John Biscello

   Lenny Bruce, seated on a rickety stool, cigarette dangling from his lips, slumping forward, shoulders slack. His mouth puckers, jumping his cigarette to attention, as he draws in fiercely, then exhales a series of bluish halos that float and dissolve. Time on his hands, balled into leaden fists, the gravity shackles of lost hours—Bruce had gotten good at blowing perfectly formed halos. That he perceives them as halos and not rings says something.

   Cinderblock walls and a stone floor slowbreathing bonechew cold.

   Who put me here used to torment Bruce, but not anymore. Now it is the negotiation of smoke and halos, unreflected.

   A sudden rush of air from the far upper corner of the room.

   What the fuck—

   Bruce saw a pigeon, a Surrealist gag of a pigeon—its snub beak fitted sideways, tiny red eyes misaligned, mangy iridescent feathers, body plumped to the point of near-busting, tri-pronged feet of pale pink banded in thick ropey veins. The pigeon flapped its wings wildly, yet remained in the corner, as if magnetized there. Bruce, less impressed that a pigeon had appeared out of nowhere than he was grateful for fugitive motion, watched the bird struggle in its invisible cage. Eventually the pigeon worked its way free from the corner, its frenzy slowed to a seductive blur, and it descended toward Bruce.

   In a trance, Bruce zeroed in on the white slip of paper wound tightly around the pigeon’s left foot. Bruce raised his hand, pinching the paper between thumb and forefinger, and slid it down and off the pigeon’s foot. The pigeon continued its bobbing levitation, as Bruce unrolled the paper and read what was written on it:

   Dear Leonard Alfred Schneider,

   …………………

   When he was done reading, he flicked his cigarette to the floor, and cursed loudly.

   Several seconds later, the pigeon exploded. An airtight pop followed by a whirling siege of feathers. Feathers got into Bruce’s hair, his eyes, grazed his lips and cheeks and chin.

   What a stupid fucking pigeon, Bruce deadpanned, and brushed feathers from his hair and face. Then he unleashed a stream of expletives, the barbed invective of a man haunted by a man visited by a godforsaken pigeon delivering a message which informed him that he had been pardoned from obscenity charges, thirty-nine years after his death, by the governor of New York, the first posthumous pardon in the state’s history.

   Bruce lit another cigarette, inhaled with a vengeance, considered smashing his fists against cinderblock, but instead decided to do what he hadn’t done in a long time: deliver a stand-up bit. His response to the pardon, tit for tat, halos be damned.

   Just so the fuckers knew, dead or not, Lenny Bruce had something left to say.