How to talk dirty and influence people: an autobiography by Lenny Bruce

Author:Lenny Bruce [Bruce, Lenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crónica, Humor, Memorias, Otros
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 1964-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Sixteen

It was starting to get desperate for us financially, and Honey said, “OK, I’ve got a chance to strip.”

“Oh, Christ, no. I don’t want you to go back to stripping!”

“Well, I’ll just go stripping for two weeks, and that’ll be it. I’ll play Las Vegas.”

The thing was just to get enough money to make payments on the car—$120 a month. I had it all figured out. I got a room for seven dollars a week. I ran an ad in the paper: “LENNY THE GARDENER—LET ME EDGE, CLEAN AND MOW YOUR LAWN FOR $6.00.”

And I lived, just for the hell of it, on 15 cents a day. I cooked for myself. I was making $90 in a burlesque joint, plus the money I got from gardening. I had Honey’s picture up and flowers in the window of my room, just like a shrine.

I had never been separated from her before, and I just couldn’t wait for the two weeks of stripping in Vegas to end. But the night she was supposed to come home, she called up and said she had a chance to stay over for two extra weeks.

“Are you kidding? Come home.”

I begged and begged and begged, but she stayed there anyway. That was a telltale sign of where I stood in the marriage. I started eating more crap and more crap. I was a complete slave. I was really hung up on her.

Eventually, Honey and I were to get divorced.

I finally had some guts and got rid of her. She left me.

We kept breaking up and going back together at my insistence. She was always better at holding out.

After you break up and go back again enough times, you get hip to one thing: the time of day you break up is very important. If you run away in the middle of the night, there’s no place to go. You can’t wake your friends up, and in a small town you’re really screwed. It’s best to break up on your day off, in the afternoon. You get out and you go to the movies. Otherwise, like a schmuck, you’re standing on the lawn at three o’clock in the morning with a pillowcase full of clothing and the door locked behind you.

That’s when you’re not proud that you’ve “lived next door to someone for 15 years and didn’t even know their name.”

When I got divorced, a couple of major magazines, like Time, asked me, five years later, that dumb question: “What happened to your marriage?” I figured I would throw a real stock line and they would know I was putting them on and they would cool it.

“What happened to my marriage? It was broken up by my mother-in-law.”

And the reporter laughed—“Mother-in-law, ha, ha, what happened?”

“My wife came home early from work one day and she found us in bed together.”

“In bed—that’s perverse.”

“Why? It was her mother, not mine.”

One thing about getting divorced, it gave me about an hour’s worth of material. That’s not bad for an eight-year investment.

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