by Joshua Furst
It hadn’t just been him. It had been his friends too. Sy and Garrett and all the rest. Suzy, of course. Even Phil in his way—their minstrel, telling the tale.
And they’d done it. They’d bludgeoned that beast till it tore apart. Candy flew everywhere.
The nation looked like them now. The most popular character in the most popular comic strip in the country was a zonked-out pothead who talked to plants. Whole swaths of New York were perfumed with skunk weed. Even oil men and congressional aides were growing their hair shaggy over their ears, letting it touch past their collars. Suburban housewives were fucking their neighbors and their husbands were sometimes fucking each other, everyone getting together afterward to discuss the joys of an unconstrained eros. And look at all the people who’d wandered off to the forests of Northern California, the hills of upstate New York, the vast empty plains of Kansas and Nebraska, the rocky beaches of Hawaii and Mexico, erasing their footprints behind them, changing their names, declaring free zones no government could reach, in India, Denmark, Thailand, Costa Rica, embracing a grubby communion with each other. Buildings were being liberated all over New York, reclaimed by force of will from a city that had let them rot. And everyone was poor, so everyone was equal—or more equal than they’d been in a long, long time.
So where was the candy now? Or maybe the better question: Why was the candy still worth anything? Why was everyone hissing Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme more candy? It’s mine! It’s all mine!! As though the goal all along had been to join the ranks of the powerful, not smash the power structure to smithereens.
Lenny, the consummate hustler, who’d scammed a whole nation into changing its dreams, had been hustled. The people’d abandoned him. It was inexplicable. Inconceivable.
And, look. Moles and agents provocateurs had squirmed their way into each and every leftist faction. Everyone and his sister hunkered down in this or that liberation front, each condemning the other for counterrevolutionary thought. The black nationalists refused to truck with whitey. Radical feminists and womyn’s libbers castigated the movement and all it had achieved for being just another, groovier iteration of the same old patriarchal bullshit—smash it, they said. Even the vegans had grown militant. The trip went on and on and became very strange indeed.
Paranoia wafted through the streets like tear gas. With smoke in the air and the wind in their faces, the legions of the Left fragmented into a hundred warring tribes, all defining themselves down to a hundred competing, essentialist dogmas each of which had only one belief in common: that to be free you had to strap on a straightjacket. They didn’t seem to understand that there was no way to reach for their precious candy if their arms were constricted inside that straightjacket. Who cares if they sewed the jacket themselves, they still weren’t free now that they were strapped in.
Nobody could take a joke anymore.
Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all, if that’s what they wanted.
’Cause, what, really, was winning if it looked like this? It was just an illusion. An impossible pose. Another something to smash for the hell of it.
Which is why he’d made the trek to the Whitmore Hotel. To remind them what freedom—real freedom—looked like. Or that’s how I sometimes think he justified it. He’d done it to show the world that he could.
And the world had come back and told him, no, he couldn’t.
Winning might not be real, but losing had consequences. Whatever he really thought about candy, there’d be none in prison. In prison he’d die. He couldn’t go there. Not like this. On a coke bust. He still had his honor. His name still stood for something, didn’t it? Wasn’t he still Lenny Snyder? The danger of building your identity around your enemies is that once they surrender, you lose track of who you are. The crazy inside you starts leaking out. Something perverse in him had wanted to get caught. Needed to get caught. Did that mean he’d won? Did it mean he’d lost? When had all this shame replaced his joy?
And here he’d get stuck again and cycle back to the beginning.
Until—at least the way I remember it—he strode out one morning singing Sinatra songs, peeled off the filthy underwear he’d been wearing and pulled himself into his best pair of cords, the short-sleeved shirt from an NYPD uniform he’d salvaged from some surplus store for one of his antics, his cowboy boots and hat, a whole get-up designed to convey that his strut was real and the time for self-doubt was over. Primping in the mirror. Blowing himself kisses.
We gaped at him. Alarmed. Relieved. Both.
Clapping his hands like he was trying to corral cats, he turned on us. “Anybody else want a hamburger?”
We said sure. We grabbed our parkas.
And sitting in a booth in some diner on Third Avenue, he chowed down and informed us, not pausing to swallow, that he’d made a decision. He was innocent. Morally innocent. Dig it: In this tattered new America, where it was all you could do to scrape up enough cash to cover your rent, maybe once in a while float the base payment on your overdue electricity bill before they turned off the lights, it was better to join the shadow economy than enslave yourself to the system of exploitation that was finally, thankfully, breaking down. Heating up his rhetoric, even just for us.
My mother glared at him, growing impatient. “So you’re saying you’re guilty.”
“Naw.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
“I’m saying the law’s at fault. Drugs should be legal.”
“But they’re not. You know? What’s that they say? If wishes were fishes, we’d—”
“And I’ve got Kunstler.”
She smirked. “Right. Okay. Let’s go talk to Kunstler.”
So that’s what we did. We marched right up to his office, unannounced.
In all the months of trying to secure Lenny’s bail, and all the previous instances in which Kunstler had shielded Lenny’s right to play the fool, I’d never once been inside his office. We’d meet him on street corners or a bench in Union Square. Sometimes my mother and I rode the dark whining elevator up to drop something off or exchange information too sensitive for the phone. Even then we’d be there for maybe two minutes, quick drive-bys during which she and Kunstler closed themselves off behind his thick oak door, ditching me in the reception room with his bull of an assistant. He never had time for meetings. There were too many press conferences to hold.
Now there we were. Lenny and my mother and me. Kicking the slush from our boots and refusing to move until he dropped everything and gave us a hearing.
Well, that’s what Lenny was doing. My mother was making helpless faces at Kunstler’s assistant. And I, as usual, just stood there, dumb and nervous.
“You have no appointment,” the assistant kept saying. She spoke with a raspy accent, like her tongue was made of sandpaper. “To see him you must make an appointment.”
“We’ll wait.”
“So wait. He won’t see you. You have no appointment.”
“Tell him it’s Lenny Snyder. He’ll see me.”
“You could be the prophet Elijah. With no appointment, he will not see you.”
But nothing could harsh Lenny’s buzz. He said something in Yiddish, something charming, I guess, and for a second it looked like she was about to laugh, but she caught herself and soured and said again, “You must make an appointment.”
From the doorway behind us, Kunstler broke in. “No need for that, I’ve got the time now.”
Who knows how long he’d been there, leaning against the doorframe. A tremendous shambling stork of a man. Kunstler was awesome in a way people aren’t allowed to be anymore. He looked, even then, when it wasn’t yet noon, like a tornado had just plopped him down where he stood, his greatcoat flapping, even in the stale air of his office, his tie loose around his neck, his long hairy fingers curled around a greasy brown paper bag, a hundred scraps of loose paper tumbling from his pockets, cocktail
napkins, torn corners of envelopes, receipts and jagged strips ripped from yellow pads, each one containing a crucially important note to himself.
He tipped his head. “Come. Come-come-come.” And he marched us past his assistant and her stink eye.
Inside, he nodded us toward some dilapidated chairs and plopped himself down behind a massive, distressed, old insurance desk. It looked like him—I mean, it had the same spirit. An avalanche of paper spilled over its surface, folders splayed everywhere, legal pads and streaked sheets of mimeograph paper. Stacks of briefs and memos were lined up on the floor, lodged on windowsills and guest chairs.
I guess they talked and I guess I listened, but I have no memory of what they said. What I remember is the ceremony of the occasion. How Lenny collected himself under his cowboy hat. How my mother ran her pinky along her heavy eyeliner.
I remember Kunstler pulling apart the croissant he’d been carrying in the bag, unwrapping it like a package and placing strands of the flakey bread on his tongue. Once it was gone, he reverted to flipping through his three poses: the listener, fingers teepeed under his nose, glasses clamped like a ten-year-old girl’s hairband across the balding dome of his head; the exasperated parent, physically blown back by the degree to which his kids wouldn’t listen; the expounder, when the glasses would come off, pinched between two fingers to be used alternately as a prod and a chew toy—one, two, three, bite, bite, bite, like an automaton.
They were debating—or Kunstler was debating himself. Running through scenarios. Parsing Lenny’s chances. And I remember the sense of how big the stakes were. He was asking, I think now, which was more worth saving, the man or the myth.
He went on and on and Lenny actually listened, tense, perched like an insect against the boot he’d dug into the leather seat of his chair, leaping up sometimes, not very often, to interrupt, to pound on a point, to protest.
And my mother off to the side, her kohl-blackened eyes smoldering, sending up smoke signals the men ignored.
Me, I glumly pulled at loose threads in the beanie she’d shoved on my head as we left the house, picking it apart, destroying the fucking thing. That’s what I remember. Being bored. Getting frustrated by the endless details. Struggling to follow them. Lost in their meaning.
I remember certain repeated words and their inflections. Entrapment. Criminal conspiracy. Prove it. Evidence. Bleecker Street. Wiretaps. COINTELPRO. Extralegal. COINTELPRO. NYPD. COINTELPRO. They’re still at it. They say they’re not, but they are. Prove it. Skepticism rising off of every one.
Even if the details were beyond me, I understood this conversation wasn’t going anywhere near the way Lenny had promised. More and more, after popping to his feet, he’d take a couple steps, make like to speak, and then stop himself. Him! The great Lenny Snyder! With nothing to say! Suffering under Kunstler’s stampede of logic and law, his mood slowly turned. And finally, he darkened and shut down, slipped lower and lower into his chair until, unable to sink any farther, he heaved himself up and began slipping all over again.
And I remember, at one point, my mother interjecting, finally having had enough, “What about Ronnie Walker? We should be talking about him.”
Lenny’s look then. The spinning wheels in his head. “Yeah.” A slow drawl. “What about Walker?”
And the others—my mother, Kunstler—waiting for him to answer his own question. It seemed so important, the key to the whole thing, and I know he went on, fierce and adamant, but I don’t recall the substance of his response, just the look on his face, like he was chasing dragons.
Then Kunstler, exasperated, rubbing his eyes. “I’d advise you to cop a plea.”
Something broke in the air—I couldn’t say what, but everybody was angry and I was scared.
Lenny popped up again, enraged, and slammed his fists down on Kunstler’s desk. “So fuck the facts. Like Suzy said, it wasn’t my cocaine. I’m innocent.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah. And morally, too.”
And Kunstler teepeed his fingers under his nose and considered Lenny like he knew he’d never see him again. He rolled back in his chair and said, “I can only advise you about the law. What you choose to do against my advice is…well, I have no control over that, do I?”
Something passed between them, some meaning beyond words.
Lenny glanced at my mother to see if she understood. He shot me a glance too. “But also,” he said, turning back to Kunstler, “you’ll do everything in your power to keep me out of jail.”
“Of course,” said Kunstler.
And that seemed to be that. Kunstler high-stepped over his maze of paper and propped himself against the lip of his desk. Gnawing on the arm of his glasses, he studied me. “How’s our little man?” he said.
I picked at my hat, trying to give him nothing.
“I’ve got news for you,” he said. He dug in the pockets of his suit jacket, patting himself down until he finally found what he was looking for. A lollypop. He crouched over me like a kind of hipper, suaver Frankenstein and held it up between us—a green wafer of sugar on a teardrop-shaped stick, the type of sucker’s gift you’d get from a dentist. It had been in his pocket a very long time. Lint clung to the wrinkled cellophane. The candy inside looked like it had freezer burn.
I must’ve made a face because he shoved it toward my chest. “It’s all right, Freedom. Take it. It’s for you.”
But the more he insisted, the less I wanted the thing. ’Cause he wasn’t just being friendly. This lollypop was some sort of booby prize, meant to distract me from whatever it was that had just happened. He was trying in his awkward, tone-deaf way to console me. He wanted the lollypop to mean more than it possibly could. And I remember feeling like if I accepted it something inside me, I didn’t know what, would be made smaller in the transaction.
Lenny flashed alive. He slapped the lollypop out of Kunstler’s hand and sent it ricocheting into the depths of the office. “Christ, Bill, leave the fucking kid alone. If he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t want it. Right, kid? You don’t want it, right?”
I might have shaken my head. My “No” was barely more than a whisper.
* * *
—
One more thing about that day.
As we trudged home that icy afternoon, my mother folded her fingers around Lenny’s arm and clung to him. Comforting. Protective. A sly, private smile flickered across her face. “I’m not gonna say I told you so,” she said.
And he cackled, just like the Lenny of old. He pulled her close. “But you did tell me so,” he said, bumping her with his hip.
And right then, in that instant, with both of them trying so hard to be happy, they seemed unfathomably sad.
Just so damn sad.
What’s funny is, after that, everything got better.
* * *
—
Lenny, well…I remember his gaze. Intense as ever, but now leveled on me. Taking me in. Lapping me up, whatever I might do.
I liked to babble. Goofy nonsense from my head, fairy tales, tall tales, learned from the water-stained books my mother’d scored in the Astor Place thieves’ market, and that in my telling flew into the absurd reaches of my imagination. I played air piano—’cause everybody played air guitar—especially to the Wings album that was in heavy rotation on our family turntable. I close-lipped my Kool-Aid for optimum mustache. Kid stuff. Inanity. Things I’d never stopped doing, even in the tense times, because it was like doing nothing at all. All of it was suddenly marvelous to him.
Like he was in love.
Like I was made of some magic he’d never encountered before.
We did things. Extensive, ever more complicated breath-holding competitions. Funny-face games. Egg creams at Gem Spa almost every day. Hot dogs from Papaya King, washed down with piña colada. Pulling the doors off the kitchen cabinets so we could cart t
hem to the park and use them as sleds.
When we raced down the block, he always let me win.
* * *
—
Lenny and me. And my mother, too. The three of us. A unit.
Packing in all the stuff we’d never bothered to do before, those experiences you could take or leave, the tourist traps, the shit you took for granted ’cause you were busy actually living.
The Empire State Building. The Met. The New York Public Library. All those institutions of culture, where money went to mellow out and change its features, where power masqueraded as a shared heritage available to anyone who didn’t question its intentions.
The Cloisters. Standing in front of the tapestries, him and my mother each resting a hand on my shoulder. Listening to their art talk. Check out the peasants trampled underfoot. Me rolling down the hill again and again while they lay in each other’s arms sharing a joint.
The Staten Island Ferry—an inane trip to nowhere.
Or mucking through the slick and sludge to the Statue of Liberty. We paid our fare and climbed the steps up, up, up through the endless gray chute, and when I began whining that I couldn’t go on, he sat next to my crumpled body and said, “You sure? We’re almost there. Look. You can see the light.” Which was true! Three, four landings up, the staircase opened and the prize, the view from the crown, shone in. But no. I was done. I didn’t care anymore. “Whatever you want, kid,” Lenny said. My mother, with a maniacal determination, teased us. “Men. Typical. Go ahead, puss out. But not me. No-ho. A woman finishes what she starts.” And she clomped up the final few flights. While we waited for her to return, Lenny pulled out his Swiss Army knife. “Here, let’s mark the spot.” And we carved into the paint.
Freedom Was Here.