Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  He cut an album. Then another. And another after that. He experienced the doubled, contradictory sensation of being celebrated—sometimes, it seemed, worshipped—for his humility before the cause. Hitching rides out to union rallies in Kentucky. Or riding the bus all the way down to Ole Miss to stir up support for Snick, strumming the whole way, leading the sing-alongs, getting that Greyhound to buzz with bottled joy. That’s when he saw the real-world effects of his evangelism.

  The problem with causes, though, is that they derive their meaning from what they achieve. The foot soldiers, those people whose aggregate passion fuels the change, might find satisfaction—or regret—after the fact in the roles they played in affecting this change, but they’d be wise to beware building their identities around the communal spirit in which the cause thrives. They might find themselves trapped, alone, in a movement that’s vanished, wondering where everyone else has gone. Some people recognize this danger from the start. They ride the spirit of the age for all it’s worth, taking what they can for their own gain. And by the time everybody else realizes it’s over, they’re already done and gone.

  Dylan, that wily cracker, was one of these types. He and Phil had arrived on the scene at the same time. They were friendly, early on, could almost have been called friends. But what Dylan knew, and what Phil could not comprehend, was that they were rivals. Only one could win. Phil didn’t want to win. He wanted to contribute. To the cause. The future. That thing greater than the self. He thought this was what everyone wanted.

  When you’re the rube in the presence of the cynic, you catch glimmers of the spite they harbor toward you. And as they keep succeeding and you stay the same, you begin to crave their approval. You give them your power and beg them to share it. But since they were never all that into sharing, they keep it and use it to make themselves stronger. Phil began molding his choices around the delusional idea that if he played things just right, he’d gain Dylan’s blessing and be redeemed in his eyes. He gave himself away, allowed himself to become the supplicant to the more charismatic man standing next to him.

  Always the believer but now no longer sure where that belief led, Phil cut some more albums. Less topical now. More darkly poetic.

  He bound himself to Lenny and Sy and their kamikaze circus, took in their exhortations to be the change, to do the only reasonable thing this world allowed and reject all reason. He cheered them on as they declared the war was over. What war? There’s no war. Make a wish and poof, it’s gone. When they mounted a greased pig on the stage at their rallies and proclaimed, If the president of the United States is gonna squeal and smell like a pig, whaddaya say we go whole hog! Let’s put this fucker in charge! Phil strummed along on his guitar, a one-man backup band. He was happy to be their bard. To wrap the belief—the hope—he still couldn’t shake in their cynicism and absurdity.

  That worked for a while, but we all know what happened. The jackboots were called out. Autocratic power, both overt and covert, kicked the life out of everything beautiful in the land. A lesson in raw political reality that Phil had ignored for far, far, far, far too long.

  He lost his confidence. Dylan, then Johnson, then Nixon stripped it from him. The only one who never let him down was Lenny, and for reasons Phil couldn’t fathom, Lenny had turned on him and closed himself off. By the early ’70s, the movement was in crisis. Smoke and tear gas clogged the air. Community had fractured and hope had fled.

  He tried throwing his energy into the conflict in Chile, inspired by Salvador Allende’s refusal to be tamed, and more, awestruck by Victor Jara, the Chilean national folk singer. Celebrated. Worshipped. Most crucially, listened to. Like Dylan, if Dylan hadn’t forsaken the movement.

  In Jara, Phil saw a version of the person he could have been if the revolution here had succeeded. And in Chile, he saw a version of what America could’ve been if it had chosen the right singer to lead it into the new age. He met the man down there once, and the first thing Jara did was embrace him by the forearms and tell him he’d always preferred him to Dylan. That his music had been a great motivation to him, a comfort, keeping him warm, sustaining his faith through the cold, dark years before Allende’s rise to power.

  Imagine.

  And imagine the associations that fizzled in Phil’s mind when he heard that in the days after the coup, Jara had been arrested, that he had been taken to a soccer stadium along with thirty thousand other believers and paraded in front of them. Here, gaze on your singer, listen to his song, hear how it speaks of your dreams, hopes and ideals, feel the emotion it stirs within you, now watch—closely—and learn.

  Imagine the lesson Phil took from Jara’s death, how they’d prompted him to strum his guitar and sing, how they’d braced his hands on a table, and with a machete, sliced them from his body. Here you see what good your song can do you. Here you see what we think of your hopes and dreams. Instead of chastened, Jara was emboldened. He used what he had left. If he couldn’t play guitar, he could still sing. So he did, and they shot him. He kept singing, and they shot him again. And still he sang. They shot him thirty-seven times until the words fell from his mouth in ribbons of blood, until he was dead, and with him Phil’s last hope for anyone’s redemption. He could trace the lines—he’d done so long before they martyred Jara. ITT, Bank of America, CIA, Pinochet. He understood that if they could do this in Chile, they could—and they would—do it here.

  So where did that leave Phil? What was left for him? Where was his path forward? He suspected the answer was nowhere, nothing, nowhere. What do you do with the time you have left when you know your life’s over yet you still have to go on living?

  Everyone’s an asshole in one way or another. Phil was less of an asshole than most. He was kind. He was patient with me. I didn’t know from alcoholism. My parents were potheads. When Phil managed to keep himself half-sober, he took me to museums and talked about poetry. Mostly, like I said, we hung out in bars—the old Polish dives. Or Gerde’s on 4th Street, where out of pity they let him drink for free. Sometimes we ventured into enemy territory north of 14th Street to hole up in one or the other of the Irish steam-table joints on Second Avenue.

  He’d get a couple drinks in him—down a shot of vodka, half a second later a shot or two more, doubles probably, I was too young to tell the difference. And if he was in the mood, he’d wave me over to sit next to him, buy me a cranberry and soda and gaze at me, slack-jawed, a touch glassy already. This look on his bloated face, shy, like he was waiting for me to tell him my secrets. His eyes would drift off toward the bottles, his own distorted reflection in the mirror behind them, then on toward the ceiling, a slow floating away, before he combed his hand through his greasy hair and found his way back to me.

  He’d tap the bar with his thumb, breaking the spell he’d put himself under, and report on where he’d just been, some instant retrieved from the long-gone decade when he’d been virile and relevant and happy to be alive. Telling his story. All the stuff I just told you.

  Once in a while—well, maybe only once—he managed to coax himself out of the moist funk of nostalgia into an excitable urgency. It happened in an instant, like a gunshot going off in his head, a sudden edgy alertness that frightened me—so uncharacteristic of him—until I realized that this must’ve been the Phil he used to be.

  “Come on, Freddy,” he said, pushing off the bar. “I wanna show you something.”

  We lumbered out into the gray evening where the air tasted like ash and was too cold to smell. For a moment we stood there in front of the bar, wavering, unsure which direction to turn. The city felt timeless. A mist hanging over it. Steam leaking out of the manhole covers.

  Phil peered up 7th Street, first one way then the other. Off to the east, avenues away, he saw a minute flame. We trudged toward it.

  Walk far enough, or so he must have thought, and we’d arrive at a campfire. All his past and future friends would be there. His compa
triots. Huddled both for warmth and camaraderie around the blaze. They’d welcome him. Maybe even Lenny would be there, arms wide open, waiting for a rough slap-the-back hug. They’d ask him to sling his guitar off his shoulder and lead them in one more round of “I Ain’t Marching,” his anthem of peace, the one song everyone, even Dylan, had once revered. “Shucks,” he’d say, feigning bashfulness. He’d tip his head, physically digging toward the tune, and scoop us all up with his song. And I, a child and not even his own, would be granted the inheritance he’d feared was lost for good.

  By the time we arrived, though, there was nothing to see. Just another ash can filled with smoldering shit, a few scabby addicts poking around it, looking for a fix that wasn’t there.

  So I took him home. Just like every other time. Did what I could to repay him for all he’d done for me.

  At some point, sometimes early in the evening, sometimes far too late, his eyes would turn to wax and his heavy body would lurch against whatever was next to him, and it fell to me to guide him to safety. In the best case, all I had to do was roll him into a cab, coax his wallet from his pocket and pay off the driver. “Twenty-four Clinton Street,” I’d tell the guy. “Here’s an extra five bucks in case he throws up.” And I’d watch until they were gone down the avenue.

  Often, though, he flailed and resisted. “No! Not yet!” A petulant toddler.

  Or, if he was too gone to even get those words out, he’d jerk away, balancing on pins, and out of duty I’d trail after him. Listen to his babble. His conceptual leaps and drunken associations. Something about Marrakesh, maybe. About a boat. Some mystifying riddle about some long-ago promise he’d made to Lenny. All the while bumping him. Turning him. Tricking him in the right direction.

  And because the bars were always closer to 7th Street than Clinton, and because he was drunk and four times my size, the right direction meant my mother and my place.

  By the time we arrived he’d want another drink, a little nightcap, two fingers of vodka in the Underdog jar we kept just for him. More often than not, he forgot it was there before taking a single sip. He’d nod off in his chair. Turn into a bobblehead. Depleted, he’d have reached the point in the night, when what little consciousness he had left sent him reaching for my mother to wipe his sweats away and lay down next to him—not too close, just near enough to anchor him while the world swayed and spun.

  She called him the Malingerer.

  Like, “Ugh, is the Malingerer here again?”

  Or, “Sure would be nice if the Malingerer moved his fat ass to the couch so I could finally get some sleep.”

  I can’t say if she liked him. She endured him. She accommodated him.

  I remember on one night—it might’ve been the same night we went searching for the campfire—he was wasted and she was exhausted and he pressed her too far.

  The whole way home he’d mumbled about how “This isn’t me. Don’t see me like this. See me as…” Spacing. Unable to complete the thought. A blank where the self was supposed to be. Then rising anger. Not toward me. More a shallow belligerence. The drunk’s frustration with the gaps in his continuity. He fell on the stairs, barely catching himself. Then he fell again, this time against me and it took all my weight to leverage him upright. By the time we were at the door, whatever self-control he had left had fled.

  He lurched inside, saw my mother and yanked her by the hips, pulling her pelvis toward his own. He ground against her. Like he was in a trance. Lethargic, but pawing at her ass, her kidneys, her ribs. His head slumped on her shoulder. A heaving bear.

  She’d dealt with him drunk before. She knew how to shrug him off, to laugh and walk him like a three-legged dog into some corner where she could dump him in a heap. “Go pass out,” she told him. “Come on. This way, now.”

  He resisted. Pulled her tighter. He wouldn’t let her go.

  They grappled over who was in control of her body.

  “Seriously, Phil,” she said, “it’s not even like you can get it up.”

  He mumbled, “Lemmeoldyou.”

  “Too bad.” Placing a palm on his chest, creating space between them, she said, “It’s late. Sleep it off.”

  As she pulled away to look at him, to make sure he’d heard her, he tightened his grip. He kissed her. Slobbery, messy with need. Missing his target. Bumping foreheads. Trying again. His mouth on her chin.

  She couldn’t wiggle away. Even drunk he was too much for her to handle. “Stop it.” She said it again. “Stop it.”

  He fumbled at her breast. Slow half sentences oozed from his mouth, trailing toward nowhere.

  Again, “Stop it. Get the fuck off me.” And she sprang her body into a frenzy of motion, a mad spinning dance that culminated in her elbowing him in the face.

  For a moment it seemed almost like something was dawning on him. But no, it was just the furry silence of the drunk hearing too many voices in his head. He collapsed on her, all two hundred and sixty pounds of him draped over her body. Clinging.

  Then, somehow, he was crying.

  He slid down her body and sank to his knees. Howled. Some guttural animal sound, like a wound deep in his bowels was releasing its stench.

  “Why don’t you love me?” he wailed.

  Arms wrapped tight around her legs. Head tapping against her groin. Like she was a goddess and he was the wretched supplicant.

  “Why doesn’t Lenny love me?”

  He was beyond tears now. Silently heaving.

  And then, all at once, he toppled to the floor, out cold.

  She stood over him, fumes rising off her. She went like to kick him. She was wearing her boots. And just at the moment when her toe touched his gut, she pulled back and slumped against the sink.

  I gathered my courage. I asked her, “Why’d you do that?”

  “He’s a fucking idiot,” was all she said.

  She pitied him, but for all the wrong reasons. Something was wrong with him, sure, okay, but everyone I knew had something wrong with them. At least he’d remembered my birthday.

  After that night, he never came back.

  When I asked where he’d gone, she said, “Am I his keeper?”

  “Are you mad at him?” I asked.

  She said no. She looked at me like I was stupid. “Why should I be?” she said.

  And that was that.

  * * *

  —

  Without Phil to look forward to in the afternoons, I started skipping school altogether. Not every day—two or three days a week. I figured anyone who noticed would be happy I was gone. It’s not like I ever got in trouble for it.

  Somehow, on those days, I always ended up way out on 5th Street past Avenue C, wasting the hours away in a burned-out old Pinto there. My special place. Every kid had one. It had been there forever, just part of the landscape and somewhere along the line I formed a kind of intense sentimental attachment to it. There was just enough scorched vinyl left on the backseat to cover the springs so I could sprawl across it. Hidden. Invisible. Free to wallow in the honey-sweet muck of myself, the melodrama of my emotions.

  The signs were all around me—Lenny’s silence, Mom’s withdrawal, Phil’s abandonment, the prison pretending to be a school she’d sent me to, the post-apocalyptic turn the city had taken in which everything was either too hot or too cold, the violence everywhere, senseless, mundane, sometimes directed at strangers, sometimes at the self, sadomasochism on a governing societal scale—it all cascaded down on me, covered me like black snow. Eight years old and I knew hope was for suckers, I knew there was no future laid out for me, just scrabbling hunger. Picking through the ruins. A terrifying prospect. An overwhelming darkness. But here in my Pinto, my gun at my side, I felt cozy and safe.

  As time went by I accumulated a parade of totems, each one carefully lined up along the moonscape that had been the dashboard. A purple-haired tr
oll doll. A chunk of concrete shaped like a turtle. Buttons of all sorts that I’d found in the gutters. A white plastic Indian riding a horse, his bow drawn and aimed—my own Geronimo. Bottle caps I’d picked up on lucky days. All kinds of crap. To anyone strolling past it looked like nothing, but to me these items, like the car itself, contained drops of my more fragile emotions, the ones I was afraid might get beat out of me. They were sacred objects. They warded off the world. A tiny army protecting little me.

  I’d leave this place feeling centered, grounded, like the Zen clichés my mother spouted just might have something to them after all.

  And wherever I walked for the rest of the day, whatever new grotesque reality crossed my path, I was impenetrable, almost indifferent, able to observe it all from a distance. A junkie could nod off in the middle of the street, halfway through the crosswalk, like he’d forgotten he was going to the other side, and get hit head-on by a city bus trying to beat the yellow light; a man might be propped up against a brick wall, legs splayed out in front of him, arms limp at his sides, just hanging out, nobody paying him any mind, or so it seemed, until you saw the hole in his forehead, the trickle of blood crawling down the furrow between his eyebrows; a kid, a little girl, maybe, would be screaming at the top of her lungs, running frantically from storefront to storefront along Second Avenue, no parents anywhere in sight; whatever it was, it couldn’t affect me. Or, if it did, if my heart reached out, it couldn’t implicate me. I had enough bruises of my own not to take on more.

  Eventually, I’m not sure how, I introduced Rosalita to my special place. Showed her my secret things.