The Flamethrowers (26 page)

“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.

I
n 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 minwhip 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.

*  *  *

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.