The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  * * *

  They killed only one person. Maury the Slumlord, who had come at them with an aluminum baseball bat, did not count. That was war and you don’t call it murder when the other side takes casualties. The only person they deliberately killed was Twilight, a neighborhood heroin dealer. After a sixteen-year-old girl OD’d they went to Twilight’s place on Clinton Street. Fah-Q, having lost his two older brothers and a girlfriend to horse, had the lowest tolerance among the Motherfuckers for dealers and their negative impact on revolutionary potential. “When you are offered only abjection and misery as so-called life,” Fah-Q said, “you sink into yourself. Feels good, but it’s a lot like death.” There was a line halfway down Clinton Street when Burdmoore and Fah-Q arrived. Sniffling junkies waiting like for bread during the Depression, wiping runny noses on the cuffs of their dirty suede jackets. There’s a movie title for you, Burdmoore thought, Snot on Suede. He and Fah-Q cut the line and went up. Those waiting didn’t object, perhaps due to their degeneracy, but also, Fah-Q was six two and weighed two hundred pounds, and people had a tendency to move out of his way. They shot Twilight with a P38, the semiofficial weapon of the Motherfuckers, came back down, that was it. No blowback, because it turned out no one cared if Twilight lived or died.

  * * *

  Robbed a Chemical Bank on Seventh Avenue, Burdmoore’s paramilitary garb for that action involving nothing but a ski mask and a black satin bikini. Incognito was how he later remembered the rationale behind the decision for the bikini, which had been requisitioned during the accidental robbery of a Courrèges store on Madison Avenue. The bikini fit, and the feel of its stretchy material had grown on Burdmoore, so much so that he was seldom not wearing it. Seldom to never. The silky bikini had become for him a sacred undergarment, the way it snugly held his junk, made him feel . . . gathered. Perfect for a stickup, he’d thought, stripping down in the van.

  * * *

  Took in escapees from Bellevue, sisters in hospital gowns who weren’t going to recover in mental wards. And escapees from the foster home on Fourth Avenue near the post office. Gave these girls and women clothes, beds, meals, and showed them the way to noninstitutional bliss. A good time was had by all. What happens between bodies during an insurrection is more interesting than the insurrection itself.

  * * *

  Took in escapees from the Order of the Golden Daughters, like Juan, who had no arms, his T-shirt 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 God.

  * * *

  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 spunk. 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 glass 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 Motherfuckers what he secretly felt they were doing with this action, cramming garbage right up against Jackie’s high-class snatch, trash held in place by snug fabric, the way he himself felt held in place by the black Courrèges 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 cock against her plush, tanned pussy. Oh, God. Was her pussy suntanned? Did it make him gay that Jackie was an icon for the fags? A question that came at exactly the wrong moment and he found himself coming while picturing big, pink, chintz-covered buttons. The Motherfuckers’ 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 fucking 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 Motherfuckers passing 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 Motherfuckers 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 Motherfuckers. But the Motherfuckers 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, wheatgrass. 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 bum, waiter and thief. The women who were with the Motherfuckers (it may as well be stated: no women were Motherfuckers. Women were the sisters of action, dreaming. Bedmate, janitor, cook, nag), carrying out plates of hot food and everybody noshing. Later they upgraded this concept and stormed the Four Seasons, ate and drank whatever they wanted, and then walked out after creaming a maître d’ for the hell 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 shit all over the place in dark, oily squirts, and everyone had to be careful where they stepped.

  * * *

  Called in the Hells 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 Motherfuckers 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 Motherfucker (whose real name on official police documents 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 classless 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 class 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 hardship, 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 pushing 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 tits.”

  “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, flashing 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 fuck 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 fucking shot me! I can’t believe you fucking 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 Saturday 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?

  “Hello? 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 glass 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 pushing 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 pissed 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 cock.” 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 subbasement 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 shift boss in thick glasses, 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?