Читать книгу How to Talk Dirty and influence people - Lenny Bruce - Страница 10

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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 fri., 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.