THE SECOND REQUEST REGAN made was more or less the opposite of the one regarding Natalia, and it came as a surprise: she said that while it might not seem the most intuitive move after having been visited by the feebees, she thought Cassie should keep in contact with Mark Brumfeld. Cassie and Regan had just gone to a movie at the BAM Cinemas in Fort Greene. They went to a showing of the second Godfather, where they were annoyed when the person behind them talked through the first half hour of the movie until Cassie turned around to shush them and saw it was John Turturro sitting with his teenage son, explaining all the complicated relationships to him throughout the movie. When she turned back, instead of annoyed she was giddy with the iconic Brooklyn experience—“John fucking Turturro is behind us,” she whispered to Regan.
“Fuck him and his baby boomer smug face,” Regan said.
The giddiness Cassie felt turned to discomfort. She got up to use the bathroom and when she came back Regan wasn’t sitting in their seats anymore—Cassie had to squint in the dark for three minutes of the Michael-Corleone-in-Sicily scene before she found her six rows closer to the screen. Afterward they went up to have dinner in the BAM Café. Corrugated tin covered the ceiling maybe twenty feet above their heads. They sat so that they both had a view out the three-story windows onto the fits and starts of traffic on Flatbush. In the cacophonous room they could barely hear each other, but it was one of Cassie’s favorite spots in the whole city. It was one of those venues that made Brooklyn seem superior to Manhattan, as if in the past decade something had flipped cultural currency from the island and down to the western end of Long Island, where they now sat. Across the avenue the sign on Junior’s awning was the same neon orange it had always been, touting the same cheesecake it had always touted. But BAM’s façade had just given up scaffolding it had carried for what felt like years, a teenage mouth free of braces, and inside the café its patrons were all newly chrome. Let the Manhattanite baby boomers who could afford it have the Met, have the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Flatiron Building, Central Park. Cassie and Regan and their generation had BAM Café, had Rumble Seat music, had the Barclays Center, the new waterpark in Prospect Park. They had the youth and they had the numbers. They were ugly but they had the music.
At the back of the room a funk band played. It was rumored Vernon Reid would join them on guitar by the end of the night. Cassie had ordered locally sourced lamb shank, and Regan was eating pumpkin risotto. They talked about a couple new attacks that were all over the news that week: A Boomer Boomer had attempted yet another vandalism of Bob Weir’s house, but this time the Marin County Police Department was prepared. They’d set up an officer in an unmarked car at the end of the block, and they caught the kid as he was taking a baseball bat to the house’s gate. Pictures surfaced on the Internet of his blackened eyes, and he’d hired a lawyer, said they gave him a “rough ride,” leaving him unbuckled in the back of a paddy wagon as it barreled down the tight esses of PCH. A new round of indignation had gripped young people all over the country. The baby boomers were fighting back, using their money and influence and their institutions to allow the system to harm the bodies of millennials. Things were ramping up. Regan said so, and Cassie agreed, and then they were quiet for a moment as the horn from the funk band blared in its Pee-Wee-Ellis-esque solo so loud they couldn’t hear each other. After their silence, Regan asked Cassie if she’d given any thought to her suggestion about her friendship with Mark.
“I don’t care either way,” Cassie said. “I just would have figured you’d want me to stop being in touch with him.”
Regan said that she could understand why she might figure that. But she knew how close the two of them were—“I have a fundamental belief regarding people who don’t stay in touch with any of their exes,” Regan said. “It strikes me as a kind of inherent character flaw.”
Cassie asked what she meant.
“It seems to me that in most cases when a person is no longer in touch with their ex, it is for one of three reasons. The first kind: they have had a problematic breakup of a variety that doesn’t allow them to be friends any longer. This can be a serious red flag—how are you to know the fault for said ugly breakup doesn’t reside with your now-current partner? That it won’t happen to you, down the road. In this case, I know you’re still friends with Isaac. In fact you were with him when I met you, and it was one of the things that attracted me to you—knowing you were still friends with your ex. Walking into a party with your ex, allowing him to buy you a beer and listen to exposing information about his own clandestine political activities. It seemed to speak well to your character.”
“Thanks,” Cassie said. “I—”
“You’re welcome. So that being the case, it strikes me that the latter two reasons why—sorry, reasons, ‘why’ is implied by ‘reasons’—the latter two reasons a person may no longer be friends with their ex if they were friends with said ex after entering into a new relationship are both fraught. The first of these two new scenarios is that the new partner in the new relationship is too insecure to handle her new partner being friends with her ex. I am opposed to being that kind of partner. My biggest fear in life is of being insecure. My second biggest fear in life is of simply being perceived as being insecure. Which I suppose could be perceived as its own brand of insecurity, but I’m willing to accept that as inherent to the syllogism. Regardless: the point to this second reason is that I am expressing to you my full-throated approval of your continuing to be friends with Isaac here.”
“Okay,” Cassie said. “Mark. Noted. And the third thing.”
“The third thing would be an inversion of the second: that you were not comfortable being friends with your ex because you were somehow insecure yourself that that friendship could intrude upon our own.”
Cassie said that, oh, man, was that not a concern, and that there were plenty of things she was insecure about, uncertain about, but that was not one of them. No matter how hard Mark pushed or still cared for her. She was not interested. Like, that was the last last last thing Regan ever needed to worry about.
“Exactly,” Regan said. “I believe you. And so I think you should remain friends with Mark, and even try to reestablish some of the connection to him you’ve lost. Set up a gig, go visit him, keep in touch.” It was the first time Cassie had ever heard her new girlfriend call him by his real name without being cajoled into doing so, and she took it as the kind of extension of the olive branch it was meant to be. “I will also say that I like the idea of your staying in contact with Mark. It is amazing how effective the most recent calls to action have been. He’s an impressive person. Plus, if he really does go and get himself into any real trouble it makes more sense to have an innocuous paper trail of your innocuous communications with him than to just go radio silent on him altogether.”
Cassie wasn’t sure she agreed with the amazingness that the last month’s actions in the name of Boomer Boomers had accomplished, and Natalia had put new questions in her head that she might have liked to discuss with Regan now if it didn’t seem hopelessly awkward to do so right after all Regan had just said about breakups. It seemed to her that in attacking baby boomer icons like Bob Weir, who had no real job to retire from in the first place, they were muddying their case—but this was one of those places where it wasn’t certain how much it was worth arguing. The violence in response to the second Boomer Action call had ramped up in a manner even Mark Brumfeld himself could never have anticipated. Attacks on major visible venues across the country. Even if no one had been hurt, the vandalism was a serious ratcheting up of the possibilities of what people might do in the name of the Boomer Boomers. To what end or extent it was unclear.
It might not have been apparent to every person in the country yet, but to those who were inclined to watch it—to believe or follow it—it was pervasive. And Regan had made clear at every turn that she was ideologically aligned with it. And now this week, one of the videos had made the first call to execute the Boomers’ ROWRY initiative. Boomer2 had declared that if baby boomers across the country didn’t retire from their jobs—“retire or we’ll retire you”—something serious would happen on March 15. It wasn’t clear what was being threatened. It wasn’t at all clear what connection Mark had to the threat. But this call to action had come with a threat of real violence that winter. It created a new round of jittery excitement. Even if nothing at all came of it, the coming three months of waiting to see what the Boomers had planned would be nervous ones.
“Okay,” Cassie said.
“Okay,” Regan said, but she did not have a mode in which she would admit she didn’t quite understand what was being said to her, so Cassie said, “I’m okay with staying friends with Mark, of course. I love Mark, just not in the way Mark loved me. And if anything I’m a little concerned about him.”