Читать книгу How to Talk Dirty and influence people - Lenny Bruce - Страница 6

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I volunteered for the Navy in 1942. I was 5′2″, weighed 120 pounds, and had a heavy beard that needed removing about once every six months.

One day I was standing at 90 Church Street in Downtown New York City, literally in the hands of a doctor who was telling me to cough—that universal experience which every male who gets caught in a draft undergoes.

The Navy taught me a sterile sense of cleanliness, punctuality, and gave me the security of belonging. For the first time I was able to relate to my fellow man.

My first “relative” was Artie Shaw. We took boot training together in Newport, Rhode Island. During that 21-day incubation period, the excitement of war was dwarfed by “Artie Shaw is here!” Artie Shaw: Begin the Beguine, Night and Day, Dave Tough, Max Kaminsky, Lana Turner, Kathleen Winsor. Artie Shaw—Orpheus, music and love—and me; we were brothers in blue. Of course, I never saw him, but it was enough for me that he was there.

(Eighteen years later I got the same gratification from those magic words, “Artie Shaw is here!”—when the owner of the Blue Angel Café whispered it to me before I went onstage. “Artie Shaw is here!” How just, how natural—we were in the War together.)

He had enlisted as an apprentice seaman. He could have gone in a dozen other ways—like Glenn Miller, for example, with a commission in clarinet—but he made it as an apprentice seaman, which was a silly-ass thing to do.

As it turned out, he had a much rougher time in service than I did. He either got an oversolicitous: “This is Artie Shaw, Captain Alden, he has agreed to give you that autographed picture of himself for Admiral Nimitz!”—or, more often: “Look, pretty boy, you’re not in Hollywood now, there ain’t no butlers around here!” Artie Shaw would have been glad to have been as anonymous as I was then, an ordinary seaman with a serial number, wanting to fight for his country.

Even as a kid, I was hip that 80 percent of the guys that go for Civil Service pension security have no balls for the scuffle outside. I am not knocking the desire for security; we’re all kind of scared and would like to be sitting under the kitchen sink, picking at the linoleum. But it really bugged Shaw. He put in an urgent request for a transfer to the Mediterranean. We were all anxious to go and be blessed by priests and rabbis, thereby giving us the OK to kill the enemy.

Those dirty pregnant Japanese women who stood in the silent army, like Italian mothers standing over the boiling pots of spaghetti, the Jewish mothers slaving over pots of chicken soup—women unconcerned with politics; all they know is that 49 cents a pound for chopped meat is ridiculous. Those dirty Jap babies crawling on the floor, amused by the magic of a cat, his purr, his switching tail. Those dirty Japs we hated, who now fill the windows of American stores with cameras. Those dirty Japs that knocked up the portable-radio industry.

Where the hell was that syndicated Nostradamus and his Criswell Predicts then?

Now there are no more dirty Japs; there are dirty Commies! And when we run out of them there’ll just be dirty dirt. And dirty mud. Then we’ll eat the mud and Pearl Buck will write a book about it. By that time, the few hippies who discovered that it’s the earth which is dirty will have made it to the moon for the Miss Missile contest.

On a cruel triple-brrr snow-cold gray winter morning at Coddington Point, Rhode Island, Artie Shaw and 20-odd other sailors sat in the fetal position with their red eyes and chapped thighs, waiting for chow to blow. A chief petty officer came in and told Artie that a lieutenant commander was outside the barracks and wanted to see him immediately. Shaw was sure that this was his transfer.

He marched out with his Don Winslow snap, the sailors nervously peeking through the barracks window. When you’re in boot camp, a lieutenant commander might as well be the President. Shaw was understandably nervous as the lieutenant commander reached out his hand, saying, “Put ’er there, Artie,” and then said 14 words that had more impact than Roosevelt’s “December 7th, a day that will live in infamy” speech.

The lieutenant commander looked Shaw in the eye and said: “I just wanted to shake the hand that patted the ass of Lana Turner.”

It was in the Navy that I had my first love affair—a one-night stand with Louise—the kind of chick that makes an elevator operator feel possessed of great control because he went up 18 floors and didn’t rip off her dress.

Louise was 28 when I met her. Her father and mother had just died, and she and her brother inherited the business: a 13 X 13-foot combination Italian-American grocery and soda fountain, with living quarters in the back. Her brother took care of the store during the day, and she worked there at night so he could go to CCNY.

Her husband was a private in the U.S. Infantry, stationed in Iceland for the duration.

I walked into the store in white hat, dress-blue uniform and my Endicott-Johnson shoes, so new they slipped on cement. I was announced by the little tin bell—the candy-store burglar alarm. Behind the counter stood Louise.

Doctors who have probed, cut, sewn and rubber-gloved so many women that it has become a task would get shaken by a Louise.

“Hmm, your adenoids seem quite normal; perhaps the trouble is respiratory. Unbutton your blouse a moment and we’ll give a listen to the old ticker. There’s quite a bit of flu going around and I ... there, uh ... actually ... uh, uh ... here, uh.... Oh God, oh merciful Mother of God, what a body! You’re so tan and yet so white. Please may I touch you? Not as a doctor.... Let me unbutton my shirt and feel you close to me. Please don’t push me away. Here, let me ... please ... oh God! I’m losing my mind, let me latch the door.... Let me just kiss it, that’s all I want to ... oh, please please please please. Please just touch it. Just ... look at it.... I do respect you. I just can’t catch my goddamn breath!”

With eight dollars hidden in my shoe and a dollar in my hand, I walked up to the counter and spoke out with a jaded-enough tone so that Louise would know that I’d been around. “Pepsi, please, and a bag of potato chips.”

She ripped the stapled chips away from the cardboard. When she spoke, her words stunned me. I never expected a woman who looked like that to talk that way to a bon vivant such as I.

“How the hell did you get gum in your hair?” she asked.

“The guy who sleeps in the bunk above me stuck it on the edge of my rack. I thought I got it out.”

“C’mere, I’ve got some benzene, it’ll take it out.”

I followed her through the blue-rayon portals that separated the store from her home. I sat on a soda box and watched her rumble through the medicine cabinet, which was a cardboard carton under her bed.

She soaked the rag and stood over me, gently kneading the chewing gum from my hair. Her thighs, with the good-life scent of the white dove, pressed weightlessly against my cheek. The gum was long gone, and my first love was nurtured in a setting of Medaglia D’Oro coffee, Ace combs, and Progresso tomato purée.

I wonder if any Chilean chicle worker ever dreamt of the delicious fruit that I received from the by-product of his labor.

I was assigned to a light cruiser, the U.S.S. Brooklyn.

Me—Leonard Alfred Schneider—on the deck of a warship bound for North Africa, along with 1300 other men and enough munitions to bring a man-made earthquake to Ain el Turk, Bizerte, and Algiers, which was to be followed after the War by a sociopolitical earthquake—for we were blasting more than enemy breastworks; we were shaking loose the veils from shadowed Moslem faces and the gold from their front teeth.

I had two battle stations—one on a 1.1 gun and my watch was on a five-inch deck gun. A cannon in the Navy is always called a gun.

Five in the morning, reveille. Five-ten, topside: wash down the decks and do paint work. Seven o’clock, secure. Seven-thirty to eight, chow: prunes, beans, cornbread, cold cuts, Waldorf salad, coffee. Eight o’clock, turn to: painting, chipping, scraping, ammunition working party. Twelve o’clock, chow: braised beef, dehydrated potatoes, spinach, coffee, cake with icing. One o’clock, work. Two-forty-five, attack by enemy planes: man your battle stations, fight with planes.

(I could use Navy time, 0600, etc., but I had elevated to the idiomatic group: “Look out the window and see who is on the left side of the boat.”)

The secure from battle may be at eight p.m. Secure at sea, ammunition working party, replace expended ammunition. Quick scrubdown, twelve-thirty, hit the sack. I never got more than four and a half hours sleep a night in three years.

Blood and salt water mixed together looks blue. Eight men followed by twelve, then by about forty more, floated gracefully by the bow of the U.S.S. Brooklyn. These dead Air Force men that just a few months ago were saying ...

“What do you want, Hi-Test or Regular?”

“Did you get my pants out of the cleaner’s, sweetheart?”

“They’ll never get me—my uncle is an alderman.”

“Now listen, Vera, I’m going to put all my stuff in these cardboard boxes, and I’m going to lock them in that closet back of the den. Please don’t let anyone touch them—and don’t just say ‘Yes’ to me—I don’t want anyone, do you understand, anyone, fooling around with my stuff ...”

His stuff. My stuff. Everyone was worrying about their stuff ... their papers ... their possessions.

The bodies continued to float by, their heads bumping the starboard side.

Seeing those pitiful, fresh-dead bodies, I knew then what a mockery of life the materialistic concept is. After they got the telegram, someone would go through his “stuff” and try to figure out why in the world he wanted “all that stuff.” The stuff that he kept so nice would eventually be thrown out of the basement, for the stuff would now be crap.

“Hey, throw this crap outta here!”