Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  Things seemed almost to be going well.

  “You remember when everybody wore those buttons with the little fists on them?” she told me, explaining the logic of what she was doing. “ ‘Free Huey Newton’? Remember? We went to DC for that rally? Lenny gave a speech. Or John Sinclair? Remember ‘Free John Sinclair’? No? It’s a thing you can do. Applying public pressure. We’ll have fun. It’ll be like a crusade for justice. For Lenny. What do you think of that?”

  Great, I thought. Yay. I imagined a parade.

  She marched me around the corner to drop in on Marcus Kirsh, an old trickster and the irreverent publisher of the underground rag The Conformist, who’d had his rifts with Lenny like everybody else. It was ten in the morning. Kirsh had just dropped acid. “You want some?” he asked like he was offering tea.

  “Sure,” my mother said. “Why not.”

  He showed her what he had. “Wicked witches or golden tickets?” The witches were stamped with pointy green hats. The tickets had been dyed a bright canary yellow. She chose the ticket.

  “That’s what you need, isn’t it, pard’ner?” he said, winking, his face open like it had never known fear, like the laughter never stopped under his skin. “The golden ticket. It’s all that’s gonna save Lenny now.” He turned to me. “You want one?”

  “He’s good,” she said. “Nobody does LSD anymore, Marcus.”

  “Right. It’s all about the cocaine,” he said darkly. “Thus…”

  He pulled two mismatched chairs up snug together and seated my mother across from himself. Their knees touched. They couldn’t escape each other’s focus.

  “Can we talk?” she asked.

  “I already signed the letter.”

  “We need money.”

  He gave her the bug eye and laughed himself into a ball on the floor. Just when you thought he was gonna pull it together, he convulsed again. Three or four times, this happened.

  My mother kept a straight face, serious, waiting. When he finally took his seat again she was back at it. “Will you help us?”

  “With money? Look around.” His apartment was the size of a rabbit hole, virtually empty except for the old and new copies of The Conformist warehoused along the floor, the cartoons and articles mocked up on the walls. “Wait till this acid kicks in. Then we’ll talk.”

  They sat in silence, staring tediously at each other. My mother’s expression held tight, somber.

  Kirsh did some hoodoo-voodoo with his bony arms, twirling and chopping them in front of her face. “I can see the gray death creeping across your cheeks,” he said. “The cannibals are massing outside the door.” When he saw she wouldn’t play, he said, “I wrote a piece. It’ll run in the next issue. The hundred-odd people who still listen to me will read it. What else can I do?”

  “A poster,” my mother said.

  Something sparked. “Free Lenny Snyder!” shouted Kirsh.

  And Mom allowed herself a small, determined smile. “Precisely.”

  By that evening, Kirsh had designed and printed 250 posters in large-scale black and white. A mug shot of Lenny, not the pathetic one from this arrest but a sexy-crazy one of him in his heyday, a corona of wild hair framing his face. A black eye. A leering I-dare-you smirk. The dimple in his chin, the cut of his cheekbones, all reinforced in dark inky ink. He’d never looked more alluringly dangerous. Stamped across this image in blocky stencil: FRAMED. And below: FREE LENNY SNYDER.

  We spent the night tumbling giggling through the streets. Or they did. I spent the night wheat-pasting. Kirsh’s acid kept them spinning as I tugged them by the hand from wall to plywood wall, a daisy chain of freaks led by a barefoot child. It was no big thing. I’d done it before.

  Each time my mother thought she was coming down, a new surge of fantasia cascaded into, over, around, and about her. The colors! The sounds! The world born anew! She and Kirsh kept forgetting what mission we were on. They buried their arms to the elbows in the glue and snickered at each other, “Oh, wow…It’s like…I don’t even know.”

  But we got it done. I got it done. By dawn every empty space south of 14th Street had been plastered over with Lenny’s likeness. I navigated my mother and Kirsh through the morning fog, dragging our mops and pail home through the sunrise, and the three of us all collapsed on the futon. Exhausted and inspired by our achievement—really, my achievement and their giddy vision quest—we slept the day away.

  It felt good, but nothing changed. Lenny was still locked up and within hours the posters were defaced with graffiti, messages from the new wave of nihilists taking over the hood. Die Hippie Scum, they said.

  Mom pressed on.

  People owed Lenny favors. Some she knew, some she didn’t. He’d been keeping a list, apparently, reciting it in his cell, memorizing and adding names to it each night. He rattled them off for her during the next visit, gave her notes on the right tactics for this or that person. A whole plan of action. Every detail mapped out. Just looking at it she could see it was more grandiose and wishful than practically useful. But hell, wasn’t that his way? Didn’t he have a long, successful record of making the impossible seem inevitable?

  She met with various cells and contingents. Maoists. Anarchists. Black nationalists. Folks who’d excised themselves from the lives they’d once lived to hole up in farmhouses without running water, or various anonymous communal spaces where they criticized themselves in the name of purity. Trotskyites. Disciples of Che Guevara. Saul Alinsky. Ideological pedants and those opposed on principle to ideology. Extremists and incrementalists. The old left. The new left. The violent, the benign. All those proliferating factions that had burst out of the old coalitions. You have to understand, even when they’d been working together, these people had seethed with spite for each other, and particularly for Lenny, who along with Sy always gobbled up the press and never followed the script.

  Of course, they had questions. They couldn’t help themselves. Theory was realer to them than flesh and blood. And what better time than now to make Lenny pay for his logical inconsistency? ’Cause, really—no, really—who exactly was Lenny hoping to help? Besides himself?

  They could go on and on, and would and did, pulling out all the tricks they’d learned in debate club, citing whichever sacrosanct notion that momentarily flitted through their minds, baiting my mother to respond so they could trip her up and score yet another Pyrrhic victory.

  And Mom being Mom, she took the bait. Didn’t he risk an awful lot defending your violent means to the press? He gave his royalties for Burn It away—remember? Well, you should! He gave them to you! He was there in Chicago during the Days of Rage getting bludgeoned right next to you. I know, I was there too. ’Cause Lenny and I organized that shit. We came up with the motherfucking name! Not that you ever gave us any credit. Without us it would’ve just been called Those Assholes Are Rioting Again. You’re telling me he still needs to do more? You’re telling me he hasn’t proven himself to you over and over again already?

  Yeah, but. Yeah, but. There was always a retort. Some esoteric quote from their pet theoretician to dismiss her charges and justify their refusal to help.

  She’d come home from these appointments hopped up and indignant, all the things she should’ve said in the moment now bouncing in her brain like popcorn. Then she’d settle into a doobie and a pot of chamomile tea and, most crucially, total silence—the only way she knew how to recover. “Don’t start with me, Fred. Mommy’s head is exploding.”

  She reached out to his old comrades and hangers-on, folks who used to linger around the apartment worshipping at his feet and fetching him beer.

  I remember we visited the Fag. Ray Garrett. It was an open secret that he’d been born to money. And he’d funded many an action in the past. Then one day in ’69, he’d vanished, only showing up to preach from the stage when the crowd was massive enough to make it worth his while. We tra
cked him down in the West Village. He was as tall and graceful as I remembered, though he’d traded his flowing linens and beads for thigh-hugging bell-bottoms and a jersey shirt festooned with an iron-on rainbow.

  It turned out he’d never been as amused by Lenny’s pet name as he’d let on.

  When my mother asked where he’d gone, what’d happened to him, he said, “I guess I found some other fags to hang around with.” The bitterness lingered there, heavy on his tongue, throughout the rest of their conversation. He’d found better things to spend his money on. The Gay Liberation Front. A bookstore on Christopher Street that he and his new friends were in the process of opening. “I’m supporting fags like me,” he said. “But I’m sure Lenny can find some kikes to bail him out this time.”

  “Come on,” my mother said. “Lenny’s always been a friend to the gays.”

  He smiled, quicksilver. “And what a night that was. Give him a big sloppy kiss for me.”

  One way or another, we reached out to and were shot down by most all the various people who’d signed the Times letter. We got maybe fifty, a hundred bucks, chump change, I don’t even know from who. Their logic was unshakable. By the standards to which they held themselves, they had an obligation to oppose injustice but a personal desire to see Lenny suffer. Everyone had some grudge or other that they’d been clutching tight for so long it had become a part of their soul. Those who didn’t despise him resented him. They blamed him for their splattered ideals.

  And the consensus—but of course!—was: guilty as sin.

  We expanded our reach. We’d talk to anyone, whether we wanted to or not. Kunstler gave us names and we’d go knocking, and we’d call him again each night with a full report.

  Why, you might ask, did my mother take orders from Kunstler? Why did a liberated woman like her, with years of experience mobilizing people, need to be micromanaged by Lenny’s showboat lawyer? It didn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blew, and maybe she already suspected, in her heart of hearts, that this time she’d bound herself to a genuinely lost cause.

  I remember weeks and weeks of slogging around the tristate area, every day a scramble to the bus, the subway, the PATH and the Penn Central, sometimes followed by a brisk walk through the tall grass along the highway toward some Jersey suburb, some hilly Town-on-Hudson’s cul-de-sacs of condos, the stately campus of this or that college where tired, aging leftists now taught at the very institutions they’d once protested against. We searched down every lead, but whether we chose to admit it to ourselves or not, we already knew they’d amount to nothing. The goodwill for Lenny Snyder had been all used up, and whatever moral authority he’d once held had disappeared like a line of coke up his nose.

  And with every new disappointment, psyching ourselves up again became harder and harder to pull off. What had been advertised as a fun crusade to Free Lenny Snyder had turned into an exercise in humiliation.

  And eventually, we just ran out of options.

  Kunstler, of course, had decided the news should come from my mother.

  “We struck out,” she told Lenny over the phone. I listened, as I so often did in those days, at her feet.

  “With everyone?” he said, his bark so abrasive that it cracked through the kitchen like he was right there.

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Even Mailer?”

  “Mailer threw twenty bucks at me and claimed he’s broke.”

  She let him digest this news.

  When he spoke again, he said, “Fuck ’em. They’re a bunch of cowards.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “You gotta talk to Sy. He’s a lion. He’ll come through.”

  And knowing how hard it must’ve been for Lenny to swallow his pride and make this request—as hard as it was for Mom to call her mother—we did as he asked. We trudged down to the Financial District. If I remember correctly, we even took a cab. It was one of those damp days when it’s not really raining but it’s not not raining either.

  Sy had rented an office in the World Trade Center, which had just barely opened—not even fully. One tower had begun taking in tenants, the other still had contractors stalking its lower levels, checking the wiring, doing damage control.

  As we walked up the staggered platforms leading to the plaza, each one as wide as a city bus, pinpricks of rain smacked against our cheeks and lodged in our hair like diamond chips. It took forever to get to the top, like climbing a mountain, and on the last rise, in the plaza between the two buildings, the wind gusted with such force you were sure it was going to blow you right back down. We stood there for a moment, like you had to on your first visit to the place, staring up at the sky, at the optical illusion of the towers seeming to bend on each side of us to meet up there somewhere beyond the clouds. It made my stomach swim. I felt like I was going to fall upward, into the chasm of air between those two monoliths.

  My mother felt it too, but she wasn’t as spellbound by the experience as I was. To her the buildings were a symptom of a larger sickness. And like leftists everywhere at that time, she was repulsed by the garish aesthetics of the place, so blunt—“there’s no subtlety”—and so arrogant. She and Lenny had discussed it a hundred times. They were like enormous tombstones erected by high finance over the graves of everything good and right in this city. Bye-bye, culture. Bye-bye, art. See ya later, alligator.

  And now, here, faced with the physical mass of the buildings, seeing close up how truly immense they were, she couldn’t help herself. She brandished both fists over her head and flipped each tower its own individual bird. “You’ve finally done it, Sy,” she shouted into the wind. “You must think you’re king of the fucking world.”

  Then she tugged me by an arm toward the revolving doors.

  On the twenty-third or twenty-fourth floor—anyway, high up there—we found Sy behind a door festooned with the words HOLISTICS, INC., the name of the venture he’d left the cause to found. He was happy to see us, warm, eager to show us this new revolution his life had taken.

  “Supplements,” he said, sweeping his arm in front of the hundreds of bottles stacked on shelves that filled one entire wall. “Vitamin C. Iron. This one’s”—he checked the label—“magnesium. Want one? Here, Freddy, catch!” And he lobbed the bottle into my chest.

  He asked about how Lenny was holding up, and he leaned in, soft, intent, flush with compassion, as my mother told him.

  “You know Lenny,” she said. “He’s a fighter. He keeps on keeping on.”

  Their joint history—that of Lenny and Sy—seemed to hang there between them. They’d been a symbiotic pair. Sy knew how to survive. How to sustain relationships and build something from nothing and sustain it. Lenny was a scam artist and a street fighter. Together, they’d made each other better. Sy could explain Lenny to the movement people, and Lenny knew how to goad Sy into the reckless mind-meld that churned out their best, most memorable accomplishments. They’d been bound by the ten thousand things they’d done together. The hours of brainstorming that often led nowhere. The nights with no sleep. The panic and frustration and intense despair that required such faith—such unqualified trust—that nothing about one remained hidden from the other. They each knew how the other took his coffee and what sandwich to order for him at the deli. They’d covered for each other’s failings and experienced each other’s sorrows and they knew the joy of watching each other soar, understanding that they’d still be earthbound if they’d tried to fly solo.

  “We’re on different paths now,” Sy said, not without sadness.

  I couldn’t get over how doughy he looked. How well fed.

  Mom and I both knew the moment had arrived. The only thing to do was to put it to him straight.

  “He needs your help,” she said. “We can’t make bail.” She locked eyes with him for a moment and then looked away. Ashamed? Maybe. But I couldn’t say if it was of having to ask like t
his or because of the gross difference between our fate and his.

  He took his time formulating a response. Folded his hands and plopped his arms on the desk. Breathed deeply and loudly, a deliberative sigh. Then he said, “Let me ask you. Would Lenny do the same for me?”

  There, in that one searing moment, I really, truly, fully understood what my mother meant when she talked about her head exploding. The steam hissing from your brain. The fire burning in your eyes. The lava hanging on your tongue.

  Sy just watched us.

  He had some advice for me as we left. “Drink a lot of wheatgrass and think for yourself.” He slipped me a copy of Anthem by Ayn Rand as Mom pushed me out the door. By the time we made it to the elevator bank, she’d peeled it from my hand and slammed it in a trash can.

  And that was that.

  “So he’ll rot in there,” my mother said as we descended. “Honestly? It’s his own damn fault.”

  She took me down to visit Lenny one morning. Whose idea this was, I don’t know. The Tombs in 1974 was no place for a child, no matter how much his father missed him.

  Just three years earlier, the place had been like something out of a medieval nightmare. Overcrowded, with four, five, six inmates to each six-by-ten cell, floors pooled with raw sewage for days on end, shit streaked across the walls, even the ceiling in places, where inmates desperate to prove to themselves that they still existed, and lacking any other instrument with which to make their marks, had flung it or used it to finger-paint their names, their sexual organs, the crude shapely bodies of imagined goddesses, legs splayed to reveal cunts as big as their heads. It was never hosed down. Nothing ever washed away. Just years’, decades’, worth of accumulated filth. Bedbugs and lice and fleas, carpets of cockroaches, swarming in such large colonies that they ruled the place like gangs, boldly leaping from bunk to bunk, attacking in the dead of night, showing mercy to no one, black nationalists, white supremacists, Irish and Italian street thugs, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Triad kingpins—if you were in the Tombs, the bugs made you their punk, and quick. The only gang more dangerous than them was the guards, the COs, who would smack you down for smiling at them wrong, poke one eye out for breakfast and the other for lunch, knock the wind out of your lungs and, if you still had the strength to gasp, gag you on their batons until you went unconscious.