by Joshua Furst
Nice Rack, Lady Liberty—Lenny Snyder.
* * *
—
I didn’t go to school. I’d never gone to school.
Lenny and my mother had loudly advocated against what they called the get-’em-while-they’re-young-and-get-’em-good system of American education. They’d given speeches. Attended rallies. Worked up a whole shtick, one part vaudeville, two parts dogma, that they performed, ad hoc, whenever they found themselves in front of a live camera. Lenny stabbing at my mother with an imaginary cattle prod. Zap: She’d jolt like she’d been electrocuted, make staticky sounds and bark out her lines. Zap: “American exceptionalism.” Zap: “Manifest destiny.” Zap: “One nation under God.” Zap: “The only good commie is a dead commie.” Zap: “Support the troops.” Zap: “They’re fighting for your freedom.” Zap: “Support the government.” Zap: “It’s working for you.” Zap: “Vote!” Zap: “Your vote matters.” Zap: “Take part in the system.” They could keep this up as long as the cameras allowed them to. “The patriarchy! Women, stand by your man! Respect your elders! Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Strive! Strive! Strive! Buy! Buy! Buy! Fear! Fear! Fear! Obey! Obey! Obey!”
Mom launching into her husky alto: “My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.” Her hand mounted on her forehead in a slapstick salute.
No way were they gonna let me be brainwashed. They homeschooled me.
But they were too busy agitating for the new consciousness to bother with the hard work required to provide me with a counter education. So homeschooling meant that they let me run wild and pick up what I could on the sly. The school of life, not only without walls, but also without a curriculum. I learned my ABCs from Sesame Street. Learned to count from the corner boys. It’s a wonder I leaned anything at all…well, that’s not true. My mother spent hours guiding me through the workbooks she’d acquired, patiently showing me how to sound out words, organizing carrots into separate piles and nudging me to add four plus seven. Let us now praise mothers and all they do.
Lenny sometimes contributed too. Civics. History. Those were his beats. We’d sit with their massive flimsy atlas and pore over the page with all the flags at the back. “They’re symbols, kid. Let’s learn what they really mean. Great Britain: Overreach. Imperial power. Ireland: Resistance and Catholic guilt. Switzerland: That’s where the money lives. South Africa: Illegitimate power. Zaire. Liberia: Self-determinism. The people rising up to take what’s theirs. China: The birthplace of civilization. Riffing. Entertaining himself. Israel: Where Jews—your people!—go to prove they can be as thuggish as anyone else. The United States of America: A dream of liberty floating on a sea of blood.” When he got bored, he’d wander off and leave me to muddle through these lessons alone. He didn’t have the patience to whack all the weeds growing in my child’s mind.
But still, I look back on those months after he got out of jail and I think Lenny really was trying to teach me something.
A crash course on him. So I’d know where I came from.
* * *
—
He sat me in his lap on the big mirrored throw pillows and read to me. Howl. King Lear. The Wretched of the Earth. Books that mattered to him. And though I could hardly follow a single word, they mattered to me too, in those moments.
“You wanna know how important you are?” he said. “This man, Allen Ginsberg, the most important writer in America, wrote a poem about you on the day you were born.”
Which…that’s not exactly true.
Ginsberg did write a poem—more a diary entry—on my birthday, but it was mostly about the washed morning light outside his window on 13th Street and the HATE sign that had been painted over the entrance to the Free Store after Groovy Hutchinson was murdered. The creeping malaise—the doldrums—that he’d been unable to shake that day no matter how many sutras he recited. I was mentioned once, obliquely. “And Susan on 7th Street still dreams of giving birth to Freedom.”
Still…nice to have. Nice to see Lenny show such pride in me.
* * *
—
He took me to a Knicks game. “Don’t believe what they tell you, kid. Baseball’s all right. Football, sure, if you’re cool with overt pageants of militarized aggression. But basketball’s where it’s at. Basketball’s the true American sport. Invented by the Aztecs. No lie. It’s truly indigenous. They’ve been playing this game right here on this land for five hundred years. It predates the white man. It’ll outlast him, too. There’s a reason the best players are all niggers and kikes.”
From the cheap seats, you could hardly see the floor through all the smoke. I have no idea who they were playing that night, but it didn’t matter. These were the ’74 Knicks! Earl the Pearl! Dollar Bill Bradley! And most especially Clyde Frazier and Dave DeBusschere. Whoever they played, they were gonna slaughter them.
“Teamwork, baby,” Lenny said. “They look like they’re all just running around but they’re not. They’re finding their marks. They’re setting picks and reading the defense. Reacting. Watch this. See how Clyde adjusts? How the rest of the team responds to his change of plan? It’s like they’ve got one mind—one united consciousness—and their bodies are vehicles for its perfect expression.”
He used to play, he said. This was news to me. Another discarded part of him that he now needed to retrieve. To hold. To hand over. He’d been a forward, like DeBusschere, first at Tilden High and then, because he was good but not disciplined enough to be really great, as a walk-on at Brandeis. Two years of that before, in one grand gesture, he threw both his career and the Brandeis season away, taking bets on his own team, running book-rackets out of his dorm room and, lo and behold, beating the spread, if not the other team, in each and every game. Didn’t take long for rumors of what he was doing to trickle out of the mouths of his duped and embittered classmates. And though it wasn’t provable—he kept the numbers in his head—the Judges judged him unworthy of standing by their side.
“Story of my life,” he told me that night at the Garden. “Never met a system I didn’t want to fuck. Watch Clyde, now—one, two, three around the horn to DeBusschere and…there. Soft off the backboard. Far out, hey?”
* * *
—
He showed me how to shoot. The fingertips loose on the leather, the impossible, awkward positioning of the elbow if you wanted to line up a straight shot. “Watch the basket, not the ball. And don’t push it from the shoulder, use your elbow as a fulcrum, extend and release.
“Here, try it again.”
All morning like this at the courts down by the river. I’d shoot an air ball and he’d chase it down, give it a dribble or two and then pass it back to me.
Again. Again. Again. And again.
I was hopeless. My eyes didn’t focus like they should. But somehow he resisted calling me out. Kept the trash talk in check for once. Pretended—and this must’ve been excruciating for him—that with enough practice I’d amount to something.
* * *
—
Coney Island. All the way out on the F train. A chilly, misty day. The place was a ghost town. All the stalls shuttered. All the rides closed down. The only thing open was Nathan’s, a bright fluorescent box in the rain, bustling at 10:00 a.m. with kids from the projects out on Surf Avenue. I remember wandering through an empty parking lot and spotting a dead, mangled animal. A dog? A raccoon? Some sort of possum? Its fur was peeled off in places, eaten away. Maggots squirmed on its soggy bloodless flesh. Lenny shielded my eyes. “No need to see that.”
We meandered along the boardwalk and watched the raindrops pelt the sand, the gunmetal waves, so consistent, so small, washing over the shore. And I remember noticing that we had the same gait—tense, forward-leaning, hands shoved habitually in the front pockets of our jeans, making ourselves thinner to cut through the air—and thinking he never taught me this, it’s just how we are, emb
edded in the genes, thinking that’s some profound shit, but not sure why or how.
“I used to come down here. As a kid,” he said. “We’d take the trolley down Flatbush. Wander over. Look for trouble.” Just that. Nothing more. He left it to me to imagine the rest. Something I couldn’t do. It didn’t seem possible that he could have ever been a child.
* * *
—
And the concerts! How many concerts, I can’t even count. Folk, blues, rock. Nothing glam—glam confused him. Ideologically he was all for it, but in practice he wondered where the humor was.
We saw Neil Young, electric, coked out of his mind in a dark little cavern off Great Jones Street.
Dr. John and Fairport Convention and Steve Miller—oh how he loved that dude—and George Harrison and Bread and J. Geils. I’m forgetting some, I’m sure. Most all at the Bottom Line, where we never had to pay because Lenny knew the owners from back when they’d organized free shows in Tompkins Square together.
Jackson Browne at the Beacon.
I was his buddy, his partner. He brought me along to each and every one. Not just me, my mother, too. We were a hip family stepping out in the city. Joyous times. We’d vibrate as we walked home, our muscles still coursing with the electric current of the music, our ears ringing so loudly that it was like someone had slapped bells over our heads and persisted in clanging them, enclosing us inside, separating us from the rest of the world. We’d be shaky on our feet.
He got us backstage passes to Jefferson Starship. We wore them around our necks and watched from the wings. It was hard to see. Everything back there was speakers and curtains. I remember Grace Slick had on a see-through blouse—a billowy thing that glistened like mother of pearl. She came right for me when they finished their set. Knelt down in front of me. Said, “Here’s the real rock star. Freedom, what did you have for breakfast? Was it good?” She took my hand between her palms. Touched a finger to my cheek. Then, to Lenny, “He’s a charmer. You sure he’s really yours?” A wink to my mother and she was gone, folded into a caravan that, this time, didn’t include us.
Springsteen and Marley and who all else at Max’s, which I hated ’cause there was always a massive scene and Lenny always joined it and I always ended up forgotten in the back of some slippery booth, nodding off, head drifting toward the table with its shellac of spilled drinks, bounced awake again and again by the maximum sound blaring through the space.
We saw the Dead, oh, I don’t know, four times that spring? They annoyed me. A Dead show meant another long night of pussyfooting around him and my mother, guessing—double-guessing—what would and wouldn’t bum them out as they tripped their asses off.
We saw Joni, or my mother and I did—Court and Spark. Lenny skipped that one. So maybe that was later. After.
Anyway…
* * *
—
Come April he took me to a Yankees game. Why? Because he was a Dodgers fan. “Know your enemies, kid. Study them. One way or another, they’ll tell you who you are.” The Yankees were the team of the plutocrats, with their dress codes and company rules about facial hair. The team that survived when the Bums were thrown out. And if sports are an elaborate analogue for the sociopolitical emotions of a people, the Yankees’ triumph—bought and paid for and legacied—over the Dodgers, and now that they were gone, the Mets, the scrappy bumblers across the river, signified the true beliefs of this city of ours. Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, I’ll offer them the moon and pay them slave wages, I’ll cultivate their dreams and then confiscate them. There! You really thought you could win? In this town, nobody ever wins but me. “We’re here to root against them,” Lenny told me as we bounced through the crowd into the stadium. “We watch the Yankees to burnish our hatred. Note that. Don’t forget it. Hatred’s the one emotion stronger than love.”
Also, the tickets were cheap if you sat with the drunks and the slobs in the bleachers. Which, where else would anyone want to sit?
We nabbed the front row, right above Bobby Murcer. I don’t remember a thing about the game, who they were playing, what the score was, who pitched, just the spirit in the air, all that rambunctious energy swirling like a wave through the stands. The hoots and jeers when somebody bungled a play. The same hoots and jeers when somebody made one. Everybody shouting at the players on the field. Everybody sarcastic, every one of them a critic, even the folks rooting for the Yankees. And Lenny’s whip-crack voice rising above the rest. “Come on, Murcer. That ain’t a throw. My six-year-old can throw straighter than that.” They could hear every word—Murcer and whoever else was out there. They could look you in the eyes and say go fuck your mother. That’s how close the bleachers were to the outfield. Sometimes a chant would go up, the whole section punching the syllables. Mur-cer. Mur-cer. Until he turned and raised his glove to acknowledge us. And as people got drunk and the game went on and on a tedium set in—the truth rhythm of the game. You became more aware of the assholes sitting near you. The statheads and the dagos and the odd little guys who, even now in late middle age, looked like their mothers still picked out their clothes. Their restlessness, their crankiness, their distaste for one another. Words were spoken. Beers were spilled. A couple times, chests were thrust and fingers jabbed. Now, instead of shouting or pleading for the players’ attention, people threw things at them—cups, crumpled popcorn cartons. I got into it too. A carton. It didn’t make it past the warning track.
Lenny leaned in at one point and wrapped an arm around my neck. “There you have it, kid,” he said. “Baseball: organized boredom punctuated by brief thrilling moments when the fact that something, anything, has actually happened tricks you into thinking you’re not just wasting your time. It’s like life, that way.”
As though to prove his point, a streaker leapt out of the stands along third base and high-stepped it into the outfield. Thirty thousand people rose to their feet, pumping their fists, giving their best Bronx cheers. The guards trailing after him, chasing him in circles, loop-di-loops, figure eights. And Jesus, the speed of that guy. Like a running colt. The way his hair flowed behind him. His bony white ass. The tangled dark mess clustered around his dick as it slapped back and forth. The excitement that lingered in the crowd, even after he was carried away, kicking and flailing his arms.
* * *
—
I can only think of a single time my parents argued in the five months we spent together that winter and spring.
We’d received a manila envelope. Official correspondence. Our address hand-lettered on the label under Carnegie Hall’s simple, elegant logo. Inside, three tickets to an upcoming show.
A note: We’re sold out! Hope you can make it! Phil.
We should go, was my mother’s stance. We owe it to him.
But Lenny was adamant. “Fuck that fucking guy. What do we owe him? Not a goddamn thing, that’s what.”
“He adores you, Lenny. He looks up to you.”
“Not my problem.”
“And—”
“And what? He ponied up?”
“When no one else would.”
“Did I ask him to do that? No. I did not. And it’s just money. I’ve burned it before, I’ll burn it again.”
“The money doesn’t matter. What matters is what it bought.”
“My freedom? Ha. Kunstler would’ve thought of something.”
“Oh?”
He turned dark. “We’re not going.”
And the look on my mother’s face—not anger but concern. A sad, protective impulse stopping her cold.
“You go,” he said. “Take the kid. Sing along to all his pretty lies. I’ll be interested to hear how that goes for you. Me, I’ll stay home and watch Kojak.”
Suffice it to say, we didn’t go.
* * *
—
I remember my mother riding him for weeks to take me out to Fl
atbush where he grew up.
“Why would I do that? There’s nothing left,” he’d say. Or, “The past is dead. Let’s not sit shiva for it.” Or, “You want him to learn his history, take him to Long Island. Let him meet your mother. See? Not so much fun when it’s your own bad trip.”
Sometimes he’d launch into an extended harangue against the very act of remembering. Crying over the never-was, he called it. And what do you end up with? Fascism. The worship of a mythic, long-ago time ruled by a vengeful tribe with a reverence for might. The complete inversion of everything that has made our people unique—our restlessness, our wandering souls, the nimbleness that comes from centuries of living and dying by our wits. “Nostalgia’s a killer. The present, that’s where it’s at. The wide open world.” Not that he necessarily believed all this. He was testing hypotheses. Rolling ideas around, raging for the pure joy of hearing himself rage.
Because one afternoon he took me on a subway ride that seemed to last forever. He stood the whole way, too agitated to keep still. Shifting from foot to foot. Reading the tags sprayed and sharpied on the car aloud. Cackling. Joking. Sparked with nervous energy.
“Listen,” he told me at one point, “as far as your mother knows, we never did this. Capisce? Don’t go ruining my reputation.”
In Brooklyn, where the train lines converged to snake out in new configurations, we transferred and rode on until we rose from the tunnel and stopped above ground.
“Come on, kid, quick-quick!”
We stepped into a kind of enclosed amphitheater above the street. I was all turned around but Lenny, who hadn’t set foot here in years, pushed ahead like he’d never left, like he still knew every rivet in every steel girder holding up the elevated platform. I wouldn’t quite say he was excited. More like he was on a rush, like he’d reentered the rhythms of his childhood and was moving instinctively in all his old ways. He’d positioned us in the car closest to the turnstiles and before I could glance around or take anything in, he had us clanking down the steps to the street.