Lenny Bruce

LENNY and BRUCE are bellied up to the horseshoe bar at the Corner Pug. After midnight. Drinking stout and bourbon. Friday night. The place is a murmur with little conversational collectives at the bar and on a patio—tables and umbrellas under starlight. Mid volume (good for conversation) Motown plays on the sound system. There’s an old Don Kirshner's Rock Concert showing— silently—on one screen and My Darling Clementine—with Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp—on the other. Old wood and bar smells. LENNY Reading today’s grapevine on HillBilly. Hawkish Warlord (in the vein of Margaret Thatcher and worse). WWIII. Further 3rd party healthcare/pharma fleecing with impunity. Etc. But nobody really talks about the broadening of this ill paradigm of finding/engineering/legislating every last possible means of sucking every last drop of revenues from the civic pool. And hydrocarbons from the Earth. BRUCE You’re a nut. LENNY No doubt you see that the cost of everything has soared under this paradigm, thought? Propped. False. And feeds the Big Chair Handlers’s big BloodyHomeShoppingClubBraveryOfBeingOutOFRange spending needs for a fiscal year’s inflated wartime financially planned print shop gone wacky Toontown whacko. BRUCE You ARE nutty, Lenny. And I LIKE that about you. …Women gotta truss up their breasts …And futz with feminine physiology and cat-fights and stuff. Us guys we gotta sit on our balls sometimes. And THAT is a whole different sorta sordid predicament. LENNY LOL, SIGH The other day at the store, Bruce, what were we talking about? BRUCE The cost of a stick of butter is $1. LENNY Yes. And it’ll go up. It’s representational. The cost of building materials has gotten SO out of sync with reality that—to counter the high costs—people can’t/won’t afford to pay builders/craftsmen/laborers anywhere close to a fair wage for good work. Build something. Anything. A fence. A home addition. The material costs are backbreaking. Craftsman has to spend thousands on materials before seeing any return, while their skilled non-union laborers are eating beans and rice for weeks at a time. AND the devaluation of your “dollar” is like a leaking faucet. It just keeps flowing out into oblivion, while the suck, the depilatory ancestral industrial simplex/complex, the combine that is too BIG to fail and has NO principal but the suck, fed to state and back again, that train keeps a rollin’. AND this it seems is what HillBilly is most likely to further for ANOTHER 4 YEARS at least, but the ease with which it goes down would suggest it can go on and on forever, from the premium comforts and food/drink service of the WhitehouseBowlingAlley and TittyBar. BRUCE What’s that got to do with the cost of butter? LENNY Watch the costs over the next coupla few years. Watch your disposable income move in the converse of [their] days holding down the Big Chair. The Pie in the Sky that makes permanently opulent whitehaired ol’ people out of died in the wool lawyerly overachiever sorts with every imaginable resource and savvy. And it’s certainly NOT just HillBilly. They’re not the top o’ the food chain, Bruce. You know it too. They’re not the groundskeeper, but the chainsaw. And US? We’re the brush. That’s that. AND it certainly never had to be this way—if you’ve read the great comics and philosophers of the past how many centuries. It’s why Bernie Sanders’ model—the truth and consequences of which he spoke UP so eloquently from state to state, what he’s spoken about committedly for the past forty years— is probably our only way to escape the suck. Sucks that we have to escape ANYthing! Atrocious Godforsaken usurpations, man! Our forefathers foretold of this. Attempted to prepare US. But what? In one Bluetooth and out the other. BRUCE But we gotta argue about repubs and dems, brotha Len. It’s a set precedence. Toontown Psychos versus Quasi-Likable warlords. Pull a cork and celebrate the wonkiness. Hardball with a hankerin’ for exemption from logic, reason, and real accountability to basic humanities. BAD thing is we’re piloted for same shit different day. And same shit?...IS like a domino effect and real, real, bad. Whoa. Now you’ got me off on a rant. Damnit. So aye we’ll be able to count a blessing or two on the Sup Court appointments. Groovy. LENNY EVEN STILL it’s just Pavlov and a great big basket o’ bones for the hoi-polloi. One per rube. BRUCE But hey… Grass is making a comeback—although gas and ass (both) are inflated to the hilt. And we still have SUNSHINE …And freshwater is obtainable for a price, on sale for a buck.