Underworld by Don DeLillo
I didn’t tell him about the Jesuits. Too interesting. He’d keep me here for hours. I told him about the project I was working on, to alter traditional methods of school instruction, and how I’d been visiting schools in ghettos and marginal parts of town, here and in Philadelphia, as a freelance associate in a behavorial research firm in Evanston, Illinois.
“And you teach.”
“I’ve taught, I’ve taught. And I’ll go back to it probably,” I said, “sooner or later. Secondary schools. Civics and English. But I want to teach Latin.”
This was also too interesting. He should have been royally amused but it was too interesting for that. Jerry had seemed for a time to be priestward bound, that was the word on him, or the Irish Christian Brothers maybe, and it put a look of total dislocation on his face, thinking of the Nicky he used to know and the one he’d hear about later, doing Latin in a classroom.
“You go see your mother?”
“Went up there yesterday,” I said.
“She still in 611?”
“Still there.”
“I like to go back,” he said. “I go eat on Arthur Avenue. I walk all over. I take my kids to the zoo.”
“See it now. It’s disappearing.”
“It used to be so crowded. Or is that just in my mind? The summer nights. Fantastic. It’s great to see you, Nick. I’m having one more. Have one more.”
I wanted to finish the first one and leave, or not finish it and leave. A chance meeting like this, if you run it five minutes longer than it’s worth, you ruin the night and the following day.
He kept adjusting his glasses.
A man alone at a table was moaning a bummed-out monologue that involved being followed wherever he went, and they were recording his private thoughts, and they were sending the seeing-eye blind to spy on him with their dogs and their pencils and their cups, and they were doing this on buses and subways both.
“Jerry, you ought to go home and play with your kids. When you’re fifty or sixty, you can come here and think about the past.”
But he didn’t want to go home. He wanted to recite the destinies of a hundred linked souls, the street swarm that roared in his head. The dead, the married, the moved-to-Jersey, the kid with five sisters who became a safecracker, the handball ace who’s a chiropractor, the stuck-up blond in the fifth grade who married a Puerto Rican prizefighter.
“We ought to go up there, Nick. Serious. Take the subway, we’ll be there in forty-five minutes. We can get dinner at Mario’s. I’ll make some calls. Get some of the guys. They’ll love it. They’ll meet us. Serious, man. Come on, drink, we’ll go.”
His voice carried an urgent logic. He was defensive and a little angry and about halfway drunk, gripped by the plan and a little angry in advance, wary of the thought that I might not see the beauty and inevitability of a trip to the Bronx, that I might be unswayed by the power of old-times’-sake, and he was already sensing the edges of a bitter affront.
“Come on, serious, we’ll take the subway. We’ll go see Lofaro. Some of the old faces. They’d love to see you, Nick.”
I didn’t want to put him off, to seem outside this or above it. Jerry knew I’d been in correction and then more or less lost to news and rumor and now here I was turned out in a tweed jacket and doing a job I liked and looking okay, stopped smoking, didn’t overdo the drinking, knew a woman with a sexy cello voice and was probably, regularly banging her, and then look at him, nice Catholic boy gone baggy and stale, hates going home, a wife in Jackson Heights and two small kids, and he’s lighting one cigarette with the butt of another, and drinks so much he blacks out, and sells commercial time for a radio station at the end of the dial, and all because he’s never killed a man.
“This is a thing we have to do,” Jerry said. “We’ll grab a cab—on me.”
A man named Jorge started a conversation with the bartender. Jorge wore a headband and looked sexually deranged. I didn’t think of these people as regulars exactly. They were denizens. That was the word somehow, from the Late Latin, deep within, and that’s what they were like, trapped souls trying to emerge, and I began to understand that Jerry came here so he could put aside self-pity and the gnaws of practical worry and be with people who would talk to him in a kind of delusional plainsong, a run-on voice without ordinary sense or strict meter but coming from deeper inside than he could bear to hear in his own locution.
The lights dimmed and flickered.
Jerry was talking to me and there was a woman with Jorge who was saying something to the bartender about the optimum temperature of beer and that’s when the lights dimmed and flickered and then went out.
Jerry was saying, “Spur of the moment. I’ll make some calls. I’ll get some guys. I’ll get what’s-his-name, Allie. This is a thing, my friend, where you don’t have the right to refuse.”
Then the lights went out.
The man at the far end of the bar stopped trying to bounce quarters into his shot glass.
Someone said, “Is that the lights?”
We sipped our stingers, Jerry and I.
The bartender said, “You know what?”
Someone started talking in the men’s room, loud enough for us to hear.
The bartender said, “Looks like from here the whole block’s out.” The first voice said, “Is that the lights?”
“They must be working on something that caused a short,” the bartender said. “And me without candles.”
The voice from the toilet grew louder and agitated.
One of the old women said something to the other, the first words out of either of them.
Jerry and I sipped our stingers.
“But you know what?” the bartender said.
Jorge was speaking Spanish now.
The bartender came up with a flashlight from the bottom of the bar and he wedged it between two bottles on the shelf beneath the mural.
The woman with Jorge was also speaking Spanish, but badly, talking to the man in the toilet.
The bartender went over to the doorway.
“I thought Allie was killed in Korea.”
“That was Viggiano. Korea.”
“Stepped on a mine, I thought.”
“That was Mike. Stepped on a mine. Viggiano.”
The two old women were silent again, adjusted to the dark, sitting there drinking.
“So all these years, you’re telling me.”
“You’ve been carrying around the wrong war casualty.”
“Or the right war but the wrong guy.”
“Let’s go outside,” he said. “I want to see what’s happening.”
“I don’t have to feel sorry for Allie anymore.”
“I think the whole block’s out. Allie’s selling fish at his father’s stall in the market. We’ll find him. I’ll call him.”
We took our drinks out to the sidewalk. The block was out and the area was out. It was after five, dark now, and the traffic lights were also out and we could hear the pulse of car horns at the entrance to the bridge above us and to the west.
People were coming out of shops and apartments, the locksmith and grocery and check-cashing place, and they stood around and talked. We could look down a tenement street to the east and see the river, a narrow strip of shimmer that formed a kind of softness, a visual whisper behind the dark bulk contours in the foreground.
“Is Brooklyn out? I think Brooklyn’s out.”
“Brooklyn’s definitely out.”
People talked to each other and looked up periodically. They looked toward the midtown sky or tried to look toward the tip of the island, blocked off of course by clustered buildings, but always up, skywatching, and they pointed and talked.
I went back inside and put my drink on the bar. I left some money near the glass. Someone was still in the toilet, agitated in Spanish, saying something about his mother, or someone’s mother, and I figured he couldn’t find the toilet paper or he couldn’t find the bolt on the door and it was a matter the denizens w
Then I stood in the doorway and watched Jerry talking to the bartender and three or four others, twenty yards up the street, and they were lighted intermittently by passing cars and they were animated, they were roused by the vastness of the circumstance, by the forces involved, and they were talking and pointing.
I went down the street in the other direction. After half a block I crossed to the opposite side and walked through an archway under the bridge and into an area filled with household garbage and smashed cars and mounds of rubble dumped by construction crews and at the north end of the passage I could see the silhouetted towers of mid-town, exact and flat against the streaked sky, and I heard the sound of car horns building, the dinosaur death of stalled traffic at rush hour, calling and answering everywhere, and I made my way out the other end, where the headlights of barely moving cars, cars stopped dead, where rivers of barium light marked my progress through the streets.
OCTOBER 29, 1962
He was back in New York, the womb of consciousness, a midnight show at Carnegie Hall, nearly three thousand people, and he stood on the enormous stage looking out across the orchestra and up past two tiers of boxes to the gallery levels, where they stood in the aisles and crowded the exits.
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&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 nihilate 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 di
“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.”
Lenny did a fair approximation of a street preacher’s voice, which was surprising, which was very unhip in fact because even if he’d started in the business as a mimic, doing Cagney and Bogart with German accents, and even if he updated frequently, doing contemporary types of every persuasion, it was not a white comic’s option these days to do a black man’s voice, was it?
“The old man holds a dollar bill by its edges. It’s older than he is. He peers over the top and says, Legal tender. He says, Which is a name, I have to admit, I would not think to call it myself. He says, We all seen the machines print the money in the newsreels nonstop like bottles of pop getting capped, only lightning fast, and they print, they print, they print, but where’s it all go is my question. I ain’t seen any. You seen any?”
Lenny did the voice, standing slightly hunched beneath the vast draped curtain in his white Italianate suit and campy black boots, the ones with little fruity loops in back.
“He says, Nobody knows the day or the hour. He’s standing there in a dark shrunken suit with bicycle clips around the ankles. Understand me when I say I wanted to give him everything I own. Not out of pity or charity or some vintage Christian shit. Out of appreciation. Out of gratitude for the sight and sound of him at that hour and in that place. Because this is New York, New York and we say it twice because it’s half Us and half Them, all hours, dig it, in bicycle clips. The man’s an actor and this is his gig that he’s perfected over decades and I stand there listening and in some funny way I hear myself, all right, or I see myself—I imagine myself at the age of ten or twelve listening to a voice like this old man’s. It’s his voice and his week. The day and the hour. And he holds the dollar bill. When the hour comes, he says, the world be separated into those that can read the message and those that can’t.”