The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  Gloria had a way of insisting that I track her comments, agree with them, as she spoke. I nodded in assent as she went on about how bad art could not save itself and could not be saved, as she spooned sauces, all of them the same ocher-orange color, into bowls. Helen Hellenberger, just arriving, peeked her head into the kitchen and blew an air kiss to Gloria. Helen looked around the kitchen, passing over me as if I were Gloria’s assistant, hired to help out for the night, and then left the room, to chat with the men.

  As Gloria went on about Burdmoore and bad art, I nodded and privately hoped I was on the side of good art. I was not making papier-mâché, obviously. Or declarations about parting labia. And I was safe in another essential way: I had not put myself out there yet. I could delay it until I knew for certain that what I was doing was good. Until I knew I was doing the right thing. The next thing would be this Valera project. It was half art and half life, and from there, I felt, something would emerge.

  Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste. She said the Motherfuckers’ actions were interesting, in the context of the dreadful hippies of that era. The Motherfuckers were about anger and drugs and sex, and what a relief that was, Gloria said, compared to the love-everyone tyranny of the hippies.

  As we all took our places at the table, Sandro came over to kiss me, say hi, because he was at the other end, next to Didier de Louridier, victim of the Motherfuckers. I didn’t mind being seated so far from him, although sometimes Sandro would speak later to whomever I’d been next to. “So-and-so said you were very quiet.” As if I had some duty—to Sandro—that required me to be more assertive, to entertain his friends. So-and-so talked nonstop, I’d say, and he’d laugh. They all talked nonstop. That is, if you didn’t intervene. They were accustomed to being interrupted. Whoever was hungriest to speak, spoke. I wasn’t hungry in that same way. I was hungry to listen. Sandro said I was his little green-eyed cat at these parties. A cat studying mice, he said, and I said it was more like a cat among dogs, half-terrified. “You shouldn’t be,” he said. “You always have something interesting to say, but you withhold it. The only one besides me who knows you,” he said, “is Ronnie.” Which sent a curious wave through me. I wanted to believe it was true that Ronnie knew me.

  We were at a massive, outdoor-use picnic table with ancient-looking messages knifed into its top. “Kilroy was here” and “eat me” and “fuck” and “fuk.” Its gouged surface was lacquered over in glossy black. The Kastles had purchased it from P.S. 130 in Chinatown, which, Gloria announced somewhat triumphantly, was selling everything but the smoke alarms to keep from closing down.

  Burdmoore turned to me. “That’s who you’re here with?” He gestured in Sandro’s direction.

  I said yes.

  “What are you, eighteen years old?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “Twenty-three.”

  He was looking at Sandro and about to say something more when Gloria started in about the purchase of the table, how they’d found someone to strip it and lacquer it, and how it had to be lifted up the elevator shaft, end-on, with ropes and pulleys. Burdmoore concentrated on the chicken tandoori, the problem of its sauce in his beard.

  “Enough about the fucking table,” Stanley said.

  He and Gloria squared off in lowered voices. As they argued, Gloria got up and went to a sideboard and I had the terrible thought that she was going to pick up Sandro’s cap-and-ball pistol and point it at Stanley. But she retrieved a tea towel and a bowl of water and set these in front of Burdmoore so he could clean his beard.

  Sandro raised his glass and said he wanted to make a toast. He gazed warmly at me across the table, his smile punctuated by dimples, and I thought perhaps he was going to toast me, my ride across the salt flats.

  “To Helen,” he said, “and to the future, our future. Let’s hope it’s a long one.”

  As I drank to Helen, I understood that her elegant Greek air, like Gloria’s stern air, was not an attack on me. The important thing was to be patient. To not make enemies. I would even try to befriend Helen, I thought.

  The common table conversation had lulled and people were breaking off into smaller groups. Burdmoore and I glanced at each other awkwardly. Each time I thought we’d speak, he smiled in a stunned or stoned way, nodded enthusiastically, and said nothing. I heard Ronnie tell someone that if you weren’t sure where the camera was focused in an image you were looking at, as a general rule you could assume it was the crotch. A man named John Dogg was talking to Helen about his art, too excited to tone down his sales pitch. Only a certain kind of pushiness works in the art world. Not the straight-ahead, pile-driving kind, which was the method John Dogg was using.

  “Malevich made the white paintings,” he said in a loud voice. “And then we had Robert Ryman. Ryman making them, too, more academic and provisional than Malevich, the religion subtracted from the facture. Little test canvases of white, like bandages over nothing. White on white. Now what I do is I make white films. Just light. Pure light, and what’s fascinating is—”

  He didn’t seem to notice that Helen’s face had gone blank, as if she’d been summoned elsewhere but had left an impassive mask behind, for his self-promotion to bounce off. John Dogg pressed on, hoping to recapture her attention. It wasn’t going to work. But I admired how convinced he was that his work was good, good enough to show to her, and he simply needed to get it seen. As if that were the main stumbling block, and not the problem of making art, the problem of believing in it.

  “They made the white paintings. I make the white films. I’ve been rather protective of the conditions of display but I’m coming around to the idea of making my work more accessible. In fact, I’m open to showing them to you. I’m enormously busy but I could make time. I could bring the reels by the gallery. No projector? Well, I could bring a projector. Oh, I see. Or perhaps to your residence, then. I’m not opposed to the idea of making a visit to your home. Why don’t we say tomorrow?”

  “I used to paint,” Stanley said to no one in particular. “I had to give it up. I lost contact with the paintings.”

  “Although it’s true that there is a powerful enough idea behind the works,” John Dogg said, looking for a signal in Helen’s blank face, “that you could just get the idea, and not necessarily see them. The main thing to understand is that I deal in light. I mean I deal with light. It’s a way of portraying light—light that is a lit picture of some other, original light. Like happiness is both an experience and an afterimage of something else. An original happiness—”

  “I tried to keep it going,” Stanley said. “Some relation to painting, to the hand, by drawing. I tried to draw pictures and could only draw boobs. I used up all my good drawing paper and a full box of Lumigraphs and every day it was the same thing. Boobs. Just boobs.”

  Didier was talking to Sandro. As he spoke, he ate and smoked simultaneously, puffing on his cigarette and then transferring it from his hand to his lips as he buttered his bread, a blue box of Gauloises next to him, ashes fluttering and mixing with his rice and curry and meat.

  “It’s best you gave it up,” Gloria said to Stanley.

  “But sometimes I want to cry.”

  “My films are not about bringing people together,” John Dogg told Helen. “They’re about dividing people into for and against.”

  I turned to Burdmoore. I said Gloria had mentioned he’d been involved in a movement that sounded interesting.

  He looked at Gloria and said it might be something Gloria snickered about but it was real. He had been a Motherfucker. Lowercase, too, he said, according to his ex-wife.

  I tried to reassure him that Gloria had not said anything insulting, but he waved my words away, as if to say don’t bother, no hard feelings.

  “We took over the Lower East Side,” he said. “Place is dead now. If you could only have known it then. But you’re too young.”

  “The Lower East
Side is full of people,” I said. “There’s all kinds of stuff going on there.”

  He smiled at me like I was endearingly naive.

  “I’m talking,” he said, “about insurrection. There isn’t shit going on in that regard. It was armed struggle, and the cops”—he said “cops” with a tough, flattened New York accent, as if he were beheading the word with the chop of his voice—“had come in with tanks, and dirtier methods, informants, heroin.”

  “No kidding?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, and some people even suspected that narcs had deliberately introduced sexually transmitted diseases. “Every one of us had the clap. It gave us a bad rep. Although we wanted a bad rep.”

  They fought the cops, he said. Drove out the dealers. Fed the people of their neighborhood. And lived a life that felt free, “given the police state we live in,” he said in his flat accent, which was growing on me. He seemed so much tougher, more streetwise, than the usual dinner company at the Kastles’.

  “In a way it’s worth explaining this,” he said. “I mean to anyone who wasn’t there for it. Did she tell you we loaded our guns under the soda counter at Gem Spa?” He nodded his chin at Gloria. “We carried these black flags. We had switchblades and guns hidden here and there. No shoulder holsters—that was a kind of unwritten rule. Shoulder holster not cool. No hip holsters, either. It’s way too NRA fanatic, that style. We all had the same kind of hand-cobbled Peruvian cowboy boots. There was a guy who sold them for cheap on Saint Mark’s, and you put the gun in the shaft of your boot. Fucking beautiful boots. I wish I had a pair now.”

  “Why were you called Motherfuckers?”

  “Because we hated women,” he said. “You think I’m joking. Women had no place in the movement unless they wanted to cook us a meal or clean the floor or strip down. There are people who’ve tried to renovate our ideas, claim we weren’t chauvinists. Don’t believe it. We had some heavy shit to work out. But we were idealists, too. We saw a future of people singing and dancing, making love and masturbating in the streets. No shame. Nothing to hide. Everyone sleeping in one big bed, men, women, daughters, dogs.”

  “Who wants to do that?” Sandro said later that night when I told him that the detail of men masturbating had seemed particularly sad. But he said he respected Burdmoore. That the Motherfuckers were something formidable. He told me the first time he met Burdmoore, he didn’t know anything about that history. He remembered the janitor Stanley would go on alcoholic binges with, a tough old guy from Staten Island whose eccentric redheaded son was an equally unlikely pet project for Stanley to have chosen, a dropout freeloader. Burdmoore had answered the Kastles’ door in his socks, wearing the kind of cheap team jacket you send away for after purchasing so many cartons of cigarettes. Sandro said the Kastles let Burdmoore drink their good whiskey and run roughshod over the loft. But that he brought some kind of life into their house and the Kastles would probably have killed each other without the distraction of a fugitive from the law.

  A wave of laughter overtook the table. Ronnie was recounting the episode of his trip to Port Arthur. Stanley said Ronnie had killed Saul Oppler’s rabbits unjustly but that the rooster, it sounded like it had wanted to die, and so Ronnie hadn’t done all bad.

  “The most you can hope for,” Stanley said, “is that someone will have the guts and know-how to kill you with a two-by-four.”

  “What kind of know-how do you need for that?” Didier asked.

  Which made Stanley laugh. He was laughing so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes, and suddenly he was really crying, his head in his hands, the table quiet, Stanley’s body shaking as he sobbed.

  “Come on, Stanley,” Gloria said. “You devalue the tear when you do this. You really do.”

  She looked around the table, perhaps seeking consolation. See the maudlin bullshit I have to put up with? Then again, she might have been saying, You better not think this is funny. This was the way with them. It was all very grave and dramatic, and you didn’t know if it was a joke or if it was real. Sandro said their gloom was almost mathematical, an endgame that Stanley had created. All Stanley had to do, at this point, to keep his art career going, was order neon tubes in various colors from a manufacturer, and his assistants arranged the tubes according to an algorithm he’d invented long ago, as if to subtract himself from the production of his own art. He was rich and well respected but he had forced his own obsolescence. The art made itself. Sandro said that Stanley’s work had outmoded him the way the postindustrial age was now robbing the worker of his place and that this truth made the art more powerful.

  The Kastles had spent the summer in East Hampton, although apparently Stanley never stepped foot on the beach. He slept all day and spent his nights drinking and making monologues on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

  Ronnie asked if he could hear a bit of one of Stanley’s recorded reels. We ate silently, listening to Stanley’s voice.

  “Without clothing nudity loses context,” it declared as the tape wound forward, one large wheel tracking the other.

  “And yet to give the body partial context . . . a belt around the waist of a naked woman, a bow tie on a naked man . . . you see what I mean. Accessories take away nudity’s dignity. Cheapen it. I know a man, a husband, whose wife enjoyed Playgirl calendars. Each year she bought one and tacked it up in her area of the loft that she and the man shared. Each month offered a different theme. A doctor, nude, with stethoscope and lab coat. A logger in Red Wing boots and a hard hat, an enormous dingaling hanging down between his thighs. The wife was always careful to turn the calendar to the new month, as if the previous one had not been enough of an imposition on this poor husband she lived with, who suffered enough as it was, from unknown causes. One day the husband decided he’d reached his limit. He took the calendar down and removed all the genitals with scissors. He put the calendar back up on the wall, careful to return the page to the proper month, the model’s genitals, previously outsized and healthy, now a jagged absence, a peek of wall from underneath, as if the nude model himself had forgotten to include his own dick and balls, or had lost them someplace, or had them taken from him in some unwholesome arrangement where he’d bet them or traded them away, and had to suffer the consequences, posing without a crotch area. The wife said nothing about it and yet in the way she proceeded, as if nothing were amiss, the husband knew he had deprived her. This made him happy for a while. But it wasn’t enough, this husband discovered. Calendars were only a touchstone for the endless fantasies that were doubtless running through his wife’s mind and he could not get in there with scissors to remove them and so he cut the cord on his wife’s personal massager—that was what she called it, but we can say vibrator. Vibrator. But I’ve digressed from the original subject of partial nudity, which is what I aim to discuss. I’m not the first to point out its tasteless nature. Diderot said something about the consequences of putting stockings on the Venus de Milo. Which brings me to another, related matter, her limblessness, so obviously part of the allure. It would be unthinkable kitsch to fit the Venus de Milo with arms. Her missing limbs are a positive attribute, not an absence. Really quite strange, as a concept. I once knew a man who played a hanky-panky with his wife that involved pretending she was an amputee. She would strap her lower leg up behind her thigh, with his assistance, and go around in a knee-length skirt and crutches, hopping on the one serviceable leg, and people assumed she had lost the other one in a terrible accident, or an illness of some kind. The two of them would have these ‘erotic weekends’ in towns where no one knew them. They would pick a place on the map and arrive in their respective play-act roles, a stoic amputee crutching her way into a motel office with the help of her doting caretaker. They would check into their room and then go to a restaurant, where they received looks of shy condolence from the hostess and waiters and the other clientele. They would order as if they were on some kind of significant date, an anniversary, say, in these hickville special-occasion establishments where the waiter c
omes to the table with a pepper grinder that’s five feet tall. You know what I mean. Heavy and oversized furniture, ugly American Colonial lighting, either too bright or too dark, places where the wine is some kind of grapy burgundy served in a carafe by small-town goobers trained by the management to congratulate you on your order. Excellent choice, sir. As they ate their chops and drank their burgundy and took in the shabby ambience, the husband covertly fondled his wife’s stump under the table, her not-real stump, her play stump. The two or even three carafes of burgundy staining in, blurring inhibitions, they would return to the motel. The man, drunk now, and good and ready to get into the real business, would remain ever patient and solicitous with his handicapped wife, help her to the room, carry her over the threshold like a child bride being airlifted into a territory of freshness and anticipation, the lightness of his wife’s body in the man’s arms somehow exactly the weight of her light compliance. He would set her softly on the bed. Proceed to undress her slowly, with meaningful pauses and great care. Eye contact, deep and even breathing. Extra attention to her knee stump, the surface of it, rounded but with shallow areas, like a very smooth rock, the knee. And then touching the cold bed below the knee, the emptiness of it. A complicated thrill, which I myself can only imagine. ‘Not for the layperson’ was what this man said of their game, an advanced level of fantasy and humping. The idea of her missing leg was a shared space between them; it was practically a religion and they didn’t want to give it up. At the end of these dirty little weekends, when for the return home she released her hidden leg, unstrapped it so that her ‘stump’ was yet again just a normal healthy knee, the sight of it there in front of her was beyond painful for both of them. The real leg contradicted everything. It ground the memories of their romantic jaunts to nothing. The wife, her two healthy legs stretched out, would sob inconsolably all the way home. This distressed her husband, as you can imagine. And he had his own interest in hoping to find a solution to their problem. So they began to inquire. They saw various doctors at various clinics. Nobody was interested in helping them. One or two medical professionals even threatened to call the police, suggesting that the man could be arrested. Which is another topic for another discourse. But briefly, why is the common good dependent upon preventing these two semi-free individuals from removing something that belongs to them, and that they both agree must be disposed of? What interest do we have in her leg that she herself does not have? Because I must confess I am among those who would want it to stay attached to the rest of her, even as this seems an abuse of governance, and an imposition on the victimless sexual satisfaction of two people, as I said, semi-free. Last time I talked to this man, we have lost touch, the reason for which you’ll learn in a moment, anyhow the last time I heard from him he and his wife had finally found some kind of doctor down in the Yucatán who was willing to perform the operation, and apparently there was a community there for rehabilitation and general lifestyle support. They were planning to relocate. The man wrote to me and said, ‘Our dream will soon be coming true.’ And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.”