Underworld

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.'

A laugh, finally

'I ought to stand here doing Chinese waiter jokes.'

He did a Chinese waiter joke. Got a big laugh. He went through a medley of movie bits and they loved it. He did routines he used to do when he wore a polo coat, suede shoes and a muffdiver's tickly mustache. They laughed, he moped. He did the old bits with suitable stinging irony but this only made them funnier and got him more depressed. They laughed, he bled. Lenny felt awful. He was supposed to be happy and revitalized but he wasn't. They'd all survived a hellish week and he'd gone dragging through four club dates coast to coast in a state of graduated disarray and now it was over and he was safe and he was appearing in concert and he should have been standing here chanting Were not gonna die We're not gonna die We're not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.

When he thought they were gonna die, he'd chanted the die line repeatedly.

But that was over now He'd forgotten all that. There were other, deeper, vaguer matters. Everything, nothing, him.

'I came here tonight to be loved like no one was ever loved. Love me like you've never loved anyone before. Come rain or come shine.'

There was an unguarded plea in Lenny's eyes.

'Parent, child or lover. I want to be washed in rivers of love.'

Return to seat Return to seat Return to seat.

The old material was making him feel bad. And the laughs were worse than the jokes. The laughs dashed and disheartened him. He switched more or less in midsentence to a bit he'd been thinking about before all this missile shit, sitting on the can in L.A. because that's where his best ideas tended to drift into range.

In fact he'd made a casual reference to the subject earlier in the evening. Got a response that seemed to indicate they were interested and unnerved.

He decided to develop the bit on the spot.

Okay. An illiterate sad-eyed virgin lives in a whorehouse in a slum district of San Juan. She has a special talent that has nothing to do with sex per se. It's a kind of parlor trick, okay. Men pay half a week's wages to crowd into a bare room in the basement where the girl, smooth-skinned and innocent, lifts her dress, drops her panties, takes a lit cigarette from the madam and inserts it filter-first in her snatch. The men go wide-eyed. It's a king-size Kent with a micronite filter. Then she contracts her labial muscles, or whatever, and sort of inhales vaginally, and removes the cigarette, and proceeds to blow a series of gorgeous smoke rings. A gasp from the men. Perfect round rings wafting up from her fleecy bush, still somewhat fine and sparse.

Lenny's audience didn't exactly gasp, as the men in the whorehouse had, but there was a certain disquiet in the hall, underscored by a smatter of nervous laughter.

Some people interpret the girl's gift in a religious manner. They think it's an omen, a sign from heaven that the world is about to end. God has selected a poor illiterate undernourished orphan girl to convey a profound message to the world. Because isn't it possible that all these O's coming out of her womb refer to the Greek letter that means The End? Others say, journalists, scientists, priests-these men have come to the bordello to witness the event and they say the rings she is blowing are not representations of the Greek letter omega. They're just ordinary alphabet-soup O's, however beautifully formed. These people say that when the girl is able to blow actual Greek omegas, with the horseshoe effect, dig, the little dipsy-doo at each end of the opening, then they'll start believing in miracles.

This is Lenny Bruce material. This is what they came for, isn't it? Who else does this material? If it's disgusting, so much the better. If it's insulting to you as an individual, get up and leave and take your crossword- puzzle husband with you.

So a rich American widower shows up one night, slumming with friends, and the girl stares proudly, con dignidad, right into his face. Then she inserts the tip of the filter in her snatch and blows a ring inside another ring and then a third tiny ring inside that. The millionaire IS shocked at the tawdry spectacle but also secretly intrigued and he finds himself going back there night after night, alone, and it isn't long before he falls in love with the girl, yes, her limpid eyes and dimpled knees and her sweet and fleecy pubes. He resolves to save her from this squalid life and more or less buys her from the madam for an enormous sum of money and takes her to his hilltop mansion overlooking the Hudson River, where he brings in teams of doctors, tutors, psychologists and nutritionists and where he watches the girl develop intellectually and grow into a healthy young woman who speaks four languages and shows a talent for the oboe.

Lenny paused here, pointing out that the end, the punch line, would have to involve some reversion to type, something the girl does that demonstrates the power of a single old and shocking habit over any number of civilizing influences.

Then he said, 'No, yes, wait. We've got it backwards. It's not the girl who reverts. It's the man. Dig it. He's the kind of cat who questions everything he does. Begins to ask himself. Was she a twisted child or an artist? Was she jailbait or saint? In other words did he make a terrible mistake bringing her here and educating her and banning cigarettes from her life? He begins to recall those delirious nights in San Juan.' Lenny gave the name of the city an authentic guttural rumble. 'Yes, those nights in the basement of the stinking bordello where she performed. Admit it, fool. You've destroyed a strange, crude, beautiful and eerie perversion and replaced it with a boring oboe. Which she plays incessantly by the way. And which is anyway just a displaced version of the king-size Kent, normalized and concertized.'

Lenny stood sideways, mike in hand, stroking his jaw.

'He longs to see smoke rings come out of her puss, her nook. First the cigarette between her spindly legs. Then the rising rings. When he bought her from the madam, she was on the verge of intertwining the rings, which is either a symbol of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or it's the Ballantine beer logo-Purity, Body and Flavor. Either way, imagine the rush he would have gotten.'

He looked into the wings, thinking.

'They marry in a smoke-free ceremony on the rolling lawn. On their wedding night, still a virgin, she stands in a negligee by the window facing west. He enters, in pafamas and smoking jacket, holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder, an unlit king-size Kent.'

But he wasn't sure how to end it.

'He takes the cigarette out of the holder and extends it in her direction, glancing at the shadowy mound under her negligee. She steps back, horrified. She says, You must be mad. She says it in four languages. She says almost everything in four languages, a habit that's beginning to piss him off.'

Then Lenny got a better idea, deeper, more challenging.

'Wait, listen, no. The millionaire is a myth, isn't he? We stuck him in the story because we needed a rich weak do-gooder, what, a respectable self-deluding jerk who shows his corruption in the end. We made him up. Let's tell the truth this time.'

He sensed a disappointment out there. They wanted the wedding night, the negligee, the boudoir, the casually cruel ending like the bit he used to do about the boy raised by wolves, found in the wild, fed, developed, educated, who graduates with honors from MIT and is killed a week later chasing a car down the street.