Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  And where was my mother during these binges? I don’t know. It seems, in my memory, that she’d ceded the apartment to Lenny at these times.

  And when she was there? He’d flee with a pocket full of oranges.

  * * *

  —

  I remember Ronnie came to our apartment once when Lenny wasn’t around. He pounded on the door. “Lenny, man, it’s Walker. I gotta talk to you.”

  My mother made me keep quiet. I held my breath. Pretended we weren’t home until he stopped banging and went away.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes Lenny would come home with a bloody lip, a black eye. We never asked what happened. I wasn’t allowed to, and Mom was sick of the burden of knowing, sick of the boasting and scheming and constant bullshitting. Sick, mostly, of him.

  Every new hustle he got himself into took him further away from her.

  * * *

  —

  I remember the fear that one of those times he’d be gone for good. And that Mom would be relieved. That whatever was taking him out into the world—his book, always his book, his running with the bikers, drug traffickers and bank robbers who’d populate his grand subversive opus and justify the dank adult urges he’d never learned how to say no to—was just an excuse, a way to rationalize walking out on us without having to cop to what he was doing.

  The sense of unwantedness. Of being a burden.

  * * *

  —

  Walker.

  We ran into him once, Lenny and I, hanging out in Tompkins Square. Boosted up on the back of a bench. A cluster of six or eight dudes around him. Tough in a different way than the kind of people we spent our time with. Hard. Untempered by idealism. As he pulled himself away from them to talk to Lenny, there was nodding and whispering. Giving fives. Low and slow. Conspiratorial shit.

  He knelt in front of me and made some token chat-with-the-kid small talk, and all I could think about was that every time he opened his mouth he managed to blow smoke in my face and why did he have to do that?

  And then he took Lenny by the shoulder and led him off behind a tree so they could discuss whatever it was without me hearing.

  * * *

  —

  That last night with mom. This is when my memories really start popping.

  She liked to think she was psychic—two parts Carlos Castaneda hokum, three parts sensitive girl-child fantasy of a world where dragons and gnomes still roamed the kingdom. Auras and vibes, blessings, curses, she took these things seriously. She listened for whispers reaching through the darkness, teased meaning from rustlings at the edge of her hearing. Mostly it was just fun. A casual, playful way to dance around the cold prison of rational thought. A whimsical nod toward the sacred.

  It was August, that night when it all went down, the 14th, a Tuesday. She sensed a bad mojo in the air: a smell, like rotting mushrooms, a phantom stirring in the beads that separated their bedroom from the rest of the apartment, a spot of chill hovering where it shouldn’t have been cold, subtle signs embedded in the hidden fabric of the moment. She kept picking up the phone, not calling anyone, just listening. Checking the dial tone. Pressing the clear plastic cylinders that opened and shut the connection. Listening some more. Slamming the current spitball box against the countertop. Swearing and shouting at the federal agents she just knew were listening in on the line. Placing the arm back in its cradle and walking away and returning to check the dial tone again.

  Eight, nine o’clock, she leapt into action. She had me by the wrist, pulling me barefoot down five flights of stairs. The nighttime was prime time on the Lower East Side. It was getting dark, so things were starting to hop. The sky streaked with color and the low summer light soaking into the brick façades, making everything look like it was glowing from the inside out. Transistor radios propped on every stoop, a turf war of tunes and textures. People hanging around—on milk crates and beach chairs and the hoods of cars, drinking beer out of brown paper bags. The streetlights were on and we dodged and wove around the freaks and stoners and the extended Puerto Rican families, the transvestites and punks and Ukrainian toughs, all making their parties right there on the street. We marched around the corner to Avenue A. Every door was flung open, a cacophony of restaurants and bars, their light flooding the sidewalk, a hundred different unrelated societies superimposed on the same strip of land. She rushed us to a dim, overstuffed storefront called Holy Ablutions and bought a bundle of sage. All this time, not saying a word to me. Dragging me like dead weight. Ignoring my alarm and confusion.

  Back home, she threw all the windows open. She held the sage to a burner on the stove until it started smoking. Then she danced around the apartment chanting who knows what, speaking in tongues and waving the sage all over the place. She turned on the radio—Bob Fass—and we listened to him rap about the Rockefeller laws that were—and this is important—due to kick in at midnight, the structural injustice embedded within them, how they were one more front in the war this country was waging against the poor and powerless. Throw everyone in jail for victimless crimes, that’s one way to ensure they don’t rise up against you. She sat in the window listening to this, sipping peppermint tea late into the night and smoking dope to take the edge off until the street outside grew silent—the only life still stirring out there, a periodic siren, the addicts, the homeless, and the charity workers passing out PBJs.

  What she’d been doing was sitting vigil. And just this once, her haphazard fidelity to superstition had happened to align with the ferocious goings-on outside her knowledge.

  Later, she’d place great significance on this—what, coincidence? She sentimentalized it and swore she’d known without knowing that wherever Lenny was that night, whatever he was doing, she’d foreseen it and—but for her stupid pride, her arrogance and jealousy and resentment—should’ve been able to stop it.

  Never mind that by then their marriage was a joke.

  Never mind that when it came to Lenny, nobody could save him, especially not her.

  So…the bust.

  What can I say? Facts are facts: At 10:30 p.m. on August 14, 1973, Lenny entered the lobby of the Whitmore Hotel on the corner of 29th Street and Ninth Avenue. He was wearing a fake mustache and wire-frame glasses. He’d brilloed his hair and roughly parted it on the side. He carried an overstuffed bag of groceries from Gristedes, bananas and sliced bread sticking precariously out of the top. And lodged in the bottom, three pounds of cocaine wrapped in plastic and tinfoil. The desk clerk reported that he was sweating profusely, shifting the bag from arm to arm as he called up. He gave his name as Benny Schechter.

  The power grid had been sputtering all summer, particularly on hot days, and Con Ed had implemented a schedule of brownouts to forestall a catastrophic failure. The elevators at the Whitmore were out that night, so Lenny took the stairs to the eleventh floor.

  Waiting for him in room 1102 were two undercover New York City police officers—later identified as Thomas Keene and Frank Giordino. Giordino had been in contact with Lenny before, having presented himself, depending on who you believed, as a heavy from Bayside recklessly stepping out, hoping Lenny would provide a conduit to a new supply chain unknown to his bosses; a tweaker from Rockaway, squalid, stupid, looking to score; or a middleman for the IRA, PLO, RAF, ANC, PPK, take your pick, hoping to work with Lenny to establish a reliable street-level cash flow with which they could support their constant need for arms. Which cover Giordino had actually used would later become crucially important. Each implied a different motive on Lenny’s part. What’s incontrovertible is that the two of them had been introduced three months earlier, in early May, by an Afro-American man whose name was never revealed to the press.

  When Lenny arrived in room 1102, he was manic. He wouldn’t stop yapping about the room’s shitty décor. The worn, discolored carpet, ominously stained in places. The bug-infested cu
rtains. He took a backward leap of faith onto the bed. “Too soft, you couldn’t even fuck on this thing.” He fiddled with the Magic Fingers coin box attached to the headboard. “You guys got a quarter? I’m tense. Does this really work?” Then he reportedly said, “This place, it’s too perfect. It’s like somebody called central casting and ordered up one fleabag hotel! The seedier the better. Make it look like the only possible reason you’d rent a room is to carry out a half-cocked drug deal.” He riffed about what they were about to do. “You guys go with the suitcase or the old duffel bag? The bag, am I right? ’Cause, look at this place!” Hopping around. Rubbing his greedy hands together. The sweat pouring off him like he’d burst a pipe.

  Giordino and Keene thought he must have been high, which, of course he was. But it’s not like he’d have acted differently clean. Anyone who knew even the least thing about Lenny understood that these antics constituted the basic core of his being. The thing that would have been odd was if he hadn’t been both high and high-strung that night.

  “Check you two out,” he purportedly said. “You in costume? You sure? Am I supposed to ask if you’re cops now? That’s the game, right? That’s how it works in the movies.”

  But he didn’t ask if they were cops. Instead he rolled on with his rat-a-tat-tat. “I’m in costume. I always am. I’m not who I say I am. Who is, right? But seriously, Benny Schechter? You gotta be kidding.”

  The cops, by now, were losing their patience. Keene would later tell the New York Post that it took everything in his power not to slap Lenny upside the head, to say, “Give it a fucking rest, already. You’re giving me a headache.” He claimed never to have been involved in such a bizarre bust. “It’s like the guy was trying to get caught,” he said.

  And maybe Lenny was. Or maybe his ego and insecurity were just too wild to tame.

  “You don’t recognize me?” he said. “Maybe I’m famous. What if I told you I was Lenny Snyder?”

  It was then that the cops decided they had to act before Lenny’s ineptitude blew the whole deal. They professed never to have heard of Lenny Snyder. Wouldn’t know him from Adam. Which might’ve been true—two guys from the Catholic precincts of the outer boroughs, what did they care about the glamorhounds fetishizing poverty in the fantasyland that was Manhattan below 14th Street? It’s not like Lenny’s movement had threatened them. Their children were too young to know from dropping out. On the other hand, they were there in the room; they’d gone to great lengths to coax Lenny toward this particular juncture at which law and order might finally reveal that the great radical prophet of global revolution was and always had been nothing but a hustler, a two-bit criminal who’d finally overstepped his bounds. Is it really possible that they’d stumbled on him by accident? I think not—but, then, I’ve got a vested interest. I think they were hitting him where it hurt. Stripping away his last vestige of pride.

  They asked to see the product. He asked to see the dough. A duffel bag—yes!—was hauled out from under the bed, thrust open to reveal thirty grand in marked bills.

  Lenny unpacked his groceries, still at it with his manic jokes, wagging bananas like cigars in front of his face, popping a can of nuts open with a fake flinch like he thought snakes might leap out the top, placing each item primly on the dinged-up desk the hotel had retained from a better era. His hands shook as he lifted the coke from the bag, and when the crucial moment finally arrived he went dumb, tongue-tied for maybe the first time in his life.

  Keene and Giordino could barely contain the urge to laugh. “Never would’ve guessed the guy would turn out to be such a pussy,” Keene said later. And for what? When they proceeded to taste the product, the final step in this pantomime, it was shit. Baby laxative, baking soda. So stepped on that they wondered who was conning whom. It had to be considered. Maybe Lenny’d marked them for cops all along. Maybe this was a PR stunt, another piece of theater constructed to make the police look ridiculous.

  Possible. But likely? Depends on who you ask.

  In any case, it was too late to change the plan.

  “We good?” Keene said.

  “Sure are,” Giordino responded.

  And the second after the money touched Lenny’s hands, the blues hiding in the bathroom, the closet, the hallway, sprang into the room, all guns drawn and leveled at Lenny’s head.

  He pissed his pants. The great Lenny Snyder. He fell to his knees, hands raised above his head, blathering nonsense about justice and fairness, and as their sights closed in on him, half step by half step, he lost all control of his muscles and bones. He slumped to the carpet, his fear secreting from every orifice. A pathetic specimen of a perp. Not even brave enough to face what he’d just done.

  So said Thomas Keene and Frank Giordino. Lenny would dispute this in a hundred different ways, adjusting, refining, launching sarcastic challenges to the public record, often contradicting claims he himself had made.

  Unlike the facts, the truth was mutable, dependent on hearsay and rumor—on each individual listener’s willingness to believe this side or the other’s coloring of events. Everyone involved had an interest in convincing the world that his version of the story was true. The cops had their own petty egos to protect. Their visions of commendation and raises and slaps on the back. Free rounds at Dempsey’s. The wanton expressions on their wives’ faces. All this because they’d pulled in a big fish, played the hero, protecting our way of life, faith and family and all that crap, the very essence of America, from the existential threat of Lenny Snyder. They were helped by the exhaustion of the populace, the desire among the hoi polloi for a simple, exculpatory explanation for everything that had gone wrong since the psychedelic ’60s had slipped into the drab, oily puddle of the ’70s. People wanted order. They wanted sense. Anything but the ruin and chaos that surrounded them. How helpful, then, if Lenny—chaos incarnate—turned out to have never been anything more than a dirty Jew, a fast-talking petty thief finally exposed to have built his whole career on the exploitation of their children’s sweet, wishful dreams. Look! This man was no angel of light! He never intended to lead you back to Eden! This is who he is, who he’s always been. A stooped, hook-nosed creature on the make for a big score.

  This was the story told by all the papers and broadcast on all the nightly news programs. This is what was codified and pounded into the consciousness of our culture at the time.

  Or, more kindly, if he wasn’t a fraud, he was a cautionary tale. What happens to a person when the culture changes, abandoning him and all he holds dear? What becomes of the idealist in a cynical age? What pits of desperation will a man wallow in, what acts of self-destruction will he reach for as he tries to save himself? Without challenging the facts the cops claimed were true, you could argue that Lenny’s was a tragic tale. He’d been a flawed messenger for the change he’d advocated. Too arrogant. Too out there. Too ready to confuse himself with his message. Is it any wonder, when the revolution finally didn’t come, that he’d cracked just like his enemies always said he would, drowned himself in delusions and drug abuse? Yes, you could argue this, and some people did. Those same movement leaders he’d warred with throughout his career, those same politicians and bureaucrats, who’d shown from the start that they cared more about the system in which they thrived than the ideals they espoused, claimed Lenny’s fall as proof that they’d been right all along.

  Remember, though: He’d been writing a book. For a year and a half he’d been in and out of the hinterlands of Idaho and Northern California, hanging with the militant remains of communes in Texas and Minnesota, taking notes on how gangs of all sorts—from the Angels to the New Lords to the Innombrable to a myriad of lesser-known outlaw groups—were creating their own economies and codes of honor, using illegal, underground activity to carve out places of freedom far from the reach of the laws of America. Isn’t it possible that he was trying, however amateurishly, to enter and understand his subject? That he got
in too deep? That the forces that had been after him for years would use his haphazard attempt at gonzo journalism as a justification for taking him down? Isn’t it possible that he was still a threat and the powers that be seized their chance to shut him up?

  Everything depended on interpretation.

  There were rumors later that he’d been running guns. That the coke was just a way to raise money for la causa. Rumors that the drugs hadn’t belonged to him. That he’d had no idea what was in the grocery bag. A splatter-shot of rumors. Lenny spread half of them himself.

  His favorite, the one he eventually worked into his myth, was that he’d wanted to orchestrate his own martyrdom. To bring down Nelson Rockefeller’s odious new drug laws. What he’d say was that he’d intended to get arrested, to force an outrageous maximum sentence and spark a revolt among the chattering classes. ’Cause it was one thing for some poor black sucker to be put away for thirty years and an altogether different thing for them to do this to an icon of the culture. Who better for the task than Lenny Snyder?

  Honestly? I don’t know why he did what he did. I have my opinions, but they change all the time. Sometimes I wonder if he’d just been bored.

  What I remember is seeing the photo that ran in all the papers the next day.

  On every front page—and there were a lot of them, the Times, the Post, the Daily News, Newsday, The Washington Post, papers from Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Boston, even London—the same shot of Lenny, cuffed, haggard, drenched in sweat, looking like a porn king in a bad suit. He’d been arrested. He was in jail.