Revolutionaries Read online

  He’d say, With each loss, our army grew. The whole country on our side, against the war. Against the pigs and their vicious pig-like ways. When the press asked him, “Okay, but what are you fighting for,” he said, “Fighting? Who’s fighting? Not us. We’re peacing.” And since I’d been born by then, he raised my squirming body to the camera and said, “We’re peacing for Freedom.”

  And what freedom looked like was kids everywhere peeling off their clothes and painting their skin day-glow blue, green, pink and yellow. Red and black. Dropping acid. Getting stoned. Wandering out in the light to let their true allegiances shine.

  He’d remind you, This was when those who did lead were being killed. Martin Luther King. Malcolm X. Bobby Kennedy. Murdered, all.

  He’d say again, I never led. I listened. Sometimes I made suggestions. Mostly I just followed the vibe in the air.

  It’s not my fault, he’d say, that I had all the best ideas.

  He sent the word out. Days are dark. Death hovers over us everywhere. So, let’s celebrate! We’re gonna throw a festival of life. Free music. Free drugs. Free love. Free life. Yippie! See you in Chicago. There would be another, competing festival in town that week—a political convention held by the Democrats, the party that unleashed this death across the nation, and Vietnam too, that bequeathed us all with this fear and loathing. The party that would take your size and fit you for a uniform, send you off to see the world, knowing you’d never return. “They’ll be there,” Lenny said, “and we’ll be there—which party would you rather attend? Can’t decide? I promise, by the time the week is over, you’ll have made up your mind.”

  The dawn had almost come. He could feel it in his blood, in his spleen and his balls. This one battle would be the last. He knew it, his friends knew it, the whole country knew it. And he was confident they’d already won. He’d seen it in a dream: His troops lined up, hands to shoulders, gyrating like Chinese dragons. They’d form circles and beat drums and spin like Sufi mystics. Burn so much incense that the scent would carry the thousand miles to Mount Rushmore. That was the start. They’d slip acid into the water and get everybody high. They’d fill their squirt guns with LACE, a secret substance that glistened on the skin, entered through the pores and turned on everything it touched. Visions of the whole city stripping down and joining the orgy; the sagging skin of ancient women pressed up against the sweet flesh of youth; men with liver spots bouncing joyous birds on their wrinkled knees, laughing and canoodling, setting their loins free; even the pigs embracing one another, stroking each other’s cocks like they’d secretly fantasized of doing for so long. They’d choose their own candidate for US president, run a cow, or a chicken, or maybe a pig, and their candidate would win against any asshole either party put forward.

  These were the tactics, he would say: Be free. Have fun. Say no to fear. The strategy required a police response. The pigs would see the love we shared, and our peace would surpass their understanding, short-circuiting their brains. They’d surge. They’d riot. We’d be slaughtered. Some of us might really die.

  The saps and pacifists planned to be there too, shuttling back and forth with their quaint signs, trying to be reasonable, dignified in their dissent. They’ll see, he’d say. They’ll realize the limits of their good intentions. They might wish it wasn’t so, but when Mayor Daley set loose his pigs, when the batons started swinging like they had in Washington, on Park Avenue, in Grand Central, at Columbia and so many other places, they’d see the absurdity of their cherished rationality. Their heads would be caked in blood just like his.

  And they did. And they were. It all came to pass.

  As the youth of the nation watched their brothers and sisters get clobbered by the pigs night after night, as they saw the politicians grimace in distaste when we kept kicking back, these kids knew they were us and we were them, and the only way they could possibly survive was to join us at the barricades. That’s what Lenny would say.

  Chicago made him famous, notorious, from sea to shining sea. He was always there—wherever the cameras were—with his nonstop zingers, his somersaults, his contraband shirts sewn from American flags. The Sid Caesar of the counterculture, said the old-timers. You can take the Jew out of the Borscht Belt, but you can’t take the Borscht Belt out of the Jew.

  One night the pigs ripped the flag right off his back. Beat him to a pulp. Three cracked ribs. A lost tooth. “I regret I have but one shirt to give for my country,” he said, the blood trickling down his chin. He grinned at the cameras and flashed two fingers, a sign of glorious victory at war that when flipped meant fuck you in some parts of the world and that in a savvy act of appropriation he and his cohort had turned into a universal symbol of resistance to the martial spirit it was meant to celebrate.

  The only thing left was to throw one last Be-in. They invaded some poor schmuck’s farm in the foothills of the Catskills. Set it free. Five hundred thousand people came from every corner of the battered nation. A three-day celebration of music and love. Children were conceived. Water turned to wine. New visions of the future fluttered in the breeze. And the pigs, outnumbered, stayed away this time. And nobody ate the brown acid. And this would be called Woodstock and forever after, those who attended—or wished they had—this transcendent incarnation of lawless harmony and effervescent love would be known as Woodstock Nation.

  He’d say, You know why they chased me underground? Just look at everything I accomplished. He’d dreamed a new society into being. No way could they let him live free after that.

  For what it’s worth, that’s what he’d tell you. And some of it was true but a lot of it wasn’t. Most of it was just wishful thinking. His own private craziness thrust onto the public stage.

  Or here’s one about me. A kind of family joke.

  May 1970. Everyone wanted a piece of Lenny, if not to join the movement, to bask in his fame—or bust him in his honking kike nose. He’d been flying all over the country—the lecture circuit, the leftist circuit—going anywhere he could get away with, sometimes sneaking into states where he’d been banned, where he’d caused so much trouble and gotten himself arrested so flamboyantly in the past that the terms of his probation stipulated he could never set foot there again. Sometimes, thinking he was clean and legal, he discovered that the state legislature had convened a special session and worked through the night to preemptively outlaw his presence.

  This time he was in a place called Hidalgo Springs, just outside Boulder, Colorado. He’d been invited by a confederacy of back-to-the-landers, nature enthusiasts who’d camped out there in hopes of being left alone to climb mountains and pick berries and gape, stoned out of their minds, at the sunset. They lived in a crevasse where two mountains met. A little forgotten nook that had been allowed to return to its natural state and inspired them to do the same. Sheer cliffs on either side. A cold-water spring that fed an overgrown creek. Raw jagged beauty surrounding a curative pool that had once, briefly, served as a fashionable weekend destination for the region’s landed gentry but was now overgrown and slick with algae. There was one rutted road, more potholes than pavement.

  Turned out the state, which for decades had negligently owned the land, had entered discussions with a corporation called Vitality, which wanted to build a bottling plant on the site. The plan, if it went through, was to clear-cut the forest straight to the spring, replacing the breathtaking splendor of the place with a strip of highway, a parking lot, a series of steel towers slung with high voltage cables, all feeding into a shiny new assembly line.

  For this to happen, the hippies had to move. They’d been unwittingly squatting on government property—just showed up one day, thought it was pretty and stayed. They had no right to their patch of paradise. But they felt like it was theirs because they loved it so much. Panicked to discover there were actual rules binding people to the world in which they lived, one of them spent three days in the Boulder library,
giving himself a crash course in the uses of public land. Pouring through the transcripts of city council meetings, he realized there’d been no civilian input on the issue, which seemed ethically untenable, though he didn’t know if it was technically illegal.

  Clinging to this nugget and its opaque implications, they petitioned the county and managed to collect a hundred or so signatures from the stoners who threw Frisbees on the University of Colorado campus. They pled their case at a Boulder city council meeting, where the officials indulged them with surprising courtesy before passing the buck to Denver. They wrote their congressmen and senators. They attempted to lobby the governor’s office, but their messages went unreturned.

  For the public good, said the Rocky Mountain News, the spring that allowed the canyon to bloom begged to be let loose. Its mineral-rich water extracted and captured and carried away to the parched regions of the country whose inhabitants would happily pay for quality hydration. Also, the county had been assured x number of jobs and y amount of increases in tax revenue if Vitality got its road and the lease to the land. It was a done deal. The papers had been signed. Now that the spring thaw had come and the mountain passes were accessible again, the creative destruction would commence in a matter of days.

  That’s when they’d called in Lenny.

  He heard them out. He smoked up and let his mind wander. He figured, hell, why not throw these fools a bone. He liked them, liked how soft they were, how bumbling and sun-blind. He liked that they were, however ineptly, living out the notions he’d thrown like confetti into the air—tuning in, turning on, dropping out. I’ll give him credit where he earned it. He was generous with his attention, always ready to run off and hang with whatever space cowboy crossed his path. Even in ’70, at the height of his drawing power, when he was commanding thousands a pop from student groups around the country—money he needed, money that flew, shoop, right into the pockets of the lawyers he paid to keep him on the street—he was drawn more to the fuckups and vagrants, the half-crazy dreamers shouting at phantoms, than to the shuck and jive of imitating himself for the amusement of two thousand coeds.

  “Dig,” he said, “I’ll man the barricades with you.”

  He’d been scheduled to speak that week in Boulder anyway and had a couple days to kill.

  My mother must’ve begged him to let us tag along ’cause he carted us out to Colorado with him. The concerned citizens of Hidalgo Springs set us up in a yurt at the end of the grassy path they called a road, and from there he went about doing what he did: an exhausting day slouched in a folding chair, feet up on the card table they’d provided for him, hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed; the only sign that he was awake, the wriggling of his lips as he heard their grievances.

  Once they’d talked themselves dry, he hopped to his feet. “Winning the argument, being right,” he said, “that’s the easy part. What I want to know is, you ready to go to war? Dig. The name of the game is obstruct and shame.” He invoked Gandhi and MLK. He taught them how to snake dance. How to turtle under the pigs’ bludgeons. How to wrap a wet bandanna over the nose and mouth, and wash the tear gas out of the eyes. “You better believe there’s gonna be press. Press like you’ve never seen. A storm of locusts. They’re gonna paint you as dirty fucking hippies. They’ll say you aren’t Christian. That you hang around, not working, plucking your guitars and fucking each other’s wives. I dig it. Why shouldn’t you sing and dance and fuck all day? Who doesn’t want to live like that? Free love, right? Back to the garden. But that’s not the trip the press is on. Their gig is to tell a story. And our job’s to make sure they tell the right one.”

  He was like a messiah to them. His presence alone made them feel like they’d been saved.

  Using the huckster’s gifts he’d developed as a kid on the corners of East Flatbush, he led them toward conclusions they’d already drawn. They cold-called their friends and allies, the students who’d signed their failed petition, cajoling them to come out and show support, whispering, “Hey, I don’t know if this is true, but I heard Lenny Snyder might make an appearance.” They drew posters—Save the Trees, What’s Good for the Planet Is Good for the Children, Tell Vitality Our Water’s Not for Sale—and stapled them to cardboard tubes. The men trimmed their facial hair. The women wriggled back into the modest dresses they’d worn to the city council meeting. They readied themselves for the picket line they’d force the bulldozers to cross. But to Lenny it was all disappointingly earnest and naïve and boring. These people weren’t about to go out trashing. They weren’t the uncompromising wildcats who followed him around the Lower East Side. He was going to have to make his own fun.

  Of course, being Lenny, he had a trick up his sleeve. From the moment we rolled into town, he’d been fixated on a particular ponderosa pine near the entrance to the canyon. A beast of a tree. An elephant. Hundreds of years old. When he first saw it, he cackled and elbowed my mother. “Check that fucker out,” he said. “It’s hung like a horse.”

  My mother used to describe the tree like this: A beautiful specimen of native fauna with so many knots and turns in its limbs that you could imagine the hardships and threats it had run up against over the long, lonely seasons of its life: the search for the sun, the water from stone, the wildfires twisting all around it. You could imagine it almost thinking, breathing, striving for its sliver of a chance at survival. It happened to have made its stand smack in the center of the new highway’s footprint. The existing road actually veered around it. A surveyor would mark it as the first tree to go.

  Both of them saw its potential.

  “Freedom,” he said to me, “you wanna be a big boy and help your daddy?”

  I was two years old. According to my mother my major passions in life were garbage trucks and Daddy. So, yes. I did want to be a big boy. Whatever he asked of me, I’d toddle off and do it.

  On the morning of May 2nd, so the story goes, when the bulldozers rolled into the canyon with the sunrise, they were greeted by the residents of Hidalgo Springs, along with a disappointing turnout of supporters, maybe fifty people in all, including children, trudging in a fitful loop, clogging the road.

  A standoff ensued, but as Lenny knew would happen, as soon as the cuffs came out the picket line melted.

  Behind it: Lenny and my mother, stoned like they often were on a big day, putting the final touches on the statement they’d prepared. He’s dancing, all boxy knees and jangly fingers, like he’s a leprechaun all of a sudden. Susan, my mother, is talking at something, pleading with it, shoving an orange slice into its mouth. They step away for the big reveal and there I am, snotty nosed, dirty faced, anointed in glitter, suspended four feet up the trunk of the pine like one of those gnomes people carve into the bark.

  “Behold, the first child,” Lenny shouts, camping it up, searching for the cameras that aren’t even there, “returned to the garden, greeting the dawn—naked, natural, clothed in nothing but the sweet milk of his innocence. A senseless, small creature who maybe, just maybe, will inherit a simpler, kinder world than our own, one without tyranny, one without fear, a world that knows no injustice, only love and peace and love. Behold, the majestic spirit that lives in this tree presents the child to the rising sun, an offering, a promise, a new covenant.” He cackles, a machine gun shooting off rounds. “Let’s see you try and pave paradise now.”

  There’s a loop of heavy chain padlocked around my waist. Ropes bind my wrists, pulling my arms out behind me. That’s how they kept me up there—how they kept the cops from just cutting me down. My heels push against a scrap of two-by-four that Lenny hammered into the trunk to give me a footrest. On my forehead, a peace sign has been drawn in body paint. On my belly, the Earth radiates—what? Sunlight? Thunder bolts? Squiggly yellow lines.

  The way my mother tells it, I was a perfect angel. Eager to do my part for the cause. I didn’t cry once, just grinned and babbled and grabbed at the paint, and that m
ight have been true as long as she was shoving those orange slices into my mouth, but…

  Look, there’s a photo. I’ve got it here somewhere. Documentary evidence. It’s not the napalm girl. It’s not Super Joel placing his carnation in a quaking rifle or any of the other iconic shots from that era, but, it’s all right there: me hanging from the tree like Christ crucified, wailing like I’ve just been shown Armageddon.

  Is that abuse? I don’t know. You tell me. When Lenny told the story, he played it for laughs.

  In any case, the bulldozers retreated. We packed ourselves up and took ourselves home.

  One lonely reporter had made the scene—an intern, really—from Rolling Stone, who was in Colorado not to cover Lenny but to bring Hunter Thompson a suitcase full of speed. It would have made the cover, but two days later Kent State went down and bumped my tree and me to the back pages.

  And then of course, three weeks after we left, the pine was chopped down and the hippies were booted to make way for the highway. So there you go.

  [ II ]

  WHAT’S GOING DOWN

  What I remember is…well, I was very young.

  * * *

  —

  Mostly it’s his voice. That cracked-whip cackle. Ragged and spiky. Jittering like a sack of broken glass with the rhythms of Brooklyn, the Yiddish jangling against Italian and Polish and German and whatever else.