Underworld

he was wearing the same Nehru jacket he'd sported in San Francisco, his Hindu statesman number, and the thing was rutted and crushed by now, resembling some wadded discard plucked from the gutter. He also wore a large medal on a chain, an accessory to the Nehru. You got the medal for wearing the jacket.

Yes, he was remembering something heavy and dense. Despite his weeklong anxiety over the missile crisis, the blackout at Basin Street West, the endless bulletins issuing from every surface in the landscape, a network ranging from TV monitors in airport boarding areas to blind newsies selling tabloids on street corners, yes, whatever the level of Lenny's unease-the nuclear showdown had slipped his mind.

Better believe it. Their ships are approaching our blockade.

Lenny nodded, he stroked the mole on his cheek, he waggled his fingers and looked out over the massed heads humming autonomi-cally in the low smoke.

'We're all gonna die!'

He said it four times total, passionately high-pitched, arms flung up.

'And you're beginning to take it personally,' he said. 'How can they justify the inconvenience of a war that's gonna break out over the weekend? You had it all planned. Friday night. Movie with your highbrow art-film friends. Serious Swedish flick at the little theater near the university. Ursula Andress naked to the waist with a slain calf slung over her shoulder. Saturday morning. Let's see. Dry cleaner, post office, grocery store, pick up shoes, put cat to sleep, call mom back home in French Lick-yeah, I'm fine, how're you, yatta yatta yatta, got a big date tonight with a real nice girl, Raytheon, she's a Mormon, they don't drink tap water or play the saxophone.'

Lenny broke off unexpectedly and leaned into the face of one of the real-estate barons sitting ringside, a guy with the bloated cheeks of a trumpet player doing a cardiac solo.

'Mick spic hunky junkie boogie.'

There was no context for the line except the one that Lenny took with him everywhere. The culture and its loaded words. He looked around some more. He seemed to need a particular kind of face into which to deliver his scripture.

One of the college profs smiled invitingly and Lenny obliged with, 'Fuck suck fag hag gimme a nickel bag.'

In fact the words were thrilling. Many people had never heard these words spoken before an audience-by a guy in a Hindu tunic yet- and there was an odd turn of truth, a sense of unleashing perhaps, or disembarrassment.

Lenny followed this flurry with an erudite riff on the German word Sprachgefuhl, a feel for language, for what is idiomatically hip-he reads up on things like this in hotels and on planes and back home in the smoky dawn of L.A. while he's waiting for a woman or a pusher.

A fight broke out in the middle of his commentary. Back near the fire exit. Five burly men in a fur ball of pummel and shove. Lenny egged them on, insulting their mothers, until they more or less rolled out the door.

He remembered the crisis again.

'Yeah so you pick up your date at the pad she shares with six other Mormon chicks. Wow what a shiksoid circus. They have strange shiny eyes and a superhuman blondness. They're the next stage of evolution after Olympic swimmers. They're right at the edge of science fiction, man. Human look-alikes from space waiting for a signal to take over the planet. They think tap water's a government plot. Their water's trucked in from a well in Utah. Raytheon's kinda cute but she's dressed so primly you feel your balls contract. You look at these girls and you mourn the lost glamour of women's undergarments. The whole nazified system of straps and harnesses. It's a legal outlet for your secret fascist longings. But chicks don't buy into it anymore. All that slithery hardware that makes wars worth fighting. You take her to a funky down-home place near the women's house of detention. She orders the knuckle sandwich. Hey, the chick digs soul food. Your spirits soar. You think of the setup at your place. Bottle of Vat 69. Zig Zag cigarette paper. Little baggy of dope from the high Andes. The mood lighting. The cool jazz on the turntable. We'll do Miles, yeah, from his blue period. If Miles can't soften her up she's probably a diesel dyke. Irbu're thinking all the universal things men have always thought about and said to each other. Get in her pants. Did you get in? Did you get some? Did you make it? How far'd you get? How far'd she go? Is she an easy lay? Is she a good hump? Is she a piece? Did you get a piece? It's like the language of yard goods. It's like piece goods. You can make her. She can be made. It's like a garment factory. It's like work that's paid for according to the number of units turned out. He's a make-out artist. She's a piece. Knock off a piece. It's a knockoff. You can't tell the woman from the fabric she's wearing.'

This is Lenny in his primitive Christian mode, doing offbeat sermons to desert rabble.

'You hail a cab and the radio's on. Khrushchev wrote a letter to Kennedy. He wants a summit. Who is this Khrushchev anyway? He's a shtarker in a bad suit. You're worried about your summit, not his. The whole point of the missile crisis is the sexual opportunity it offers. You get Raytheon to your place and convince her the whole world's about to go zippo and astonishingly it works and within minutes she's standing naked in your living room and she is all ovals and loops, like the Palmer handwriting method, and so blond she could be radioactive.'

Lenny switched abruptly to ad lib bits. Whatever zoomed across his brainpan. He did bits he got bored with five seconds in. He did psychoanalysis, personal reminiscence, he did voices and accents, grandmotherly groans, scenes from prison movies, and he finally closed the show with a monologue that had a kind of abridged syntax, a thing without connectives, he was cooking free-form, closer to music than speech, doing a spoken jazz in which a slang term generates a matching argot, like musicians trading fours, the road band, the sideman's inner riff, and when the crowd dispersed they took this rap mosaic with them into the strip joints and bars and late-night diners, the places where the nighthawks congregate, and it was Lenny's own hard bop, his speeches to the people that rode the broad Chicago night.

JULY 2, 1959

We stopped the car half a block before the bridge and switched to a taxi. I gave the guy the address and he looked at me, looked at her, then nodded briefly. I'd been told it was better to take a taxi across the border because if you drove your car you became subject to major delays owing to inspections by customs agents on your return to the U.S. side, for guns and drugs.

The town had a strange electric brightness in the stormlight. Blue and green stucco shops with pottery on display-pottery, copper, blankets, glass.

'I think I'm having second thoughts,' I said.

'Please, okay?'

'Maybe they're first thoughts. I never really thought hard enough until now.'

Amy could carry a fair amount of reproach in her clear brown eyes.

'I took it for granted that this was the only thing to do,' I said. 'We should have talked about it some more.'

Her look was the kind of look you get when someone wants you to know she is taking great pains not to pity you. When we cleared the town and drove into the brown hills the rain came hard. About six minutes later the driver pulled up in front of a fairly sizable house behind some trees and the sun was hot and bright and the ground was smoking.

The woman who let us in looked at Amy and said, 'Please, your name,' more or less managerially.

'Amy Brookhiser.'

'Yes, you'll come with me.'

And that's what happened. Amy went with the woman, who was either the nurse, the wife, the office manager or some combination of these. I thought we might have some reassuring words for each other, Amy and I, or I might say something even if she didn't, although I didn't know what I might say, but they were down the hall and making a left turn and I still had our overnight bags in my hands.

All right. I set the bags down and went into the living room, or waiting room, and sat on the sofa. There were no magazines to read. All the reading was on the walls, painted sayings and occult symbols, and this was unexpected. Circles, chevrons, arrows, birds, mucho mystical drivel, and I was trying to absorb it all. A number of shaped sayings, words that formed triangles and tall palms, trees of life perhaps-sayings in English about the passage of the soul and the eye of God, and there were mystical eyes and admonitory hands on all four walls and the ceiling.