Underworld (73 page)

“The cuff.”

“The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That's the counter.”

“That's the counter.”

“And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That's the quarter.”

“The quarter,” I said.

“And the strip above the sole. That's the welt. Say it, boy.”

“The welt.”

“How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don't know what they're called. What's the frontal area that covers the instep?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know. It's called the vamp.”

“The vamp.”

“Say it.”

“The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn't supposed to memorize.”

“Don't memorize ideas. And don't take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?”

“This I should know.”

“Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue.”

“I can't think of the word. Eyelet.”

“Maybe I'll let you live after all.”

“The eyelets.”

“Yes. And the metal sheath at each end of the lace.”

He flicked the thing with his middle finger.

“This I don't know in a million years.”

“The aglet.”

“Not in a million years.”

“The tag or aglet.”

“The aglet,” I said.

“And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We're doing the physics of language, Shay.”

“The little ring.”

“You see it?”

“Yes.”

“This is the grommet,” he said.

“Oh man.”

“The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it.”

“I'm going out of my mind.”

“This is the final arcane knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs—a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?”

“I don't know.”

“A last.”

“My head is breaking apart.”

“Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren't important, we wouldn't use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it,” he said.

“Quotidian.”

“An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”

His white collar hung loose below his adam's apple and the skin at his throat was going slack and ropy and it seemed to be catching him unprepared, old age, coming late but fast.

I put on my jacket.

“I meant to bring along a book for you,” he said.

His hands were still young, though, a soft chalky baby blush. There was a chessboard on a table in a corner, opposing pieces marshaled.

“Come to Upper Red tomorrow and I'll dig it out for you.”

Upper Red was the faculty residence. They named the buildings at Voyageur after local landmarks—lakes, towns, rivers, forests. Not after saints, theologians or Jesuit martyrs. The Jesuits, according to Paulus, had been treated so brusquely in so many places for their attempts to convert and transform, decapitated in Japan, disemboweled in the Horn of Africa, eaten alive in North America, crucified in Siam, drawn and quartered in England, thrown into the ocean off Madagascar, that the founders of our little experimental college thought they'd spare the landscape some of the bloodier emblems of the order's history.

“By the bye, Shay.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did I see you in that little group yesterday signing a petition in support of Senator McCarthy?”

“I was there, yes, Father.”

“Signing a petition.”

“It seemed okay,” I said.

He nodded, looking past me.

“Do you know why the Senate condemned him?”

“The others were signing,” I said. “Some of the South Americans,” I said a little desperately, knowing how stupid this sounded but thinking, somehow, this was the way to exonerate myself.

“So you signed. The others were shitting, Father. So I shat.”

He looked past me, nodding reasonably, and I turned and left.

I walked back and forth across the parade in the blowing snow. Then I went to my room and threw off my jacket. I wanted to look up words. I took off my boots and wrung out my cap over the washbasin. I wanted to look up words. I wanted to look up velleity and quotidian and memorize the fuckers for all time, spell them, learn them, pronounce them syllable by syllable—vocalize, phonate, utter the sounds, say the words for all they're worth.

This is the only way in the world you can escape the things that made you.

They arrived in the rain, a young crowd except for the columnists from the Chronicle and Examiner and a couple of graybeard poets from City Lights, and they waited for Lenny Bruce to come out onstage.

This was Basin Street West and the small stage had a backdrop of fake fieldstone. The wall was supposed to suggest a homey atmosphere but it resembled a mass of ugly bulging rock and it made the club seem dungeonlike or bunkeresque.

They sat there and waited for Lenny, the jazz musicians emitting a faint reek of weed, a few monosyllabic chicks in existential black, the clean-cut college boys with secret deviant tastes, the entire staff of a little magazine called Polyester Wok, five righteous souls whose anger at the world was being undermined by the events of the past few days.

Suddenly Lenny was there, without an intro, slipping into the spotlight and beginning to talk before he'd even lifted the mike from the stand.

“They're evacuating Norfolk, Virginia. You know about this? Norfolk. The huge naval base where ships have been setting out, destroyers, cruisers, to form the blockade. They're evacuating dependents and all nonessential personnel. The question is,” and he turned his head sideways so he could look at the audience obliquely with a sly sense of put-on. “Who moves in when they move out? That's right—there goes the neighborhood. Because all the spade undesirables from three hundred miles around are gonna snatch up those houses and ruin real estate values and the Navy's gonna say, Fuck it, man, never mind the Russian subs and cargo ships, let's aim our guns at Norfolk.”

Lenny looked a little bloated tonight, his face puff-pastry white and an extracurricular jitter in his body lingo.

“Everything is real estate. You're a product of your geography. If you're a Catholic from New York, you're a Jew. If you're a Jew from Butte, Montana, you're a totally goyish concoction. You're like instant mashed potatoes. And that's what this crisis is all about, incidentally. Instant mashed potatoes. The whole technology, man, of instant and quick, because we don't have the attention span for normal wars anymore,
and in the movie version it's Rod Steiger playing Khrushchev as an Actors Studio chief of state. Dig it, he's deep, he's misunderstood, he's got the accent down pat, the shaved head, he does the screaming fits, he does the motivation—lonely boy from the coal pits ruthlessly fights his way to the top but all he's really looking for is a wisecracking dame who'll give him some back talk and make him laugh once in a while. This is no bumpkin—half man, half sausage. Steiger plays him as a moody and sensitive loner burdened by the whole mishegaas of Russian history. We see his tender feminine side when he has an affair in a coat closet with an American double agent played by Kim Novak in a butch haircut.”

Lenny did the voices, the accents. He was not technically sound but mixed in whole cultures and geographies and cross-references to convey the layers of impersonation involved.

There was a beatnik element in the audience, several postbeats in old checked lumberjackets vintage 1950, men with a kind of distance in their gazes but still alert to signs of marvels astir in the universe, and a woman in a patchwork shirt with a baby in a pouch, probably the first and last infant at one of Lenny's shows but this was San Francisco in the week that was.

“Kennedy makes an appearance in public and you hear people say, I saw his hair! Or, I saw his teeth! The spectacle's so dazzling they can't take it all in. I saw his hair! They're venerating the sacred relics while the guy's still alive.”

In the beatnik canon it was America's sickness that had produced the bomb. If the beats were receptive to Lenny's take on hypocrisy and related matters and if they regretted his drug busts and obscenity trials, they were probably unmoved by the Russian accents and other ethnic riffs and bits that came shpritzing out of him like seltzer from an old bottling plant in Canarsie. The whole beat landscape was bomb-shadowed. It always had been. The beats didn't need a missile crisis to make them think about the bomb. The bomb was their handiest reference to the moral squalor of America, the guilty place of smokestacks and robot corporations, Time-magazined and J. Edgar Hoovered, where people sat hunched over cups of coffee in a thousand rainswept truck stops on the jazz prairie, secret Trotskyites and
sad nymphomaniacs with Buddhist pussies—things Lenny made fun of. Lenny was showbiz, he was suited and groomed and cool and corrupt, the mortician-comic, and the bomb was part of a scary ad campaign that had gotten out of hand.

He was wearing a Nehru jacket tonight, a dark tunic with a high collar, it needed cleaning and pressing, and he had a white raincoat draped over his shoulders—either he'd forgotten to take it off or he was planning to get out of here in a hurry.

He began an impressionistic ramble. Hard to follow. About court cases, lawyers and judges. Like listening to someone who thought he was talking to someone else.

Then he broke off and said, “Love me. That's what I'm here for. Tonight and every night. Stop loving me, I die.”

This was not a bit. The bit followed this. It was a bit he'd thought up sitting in the plastic pygmy toilet on the flight from L.A. with a red light near his right eyeball flashing
Return to seat Return to seat.

“The archangel Gabriel appears in the sky over Havana. Bodyguards wake up Castro and he tells them, Lemme alone, and they tell him it's the messenger of God, and he gets in a helicopter and goes up there. The angel's wearing a white robe and he's holding a flaming trumpet and Castro's intrigued when he sees that Gabriel's a black man. He thinks, Great, an articulate Negro, we can have a real no-bullshit dialogue. He says to the angel, I don't believe in God but lemme ask you. Whose side are you on in this crisis? And the angel says, I'm only gonna say this once. The side that has baseball and jazz. Castro says, We have baseball and jazz. We call it Afro-Cuban music and you'd dig it, man. Swings like crazy. And Gabriel says, Don't patronize me, motherfucker. I blew with Bird, you know. Yeah, we jammed together at Minton's in the old days. Okay, you wanna know which side I'm on. The side that has mom and apple pie. Castro says, No problema. The Russians have mom and apple pie. They call it
yablochy pirog.
The angel says, Okay, you so smart, the side that has Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and the Mafia. And Castro says, Damn we threw the Mafia out of Cuba. But how come you're siding with them? The angel says, Lawd Jesus has a soft spot for the mob. Castro says, How come? The angel says, What you think, man? He's Italian.
Castro says, Wait a minute. Jesus is Italian? The angel says, Well—ain't he? And he looks a little uncertain. He starts shaking the spittle off the mouthpiece of his trumpet, a thing Gabe does whenever he's insecure. He's very touchy about his education. He says a little defensively, All the popes are wops. Everybody knows this, man. This because Jesus a wop. Jesus a guinea from the word go. Check his complexion, Jim. Castro says, Jesus lived in the Middle East. Gabriel says, You must be crazy, telling me shit like that. The cat's Neapolitan. Talks with his hands. Castro says, He was a Jew if you wanna know the truth. The angel says, I know he was a Jew—an Italian Jew. They have them, don't they? And Castro says, Why am I standing here listening to this? You're totally loco, man. And the angel says, Are you telling me I believed all my life that Jesus changed water into wine at an Italian wedding—and he
didn't.”

Lenny did this bit a little distractedly, slurring lines here and there, but isn't that what he always did, wasn't that part of the whole hipster format—a kind of otherworldly dope-driven fugue.

“I saw his hair! I saw his teeth!”

Then he remembered the line he'd come to love. He went into a semicrouch and put the raincoat over his head and practically stuck the mike down his throat.

“We're all gonna die!”

Yes, he loved saying this, crying it out, it was wondrously refreshing, it purified his fear and made it public at the same time—it was weak and sick and cowardly and powerless and pathetic and also noble somehow, a long, loud and feelingly high-pitched cry of grief and pain that had an element of sweet defiance.

And his voice sent a weird thrill shooting through the audience. They felt the cry physically. It leaped in their blood and bonded them. This was the revolt of the psyche, an idlike wail from their own souls, the desperate buried place where you demand recognition of primitive rights and needs.

Then he gets an idea and flicks it straight out, like a boxer jabbing so well it brings a grin to his face.

“But maybe some of us are more powerless than others. It's a white bomb, dig.” And his voice changes here, goes redneck and drawly. “It's
our bomb. Moscow and Washington. Think about it, man. White people control this bomb.”

The idea delights him.

“You look down at Watts. You look up at Harlem. And you say, Fuck with our chicks, man, we drop the bomb. Better end the world than mix the races.”

He goes into a bopster's finger-snapping slouch.

“Because we'd rather kill everybody than share our women.”