Last Words Read online

  We didn’t plan it. We were in New Orleans for the World Series and the Yankees won. Celebrations followed and a few hours later Brenda got pregnant. (She was positive, she said.) We went back to Chicago, where I was working at the Playboy Club—appropriately enough—and took the bunny test. Sure enough, the rabbit died.

  Brenda had a great pregnancy and in her seventh month went home to Dayton to have the baby. Her parents picked her up at the airport and her mother weighed about eighty pounds. Brenda freaked. Her dad said nothing and seemed to know nothing. So Brenda drove straight to the family doctor: “What the hell is happening with my mother?”

  He said, “She’s dying of cancer.” He hadn’t told anybody, not her father or her younger sister, nobody. And Brenda’s mother was the sort of person who never shared anything with anyone. But she only had weeks to live. The poor woman really wanted to see our baby—she decorated a complete nursery for her, trimmed a bassinet and made a special bedspread and baby clothes. A little palace for the baby. But her dream was not to be. She slipped into a diabetic coma not long after and in a day was gone.

  As Brenda’s mother was dying, our child was born. A daughter. We named her Kelly.

  Now we were three. And broke. And homeless. We moved back to 121st Street and I borrowed money from anyone I could, old friends from the neighborhood, Mort Sahl, my mother, anyone. I had a running debit balance with Doug, a pal from the old days. I remember sitting with him on a bench in the median of Broadway at 122nd Street once, relaxing with a six-pack and a couple of joints. I owed Doug six hundred dollars but I needed a sum in four figures. I made him an offer: you lend me X dollars to get to whatever the target sum was, I’ll give you a percentage of my future earnings in perpetuity. He said okay—and never held me to it.

  My mother, on the other hand, had a fucking list: “That telegram when I wired you fifty dollars in Chicago? The telegram was $2.50. So that’s $52.50.” I would say: “What about those sneakers you got me in fourth grade? Where does being a parent end and becoming a loan shark begin?”

  March 1963—when Brenda was six months pregnant with Kelly—was a turning point. I’d just played a pot-and-coffee place called the House of Pegasus in Fort Lauderdale and run into a group of New Yorkers, some of whom later became the group Spanky and Our Gang. I’d smoked enough pot with them that I’d reached a resolve, a crossroads. The way I put it to Brenda was, “I have to take a stand. We’ve got to live or die in New York. I can’t keep going out to nowhere places, playing to people who have nothing to do with where I ought to be heading. I’ve got to find somewhere I can work things out.” Though it risked cutting us off from what little income we had, she supported me totally. And I began to have a powerful feeling of things inside me developing. Just like her, in fact. Perhaps it was creative couvade syndrome.

  At the time, the only way for struggling comics to be seen was something called a hoot. “Hoot” was short for “hootenanny,” originally an impromptu concert of folk music, but which had evolved into a version of amateur night where all kinds of aspiring entertainers could strut their stuff—not just singers, musicians and comics, but jugglers, dancers, magicians.

  That March, I did my first hoot at the Cafe Wha?—a hole-in-the-wall off Bleecker—and another the next night at the Bitter End on Bleecker itself. Nothing. A few nights later I auditioned at the Village Vanguard, a venerable old jazz joint in the West Village. Still nothing. Next month I did the same circuit, and at the Bitter End hoot, Howie Solomon caught me. Howie owned a new, quite large coffeehouse-style club across Bleecker Street called the Cafe Au Go Go.

  The Go Go was well on its way to becoming the epicenter of everything people now remember Bleecker Street—and by extension the Village—to have been in the sixties. Stan Getz recorded his Au Go Go album there, other jazz giants like MJQ and Nina Simone played it. Mort Sahl was a regular. Steve Stills got his start as a solo, as did many other folkies who later crossed over to rock. Howie covered the field and he offered me exactly the kind of deal I was looking for: an open-ended arrangement to be a regular when the mike was open, two nights here, four nights there, drop by of an evening if you’re downtown. He’d offered the same deal to a number of young musicians but to only one other comic, a guy three years my junior named Richard Pryor.

  The Go Go became my home-court advantage. I still took jobs outside New York—I wasn’t turning down money—but I had made my stand. Now I had a place to stand as well, a laboratory in the very heart of what would soon be the counterculture. An audience not only open to material that contained some ideas, some risk, but outsiders by instinct or choice who didn’t accept received values, who resisted convention, who felt alienation from the smug certainties of middle-class Middle America. And who in a few short months would add to this potent mix a smoldering rage …

  When Kennedy came on the scene, I identified closely with the youthful Irish Catholic man of ideas. He wasn’t my class but he was my tribe. A politician, yes; but like a lot of my contemporaries, I wasn’t old enough yet to have been disappointed. With him a new beginning seemed possible, a chance for ideas to be advanced that took into account how people felt and lived, how the world treated them. A slow but sure march toward more concern about people and less about property. The black struggle was the most visible and emotional example of it, but Kennedy’s promise included much else, explicitly and implicitly, about people who had been ignored or marginalized in the rush to the fifties’ consumer paradise.

  During the Kennedy years, I found my political values. Or rather I found political ideas that matched the feelings of an individual who was not organized politically.

  My Kennedy impressions were affectionate. I continued to do JFK through these years but my ear gave me as much pleasure as satirizing him. Though I have this other alien creature inside that wants to get out, most of me is just pure hambone-entertainer child-showoff. And I had this favorite phrase of Kennedy’s: “We will low-ur the quo-tah of sug-ah from Cu-ber.” I loved that because in a nine-word sentence I got to use two intrusive r’s and leave off two final r’s. Flashy word shit. My claim to fame.

  Like most people, I remember where I was when the assassination happened and what I was doing. I was walking my baby daughter on 110th and Broadway in the very fancy pram Mary had bought her. There was a blind man’s news kiosk on the corner. I went to buy the newspaper but he didn’t hand me one. He just said, “You hear about the president? The president has been shot down in Dallas.”

  I went into Rexall’s or Liggett’s or some drugstore and called Brenda. I said, “Turn on the television,” and I realized I was crying. It came out as a cry. As a gasp. And yet I hadn’t felt grief before I tried to speak the words to her. Saying the words caused the emotions …

  That’s all I consciously remember. Beyond that, I’m not sure what I felt. I was limited by being very self-absorbed in my career path. I’ve probably done some blocking in all the years. And there was always the marijuana.

  But I was stunned. I don’t know if I was depressed. As far as the Moylan—the community—was concerned, there was great shock that this kind of thing could even happen. In America or anywhere. But the sheer elemental shock of it blocked out or pushed away other, more nuanced emotional reactions that might’ve taken place in its absence. I knew guys who liked Kennedy, guys who didn’t. Obviously there were cultural links: we were all Irish Catholics. But in general they were conservative and Kennedy was a liberal.

  I was down in the Moylan when Oswald got shot, because there was a TV there, and we all saw it. Other than that, as far as I recall the bar functioned normally the weekend of the assassination. The feeling was, “Hey, we’re drinking here and there’s exciting stuff on TV.”

  There was another assassination going on at the time—a slower and more methodical one but in the end just as deadly. One that affected me far more deeply and directly.

  Two years earlier, in 1961, Lenny Bruce had begun to be hit with a series of arrests for obs
cenity in San Francisco, Los Angeles (at three different clubs), Chicago and finally in New York (twice in two weeks) at … the Cafe Au Go Go. The British police also deported him from the UK when he tried to perform in London.

  I guess it would be clinically paranoid to think these were coordinated, but because several ended in acquittal or mistrial (in one case he was illegally tried in absentia) and because he was often arrested while awaiting trial for a previous arrest, it certainly looked like there was some degree of consensus. As if by some kind of bush telegraph, law enforcers across America had agreed that this comic had to be made to shut the fuck up.

  I was there when Lenny was busted in Chicago—in fact I went to jail with him. It was in December 1962 at the Gate of Horn. Bob Carey of the Tarriers, one of my folkie friends, and I were drinking beer upstairs and watching Lenny be his usual genius self. Suddenly a policeman stands up in the audience and says, just like they do on a street corner when someone gets shot or run down and a crowd gathers: “A’right, the show’s over!” He actually said it, not as a metaphor, but as a literal piece of information being transmitted to the audience by someone in authority. “A’right, the show’s over!” Wonderful.

  They hauled Lenny away. Lenny had been busted so often that he always wore his coat during performances so he could leave immediately with the police. (He didn’t want to get separated from that coat; it was a nice piece of cashmere.)

  The cops bust the upstairs bartender too, because he’s serving the people during sets, and they bust the owner, Alan Ribback. Carey and I stay upstairs. Downstairs the cops are trying to close the front door so they can check ID before people leave in case there are minors present. They really wanted to punish the club for having the balls to let Lenny speak free. Eventually they found a girl who was fifteen or sixteen and Alan later got into legal troubles for that. The Gate of Horn was never really the same afterward.

  Carey and I were still drinking—we were pretty juiced—and purposely I arranged to be almost the last going out. The policeman said, “I wanna see your ID.” I said, “I don’t believe in identification. Sorry.” And I tried to give some kind of fucking stupid drunk speech.

  The cop grabbed me by the collar and pants in the old buncheroo fashion and hustled me down the stairs and through the lobby to the front door. As I was passing the bar area, I yelled out: “Brenda, I’m going to jail!” Then it’s out the door with my hands cuffed behind me and into this paddy wagon where Lenny was.

  I knew Lenny not just because he gave Jack and me our break, but because he was a friend of Brenda’s. Whenever we were in the same city on the road, we’d check in with him and he’d always welcome us, especially Brenda “the shiksa.” He was an affectionate and lovable man—even to cops. He always called them “peace officers.”

  He said, “Why you here, man?” I said, “I told them I don’t believe in this shit.” I omitted to mention that it wasn’t a principled First Amendment stand so much as a smart-ass joke.

  Lenny showed me how to work my arms down under my ass and my feet so the handcuffs were in front of me. Somehow that worked. Much better. And off I went to jail with Lenny in a paddy wagon. And even though it began as a drunken joke, the whole affair had a radicalizing effect on me.

  It was only reinforced when Lenny was busted at the Go Go. Not once but twice. I was out of town at the time because when the Go Go had major headliners, the regulars had no opportunity to appear.

  By now it was becoming pretty clear that Lenny wasn’t being arrested for obscenity. He was being arrested for being funny about religion and in particular Catholicism. A lot of big city cops—not just in New York but in Philly, San Fran, Chicago—tend to be Irish Catholic. In addition Lenny’s persecutors had names like Ryan (the judge who tried him in absentia in Chicago), Hogan (the DA who went after him in New York) and Murtagh (the trial judge in New York). Lenny’s Chicago trial began on Ash Wednesday, 1963. In court, judge and jury having just come from Mass, everyone had ash crosses on their foreheads.

  So it probably shouldn’t have blown my mind that the vice squad cop who busted Lenny at the Go Go—the one who wore the wire—grew up in my neighborhood. But it did when I found out in the Moylan a couple weeks later. He was a guy named Randy. I’m immediately thinking, why would Randy do that? He must know what great stuff Lenny’s doing, knocking down this bullshit, seeing through that. Surely any of the guys I grew up with would agree. We were so outside the law, so inconsonant with authority.

  A few days later Randy comes into the Moylan and he has a transcript from the wire he wore. He’s showing it around to the guys: “You gotta see this. Lookit what that foulmouth had to say … A nun’s tit, fecal matter on a crucifix, Pope this, Cardinal that.” And there are universal reactions of outrage. I try to mount a feeble defense of Lenny and they get even more outraged. Now I am truly blown away. Because these are disrespectful guys. They stopped going to Mass when they were twelve, thirteen. Nothing was sacred to them.

  It was the most dramatic evidence I’d had to date that these lines were sharply drawn, the legacy of that Catholic upbringing, that clannish Irish working-class neighborhood ethic was a rigid demarcation. Just because you grew up with a guy and shared A, B, C, D and E with him didn’t mean that on F through Z you wouldn’t be diametrically opposed to each other.

  Twelve days before Lenny died in 1966 Brenda and I went up to his house in Hollywood. We’d just moved there and we wanted to check in just like the old days. He had a beard by then and he was completely immersed in his legal battle; he knew the law incredibly well on the specifics of his cases. He didn’t appear in clubs anymore—the Irish cops and judges had indeed shut him the fuck up. He was just about bankrupt, having spent all his income and intellect trying to vindicate himself. We visited for a while and he was as affectionate and lovable as ever. That was the last time we saw him alive.

  Lenny was one of the very few comics—perhaps the only one—I sought out and felt comfortable hanging with. I never had a circle of friends in the comedy biz. I never went to the delis or coffeeshops after late shows, where people would sit around eating breakfast and riffing till dawn. I always felt alien, not a part of them. Not that I was different or better, I was just apart. They had some common bond that didn’t include or interest me. A competitiveness that I was very uncomfortable with. I wasn’t a compulsive entertainer. I could always think on my feet, but I never was quick around the kind of people who dominate a table. I was a product of ideas, not ad-libs. Later I came to realize the curiousness of choosing to be, and feeling, apart from people and at the same time dying to be accepted. Longing to be accepted, to be asked in. But on my terms.

  I rubbed elbows with some comics—like Richard—but it was rock musicians who shaped my development. John Sebastian, Cass Elliot, Zal Yanovsky, Phil Ochs—all the people in the Village in the midsixties who were forming and reforming into groups like the Mugwumps and Poco. Having had that initiation on Wells Street I felt at ease with them. They were companions, not competitors.

  In the end I was a loner. A loner happy to be alone. I worked alone, I wrote alone. I was sticking to my plan, which I’d nurtured for years. Stage One: radio as a way into show business. Stage Two: become a comedian, like the comedians I’d listened to on the radio as a boy. Stage Three: achieve fame as a comedian and take possession of the ultimate dream: movie stardom. To be Danny Kaye—or Danny Kaye the Second. (Though by now this had shifted in the direction of Jack Lemmon the Second.)

  Stage One of this plan had already worked; there seemed no reason to believe that Stage Two wouldn’t someday succeed also, leading, as inevitably as night follows day, to Stage Three: all Hollywood, helpless with laughter, at my feet.

  But Stage Two was turning out to be a long, hard and lonely row to hoe. There was a deeper problem: I didn’t feel free onstage. I was constricted, a very Protestant-Catholic comedian. Even on pot, which I was on every day, I was still in that Playboy Club, in that Playboy tie, talking about Bar
t Starr and a stupid Vitalis commercial and how he could throw the football and grab someone’s ass. That I knew intellectually there was an anal, uptight world out there I didn’t feel part of didn’t erase the fact that I was a living, breathing example of it.

  And for all the comfort I felt in the Village with its outsider-Left-liberal-pot-smoking audience, this wasn’t the direction I was going in at the Go Go. As much as I might want to say I had a risky, edgy side that wanted to experiment with material that had social significance, and this was the right audience and Greenwich Village was the right place, I’d be full of shit. What I was trying to do was to develop a TV act.

  Or rather that one solid five- or six-minute piece that would open the doors to TV.

  And I had it now. It was called “The Indian Sergeant.” The premise grew out of all the Westerns I’d seen as a kid. If the U.S. Army or the pioneers or cowpokes always had a weather-beaten, battle-hardened sergeant or trail boss who pumped up his men before the climactic battle, the Indians must have had the same NCO type who did the same for them. My Indian sergeant was my well-worn Irish guy from the Upper West side …

  All right, tall guys over by the trees, fat guys down behind the rocks and you with the beads—get outta line! Boy, there’s one in every village.

  All right, youse’ve all been given a piece of birch bark and a feather dipped in eagle’s blood. We want youse to write on the birch bark—with the feather—in the upper right-hand corner. The upper RIGHT HAND corner. That’s your ARROW hand. You write your name. Last name first, first name last. If your name is “Running Bear” you write, “Bear, Running.” Underneath your name we want your age. In summers. If you’ve been alive for eighteen summers, you put “18 summers.” Yeah, Trotting Bear? (pause) If you were born in the winter, just put that down. Next, you write down your date of enlistment. That’s the day we came around and took you from your parents and made you sleep on the hot coals.