by Lenny Bruce
I am not trying to project an image of myself as pure, wholesome and All-American. Again, I certainly am not making any value judgment of others and attempting to put myself on a high moral level above anyone else. As I have said, I have indulged myself in houses of prostitution.
I try to keep in mind that the only difference between a Charles Van Doren, a Bernard Goldfine, a Mayor Curley or a Dave Beck, and me, is that they got caught. I am always offended by a judge or district attorney with an Academy Award sense of moral indignation. I have great respect for the offices of law enforcement and preservation, but I’ll never forget that William O’Dwyer was the D.A.
I love my country, I would give allegiance to no other nation, nor would I choose any other for my home, and yet if I followed a U.S. serviceman and saw the enemy bind him, nude, face down, and then pour white-hot lead into a funnel that was inserted in his keister, they wouldn’t even have to heat another pot for me. I would give them every top secret, I would make shoeshine rags out of the American flag, I would denounce the Constitution, I would give them the right to kill every person that was kind and dear to me.
Just don’t give me that hot-lead enema.
So that’s how low I am. That’s what I would resort to, to keep that lead out of my ass. I spent four battle years in the Mediterranean and saw starving priests, doctors and judges. I saw ethics erode, again, according to the law of supply and demand.
So I am not offended by war in the same way that I am not offended by rain. Both are “motivated” by need.
I was at Anzio. I lived in a continual state of ambivalence: guilty but glad. Glad I wasn’t the GI enjoying 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.
War spells out my philosophy of “No right or wrong”— just “Your right, my wrong”—everything is subjective.
After we resolved our conflict with the villainous English, the Indians were next. They had some absurd notion that since they were here before us, they had some claim upon the land.
Setting a precedent for Nazi purging, we proved to those dunderhead Indians the correctness of the aphorism “Possession is nine tenths of the law.” If you have any doubts about that, if you’re ever in Miami, drive to the one tenth: the Seminole Indian reservation, in the mosquito-ridden, agriculture-resistant Everglades swamps.
The next suffering people we had to liberate were the Mexicans. We took Texas and California. But we always maintained a concept of justice. We left them a land where holy men could walk: the desert.
Later, continuing with our hollow, rodomontade behavior, we involved ourselves in the war to end all wars.
After going out on a limb like that, there were wars that followed nonetheless, especially the one that took courageous Americans, heroic Russians, invincible Englishmen, and the indefatigable French, who shared moral unity, having God and Irving Berlin on their side, and censuring those who offended the principles of Christianity—the Italians.
The Pope, possessing the clairvoyance of a representative of the Deity, did not flee to Argentina, thereby escaping the fate of Adolf Eichmann.
Where was I? Coming out of a whorehouse in Marseilles—the mental-health official would have been so happy in The Torture Chamber.
Sometimes when I work onstage I make these stream-of-consciousness transitions so smoothly from one point to another that the audience doesn’t realize until later that I have forgotten to tie up the idea I began with. More than once, someone has come back to the club and tried to get back in, demanding to find out the ending.
Something unusually emotional was happening to me during the merchant marine time. I found that the longer I stayed away from Honey Harlowe, the more involved I became with her. It was so new to me—what others had called “being in love”—and I discovered that I actually enjoyed abstaining: a sort of selfless sacrifice. I just was not interested in participating in sexual relations with anyone but Honey.
It was an amazing experience for me. I was 25 and I had dated at least 200 girls and been promiscuous with twice that number (since this included those I never “dated,” in dressing-room bacchanals, chorus girls and strippers who had nothing else to do till their nails got dry). It was an inescapable fact: I was hooked on Honey.
When our ship hit Spain I took all of the money I had saved and called Honey. It took me a long time to trace her, from one club to another, and finally to her mother, but then at last I heard her voice.
I told her I loved her and I was coming home.
Chapter Eleven
Honey and I got married . . . I was wed to a stripper!
Strippers were only a step above hookers, even as late as 1951. The first great break-through—or, rather, breakdown—of society’s nudity/lewdity guilt-by-association was the now-famous Marilyn Monroe calendar. Marilyn’s respectability when she died was based principally upon her economic status, which is, in the final analysis, the only type our society really respects.
There were a number of other steps which she took to climb down off the barbershop mirror and up the ladder of acceptability, the chairmanship of the board of directors of her own corporation. Joe DiMaggio was the first rung in that ladder. In marrying all America’s all-American, she challenged society to condemn its own honored image of the red-blooded hero prototype. After all, would Jolting Joe ever take as a wife someone whom we could not admire?
After she had thus won the “workers’ vote,” she copped the intellectuals’ approval in a tour de force by becoming Mrs. Arthur Miller. (He’s a brilliant fellow—would he demean himself by climbing into bed with someone who was not his equal? She reads Dostoievsky!)
Other bovine ladies began to bare their chests for a frank and honest appraisal of their inner spiritual qualities. I have in mind that picture of Sophia Loren sitting in a public restaurant, quite exposed herself, in a gown of delicate décolleté, but staring at Jayne Mansfield’s naked nipple peeking out of her low-cut sheath as if to say, “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”
Marilyn Monroe was PLAYBOY magazine’s first Playmate of the Month. PLAYBOY’S Editor and Publisher, Hugh M. Hefner, has cleverly accompanied these center foldouts with capsule biographies emphasizing that the Playmate is not necessarily a professional model, but the very antithesis: a secretary, a coed, a waitress, a social worker. You Too Can Take Off Your Clothes and Succeed.
Archaeologists a thousand years hence will indeed be confused by the slew of would-be PLAYBOY imitators, and even Pageant (the Legion of Decency’s PLAYBOY) and other like magazines with their articles interspersed with sweet young Oklahoma lasses who are kept from being overexposed by bulky-knit Italian sweaters that never quite do the job.
If a girlie book was all that was left as a document of this generation, an anthropologist of the year 2965 would logically assume that this culture seemed to be identified with the religious concept: “God made my body and if it is dirty, then the imperfection lies with the Manufacturer, not the product. Do not remove this tag under the penalty of law.”
Meanwhile, back at the strip show, I knew that according to all true Christian standards nudity in itself was certainly not lewd, but burlesque—with its “subtle” charades of grabbing, “floor work,” pulling and touching—was lewd. Lewd in the sense that there was a woman on the stage whose chief aim was to get the audience horny. I knew that my wife would have to stop stripping unless I could rationalize being a halfway pimp.
I decided to develop her other talents. Honey had a fairly good voice. I spent two years doing a double with her, working all sorts of joints so that we could be together, but after about the first month, I realized I would have to
have more money to make her a singer than I was making as a comedian.
How to make some quick money and stay out of jail . . .
If Father Divine could do it, why couldn’t I!
Of course—that would be the gimmick—I would become a priest or a rabbi or a monk or whatever the hell was necessary to perform miracles such as taking money from someone else’s pocket and putting it into mine, still remaining within the confines of the law. I had no qualms about the sinful aspect of my aspiration because I felt—and still do feel—that all so-called “men of God” are self-ordained. The “calling” they hear is just their own echo.
I knew, of course, that becoming a rabbi or a priest would be a slow process. Churches and synagogues were probably hard to come by. I’ve never seen one for rent, and they don’t ever seem to go out of business. The amazing thing about churches and synagogues is that they never complain about a bad location. I suppose they have a lot of walk-in trade.
No, that would be too slow a process for me. First renting the building, then putting ads in the papers, “Grand Opening, Free Prizes and Blessings to the Kids!” Then I would have to hire an organ player, one that would be responsible and show up for the gig. And then I would have to decide if I would be the m.c. or would I hire one, and what would be the theme of the show—would it be Fire and Brimstone, or Ivy-League Reform?
The big problem would be the breadbasket holders. Most good ushers were working, I assumed, and the ones who weren’t working had probably been busted for gelt-grabbing.
So a house of worship wasn’t the answer. What I needed was some disease which hadn’t been exploited yet. Cancer, muscular dystrophy and tuberculosis had been run through the wringer. Most people had benefited from their contributions—they had the same catharsis of guilt for their own health that Nobel, the man responsible for the killer, dynamite, must have had when he instituted the Nobel Peace Prize.
I needed a disease.
Bronchitis? No, that’s such a unhip disease. At least consumption has a sexual connotation to it; bronchitis is sort of poor and Jewish. “I’ve got bronchitis, I want a challah and some sweet butter.”
Cholera is Midwest-Protestant-Nelson Algrenish.
Pellagra has class. “Yeah, I got pellagra—uh huh, we brought it up from Southampton with us.” You can even make out with chicks. “Yeah, baby, cool it with him if you want to. I’ll just pellagra it up here. I’ll stay in the pad alone. . . .” That’ll get her.
The clap! No one had ever exploited the clap! When the guy comes to your door for the Community Chest or the United Fund, do you ever say to him, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m gonna give you a donation, but how much of my buck is going to the clap?” And actually, it’s way up there on the charts. Or are you like a lot of subintellectuals who would say, “Well, no, I wouldn’t ask about the clap because only bums get it. And Communists.” Sure, 7,000,000 war heroes that are bums and Communists.
You can talk about leukemia all day long, because there’s no specific cure, but the clap—you could whack it out in two days with all the antibiotics, so how come it’s there and stays up there? Don’t even say the word clap, man. “It’s all right, Mrs. Sheckner, you’ve just got a little discharge.” Because you get leukemia in a respectable way. But how do you get the clap? By doing it, and anybody who does that dirty thing obviously deserves to get the clap.
Why do you think Ben-Hur’s mother and sister got leprosy? Because they didn’t put paper on the seat.
Now, if your daughter dies in the back of a taxicab bleeding from a bad curettage because she had a baby in her belly and therefore she’s a tramp because the witch doctor didn’t put a hoop on her finger, is it any easier for your son to come to you and tell you he has the clap?
If he’s lucky, he may go to some schmuck who sweeps up the drugstore.
“Hey, Manny . . . you’ll mop later, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Whaddaya want?”
“Listen, I got the clap.”
“Oh, yeah—where’d you get that?”
“From painting the car, schmuck—what’s the difference? I got it, all right?”
“So whaddaya want from me?”
“Some pills. You work in the drugstore here.”
“All right, I’ll give you some pills. Dexedrine Spansules.”
“Is that any good?”
“Yeah, they’re all the same. These are good. They keep you awake so you know you’ve got it.”
“How do I know when I get rid of it?”
“Well, if your knees don’t swell up and you don’t go blind, I guess you’re OK.”
“The reason I want these pills is, I finally got a good job.”
“Oh, yeah? Where you working?”
“In a meat-packing plant, and I don’t want to lay off because I’m sick with the clap. You want some steaks?”
“No; no, thanks.”
I envisioned my campaign. . . . “She’s got it, by jove, I think she’s finally got it!” And then the chorus would sing, to the tune of “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet,” “Curb the Clap Today in the U.S.A., it’s a job that’s never been done before!” What a thrill it would be to produce the first Clapathon on TV. Instead of little children being exploited, coming out with their little crutches, you could have glamorous movie stars: “Folks, we’ve raised $680,000 tonight, $680,000 that will be spent for research and treatment; no longer will men have to suffer the indignity of putting it on the window sill and slamming the window on it.” A big ad campaign—“Remember, an ounce of prevention, the most important quarter inch!”—and then perhaps a beautiful dramatic actress would give a testimonial:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have been helped by this wonderful organization; thanks to these brave people, we have been brought out of the dark ages. We have had the clap in our family for years and never knew it. My husband and I sensed there was something strange about the size of Ronnie’s head—he was our first son—but like many others we were too ashamed to ask our doctor about it. Then we read the literature, Curb the Clap Today, and we brought it to our family doctor. He read it and to his amazement he discovered that he had the clap, too . . .”
But I was only fantasizing again, making stuff up for my own amusement. Then one day I was looking through my scrapbook and I came upon a feature story on myself that had appeared in The Detroit Free Press:
FRIEND TO FOUR HUNDRED
Entertainer Conducts Aid Drive
For Lepers
By Ralph Nelson
Free Press Staff Writer
Ashore in Trinidad in 1944, while his ship was being refitted with guns, a 27-year-old Detroiter began a friendship with a colony in British Guiana that remains strong and warm.
The people of the colony number about 400 lepers at Mahaicony Hospital, East Coast Demerara, British Guiana, a handful of missionaries and six American Sisters of Mercy who care for the sick.
Leonard Bruce, of 1347 Selden, was then a turret gunner aboard the U.S.S. Brooklyn, a light cruiser that saw action at Casablanca and Salerno, and won a Unit Citation at Anzio.
“We put in at Trinidad for new guns and repairs from shell fire,” Bruce said. “It was there I first found out about lepers, and how completely forgotten they are by the world.”
Bruce said that the greatest strength for good at the tiny colony is a 61-year-old Unitarian missionary, himself a leper.
“The care and Godliness that Adam Abrigo, himself incurably ill, spread among the sufferers was wonderful,” Bruce said. “I cleaned out the ship of all we could spare in the way of old clothing, shoes and food, and I’ve been sending the colony things ever since.”
Bruce admitted that his private welfare project is getting out of hand.
“There are about 400 lepers there, including 50 small children who are stricken,” he said. “Their need for toys, with Christmas coming, underclothing, jackets, candy and food, is overpowering. The colony is very poor.”
Bruce pointed out that sunglas
ses are a great boon to the sick, as leprosy strikes at the eyes, making the equatorial sun unbearable.
Bruce and his wife, Harriet, both well-known Detroit entertainers, will leave January 15th, with a USO group headed for Korea, for a 10-week stay.
“Before we go, I hope we can reach into the hearts of enough Detroiters, with a few toys or old clothing to spare, to make a good Christmas for the inmates of the leper colony,” Bruce said.
“Twenty-four-pound packages are the largest that are permitted, and it will take a lot of bundles to go around to the 350 people and those little children.”
Letters to Bruce from Father Abrigo bear mute testimony of the need and gratitude of the colony for gifts Bruce had sent on his one-man crusade of help.
“Just a package, to the Medical Superintendent of the Mahaicony Leprosarium, East Coast Demerara, British Guiana, South America, will do more for these people than anyone can ever know who has not been there.”
Now this article had been factual and I had been proud of it. But for the first time it seemed to me that even I had been exploited. The reporter, a nice enough guy, was hard up for a human-interest story around Christmastime and that was the reason he had written it. He had to make some kind of a living, like everyone else. It was just practical. So my lepers and I got used.
Actually, the article didn’t hurt anybody; it helped people. As a direct result of the article, a wealthy man donated 30,000 pairs of sunglasses. The people who received the donations, as well as those who gave them, benefited. They felt very generous and noble and gratified.
But more important—to me, that is, at that particular moment—was the fact that the reporter had helped himself. “God helps those who help themselves,” I remembered.
Until then my theological knowledge had been limited to the lives of Christ and Moses, which I had read many times. I had been touched deeply by what I understood. I really loved Christ and Moses. I related very strongly to them because it seemed to me that I thought so much like them in so many ways. They had a deep regard for education and they continually gave, with no motivation other than to give.