WHEN HE WAS ASKED BY REPORTERS, by friends, by his mother in the years after the Boomer Boomers became the most infamous domestic revolutionary group in the country in four decades, what had set him on his path—an inciting incident, people wanted an inciting incident, so he gave them not one but two—Brumfeld did not think of the day he left the New York borough where he’d lived since the month after he graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college in Maine. He did not attribute his actions to his failures in love or money, which explanations interviewers were most likely trying to elicit. He didn’t think about Cassie and her jilting him, or the lack of response to his Emma Goldman piece in The Unified Theory. He did not even think of the day Glen had shot down his best idea for a feature for the magazine, no matter how influential that rejection had been on him. Instead, two stories would come to Isaac Abramson’s mind:
The first was of a pickup basketball game.
This was an unlikely occurrence. The summer after Brumfeld was forced to give up his apartment and move into the basement in the suburban Baltimore house where he’d grown up, he was idle. He hadn’t maintained relationships with his high school friends, most of whom had stayed in the area, or perhaps moved down to D.C., while he was in New York. His close female friends were now married, and in their mid-thirties their husbands frowned upon their keeping up with a thirty-year-old unemployed bachelor. He hadn’t even accepted Facebook friend requests from his high school friends, had lost touch with them when he moved to New York and kept it that way. On occasion he was able to take the Bolt Bus back up to the city and play a gig with the bluegrass band he’d played in in his decade in New York. But without work, without a solid income, travel grew expensive and doing so meant seeing Cassie, which bore its own pain—while she might not have factored into his decision-making while he was leaving, after just days in his parents’ house, alone with little more than self-harm to keep him occupied, he was consumed by how much he missed her. So rather than just sitting around pining for—or worse, e-mailing—his ex, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he went to the same JCC where he’d played pick-up basketball as a kid. One afternoon in mid-June, a month after he’d moved back into his parents’ basement, his thoughts on the America he lived in in 2010 changed.
There was a break between games. The men Brumfeld played with were in their mid- to late fifties. Brumfeld had been plagued with an eidetic memory. He remembered every face he saw, and every face on the court. The tall hirsute Sephardic man who set up in the middle of the lane every trip down, who missed every baby-hook he attempted, who on defense was a single lethal elbow seeking a hack-worthy face, was Jaime Silver. The point guard who ran his mouth the whole time he ran the ball up the court was Stan Finkel—Mark’s own freshman Social Studies teacher.
He’d hated Mr. Finkel, who wore TJ Maxx blue blazers in the classroom and burgundy Members Only jackets out of it, who had once accused him of cheating on pop quizzes (he had been cheating, but that didn’t change the fact that he hated being accused of it), whose balding pattern matched to the follicle the balding pattern on Glen’s head.
On that water break, Finkel was talking to Silver courtside. Mark kept to himself. In the first month or so he picked up his iPhone and looked at what the editors of The New York Times selected to tell him about what was happening in the world. But his subscription had run out. While he could read his parents’ paper copy in the mornings, he had access to only ten articles a month for free. It occurred to him that the word news was a plural noun: more than one new. A multiplicity of new things. Ten things that were new, then a paywall, was not quite what people meant by “news.” So, undistracted by the screen before him, he sat and listened instead:
“I made almost forty thousand just this past week on the stuff,” Finkel was saying. Silver was hirsute and swarthy and his Latino first name rhymed with “buy me.” He nodded and yessed as Finkel spoke. “They call it hydraulic fracturing. The tree huggers hate it and, sure, if I think about it or talk to my kids about it, I hate it, too. But it’s not like I’m the one doing the whatever they call it—fracking. Frucking. I just invest in the sand they use. I’m telling you—forty thou, this week alone. I won’t tell you how much I’ve made this year. I don’t like to talk money, kind of thing. Indiscreet. I’m taking Val to Positano next month, if that tells you.”
Brumfeld in his entire decade in New York had gotten out of the city maybe twice a year. A couple times he had taken Cassie to a B&B, but she seemed to prefer being in town and had gigs most weekends. By the end of their relationship he wouldn’t even have thought of trying to take a vacation with her. Mostly he went home to see his parents with the hope of returning with a check in hand to help out with rent.
“Amazing,” Silver said. “You’ll have to put me in touch with your broker.”
“Broker? Shit, I just read about it and do it myself on eTrade. Sometimes I e-mail with an old friend who knows about it. I just see what they say in Bloomberg News and then go for what’s hitting, kind of thing. And then—Positano.”
Silver was looking down at his hands. Mark could see him racking up the eTrades, and their proceeds, and the coastal Italian vacations all those proceeds could afford him, in his big Sephardic elbow of a head. Brumfeld didn’t say anything, but his face must have betrayed what he was thinking—Finkel looked at him again this time and said, “What?”
Being spoken to sent a charge through Brumfeld’s body. He looked away. It had been weeks since he’d talked to anyone other than his mother. After years in a magazine office Brumfeld had learned about the social constraints of hierarchy—the kind of free conversation a group of editorial assistants might have, and how it would shift if an assistant editor joined in, or how it would stiffen if the editor-in-chief came around: all eye-tightening smiles and reflexive nodding. This had softened for him in his time as a grad student, but when he was with a mentor it was mentorial, another kind of power. This was Stan Finkel. His high school Social Studies teacher, he of liberal politics and Members Only jackets, who had driven the same Volvo 940 that Mark himself had driven over to this game, borrowed from his parents.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” Finkel said. He looked at Mark and then looked back at Silver. “You know what he’s thinking, too, Jaime. I see it on my kids’ faces. I don’t need it on the basketball court. I’m retired, I’m living a life I never led when I was working. I planned to collect my couple thousand a month from Social Security and live quietly, kind of thing. A timeshare in Boca Raton. But here we are.”
“Here you fucking are,” Mark said.
He didn’t mean to say it. He wouldn’t have talked this way to Glen, or to any of the critics and writers he studied with in grad school. But some combination of the shock at news of Finkel’s small retirement fortune, and of Mark’s hearing about fracking, had put words in his mouth. Now that he was talking, what was he going to do?
“Sorry—here you frucking are,” Mark said.
“Who are you?” Finkel said. He was well under six feet tall, with soddy patches of brown hair on either side of his head. On Finkel it looked like capitulation to death two decades early, like wearing sweatpants outside the house (which incidentally the magazine where Mark used to work had just declared a trend). Mark remembered the antagonistic tone Finkel had taken when he’d called young Mark into his office to accuse him of cheating. He heard it again now, shimmering with the thin glowing filament of memory.
“Mark Brumfeld,” Mark said. “I was in your ninth-grade Social Studies class.” He couldn’t help himself: “Kind of thing.”
“Not what I meant. I mean, who are you to talk to me? We’re having a private conversation. You millennials with those computers in your pockets, zapping radiation into your nutsacks, noses pressed to your screens—you think you can just blurt out whatever comes to your mind.”
“Felt like an awfully public conversation to me,” Mark said. “No one wants to hear about your money. Just sitting around in public bragging about destroying the environment. I remember you as a teacher. As a man who wouldn’t have made financial gains off destroying the water supply in West Virginia or Pennsylvania. Making it so rural people’s water could be set on fire just by lighting a match, like we were returning to life under the fucking robber barons.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“I am taking care of myself. And more than myself,” Brumfeld said. “It’s you who only takes care of yourself, your whole generation just doing just that. Taking care of yourselves.”
When he said it Finkel took a step closer to him.
The way he told it later, something shifted in that moment. It was like a fourth wall had broken down. Mark Brumfeld eight years earlier had assigned and edited an eight-thousand-word feature on the first companies to begin fracking. Even then, almost a decade earlier, they’d been predicting that the environmental costs of fracking would far outweigh the financial benefits. At the time the last fiduciary benefit Mark suspected that evil would bring was vacations in Positano for the very man who’d taught him Social Studies. Back then there was a distance a teacher kept from his students, the way a thirty-five-foot barrier was maintained between pro-lifers and women entering Massachusetts abortion clinics.
Now that distance had been closed.
“I said take care of yourself,” Finkel said. Mark had been in two bar fights in his years in the city, had been mugged three times on the Myrtle Avenue side of Fort Greene Park in the first two years he had lived there. But now he just said, “You’re not worth it,” and walked to the water fountain. The whole time he was drinking it was as if something in him had been fractured, some new energy loosed, a new anger that had been hidden in the shale of his veins but now was being released all at once, valuable and voluble and volatile. Rage hidden and kept discreet within the sedimentary walls of his own adult civility was rising to the surface, raw power ready to be burned for fuel.
By the time he got back to the court, the rest of the players were ready to run one more full. First time down on defense, Finkel passed the ball to Silver on the wing. Mark was defending the post. Each bump of each body in the lane was like the blast of chemical-saturated water opening crude in the bedrock of his arteries, combustible chemical-suffused water swelling all around him. The anger that had been building up in him each night he’d gone to sleep in his childhood bed, in his childhood basement, two hundred miles from Cassie and broken up with her, alone, felt ready to burst. When Finkel cut for the basket Mark was there. Instead of jumping to block the shot, he kept down on the floor and undercut his former Social Studies teacher, whose legs went out from under him. Finkel’s body rolled across Mark’s back until he flipped over one full turn, slammed to the floor hard on his lower back, then popped right back up.
“What the fuck was that?” Finkel said.
Mark swung.
He got one good hook into the side of Stan Finkel’s head before bright lights flashed in front of Mark’s eyes. Silver jumped between the two, and he threw an elbow for good measure. It caught Brumfeld above the eye. Mark put his hand to his face to see that a sticky sluice of blood was trickling down his cheekbone. It left him dazed, the space above his eye feeling like it was swelling big as the Ohio River in early spring rains. He saw Silver standing in a capoeira stance, one foot back and arms moving in strange dancelike arabesques until the older man saw that Mark meant his friend no further harm.
Silver ran to pick Finkel up. Mark felt the slow trickle of blood now reaching his stippled chin like water seeping out of a haystack. With it seeped the slightest ease to his angst. His eye was throbbing with each beat of his throbbing heart. At that moment a world opened up in Mark’s head. He was already more Abramson than Brumfeld.
He left the JCC. He got into his parents’ sea-green 1993 Volvo 940 and drove the roads outside of Baltimore he had once driven daily to clear his head and smoke pot without being caught. A sharp pain in his fist surged along with the pain in his eye with each hydraulic pulse of his heart. For the first time in a year, maybe more, he felt not pain, not embarrassment, not self-loathing. The fear fell away like shale from a hydraulic-blasted mountainside.
He felt pure, crude, previously untapped freedom. Resist much, obey little—Whitman had been telling him just that since he first read the opening section of Leaves of Grass, and it felt for the first time in his life like he’d heeded the call.
There were four dozen reasons he’d heard for the economic downturn, for the paucity of jobs available in the two years since the Great Recession had started. Trillions of dollars were headed to pay for the two Forever Wars that had been ongoing his entire adult life. There were credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations; there were soon to be eight billion people on Earth; global ecological catastrophe was so much a foregone conclusion that half the serious novels and television series people watched or read were about what life would be like after it hit. Part of him suspected those entertainments let people continue at their environment-destroying behavior, allowing them to think, Well, if Mad Max or The Walking Dead is ahead for us, we’re fucked anyway, so why not keep tearing through these Keurig individual espresso pods, washing our faces with micro-bead-filled face washes, trash-filled oceans be damned? But on that ride up Falls Road, through Pikesville, and off farther into the dense deciduous-covered roads, it occurred to Mark that there was a clearer reason for it all—for his high school Social Studies teacher now to be enjoying unprecedented leisure and return on his investments only twenty months since the financial sector had imploded so badly the likelihood of Mark’s ever getting a real job was nothing more than a distant dream:
It was the baby boomers.
It had always been and was always going to be the baby boomers.
It grew so clear to Mark as the flow of blood slowed on his face, drying and caking against the tissue he found in the cracked plastic slot in his driver’s side door. It was the baby boomers who had what he wanted, who in their geologic later years had petrified until they were protecting all the natural resources, who had what his friends and his colleagues and his fellow alumni and all those twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds and even some forty-year-olds in all the bars in Fort Greene and Bushwick and Williamsburg, in Oakland and Berkeley and Petaluma, in Crown Heights and Prospect Heights and Pacific Heights and Ditmas Park, wanted.
It was the baby boomers.
It was time for someone to do something about it.
So while it felt like a kind of cliché—while becoming any kind of cliché was all he’d been trying to avoid since he was old enough to understand what a cliché was—Mark slammed on the brakes. He did not look in the rearview mirror. He was lucky no one had been behind him. It took a nine-point turn to reverse direction on that narrow suburban street. As he sped back to his parents’ basement, he began to craft his initial diatribe. By the time he opened his three-year-old black MacBook, he was gravid with complaint, gibbous with jeremiad. He’d bought the laptop just months before the first one with a built-in camera had been introduced, so he set up the iSight next to it, pointed it at his face. He’d worked on some Internet shorts for the university admissions office once he finished his course work, so he knew a little about production on the fly.
In the background, just over his shoulder, was a poster from the first Grateful Dead show he’d attended, RFK Stadium 1994, almost two decades earlier. It was a huge portrait of Jerry’s face. He thought about taking it down but decided he liked the irony of it in the background, so he turned it upside down, like declaring war while flying the enemy’s flag. On the laptop screen in front of him he could see the sweat-soaked hair plastered to his forehead. The blood on his right cheek appeared on the right side of the screen. It had dried in a tacky trail on his face, and his right eye was puffy like a boxer’s in a late round. He didn’t stop to take a shower, didn’t wipe any more of the blood from his face, or the wet hair from his forehead. He didn’t take the time to have a look at how you upload a video onto YouTube, not a part of the production process he’d engaged in in the past, though he had a user ID and a password (ID: BlackPeter3@yahoo.com; psswd: mightaswellmightaswell). When he left for college Mark had never even sent an e-mail. He brought with him the magenta-and-white iMac his parents had bought for themselves, good baby boomers that they were, but never learned how to use, and passed along to him. He left college and took his first job working as an intern at that glossy magazine, where he worked off and on for the next decade, having sent perhaps a hundred e-mails in his lifetime. Now here he was a decade later, sitting in front of an iSight camera, in front of a Mac laptop.
He hit Record.
“This is the first Boomer Missive. Today is June 12, 2010. Earlier this morning I hit a baby boomer in the face. He hit me back. Now I will hit back again. I will hit back harder. We will all hit back.
“Resist much, obey little.
“Propaganda by the deed.
“Boom boom.”