Читать книгу How to Talk Dirty and influence people - Lenny Bruce - Страница 7

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Standing on the deck of a warship in battle, you get a good look at the competitive aspect of life, carried to its extreme.

Our society is based on competition. If it isn’t impressed upon you at home with the scramble for love between brothers and sisters, they really lay it down to you in school—in numbers any child can understand—that’s what grading is.

You bring home 100 percent, and your mother hugs you and your father pats you on the back. The teachers beam at you. But not your schoolmates; they know they’re in competition with you, and if you get a high percentage they must get a lower one. Everybody wants love and acceptance and he soon learns that one way to get it is by getting higher marks than the other fellow.

In essence, you are gratified by your schoolmates’ failures. We take this with us into adulthood. Just look at the business world.

So, my first instinct in this structure of economic and critical success is to want Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Herman, etc., (my “schoolmates”) to bomb. If I bring in a bigger gross at a café or a concert than Mort does at the same place, I’ve brought home a good report card.

I struggle with this part of me which is inhumane, and now—perhaps this can be explained by the fact that I am making enough money to afford to be magnanimous about it—I genuinely rejoice in another’s success. I would like to believe that if I were still scuffling and Mort was doing well I would still be happy for him. But I wonder. I am happy he’s doing well. But not better than me.

The U.S.S. Brooklyn was a big ship, and she was considered quite a danger and a nuisance by the enemy. At night the enemy planes, unless they had inside information, could only tell what they were bombing by the firepower that was thrown at them. If they received nothing but 20 millimeter and 40s, they would assume that the largest craft below was a DE or some other small craft that carried only small arms.

We were trapped in a strange bind. We were the only heavy power in the area, but if we threw up our big stuff—our five-inch guns—they would know immediately that we were a cruiser, and then they would send for assistance, and do us in.

When General Quarters sounded at sea, it was usually an E-boat or a submarine. I loved this because I wasn’t as afraid of being killed in battle as I was of being bored. Lucky for me that the guys in power at the time knew the real danger and kept me occupied. I was grateful, but it was still pretty exhausting, fighting 60 hours without securing from battle stations.

Through three years and four major invasions—Anzio, Salerno, Sicily, Southern France—I was a shell passer with a heavy helmet that was lined with smelly foam rubber. Two years of sleeping in a hammock, then graduating to a lower bunk. Three years of hearing “Now hear this!” till I didn’t want to hear it ever again. Three years of being awakened by a buzzer that made the sound that a gigantic goose would, laying an egg the size of a Goodyear Blimp.

Gonk! Gonk! Gonk! Gonk!—that was the base line. The boatswain’s whistle and the trumpet just lacked a rhythm section to keep them from being real hard swingers.

The impersonal voice would boom over the speaker: “All men man your battle stations, secure all hatches, the smoking lamp is out.”

I’d scramble up the ladder just in time to get my helmet knocked off and my nose bloodied from the concussion vacuum created in the hatch cove.

We would be bottled up in Naples harbor, the Germans bombing and strafing every ship in the bay. It was blindman’s buff.

As a child I loved confusion: a freezing blizzard that would stop all traffic and mail; toilets that would get stopped up and overflow and run down the halls; electrical failures—anything that would stop the flow and make it back up and find a new direction. Confusion was entertainment for me.

While the War was on, the alternation of routine and confusion sustained my interest, but then it was over and I wanted out.

I had been a good sailor with a sterling record of consistent performance, but I wasn’t a mensch. However, I didn’t put the Navy through any red tape coming in, so I felt they should permit me to exit with the same courtesy. A lot of guys tried to get out during the War and I considered that cowardly, but I rationalized my schemes with: “Why not?—the War is over.”

But how does one go about shooting his toes off with an oar?

We lay at anchor in the Bay of Naples and the night closed in around me. I had to get out, and get out fast. Other guys had gone wacky—some on purpose—and the only ones that got out were those who could just sit and say “No” to everything. They got out, but with a dishonorable discharge. And by the time they were processed, it was six months in the brig, a trial, and such a hard time that it wasn’t worth it. I had to think.

You spend your whole life thinking and worrying. Worrying about the deposit bottles, and where to cash them. That night it seemed that getting out of the Navy, or even getting out of the Mediterranean, was years away. I wondered who was buying Mema her Vaseline.

I closed my eyes in the pitch-black night and then, all of a sudden, the heavens seemed to light up like Times Square. For a moment, I thought: “Oh-oh, I don’t have to worry anymore; my problem has solved itself; I won’t have to pretend.” I recalled previous flashes on my optic nerves ...

I am sitting at the Silver Dollar Bar in Boston, next to a girl with chipped, bitten-off, painted fingernails, and lipstick on her teeth. We are having our picture taken by the night-club photographer. Flash!

The first time I ever saw a flashlight, my cousin Stanley was sticking it in his mouth, making his cheeks all red.

Magic lights—the flash of lightning on choppy Long Island Sound as my Uncle Bill pulls in a flounder.

Fireflies through the window screens.

The lights in the Bay of Naples kept getting brighter and brighter. I wondered for an instant—is this the spiritual illumination I’ve read about? Will I see the Virgin of Fatima appear next?

My vision cleared and simultaneously I felt a smothering wave of factory heat—hotter than all the asphalt roads in Arizona put together. Mt. Vesuvius had erupted for the first time in centuries. Mt. Vesuvius, the earth that bore the tree, that bore the fruit, that fed man. The carbon process—each of us one molecule in the vast universe.

The earth that saw man destroy his competitor.

The earth that saw Italians killed. Italians—the Venetians, the brilliant colorists. The Italians that would soon clothe Miles Davis.

The earth saw this and vomited that night in Naples.

In the Army you can get out if you’re a wack. Why couldn’t you get out of the Navy if you were a WAVE?

Down in my bunk I had a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing. There it was.

A transvestite is a nut who likes to get dressed up in women’s clothing. He may never engage in homosexual practice or do anything else antisocial. He’s completely harmless. But obviously he would be an inconvenience to the Navy, where they like to keep everything organized by having everyone dress alike.

I figured that if I could demonstrate to the Navy that I still had a great deal of patriotism and loyalty to the uniform, the old esprit de corps—rather than indulging myself with the obvious sort of feather-boa negligee and gold-lamé mules drag outfit—then maybe instead of booting me out, they’d open the door politely and escort me out like an officer and a lady.

Swanson, one of my shipmates, could sew as well as a girl. He was also a beer addict. He’d do anything for a bottle of beer.

In North Africa, Gibraltar, Malta, Corsica, Sicily—wherever we made port—they had given us chits that entitled us to so much beer. I didn’t drink beer, and I saved all my chits. Along with these—I won some gambling, and I also received quite a few for standing watch for different guys—I had enough beer chits to play Scrooge at an AA Christmas show.

I gave my chits to Swanson, and his fingers flew to the task. The way he threw himself into his work made me wonder about him. With the pleats, the shields, everything, he made me a lieutenant.

For a while it was just scuttlebutt that a WAVE was seen promenading forward at the fo’c’sle during the midnight watch. A number of guys who saw it didn’t report it out of fear that they’d be given a Section 8 themselves. Finally one night I was doing my nautical Lady Macbeth when four guys, including the chief master-at-arms, jumped me.

I yelled, “Masher!”

Four naval psychiatrists worked over me at Newport Naval Hospital.

first officer: “Lenny, have you ever actively engaged in any homosexual practice?”

lenny: “No, sir.”

(An “active” homosexual is one who does the doing, and the “passive” is one who just lies back. In other words, if you were a kid and you were hitchhiking and some faggot came on with you and you let him do whatever his “do” was, he was an “active” homosexual because he performed a sexual act with someone of the same sex, and you are a “passive” homosexual if you allowed any of this to happen. You’ll never see this in an AAA driving manual, but that’s the way it is.)

second officer: “Do you enjoy the company of women?”

lenny: “Yes, sir.”

third officer: “Do you enjoy having intercourse with women?”

lenny: “Yes, sir.”

fourth officer: “Do you enjoy wearing women’s clothing?”

lenny: “Sometimes.”

all four: “When is that?”

lenny: “When they fit.”

I stuck to my story, and they finally gave up. Only, it didn’t work out the way I had figured it. They drew up an undesirable discharge.

At the last minute, though (this does sound like a fairy story, doesn’t it?), the Red Cross sent an attorney who reviewed the case and saw that the whole thing was ridiculous. There were no charges against me. The entire division was questioned, and when it was ascertained that I had a good credit rating in virility—based upon paid-up accounts in numerous Neapolitan bordellos—I received an honorable discharge.

So everything worked out all right, except that they took away my WAVE’S uniform. It bugged me because I wanted to have it as a sort of keepsake of the War. I wouldn’t ever wear it, naturally—except maybe on Halloween.