Revolutionaries Read online

  Even whispering, his voice cut the air like a siren. “Kid,” he’d say, squatting, holding me between his knees, and he’d tell me a secret.

  I’d laugh, thrilled to be the focus of his attention, which made him laugh too, a different laugh, a silent undulation of his abdomen, a laugh that for once, and because of me, wasn’t a performance.

  He’d fall back, taking me onto his chest, and he’d hold me there. “Atta boy,” he’d say. And to my mother, “Kid can’t tie his shoes but he knows the score.” And I’d feel like I’d accomplished some hugely important thing.

  That voice…

  * * *

  —

  And the hair, obviously. That nest of black curls like a Chia Pet gone wild. I used to poke it. Get my fingers caught in it. He never combed it. I’d stand on his bony thighs and dig my hands in and he’d say, “Knock it off,” but I knew he didn’t mean it. “Knock it off, knock it off.” Him thrusting his lip out for me to twist, smirking at me with that flirtatious I-dare-you expression of his. It was a thing we did.

  “Fucking knock it off.”

  I’d dig in again and tug my hands through the knots, over and over, thinking one of these times I’d find a prize in there but also testing, waiting for him to enact part two of the game. The funner part. Thrilled by the anticipation, the not-knowing when it was going to come.

  “Knock it off or I’ll fucking knock your block off,” he’d say.

  And he’d open the trapdoor of his legs and send me falling hilariously to the floor.

  Our special little game.

  * * *

  —

  I remember people coming and going. Some I knew, some I didn’t.

  Phil Ochs with his guitar like a rifle strapped to his back and that innocent, happy-to-be-here way about him.

  Sy Neuman, Lenny’s real and metaphorical partner in crime. Shrimpy, hairy, like a human Tribble. He always wanted things Lenny couldn’t or wouldn’t give him. It wasn’t until years later that I understood how the two of them had invented each other. I’d been too young to remember them in action, Sy dressed like a guerrilla, hectoring crowds of thousands with hard facts and statistics and Marxist theory while Lenny incited them and made them laugh. I’d missed the years during which they spent every waking hour spurring each other toward greater outrageousness, binding their imaginations together, absorbing American culture as a team and projecting it back as the grotesque Technicolor absurdity it was.

  There were others. So many people tromped through our apartment. Allen Ginsberg, Marcus Kirsh. Rip Torn and Geraldine Page—they were all fire. Ray Garrett, vibrating equal parts joy and rage in his fogged-up Lennon glasses and his gauzy loose linens—Lenny affectionately called him the Fag. More. They’re mostly faces, postures, body odors.

  The chance occasions of their arrivals and departures. The total lack of structure they brought to our lives. Like our apartment was less the place where we lived than the place where, on any given day, ten or twenty people might be hanging around, raiding the fridge, filling the rooms with smoke, pissing in the sink, blissing out on the Mexican rug by the plastered-over fireplace. Like it belonged more to them than to us.

  * * *

  —

  The soapy, musty smell of the vegetable curries they and their friends were always making. All that cumin. As though cumin alone could transform the country.

  * * *

  —

  Fragments of conversations. The intensity of them. The way they filled the whole apartment with frenetic, molecular motion, made it seem like the molten core of the world. At the white-hot center, Lenny, radiating and glowing. His energy like an atomic wind incinerating everybody where they stood.

  * * *

  —

  And the crazy shit that spewed from his mouth:

  “You got to give it to Charlie Manson. Dig. He put his money where his mouth was. The spirit of the thing, it was beautiful, man. It’s the execution that was the problem.” Leering at his audience, the scruffy magpies chugging beer in the kitchen, daring them to bust him on his bad taste. “Too much psychic mumbo jumbo. The politics weren’t legible.”

  His friends chuckling. Shaking their heads and staring at their boots. Never sure how much of what he said was a joke.

  Lenny talking tough. All transgressive bravado. Trying out one-liners.

  “Ask not what your country can do to you. Ask what you can do to your country.”

  “We’re all niggers now, brother. Some of us just won’t admit it.”

  “The beautiful thing about liberals is you can spit in their faces and they’ll thank you for it.”

  He said to me once, “Hey, kid, you wanna make your papa proud? Learn how to shoot a gun. Live the revolution. I’ll tell you who you should assassinate first: Ronald Reagan. Dig. He’ll bury this country if he gets the chance. He’s already doing it to California. Somebody needs to stop that motherfucker. Might as well be you.”

  Crouching to meet me man to man. Staring me down like he thought I might cry or piss my pants. But I didn’t. I raised my fist in a black-power salute.

  For weeks afterward, he and my mother fell over each other imitating me, taking turns saluting and shouting “Right on!”

  * * *

  —

  Sy, dressed like an American Indian, stripped to a loincloth, his hairy legs and chest smeared with greasepaint. Red, green and black streaks smeared onto each cheek, wedged into the tiny swatch of skin that wasn’t buried beneath his massive beard.

  We were in DC. I remember that clearly. Lenny, Mom, me and Sy. Standing in the sun outside the Capitol. There was a chill in the wind. We’d been out there forever.

  “They better let us in soon,” Sy said. “Look.” He flipped up the front of his loincloth and showed us his underwear. “I’m freezing my fucking balls off.”

  * * *

  —

  I remember one time, I was maybe four, sitting on the floor surrounded by a bunch of smelly dudes, all leaning as one toward the TV, their chairs tipped on two legs, poised there, watching, waiting for Lenny to appear on the screen. I could feel their excitement infiltrate my body and send my heart racing.

  Something was about to happen. A talk show. The theme music. The host making funny.

  And somewhere behind us, watching us watch for him, the real Lenny slouched against the doorway like he could give a shit.

  After the first commercial break, the guy holding me in his lap—he had a humongous head, perfectly round, and his hair and beard frizzed out around his face in a way that made him look like a bloated sunflower—he pointed at the screen and said, “You see that? That’s your dad.” I could hear Lenny’s voice crackling from the speaker. But he—his image—wasn’t there. Just the host sneering in his skinny tie, hunched over his desk like a dyspeptic baboon, and next to him, where the guest should have been, floated a pixelated blue box. Then the second commercial came and Lenny—the one there in the room—clapped a single clap and let loose his cackle. “Fucking perfect,” he said. “Those cocksuckers censored me. Dig it. They just told the whole country, be afraid of this man, brother, be very afraid. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

  And the sunflower dude and the rest of them puffed up, smug and fat, like they were the ones who’d pulled off this great feat.

  They lived off his vapors. He was like their king. And since he was important, I was important too.

  * * *

  —

  Seeing myself in the cracked mirror propped against their bedroom wall. A guayabera shirt. A bandanna around my neck. Jeans—dungarees, Lenny called them. We argued. Jeans. Dungarees. No, they’re jeans. Listen to me: They’re dungarees. The uniform of the hardworking man. Mine were faded blue, baby-soft, with patches sewn onto odd, useless places. A peace sign on my ass. A dancing bear on my hip. Bell-bottoms. Under them,
a pair of child-sized cowboy boots made out of shiny black pleather. A costume, but it wasn’t Halloween.

  Oh, and I was wearing a black beret. A fresh-faced Che Guevara. My unruly hair jutted out like wings over my ears.

  We were going somewhere special. I have no memory of where or why. Just the costume itself. Me, the tyke revolutionary.

  And Lenny, hovering. Bouncing around the room. Hammering slogans into my head. “Huelga! Viva la resistance! Hasta la victoria siempre! No justice, no peace! We’ll make a fighter out of you yet, kid.”

  * * *

  —

  A sense of pride as I walked around with him. Of specialness and celebrity. Even the cops stopped to say hello.

  A sense of holiness—from both of my parents—like in their profanity and filth and chaotic refusal they were holding up an ideal only they could achieve. Daring the whole world to be as free as they were. They really, truly believed they were molding a new human out of the rubble. The question was whether that human would be me.

  * * *

  —

  Things I knew without having learned them. Ideas and attitudes.

  That right was wrong and wrong was right. That the people the TV said to fear—the dangerous elements with their rude behavior, the revolutionaries robbing banks and stealing Brinks trucks and writing manifestos, dudes arrested at the border with their seaplanes packed with weed, the balaclava-shrouded men engaged in armed struggle all over the world, taking hostages in the Olympic Village in Munich—they were our heroes. Brave freedom fighters. Our people. Compadres. Lenny was one of them. My mother, too.

  And the truth was always the opposite of whatever you were told it was supposed to be.

  * * *

  —

  But also, dread. A sense that the city, maybe the whole country, might explode. Currents crackled in the air, an electric buzz, flowing through each and every person in each and every restaurant, saloon and market, that was amped, unstable. The folks crouched on fire escapes, packed on subway platforms—their internal energy was running way too hot. You sensed that one or ten of them might be live wires, that a fire might ignite at any second.

  Bombs were going off, not every day, not even every week, but often enough to impress a kid, to teach him not to grow too attached. Shit blows up. Angry people fight back. Not where we lived on the Lower East Side, maybe, but elsewhere. We were safe in our ghetto. Safe because here the battle had already been waged. And we controlled the wreckage. I knew this was true ’cause my mother told me so.

  But, elsewhere? Watch out. It’s a war out there.

  * * *

  —

  I remember running. The momentum of forward movement. It’s more a sensation than a specific event. I don’t know the location. I can’t place it in time. We were in a city—I couldn’t tell you which one—and there was a disorienting onslaught of sound. Of crowds. We were running with a mob, pressed in on all sides. Or my mother was. I bounced against her chest, bound to her by some sort of makeshift sling, holding on with all my strength, but my hands kept slipping and I was sure I was going to slide off and be trampled by the horde of protesters behind her. Especially when she stutter-stepped, which she did frequently to avoid tripping on the obstacles scattered everywhere. She shouted herself hoarse. Her breath and the strident force of her bleating percussed against my temple. The rage in her. The kinetic disturbance. It propelled us forward. Kept us running. Set our pace. It felt like we’d be running forever, clanging garbage can lids together. Stomping our boots and beating our drums. We ran. When a siren yelped, we ran faster.

  I glimpsed something burning up ahead. A car was on fire. Tipped on its side. Flames licking out of the passenger window, twirling in the wheel wells and searing the steel of the undercarriage. A cop car.

  We ran right past.

  There were times when my mother had a bat in her hands. She’d swing it and I’d reel with the momentum of her body. Trashing, she called it. Destroying the Satan who went by the name of Property.

  * * *

  —

  I remember, sometimes, when Lenny was away, listening for bombs in the night, waiting for our building’s foundations to shake, wondering what it would feel like to die. Thankful that he wasn’t there to see my fear.

  * * *

  —

  Panthers, Weatherpeople, freaks killed and captured, all added to the growing roll call of martyrs. How the gravity plunged in our house on those days. I was confused about a lot of things. The specifics, the whys and hows, were beyond me. But I knew not to ask. These weren’t things I was supposed to understand.

  News of shootings, standoffs, lone individuals frothing at the mouth, nailing list after list of demands on the doors of power. In our house, we strained for the details of each arrest, listening for word—was this one of ours? Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t and often you couldn’t really tell the difference.

  Bombs in Philly. A bank. Its marble columns collapsing like ancient ruins.

  * * *

  —

  A man and a woman at our front door. The steam rising off them. The way their hats sat oddly on their heads. The way, even after they stepped inside, they refused to take their sunglasses off. The sense I had that they were different, spookier, more threatening, than the usual flotsam passing through the place.

  And the furtive discussions that went on above my head, everyone mumbling, swallowing their words. My mother guiding me to another room. “Come on, Freddy. Let’s go find you a toy.”

  Lenny’s voice—I could just make it out—“Hold on,” and then the screech of Hendrix’s guitar shredding the space like a chain saw.

  Later, Lenny, serious, grave, crouched next to my mother in the back room with us, whispering. Her nodding, reaching for his elbow. “Go. Do what you have to do.”

  The thud of the door pounding shut behind him. The way the record skipped in that moment.

  Then, my mother lifting the needle from the groove. Silence rushed in. I knew not to break it.

  * * *

  —

  Another time when I sensed Lenny was proud of me.

  Wandering the streets. Walking up the avenue. He pointed people out.

  “That guy?”

  “No.”

  “Him?”

  “No.”

  We were identifying undercover agents.

  “That one there with the rainbow belt?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “The shoes.” It was always the shoes.

  I cracked Lenny up. He cackled like the world itself had pleased him.

  * * *

  —

  Bombs in LA, Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, Cleveland. Federal buildings. State government offices. The way Lenny’s eyes flashed with life at the news.

  * * *

  —

  They didn’t bother with babysitters. India was in the air—the incense, the pajamas, the sitars and jangly anklets. They’d cue a raga up on the hi-fi and take off for the night, leaving me alone with Ravi Shankar and the great spinning circle of creation.

  No bedtimes, no discipline, no supervision.

  They let me play in traffic.

  They let me run around the block half-naked, my circumcised little penis exposed to all the neighbors.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes they dragged me along to parties.

  Up a hundred stairs, through hallways crammed with boxes, bricks of twine-wrapped newspapers, power tools and broken plains of sheetrock. Down into basements, death traps, all exposed beams and unfinished floors and ceilings, extension cords strung like trip wires, plugged into work lamps, moss and creeping weeds leaking through the cracked cement, Tic Tac–shaped pebbles strewn everywhere—the black ones were rat shit, the brown ones poison. Industrial
spaces. Abandoned warehouses. Semi-converted lofts. Liberated or forgotten places. Falling down. Unreconstructed. The rotting bits and pieces of the city that Lenny and his friends had scavenged and claimed. We’d squeeze into freight elevators with twenty other freaks all dressed up like refugees from another time, legs squeezing me from every side, corduroy and denim squishing against my face as the platform groaned and the chain clicked, and up we went until with a thud, we’d come to a stop.

  Wherever we were, whatever night of the week, the same tea-stained scene, the same cheap prisms bending light, distorting it, taking it apart.

  I was a party trick Lenny pulled from his sleeve. Something to be passed around and poked and prodded, the dog you got drunk so you could watch it flail. People would be lined up all the way out the door waiting for their turn to blow smoke in my face, giggling about the bizarre thrill of shotgunning a three-and-a-half, four-year-old child.

  Then the horror would kick in. Heavy. Dark. Glassy. Smeared with Vaseline. Beaded curtains rattling in my ears. Silly putty faces floating close and laughing. People spoke to me at the wrong rpm, droning and distorted, telling me things like “John is dead.” Lenny didn’t care. My mother didn’t care. If the party went till dawn, they’d keep me there all night, crashed out and shivering on a beanbag in the corner.

  * * *

  —

  Bombs going off in Washington outside the Pentagon. The scorched façade on the TV screen. Cops in hard hats, circling, studying the debris.

  * * *

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