Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  She’d been in the movement, peripherally, back when she’d dated Sy. Now she worked for Redbook. She’d published a couple articles my mother had written, heavily edited—I mean, rewritten from scratch. But still, a byline, an opportunity to present the new consciousness to the great underestimated nation of women, just waiting for the call to find one another. We ate well for a few weeks after those checks came in. We put a tiny dent in our back rent.

  Kindness can cut deep when you’re in real need. My mother must have known she’d been given these gigs out of Cindy’s sentimental loyalty, a kind of philanthropy intended to absolve her guilt over abandoning the counterculture when things got too hot, but Mom started dreaming that she could be a writer and bombarded Cindy with half-cocked pitches. How to recognize the chicest clothes at your local thrift shop. Eight surefire self-defense tactics for when you find yourself alone on the streets at 3:00 a.m. How to kill a rat. And of course, Lenny, Lenny, Lenny, his tribulations. Topics that might’ve worked in The East Village Other but would seem bizarre to the happy homemakers who subscribed to Redbook.

  Cindy must have braced herself every time the phone rang, dreading my mother’s impossible dreams. Anyway, she stopped answering. Stopped inviting us over.

  Isha Ali, though, she was hard as cut diamonds, hot with love and discernment. No pretensions given or accepted. If she liked you, you sensed, she’d take you in like a sister, but if you crossed her you just knew, whoa, she’d scar you for life. Like the real thing my mother feared she could never be.

  Isha’s husband, Calvin Williams, had been shot dead in his sleep by the cops in Philly, another martyred Panther to add to the list. And though compared to this Lenny’s self-sabotage looked like a bad joke, she was wide-minded about it, open to paradox. She cared more about the circumstances she and my mother shared than the righteousness or not of the men who’d caused them.

  The two of them had been to the wars. They were battered and struggling now to fend off the crush of poverty while raising their little boys alone. They laughed a lot together—full-bodied, unguarded—and bemoaned the fissures that had opened up all around them.

  “That’s what happens when the Left starts winning. Rich liberals take what they want and exploit it. The rest of us gouge each other’s eyes out for the scraps.”

  A chortle.

  “We—and by we I don’t mean you and me—only know how to lose. We want to lose.”

  “We want each other to lose. We—again, not you and me—want to win at everyone else’s expense. Women, black folks, the gays, everybody. They’re just out to get what’s theirs. When they say ‘solidarity,’ they mean step in line.”

  A rueful snort.

  “We want the poor to lose. Is it any wonder that they killed Martin right after he announced the Poor People’s Campaign?”

  “Well, we—and by we I do mean you and me—have already lost. All that’s left is the dying.”

  A contented smile. With Isha my mother felt seen, finally, and understood.

  Meanwhile, in the other room, Isha’s son, Amari, was grabbing my toys, claiming them as his own and stiff-arming me so I couldn’t take them back. He’d give me the stink eye. He’d taunt me. “Reparations, motherfucker!”

  Good times.

  But Isha too often kept her distance. She had to be careful not to be seen with kikes like us. Her militant patrons wouldn’t tolerate it.

  Most of the time, Mom felt forgotten. Isolated. All she had was me.

  She took comfort in men and, a couple times, women. I don’t judge her. I understood, even then, that whatever she got from these strangers in my house could only ease the burden on me.

  Anyway, freedom meant it wasn’t my decision.

  They never lasted long, these love affairs, with their queasy mix of tenderness and pity. A day, a week, and Mom would recoil, disgusted by her weakness and hateful toward the good intentions that clung to these shmucks. Their compassion couldn’t equal Lenny’s fierce, frenetic propulsion.

  What could?

  What ever would?

  Freedom meant watching as my mother dissipated. As she sprawled on the couch with a forearm thrown over her eyes, her tea getting cold, the day blurring into night. Signs of weakness beyond comprehension. Moments when I’d done some foolish thing, drawn on the walls, broken a glass by mistake, demanded breakfast when I knew there was no food, poked at her, poke, poke, poke, vying for attention. She’d snap at me, “Cut it. Get lost. Scram.”

  I’d bop from foot to foot, not sure if she was serious. Sometimes she’d melt and remember I was a kid. Her kid. She’d pull me close and suffocate me with her remorse.

  More often, she’d tighten, fuming, and I’d flee and blame myself, not her, for my banishment. But I’d be angry too. Shaking out of my skin. Because she’d failed me. She and Lenny both.

  Freedom meant drifting through the streets in search of any reason not to go home.

  Everyone lived on top of everyone else, like layers of paint splashed over the same wall. You had to know your faction and you had to know the others, how they lived, how they thought, their proverbial POV, what would make them laugh and what would get your ass kicked.

  It meant wising up to the dangers that lurked in the battlefield we called a neighborhood. You learned to read the signs, the cut of his leather—tailored and sleek like the Puerto Ricans’ or distressed and worn like the white boys’? And what secondary evidence could be found? Patches meant Angels. Buttons meant the new white breed called Punks. Either could fuck you up, but since the Angels lived by a code, they might just protect you instead.

  There were others: Freaks like us. Trash superstars—the remnants of the Factory, glamorous in their glitter, rags and rubber. Queers and artists (often the same thing). Black kids from the projects out by the river. That confederation of anarcho-nihilists who called themselves the Pedophiles. Old-timers, the Jews and Poles and Ukrainians, what was left of the original ghetto, those who refused to ghost away; they lived in a society that had long been out of date. They endured the rest of us, waited us out, and their kids were the toughest motherfuckers on the block.

  Some people—well, Lenny—could talk to everybody. But I was no Lenny. I had to be prepared, on any given day, to be shoved hard enough in the back to go sprawling. So many skinned knees I stopped wearing shorts. I learned to notice when people around me shifted pace, when their hands lingered a tick too long in their pockets. I traveled with my keys splayed through my fingers like brass knuckles.

  Freedom meant shit happened. You couldn’t control it.

  A fight would break out. Preening. Scuffling. All of a sudden, a fist. Sometimes you knew one of the people. You might even know his name. You’d seen them all around. But you kept on walking. You didn’t stop to watch.

  One day, a junkie stoop-sitting on St. Marks became so offended by the sight of my tie-dye that he ripped the shirt right off my back, leaving only the collar around my neck.

  Some kids once pinned me to a curb over on Stuyvesant and tried to shove a dead pigeon down my throat. When I flailed, one of them aimed a feather at my eye and threatened to poke it out if I didn’t stop. I went limp and he said, “What’s the matter, pussy?” They acted like they were just being friendly.

  I carried my AK with me everywhere I went like one of the crazies lost in his own myth.

  Random things caught fire. Trash cans. Tires. Second-floor apartments. You never knew who did it or if it was on purpose.

  Freedom meant not caring, trying not to notice.

  It meant turning yourself into the deviant creature you imagined might be hiding under your skin. That is, if you had the stomach, the balls, to do so.

  But also, it meant a throbbing boredom.

  I remember long tedious afternoons, nothing on the tube, Mom off who knows where, and me baking in the sunlight that poured in thr
ough the windows, wondering where Lenny might be at that moment, what he was up to. Some thrilling adventure. I remember feeling him nearby sometimes, secretly watching, urging me to survive.

  “It’s important, what we’re doing,” my mother told me on low, slow days when I asked her if this was what it felt like to be dead. “We’re refusing to break. One day history will write about our courage and sacrifice.”

  Notice the assumptions hidden in that statement. Getting arrested was something to be proud of. Losing your father was cause for celebration. Even when we felt small and insignificant, we did what we did for the public record. Because, of course, the world revolved around us. Or if not us, Lenny. We basked in his glory.

  She did what she could to try to distract me. We’d go to Tompkins Square and I’d hide under benches, stand stiff behind trees, race around, dodging the hippies, the homeless, the junkies. I’d spin figure eights around the Hare Krishnas with their jingle bells and sitars and filthy blackened feet. And she’d hang back behind me, pacing herself, making sure not to catch up, her arms out stiff and her fingers splayed like claws. We called the game Fugitive or sometimes just Lenny. It never got old. She’d chase me until she collapsed. Or we both did. Her tumbling over me, tickling. Our small joys.

  And then we’d feel close to him for the rest of the day.

  Renewed.

  We could go on.

  One night, I remember, I was outside someplace and the streetlights weren’t working—on the fritz or smashed or maybe there weren’t any. I was near the river. The air had that salty weight to it. By myself. No Mom. Just me and this eerie, silent pocket of city.

  For once, I wasn’t scared.

  I remember not wanting to return to the fray, the blinking lights, the noise—I can hear it now, muted, a distant party.

  Footsteps tapped toward me along the cobblestones. Male, I could tell by the cadence of the sound.

  And I remember thinking, maybe I’ll die here. Maybe it’ll take forever to find me. And maybe then my mother’s life will be easier.

  A dude came into view. Kind of a young turk. A white guy in all black, flashing chrome and steel. Just strutting along. Attitude rising off him like diesel fumes. It had to be midnight, and we were in the shadows, but still, he was wearing his sunglasses. Oblivious to me, or so it seemed.

  When he was right on top of me, he bobbed his head and pivoted on the balls of his feet, smooth, almost dancing. He shimmied his shoulders. Leaning in, invading my space, he clasped the sunglasses between finger and thumb, pulled them from his face and revealed his eyes, and there was something about him, a moxie that registered in my young mind as a new, rage-free form of confidence. It’s stuck with me all these years. This random guy, showing me a brief glimpse of his playful machismo. The joy bursting out of it. He swept his palm out flat like he was displaying the world to me. Then he slipped the sunglasses back over his eyes and kept on going like none of it had happened, like the whole encounter had just been a figment of my imagination.

  For a long time, I was sure this had actually been Lenny, coming to me in one of his disguises. To buck me up. To scare the dogs away. To remind me that one day he’d return to us.

  We just had to hold on. We had to have faith.

  ’Cause, really, in essence, that’s what freedom meant.

  It meant wasting away. Lenny’s last true believers.

  There were times when the pressure let up and I’d catch sight of the life I’d have if I were that solitary young turk. For a minute, an hour, I’d experience the luxurious sensation of floating unencumbered through time and space. Just reading a book in the afternoon sun. Throwing a tennis ball against a wall and conjuring more and more complex rules to keep myself entertained. Traveling through boredom to that place beyond, where everything suddenly became interesting.

  So this was what other people meant by “normal.” They meant unafraid. They meant having no need to strike a defensive crouch.

  It only happened when I was alone, when my mother and her moods were far enough away to seem abstract and not quite real.

  I remember one afternoon—it must’ve been June; the kids were still in school but it was hot as shit. And me, I spent the whole time rooting around in the dirt in Tompkins Square. I had a magnifying glass. I’d found an old dead leaf. A sunny day. Perfect for starting fires. I remember how pleasurable it felt to concentrate on channeling the sun’s rays. How I could get the light to focus and make it dance and navigate it around my nest of dirt, but holding it still on the skin of a leaf, that was tricky. Addictively frustrating. Almost, but not quite, impossible. My arm would get tired. I’d shake it out, start over.

  All that existed were the glass and the leaf, and me lost in them. The other people in the park, whatever they were doing, the dogs, the squirrels, the rats, everything had faded and fallen away. So when a girl—Rosalita, that was her name—raced over and stole the glass out of my hand, she seemed to come from nowhere.

  She was one of the squatter kids from up on 13th Street. Tough. With stringy dull hair and mean dark eyes and the ghost of an old scar running down her cheek.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” she said. She posed, hand on hip, waiting for a reaction. “You’re not even trying to burn something worthwhile.”

  On another day, in another context, bunkered inside the family paranoia, I might’ve responded by shrinking and willing myself to disappear. Instead, I challenged back. “Oh? What’s something worthwhile?”

  She marched my magnifying glass over to the buckled trash can that had been plunked next to a string of concrete ruins that had once been benches. Shoving the glass into her back pocket, she studied the garbage. Tracking something. Up and down, over, around. Tracing its path. Her hands poised and ready to grab it. Then clapping. “Fuck.” More clapping. “Shit, damn, fuck.” Her head bobbed and twisted. I could almost see the dotted line trailing behind the path of her eyes.

  I wandered over. Not to help. Just to see if she’d succeed.

  As I got closer, she sensed me and flapped her hand. “Get back.”

  Her focus narrowed on a fly resting for a moment on a banana peel, twitching, running its front leg over its head, cleaning itself.

  Another clap, but she missed again and the fly flew off. “Why’d you do that?” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “You chased it away.”

  I could’ve argued but I liked her. I liked the way she’d taken charge. I said, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t do it again.”

  To prove myself, I went off to find my own flies. I searched the overflow, the snowdrifts of crap that piled up in the corners and along the pathways. They were drawn to the spots where the junkies hung out. They liked the stench of urine.

  And—wait, wait, wait…

  There.

  “I got one!” I shouted.

  Rosalita came running. The fly ticked around inside my cupped hands, batting its wings against my palms. “Show me,” she said. So demanding.

  “If I show you, I’ll lose it.”

  We negotiated a transfer, hands on hands, each gap shut tight. She bossed me around and I did what she told me.

  Then, the fly in her hands, we returned to my station—the light was pure there—and she tightened her palms until she had the fly pinched between her thumb and her forefinger. She placed it in the dirt, holding it tight by one wing, and pulled the magnifying glass out of her pocket.

  “See, this is how you do it,” she said.

  And with a flick of her finger, she crinkled its wing.

  We were, both of us, sprawled on our stomachs, propped up on elbows. Two kids being kids, impervious to fear. Nothing existed but us. I remember realizing this. It startled me. That we’d fallen into this intense communion. What I’d always longed for. Still do.

  We watched the fly hobble in circl
es, flicking its good wing, trying to get away. You could hear the whiz of its struggle. It seemed to know it was wounded. And after a while, it exhausted itself and gave up.

  Rosalita worked the angle of the sun through the glass. She was better at it than me.

  She had a steady hand. Once she’d grown her bead of light, she led it to the fly—it was docile now. We waited for something to happen. The fly glowed. Its eyes and torso shimmered like steel, orange and purple and green. And then a little stream of smoke rose out of it.

  She nudged the carcass with her finger. There was nothing left inside. Just a brittle dead shell.

  She grinned at me, all teeth, one of them chipped. “See?” she said. “That’s how you do it.” She hopped up and handed me the magnifying glass. Still grinning. Proud. Like she’d even surprised herself.

  I felt bad for the fly but I tried not to show it. I probably mumbled something. I don’t remember what. What I remember is this feeling: Don’t go.

  “You want to kiss me?” she said.

  I threw it back at her. “Do you want to kiss me?”

  “Maybe.”

  There was menace inside her, coursing through her blood. It couldn’t be repressed even in her kinder moments.

  I positioned myself in front of her and waited and we stood there clueless, not knowing what to do next.

  “You have to be closer,” she said, so I took a step toward her and puckered and clenched, my eyes shut tight.

  “You know what?” she said. “I changed my mind.”

  And off she ran. And I remember wondering, is this what it means to have a friend?

  My mother and Lenny worked out ways to stay in touch. They couldn’t call each other. Our phone was still tapped. We were being watched or, anyway, Fran downstairs still had one eye fixed on our movements, and who knew who she might be complaining about us to. What they did was they sent letters back and forth like contraband. My mother’s contact was Ted Barrow, our drop spot the Namaste Bookshop.