by Don DeLillo
Lenny whirls and points at some phantom confederate in the wings. In fact there are no wings—just walls and doors.
He tried to fit the condom over his tongue again.
“Never underestimate the power of language. I carry a rubber with me at all times because I don’t want to inseminate someone by schmoozing with her. Some innocent teenage girl asks for directions to State Street. Zap. A virgin birth.”
A small commotion in the middle of the room—could be some walkouts or maybe just a waiter and some noisy plates. The waiters are supposed to work quietly during performances but this was a hungry bunch of trenchermen who made a racket when they ate, gorging on sirloins, barbecued ribs, lobster tails, spaghetti and chicken livers, and more or less thrashing their way through a Mister Kelly specialty, the green goddess salad.
Lenny said, “Love me unconditionally or I die. These are the terms of our engagement.”
Kelly’s was jam-packed tonight, well over the legal limit of a hundred and sixty, and they were sitting, standing and stacked ten deep at the fire exit. And they were loud, they bawled and lowed like beef on the hoof, men on business trips with dilated veins throbbing at their temples, a group of touring usherettes from the Far West, half expecting to encounter themselves in one of Lenny’s bits, and look at the heavyset men in big suits with star sapphires on their pinky fingers, in from the mobster suburbs with lapels so wide they do semaphores when the wind blows. And a table filled with developers chewing on Cuban cigars—a bachelor night on the town. And sophisticated women digging the weird insides of one man’s psyche. And a couple of butterball college professors looking for some belly laughs, idea men from the humanistic enclave. And Hugh Hefner and a cluster of Playboy models, aspiring centerfolds on leave from the Mansion, tall, young, fair and so flawlessly complexioned they seem to be airbrushed. And Hef with his dirty paternal smile steel-seamed around a briar pipe.
Walkouts in progress—an old story of course on the Lenny Bruce circuit. Two women and a man offended by the sight of a guy sticking his tongue in a Trojan.
Lenny spotted them and fixed on the woman bringing up the rear. Big-boned, let’s say, and able-bodied.
“Look who’s splitting the scene. You know who that is, don’t you? You can recognize her from the wanted posters. Josef Mengele’s head nurse. Up from Argentina on a budget tour.” Pause a beat. “She’s doing the stockyards, the prisons and the morgue.” Pause a beat. “When she was still active, they called her Attila the Huness.”
Who else was in the room? Second City comics here to idolize the super sicko. Jazz writers and theater people. Some porko politicos and their rosary-bead wives—they’re here under the impression that Lenny’s an Italian crooner whose real name runs to eleven syllables and carries a serious curse.
Who else? A number of Cook County vice cops scattered through the room with notebooks and tape machines, sucking up every arraignable word.
Lenny was still hectoring the walkouts.
“Make room, make room. They got a flight to Buenos Aires in ten minutes. Eichmann Air. The stews wear striped pajamas.”
Those were the terms of Lenny’s act. If you didn’t like the bits he did, you were a mass murderer. Or you were the Polio Mother of the Year 1952 or the subject of a brief improvised bit, which he now performed, on the flashing light in airliner toilets, a recent obsession of his.
Return to seat Return to seat Return to seat.
Lenny once had a sixty-party walkout in New York. An entire Grey Line bus tour just upped and fled. Angelo the maitre d’ looked at Lenny and said, You gotta talk dirty? Who’s gonna make up the tips, you fuck?
Lenny licked and rubbed the condom. He fingered it, twirled it, snapped it.
“I just realized. This is what the twentieth century feels like.”
Then he paused thoughtfully, appearing to remember something. He stuck the rubber in his pocket, absently—he was wearing the same Nehru jacket he’d sported in San Francisco, his Hindu statesman number, and the thing was rutted and crushed by now, resembling some wadded discard plucked from the gutter. He also wore a large medal on a chain, an accessory to the Nehru. You got the medal for wearing the jacket.
Yes, he was remembering something heavy and dense. Despite his weeklong anxiety over the missile crisis, the blackout at Basin Street West, the endless bulletins issuing from every surface in the landscape, a network ranging from TV monitors in airport boarding areas to blind newsies selling tabloids on street corners, yes, whatever the level of Lenny’s unease—the nuclear showdown had slipped his mind.
Better believe it. Their ships are approaching our blockade.
Lenny nodded, he stroked the mole on his cheek, he waggled his fingers and looked out over the massed heads humming autonomically in the low smoke.
“We’re all gonna die!”
He said it four times total, passionatly high-pitched, arms flung up.
“And you’re beginning to take it personally,” he said. “How can they justify the inconvenience of a war that’s gonna break out over the weekend? You had it all planned. Friday night. Movie with your highbrow art-film friends. Serious Swedish flick at the little theater near the university. Ursula Andress naked to the waist with a slain calf slung over her shoulder. Saturday morning. Let’s see. Dry cleaner, post office, grocery store, pick up shoes, put cat to sleep, call mom back home in French Lick—yeah, I’m fine, how’re you, yatta yatta yatta, got a big date tonight with a real nice girl, Raytheon, she’s a Mormon, they don’t drink tap water or play the saxophone.”
Lenny broke off unexpectedly and leaned into the face of one of the real-estate barons sitting ringside, a guy with the bloated cheeks of a trumpet player doing a cardiac solo.
“Mick spic hunky junkie boogie.”
There was no context for the line except the one that Lenny took with him everywhere. The culture and its loaded words. He looked around some more. He seemed to need a particular kind of face into which to deliver his scripture.
One of the college profs smiled invitingly and Lenny obliged with, “Fuck suck fag hag gimme a nickel bag.”
In fact the words were thrilling. Many people had never heard these words spoken before an audience—by a guy in a Hindu tunic yet—and there was an odd turn of truth, a sense of unleashing perhaps, or disembarrassment.
Lenny followed this flurry with an erudite riff on the German word Sprachgefühl, a feel for language, for what is idiomatically hip—he reads up on things like this in hotels and on planes and back home in the smoky dawn of L.A. while he’s waiting for a woman or a pusher.
A fight broke out in the middle of his commentary. Back near the fire exit. Five burly men in a fur ball of pummel and shove. Lenny egged them on, insulting their mothers, until they more or less rolled out the door.
He remembered the crisis again.
“Yeah so you pick up your date at the pad she shares with six other Mormon chicks. Wow what a shiksoid circus. They have strange shiny eyes and a superhuman blondness. They’re the next stage of evolution after Olympic swimmers. They’re right at the edge of science fiction, man. Human look-alikes from space waiting for a signal to take over the planet. They think tap water’s a government plot. Their water’s trucked in from a well in Utah. Raytheon’s kinda cute but she’s dressed so primly you feel your balls contract. You look at these girls and you mourn the lost glamour of women’s undergarments. The whole nazified system of straps and harnesses. It’s a legal outlet for your secret fascist longings. But chicks don’t buy into it anymore. All that slithery hardware that makes wars worth fighting. You take her to a funky down-home place near the women’s house of detention. She orders the knuckle sandwich. Hey, the chick digs soul food. Your spirits soar. You think of the setup at your place. Bottle of Vat 69. Zig Zag cigarette paper. Little baggy of dope from the high Andes. The mood lighting. The cool jazz on the turntable. We’ll do Miles, yeah, from his blue period. If Miles can’t soften her up she’s probably a diesel dyke. You’re th
inking all the universal things men have always thought about and said to each other. Get in her pants. Did you get in? Did you get some? Did you make it? How far’d you get? How far’d she go? Is she an easy lay? Is she a good hump? Is she a piece? Did you get a piece? It’s like the language of yard goods. It’s like piece goods. You can make her. She can be made. It’s like a garment factory. It’s like work that’s paid for according to the number of units turned out. He’s a make-out artist. She’s a piece. Knock off a piece. It’s a knockoff. You can’t tell the woman from the fabric she’s wearing.”
This is Lenny in his primitive Christian mode, doing offbeat sermons to desert rabble.
“You hail a cab and the radio’s on. Khrushchev wrote a letter to Kennedy. He wants a summit. Who is this Khrushchev anyway? He’s a shtarker in a bad suit. You’re worried about your summit, not his. The whole point of the missile crisis is the sexual opportunity it offers. You get Raytheon to your place and convince her the whole world’s about to go zippo and astonishingly it works and within minutes she’s standing naked in your living room and she is all ovals and loops, like the Palmer handwriting method, and so blond she could be radioactive.”
Lenny switched abruptly to ad lib bits. Whatever zoomed across his brainpan. He did bits he got bored with five seconds in. He did psychoanalysis, personal reminiscence, he did voices and accents, grandmotherly groans, scenes from prison movies, and he finally closed the show with a monologue that had a kind of abridged syntax, a thing without connectives, he was cooking free-form, closer to music than speech, doing a spoken jazz in which a slang term generates a matching argot, like musicians trading fours, the road band, the sideman’s inner riff, and when the crowd dispersed they took this rap mosaic with them into the strip joints and bars and late-night diners, the places where the nighthawks congregate, and it was Lenny’s own hard bop, his speeches to the people that rode the broad Chicago night.
JULY 2, 1959
We stopped the car half a block before the bridge and switched to a taxi. I gave the guy the address and he looked at me, looked at her, then nodded briefly. I’d been told it was better to take a taxi across the border because if you drove your car you became subject to major delays owing to inspections by customs agents on your return to the U.S. side, for guns and drugs.
The town had a strange electric brightness in the stormlight. Blue and green stucco shops with pottery on display—pottery, copper, blankets, glass.
“I think I’m having second thoughts,” I said.
“Please, okay?”
“Maybe they’re first thoughts. I never really thought hard enough until now.”
Amy could carry a fair amount of reproach in her clear brown eyes.
“I took it for granted that this was the only thing to do,” I said. “We should have talked about it some more.”
Her look was the kind of look you get when someone wants you to know she is taking great pains not to pity you. When we cleared the town and drove into the brown hills the rain came hard. About six minutes later the driver pulled up in front of a fairly sizable house behind some trees and the sun was hot and bright and the ground was smoking.
The woman who let us in looked at Amy and said, “Please, your name,” more or less managerially.
“Amy Brookhiser.”
“Yes, you’ll come with me.”
And that’s what happened. Amy went with the woman, who was either the nurse, the wife, the office manager or some combination of these. I thought we might have some reassuring words for each other, Amy and I, or I might say something even if she didn’t, although I didn’t know what I might say, but they were down the hall and making a left turn and I still had our overnight bags in my hands.
All right. I set the bags down and went into the living room, or waiting room, and sat on the sofa. There were no magazines to read. All the reading was on the walls, painted sayings and occult symbols, and this was unexpected. Circles, chevrons, arrows, birds, mucho mystical drivel, and I was trying to absorb it all. A number of shaped sayings, words that formed triangles and tall palms, trees of life perhaps—sayings in English about the passage of the soul and the eye of God, and there were mystical eyes and admonitory hands on all four walls and the ceiling.
I tried to absorb this surprise, wondering what it meant and why I hadn’t been warned, and that’s when the doctor walked in. A man I worked with in Palo Alto had given me his name and address, and I’d called and made arrangements, and there were assurances about safety from two other people I’d talked to, safe, clean, professional, but no one had said anything about the walls.
He didn’t seem to be looking at me.
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “Dr. Swearingen?”
He wasn’t looking at me.
He said, “Everything seems to be in order.”
I said, “Do I pay now?”
We seemed to be having a conversation that went backwards.
He thought about the question of payment, his mouth scrunched up, my hand at my wallet, waiting.
He was a tall man in a white smock, tall and stooped, with an odd pallor, and deeply introspective, I thought, six feet seven or eight, an American who did abortions, according to the people I’d talked to, out of a sense of duty and compassion, and he hadn’t shaved today.
I paid him two hundred dollars cash and he said, “Expect some bleeding,” maybe as a way of veiling the transaction, and then he went down the hall.
I sat there with the pictures and the words. I didn’t know how to think about any of this. I didn’t know what to call it. Maybe Amy knew but she wasn’t saying much. All she wanted to do was get it over with.
I was willing to make sacrifices and be responsible. This is what I told myself. I wanted to fix myself to something strong, to a wife, I thought, and child.
But it wasn’t strong at all. It was hopeless, worthless and weak. We wouldn’t last a month together. We were restless and grasping, we were a fling that had run intermittently for two years only because we lived in different cities, and we were religious in our attachment to risk, and she was the last thing I needed in this world.
And you felt a strange shaded grief, didn’t you, sitting in the room, a sadness shaded by distance, and you tried to think yourself into the middle of the child’s unlived life.
Someone was cooking a meal a couple of rooms away and this disturbed me. The savor of the food and the faint sounds of activity, someone opening cabinet doors—this disturbed and confused me and made me a little angry.
Amy was twenty-six years old, a couple of weeks shy of twenty-seven, and she lived and worked in Wichita. I was twenty-four, roughly half a continent away, and I knew she half hated both of us for what had happened.
When Amy came out I realized I hadn’t told the cabdriver to pick us up and we waited a while until the woman made the call and someone showed.
They’d given her a local, only, because that’s what they were equipped to do, and she wasn’t groggy on the ride to the border but sat forward and gripped the edges of the front seat and didn’t want to talk.
The customs men checked the cab for contraband and breezed through our bags and we were in our rented car in a matter of minutes.
I drove out of Del Rio headed east on 90. Amy slept a while and woke up and was thirsty. Up ahead of us a pickup went into a spin, just like that, the only other vehicle on the road, skidding and whipping when it came off a sandy ramp, and I slowed down so we could watch objectively.
“Swapped ends,” Amy said quietly. “That’s what my old granddad Parker would say. Truck swapped ends for sure.”
She spoke in a tired and quiet voice and I drove slowly past the pickup, which was facing the way it wanted to face again, with two teenage boys in the cab, collecting themselves in a flurry of stupid grins, and I looked for a place where Amy could get a cool and healthy drink somewhere between here and the airport.
OCTOBER 27, 1962
The hotel was called the Wav
es, and why not? This was Ocean Drive, wasn’t it, in the municipality of Miami Beach.
Small rich angry men got out of rented convertibles with their dolled-up wives, women so cultishly tanned they resembled tobacco leaf.
Spoiled savvy with-it kids from northern cities flashed fake I.D.s at the bar. They were enrolled at the resort colleges in the area and were eager to catch the act in the big room.
A contingent of Cubans fell by, headed for the hotel lounge, shod, clad, tropically smart—the women in wraparound white and born to dance and the men sunglassed and wary. They looked like bodyguards for some jefe about to topple.
There was a Latin band in the lounge doing mambos and cha-chas and a number of Long Island sexpots were here, looking for second husbands. They traveled in pairs or with a sister, even, like a hunter and her gun bearer, one divorced, one single—dating an orthodontist here and an iffy sort of businessman there. Says he’s an executive in the hotel linen supply business? But when I call him on the phone? I have to ask for Marty? And his name is Fred?
Eyelinered, tweezered, mascara’d, flashing acrylic nails, coral, with matching lipstick and blush. These were women who’d always been part of the in-group and some of them preferred the nightclub to the lounge because they wanted to get a taste of Lenny Bruce.