by Lenny Bruce
Suddenly Hannah’s eyes focused on me. She screamed as if I were some horrible monster, “How long have you been standing there?”
I watched as Harry grabbed at a flurry of white sheet.
She reiterated: “I said, how long have you been standing there?”
I reacted subjectively, assuming they wanted me to show off since her question related to an area of learning that I was involved with at the time. I looked up at the clock, thought for a moment, and repeated her question. “How long have I been standing here? Well, the big hand is on the five, and the little hand is on the three, that means it’s—umm—3:25.”
They told me that was very nice and I was a very clever boy, and that I should go to bed.
Without someone telling me what they had been doing, I could never tell you whether that was a clean act, a dirty act, a self-indulgent act, or an ecstatic act of pure religious procreation. With all the exposure I’ve had, I still can’t tell you. You must interpret what went on in your own way—and, of course, you will.
My childhood seemed like an endless exodus from aunts and uncles and grandmothers. Their dialog still rings in my ears: “I had enough tsooris with my own kids. . . . How many times have I told you not to slam the door? . . . Don’t run up the stairs. . . . Don’t tell me ‘Danny did it’—if Danny told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, you’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, right? . . . Children have children’s portions and big people have big people’s portions—if you’re hungry you’ll eat more bread—and there’s plenty of cabbage left . . .”
The plan was I would stay with relatives till my parents “could get straightened out.”
I learned there is no Judge Hardy, there is no Andrew, nobody has a mom like Fay Bainter.
Oh God, the movies really did screw us up.
Chapter Three
As an imaginative young sensualist, I dreamed about living over a barn, seeing the stars through a cracked-board room, smelling the cows and horses as they snuggle and nuzzle in a shed below, seeing the steam come up from the hay in the stables on a frosty winter morning, sitting at a table rich with home-canned goods with seven other farm hands, eating home fries, pickled beets, fresh bacon, drinking raw milk, laughing, having company in the morning, having a family, eating and working and hanging out with the big guys, learning to use Bull Durham.
At 16 I ran away from home and found it. Two rich, productive, sweet years with the Dengler family on their Long Island farm.
The Denglers were a combination of Swedish and German stock. Although they were still young—she in her 30s and he in his 40s—I never saw them kiss each other. I was shocked when I learned that they slept in separate bedrooms. I knew they were tired after working a long day, but I couldn’t understand why anyone who could, wouldn’t want to sleep in another person’s arms.
I would wait for an opportunity when Mr. Dengler was enjoying a good laugh, and then I would catch him unawares and give him a big hug. Mrs. Dengler called me a “kissing bug,” but she never rejected me. They said I would probably end up being a politician.
The Dengler farm faced the highway. As I carried the pails of slop to the hogs, I watched the cars whizzing by on their way to Grumman and Sikorsky and Sperry. Neither the drivers nor I realized that their day’s work would some day put an end to someone somewhere also carrying slop to hogs. A couple of times when the cars overheated, they would stop for water, and I would ask them what they were making out at Sperry’s.
They didn’t know. “Some fittings . . .” Some fittings—the Norden bombsight to fit into the B-17. “I just do piecework.” (My approach to humor today is in distinguishing between the moral differences of words and their connotations; then it was simply in the homonym: “Oh, you do piecework? How about bringing me home some?”)
Directly opposite the highway that ran by the farm was a long dusty dirt road with crops on each side—potatoes, carrots, lettuce—everything you buy in your grocery store. They were cultivated, irrigated, weeded and fertilized by the farm hands. Some of the fertilization was direct from producer to consumer: There were no lavatories in the fields, but the itinerant dayworkers—six Polish women—had a very relaxed attitude toward the performing of their natural functions.
To this day, I insist that all my vegetables be washed thoroughly.
I was entrusted with the unromantic job of weeding, although I did get to drive the old truck with the broken manifold, back and forth across the field, which really gassed me. I imagined myself to be Henry Fonda. The only thing that bugged me was that it was so lonesome out there all day. I tried to talk to the Polish ladies, but they didn’t understand me. I even brought them candy—Guess Whats, Mary Janes, Hootens—but all they did was grunt. I could watch their most intimate functions, but it was as if I didn’t exist.
Mrs. Dengler would get up about 3:30 in the morning to cook breakfast for eight men; she would work in the fields herself till about eight o’clock that night, and then she would do her housework.
During the winter, the Denglers ran a roadside stand selling canned goods and eggs to the workers on their way to and from a nearby defense plant.
The canned goods would actually be sold out the first day, and we only had enough chickens to supply eggs for about two or three cars. So we bought eggs wholesale from as far away as Texas, and Mason-jar canned goods from an outfit in Georgia.
My job was to immerse the jars in hot water, wash off their labels and put ours on. I would also open the egg crates—which were packed by the gross—and repackage the eggs in our cartons, by the dozen. With my philanthropic sense of humor, I would add a little mud and straw and chicken droppings to give them an authentic pastoral touch.
People were always coming back and telling us: “How fresh the eggs are!” Sales increased rapidly and I soon had a big problem. Although I had enough straw and mud, there were only 22 chickens—and I was too embarrassed to ask if there were any wholesale chickenshit houses in Texas.
I decided to cut the pure stuff with cow manure. There was never a complaint.
Once a week a big LaSalle would drive all the way out from the city to get farm-fresh eggs. The chauffeur was a little wizened old Englishman who never, ever spoke. The owner was a woman who looked like Mary Astor. She was a very grand-type lady, about 35, which seemed quite old to me.
She said the farm was “quaint” and remarked how fortunate I was not to be “cursed by city pressures.” She began to bring me things—sweaters, shoes, even a tennis racket. I fed her charitable id and exclaimed: “Oh, gosh, a real sweater! I always wanted one with no patches on it!” All I needed was “Gloriosky, Zero!” to complete the picture.
Once I sensed she was feeling a little low, so I told her that my mother and father had been killed. I fabricated a very pathetic story for her, and it really picked her up. It was a sort of Fantasy CARE Package—a little something extra added to the product, like with the eggs.
One day she forgot all about buying the eggs, and insisted on taking me to town to buy a new jacket. I had an old suede jacket with a broken zipper that had to be pinned shut. I told her I couldn’t leave the stand. She told the chauffeur to get out and take over for me, and she would do the driving.
On the way back from the city, she pulled over into a shaded area and stopped. We talked for a long time, and she told me about her son who was drowned, and also about her husband who manufactured and rented candy machines. She intimated that she would like to adopt me.
She asked about my religious beliefs. She asked if I had ever been naughty with girls. I had never even kissed a girl—I hadn’t gone to high school and I was very shy—I had often thought about being “naughty” with girls, but I could never seem to arrange to be in the right place at the right time.
We talked about some other things, and she told me to look in the glove compartment for a surprise. Inside I found a sheath knife and a flashlight. There was also a packet of pictures, and she asked me if I would like her to show them to
me.
I had never seen any pictures like those before. They were of men and women in various attitudes of lovemaking. The nudity and the absurdity of the contortions amused me, and I started to laugh. She was quite disturbed by my reactions, but I couldn’t help it. I had a genuine giggling fit.
She asked me if I thought the pictures were dirty, and when I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to answer, she said that it was a cover-up for a filthy mind. Not wanting to lose the jacket, I apologized.
She forgave me and then delivered a lecture on how some women can give you a terrible disease. She explained how you can get some diseases from using towels or from sitting on toilet seats. She asked me if I knew what the symptoms of these diseases were. I confessed my ignorance, and she grew alarmed.
“Why, you can have one of those diseases right this minute and not even know it!”
And, with a very clinical attitude, she unbuttoned my pants.
A few years later in boot camp, when we got our first illustrated lecture on venereal disease, I was disappointed. It lacked the same personal touch.
The Denglers were quite upset with my impatience to volunteer for the Navy. I pestered Mrs. Dengler daily, waiting for that official letter. I had some literature about the Navy and the training courses they offered, and I reviewed it at every opportunity in my “reading room”—a four-holer (one hole was entirely sewn up by a cobweb) with a wasp hive the color of gray cardboard up in the right-hand corner of the ceiling. I always read uneasily, in dread of an attack.
The outhouse is to the farm hand what the water cooler is to the white-collar worker.
But, working for the Denglers, this wasn’t necessary for me. They were easy bosses to work for. Although I put in about 60 hours a week and received $40 a month plus room and board, I felt no resentment, because they worked longer and harder.
Then, too, they were my mother and father—the mother and father I had always dreamed about—and I always had good company, which made me think about all the lonesome people who lived in furnished rooms with their container of milk or can of beer on the window ledge. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the people who are lonesome could live in one big dormitory, sleep in beds next to each other, talk, laugh, and keep the lights on as long as they want to?
Lonesome people are a vast neglected segment of that mythical American Public the advertising men are always talking about. One mustn’t assume that all lonesome people are pensioners, old maids and physically handicapped shut-ins. There are lonesome young men who sit in the Greyhound Bus Station and there are secretaries who live in immaculate apartments that they wouldn’t mind having messed up by some guy who doesn’t hang up his clothes.
Sometimes when I’m on the road in a huge hotel, I wish there were a closed-circuit television camera in each room, and at two o’clock in the morning the announcer would come on: “In Room 24-B there is a ripe, blue-eyed, pink-nippled French and Irish court stenographer lying in bed tossing and turning, fighting the bonds of her nightgown. All the ashtrays in her room are clean, her stockings and panty-girdle have just been washed and are hanging on the shower-curtain bar. This is a late model, absolutely clean, used only a few times by a sailor on leave.”
Or: “In Apartment 407 there is a 55-year-old Jewish widower who is listening to Barry Gray on the radio, sitting in his underwear and looking at the picture of his daughter and son-in-law who live in Lawrence, Long Island, and haven’t called since Yom Kippur. This a bargain for an aggressive young woman who can say to him, ‘I like you because you’re sensible and sensitive—all right, it’s true young men are a “good time,” but after that, what?—I like a man I can have a serious discussion with, a man who can co-sign . . .’”
Mrs. Dengler drove me to the station of the Long Island Railroad to catch the train that would take me away to war. I kissed her and said, “Goodbye, Ma.” She smiled at me and left. She never had any kids of her own.
Chapter Four
I volunteered for the Navy in 1942. I was 5′2″, weighed 120 pounds, and had a heavy beard that needed removing about once every six months.
One day I was standing at 90 Church Street in Downtown New York City, literally in the hands of a doctor who was telling me to cough—that universal experience which every male who gets caught in a draft undergoes.
The Navy taught me a sterile sense of cleanliness, punctuality, and gave me the security of belonging. For the first time I was able to relate to my fellow man.
My first “relative” was Artie Shaw. We took boot training together in Newport, Rhode Island. During that 21-day incubation period, the excitement of war was dwarfed by “Artie Shaw is here!” Artie Shaw: Begin the Beguine, Night and Day, Dave Tough, Max Kaminsky, Lana Turner, Kathleen Winsor. Artie Shaw—Orpheus, music and love—and me; we were brothers in blue. Of course, I never saw him, but it was enough for me that he was there.
(Eighteen years later I got the same gratification from those magic words, “Artie Shaw is here!”—when the owner of the Blue Angel Café whispered it to me before I went onstage. “Artie Shaw is here!” How just, how natural—we were in the War together.)
He had enlisted as an apprentice seaman. He could have gone in a dozen other ways—like Glenn Miller, for example, with a commission in clarinet—but he made it as an apprentice seaman, which was a silly-ass thing to do.
As it turned out, he had a much rougher time in service than I did. He either got an oversolicitous: “This is Artie Shaw, Captain Alden, he has agreed to give you that autographed picture of himself for Admiral Nimitz!”—or, more often: “Look, pretty boy, you’re not in Hollywood now, there ain’t no butlers around here!” Artie Shaw would have been glad to have been as anonymous as I was then, an ordinary seaman with a serial number, wanting to fight for his country.
Even as a kid, I was hip that 80 percent of the guys that go for Civil Service pension security have no balls for the scuffle outside. I am not knocking the desire for security; we’re all kind of scared and would like to be sitting under the kitchen sink, picking at the linoleum. But it really bugged Shaw. He put in an urgent request for a transfer to the Mediterranean. We were all anxious to go and be blessed by priests and rabbis, thereby giving us the OK to kill the enemy.
Those dirty pregnant Japanese women who stood in the silent army, like Italian mothers standing over the boiling pots of spaghetti, the Jewish mothers slaving over pots of chicken soup—women unconcerned with politics; all they know is that 49 cents a pound for chopped meat is ridiculous. Those dirty Jap babies crawling on the floor, amused by the magic of a cat, his purr, his switching tail. Those dirty Japs we hated, who now fill the windows of American stores with cameras. Those dirty Japs that knocked up the portable-radio industry.
Where the hell was that syndicated Nostradamus and his Criswell Predicts then?
Now there are no more dirty Japs; there are dirty Commies! And when we run out of them there’ll just be dirty dirt. And dirty mud. Then we’ll eat the mud and Pearl Buck will write a book about it. By that time, the few hippies who discovered that it’s the earth which is dirty will have made it to the moon for the Miss Missile contest.
On a cruel triple-brrr snow-cold gray winter morning at Coddington Point, Rhode Island, Artie Shaw and 20-odd other sailors sat in the fetal position with their red eyes and chapped thighs, waiting for chow to blow. A chief petty officer came in and told Artie that a lieutenant commander was outside the barracks and wanted to see him immediately. Shaw was sure that this was his transfer.
He marched out with his Don Winslow snap, the sailors nervously peeking through the barracks window. When you’re in boot camp, a lieutenant commander might as well be the President. Shaw was understandably nervous as the lieutenant commander reached out his hand, saying, “Put ’er there, Artie,” and then said 14 words that had more impact than Roosevelt’s “December 7th, a day that will live in infamy” speech.
The lieutenant commander looked Shaw in the eye and said: “I just wanted to sha
ke the hand that patted the ass of Lana Turner.”
It was in the Navy that I had my first love affair—a one-night stand with Louise—the kind of chick that makes an elevator operator feel possessed of great control because he went up 18 floors and didn’t rip off her dress.
Louise was 28 when I met her. Her father and mother had just died, and she and her brother inherited the business: a 13 × 13-foot combination Italian-American grocery and soda fountain, with living quarters in the back. Her brother took care of the store during the day, and she worked there at night so he could go to CCNY.
Her husband was a private in the U.S. Infantry, stationed in Iceland for the duration.
I walked into the store in white hat, dress-blue uniform and my Endicott-Johnson shoes, so new they slipped on cement. I was announced by the little tin bell—the candy-store burglar alarm. Behind the counter stood Louise.
Doctors who have probed, cut, sewn and rubber-gloved so many women that it has become a task would get shaken by a Louise.
“Hmm, your adenoids seem quite normal; perhaps the trouble is respiratory. Unbutton your blouse a moment and we’ll give a listen to the old ticker. There’s quite a bit of flu going around and I . . . there, uh . . . actually . . . uh, uh . . . here, uh. . . . Oh God, oh merciful Mother of God, what a body! You’re so tan and yet so white. Please may I touch you? Not as a doctor. . . . Let me unbutton my shirt and feel you close to me. Please don’t push me away. Here, let me . . . please . . . oh God! I’m losing my mind, let me latch the door. . . . Let me just kiss it, that’s all I want to . . . oh, please please please please. Please just touch it. Just . . . look at it. . . . I do respect you. I just can’t catch my goddamn breath!”
With eight dollars hidden in my shoe and a dollar in my hand, I walked up to the counter and spoke out with a jaded-enough tone so that Louise would know that I’d been around. “Pepsi, please, and a bag of potato chips.”
