As of July 2003, New York Governor George Pataki was still giving "serious consideration" to the petition asking him to grant a posthumous pardon to controversial ?60s satirist Lenny Bruce. Apparently, Pataki needed more time to make up his mind on this blatant no-brainer. Five months later, he finally pardoned Lenny, who would have been absolutely outraged that Pataki did so in the context of justifying the war in Iraq.
I would love to be able to publish that as a postscript in Lenny?s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, which I edited for Playboy, where it was to be serialized. In my capacity as Lenny?s editor, I found myself sitting in an office at Playboy with their attorneys. They were anxious to avoid libel, so they kept changing the name of any person in the original manuscript who might bring suit, all the way to the ending, a montage of Lenny?s life experiences, cultural icons, folklore, and urban myths:
"My friend Paul Krassner once asked me what I?ve been influenced by in my work.
"I have been influenced by my father telling me that my back would become crooked because of my maniacal desire to masturbate; by reading ?Gloriosky, Zero? in Annie Rooney; by listening to Uncle Don and Clifford Brown; by smelling the burnt shell powder at Anzio and Salerno; torching for my ex-wife; giving money to Moondog as he played the upturned pails around the corner from Hanson?s at 51st and Broadway; getting hot looking at Popeye and Toots and Caspar and Chris Crustie years ago; hearing stories about a pill they can put in the gas tank with water but ?the big companies? won?t let it out ? the same big companies that have the tire that lasts forever ? and the Viper?s favorite fantasy: ?Marijuana could be legal, but the big liquor companies won?t let it happen?; Harry James has cancer on his lip; Dinah Shore has a colored baby; Irving Berlin didn?t write all those songs, he?s got a guy locked in the closet; colored people have a special odor.
"It was an absurd question.
"I am influenced by every second of my waking hour."
The lawyers edited Harry James and Dinah Shore out of that paragraph, but for some unfathomable reason, Irving Berlin remained.
In his manuscript, Lenny had mentioned an individual called Blow Job Betty, and the lawyers were afraid she would sue. "You must be kidding," I said. "Do you really believe anybody would come out and admit that she was known as Blow Job Betty?"
Lenny and I had an unspoken agreement that there would be nothing in the book about his use of drugs. When I first met him, he would shoot up in the hotel bathroom with the door closed, but now he just sat on his bed and casually fixed up while we were talking. That?s what we had been doing one time when Lenny nodded out, the needle still stuck in his arm.
Suddenly the phone rang and startled him. His arm flailed, and the hypodermic came flying across the room, hitting the wall like a dart just a few feet from the easy chair in which I sat. Lenny picked up the phone. It was Blow Job Betty, calling from the lobby. She came up on the elevator and went down on Lenny. In front of me. Lenny had introduced me, "This is Paul, he?s interviewing me."
At one point while she was giving him head, Lenny and I made eye contact. He looked at me quizzically, and his eyes said, "I?m not usually an exhibitionist."
My eyes replied, "And I?m not usually a voyeur."
A little later, Lenny said to her, "I really wanna fuck you now."
Blow Job Betty gestured toward me and said, "In front of him?"
"Okay, Paul," said Lenny, "I guess the interview is over now."
In retrospect, I now understand the mindset of Bill Clinton when he testified under oath that he "never had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." The president had simply made the same distinction between intercourse and oral sex that Blow Job Betty had made.
Incidentally, those Playboy lawyers insisted on changing Blow Job Betty?s name to Go Down Gussie.
"I hope there actually is somebody out there named Go Down Gussie," I told them. "And I hope that she sues for invasion of privacy."
Paul Krassner is the author of Murder at the Conspiracy Convention and Other American Absurdities. See George Carlin?s Introduction at www.paulkrassner.com.
