Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  He’d show them. He and his army of freaks would turn their revolution upside down.

  And they did.

  But first, one more celebration of love. Another Be-in in the Sheep’s Meadow. This time, a marriage. My mother and Lenny, two wandering Jews dressed in their sharpest native garb. Old-timey robes hemmed with thread of blue and gold, cinched at the waist with ropes made of hemp. The straps of their sandals snaking up their calves. The rabbi came courtesy of city hall. There’s no best man, no maid of honor. Just four thousand witnesses tripping on acid and a photographer from the Associated Press. It’s Easter. Lenny tells the assembled crowd, “We’re living right now in a culture of death. We need a new life. A new covenant. We need to reassert the possible. We need to court transfiguration. What I’m saying is, let’s make love, not war.” He and my mother untied their robes. They let it all hang out, every inch of their skin. They embraced and lowered themselves to the grass and committed a transgressive act of sexual love right then and there for everyone to see. Conceiving the new vision of humanity that, ten months later, would become me. Freedom. Fred for short. To Lenny, just the kid.

  In the meantime, he had a generation’s consciousness to change.

  Lenny would say, We presented the timid with a vision of the future and told them, “This could be your present. All that’s stopping you is you.” He’d say, We told them, “Don’t be a slave to the death cult of money. Come outside and breathe the fresh air. You wanna see what’s in the hearts of the money changers? Come on. I’ll show you.” He led a ragged band of hippies downtown to the Stock Exchange. “Let’s take a tour. Observe the animals in their natural habitat. They filed in like tourists and assembled on the visitors’ deck overlooking the trading floor. See how they’re crammed into that overcrowded pen? Note the leashes Windsor-knotted around their necks. The cacophony of growls and barks as they barter over paper chits. Can you smell their fear? They sure as fuck smell yours. Pity them, for they know not what they do. But wait!” He fished a crumpled dollar bill from his pocket, held it over the railing and let go. The bill fluttered and twirled like a butterfly. It floated over the herd of traders. First, one guy noticed it. Then another. Then a third snatched it out of the air. Lenny dropped a second bill. He gave my mother a signal and she dropped one too. A handful of traders had caught on by now. With each new bill, more of them hooted at the deck. Lenny’s eyes bugged in mock surprise. He threw his head back and shook his mighty mane, cackling with his signature glee. “Free money,” he called, letting loose another handful and watching the traders scamper. They were like children at a parade, arms outstretched, faces contorted with the effort to contain their excitement, screaming hoarsely at the man on the float who might or might not aim his candy at them. Each falling dollar instigated a scrum. Lenny cackled and cackled. “You see what we’re dealing with?” His friends all got in on it. They’d stuffed their pockets too. Hundreds of one-dollar bills. And eventually so many fell at such a rate that the traders erupted in an all-out battle, mano a mano, every man for himself. No one was watching the boards anymore. All trading halted. The market shut down. ’Cause why flip numbers and bid on abstractions when cold hard cash is pissing from the sky. “Score one for freedom,” Lenny told the press assembled on Wall Street. “All for one lousy buck. Those people are animals. I feared for my life.” Then he pulled the last dollar bill from his pocket, held it up to the cameras and set it ablaze.

  It’s all about disruption, he’d say. We pissed in their corner and claimed it as ours.

  He was no longer a he. Now he was a them. An us. A tribe. All those kids who’d flooded the Lower East Side now decked out in feathers and headdresses. No chiefs, only warriors. No centralized power. An us against the them that used its money and its institutional force, its tactical police and educational endowments and media and corporate structures and branches of government to send us to the slaughter in Vietnam, to throw us in the slammer for two measly joints, to build bombs and plasmatic chemical compounds capable of wiping out half the Third World, all the while enslaving our brothers and sisters here, especially those who happened to be black, shoving them into ghettos, standing by and watching as those ghettos burned.

  He’d say, We rounded up the trash on the Lower East Side and carted it uptown to Lincoln Center, where the elite went to be told how special they were. Garbage for garbage, we said as we filled their precious fountain with the refuse of the poor.

  He’d say, We dressed ourselves in combat fatigues and headed to Midtown to play capture the flag. Using the streets of the city—its skyscrapers and plazas and double-parked trucks—as their battleground, they hid behind phone booths and under public benches. Toy guns in hand, they brought the war home. Some of them fought for the red, white and blue. Others for the Viet Cong. Someone had mounted speakers on the corner of Park and 57th. At the designated time, the music began, first softly—Appalachian Spring floating through the canyon—then louder, more militant, with the soaring chords of imperial power, Wagner and Dvořák and Carmina Burana, and suddenly, when Lenny—their non-leader—gave the signal, they surged into traffic, pretending to get hit by yellow cabs, reviving the slap-and-fall scams they’d perfected in junior high. They shot at each other. They trampled passersby. They leapt onto the hoods of cars stopped at red lights and fired balloons filled with cow’s blood at limousines. These balloons, when they exploded, man, blood splattered everywhere. Shellacking the streets. Running in the gutters. When the cops arrived and started cracking heads, the avenue became a genuine war zone. They got their asses kicked, but like true guerrillas they gloried in the conviction that they’d won by losing.

  That was the first battle. There would be more.

  They painted a maple leaf on the army recruitment center in Times Square and scrawled Canada wants you…to be happy and free! across it.

  They procured a brick of the sweetest Thai stick and stayed up all night rolling perfect joints. Using the white pages and a dart—so they claimed—they chose a thousand of their fellow citizens to receive these gifts in the mail. They were magnanimous, their portions generous, and they saved just a small ration of weed for themselves. It so happened that among the random names selected were Peter Ingstrom, Mayor Lindsay’s chief of staff; the Honorable Judge Benedict Fieldston of the 9th District; Aaron Lemoux, the fallen son of Oliver Lemoux, the president of Standard Oil (addressed to the family home on Fifth and 81st); and, since the message meant nothing if no one heard it, Chet Huntley, news anchor for NBC. To make sure these people understood the full implications of opening their mail, Lenny included a small typed message in each package: “Congratulations, friend. You are now in possession of a marijuana cigarette. Enjoy it! Keep it for yourself or pass it around at your next dinner party. It’s yours to do with as you please. We suggest, though, that you bear in mind the following fact: Simply carrying this cigarette on your person or having it in your home is a felony offense in this country. If Officer Friendly finds out you have it, he’ll be forced to do his duty and put you away on a five-year sentence. Welcome to the other side of the law, friend. We’re sure you’ll like it here as much as we do.”

  They imagined themselves to be outlaws now. To prove it, they made mischief for the cops. They called them pigs and exercised their free speech by oinking whenever they saw one. They tossed marbles in the street as the horse brigade trotted past. They released rats they’d trapped in their tenement apartments into the conference rooms of the Hyatt and the Plaza, a nuisance that on some days tied up half the force. Set off M-80s and smoke bombs on strategic rooftops across the Lower East Side and watched as the pigs—oink, oink—swarmed around, confused, thinking that the whole neighborhood had exploded. Which it had, just not physically. The real bombs had gone off in the minds of the young—not only here, but all over this great nation of ours. There were thousands of them now, millions. Though Lenny didn’t lead them, they followed him wherever he wen
t.

  To DC, for example, to exorcise the evil spirits lurking there. Dressed in the garb of druids, shamans, witches and monks, 200,000 strong, they waggled their fingers above their heads and spoke incantations, chanting and spinning to the music blaring at their backs. When the National Guard raised its rifles at them, they stuck flowers in the barrels and passed by unharmed. They made love on the National Mall and roused the stone effigies of the great leaders; you could see the smile curl at the edge of Lincoln’s mouth, you could hear his blessing float over the crowd. They pried off the lid of the Capitol building, and with the mighty force of their love, set the demons lodged inside loose to twirl toward the heavens, a maelstrom of peace, an anti-Armageddon. They raised the Pentagon off its foundation, levitated it twenty-four feet above the Earth. The way it glowed. The rancid gunk that oozed from its plumbing. The smell. A heavy scene, Lenny would say. But man, it really happened. I saw it with my own eyes.

  A few weeks later they trailed him uptown to make peace with the enemy and conjure the end of the war into existence. Playing it straight, their hair combed and shirts ironed, they hooted and laughed and danced in the streets, rejoicing. They pressed copies of The New York Times into the hands of ad men, insurance execs, delivery boys and secretaries, all those squares speed-walking through the pneumatic tubes of commerce—their own edition, identical in every way to the real thing except for the words on the front page and the two-inch headline above the fold: JOHNSON UNCONDITIONALLY WITHDRAWS FROM VIETNAM. Hey man, didn’t you hear? The war’s over. And for an afternoon, it seemed like it was true. The joy in the air. The relief, even among buttoned-up types who would never dare to criticize the president.

  Then on to Grand Central Station, the place from which the life of the city flowed, with its train schedules dictating the rhythms of industry, funneling the commuting machers from their homes in Westchester into its clogged chambers and spitting them out into the metropolis, where their time no longer belonged to them. Grand Central was the cinch in the hourglass. Break it and you’d unleash who knew what—ancient winds blowing a million grains of sand over this vast, seething, overpopulated land. First in small, then larger groups, in platoons, in battalions, his freak army slouched into the great art deco church of time. They carried presents bound by string, and at precisely five o’clock, they pulled the cords and out soared festive balloons, each one streaming a banner imprinted with a word: PEACE and LOVE and LAUGH and FUCK, but also WAR and KILL and DEATH. Pick your poison. Take one home.

  There was another balloon, much larger than the rest. This one dangled a canvas sack, $$$ stamped right on it, like a Krazy Kat gag come to life. Reach for it, as many people tried to do, and you’d release real money. Shades of the Stock Exchange, but this time the bills rained down on decent, average Americans. People picked them up, studied them. And they noticed a message stamped minutely on each one: “Enjoy this free money. Go buy yourself an ice cream. While you eat it, consider how lucky you are that this isn’t napalm. If it were, you’d be dead.”

  More freaks tumbled into the chamber, overrunning the commuters. Gobbling up all available space. They sang songs. They chanted. They strummed acoustic guitars and ate pastrami sandwiches. They toked up or took acid and watched the constellations on the ceiling dance. They whispered sweet nothings into a corner and someone on the other side of the room heard them and whispered sweet nothings back. They sat on the railings of the great stairwells. They perched on the counters of the cashiers’ windows. They scaled the information booth and from this roost sent messages ricocheting around the room: Time is an illusion. Poetry is in the street. Commodities are the opium of the people. Boredom is counterrevolutionary. Concrete breeds apathy. We’re all undesirables. Time is an illusion. We’ll say it again: Time is an illusion. Kill time. Kill time. Kill time. And then someone reached out and snapped the hands off the landmark clock atop the booth and the pigs swept in. They’d been watching and waiting for their chance. Truncheons out and swinging, they squeezed in from all sides, four new walls of bristly, engorged pink flesh constricting around Lenny and his tribe. There was nowhere to run. Bones were broken. Heads cracked. Another ass-kicking, this one more intense and dramatic than the last.

  It was beautiful, Lenny would say. The cops went ahead and made our point for us.

  He marched them up to Morningside Heights, to invade the citadel on the hill where Columbia University shielded its students from the brute repercussions of their entitlement. He took the hippest undergrads on a campus tour. “Here’s the building where the science labs are housed. PhD candidates. Tenured professors. They submit proposals. The school approves them, or it doesn’t. Some of them are given budgets to fund their experiments. The money comes from grants, and that’s where things get interesting. Who provides the grants? You wanna guess?” He’s chewing gum. Blowing bubbles. Fucking around with a translucent yellow yo-yo he bought from some subway hawker on his way uptown. There’s a charger inside that revs when he flicks the string, and the yo-yo lights up like a carnival game. “Oil companies. Pharmaceuticals. The US Department of Defense. Since the school wants the money and the scientists want the labs, the proposals are tailored to appeal to these benefactors. That building right there, that’s where napalm was invented. Agent Orange, too. The hounds of hell. Use your imagination. Whatever you dream up will be much less terrifying than the reality they’re concocting in there. Is this right? Is this just? Does this surprise you at all?” He’s flicking that yo-yo up and down. Windmilling it. “Come on. Let’s take a stroll down Amsterdam. See where your tuition money really goes. While we’re walking, I’m gonna give you a pop quiz. You kids are good at tests. You must be. You’re driven. Ambitious. I see it in your eyes. Your entire lives have been dedicated to casing the system so you come out on top. And now here you are at an elite institution of higher learning. I’m curious about what they’re teaching you. So, tell me: Who’s the largest landholder in New York City? No. No-no-no. It’s the Catholic Church. Who’s number two? That’s right. Columbia. A nonprofit dedicated to the public good, by the way, at least according to the school’s charter.” The gum has been wedged in his cheek this whole time to free his tongue for speechifying. Now he molds it into a ball with his teeth and then—thwat—spit it with expert aim at a pig cruiser double-parked in front of a bodega. He’s still at it with the yo-yo too. “You see that building there?” he asks, jutting his chin at a five-story brick façade in desperate need of repointing. “That’s one of their properties. The one next to it too. The whole block belongs to them. Everything from here to 132nd and on over to Frederick Douglass. They don’t look so bad from here, but step inside and see what you find. Wouldn’t be hard to do—the locks are all broken. Some of those apartments haven’t had running water for two years. Families living twelve to a room—aunts and uncles, granny, great-granny, everyone shoved into six hundred square feet—they have to beg Ernesto at the Cuban-Chinese every time they want to take a shit. Your august institution of higher learning doesn’t give two fucks about people like them, not like it does about you. They’re collateral. Property. Pawns it can use to subsidize the verdant lawns of your campus, the passionate conversations in your classrooms, the catered meet and greets with your faculty and, of course, the sulfurous experiments taking place in the bowels of Pupin Hall. You want to know how much Columbia loves you? Let’s cut through these projects, over toward Columbus. There’s a park over there. Basketball courts. A playground. Some grass where the locals can spread out blankets and have picnics. In summer, that fountain there is clogged with little black and brown kids, shrieking as they charge through the water, cherishing this brief respite from the sweltering claustrophobia of their apartments. A nice park. Not the prettiest you’ve ever seen, but it does the job. My question for you is, do you want these kids to keep playing in the park? To experience fresh air? To know what it feels like to run for a better reason than because the pigs are chasing them? I thought so.
But listen. Columbia University doesn’t. Columbia University believes these people don’t deserve their shitty little park. Columbia University believes it has a responsibility to build you a new multimillion-dollar gym on this park. A swimming pool. A weight room. Handball courts. Anything your little hearts desire. It wants to please you. To make you comfortable. It wants you to know how special you are. And once the gym’s built, you better believe Columbia University’s not gonna let anybody but you use it. Is that fair? They’re taking these people’s park away and giving it to you who have so much already. Is that just? I don’t think so either. Aren’t you sick of the lies and hypocrisy?” He flipped the yo-yo into a cat’s cradle. Held it there for a dramatic second—spinning futilely with nowhere to go. “Columbia University belongs to you. What do you think would happen if you told President Kirk that you refuse to learn the lies they’ve been teaching you?” Ever so slightly, he tugged the string and the yo-yo bounced and spun incrementally faster. “That you refuse to take part in bullying the people who live under the university’s heel?” Another pull. Another bounce. “That you know what freedom is and this ain’t it?” Another pull, this time with such force that the yo-yo flew up out of its cradle and swung around the finger to which it was tied. “Let’s liberate this school from its shackles.” Pinwheeling the yo-yo faster and faster until, finally, he fell to a knee, slammed his palm to the ground and shattered the fucking thing against the sidewalk. “I’ve got a hundred friends right over there just waiting for the word to help you do it.” And lo, his freak army rose up behind a chain-link fence. They pressed forward, fists raised in revolutionary salute, thrusting their weight into the grid of metal, pushing and churning and knocking the fence down. They marched on, the students and Lenny with them, up the hill, onto the campus, taking on more students at every turn, and when they reached Low Library, where Kirk kept his offices, they invaded and pushed everyone else out, anyone who challenged what they were doing, anyone who maybe just didn’t care. They barricaded doors. They encamped and proclaimed the university free. They liberated it and then occupied the premises for six days until the pigs goose-stepped in and again showed the good people of this nation the brute force their government and moneyed interests were willing to bring down on anyone, even their own children, if they dared ask what the fuck was going on.