How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

by Lenny Bruce

  In the movies, Porter Hall and Gene Lockhart were always successful businessmen, but Everett Sloane was a tycoon. He would get his gun off disillusioning Joel McCrea, who wanted to publish a newspaper that would make a statement, and telling him: “M’boy, you’ll see when you get old that it’s all a game.” And I used to think “No, it’s not that way, this cynical old bastard is bullshitting, there are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, the liars and truth-tellers.”

  But Everett Sloane was right.

  There is only what is. The what-should-be never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is only what is.

  A bronze honor roll, black wreaths, and those dopey green sticks with dye running that support them.

  My uncle always used to lie and say that he just bought a poppy.

  There is only what is.

  And so the figures will never be in, relating to the unspoken confessions of all those criminals who purchase contraceptives unlawfully, and willfully use them for purposes other than the prevention of disease.

  There is only what is.

  My friend Paul Krassner once asked me what I’ve been influenced by in my work.

  I have been influenced by my father telling me that my back would become crooked because of my maniacal desire to masturbate . . . by reading “Gloriosky, Zero!” in Little Annie Rooney . . . by listening to Uncle Don and Clifford Brown . . . by smelling the burnt shell powder at Anzio and Salerno . . . torching for my ex-wife . . . giving money to Moondog as he played the upturned pails around the corner from Hanson’s at 51st and Broadway . . . getting hot looking at Popeye and Toots and Casper and Chris Crustie years ago . . . hearing stories about a pill they can put in the gas tank with water but the “big companies” won’t let it out—the same big companies that have the tire that lasts forever—and the Viper’s favorite fantasy: “Marijuana could be legal, but the big liquor companies won’t let it happen” . . . Irving Berlin didn’t write all those songs, he’s got a guy locked in the closet. . . colored people have a special odor . . . James Dean is really alive in a sanatorium . . . and Hitler is waiting to book me for six weeks in Argentina . . .

  It was an absurd question.

  I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.