Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

From DeLillo's Underworld:

Walkouts in progress—an old story of course on the Lenny Bruce circuit. Two women and a man offended by the sight of a guy sticking his tongue in a Trojan.

Lenny spotted them and fixed on the woman bringing up the rear. Big-boned, let’s say, and able-bodied.

“Look who’s splitting the scene. You know who that is, don’t you? You can recognize her from the wanted posters. Josef Mengele’s head nurse. Up from Argentina on a budget tour.” Pause a beat. “She’s doing the stockyards, the prisons and the morgue.” Pause a beat. "When she was active, they called her Attila the Huness.”

Who else was in the room? Second City comics here to idolize the super sicko. Jazz writers and theater people. Some porko politicos and their rosary-bead wives—they’re here under the impression that Lenny’s an Italian crooner whose real name runs to eleven syllables and carries a serious curse.

Who else? A number of Cook County vice cops scattered through the room with notebooks and tape machines, sucking up every arraignable word.

Lenny was still hectoring the walkouts.

“Make room, make room. They got a flight to Buenos Aires in ten minutes. Eichmann Air. The stews wear striped pajamas.”

Those were the terms of Lenny’s act. If you didn’t like the bits he did, you were a mass murderer. Or you were the Polio Mother of the Year 1952 or the subject of a brief improvised bit, which he now performed, on the flashing light in airliner toilets, a recent obsession of his.

Return to seat Return to seat Return to seat.

Lenny once had a six-party walkout in New York. An entire Grey Line bus tour just upped and fled. Angelo the maitre d’ looked at Lenny and said, You gotta talk dirty? Who’s gonna make up the tips, you fuck?

Lenny licked and rubbed the condom. He fingered it, twirled it, snapped it.

“I just realized. This is what the twentieth century feels like.”

(See also Lenny, o'course)

Comments

[TEV]

Certainly the right choice given the date, but I've always felt the Lenny Bruce chapters were the weakest parts of Underworld (a book I pretty much adore in the main ... )

[Rake]

Ah, then we must agree to disagree (while both pretty much adoring Underworld).

At any rate, it was nice, while typing this passage out, to be back with Don D. in his limpid 'n' accessible days. The man can really write, at times.

[TEV]

Yes, he can. I still remember reading the prologue nearly in its entirety standing in the Powells bookstore in Portland Airport. My flight had been delayed and had time to kill. Hey, I even liked parts of The Body Artist, though I know I'm in the minority there ...