Jerry was talking to me and there was a woman with Jorge who was saying something to the bartender about the optimum temperature of beer and that's when the lights dimmed and flickered and then went out.
Jerry was saying, "Spur of the moment. I'll make some calls. I'll get some guys. I'll get what's-his-name, Allie. This is a thing, my friend, where you don't have the right to refuse."
Then the lights went out.
The man at the far end of the bar stopped trying to bounce quarters into his shot glass.
Someone said, "Is that the lights?"
We sipped our stingers, Jerry and I.
The bartender said, "You know what?"
Someone started talking in the men's room, loud enough for us to hear.
The bartender said, "Looks like from here the whole block's out."
The first voice said, "Is that the lights?"
"They must be working on something that caused a short," the bartender said. 'And me without candles."
The voice from the toilet grew louder and agitated. One of the old women said something to the other, the first words out of either of them.
Jerry and I sipped our stingers.
"But you know what?" the bartender said.
Jorge was speaking Spanish now.
The bartender came up with a flashlight from the bottom of the bar and he wedged it between two bottles on the shelf beneath the mural.
The woman with Jorge was also speaking Spanish, but badly, talking to the man in the toilet.
The bartender went over to the doorway.
"I thought Allie was killed in Korea."
"That was Viggiano. Korea."
"Stepped on a mine, I thought."
"That was Mike. Stepped on a mine. Viggiano."
The two old women were silent again, adjusted to the dark, sitting there drinking.
"So all these years, you're telling me."
"You've been carrying around the wrong war casualty."
"Or the right war but the wrong guy."
"Let's go outside," he said. "I want to see what's happening."
"I don't have to feel sorry for Allie anymore."
"I think the whole block's out. Allie's selling fish at his father's stall in the market. We'll find him. I'll call him."
We took our drinks out to the sidewalk. The block was out and the area was out. It was after five, dark now, and the traffic lights were also out and we could hear the pulse of car horns at the entrance to the bridge above us and to the west.
People were coming out of shops and apartments, the locksmith and grocery and check-cashing place, and they stood around and talked. We could look down a tenement street to the east and see the river, a narrow strip of shimmer that formed a kind of softness, a visual whisper behind the dark bulk contours in the foreground.
"Is Brooklyn out? I think Brooklyn's out."
"Brooklyn's definitely out."
People talked to each other and looked up periodically. They looked toward the midtown sky or tried to look toward the tip of the island, blocked off of course by clustered buildings, but always up, skywatching, and they pointed and talked.
I went back inside and put my drink on the bar. I left some money near the glass. Someone was still in the toilet, agitated in Spanish, saying something about his mother, or someone's mother, and I figured he couldn't find the toilet paper or he couldn't find the bolt on the door and it was a matter the denizens would have to deal with.
Then I stood in the doorway and watched Jerry talking to the bartender and three or four others, twenty yards up the street, and they were lighted intermittently by passing cars and they were animated, they were roused by the vastness of the circumstance, by the forces involved, and they were talking and pointing.
I went down the street in the other direction. After half a block I crossed to the opposite side and walked through an archway under the bridge and into an area filled with household garbage and smashed cars and mounds of rubble dumped by construction crews and at the north end of the passage I could see the silhouetted towers of mid-town, exact and flat against the streaked sky, and I heard the sound of car horns building, the dinosaur death of stalled traffic at rush hour, calling and answering everywhere, and I made my way out the other end, where the headlights of barely moving cars, cars stopped dead, where rivers of barium light marked my progress through the streets.
He was back in New York, the womb of consciousness, a midnight show at Carnegie Hall, nearly three thousand people, and he stood on the enormous stage looking out across the orchestra and up past two tiers of boxes to the gallery levels, where they stood in the aisles and crowded the exits.
Lenny Bruce in concert.
" New York, New York. We say it twice. Once to entice them to leave Kansas. And once more over their grave."
They heaved in their seats.
" New York, New York. Like a priest doing his Latin gig. Mumbo jumbo, mumbo jumbo. He says it twice because he's talking about shit, piss and corruption and he wants to be sure you understand."
His people were here, the A amp;R guys from the Brill Building, the fellow comics who worked toilets all over Jersey, the actors and would-be actors and actor-waiters and cabdrivers with equity cards. The balding men from the Upper West Side were here, with shaggy sidelocks and intimations of suffering, and the women were with them-frizzy, lippy, opinionated, with full bodies and big rich real faces and a brassy way of laughing.
Lenny wore a white slim-line suit, well-pressed, and a puce pimp shirt with a roll collar, like a man trying to remind himself he is indestructible.
It was midnight in a driving rain but they were all here, musicians and folkies, writers for the high-dome journals, a selection of people with wasted chalk faces and needle lesions under their clothes and there were a fair number of disembodied others just finished smoking some DMT, the quick-acting chemical superhigh devised by NASA to get us to the moon and back whether we want to go or not.
He looked up and down and around.
"What a crazy nerve-wracked morbid week. We're all drained. We were minutes from being fireballed. But now, but now, but now."
He looked past the slender columns into the depths of the third tier and then up at the faces hanging over the balustrade at the top of the house, young people glowing slightly in the overspill from spotlights placed high on the side walls.
"We're not gonna die!"
He did a minstrel dance step, mouth wide, hand high, fingers spread, and stood there laughing a while.
"Yes, they saved us. All the Ivy League men in those striped suits and ribbed black socks that go all the way to the knee so when they cross their legs on TV we don't see a patch of spooky white flesh between the sock and the pants cuff. It's so vulnerable, dig, that strip of pale skin. The legs of powerful men tend to be hairless, which makes them feel secretly weak and effeminate, so they make sure they're wearing high enough socks. Garters are a tricky business for exactly this reason. No, yes, they saved us. They did it. Russians agree to remove missiles and end construction of missile bases in Cuba. Khrushchev is retching in his latkes. He's taking hot baths to relax. Like a plastic pouch of corn coming to a boil."
Lenny's teenage fanatics were here, kids from Brooklyn and Queens who did his bits word for word, memorizing off his albums but more religiously from the rare tapes slyly recorded by traffickers in contraband goods. And Bronx boys who lope along the Grand Concourse to catch every foreign flick at the Ascot, hoping for a glimpse of titty- Lenny was their diamond cutter, their cool doomed master of uncommon truth.
"They saved us in their horn-rimmed glasses and commonsense haircuts. They got their training for the missile crisis at a thousand dinner parties. Where it's at, man. This is the summit of Western civilization. Not the art in the shlocky museums or the books in the libraries where bums off the street infest the men's rooms. Forget all that. Forget the playing fields of Eton. It's the seating plan at dinner. That's where we won. Because they toughed it out. Because they were tested in the cruelest setting of all. Where tremendous forces come into play and crucial events unfold. Dinner parties, dig it, in the Northeast corridor. Your mother used to say, Mix, sweetheart. There was anxiety, a little hidden terror in her voice. Because she knew. Mix or die. And that's why we won. Because these men were named and raised for this moment. Yes, tested at a thousand formative dinners. It started in adolescence. Seated next to adults, total strangers, and forced to make conversation. What a sadistic thing to tell a kid. Make conversation. Some could not do it. Some broke down and were sent to forestry school, They smoked roots and leaves and grew facial hair. They developed involved relationships with animals. But others. The others. The others masturbated to marching songs and married their second cousins and grew strong and dominant. You know they're powerful men when their wives play bridge with the curtains drawn. The sunlight gives them migraines. They twist their handkerchiefs when they talk. Remember how your aunt Tovah would sit twisting her hanky. Stand up straight, she'd say. Talk to people, she'd say Try For me, sweetheart."