Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  And then…Well, first she glanced at me, all wry and witty, like she was reminding me we had our own secret. She squeezed my hand. There was a sudden softness to her touch. And she took the bullhorn and gave her speech.

  I don’t know what the crowd thought they would hear. Some ode to Lenny. To the movement. Platitudes and bullshit. Inspiration. Hope.

  What they got instead was this: “You know…there was a time, not so long ago, when Lenny and I thought we were on the cusp of history. We could feel it, a vibration in the air, like every second was momentous, like each tick of the clock was going to change everything. And well…” She drifted, considering where she wanted to go with this. “I guess we did change a few things. We caused a few disruptions. But not in the way we thought we would. We believed too strongly that we were righteous. We thought we, ourselves, were the cause. That it was about us. That somehow, eventually, we’d pull off a transformative coup and absolutely everything would be different. We thought we could win, is I guess what I’m saying. But listen. No one wins. You can do some good things. That’s about it. And when we realized this we got a little lost.” She went on. She let her defenses down for those few minutes, just long enough to show these people she’d survived, that she was capable of survival. She and Lenny both, wherever he was. “And who knows,” she told them, “maybe you will save your precious river. I hope you do. I admire you people. But even if you don’t, you’ll still have to look yourselves in the eye.” She glanced at Lenny like she was about to confront him, then changed her mind and turned away from him. “Can you?” she asked the crowd. “ ’Cause what I want to know is, what kind of you can you bear to live with? Fight for that. It’s the only question that really matters.”

  Then she lobbed the bullhorn to the Queen and, as fierce as Lenny Snyder had ever been, maybe fiercer, she dragged me away through the crowd.

  * * *

  —

  Later, the Queen took us, as promised, to Best New Garden.

  Not just us. Joel and Alice came too. And Carl. Everyone huddled around the too-small table.

  I got my sweet and sour pork and an egg roll that I ate in the meticulous way Phil had taught me. No one noticed. They were all too busy talking. Unwinding. Walking through the merits of the demonstration, the size of the crowd, the new faces that had shown up, as though this tiny march with no press and no opposition had actually achieved something. They were absurdly proud of the T-shirts. They’re so nice. They look so good. Lenny was gracious about Joel and Alice’s fuckup that morning—apparently Nick Dixon knew how to let things go.

  Sometimes Joel or Carl or Alice made awkward stabs at connecting with the strangers at the table—my mother and me, their guests. What grade are you in? What’s your favorite subject? Condescending questions. They weren’t really interested in the answers. How long are you up here for? Isn’t it beautiful? You should see it in the autumn, the leaves. So magnificent.

  They were impressed by us. A little awed by my mother. Weirdly oblivious to the fact that Lenny was sitting right there with them. And my mother, she played it cool. She was in her power.

  When, eventually, one of them—Joel—worked up the courage to ask her a direct question, he said, “Where’d you meet Caroline and Nick?”

  “Oh, around,” she said, winking. “All us lefties know each other somehow. You?”

  Alice placed her hand on top of Lenny’s and gave a little squeeze, a cozy gesture, small-town good intentions. “Joel married them,” she said. “And we slowly became friends.”

  What I remember is my mother blinking. Joel and Alice, Lenny, the Queen, everybody just blinking, blinking, blinking at each other.

  And the questions screaming inside me. What’s wrong with you people? Why’s everybody acting like this is normal?

  * * *

  —

  And I remember we didn’t stay the night. We packed up our shit and got out of there. Forgetting things. Socks. Those stupid alpaca hats. My mother’s fury evident in her willful refusal to make a scene. What more was there to say to these people? Not much. Not right then. Everything was known.

  I remember feeling that our lives had changed, even though they were still the same as they’d been before.

  We climbed into the Impala and drove away. I read her the directions through the back roads, reverse-engineered from the sheet Lenny’d sent us. We drove and drove. Both of us quiet. Synched.

  It got dark in that way gray days do, a shifting of shades, a growing gloom. By the time we hit the highway, night had fallen.

  I remember how tightly her hands clutched the wheel. The whiteness of her knuckles, squeezed of blood. And I wanted to say something. To comfort her. But I didn’t know what, or how. It was just an itch. Something under my skin that kept moving every time I thought I’d found it.

  Finally, I located the words. Then for a long time, I was afraid to say them.

  “He’s not a good person. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  She just kept driving.

  * * *

  —

  A while later, I don’t know how long—I don’t even really know where we were—she impulsively pulled onto an exit ramp.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  She looked at me. She might have smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

  I answered right away. “Anywhere. Everywhere.”

  And that’s what we did.

  We were tough. We didn’t believe in anything anymore.

  [ IV ]

  INVISIBLE ANIMALS

  I’ve been thinking I should tell you about the time Lenny propped me in front of an electrical outlet and—using the little bit of knowledge he’d gained from watching his father tinker with their house in Flatbush—opened the plate, dislodged the cartridge and stripped off the wires, broke the thing down until all that was left was a hole in the plaster, black and red and yellow wires snaking out like vipers, and him cackling in that gleefully cruel way of his, babbling on about the wisdom of elders, how the things they know have a way of disappearing and you don’t know what’s been lost until, one day, the roof caves in and the past is dead and you’re shit out of luck, standing there in your upstairs neighbor’s sewage. How he coaxed me to experiment with the hardware, play with it, study it, figure out how it worked.

  “Lesson one,” he said, “put this outlet back together.” And he wandered off and left me to it.

  First thing that happened, I grabbed the wires and was shot through with current, hovering off the floor like a Looney Tune. I couldn’t let go. It was like my hand had been soldered to the fucking things. Buzzing, actually buzzing—brzz, brzz. Sparks crackling off my body.

  And did he help me? Did he show concern?

  He’s the one who’d turned the breaker back on. He laughed so hard he gave himself seizures. “Lesson two,” he said, “don’t believe a fucking word your elders say.” Pounding the floor with the heels of his Beatle boots, grabbing his dick like he was choking off the fucking Hoover Dam. “And don’t stick your fingers in electric outlets unless you wanna get fried.”

  * * *

  —

  Or I could tell you about the day when I was twelve and we had maybe an hour to connect before he was whisked away to another safe house. I hadn’t seen him in over a year. And what did he want to do with this hour? Not learn about me. Why bother with that when there was so much to say about himself? He carried this shoe box around with him, held together with duct tape, so beat up it was more tape than cardboard. A soft gummy rectangle of silver that he placed on the table between us.

  “Open it,” he said.

  I thought maybe there’d be a present inside. Stickers for my skateboard, something like that, like maybe he’d spent some time trying to understand this kid he barely knew. The way he snickered at my trepidation, though, made
me think it was another trick. A scorpion, a cobra, something writhing and poisonous and poised to strike.

  “Christ, kid. It’s not gonna bite you,” he said.

  He pulled the top off, and what was inside? Photographs of all the women he’d fucked. White girls and black girls and Asian girls. Native American girls, hippie chicks, existentialistas and debutantes courting exotic thrills. One dumpling-shaped girl he claimed was an Eskimo. All of them naked, posing for his camera. Spreading their hairy pussy lips for him, pushing their nipples toward their outstretched tongues. Grinning at the camera sometimes, a strained, nervous despair caught in their eyes.

  “Go ahead and stare,” he said. “The human form is a beautiful thing.”

  I wasn’t squeamish about the fact that they were naked. I’d seen naked women before. You don’t spend as much time as I did mixing it up with the radical fringe without gaining an exorbitant familiarity with the nude body in all its blemished glory. Hell, before she went straight, I’d seen my mother naked more often than I’d seen her clothed. What I was, was annoyed, exasperated by the, by now, completely expected irony of this icon of anarchic freedom, this dude who’d famously said, “Follow your bliss, and if anybody tries to take it away from you, piss on ’em,” forcing his will on me.

  He rifled through the box looking for his favorites. Whenever he found one, he took it out and gazed at it like it held the key to eternal youth. Then, handing it to me, he’d tell me about what crazy tricks this girl could do with her tongue or how she later guzzled a vial of liquid acid and turned into one of the moons of Jupiter.

  He wanted my approval. A pal, a confidant. He wanted me to pat him on the head.

  “When I was your age,” he said, “my father took me to a whorehouse and told me, ‘You’re a man now. Go crazy.’ I ain’t down for that. For one thing, though I’ve got nothing against whores, until they rise up and start forming cooperatives, they’re being used. I can’t be party to that. For another, love is free.” He fanned a new stack of photos. “I’ll tell you a secret, and your mother knows this: Throughout your life there are going to be women who want to please you. When this happens, you’ll feel a kind of moral conflict. You’ll worry about what your girlfriend will think. You’ll worry about hurting the people you love. I’m telling you now, don’t. Just do your thing. Free your mind. Be the revolution. If a girl wants you to make her, go ahead and make her. She’s giving you a gift. It’s your duty to accept it. Each one who gets away will haunt you forever. You don’t want to be that pathetic old shmuck doddering around in an apartment stacked floor to ceiling with newspapers. I’m telling you, Freedom, learn what that means. Do it. Go make the girls.” He punched me too hard on the arm and said, “All right. End of lesson. I gotta make like a banana. Here. Take a souvenir.” He handed me a photo.

  When I looked at it later, I discovered it was a picture of my mother.

  * * *

  —

  Or maybe you’d like to hear more about all the cocaine he did off the kitchen table while he was supposed to be babysitting me.

  Or the time he spiked my Hi-C with acid.

  There’s the time he tried to hide me in his luggage so he wouldn’t have to pay for my ticket to Nicaragua.

  There’s the time he took me up to the roof on 7th Street so the two of us could piss over the edge onto the undercover agents hanging out on our stoop.

  The time he dressed me up like a Hasidic Jew and paraded me through a KKK rally.

  You want more? I’ve got a million of them.

  What I really want to tell you about is the time Life magazine flew him and a bunch of the other radical celebs from that period down to Miami for a kind of reunion. It’ll tell you a lot about those guys, and a lot about Lenny. Maybe it’ll tell you something about me, too.

  This was 1988. Twenty years since their heyday. Fifteen since his arrest and all that came after it.

  In the meantime, my mother and I had found new ways to live. Not better, just different. We’d left the city behind and wandered off into the alternate country that was America, a place where people didn’t know what they didn’t know, where nobody even asked what we’d done or why. We saw Lenny sometimes, when we had to. Like visiting an invalid. More duty than joy. The Queen made the arrangements and, in her lofty way, made sure we kept to them.

  The reunion in Miami lasted barely a day and a few hours into the night. An afternoon of posing for photos and munching on maduros in a too-blue Cuban restaurant with ornate iron bars on the windows—chosen for both its symbolic resonance and its carefully maintained “authenticity.” Then more photos at dusk as they walked along the beach. And afterward, an evening reception in their honor at the Bleau Bar of the Fontainebleau Hotel, the very spot some of them, Lenny included, had effectively shut down with a bushel of stink bombs during the 1969 OPEC convention, and also the place where Lenny and Sy had built trenches out of US mailbags filled with sand, forcing the delegates to literally walk through a war zone to and from the 1972 Republican National Convention.

  Everyone had evolved. Well, everyone but Lenny. Sy, Ray Garrett, Jimbo Jackson, Bobby Seale, a bunch more. The circumstances of their lives had changed dramatically. Sy’s aspirations to become the vitamin king had been actualized in an empire of steel and glass stores. Garrett’s work in the West Village had transformed him into a different, altogether more fabulous agent for change; at the club he owned, it was always Halloween. One guy had moved to Japan to worship the wind. Another one had become a forum speaker for EST. Tom Hayden, who hadn’t bothered to show up, was a California State assemblyman now. He sent a note: The work we did in the late 60s marked an important turning point in the history of our country. It will stand as an example to future generations of what can be accomplished when the public comes together to demand change and stand up for what’s right. I regret that my schedule won’t let me get away.

  It wasn’t that they’d grown cynical. More that they were satisfied with what they’d become. Though they’d moved on to other less conspicuous lives and were no longer as famous as they’d once been, some gravity in their step, some power emanating off their being, led people on the street to wonder who they were. They’d faced down the beast and come through with the core of their selves more or less unbroken.

  Not so with the great Lenny Snyder. He’d cut a deal in ’82 and reemerged from the Underground to the blinding sun of Ronald Reagan’s new morning, but his eyes had never adjusted. The only thing he knew how to do was to keep on keeping on. Fighting for social justice, as they called it now, chaining himself to nuclear power plants and draping himself in the Sandinista flag. But he no longer made sense to himself, and this country no longer made sense to him. The fault lines had shifted and he didn’t know where he was anymore.

  What I mean is, he’d forgotten how to laugh.

  He barely made it through the day, fumbling to connect with these former comrades, so bizarre, so alien—to him, so compromised. Unlike them, he’d embraced this reunion with a fervor completely lacking in irony, talking for weeks about when-I-see-those-guys this and when-the-band’s-back-together that. And he’d dressed the part: a tie-dye starbursting across his chest, a wooden peace symbol hanging from a thong around his neck. He looked like the past and it was blatantly obvious, right from the get, that he’d misjudged the moment. Even after he covered up with the worn-out corduroy sports coat he’d brought along, his deluded yearnings remained wrapped around him like the flag shirt of a deposed regime.

  Their attitude was, well, that’s Lenny for you.

  And the conversations he’d been rehearsing in his head, everyone reminiscing about the cause and boosting themselves up, reminding one another of things they’d forgotten, pining together for things that would never be—these never materialized. Instead there’d been talk of stock tips. Discussions of the expansions people were making on their houses in Marin, in Cap
e May, Silver Lake and Sun Valley. Talk of second and third and, in one case, fourth wives. Talk of everything money could buy.

  By the time they arrived at the Fontainebleau, he’d withdrawn nearly completely. Silent. Glum. Lingering on the fringe of the festivities. Gazing at the neon zigzags mounted on the walls, shrinking under the synthetic music and synthetic magic, not quite confused, but profoundly disappointed by the crisp lighting, both inside and out, that turned the hotel into an illuminated jewel, a setting for the new movie America had conjured in which money was no object and the heroes all wore power ties.

  No one seemed to notice how far he’d retreated. Or, if they had, they didn’t seem to care. They were an aging Rat Pack, and I’m not saying they’d abandoned their ideals, but they were comfortable with the thought that if someone had to lose, at least it hadn’t been them.

  Bobby Seale, who’d been primping under a chef’s hat branded with a cartoon image of himself all day, spent the evening trailing after the photographer and his weedy sidekick—the writer, I guess—poking them to remember to plug his barbeque sauce. Ray Garrett, decked out in a skinny rainbow-print tie and a jacket tailored out of trash bags, kept up a running monologue about the significant aesthetic differences between the Bleau Bar and his joint in New York, parsing their meaning—and cultural relevancy—to anyone who got sucked into his orbit.

  Sy and Imamu Sefu—who under his original name, Carlton Krane, had been “minister of culture” for an organization called the RBP—goofed on the theme of Miami Vice. They cast themselves in the starring roles: a short, Jewish Crockett, going wide around the middle; a dramatically balding Tubbs, his slick suit accented with an African-print pocket handkerchief.

  As waitresses in miniskirts and tuxedo shirts glided by, flaunting one-bite empanadas and yucca fritters, Sy and Sefu struck casual poses, leaning alert and cool against the bar, and tried to pull them into the game.