by Joshua Furst
Big deal. It was his job to get himself arrested. His favorite sport, when sizing up a new audience, was to boast about all the ways he’d been busted. A good bust. A bad bust. A hard bust. A bullshit bust. That time the pigs laughed and refused to bust him. “It’s not your turn, Lenny. You didn’t do nothing wrong.” Goosing him. Shrugging him off. Till he marched down to the precinct and grabbed a folding chair and smashed up the trophy case they kept in the lobby. “Now I’ve done something wrong. You gonna read me my rights, or what?”
This was different. But how? Not in form but in content. The photo on the cover of the tabloids told the tale. Lenny’s stunts had lost their humor. Now he was the spectacle. No righteousness here. No confident defiance. He was stooped and tired. Not even resisting. His dress shirt soaked in flop sweat under a rumpled suit jacket, he hung like a rag from the hand of the pig still clamped to his bicep. And his eyes, avoiding the camera—they contained something new. Fear, yes. A blunt, stupid fear. But also shame.
He’d been cut down to size. He was just a man now.
I remember my mother on the phone in the other room while I stared at the photo. Talking to Lenny’s lawyer, the legendary William Kunstler. Or talking’s maybe the wrong way to put it. You didn’t talk to Kunstler. You endured him. You sank under the weight of his monologues and said fine, sure, fine, whatever, when he finally got around to asking a question. He’d been calling all morning to relay new facts: the barrage of charges, where Lenny was being held, what time and where he was going to be arraigned. “They’ve been after him a long, long time,” he told her. “They’re not gonna let this one go.”
And she said—and this might be where the fixation started—“Whatever this is, it’s Ronnie Walker’s fault.”
I’d learn all this later. Right then I was heaving, clinging to the photo, vaguely aware of the muffled sounds of her cursing and spitting in the other room.
When she returned to the kitchen, my mother was dressed, playing it straight or as straight as she could. She’d thrown on a frock that ran halfway down her shins, one of those printed muumuus even women who weren’t fat wore in those days, and sandals that wrapped right up to her knees. She was in a state, ruthlessly focused in the way she got when she was about to take to the streets.
“I’m off to the Tombs,” she said, not to me. To the ceiling, the door. I’m not sure she even saw me.
And I remember, without her, the apartment grew very quiet.
Something welled up in me. A ballooning agitation. I flailed. A diarrhetic stream of kid terrors raced through me. Spasms. A child’s mind in meltdown. Until, finally, I threw myself on the floor and sprawled there, quivering, entirely spent.
For I don’t know how long I just lay there, pressing my forehead into the linoleum, thinking about that photo. The expression on Lenny’s face. That horrifying shame. I still didn’t understand what he’d done. Didn’t want to. Didn’t need to. It was too much just knowing he could be made so small. Him! Lenny Snyder! My terrifying father. The man who, more than the rest of them combined, had yanked the fedora off the country’s head and exposed the scrambled, incoherent psyche hiding beneath it. That’s what I’d been taught. That was who he’d been throughout the five and a half years of my life. Not this embarrassing sweaty schlemiel.
How? How, how, how, how could this have happened? Lenny’d had a gift for controlling the optics. For seeing every possible version of the story, the way these variations would play in the press, and how those reports, analyses and think pieces would be understood by the always-underestimated man on the street. He dealt in symbols. When they worked—and for a long time they did—his message stood like a beacon on the hill, casting its light over everything below. A burning dollar bill held up to the cameras. A chorus of children singing songs of peace, their shirts and faces slicked with blood and coal. There was always something out there in the world to justify his grandiose self-promotion. But that Lenny and the Lenny in this photo—they were incompatible human beings. Whatever kind of asshole Lenny might’ve been, he wasn’t a man to be caught reeling, falling, pissing his pants.
I refused, I just refused to believe it was true. And if I lay there long enough, grinding my head into the grubby tile floor, maybe, just maybe, I could make it not true. Which is what I did. I could have laid there forever. It wasn’t like anybody cared anyway.
All that was left to do was wait. And then, or so it seemed to me at the time, to die.
Instead, I fell asleep.
He was arraigned on charges of narcotics trafficking—a class-A felony—by a judge named Preston Eggleston, an unimaginative soldier for the status quo that Lenny and his scruffy pals had tried so hard to replace with, as Lenny liked to say, “the status quid.” Eggleston, out of spite or because of the authoritarian’s natural instinct to punish, set Lenny’s bail at $100,000. A sum that made a statement. Street dealers, Hells Angels, serious pushers like those Lenny’d been researching for his book were getting slammed for five, ten grand, twenty at the most.
So the fix was in. Everybody knew it.
In Kunstler’s calculation, this was a good thing. During the quick walk-and-talk he allowed my mother as they left the courthouse, he flashed confidence. “They’re sitting there thinking, ‘We got him good this time. No way we’re going to let him go.’ And the more they overplay their hand, the better this is going to be for Lenny. We’ve got precedent on our side. There’s a clear path—not without risks, mind you—and we’re going to follow it.”
When my mother asked for details, he waved her off.
“Trust me. I have my ways.” Pulling off toward the taxi stand, he called back to her, “You worry about making bail. I’ll worry about the rest.”
And worry she did. Because, even with Lenny’s book deals and college tours, even with the big coke he’d supposedly been slinging, we didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money.
In earlier times, when Lenny’s arrests were freighted with political righteousness, there’d been systems in place, well-funded organizations willing to come to the aid of culture warriors. That was a different era. Now Lenny was on his own.
And bail bondsmen wouldn’t deal in figures that high. Or they would, but not for Lenny, who’d warned his readers in Burn It, Break It, Steal It to stay away from them. “They’re the seedy underbelly of the court system,” he’d written. “Capitalism at its most usurious extreme. Get involved with them and you’re dealing with a much more dangerous adversary than some two-bit sheriff with a huff in his puff. They’ll break your legs, crush your bones and keep you in hock for the rest of your life. Would you get into bed with the Gambino crime family? Neither would I. So borrow some bread from your great-aunt Esther, instead, the one everybody hates. That way you won’t get hurt and you won’t feel guilty if you jump bail.”
What Lenny wanted was for my mother to crawl home to her estranged mother in Long Island and beg for a slice of the fortune my grandfather had left behind. He’d died of a sudden heart attack in the pool at the Roslyn Country Club. In the thirty-two years since he’d fled Austria and come to this country, he’d worked up to senior VP and then president of Harman Kardon, the high-end electronics company, and he’d invested well. The dough was there somewhere, if she could just access it, which would’ve been easy if he were still alive—they’d adored each other—but the thought of approaching my grandmother paralyzed her.
Days passed as she agonized over what to do, ranting to anybody who’d listen—mostly me.
In the seven years since she dropped out of Mount Holyoke to join the revolution, she’d only seen the woman once—at the funeral.
“It was horrible. You don’t even want to know,” she told me, or herself, since I was just a mirror for her thoughts. “Horrible. Just horrible,” she said again. “You weren’t there. We left you with Judy”—whoever that was—“because it was enough trouble, given all tha
t was going on, just to bring Lenny along.”
And she proceeded to rattle off—not for the last time—every detail of the story she’d claimed was too horrible to tell: The service at the Jewish funeral home on Minneola Avenue, officiated by a rabbi they’d never met before. The glow boxes behind the podium, lit up to look like stained-glass windows. The small gathering of devoted friends and colleagues, all those men itchy under the ill-fitting yarmulkes they’d fished from the tray at the entrance to the chamber.
The homily, boilerplate: “We’re here to mourn the passing of”—Rabbi Joe-Shmoe peering at the card on which he’d written down the names—“Arthur Morgenstern”—glancing at my grandmother to be sure he’s got it right—“cherished husband of”—the card again—“Estelle, and father of”—one more time—“Susan.” He went on far too long about the honorable man Arthur Morgenstern had been—“his love of skiing, his pride in his role as provider”—his voice growing thick, like he’d known this man or cared about this family, as if any of them had ever been members of his congregation.
Then the dedications from Arthur’s brother, his boss, anyone else who’d asked to speak, except of course his loving, free-spirited daughter, who’d been forbidden by her mother from “making it all about her.”
Restless, on guard, cynical about the virtue of hollow ceremonies, my mother and Lenny battled the urge to criticize the paltry good-enough-ness on display. Failing that, they glanced around the room, taking it in in all its cheesiness, counting all the faces they didn’t recognize. One in particular. A man of a certain build. A certain stripe. Wearing a certain kind of flat, sturdy shoe. FBI. Overseeing the proceeding. Taking notes. Padding his dossier on Lenny, even here.
Then, later at the house, after Lenny skipped on home, his support not worth the tensions his presence would create: My mother and grandmother, separately mourning on either end of a long, low mid-century sofa. Legs crossed identically. Each refusing to look at the other. A stalemate broken, again and again, by the complaint and accusation Jews confuse with love. “You never call. You never visit.” “Oh, now you want to hear from me.” “I didn’t say that. Think of your father.” “I am, Ma. On today of all days, he’s all I’m thinking of.” “I didn’t mean like that. I meant—oh, forget it.” “I’ll have you know, Ma, that we talked every week. Dad would call me from the office. He just knew better than to mention anything to you.” Pulling back into their corners, for a time, until some new resentment thrust them forward again. “Did you have to bring that man?” “You mean Lenny? My husband?” “Oh, is there another?” “Shut it, Ma. Really. Don’t start with me.” “Susan—” “I mean it. Don’t start.” And again and again until the guests, proud to flout the kosher laws even at a shiva, began arriving with their shrimp bowls and rugelach and chicken hearts wrapped in bacon, and then the two of them were compelled to circulate through the house, accepting condolences, pretending to be gracious, keeping the coffee flowing while my grandmother searched for every opportunity she could find to take veiled swipes at her daughter. “This one ran off to change the world, like what we’d given her wasn’t good enough, like the safety and opportunity this country’s provided is something a person can just take for granted. How he worried! How many nights he paced the halls, unable to sleep, convinced she was locked up in some jail somewhere or worse. I’m not saying she killed him, but…He was too anxious. High blood pressure is what it was. The Morgenstern curse.” Argument as a proxy for mourning.
And Mom whispering back, as she squeezed past her toward the kitchen to refill the tray of deviled eggs, “I didn’t kill him. If anything, you did. You and your all-encompassing, overwhelming fear.” Compulsively bringing in all the childhood experiences her mother never talked about: Saarbrücken, the Brownshirts, the never-healing wound. Taking it too far, like she always promised herself not to do before going ahead and doing it anyway.
The guilt and shame that sluiced through her after that. This was no way to honor the beloved dead. The kindest thing to do for her mother was to flee, so she did. Let her mother think the worst, which of course she did.
What was the use of asking for a favor now? What, realistically, were the odds of receiving any sympathy? If she couldn’t forgive herself, she knew, her mother had no reason to do so either.
So she put it off and off. She visited Lenny as often as she could, left me home with the boob tube and a bag of chips. And she did what she could to avoid the topic. When he asked about the money—“your inheritance, it’s owed you”—as he did each and every time, she’d mumble and pretend she hadn’t heard him.
Meanwhile, the celebrity muckraker Ricardo Polente did a two-part exposé on Lenny’s case, calling it the scandal of our time, which didn’t mean much, since a journalist of his caliber would’ve happily devoted a prime-time special to proving that hangnails were the scandal of our time if he could’ve found the requisite footage to carry him through forty-two minutes of airtime.
He filled a whole hour with obfuscating details, details that cast doubt, details he could only have gotten from Kunstler. He noted the mysterious break-in six months earlier at the clubhouse-cum-office-cum-printing-press on Bleecker—everything rearranged, nothing stolen. “It’s the kind of thing that just makes you wonder, how long had the FBI been surveilling Lenny and how legal was this sting operation? Isn’t it possible that Lenny’s not the drug kingpin he’s been tarred as, but rather, another casualty in our government’s ongoing persecution of the Left?” He hammered on the size of Lenny’s bail, poked holes in the narrative the police and, up to that point, the press had built around the arrest, pointing out how lame the coke Lenny supposedly sold had been, less pure than the dust you’d find on the toilet tops in the bathrooms of most Manhattan dance clubs. “What he’d sold these guys was baby laxative, plain and simple. Mannitoil’s. That’s what it was. But the joke was on him. And why?”
He made his viewers wait until the next night to find out.
“Get it together,” Lenny told my mother when she visited the Tombs to report in. “Call the old lady already. She owes you. Make her understand that.”
In any other context, she would’ve hit back with everything she had. Instead, she kept calm and allowed just a touch of sarcasm to curl through her voice. “Easy for you to say. She’s not your mother.”
Never one to let a cheap shot pass him by, Lenny responded, “My mother’s dead. Pops, too. What’re you saying?”
“Forget it.”
“Just ask her.”
“I will,” she said, but when she got home and tried, she could only stare at the phone and moan, “I can’t do it. I can’t. I just can’t do it.”
Polente used the second night’s broadcast to gloss through Lenny’s most celebrated stunts and replay old clips—the march on Washington, hippies flashing peace signs and twirling to the Dead, the flowers, the tie-dye, the trippy bubble letters falling into each other. Telling a story of harmony and hope that already played like the chorus to a song you’ve heard so often it tortures you in your sleep. “Oh, how the mighty fall. Oh, how ideals curdle,” Polente said, as the images took their familiar turn toward darkness. Fire hoses aimed like battering rams in Birmingham. Cops pummeling youngsters in Chicago. The flash of a knife below the stage at Altamont. Charlie Manson’s smiling face. Hendrix coaxing the flames from his guitar. “Are the sordid allegations against Lenny Snyder yet more evidence that the Age of Aquarius was and always had been a sham? Or do they forebode a new dark chapter in the history of our country, one in which our freedoms will be systematically trampled and any who dare to rebel will be sent to the gulag? The answer depends on your point of view. But one thing is indisputable. Whatever your feelings about Lenny Snyder, he surely deserves a fair hearing in a court of law, just as any other citizen of our great nation would receive. There shouldn’t be one set of rules for him and another for you and me. Not in the America I know and love.” Hi
s mock profundity leading him, as it always did, into a prim sanctimoniousness.
For a moment it seemed the scandal might turn. The tabloids buzzed for a day or two. The barflies argued. Seizing on this pressure, Kunstler got the bail cut in half.
And still my mother couldn’t pick up the phone.
And Lenny remained locked up in the Tombs.
The time had come, she knew, to confess her failure. Let Lenny curse her out all he wanted. His abuse had nothing on the mindfuck of speaking to her mother. Once there, in the Tombs, seeing his hopeful face, though, she lost her nerve again. She was afraid for him, afraid of becoming yet another of his problems. She didn’t have the heart to fight back right then. Like all the best ranters, she could mostly only summon her Sturm und Drang at a safe, cushioning distance from her tormentor.
“I talked to her,” she said, leaning in toward the glass. “She told me we could go fuck ourselves.” Not really a lie if the essence was true.
Lenny just smirked. All that anguish for nothing. “So we’ll do this the hard way,” he said. “Start a group. Get organized. You can call it the Lenny Snyder Defense fund. LSD for short.”
Ha! He could still make himself laugh.
So she did what he asked.
She harnessed her will and, with Kunstler’s help, called up a couple of the more visible movement figures—Leslie Ritchler and Preston Hammington, old-timers whose bitter memories of McCarthy would, she hoped, lead them to overlook, this once, their profound distrust of Lenny and his motives. She convinced them to take out a full-page ad in the Times, an open letter arguing that Lenny’s arrest was an embodiment of the class warfare at the root of Rockefeller’s new drug laws. What they drafted said everything Lenny would have hoped for: That he was a serious man committed to the people, to the cause of freedom; that these new laws were a manipulation of the American justice system meant specifically to target black folk and the youth; that Lenny’s arrest under these laws and the outrageous size of his bail were a transparent attempt to make an example of a controversial public figure. A short, forceful statement of outraged support signed by 126 notable leftists: Noam Chomsky, Dr. Spock, the Brothers Berrigan, and Lenny’s old mentor at Brandeis, Herbert Marcuse. Ginsberg signed it. Mailer. John and Yoko. Marlon Brando. A glittering list. Every loudmouth from here to the Hollywood Hills—except for Phil Ochs, who to his great distress hadn’t been told the letter existed, and Sy, who’d given no explanation, traveling or something, my mother rationalized, unreachable.