Tuchuses and Nay-Nays

Posted on Jan 21, 2011

Mr. Fish

By Mr. Fish

Lenny Bruce, saintly believer in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and eloquent teaser of all that had previously deemed itself to be unticklish, had a bit in his act where he talked about the greatest entertainment draw of modern civilization not being a Monet exhibit but rather being tits and ass. In his performance he described a pair of nightclub promoters on the Las Vegas Strip discussing what to put on their marquee to advertise tits and ass in such a way as to help their audience not appear so depraved at patronizing a show designed to perpetuate the not-so-fine art of ogling. Tuchuses and nay-nays was suggested as an option, which, to me, became a metaphor for what it meant to replace the literal meaning of something with the figurative meaning; that is, to replace the facts with a value judgment that had less to do with the truth and more to do with a particular interpretation of the truth, which, contrary to the real truth, was much more user-friendly because it was exempt from needing to merely reflect reality and didn’t need to be corroborated by anything or anybody. It became an opinion that could be carried around in the brain, where it could be edited and tweaked and reworked and perverted into something wholly self-serving, oftentimes gaining more detail and more prestige than the real world would ever be likely to lavish upon it. In fact, with the volume turned up on its appeal, an interpretation of reality will oftentimes seem more real than the reality that it’s interpreting, even when the reality is standing in stark contrast and in blatant opposition to the outlandish claims of the interpretation. (Think of the divine celebrity of royal lineages or the groundless claims of the Aryans espousing genetic superiority over non-Aryans, where the proof is never in the putrid pudding.) 

Tuchuses and nay-nays, thusly, became for me an explanation as to how only those willing to frame their understanding of the world in terms of how well their opinions interacted with the opinions of others could be counted upon to so consistently rebuke the First Amendment and to perceive the existence of a contrary point of view as being grotesque and inciting and completely unacceptable.

Rewind to mid-August in 1975. “Oh, for crapsake,” seethed my mother, rinsing the vodka from the small green plastic cup that she kept under the kitchen sink with all the other solvents. “Don’t tell me that you’re turning into that pot-smoking hippie freak who just lurched out the front door with her hair in her face?” She was talking about the babysitter who, with her patchwork bell-bottom pants, hand-sewn blouses fashioned from loud curtains and a fondness for the word bullshit, had become the secret love of my life.

“I’m not talking about Anna, no,” I said, sitting at the dining room table painting blood on the hands of a Godzilla model. “I was just asking a question.”

“If you think you’re an incomplete person, somehow, just because I didn’t eat your placenta like a goddamn hyena when you were born, you’re way off, Buster Brown,” she said, lighting a cigarette like a fuse for her mood. “Way off.”

“I just wanted to know if, when I’m at school, I could give somebody my ring finger instead of my middle finger. I couldn’t get in trouble for that, could I?  I mean, technically?”

“What the hell kind of job does she think she’s preparing for by joining the Peace Corps, anyway? What goes on the resume after that, I wonder? ‘Has bad breath and wipes ass with hibiscus leaves and will refuse to stand for the “Star Spangled Banner” ’ – wonderful! I’ll tell you one thing, when that girl menstruates, everybody knows about it.”

“She’s a free spirit,” I said, not knowing at age 9 what the word menstruates meant.

“Yeah, free,” said my mother, chuckling and blowing smoke. “The only thing that makes that girl not a whore is the fact that she doesn’t take money from boys who want to see what the top of her head looks like when its banging against the bottom of a steering wheel—I’ll say that she’s free. Birth control for that idiot is a stick of gum.”

“Mom,” I said, impatiently drumming my fingers against the table, “can you just answer the question?”

“You’ll figure it out for yourself when you’re older, trust me,” she said, shaking her head. “When a girl shows up at a quarter ’til nine on a Sunday morning raking at her crotch like a cocker spaniel and asking if she can take a quick shower before she starts work, well, you can put two and two together. All I’ll say is that when she was done, her hair was still dry and the bathtub looked like what’s left over after you hose out the back of the air conditioner.”

“So, you think I can hold up my ring finger at people and that’s OK?”

“Huh?” she said.

“My ring finger,” I said.  Nothing. “Instead of my middle finger.”

“Oh, right, yeah, don’t hold up any fingers at anybody. Don’t be stupid.”

“And the only reason is because my ring finger looks like my middle finger?”

“Yeah, don’t do it.”

“So it isn’t about my actual finger, right?  It’s what people think about a finger, one that they’re not even seeing—right?”

“I guess.”

“So my finger is really OK and people are getting upset because they think they’re seeing something that they’re really not?”

“I thought you had homework to do?”

“So if I do this,” I said, holding up my ring finger, “and I get in trouble, I’m getting in trouble because people are beating themselves up with their own imaginations and that’s my fault?”

“Sure it’s your fault!”

“How?”

“Listen, don’t be a troublemaker just to make trouble,” she said, essentially telling me not to be a bullshit detector just to detect bullshit.

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