Читать книгу How to Talk Dirty and influence people - Lenny Bruce - Страница 5

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As an imaginative young sensualist, I dreamed about living over a barn, seeing the stars through a cracked-board room, smelling the cows and horses as they snuggle and nuzzle in a shed below, seeing the steam come up from the hay in the stables on a frosty winter morning, sitting at a table rich with home-canned goods with seven other farm hands, eating home fries, pickled beets, fresh bacon, drinking raw milk, laughing, having company in the morning, having a family, eating and working and hanging out with the big guys, learning to use Bull Durham.

At 16 I ran away from home and found it. Two rich, productive, sweet years with the Dengler family on their Long Island farm.

The Denglers were a combination of Swedish and German stock. Although they were still young—she in her 30s and he in his 40s—I never saw them kiss each other. I was shocked when I learned that they slept in separate bedrooms. I knew they were tired after working a long day, but I couldn’t understand why anyone who could, wouldn’t want to sleep in another person’s arms.

I would wait for an opportunity when Mr. Dengler was enjoying a good laugh, and then I would catch him unawares and give him a big hug. Mrs. Dengler called me a “kissing bug,” but she never rejected me. They said I would probably end up being a politician.

The Dengler farm faced the highway. As I carried the pails of slop to the hogs, I watched the cars whizzing by on their way to Grumman and Sikorsky and Sperry. Neither the drivers nor I realized that their day’s work would some day put an end to someone somewhere also carrying slop to hogs. A couple of times when the cars overheated, they would stop for water, and I would ask them what they were making out at Sperry’s.

They didn’t know. “Some fittings ...” Some fittings—the Norden bombsight to fit into the B-17. “I just do piecework.” (My approach to humor today is in distinguishing between the moral differences of words and their connotations; then it was simply in the homonym: “Oh, you do piecework? How about bringing me home some?”)

Directly opposite the highway that ran by the farm was a long dusty dirt road with crops on each side—potatoes, carrots, lettuce—everything you buy in your grocery store. They were cultivated, irrigated, weeded and fertilized by the farm hands. Some of the fertilization was direct from producer to consumer: There were no lavatories in the fields, but the itinerant dayworkers—six Polish women—had a very relaxed attitude toward the performing of their natural functions.

To this day, I insist that all my vegetables be washed thoroughly.

I was entrusted with the unromantic job of weeding, although I did get to drive the old truck with the broken manifold, back and forth across the field, which really gassed me. I imagined myself to be Henry Fonda. The only thing that bugged me was that it was so lonesome out there all day. I tried to talk to the Polish ladies, but they didn’t understand me. I even brought them candy—Guess Whats, Mary Janes, Hootens—but all they did was grunt. I could watch their most intimate functions, but it was as if I didn’t exist.

Mrs. Dengler would get up about 3:30 in the morning to cook breakfast for eight men; she would work in the fields herself till about eight o’clock that night, and then she would do her housework.

During the winter, the Denglers ran a roadside stand selling canned goods and eggs to the workers on their way to and from a nearby defense plant.

The canned goods would actually be sold out the first day, and we only had enough chickens to supply eggs for about two or three cars. So we bought eggs wholesale from as far away as Texas, and Mason-jar canned goods from an outfit in Georgia.

My job was to immerse the jars in hot water, wash off their labels and put ours on. I would also open the egg crates—which were packed by the gross—and repackage the eggs in our cartons, by the dozen. With my philanthropic sense of humor, I would add a little mud and straw and chicken droppings to give them an authentic pastoral touch.

People were always coming back and telling us: “How fresh the eggs are!” Sales increased rapidly and I soon had a big problem. Although I had enough straw and mud, there were only 22 chickens—and I was too embarrassed to ask if there were any wholesale chickenshit houses in Texas.

I decided to cut the pure stuff with cow manure. There was never a complaint.

Once a week a big LaSalle would drive all the way out from the city to get farm-fresh eggs. The chauffeur was a little wizened old Englishman who never, ever spoke. The owner was a woman who looked like Mary Astor. She was a very grand-type lady, about 35, which seemed quite old to me.

She said the farm was “quaint” and remarked how fortunate I was not to be “cursed by city pressures.” She began to bring me things—sweaters, shoes, even a tennis racket. I fed her charitable id and exclaimed: “Oh, gosh, a real sweater! I always wanted one with no patches on it!” All I needed was “Gloriosky, Zero!” to complete the picture.

Once I sensed she was feeling a little low, so I told her that my mother and father had been killed. I fabricated a very pathetic story for her, and it really picked her up. It was a sort of Fantasy CARE Package—a little something extra added to the product, like with the eggs.

One day she forgot all about buying the eggs, and insisted on taking me to town to buy a new jacket. I had an old suede jacket with a broken zipper that had to be pinned shut. I told her I couldn’t leave the stand. She told the chauffeur to get out and take over for me, and she would do the driving.

On the way back from the city, she pulled over into a shaded area and stopped. We talked for a long time, and she told me about her son who was drowned, and also about her husband who manufactured and rented candy machines. She intimated that she would like to adopt me.

She asked about my religious beliefs. She asked if I had ever been naughty with girls. I had never even kissed a girl—I hadn’t gone to high school and I was very shy—I had often thought about being “naughty” with girls, but I could never seem to arrange to be in the right place at the right time.

We talked about some other things, and she told me to look in the glove compartment for a surprise. Inside I found a sheath knife and a flashlight. There was also a packet of pictures, and she asked me if I would like her to show them to me.

I had never seen any pictures like those before. They were of men and women in various attitudes of lovemaking. The nudity and the absurdity of the contortions amused me, and I started to laugh. She was quite disturbed by my reactions, but I couldn’t help it. I had a genuine giggling fit.

She asked me if I thought the pictures were dirty, and when I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to answer, she said that it was a cover-up for a filthy mind. Not wanting to lose the jacket, I apologized.

She forgave me and then delivered a lecture on how some women can give you a terrible disease. She explained how you can get some diseases from using towels or from sitting on toilet seats. She asked me if I knew what the symptoms of these diseases were. I confessed my ignorance, and she grew alarmed.

“Why, you can have one of those diseases right this minute and not even know it!”

And, with a very clinical attitude, she unbuttoned my pants.

A few years later in boot camp, when we got our first illustrated lecture on venereal disease, I was disappointed. It lacked the same personal touch.

The Denglers were quite upset with my impatience to volunteer for the Navy. I pestered Mrs. Dengler daily, waiting for that official letter. I had some literature about the Navy and the training courses they offered, and I reviewed it at every opportunity in my “reading room”—a four-holer (one hole was entirely sewn up by a cobweb) with a wasp hive the color of gray cardboard up in the right-hand corner of the ceiling. I always read uneasily, in dread of an attack.

The outhouse is to the farm hand what the water cooler is to the white-collar worker.

But, working for the Denglers, this wasn’t necessary for me. They were easy bosses to work for. Although I put in about 60 hours a week and received $40 a month plus room and board, I felt no resentment, because they worked longer and harder.

Then, too, they were my mother and father—the mother and father I had always dreamed about—and I always had good company, which made me think about all the lonesome people who lived in furnished rooms with their container of milk or can of beer on the window ledge. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the people who are lonesome could live in one big dormitory, sleep in beds next to each other, talk, laugh, and keep the lights on as long as they want to?

Lonesome people are a vast neglected segment of that mythical American Public the advertising men are always talking about. One mustn’t assume that all lonesome people are pensioners, old maids and physically handicapped shut-ins. There are lonesome young men who sit in the Greyhound Bus Station and there are secretaries who live in immaculate apartments that they wouldn’t mind having messed up by some guy who doesn’t hang up his clothes.

Sometimes when I’m on the road in a huge hotel, I wish there were a closed-circuit television camera in each room, and at two o’clock in the morning the announcer would come on: “In Room 24-B there is a ripe, blue-eyed, pink-nippled French and Irish court stenographer lying in bed tossing and turning, fighting the bonds of her nightgown. All the ashtrays in her room are clean, her stockings and panty-girdle have just been washed and are hanging on the shower-curtain bar. This is a late model, absolutely clean, used only a few times by a sailor on leave.”

Or: “In Apartment 407 there is a 55-year-old Jewish widower who is listening to Barry Gray on the radio, sitting in his underwear and looking at the picture of his daughter and son-in-law who live in Lawrence, Long Island, and haven’t called since Yom Kippur. This a bargain for an aggressive young woman who can say to him, ‘I like you because you’re sensible and sensitive—all right, it’s true young men are a “good time,” but after that, what?—I like a man I can have a serious discussion with, a man who can co-sign ...’ ”

Mrs. Dengler drove me to the station of the Long Island Railroad to catch the train that would take me away to war. I kissed her and said, “Goodbye, Ma.” She smiled at me and left. She never had any kids of her own.