"I can be arrested in twenty-three states for waving this thing in public. You're thinking, Sure in the Bible belt. Actually I'm safe in the Bible belt because they don't know what this is. They put Saran Wrap on their dicks."
He shook his hands hallelujah and took a stagger step back.
"I swear I saw it in Time magazine. You get a box of Saran Wrap and you tear off as much as you need for your particular endowment."
The word endowment got a bigger response than Saran Wrap or Time magazine.
"Leftover meatloaf."
He did his hipster crack-up laugh, bending from the waist like some Hassid at serious prayer. There were a few people in the audience, two, three, four people going small and tight in their seats.
"Saran Wrap. It sounds interplanetary. Picture it. A little town somewhere in America. A housewife pins laundry on a line. White and Negro children play peacefully in a schoolyard. Apple pies are cooling on kitchen windowsills. Suddenly a deathly stillness. People pause in midmotion. A dog named Skipper hides under the porch steps. Then a blinding flash. It's a visit from outer space. Creatures from the planet Saran. They're very thin and sort of filmy looking. They say to the leaders of Earth, Take this new material we've just invented and test it on yourselves, because frankly we're afraid to."
Lenny's heavy lids began to lower slowly as he changed the scene.
"It's a documented thing, farm boys and ranch hands taking strips of Saran Wrap with them when they go on dates. There are teams of sociologists doing fieldwork on this matter. Not to mention admen on the Dow Chemical account, which is the company that makes the stuff, and they're looking to position their product as a food wrap and a scumbag, if only they could devise a diplomatic language. Ad biggies on Madison Avenue. Let's do a nice old country doctor in a lab coat. Sitting in his rustic office pulling Saran Wrap off the chicken sandwich his wife packed for his lunch and he drapes the wrap absent-mindedly around his finger. Talking about freshness and protection. Maybe sneaking in a word about overpopulation. And the admen get excited by the idea. Let's run it up the flagpole blah blah blah. It's nearly subliminal, dig?"
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 autonomi-cally in the low smoke.
"We're all gonna die!"
He said it four times total, passionately 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."