Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  “Where are we?”

  “Sutter Avenue,” he said. “Can’t you smell the aspirations? Come on. This way.”

  He led me into the shadows under the tracks and as we jaywalked, weaving around double-parked cars, he launched into a rap about how this was where the dirt poor went to wallow in the mud. How the Jews and the blacks shunned even by their own people washed out here to stoke their resentment in half-collapsed buildings and scheme, separately and together, about leveling the world. “Heaven,” he said. “It was fucking heaven.”

  Walking and talking. As long as he stuck to the long outrageous con called civil society, he was in his element.

  We moved from street to street with no clear destination. Past I don’t know how many boarded-up buildings, I don’t know how many mountains of trash, houses with cinder blocks where their front stoops should’ve been, around corners onto commercial strips lined with so many street hawkers you couldn’t find the storefronts behind them. The smell of those strips—incense, frankincense, sandalwood, rising from bundled sticks mounted under rocks on tables; fish frying in open kettles filled with oil; tins of cocoa butter and vials of essential oils stacked around arrangements of geodes and precious stones, sending up a sweetness so strong it clogged the nose. The colors—the emaciated wooden figurines lined up like judges with their deep hues of brown, mahogany and black; the racks of shirts and dresses bursting with negritude. The stacks and stacks of socks that had fallen off trucks. People tumbling over the sidewalks into the streets; life like you didn’t see in our part of the city. Then, around another corner and the street would be empty except for one lone kid riding his bike in circles over the broken pavement.

  “It’s just about the same. Except the Jews are gone. Look, there’s Herzl Street.”

  “So you grew up there?” I asked.

  “Fuck no. Even when this place was teeming with Jews, Pops thought he was too good for it.”

  Wherever we went, whatever turn we took, we were conspicuous. Dudes with picks in their ’fros propped on the hoods of cars followed us with their eyes. Old men sitting on milk crates in front of tenements muttered under their breath. Women in hijabs, pulling carts of groceries behind them, crossed the street to avoid us. “Don’t worry about it,” Lenny said. “If you lived here, you’d be suspicious of us too. ’Cause, look. We’re not priests. We’re not social workers. What the fuck are we?”

  “I thought we were going to see where you grew up.”

  Lenny threw a shoulder, shrugging me off. He peered up the street—one way, the other—stalked partway down the block, looked around, stalked back. Searching for something. Unable to find it. We moved on, farther down the main thoroughfare, past faded old furniture stores with broken windows and empty showrooms, storefront tabernacles, vacant lots, the odd art deco fortress.

  “I am showing you where I grew up. You wanna know what made me, it was more this place than that back there. I liked it better over here. More action. More trouble. You wanna know the difference between a gangster and a radical? The gangster takes your money and then demands more. The radical burns it and offers you some soup. Brownsville had both. You could hop between the two. Pick-up basketball at the Boys Club, then dice in the alley behind the candy store.”

  Another turn and we were back in the shadows of the elevated train tracks. He gestured toward a park built into the hill above us. “That’s where I smoked my first joint. Made my first girl.” And turning again, he said, “Here you go, kid. Flatbush. Canarsie. Crown Heights at a stretch. This right here is the no-man’s-land where all those hoods blur. This is where the fun stops. Over here, you’re an alrightnik. Back there”—he jutted his chin toward the other side of the tracks—“that’s Pigtown, where you’re a nogoodnik.”

  “So—”

  “ ’Cause, what’s the fun in being an alrightnik? Really, kid. Have I taught you nothing?”

  He wandered on, turning into the residential streets with their rows after rows of peaked Archie Bunker houses. His chatter trailed off. Eventually, after we’d walked for forever, we came to a house that didn’t look like the others. No bricks. No balcony. No striped plastic awning. Just a squat two-story box covered in rotting yellow clapboard siding. “There. That’s where Pops and I lived. On the second floor.” He let me study it for a while, let me try to imagine him into it. The darkness. The difference from the cozy homes around it. “Before Fred Trump came in and built the bungalows, the whole hood looked like this. This and empty fields. Dirt roads.” He sat himself down cross-legged on the sidewalk and, remarkably, left me to think my own thoughts for a moment.

  I look back on it now and I wonder why I didn’t ask him more questions. What he meant by alrightniks. What he meant by nogoodniks. How his father had managed to hold on to the house when everything around him was being rebuilt into what at that time must’ve seemed like the future. And why? What pride or fear or necessity led him to cling to this tumbledown shack instead of moving up to a house of solid brick? I knew he’d been a merchant, a step above a peddler, a buyer and seller of this and that, though what exactly he sold remained forever amorphous—abstract—as if the goods themselves were meaningless, cheap excuses for the transaction, the deal, the movement of money from one place to another, the accumulation of respectability. And so why had he and Lenny stayed in the oldest, saddest, least respectable home in Flatbush, a place that, for all his striving, embodied the poverty he’d tried to escape more than the wealth he’d believed was his destiny?

  I should’ve asked Lenny about all of this. But I didn’t have the wits yet to know how to do that. I was too young. I understood that this experience was profound, but why that might be was beyond my comprehension.

  It’s easy to psychologize. To see little Lenny learning how to resent the man, traveling back to the rougher streets in Brownsville that his father had fled and throwing himself into the fast-talking, shit-kicking trouble he found there, the people he could identify with because, whatever their race or creed, they were all as poor as he felt himself to be. You can imagine Lenny cultivating the chip on his shoulder there. Learning to love it. You can imagine how these early experiments set the stage for the rest of his life. The secret message he was sending his old neighbors when, in ’67, in response to the tour buses of thrill-seeking squares trolling along St. Marks Place, he’d organized his own tour of hippies to ride in the backs of borrowed pickup trucks through the placid streets of deep Brooklyn and Queens, their faces dripping with day-glow colors as they gawked and pointed at the Trump bungalows. The personal motives behind the chaos he’d unleashed at the Stock Exchange, showing the world—and the spirit of his dead father—what he really thought of the old man’s dreams.

  I think about how he sat in front of his old house that day, silent, not moving, coiled like a snake, and I recognize that this place held some key to who he was. But to say it summed him up would be too simple. He’d outgrown that house. That place. He’d liberated himself. Made something new—the famous Lenny Snyder—out of the scraps he’d been given.

  For years afterward, right up to the day he died, I held on to a desire to return to Flatbush without him, to ask him the questions I should have then. When we were apart, I’d contemplate all the things I didn’t know. I’d make lists in my head, tell myself, Next time you see him, remember, get answers. But then, in his presence, there was always something else stealing my attention, some crisis, some passion, some new circus of his that overwhelmed everything, and I’d forget, or I wouldn’t know how to assert myself. I’d feel that familiar urge to flee and hide. He was too much trouble. The only way to carve out any room for myself was to cut myself off from him completely.

  The one thing I did ask, right then, right there: “Where was your mom?”

  He ignored me. Acted like he hadn’t heard what I said. But a few seconds later he hopped up like I’d broken him out of a trance and he was
off again, wandering, leaving me to catch up or not.

  What was a kid to do?

  I followed him.

  No matter which way we turned, we passed the same oppressive bungalows, endless lines of squat red huts set back from the street behind tiny strips of lawn. Sometimes they had green awnings, sometimes white, or no awning at all. They felt like places where you might get lost and forget who you were. On the corners of the avenues, larger tenements and apartment complexes loomed, buildings with names like the Lincoln, the Alford, the Bertha, the only things tethering this nearly suburban landscape to the city.

  And the quiet. Block after block, we hardly saw a soul. Those few people we did see seemed isolated, out of time. A bum picking through a trash can. A girl with pigtails and glasses playing with a stick. Some dude cracking his screen door to scowl at us.

  We could’ve been walking in circles for all I knew. Once or twice Lenny stopped to stare, to hawk a loogie into the gutter. Then we’d keep moving.

  Finally we reached an area where the streets widened and the houses fell away entirely. In their place, a crumbling brick wall held together with moss and brassy yellow lichen. Above the wall, a chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

  “There,” Lenny said, throwing a thumb. “That’s where my mother was.” The first words he’d spoken since we’d left his old house.

  I peered over the fence, through the brambles and bushes, but I couldn’t see anything except darkness.

  We kept walking. Past a massive derelict smokestack, the trees thinned out and revealed what might have been a prison or a poorhouse back in the day, a hulking old fire-scorched complex of buildings where you just knew nothing good had ever happened.

  “What is it?” I asked Lenny.

  “Brooklyn State Hospital. She was in Building G.”

  “What happened to her?”

  He ignored my question and walked on, pointing at the sprawling prefab school across the street. “You see that? Wingate. I got my high school degree from that joint. Never set foot in a single classroom. Dig. Pops said, ‘Go ahead. Ruin your life. What do I care?’ Which meant he cared too much about all the wrong things.”

  Typical Lenny. Intriguing me with the seed of a story while skipping the details that might allow me to comprehend what the hell he was saying. What he wanted was for me to ask. So, something had gone down between his father and him. Okay. But we’d been walking for hours and I was still hooked on the mystery of his mother.

  Anyway, he couldn’t handle the silence. Wait him out long enough and he’d rush back in with more.

  “They’d built the place when I was a sophomore to warehouse the overflow from everywhere else. A weird mix of kids from all sorts of hoods. An experiment in integration that I was supposed to take part in. But as far as Pops was concerned I spent too much time hanging out with the shvartzes already. Tilden. That’s where it was at.” He gestured toward some faraway place. “The white school. The Jew school. He worked like hell to keep me in Tilden. Harder than he ever did to keep my mother out of the nuthouse. Even tried to bribe the school secretary. Guess he succeeded because I did stay at Tilden. And irony of ironies, the place was crawling with pinkos. He’d have been better off letting me go to Wingate. Maybe then I wouldn’t have spent my high school career writing anti-McCarthy diatribes for the student paper. Maybe I never would’ve applied to Brandeis, where revolution was the only game in town. He definitely wouldn’t have had to endure the shame of my refusing to sign the loyalty pledge Tilden shoved down our throats, or of being told that as punishment I wouldn’t get my diploma, or the irony of having to scramble to work out a deal to let me graduate from the very school he’d tried so hard to keep me out of.” He grinned at me. “So fuck him and the horse he rode in on.”

  We’d moved deep into some new neighborhood where the houses had driveways and sprawling wooden porches. Grand old Victorians. Actual trees. A foreign country.

  I worked up my courage. “That place back there. Where your mother was? That was—”

  “Building G. I told you. They don’t get any nuttier.”

  “And she lived there?”

  “Until she got shipped out to Kings Park.”

  We took a turn and the city swallowed up the genteel precincts we’d just gone through. We were back to tall buildings. To bricks and graffiti and faded signs.

  “You ever met someone who’s batshit crazy?” he asked. “They’re lovely. They’re alive—until the lobotomy. Check it out. That’s the armory.” He jutted his chin toward a red stone castle that took up a whole block. “That’s where they’ll come from when they hunt us all down.”

  And just like that, we were back on the boulevard and down in the subway and on our way home.

  * * *

  —

  One final thing I remember from this time.

  A new restaurant had opened. Fancy. Uptown. It had gotten all kinds of press. Famous people hung out there. Not like us. Legit. Born to it. The Jackie Onassises of the world. And Lenny got it in his head that we should go.

  First we had to outfit ourselves for the part. Jackets. Ties. For my mother, a pair of real heels. We hit every thrift store on the Lower East Side, ventured all the way over to Bleecker in our search. You’d be surprised what people threw away. By the end of the day we’d cobbled together what could be called somebody else’s Sunday best. A lot of somebodies. We looked sharp. My mother wore lipstick and eye shadow, probably for the first time in my life. Understated but elegant. Her hair up in a loose knot, a few key strands dangling to frame her face. She hadn’t forgotten the principles drilled into her by my grandmother. She’d found a proper gown and a string of fake pearls. It was the first time I’d ever seen her dress up in anything other than patterns or exotic prints. Lenny played it straight too. His hair was still short enough to pass. All three of us. We looked like we’d just come in from Paris or Milan. “Dress the part you’re playing,” Lenny said. “The rest will come. People see what you tell them to look for.”

  Off we went to the meal of our lives. To peek, ever so briefly, at the life those who would rule us took for granted.

  You’d think I’d remember the name of the place, but no. I can tell you that the chairs were uncomfortable and the tables were packed too close together. And that what I ordered didn’t end up being what I’d expected, and there were some chuckles and knowing conversations with the jolly, gruff, thick-accented owner when he learned I’d had trouble choking it down. I do remember that the whole place was overstuffed, too much gold and too many mirrors, too breakable. And not knowing where to look. But liking that the dinner came with not two, not three but four desserts. And truffles, whatever those were.

  And how happy Lenny and my mother were. How they gazed at each other, moony, in love, sharing off each other’s plates.

  Like they knew this night would have to stand for much more than itself later on.

  What I remember most: Near the end of the meal, Lenny ordered champagne. He told the waiter, “Let’s get a flute for the kid too.” When it came, we all raised our glasses over the table.

  “To freedom,” said Lenny, and I thought he meant me.

  Then, after I’d eaten all the bread I could hold and my parents had eaten not only everything on their plates but also most of the food on mine, Lenny presented the owner with a letter, typewritten on heavy bond paper. I have no idea what it said, but I do know this: After the guy read it, silently mouthing the words, his already obsequious attitude turned brighter. He clapped me on the shoulders, both hands heavy, squeezing from behind. “Monsieur,” he said, “I hope your meal with us met your standards.”

  “Exceedingly,” Lenny said, and the man beamed like he’d been touched by God.

  “You understand,” the man said, “that I cannot under any circumstances accept payment from you. It’s a gift simply to be able to provide
you and your charming family with hospitality. A great pleasure.”

  “The pleasure’s all mine,” said Lenny.

  And as we fled we managed to refrain from giggling until we were down the block and around the corner.

  * * *

  —

  Later that night, three or four in the morning.

  I was woken up by what sounded like mewling. A low, mournful fugue like the alley cats made when they were in heat, but much closer, inside the apartment.

  I slid out of bed and waded through the dark toward the sound, and there were my mother and Lenny, upright on their futon, wrapped around each other like vines. It was hard to see what they were doing. They blurred. Shadows within shadows. But they were fully clothed. They weren’t having sex. I watched them for a long time, and finally, I understood. They were crying. But more than that. Something beyond crying. These sounds. They were the guttural rumble of despair.

  * * *

  —

  That’s all I’ve got.

  After that, poof. He was gone.

  [ III ]

  THE WILDERNESS

  I could…well, okay. Let’s start here. The next morning.

  What I remember is my mother explaining that Lenny had slipped off to a place called the Underground and not even she knew where that was.

  “He’s safe,” she said. “Here with us, he was in danger.”

  “Are we in danger?” I asked.

  She had no answer for that. Instead she said, “The bad guys won’t know he’s gone for months and a lot of people are helping him.”

  “Are we in danger?” I asked again.