The man looked into the audience, stroking his chin, body set in a hipster slouch, and he wore a charcoal suit, continental cut, with natural shoulders and half lapels, and a dark slim knit tie, and that New York Levantine look-yes, this was the infamous sick comic, Lenny Bruce, and they waited for him to tell them how they felt.
Because the Russians had put missiles into Cuba. And President Kennedy's grim speech still formed a kind of auditory wall running through the room. Nuclear strike capability. Full retaliatory response. Such resonant and carefully crafted terms. This was an audience accustomed to a different level of dread. Out-of-work actors and musicians, screenwriters doing draft number ninety-two, there were agents with eczema, wholesome blond beach-body hookers with their vicious slithering pimps. And Lenny's wearing a little smirk, eyeing this group like he sees right to the tacky nougat center of their collective soul. Always a few literate junkies. Maybe a couple of beehived tourists who'd wandered in by mistake with their siding salesmen husbands. And there has to be one name actor with a dose of clap and another who's been reduced to doing soaps. And they all needed Lenny to help them make the transition to the total global thing that's going on out there with SAC bombers rumbling over the tarmac and Polaris subs putting to sea, like dive dive dive, it's dialogue from every submarine movie ever made and it's all factually happening but at the same time they find it remarkably unreal-Titans and Atlases being readied for firing.
Lenny studies them a while, letting the moment draw meaning and portent. It's not at all obvious what he's going to say until he says it, with a thrust to his lower lip and an executive timbre in his voice.
"Good evening, my fellow citizens."
And once he says it, the remark is retroactively inevitable because this was the President's opening line of course and it gets a medium laugh but Lenny kills the bit before it begins. He's not about to do a Kennedy imitation.
He leaned back to distance himself further from the line. Smoke rose from the crowd, hanging in the beam of the baby spot, and he shifted into his own voice with its bent vowels and high nasal shadings.
"I dig it on one level. Being on the brink. It's a rush, man. You can talk all you want about living on the edge. Yeah I know, you smoke some grass on Saturday night. Making the scene. Plus you accidentally drove through Watts one night and can't stop talking about it. Made your shorthairs stand on end. Negroes in porkpie hats. No, yes, this thing here, let me tell you what the edge is. The true edge is not where you choose to live but where they situate you against your will. This event is infinitely deeper and more electrifying than anything you might elect to do with your own life. You know what this is? This is twenty-six guys from Harvard deciding our fate."
He swiveled toward the wings and pointed at some shadow presence as a laugh bubble broke over the massed heads.
"Dig it. These are the guys from the eating clubs and the secret societies. They have fraternity handshakes so complicated it takes three full minutes to do all the moves. One missed digit you're fucked for life. Resign from the country club, forget about the stock options and the executive retreat, watch your wife disappear in a haze of secret drinking. You have to be hip to stay connected. These guys wear boxer shorts with geometric designs that contain the escape routes they've been assigned when the missiles start flying."
Lenny was a handsome guy with dark hair and hooded eyes and he resembled a poolshark who'd graduated to deeper and sleazier schemes. His brows were set at a cosmopolitan arch that seemed to function as an open challenge to his hustler aspect-if you're dumb enough to believe my scam, that's your problem, shmucko.
And he said, "Picture it," and snapped his fingers, releasing the genie from the bottle. "Twenty-six guys in Clark Kent suits getting ready to enter a luxury bunker that's located about half a mile under the White House and the faggot decorator's doing a last-minute checklist. Let's see, peach walls, stunning. Found the chandelier in a little abbey outside Paris. None of that Statler Hilton dreck in my bomb shelter."
And even those in the audience who were familiar with Lenny's habitual scat, the vocal apparatus with its endless shifts and modulations and assumed identities, the release of underground words and tensions-they felt a small medicinal jolt at the pitch of the decorator's voice.
"Rugs, fabulous, the purest Persian slave labor. Arched windows, okay we're twelve stories underground but the curtain fabric was irresistible so just shut up. Dining table, plantation mahogany, eleven bottles of Lemon Pledge. Centerpiece, designed it himself, the highlight of his career. A huge mound of crabmeat carved in the shape- they're gonna love this, it's so forceful and moving-yes, Kennedy and Khrushchev wrestling in the nude. Lifesize."
And Lenny did a knee dip with his swivel, pausing to let the audience develop the image.
"All right, can't stand around admiring. They'll be down any second. The President, the Secretary of State, the Joint Chiefs, this guy, that guy, the guy with the secret codes for nuclear launch-he's a toilet-trained Jew, incidentally, so there won't be any mix-ups. Let's see now, what else? Flatware he's done, stemware he's done. After-dinner mints, let's see-do I give them the mocha or the cafe noir?"
He did the opening again, checking the line for style and fit.
"Good evening, my fellow citizens."
A stir of renewed anticipation-maybe they wanted him to pursue the presidential thing but he waved it off again and stood there sort of humming at the hips, doing a little wobble that seemed to get the next thought going.
Then he did the shrillest sort of falsetto.
"We're all gonna die!"
This cracked him up. He bent from the waist laughing and seemed to be using the mike as a geiger counter, waving it over the floorboards.
"Dig it, JFK's got this Russian man-bull staring him down, they're pizzle to pizzle, and this is a guy Jack doesn't know how to deal with.
What's he supposed to say? I shtupped more debutantes than you? This is a coal miner, he's a guy who herded farm animals barefoot for a couple of kopeks. He's been known to stick his fist up a sow's ass to fertilize his vegetable garden. What's Jack supposed to say to him-a secretary gave me a handjob on the White House elevator? This is a guy who craps with the door open on state occasions. He has sex with his bowling trophies."
The seating at the Troubadour consisted mainly of folding chairs and when enough people laughed there was a wheezy groan from the slats and hinges. And the audience sat there thinking, How real can the crisis be if we're sitting in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard going ha ha ha.
"We're all gonna die!"
Lenny loves the postexistential bent of this line. In his giddy shriek the audience can hear the obliteration of the idea of uniqueness and free choice. They can hear the replacement of human isolation by massive and unvaried ruin. His closest followers laugh the loudest. Their fan-fed vanity is gratified. They're included in Lenny's own incineration. All the Lennies. The persecuted junkie. The antihyp-ocrite. The satirist and nose picker. Lenny the hipster fink. Lenny the ass mechanic, girl-spotting in hotel lobbies. Lenny the vengeance of the Lord.
"Powerless. Understand, this is how they remind us of our basic state. They roll out a periodic crisis. Is it horizontal? One great power against the other. Or is it vertical, is it up and down?" He seemed to lose his line of argument here. "The U.S. is putting up a naval blockade. Fine, good, groovy. D'ya hear what he said?" And Lenny did his basso head of state. 'Any offensive military equipment being shipped to Cuba gets stopped dead in the water by the U.S. fleet." He jabbed at some imaginary lint on his lapel, signaling a shift, a bit. 'And there's this woman sitting out there in Centralia listening to the speech. She hears, Maximum peril. She hears, Abyss of destruction. She has a job dishing out meat patties in the school cafeteria and she comes home exhausted and turns on the TV and it's the President of the United States and he's saying, Abyss of destruction. And she sits there in her cafeteria whites, with her shoes off, picking her feet. Her name is Bitty. She's thinking they pre-empted Lawrence Welk so this Irish Catholic millionaire can talk about abyss of destruction. Then she thinks, Hey, wait, that's a movie title, right? Sure, it's one of those hard-boiled cynical crime dramas in moody black and white. I saw it with the Muscular Dystrophy Mothers of Central Kansas. The speech goes on and on and Bitty's trying to register the enormous-and the President says something about, Swift and extraordinary buildup. Soviet missiles in Cuba. But she thinks he's talking about the grease in her oven. Yeah that greasy buildup's beginning to bug me, man. She has this oven cleaner she's eager to try. Works fifty-two percent faster than the strongest industrial acid. She tries to concentrate on the President's speech but everything he's saying sounds like a pitch for insect repellent or throat spray. And Bitty's sitting there in Emporia or Centralia and she gets up out of the chair and goes to the phone and calls her friend DeeAnn. DeeAnn is the local movie expert. DeeAnn reviews movies for the cafeteria workers' newsletter, Meat Patty Week. And Bitty says into the phone, Who was in that movie the President's talking about on TV? And DeeAnn says, You're asking me about movies? At a time like this?"