by Joshua Furst
And I remember she touched my chin with her thumb. Held it there for a second and then said, “We’re fine. You and me kid, we’ll ease on down the road, just like we would if Lenny was still here.”
That was the extent of it.
That and the water gun, the AK-47 she fished out from on top of the kitchen cabinets. A parting gift for me from Lenny. A consolation prize. Except for the red plastic plug in the barrel, it looked exactly like the real thing. In true Lenny fashion he’d attached a note, scrawled like all his other missives in a big, loopy, ego-projecting cursive on lined yellow paper ripped from a legal pad.
Hey kid, it said. See you on the flip side. Use the gun to protect your mother.
No signature. No sign-off. No proclamation of love.
Reading over my shoulder, my mother snatched the note out of my hands. “That’s a joke,” she said. “I don’t need protecting. Neither do you.” Something about the way she said this, though, made me think that it now fell to me to crack her up and distract her from the taste of iron in her mouth.
First thing I did, I filled the AK’s banana clip with water and stomped through the apartment, pounding out a war dance, tomahawk chopping and thrusting my gun around like I’d seen soldiers do on TV. I incorporated karate moves, kick-ass Bruce Lee shit, elbows out, legs high and stiff. And I imagined Lenny surveying all this from wherever he was underground, cackling, cracking up, giving a single clap of his hands, less for me than as an exclamation point on his pleasure. I saw him leaping in and gleefully narrating my demonstration of martial prowess with the standard one-two of a bad overdub.
It took time, it took coaxing, but my mother joined the fun. She slammed her bare feet against the floor, shaking the foundations, sending tremors through the building until the downstairs neighbor, Fran Wronski, a devout Polish hausfrau who hissed at us in the stairwell because she thought we were Satanists, and whom we suspected but couldn’t prove had been feeding the feds lies about us for years, pounded the ceiling with the blunt end of her broom. Fists on hips, triumphant, my mother shouted at the walls and the ears lurking there, “That’s right, motherfuckers, he’s not here! Oh no! Not today!” Falling to her knees. “He’s gone!” she said. “You hear me? He’s gone to Disneyland!”
She flopped onto her back and closed her eyes. Took a deep yogic breath.
“When will he come back?” I asked.
“That’s a secret, Freddy,” she said, suddenly tired. “Nobody knows. But he will. I promise.” Then pounding her fist against the floor to let old Fran know she’d heard her and didn’t give a shit, she shouted, “You hear that? He’ll be back, you fucking cocksuckers!”
She heaved. Laughing. But, no. Sobbing.
She crumpled like a used tissue on the floor.
Leaving me to carry on alone.
AK strapped to my shoulder, I circled her in full guerrilla mode, my finger pulling rapid-fire on the trigger as I took aim at every target the apartment offered, the beaded curtains we used as doors, the wavy-gravy posters commemorating my parents’ coups in drippy, melty words, family photos going back to the old country, to Ephraim Snyder, the cantor, and his wife, Fanny, paintings and lithographs, their McCarthy peace poster and other movement memorabilia, Lenny’s signed copy of Sgt. Pepper, the button-eyed doll he’d kept to remember Snick and Liberty House by, the ferns and ficus trees and creeping ivy strung with bright flowers that my mother had painted up the walls and across the ceiling, the books and pamphlets stacked all over the place, the framed photo of me chained to that fucking tree, the whole history of the times they’d lived through and influenced and hated and loved, all hoarded like memories in our cramped tenement apartment.
It felt good to soak the place down. Such power. Such release. Such cathartic vandalism.
I remember my mother telling me that before he fled Lenny had said to her, “I refuse to let you suffer for my sins. I want you to stay free.” Like a mandate. Like a dare.
We took him at his word. We believed him.
If Lenny was free, we’d be free too. We’d enter the new world. No bounds could restrain us. We were free! Finally! We were truly free!
But what did that word even really mean now?
It meant constant vigilance. Knowing, at all times, that someone was somehow trying to ascertain just how free we were. There were ears in the walls and eyes in the windows. We kept the blinds down, the music always cranked up. Lenny’s spitball box remained attached to the phone, hissing and screeching, inserting a scrim of ones and zeros between us and anyone who tried to call.
On Mondays or Tuesdays, if we’d been out of town, we played a game called Find the Bug in the early-morning hours. We’d tear the apartment to shit. Flip the pictures hanging on the walls. Roll up the rugs. Stick our heads inside the TV set. We never found anything, but you know what the thin man says: Just ’cause you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone’s not out to get you.
Eventually we got used to it. Vigilance became a habit. We assumed the narcs were living among us.
Anyway, what more could they do to us? We were merely the survivors.
Freedom meant a thousand other adjustments too.
It’s easy to espouse free when you’ve got an income. To give the Panthers twelve thousand bucks when you know another check’s in the mail. Lenny’d been less free folk than urban raconteur. His book was a bestseller. His speeches drew thousands in protest and support. Worse came to worst, he could always extort the local businesses that got rich off the movement he’d started. Before he went on the run, we’d lived like exiled kings. We had a color TV, cab fare if we felt lazy, all the Gem Spa egg creams we could suck down.
Now all that was gone—all except the TV.
So, freedom meant learning how to scrounge for cash.
Mom tried hawking candles she’d hand-dipped in wax warmed over the stove, colored with the same DEP packets she used for my tie-dyes. Spindly things. The wax soft as putty.
She moved on, jewelry twisted out of wire and rhinestones. This seemed like a sure bet. Back in the day she and Lenny had raked it in just by stringing beads on strips of leather. Nobody was buying that crap now. You needed semiprecious stones. You needed designs that looked less like crude weapons. You needed talent. That’s what she was told.
“I’ve seen people sell worse shit than this in the parking lots at Dead shows,” she told these skeptics.
“Then go join the caravan, if that’s what you’re into.”
It wasn’t. She didn’t.
One night she found a sewing machine on the street. A sign from the cosmos. How hard could it be? Well, it took her almost a week to figure out the machine had been thrown out because it was broken, and another of struggling by hand over a single blouse to realize tailoring clothes was hard as fucking hell.
Getting a normal job through the normal channels—running a cash register, answering phones, temping, like the great masses she’d dreamed of saving—this she couldn’t do. She’d rather die than be a slave to the system that she still, despite everything, wanted to destroy.
So instead we suffered for our freedom, which of course, ironically, proved we were free.
Freedom meant the sharp blade of poverty slicing away at our thoughts, keeping us jumpy, obliterating our concentration. It meant a constant tightness in my stomach, the tension of my body eating itself. Mom’s anxious fingers tapping constantly at her lip, twisting, picking, her voice sharpening and stabbing if I ogled a candy bar. We subsisted on peas and lentils. My Kool-Aid was replaced by hibiscus and chamomile, bought in bulk from dark, musty Chinese joints under the Manhattan Bridge, boiled and strained and left to cool on the windowsill.
Freedom meant spending afternoons at the food pantry in the basement of St. Mark’s Church, not as volunteers but as supplicants. It meant learning not to whine about the tasteless mush my mother cooked or the sludge it turned
into when it hit my bowels. We learned how to scavenge the dumpsters behind Met Foods, how long after closing time the rejects were thrown out: perfectly good boxes of Raisin Bran magically transformed into trash by the date stamped on their sides, or fruit—browning bananas, bruised apples, plastic containers of strawberries, just fine if you ignored the couple of moldy ones at the bottom. Sometimes we’d snatch bread. White bread. Wonder Bread! We weren’t too proud to eat mass-produced garbage. We’d cart it home with the rest of our haul, and since the toaster had broken in a hail of sparks and fire, we’d brown slices over the burners on the stove, gorge ourselves on a whole loaf in one sitting; if we were lucky, with butter, too.
We never blamed Lenny for our hardship, not even on days when we didn’t eat at all. We knew that whatever pain we were going through was nothing compared to his life on the run.
Besides, just as often, we’d have ground beef or sliced cheese that Mom had smuggled out under her dress. I got in the game too. Hot dogs, polish sausages, snaked down the leg of my jeans. Those old lessons in thievery finally sinking in.
On Tuesdays we stood in line at the Catholic Workers building—the very one Lenny had taught me to rely on if ever I found myself truly in trouble—waiting for our stew thick with pasta and potatoes. We’d sit at long foldout cafeteria tables with the other hard-luck cases. We were them now. We were free. This was what freedom meant.
On Sundays it was Sister’s, the little spot on Second where Sister herself—helped by a scrappy collective of no-bullshit women—made one dish a day in bulk and fed whoever walked in. Pay what you will, no questions asked. We ate for free those nights. Roast chicken. Three-bean chili. The best mac and cheese the world has ever seen. Sometimes we paid a quarter, plucked from the street. Or we’d help with the dishes after Sister locked up.
On certain days, when nothing had worked out, we trudged over to Dubrow’s Cafeteria and piled our trays high with saltines and ketchup, free for the taking from the condiment rack. We’d crumble the crackers in a heap on our plates, slather on the ketchup. Add enough salt and pepper—free too, in their paper two-tubes—and if you squinted, if you held your nose, you could almost convince yourself it was spaghetti marinara you were eating.
Other nights, we found ourselves reduced to scavenging in the garbage cans along the avenues for pizza crusts and half-empty containers of fried rice.
Freedom meant learning quick who your friends really were.
It meant strained relationships, a fraying of the networks in which my parents, at another time, might have shared a meal or caught a film or just bounced through time, wasting the day away. Now my mother and I had nothing to contribute to these potlatches. Show up empty-handed often enough and you eventually stopped being invited over. Your poverty is interpreted by others as an affront to the concept of sharing. Movies, wasted days, these cost money too. We tried to be graceful. We tried gently demurring and ducking the fun. But how many humiliations does it take? How many evenings of listening to your friends grumble about the price of gas to Woodstock, where they were overseeing the work on their country house—A shack really, they’d say, it’s falling apart so we got it for next to nothing. But when it’s done? Man, we’re putting in solar panels and a Japanese rock garden and a skylight, and hey, did you try the shrimp, Suzy?—how many nights like that before you felt yourself screaming inside, What’s the matter with you people? I can’t afford a subway token. You really think I give two fucks about your koi pond?
The networks fell away. Or we did. We couldn’t keep up.
This was city living, not Black Bear or Drop City or whatever commune with its homemade bread and evening hootenannies and fifteen-hour discussions of any and every minuscule infraction of the public peace. Its commitment to all going down together. We hadn’t rejected this society, exactly. We’d sunk into the concrete and gotten our feet stuck.
The squatters living in buildings Lenny claimed to have liberated back when they were called crash pads, even they abandoned us. Those people didn’t trust us. Why should they? To them, Lenny and my mother were charlatans. Fixers cultivating powerful connections they didn’t want folks on the street to know about. The squatters came to us for help, not the other way around.
At first my mother tried to keep playing her old role. I remember her dragging me to a women’s lib meeting. Some church basement. Me squirming on the folding chair next to her, slipping to the floor. My mother’s legs. Her clogs. Her flared jeans. All the other legs under the table too. Muscular, hairy legs. Black legs and brown legs and white legs. Legs draped in cotton printed with African and aboriginal patterns. A multitude of legs concealed under dirty jeans. They all belonged to women. I was the only child there. The only male.
The tension in the air when my mother said, “I could be a great asset to you.”
“Could you?” The derision in this woman’s question. Such antagonism. I didn’t understand.
“I’ve run national campaigns. Maybe you’re familiar with a few of them. The March on Washington in ’70. The May Day Draft Dodge. We got thousands of people in sixteen different cities to burn their cards on the steps of city hall. Lenny and—”
“See, I’m going to have to stop you right there.” This was a different woman. They were taking turns with her.
“Why?” my mother asked, bristling. “Because of Lenny? He’s my husband. We’re partners. Equal partners. The work we’ve done, the things we accomplished—”
“You keep saying we, but all I ever saw was him.”
“He’s the public face.”
“And you’re apparently okay with that.”
“Yes!” The vehemence squeezed into this one little word. The fierceness. I stopped moving under her feet, paying close attention now.
“Well, we’re—”
“Some of us aren’t—”
They all started talking over one another.
“It sends the wrong—”
“—structural imbalance—”
“—didn’t hear him giving you credit too often.”
“I’ve been a little busy raising a child lately,” my mother said.
More commotion. More interruptions. More talk of “structural imbalance” and “conforming to society’s expectations” and also “maybe he should be the one staying home.” I remember almost laughing at that—word still wasn’t out that he’d gone on the run.
“Look, I came here to help,” my mother said. “I know all the players. People who could be very useful to you.”
“Men, you mean.”
One lone voice defending her: “Come on, Renee, that’s not fair.”
And we were out of there.
I don’t know how many of those meetings we went to. Was it one? Two? Not many. I remember my mother grumbling about them, “The problem with those girls is they have no sense of history. They want power, not equality.”
It’s not for me to say if this was true. What I’m sure of is she felt rejected by them, and part of her believed she deserved their condemnation.
Because here’s another thing freedom meant. It meant that despite my mother’s tendency toward riot, despite her proud stances on abortion and equal rights and sexual liberation, she couldn’t escape being seen by the world—and secretly, by herself—as, more than anything, Lenny Snyder’s wife.
Now she was struggling, unsure who to become.
She started smoking again for the umpteenth time. Mores. Then More Menthols. Then Virginia Slims.
She threw herself into one thing after another. Learned to cast tarot. Studied astrology. Chinese herbal medicine. Macrobiotics. The Teachings of Don Juan. Each new passion consumed her for however long it lasted, a month, a week. As if macramé owls—another lightning obsession—were capable of transforming the soul.
She spent two and a half days at Theater for the New City building giant Easter I
sland heads out of refrigerator boxes. Then she quit in disgust when the director suggested that maybe she should let another assistant—one who knew what he was doing—teach her the right way to construct the things.
There was one jag during which she became a Buddhist. Chanting nam-myoho-renge-ko for hours at a stretch. Praying for wealth.
None of it worked.
The truth is, she was desperately lonely.
How she clung to me. Arms around my belly. Face in my neck. She’d breathe me in, not so much showering me with love as burying me in it. She constantly asked for my advice. What should I wear today? What should I do today? Why don’t they like me? Why won’t someone help me?
To which, how was I supposed to respond to that? “I’m a kid, Mama. I can’t help. Don’t you see? Mama, please.” But I couldn’t say that.
She’d say, “Sing me a song, Freddy. I’m sad.”
So, I’d sing,
Sing. Sing a song.
Sing out loud. Sing out strong.
Sing of good things not bad.
Sing of happy not sad.
Sometimes a flicker of relief or distraction—let’s say love—would shoot like a falling star across her face. Just long enough for me to notice when it was gone.
I’d sing,
Oh, baby, baby it’s a wild world
It’s hard to get by just upon a smile
Oh, baby, baby it’s a wild world
I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.
And she’d join in sometimes and we’d sing together, tracking the melody in each other’s eyes, both thinking our own secret thoughts about Lenny, about each other, about how hard it was to be the person other people needed you to be.
She had two friends. Cindy Belloc and Isha Ali. They lived worlds away—the Upper West Side, Harlem—and I only remember visiting either of them three or four times apiece, but the way she talked you’d have thought she saw them every day.
Cindy was glamorous in a low-key way. Pantsuits and defiantly flat hair. She carried herself with an air of self-possession that recognized empathy as a function of self-confidence. Sipping tea from real china, not even chipped, in her classic six, we felt almost dignified, flattered to be treated as equals.