by Lenny Bruce
Horace had chosen show business because it was best for him since he was so obviously nellie; not that show people have more of a Christian attitude toward their fellow men and are less likely to look askance at one who is out of step—it’s just that their egos are so big and they are so self-centered that they haven’t the time to concern themselves with the individual and his problems.
As with drug addicts, Horace’s homosexual traits were environmental. He wasn’t “born that way.” He was introduced to a group once that gave him identity. He was a stock boy at Macy’s and after one summer at Atlantic City he came back a faggot. He could just as easily have come back a junkie or a water skier or a Jehovah’s Witness—the point is, he came back as something.
“At least I’m something,” is the keynote. “I belong to a group. I share their notoriety, their problems, their laughter.” In a crowded arena, the cliché “It takes one to know one” is actually a profound philosophy.
At any rate, Horace blossomed in this anthropophagous society. He became poetic in his facility to relate in the argot of the citizens of Groupery in the county of Padded Basketdom—the esoteric delight in passing a complete stranger and shrilling, “Get you, Annie!”; the same idiomatic rapport of the nighttime junkie who is looking to score. Horace became a faggot simply because he wanted to belong.
Well, the Korean War weeded out some of the population and helped the housing problem, but it didn’t leave the dramatic impact that World War Two did. As the impact lessened, so did the desire to escape lessen. And all the escape hatches—the bars, night clubs, theaters—felt it. And the people who depended economically upon these media also felt it.
Horace and Hilda were part of this milieu.
I was luckier. Comedy is an amorphous craft in the sense that there are no academies, there are no formulas. There are no books on comedy that can train an aspirant to command a salary of $200,000 a year, but it is a craft and it can be learned.
The reports on me were now: “All Lenny Bruce seems concerned with is making the band laugh.” That should have been my first hint of the direction in which I was going: abstraction. Musicians, jazz musicians especially, appreciate art forms that are extensions of realism, as opposed to realism in a representational form.
The Club Charles in Baltimore was my last bomb, then. The owner asked me if I had any good numbers like “The Golf Lesson.” This was sort of a devitalized Dwight Fiske routine, with nothing left but the subtle swish. I told the owner I didn’t have any good numbers like that.
Jack Paar, Sophie Tucker, Joe E. Lewis and the other comedy performers of their generation grew up in our culture at a time when the discussion of sex was secretive and chic, so that the double-entendre comedian was considered quite daring. It delighted the customer to be “in”—“Ha, ha, you know what that means, don’t you?”
My generation knows—and accepts—what that means, so there is no need for humor in that whoopee-cushion vein.
This is not an indictment of the performers of that era, for I know (and it disturbs me greatly) that soon I will be out of touch. I am 39 and already I can’t relate to Fabian.
There’s nothing sadder than an old hipster.
Chapter Eight
In between the club dates, there were many theaters in the New York area that had vaudeville for one night. You got $17.50 for a single and a two-person act got about $25. All the acts were working these dates just to have a showcase; the money was secondary (because that’s when the rent was due—on the second).
The announcement would read:
VODVIL EVERY FRL., SAT., SUN.
BINGO EVERY TUES.
FREE DISH TO LADIES
RKO Jefferson, Fourteenth Street.
Rehearsals were at 7:30 P.M., shortly after I got off the crosstown shuttle and cranked out a penny’s worth of semifaded chocolate-brown nuts. How the hell did those nuts get faded in a vending machine down in the dark subway? Maybe they were nickel nuts that didn’t sell in Miami because of a short season and they were shipped here next. I never knew the precise ingredients of the chocolate, but they were superior to M. & M.s—they wouldn’t melt anywhere, let alone in your mouth.
(The vending machine on 42nd near Hubert’s Museum was the best. It was integrated with engagement rings, wee harmonicas and teeny red dice.)
I washed down the peanuts with a Nedick’s hot dog from the orange-drink stand next to the theater.
CLARK GABLE—SPENCER TRACY
BOOM TOWN
ROUGH, RAW, RIPPING!
MEN WITH HEARTS OF IRON
AND FISTS OF STEEL
The movie would be on and you’d just have a talk-over rehearsal with the five band guys in their room which was behind the pit, or sometimes in back of the screen. The backstage manager wasn’t a kindly old man called Pop; he was a cranky motherfucker who kept yelling, “How many times am I going to tell you assholes there’s no smoking back here!”
Prince Paul and Company, a brother-and-sister high-wire act, were bitching at their outdoor agent. They had never worked in the States. He had seen them at Wallace Brothers’ Circus while they were touring in Canada and he was selling stocks in between bookings. He talked them into coming to New York with a promise of getting them on the Ed Sullivan show or a date at the Latin Quarter. They explained to him that they had never worked in any night clubs since their act required a 15-foot ceiling clearance after their rig was up. Altogether they needed about 53 feet.
For $25, the Prince had been sweating out 7 hours of rig assembly, reworking the antiquated floor plates that were in the theater; he completely severed the tip of his forefinger and badly bruised his knee with a miscalculated hammer swing; and he got fed up with Horace playing Florence Nightingale with his cold compresses and shrieks of “You’re so strong.”
With no cooperation from an unsympathetic theater manager who played 15 different acts a week, Prince Paul had just finished stripping a lug nut thread on the second guide wire when he heard the backstage manager yell, “What the hell do you people think this is, a goddamn rehearsal hall? You better make sure you clean up every bit of that crap after you’re finished!”
The Prince kissed his severed forefinger, chucked Horace in the ass, walked over to the water cooler, picked up the stage manager and threw him directly through the center of the screen, just after Spencer Tracy had walloped Clark Gable on the chops, knocking him down. The audience thought the stage manager was Clark Gable getting up.
I wonder if somebody who saw him flying out envisioned at that moment the commercial potentialities and formulated the idea for Cinerama.
They took the Prince to the 36th Precinct, leaving his sister alone with the grim prospect of doing a nine-minute act with no partner. I can’t describe the expression on her face when she looked up and saw the rig. From the top of the bar there was only three feet to the ceiling.
I crouched on my haunches in the wings as Prince Paul and Company was introduced as a double. I waited to see what the hell she was going to do as a single, with not enough room to recline, much less stand.
She went out and did eight minutes; she chinned herself 571 times.
During this post-War period, I was afraid I didn’t have it as a comedian. I had the mental facility, but I didn’t have the psychological capacity to accept rejection, which I sure got a lot of in those days. It was after work in one of those showbiz restaurants—the Hanson’s of Baltimore, where everybody has his picture hanging on the wall—that I bumped into Tommy Moe Raft, who was a terrifically funny burlesque comic. I had seen him work several times and admired him immensely.
Sitting next to him was a stripper who was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.
She had long red hair that she actually sat on. She had a face that looked like a kindergarten teacher’s. Since she was obviously a natural redhead, she wore very little make-up, stood about five feet, seven inches tall, and had strength-and-health-club measurements. Her firm alabaster breasts
that were mapped with light, delicate blue veins, showed from her low-cut Frederick’s of Hollywood dress, and I suddenly realized the attraction: Honey Harlowe was a composite of the Virgin Mary and a $500-a-night whore.
I sat with Tommy and he introduced us. Then he invited me to a party that she also was attending.
I took a cab there and walked up the stairs, heading for the door with the noise. The host was a manufacturer of aluminum awnings, and he “just loved show people.” They used to give parties and get drunk, and then the husband would love his show people (the strippers and the girl singers) and the wife would love her show people (the acrobats and the m.c.s).
Everybody at this party was sober, and quite proper. Some people were exchanging cute little off-color jokes, and a few intellectuals were discussing the decadence and lack of culture in Baltimore. Honey and I just stared at each other and got hot.
Suddenly, right there on the sofa, in the midst of 20 to 30 people, we were hugging and kissing and rubbing and groping and embarrassing everyone at the party.
This was something special. I knew, and I didn’t want to know it. Besides, who wanted “something special”? I was half-glad and half-sorry when I realized I wouldn’t be around long enough to find out; I had made previous plans to ship out on a merchant ship after the Baltimore engagement. I was bored and depressed, so I had signed up.
If I had met Honey before, maybe I wouldn’t have.
Chapter Nine
I was on the Luckenbach Line bound for Turkey, Greece, Marseilles, back to the Mediterranean I couldn’t wait to get out of a few years before.
Two ships performed the same function—transporting men and objects across the Atlantic from one place to another; one place was Pier 92 on New York’s West Side, the other was Marseilles—the two ships were the U.S.S. Brooklyn and the Samuel Brown. And I was on them both.
Samuel Brown might live in Brooklyn—but in Red Hook, not in Seagate. He alone could never attain the stature of all the individual little people in all the neighborhoods from Kensington and Bay Ridge to Bensonhurst and Coney Island who collectively make up the borough—rich, influential and powerful. That essentially is the difference between the merchant marine and the United States Navy. But though the merchant seaman commands less social esteem (there are no campaigns to write letters to the boys on tramp steamers and no USO shows at Christmastime), he makes more money and has an easier life, which are a pair of compensatory factors carrying no small weight.
Whereas in the Navy I scrubbed the decks aft of the 5th Division Fire Control Tower every morning—whether or not it was dirty—in the merchant marine the boatswain would say, “The deck around the forward hatch is getting mangy, Schneider. Grab some red lead and paint it.” That was the prevailing climate: If it’s dirty, paint it; if it’s broken, “deep-six” it. “Deep sixing,” although frowned upon by the ship’s owners, is quite a common practice. This is the procedure, one which you will never find elaborated upon by Jack London:
A 300-foot steel cable, used for mooring, has become frayed and is in need of repair. Rope splicing is comparatively simple, but cable is a combination of threaded steel and hemp, and when it breaks under the strain, the seven-strand splicing is a wicked job. You can’t work it properly with gloves, and without them, it is like trying to wrestle a barracuda.
I have struggled with four or five pretty husky guys, bending and twisting the hawser while it lashed around the deck as if it were alive. At the end of several hours our hands were so cut up that we looked as if we had butchered a cow in our blood-spattered levis. Everybody goes through this. Once you’ve been through it you are automatically inducted into the “Deep-Six Club.” The initiation ceremony consists of simply throwing the cable into the ocean.
This fraternal rite cannot always be practiced in broad daylight without some sort of subterfuge, which usually comprises raising furious alarm in one part of the ship while the surplus goods are debarked over the side at another. In the Caribbean or anchored off Corsica, for instance, where the weather is warm and the water tepid, one Deep-Six Club member would volunteer to fall overboard. This was a drastic measure, to be sure, taken only when a whole set of lockers or bunks needed repainting.
“Waste not, want not” was not the merchant seaman’s motto, then. Only those excluded from membership—the captain, the purser, etc.—disapproved of the Deep-Six Club. This was because they remained on the ship, whereas, for the most part, seamen sign on for one voyage and quit. Very few re-sign for the same ship. This is one indication of the character of men in this area of work. Their attitudes and relationships, personal as well as toward their work, are of a temporary nature. You may form friendships of remarkable intimacy, sharing the details of each other’s lives, and then never see each other again.
I shared a compartment with two West Indian Negroes who were immaculate in their personal habits, and quite entertaining to listen to. They had a unique sound: “Mon, what de hell awr ye tawkin’ about? You don’t speek de king’s Hinglish!”
They were marvelous seamen, and one of them with whom I became very friendly, Caleb Chambers, had been all over the world 60 times. It never failed to amaze me that he was as much at home in North Africa, Casablanca or Gibraltar as he was in San Pedro, California. It really knocked me out to hear him give directions. I’ve traveled the States extensively, but my knowledge of places is extremely limited. I can tell you how to get from the Civic Center in Los Angeles to Hollywood and Highland Boulevard, or how to get from O’Hare Airport in Chicago to Mister Kelly’s on Rush Street, but so could Caleb.
He could also tell you how to get from the Medina in Casablanca to the Valleta in Malta, and advise you on the fastest, cheapest way to get there. But what really bugged me was that he was so familiar with everything everywhere that sometimes, when we would hit port, he wouldn’t even bother going ashore. Imagine docking in Istanbul and staying on ship!
I have been to about 30 different countries and I’m ashamed to admit that my knowledge of the sights, culture, art and customs is on a par with the limited perspective of any other sailor. In Lisbon, the only place I know is the American Bar and Madame Krashna’s. The same in Marseilles, Oran, Algiers, Izmir. The only place I know a little bit about is Libya. That’s because the whorehouses are off limits. If you get caught in one of them, a fine and a jail sentence are mandatory.
I am enough of a snob to not mind having a record for jewel theft, embezzling or safecracking; but doing time for getting caught in a whorehouse would really be humiliating.
This is a warped concept, I realize. We Americans have a negative attitude toward prostitution that is not shared by foreign peoples. Even the words “French brothel” sound exotic, nearly romantic, compared to “cat-house.” And they are more romantic. They cater to the imagination and the spirit as well as the body. Here, it’s disgustingly cut and dried.
In Marseilles, for example, there was a place called Madame Claridge’s that was delightful. They had an Arabian jazz trio, a bar and, of course, lots of girls. They charged admission, which I suppose you could call a “cover charge.” Many guys used to go there just to drink and absorb a part of culture few American men ever experience.
If a guy walks into an American bar with the thought of picking up a girl, he will get an audible, hostile rejection from at least 90 percent of the women he approaches. And a painful physical rejection from the boyfriends of some of the other 10 percent when they return from the men’s room. At Madame Claridge’s, however, if you had a neurotic imagination, you could pretend that you were walking into an American bar and that every girl you tapped (you had your choice of 20 or 30 beautiful ladies) was willing to go upstairs with you.
“It seems I can’t go into a bar anymore for an innocent glass of sherry without a dozen women begging me to take them to bed. I’m really devastating. All right, all right, if you insist, one at a time . . .”
Their return English is always questioning, in the few broken phrases they
know: “How much you got?” “Short time?” “All night?” “Costume show?”
The costume show is an institution that might well be studied by clinical psychologists. Although I assume none of these girls has ever read Krafft-Ebing, I am sure they are instinctively cognizant of the many erotic fetishes that men have and are willing to pay for in order to have them catered to.
The costume show cost 1000 francs extra, which in those days was about $20. This might seem expensive, but we were getting $10 a carton for cigarettes that we bought tax-free for about 50 cents a carton.
You had a choice of basic settings—rooms complete with the particular decor required by the girl in costume to play her part.
1. The Housewife Room. The room was decorated like a homey kitchen. The girl wore a white cotton dress, an apron, no make-up, her hair pulled back simply in a bun. I didn’t understand French, but since she had a complete routine memorized I called in a friend to translate for me. “Ah, Antoine, you naughty boy, you are late again. Tsk, tsk, tsk. You are making your poor mother gray with worry. Ah, quel dommage, you look disturbed, my son. Here, sit by Momma. There, that is better, no? See, I’ll massage your back. But don’t do anything naughty to me. Antoine! Antoine! What are you doing? I am your mother! In a moment I will have to ask you to stop . . .”
2. The Seminary. This cost 2000 francs, but it was worth it. The room was a bare monastery cell with only a wooden table, some straight chairs and a straw pallet. Religious statues, pictures and candles were everywhere. The “towel girl” led me in and left me alone there, and as I looked about I was furious that when I would tell my friends in the States about it, they would think it was a lie. Not only that but they might have me committed. And I was at least as sane as the hundreds of men who visited this place seriously, men who we would consider decadent and degenerate, and more than that, in some twisted way, fanatically religious.
