by Joshua Furst
There was a copy of Newsweek with my mug on the cover right there on the coffee table and I kept glancing at it throughout the conversation, waiting for someone to put two and two together. Nobody did. I’m telling you, it was my most existentially challenging moment yet. One of the women—a sensitive older soul, churchy; in a different world she’d be out advocating for liberation theology—asked me what I thought and I surprised myself by saying they were right. Lenny was a coward. And the trippy part was that I believed it as I said it.
That’s what this life does to a person. You have to channel yourself into the character you’re playing. Change the makeup of your mind. It’s method acting. You have to be this other person entirely. But somewhere inside some part of you watches this new you from the perspective of the person you were, horrified, defiant, punching at your brain.
Of course I haven’t been able to move from the couch since, but that’s a story for another day…
Much love,
Country Mouse
And there’s this one. I’ve got a bunch of them.
Northstar—
Things have only gotten worse since the last time I wrote.
I went to another party a few days ago. A different scene. Heavier. It had a real Frisco vibe. Full of old compatriots and friends.
I knew before leaving the hotel that I shouldn’t have gone. But fuck it. I didn’t care. I needed the danger. To be, just for a night, reckless and alive again.
Anyway, it was a test. The person going to this party wasn’t Lenny Snyder. He was the other guy. The one I’ve become. A friend of the Queen who was a friend of a friend of a friend of the host. And as I slumped along toward the club with my new gait, I felt pretty good about being this person. I felt healthy. Energetic. Light on my feet. I was excited to be out in the streets of a city, to see the trash on the sidewalks, the cigarette butts and broken bottles in the gutters, the cars belching their exhaust, all the hip, happening grit of life roiling around me, Ratso Rizzo barking, “I’m walkin’ here.” Young dudes with afros and Ray-Bans and terminally bad attitudes, jiving, “go ahead and try to make me move.” All those different vibes bouncing off each other, negotiating their terms of engagement. God, I’d missed it. The city. It brings out the best and the worst in a person.
And just like that, the guy I’d been pretending to be, he just vanished. So long, my provincial rube. So long, shy dumpy boob. I was Lenny Motherfucking Snyder again.
Of course the Queen noticed the change immediately. She’s got psychic powers, at least when it comes to me. She clamped me by the arms and stopped me in my tracks. “Don’t do this,” she told me. “Get it together.” Her gaze burning through my eyes. “Right now. Or we’re turning around and marching back to the hotel.” The power this woman has over me. She’s saved me a thousand times. I can’t oppose her.
I reined myself in and we made it to the party. Somebody’s birthday, I’m still not quite sure whose.
Hidden behind dark glasses, I played my role as the Queen talked to old friends. She introduced me around, or I should say, she introduced the person I was pretending to be, which was right and good.
One of the funny things about life underground is the difference between pretending to be someone else and believing you’re this other person. When I’m pretending, it takes an extra split second to respond to my name. My accent slips—I start dropping my H’s. It’s hardly noticeable except to the Queen, and it kept happening at this party. Every interaction, no matter how slight, ended with her kicking my shin or pinching my elbow. But I couldn’t stop it. The more I tried, the worse it got. Like trying not to think of the word “orange.”
And of course everybody was talking about Lenny Snyder. Lenny Snyder this, and Lenny Snyder that. My name bouncing off the walls, echoing everywhere. Lenny Snyder. Lenny Snyder. Whispers and threats spurring my paranoia. Every glance thrown even vaguely in my direction accused and convicted me of being who I am.
I should’ve left then. Instead, I stayed and sank into the darkness at the edge of the room.
Eventually the Queen and I found ourselves sitting with a young woman with short blond dreadlocks, a poet, I was told. One of Ginsberg’s ever-growing tribe of wandering souls. I don’t know how she ended up at our table. She kept looking around the room, starstruck.
The Queen, in that gracious way of hers, coaxed this woman—really, she was just a girl, maybe twenty, still a child—into conversation and it turned out that she had a combative mind. Passionate. Engaged. Every thought on fire. The Queen is a master of small talk—it’s in her blood. She kept it light. Current events. The boob tube. The woman’s own poetry. Guiding her away from anything that might get her shouting.
Okay, cool. I did my best to tune them out.
But when Lenny Snyder’s name came up, you better believe I shot to attention. And when the poetess got hot and said, “I don’t know why we’re supposed to have any sympathy for that guy. He’s a misogynist and a creep. Where was he on equal rights? Where was he on black liberation? Nowhere and nowhere. He was against the war, but why? Because white guys like him were getting killed. When he talked about sexual liberation, you just know he meant liberating women of their right to say no when he wanted to fuck them.” The same old tired line. And babe, I just lost it. I took off my sunglasses. I leaned in, and before the Queen could stop me, I told this girl, “Kid, listen, I love how primed for the fight you are. I love your spirit. But frankly, you need to learn your history. You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”
“Who the hell are you and who asked for your opinion?” she said.
And she might not’ve known it, but she’d caught me out. In that moment, I had been wholly and completely Lenny Snyder.
The Queen sees everything. She stated my new name like she was hammering a door shut. She recited my cover story and told the woman, “Don’t mind him. He’s not feeling well today.”
But at that point, I was gone. “What do you know about Lenny Snyder?” I said.
“I know he loved to see his own face on TV and I know he gave up what little credibility he might’ve had when he got himself arrested for dealing coke.”
Ginsberg and Ray Garrett had joined us at the table. I’d been so claustrophobic that I hadn’t noticed them until this minute. “Is it the dealing that bothers you or the fact that he got caught?” Garrett asked. This caught her off guard. He went on. “Because I’ve thought about this a lot. You know, Lenny and I were friends. He wasn’t perfect—who is? And he undeniably lost himself for a while there, but we all did.”
She kept pressing. “Please,” she said. “Lenny Snyder doesn’t know the first thing about what it means to be oppressed. Why should it be okay for him and not, say, me?”
“But was it okay for him?” asked the Queen. “He got arrested. The only reason he’s not in prison right now is because he went on the run.”
“Unless he was set up,” I said.
Garrett studied me. I couldn’t tell if he recognized me or not. I had a beard and that new nose. Even in the dark I’d left my sunglasses on. “You and I both know he wasn’t set up.”
“Do we?” I said. “I’ve got it on good authority that he was.”
For a moment there, it was like all my illusions had been stripped away. I couldn’t have hidden if I wanted to.
“But that wasn’t my point,” he said, turning back to the poetess. “You can judge Lenny all you want, but I’ll tell you what. If Lenny were here, he wouldn’t judge you. He’s the least judgmental person I’ve ever met. Well, except for Allen,” he said, patting Ginsberg’s knee. “But Allen’s a saint. Lenny’s a hostage to his emotions. If he were here with us tonight, hearing your outrage at the way men—even supposedly enlightened men of the Left—are still profoundly failing to respect women, he’d have only one thing to say. ‘How can
I help?’ And he’d mean it. For all his faults, that’s the kind of person Lenny Snyder is.”
She took this in slowly. “Okay, white man,” she said, and her posture, like a coiled cat, said she was prepping for her next lunge.
And you know Garrett. He fagged himself up. “Okay yourself, honey,” he said, and he winked at me. And the Queen, who like I said sees all, capitalized on the moment to announce that we’d be leaving now.
I’d blown it. Taken needless risks. But I was beyond the question of risk at that point. My blood tingled radioactively in my veins. The person I’d become was gone and I was fully and completely and exclusively Lenny. I didn’t care who knew it.
No, it was heavier than that. I actually wanted the world to know. I wanted to be found out, if not by Garrett and this strident young poet, then by somebody else. So I’d have proof that I still existed.
Babe, if only you knew. I’ve been watching the news of Lenny Snyder, turncoat revolutionary, discredited rebel, I’ve watched these claims wax and wane in the press and no one ever refutes them. No one lifts a finger to correct the record. And the myth morphs and mutates—it lives a separate life from me. I’m gone. The best me. The me who’s Lenny Snyder. Obliterated. And sometimes it gets so heavy that I just explode inside myself.
That’s what was happening at this party. I never should’ve gone. Never should’ve allowed myself to come face-to-face with old friends who’d remind me of my old life.
As I squeezed past Ginsberg he placed a hand on my arm. Up to now, he hadn’t said a word to anyone. He’d just sat with us in that calm, alert manner of his, listening, betraying nothing. He motioned for me to bring my face close to his and I bent for his blessing, like I’ve done a hundred times before, like so many people do when confronted by his humbling presence, and dig this: He squeezed my shoulder and whispered, “It’s good to see you.” That was all. The look on his face said the rest.
It broke me.
But the Queen, she’d had enough. She hustled me out of there before I could even thank him. She threw me in a cab. Got me to the hotel.
And since then…
Well, I’ll put like it this: There was a moment when she had to physically extricate me from the window because I was halfway out and ready to jump, shouting, “I’M LENNY SNYDER! I’M LENNY FUCKING SNYDER!” She bound my hands and feet to a chair. Call it my Bobby Seale moment. Now she’s terrified of what I might do to myself. She’s hidden all the knives and taken my pills from me.
Suzy, I’m cracking up. Hell, I’ve already cracked. I cry in my sleep. The Queen tells me I howl, “MERCY! MAMA! MERCY!”
But there is no mercy. There’s just submission or refusal. I’ve spent my life refusing. I’m GOOD at refusing. Resistance is the very core of my being. No matter how dangerous it might’ve been, I was always right there on the front line, ready to sacrifice my body for the cause.
Wasn’t I?
Suzy, tell me. Remind me who I am. Please.
’Cause I keep asking myself, when is enough enough? At what point does your God-given right to freedom succumb to the floodwaters rising around it? What’s freedom worth when your life’s a fraud?
—L.
He could be like that, and then he could be like this:
Esther,
I now hear from Kunstler that there’s nothing more anyone can do until and unless I turn myself in. And I’m telling you, this news hit me like a punch in the balls.
My question to you is: What have you been doing? What happened to LSD?
I was relying on you.
But apparently you’re gonna let me die out here in the cold. Maybe that was your plan all along.
You’ve betrayed me, Suzy. You’ve betrayed me and taken my freedom from me.
—The Wandering Jew
I remember when she got this one. How she tried to hide her emotions from me. She’d been standing in the kitchen, like always, two steps into the apartment, ripping open envelopes before even taking her jacket off. And I remember she stopped stone-cold. Just froze. She crumpled the letter in one hand and dropped it in the trash. Picked it back out. Read it again. And again and again. It was like the life force was seeping out of her. I asked, “What’s wrong?” But nothing. The letter fell from her hands. She didn’t say a word. Just shuffled away to sit in the window, staring out at nothing, done for the night.
I kept that letter. I flattened it out and folded it up nice and carried it around with me in my pocket. Taking it out every once in a while to remind myself that I had to do better. That it was up to me to fix our lives. How, I didn’t know, but I was sure, if I worried with enough intensity, if I pushed my scheming mind deep enough into the white expanse beyond my comprehension, the correct course of action would come clear. It never did, of course. What did I know? But I gave myself stomachaches trying.
The key was Ronnie Walker. That’s how I saw it. My mother hadn’t mentioned him in months, not in the phone calls I overheard between her and Kunstler, not in the chattering and “processing” she subjected me to. It was like his alleged role in Lenny’s bust had been completely erased. Nonetheless, I fixated on him. Everyone else might’ve forgotten, but I hadn’t. I’d show them. I’d find Walker and save the day.
This was the sum total of my plan: somehow corner Walker and force him to confess. At gunpoint if necessary. I had my AK.
But wherever I looked, he was never there.
Okay, here’s one from my mother that I’m willing to share.
After months and months the obstacles put in her way by social services, meeting with caseworkers, filling out the same forms again and again, receiving promises that were later denied or forgotten, but still, persisting, dogged, unrelenting, proving her poverty, she’d received a single misspelled letter in the mail, informing her that she’d been denied. No welfare for her. The reason, as stated: husband’s assets.
What that meant remained obscure. Lenny’d brought in some dough from his book and his lecture tours. But her understanding was that this money was gone. He’d given it all away to the Panthers in a grand public gesture—cameras, flashbulbs, speeches, him and Huey Newton throwing a kamikaze flurry of black-power salutes back and forth until he ceremoniously lifted up an oversized, like, Publishers Clearing House–sized check and secured it in Newton’s hands. That’s what got reported in all the news outlets. It was what he’d told the IRS and what she’d then told the welfare office.
So was he holding out on her? Would he do that?
Didn’t matter.
She needed to survive. And she was still his wife. For richer, for poorer.
So, she sent him this:
L,
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think there’s still royalties coming in from your book, and if so, can I somehow access the account or the money? I spoke to Kunstler and he told me that he knows nothing about it. I called the publisher too, and they told me they weren’t authorized to discuss your finances with anyone but you.
I guess what I’m saying is, can you help me?
I hate myself for even asking, but I’ve run out of options. I’ve been denied welfare. I guess I could appeal, but that’ll take months, maybe another whole year (you know those bureaucracies, they’re there to kill you slowly) and the writer’s life is apparently not for me—Cindy Belloc won’t even return my calls. I’m a street fighter and a rabble-rouser and, I fear, far too extreme for the story the liberal press wants to tell. (“Unreasonable,” they call me. Well, the Nazis were reasonable. Would they rather that?)
Frankly, I’m tired.
Freedom has become a complete pain in the ass. I don’t blame him. I love him and this is all very hard on him. But he sometimes goes for days refusing to speak, staging a silent protest against your absence. Or he lashes out. He lectures me like he’s
the parent and I’m the petulant, misbehaving child. The other day he had the gall to say, “You don’t even try, Mom. If I was Lenny, I would’ve left you too.” Can you imagine? It took all my strength not to smack him. And then, when I finally calmed down, it broke my heart. Poor kid. It’s not his fault the world’s upside down.
To say nothing of the constant surveillance. I found another bug in the overhead lamp last week. And the FBI came knocking again yesterday. They still believe, despite all the evidence, that I know exactly where you are. I told them, “Look, I can’t even find my checkbook. How do you think I’m supposed to keep track of Lenny?” They didn’t laugh. They never do. Lately, neither do I.
It’s getting very dark down here in the LES. I don’t know how Freedom and I are going to survive.
Faith, I guess.
And maybe some help from you?
I miss you more than God.
—Suzy
Reasonable?
Well, here’s how Lenny responded:
Susan B. Anthony—
I hear you loud and clear.
What I’ll say in my defense is that you knew this life would be tough from the day you first walked into the Free Store. And we talked at length about how much harder it would become after I went underground. You knew what you were getting yourself into. I wish I could say I’m sorry, but I’m not. It’s the price of doing my business. None of this should surprise you in the least.
I guess I, maybe, thought you were tougher than you are. Well my offer still stands. Go ahead and file for divorce if you must. Tell the judge I abused you. Who cares if it’s true. Ship the kid off to your mother if he’s too much for you to handle. Move on with your life.
But don’t blame me.
And don’t say I ever wanted it this way.
See you around.
—Benedict Arnold
For months after that, through that whole spring and summer, my mother still trekked over to the Namaste Bookshop hoping to hear from him. She still positioned me out on the street. Still chatted with Barrow about whatever rumors he’d picked up. Faking it. Braced for disappointment but trying to show the people who mattered that she was as fierce as ever.