Free Sylvia: A Novel by Leonard Michaels Page A

for a wedding. I don’t know why she bothered putting it on. Maybe she thought this dress would be an exception, as if there were a kind of red that a bride might wear. She did look good in it. The second dress was yellow and had a flared skirt. It made her look rather wide, and it brought out yellowish tones in her skin. Later, she said that my face had been ugly with disapproval in the clothing store. “You know I’m a pig, and I know I’m a pig,” she said. In the apartment again, she sat on the bed in her coat. Nothing had been accomplished. She hadn’t bought bras or a wedding dress. I said, “Let’s clean up this place.” She said, “Yes.” Her answer raised my spirits and I began to move about, picking things up. She noticed my show of energy, my optimism. She collapsed onto the bed, still in her coat, and she closed her eyes and started to go to sleep. I think I knew, before she collapsed, that I’d made a big mistake. My bustling about wouldn’t inspire Sylvia to do the same. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was my way of being insensitive, pretending not really to know her feelings, my way of not loving her. Seeing her lie there, in her coat, I quit trying to clean up. It was all very depressing, my stupid bustling and her collapse. I was more conscious than ever before of the havoc in our apartment, and in my heart. She keeps telling me that I think she is apig. She doesn’t like her face, doesn’t like her body. I don’t want to love her anymore. Too hard. I’m not good enough.
    JOURNAL, MARCH 1961
    We went to the Village Vanguard, about five or six blocks from MacDougal Street, to see Lenny Bruce. The room was jammed and very dark. You couldn’t make out the ceiling, or the faces of people who stood along the bar. Hardly enough light for the waiters to pass between the tables. Light seemed concentrated in the spotlight on Lenny Bruce.
    He wore a black leather jacket and had a hunched, scrawny, unwholesome, ratlike ferocity. His face, flattened and drained by the spotlight, looked hard, a poolroom face, not an entertainer. He began by reading a letter from a priest. It said Lenny Bruce is a moral genius, a great satirist. After reading the letter, Bruce began a routine made up mainly of shock words. He said “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” while pointing to people in the audience. The audience tittered, laughed, then laughed more—and then—laughed as if we’d all gone over the edge, crazed by the annihilation of proprieties, or whatever had kept us from this until now. But Sylvia wasn’t laughing. She smiled tentatively, as if more frightened than amused.
    Bruce said a word like “nigger” had power because it was suppressed. He spoke quickly. Nothing must be suppressed. We mustn’t keep ourselves from knowing how depraved weare. At once scary and hilarious, he seemed to make sense. Who could resist him? A hysterically funny dead-white ratface attacked political hypocrisies and puritanical attitudes toward sex. He did a long routine on the word “snot.” The word became the thing. He said imagine it on the sleeve of his suede jacket, shining, stiff, impossible to remove. He rushed toward the audience with the medal of snot on his sleeve. People shrieked with pleasure. Another routine was about a lady selling cosmetics, the Avon Lady, who came to Bruce’s house. She wanted to speak to his wife, who was in the bedroom, lying naked and unconscious in bed, sleeping off some drug. Bruce described himself dashing into the bedroom to make his wife presentable. He hung galoshes on her feet. Then he led the Avon Lady into the room. The audience laughed and screamed. In another routine, about an auto accident, Bruce made a picture of a man being lifted from a mangled car, half dead, bleeding heavily, in terrible pain. As he is carried to an ambulance, this man cannot help studying the beautiful ass of a nurse. The audience laughed and screamed. I laughed as much as anyone and felt a pleasing