Through the long night, too long, three solid hours nonstop, too long because it has to be too long, they've just survived a crisis and need to be intemperate, and too long because Lenny just can't stop, he looks up from under the proscenium arch and sees the ornamented ceiling and the gilded rows of boxes and he knows this is the temple of Casals and Heifetz and Toscanini and it gives him a mainline jolt, and too long because he's been running on scared fumes all week and he feels revived, alive, ready to wail the night away
The disc jockeys were here, guys who did late-night jazz in voices of smoky innuendo. Celebrities were spaced through the orchestra, called the Parquet with a capital P Mixed-race couples were here, displaying a honed nonchalance. People bored with ordinary comedy People who wanted to be challenged and attacked, who wanted to hear their well-meaning sentiments exposed as so much liberal dinner prattle.
Lenny screwed the mike off the stand and blessed them all.
"Lemme tell you the untold story of the week. The President called the Pope." A stir of anticipation. But it puts him off-he's not in the mood for popes tonight. "Yeah, they were in secret communication all week long. Never mind all that separation of church and state crap. They stick together, these crossbacks." Popes are automatically funny-they don't need Lenny to dignify their shtick. "The Pope's got submarines, you know. Justa say the word, Johnny, I send. We nihi-late them sonna ma bitches. Your Holiness, I'm astonished, man. You have your own fleet of subs?"
Lenny lost interest. He swerved into sermons and admonitions, streams of rumination on patriotism, communism, the income tax and women who insert cigarettes in their pussies and blow perfect smoke rings. And when he said something funny or produced an occasional zing of insight, and they applauded, he said, No, don't, please- lemme fly on my own.
"I've always known. I've known since childhood. I'm as corrupt as they are. I grew up here. The police are crooked and so am I. The politicians lie and I lie worse. I wanna kill myself on television so people can go to sleep with the face of a dead sinner on the rim of their eyeballs."
They saw the lounge lizard with bedroom eyes. They saw and heard the frisky kid with the adenoidal voice, the boy who wants to make his mother laugh. They heard the frantic talker who chases after his own discontinuous ideas. They saw the zonked layabout, all lassitude and spent attention span. They heard the crusader for dirty words, the social philosopher, the self-styled lawyer, the self-critical Jew, the Christian moralizer and the commentator on race.
"I flew in from Miami last night and took a taxi direct to the Apollo Theater, where I met up with some friends for the late show because I love that scene, and we came out after the show and I've got a suitcase and a garment bag and it's late and it's cold and we can't find a cab because cabs don't go to Harlem and so we start wandering, dig, and we come across an old man on a corner doing a rap for three people. He's about a hundred years old and he's preaching to three sorry souls and it's like Hyde Park Corner only in blackface."
Lenny did a fair approximation of a street preacher's voice, which was surprising, which was very unhip in fact because even if he'd started in the business as a mimic, doing Cagney and Bogart with German accents, and even if he updated frequently, doing contemporary types of every persuasion, it was not a white comic's option these days to do a black man's voice, was it?
"The old man holds a dollar bill by its edges. It's older than he is. He peers over the top and says, Legal tender. He says, Which is a name, I have to admit, I would not think to call it myself. He says, We all seen the machines print the money in the newsreels nonstop like bottles of pop getting capped, only lightning fast, and they print, they print, they print, but where's it all go is my question. I ain't seen any. You seen any?"
Lenny did the voice, standing slightly hunched beneath the vast draped curtain in his white Italianate suit and campy black boots, the ones with little fruity loops in back.
"He says, Nobody knows the day or the hour. He's standing there in a dark shrunken suit with bicycle clips around the ankles. Understand me when I say I wanted to give him everything I own. Not out of pity or charity or some vintage Christian shit. Out of appreciation. Out of gratitude for the sight and sound of him at that hour and in that place. Because this is New York, New York and we say it twice because it's half Us and half Them, all hours, dig it, in bicycle clips. The man's an actor and this is his gig that he's perfected over decades and I stand there listening and in some funny way I hear myself, all right, or I see myself- I imagine myself at the age of ten or twelve listening to a voice like this old man's. It's his voice and his week. The day and the hour. And he holds the dollar bill. When the hour comes, he says, the world be separated into those that can read the message and those that can't."
A long pause. A hush in the hall. Lenny seemed half lost in reverie, in conjure, and maybe people began to feel uncomfortable because he could not seem to stop doing the voice. It was as if the voice had been crossed with his own. It was as if cross-voices were unavoidable, whether you knew it or not, whether you liked it or not, and maybe this old black man spoke in Lenny's voice at times, alone, unknowing, in his room, on some level, hearing the bandy scales in his head, the push and shove of Lenny's own fluted music, and Lenny did the old man's, spoke in the old man's, unavoidably.
"Then he looked at us, over on the side where we're standing. We're a black guy, a white guy and two white women, except one of the women has been in the street all this time looking for a cab. He looked at us briefly. Took brief notice. Seemed to know us in this brief look. Then he turned back to the original audience, these three lost people of the streets, these wastelings of the lost world, the lost country that exists right here in America. And he resumed his rap and they stood there listening."
Lenny did the voice a little longer and when he finished he had to pause again to return to the stage, the hall and the audience.
"I wanted to give him my garment bag full of suits, my suitcase full of drugs, my house in the Hollywood Hills. We listened only eight, nine minutes. Less. A cab pulled up and we left and I won't go back because-I don't know why, I just won't. Bugged out by the whole scene. His life, his rap. I ought to tell Polish lightbulb jokes."