by Joshua Furst
“What’s your name, kid?” the guy said.
He’d cornered me. He was squatting, split-legged. His pants strained their seams. “You’re scared. It’s okay to be scared sometimes. I’ve got a kid just about your age. He gets scared too. The world’s a scary place.”
Something crashed against the wall—another spitball box biting the dust—and we heard my mother bark from the other room, “What part of go fuck yourself don’t you understand?”
The guy peered down the chain of rooms at my mother on the phone, checking on her, or checking her out, a little bit of both.
And I suddenly remembered. The throw pillows. Somewhere on the floor out there. Unless she’d put it away somewhere. But that wouldn’t have been like her.
“Looks like she’s left you in charge,” he said. “You can handle that, right? But you know, that means you’ve got a big decision to make. You look like a nice kid. You look like a kid who tries not to get in trouble. And hey, right now, you’re not in trouble. You should know that, okay? You can keep it that way too. It’s easy. I just need to know what happened to your daddy. Does he call to say good night? Go ahead and tell me. I’m one of the good guys.”
Like I was a chump.
“The thing is, if you don’t tell me—well. There’s some things you should know. Different kinds of trouble. ‘Aiding and abetting.’ ‘Harboring a fugitive.’ Ever heard of that?”
I tried to summon Lenny. What would he have done at a moment like this? I couldn’t remember.
The cops were inside now. Some of them. Log-jammed around the door. The whole squadron seemed to have been called up. Here and there I recognized a face among them—guys who’d been friendly back in the day, guys who’d acted like they were in on the joke. And maybe they had been. Maybe it was their joke all along and Lenny and his movement had been the punch line.
Everyone watching me. Waiting for me to say something. I felt hot. I couldn’t think.
And then there was my mother, palming my head, holding me steady. Guarding me. She’d wrapped herself in a caftan and she was holding my AK. “Lenny’s not here,” she said. “But you know that.”
“I know nothing,” said Horsley. But he stood up and backed away from me.
She sucked water out of the barrel of the gun, drinking from it. A bluff. Asserting her unflappable cool. “Sure you do. This is harassment. Our lawyers have been informed.”
“Mind if we have a look?”
She pointed the gun at him for half a second, casual, almost like she didn’t mean it. Just a prop, a baton waving him on. And off he went to ransack the apartment, his police escort trampling after him.
While we waited them out she sat behind me, bracing me tight between her knees. She kissed my neck—the soft spot where everything converged. “Don’t be scared, little man,” she said. “This is progress.”
Later, after they left, having discovered nothing, not even a stem, not a single seed, she explained herself. “Wait and see, Freddy. It gets better from here. Now that everyone knows he’s gone, we can start fighting to get him back.”
“And?” I said.
“And what? That’s it.”
And wandering off to hop in the shower, she left me there to stew.
It wasn’t enough. The world had promised us something. Or Lenny had. I couldn’t say exactly what that might’ve been, but I knew it was far from the life we were living. Nobody even really talked about it anymore. And look, our apartment had just been totaled. Posters torn from walls. Files and news clippings scattered everywhere. Shoe prints on the plasterboard where the cops had kicked at phantom secret compartments. Lenny’s famous American flag shirts—this I remember particularly clearly—littered everywhere, ripped to shreds. It was hard to make the leap from this ruin to something as nebulous as hope. The best I could do was give in to my clenched urge for order and try to put everything back in its place. I folded afghans, stacked books on shelves, sorted ripped paper into color-coded piles, cleared a shotgun path down the middle of the apartment. Did it help? It did not.
There was more buzzing at the door. People rallying to the cause. Well, one person anyway.
“Ochs here.”
I peered through the fish-eye. He looked older than he had the last time I’d seen him, fatter, bloated. He was worn out. Half-faded. “You’re not supposed to be here,” I said. But I opened the door, hating myself and my weakness even as I did.
He stuttered—or no, that’s not quite the right word. More a whisper of an echo of doubt in his voice. “W-Will you let me in?” And before I could answer he ducked inside, his arms overloaded with newspapers.
What struck me was that, under the fat he was the same old Phil he’d always been, wearing the same old uniform—that pale blue work shirt, those grease-stained chinos, the work boots laced tight around his ankles. And that same melancholic determination—let’s call it idealism—weighing him down like a hair shirt. He seemed harmless. A fern.
I wanted him to leave.
He spilled the papers all over the kitchen table and started opening cupboards. Shutting them. Opening others. “Where’s the coffee in this place?” he said.
“Where’s anything?” I said back.
He moved on to the fridge, shuffling shit around to see what might be hidden in there.
And done with her shower, now dressed for battle, my mother appeared and leaned against the doorway, where until that morning a beaded curtain had hung. She watched him, impassive, glancing my way once so I’d know she was pissed.
When, finally, he realized what was going on, Phil flopped into a chair and squinted up at her. “Hey,” he said. “Suzy.” Soft as a sponge.
They stared each other down, weighing implications, silently negotiating terms. His compassion must have enraged her. It must’ve looked like pity.
“You don’t know, do you?” he finally said.
“Know what? Has he been caught?” she said.
“No.”
“Then of course I know. He’s been gone for months.”
“You should’ve told me,” Phil said.
“Oh? Why?”
He gaped at the floor.
“Whatever. I don’t have time for this.” She stepped past him and made for the door. “He’s your problem now,” she said. Not to Phil, to me. And off she went. To see Kunstler, I found out later. Paperwork. Reporting. A private mea culpa. The beginnings of a public record meant to prove we’d known nothing, been abandoned, were eligible for welfare.
With her gone, the fear tightened in my chest. I ached. Everything inside vibrated, unstable. This was how it would be. This was forever. That’s what I kept thinking.
Not knowing what else to do, I threw myself back into my quest for order. The trash can—I tipped it upright and piled in the garbage. Lemon rinds, orange peels, cakes of loose tea, napkins, everything nasty, damp and sticky. The beads from the curtain in the kitchen doorway. There was crap everywhere. I’d start on one project that seemed almost manageable and in a panic switch to another. Righting tipped stools and retrieving stray coupons and refrigerator magnets wedged under the oven, the fridge.
Phil—a sucker for the tragic, good with helpless things—just watched me, sad, caring. It was intolerable.
I went at him with all I had. “Why are you here, Phil? Why’d you come? We don’t want you here. You think you’re helping? You’re not helping. Nobody asked you to come here. We don’t want your help. We don’t want your newspapers. Or your stupid…” I looked for some weakness I could exploit. “…shirt. Go write some songs, or something,” I said. I wasn’t good yet at school yard taunts. Couldn’t think on my feet. “You’re stupid,” I said. “I hate your stupid face.” I told him my mother and I could take care of ourselves. Said, “We’re tough motherfuckers. Tougher than you.”
And he just took it. Passive
resistance on an intimate scale. Slouched there with his shoulder to the wall, clear-eyed, patient, waiting, waiting, waiting me out, not even trying to comfort me so I could push him away again.
When, finally, I was near tears, he tipped his chin and said, “You find that coffee yet?”
I blinked at him.
“You really want me to leave?” he said.
Too proud to bend, I stomped off to find my gun.
For the next however long, he kept his distance from me. We camped out in different rooms. I listened through the walls. Cupboards opening and closing. The tap. The teakettle. The burner clicking and catching. I was glad he was there.
Eventually, a kind of numb normal settled in and I went off to find him.
You have to understand how large Phil loomed in my life throughout this time. He had a knack—he seemed to magically show up whenever and wherever I needed him.
I hovered and watched him in the front room, newspapers stacked in read and unread piles on either side of him. I wasn’t sure yet if I’d be willing to speak, but I was ready to hover around him. I held my AK tight and edged closer, trying not to be noticed. He’d folded the section in his hands subway-style. I came closer. Just for a second, he held the hair out of his eyes, gazed at me and then went back to his paper.
“What’s it say?” I asked him after a while.
Tensions in Chile. Some hotel bombed in Norway. Odds on the Foreman fight scheduled for that evening. People had been born. People had died. Another day. The world was full of news. “Take a look out the window,” he finally said.
A crowd had convened. Ten or twelve shabby men in sloppy clothes. The press. You could see it in their posture, in the hollows of their eyes. They were dressed like anybody else, a little sharper around the edges, maybe.
“Tonight, tomorrow, it’ll be nonstop Lenny. Exciting stuff. In England they call it taking a runner. You could make a statement. Then you’d be the news.”
Lenny had warned me about these people. They lived in the country of cynicism. “Anytime you’re dealing with a newsman,” he used to say, “someone’s gonna be the sucker. Your job is to make sure it’s him, not you.”
“What do they want?” I said.
Phil let slip an understated, private smile. He put down his paper. “What would Lenny do?”
“He wouldn’t be in a situation like this.”
“But he is. This is exactly the situation he’s in. You are, too.”
He was up. Pacing. That hand clamped to his forehead. Gears were grinding in his brain. He grabbed my mother’s beat-up old guitar from where it lived, never used, in the corner. “We could write a song. All the news that’s fit to sing.”
Clamping a foot on the arm of the couch, he rested the guitar on his knee, tuned it in a flash and plucked out a few chords. Then he adjusted the capo and spun out a tune, fully formed, a ballad, faint echoes of the olden days lilting through it. Maybe it was new, made up on the spot. It sounded like all his other songs. The minor harmonies. The abrupt shifts in key. The tempo that slowed and sped up with the length of his lines. The rumbling on the strings as he took the song on its turn toward hope.
“Songs don’t fix anything,” I said.
This saddened him. Such a young kid, so jaundiced already. “You really believe that?” He plopped down on the couch, draped his arms around the neck of the guitar and stared at me, earnest, taking me seriously. “You sound like your dad now,” he said.
“So what?”
“So it’s interesting.” Mounting the guitar like a cane between his legs, he leaned toward me. “Have you ever been to a demonstration? I know you have. I’ve gone to them with you. Used to be we marched side by side. So…so you know. It’s the songs that unite and focus the crowd. Music gets them moving in the same direction.” He contemplated what he’d just said for a moment. Then he added an amendment. “It’s not the music Lenny lost faith in. It’s the direction.”
A few things here. First, assume this was all going over my head. And that Phil didn’t think twice about whether or not I understood him. He’d stored this up for years and now he was making his case, if not to Lenny, then to the next best thing. Making peace. Making clear that whatever misunderstandings might’ve accumulated between them, his fidelity had never wavered. Second, don’t forget how freaked out I was. And that Phil had promised some vague possibility of solace. So this wasn’t helping.
He went on. “You know he’s right, don’t you? We’ve veered off course. Wh-Who knows where the hell we’re headed now. Who’s going to remember the place we were trying to get to? Who’ll keep the record? I’ll tell you. The singers. The troubadours. That’s who. So…so music.”
Something snapped in him and he realized he was talking to a six-year-old.
“Did Lenny ever tell you about the day we first met? I guess, no. W-Why would he? You should know this, though. Who he was. W-What he was capable of.
“So.” Gauging my interest, pushing on. “Right around the corner. On St. Marks. Late September 1967. Not long before you were born, actually. I was on my way to check on Old Bull Lester. You don’t know who that is. A foundational figure. Maybe the last of that generation of hobos who’d carried the sounds of the South to the cities up north. Folk and blues and a lonely wind in the boxcar. Not a thought of fame. Alan Lomax found him living in a cold-water flat on Avenue C. He recorded him, turned a few of us on to him. Eighty-four years old, arthritic and blinded by cataracts. But he still had that auld lang syne, as they say. He’d invented a style of double-fretting—unconsciously; he was entirely untrained—by which he could coax two different chords from his instrument at the same time and make them harmonize. We owed him, for this and a whole lot more. We revered him. On Sundays I took it upon myself to check in on him, learn what he knew, keep the old sounds alive, bring him groceries and that sweet red wine he loved. He’s long gone now.
“Anyway. Fall ’67. I was heading over to Old Bull’s place, walking along under the elevated train past Astor Place, then down St. Marks toward the park. Halfway up the block, right near The Dom, I saw something was happening. A tight little knot of strife. People had congregated and stepped up on the stoops, straining to see.
“Th-This was a tense time on the Lower East Side. The tribes were in chaos, struggling to hold on to their turf and forge a new equilibrium. There’d been troubles here and there, ethnic sensitivities getting out of hand, the meddling cops exacerbating distrust. The Newark riots were fresh in the air, which just heightened the usual nobody-listening-to-each-other shit. I’d been noticing all this, wondering if this was going to be a moment of coming together or falling apart. I feared the second, which…I’ll tell you what: Despair’s never far away. It’s always there, lurking behind the next hill.”
He lost himself for a second. “If we were going to end the war, we…we needed each other. Anyway, it turned out some black kid—he couldn’t have been sixteen—was in such a good mood he’d jaywalked. Then he’d hopped off a car bumper to slap a No Parking sign. And this cop in a bad mood had watched him do all this and now he was intent on ruining the kid’s day. By the time I got there, the kid was trying to save face, pleading and jiving. So we know how that goes. It’s always the cop who escalates the situation. He stepped up to the kid, pushed, and the kid went passive, stepped back, held up his hands. ‘I’m cool,’ he said.
“ ‘You’re not cool,’ the cop said. ‘You’ve broken three—make it four city ordinances. And I’m of a mind to place you under arrest.’
“I was just about to leave, shaking my head in shame, when out of nowhere there was Lenny like some lunatic prophet, making a racket down the street, running a broken umbrella along the iron fences out front of the buildings, barking like mad. ‘Crumbpacker! Hey! Hey, Officer Crumbpacker! I need some assistance over here!’ That voice of his crackling like lightning in the air.
“I knew who he was, of course. He’d already made himself notorious by then. But I’d never seen him in action.
“ ‘Hey! Officer Crumbpacker! It’s an e-merg-en-cy! There’s some peace being perpetrated over here. You gotta break it up. It’s your duty. Hey, ain’t you an officer of the peace?’
“Everyone looked. The cop, the kid, everyone.
“ ‘Come on, man,’ Lenny said. ‘How ’bout you pick on somebody your own size.’
“And we all laughed, everyone but the cop. He was a little hockey-puck of a guy. The kid towered over him.
“Lenny had wandered into the street. He wove back and forth, holding up traffic, stepping onto the hoods of cars, leaping off them, doing a soft-shoe, Fred Astaire in army-surplus boots.
“Somewhere in there the kid ran off. But Lenny wasn’t done. ‘You want to arrest somebody, Crumbpacker? Arrest me. Look here, I’m jaywalking.’ He twirled the umbrella like a baton. “Come on, people, you can jaywalk too. It’s the fun new dance. All the kids are doin’ it.’
“The cop, flustered, humiliated, was turning red.
“ ‘Crumbpacker’s bored, folks. Come on. Help him out. Let’s give him something to do.’
“Lenny’s eyes darted over the crowd, a thousand calculations flicking behind them. He saw me and called out, ‘Hey, Phil! Phil Ochs, everybody. Give him a hand.’ And I have to say, shameful as it is, I ducked when I heard my name. I wasn’t ready yet to hear Lenny’s message. He was too hip for me. I was still stuck in ’64. ‘Hey, Phil. You’re an honest guy. Give it to me straight. Did you see that kid destroy any property?’
“ ‘N-No.’ I cleared my throat and said it again, louder. ‘No.’
“ ‘No’?
“ ‘No.’
“ ‘I didn’t think so,’ he said. ‘Because…’ And he had us now, the crowd, me, even the cop. Everyone. And what he did with this attention, w-well, he quieted himself. He made us wait. And wait. Until, just when he sensed we might lose interest, he planted a boot on the bumper of the very same car the kid had jumped off of, raised himself up and stood there. He took two steps and he was standing on the hood. His voice cracked out. ‘This is what destruction of public property looks like.’