by Joshua Furst
“Bottle caps, huh?” she said. “Buttons? A hunk of cement picked up off the street?” If I told her they protected me, she would’ve laughed in my face, plucked them off the dash and thrown them down the gutter. Chastising my weakness. The garishness of my need.
“I like them,” I said. “I’ve given them all names.”
Deflection. Deniability. She could respect that. Eventually she grew to see their charm. How they guarded the compound. How behind the line, sunk inside the Pinto’s charred and rusty carcass, you could almost believe you were in a different world.
We spent a lot of time in there. It got to be so that if I couldn’t find her kicking around the neighborhood, I knew I could just wait there in the backseat and she’d show up. Maybe neither of us would cop to it out loud, but we depended on each other. My safe place became hers. That’s how intimate we were.
Sometimes when we talked we’d expose our deeper selves. Or I did. I compulsively babbled about, oh, I don’t know. How unstable my mother was. How impossible it was to be the boy she wanted when that boy was really Lenny and I’d never match him. How sad I was that he was gone. And Phil, too. What was wrong with me, with her? That we’d been abandoned? But what had we done? Maybe it was the fact that we existed. I poured out my maudlin, incoherent self to Rosalita. And maybe she stopped short of comforting me, but she also stopped trying to toughen me up. Her silence served as a kind of compassion. I felt, however meekly, like I was being held.
“He’s gonna come back,” I told her. More than once. “Lenny’s gonna come back and get us. When it’s safe.”
And if I wondered about her reciprocal pain, well, she found other ways to communicate it to me.
“You know what the backseats of cars are for?” she asked one day.
“It’s where the kids sit,” I said.
“No, goof, it’s where you get laid.” This term was new to both of us. She used it lusciously, like a magical new toy. “You know. Like fucking.” She made a circle with one hand and jabbed her finger back and forth inside it.
I must have looked dumbstruck in that moment ’cause she pressed on. “You wanna try it?”
Well, no, I didn’t. But I couldn’t turn down a dare—not from her.
We took our clothes off. In the tight confines of the car we kept bumping into each other, a foot to the shin, a shoulder to the gut. Down to our underwear, we both stopped. Partly, it was too cold. Partly, I don’t think either of us was ready for whatever came next. We’d seen it done by grown-ups. That wasn’t the problem. What it was, was it felt dirty, even for us, even though we’d seen each other’s privates before, touched them even. This little space in the back of this burned-out car with each other—it was the closest thing either of us had to innocence. Reckless and stupid as we might’ve been, we knew enough to think twice about forsaking it.
So we shivered there, rubbing out goose bumps, not sure what to do next.
“Have you done this before?” I asked.
“All the time.” Another boast. Who knows if it was true. “Lumps sometimes does it to me. And Stinger.”
The other times, when we’d played doctor or whatever, we’d only shown each other quick flashes of ourselves. Now, seeing her stripped down to her Wonder Woman panties, I noticed scars along her rib cage, a string of circles. She must’ve seen me looking. She crossed her arms over them.
We sat like this for what seemed like forever. Getting colder. I think it even started to snow. I remember fiddling with my AK-47, flicking the plastic safety latch back and forth. Just something to do. A distraction from her. And eventually the tedium overwhelmed what had come before, and little by little we put our clothes back on and when we saw each other again, which we did, all the time, we acted like that day had never existed.
A secret. Something I could call my own.
There were casualties everywhere. Not just us. Not just the dead rock gods. It was the spirit of the times.
Unless you got out like Sy or took off for the country to play at utopia, you lived under siege. You lost track of all connection between yourself and the larger movements of society. Within the fourteen square blocks I called home, the concept of normal took on a sickly shade. As long as I didn’t leave, I didn’t notice, but one step west of the Bowery, one peek above 14th, and I was immediately confronted by the evidence of how alien and inscrutable I had become.
You have to understand, we didn’t realize we were casualties. We thought—or my mother did—that the war was still raging, and despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we believed we were still going to win. Like I said, we were under siege. We figured we could wait it out, and once it was over, pick up the good times right where we’d left them.
And maybe this was the freedom Lenny and my mother had dreamed of, but it felt to me more like a wasting away into nothingness. At Woodstock Lenny’d famously told everyone not to eat the brown acid. But we did. We all did. Someone had dosed the water. A constant steady stream of psychedelic gibberish.
People who were there one day would be gone the next.
Sable, the tranny with shaky hands and cracked nails. She’d been a lesser satellite in Warhol’s orbit once. Now she lived in a dank basement apartment on 11th Street, shooting speed and constructing sad-eyed dolls out of burlap and cotton balls—intricate creatures with molded faces and hand-sewn gowns and hair clipped from Sable’s own head. They ached with something like a desire to live. She carried them with her on her jaunts around the hood like they were part of her. One day, or so the rumor went, a couple of bridge-and-tunnel pricks snatched one of the dolls from her arms. Goaded her into a game of Keep Away. I wasn’t there, I didn’t see it, but word was when they got bored of watching her plead, one of them faked handing Sable the doll back, let her get hold of a leg and pulled like mad. The doll ripped apart at the seam. Stuffing floated off down the street. Sable screamed like she’d just witnessed a murder, which maybe she had. We all heard her shrieking, even from blocks away. And after that you just didn’t see her anymore.
Or Moishe Kirschenbaum, a shell-shocked escapee from the Hasidic precincts of Brooklyn. He might as well have been from Neptune. He couldn’t understand the most basic facts of secular American society. All he knew was that it must be better than the place he’d come from. A big motherfucker—six-six, thin as paper. In the ’60s he’d been in a protest band. He played the jug. The kazoo. The Jew’s harp. Now he pedaled around the neighborhood on his bicycle, all got up in costume—a Groucho mask pulled over his long donkey face, a shabby yellow leotard, rainbow-striped circus pants ripped at the crotch. I watched him scale the pedestal at the corner of Tompkins Square Park one morning and perch there, curled up like a praying mantis. I went to school. I came home. I went back out to the bodega for a Yoo-hoo. All day long, every time I walked past, there he was, not moving, not even blinking. Just one among a hundred bizarre things I saw him do. If anyone had cared, he’d have been carted off to Bellevue, but here, he was just part of the topography. Until one day, you asked yourself, where’d Moishe go? Feels like weeks since I’ve seen him. And you’d ask around and everyone said the same thing. And you’d be stuck with that question for the rest of your life.
Or Hank Palmer, the fat junkie who’d been eighty-sixed from the Angels for reasons unknown. He hung out at the St. Mark’s Bar & Grill, where the Stones later filmed their “Waiting on a Friend” video. Took a hot-shot in the bathroom there and died. They couldn’t get him out. He was too obese. Had to bust the wall down to make a hole big enough to slide his body through. The kids from the neighborhood, we all stood and watched.
Pastor Paolo, Rico the Ferret, Sally Sturges and Little Mickey Moonbeam. More. You heard about them all the time, out on the street, around the block.
Death was coming.
It would get worse, you could sense it.
Whatever was going right and what
ever was going wrong, you’d look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if it would be your turn next.
I remember my mother staring down that question, struggling with her paltry alternatives.
She had no one to talk to, so she talked to me. Processing. Using the new lingo of self-improvement. “I’ve been working on getting in touch with myself,” she’d say as she sat on her windowsill, toying with the leaves of the half-dead fern. “And I’ve started to realize, maybe I resent him. Subconsciously. Because…it’s like this: We thought of ourselves as Bonnie and Clyde. That’s what we used to say. ‘Let’s go down together in a hail of bullets.’ Turns out we’re not. We’re just Clyde. Clyde and his sidekick. He can take her or leave her. And what’s Bonnie supposed to do while Clyde’s away? Change Clyde Jr.’s diapers. Keep the coffee warm. Spend her evenings polishing the gun she’ll probably never use again. And I’m miserable, Freddy. You see that, don’t you? I have no purpose.”
It was no use to cry, What about me? What about being my mom? Isn’t that a purpose? Isn’t that hard enough? She wouldn’t have heard me. She couldn’t see me as separate from herself.
Who knows how high she was. She saw things most clearly while she was speeding. Or not clearly, lucidly. Her premises might be wrong but her arguments were sound, her conclusions compelling enough to spur her toward action. But when she did act, she behaved erratically. Grasping for reasons to justify her descent.
No, that’s not fair. She really was, in her addled way, looking for something to throw her belief into. She’d built her faith around the revolution. She couldn’t bear the thought that it had fallen apart.
More and more, she fixated on her friend Isha. They hadn’t talked in months, hadn’t seen each other since that tricky period before the world knew that Lenny had gone underground. None of that mattered. In my mother’s neo-mythic imagination, she and Isha—they shared the same vision. Together they could launch a targeted assault on the unequal system in which they were both trapped.
She chattered about this too, sometimes when it was just us, alone in the apartment, waiting out the night. Making plans. Hypothetical. Notional. Fantasies. Nothing big. Nothing dramatic. The time for theatrical ploys was over.
“We’ll start with small stuff,” she’d say. “Things we can accomplish. Isha and I, these past few years, we’ve known how hard it is. We can use that. Our experiences as single mothers. And the two of us, the very fact of us—one black woman, one white, both fierce as hell—we’ll remind people what the real issues are. Poverty. Poor women. The ones waiting all day at the welfare office. Begging the bodega guy to convert their food stamps into cash. Clothing their kids from the dollar store. All those women the rich, famous libbers mock with their talk of having it all. We’ll hold teach-ins. We know how to do that. Community building. We’ll perform street-level interventions, showing these forgotten women how to beat the system, and…”
Sometimes she’d lose the thread. She’d articulate stray ideas, complaints, sorrows. Like, “The whole conversation takes place within a value system that reinforces capitalist imperatives.” Or, “I’m so sick of being told I’ve failed at life just because I’m not rich and liberal.”
And then she’d wait like she somehow thought I had something intelligent to say.
Sometimes she got emotional, sentimental, like drug fiends do. She’d tear up. “Oh, Freddy. Oh, my sweet, kind boy. I’m tired. I can’t tell you how tired I am. But”—a rally, the will to go on—“once Isha and I put our heads together, you’ll see. It’s all gonna work out.”
At first it was just talk. Then she started calling. Impulsively. At odd, inappropriate hours. Isha never answered. She was never home. Her son, Amari, he of the Fisher-Price reparations, picked up sometimes. He always had a reason she couldn’t come to the phone.
Finally, one morning we marched up to Harlem to knock on her door.
I remember the tenement building they lived in, so much like our own, the same broken front door and the same mounds of trash spilling out under the stairway. The hall lights were shattered. The windows cracked and painted over. Drips of orange-brown syrup clung to the walls. The steps were covered in black mottled scum. Except for the smells—fried fish, stewed greens, not a whiff of boiled cabbage—we might as well have been on the Lower East Side.
We curled up the stairs to the third floor. Knocked. Nothing. Knocked again. Still nothing. Hopped up, anxious, my mother put her ear to the door and listened. She knocked again, harder, using her fist, and finally someone responded. Amari.
“Whatchu want?” he said. He didn’t open the door.
“It’s Suzy,” my mother said. “Snyder. Your mom’s friend. I’ve been calling.”
We lingered, waiting.
“Whatchu want?” Amari said again.
“I’ve got Freddy here with me. We were in the neighborhood. I figured we should stop by and say hello.”
Another lag and then the sound of the locks shifting and the door opened an inch and pulled tight against its chain. Amari’s amber eye, cold and wary. His ridged forehead. Sizing us up.
“See? It’s us,” said my mother. “Can we come in?”
“Mama ain’t here.”
Above us a door slammed shut and the energy in the hallway changed. It was like we’d transgressed and were about to be caught. We kept waiting. A pruned old woman in a housedress creaked down the stairs, bouncing a squeaky cart full of laundry in front of her. She glanced at us. Sniffed. In Harlem, as in Brooklyn, the only white folk who ever came around were nuns and social workers, cops, parole officers. We weren’t any of those. We were intruders. She walked on, hobbling, struggling with the cart on the steps, not saying a word, warding us off with silence.
“You sure your mom’s not here?” my mother said. “I’d really like to see her.”
“You callin’ me a liar?”
“We could wait for her. How is she? Can you tell me that?”
“No.”
They went back and forth like this. Around and around. The longer Amari lingered there, the more obvious it became that Isha was inside. I remember wondering what he was hiding, what he was afraid of, what darkness he was trying to protect. Casualties. There were casualties everywhere. The best minds of every generation. That’s the way it goes. I know that now.
Years later, on the last album he dropped before he was killed, Amari recorded a song that laid it all out. A slow groove. Plaintive. Simple and direct. Isha, he said, almost but not quite singing. It means purity, gift of god. He used Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me,” with its exhausted air of defeat, for the hook. And rapping above the beat, he told the story of Isha’s decline. How she’d run on the diesel of the black-power movement, holding steady through the fires on all sides. How when the pigs gunned daddy down, she refused to hate. You taught dignity, stand tall, rise up, don’t be swept away. How he tried to take her word on that, but Mama, it was hard to watch you turn it all back on yourself. He talked about the rot deep in her bones. How she treated herself to the life she believed she deserved: hard drugs and harder dealers and open sores. No more dignity left to lose. She’d just been trying to survive. Mama, you loved me. His voice ached with emotion. Oh mercy mercy me. He’d tweaked the lyrics. Things ain’t how they s’posed to be.
It struck me, that song. Just how much Isha and my mother had had in common. How similar their paths had been, though Isha’s was worse. I think about it a lot.
And I remember, while we stood there outside their door, wondering what I’d do if Isha and Amari showed up unexpectedly at ours. Would I let them in? If it meant they’d see my mother bouncing off the ceiling? No. I wouldn’t. I’d do the same thing Amari was doing. I was him. He was me. Both of us fighting to save our mothers. Neither of us equipped to even think about how to go about it. And I remember understanding, even then, that we’d never discuss this, never be allies, not ev
en friends, any more than my mother and Isha ever would be again.
My mother, though, she couldn’t see this. Her need was too great. She’d taken the risk to drag us up there and beg for the help she needed to save herself from herself. Having done so, she couldn’t see anything except her goal.
She was pleading now. She’d jammed one foot in the crack to make sure Amari couldn’t slam the door in her face.
“You got to go,” he kept saying. “Lady, you got to go. Leave us alone.”
And my mother, in response, said, “Just tell her it’s me. It’s Suzy. She’ll understand. She knows me. Just tell her, please? You’ll see. Please. She knows me. She’ll want to see me.”
Muscling the door. The two of them. Pushing and pulling until finally the chain broke or the latch came loose or something happened to it to send it flying open—Amari falling back on his heels, tumbling, trying not to lose his balance. And there was Isha, hunched on a sofa, watching it all through glazed eyes.
“She don’t want to see you,” Amari said. Now he was the one who was pleading. “She don’t need no help from whitey.”
The violence of the struggle, and the sight of Isha there in front of her, half-gone—my mother was stunned. Speechless. Unable to move. She saw now, with an indelible clarity, that she shouldn’t have come here.
“Leave us alone,” Isha said. “You’ve got nothing to give us.”
She was right. My mother couldn’t help her. She couldn’t help my mother. Whatever had united them in the past was fractured now. Everyone was on their own.
* * *
—
We got lucky.
Seeing Isha like that rattled my mother enough to propel her out of the house in search of a job. Or a sort-of job. She volunteered at Sister’s. Stood by her principles and bartered her labor for the greater good. Made just enough to cover the rent.