The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  * * *

  Rudy’s was packed. People were arriving in buoyant swells, pushing in and talking loudly, bringing the energy from wherever they’d just been, different groups merging together like weather systems. Talia ran into two friends—girls I had seen around, at art openings, sitting at the Café Borgia or Graffito or Looters, an after-hours club where you had to pound and yell and hammer on the door to be let in. Neither of her friends was as pretty as Talia, which made sense. She got to be the pretty one. And the least compromised, the least dutifully feminine, with her husky voice, her karate pants, her low and complicitous “one of the guys” laugh.

  Giddle came toward us and I realized she had been at the bar all those hours since we’d left in the early evening. She shone like something wet, a piece of candy that had been in someone’s mouth. Up close, I realized it was glitter, here and there on her face and arms. It must have rubbed off from someone else. She hugged me in a cloud of cucumber oil. As a rule, the later it got, the more drinks she’d had, the more cucumber oil Giddle applied. It was so cloying and dominant a scent that I’d started to smell it when she wasn’t even around. I smelled it on my own clothes. Even on Sandro’s clothes. It got stuck in my head the way a song might.

  After hugging me, Giddle took the drink in her hand and poured its remnants over Sandro’s head. I was shocked, but strangely, Sandro was not. He simply blotted his face with cocktail napkins from the bar. I felt it was my fault for having such an eccentric friend, but Sandro didn’t make a big deal out of it. “She’s drunk,” I said, watching her hug everyone we’d come in with. Ronnie was next. Then Giddle moved on to Burdmoore, seeming not to notice that Burdmoore was someone we didn’t already know. She threw her arms around his neck. He didn’t object. Their lips touched and kept touching. They gripped each other like two people having a reunion in the international terminal at JFK.

  We all danced. Sandro, with his hand on my waist and the other on my shoulder, guiding me. “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” a mainstay on the Rudy’s jukebox, filled the room.

  If he didn’t care for me

  I could have never made him mad

  But he hit me,

  and I was glad.

  I responded to dips and twirls too late and felt like I was trying to sing along with a song I didn’t know, mouthing each word just after hearing it sung. I didn’t care. Sandro was a good dancer; it was part of his role as the older man, the teacher.

  Henri-Jean wove his way around the edge of the dance crowd, carrying his striped pole, raising it high so he wouldn’t hit anyone. Whenever there was any mass of people in SoHo, at Rudy’s or a loft or an art opening, Henri-Jean made his scheduled appearance. “The sentient automaton,” Ronnie called him, like Chaplin. Sandro said he was nothing like Chaplin.

  Smoke collected above our heads, red-lit and infused with a bright, jangly, early sixties girl-group sound, rising toward the ceiling like an evaporating valentine. Rudy didn’t always turn on the red light, softly emitting colored neon tubes arranged in an acrostic that hung from the wall, made by Stanley. Until a year ago, the red light glowed continuously during open hours, but then the bulbs for it were no longer manufactured and had to be handblown by a glassmaking studio in Washington State. Now Rudy only plugged it in on occasion, but it wasn’t clear what the occasions were. “A mood on the street,” Rudy said. “I just know.”

  Burdmoore was dancing with Giddle.

  “I don’t like the beard!” she shouted over the music.

  “Why?” he shouted back.

  “Because it’s not you,” she said. “You never had that beard—”

  Burdmoore grinned. “I’ve never not had this beard, sister.”

  “You should shave it,” she said, “go back to your old look, you.” She grabbed the lapels of his rumpled blazer and shoved him in an affectionate manner.

  “I will shave it,” he said, his face brimming with a kind of amused joy as he held her by the waist to stop her from shoving him again. “I’m going to. Tomorrow.”

  More oldies came on. The Marvelettes. The Feminine Complex. Those girl groups would always remind me of Sandro, his light, careful steps, his way of politely overlooking my inability to take cues. He learned to dance at boarding school in Switzerland, where they’d had proper ballroom lessons, each boy taking his turn with the teacher, a Chilean woman whom Sandro had dreamed about for years afterward. He had tried to contact her through the school but she’d disappeared. “Maybe she simply went on to do something else,” I’d said when he’d told me about her, “which isn’t really disappearing. It’s living.” Sandro remembered all the steps. People said Mondrian had been a good dancer. And Yves Klein, too. There was something to it, artists who could dance. To be either a good dancer or a good artist the decisions needed grace and improvisation, an ease of bodies, of matter, in space. Like the old painter who had been a mentor of Sandro’s. An artist he had pilgrimaged to see in New Mexico. She was living in an Airstream trailer and made paintings in an uninsulated outbuilding with no electricity. Got up before first light, worked until dusk, ate food from cans, slept alone. She told Sandro she had gotten the idea for her most important cycle of works when she was walking with her sister on an empty Texas plain one summer evening, a single star in the sky above them. They were teenagers. This was before cars, before World War One. “My sister had a gun and kept throwing bottles up in the air and shooting them,” she had told Sandro. “We walked under the big empty twilight and that star.” There had to be an element of chance. But also precision. An occasional dead-on hit. My sister had a gun.

  The jukebox was turned off and a band called the Soviets started to test their equipment, saxophone erupting in blurts and squiggles, cymbals crashing down over the room. Giddle and Burdmoore retreated to a dark booth where they seemed to be working out some ancient connection, never mind that Giddle had possibly mistaken Burdmoore for someone else.

  We were at the bar having one last drink. Sandro and I had meant to leave but he and Ronnie got involved in a semi-argument. Ronnie brought up Italy. He said I should go to Monza and that Sandro shouldn’t be a stick-in-the-mud about it. “You’re against it,” he said to Sandro. “I get it. It’s your family. But the thing is, she’s the fastest chick in the world, Sandro. And you’re slowing her down.” He said it lightly, teasingly, drunkenly, and Sandro went sullen.

  “Thanks, Ronnie,” Sandro said. “I spend my whole life trying to get away from Valera, and I end up with their spokespersons, my best friend and my woman, both against me. Why don’t the two of you sell me a set of tires while you’re at it?”

  I felt bad. But I wanted to go to Italy and hadn’t possessed the courage to push for it. Ronnie was doing it for me.

  But why? I wondered. For what motivation? And then I realized he was convincing Sandro that Sandro and I should leave New York, and I thought, won’t you miss me, Ronnie?

  At the confusion of that, I assented to the next round of drinks, while Sandro and I argued about Valera and Italy. “Why can’t you just do something here? Focus on the photographs you have,” he said. “Of Bonneville.”

  I wanted to carry the project through, I said. Going to Monza was part of Bonneville; it was one project.

  Ronnie ended up in a nearby booth with Talia and the two less-pretty accomplices. My discussion with Sandro was put on hold as we watched them. The girls had gotten the idea to slap and hit themselves, with Ronnie’s encouragement. They were laughing, going around the table, each girl slapping herself. The first round of slaps was light, a light pat on the cheek, the heel of a hand on the forehead. Each of the girls slapped herself, and with each slap they all erupted in laughter. When it was Talia Valera’s turn, she punched herself in the face with a closed fist. She had especially large fists, like a puppy with huge paws.

  Sandro went over to the booth and tried to reason with her.

  “Calm down, Sandro,” she said. “It’s just a game.”

  “You’ll end up with
a black eye,” Sandro said.

  She didn’t care. Ronnie had his camera and took pictures. She gazed at the lens in a frank manner.

  I thought again of the girl on Ronnie’s layaway plan. Had she taken a bath and given up, gone to sleep? Or put on more lipstick, gone out looking for Ronnie, but to the wrong places?

  Flash. Talia posed again for the camera. Her eye was swollen now, and had the taut appearance of polished fruit. There was a gash above her eyebrow, probably from the silver rings she wore, plain metal bands that shone prettily against her tanned skin. I detected pride in her look, as if she felt that the gash and swollen eye were revealing her inner essence, deep and profound, for Ronnie and his camera.

  “This is great,” Ronnie said. Click-click. Flash. “Just great.”

  * * *

  “He refuses to grow up,” Sandro said to me as we were leaving.

  But was that what he refused to do, or was it something else?

  Either way, while Ronnie acted like an asshole and got away with it, Sandro and I were on the street getting mugged.

  11. THE WAY WE WERE

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

  By late 1966, the year the movement formed, the way they were was armed. Armed and ready to battle the Man and his Pigs. They were a Lower East Side street gang with a theory, a call, to liberate people and zones of strategic importance, to colonize an entire quarter of New York City as a network of crash pads, soup kitchens, and arsenals.

  They were prepared to requisition all goods that met their needs. The way they were was ready to advance the struggle by any means necessary. The way they were was dangerous. Ecstatic. Angry. Occasionally stoned, but ready to put down the joint and take up the gun at any moment. Taking the City, from Riot to Revolution Bubalev’s treatise was called. From riot to revolution was the point of their arrow. They were looking for people who liked to draw. Who were ready to draw. Pull back the hammer and fire. If you didn’t believe in lead you were already dead. The way they were was unafraid to shoot a Pig in the face. The police were structurally bad, in Bubalev’s formulation. They ratcheted that analysis: the Pigs are assholes, they are the enemy of us and our brother.

  The way they were was done with a shitty police state where action was no sister to dreams. The way they were was unafraid. Ready to defend a new and total freedom from Amerikan capitalism and its wars, its deadening effects, its slaveries.

  What happens between bodies during an insurrection, Bubalev said, is more interesting than the insurrection itself.

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

  Fah-Q Motherfucker declared in a 1967 flyer printed in their squat on Tenth Street that in Amerika life is the one demand that cannot be fulfilled. We are here to live, said Fah-Q. To demand our life. Not to request that the needs of life be met. We are here to meet them ourselves, to meet the demand for life.

  * * *

  Among the Motherfuckers’ many actions in that potent five-year run, 1966 to ’71, some storied, others unknown except to their participants, the following represent a few choice cuts:

  * * *

  Requisitioned uniforms from an army surplus place on Canal Street, to meet their needs for revolutionary dress: black Levi’s, black T-shirts. Took an entire pallet of each as they were delivered by a wholesale supplier.

  * * *

  Occupied the squat on Tenth Street, what would become their famed headquarters, in the last days of 1966 and then held a New Year’s feast for their neighbors, burying an entire pig, which they stole from the Meatpacking District, in the sand of the children’s playground in Tompkins Square Park, an effigy of the most hated neighborhood denizen, the uniformed Pig. “Pig roast! Pig roast!” neighborhood children yelled, running up and down Avenue B, bordering the park. The Motherfuckers core group took a lesson from that day, their first big community gathering: the children of the Lower East Side, underfed, runny-nosed, of black and brown complexions, robbed of a lice-free, misery-free existence, robbed of most aspects of childhood, were already soldiers partaking in the struggle. Fah-Q understood, as a survivor himself of the ghettos of Miami, Florida, who and what they were. But he did not recruit them. They joined on their own, a breeze of play, of life, who defended the perimeter of the Motherfuckers’ compound. The Pigs were afraid of those children, who had nothing to lose. In May of ’68 they were breaking up pieces of sidewalk (just as Fah-Q, who gave them pickaxes, had seen it done in the newsreel footage from Paris). That summer the kids heaved concrete and cobblestones at Pigs on their big Harley-Davidson Pigcycles as they rode up Avenue A, one of whom crashed, a big, beefy fellow in short sleeves and knee-high, shiny jackboots. Later that year the children stole an idling ambulance as two paramedics were picking up Chinese food on Houston Street. The kids brought the stolen ambulance straight to the Motherfuckers, who converted it with matte black spray paint and new plates and a removal of most identifying marks. It became their official van, useful for requisitioning goods from appliance stores along the Bowery, items stocked right there on the sidewalk, which they claimed for their own store on Tenth Street, called Free, where they gave everything away.

  * * *

  Robbed a Chemical Bank on Delancey Street. The bacon bank, they called it. Smoky vaporized bacon grease from the deli next door permeated the carpets, air, walls, everything. The bacon bank never did not smell like bacon. It had been easy: two P38 pistols, pantyhose over their two heads (which gave their faces a blurred intensity, encouraging the tellers to meet their needs, and quickly), one note, with clear instructions. Their stickup appeared nowhere in the news, which was a lesson to the Motherfuckers, useful: banks were robbed daily. It was not a difficult task to rob a bank. It was easy and that was why it happened every day. Every business hour you could be sure a bank somewhere in New York City was being quietly held up and that you were never going to hear about it, know about it, unless it was you who had robbed it. The banks did not broadcast these robberies. If everyone knew, they would rob banks instead of work.

  * * *

  Beat up a rock band from Detroit called the Stooges. Beat the shit out of them for not being tough enough, and having a reputation for intensity though it was unearned. The Stooges had played at a rock club on Second Avenue, and just after their set ended word spread that the band was piling into their limousine and heading off to Max’s Kansas City for dinner with rich people and celebrities. The crowd became enraged, dragged the singer and his bandmates from their limousine and forced them back inside the club. The Motherfuckers concentrated on pummeling the singer and then pissed on his satin pants. Which he was still wearing as he lay on his side, groaning. Not quite in the same way he had groaned and yowled onstage, trying to peddle his fake intensity to the young girls, among them Love Sprout and Nadine, Fah-Q’s and Burdmoore’s respective womenfolk. Fah-Q and Burdmoore crossed streams of urine over the body of the singer, and Burdmoore knew that brotherly pacts ended badly. But he was in it to the end. He was ready for badly.

  * * *

  Firebombed a retailer of Thom McAn Shoes the week before it was scheduled to open on Saint Mark’s Place, accidentally burning down the community center next door, where Alcoholics Anonymous met. No apology was issued. They hated Alcoholics Anonymous anyway. Talk to the flames, Fah-Q said. The Motherfuckers started things. Sometimes the things they started finished themselves.

  * * *

  Ransomed Maury the Slumlord’s miniature whippet (“minwhip”), sending a note with a demand for five thousand dollars to be dropped with the bartender at McSorley’s. Listen Maury you scumbag, the note went, if you want to see this stupid arachnid creature again pay up. Maury owned vast holdings on the blocks surrounding Tompkins Square Park, including their own large tenement building on Tenth Street, which had been empty and boarded before the Motherfuckers decided it would meet their needs. Rumor had spread that Maury was in the process of having it condemned to get them out. Instead of paying the ransom for his minwh
ip Maury called the cops, who referred him to animal control, and it turned out he didn’t have a pet license for the dog. The Motherfuckers, meanwhile, had developed an attachment to the minwhip, formerly called Basket and now rechristened Bonanno, after Alfredo Bonanno, an Italian anarchist who was currently doing time in some Italian prison somewhere and Burdmoore had never read his stuff but understood that his name carried a kind of weight because Bonanno had tried to burn down the Vatican. Bonanno the minwhip could leap incredibly far, he was a long jumper, and also a biter. The Motherfuckers trained him to hurdle flaming barricades and attack the Pigs.

  * * *

  A few actions remained merely dream actions, but very few. Like the day they went to dangle their erections in the faces of tourists. They went to the Statue of Liberty to carry this out. It was Valentine’s Day and freezing, but no matter, hundreds of families were lined up to enter the big lady. The Motherfuckers unzipped and found themselves shriveled to nothing. There was little point in wielding their weaponry that cold morning. Instead, they semispontaneously pissed an important movement message into a snowbank on Liberty Island. Burdmoore did the N and started the E but ran out of fuel. Luckily one of them had brought beer along, which they passed around, taking long guzzles to complete the message. NEVER WORK.

  * * *

  Smashed up a Cadillac Brougham that was parked on Tenth Street. Burdmoore had identified the car as belonging to Thurman Johnson, a fuckhead Southern gentleman who was sleeping with Nadine, and even if the movement was down on couplism, this bothered Burdmoore, because Thurman seemed not to appreciate Nadine but to employ her in a sadistic power trip. The trees on Tenth Street reflected on the windshield of the parked Cadillac like a leafy silkscreen before Burdmoore shattered its glass with a sledgehammer. It felt great to smash that windshield, even if the car turned out not to have been Thurman Johnson’s.