Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  I was wary of Barry from the beginning and so were some of the other original Motherfuckers. Alfonso Motherfucker was a soft-spoken Puerto Rican poet with legs crippled by polio. He had been expelled from the University of Puerto Rico for his involvement in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Alfonso remembers walking down Haight Street with Barry during a trip to California in 1970. Suddenly, and without warning, Barry walked up to a Black man who was making a phone call from a phone booth, stuck his fingers in the man’s side imitating a gun, and took his wallet. Alfonso walked away vowing never to associate with Barry again.f

  It’s no wonder that Ben was looking around for soldiers. Being a shrewd judge of character, he surely realized I would not be much use in combat. The truth is that I never learned to fight and I was terrified of violence. I generally managed to skirt danger, but when it was absolutely unavoidable, I can only describe my behavior as cowardly.

  I remember one incident in which I became literally paralyzed by fear. We had traveled to Boston, at the request of a group of street kids who hung out on Boston Common, a seventy-five acre park in the center of the city. They had been attacked by gangs of off-duty service men and constantly harassed by the police. We held a rally to support them, and defying a nighttime curfew, stayed with them till the morning. The next day the police massed and drove us from the park. We regrouped at Arlington church at the foot of the Common for a meeting. The meeting was to take place in the basement. When we arrived, many of the kids who had been in the park had already gone inside. Suddenly cars drove up and about twenty drunken marines got out, opened the trunks, and pulled out baseball bats. A fight ensued. We drew our little knives, and all around the parking lot we were dodging bats and stabbing with our knives. I cowered ingloriously on the sideline. When the police arrived Ben was still defending himself. He’d been backed into a corner and two marines were swinging at him. Those of us who could scattered and reassembled in an apartment where we had been staying. We were freaked out. Some of us had been hit by bats. Alan complained about a knife wound he had suffered. He sat on the toilet moaning.

  Ben was not able to escape. The cops arrested him and cuffed him, but never found his knife, which he managed to conceal in his fist and jam down a crack in the back seat of the patrol car that took him to jail. In the course of the fight, one of the marines had been stabbed. He was wounded so severely he almost died. Although he had not done it, the cops accused Ben of the stabbing.

  He was charged with attempted murder, and faced a possible sentence of twenty-five years. The charge was later reduced to assault. At the trial, Ben’s lawyer urged him not to take the stand. He did anyway, long hair and all, dressed in a suit, with beads around his neck. He was an excellent witness. His defense was that he hadn’t stabbed the marine, but if he had, it would have been justifiable self-defense. The jurors went into the jury room to deliberate. It didn’t look good. The Vietnam War was raging. Ben was accused of attempting to kill one of “our boys.” Initially eleven jurors were for conviction. The one hold out was the only African American on the panel. He managed to persuade the other jurors there was reasonable doubt. Ben was acquitted.

  In the rhetoric of the movement, the bourgeois values of America masked its barbarism. But for me, the relation between mask and reality was reversed. My barbaric Motherfucker exterior masked my ambivalent relation to bourgeois values. I hid my fear, my insecurity, and my obsessions beneath a façade of bravado. My strategy for self-preservation was to maintain the split between my hidden private world and my public persona that I had hoped to overcome by immersion in radical politics.

  As a dirty Motherfucker, I acted out with enthusiasm my disdain for decorum and convention. But despite my posturing, I remained plagued by sadomasochistic fantasies and an obsession with my own filthiness—my pores, pimples, and smells. Perhaps because of these obsessions, I raged with a special vehemence, like a prisoner frantically struggling to free himself of his shackles.

  The System was shit. Not I. Or rather, if I was shit, then I would be shit with a vengeance. I reveled in the power of excrement. I would reduce “the System” to garbage. I would clamber over it like a rat in a dump. I, who felt like shit, hurled shit at my enemies.24 “You are shit” I screamed, at professors, generals, judges, and banqueters emerging from their limousines. “Fuck the war.” “Fuck Johnson.” “Fuck all you pompous asses.” Treating “no-trespass” signs as invitations, shoplifting from supermarkets, turning over garbage cans, hurling muck and rocks and invective, I became a human dirt ball. I ignored stoplights. I preferred running in the street to walking on the sidewalk. The sound of breaking glass was music to my ears.

  And still I worried about pimples.

  At about the same time that I was beginning my involvement with the Motherfuckers, I began a relationship with Yeshi, whom I would later marry and who would become the mother of my children. Yeshi had taught at Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama and participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery. When we first got together she was working as an organizer at Mobilization for Youth, an anti-poverty agency on the Lower East Side funded through Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Her job was to help Puerto Rican women on welfare set up sewing cooperatives. In her Frye boots and blue suede mini-skirt she looked to me the very embodiment of radical chic. And she had a living space to match her outfits: a nice apartment in a building with an elevator, overlooking a quiet churchyard on 10th Street and 2nd Avenue.

  Until now, my relations with women had consisted of my time with Prudence in London, a few brooding, guilt-ridden, sexually dysfunctional affairs, and one spectacular experience of anonymous sex. With Yeshi I had the possibility of an intimate sexual relation that could serve as an antidote to my sadomasochistic fantasy life. I took refuge in her embrace—from the street, from our constant confrontations, threats, counter-threats, and from my fantasies. Yeshi steered clear of the Motherfuckers as much as possible. She felt scorned by them as a useless bourgeois woman. I would lie with her in bed, worrying that I was missing something out on St. Marks Place, but sure that I needed to be “cured” of my introversion by a real relation to a woman.

  In the street, I played the role of cultural terrorist, prophet of instinctual release, vengeful and relentless. I’d return from raging in the streets, to find myself impotent in bed. Yeshi would lie with me, coaxing sexuality out of me, quieting me, and gently ridiculing my fears. I handed out flyers filled with inflamed rhetoric, taunted the police, proclaimed the liberation of fantasy, but ran from that fantasy into the arms of a woman. Once safe, I immediately feared that my refuge would become a prison. Yeshi would be my Delilah, ready with her shears to trim my fury. She would turn me into a timid, trapped plaything. She would isolate me in some cute little Greenwich Village apartment where she and I would sit at the kitchen table, dipping pieces of croissant into our coffee cups, and on Sundays, languidly turning the pages of the New York Times. Oh the shame of it!

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about the consequences of a cozy private life with Yeshi. The neat compartments into which I had divided my life collapsed dramatically after a fire destroyed two Motherfucker crash pads on 4th Street. Ben’s dog and Johnny’s cat died in the blaze. After the fire, the newly homeless Motherfuckers invaded Yeshi’s apartment. My comrades tore down her Picasso prints and spray painted “Down with the Bourgeoisie” on the walls of her living room. She and I would come home to find Motherfuckers sleeping in our bed.

  Day after day, Motherfuckers would ride up and down in the narrow elevator, watched disapprovingly by the Puerto Rican superintendent. He became increasingly upset about the invasion of his building. Israel, one of the Puerto Rican street kids who attached themselves to us, spray-painted graffiti in the halls. Every time the super cleaned it off, Israel would do it again.

  One evening, Joan, Israel, and Jamie, another of our Puerto Rican street kids, had been hanging out together. When they came back home and entered the downstairs lobby t
hey noticed the superintendent staring at them. Joan doesn’t remember anything being said, but the expression on his face frightened her. She pushed the button for the elevator. When it opened they hurried in. But they were not quick enough. The superintendent had armed himself with a bottle of acid. He rushed towards them, hurled the acid, and hit Jamie full in the face. Jamie was taken to the hospital. He wore the scars for the rest of his short life and was never mentally the same.

  Hours after the incident Jamie’s friends were in our apartment. They looked out the window, and there was the superintendent, sitting on a lawn chair outside the building, having a beer as if nothing had happened. Everyone went berserk. They rushed downstairs. Someone stabbed him with a knife. He died.

  We shouted “Off the pig,” but the first person we killed was a Puerto Rican superintendent. The killing never made the papers. My questions about what happened were met with impatience. I did not need to know what happened. All I needed to know was that he had to die. You can not live on the streets and allow yourself to be attacked without defending yourself.

  About the time the Motherfuckers were turning Yeshi’s apartment into their crash pad, a biker gang set up their headquarters in a loft on 3rd Street. Now there were two gangs on the Lower East Side, the Motherfuckers and the Gypsy Jokers. One day two of the Jokers showed up at Yeshi’s apartment looking for Barry. Ben let them in. They said that Barry had ratted one of them out in a dope deal. They had a contract out on him and they were going to kill him. He had a choice. They could kill him there in the apartment or he could come with them and they’d kill him somewhere else. Ben had a 25-caliber pistol in his pocket. He said to them, “I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re not going to kill him, not here or anywhere, because if you try, one of you is going to die.” They left. They told Ben the hit had been ordered by their leader. Ben went to their headquarters and confronted him. He was a head taller than Ben. They both pulled knives and began to circle each other from one end of the loft to the other, talking all the while. In the end they put away their knives and shook hands.

  Peace was restored, but it didn’t last long. Another biker gang, the Aliens, who later affiliated with the Hells Angels, moved into town and went to war with the Gypsy Jokers. The war ended when the Aliens raided the Gypsy Jokers’ headquarters. They tied the leader of the Jokers to a chair and set the loft on fire. He burned to death. Not long afterwards the police raided Ben’s apartment on Mott Street and found a stash of guns, acid, and explosives, and a roster book containing the names and badge numbers of members of the Tactical Patrol Force.

  We continued to swagger, but the circle was closing in on us. I was not the only one who felt it. Charlie was gone. Other Motherfuckers drifted away. Ben had made up his mind to change course. We had mined a thin vein. It was giving out. We were deep underground, unsure of the supports shoring up the mineshaft. The little canary that warns when the air becomes unbreathable was beginning to cough and wheeze. It was time to get out.

  NEW MEXICO

  Ben had heard about a hippie gathering of the tribes that was to take place in New Mexico and decided the time had come for us to make our escape from the ghetto. He was determined not to abandon the rainbow of kids who hung out with us and told them that if they wanted to come with us, we’d find room for them. He scored an old school bus from Saul Gottlieb of the Living Theater. But he didn’t have money for gas or supplies. He was trying to figure out what to do when he ran into Paul Krassner outside the Odessa Restaurant and pitched him the plight of the kids. Krassner told him to wait. He’d be right back. He walked away and in a short while came back with a check for three thousand dollars. Armed with a working vehicle and gas money, the Motherfuckers packed their bags and set out across the country, shoplifting along the way. Yeshi and I drove out separately.

  In the late Sixties, hippies were moving into the Mexican villages of New Mexico as earlier they had moved into the Puerto Rican tenements of the Lower East Side. Ben had no intention of joining one of the blissed-out hippie communes proliferating in the dry windswept plains around Taos. He had something quite different in mind. He arranged a meeting with Elizabeth Sutherland (now Betita Martinez) who lived in Espãnola, where she edited El Grito Del Norte, a newspaper that served as the mouthpiece of the Alianza, a militant Chicano movement for land rights. The goal of the Alianza was to reclaim ownership of the original Spanish and Mexican land grants that had been incorporated into the National Forest. The movement’s founder, Reis Tijerina, hoped to spark an armed insurrection by leading a series of raids on government institutions. On June 6, 1967, Tijerina and a group of his men stormed the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, the county seat a few miles north of Canjilón. They freed prisoners, shot a policeman and a jailer, and fled with a reporter and deputy sheriff as hostages.

  Through Elizabeth we met two brothers, Juan and Tony, who had been lieutenants in Tijerina’s little army and leaders in the courthouse raid. They lived in Canjilón, a tiny mountain village about sixty miles up the road from Espãnola and forty miles south of the Colorado border. Canjilón was an Alianza stronghold. During the manhunt that followed the courthouse raid, the National Guard occupied Canjilón. The men of the town hid in the hills during the day, and snuck back at night for dinner. Eventually Tijerina was captured. By the time we arrived he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The men of Canjilón returned to eking out a living surrounded by National Forest they considered stolen from them by the US government. They were not reconciled. They awaited the time when they would rise again. Juan saw us as potentially valuable allies. He knew we had guns and they would need all the guns they could get. He agreed to let us live rent-free in a little three-room adobe house he owned in the village. Ben told Juan we’d be ready when we were needed. This clearly was the place for us.

  But we were city kids. We had little idea what to do with ourselves in the country. We had no way to earn a living even if we had wanted to. We drove down the road to Espãnola, signed up for food stamps, bought guns, and went off to hunt deer in the national forest. We started a compost pile and a garden, and dug an outhouse. We acquired a couple of goats, a few chickens, a rooster, a stray dog with distemper who ate the rooster, a flat bed truck, and a VW bus with eyes painted on the side. We used the truck to steal hay to feed our two goats. Once we rustled a cow. It was standing alone in an empty field when we drove by. We shot it, wrestled it into our VW bus, drove to a place we would not be observed and skinned it with a knife. The knife was dull. It took forever. We got it home, ate cow till we couldn’t eat anymore, then gave the rest away. Because we had read that Native Americans used every part of the animals they killed, we decided to tan the skin and make a drum. Two methods of tanning were proposed: stewing in birch bark and stewing in urine. We compromised and combined the two methods. We submerged the skin in a barrel with the mixture. The barrel stank. The skin marinated. When we examined it two weeks later, it had turned to jelly. We intended to make the body of the drum from a log, which we would hollow out by burning out its center with coals from the fire. This method required constant careful attention. Whoever was overseeing the task neglected his duties. The coals burnt big holes in the sides and the log broke into pieces.

  We read Black Elk Speaks, which purported to be the reflections of an Oglala Sioux medicine man.25 Black Elk thought it was a bad idea to live in square houses. We decided to build an underground kiva in our backyard. We dug a long oval hole, carefully leveling the floor and smoothing out the sides. With the mud we dug out of the hole we made adobe bricks and constructed a domed roof. It had a smoke hole at one end. On winter solstice we built a fire and took peyote. We sat in a circle, chanting while the smoke curled out the smoke hole and up into the cold crystal moonlit night. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we finished construction, the kiva began to collapse. We had built it too close to an irrigation ditch. The water from the ditch seeped through the walls, and our beautiful domed roof collapsed in a pile of r
ubble.

  Isolated in our little home in the country we read about the formation of the Weathermen, about their Days of Rage, and how they put on helmets and fought the Chicago police. We read about the explosion in the Greenwich Village town house that killed three of their members who had been trying to manufacture a bomb. The Weathermen were the new Motherfuckers. A visitor passing through Canjilón reported that I’d been named a co-conspirator in the indictment that preceded the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial. It all seemed very far away. On July 20, 1969, “Buzz” Aldrin walked on the Sea of Tranquility. A few months later, we sat out on a mesa surrounded by stars and looked up at the moon. Its light poured down on us and I wondered how we had become so marginalized.

  Isolated, no longer able to imagine ourselves at the center of history, the remnants of the Motherfuckers began to turn on each other. Ben’s tyrannical nature became ever more intolerable. Craziness seemed to spread through the ranks. One day I was at the wheel of our old VW bus, driving down the mountain road that winds from Canjilón to Espãnola and enjoying the view of the yellow ochre sandstone bluffs that Georgia O’Keefe loved to paint, when suddenly I lost control going around a curve. The bus rolled over and skidded towards the cliff. I remember looking out the window and seeing Alfonso Motherfucker, who had been thrown out the sliding side door, flying in the air above the bus, withered leg and all, like a figure in a Chagall painting.g The bus came to a stop just short of the edge. Miraculously no one was hurt. We stashed the guns we were carrying in the brush in case the police came by and waited for someone to stop and offer help.