by Joshua Furst
At least we had food now. It was better than nothing.
I remember nights at Sister’s during those few good months, waiting around while my mother worked. Picking at the meatloaf she slipped in front of me. Making piles—the carrots here, the onions there, the mushrooms from the gravy far off to the side—until I could be sure my meat was pure. Then homework: workbooks for cursive and simple arithmetic. Rocking on the uneven legs of my chair until someone glanced my way.
The women at Sister’s were all about mother love. They didn’t mind my being there half the night. I was their pet.
Meg and Colleen and Nita and Violet. Billie, with the split ends, missing a bunch of teeth—you could feel the earth clinging to her broad flat feet, the old world rising through her, grounding everything she touched.
Misty and Juana, who might or might not’ve been a couple. They’d sit with me when it was slow and ask questions. “Whatcha learning? George Washington, huh. Whatcha think of him? You really believe he never told a lie?” Taking me as they found me and fawning over what they saw. “You’re so smart…so sensitive…such a good boy. You take care of that old mother of yours, don’t you?” Flattering me with their wishful assumptions.
I’d tap my water gun, there as always by my side, and say, “You betcha.” My favorite phrase. I’d heard it on TV.
They’d tell me about themselves, about the lives they’d lived. How Colleen had gotten that scar on her arm. Why Violet left Detroit and the many stops she’d made between there and this final, unexpected destination. “It ain’t much, but it’s ours,” she’d say, putting on a fake southern drawl to mock and camouflage the sincerity of her feelings. Then she’d laugh—sharp hiccups of sound—as though even that small crack had to be plastered over.
Even Sister herself—that’s all anybody called her—kept tabs on me. Coming up from the basement with a tray of lasagna, she’d throw me a benign eye and tick her cheek, two clucks like a gun cocking, as she strode by. She’d lean back on the counter and smile, not so much at me as at the space she’d created. Like, This, all this. It’s my little miracle.
And it was, I guess.
These women, each and every one of them, had lived hard. But somehow guided by Sister’s vision, they’d carved out a space for themselves, a humble corner where it didn’t matter what kind of messes they were. A cozy feminine benevolence pervaded, radical in its compassion and lack of judgment. They could heal, or not. Whatever they wanted.
My mother stood apart. Skeptical. She’d always felt she was more one of the boys. This squishy acceptance, it made her nervous. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to feel safe.
I’d watch her run the register or work the slop station, holding herself that little bit apart from the others. They’d tease her—Juana or Meg, the cutups of the group—throwing an arm over her shoulder and striking a pose, waiting for her to seethe and tell them to buzz off. Or they’d ask about Lenny, had she heard from him, was he safe, had Kunstler worked his magic yet? “We don’t know how you do it, believing in him like this, when the whole world’s saying you should just forget him.” They’d push it. “You’ve got a will of steel. We admire you. No way in hell would I wait for a man like that, but hey—”
Mom let them see her smirk. “Give me a fucking break,” she’d say. “I’m an idiot.”
“You said it, not me. But you know? Somebody’s got to stand up for those oppressed men.”
Getting to her. Playing their angles.
But they’d send pies home with us. Plates heavy with leftovers.
On my mother’s thirty-second birthday, Sister baked her a cake. Angel food. Marshmallow frosting.
“I don’t want this,” my mother said. “I’m not going to celebrate.”
“It’s your Jesus year,” they said. “Celebrate that.”
“I’m a Jew. What do I care about that motherfucker?”
And knowing how to turn her frown upside down, Juana, or maybe it was Meg, winked and said, “You cared enough to kill him. Think about that.”
So celebrate they did, blasting Aretha and Diana Ross late into the night, drinking too much cheap wine and watery beer. They weren’t proud. That was their beauty and their strength. Even my mother danced—low, leading with her hips.
I watched that place do its work on my mother. Not quite softening her. More like surrounding her with softness.
And then, at home, all she’d do was complain about them. “It’s like a cult. Don’t you think, Freddy? All those good intentions? If I don’t watch out they’ll turn me into a lesbo. Hah. Well, no, but…”
She’d shake her head and glare at the floor and I’d know she was thinking about what champs they all were. Billie, with her ever-changing cast of violent men, and Colleen, skittish like a kitten lost on the battlefield, and Misty and Juana, so suspiciously happy. Sister herself, who must’ve reminded my mother of Lenny, a quieter, less grandiose version of Lenny. All of them.
It had to have been humiliating for her. She must’ve ached, seeing Sister hold tight to her irrational dreams.
But she kept going back. For the money, sure, what there was of it, but also for the friendship. For—and I mean this sincerely—the freedom.
She was getting herself clean.
Six weeks in Sister’s care and she risked dreaming again. She risked thoughts of the future. Risked revving her engine just a touch to see if it still worked.
And that was when this came in the mail:
Petulant—
Enough with the silence! It’s unbearable. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, a hundred times, a thousand: you and I are the same person. The same heart. The same mind. If I can’t bounce my sense of the world off of you, I’m lost.
You understand me? I’m lost, Susan. Weeks go by and I remain catatonic. I can’t write. I can’t read. I can’t even think. If the Queen weren’t here, I most likely wouldn’t eat. She makes me soups. She watches to make sure I get them down. They taste like bitterness. My own personal gruel.
I need you.
I don’t know why you’ve forsaken me. Maybe it’s just the distance and the troubling consequences of what must feel to you like a never-ending trail of government persecution. Maybe you lost faith and decided I’m not worth the trouble. I could understand that. It wouldn’t be like you, but I could understand it. What I can’t understand is why you’d cut off all contact with no explanation at all. Don’t you realize what that does to my mind?
Is it the Queen? She’s not a threat to you. Love’s not a rare commodity like gold. It’s constantly replenishing. The more you let it into your life, the more you have to give. Even if this weren’t true, my heart’s big enough to contain you both. You should be happy she’s here keeping me alive. It’s a helluva job and she’s wondrous at it. She’s like a custodian, keeping me oiled and running until you and I can be reunited.
I don’t think it’s this, though. We’ve shared ourselves with enough other people through the years that I’d know by now if you were the jealous type.
So what is it? The money? If I had any lying around, you’d be the first to know, okay?
Please, talk to me. Send me a locket of your hair.
—Your Ever-Loving Two-Hearted Fool
And this:
Olive Oyl,
Got the blues. Can’t shake ’em. I’m not myself—don’t know who I am. People talk about the legendary Lenny Snyder and I think to myself, do I know that guy? Feels like I used to. Would I recognize him if I saw him on St. Marks? Would he recognize me? He’d think I’m a square. That’s the straight dope. Nebbishy, afraid. Some hick who couldn’t possibly know the score.
I’ve lost myself out here in the high plains—and no, that’s not a clue, it’s a metaphor. Seems like this whole country is high plains nowadays. The air’s thin. The war’s far away.
I need to see you. I need to see the kid. See my face in his and remember who I am.
It’s all I live for.
—Popeye
It was like he could sense her pulling away and he couldn’t resist the temptation to remind her that her life had been indelibly marked by him. When he got no response from her, he upped the ante.
Daffodil,
Are you free the weekend of April 19? I am! And I want to see you!
Come. I don’t care about the risk. Just come.
I’ve already worked out all the details with Kunstler. For obvious reasons, they’re complicated. Among other things you’ll have to find a car. Just ask him and he’ll fill you in. In person! No phones!
Is that a yes I hear? Yes? Yes! YES!!
I’ll see you then? Can’t wait! And the Queen can’t wait to meet you!
—Honey Bee
P.S. Bring the kid. I’ve got a baseball we can throw around.
I remember watching her after she read this. Her waving the sheet of yellow legal paper at me and jabbing at it with her finger. There was a violence to her excitement.
“What did I tell you, Freddy? Didn’t I say everything would work out?”
She stomped off to the stereo and blasted the tunes. Collapsed on the couch with her head flung back, and let Richie Havens’s frenetic guitar work carry her away to that fantastic future she’d almost lost faith in.
This was vindication. A big fuck you to all those people who’d tried to convince her to rebuild her life without him. The cynics and realists and pansy-ass healers. Hell, at one point, even Kunstler had suggested she give up hope.
Fuck them.
Fuck them all.
We were gloriously free.
Lenny had called us home. Just like he’d promised. Would we go? It wasn’t even a question.
But first, one more thing about Phil:
There’d been times when I thought everything would be better if he’d just come around like he used to. But he never did. Not after that brutal night with my mother.
When I think of him now, I imagine him stewing in that apartment on Clinton Street, boxed in by stacks of The New York Times, taking slugs of vodka out of a chipped coffee mug. Drunk and sentimental, he’d swipe a paper off one of the stacks and gaze at the headlines. Watergate, My Lai, Gerald Ford. Dylan’s second—or was it his third—comeback. They mocked Phil, these stories of power and import. Even when they revealed necessary truths, they distorted them. Bolstering the system that encouraged the corruption they’d been sworn to expose. Flattering—placating—the tone-deaf liberals who, trapped between their good intentions and their desire for comfort, depended on the paper for proof of their righteousness. All the news that’s fit to print. Hah! The beautifully delusional arrogance of it all.
I imagine Phil stumbling around his apartment, thinking, to the degree that he could still think at all, that he’d had the wrong critique. Told the wrong story. They’d edited him out. Called him a buffoon—not even worth condescending to. And they were right. He knew it. He’d thought kindness was a virtue. As though something greater than his ego was at stake. He should’ve learned from Dylan, from Lenny, to use the machine, make it all about him, tie the drama of his own life to the message. He should’ve played chess with the world and never appealed to goodness. Goodness always loses. You lost, Phil, he’d tell himself. Got just what you deserved. Despising the game doesn’t make you a winner.
I imagine him stumbling through that dark apartment, bumbling into the artifacts of his past. The notebooks full of old aborted ideas, the guitar, the newspapers, newspapers everywhere, warped, water-stained, yellow at the edges. Lyrics sliding around inside his brain, not his, Dylan’s…there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all…They nicked and cut…you got a lot of nerve…you had no faith to lose and you know it…He knew them better than he did his own.
And I imagine him tripping over his own feet, falling into the stacks of papers. Unable to get up. Not even wanting to. If someone had to pull his body through another day, let it be somebody else, not him. I imagine him passing out, hoping he was dying, and waking up the next day as a different man, cynical, with a sudden will to survive.
That’s what I think now. I don’t know what I thought then.
All I knew was that he’d cut my mother and me out of his life, and missing him gnawed at me so much that one afternoon I marched down to Clinton Street and pounded on his door. One touch and it flew open. The place was gutted. A gaping emptiness. The windows had been thrown wide, the dark burlap curtains torn down and piled in a mess along the wall. The only signs Phil had ever lived there were a page from the New York Post shellacked to the floorboards and a putrid carton of lo mein in the unplugged fridge.
I blamed my mother. I ran home to scream at her. “Where is he? What did you do to him? I hate you. Bring him back. I hate you.”
She tried to mollify me. “You know, Freddy, Phil’s a busy guy. He doesn’t owe us anything. When he wants to be in touch, he’ll find us, I’m sure.”
I wouldn’t hear it. “No he won’t. You did something. What did you do?” Shouting myself hoarse. I couldn’t conceive of adult complication. Life was an all-or-nothing venture to me. And when things went wrong there had to be a reason.
“Should we call him?” she asked, amused by my strong emotion.
“We can’t call him. He’s not there. I told you already.”
She went to the phone and picked up the receiver.
“He’s not there!”
She dialed one number, then another, teasing me.
“Mom!”
“So you don’t want me to call him?”
“He’s not there! All his stuff’s gone!”
“Well, there you go, Freddy. He’s moved. Maybe he’s gone back to LA.” Gauging how well her gambit had worked, and seeing I’d been stung, she placed the receiver back in its cradle and watched me some more.
“He would’ve said goodbye,” I said. “Why didn’t he say goodbye?”
She knelt. She pulled me toward her. “It means he loves you. When you grow up, you’ll see. People hate goodbyes. Goodbye means forever.”
What she didn’t tell me, what she’d been protecting me from, were the rumors she’d been hearing around town. How somebody had heard from somebody else who’d heard from somebody else right up the line that Phil had been spotted curled up in front of a basement storefront on Little West 12th, covered in his own urine, frozen half to death; how he’d been seen stalking McDougal with a hammer in his belt, accusing friends and strangers alike of having stolen something he called “the chimes,” how he’d tried to bludgeon Sy Neuman with that hammer and, later, Marcus Kirsh and even poor old Pete Seeger; how he carried a guitar case full of cash around with him now, spitefully flinging it open, throwing bills in the face of anyone who tried to talk some sense into him; how, most recently, she’d heard he’d holed up in the Chelsea Hotel, refusing to leave his room for any reason, getting his vodka delivered by the case from the liquor store down the street while he recorded a grand, rambling theory of his persecution by the Times, by Bob Dylan and the CIA and Interpol and MI6, by General Robert McNamara himself, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, LBJ, the whole kit and caboodle of pirate politicos, a frightening tale to hear, so said those who’d heard it, not because it was true but because of its pathetic logic, the hysterical reach of Phil’s complaint, drawing connections between himself and Che and Fidel in the Sierra Maestra, the Rosenbergs, Emma Goldman, Leo Frank and more, James Dean and Marilyn and Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, even Ralph Waldo Emerson, Guy Fawkes and Jean-Paul Marat and Joan of Arc, Robin Hood, Hassan the Assassin, Jesus Christ, a long continuous chain of martyrs tracing back to the days of Jeremiah, all of them blazing like heretics in the temples of the corrupt, all of them battling the same craven machers, a
ll of them losing, but winning by losing, all except Phil Ochs, who’d simply lost by losing, so said the man holding court in his fourth-floor room in the Chelsea Hotel, which was why he’d had to murder that coward in cold blood and take over the job Phil had been too weak to finish. He called himself John Traine now—that’s what she’d heard. And however sincere and generous Phil had been, Traine was just as spiteful and relentless. He’d transformed himself into a nasty piece of work whose self-hatred encompassed the entire world.
She told me none of this. Maybe, not having witnessed it firsthand, she refused to believe what they were saying on the street. Maybe she couldn’t bear to contemplate the role she may or may not have played in bringing him to this state, couldn’t face her culpability—if that’s what it was. She was free, we were free, everyone else was free to travel his or her individual path regardless of the hardship they heaped on themselves, and this had been meant to lead to liberation, to an open society where every human being, even the most deranged, was accepted. Maybe, not knowing how to help him, she ached so much that she hid the depths of his pain from herself. She was a person who cared. She’d seen so many casualties. Maybe she refused to admit that Phil might be one of them.
Whatever it was, when word came down that he was doing a secret gig at Gerde’s, she was reluctant to go. I begged and pouted until I got her to relent, which took less effort than it should have.
Typically, on the night of the show, she couldn’t get it together to motivate us out of the house. She changed costumes three times and struggled to get her eyeliner just right. Then she couldn’t find the keys. And the particular festive floppy hat she wanted to wear. She dawdled. Always one more thing to do before we left. This meant something to her too, seeing Phil again. Maybe she’d intuited that it was the end.
We made it finally out onto the street just to march right back upstairs and change into lighter jackets. Then, as we wandered across town, she decided we needed to eat something and she hustled me into a pizzeria.