Don DeLillo - Underworld

Lenny Bruce in concert.

" New York, New York. We say it twice. Once to entice them to leave Kansas. And once more over their grave."

They heaved in their seats.

" New York, New York . Like a priest doing his Latin gig. Mumbo jumbo, mumbo jumbo. He says it twice because he's talking about shit, piss and corruption and he wants to be sure you understand."

His people were here, the A amp;R guys from the Brill Building, the fellow comics who worked toilets all over Jersey, the actors and would-be actors and actor-waiters and cabdrivers with equity cards. The balding men from the Upper West Side were here, with shaggy sidelocks and intimations of suffering, and the women were with them- frizzy , lippy, opinionated, with full bodies and big rich real faces and a brassy way of laughing.

Lenny wore a white slim-line suit, well-pressed, and a puce pimp shirt with a roll collar, like a man trying to remind himself he is indestructible.

It was midnight in a driving rain but they were all here, musicians and folkies, writers for the high-dome journals, a selection of people with wasted chalk faces and needle lesions under their clothes and there were a fair number of disembodied others just finished smoking some DMT, the quick-acting chemical superhigh devised by NASA to get us to the moon and back whether we want to go or not.

He looked up and down and around.

"What a crazy nerve-wracked morbid week. We're all drained. We were minutes from being fireballed. But now, but now, but now."

He looked past the slender columns into the depths of the third tier and then up at the faces hanging over the balustrade at the top of the house, young people glowing slightly in the overspill from spotlights placed high on the side walls.

" We're not gonna die !"

He did a minstrel dance step, mouth wide, hand high, fingers spread, and stood there laughing a while.

"Yes, they saved us. All the Ivy League men in those striped suits and ribbed black socks that go all the way to the knee so when they cross their legs on TV we don't see a patch of spooky white flesh between the sock and the pants cuff. It's so vulnerable, dig, that strip of pale skin. The legs of powerful men tend to be hairless, which makes them feel secretly weak and effeminate, so they make sure they're wearing high enough socks. Garters are a tricky business for exactly this reason. No, yes, they saved us. They did it. Russians agree to remove missiles and end construction of missile bases in Cuba. Khrushchev is retching in his latkes. He's taking hot baths to relax. Like a plastic pouch of corn coming to a boil."

Lenny's teenage fanatics were here, kids from Brooklyn and Queens who did his bits word for word, memorizing off his albums but more religiously from the rare tapes slyly recorded by traffickers in contraband goods. And Bronx boys who lope along the Grand Concourse to catch every foreign flick at the Ascot, hoping for a glimpse of titty- Lenny was their diamond cutter, their cool doomed master of uncommon truth.

"They saved us in their horn-rimmed glasses and commonsense haircuts. They got their training for the missile crisis at a thousand dinner parties. Where it's at, man. This is the summit of Western civilization. Not the art in the shlocky museums or the books in the libraries where bums off the street infest the men's rooms. Forget all that. Forget the playing fields of Eton. It's the seating plan at dinner. That's where we won. Because they toughed it out. Because they were tested in the cruelest setting of all. Where tremendous forces come into play and crucial events unfold. Dinner parties, dig it, in the Northeast corridor. Your mother used to say, Mix, sweetheart. There was anxiety, a little hidden terror in her voice. Because she knew. Mix or die. And that's why we won. Because these men were named and raised for this moment. Yes, tested at a thousand formative dinners. It started in adolescence. Seated next to adults, total strangers, and forced to make conversation. What a sadistic thing to tell a kid. Make conversation . Some could not do it. Some broke down and were sent to forestry school, They smoked roots and leaves and grew facial hair. They developed involved relationships with animals. But others. The others. The others masturbated to marching songs and married their second cousins and grew strong and dominant. You know they're powerful men when their wives play bridge with the curtains drawn. The sunlight gives them migraines. They twist their handkerchiefs when they talk. Remember how your aunt Tovah would sit twisting her hanky. Stand up straight, she'd say. Talk to people, she'd say Try For me, sweetheart."

Through the long night, too long, three solid hours nonstop, too long because it has to be too long, they've just survived a crisis and need to be intemperate, and too long because Lenny just can't stop, he looks up from under the proscenium arch and sees the ornamented ceiling and the gilded rows of boxes and he knows this is the temple of Casals and Heifetz and Toscanini and it gives him a mainline jolt, and too long because he's been running on scared fumes all week and he feels revived, alive, ready to wail the night away

The disc jockeys were here, guys who did late-night jazz in voices of smoky innuendo. Celebrities were spaced through the orchestra, called the Parquet with a capital P Mixed-race couples were here, displaying a honed nonchalance. People bored with ordinary comedy People who wanted to be challenged and attacked, who wanted to hear their well-meaning sentiments exposed as so much liberal dinner prattle.

Lenny screwed the mike off the stand and blessed them all.

"Lemme tell you the untold story of the week. The President called the Pope." A stir of anticipation. But it puts him off-he's not in the mood for popes tonight. "Yeah, they were in secret communication all week long. Never mind all that separation of church and state crap. They stick together, these crossbacks." Popes are automatically funny-they don't need Lenny to dignify their shtick. "The Pope's got submarines, you know. Justa say the word, Johnny, I send. We nihi-late them sonna ma bitches. Your Holiness, I'm astonished, man. You have your own fleet of subs?"

Lenny lost interest. He swerved into sermons and admonitions, streams of rumination on patriotism, communism, the income tax and women who insert cigarettes in their pussies and blow perfect smoke rings. And when he said something funny or produced an occasional zing of insight, and they applauded, he said, No, don't, please- lemme fly on my own.

"I've always known. I've known since childhood. I'm as corrupt as they are. I grew up here. The police are crooked and so am I. The politicians lie and I lie worse. I wanna kill myself on television so people can go to sleep with the face of a dead sinner on the rim of their eyeballs."

They saw the lounge lizard with bedroom eyes. They saw and heard the frisky kid with the adenoidal voice, the boy who wants to make his mother laugh. They heard the frantic talker who chases after his own discontinuous ideas. They saw the zonked layabout, all lassitude and spent attention span. They heard the crusader for dirty words, the social philosopher, the self-styled lawyer, the self-critical Jew, the Christian moralizer and the commentator on race.

"I flew in from Miami last night and took a taxi direct to the Apollo Theater, where I met up with some friends for the late show because I love that scene, and we came out after the show and I've got a suitcase and a garment bag and it's late and it's cold and we can't find a cab because cabs don't go to Harlem and so we start wandering, dig, and we come across an old man on a corner doing a rap for three people. He's about a hundred years old and he's preaching to three sorry souls and it's like Hyde Park Corner only in blackface."