Don DeLillo - Underworld

"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 Actor's 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.