One Hand Jerking

by Paul Krassner

  After the first week of the trial, Lenny flew to Los Angeles—Town D—where he was promptly arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. Years later, the arresting officer went to prison himself, for drug smuggling. When the Chicago case resumed, the jury found Lenny guilty. The judge gave him the maximum penalty—a year in jail and a $1,000 fine—“for telling dirty jokes,” explained a network newscaster.

  A week later, the case against the Gate of Horn was dismissed, but it had become obvious that Lenny was now considered too hot to be booked in Chicago again. In San Francisco, the jury found him not guilty of obscenity. Arresting officers admitted that his material didn’t arouse their prurient interest. But in Chicago, the judge refused to permit that line of cross-examination by the defense. Nor would he allow the head of the vice squad to take the stand, on the grounds that his testimony would be extraneous to the issue before the court.

  “Chicago,” said Lenny, “is so corrupt it’s thrilling.”

  In less than two years, Lenny was arrested 15 times.

  “There seems to be a pattern,” he said, “that I’m a mad dog and they have to get me no matter what—the end justifies the means.” It became a news item in Variety when he didn’t get arrested one night. While the Chicago verdict was on appeal, he was working at the Off-Broadway in San Francisco. The club’s newspaper ads made this offer: “No cover charge for patrolmen in uniform.”

  Since he always talked on stage about his environment, and since police cars and courtrooms had lately become his environment, the content of Lenny’s performances began to revolve more and more around the inequities of the justice system. “In the Halls of Justice,” he declared, “the only justice is in the halls.” But he also said, “I love the law.” Instead of an unabridged dictionary, he now carried law books in his luggage. His room was always cluttered with tapes and transcripts and photostats and law journals and legal briefs. Once he was teasing 10-year-old Kitty by pretending not to believe what she was telling him.

  “Daddy,” she said, “you’d believe me if it was on tape.”

  Lenny’s jazz jargon was gradually being replaced by legal jargon. He had become intimate not only with the statutes concerning obscenity and narcotics, but also with courtroom procedure, and his knowledge would be woven into his performances. “Query,” he’d begin. “If a tape recording is my voice, are they using me to testify against myself, since it’s my voice that would indict me?” As club owners became increasingly afraid to hire him, he devoted more and more time and energy to the law. When he finally got a booking in Monterey, he admitted to me, “I feel like it’s taking me away from my work.”

  One time we were fooling around with a tape recorder, and Lenny began spinning out quaint, absurd imagery:I will confess to some experiences that I’ve had. Forbidden sights I have seen. The most beautiful body I’ve ever seen was at a party in 1945. I was in the bedroom getting the coats. The powder room door had been left intentionally ajar, and I viewed the most perfect bosom peeking out from the man-tailored blouse above a tweed pegged skirt.

  “You like what you see? They are nice, aren’t they?” she said, caressing the area near her medallion.

  “Yes, they are very nice.”

  “Would you like to touch them?”

  “I’m—I’m—”

  “You’re shocked,” she said, “aren’t you?”

  Indeed I was. Eleanor Roosevelt had the prettiest tits I had ever seen or dreamed that I had seen.

  “I’ve got the nicest tits that have ever been in this White House, but because of protocol we’re not allowed to wear bathing suits, you know. I get a million offers for pictures, but being saddled with the Girl Scout coordinators has left me with only a blind item in a gossip column: What Capitol Hill biggie’s wife has a pair of lollies that are setting the Washington-go-round a-twitter?”

  Lenny’s problem was that he wanted to talk on stage with the same freedom he exercised in his living room. That harmless little bit of incongruity about Eleanor Roosevelt would show up in his act from time to time. It certainly didn’t fall within the definition of hard-core pornography which the Supreme Court had ruled was not protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, Lenny was arrested in supposedly sophisticated New York at the Cafe Au Go Go for giving an indecent performance, and at the top of the police complaint was “Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits.”

  Ultimately, Lenny fired all his lawyers in the New York trial and defended himself. He was found guilty, even though the law stated that to be obscene, material must be utterly without any redeeming social importance; therefore, if one single person felt that Lenny’s performance had the slightest bit of redeeming social importance—and there were several witnesses who so testified—then he should’ve been found not guilty.

  Lenny hadn’t been able to get work in six months. Club owners were afraid to book him. He almost got an engagement in Philadelphia, but the deal fell through when the district attorney demanded that Lenny show up a couple of days early and take a Naline test to prove there was no morphine in his system. Plus he was told to present his material in advance. CRIMINALS MUST REGISTER. He performed at a club in Westbury, but on his way to the parking lot after the first performance, a district attorney warned him, “If you do another show like the one did tonight, I’ll arrest you.” Then the D.A. told the club owner, “If you let him go on, I’ll pull your license.”

  Lenny went before the Court of Appeals in New York, seeking an injunction that would prevent district attorneys from arresting him in the future. The three-judge panel was headed by Thurgood Marshall, former chief counsel for the NAACP, who would later become the first black justice appointed to the Supreme Court. Lenny pleaded that he was like a carpenter whose tools were being taken away. He compared the denial of his rights to “a nigger who wants to use a toilet in Alabama.”

  “You’re not a Negro, Mr. Bruce,” said Judge Marshall.

  “Unfortunately not, Your Honor.”

  And Lenny’s request was denied. A week later, he was due to be sentenced. Once again, he would act as his own attorney. In court, he borrowed a watch, because he planned to state for the record what time he began and ended his argument—“so that the judge can’t close me out for taking too long.” Lenny spoke for a solid hour. He did everything in this one-time-only matinee performance short of applying burnt cork to his face, donning white gloves, getting down on his knees and singing “Nobody Knows De Trouble Obscene,” but his most relevant argument concerned the very obscenity statute which he’d been accused of violating.

  As his legal homework, Lenny had obtained the legislative history of that statute from Albany, and he discovered that back in 1931 there was an amendment proposed which excluded from arrest in an indecent performance: stage-hands, spectators, musicians and—here was the fulcrum of his defense—actors. The law had been misapplied to him. Despite opposition by the New York Society For the Suppression of vice, the amendment was finally signed into law by then-Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Lenny had complained that prosecutor Richard Kuh tried to do his act in court. A friend of mine who dated Kuh swears that he took her back to his apartment and played Lenny Bruce records for her. Maybe someday he would play for her the sound-track album from the movie Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman doing Lenny’s act on stage where he complains about the district attorney doing his act in court. But now, before sentencing, Kuh recommended that no mercy be granted because Bruce had shown a “lack of remorse.”

  “I’m not here for remorse,” Lenny responded, “but for justice. The issue is not obscenity, but that I spit in the face of authority.”

  The face of authority spat back at Lenny that afternoon by sentencing him to four months in the workhouse. Then, in the press room of the Criminal Courts building, a reporter asked, “Do you believe in obscenity?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lenny. “Do I believe we should pray for obscenity?”

  As we walked into the lobby, a man came
up and said, “Listen, I have some stag films and party records that you might be interested in.” Lenny and I went for some pizza instead. Then we headed for his hotel room where, to help unwind from the day’s tension, he played some old tapes, ranging from a faith healer to patriotic World War II songs.

  “Ignoring the mandate of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” observed Lenny the lawyer, “is a great deal more offensive than saying Eleanor has lovely nay-nays.”

  On October 2, 1965, Lenny visited San Francisco FBI headquarters. Two days later, they sent a memo to the FBI director in Washington, describing him as “the nightclub and stage performer widely known for his obscenity” and stating that “Bruce, who advised that he is scheduled to begin confinement, 10/13/65, in New York State as a result of a conviction for a lewd show, alleged that there is a conspiracy between the courts of the states of New York and California to violate his rights. Allegedly this violation of his rights takes place by these lower courts failing to abide by decision of the U.S. Supreme Court with regard to obscenity. . . .”

  On October 13, Lenny’s 40th birthday, instead of surrendering to the authorities in New York, he filed suit at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to keep out of prison, and he got himself officially declared a pauper. He also asked the federal court to protect him from harassment by police in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to determine how much money he had lost since his conviction in New York, and to order the police department there to pay him damages.

  Since his first arrest for obscenity in San Francisco, his earnings had plummeted from $108,000 to $11,000, and he was $15,000 in debt. Under great emotional and financial stress, he had not yet filed a proper appeal in his New York case. Au Go Go owner Howard Solomon had been convicted of the same charge, and that ruling was reversed on appeal.

  On May 31, 1966, Lenny wrote to me: “I’m still working on the bust of the government of New York State.” And he enclosed his doodle of Jesus nailed to the cross, with a speech balloon asking, “Where the hell is the ACLU?” Lenny hadn’t identified with Christ’s jester, but now he did seem to be identifying with Christ himself.

  On August 3, he received a foreclosure notice on his home. Lenny died that day from an overdose of morphine. His death was on the cusp of accident and suicide. In his kitchen, a kettle of water was still boiling. In his office, the electric typewriter was still humming. He had stopped typing in mid-word: Conspiracy to interfere with the 4th Amendment const

  Constitutes what, Lenny?

  At the funeral, his roommate and sound engineer, John Judnich, dropped Lenny’s microphone into his grave before the dirt was piled on. But, like any pioneer, Lenny’s legacy continues on. I asked a few thoughtful stand-up comics how he had influenced them.

  Barry Crimmins: “I think about him almost every day and he really, really, really has kept me honest on the stage. I don’t get fucked with because of what he did. Speech became a lot freer, thanks to Lenny. I have never had to worry about local police officials monitoring my shows. The only true censorship I’ve faced has been commercial in nature.”

  Paul Provenza: “He influenced me in a big way, now more than ever. I didn’t realize that I would politicize comedically until I grew to a point where I can come out with the truth. When I was first listening to Lenny, all I was thinking about was comedy, and I realize now that it was the other way around. His comedy was about what he was thinking and feeling.”

  Veteran comedian George Carlin sums it up: “Lenny Bruce opened the doors for all the guys like me; he prefigured the free-speech movement and helped push the culture forward into the light of open and honest expression. I like to find out where the line is drawn, and then drag the audience across the line with me, and make them happier for the experience. Lenny opened all the doors, or kicked them down.”

  Among the doors Lenny kicked down were the traditional targets of stand-up performers—airplane food, Chinese waiters, their wives’ cooking, driving and frigidity—and instead he went after, in Carlin’s words, “the powerful people, to puncture the pretentiousness and pompousness of the privileged.”

  A documentary, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1999, but as producer Robert Weide told me, prophetically, “If there’s a documentary about the Holocaust, it will win.”

  “You don’t think you have any chance at all?”

  “The odds against my film winning are six million to one.”

  Lenny really would’ve appreciated that.

  EPILOGUE

  When rock star Bono received an award at the Golden Globes ceremony in 2003, he said, “This is fucking brilliant.” However, the FCC ruled that he had not violated broadcast standards, because his use of the offending word was “isolated and nonsexual.” You see, it was merely an adjective.

  But then Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast during the half-time extravaganza at the Super Bowl. I had never seen the media make such a mountain out of an implant. The incident served as an excuse to crack down on indecency during this election year.

  So, in February 2004, the FCC reversed the Bono decision, contending that his utterance was “indecent and profane” after all.

  And has Governor Pataki now decided to revoke his posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce?

  GAY RIGHTS AND WRONGS

  BEFORE THERE WAS SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

  In November 2002, an appeals court ruled that Louisiana’s 197-year-old anti-sodomy law did not discriminate against gays and lesbians. The state Supreme Court had previously claimed that the law against oral and anal sex did not violate the right to privacy, based on an appeal, but then plaintiffs, the Louisiana Electorate of Gays and Lesbians Inc., challenged the law, asking the appeals court to consider the trial judge’s ruling that the law did not amount to unconstitutional discrimination.

  So it was good news a month later when the United States Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Constitution permits states to enforce anti-sodomy laws exclusively against same-sex couples. Until then, the Court had hesitated to admit that such discrimination violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws.” There was fear that if they overturned a Texas law which criminalized “deviate sexual acts” between people of the same sex, it could affect state laws on adoption, foster care, marriage, and employment.

  In fact, back in 1986, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s outlawing of consensual homosexual sodomy. That story made front page headlines. A few months later, however, there was only a small news item on the inside pages when that same Court refused to reinstate a law in Oklahoma that outlawed consensual heterosexual sodomy. This meant that if Sandra Day O’Connor participated in a threesome with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas during recess, indulging in an infinite variety of positions, only the two men could be arrested.

  In an anthology, Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation From People Who Know a Thing or Two, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce writes: “I’m still the reluctant pornographer, but in this era of rampant assimilationism and gay conservatism, I see pornography as the last refuge of gay radicalism.” Let us hope, then, that legislation in America will eventually catch up with the porn industry.

  It should not be forgotten that, during his first term as Senate Republican majority leader, Trent Lott publicly compared homosexuality to kleptomania; voted yes on prohibiting same-sex marriage; voted no on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation; blocked the nomination of openly gay philanthropist James Hormel as a U.S. ambassador; and was lambasted for ignoring a surge in anti-gay hate crimes even after the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard became international news.

  Although skin color cannot be changed—except perhaps for Michael Jackson—there is currently a movement to transform gays into straights. Ironically, Robert Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, was a central figure in persuading the American Psychiatric Association to de-pathologize homosexuality in 1973, but he recently
reported the results of a study in which two-thirds of a gay and lesbian sample successfully went through “conversion therapy.”

  Dr. Spitzer defends himself: “What I found was that, in the unique sample I studied, many made substantial changes in sexual arousal and fantasy—and not merely behavior. Even subjects who made a less substantial change believed it to be extremely beneficial. Complete change was uncommon. My study concluded with an important caveat: that it should not be used to justify a denial of civil rights to homosexuals, or as support for coercive treatment. I did not conclude that all gays should try to change, or even that they would be better off if they did. However, to my horror, some of the media reported the study as an attempt to show that homosexuality is a choice, and that substantial change is possible for any homosexual who decides to make the effort.”

  But, in The Advocate, a national gay news magazine, Michelangelo Signorile points out that “conversion therapies have been shown to be harmful. A five-year study of 150 people published in the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy in 2001 strongly concluded that ‘participants in conversion therapies are plagued by serious psychological and interpersonal problems after termination.’ These findings were consistent with several other papers published in journals during the 1990s. . . . With religious right-backed ‘ex-gay’ groups promoting conversion therapies in full-page newspaper ads for several years now—and recently in in ads in Washington, D.C. subway stations—the time for the vast majority of psychologists to take a stand would seem to be at hand.”

  And when Bill Clinton became president in 1992, it was thought that discrimination against gays in the military would finally end. But then Colin Powell—the first African-American to become head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—acted to prevent such progress. In my dreams, I confronted him: