by Joshua Furst
But none of that was what drew me to search her out.
We shared our dark little dreams. And though I couldn’t quite fathom what her life was really like, how she was related to the other kids in the squat—sometimes they were her “brothers” or “sisters” or “cousins”; sometimes they were just “those fuckers”—or if she had any parents at all, I felt I understood her. Her defiance. What it covered up. She’d much rather throw a sharp rusty pipe at my feet, daring me to flinch, than cop to any fear in her life.
A lot of the time we just existed near each other. Sitting around. Lying on the grass. Proximity was a form of intimacy. We had nowhere to go. Nothing to do. And even if we did, what difference would it have made? We were precociously cynical in that way so endemic to kids in the city. Unimpressed by the museums, the celebrity sightings, the concerts and monuments and free theater in the park. We were hip to the con. We knew that none of the cultural opportunities the city offered would lift us rank heathens up to the vague, genteel civic ideal they promised. That stuff wasn’t meant for us. But also, we were unimpressed by the seedy thrills that the counterculture held out as an alternate path, the hard drugs and grifting and bodies for sale. The screaming guitars and hoarse rebel yells and clubs and bathhouses and everyone, everyone, even those in squalor, clamoring for fame. Nothing impressed us. Whatever lie we might choose to build our lives around, the truth would remain the same. The poor would be poor. The rich would be rich. And we’d still be alone with no real friends but each other.
Sometimes we touched hands as we lay there together. Sometimes the sun beat down so warm on our faces that we fell asleep.
When we talked it was with a sneering ticklishness. She taught me to boast and to lie. She’d say anything, whatever popped into her head.
“You know that pet store over on Ninth Street, the one that smells so nasty, like birds? The lady who owns it killed her husband, did you know that? She ground him up and fed him to the cats. It’s true. She never got caught.”
Or, “Did you hear about that artist guy with the beard? You know the one I mean? He’s always dressed up like Jesus? He’s making dirty movies now. He casts his daughter in them. I know because he asked Lumps and Paulie and Stinger if they wanted to be in ’em too. Would you do that? I’d never do that.”
Who knows what was true and what wasn’t. One day she told me she was dying. “There’s a hole in my heart. It’s a very rare disease. I’ve had it since I was born. One day I’m gonna drop dead. Could be today. Definitely by next year.”
“You don’t look sick,” I said. “You don’t act sick.”
“But I am. What would you do if I died right this minute?”
“Nothing, ’cause you’re not gonna die.”
She had a particular look she threw when she was frustrated that lit up the pencil scar on her left cheek. “I am gonna die. At most in two years.”
Best to just go with it. Anyway, she was more upset that I didn’t believe her than that she was really going to die. “Maybe I’ll die with you,” I said.
“Would you? Oh my God.” She launched herself onto me. Slaps and squeezes. “Dy-no-mite!” And she was up and off to scale the bridge, straining to pull herself from rivet to rivet, negotiating gaps barely as wide as her body. Reckless. Peering down at me still rooted in the dirt and mocking my fear of joining her. “Freddy, look! It’s fun! Freddy! Or maybe you’re just a pussy!” Like, whatever the truth of the hole in her heart, she was hell-bent on dying one way or another.
There was one time when she somehow got hold of a whip and insisted that we take turns using it to try to knock each other off our feet. The only thing that stopped us was, we were too small and the whip was too long for us to handle, much less snap. We couldn’t even flick it to its full length; it just wagged there, limp, in our fumbling hands.
Another time she found a baggie of powder under a park bench.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
We didn’t know what it was. It was kind of pissy yellow. Marked with a unicorn.
“No way.”
“Come on. Nothing’s gonna happen.”
“It might be poison,” I said.
She laughed. “So, let’s do it.”
I still refused. Visions of Lenny at his worst jittered in my head. Of my mother. Of the dead eyes you saw on nodding junkies. Of the naked duster I’d seen, once, fighting off a platoon of cops out in front of Cooper Union, shards of glass embedded in his chest, blood everywhere, trickling down his thighs.
“Do it! Do it!”
She poured the powder out onto one of the wooden slats of the bench and began cutting it into lines like she’d seen people do in the squat.
“We could die.”
She glanced up and snarled. “So what?”
And as she struggled to roll a dry leaf into a straw, I panicked and blew the powder to the wind.
“Why’d you do that? I hate you. You’re never any fun.”
But she didn’t hate me. Even if she screamed and swore and hit me all the time. I knew. We needed this tug-of-war. She’d pull toward destruction. I’d pull toward something else. Revelation. Release. That thing I couldn’t name but just knew must exist.
By late September of ’75, my mother realized that her life would be easier if I wasn’t there needing things all day. She enrolled me in school. As long as I was someone else’s problem, she no longer cared if I was indoctrinated or not. Anyway, even she was half-bored and exhausted by her screeds now. The politics meant nothing. All they did was increase her hardship.
So off I went to PS 64, where the dregs of the Lower East Side gathered and clotted in the drain.
The first thing that happened my very first day was the vice principal tried to confiscate my AK. He pretended to be nice about it. He told my mother, while she filled out my registration forms at the high counter in the office, “He can have it back at two-thirty when school lets out.”
“Come on, man,” she said, barely paying attention. “It’s a water gun.”
“It’s still a gun.”
She shot him a look. Continued with her forms.
“We’ve got rules, ma’am. Policies.” A big hulking dude who, I’d discover later when I saw him patrol the halls, wore his pants too tight.
She stopped writing. Tapped the pen on the counter and stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I don’t kid. Would you feel safe knowing I let other children bring guns to school?”
“Water guns. That shoot water. Not bullets. You dig?”
“In this case, ma’am, that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“It’s a toy,” she said. “It comforts him.” She shook her head in disgust, realizing she couldn’t win. “You people.”
Smiling at her, he said, “What people?” He was black.
More disgust, smeared with scorn. “Bureaucrats.” She looked at me fighting back my terror, cradling the gun like I’d die without it. “This isn’t going to work out well for you,” she said, meaning the vice principal, but she might as well have been talking to me, since she caved and took the gun home with her, leaving me exposed, all by my lonesome.
I hated it there.
Already in second grade, the patterns were set.
The black kids—and it was mostly black kids—hung out with each other, vacillating between a resentful pliancy and rambunctious outbursts of coded disdain for the entire endeavor of public education. They knew the value of what they were getting and they gave it the same respect it gave them. Where they ruled was the playground. They stampeded down the slides, dodged swings, scaled the monkey bars and fences, reveling in this space where they were left alone, free of the assumptions the union-vested lifers teaching in the school threw their way—that they’d failed just by being born; that the harder they tried, the greater the
joke on them would be—and also free of the humiliating condescension, the saccharine pandering of the younger teachers, those do-gooders who, still bucking the limits of good intentions, had made it their mission to prove the old-timers wrong. Sometimes I’d catch Dante Alexander—the kid who sat next to me—staring at his desk in an unending stone-cold rage and I’d think, I don’t blame you. Your daddy told the truth. You’re already fucked.
I sympathized. I was sure I was fucked too.
The white kids—Russians, Polacks, the offspring of the hippie artist-freaks and the wannabes who’d followed them to the hood, Jews of the old school and the new—none of them would have me. They stuck to their own just like the black kids and I reeked of something that wasn’t quite right. They all wore the same jean jackets, festooned with the same buttons. The same floppy newsboy caps with the same shaggy hair winging out from under them. Whatever their obsession—comics, chess, magic, theater, movies, Star Trek, Hashem, the batting averages of long-retired baseball players—you got the sense that they were after the same underlying goal: proof that they were singular, meant for the best of the better things. Not having been schooled in the topics they cared about, I wasn’t even worth dominating. What could I say to a Beatles fanatic as he proclaimed, for the ten-thousandth time, all his reasons for believing Revolver was their peak? My mom fucked John Lennon at an orgy once? He’d never believe me, but you know he’d hate me. And I’d probably have to explain what “fuck” meant. So, better to cede. To remain invisible.
The Puerto Ricans existed in a separate world, hidden from the rest of us behind a scrim of Spanish.
The Asian kids sat up front and talked to nobody, especially not one another.
Then finally there was that other klatch of kids, children of the impoverished gentry, journalists, actors and graduate students, painters and poets, photographers, a whole multiracial class of New Yorkers that was, then as now, low on cash but high on cultural capital. They’d been raised to embody their parents’ ideals, a liberal humanism that, as they aged, was supposed to colonize the world. They transcended race and creed, were bound instead by their exquisite taste, their precocious facility with the language of art and fashion and cool. Their sense of destiny. In another life, they would’ve been my people. Instead all they gave me was the cold comfort of their knowing my name, what it signified, why they should snub me for it.
And this was the education you got at public school. Not reading or writing or arithmetic but a practical initiation into social theory. You learned to recognize your tribe and the danger of trying to transcend it. Stay in your box, love it, let it shape you. Hold your resentments tightly. There’s power in the mob. Protection. Out on your own you’re gonna get trampled. The one thing you couldn’t do was think for yourself.
In that context, I was a tribe of one. A feral dog. I bit. I threw flailing punches, even at girls. Instead of fear, I provoked only laughter.
The administrators, that fucking vice principal and the social workers, even my teacher, Ms. Rice—not a cruel woman, just dim enough to confuse the existence of rules with their value—all of them at some point called my mother to discuss my unhinged behavior, to send me off with her and rid themselves of the problem. Sometimes she was home and sometimes she wasn’t. When she was, she sometimes answered the phone. And when she did, she was sometimes willing to trek over and retrieve me.
Other times, she left me to sit in the corridor outside the principal’s office with its three stiff chairs and giant clock on the wall. And then, when two-thirty came I might still be there for an hour or two more, listening to the sound of the other children rioting in the halls gradually thin to an empty echo, waiting for the moment when the office secretary finally released me so she could go home.
But maybe, just maybe, my mother would pick me up, listen to what I’d done and fight back on my behalf. “I heard you,” she’d tell them. “You keep saying the same thing. He threw the ruler. What I don’t understand is why. What did the other kid do? Do you even know? Freedom must’ve been provoked. Do you even care? You’re treating the symptoms, but you know what, I think maybe you’re the disease.”
Oh, how they must have loathed her.
But not me. I didn’t hold my mother’s absences against her. Those times when she did show up and stand up for me were enough. Later, at home, I knew, she’d give me back my gun. She might even wrap me in her arms and tell me I was brave. That I was righteous. That Lenny would be proud of me.
* * *
—
Sometimes after school, I’d go outside and there would be Phil leaning against the sagging chain-link fence. No matter the weather, rain or snow or sleet or sun, he’d be dressed in his uniform, those old work boots, that stained blue shirt, that greasy jacket.
He’d wave me over and say, “Looks like it’s you and me today, Freddy. Your mom got hung up. Let’s make the most of it.” He’d kneel down and reach behind my ear to flip out a quarter—something he’d learned to do in his lonely, sickly youth. “W-We could find some creative way to spend this,” he’d say.
And we’d go to the Gem Spa so I could load up on candy. We’d run through the neighborhood, jumping in puddles if it was raining, letting ourselves get soaked to the bone. We’d cut through the projects on Avenue D, dodge traffic on the service road below the FDR, climbing the concrete dividers to get to East River Park where we’d stand by the railing at the edge of the river and watch the rain pelt the surface of the water.
Then, maybe the sun would break through and Phil would say, “Look at that. The forces of good strike again.” He’d drop a hand onto my shoulder. “Let’s go someplace warm where we can dry off.”
What he meant, sometimes, was we were headed to his pad on Clinton Street, a third-floor walk-up looking out on the Williamsburg Bridge. We’d navigate the maze of newspapers he warehoused there—twelve years’ worth, stacked like roman walls, dividing his apartment into smaller and smaller chambers. And we’d sit by the window on stools made of newsprint and watch the Brooklyn-bound traffic pile up and start to glow, listening as the horns and sirens punctuated the merengue that the Dominicans who ruled the block played as a soundtrack to their eternal stoop-sitting, dominos-playing party. The screech of city life.
When winter hit he’d make us hot cocoa, spiking his cup with vodka.
He’d leave me be. Let me rummage through the papers searching for treasure while he scribbled in his notebook across the room. When I fell asleep, he’d carry me home to my mother.
Other times, what he meant was let’s find a bar.
Understand: We were living in seedy times. Kids I knew were skipping school to play the ringer in their uncles’ three-card-monte rackets, happy to be paid off in sour-apple Now and Laters from the corner bodega. Kids whose landlords had cut the heat to their apartments hid out for weeks on end in the school’s boiler room, giving the creepy janitor blow jobs in exchange for keeping warm through the night. They ran in packs through the shells of burned-out buildings, crunching over shattered glass until their sneakers were encrusted with razor-sharp shards, jumping from one rooftop to another until someone died. Compared to that, fucking around in a bar—picking at the duct-taped booths at Blue & Gold, say, playing elaborate games of solitaire with the pool balls, drawing pictures in my own mouth-steam on the mirrors—while Phil slammed happy-hour drinks was nothing.
So he was a drunk and a slob. So he was endlessly, fatally consumed with self-pity. So what? There was something luxuriously stable, more stable than anything else in my young life, about hunkering down for a two- or three-hour stretch behind the clouded windows of an empty dive with him. And I didn’t know—I mean, nobody knew—how close he was to spinning off the edge of the world.
Think about what he’d been through at this point. A lonely kid whose parents had dragged him all over the place as they tried to outrun their secret selves. Never staying put l
ong enough to feel like he had a home. But circling back, time and time again, to Columbus, Ohio. That’s where he defined himself. So there was that kid. Sensitive, intelligent. Steeped in the lore of the American West, all those cowboys and Indians and railroad men and hucksters, speculators and miners and unions and union busters. A solitary Jew in a cold Calvinist place where if he learned anything it was that the mechanistic gears of society would grind you into sausage if you were at all different from those around you. Unless you were rich, and odds are you weren’t. He wasn’t. He spent his childhood hiding in the movie palace, projecting his own psyche onto the images of Brando and James Dean towering over him. Willing himself to one day be like them. Valuable, even in his insignificance. Necessary. An agent of change.
And he brought to New York what he had to give. An acoustic guitar. A whole lot of desire for something to believe in. Imagine the moment when he first stepped onto the stage at Cafe Wha? and gazed in terror at the strangers, all so much more worldly than himself, crowded around the wobbly tables in the dim light. He knew he was outmatched. But he steadied his nerves, mounted that guitar like a machine gun against his shoulder and let his thin baritone float into the room. A tragic sound. Someone cruel could have broken it like stomping out an ant. Instead, they listened as he earnestly crooned about the Cuban Missile Crisis. They heard the yearning in his voice, the pangs of longing for a society uncorrupted by the coercion of empire, and they knew he was naïve but they loved him for it. They saw courage in it. This naïveté, it had to be protected. Phil might be the one they’d been waiting for, the idiot savant who could march them back to Eden.