by Joshua Furst
“And suddenly he was in the air, both arms flexed above his head, clutching the umbrella, bringing it down just so, hooking the No Parking sign and yanking. The sign popped a screw and twirled, bent, on its post.
“Lenny landed on both feet, crouched, somehow directly in front of the cop. He smirked. ‘Whatcha gonna do, pig?’ he said. ‘Jaywalking. Destruction of public property. I think you might get your arrest now!’
“And he was off, triumphant, cackling, bouncing through the crowd, waving for all the children to race along with him. He spun and backpedaled, calling out, ‘Guess you’re gonna have to add resisting arrest to that list.’ And then he was gone around the corner of Second Avenue, the cop huffing after him, stopping, wheezing.”
Phil flipped the guitar to his knee and plucked a few notes, hit a double chord. He watched his fingers as he worked, head bowed, hair drooping over his face. Giving not one sign of what I was supposed to do with this information. What it had to do with today. With me. I remember feeling it was all irrelevant. That Lenny was irrelevant. Not there. Not gonna save us. And I remember the shame that attached to this feeling. The sense that forsaking Lenny meant betraying myself.
Phil ran his hand over his head and brushed the hair out of his face. “Whatever people say about your father,” he told me, “and they’re going to say all kinds of things, hold on to what you know. He’s not the person they claim he is.” He went back to his strumming, pressed two fingers to the fret board and rumbled out a rhythm over a single chord. “It’s a pretty good song, I think. Should we try it?”
He unhitched the accordion bars over the window and shoved them open, inched up the screen and ducked onto the fire escape, pulling the guitar out after him.
And what could I do? It seemed wrong to leave him hanging there.
He saluted the reporters with a curt two-fingered tap to his forehead. “Hi-ya,” he said, calling on his stage voice. “Beautiful day.” He cleared his throat. “Freedom and I—” He walked me forward so the reporters could see me, hooked my neck in his elbow, pulled me tight like a pal. “Freedom and I have a message for you.” A shy chuckle and he added, “A different perspective. This is called ‘The Clown with the Bomb in His Hand.’ ” With that, he began strumming, singing the same song he’d plucked out inside, softly at first, his voice swallowed up by the dense humid air, but building, accumulating power and speed as his conviction swelled.
And the people on the street, the reporters, yes, but also the folks from the hood, responded in just the way I’d thought they would. He got catcalls. People shouting from windows. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. One of the reporters, recognizing Phil, called out, “You babysitting, man? Is this what you’ve come to?”
Phil just kept on strumming. He knew from a tough crowd. He must’ve thought his belief would win them over like it had so many skeptics before.
But I surprised myself and aimed my gun and shot, raining water down in their direction, a weak spray that died before it reached them. And they laughed, so I grabbed a chunk of cement, a decorative molding that had fallen off the building’s façade onto the fire escape. I whipped it, dinging a car. They laughed at this too. They were in on the same joke as the cops had been that morning.
When Phil’s last chorus wound its way to an end and the final tremor of his song dissipated, the reporters broke into a round of applause. Ironic. Cruel. Humiliating.
Did he know this would happen? Maybe. It could be he foresaw everything that occurred that day. I imagine him, after a night of maintenance drinking, shuffling past a newsstand as he walked home at bar time and seeing the early edition, still bundled in its heat-sealed plastic strips. The pressure drop of recognition as he noted the date and thought of Lenny, his day in court, and Mom and me. I picture him, buzzed and sentimental, not thinking too hard about what to do next, just heeding the call. Faithful, as always, to his old allies, regardless of what they might think of him. Maybe he realized I wasn’t equipped to comprehend the implications of what was happening. Maybe he knew I’d need someone to lash out at. Someone who would pretend to be more pitiable than me. And maybe he’d known that he and he alone was particularly equipped to be this person.
As we ducked back inside I reached out and patted his back like some sort of big brother. “Phil,” I said, “it’s gonna be okay.”
The circumstances of my mother’s and my life somehow became both more and less real after that. Everything changed by not changing at all.
We limped along.
The trash made it down to the street, most of it. Anything that couldn’t be salvaged from the raid. “Stuff is just stuff,” my mother said. “Artifacts of the past. Didn’t anybody ever tell you history’s dead?” For months, we picked scraps of paper—the remains of posters for long-ago events that my parents had thought would be famous forever—out from under the furniture, from corners and closets. Every once in a while we still slipped on those beads—there always seemed to be more of them.
You get used to it. You keep keeping on.
We found hope wherever we could.
One morning before dawn, my mother disappeared, leaving me to stew in the apartment with no idea where she was, sure she’d been stolen away by the pigs, while she waited in line at the welfare office and met with the caseworker and filled out the forms and got herself on the list that might, just might, give us what little security we needed to survive. When she finally got back at, like, eight that night, she was so pissed at the bullshit of it all that I couldn’t say anything. I just had to swallow my fear.
But maybe things were looking up. Lenny was back in the news. The time was ripe for my mother to pounce like a good Yoko Ono. She pled Lenny’s case one more time in The Village Voice, countering the narrative that had been building—Lenny the huckster, the coward, the fraud, he’d steal the lunch money off your kids if he could—with her own theories of government conspiracy, an invidious COINTELPRO, law enforcement used as a bludgeon to smash our constitutional right to dissent. She recapped Lenny’s long history of harassment, the slanderous whisper campaigns against him and the Left in general, started by moles trying to knock the wind out of anyone who might dream of a better world.
Stuff was happening. I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel her excitement. The flame in her eyes. She and Kunstler talked a lot about Ronnie Walker. They’d hired an investigator to map his life, look into who and what he’d ever been. They hadn’t found anything yet, but they were close. That’s what she kept saying. “We’re close.”
And maybe she was circling a mirage, but it kept her lively while it lasted.
She grooved around the apartment blasting tunes.
Sometimes she dragged me out into the sunshine. We hopped turnstiles and rattled up to the Sheep’s Meadow—site of my conception. We’d hit a playground or two. Hang out with the rich kids who called Central Park their own. The two of us. Taking over. Or she’d take over. She swung higher than me, whipped faster through the monkey bars. I tagged along. On the teeter-totter, she’d use her weight as leverage and plant her feet in the dirt, anchor herself, suspending me way up high above the ground, and in a flush of delirious joy, she’d sing,
Even though we ain’t got money
I’m so in love with you honey
Everything will bring a chain of lo-o-o-ove.
The whiplash I felt trying to match her highs. The sense of responsibility and dread, knowing even at six that her joy, her hope, her belief in the possible—it would crash. That she’d look to me to rebuild it and I wouldn’t know how.
See, that’s what I mean about change. It wasn’t material, but…I understood now what this chain of love implied. I understood who was supposed to protect whom.
Most of her energy went into doing what she could to bring LSD back to life.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite her own experience b
egging for cash back when no one had ponied up for Lenny’s bail, she convinced herself that this time—now that he was safely hidden away, living like the outlaw he’d always claimed to be—his old allies would rally to his cause. LSD would bring the movement back to itself. The tribes would gather again, rekindling the fires that had gone out in the years since everyone had fallen away. It would be a sort of revivalist event where everyone would lift a lighter and sing along to the old songs living in their bones. And Lenny would be the star leading them on, his spirit that much more powerfully there in the room for the fact that he himself was unable to attend.
She worried about it like you would any party to which you’d invited people you didn’t trust. All day, before the first and, as it turned out, only LSD meeting, she futzed over the details, pulling the lava lamps out of the bottom of the junk closet, draping Indian-print sheets over the windows. Moving the furniture around just so. She stacked Lenny’s favorite albums six-deep on the record player: Airplane, the Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Santana, Steve Miller, The White Album. She cued the first one up and flopped back on the couch and let its jangle and thump spill over her.
And she waited and waited and waited and waited for Lenny’s champions to arrive.
Wanna guess who showed?
Phil Ochs.
No one else.
Just Phil, always a sucker for a cause. Give him your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free and he’d write them a six-thousand-word paean for The Nation, organize a benefit concert on their behalf and get sloppy drunk at their birthday parties.
I remember him clomping into the room my mother had worked so hard on. In one hand, a whole mess of cheap Chinese. In the other, a couple of jugs of Carlo Rossi. He threw my mother a halfhearted two-finger salute, dropped into a folding chair in the corner, barely noticing the vacant seats around him, and set up shop. I remember a kind of awe at his obliviousness. It seemed like audacity to me. Confidence. And I remember how my mother scowled when she saw him, like he didn’t count, like he’d crashed the party.
He fanned the cartons in an arc around his seat and methodically opened and ate what was in them. Sweet and sour pork clotted with syrup. Wilted string beans. Rice. Sesame chicken. More rice. Some sort of beef dish that glistened like an oil slick. Yet more rice. Then lo mein, which he shoveled up in bulging knotted mounds while he hovered over the carton and bit down on the stray noodles.
God, the sounds he made. Slurping and munching and grunting with pleasure. Yum, yum, yum. He ate with great velocity, spraying soy sauce all over his pants and the floor. Drowning each bite with wine straight from the jug.
My mother could barely force herself to stay in the room. He both disgusted and fascinated her. And maybe she was right to be disgusted. Maybe he was putting on a gross display of the sad, fussy glutton he’d turned himself into, but to me he sparkled with all the magic of an adult who’s solved life’s mysteries. I sat at his feet. Watched for what I could learn.
Eventually he glanced at her and, like he’d just noticed where he was, asked, “Where is everybody?” Talking with his mouth full.
She just shook her head. Bored holes in him with her eyes.
Lowering his chopsticks and carton to his knee, he held her for a moment in his pitiful, compassionate gaze. Then he gave a little shrug and went back to his feast.
My mother retreated inside herself after that. Soaking in the humiliation. She sprawled on the couch with her eyes closed, mouthing along to the music like it could somehow carry her off to paradise.
And I remember—and this seemed far more important than the party—how when he was stuffed and you’d think he couldn’t eat another bite, Phil pulled two egg rolls out of his bag, one for him and one for me.
Understand: Egg rolls were among the few things we could afford. They cost forty-five cents. I ate a lot of them. And every single one tortured me. Did you take them out of their packaging and dribble grease down your arm? Or did you leave them in and end up with a sticky mess of duck sauce pooling in the bottom, turning the crispy parts soggy? Why, after one bite did the stuffing always fall out? Such a basic life skill. It shouldn’t have been that hard. But I couldn’t master it. No one had taught me how. I struggled, embarrassed and ashamed, with each and every one I ate. And Phil had noticed my anxiety. He understood.
“W-Watch this,” he said, holding his egg roll up as an example.
He laid it, still wrapped, on his knee and grabbed the duck sauce. Pinching its sealed end, he shook the packet so the sauce would settle, and used the ribs cut into the end to tear it just slightly, enough to puncture the air bubble inside and create a spout. “It’s easy.”
All I’d ever managed was a long spurting gash.
Then he cupped the packet over the egg roll and spread a long spiraling ribbon of sauce across the tip. He did it again. Bite by bite. Ripping a bit more cellophane away each time. Everything contained inside right to the end.
It was a revelation. Such a small, insignificant lesson in living but delivered with such deliberate attention. Like he’d seen me. My needs. My confusion. Like I mattered. Like being baffled was a completely reasonable response to a mystifying world and a kid sometimes needed a little help.
It’s stupid, I know.
But—and here’s the thing—I remember that’s when I understood he loved me.
* * *
—
And I remember, later, he and my mother got screaming drunk and feely with each other and he was there the next morning and many more after that and she never tried to hold another LSD meeting. She never even thought about it. LSD became another piece of evidence. More proof of the vast conspiracy against Lenny.
Here’s another letter:
La Mer—
So much has gone down since I last wrote that I don’t know quite where to start.
Maybe with an apology? I promised to write you each and every day, but over the past two weeks I’ve blown it. And for that I’m very sorry.
In my current circumstances, all I have is my word. It crushes me to think that I’ve broken it—and with you! Do me a favor, babe, and in your next letter, bring down the hammer. Snap the whip. Remind me who I am.
’Cause, babe, if you only knew the trouble I’ve seen.
I’ve had to pick up and flee again. By now I should know the signs. The spooky quiet that follows me around. The double takes on the street. The woman at the grocery store, usually so friendly, fumbling, unwilling to meet my eye. But apparently I’ve lost my Spidey sense. When the anonymous call came in telling me to run, it flattened me like an anvil. And as I hopped on the next bus to nowhere, I was shaking like a motherfucker. Half of me hoped they’d just catch me and put an end to the whole charade.
Well, they didn’t, obviously. I’ve lived to fight another day.
Now I’m in another depressing factory town where the people are gray and washed out like the sky and the sidewalks are crumbling and gas costs a fortune. America! I’m seeing it through different eyes now—tired eyes—and it’s a heavy trip. An angry, unforgiving place. From where I’m sitting now, it seems impossible that we could have accomplished all we did just those few short years ago.
Were we deluded? I don’t think so. I think we didn’t take it far enough.
The truth is, I’m in a fragile state. I’m fucked in the head. I don’t know how much longer I can live like this.
But, babe, please don’t worry. It’s not your problem. You’ve got enough on your plate with the kid. You don’t need another infant to take care of.
I shouldn’t even be telling you this stuff. I’d rather my letters were full of wine and roses. The good stuff. Only the good stuff.
And maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to bear putting the words down over these past few weeks. To do so would be to needlessly burden you.
Well, I’ll say it right now: I officially and eternally relieve you of the burden that is Lenny Snyder. Promise me you won’t let me take you down with me.
If it helps, there’s a woman who’s been traveling with me. She came into my life at the crucial moment when I was still learning how to be someone else. She’s a deep soul. A shiksa with a conscience. I call her the Queen of Sheba. She hails from the kingdom of light. I trust her. There are no secrets between us. She’s proven in a million ways that she won’t betray me. And without her, I swear, I’d be dead by now.
So don’t worry. I’m in good hands.
Be free!
—Your Lost Seaman
And, wait, there’s this one too:
City Mouse,
The other day I went to a party, a small gathering of what I guess constitutes the closest thing this town has to a counterculture. They’re theater folk, mostly. Eccentric amateurs. Secret homosexuals. Women too timid to seize the liberation they yearn for. They don’t fit in here, but they still believe what they see on the CBS News.
Babe, it was a trip. The only thing anyone wanted to talk about was Lenny Snyder. The trial. All that jazz.
The upshot? Lenny Snyder’s a fraud, and if he really believed half the things he claims to he’d have shown up in court to face the music.
I don’t blame them. They have a vague sense that things aren’t what they should be, but absolutely no means of accessing the truth. They’ve never been exposed to anything but propaganda.
I’ve gotten to know these people. They see me as a quiet, thoughtful man who’s worked with his hands his whole life. It would blow them away to learn I was Lenny Snyder.