«Jesus, aren’t we getting rather serious?» said Ned, baffled by the unexpected turn the conversation had taken.
«Serious?» said Marcelle mockingly. «I’m walking out on you. You can stay single for the rest of your life—and thrash out all those weighty problems that bother you. I feel as though a big load had been taken off my shoulders.» She turned to me and stuck out her mitt. «Thanks, Henry, for giving me a jolt. I guess you weren’t talking such nonsense after all….»
22
Cleo was still the rage at the Houston Street Burlesk. She had become an institution, like Mistinguett. It’s easy to understand why she fascinated that audience which the enterprising Minsky Brothers gathered every night under their closed roof garden. One had only to stand outside the box office of a matinee, any day of the week, and watch them dribble in. In the evening it was a more sophisticated crowd, gathered from all parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and New Jersey. Even Park Avenue contributed its clientele, in the evening. But in the bright light of day, with the marquee looking like the aftermath of small-pox, the Catholic Church next door so dingy, woe-begone, so scroungy-looking, the priest always standing on the steps, scratching his ass by way of registering disgust and disapprobation. It was very much like the picture of reality which the sclerotic mind of a sceptic conjures up when he tries to explain why there can be no God.
Many’s the time I had hung around the entrance to the theatre, keeping a sharp eye out for some one to lend me a few pennies to make up the price of admission. “When you’re out of work, or too disgusted to look for work, it’s infinitely better to sit in a stinking pit than to stand in a public toilet for hours—just because it’s warm there. Sex and poverty go hand in hand.
The fetid odor of the burlesk house! That smell of the latrine, of urine saturated with camphor balls! The mingled stench of sweat, sour feet, foul breaths, chewing gum, disinfectants! The sickening deodorant from the squirt guns levelled straight at you, as if you were a mass of bottle flies! Nauseating? No word for it. Onan himself could scarcely smell worse.
The decor too was something. Smacked of Renoir in the last stages of gangrene. Blended perfectly with the Mardi Gras lighting effects—a flushed string of red lights illuminating a rotten womb. Something disgracefully satisfying about sitting there with the Mongolian idiots in the twilight of Gomorrah, knowing all too well that after the show you would have to trudge it back home on foot. Only a man with his pockets cleaned out can thoroughly appreciate the warmth and stench of a big ulcer in which hundreds of others like himself sit and wait for the curtain to go up. All around you overgrown idiots shelling peanuts, or nibbling at chocolate bars, or draining bottles of pop through straws. The Lumpen Proletariat. Cosmic riff-raff.
It was so foul, the atmosphere, that it was just like one big congealed fart. On the asbestos curtain remedies against venereal diseases, cloak and suit ads, fur trapp…, tooth-paste delicacies, watches to tell time—as if time were important in our lives! Where to go for a quick snack after the show—as if one had money to burn, as though after the show we would all drop in at Louie’s or August’s place and look the girls over, shove money up their asses and see the Aurora Borealis or the Red, White and Blue.
The ushers… Ratty, jail-bird types, if male, and floozy, empty shits, if the other sex. Now and then an attractive Polish girl with blonde hair and a saucy, defiant mien. One of the dumb Polaks who would rather earn an honest penny than turn up her ass for a quick fuck. One could smell their filthy underwear, winter or summer…
Anyway, everything on a cash and carry basis— that was the Minsky plan. And it worked too. Never a flop, no matter how lousy the performance. If you went there often enough you got to know the faces so well, not only of the cast but of the audience too, that it was like a family reunion. If you felt disgusted you didn’t need a mirror to see how you looked—you had only to take a glance at your neighbor. It should have been called «Identity House». It was Devachan hindside up.
There was never anything original, never anything that you hadn’t seen a thousand times before. It was like a cunt you’re sick of looking at—you know every liverish crease and wrinkle; you’re so goddamned sick of it that you want to spit in it, or take a plunger and bring up all the muck that got caught and the larynx. Oh yes, many a time one had the impulse to let fire—turn a machine gun on them, men, women and children, and let ’em have it in the guts. Sometimes a sort of faintness came over you: you felt like sliding to the floor and just lying there among the peanut shells. Let people walk over you with their greasy, smelly, shitty shoes.
Always a patriotic note too. Any moth-eaten cunt could walk out front-and-center draped in the American flag and by singing a wheezy tune bring down the house. If you had an advantageous seat you could catch her wiping her nose on the flag as she stood in the wings. And the sob stuff… how they liked the mother songs!
Poor, dopy, dog-eared saps! When it came to home and mother they slobbered like wailing mice. There was always the white-haired imbecile from the Ladies’ Room whom they trotted out for these numbers. Her reward for sitting in the shit-house all day and night was to be slobbered over during one of the sentimental numbers. She had an enormous girth—a fallen womb most likely—and her eyes were glassy. She could have been everybody’s mother, so goofy and docile she was. The very picture of motherhood—after thirty-five years of child-bearing, wife-beating, abortions, haemorrhages, ulcers, tumors, rupture, varicose veins and other emoluments of the maternal life. That nobody thought of putting a bullet through her and finishing her off always surprised me.
No denying it, the Minsky Brothers had thought of everything, everything which would remind one of the things one wanted to escape. They knew how to trot out everything that was worn and faded, including the very lice in your brains—and they rubbed this concoction under your nose like a shitty rag. They were enterprising, no doubt about it. Probably Leftwingers too, even though contributing to the support of the Catholic Church next door. They were Unitarians, in the practical sense. Big hearted, open-minded purveyors of entertainment for the poor at heart. Not a doubt about it. I’m sure they went to the Turkish Baths every night (after counting the money), and perhaps to the synagogue too, when there was time for it.
To get back to Cleo. It was Cleo this night again, as it had been in the past. She would appear twice, once before the intermission and a second time at the end of the show.
Neither Marcelle nor Mona had ever been to a burlesk before; they were on the qui vive from start to finish. The comedians appealed to them; it was a line of filth they were unprepared for. Yeoman work they do, the comedians. All they need are a pair of baggy trousers, a piss-pot, a telephone or a hat rack to create the illusion of a world in which the Unconscious rules supreme. Every burlesk comedian, if he is worth his salt, has something of the heroic in him. At every performance he slays the censor who stands like a ghost on the threshold of the subliminal self. He not only slays him alive for us, but he pisses on him and mortifies the flesh. Anyway, Cleo! By the time Cleo appears everybody is ready to jerk off. (Not like in India where a rich nabob buys up a half dozen rows of seats in order to masturbate in peace.) Here everybody gets to work under his hat. A condensed milk orgy. Semen flows as freely as gasoline. Even a blind man would know that there’s nothing but cunt in sight. The amazing thing it that there is never a stampede. Now and then some one goes home and cuts his balls off with a rusty razor, but these little exploits you never read about in the newspapers.
One of the things that made Cleo’s dance fascinating was the little pom-pom she wore in the center of her girdle—planted right over her rose-bush. It served to keep your eyes riveted to the spot. She could rotate it like a pin-wheel or make it jump and quiver with little electric spasms. Sometimes it would subside with little gasps,
