wouldn’t. Nothing could silence Bruce except, of course, his tragic demise in 1966 at age forty, the comic genius found dead of an overdose of either morphine or persecution, depending on your point of view.
What he left us in the pages of this book and in uncounted monologues and court proceedings, some quoted here at length, is one man’s searing testimony about the world he lived in and where it went wrong—so far as he was concerned. Bruce was no preacher, telling others how to live. He was simply saying what he believed: not to win converts but only to make his case to those who bothered to encounter it.
Watching the presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960, for instance, “convinced me more than ever that my ‘ear of the beholder’ philosophy is correct; that the listener hears only what he wants to hear,” he writes in these pages. “I would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and their comment would be, ‘He’s really slaughtering Nixon.’ Then we would all go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, ‘How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?’”
Unlike the priests, rabbis, politicians, journalists, cops, and others Bruce skewered for their pieties, Bruce acknowledged that he wasn’t necessarily going to convince anyone of anything. He just wanted to be heard. But the social and legal system that came down on him—costing him jobs, money, opportunities, and reputation—didn’t want to hear it.
The loss was theirs, and ours, because most of Bruce’s soliloquies, whether on the stage or the page, have proven way ahead of the society he targeted. Has anyone, after all, exposed the absurdities of our drug laws more succinctly than Bruce did in this passage: “And yet at this very moment there are American citizens in jail for smoking flowers. (Marijuana is the dried flowering top of the hemp plant.)”
Bruce wrote that more than half a century ago, and it remains as current as the latest marijuana bust.
Or consider his eloquence on war, a subject he knew better than most of the politicians who sent young men into it, Bruce having watched bodies pile up during his service in the US Navy during World War II.
“I was at Anzio,” he writes. “I lived in a continual state of ambivalence: guilty but glad. Glad I wasn’t the GI going to that final ‘no-wake-up-call’ sleep on his blood-padded mud mattress. It would be interesting to hear his comment if we could grab a handful of his hair, drag his head out of the dirt and ask his opinion on the questions that are posed every decade, the contemporary shouts of: ‘How long are we going to put up with Cuba’s nonsense?’ ‘Just how many insults can we take from Russia?’
“I was at Salerno. I can take a lot of insults.”
But of everything that Bruce said and wrote, what seemed to irk those in power the most was the subject at the root of all human existence, the one issue that makes all else possible yet drove Bruce’s enemies crazy: sex. Bruce was unflinching in discussing the subject in clubs and in his writings, the opening salvo of his memoirs erupting in a full-frontal discussion not only of sex but of racial stereotypes surrounding it. Even as the topic has become passé in rap songs and on cable TV—showing once again how far ahead of the curve Bruce was—you still could be fired for saying these words at work. In Bruce’s era, even at the dawning of the sexual revolution, they were very nearly blasphemous.
Still, he revels in the topic, rhapsodizing on masturbation, analyzing the meaning of orgasms (and how we discuss them), contemplating how each gender perceives what drives one into the other’s arms. To those who raged at these routines and charged him with obscenity, Bruce offers an utterly disarming response: “Obscenity has only one meaning: to appeal to the prurient interest. Well, I want to know what’s wrong with appealing to prurient interest.”
What makes his observations all the more potent, of course, is Bruce’s dexterous way with a phrase. Yes, he’s funny—hilarious, even, in much of his Swiftian commentary—but the rhythms and cadences of his words reflect the soul of a jazz musician. Syllables and consonants flow with seeming effortlessness when Bruce is on a tear, his love of jazz evident not only in his references to celebrated musicians such as Miles Davis and Kenny Drew but also in the relentless forward motion and swing-beat feel of his solos. Bruce was keenly self-aware of his deep connection to the music, and not only because he played so many smoky jazz rooms on the way up.
“The reports on me were now: ‘All Lenny Bruce seems concerned with is making the band laugh,’” he writes, quoting early criticism of his nascent art. “That should have been my first hint of the direction in which I was going: abstraction. Musicians, jazz musicians especially, appreciate art forms that are extensions of realism, as opposed to realism in a representational form.”
Like saxophonist Sonny Rollins playing endless choruses on a classic tune, veering further and further from the original, Bruce was creating a self-styled world of sound and thought of his own, far from the one-liners and stale jokes of an earlier generation of comics. Instead of notes, he had words; instead of melodies, he had themes. But the result was the same as a master jazzman’s solo, a burst of rhythm and thought—a stream-of-consciousness rush of ideas—that may seem dizzying while it’s unfolding but becomes lucid by its final, climactic moments. No wonder Ralph Gleason, the great San Francisco jazz critic, stepped forward as Bruce’s earliest champion, “the first one who really went out on a limb for me, to help my career,” as Bruce puts it. Perhaps only a jazz connoisseur could have detected the emerging wizardry in Bruce’s early work.
Equally important, though, is the heady range of ideas Bruce dares to take on in this volume: How movies have ruined our lives. How everyone has to sell out to live. How every hipster—including Bruce himself—eventually goes out of date. How pain precipitates art. Bruce’s divorce, for instance, gave him “about an hour’s worth of material,” he writes. “That’s not bad for an eight-year investment.”
And Leonard Alfred Schneider—Bruce’s birth name—soars when exploring the meaning of being a Jew. He does it with a laugh: “To me, if you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. . . . If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.” And he does it with a cry, addressing the most sacred and looming subject of Jewish modernity, the Holocaust.
Like all genuine sages, Bruce directs as much critic
ism toward himself as anyone else, which lends credibility to his skepticism of others. He confesses to the skeletons in his closet, considering himself no better than any of the rest of us, though he’s surely a lot more self-revealing.
In addition to illuminating key forces in his life, such as his passion for his wife Honey Harlow and his emptiness at losing her, Bruce digs deeply into the multiple arrests and courtroom dramas he faced. Pages and pages of transcripts unfold here, Bruce either dissecting the lies of those who accused him or relishing his attorneys’ skill at doing so. Bruce clearly wants the reader right there with him on the front lines, witnessing what he is enduring, as he takes the blows for what many people thought but most were afraid to say aloud. That he did so in the glare of publicity, at enormous legal peril and considerable financial and emotional cost, says a great deal about the nature of his character.
With the return of this book to print, Bruce in effect is still arguing his case, courageously pointing out what his accusers have done to him, even while they held great legal power over him. The bravery of that act should inspire us all.
If there’s a central lesson running through all of this, perhaps it’s Bruce’s apparently boundless respect for everyone else’s rights, even as his own were being so grievously violated.
“Let me tell you the truth,” he writes. “The truth is ‘what is.’ If ‘what is’ is, you have to sleep eight, ten hours a day, that is the truth. A lie will be: People need no sleep at all. Truth is ‘what is.’”
That’s different for each one of us, Bruce is saying, and he lived his life championing that apparently dangerous principle. He did that for us, and for that we owe him an enormous and lasting debt.
—HOWARD REICH
Chicago, March 2016
Howard Reich has covered the arts for the Chicago Tribune since 1978 and joined the staff in 1983. He has written five books: Portraits in Jazz, Let Freedom Swing, Jelly’s Blues (with William Gaines), Van Cliburn, and Prisoner of Her Past (originally published as The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich). Reich has won an Emmy Award; two Deems Taylor Awards from ASCAP; an Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University’s Alumni Association; eight Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists; and an Excellence in Journalism Award from the Chicago Association of Black Journalists. The Chicago Journalists Association named him Chicago Journalist of the Year in 2011 and has given him three Sarah Brown Boyden Awards. He lives in Chicago.
Chapter One
Filipinos come quick; colored men are built abnormally large (“Their wangs look like a baby’s arm with an apple in its fist”); ladies with short hair are Lesbians; if you want to keep your man, rub alum on your pussy.
Such bits of erotic folklore were related daily to my mother by Mrs. Janesky, a middle-aged widow who lived across the alley, despite the fact that she had volumes of books delivered by the postman every month—A Sane Sex Life, Ovid the God of Love, How to Make Your Marriage Partner More Compatible—in plain brown wrappers marked “Personal.”
She would begin in a pedantic fashion, using academic medical terminology, but within ten minutes she would be spouting her hoary hornyisms. Their conversation drifted to me as I sat under the sink, picking at the ripped linoleum, daydreaming and staring at my Aunt Mema’s Private Business, guarded by its sinkmate, the vigilant C-N bottle, vanguard of Lysol, Zonite and Massengill.
At this tender age, I knew nothing of douches. The only difference between men and women was that women always had headaches and didn’t like whistling or cap guns; and men didn’t like women—that is, women they were married to.
Aunt Mema’s Private Business, the portable bidet, was a large red-rubber bulb with a long black nozzle. I could never figure out what the hell it was for. I thought maybe it was an enema bag for people who lived in buildings with a super who wouldn’t allow anyone to put up nails to hang things on; I wondered if it was the horn that Harpo Marx squeezed to punctuate his silent sentences. All I knew was that it definitely was not to be used for water-gun battles, and that what it was for was none of my business.
When you’re eight years old, nothing is any of your business.
All my inquiries about Aunt Mema’s large red-rubber bulb, or why hair grew from the mole on her face and nowhere else, or how come the talcum powder stuck between her nay-nays, would get the same answer: “You know too much already, go outside and play.”
Her fear of my becoming a preteen Leopold or Loeb was responsible for my getting more fresh air than any other kid in the neighborhood.
In 1932 you really heard that word a lot—“business.” But it wasn’t, “I wonder what happened to the business.” Everyone knew what happened to the business. There wasn’t any. “That dumb bastard President Hoover” was blamed for driving us into the Depression by people who didn’t necessarily have any interest in politics, but just liked saying “That dumb bastard President Hoover.”
I would sit all alone through endless hours and days, scratching out my homework on the red Big Boy Tablet, in our kitchen with the shiny, flowered oilcloth, the icebox squatting over the pan that constantly overflowed, and the overhead light, bare save for a long brown string with a knot on the end, where flies fell in love.
I sort of felt sorry for the damn flies. They never hurt anybody. Even though they were supposed to carry disease, I never heard anybody say he caught anything from a fly. My cousin gave two guys the clap, and nobody ever whacked her with a newspaper.
The desperate tension of the Depression was lessened for me by my Philco radio with the little yellow-orange dial and the black numbers in the center. What a dear, sweet friend, my wooden radio, with the sensual cloth webbing that separated its cathedrallike architecture from the mass air-wave propaganda I was absorbing—it was the beginning of an awareness of a whole new fantasy culture . . .
“Jump on the Manhattan Merry-Go-Round—the Highway, the Byway, to New York Town . . .”
“And here comes Captain Andy now . . .”
The biggest swinger was Mr. First-Nighter. He always had a car waiting for him. “Take me to the little theater off Times Square.” Barbara Luddy and Les Tremayne.
And Joe Penner said: “Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk.”
“With a cloud of dust, the speed of light and a hearty Hi-Yo Silver Away!”
Procter & Gamble provided many Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowship winners with the same formative exposure.
Long Island had loads of screen doors and porches. Screen doors to push your nose against, porches to hide under. It always smelled funny under the porch. I had a continuing vision of one day crawling under there and finding a large cache of money, which I would spend nobly on my mother and aunt—but not until they explained the under-the-sink apparatus; and, if there was enough money, perhaps Mema would even demonstrate it for me.
I would usually hide under the porch until it came time to “get it.”
“You just wait till your father comes, then you’re really gonna get it.” I always thought what a pain in the ass it would be to be a father. You have to work hard all day and then, instead of resting when you come home, you have to “give it” to someone. I didn’t “get it” as much as other kids, though, because my mother and father were divorced.
I had to wait until visiting days to “get it.”
I look back in tender relished anger, and I can smell the damp newspapers that waited on the porch for the Goodwill—they never picked up anything we gave them because we never had it packed right—and I can hear the muffled voices through the kerosene stove.
“Mickey, I don’t know what we’re going to do with Lenny. He was so fresh to Mema. You know what he asked?”
Then they would all laugh hysterically. And then my father would schlep me from under the porch and whack the crap out of me.
For being fresh to Mema. For forgetting to change my good clothes after school and catching my corduroy knickers on a nail. And for whistling. I would even “get it” for whistling.
I used to love to whistle. The first tune I learned to whistle was Amapola. “Amapola, my pretty little poppy . . .” I received most of my musical education from the sounds that wafted from the alley of Angelo’s Bar and Grille, Ladies Invited, Free Lunch. I was enthralled with the discovery of the jukebox: a machine that didn’t sew, drill, boil or kill; a machine solely for fun.
Angelo, the tavernkeeper, was a classic illustration of onomatopoeia. He laughed “Har! Har! Har!” He talked exactly like the balloons in comic strips. When he was disturbed, he would say “Tch! Tch! Tch!” To express contempt, he would “Harrumph!”
I kept waiting to hear Angelo’s dog say “Arf! Arf!” He never made a sound. I told this to Russell Swan, the oil painter, sometime house painter and town drunk. He replied that the dog had been interbred with a giraffe—a reference I didn’t understand, but which cracked up the erudite Mr. Swan. It must be lonesome, being bright and witty and aware, but living in a town where you can’t relate to people in all areas.
Mr. Swan gave me the first book I ever read, Richard Halliburton’s Royal Road to Romance, the tale of a world traveler who continually searches for beauty and inner peace. I loved to read.
“Don’t read at the table,” I would be told.
“Why do they put stuff on the cereal box if they don’t want you to read?”
“Not at the table.”
When I get big, I thought, I’ll read anywhere I want . . . standing on the subway:
“What’s that you’re reading, sir?”
“A cereal box.”
I almost always made a good score in back of Angelo’s Bar and Grille; the loot consisted of deposit bottles. But there was a hang-up—you could never find anyone willing to cash them. The most sought-after prize was the large Hoffman bottle, which brought a five-cent bounty.