Of course, Lenny Bruce never intended to be an icon. In the early days, Bruce just wanted to be a comic, and he followed the usual route. He spent some time in the Catskills, honing without ever really perfecting a series of run-of-the-mill impressions: Bogart, Bela Lugosi, the typical B-list stuff. As Albert Goldsmith wrote in his landmark book with Lawrence Shiller, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!!", Bruce, along with other performers, would sometimes act as a plant at a local talent show. And of course, true to form, he tried to develop an act with his wife, Honey Harlowe, a stripper with whom he shared a tumultuous, passionate, and sometimes depraved relationship throughout his life, even after the couple divorced.

But something in Lenny Bruce's genetic makeup would never allow him to be run-of-the-mill, said Collins.

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Born Leonard Alfred Schneider, he was the only son of an overly proper father of British-Jewish extraction - some speculate that he, or more specifically, his son's feeling of isolation from him, was the Freudian foundation for the emotionally isolated Lone Ranger in Bruce's later routine. His mother, Sally, was a flamboyant sometimes-entertainer and barmaid who wandered in and out of Lenny's early life. Sally not only introduced him first to show biz, but also to a kind of campy subterranean and sometimes freakish world right under its surface.

Sally first took Lenny to Hubert's Museum, a 42^nd Street pinball arcade with a freak show downstairs, a place that Lenny Bruce would often cite in his work, and which may have been a kind of metaphor to him. He was fascinated by the overwhelming tawdriness of the place. Years later, he would still laugh heartily at the deadpan delivery of the ringmaster at Hubert's flea circus. Above all, he was amused and intrigued by one act, which in hindsight may have been a precursor to Bruce's fascination with bizarre and slightly freakish American psyche.

Goldman recounts it this way. "Just to the right of the flea circus is a platform that contains a sinister-looking electric chair, a heavy wooden frame chair looped with leather straps and pigtail wires, in which the audience is invited to sit and receive a token electric shock. Beside the chair is Lenny's other favorite act, Albertus Alberta - half-man half-woman. This old closet queen, as Lenny calls him, is dressed in a schizzy costume: a 1930s tux on the right side and on the left, a flapper's flounced and spangled dress. Displaying each side of his body in turn, he delivers his spiel with a heavy French accent: Ladies and Gentlemen, I wuz born of noble parents in Parees, Frawnce, but I am a freak of medical sci-ence. You can thank the cree-a-tor that you were not born like me: one half ze-woman, one half ze-man. You notice, this left pahrt of my bodee, I wear a 2 inch Kitty Kelly skyscraper heel...ON THIS SIDE, I CAN KICK A SOCCER BALL FIFTY YARDS..."

Truth be told, Lenny Bruce was never cut out to be a squeaky-clean Borscht-belt comic. You only had to look at the method he used to extricate himself from the service at the end of World War II to understand that about him. Though he spoke little of it, there is ample reason to believe that the war deeply affected Bruce. As Goldman wrote, while serving in the Navy in the Mediterranean around the time of the assaults on Palermo and Anzio, Bruce, from his forward gun turret, "witnessed plenty of carnage. Lenny saw dead bodies floating in the water and noted how the mixture of green sea and red blood produced a sinister shade of blue." When the war in Europe ended, Bruce feared that he was going to be dispatched to the Pacific and hatched a scheme to get out. At a time when America didn't even talk about homosexuality, Bruce paraded around the ship in a flamboyantly campy way. It made his shipmates nervous, and ultimately, it made Bruce a free man, albeit one with a dishonorable discharge. Later, when it looked like he might fail at comedy, he did a stint in the Merchant Marines. Once again, that experience was full of the kind of lurid experiences, nights in sweaty brothels, and seaside dives that would inform his later work.