Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  “What can you tell me about the notorious Carlos Estevez?” Sy’d ask. “Nothing? Really? Or are you scared to say?”

  And as the waitress stared at them in confusion, Sefu would pick up the thread. “Did he threaten you? He threaten your mami in Havana? If you help us, we can help you.”

  Sometimes the girls would laugh and duck away, politely but effectively, sometimes they’d just wait for Sefu and Sy to let them go. “All right, fine,” Sy might say. “Gimme one of those rice puffs—what is that, tuna tartare? I’ll take two. You know what? I’ll take three. Thanks, babe. Be good.”

  On and on like that. The two of them entertaining themselves. Content. Free at last, free at last from the versions of themselves they’d outgrown years ago.

  “Hey, Lenny, you want in?” Sy called at one point, holding a grilled shrimp up by its sugarcane skewer. “If Lenny’s your real name. You sure you’re not the notorious Carlos Estevez? I bet you’ve got a cigarette boat waiting for you offshore, packed to the gills with contraband.”

  “Shit, you’re right,” said Sefu. “He’s the spitting image of that cagey motherfucker. Quick! To the Lamborghinis! If we chase him at high speed through town for an hour, he’ll lead us straight to the cocaine!” He started crooning. “I can feel it coming in the air, tonight. Oh, Lord.”

  Lenny blinked at them, his eyes tired. Sunken. Dark-ringed. A mark that would never leave him.

  Sefu sang on. “If you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand…”

  Lenny couldn’t have been five feet from them, but the distance might as well have been five miles. He’d wandered off the path. Or maybe they had. Either way, he’d never catch up.

  “It’s a joke, Lenny,” Sy told him. The two of them had never lost the ability to see through each other. “Hey—”

  But Lenny had turned away, shuffling toward the door, not hearing.

  It was my job to follow him.

  Out in the damp air, with the dark ocean off to one side, far beyond the pale blue lights of the hotel that washed over everything, even us, we meandered through the palm trees and empty cabanas on the pool deck. I watched him like you would a rheumy dog—the one that might have rabies, the one that limps forlornly along in the weeds. I refused to get too close. I was twenty. Old enough to have begun piecing his life together, but not old enough to fully comprehend it. Not old enough to forgive him for it.

  “Still with the coke bust,” he muttered at one point, knowing I was there but not looking at me. “Like they weren’t coked up too. Like the whole world hadn’t been coked up back then.”

  The Queen already had him on suicide watch by this time and she’d sent me along with instructions not to let him out of my sight. She hadn’t said I had to talk to him. So I didn’t.

  He seemed oddly thankful for my silence, thankful to be allowed to wander with me beside him, heading nowhere ever so slowly. Taking in the distance between where he was and the place he understood. The place he cared about. The place where he understood the rhythms because they were his own. The buzz in the air before a fight went down. The way everything grew quiet and the wind stopped blowing just before the streets erupted. And the people. The addicts and crazies so deep in their own dreams that they didn’t notice everyone else staring. Folks who couldn’t tell the difference between their inner dramas and the reality outside their doors. The squatters and extremists and the lost souls. The actors and painters and puppeteers who’d let their dreams of glory be replaced by a misfit community willing to applaud their every failed endeavor. Those wandering others nobody wanted. The renegades and desperados who played out their turf wars on the flip side of society’s coin. The Lower East Side. This place America had abandoned. This ghetto into which the hard-luck had been segregated to fend for themselves—first the freemen and freed slaves, then the Germans, the Irish, the Jews, Poles, Ukrainians. And then the Puerto Ricans and hippie scum like him. He’d imagined what they could get up to while no one was watching. Anything they wanted—such was the irony of poverty. They could upend the paradigm. Not next year, but right now. Bring Jerusalem, that city shining on the hill, into being right here in the place where they were. And he’d tried, oh, he’d tried to lead the people forward, and for a while, he thought he’d succeeded. A shabby freedom began to thrive in the shit-strewn streets of the Lower East Side, growing like mushrooms after a hard rain. And why couldn’t its spores cover the whole nation? But then…but then…but then…

  At the lip of the swimming pool, he stood and watched the ribbons of light twist and shift in the water. Wondering what would become of him? And what would become of them—all those down-and-outers nobody cared about saving anymore?

  I know this now. At the time, I was just bitter. Resentful that I’d agreed to be his babysitter, angry that yet again he was the one who got to be self-involved and even angrier that in his presence I couldn’t help but get caught up in his despair.

  I’ve thought about this a lot. There’s no question he sold cocaine to those cops. The real question has always been why. And depending on the answer, what does that imply about his heart? Was he a good person? Had he ever been a good person?

  These were questions I wasn’t equipped to answer.

  He was my father.

  “It’s like the whole thing was a game to you,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “No, it wasn’t a game.”

  And he shuffled off to gaze at the balconies of the impossibly expensive hotel suites above our heads.

  * * *

  —

  Later, on the plane, on our way back to New York, I asked him, “Why’d you hate Phil so much?”

  “Who?”

  “Phil. Phil Ochs.”

  “I didn’t hate him.”

  “Something must’ve gone down between you two.”

  He said nothing, just gazed at me, his face narrowing like he was warding me off.

  “You threw him down a flight of stairs,” I said.

  He mumbled something I couldn’t catch.

  “What?” I said.

  Those eyes. Dark. Crushed. Like somehow I’d hurt him.

  It would’ve been kinder of me to let it go, but I knew I wouldn’t get the chance to ask about this again. “Tell me. It never made sense.”

  “He was embarrassing,” Lenny said. He broke away from me. Listing off somewhere. His head sinking toward the half-empty Bloody Mary glass on his tray.

  “Lenny?”

  Snapping back, he downed the rest of the drink. “He actually believed the revolution was coming. Like the whole world was gonna sprout sunshine and roses and nobody’d ever have to take another shit.” He was angry, but not at me. “The guy had no escape plan.”

  He glanced at me, furtive, like he thought I might hit him and I knew this was as much as I’d ever get out of him.

  “Did you?” I said.

  The ghost of his old self flickered for an instant before melting away into the blank apathy that would kill him two and a half years later.

  For a while, half an hour or more, we sat there in our own private thoughts, as comfortable as we’d ever been with each other.

  Then he plopped his hand over mine and came back to me. “You remember that day we went to the zoo?”

  I hadn’t. But then I did. Every detail.

  Springtime. A day or two before he went underground.

  I’d put on my favorite T-shirt—Lucky Charms, which I’d got in the mail by collecting the proof of purchases and sending them off to the address on the back of the box. We’d made it down the stairs and before we were even out the front door of the building I knew I’d misjudged the weather, confused the crisp sunlight out the window for warmth. The door had been broken since I could remember, the pneumatic pump that was supposed to ease its movements hanging loose on its mount and slapping against the plaster w
all every time anybody opened it. You’d touch it with one finger and it would fly open. But on this day, Zoo Day, the door resisted. Lenny braced it with his foot so it wouldn’t slam back on me.

  Then, out on the stoop, he slid his sunglasses onto his face and raised his arms like he was gathering the day between them. He gulped down air. Morning light flashed off the windows across the street. Fallen blooms raced and twirled along the pavement like they were going somewhere important.

  “You smell that, kid?” he said. “Life.”

  I rubbed at the goose bumps on my arms. “I’m cold,” I said.

  He appraised me, my sneakers, my jeans, my little green T-shirt. “You’re not cold,” he said.

  “But I am. I need my windbreaker.”

  “You don’t look cold.”

  I pointed at my arm. “Goose bumps mean you’re cold.”

  “Tough it out. It’s good for you.”

  I pointed at his arm. “You’ve got goose bumps too.”

  “Nah, that’s just my skin. It’s always like that.” I couldn’t see his eyes through his shades, but I knew he was making fun of me. Busting my chops, as he would’ve said. He shoved the door open again like he was daring me to chicken out. This time it slammed into the wall like it always did and bounced back, but he caught it and held it still for me and said, “Fine. You want it? Go get it. It’s a free country.”

  I just stood there and stared at the ornate doors of the church across the street.

  “Kid?”

  “Why can’t you do it?”

  “Kid. Really.” He got down on one knee and perched the glasses on his forehead, above the ridge of his colossal eyebrows. “What’re you gonna do? You want that jacket or not?” Some people on the street were wearing jackets. Others were not. “Fuck the jacket,” he said. “It’s early. We’ll get there, the sun’ll come up, you’ll get hot. And I’ll end up carrying it around for you all day. You dig? Fuck the jacket. That shit’ll just weigh you down.”

  I nodded, unconvinced.

  “Fuck the jacket,” he said again. “Say it with me.” He nudged me in the chest. “Come on, kid. Say it with me. Fuck the jacket.”

  “Fuck the jacket.”

  “Yeah!” He used his fists for emphasis. “Fuck the jacket!”

  We chanted it together: “Fuck the jacket! Fuck the jacket!” We made it our mantra, shouting it as we marched toward Astor Place. “Fuck the jacket! Fuck the jacket! Fuck the jacket! Fuck the jacket!”

  And seeing I’d calmed down, he said, “Check this out, another cool thing,” and he flicked my nipple with his middle finger, giving me a stinger. It was like he’d built me up just to knock me down again.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “That didn’t hurt.”

  What to say? What to do? Sometimes, the shifts between his jokes and his cruelty overwhelmed me. I’d feel myself filling with murky confusion, my breakers overloaded, surging with conflicted, incompatible emotions.

  He bopped along. Spinning through pedestrians, pivoting around the women walking by, checking them out, making a spectacle. It was like a street dance. Visual jazz. The cock of the walk in the city. He exuded a horny joy that said I’m no threat to you—unless you want me to be.

  And I straggled after him, rubbing my scrawny arms.

  Uptown, I was still so cold that we jogged to the park. I remember thinking the sidewalk was a different color than it should be. On the Lower East Side it was a splotchy, beaten gray, like dirty dishwater congealed on a hard surface. But up here it glistened white on white. There wasn’t even any gum blackened into it. The one place left in the entire city that hadn’t given in to the entropy of the times.

  We got to the zoo, and turns out, it was closed. No explanation, no posted hours, just closed. The spear-tipped gates shut up tight.

  “See, kid,” said Lenny, “this is how they do it. First they close the zoos, then they close the libraries. Before you know it, they’ve put their chains on your brain.”

  I peered through the bars. Beyond the shuttered ticket booths there were steps leading to a circular plaza with a ring in the middle, like a circus ring, but encircled by a moat of concrete, half-filled with mucusy green water. A craggy hill of platforms rose from the center. There should’ve been penguins there, or seals, or polar bears. Animals that could put on an act. I could see the skids and furrows in the platforms where they’d slid down the concrete, but the animals themselves were missing.

  “What happened to them?” I asked Lenny.

  “Shot for crimes against the state,” he said. “If you know where to look, you can find pigs with machine guns patrolling the shadows. You see ’em?”

  I went up on the rubberized toes of my Keds and peered around. Images of hunchbacked pigs swam through my mind, hairy and pink, waddling around the zoo’s cobblestone pathways on their hind legs, draped in blue shirts, badges pinned to their chests. Not real pigs. Not porcine creatures. But the ones I’d been trained to loathe and never ever, under no circumstances, fear. The ones who’d spit on you to look at you and who’d haunted my days since I could remember. They carried tommy guns. Their torsos were so heavy that they walked all herky-jerky and each step threatened to topple them over, which just made them angrier, meaner. Their tiny black eyes, when they looked at you, glowed with red death.

  Lenny clutched his hair—still disorientingly short—with both fists. “Hey, kid, don’t get sad, get mad,” he said. “There’s still hope. Come on. Follow me.” Crouched like a burglar, he slid behind the shrubs lining the wall and skulked forward.

  I wiped my nose and squeezed in behind him. Toughed out the branches poking and scraping me every time I pushed past another bulge of stone. The ground had this spongy, like, permanent dampness. A mulchy mix of shredded wood and black Manhattan dirt. Roots sometimes curled up and surprised us. We pressed on foot by foot, Lenny moving in front of me, leading, a role model I could trail, imitate and trust, until he stopped abruptly and stood up tall, listening, tipping his head around a corner. And watching him, not the obstacles in front of me, I caught my shirt on a thorn and felt it rip.

  “Lenny!” I held the tear out for him to see and the wind pricked at the newly exposed patch of skin on my belly.

  “Never mind that,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “But—”

  “Kid!” he barked. “It’s a shirt.” But he knelt down in front of me—for the second time that day—and went through the motions of examining it. “Gives it character,” he said. “Okay?”

  And as he watched me reconcile with this, something happened. His face. I’ll never forget it. The cynicism. The tricksy menacing rage. All the dark violent edges. It vanished. And in its place there was just joy. A wild, uncontainable joy. Beaming up at me. A maniacal happiness at being on this adventure he’d concocted for us.

  He said to me, all dramatic, whispering, “Here’s the plan, Stan. Just around this corner there’s another gate. It’s not like the one back there. It’s just a little wooden jobby. They use it to bring the trucks in and whatever. We just have to get up enough speed and momentum and we can take it. You up for this? We’re gonna storm the fucking barricades.”

  Took me half a second to make up my mind.

  We darted out from behind the shrubs, whooping and hollering like Comanche warriors, Lenny waving me this way and that, up a hill, around a tree, on loop-de-loops through the park until we were on the muddy road leading to the gate, thirty, forty feet away. We reared back and kicked as fast as we could, splashing through the puddles pooled in the ruts where the wheels of trucks had dug deep. I’d never run so fast. It was like my legs were spinning on their own and I just had to keep up with them. And when we were close, we braced our shoulders and aimed and leapt and slammed ourselves against the rotting wooden slats. We heard a crack. The latch had broken.

  We we
re in.

  We wandered around the zoo after that, buying imaginary popcorn and sno-cones from the shuttered vendors’ booths, peering into the empty cages and discussing what the animals that weren’t there might be doing.

  “Look, he’s pacing,” I’d say. “He must be hungry.”

  “Throw him some popcorn.”

  And I’d throw my imaginary popcorn inside for the imaginary leopard.

  Or Lenny would ask, “Do you think it’s smart to put those chickens in with the foxes? Whose idea was that?”

  “Fucking bullshit,” I’d say.

  And we’d both laugh.

  “Wait, there’s a peacock in there too. Peacocks are vicious, kid. Mean as hell. He’ll protect the chickens. He’ll peck that fox’s eyes out.”

  “Hey, let’s go see the pandas.”

  “Let’s see the snakes.”

  “Let’s go find the motherfucking jackalope!”

  We went on like that, cage by cage. Whimsical. Playful. Kicking around for two, maybe three hours. We didn’t see a single other person the whole time. And eventually I got bored, like kids do.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “Eat your popcorn.”

  “No, really. I’m hungry.”

  “You’re not hungry, kid. You’ve been eating all morning. Here, you want a hot dog?” He twirled his hand over his head and pulled down yet another imaginary hunk of food.

  “That’s not real, though.”

  “What’s real? What does real mean?” he said. “Is this real?” He shook the pen we were walking past. “Is this sidewalk real? The sky? That fucking tree? Am I real, Freedom? Are you?”

  “I’m not having fun anymore,” I said.

  As we’d wandered around, Lenny had been scooping up pebbles. Little ones, gravel-sized. Bouncing them in his hands. Shooting them back and forth between his palms. He hadn’t been conscious of what he was doing. Just another way to burn through his nervous energy. Since they were there, and why not, he zinged one at me.