1.
Volunteers
Call me Fred. I hate Freedom. That’s some crap Lenny dreamed up to keep people like you talking about him.
And it worked. Right? I mean, you didn’t drive all the way up here with your tape recorder and backpack full of good intentions to learn about me. I’m just the kid. What you want is more of him. More of the ’60s hoopla. All that rebel music. The tie-dyes and free love and taking it to the streets. Even now, twenty-eight years after he died, you can’t get enough.
So, fine. It’s been like that my whole life. Who am I to judge?
By the time Lenny was the age I am now, he’d changed the world—or, anyway, that’s what he would have claimed. And me? I’m just some dude who’s done some carpentry. Some bathtub restoration. Sustained myself by staying out of sight. I’ve worn ironic T-shirts and thought ironic thoughts about the commodification of revolution, worked at coffee shops and bookstores. Whatever it took. I’ve run some scams. I’ve had scams run on me. I’ve deflected and I’ve survived. If there’s one thing you learn when you’re Lenny Snyder’s son it’s how to bullshit your way on through to the next day.
But really, I don’t know anything about anything.
Except Lenny, I guess. I know a lot about him.
I know I let him down.
But he let me down too.
Why? How?
Well, where to start? I guess, with him. Lenny Snyder. Alpha. Omega.
This might take some time. You want coffee? I’ve got instant.
If Lenny were here, he’d say he cut his teeth as a Freedom Rider. Did that for years. Learned how to organize from John Lewis himself. Eventually he found himself hanging around Liberty House, the storefront on Bleecker where the SNCC sold its tchotchkes. He spent his days unpacking handwoven rugs and wooden earrings, burlap dolls with button eyes. Stocking displays with pickled green tomatoes and peach jam. Doing his part for the poor black folk of Mississippi by hawking their product to the guilt ridden, socially conscious engagé in New York. Feeling restless. Wasted. No longer in the action. Just a good-intentioned shopkeeper shilling for Snick.
He’d say things were happening there in the city. A new energy gusting through the streets, blowing the youth of America, kids nobody wanted, kids who’d lost faith in their parents’ gods, over the bridges, through the tunnels and into the city. They’d wander around the shop a bit dazed, a bit hungry. Not exactly sure why they were there. They’d go for the candy—peppermint, caramel. They’d weigh it, shyly, in their hands. Ask how much and, when he told them, they’d say “groovy” and pretend to browse for another minute before placing it all back on the shelf. Without a word, they’d shuffle out of the store and hump it back to the Lower East Side, where they’d shiver and starve and wonder what they’d been thinking by coming to this town. He’d stare out the window, watching them go, and think, Why am I in here when I should be out there? Snick would be just fine without a Jewboy like him ringing up sales and balancing the books.
Lenny would say, These kids, they weren’t hippies. What was a hippie? A hippie was something he hadn’t invented yet. These kids were just runaways attuned to the cosmic vibes in the air. They had draft cards to burn and were looking for something new, whatever that might be, an alternative to the Southeast Asian quicksand rising invisibly around their ankles. Well, he knew what it was. That something new was him. He stopped cutting his hair. He put away the oxford shirt and the dress slacks, threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and headed across town to join the youth culture.
He’d say, The revolution needed its heroes. He just happened to hear the call.
He set himself up as a trickster, a satyr, the great god of Pan dancing on goat’s feet through the wilderness of the Lower East Side. He set about using his organizing skills to create a new society. Saying, Never trust anyone over thirty. Saying, Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Saying, Flower power is people power. Free your mind and your world will follow. Reality is what you make it. The revolution is in your mind. Tune in, turn on and drop out. Everything should be free.
And drawn by his message, the kids just kept pouring in.
When he saw they were hungry he wheedled a deal with the old-timers who ran the local greasy spoons, Poles and Puerto Ricans and Jews who spoke his language. You set a percentage of your produce aside, maybe some of that meat too, and I’ll keep these longhairs from looting your shop. He made stews every Thursday and ladled them out to whoever happened to be loitering in Tompkins Square.
When he saw they had no place to sleep he told them, Come to me. I’ll point you toward the closest crash pad. I know where they all are. We’re taking this hood over one building at a time.
When he saw they had no clothes, no shoes, nothing of their own, he broke into an empty storefront and flung its doors open wide. He carted inside whatever he found on the street—couches and dressers and stacks of old books—and supplemented this with more luxurious items, suede jackets, miniskirts, the latest fashions that he liberated from the backs of trucks. He’d go to Macy’s—the service entrance, late at night—and load up the chipped, discarded floor models of last year’s furniture, haul them downtown, loose them into the world. Kids would stroll in. “What’s this cost?” they’d ask about some broken umbrella, some battered frying pan with a melted handle; if they were daring, a Formica table. And Lenny would tell them, “You want it? It’s yours. Just leave something in its place. Or don’t. It’s free. This is a free store.” One day he showed up with a state-of-the-art color TV, a massive thing built into its own cabinet with a hi-fi record player tucked in the lid. Top of the line. Straight from S. Klein’s department store. It even had a remote, that’s how fancy. He’d driven his van up and given the manager some story about the warehouse wanting it back. Walked right out with it. Put it in the window, a sign taped to the screen: EVERYTHING FREE. Kids came and went taking what they wanted—loose buttons, comic books, moccasins and boots—but for some reason they never touched the TV. Never even asked about it. They couldn’t make the leap to total freedom, not yet. Lenny had a shitload of work to do if he was going to change their frame of reference.
When he saw they had no dope he’d roll them a joint. You couldn’t put a price on the new consciousness.
When he saw they wanted music he stormed the Fillmore East and demanded that the shows be put on for free.
When he saw they had the clap he stole them penicillin.
When he saw that they were often suicidal he set up a hotline for them to call. A handful of bleeding hearts he sometimes fucked who were willing to stay up late talking the kids down.
When he saw they were getting arrested for loitering, littering, pissing on a tree, spurious charges, like most crimes in this country, he strong-armed the head shops and record stores that had built their fortunes off the kids’ desires into floating a bail fund. No interest. No payback. You dig it? We’re free.
He held town meetings and formed committees. Gem Spa’s raised the price of its egg creams? Let’s boycott. Leshko’s won’t serve you if you’ve got long hair? We’ll sit in. The cops down at the 6th Precinct are harassing the Puerto Ricans again? Let’s go show those motherfuckers what it feels like.
He got himself a mimeograph machine and printed up leaflets by the hundreds. Out on the streets all day and all night, he handed one to anybody who walked past. A crudely stapled pamphlet full of subversive survival tactics. Neighborhood announcements. Locations of ad hoc health clinics and community gardens. There’s gonna be a block party on 12th Street this Sunday. Watch out for the blond guy in the red felt hat—he’s been groping women on St. Marks Place. The Icelandic five Aurar coin is worth an eighth of one American cent. It’s the exact same size and weight as a quarter. Score yourself a handful, head to the Automat, slip these slugs into the machines and feast away.
When the streets needed cleaning, the city having allocated its limited resources to neighborhoods with boulevards and homeowners who actually paid taxes, he and his cohort dressed themselves up as clowns, complete with greasepaint and size 26 shoes. They procured a bevy of janitor’s brooms and swept the streets themselves, amassing mounds of trash and public nuisance summonses at the end of every block.
He nudged and prodded. Said, Let this melt on your tongue. I’ll be your spirit guide. Let’s meet on Saturday at the Great Lawn. We’ll float up there on papier-mâché wings. We’ll strip off our clothes and dance and be happy, and unlike this fucking country of ours, we’ll know no sin. Ten thousand people made the trip with him, and when they arrived, he pointed to the sky and ten thousand flowers rained down around them. And for a while, a few Technicolor hours, they all forgot they were going to die and who it was who was trying to kill them. Next time they’d remember. He’d make sure of that.
Love was in the water, in the lead-laced soil, winking through the cracks in the pavement. You couldn’t walk out the door without stumbling over it. Girls were acting like men, giving it away for free. He partook, how could he not, in the beauty of creation. He met my mother one day at the Free Store when she backed a delivery truck up to the door, flung open the back and released a hundred chickens onto the sidewalk. A storm of feathers. A squawking and clamoring over each other as they raced off to coop out all up and down the street. And then there she was with the body of a vixen and the body language of an urban guerrilla. Ironed hair hanging straight down to her ass. She could have wandered in from the hills of Cuba.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Animal husbandry,” was her answer. “Come on. The next load is goats.”
In the cab of the truck, heading out of town, he asked, “What gives? What’s the big idea?” She reminded him of the girls he’d known in Brooklyn, so much tougher than the boys, striving to get their ya-ya’s out before they took the frum. Those girls who’d shown him how to swear and taught him the meaning of swagger.
“Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day,” she said. “Teach him to fish, you feed him forever. Not so long ago New York was clogged with livestock. People might’ve been poor, but they didn’t go hungry. They harvested their own eggs, milked their own cows. What we’re doing now is repopulation.”
“You’re blowing my mind,” he said. “Lady, what’s your name?”
“Suzy Morgenstern. What’s it to you?”
She had a brown spot in the white of her left eye, a liquid beauty mark. The sexiest thing he ever did see.
Two weeks later—they were already fucking by then—they repeated the stunt, this time with saplings liberated from Van Cortlandt Park. A neighborhood beautification project. Plop a tree in the middle of the street. Surround it with dirt until it stands upright. Bring the jungle back to the concrete jungle. The hippies—they were hippies now, no doubt about it, but what did that mean? It meant people without limits, no need for authority, different from bikers only in that they were scrambling toward God, not the devil. They thought Lenny’s reforestation project was far out. Each time a new tree materialized on Avenue A or 4th Street or Delancey, they’d rise from the muck to wrap it in ribbons, flower children dancing around a maypole. It had the added benefit of stopping traffic.
Lenny would say this was more than fun and games. He’d say he had a plan all along. Power to the people.
He’d remind you there was a war on. People lived in terror of getting drafted. We had to show them the garden before they could ask who owned it. Who
should own it. Who would care for it best.
We had to give them hope, gain their trust and educate them. That’s why the puppet shows and mimes and clowns. That’s why the massive yellow submarines. That’s why the body paint and dandelion necklaces. That’s why the Be-ins and Love-ins and Smoke-ins. Tell them, Hey, take a look, all the old folk are gawking. Stare into their souls. Your mother? Your father? What do you think of them? That man in the suit reading
The Wall Street Journal? Those guys gathered in the situation room, dreaming up new strategies to get you killed? What do you think they think of you? He’d say the gambit all along had been to inject an activist spirit into the youth culture. He was thirty, not a kid at all, and for him getting stoned and playing bongos in the park was a job, not a spaced-out way to kill an afternoon. Public relations. An act he put on to build community among those he considered his constituency. It was serious work, galvanizing them and setting them loose on the nation. When he wasn’t on the street, he was in a meeting in any of a hundred flash points scattered through the city—a stalwart old leftist’s apartment or a church basement or the AFL-CIO offices or a classroom filled with those untrustworthy cocksuckers in SDS—crouched on a folding chair, ready to spring.
The people in these meetings, they annoyed him like hell. The sanctimony. The condescension. The unending ideological debate. It all made him angry. The old Left—and the new Left too—were a bunch of pompous asses. Maccabees, he called them. No sense of humor. They wouldn’t know joy if it kicked them in the head. And worse, they were boring. A total snooze. Things that could be said in three words required a two-and-a-half-hour speech. He longed to leap up and hang from the ceiling fan, hoot like a howler monkey and shut them the fuck up. He longed to throw his chair at their leaders’ heads. To say, You keep droning on about revolution but really all you want is more of the same. A cadre of saps and earnest pacifists patting themselves on the back. Talking about empathy and the tears of the world. Wake me when you’re done singing “Kumbaya.”
He’d show them. He and his army of freaks would turn their revolution upside down.
And they did.
But first, one more celebration of love. Another Be-in in the Sheep’s Meadow. This time, a marriage. My mother and Lenny, two wandering Jews dressed in their sharpest native garb. Old-timey robes hemmed with thread of blue and gold, cinched at the waist with ropes made of hemp. The straps of their sandals snaking up their calves. The rabbi came courtesy of city hall. There’s no best man, no maid of honor. Just four thousand witnesses tripping on acid and a photographer from the Associated Press. It’s Easter. Lenny tells the assembled crowd, “We’re living right now in a culture of death. We need a new life. A new covenant. We need to reassert the possible. We need to court transfiguration. What I’m saying is, let’s make love, not war.” He and my mother untied their robes. They let it all hang out, every inch of their skin. They embraced and lowered themselves to the grass and committed a transgressive act of sexual love right then and there for everyone to see. Conceiving the new vision of humanity that, ten months later, would become me. Freedom. Fred for short. To Lenny, just the kid.
In the meantime, he had a generation’s consciousness to change.
Lenny would say, We presented the timid with a vision of the future and told them, “This could be your present. All that’s stopping you is you.” He’d say, We told them, “Don’t be a slave to the death cult of money. Come outside and breathe the fresh air. You wanna see what’s in the hearts of the money changers? Come on. I’ll show you.” He led a ragged band of hippies downtown to the Stock Exchange. “Let’s take a tour. Observe the animals in their natural habitat. They filed in like tourists and assembled on the visitors’ deck overlooking the trading floor. See how they’re crammed into that overcrowded pen? Note the leashes Windsor-knotted around their necks. The cacophony of growls and barks as they barter over paper chits. Can you smell their fear? They sure as fuck smell yours. Pity them, for they know not what they do. But wait!” He fished a crumpled dollar bill from his pocket, held it over the railing and let go. The bill fluttered and twirled like a butterfly. It floated over the herd of traders. First, one guy noticed it. Then another. Then a third snatched it out of the air. Lenny dropped a second bill. He gave my mother a signal and she dropped one too. A handful of traders had caught on by now. With each new bill, more of them hooted at the deck. Lenny’s eyes bugged in mock surprise. He threw his head back and shook his mighty mane, cackling with his signature glee. “Free money,” he called, letting loose another handful and watching the traders scamper. They were like children at a parade, arms outstretched, faces contorted with the effort to contain their excitement, screaming hoarsely at the man on the float who might or might not aim his candy at them. Each falling dollar instigated a scrum. Lenny cackled and cackled. “You see what we’re dealing with?” His friends all got in on it. They’d stuffed their pockets too. Hundreds of one-dollar bills. And eventually so many fell at such a rate that the traders erupted in an all-out battle, mano a mano, every man for himself. No one was watching the boards anymore. All trading halted. The market shut down. ’Cause why flip numbers and bid on abstractions when cold hard cash is pissing from the sky. “Score one for freedom,” Lenny told the press assembled on Wall Street. “All for one lousy buck. Those people are animals. I feared for my life.” Then he pulled the last dollar bill from his pocket, held it up to the cameras and set it ablaze.
It’s all about disruption, he’d say. We pissed in their corner and claimed it as ours.
Copyright © 2019 by Joshua Furst. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
