Authors: Glenn O'Brien
T
HIS
SCHMUCK
here was hooked on morphine suppositories. Like that? Honest to God. If heroin is a monkey on the back, what’s a morphine suppository?
When I was in England all these faggots were strung out on sleeping pill suppositories.
Emmis.
So I says to this cat, I says, “Do they really make you sleep, man?”
He says, “Are you kidding? Before you get your
finger
outta your
athth
you’re
athleep,
Mary.”
That’s a beautiful ad:
BEFORE YOU GET YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR ASS—YOU’RE ASLEEP!
nebyaltal
“What is
that
? What did he need
that
for?”“He’s
weird,
that’s all. He’s on it, that’s all. He’s on it.”“How can you tell?”
“You can tell when they’re on it. He’s standing on it right now. He
has
to have it. They gotta have it. They kill their mothers for it in the mornings. They got the strength of a madman.”
How does he take it?
[
Deep bass voice, with pride
]: “I take it in the suppository form.”
Haha! I got high just before the show:
[
Urgently
] “Get it up there, Phil!”“O.K.”
“Hurry up! Hurry up! Somebody’s coming!”
Now the reason why I take it in the suppository form is that I have found that even with the most literate doctors, it’s not the
substance,
it’s the
method of administration,
because if this man would take a ton of opiates through a suppository, the imagery is: “If he takes rubicane in the arm, it’s monstrous; but the guy takes it in the ass—what can it be? The
tuchus
. . .”
T
HIS
IS
a benzedrex inhaler. I know the inventor, who invented amphetamine sulphate, which was originally used for just shrinking the mucus membrane, you know, the air passage, but some fellows found out that you could crush these benzedrine inhalers and—you’ve done it—and put them in coca-colas, and it would become a cerebral depressant. So, somehow they took out the benzedrine and put in benzedrex.
The old thing—one guy ruined it for the rest.
Now, if you notice, it has a date when it’s exhausted. Your nose? No. The inhaler. Smith, Klein and French.
Now it’s sort of weird, you know. I put this, and you know, sniff it up there. But it’s about a year old, and it’s probably exhausted; so I don’t know if I just did that, or sticking things in my nose, you know? Or maybe I’m just hooked on smelling my pocket!
Actually, is it lewd? That goes back to taste. You know that it’s just not good taste to blow your nose in public or put one of these in your nose in public. And I’ve never done it in front of anybody. But I just feel like I wanna do it tonight.
For the first time, being recorded on tape, a man sticking a Smith Klein French inhaler in his nose!
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here at Fax No. Two. A hush is going over the crowd. He’s reaching in his pocket. His neck is tightening. Some ladies sitting ringside, traumatically, are sweating. He’s taking it out, giggling nervously. Will he stick it up there? Nervous laughs emit from the crowd. He’s a degenerate. Two D.A.R. women are throwing up. There go the people from the Mystery Bus Tour.”
‘We want our $5.75 back!’
“There he goes, folks, he’s sniffing!
‘Hi, Howard, hi! Zowie! We’re really high now, Howard.
We certainly are. We’ve solved the world’s problems.’”
And you’re only twelve months old, you little bugger!
E
XPLOITATION
F
ILMS
present: I WAS A TEEN-AGE REEFER-SMOKING pregnant YORTSITE candle. With Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood. See Sal Mineo as the trigger-happy Arty, the kid who knew but one thing—how to
love,
how to
kill!
And see Fatlay Good as Theresa, the girl who knew the other thing, tenderness, and love. And see Lyle Talbot as Gramps, who liked to watch. A picture with a message, and an original Hollywood theme—narcotics.
The film opens as we find Nunzio locked in the bathroom with the stuff, the
baccala,
the marijuana. Cut to the exterior—Youngstown kitchen, there’s the wife, you know, the factory-worker wife, the whole bit. He comes home,
WIFE
[
delighted
]: Put me down, you big nut! Oh, tee hee . . .
That scene, you know? Looking at her,
HUSBAND
[
tenderly
]: Where’s our son, where’s Ralph?WIFE
[
concerned
]: He’s in the bathroom again. And I dunno whatsamatter with him. He’s nervous and listless, and he’s not bothering with any of his friends, and he’s falling off in his studies . . .HUSBAND
: In the bathroom again, eh? Tsk Tsk. Hmmm . . .[
knocks on the door
] Rhere?RALPH
[
sucking in a big drag, then trying to hold it in as he answers
]: Usta minud, I beyout in a minud.WIFE
: He’s got asthma.HUSBAND
: Will you stop with that, you nitwit! He’s on the stuff!
O.K. Suddenly we hear a knock at the door, a whistle; and he takes the marijuana, throws it in the toilet, rushes to the door—there’s no one there! He’s thrown it away! It’s
gone,
it’s
too late!
Beads of perspiration are breaking out on his forehead.
RALPH
:
It’s gone! There’s only one thing left to do—
smoke the toilet!
The Essential Lenny Bruce
, 1967
Mort Sahl was the first stand-up comic whose schtick was intellectual. Not goof intellectual like Irwin Corey, but the campus type with button-down, V-neck and newspaper. Sahl was a new type, a liberal middle-class hipster, riffing on politics. He was like a clean version of Lenny but then when JFK, for whom he’d written jokes, got assassinated Sahl went all out, reading the Warren Commission Report on stage and getting laughs. He got a lot, but he also brought down heat from the officious media and was marginalized as one of those conspiracy kooks, especially when he was deputized by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison. Sahl’s one-man Broadway show was canceled in 1967 on the eve of opening night, but he never backed down.
All right.
Now are there any groups
Which we have not offended
In some small way?
I’ve gone into every field except theism.
I do that on the next show.
And I’ll tell you about
The Billy Graham rally in New York.
Which I went to in your interest.
Kind of consumer’s test.
And I did, I went to see him.
And he’s pretty wild.
And I thought it quite significant
That his annual report is in the paper
For the ’57 Crusade to Save Souls,
And it didn’t get into the religious section
On Saturday or Sunday
But it’s on the financial page.
Well, he did very well.
There’s nothing wrong with, you know,
Paying your way.
So, at any rate . . . that isn’t what I meant!
I thought I heard some bowling upstairs.
So, at any rate . . .
He does that all the time.
You got the wrong connotation.
I think too many of you are free-associating, you know.
Graham does that all the time.
He’s alway’s reading and looking up, you know.
Which even people in the field will admit
Is an assumption.
We don’t
know
.
I mean, we think it, right?
He does that.
And he always says to his audience,
“Do you believe?”
And the audiences always say—
You know, they are very vociferous;
They’re kind of a cross between
The Bonus March and Jazz at the Philharmonic.
Anyway, he always says to them,
“Do you believe?”
And the audience always lays it on him,
You know, like,
“YOU KNOW IT!”
Sure.
And then a couple of minutes later
He’ll be into original sin or something,
And all of a sudden he’ll stop—
You know, like they never said it—
And he’ll say,
“Do you believe?”
And then they lay it on him again.
He does this all the time, you know.
So he obviously is insecure in these areas.
So I’ll have more to say about him later.
I don’t want to give all this away.
But it’s really weird.
It was a very weird rally.
And this rally,
You read about this kook who went out,
This kind of weird guy went out
And started collecting money with the others.
He’s not really an usher.
And he’s putting money in the bag and everything.
And nobody knew
Because the sun was in back of him
Forming a nimbus.
And I was meanwhile
Taking pictures of Graham like crazy
Because I wanted to show something
To the folks back home.
And then later on I developed the roll
And it was blank.
Which is really weird.
Anyway, so then this guy collected all the bread
And he started to split with the money.
And these two policemen caught him
At the gate at the rally
And they brought him
To Billy Graham’s feet for salvation.
And he said, “What are you doing with the money?”
And he said, “I took the money
In an effort to get closer to God. . . .”
By eliminating the middleman, of course.
The Future Lies Ahead
, 1958;
Breaking It Up!: The Best Routines of the Stand-Up Comics
, 1975
Folk singer. Unusual voice. Groovy vines. Thirty-five studio albums, twelve live. Probably greatest songwriter in English and maybe the hippest man alive. Has been since he got booed at Newport for using an electric guitar. Around that time (’65–’66) he was doing prose poetry too, in a surrealist vein, which when finally published in 1971 as
Tarantula
failed to have the impact of the songs. Dylan stayed away from the written word until 2004 when
Chronicles: Volume One,
a luminous memoir of Beat funky folky bohemia, was published to considerable acclaim. I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t surprising that it was superbly written but it was amazing that he could remember it all.
W
HEN
I
wasn’t staying at Van Ronk’s, I’d usually stay at Ray’s place, get back sometime before dawn, mount the dark stairs and carefully close the door behind me. I shoved off into the sofa bed like entering a vault. Ray was not a guy who had nothing on his mind. He knew what he thought and he knew how to express it, didn’t make room in his life for mistakes. The mundane things in life didn’t register with him. He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn’t sweat the small stuff, quoted Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed. At times he could say things that had way too much edge. Once he said that President Kennedy wouldn’t last out his term because he was a Catholic. When he said it, it made me think about my grandmother, who said to me that the Pope is the king of the Jews. She lived back in Duluth on the top floor of a duplex on 5th street. From a window in the back room you could see Lake Superior, ominous and foreboding, iron bulk freighters and barges off in the distance, the sound of foghorns to the right and left. My grandmother had
only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes on weekends my parents would drive down from the Iron Range to Duluth and drop me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe. The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My grandmother’s voice possessed a haunting accent—face always set in a half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn’t been easy. She’d come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.
Originally, she’d come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea—the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine—the one that Lord Byron wrote about in
Don Juan.
Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather’s parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers.
My grandmother’s ancestors had been from Constantinople. As a teenager, I used to sing the Ritchie Valens song “In a Turkish Town” with the lines in it about the “
mystery Turks and the stars above
,” and it seemed to suit me more than “La Bamba,” the song of Ritchie’s that everybody else sang and I never knew why. My mother even had a friend named Nellie Turk and I’d grown up with her always around.
There were no Ritchie Valens records up at Ray’s place, “Turkish Town” or otherwise. Mostly, it was classical music and jazz bands. Ray had bought his entire record collection from a shyster lawyer who was getting divorced. There were Bach fugues and Berlioz symphonies— Handel’s
Messiah
and Chopin’s A-Major Polonaise. Madrigals and religious pieces, Darius Milhaud violin concertos—symphonic poems by virtuoso pianists, string serenades with themes that sound like polka dances. Polka dances always got my blood pumping. That was the first type of loud, live music I’d ever heard. On Saturday nights the taverns were filled with polka bands. I also liked the Franz Liszt records—liked the way one piano could sound like a whole orchestra. Once I put on Beethoven’s
Pathetique
Sonata—it was melodic,
but then again, it sounded like a lot of burping and belching and other bodily functions. It was funny—sounded almost like a cartoon. Reading the record jacket, I learned that Beethoven had been a child prodigy and he’d been exploited by his father and that Beethoven distrusted all people for the rest of his life. Even so, it didn’t stop him from writing symphonies.