by Joshua Furst
He scored them from the phone freaks and most of them didn’t work. They fell apart in your hands. Emitted squeals like knives slashing at your eardrums. Overheated and spontaneously combusted. He was crazy for them, though. They were going to take us, literally, off the grid.
Mom indulged him. She’d pound the flat of her hand on the box, willing it to work, cursing the thing, cursing Lenny, smashing at the thing until it cracked.
I remember her fielding calls through one of these spitballs, late in the game, during the last few months before the arrest. Always the same conversation no matter who she was talking to. “How the hell should I know where Lenny is. He’s off somewhere with Walker. He could be dead for all I care.”
Walker. Always Walker. I remember my mother’s resentment of him more than I do the man himself.
* * *
—
Lenny in the living room, spread-eagle on the couch, jabbering at Sy, who was reclining on the throw pillows on the floor, casual in a pair of green short-shorts, his hairy dwarf legs stretched out in front of him, one ankle crossed over the other. Lenny was doing his intense, pissed-off number, chiding and sneering and accusing him of abandoning the cause just as they’d begun to win. Sy just fiddled with the mirrors sewn onto the pillows. Barely listening. No longer taking Lenny seriously. They’d been through this before.
“You won’t even defend yourself,” Lenny said, like this proved something.
“There’s nothing to defend.”
“Says the guy who just bought a house in Scarsdale.” Lenny hunched over the coffee table as he talked, separating the seeds from a cluster of marijuana.
“I’ll have you to dinner. You can tour the wine cellar and pick out any bottle you want.”
“You got any Ripple down there?”
“Fuck no. I’ll tell you what I do have, though. A walk-in humidor. You think this shit’s good”—Sy motioned toward the pot on the table—“wait till you get a taste of the sweet mercy I’ve got warehoused down there. Bricks and bricks of it, wrapped in tinfoil. Compared to that, this here is skunk weed.”
And like that, the tension between them evaporated and they were cracking up like it was old times.
I had no idea what was at stake, of course. To me Sy was the dude who used to wear a loincloth and now sometimes came around in suits and ties, boasting about all the cash he was raking in. He was the weirdly straight guy in Lenny’s crowd.
What struck me that day was that Lenny treated him like an equal. He actually wanted Sy’s approval. And he’d never fully receive it—I saw that too.
* * *
—
At dinner one night in a restaurant. It seemed fancy to me, but it probably wasn’t. Fancier than a slice of pizza is what it was. A wooden-table, plates-that-could-break, real-silverware type of place.
I ate only pickles. My go-to dish. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, pickles were it and I was content ’cause this place had them and they’d brought me a whole bowl.
There was wine on the table. And crispy bread sticks. The place couldn’t have been that fancy—the napkins were made out of paper. Expensive paper, hard to rip, but still paper.
We were there with other people. A man and a woman. They were serious—or I mean, they took themselves seriously. A strong-willed, iron-eyed black couple who understood power and were comfortable with it. They were the kind of people who, even if you didn’t know who they were, you knew you should know who they were. They held their space with a kind of relaxed command, like they knew they wouldn’t be pushed around. Even I could sense it and I was just a scrub who knew nothing about nothing. The man had a thick face, a few freckles on his cheeks, and massive eyes, wet and heavy. They projected compassion—what others might dismiss as dignity. But there was something else about him too. A toughness. A forbearance. Like he knew how harmless he appeared and he’d learned how to use this misperception with great ferocity. But he wasn’t the real force in this couple. His wife, with her jangle of bracelets and her violet eye shadow and her skintight leather pants, did all the talking, and by talking I mean speechifying.
My mother was impressed with them. She leaned in almost halfway across the table to keep up with the conversation. She kept saying “Mmmm” and closing her eyes, like she was trying to demonstrate how much she savored their wisdom. She articulated her own points in a way that didn’t sound like her at all. She was deferential and more eager than usual to prove how smart she was.
Lenny, for the first time I could remember, was out of it. Not groggy. Not stoned or tripping or hiding in the dark but cut out. Irrelevant. This was Suzy’s stage—or the bracelet woman’s. They paid as much attention to him as they did to me—zero. He was restless. He was bored. He kept staring at the woman’s sweater, at her tits, like he was daring her to notice, like he wanted her to tell him off. She just kept on talking. Sometimes, when she made a particularly emphatic point, she clutched my mother’s hand and squeezed. Lenny stole food off my mother’s plate—a breadstick, a carrot, something—held it to his lips like a cigar and waggled it. No response, just a slow glance from the man with those eyes. He took a bite. Petulant. Put the uneaten portion back on the plate. A little later he ran his finger along the lip of his wineglass, trying to make it sing, but it wouldn’t and he gave up. He was getting antsier and antsier. He started making jokes. One-liners. Irrelevant comments that nobody laughed at. He danced the wings of the chicken he’d ordered back and forth across the table, kicking the legs like deep-fried Rockettes. I laughed, at least.
“You like that, kid?” He did it again, glad somebody’d noticed but disappointed it was just me. He lobbed one of the wings onto my plate. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Eat.”
And then he turned back to the woman, studying her. Her afro. Her cheekbones. Her long, tapered fingers. He was playing with his napkin under the table. Folding it. Folding it. Folding it again. A tear here, a twist there. When he revealed it, the napkin had become a brassiere. He plopped it on the table between Mom and the woman.
Finally, attention. The woman stopped talking to examine his work. “Nice, Lenny,” she said. “You should do children’s parties.”
She handed the bra to her husband and shifted in her chair to block out our side of the table.
The husband made a face and set the bra in front of Lenny, watching him like a teacher poised to catch a kid cheating on a test.
Lenny liked this. He arched one teasing eyebrow, tipped his head this way, tipped his head that way.
“Watch yourself, now,” the man said.
“Always on my toes.” Lenny snatched another napkin, dropped his forehead to the table and began working on it.
At this point, everybody had an eye on him, but it was subtle. The man had placed his hand lightly on his wife’s neck, resting it there, reminding her that he was nearby. Mom hunkered down inside the conversation, willfully refusing to acknowledge Lenny. “It’s all so interesting. Tell me more,” she gushed. The woman did. There was a weaponized edge to her speech, like she was aiming it at Lenny—don’t fuck with me, boy.
He came back with a new specimen of origami, twirling it between his fingers. An elliptical shape with an opening on one side, folds like petals shrouding a delicate gap. “An oyster,” he said. He flicked it like a paper football at the woman. Waited while she examined it. Finally he’d impressed her, but in the wrong way.
“Open it,” he said.
When she did so, distastefully, she discovered something written inside. She handed the note to my mother and she read it too. Something seeped from her body. Her lips set tight. She locked eyes with the woman, then with Lenny, who snickered and said, “What?” Eyelids shut like in prayer, my mother waited for the heat to pass through her before handing the note back to the woman. The man read it too. They all had these looks on their faces, the kind Lenny had taught me to rec
ognize as the pinched constipation of the oppressor.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “You’re not into free love? I thought you guys were radicals.”
Everyone waited for what was next.
“Well, that was a success,” my mother said finally.
The night was over. Even I knew it. Nobody, not even Lenny, was happy.
Later, walking home, my mother said, “Great job, Lenny. Really. Stellar.”
Later still, Lenny swiped a pebble of concrete out of a shattered section of sidewalk and lobbed it at a street sign. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” he said.
Neither of them said another word to the other for the rest of the night or for the next I-don’t-know-how-many days.
* * *
—
I remember them after that in separate rooms, radiating contempt for each other.
* * *
—
Near the end, he was out more than he was home. He was vague on the details, smug, gloating over his secrets, barely there when he did show up, popping in for a clean shirt, to grab a book or some cash or to swipe my yogurt from the fridge. My mother never asked where he was going. She knew better than to tell him to be safe. She’d nod goodbye with a jut of her chin and not even bother to watch him go. Then she’d stare at the door after he slammed it like she hoped she’d never see it open again.
Or she’d ignore him completely, just sit there in our dilapidated green armchair and pretend to focus on the feminist tracts and pop psychology she was into. Living her own life. Trying to, anyway. Working toward the personal transformation she hoped would maybe solve all her problems. Making it clear to him—though he wouldn’t notice—that the new self-actualized woman she yearned to become would have no need for a raging, reeling fiend like him.
* * *
—
And the sense on some nights, after Lenny stalked out, that the walls of the apartment were incrementally collapsing, so slowly that nobody noticed but me. One day they’d fall in on us—me and my mother—and we’d be buried in the rubble, crippled and bleeding, our skin caked white with plasterboard powder. We’d never recover. We’d limp through the rest of our lives in a fugue state, somewhere this side of death but far from alive. I remember staring at those walls. Boring holes in them, marking their warps and angles against the floor, trying to pin down some sign of weakness there that I could show to my mother as proof that this pit needed to be fixed. She could solve the problem. I knew she could. If only she’d bar the door and lock Lenny in with us. ’Cause I understood what was happening. The walls weren’t falling in for no reason. They were gravitating toward the empty space, the dark, vacant nothingness left by Lenny’s absence.
Mom didn’t seem to care. He’s researching his book, is what she told me, as though that explained his rage, his furtiveness, his jitters, his being almost always anywhere but home.
This was before the shit at the Whitmore Hotel.
“Tonight it’s just you and me,” she’d say. Like that made it special. Like that made it different from any other night.
And behind her, the walls would buckle that little bit more.
* * *
—
I remember wandering west one day, cutting across the avenues, taking a diagonal path away from home. “Go get your ya-ya’s out and leave me alone,” Mom had said as she shuttled me to the door. I was angry at Lenny for being gone again. I was angry at her for letting him go. The fortress had been breached.
The world wasn’t as free as Lenny and my mother made it out to be. Zones of relative freedom—of familiarity and intimacy—nestled inside each other. The apartment, where we could do whatever we wanted, lounge around naked gorging on ice cream, or—less fun—watching my mother trip and paw at phantoms in the air. The block, where we were known and tolerated, where people called our names when we went strutting by. The neighborhood, that span of blocks bound by 14th Street to the north, Houston to the south, Third Avenue, the river—inside this grid, you always knew where you were, what to expect around the next corner, how to play it, when to be cool and when to run. Each zone was contained within an invisible barricade, walls you passed through, if only psychologically, as you moved on to the next slightly less secure pasture.
Even at five, a kid could navigate the terrain alone.
I remember passing the landmarks I knew. St. Mark’s Church. That square of sidewalk that had been painted to look like an all-seeing Masonic eye. La MaMa, where the theater freaks hung out, sometimes literally, swinging from the windowsills, singing experimental show tunes. The Catholic Workers building where, Lenny had told me, if I ever found myself in trouble, I could get a hot meal and a shower for free. And then I was at the edge of the known world. The Bowery, with its converging, dividing lanes of traffic. Its SROs. Its junkies and drunks, so different from ours, drabber, sadder, older.
Up the avenue, dropped in the middle of the street, stately Cooper Union. Who knew what was beyond it. I’d been to the other side lots of times, but never alone. I’d tagged along behind Lenny or my mother when they went to visit friends and collaborators. I’d marched up Broadway with the angry mob. But the material particulars of the landscape whisked by me, barely noticed, streaks of color and form, leaving me with just a sense of their weight, their light, nothing more. They belonged to strangers. Different ken, not to be trusted.
I crossed the street, expanding my territory. A conquest. Ownership. A grabbing hold of a new swath of city. Showing my mother—and Lenny too—that my New York wouldn’t be defined by them.
Going nowhere, just away. I believed I was taking steps toward myself. What did I know? Not a damn thing, that’s what.
I headed up to Astor Place, walked up and down Broadway. I spaced out for a while outside a church, watched a squirrel dig through the leaves in an empty fountain. I meandered from street to street, taking arbitrary turns based on the walk signals. Seeing things now. The buildings were shorter, sturdier. There were fewer shadows. People wasted less time here—expending their energy on specific, measurable goals. They glittered like mirrors in the sun, unfettered, confident in both their industry and their leisure. Most of them. Around the edges, working the newspaper stands and hawking baubles, power-spraying the sidewalk, lurking in doorways and subway entrances, the unglamorous thick-tongued hordes watched and waited, encroaching, threatening. I remember wondering which tribe was mine, certain that Lenny would say “Power to the people” but knowing, also, that we were separate from these people, special, famous, more daring than them.
Eventually, it occurred to me that I had no idea where I was anymore. Behind a green gate, there was a quaint little alley, cobblestones and gaslights and ancient brick houses. A single strip of life that the city had forgotten to carry into the twentieth century with it. I wandered in and the gate clicked shut behind me. I’m positive I heard it ’cause I wasn’t sure I could get out again. The spookiest part was that no one was here. Just me and the ivy, so distant from the city, yet smack in its center.
For a while I dawdled, examining the slate stoops, flaked away from centuries of use, running my hand over the iron horse heads on the hitching posts. I tried to ignore the tug of worry over what that click I’d heard might’ve meant. I was pretty sure I’d trapped myself, and the more I tried to avoid thinking about this, the more convinced I became that, absolutely, no question, I was trapped.
I fucked around with the lid of a rotting wooden box attached to one of the houses. A coal shed, maybe. Or a potato bin. I was guessing. I had no idea what it had ever been used for. I picked off some of the flakey powder-blue paint. Tapped with the toe of my sneaker at the soft spots rooted in the dirt. Swung the lid open and shut, open and shut until the hinge snapped in half.
Panic cut across me like a riptide. Not that I was going to get in trouble, more that I was going to be stuck in this alley forever. I cu
rled into a ball and wrapped my arms around my head like a nuclear bomb was crashing down on me. Stayed like that for I don’t know how long.
Past the echoing in my ears, I made out the sound of the gate creaking open. The click of the latch again. Shuffling feet.
It was Phil Ochs. He crouched next to me and placed a hand between my shoulder blades. Held it there, firm but gentle, until I calmed down. And without asking what had happened, why I was there, if I was scared, without asking any of the questions that might have exposed the brute childish truth of my predicament, he navigated me home.
When we reached my front stoop, Phil wouldn’t come up. “I’m not w-welcome there anymore,” he said.
He lingered like he was waiting for one more thing. He flicked his head to keep the hair from falling into his eyes and gave me a complicated, sort-of-sad smile. Then, like he’d just remembered why he was there, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a guitar pick. Kneeling in front of me, he held it out in an open palm.
“F-From the great Phil Ochs,” he said, cutting the self-aggrandizement with a lopsided smirk. “You can tell people he was once your father’s friend.” Standing back up, he dipped his head and touched two fingers to his temple in a halfhearted salute, a familiar gesture, perfected through years of signing off with it from the stage. “I’ll see you around,” he said.
And with that he lumbered off, back the way we’d come.
* * *
—
And of course I remember Lenny’s coke jags—it never occurred to him to hide them from me.
White powder dusted over album jackets. He liked to use the Dead for this. Him pushing it around with his old Brandeis ID, maneuvering it into finicky lines, cutting them in half to create even smaller ones, bringing a meticulous concentration to the task, rationing the stuff so it would last all night. He’d chatter at me between snorts. Labyrinthine monologues, rich with righteous zeal. He was still a fanatic, even by his lonesome. I couldn’t follow him. Most of what he said was nonsense. What use does a five-year-old have for Marcuse? How did he think I was supposed to comprehend his intricate theories about Zionism and its corrosive effects on the Jewish character, say, or the race war that he envisioned erupting the day we finally elected a black president? Not that it mattered. He was talking to himself. Or rather, the coke was talking through him.