Lenny (Prompt: Something Before My Time)

I first met him in his cartoon 

where he plays an emotionally

distant Lone Ranger

who ends up taking Tonto 

away for a consensual 

unnatural act.

I was instantly hooked.

As he mocked 

the pseudosanctimony of

Ike’s America,

I was stuck in 

Reagan’s Movie America

and he sounded prophetic.

He wasn’t just telling jokes,

but trying ideas.

He peeled back the 

hypocritical 

“what should be” 

to reveal the caustic

“what is.”

The popular version is

that he was a dirty mouth comic 

who just said “cocksucker” 

and lowered the bar 

for generations of vulgarians

waiting at the Gate (of Horn). 

To me, he was a poet

with words and sounds 

and bad movie star imitations.

He was desperate 

for the truth

and when he gazed upon it, 

he found it painful 

to the point 

of heroin.

More than a martyr,

he was an artist,

trying to tickle out an honest laugh

and some truth,

the same way that 

Charlie Parker tried to 

coax something hitherto unknown 

out of the trunk of jazz standards.

His was an alto saxophone voice,

alive and demanding,

bending notes with 

Yiddish rhythm,

street profanity 

and the tsuris of 

five millenia and 

six million Jews. 

He never tried to do the

same thing twice

and I understand

he was genuinely kind

and generous to a fault.

Who else but SuperJew

would stand up 

and say 

“Have rachmones 

for Adolph Eichmann?”

Only Jesus Christ

and Lenny Bruce.