Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

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.