The Flamethrowers Part 12

Took in escapees from the Order of the Golden Daughters, like Juan, who had no arms, his T-s.h.i.+rt sleeves empty and flapping. The Order of the Golden Daughters brainwashed children by sharing the white smoke of the drug dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, as a highway to G.o.d.

Raided the Order of the Golden Daughters after the leader gave herpes to Love Sprout, who was only fourteen. The church was in an apartment. Burdmoore's own street-level quarters in the squat on Tenth had a dirt floor and six unfixed Manx cats who infused his lair with the eternal smell of cat s.p.u.n.k. The church apartment was squalid in a different way. One hairy fatso, the leader, freebasing in white robes that had fallen open, a face almost entirely masked by an unkempt beard, the leader's wet red mouth connected to a gla.s.s pipe. Burdmoore took one look at him and almost puked. Two teenage boys lay on the floor moaning about the light filling them up, as a pigeon on a sill above them with pushpins in its wings tried to unflap them from the pins. Fah-Q and Burdmoore picked up the leader by the scruff of his robes. Knocked over his freebasing gear. Doused the place with kerosene and lit a match. Carried the moaning, moony-eyed boys back to HQ and treated their DMT highs with orange juice. Fah-Q and Burdmoore did what they could to balance out the bad morale in the community. The pushers, charlatans, proselytizers, and Pigs. They did what they could to offer care. Care with strength, call it armed love. Fah-Q did.

Brought garbage to Lincoln Center. Garbage for Garbage, the action was called, which took place on the ninth day of a garbage strike in the summer of '69. As they moved north up Broadway with bags of garbage in the back of the van, Burdmoore had it in his mind that they were riding up Jackie Kennedy's tanned leg to the Lincoln Center fountain, her panties.

They upturned their garbage bags into the fountain, filling Jackie's underpants with coffee grounds, beer bottles, sour, crushed milk cartons, all variety of stinking muck. Burdmoore wondered if he should be sorry, but then he knew Jackie must be digging it. Every chick wants her panties filled. Name a chick that- Burdmoore didn't share with any of the Motherf.u.c.kers what he secretly felt they were doing with this action, cramming garbage right up against Jackie's high-cla.s.s s.n.a.t.c.h, trash held in place by snug fabric, the way he himself felt held in place by the black Courreges bikini. He'd had to lock himself in a bathroom afterward and jerk himself vigorously. Jackie turned him on so much he wondered if he were actually gay, but he shoved the thought away and focused on yanking down her fancy underwear and thumping his c.o.c.k against her plush, tanned p.u.s.s.y. Oh, G.o.d. Was her p.u.s.s.y suntanned? Did it make him gay that Jackie was an icon for the f.a.gs? A question that came at exactly the wrong moment and he found himself coming while picturing big, pink, chintz-covered b.u.t.tons. The Motherf.u.c.kers' next big action came quick because he needed to engage in something indisputably macho and so they * * *

Knifed a concert promoter on Second Avenue. The promoter was refusing to let them use his club for community events. "This is for Jerry f.u.c.king Garcia," Burdmoore said, as Fah-Q jammed the spike of his knife under the promoter's ribs.

Robbed a Chemical Bank on Broadway and Seventy-Ninth Street, wearing wigs. Burdmoore's was brunette with bangs (this is for you, Jackie), and then splurged on groceries at Fairway. Returned to the Lower East Side and fed the people. Fed the people for a week. Chasing after junkies and alcoholics and teenage girls with hollow eyes, Dominican and black children who otherwise lived on chocolate Yoo-hoo and Cracker Jacks, the Motherf.u.c.kers pa.s.sing out paper plates with grits, pinto beans, rotisserie chicken, salad. Families of every racial type included in the New York census came to their address on Tenth Street and ate the food the Motherf.u.c.kers cooked and served, drank the juices they made and ladled into Dixie cups and for which they asked nothing in return. They even fed the hippies, who were unpolitical hedonists hated more or less by the Motherf.u.c.kers. But the Motherf.u.c.kers did not turn anyone hungry away. Your hunger is your dignity is your payment, they said as they handed out the plates of food and the cups of fresh juice, beet, carrot, pineapple, wheatgra.s.s. Food. Grace. Love. Dignity. Enjoy. Enjoy. Enjoy.

Stormed Veselka, the overpriced rip-off Ukrainian diner on Second Avenue and Ninth. No territorial borders anymore between kitchen and restaurant, customer and b.u.m, waiter and thief. The women who were with the Motherf.u.c.kers (it may as well be stated: no women were Motherf.u.c.kers. Women were the sisters of action, dreaming. Bedmate, janitor, cook, nag), carrying out plates of hot food and everybody nos.h.i.+ng. Later they upgraded this concept and stormed the Four Seasons, ate and drank whatever they wanted, and then walked out after creaming a maitre d' for the h.e.l.l of it with the contents of a fire extinguisher. Comiendo, as Fah-Q, who was Cuban, liked to say, comiendo a la fuerza. Eating by force.

Called in security geese, or rather some geese randomly ended up in their squat, which Juan trained and oversaw, along with looking after Bonanno the minwhip (Juan loved animals, and had he not been armless, homeless, neglected, afflicted, abused, molested, and left for dead on Avenue D, Burdmoore felt he might have become a veterinarian). The geese honked their heads off and bit anyone unapproved who came to the compound as well as offering a lively, dynamic presence to their scene. The downside was that they s.h.i.+t all over the place in dark, oily squirts, and everyone had to be careful where they stepped.

Called in the h.e.l.ls Angels when news came of an imminent raid, to be led by Captain Fink of the Ninth Precinct, with reinforcements from other precincts. The Angels met their needs, for the most part. They barricaded the corner of Tenth and B, and from inside, launched Molotovs, and later, when the police arrived with the usual-riot gear and billy clubs, baton rounds of various sorts, mostly rubber and bean bag bullets, stench darts, smoke bombs, water cannons, flashbang and sponge grenades, tear gas-the Angels put together a huge tower of burning tires to neutralize the tear gas. The Motherf.u.c.kers held their ground and the Pigs had to regroup and find a new tactic to try to flush them out. The hitches were few but unfortunate: drunk and caged in too close of quarters, one of the Angels committed a forcible act on Burdmoore's wife, Nadine. The cause of whose tears, Burdmoore understood, could not be found in the traces on her cheeks. My hands are tied, Burdmoore said, frowning, as he and Nadine both looked at his hands. What could he do? Not much. Little. In fact, nothing. Even as he knew the source of her tears was endless. Bottomless and endless and not to be found in their traces.

In the rain. In a squat. In an orgy. We meet again.

Made end-time plans, with sixty-eight charges brought between the two of them, Burdmoore Model and Fah-Q Motherf.u.c.ker (whose real name on official police doc.u.ments was Hector Valadez, which no one knew until the warrants were served. Fah-Q said you should hear in your name nothing of yourself, nothing but the voice that calls it).

It was time for the diaspora, the wandering, Fah-Q said, Burdmoore agreeing, but on what the wandering was, how it related to struggle, to revolution, they did not agree. For Fah-Q, struggle was a historical process with specific phases, stages, ruptures, plateaus, and victories, all leading to an eventual cla.s.sless society. Burdmoore was more of a mystic, an intuitive sort of dude. For Burdmoore, there was only waiting-that was how you prepared for the future, by waiting for cataclysm and you would know it when it came. It might blow up in your face, but hopefully your enemy's face.

Fah-Q said the city could no longer be the site of an insurrectionary seizure of the means of life. It was 1971 and not only was the heat on him and Burdmoore, the factories were closing. The worker was leaving the city, and the city, according to Fah-Q, was only the worker, the factory, the reproduction of the cla.s.s relation. It was time to drop into the void, the desolate mountains of northern Mexico.

Burdmoore went with him, taking Nadine, but only to evade the police. Burdmoore believed still in the city, which he felt sure was the only place for love and violence. Whoever goes into exile exiles, he told himself on the day of their hasty departure. Does not the stranger who leaves take with him the inhabitable city? I take it with me, he thought, and I will return it and myself in due time. At the right moment. History, Bubalev said, happens in cities. Not elsewhere.

In the meantime, with sixty-eight charges between them, it was time to go.

Six months into their hards.h.i.+p, Nadine having ditched him for a ride to Los Angeles, Burdmoore lucked out and found legal aid. Returned to New York and worked out a deal with the DA. Regrouped and waited for the rupture he knew was coming.

With or without him, it would come.

12. THE SEARS MANNEQUIN STANDARD.

It was simply our night. People were mugged every night of the week in SoHo, where the streets were dark and empty-no streetlights, no open stores, just deserted loading docks.

We'd walked with a kind of pall over us, Sandro annoyed at Talia for letting Ronnie goad her into punching herself in the face, annoyed at me for announcing to him that I was going to Monza, which was what I said on the street, outside Rudy's, drunk and pus.h.i.+ng the limits.

"I'm going," I said. "I was invited and it's not about you. It's about me."

"Great," he said. "That's great. Maybe for your next act you can show them your t.i.ts."

"That's nice," I said.

"It's as nice as the Valera Company gets," he said. "Actually, it's nicer, because it's a region of human qualities. Of females. But never mind."

We walked along in the dark, our silence thick with two minds that were not going to reconcile easily. He wanted me to forgo the trip, and I thought it was unfair to pretend that my driving the Spirit of Italy was nothing. It was not nothing, it was actually incredible. And yet I was being forced to choose, now, between a genuine opportunity and Sandro. The more I thought about it the angrier I got, and then our mugger emerged from a doorway.

He was holding a knife out in front of him like it was something hot, flas.h.i.+ng it at us in jabs. He demanded our wallets.

Sandro reached for his, in his back pocket, and instead withdrew the cap-and-ball pistol.

"Drop the knife."

The mugger didn't.

"You aren't going to shoot me," he said to Sandro. "What the f.u.c.k is that man-"

He reached toward Sandro. Sandro pulled the hammer back and fired.

A ball of smoke went up. The knife clattered to the sidewalk.

The mugger shrieked, holding his hand, his body folded around it. He looked up at Sandro from his crouched position, clutching his hand.

"You f.u.c.king shot me! I can't believe you f.u.c.king shot me!"

I felt the mugger's horror as mine, too.

I said I was going to call 911 and get the guy an ambulance. We were only a block from our loft. "You better wait with him," I said.

"Sure," Sandro said, and shrugged like I was making a minor and fussy request, asking him to retrieve a candy wrapper he'd just dropped on the ground.

I was on hold, 911 flooded with calls on a Sat.u.r.day night, New York so full of emergencies that the wait was ten minutes.

"Did you see the gunman?" the operator asked me.

"The gunman?"

"The person who shot the victim," she said.

The victim?

"h.e.l.lo? You're going to have to make a report-"

I hung up the receiver. Cooked old spaghetti, and as the water boiled I heard the ambulance.

I kept expecting Sandro. He didn't return. I wasn't sure what to do. I ate the spaghetti and drank a gla.s.s of warm white wine because these were what we had and it was late and there had been a lot of drinking and I was hungry for a second dinner. The ambulance had come and gone and now I heard nothing. I decided I'd better go back out. There was no one on the street. It was dark and quiet, as if we'd never been there getting mugged. I walked down to Houston Street, where an occasional taxi sped past. Returned home and waited.

I sat on a daybed in the living room, a plywood platform that Sandro had built, listening through the open windows to the airy tone of the sleeping city. Not a single car disturbed the loose cobblestones on our street. I turned on the television. The three a.m. movie was just starting. A baby crying in the arms of a woman whose face was puffy from sleep, her hair matted and pillow-dented. The scene was familiar but I could not place it. The camera moved to a prettier woman on a couch. She sat up, thin and blond with a weedlike vitality, looked out the window at a front-loader pus.h.i.+ng coal waste around. I realized I'd seen this movie in a theater with Sandro. The prettier woman had ditched her husband and kids and was about to set off on a series of sketchy adventures with a jumpy, anxious man. The point of the film was not the stark life in a coal-mining town, although that was how Sandro had read it, the human element of industry. It was about being a woman, about caring and not caring what happens to you. It was about not really caring.

Coal came in different sizes, Sandro had explained after we saw the film. Names like lump, stoker, egg, and chestnut. Sandro liked knowing those kinds of things. He and Ronnie both did, although, as Ronnie joked, Sandro owned factories and Ronnie had worked in them. Or at least that was what Ronnie said, that he'd worked in a textile mill. But sometimes he said he'd only ever worked on boats. And yet the stories Ronnie told about working in the textile mill seemed real. I decided that if he hadn't worked in one, well, someone had. Someone had lived the experience Ronnie narrated to us. "We p.i.s.sed behind the dye house," he said. "Because there were old lushes hiding in the bathrooms, hovering and waiting for you to pull out your young c.o.c.k." Ronnie's job was stirring a dye vat. He worked with another kid, tall and skinny with a goiter on his neck the size of a tennis ball. One week, Ronnie said, this kid with the big goiter on his neck didn't show up and Ronnie stirred the dye vat alone. The next week the kid was back, a large bandage where the goiter had been. Ronnie said they had a secret medical clinic in the subbas.e.m.e.nt of the mill so that no one would file workers' comp. "When my hand got caught in a roller," he said, "these guys wheeled me down there and left me for dead with a big male nurse who fed me MREs and morphine."

"Is he telling the truth?" I asked Sandro. "He's complicated," Sandro said. "You have to listen closely. He'll say something perfectly true and it's meaningless. Then he makes something up, but it has value. He's telling you something."

The woman in the movie goes to court and tells the judge she's no good, her kids are better off without her. Her calm and snowy face: a person quietly letting her life unravel. Because of her beauty, there would be no unnecessary detours through vanity.

I have other problems, Nadine had said.

The woman in the film was already beautiful and had to confront her life directly. She was driven to destroy herself, and because of her beauty, free to do so.

She tries to collect the rest of her pay at a sweatshop.

What can I do for you, lover? The s.h.i.+ft boss in thick gla.s.ses, his eyes big jelly orbs rolling over her.

Behind him, centering the frame, the employee punch clock. Ronnie and Sandro's friend Sammy punched a time clock on the hour every hour twenty-four hours a day for a year. Sandro said it was one of the great artworks of the century, that and Ronnie's declared project to photograph every living person. Sammy who had lived outside for a year, which was far more grueling, more extreme, than driving a land speed vehicle. But both meant shaping your life around an activity and calling it a performance. And so why should I not go to Monza?

I heard the garbage trucks outside. Ronnie was probably making his appearance at the young girl's, the one he was keeping on a layaway plan. Not as he had doubtlessly promised, hours earlier, but now, in the final moments of night, to take what she offered.

The woman in the film drinks in a bar. She's in hair curlers, a chiffon headscarf tied over them like a tarp over a log pile. The hollows of the curlers, s.p.a.ces for hope: something good might happen.

There was no sign of Sandro. I watched the film to keep myself awake while I waited.

A man bought the woman a beer. She took dainty sips in her hair curlers, in preparation for no specific occasion. Curler time seemed almost religious, a waiting that was more important than what the waiting was for. Curler time was about living the now with a belief that a future, an occasion for set hair, existed.

But then she was putting on her ratty underwear and the rest of her clothes and chasing a traveling salesman out of a motel room, abandoning the curlers for good.

Hey! Hey, wait up!

I came to rehea.r.s.e parts of this film, my memory of the scenes returning in more detail as I watched. I began to antic.i.p.ate. Not the lines, though I remembered a few of them, but looks on the woman's face.

Gazing at department store mannequins as if they possessed something essential and human that she lacked. Mannequins were carefully positioned to look natural, looking off in this direction or that but never at us. This was part of the Sears Mannequin Standard. My mother had worked for a short time as an a.s.sistant window dresser at the Sears in downtown Reno. She was given a booklet with a list of instructions, the most important being the no-eye-contact rule. If the mannequins made eye contact with shoppers they would disrupt the dream, the shopper's projection. A mannequin's job was to sell us to ourselves in a more perfect version for $19.99.

The woman peered at the mannequins for guidance. Examining their enameled makeup, a purse dangling from a stiff arm, a pole supporting each life-size figure from behind, disappearing into a hole cut into the rear seam of her slacks. They each have a pole up their a.s.s, says the sudden wryness in the woman's face. How about that.

Her face when Mr. Dennis, the jumpy man, tosses her new lemon pants out the car window: childlike disappointment.

When you're with me, no slacks. No slacks!

Tosses her lipstick.

Makes you look cheap.

When you're with me, no curlers. Why don't you get a hat?

You don't want anything, you won't have anything, he tells her. You don't have anything, you're nothing. You might as well be dead.

Everything goes wrong when they try to rob a bank. It was like poor Tim Fontaine, Ronnie's younger brother. Tim Fontaine, who had robbed a bank and then waited at a crowded bus stop when the ink bomb in the money bag went off. Why didn't he take a cab? I'd wondered. "Because that's my brother," Ronnie said. "If he was smart enough to take a cab he might have figured out some other way to finance his drug habit." Ronnie said that before his brother robbed banks he sold heroin in Bushwick and that it was a stupidly hard job, sixteen-hour days, and his only pay was a morning and evening fix. "That's the thing about junkies," Ronnie said, "they work like dogs, it's all day out on the streets and they think they're cheating the system. I told my brother, you make twelve cents an hour." "How much do you make, Ronnie?" Sandro had joked. And Ronnie said, "I don't make a wage, I'm an artist. I'm not part of the system." "Neither is your brother," Sandro said. "So you have to tack on something to his twelve cents an hour, some added value."

I once met Tim Fontaine. I'd had ideas about what he'd be like, as a brother of Ronnie's, and as a person who'd spent several years robbing banks and armored cars before he was caught. I pictured sideburns like Ronnie's, swaggering and handsome like Ronnie, the never-washed and greasy Levi's, the motorcycle boots. The sarcasm. Sungla.s.ses propped on his head and the slightest, barest touch of a grace that was almost feminine, because Ronnie had a pretty mouth. In other words, I pictured Ronnie. Tim Fontaine was nothing like Ronnie. He mumbled and shuffled and stared at the floor. He wore the stiff, ill-fitting, and too-new-looking work clothes I later learned is the universal wardrobe of ex-cons. The severe, barbershop hair. A mustache that covers some kind of pitting or scarring. The awkward bulk of prison yard muscles. There was a sense with Tim Fontaine that it was all uphill from here. Twelve steep steps, then repeat. He barely looked at me when I met him, just stared at his hands, the pads of his fingers crusted and s.h.i.+ny. "The dumbf.u.c.k removed his fingerprints with acid when he turned eighteen," Ronnie said. "As if that won't instantly ID you as a criminal."

Nearing the end of the film, morning in a deserted quarry. The woman wakes up in a car, a soldier unzipping his pants and forcing himself on her. She escapes, runs screaming into the woods in her white sandals, slingbacks Mr. Dennis had borrowed from the trunk of a car in the Woolworth's lot. By luck they had fit her perfectly. She tears through the bramble, scratched, frantic, half-dressed, half-raped, and falls, facedown, crying.

Night at a roadside tavern. Someone fits an unlit cigarette behind her ear. She's given a hot dog. Chews it, meek and grateful. Her beer gla.s.s is filled and refilled.

Honky-tonk music plays, fiddles eking out cheer as people shout and smoke and drink, their voices pelting the woman.

You don't want anything, you won't have anything. You don't have anything, you're nothing.

The cigarette in her long-fingered hand. Her snow-faced beauty, the light of it dim.

I am still . . . so . . . pretty. Nadine, leaning toward me to prove it.

The camera frames the woman, her eyes toward the table.

That's it. End of film.

As if on cue, I heard our freight elevator climbing toward the top floor on its chains.

The elevator rumbled and squeaked slowly back down to its resting position on the first floor. I turned off the television and got up.

Sandro was sitting in the dark, on a chair in the middle of the large entrance room. I went for the light switch.

"No," he said, "leave it and come here."

He buried his head against me. I was flooded with sympathy for him. The only fair thing, I thought, was to try to share the psychic fallout for his mistake. And yet as I stroked his hair, his warm weight against me, I felt separate from what he'd done, defending eight dollars plus a phone number scribbled on a hardware store receipt-the contents of his wallet, I later saw. The number was the Trust E. Ordering takeout, probably. He'd shot a person in the hand to defend eight dollars and a phone number I knew by heart.

He picked me up and carried me to the bed. There was a bed in that room that we didn't normally sleep in. It and the single chair were the only furniture. Sandro liked to have a bed in every room, freestanding, never pushed against a wall. Even on the floors below, which were only for displaying his finished works and the works of his friends, Stanley Kastle, Saul Oppler, John Chamberlain, a few pieces of Ronnie's, there was a bed in each open room, islands of domestic comfort in s.p.a.ces otherwise so spare that an old steam radiator in the corner, its silver paint flaking, seemed homey and domestic. The only person who used these beds was Sandro. He liked a surface for lying down and thinking, for feeling the s.p.a.ce of a room, for looking up at the high, repeating pattern of stamped tin, listening as the cobblestones made their hollow clomp-clomp when trucks pa.s.sed on the street below. Its austerity gave Sandro's loft the feel of a very clean machine shop. Everything in it was coated in a fine residue that had a greasy sustenance to it, like graphite shavings, dust that left a blackish smear if you tried to wipe it from a windowsill, or if you sat on a chair in light-colored pants. Sandro's loft would never be clean like a regular home. Machine lubricants and the solvents and by-products of fabric treatment were stained into the floorboards in ghost-dark shadows. In the building's former life it had been a dress factory. When Sandro first bought it, Gloria Kastle was working for him as an a.s.sistant, one aspect of their "long history," which Gloria took pleasure in alluding to and Sandro rolled his eyes at. Dress pins had been packed into the s.p.a.ces between every floorboard, and Gloria's job had been to pull them out, crouching on her knees with a handheld magnet. It took her a week and her back hurt for months afterward, but she said she grew attached to the task, consolidating stray pins. "When I closed my eyes at night," she said, "I saw pins being coaxed from cracks and crevices with a very strong magnet, the pins sticking to one another like a chain of paper dolls." Sandro had done the brute work, unbolted and javelined the scores of industrial ironing boards into an open dumpster in front of the building, whose sea level of discarded machinery rose each day and was magically lowered each night as nocturnal scavengers climbed into the dumpster and carried things away.