by Lenny Bruce
She ripped the stapled chips away from the cardboard. When she spoke, her words stunned me. I never expected a woman who looked like that to talk that way to a bon vivant such as I.
“How the hell did you get gum in your hair?” she asked.
“The guy who sleeps in the bunk above me stuck it on the edge of my rack. I thought I got it out.”
“C’mere, I’ve got some benzene, it’ll take it out.”
I followed her through the blue-rayon portals that separated the store from her home. I sat on a soda box and watched her rumble through the medicine cabinet, which was a cardboard carton under her bed.
She soaked the rag and stood over me, gently kneading the chewing gum from my hair. Her thighs, with the good-life scent of the white dove, pressed weightlessly against my cheek. The gum was long gone, and my first love was nurtured in a setting of Medaglia D’Oro coffee, Ace combs, and Progresso tomato purée.
I wonder if any Chilean chicle worker ever dreamt of the delicious fruit that I received from the by-product of his labor.
I was assigned to a light cruiser, the U.S.S. Brooklyn.
Me—Leonard Alfred Schneider—on the deck of a warship bound for North Africa, along with 1300 other men and enough munitions to bring a man-made earthquake to Ain el Turk, Bizerte, and Algiers, which was to be followed after the War by a sociopolitical earthquake—for we were blasting more than enemy breastworks; we were shaking loose the veils from shadowed Moslem faces and the gold from their front teeth.
I had two battle stations—one on a 1.1 gun and my watch was on a five-inch deck gun. A cannon in the Navy is always called a gun.
Five in the morning, reveille. Five-ten, topside: wash down the decks and do paint work. Seven o’clock, secure. Seven-thirty to eight, chow: prunes, beans, cornbread, cold cuts, Waldorf salad, coffee. Eight o’clock, turn to: painting, chipping, scraping, ammunition working party. Twelve o’clock, chow: braised beef, dehydrated potatoes, spinach, coffee, cake with icing. One o’clock, work. Two-forty-five, attack by enemy planes: man your battle stations, fight with planes.
(I could use Navy time, 0600, etc., but I had elevated to the idiomatic group: “Look out the window and see who is on the left side of the boat.”)
The secure from battle may be at eight P.M. Secure at sea, ammunition working party, replace expended ammunition. Quick scrubdown, twelve-thirty, hit the sack. I never got more than four and a half hours sleep a night in three years.
Blood and salt water mixed together looks blue. Eight men followed by twelve, then by about forty more, floated gracefully by the bow of the U.S.S. Brooklyn. These dead Air Force men that just a few months ago were saying . . .
“What do you want, Hi-Test or Regular?”
“Did you get my pants out of the cleaner’s, sweetheart?”
“They’ll never get me—my uncle is an alderman.”
“Now listen, Vera, I’m going to put all my stuff in these cardboard boxes, and I’m going to lock them in that closet back of the den. Please don’t let anyone touch them—and don’t just say ‘Yes’ to me—I don’t want anyone, do you understand, anyone, fooling around with my stuff . . .”
His stuff. My stuff. Everyone was worrying about their stuff . . . their papers . . . their possessions.
The bodies continued to float by, their heads bumping the starboard side.
Seeing those pitiful, fresh-dead bodies, I knew then what a mockery of life the materialistic concept is. After they got the telegram, someone would go through his “stuff” and try to figure out why in the world he wanted “all that stuff.” The stuff that he kept so nice would eventually be thrown out of the basement, for the stuff would now be crap.
“Hey, throw this crap outta here!”
Chapter Five
Standing on the deck of a warship in battle, you get a good look at the competitive aspect of life, carried to its extreme.
Our society is based on competition. If it isn’t impressed upon you at home with the scramble for love between brothers and sisters, they really lay it down to you in school—in numbers any child can understand—that’s what grading is.
You bring home 100 percent, and your mother hugs you and your father pats you on the back. The teachers beam at you. But not your schoolmates; they know they’re in competition with you, and if you get a high percentage they must get a lower one. Everybody wants love and acceptance and he soon learns that one way to get it is by getting higher marks than the other fellow.
In essence, you are gratified by your schoolmates’ failures. We take this with us into adulthood. Just look at the business world.
So, my first instinct in this structure of economic and critical success is to want Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, etc., (my “schoolmates”) to bomb. If I bring in a bigger gross at a café or a concert than Mort does at the same place, I’ve brought home a good report card.
I struggle with this part of me which is inhumane, and now—perhaps this can be explained by the fact that I am making enough money to afford to be magnanimous about it—I genuinely rejoice in another’s success. I would like to believe that if I were still scuffling and Mort was doing well I would still be happy for him. But I wonder. I am happy he’s doing well. But not better than me.
The U.S.S. Brooklyn was a big ship, and she was considered quite a danger and a nuisance by the enemy. At night the enemy planes, unless they had inside information, could only tell what they were bombing by the firepower that was thrown at them. If they received nothing but 20 millimeter and 40s, they would assume that the largest craft below was a DE or some other small craft that carried only small arms.
We were trapped in a strange bind. We were the only heavy power in the area, but if we threw up our big stuff—our five-inch guns—they would know immediately that we were a cruiser, and then they would send for assistance, and do us in.
When General Quarters sounded at sea, it was usually an E-boat or a submarine. I loved this because I wasn’t as afraid of being killed in battle as I was of being bored. Lucky for me that the guys in power at the time knew the real danger and kept me occupied. I was grateful, but it was still pretty exhausting, fighting 60 hours without securing from battle stations.
Through three years and four major invasions—Anzio, Salerno, Sicily, Southern France—I was a shell passer with a heavy helmet that was lined with smelly foam rubber. Two years of sleeping in a hammock, then graduating to a lower bunk. Three years of hearing “Now hear this!” till I didn’t want to hear it ever again. Three years of being awakened by a buzzer that made the sound that a gigantic goose would, laying an egg the size of a Goodyear Blimp.
Gonk! Gonk! Gonk! Gonk!—that was the base line. The boatswain’s whistle and the trumpet just lacked a rhythm section to keep them from being real hard swingers.
The impersonal voice would boom over the speaker: “All men man your battle stations, secure all hatches, the smoking lamp is out.”
I’d scramble up the ladder just in time to get my helmet knocked off and my nose bloodied from the concussion vacuum created in the hatch cove.
We would be bottled up in Naples harbor, the Germans bombing and strafing every ship in the bay. It was blindman’s buff.
As a child I loved confusion: a freezing blizzard that would stop all traffic and mail; toilets that would get stopped up and overflow and run down the halls; electrical failures—anything that would stop the flow and make it back up and find a new direction. Confusion was entertainment for me.
While the War was on, the alternation of routine and confusion sustained my interest, but then it was over and I wanted out.
I had been a good sailor with a sterling record of consistent performance, but I wasn’t a mensch. However, I didn’t put the Navy through any red tape coming in, so I felt they should permit me to exit with the same courtesy. A lot of guys tried to get out during the War and I considered that cowardly, but I rationalized my schemes with: “Why not?—the War is over.”
&nbs
p; But how does one go about shooting his toes off with an oar?
We lay at anchor in the Bay of Naples and the night closed in around me. I had to get out, and get out fast. Other guys had gone wacky—some on purpose—and the only ones that got out were those who could just sit and say “No” to everything. They got out, but with a dishonorable discharge. And by the time they were processed, it was six months in the brig, a trial, and such a hard time that it wasn’t worth it. I had to think.
You spend your whole life thinking and worrying. Worrying about the deposit bottles, and where to cash them. That night it seemed that getting out of the Navy, or even getting out of the Mediterranean, was years away. I wondered who was buying Mema her Vaseline.
I closed my eyes in the pitch-black night and then, all of a sudden, the heavens seemed to light up like Times Square. For a moment, I thought: “Oh-oh, I don’t have to worry anymore; my problem has solved itself; I won’t have to pretend.” I recalled previous flashes on my optic nerves . . .
I am sitting at the Silver Dollar Bar in Boston, next to a girl with chipped, bitten-off, painted fingernails, and lipstick on her teeth. We are having our picture taken by the night-club photographer. Flash!
The first time I ever saw a flashlight, my cousin Stanley was sticking it in his mouth, making his cheeks all red.
Magic lights—the flash of lightning on choppy Long Island Sound as my Uncle Bill pulls in a flounder.
Fireflies through the window screens.
The lights in the Bay of Naples kept getting brighter and brighter. I wondered for an instant—is this the spiritual illumination I’ve read about? Will I see the Virgin of Fatima appear next?
My vision cleared and simultaneously I felt a smothering wave of factory heat—hotter than all the asphalt roads in Arizona put together. Mt. Vesuvius had erupted for the first time in centuries. Mt. Vesuvius, the earth that bore the tree, that bore the fruit, that fed man. The carbon process—each of us one molecule in the vast universe.
The earth that saw man destroy his competitor.
The earth that saw Italians killed. Italians—the Venetians, the brilliant colorists. The Italians that would soon clothe Miles Davis.
The earth saw this and vomited that night in Naples.
In the Army you can get out if you’re a wack. Why couldn’t you get out of the Navy if you were a WAVE?
Down in my bunk I had a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing. There it was.
A transvestite is a nut who likes to get dressed up in women’s clothing. He may never engage in homosexual practice or do anything else antisocial. He’s completely harmless. But obviously he would be an inconvenience to the Navy, where they like to keep everything organized by having everyone dress alike.
I figured that if I could demonstrate to the Navy that I still had a great deal of patriotism and loyalty to the uniform, the old esprit de corps—rather than indulging myself with the obvious sort of feather-boa negligee and gold-lamé mules drag outfit—then maybe instead of booting me out, they’d open the door politely and escort me out like an officer and a lady.
Swanson, one of my shipmates, could sew as well as a girl. He was also a beer addict. He’d do anything for a bottle of beer.
In North Africa, Gibraltar, Malta, Corsica, Sicily—wherever we made port—they had given us chits that entitled us to so much beer. I didn’t drink beer, and I saved all my chits. Along with these—I won some gambling, and I also received quite a few for standing watch for different guys—I had enough beer chits to play Scrooge at an AA Christmas show.
I gave my chits to Swanson, and his fingers flew to the task. The way he threw himself into his work made me wonder about him. With the pleats, the shields, everything, he made me a lieutenant.
For a while it was just scuttlebutt that a WAVE was seen promenading forward at the fo’c’sle during the midnight watch. A number of guys who saw it didn’t report it out of fear that they’d be given a Section 8 themselves. Finally one night I was doing my nautical Lady Macbeth when four guys, including the chief master-at-arms, jumped me.
I yelled, “Masher!”
Four naval psychiatrists worked over me at Newport Naval Hospital.
FIRST OFFICER: “Lenny, have you ever actively engaged in any homosexual practice?”
LENNY: “No, sir.”
(An “active” homosexual is one who does the doing, and the “passive” is one who just lies back. In other words, if you were a kid and you were hitchhiking and some faggot came on with you and you let him do whatever his “do” was, he was an “active” homosexual because he performed a sexual act with someone of the same sex, and you are a “passive” homosexual if you allowed any of this to happen. You’ll never see this in an AAA driving manual, but that’s the way it is.)
SECOND OFFICER: “Do you enjoy the company of women?”
LENNY: “Yes, sir.”
THIRD OFFICER: “Do you enjoy having intercourse with women?”
LENNY: “Yes, sir.”
FOURTH OFFICER: “Do you enjoy wearing women’s clothing?”
LENNY: “Sometimes.”
ALL FOUR: “When is that?”
LENNY: “When they fit.”
I stuck to my story, and they finally gave up. Only, it didn’t work out the way I had figured it. They drew up an undesirable discharge.
At the last minute, though (this does sound like a fairy story, doesn’t it?), the Red Cross sent an attorney who reviewed the case and saw that the whole thing was ridiculous. There were no charges against me. The entire division was questioned, and when it was ascertained that I had a good credit rating in virility—based upon paid-up accounts in numerous Neapolitan bordellos—I received an honorable discharge.
So everything worked out all right, except that they took away my WAVE’s uniform. It bugged me because I wanted to have it as a sort of keepsake of the War. I wouldn’t ever wear it, naturally—except maybe on Halloween.
Chapter Six
The first place I went to when I got out of the Navy was back to the farm. I was anxious to show the Denglers my uniform and battle ribbons. And I wanted to see the Soapers down the road and the Ettletons across the way.
I got off the bus, and there were Mr. and Mrs. Dengler in the front yard, crating tomatoes. I ran over and threw my arms around Mrs. Dengler. She said “Hello” to me as if she had seen me only an hour before and I had just finished cleaning the stables.
I had written to them many times from overseas and had never received any reply, so I assumed they had sold the farm. I hadn’t expected to see them now; I merely wished to find out where they moved. I couldn’t believe they just wouldn’t answer, because I’d thought our relationship had been so close.
“Didn’t you get my letters?” I asked.
“Yes, thank you. We’ve been so busy we haven’t even had time to do any canning.”
I had expected . . . I don’t know what the hell I had expected. Maybe some crying, or a big surprise cake; but instead Mr. Dengler simply climbed into the truck and his wife joined him.
“You put on some weight,” she said. “Are you going to be around? Probably see you later.”
And they drove off, leaving me staring at their dust.
Would I be around? I wept out of embarrassment. I felt like a clown in my uniform. The next train didn’t go back to New York until 11 P.M.
I walked the six miles back to the station and just sat around, sort of half-hoping that Mrs. Dengler would come looking for me. She knew there were only three farmhouses in the area and only one train back to the city. She would go to each farm and inquire if I was there. Then she would rush off to the station and say, “Boy, you fell for the oldest trick in the world. You were really feeling sorry for yourself, weren’t you? We were going to let you stay here another two hours just to tease you. I made a big surprise party cake for you, and all your friends can’t wait to see you and hear all about how it was over there.”
But no one came to the station.
I bumped into one kid I had known slightly, and he asked me if I was looking for a job. They wanted some beanpickers at the Ettletons’.
I knew then that this was all it had ever been: a job. Tom Wolfe was right when he said you can’t go home again, but it’s especially true when it was never your home to begin with. Still, you don’t completely dissolve the fantasy . . .
Any minute that big black LaSalle would pull up, and my benefactress would make me secure with a sweater and a blow job, and the chauffeur would shake my hand and say, “Good show, son! It’s grand to have the master home!” Then we would drive off to the little theater off Times Square, where Madame Chiang Kai-Shek would confide to me in the lobby that the Generalissimo hadn’t taken off his stinking boy-scout uniform in 25 years; Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be standing up, pushing his wheel chair, screaming, “See the boardwalk in Atlantic City!”; my mother and father would be there—together—because they were never really divorced . . . they would kiss each other and say, “It’s all over, Lenny, it was just a joke.” Now everyone is seated, the lights come down, the conductor strikes up the last 32 bars of Pins and Needles, the curtains open, and there is Mema, reading a cereal box that explains what the big red-rubber bulb is for and telling the whole world: “It’s Nobody’s Business But Lenny’s.”
My mother had involved herself with a girl named Mary. In business, that is . . . my mother did not profess Will Rogers’ paraphrased philosophy: “I never met a dyke I didn’t like.”
They taught ballroom dancing. My mother’s name is Sally, so they combined names and came up with “The Marsalle School of Dance.”
The school—a loft over Tony Canzoneri’s liquor store—consisted of an office and a big room where their pupils (pensioners and other lonesome men that belonged to The Great Army of the Unlaid, but who were fortunate enough to be reaping the benefits of Mutual of Omaha) waited to learn the tango and the peabody.