by Joshua Furst
That couple—the one that had shown up so furtively at our door—on the nightly news, stripped of their sunglasses, hands cuffed in front of them. The speed with which my mother stepped to the TV and turned it off. The sense that even in my freewheeling home, there were things I wasn’t supposed to know.
* * *
—
And always Lenny’s voice, his manic patter, running me over at great velocity, trampling me under a stampede of words. He was so enthralled, sometimes, by his own performance that he didn’t notice if I was listening or not.
* * *
—
Him boasting at parties: “I told them, don’t lay that on me. That’s your trip, not mine. I didn’t ask you to manufacture a hundred thousand Lenny Snyder dolls. It wasn’t my idea to give them pull-strings so they could yelp ‘Power to the people’ and ‘Groovy!’ You’re trying to turn me into a fucking hula-hoop. That’s what I told them. And the American flag shirts for twenty-seven bucks a pop with the patch on the shoulder of me flashing a peace sign. The empty boxes that, you open them up and they shout ‘Dig it!’ and laugh—ah, ha-ha-ha-ha. The posters and trading cards—a whole set, me and Sy, Leary, Hayden. Eldridge Cleaver. Smelling like sugar from the stale gum inside. I said, that’s cool. I still have my mint-condition Yogi Berra rookie card. But listen, chewing gum’s a snooze. And bad for the environment. Let’s swap out the gum for a tab of acid. You do that, you’ve got a deal. If not, I’ll tell you what I’ve told every other cocksucker who’s ever tried to commodify me. Go fuck yourself. Lenny Snyder ain’t for sale.
“The record deals. I told them, Go fuck yourself.
“The film crew—they had a vision. An antic Lenny Snyder racing from one national landmark to another, the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, everywhere, the whole enchilada. High-stepping up the steps, peeking around marble columns, doing cartwheels and periodically leaping and shouting ‘Yippie!’ as a paddy wagon full of Keystone Cops chases me—sexy ones with big tits and miniskirts. I said: What? You think I’m a long-haired Benny Hill? Go fuck yourself.
“The publishing house—it wanted to put together a book of letters from the hundreds of women who’ve fallen in love with me. Come-ons and fantasies. Daydreams about my hair. I asked them, where you gonna get those letters? I’d like to vet them. I want names and addresses. They said we’ll write them ourselves. The contents don’t matter. It’s the packaging that counts. Right, I said. Of course. Go fuck yourself.
“I said to all of them, I’m not your product. I don’t want your money. I operate in a different economy. Tell you what I’ll do, though. I’ll consider your offer if you let me decide what happens with your profits. We’ll give them to the Panthers, the PLO, the IRA. Every cent. Publicly. We’ll hold a press conference.
“That’s what I told them. Join me where I stand. I ain’t coming to you.
“And you know what they said to that? They told me to go fuck myself!
“So I remain free. Ha-fucking-ha!”
* * *
—
But also, the silence during those stretches when he disappeared. Like the apartment itself was yearning for his presence.
* * *
—
He had women everywhere, girlfriends, groupies, chicks he picked up on the street. My mother knew about them. They had an open marriage—the kind that only went one way—so, she pretended not to care, but sometimes, on especially bad days when he’d been gone for a week or more and she’d heard rumors that he was maybe shacked up in the Chelsea Hotel with some fuck-me poetess or carting an eighteen-year-old runaway with him on his trek through the college campuses of Ohio, she’d work herself up to such a hyperventilating pitch that when he finally did come home, you could see her deciding—making a conscious choice—to indulge her elemental rage. Stamping her feet, bringing all of the power in her petite frame down like bang snaps on the scratched and distressed hardwood floor. Whipping her arms like buzz saws at his head. Sobbing. Tearing at her hair, her clothes—actually rending her clothes—like some wailing woman from the old country. The accumulated sorrows of the generations—the long line of women of her tribe who, going back to the City of David, had all silently endured their philandering men—channeling through her onto Lenny’s head.
What he would do was watch her. Just watch her. Hands dug to the wrists in the pockets of his jeans. Ducking once in a while when she came clawing toward him but mostly just standing there, a witness, alive with admiration, stinking of pussy, proud of himself.
“My very own balabusta,” he called her. “My lunatic love.”
He taunted her. “Right on, babe, let it out. You can do better than that.”
My mother crashed again and again against him. Exhausted herself. Fell back to rev up and crash into him again. The endorphins flushing through her brain. The adrenaline crackling. A kind of euphoria.
Never mind that they always chose three in the morning to act out this Punch and Judy show. Never mind that I was still awake, tucked into myself, doing everything I could to make myself smaller.
Eventually, inevitably, Lenny would hold up one long finger, like, Wait, I have an idea, and my mother, having spent every ounce of herself by then, would pause for him to justify his existence. He’d raise a leg and cut a fat, juicy, distended, orgiastic fart. A slow, tricksy smile lighting up his face. It took me my whole life to understand that he had his reasons for behaving like this and that he wasn’t the only one getting something vital from the transaction. He’d cackle and, just like that, she’d cackle too. You could see it all over her, the total, relentless joy she found in him. And then they’d be in each other’s arms, jitterbugging through the room like there’d never been anything but love between them.
* * *
—
Riding on his shoulders, hands tangled in his hair like I was holding reins. We were at yet another massive demonstration. From way up there, I could see the scope of the crowd surrounding us. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people. An undulating sheet of humanity sprawled out in every direction, restless, waiting for something, anything, to happen, to be told to march, to be lit on fire.
Off in the distance, the Washington Monument. It meant something but I was too young to know what. I was more interested in how it looked not real—like it had been put there by Lenny and his friends as a backdrop for the pageant about to commence. I was more interested in how the breeze slapped my face and made my eyes tear up. The beach balls soaring over people’s heads. The various clusters of folk who, having grown sick of standing, nestled in the grass and sang along with that one guy in each group who’d brought a guitar. I knew all the songs. “We Shall Overcome.” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Give Peace a Chance.” “This Land Is Your Land.” They were my lullabies.
Lenny wandered through this pastoral scene, bouncing me, his hands clasped around my feet. Everyone wanted a piece of his attention. A crumb. To touch the hem of his shirt. To slap me high-five. It was fun for me. I felt like a superstar. But he couldn’t stop grumbling.
“They think they’re at a fucking party,” he said—to who? Sy was there, and Phil Ochs, and Ray Garrett, the guy Lenny called the Fag, and a slew of other players in their scene. The sunflower dude. Everybody. It was a family reunion.
Lenny complained to all of them. “This scene is a drag, man. It’s bumming me out.”
He was sped up, angry at the very people who adored him, mostly because they adored him.
We ended up in a holding pen of some sort. There was a stage and a banner and a tower of speakers and a parade of folks waiting their turn at the mic. “Give ’em what they want,” Lenny sneered. “Flatter them. Fucking liberals ruin it every time. Just look at them. They think being here is accomplishing something.”
“It is accomplishing something, Lenny,” someone said. “It means we’re winning.”
I think it was Phil. You know what? I’m positive. Fingering his guitar. Tuning it up. Going over the set list taped to the barrel.
And Lenny lashed out at him. “Oh? Is this what winning looks like?” Talking with his hands. Bucking me around on his shoulders. “I’m telling you, the first sight of blood and these motherfuckers will scurry back to their fallout shelters. But, hey, it’s cool,” he said. “You go ahead, Ochs. Climb up on that stage and lead your sing-along. Shower the people with nostalgia. I’m telling you, though. This scene is over.”
Phil looked like he might cry. But he always looked like that. “Oh,” he said, absorbing, considering. “Then w-what’s next?”
Lenny darkened. “What’s next? You wanna know w-what’s next? Le déluge, motherfucker! That’s what’s next!” He just wouldn’t stop. “Go on, man. It’s your turn. They’re waiting for you. I’ll tell you what, though. I’m done tap dancing.”
* * *
—
Certain things you just know. Immutable truths. Some kids were scared of you, others scared you. You knew which were which just from the look of them. Something in their stances. The way their clothes hung on their bodies. The size of their voices. The farther east you went, the more you had to pay attention to the messages your skin was sending you.
We lived on 7th Street between First and Second. Kids from SoHo, the Village, they didn’t impress me. They wore their backpacks high on their shoulders. Kids from the east side, south of the park, where the language of the street was Puerto Rican, they were tougher. You might find yourself regretting having answered back as you stepped out of one of their botanicas. But the most terrifying kids lived in the squats north of Tompkins Square. They squirmed on the stoops in hungry packs. Watched you with cold, dispassionate eyes, flinging butterfly knives between their own feet as their naked little brothers and sisters played chicken with traffic. I don’t remember any one thing about them. Just the sense, any time I was over there, that they were waiting for their chance to fuck me up. The problem was they didn’t believe in anything. The problem was they had no code; or if they did, it was so erratic that any random cruelty could be justified. The problem was I belonged to Lenny and they knew it and I knew it and they didn’t like it. Something to do with him taking credit for having liberated the shitholes they lived in. His posing as the leader of their mangy clan.
I remember him dragging me over there one time. Me asking, “Why do they always stare at me like that?”
“Like what?” he said.
“Like that. So mean.”
And I remember him thinking about this for a second, sizing me up and then saying, “They think you’re a pussy.” And me not knowing if they were right or wrong, but sensing that he did and that he didn’t like the answer.
* * *
—
The more desperate you were—the more emotionally unstable and materially endangered—the more he respected you. We’d be walking along and he’d have one eye out for people in a jam, gaunt, distressed drunks sobbing in the gutters, guys who’d been on the street so long they’d fallen out of time, grown ageless, so worn and leathered they no longer begged for change, just wandered around in a daze, scavenging, hiding in the subways where the rat economy allowed them to survive, surfacing every once in a while to expose their sores to the bracing fresh air, their thin hair blowing wild and beards down to their bellies, like Hasids banished from the tribe, lost and searching for their God. We’d see these men—always men, never women—and the better facet of Lenny’s nature would surface and catch the light. The thing in him that had been hardened by years of struggle and fame. He’d kneel down next to them. Share a smoke with them. Break bread. As comfortable as warriors who hadn’t seen one another since the Battle of the Bulge, who’d gone on to grossly different kinds of luck with life, but still shared a secret knowledge, a wound they couldn’t explain to anyone else and didn’t have to among themselves. He’d laugh with them and, remarkably to me, he never once sneered. Lenny, who sneered at everyone and everything. He accepted these guys in the place where he found them. They were courageous to him. He believed that the shame beaten into them was tragic. That it wasn’t them but the people who’d put them there who should be ashamed.
* * *
—
A lot of what I remember about that last year is him not being there.
Just me and my mother. The security of knowing she was two rooms away, sipping her chamomile tea, cutting up a pear she’d later bring me as I sat on my pillow, six inches from the TV, entranced by the big eyes of Kimba of the Jungle.
I remember the limitless possible selves—each as kind and lovely as the others—that she urged me to imagine lying dormant inside me.
And special days, cradled in sunlight, when she put Free to Be…You and Me on the turntable and we’d tumble into the all-accepting, gender-contorting, fantastically shame-free mirage inside that record, chanting along to “William’s Doll” and “It’s All Right to Cry,” discussing the societal implications of “Atalanta” with the Talmudic fervor of true believers. The hope she worked so hard to instill in me, that cruelty was a crime that could be overcome.
Me and my mother, navigating the streets of the city together. My little hand in hers. My head in her skirt. Running errands. Getting bored. Lenny’s presence felt only in its absence.
The bandshell at Tompkins Square, empty in early-morning fog. The fragility of the morning rituals of the people waking up on its stage.
The warmth of her arms across my chest as we sat on the grass and watched a squirrel tussle with an empty Fritos bag.
Her scent, cottage cheese and jasmine. Sometimes a strong tug of iron in the lower registers. How tightly these smells wrapped themselves around me.
I remember the psychedelic colors that swirled and blurred as my mother and I pushed past storefronts—the gaudy brightness of everything—chipping in places, growing old. The sense that beneath this thin layer of paint, the city was crumbling, rotting away.
And joyful marches. Her face flushed with life. Me helping her hold up the sign we’d made. She seemed to always know everybody there. They gave her the megaphone. Let her lead the chants. She was special to these people, desired, and since Lenny wasn’t there she belonged to me. Only to me.
* * *
—
There was this one wizened little man who peddled ideology from a card table on the sideline of every demonstration. I have no idea why he’s stuck in my memory, but he is. Vividly. His hundreds of buttons, one for every issue and every point of view on the left side of the scale. A cacophony of dissent pinned to his felt vest, strung like jewels along the brim of his Greek fisherman’s hat. I remember there was something sour about him. Ageless and embittered. He could have been imported under a bell jar from 1890s Grozny, or just as likely, gotten lost en route to some Trotskyite gathering on Orchard Street where everyone spoke Yiddish and still thought it was 1952. Nobody ever said a word to him and nobody ever picked up any copies of the socialist papers he hawked.
* * *
—
The sounds. The music everywhere. Bands of traveling minstrels strumming esoteric instruments, looking like they’d just tumbled out of a horse cart from the twelfth century. Their lace-up boots and tunics. The wineskins slung over their shoulders. Hippies dancing barefoot in the streets. Women with hairy legs twirling and folding themselves in half, swaying, their heads upside down between their legs, their misshapen wide-brimmed hats falling into the gutter. Their laughter. How they flipped the hats right back onto their heads, not caring what sticky sliminess might’ve accumulated on them.
Hippies with their hands out, asking for change.
Non-hippies too, asking for change. Black people. Brown people. Native Americans or, anyway, people dressed up like them.
We paid our tithes and kept moving.
The sense that someth
ing was always happening but nobody really had anything to do and that when and if Mom and I chose to step out we’d be wanted somewhere.
* * *
—
There was a period during which the television was always on. Men in horn-rimmed glasses leaning into microphones and droning on in flat, tedious voices. Sometimes my mother turned the sound down, played music, barely paid them any attention. But we couldn’t turn it off. I wasn’t allowed to watch Sesame Street or Kimba or Mister Rogers.
I learned to hate these men. It was their fault my pleasure had been denied. I didn’t understand—I couldn’t fathom, even with Lenny Snyder as my father and Suzy Snyder as my mother—why a bunch of clean-cut dudes in ugly suits were more worthy of attention than the shows I liked. The little I understood about Lenny and Mom’s ethos, the one lesson I’d learned, was that you should do your own thing. Live the reality of your own choosing. Fuck everything else. Just ignore it.
But here was Mom, subjecting herself to hours and hours and hours of the very people she hated. They droned on and on. All they did was make her mad.
* * *
—
The music. When Lenny was home, we listened to acid rock. 102.7. WNEW. The Doors and Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. The Dead. His favorite, the Steve Miller Band. When he was gone, Mom turned to the AM dial. Cat Stevens. Carol King. Harry Chapin. Quiet songs that sometimes carried her off into a god-haunted place where I couldn’t reach her. We’d twirl around together singing along to James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” Falling into each other. She’d touch the tip of her nose to mine. I’d pretend not to notice how sad she was.
The things he’d say to her if she dared play this stuff while he was home. The wars they’d have.