by Joshua Furst
Guys were killing themselves to get out of there. Two weeks inside were worse than a lifetime in the fed. There’d been riots. Five COs had been held up with shivs fashioned from bedsprings—pig stickers they were called, and in this one instance they earned their name—taken hostage in the barricaded seventh floor and treated to some of their own medicine. The inevitable exposés started appearing, punny New York Post covers, New York Times editorials, and eventually the city caved and announced they’d shut down. Inmates were shipped to Rikers, to Attica, where a few months later they’d riot again.
By the time Lenny got there the place was like Auschwitz after the war but before liberation, emptied of nearly all its population, about to be abandoned but as gruesome as it had ever been for the couple hundred souls still trapped behind its walls.
And it was into this horror that my mother dragged me.
I remember us walking down from the Lower East Side, her chattering like mad, to me, to herself, it was hard to tell which. “Fucking Walker. Fucking Kunstler. Fucking Sy. Fucking Garrett. Fucking motherfucking fuckers. Some fucking community.” She pulled me into traffic, heeding no lights, her hand cuffed around my wrist, yanking me along. I had to two-step to keep pace. Across Canal, delivery trucks inched up on top of us. “Hey! Asshole! You got eyes? You see the child with me? No? Fucking no? You gotta be kidding me.” So focused on the anger seething inside her that when the city crashed in it was just more raw noise. “You were supposed to be smart, Lenny. That was the deal. You were supposed to make sure shit like this didn’t happen.” Definitely not talking to me. “So what’s the play, Lenny? I’m out of ideas.” Saying all the things she’d have to suppress later. She didn’t always deal with pressure very well. Her anxiety had a way of spilling all over me, thrusting me forward, aloft, like I was caught in the turbulence of a wave.
And then there we were, outside the prison. An art deco box, but without the graceful curves, stripped of everything but the spikes and angles so you felt pinched by its constricting geometry. Its grand entrance was for upstanding people, not us. We had to circle around to the side and find the hole outside of which visitors were made to wait in shame.
When our turn came, before she wrestled open the levered door, she knelt on the sidewalk in front of me, braced my hips and said, “This is going to be…educational, Fred. Lenny needs to see that you’re brave. That you still believe in him. Remember that. The bonds of love are stronger than any prison.”
A nice sentiment. She must have read it in some book.
Inside, the walls looked like they weighed a million pounds. Walking down the hallway, you could feel them swallowing you up. Even the waxy lead paint they used seemed heavy, like it was pulling the whole of the building down.
We were accosted by an endless string of guards. One to sign us in, another to escort us through reception, a third to buzz us into the air lock, a fourth and fifth to pat us down and root through my mother’s fringed bag. Then at the second door, another to lead us through the maze of corridors to the room that housed the visiting berths. And each of these guards, no matter his shape or size, gave off the same aura, like something rancid, something toxic, was oozing out of him. I’d noticed this in low doses in cops before, but never encountered it in such concentration. Scorn. Loathing. Utter revulsion. For my mother, for me, for any and everyone who wasn’t them.
An education. Well, here was the first lesson.
For six years I’d been surrounded by Lenny and his carnival of malcontents, soaking up their opposition to power. I’d experienced their theatrics as a kind of pageant, a story they told the world to entertain themselves. They compared arrests like baseball cards, comic books, things they competed for and collected. They were cool. They were hip. They were at one with their times. The big police riots were long in the past and whatever moral seriousness still lurked in them, whatever sacrifices and risks they’d taken, seemed hypothetical, unrelated to their lives. Even the episode with me and that tree—it was a joke, an anecdote to be trotted out at parties. There was rarely a sense that the danger had been real, just occasional glimmers, encounters with people whose eyes told of hard secrets, stories about certain legendary actions when the air changed and a depth charge of terror plunged through everyone’s gut, but even then—the way they told it—they always won.
Not so in the Tombs. There was no winning here. No escape. No joy. No glory in revolt.
As we were shunted deeper into this fortress, the mechanisms of control grew more pronounced. The place was designed to disorient you, hallways turning and doubling back on themselves, rooms with too many doors to keep track of, the same floor-to-ceiling tiles on the walls, all painted the same pissy prison-yellow. Noise assaulted you from every direction. First the clang of reinforced steel doors. Then what sounded like sledgehammers pounding on iron pipes, an almost musical rhythm except for how it skipped every time you caught the beat. More. Scraping sounds. Screeching sounds. Yowling sounds. Echoes. The rattle of steam heat bucking through faulty pipes.
We went through one last door and were handed off to yet another guard. These guys, they all blurred together. Bulky white dudes in uniforms that made them look like blobs, their faces hardened with the pinched menace of stupidity.
This specimen consulted his clipboard and barked us toward one of the booths lined up like door-less toilet stalls on the other side of the room. “Snyder,” he shouted.
And Lenny’s cracking voice beckoned us forward, warbling “So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Was it campy? Yes it was.
We couldn’t see him. In my memory, he’s not seated behind glass but walled up behind a solid steel panel, painted that same yellow and fitted with a slot—like a mail slot—that was sealed up with bulletproof plastic.
He launched into a new verse—“Did you ever see a robin weep, when the leaves begin to die”—and my mother nudged me half step by half step toward his stall.
“Kid, is that you?”
The tin bench built into the wall had lost half its screws. It hung there uselessly, unable to take even my minuscule weight. I shifted on my feet, not knowing what to do.
“It’s him,” my mother said.
Simply being there—us on this side, him on the other—communicated the whole message. I studied the graffiti scrawled and scraped all around me. So many illegible names. Such deep gouges.
“Listen. Kid,” Lenny said. “You bring the cupcake?”
“What?”
“The cupcake.”
I glanced at my mother but she was no help.
“Remember? We discussed this.”
“He doesn’t know what you’re talking about, Lenny.”
“Sure he does. The cupcake. Remember, kid? You promised to bake me a cupcake.”
“I did? Uh…I don’t know how to bake.”
“Sure you do. You go to the store. You buy a box of mix. You read the directions. The cupcake’s crucial, kid. You don’t remember any of this? Next time bring the cupcake. Lemon crème’s my favorite. And add that something-special to it just for me. That something I might not be able to get here on the inside.”
“He’s joking,” my mother said.
I didn’t get it.
She went on. “He’s joking and these assholes are listening—you know they are, Lenny. They’re just looking for an excuse.”
“Hey, kid. Come here.”
I stood on my tiptoes to try and look through the slit. Behind the scribbles etched into the plastic, one eye peered out at me.
“Don’t listen to her. She’s just jealous.”
“Lenny, cut it,” my mother said. “I’m serious. We don’t have time for this.”
“I’ve got all the time in the world, baby.”
“He’s showing off for you.” She leaned back against the stall and bit at her lips in exasperation. Given how wound up she’d been all day, I
doubt anything Lenny might have done would’ve pleased her.
Still, somebody had to say something, so I tried. “What’s the joke?”
“The joke, Fred, is that you bake a file into a cake,” said my mother, “and you deliver the cake to the person in jail, and after they eat the cake they can use the file to saw through the bars and break themselves out. It’s a cliché and it’s not very funny. And”—she turned toward the steel plate—“you’re not fucking Cool Hand Luke.”
“I’m trying to talk to my boy,” Lenny said, a new tone, almost a plea, tugging at his voice.
“Fine.”
“So let us talk.”
But she wouldn’t. Not yet. She’d spent too much for too little reward. “You want to know how it’s going out here?” she asked, flat and sarcastic.
“I already know,” he said softly. “I talked to Kunstler.”
If she’d expected this, she didn’t let on.
“Hey, kid,” Lenny said, bouncing back. He dipped his head around, ducking here and there, trying to make me out through the distressed plastic. “You know what they did? You’re not gonna believe it. Can you see me?”
“Sort of.” All I saw were shadows, color shifting behind the scrim.
“They cut my hair. Shaved it right off. Crazy, huh? It looks pretty good, though. I think I kind of like it.”
“Why’d they do that?”
“You really want to know? It’s…well, it’s kind of heavy.”
Before he could go on to describe how the COs had pulled him from his cell, bucking and squirming, a guard on each leg, his arms locked behind his back—and the suddenness of it all, the way their violence had erupted out of nowhere, the poodle-shears scraping crudely across his scalp, catching sometimes in his tangle of curls, yanking it out by the roots—my mother cut in. “Lenny—”
“What?” he snapped.
The viciousness that passed between them in that instant. It said more about the bonds of love than either of them would ever have admitted.
She let him sit without an answer for a long minute before saying, “We have to go.”
Something like panic roiled on the other side of the steel plate.
“Wait. Kid. Freedom. One more thing. I gotta tell you.” He was scrambling. Revving himself up. “This place is a joke. It’s all a fucking joke. And I’m not the guy they’re trying to turn me into. I’m this guy. I’m Lenny fucking Snyder. Don’t forget it. Whatever they do to me. Whatever they do to you. I’m Lenny Snyder and you’re my son. And Freedom is a state of mind.”
A lesson there, too. But I was, at the time, entirely unequipped to comprehend it.
So anyway, that’s where we were.
By now Lenny’d been locked up for months and the trial was still more than half a year away. LSD consisted pretty exclusively of Kunstler and my mother and, for what it was worth, me. There was nothing doing. We’d pretty much given up. And out of nowhere we got a call from Bob Fass at the leftist radio station WBAI. He hadn’t forgotten Lenny’s many appearances on his show to announce this or that public rally, free concert, mobile soup kitchen or spontaneous protest at x-y-z time in such and such a place, all those instances when Lenny had called in from pay phones in the middle of the chaos to describe what he was seeing and provide essential details—where exactly the cops had assembled, how many people they’d beaten and hauled away, which streets were still open to intrepid listeners who might want to venture out to the barricades. Don’t forget your bottle of water. They’ve got the tear gas flowing.
“Lenny’s a compatriot,” he told my mother. “We need him. How ’bout you come up to the studio and make a pitch.”
He’d read Kirsh’s screed in The Conformist, which turned out to have framed Lenny’s incarceration in a sweeping argument for the legalization of everything from pot to angel dust to bennies to H, since losing your mind was the only sane response to an insane world. And though Fass couldn’t get past his skepticism as to how this might lead to a better, more equitable and accountable system of government, his feeling was, hey, everybody makes a mistake now and then.
“What matters is that Lenny’s an important voice,” he said. “And now that so few voices are left, it’s crucial we get him back. Don’t know why I didn’t think to do this earlier—well, I do know. But that was my mistake. We’ll rectify that.”
The thing to do was to pick up on the insinuations Ricardo Polente had thrown around on his televised exposé. But minus the leer. To appeal to people’s sympathy, not their lust for scandal. And the path toward sympathy, Fass and my mother agreed, led through me.
They knew I could do it. Lenny had dragged me up to ’BAI to be interviewed by Fass once before. A stunt. I’d be the voice of the new youth generation. Four years old. Not a hippie but a bippie—coming to you live from the papoose. He’d asked me intricate, serious questions. Did I believe violence was a rational response to the irrational policies of the US government? In light of what the Pentagon Papers had revealed about the depths of mendacity and subterfuge in the Defense Department, should a criminal investigation be launched and, if so, who should head it? Did I stand with Shirley Chisholm on the ERA? And I chirped out my answers. All very cute. Nobody comes between me and my mom’s boob. As for the Pentagon Papers, what was there to say except that even a child could’ve seen it coming. Never trust anybody over six.
At the end of the session, Fass asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Free!” I said. I’d been heavily prepped for all these questions. “But what does it matter? If we don’t unilaterally pull out of this unjust and illegal war in Vietnam, I won’t even have a chance to grow up.”
Apparently, I killed. Who knows.
All I remember is the hot light over the table, the mic suspended in its cage like a leg in traction, the massive plate-glass window that took up one whole wall.
The idea was that we’d repeat this performance, but instead of being interviewed, I’d just tell my story, like a tiny professor bringing the news, the secret history, to the masses waiting out there to have their minds blown.
It was supposed to be fun. That’s what my mother kept saying. “You like telling stories, and God knows you’re a ham. Pretend you’re talking to me. You’ll be fine. I promise. It’s no big deal.”
But it was a big deal. She spent days writing and rewriting the script. Anguishing over it. Squeezing her eyes shut and chewing her pen. She’d started smoking again. Mores. Filling mason jars all over the apartment with those thin brown butts.
I asked her, why couldn’t I just say I missed Lenny and talk about all the stuff he’d done and whatever? Just be myself?
“That’s exactly what you’re gonna do,” she said. “But you have to do it effectively. That’s why we have a script. So people actually want to give us money. Like I said, no big deal.”
And the less of a big deal she tried to make it, the bigger the pressure on me became. We’d rehearsed and rehearsed, me stumbling over the words I didn’t know, working them out phonetically.
Would you believe this was how I learned to read?
At night, I’d sit there in the dark, listening to cop cars whine through the neighborhood and I’d play out fantasies of all the ways I could fuck up and instead of saving Lenny, condemn him to an eternity of…what? Piercing cold and darkness and sinister strangers. Somewhere along the line he and my mother had made the mistake of letting me watch Nosferatu on The Late Show. The creature, that gargoyle with its long eerie fingers and its taste for blood mixed in my mind with the junkies who’d taken over the hood. I saw them crouched in the shadows, watching Lenny, not me, waiting for the right moment to stab their needles into his neck. He’d be in howling pain. On his back. Naked. And they’d be shaving his head again. It would be my fault. Every time. Whatever scenario spooled through my mind, it always ended up bein
g all my fault.
I was getting headaches. Boxing matches were being fought in my stomach.
By the night of our appearance, I’d wound myself up so tight I could hardly look at my mother without hyperventilating. I was ticky. Twitchy.
She must’ve noticed, but her response was to deny my fear and drive me harder toward our objective. “Remember. No big deal. Just do what we practiced. It’s in your genes. You just have to channel Lenny.”
In the cab to the station, she kept touching me—my hands, my shoulders, my hair, my cheeks—saying, “Breathe. The key is to breathe. Because remember what happened this afternoon? When you started rushing? And losing your place? That’s what happens when you don’t breathe.” A pat on my knee. A deep inhalation to show me how it was done. “I’m not saying you should worry about it. Just be aware. You’ll do great. I promise. You’re going to be fantastic.” A squeeze of my arm. “Just remember to breathe.” A pause. She squeezed my fingers so hard they cracked. “Okay?”