Underworld (78 page)

“Enjoy your dance, Junior?”

“I think I know who they are.”

“Didn't you say that last time we were in here?”

“A group little seen and less known. Campus demonstrations mostly. No one, and this is odd.”

“What?” the Boss barked.

“No one in Internal Security has come up with a name for the group. They've been known to act out protests, playing all the roles, even the police. Turn around.”

“Find the links. It's all linked. The war protesters, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair.”

“There's some dandruff on your jacket,” Clyde said.

Men entered and left, carrying a single sullen murmur in and out of the tiled room. They unzipped and peed. They urinated into mounds of crushed ice garnished with lemon wedges. They unzipped and zipped. They peed, they waggled and they zipped.

Edgar stood before the mirrors, still masked, and the sight of him prompted Clyde to think of the secret garden behind the Director's house, a sector fenced away from neighbors and never shown to guests, where statues of nude young men rose from fountains or stood draped in fall-flaming vines. Less titillating than inspirational, Clyde believed. This was the male form as Edgar's idealized double. A role livingly filled by Clyde. At least it used to be that way in the days when Edgar would stealthily tilt a mirror so he could lie in bed and watch Junior doing push-ups in the adjoining room.

That was 1939 in Miami Beach. This was 1966 in New York and we are living in muddle and shock.

He'd let that girl charm and tempt him, and he'd liked it, and he'd been disappointed when she slipped away before the kiss, and he'd been played for a fool in the oldest way—that radical enravishing self-possessed heartless come-hither bitch.

Back in the ballroom half the guests were gone. The rest measured out the time so their departure would not seem influenced by the spectacle, the protest, whatever it was—the mockery of their sleek and precious evening.

The society band played some danceable numbers but nobody wanted to dance anymore. Edgar and Clyde sat drinking with a putty-colored man in smoked glasses and his overmasked wife—satin wings, coq feathers and embedded diamonds.

Possibly Mafia, Clyde surmised.

Edgar would not speak to anyone. He sat, drank and hated. He had the sheen of Last Things in his eye. Clyde knew this look. It meant the Director was meditating on his coffin. It gave him dark solace, planning the details of his interment. A lead-lined coffin of one thousand pounds plus. To protect his body from worms, germs, moles, voles and
vandals. They were planning to steal his garbage, so why not his corpse? Lead-lined, yes, to keep him safe from nuclear war, from the Ravage and Decay of radiation fallout.

And when he died, whatever the circumstances, they would suddenly, all those elements that despised his unchecked power—they would invert their distrust and begin to float rumors that the Director himself was the victim of a wry homicide planned and carried out by unknown parties in the vast and layered webwork of the state.

This is how the Boss would finally draw some sympathy, an old man put to sleep in a complex scheme so expedient and deceitful as to be widely admired even as it was only half believed. And Clyde himself was already prepared to half believe it.

Edgar dead, pray God, not for ten, fifteen, twenty years yet.

Maybe the sixties would be over by then.

The woman in the gaudy mask said, “You think they'll be waiting outside, those creeps, to make me miserable all over again?”

The husband said, “It's nearly four a.m. Hey. They gotta sleep sometime.”

At four a.m. they were waiting outside. Clyde and Edgar watched from the lobby. The last partygoers straggled out and the protesters rasped and chanted, wearing children's masks again.

An hour later it finally ended. Edgar and Clyde left by the main entrance and went down to the Cadillac as the spent trash of a day and a night in a great coastal city went wind-skidding through the streets.

The armored limousine rolled slowly back to the Waldorf.

Yes, the Director would finally get some sympathy from the same people who made jokes about them both. Smutty swishy jokes. But Edgar and Clyde were not a couple of old queens doddering on. They were men of sovereign authority. And Edgar did not intend to yield control anytime on this earth.

Clyde spotted the bug.

He glanced at Edgar, who sat mute and brooding in his sequined mask. He'd worn the mask steadily since dinner. Hard, cold, laconic, with all the private fury of some unassuageable pain, he wore the leather mask because it eased, if only briefly, the burden of control.

And when Clyde spotted the bug, the poky little Volkswagen with its incandescent doodles and whorls, he decided to say nothing to Edgar. The car was a hundred feet behind them, like a day-glo roach, slow and sleepless and clinging.

He said nothing to the Boss because the night had been filled with shock and distress and he wanted to absorb this final bodeful moment on his own. He was Junior after all, now and always, willingly, necessarily, however tired and befooled, the life companion and loyal second man.

This was Thursday. They'd first felt the full impact of the danger on Monday evening when the President addressed the nation on radio and television. On Tuesday they were told that Soviet ships were en route to Cuba with missiles and warheads to add to the number already installed on the island. Wednesday was tense. On Wednesday they found out that our naval blockade was in effect and that fourteen Soviet ships were nearing the quarantine line.

Now it was Thursday. On Thursday evening as SAC bombers carrying thermonuclear weapons circled the Med or flew Arctic routes across Greenland or hugged the western borders of North America, people rode home from work with the radio on or the newspaper up in their eyes.

And with darkness webbing down out of the broad and soaring sky over the lake, deeper into evening now, the night people were out, slipping past the bars and tonky clubs, mingling with tourists and conventioneers who were checking out the action. On the fringe streets
they sidestepped taxis on the prowl and veered around the traffic of negotiated vice and they made their way to Rush Street, finally, where Mister Kelly's stood, a big-name room in Chicago's bouncing night.

Lenny Bruce came slouching down from the second-floor dressing room and walked a little bleary-eyed through the kitchen and out the swinging doors, where he did a sidle step onto the stage.

A waiter with a tray said, “It's a human zoo out there tonight.”

Fifteen minutes into his act Lenny took a condom out of his pocket and tried to fit it over his furrowed tongue. Then he tried to talk through it, or out of it. Finally he dangled the item between his thumb and index finger, holding it away from his body, specimenlike—it's a dead jellyfish that has the reflex power to deliver one last spasmic sting.

“I can be arrested in twenty-three states for waving this thing in public. You're thinking, Sure in the Bible belt. Actually I'm safe in the Bible belt because they don't know what this is. They put Saran Wrap on their dicks.”

He shook his hands hallelujah and took a stagger step back.

“I swear I saw it in Time magazine. You get a box of Saran Wrap and you tear off as much as you need for your particular endowment.”

The word endowment got a bigger response than Saran Wrap or Time magazine.

“Leftover meatloaf.”

He did his hipster crack-up laugh, bending from the waist like some Hassid at serious prayer. There were a few people in the audience, two, three, four people going small and tight in their seats.

“Saran Wrap. It sounds interplanetary. Picture it. A little town somewhere in America. A housewife pins laundry on a line. White and Negro children play peacefully in a schoolyard. Apple pies are cooling on kitchen windowsills. Suddenly a deathly stillness. People pause in midmotion. A dog named Skipper hides under the porch steps. Then a blinding flash. It's a visit from outer space. Creatures from the planet Saran. They're very thin and sort of filmy looking. They say to the leaders of Earth, Take this new material we've just invented and test it on yourselves, because frankly we're afraid to.”

Lenny's heavy lids began to lower slowly as he changed the scene.

“It's a documented thing, farm boys and ranch hands taking strips of Saran Wrap with them when they go on dates. There are teams of sociologists doing fieldwork on this matter. Not to mention admen on the Dow Chemical account, which is the company that makes the stuff, and they're looking to position their product as a food wrap
and
a scumbag, if only they could devise a diplomatic language. Ad biggies on Madison Avenue. Let's do a nice old country doctor in a lab coat. Sitting in his rustic office pulling Saran Wrap off the chicken sandwich his wife packed for his lunch and he drapes the wrap absent-mindedly around his finger. Talking about freshness and protection. Maybe sneaking in a word about overpopulation. And the admen get excited by the idea. Let's run it up the flagpole blah blah blah. It's nearly subliminal, dig?”

Lenny whirls and points at some phantom confederate in the wings. In fact there are no wings—just walls and doors.

He tried to fit the condom over his tongue again.

“Never underestimate the power of language. I carry a rubber with me at all times because I don't want to inseminate someone by schmoozing with her. Some innocent teenage girl asks for directions to State Street.
Zap.
A virgin birth.”

A small commotion in the middle of the room—could be some walkouts or maybe just a waiter and some noisy plates. The waiters are supposed to work quietly during performances but this was a hungry bunch of trenchermen who made a racket when they ate, gorging on sirloins, barbecued ribs, lobster tails, spaghetti and chicken livers, and more or less thrashing their way through a Mister Kelly specialty, the green goddess salad.

Lenny said, “Love me unconditionally or I die. These are the terms of our engagement.”

Kelly's was jam-packed tonight, well over the legal limit of a hundred and sixty, and they were sitting, standing and stacked ten deep at the fire exit. And they were loud, they bawled and lowed like beef on the hoof, men on business trips with dilated veins throbbing at their temples, a group of touring usherettes from the Far West, half expecting to encounter themselves in one of Lenny's bits, and look at the heavyset men in big suits with star sapphires on their pinky fingers, in from the
mobster suburbs with lapels so wide they do semaphores when the wind blows. And a table filled with developers chewing on Cuban cigars—a bachelor night on the town. And sophisticated women digging the weird insides of one man's psyche. And a couple of butterball college professors looking for some belly laughs, idea men from the humanistic enclave. And Hugh Hefner and a cluster of Playboy models, aspiring centerfolds on leave from the Mansion, tall, young, fair and so flawlessly complexioned they seem to be airbrushed. And Hef with his dirty paternal smile steel-seamed around a briar pipe.

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 still 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 sixty-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.”

Then he paused thoughtfully, appearing to remember something. He stuck the rubber in his pocket, absently—he was wearing the same Nehru jacket he'd sported in San Francisco, his Hindu statesman number, and the thing was rutted and crushed by now, resembling some wadded discard plucked from the gutter. He also wore a large medal on a chain, an accessory to the Nehru. You got the medal for wearing the jacket.

Yes, he was remembering something heavy and dense. Despite his weeklong anxiety over the missile crisis, the blackout at Basin Street West, the endless bulletins issuing from every surface in the landscape, a network ranging from TV monitors in airport boarding areas to blind newsies selling tabloids on street corners, yes, whatever the level of Lenny's unease—
the nuclear showdown had slipped his mind.

Better believe it. Their ships are approaching our blockade.