Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  We avoided the main entrance and went in and out via the basement, squeezing through the stairwell stuffed with warped and faded ten-cent remainders and into the dark hoarder’s nest of brittle paper where Barrow kept his overstock. The place spooked me. It was unfinished. So dank. So many secrets. The one time I went down there the mildew creeping through the stacks so overpowered me that I could feel the spores coat my body like the black death. The gateway to the Underground is how I imagined it. Who knew what monsters lurked there waiting to pounce. Smackheads and bloodsuckers and Nosferatu.

  After that, my mother mercifully set me up to stand guard outside. I remember poking around out there, my nose level with the sidewalk like a troll, checking out the shoes that wandered past, seeing a pair, sometimes, that shouted narc. Feeling proud of myself, ready with my gun.

  On a good day, my mother walked out with a manila envelope full of letters that she’d carry around in her fringed shoulder bag for the rest of the afternoon. They’d stick out, just a corner, their open flaps exposing our secrets to anyone who might want to hurt us. We’d poke through the neighborhood doing this and that and I’d be sure everyone—good, bad or indifferent—could learn everything they wanted to know about us in a glance.

  She didn’t care. She was cool.

  Except when she wasn’t and she pawed at the envelope, caressed it, riffling the edges of the smaller ones inside, guessing at their contents, knowing she had to be careful about where and when she opened them. An exquisite torture.

  And I knew this meant that when we finally got home, I’d be entertaining myself all night while she communed with the scraps Lenny’d sent her of his life.

  * * *

  —

  It’s been years since I’ve looked at those letters. They’re painful. They pull me back into the paranoia that I’ve spent my life learning how to avoid. Call it denial. Self-preservation. When you’re raised in a cult, you develop tactics. So you can survive. So you don’t get sucked back in.

  But lately, you’ve got me thinking about this stuff. Last week I fixed my truck and drove up to Brandeis to look at the papers Lenny sold them before he died.

  They surprised me. I hadn’t remembered them being so…

  Well, here. Listen to this:

  Penelope—

  The first thing you’ll want to know is if I made it.

  I did, and how.

  Dig it:

  Mario and Gypsy met me in the movie theater, as promised. It was a heavy scene. They sat a seat apart from each other in the back row, and I entered late after the lights dimmed, squeezing through and taking the seat between them. They were so well disguised that I was convinced I’d fucked up and that they were the wrong people for the first twenty minutes or so. But then Mario got up to use the john, and there on his seat, voila, the envelope. Their people came through—those Weathermen are pros—and before you could say “your mama” I had a new name and a ticket to Somewhere in my hands. (I can’t tell you where, of course; all will be revealed one day when they write my story.) Gypsy gave me a hard look. “Now we’re even,” she hissed. “Ask for anything else and you won’t get a response.” She watched the movie for another half hour and then she slinked out too.

  And get this: The movie they picked was The Way We Were. So maybe they’ve got a sense of humor after all. I stuck around to watch the whole thing. Research. It’s a good flick. There’s a character based on me.

  Then I checked myself into a fleabag motel near the airport and dyed my hair. I’m a blond now and what they say is true: I’m having much, much more fun.

  I’ll let you in on a secret: Anonymity’s a drag. I’m just another shmuck now. Not even you would recognize me. I’ve got a new nose. Well, almost: It’s still healing. I’m working on my walk. A clean passport and legal driver’s license. My new name’s growing on me day by day, even if I still forget to answer to it half the time. The only real question left to figure out is, who do I really want to be?

  It’s exciting. I’m ready to commit to whatever comes now.

  The hardest part was letting go. I could have stood in the dark with you, watching the kid sleep forever. You know this. You were there. Whatever goes down from here on out, whoever I become, however far away from each other we travel, please remember this.

  There will be times when you won’t hear from me. The danger might be too high. The ground too uncertain. You’ll hear rumors. Kvetching. Disinformation campaigns. Ignore them. You know how these motherfuckers like to talk, and the same agents provocateurs who claimed I stole SDS’s lunch money back in ’68 are still spreading lies and trying to discredit me.

  Teach the kid who his daddy was. Don’t let our enemies do it for you.

  I’m counting on you, Suzy-Q. Have faith. Think of it like this: I’m taking the long way home. Wherever I go, whether you know it or not, I’ll be carrying the two of you with me.

  —Odysseus

  She never knew when these letters would come. She’d get six in one week, two months’ worth of one-sided conversations detailing his private obsessions. Then she wouldn’t hear anything from him for months and she’d be left to wonder if he was in danger, if he’d been found out and forced to change his hair color and hop on yet another bus to nowhere.

  Here’s another one:

  Luna,

  Had a dream last night. The two of us on a boat. A little dinghy that looked like it was barely seaworthy. In my dream-logic it morphed into a luxury yacht when we boarded it. The beauty of the sea on a calm sunny day. Rocking. Floating. Far off at sea. And in this dream we were surrounded by a tremendous radiating sensation of peace. We sat on a blanket laid out on the deck, eating fresh-cut apples and honey-drenched cheese. Warm, doughy fry bread like we used to get at Curry Tandoor. We lazed around and napped and fucked—oh, did we fuck! The rocking of the boat. The rolling of our hips. The waves lapping up against the hull. We were in tune with the sea and the earth and the universe. Cosmic fucking. That’s what it was. The kid was there too. Serious like he sometimes gets. He sat on the prow watching the horizon through a golden periscope. Not moving. Navigating us toward dry land. Safe haven. I don’t know. Our destination was hazy. What was clear was that we—you and I—were in his hands and that we both knew with that deep certainty one accesses in dreams that he was leading us toward a better place than the one we’d left behind. For a long time we floated like this. A light rain fell. A sun shower. And then the kid shouted, “Land ho!” and we followed the seagulls to a rocky beachhead we’d never seen before.

  I woke up slowly, not wanting to leave, feeling like I could choose between that world and this one. But of course I can’t.

  Eventually there I was again, blinking on the couch in the chilly, damp basement of the safe house where I’m currently shacked up. Barely recognizing myself.

  I’ve been thinking about this dream all day. Is this what they call a dream of escape? ’Cause it feels to me more like a dream of what could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been. Like the truth is that you and the kid are on that dinghy without me, sailing off to new frontiers I’ll never see.

  There’s so much I’m missing.

  Send word.

  —Sol

  Her letters to him were…less interesting. Or that’s not true. What they were was too close. To me. My experience. Even now, I feel like I need to protect her.

  I found this, though. She got me to perform for him sometimes. To improvise stories into the tape recorder so he could hear my voice and feel like he was still part of the family. I’d forgotten all about it.

  Listen:

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

  WELCOME TO THE STORY OF THE FREE LITTLE PIGS!

  Once upon a time in a kingdom way far away there were free little pigs named Joe and Bo and Stinky who all wanted to have their own houses. That was because they ha
d growed up all together in a teeny-tiny pigsty. It was a really tiny and muddy and yucky pigsty and the free little pigs got stuck and bumped into the other free little pigs when they tried to turn around sometimes. They were very very sad, and they, even though they loved each other very much, they sometimes wanted to be alone and not have to share their toys all the time.

  And they lived with the mean farmer too, who always spit at them and called them names. He was big and fat with the overalls and the hat, like the farmer hat, and he smoked cigarettes and didn’t look both ways when he crossed the street and all kinds of stuff like that. And he was the one who made them live in the pigsty. He did all the things that bad people do. He chased them around with the poker thing and he didn’t fix the heat in the winter.

  So one day the free little pigs ran away from him. They moved out to the faraway country to make their houses and meet the big mad wolf.

  When they got to the country, they played. They, like, rolled around in the mud because they were free little pigs and they liked that. And they played tag too, but the one pig, Stinky, didn’t want to because he always had to be It and he was way slower than the other pigs so he couldn’t ever catch them and they made him cry. And what else? They played cops and robbers and keep-away and, um, and they got to go to their dad’s house sometimes because he lived there too, and they got to play with him. And, you know what? They never ever ever ever ever ever had to go to Amari’s house and eat nasty rutabaga stew while their mom did grown-up things without them ’cause they cramped her style.

  Their dad was a nice dad. He played with the free little pigs and he didn’t ever yell or make fun of them because he was so busy playing with them. And then, after a while when he usually gets all like HUMPF, HUMPF and making I-don’t-want-to-be-here noises, he didn’t do that either because he still, even after all day of playing, he wanted to play with them some more. And even then when it got to be bedtime, he didn’t want them to have to go home.

  Then at home, when it was late at night and they were sleepy from playing all day at their dad’s house, they couldn’t sleep. It was too dark and scary and they missed their dad. And it was really cold…and really dark…and…just really, really cold…and it got rainy sometimes and people shouted outside their window at night.

  And monsters—there were monsters there too. They couldn’t see them too good.

  The monsters sat way far away in the woods—they were so big, like this big—and they had little tiny heads and big sharp teeth that flicked around on snake necks. They would fly their heads up to the free little pigs and say really quiet and whispery, “DON’T GO TO SLEEP OR ELSE I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!” And then when the little pigs looked to see them, they’d pull their heads away really fast and be like ghosts. The free little pigs were so scared they had to give each other big hugs all night long.

  They wished they were still at their dad’s house.

  Then it got to be morning and the monsters went away and then they made their houses!

  The first little pig made his house out of straw. And the second little pig made his house out of sticks! And the third little pig made his house out of bricks!

  Then they were happy because they had their houses and it was warm inside.

  But then the big mad wolf came!

  “Little pig, little pig, let me come in!”

  “No!” shouted the free little pig named Joe who lived in the straw house and…

  Anyway, you get the picture.

  It’s strange. I’ve got a shitload more, but I don’t remember making a single one of them.

  Three months after Lenny went underground, almost a year after the bust, on an early August night in 1974 not so different from the one that had sent him rushing deliriously into the Whitmore Hotel, a night that, more crucially, marked the end of the day before the trial was set to begin, my mother went at it with the sage again. We lit candles—massive things, the size of moon rocks, with five or six wicks apiece. Clutching my AK so tightly my fingers went numb, I squirreled from post to post around the living room, patrolling, my eyes on the windows or the shadows in the hall, while my mother hunched next to the radio, focusing in on WBAI, on Fass or sometimes when he went on a tangent, on Vin Scelsa, spinning the dial back and forth, anxious for news of Lenny that no one was interested in broadcasting anymore.

  I think we thought he’d come back. That he’d show up at the courthouse, despite the risk, and vindicate himself like he had in the past. He’d somersault down the steps, crack that famous grin for the cameras and drawl, “Shucks, boys, what did you expect? You can’t catch me. I’m the gingerbread man.”

  I think we thought he’d send us a signal that night telling us to get ready for him.

  The last thing I remember is being sprawled across the throw pillows and that it was real late and I’d been watching the candles swallow and drown their wicks.

  I woke the next morning to the scream of the door buzzer. Then the phone started ringing too, and I realized this had been going on for who knew how long, that I’d been hearing it in my sleep, stitched through my dreams.

  It was late. After nine. The sun sliced a rectangle around the closed blinds.

  The buzzer screamed again, longer, angrier this time.

  I was discombobulated, trapped in my mother’s arms on the futon in her room. She must’ve carried me in there after I passed out. The way she curled around me now—clinging, almost peaceful, her breath coming in with soft milky pops—I wondered how she could sleep like this, so still when whatever was about to happen was right here, right now.

  I squirmed out of her arms and padded off to see who was at the door. Odd things were happening inside my head, like déjà vu but more uncertain. Like the future—the immediate future, the next few moments—had already spooled out in some other dimension. I could feel its momentum, I just couldn’t see it. I remember this great dread about who might be out there. A fear that it would be Lenny and also that it would not be Lenny.

  The buzzer again. The phone. The jackboots of doom kicking at our door.

  Balancing on a kitchen chair, I peered through the peephole. All I saw was hair, fish-eyed and magnified out of proportion.

  “Lenny?” I said.

  The guy shuffled, didn’t answer. His hair wiggled and bent. I heard mumbling. Or whispering.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  An eye. “The name’s Douglas Horsley.”

  “Uh…”

  He backed up so I could see him. Then he grinned at the peephole and waved. A total square. “Are your parents home? Be a good boy and fetch them for me.”

  We had rules for what to do when cops came to our door. Protocols. Steps to take. Legal rights to assert. Fuck if I could remember a single one.

  I hopped off the chair and ran to my mother, calling, “Should I let him in?”

  She rolled onto her back. Blinked. Stalled. “No,” she said wearily. “I’ll do it.”

  The phone rang again. The buzzer buzzed.

  When the ringing finally stopped, my mother gathered herself up and rested her forehead on her knees.

  “Mom?”

  “I said I’ll do it.” It was like I’d joined her cadre of enemies.

  Up then, and marching toward the kitchen, she made no effort to prepare herself. Her hair hung like a geyser, black curls and stray locks spritzing out all over the place. The shapeless tie-dye she’d worn to bed rode just below her hips, not quite covering her naked ass.

  And though she was no prude—nudity, like everything else, was a political act to her—this…it seemed dangerous. Reckless. She’d been having premonitions of Armageddon. And now the federale was lurking in the hallway. The phone was ringing off the hook. Who knew what else was coming down on us. She and Lenny had warned me this day would come. For years—my whole life—we’d been waiting for t
he moment when the feds would bum-rush the place and extract their payback for all the times Lenny had made them look like fools. Now here it was. She needed armor. Sturdy shoes. To protect herself so she could protect me.

  Or not. There were ways of wielding power I couldn’t yet imagine.

  She flicked angrily at the various bolts Lenny had installed on the door. Turned the gear on the crossbar belted above the knob. Kicked the iron rod from its groove in the floor. Then, throwing the door open, she blocked Douglas Horsley with her hairy bush.

  Did he blanch at her pudenda? You bet your ass he did. He went further. He gawked. Studied its curls and folds.

  “Up here.” She snapped her fingers in front of his nose. “Warrant?”

  Amusement played on his face. “What do you think?”

  “Let me see it.”

  He slapped a sheaf of papers against his open palm. Held it out. Pulled it back. Cat and mousing her. Flirting. The stairwell behind him was crawling with cops.

  As she looked over the warrant, the phone rang for the hundredth time. She swore. “Jesus fucking Christ.” She spun away, leaving the door open, stomped down the length of the apartment and then she was swearing at and pounding on the spitball box while Douglas Horsley and I stared at each other like bozos.

  “We need to talk to your daddy,” he said, saccharine, faux. There was something of the used-car salesman to him.

  I backed up a step.

  “Is he here?” He mugged, peering under the table. Grinned at me like this was some children’s game. Like he was a paid entertainer here to beg for laughs. “Is he back there? In the closet? The bathroom?”

  I said nothing. Took another step back. My head clicked with calculations, the reverse chronology of lost and found that, I hoped, would lead me to my AK-47. I’d had it the night before. I’d put it down. But where? If I only had it now, I could be brave.