Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  * * *

  —

  Nixon’s face melting on the TV as Lenny, my mother, and I watched in charged silence. His stiff, hunchbacked body. The air of momentous expectation, like a victory was about to be declared. The constricting tension. Nixon said something and Lenny lunged to his feet, hooting, clapping, howling. My mother fell back like she’d been holding a massive weight above her head and was all of a sudden free of it, like she was exhausted but also elated. “Yes,” she said. Then, at the top of her lungs, “Yes!” Out the open windows, somebody picked out “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the electric guitar. People shouted, yodeled, celebrations breaking out up and down the block.

  Then the phone started ringing. Short calls. Lenny’s friends. And from the way he gloated and strutted around, I gradually realized they were congratulating him.

  The war was over. One of them anyway. He did this. Or, as my mother would say, “We all did this.” But it was mostly him. Lenny Snyder got the glory.

  The look on my mother’s face while she watched him. Like a butterfly spreading its wings for the first time. Like she’d decided to let the beauty pour off herself and cascade all over her husband.

  “You know what would make this moment even sweeter?” Lenny said into the phone. Who knows who he was talking to. This was the tenth or twentieth call he’d taken. “If I’d really fucked that prig Tricia like I told the Post. That bird has flown. She must really hate me now.” A cackle. He was cracking himself up.

  My mother folded in on herself. Her lips pursed and she drew a shroud over her beauty. I felt like I was on a river, riding a raft that was splitting in two, unsure which side to hold on to through the rapids.

  * * *

  —

  I remember a new kind of hope in his presence, a longing to play with him, a feeling that he might be willing to play with me. An adventure might’ve been planned for the day, an expedition to the park or maybe a birthday party for one of my little friends—though I don’t recall having any friends. Maybe we’d take the subway out to Brighton Beach, where they’d strip me naked, set me loose in the surf. Whatever it was. A day organized around celebrating me. I remember my mother reciting the whole list of things we would do. Making promises about the fun we’d have. I remember an outlandish feeling of excitement. An expectation as big as the wind.

  And I remember that this expectation revolved around the fact that Lenny had chosen me over his work, that he’d said no to the action and the accolades to take part in this kid-sized fun with me. He was the hinge. The door to all this joy my mother had laid out in front of me wouldn’t open without his involvement.

  Maybe it was just that once and I’ve embellished around the experience, extended it into a persistent pattern to quell the possibility that what happened next was more than an aberration. That the mask had been lifted and I’d caught a glimpse of the thing lurking, always, beneath it.

  What happened was that we didn’t go to the beach or the park or the party or whatever it was we’d been supposed to do.

  I remember lots of sunlight. So much that instead of streaming in the windows of our railroad apartment, it seemed to radiate from the walls of the living room itself, up front, facing the street. My mother was there. Me. Lenny was not. He was at the other end of the apartment, past the series of entryways that led to darker and darker rooms the farther back you went.

  And that’s why we weren’t going. Because Lenny was back there and we were up here. It wasn’t my fault. My mother made this clear. But why, then? Because, that’s why. But why because? Because we can’t, that’s why. She wouldn’t say it was because there was something wrong with Lenny, but I knew this was the reason and her refusal to say so made the darkness engulfing him all the more menacing. It was like the darkness was emanating from him. Like if I could only bring him up into the light with us, everything would be fine.

  So I ran to him, and when I got to the last doorway it was so dark back there that I could barely see, but I could feel his presence, his heat, his…I want to call it fear. Vacancy. Something altogether different from the rage and pixie dust that motored him out into battle. He wasn’t moving. Not even breathing, it seemed. Just there, buried in the deep hole of himself. I can see him to this day. The shadow of him, the shrouded fact, the faint light in those eyes that didn’t seem to register my presence.

  One glimpse and my mother guided me away. But it was enough. Some portion of Lenny’s fear—the failure, the premonition of failure, that’s what it was—had pierced me and dispensed its poison into my blood, and this was more terrifying than any extravagant act of vandalism, mayhem or destruction Lenny might have exposed me to out in the world.

  And back in the sunlight of the living room, I wanted to ask my mother why again, but I knew I couldn’t. And anyway, it was a different question now.

  * * *

  —

  And then nothing.

  The glory days were over. He’d aged out of the fight. I’d say he reached the heights of celebrity from which he was paid just to exist, but we never had any money—or none I ever knew about.

  There was no more kicking up trouble, getting righteously arrested, racing off somewhere to raise hell for weeks on end in some other state, some other country. Now when he wasn’t home he had no excuses.

  His new job seemed to consist of wandering around and joking with people on the street. Sometimes, very rarely, he’d drag me to an office, this tiny room above a boot shop on Bleecker. Always empty except for us. A desktop made from a piece of warped plywood propped up on sawhorses. A wall of filing cabinets with so many papers and overstuffed folders stacked on top that I was sure, each time we went there, that they were going to topple down on me and flood the room. He’d run a flyer through the mimeograph machine—hundreds of copies on colored paper—and leave most of them there, taking a few to pass out on his patrols through the neighborhood.

  Once in a while we all sat around together, him and me and my mother, stuffing envelopes—making sausage is what he called it. But this wasn’t frequent. He sometimes managed to bag an interview. To talk about himself and the things he’d done back when he still had things to do. There were a few special days when he was called up to play himself on the nightly news, but that didn’t happen too often anymore.

  He was writing a book, a guide, as he described it, about how to be an outlaw in the new America. A follow-up to his notorious grifter’s handbook Burn It, Break It, Steal It.

  * * *

  —

  I remember Sy coming to visit in a suit and tie, preposterously clean-shaven, his arrogant cheekbones bloated on his face. And me shrieking with delight like four-year-olds do, not recognizing him, refusing to believe this was the same man I’d known all my life. I demanded to know, “What’chu do with him? Where’d you put him?”

  * * *

  —

  I remember the dense funk that hung in certain corners of the park, at the walled ends of alleyways, under stairwells, anywhere the breeze caught and eddied. Stale piss and spilled beer. And poured over this like syrup, penetrating everything, the sweet tang of marijuana. Repulsive smells that you long for after they’re gone.

  * * *

  —

  And a new presence on the streets, younger and harder to comprehend than Lenny’s winos: Junkies. Living statues. Bodies void of souls. You put in a quarter and they danced for a moment, a few jitters, a brief stirring of consciousness, before returning to a state of blessed, terrifying emptiness.

  * * *

  —

  I remember Phil’s voice outside the apartment door. “Lenny, please, l-let me in. Let me t-talk this through with you. I’ve got wine, man. Chianti. I’m your friend, Lenny. Don’t do this. Don’t be like this, man.”

  Lenny’s body wedged like a chair against the door, him leaning his whole weight into his shoulder, like somehow shambli
ng, passive Phil might bust through the fifteen dead bolts he’d installed in his paranoia. He was shirtless, barefoot, free-balling it in a pair of bell-bottoms that hung off his hip bones and expose the top fringe of his pubic hair. I remember the sinews of his shoulders and biceps flexing like angry eels under his skin.

  “I’m on to you, Ochs, you fucking cocksucker. Take your Chianti and go the fuck home.”

  The stringiness of him. The coil of his rage. His whine, his sneer, a scratching needle of complaint. Him pounding the door. Leaving dents.

  Later, Lenny slumped on the floor. The black and white tiles, cheap and worn out, the dirty pink construction paper showing through in spots. His energy gone. The kitchen less crowded now without his hot air.

  Then, later still, even his body was gone. I’d draped myself in a chair with my feet in my mother’s lap. The nubbly texture of her burlap dress itched pleasantly at my ankles. She was drinking red wine out of a chipped coffee mug. The table wobbled every time she set it down. Phil was there too, standing, his ass to the counter, drinking his wine straight from the bottle—one of those decorative jobs, like an ancient urn wrapped in macramé. I wanted to smell it. Phil’s face was puffy. His eyes, especially. They were talking, but it was all too subtle and complicated for me to understand. What I got was the tone, the soft goodness of it. Such concern. Such comfort. I felt safe. Protected. I wanted to pat Phil’s head.

  And even later, Lenny came back like a flash flood and then my mom was shouting and Lenny had Phil by the shirt, grappling, shoving, pushing him back, back, out onto the landing, where Phil missed a step and tumbled, sprawling, down the stairs.

  * * *

  —

  More and more, he hung around with Ronnie Walker.

  Mostly, I remember Walker by what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a Panther. He wasn’t a poet or musician or artist. He wasn’t into black nationalism. Not a card-carrying anything, as far as I could tell. Just a guy. A city dude. Raised uptown. Harlem or the Bronx. A vet, I think. There was this Asian woman I saw him with sometimes. Maybe his wife. Maybe a prize he brought home from the war.

  He might’ve been down with the politics of the time—it seems like I saw him sometimes at rallies and fund-raisers and other events Lenny and my mother dragged me to, but he existed apart from the buzzy closed network of organizers and their egos. Never on the stage. Half the time, not even in the room. Out on the street, hanging around the stage door looking to catch Lenny for half a second, whisper in his ear, slap a low-five. Conspiring.

  I remember he liked to wear a black watch cap low on his forehead, over his ears. And one of those green army field jackets—maybe that’s why I thought he was a vet.

  I remember…not a lot.

  I remember Lenny telling my mother, once, “He’s the real deal,” and I remember not understanding what that meant.

  * * *

  —

  More tests:

  “It’s all in how you play it,” Lenny told me. “Be cool. Walk right in and check out the goods like you intend to buy everything in the store. Pretend you’ve got a wad of cash stuffed in your pocket. Fifties. Hundreds. Only the big bills. Feel it there. The weight of it. All rolled up inside a rubber band. Run your thumb along the edge. Feel the ripple, how it gives. Fresh bills. Never used before. Breathe in that new money smell. Make it real. Believe it. Who’s ever seen so much dough in one place? Well, you have! This is chump change. Walkin’ around money. How’s it feel to be so rich? How’s it affect your posture? Your heart? Your cock?”

  He watched me shift my weight, shoulders rising out of their insecure slouch. He nodded encouragement. It was a game we were playing. A lesson built into it.

  “Now go get ’em, kid,” he said. “Take ’em for all they’re worth.”

  And he shoved me through the door of the corner bodega.

  I wandered the aisles, looking for some impressive thing to steal. Cool. Just a kid popping in on his way home from school. Never mind that it was ten in the morning and I wasn’t even old enough for kindergarten. I fondled the chips. I waved to the guy who ran the place, towering there behind his high counter.

  “What you lookin’ for, papi?” he asked, friendly. He knew me from around the block.

  “Nothing,” I told him, and in an instant I felt the confidence—the arrogance—flush from my body. He was watching. He was on to me. He knew there was no roll of cash in my pocket. I ducked my head and continued through the aisles, feeling the heat of his suspicion press down on me. Time ticking away. Lenny was outside, waiting. Calculating the ways I was fucking this up. I was thinking I should just give up now. Spare myself the hassle of being chased from the store.

  “Your moms send you for something? Bread? Sugar? Tell me, I’ll find it.”

  I shook my head. The piss began to burn in my bladder.

  The counter the guy sat behind consisted of a grid of see-through cubes, each filled with a different brand of candy.

  “I just want some of that,” I told him, pointing at the Tootsie Rolls, not the brown ones but the green and pink and yellow ones. I had a quarter in my pocket and I held it up to him. He had to stretch his whole girth across the counter to reach my hand. Then he gave me five Tootsie Rolls—six—one for good luck.

  Back outside, I showed Lenny what I had, pretending I’d stolen it. A transparent lie. The candy was in a brown paper sack.

  He shot me this tight look, bafflement, disappointment, scorn, all bound together in the flick of an eye. “Not cool,” he said.

  And he was off. Walking fast up the avenue. I struggled to keep up. A few paces on, and he turned to me again.

  “Not fucking cool.”

  Anger wormed through his body and I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but instead he grabbed the bag and whipped it into the street, candy flying from it as it spun, dinging off windshields, flattened under wheels.

  For the next three days he pretended I didn’t exist.

  The lesson was, he’d rather I’d been arrested.

  * * *

  —

  The ragged people you sometimes ran into. Weaving along the avenues.

  Men in torn dresses, sometimes flapping under cracked biker jackets—not drag queens, not subtle, not elegant. They reeked of brutality. Had no sense of irony. Or too much of it.

  Women with open sores weeping on their cheeks.

  Dudes out in the freezing cold in filthy T-shirts. Immune to the weather. Flying on something, reeling, crashing, burning. Combat boots lurching on and off the curb. Arms and legs and shoulders swinging like clubs. Mouths raw and wet like fresh wounds.

  Half the time Lenny knew them, but when we saw them like this, we kept our distance. “Give that one some space. He’s had a bad night,” he’d say. “All you can do with a guy in that state is to watch out you don’t get hit when he starts flailing.”

  They didn’t frighten me. They were too familiar to make me flinch, just another part of the fabric of the city. At war with something, sure, but I knew it wasn’t me.

  * * *

  —

  There was this one cop we used to see around. Not a beat cop. He was higher up than that. He held himself differently. Cooler. Less bluster. His power lived in his shoulders. His heavy feet. He’d learned how to contain it. He had nothing to prove. A big guy, pink and doughy like they all were, but smarter than most of them—more refined. And tall. The orange in his hair fading like the cover of a paperback left on the dashboard. Something about him said he wouldn’t beat you down. His shirts were always ironed. He never seemed to sweat.

  We’d spy him through the window of the Odessa diner. Eating alone. Always Odessa. Always alone. Lenny’d see him there and a kind of joy would take over his body. We’d go flouncing in to pester the guy. The cop. The sergeant or captain or whatever he was. Lenny’d drape himself over the booth and tap him on
one shoulder, come up on the other. Whoop—made ya look! He’d grab the cop’s cap, twirl it in his fingertips, put it on his own head, put it on mine. He’d steal a pierogi off the guy’s plate. Fucking with him. Laughing in his face.

  And the guy, this cop, he’d just sit there and take it.

  This one time, Lenny slipped over to the counter and ordered us a meal. Potato pancakes. Cherry cheese blintzes. “The pig’s paying,” he told the waitress. “Put it on his tab.” Doing whatever he could to incite the guy. But this cop was unflappable. He just didn’t care. “We’ll take it to go,” Lenny told the waitress.

  And as we tumbled toward the door with our bag of food, Lenny patted the guy’s shoulder and thanked him and, even through that shouty Brooklyn whine of his, he came off as genuine. Not a hint of a sneer.

  That was Lenny. That’s the way he was. But there was something else about his games with that cop. This sense that they were both in on the joke. Sometimes the cop seemed to struggle to keep himself from laughing. His mouth would be twitching, holding back a smile.

  Then later the same day, Lenny’d be leading mobs through the streets, chanting “Fuck the pigs,” chanting “The only good cop is a dead cop.”

  So…you know?

  * * *

  —

  Lenny was always bringing home these metal contraptions, all screws and steel plates and tangled wires. Spitball boxes, he called them. Electronic devices jerry-rigged to communicate with the dial tone in beeps and blurts so you could save your quarter and beat the system while you talked on a pay phone. They did other things too, supposedly: transfer your long distance to Manny Hanny, scramble the circuits and override any taps that might be on the line.