Ironically, Lenny Bruce was never so highly revered as a performer as during this period when he was holed up in his California house, not working a day, because the clubs wouldn’t hire him. Following his second LA trial more than eighty prominent figures, including theologians, scientists, entertainers, novelists, playwrights, and critics, a virtual Who’s Who of American intelligentsia, had signed a public protest against his legal persecutions. They described Lenny as a “performer in the field of social satire in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain.” Many cultural luminaries wrote letters to Lenny ruing his suffering and extolling his art. For the most part he didn’t answer this correspondence.
Lenny was dead broke from not having any income and paying lawyers for his frequent court appearances. Since curtailing his visits to Ava, he had stopped taking care of himself. He was surviving on junk food, diet soda, smack, methedrine, uppers to study, and downers to sleep for an hour or two. Lenny was paranoid about the police breaking into his Hollywood home and taking his drugs from the medicine cabinet, so he paced his rooms with syringes, vials, and pills jiggling in his pockets. He was putting on weight and his ankles and feet were achy and swollen with edema.
Nonetheless, Lenny harbored the hope of winning back his reputation in the courts and salvaging his career with something new and bold. For a few hours in the morning he studied law books, listened to tapes of his past trials, or sometimes jotted ideas for routines or notes about Ava. Their white-hot love affair had been more obsessive and delicious than any man could imagine, but winning Ava’s commitment had changed the experience almost overnight. Lenny wrote in his notebook that it was a relief not to feel such wrenching desire. This huge love had been a distraction and now he felt drawn back to his old habits, and if they shortened his days on earth they also brought back his artistic hunger. An old friend of Lenny’s, television pioneer Steve Allen, was guest hosting for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and had invited Lenny to make an appearance. Lenny was looking forward to this first gig in months.
He began writing pages about romantic love with the notion of developing ideas into a book or perhaps a screenplay. Ava would be the gorgeous centerpiece while Jim and Marvin’s flashy business hoax would be the metaphor for critiquing an unethical economic and legal system that pillaged men’s lives. “Ugliness and beauty, who can tell?” Lenny wrote cryptically in one of his journals.
While Ava was dreaming about a new house and a baby in Hollywood, Lenny was turning her over in his mind, examining his attraction and doubts as closely as he examined her nude body when they were together on the farm. He still got horny when he thought of her arms, her neck and breasts, but it bothered Lenny that he cared so much about the way she looked. If she weren’t a stunning beauty in the manner of his ex-wife, maybe he wouldn’t like her at all. It was hard to gauge the wisdom of an exceptionally beautiful woman like Ava. Probably he loved her because she made him feel young and alive. His little black books had pages of such musings. Perhaps it wasn’t Ava he loved but an image he’d created? Maybe she was hardly more than the projection of his desire. Lenny became obsessed with this idea that Ava lived in his head and that loving her was mostly loving himself. She was just handy.
Lenny was thinking about these ideas incessantly. What is love? he asked Ava on the phone after sharing some thoughts about the new project. Lenny’s mind was filled with the taped sounds of her life, her darkest urges and needs. He thought of her more now as his model and muse than a lover and he wanted to share each bratty caustic irony, except her deep silence stopped him short. The question of her value apart from physical beauty had tortured Ava ever since she realized that first-place trophies in beauty pageants were the way to her father’s heart. But more immediately, she was on the verge of leaving her husband to come to Lenny. She wasn’t feeling like a muse. She was nauseous in the morning, pregnant with his son, not that Lenny knew this. Ava was confused and upset.
Lenny tried to mask his mistake with fast talk and gaudy promises. But he got off the line feeling disgusted and out of control. Then, for a moment, he saw it clearly: they were both scrambling to grab onto something, two big losers. He loved her, or he needed her, what did it matter? She’d wanted to come to him and he’d tortured her with insipid conjectures. He wanted to touch her, call her back, explain everything, but he was too sick and weak. He was trapped in a bottle. He tried to pardon himself with junkie excuses: he couldn’t help himself; he’d call her back later. He went in the bathroom and took out the stuff. He watched himself grinning into the mirror.
* * *
Ava was late turning on The Tonight Show and host Steve Allen was nearly finished with his introduction.… he’s more than a comedian; Lenny Bruce comments on the world with the genius of a philosopher. Here he is, the great Lenny Bruce.…
When Ava saw him on the grainy little black-and-white television her heart began flapping in her chest. She had no idea he would be on. Lenny was seated on a stool, twenty pounds heavier than the last time he visited Canada. By the way, I’m not proud that I’m divorced, he began hesitantly, as though trying to fathom the routine. Lenny’s eyes were swollen and spooky and one of them hardly opened. Ava knew the look. It’s a failure, you know, and it’s a hang-up, being divorced. Especially if you’re on the road. He spoke slowly, mumbling his words, occasionally spitting one out like a bad seed. But once the material caught hold, Lenny smiled to himself and delivered the routine in a restless, searching manner all the more affecting for his obvious discomfort.
Society has made up a lot of dirty words that actually hurt me as an individual. Now, I’m on the road, and it’s three o’clock in the morning, and I meet a girl, and I like her. Supposing I just have a record I wanted to hear, or I have a good painting, an original Degas, and I want to relate to her, just talk to her. There’s no lust, no carnal image there. But because where I live is a dirty word—at three in the morning—I can’t say to her, Would you come to my hotel? ’Cause “hotel” is a dirty word at 3:00 A.M. Not the next day at two o’clock in the afternoon when the Kiwanis meet there, though—then “hotel” is clean. But at three in the morning …
So you start to think. You know you can’t say “hotel” to a chick, so you try to think of what won’t offend. What is a clean word to society? “Trailer.” Trailers are hunting and fishing and outdoors. You tell a chick, Hey, you wanna come to my trailer? there’s nothing dirty in that. Okay, uh, where is it? “Trailer” is clean and so she’d be happy to come there.
I met a chick I really dig; I’m crazy about her. I met her in a circus tent where she tries to entice guys to buy coupons with her looks; because she’s really stacked, everyone wants to touch her. Me too. Is that dirty or clean? Maybe it’s dirty, but it seems clean to me. She’s in this tent selling coupons. Buy a coupon and you get a dream. An expense-paid trip to the Caribbean. Or money for the rest of your life. They sell big dreams in the circus tent. People are spending hundreds for coupons that are probably worthless, unless a dream is worth something. Apparently it is, because I told this lady I loved her, right there in the tent, and she laughed at me. He must be a dirty old man, says he loves me in a tent. He wants it. He must be dirty.
My girl is so beautiful, reminds me of my ex-wife. Maybe that’s bad, to fall for someone because she reminds you of someone else. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad.
Anyhow, she lets me visit her on the farm, whenever her old man is away, which is probably wrong. But it feels right. I call her place the Sad Palace. It’s sad because this chick, she’s so beautiful and stacked, she thinks she’s ugly. The Sad Palace turns things upside down. My girl can’t stand her arms, her legs and breasts, as if someone told her they are dirty. They are beautiful. Legs and breasts aren’t dirty. I always tell that to judges when they haul me into court for obscenity. How can legs and breasts be dirty, c’mon! That’s what the farm does to her, confuses ugly and beautiful. In the Sad Palace, beautiful is ugly and ugly is beautiful. She looks out the win
dow at the trees and thinks the view is ugly. This place makes you wonder, What is dirty? What is clean? Maybe what you think is dirty, Steve, is different from what I think. I keep saying that to the judges. Maybe what’s dirty for you is clean for me.
* * *
Ten days later, Lenny called Ava on the phone and was just barely coherent. He said that his ex-wife, Honey, came over to the house and they shot up together, very strong shit; he collapsed on the floor. Ava missed some of the words, but Honey was all through it. Honey was worried he might die. She couldn’t get him standing. He was too heavy. Honey and a friend brought him around by holding ice cubes against his balls and then they forced him to drink coffee and walk around the pool. Honey fed him uppers so he wouldn’t fall asleep. She said she wouldn’t do smack with him anymore because she couldn’t lift him up, he was too heavy.
Lenny insisted he was okay. He didn’t sound okay. He was back seeing his wife. Ava told him then, blurted it out that she was pregnant with his child. Lenny, do you hear me? I’m having a baby, your baby. You wanted this baby. You hear me? His answer was incomprehensible. Then she heard a shuffling sound and he was off the line. She tried to dial back, but no one picked up. She didn’t know anyone in Lenny’s California life to dial. She was shut out. There is nothing about this last conversation in Lenny’s notebooks. There is no telling whether he understood what she was saying about the baby.
Three days later, Ava was in the kitchen having a sandwich when she heard on the radio that Lenny Bruce had died of an overdose in his Hollywood home.
21.
Nine months had passed since Mara had introduced herself to Jim at a recruiting meeting in Israel. They were seated on a torn sofa that smelled like old dogs. She was now his wife. They had taken their vows in a civil ceremony with two witnesses selected at random from a small group of people milling around.
Mara was absently turning through yesterday’s newspaper and glancing out the window at her kids playing in the backyard near the rusty swings. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. He waved at her playfully, hoping for a smile. Jim sat back and stared out the window at the kids.
He couldn’t sell this one small woman who had become his wife. He couldn’t convince her that things would turn his way again. He couldn’t make Mara believe he would lose twenty pounds or that he would have the check next week from Peter—his youngest brother occasionally sent Jim a check for thirty or fifty dollars—and they would be able to go out to an Italian dinner in the mall. She had a resistance, a thickness he could not penetrate; perhaps it was petulance or the arrogance of youth. He couldn’t make his words stick. He couldn’t close it.
Jim’s focus had narrowed to her smallest impulses and responses. All his selling had become devoted to currying her favor. When Mara was happy and especially if he made a remark that captured her interest or made her smile, he felt as if something very large had broken his way. Immediately he wanted to build upon it, make it forever. If she made a caustic remark or turned off to him completely—she had been doing this more lately—he felt like a spurned adolescent. He rarely thought about his daughter or his ninety-five-year-old mom, who was still living in Canada in the house he had bought for her in 1975. He tried to squeeze Phyllis from his mind, although she had saved him from many jams and shared his aspirations for more than two decades of marriage. They had lived in spectacular homes and shared thousands of delicious meals. Now Jim didn’t know where she was sleeping or eating or whether she was eating at all. He wasn’t even curious—this was proof, he reasoned, that Phyllis was no longer alive to him and hadn’t been for some time. This was his justification, his righteousness. Mara was living in his skin. She was lurking behind every miscellaneous thought.
Trying to find work seemed pointless. Who would want to hire an old man? Also, the history he was narrating trivialized the sorts of jobs that might be possible. Jim had once tamed the jungle. How could he take a job in a shoe store? Even the Wow Card seemed pitiful. Jim endeavored to please her with yachts, trophy homes, new offices, business finesses, even Marvin’s sordid love life; he served the past up to this petite woman he did not understand very well.
Of course anyone could see that she was drawn to her ex-husband. There was unfinished business between them, also something raw that Jim could not compete against. Some afternoons when she went off with her kids she didn’t answer her cell phone for hours. Jim felt desperate and weak; his heart fluttered. But later that night, or the next day, she leaned back his way, peeled away her fierceness. She said to him, I like to make you happy, Jim, and he smiled like a grateful boy. Mara touched his face and he shivered. Perhaps at such moments she saw her own father, whom she had adored. She’d lost him less than a year before she came from Israel to live with Jim. He could accept this. A salesman worms his way in from any angle.
And their passion was a magical potion. It left him feeling alive and young, absurdly young, and giddy with hope. He didn’t wash himself afterwards so he’d remember their smell when she drifted away again. He liked to think about her little sounds, most of all her urgency. No one could pretend like this, he said to me a dozen times when she was out of the house and he didn’t want to think where. Maybe he could still beat it back, whatever was taking her.
Making love and fleecing each other—that was the deal, but Jim didn’t understand or couldn’t accept it. He pressed for a longer, bigger contract. He rolled out his best of times like my dad’s aging salesmen friends who had squeezed out the last drops of glory in shabby Jewish delis and cheap hotels in Miami Beach. He regaled her with opulent stories (as he had once filled Ava’s life with every gift under the sun), although it occurred to him that someday Mara would know all of them and they’d be looking at each other in these terrible rooms with the two kids pestering them in Hebrew like hungry chickens. Not yet.
* * *
Jim’s voice was a little reedy. He wasn’t feeling energetic, but he wanted to capture her attention. Mara, dear, I lived like a king. Jim sometimes forgot the names of his children, but he could envision every detail of the magnificent house he had built on the lake. Mara, he repeated gently, until she looked up. He paid $5 million for the property alone, forty-eight acres of rolling land that narrowed to a peninsula with stretches of sandy beach. That’s where he and Ava built the main house for an additional $2 million and more. What did it matter?
Jim had insisted on ten-foot ceilings with broad antique beams, and Ava nervously turned through a dozen magazines and eventually settled on custom knotty alder cabinetry to go with limestone flooring and Brazilian granite counters. A barge hauled in huge rectangular stones to make a picturesque seawall. But the main house was angled out over the seawall so that you could not see it from the rooms.
Every Friday, unless he was traveling, Jim brought home a large brown paper bag with their spending money, fifteen thousand, some weeks thirty thousand in cash, play money. Jim urged Ava to buy things for herself, for the house or for their son, Michael (the strange boy was her secret whom she tended like a precious garden), but she couldn’t keep up the pace. She tried but found it exhausting to spend all the cash Jim brought home. Whatever they couldn’t use immediately he stashed in a safe.
Winter nights, the lake raged like the stormy Atlantic. They ate caviar and sipped Merlot pretending they were on the bridge of a liner. In July and August, it was mostly calm and the water lapped against the retractable dock, with Jim’s two Chris-Craft speedboats at rest in the shade of the house. In the evening light the property was exquisitely restful, like a Wordsworth memory. On the hill behind the house, a small herd of Irish sheep grazed. He could still smell the bloom of Ava’s cut flowers in the summer. He could almost place all of it in Mara’s arms, almost.
Mara was more attentive when he described things she could imagine, the beauty creams and perfumes, cooking aids, exercise equipment, cashmere sweaters, hunting jackets, and despite the sweltering heat of August in Florida, Ava’s lustrous fur coat appealed to
Mara, as well. But as Jim grew increasingly more wealthy and flagrant in his buying for Ava, Mara lost her focus. He had lived so far beyond her petit bourgeois dreams. Mara could barely imagine Jim’s wealthy past and it made her feel agitated and angry she was missing her only big chance in life. Her youth would be gone in a minute while she was living with an old man in a house wreck.
Why should she care about Ava’s third-floor penthouse studio that Jim had built lavishly for her new arty life with a marble fireplace and a golden travertine floor to match their alder kitchen cabinetry, or the twin greenhouses, and why the hell did he need Irish sheep? Now, while Jim was waiting around for things to break his way, the four of them were eating chicken wings unless they splurged for burgers at McDonald’s. Jim was sweating each nickel. You promised me gymnastic lessons for the boy, she repeated bitterly every few days. You promised me, Jim.
Nineteen-seventy was a banner year. Grain prices were up and farmers had capital to buy machinery and they needed storage. Jim and Marvin were planning a fourth plant to service the western provinces. Mara, please look at me when I’m talking. He could still taste success. He wanted to surprise her with the little white BMW she dreamed about. The best had been effortless for Jim; just drive to the dealership and write a check. Jim believed that money could buy love or at least something close enough. The money washed back and forth through time; it was confusing for him. Every week they could have thrown thousands off their balcony into the waves and it wouldn’t have mattered. If only he could shower Mara with toys, she wouldn’t leave him.
No good. Desperation is pathetic in a salesman. Jim had seen the play in New York in 1975 with George C. Scott playing Willie Loman. He cried throughout the last act. Walk away from the deal, but never plead: he taught this rule to every one of his men. Except he was in a terrible position now, boxed in by old age and poverty with no redress. Did she care about him anymore? This question raged within him. Since their marriage, something had changed, that’s for sure. Probably had to do with her ex-husband living nearby. Jim could feel her disgust as if he’d suddenly turned old, with varicose legs and a hanging belly. He shuddered, piled on the high life. More and more cash had accumulated in the safe in Jim’s study. He started betting on football games; fifty thousand each weekend, soon it was a hundred thousand. Ava was so beautiful while she tried to save herself, no more makeup and sexy dresses, peeling down to find the truth, and men yearned for her all the more; she was the dream of every man. Jim’s brown bags of money only deepened her confusion and sorrow. She began to collect fine art. She was slow, painfully slow, making her choices, and this irritated Jim.
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