The first night, Sam slept fitfully. Even after Richard and Eli quit partying, the upstairs neighbors kept rampaging back and forth across the ceiling and bursts of shouting and what sounded like gunshots drifted up from the street and a smeary glow irradiated the curtainless window and ants or roaches or bedbugs or worse swarmed up from the mattress. The alarm went off at six o’clock and he and Kim fell all over each other in the tiny filthy bathroom. It took over an hour to get to the Fat Neck station, and of course Brad the Rad wasn’t there so they had to pay for taxis to their high schools, which consumed a serious chunk of Sam’s filched cash supply. After two days, he swore he would never ever be a commuter. How could his father have endured the soul-crushing routine all those years?
on wednesday afternoon, his mother showed up at school. She didn’t come in—anything to avoid a scene in front of strangers—but Sam spotted the family station wagon hulking amid a fleet of rich kids’ sports cars in the student parking lot. He thought of ducking back inside, making a run for it out the back door. No. Better not to act like a criminal. So he sauntered up to the passenger door, staring her down all the way, and got in.
“I told you—” he started, but she laid a hand on his arm. Were those tears in the corners of her eyes? She looked small inside her puffy red parka. Small and scared. “See?” Sam spread both arms out, shaking off her hand. “Alive and well—and studying! Look at the books!”
“Sam. We . . . I . . . you scared us to death.” She looked like she was going to lean over and hug him, but she didn’t. “Okay”—she was breathing hard—“you made your point, honey. Now it’s time to come home.” No apology? No we-were-so-blind? “I know your father said some things he shouldn’t have. People lose their tempers, you know? But that’s no reason to—”
“You really don’t get it, do you?” His voice scraped his throat. He wanted her hand back on his arm. He wanted her to cry again. “You can’t just crap on people and expect them to fall into line. You—”
“I’m not people—I’m your mother. It’s my job to take care of you.”
“Yeah, well, I think you need to resign. I’m raised—you said so yourself.”
“At least tell me where you’re staying. Be reasonable, Sam. If we think it’s safe—you and Kim could—”
The word “Kim” in her mouth made him burn. “I don’t need your permission. I told you already—Tutu’s looking out for me. I’m doing everything right—but I’m doing it my own way. Why can’t you trust me?”
Because you’re such a baby. Because you’re such an idiot. Because I’m your mother and I love you.
“I do trust you, Sammy. Really. But you hear all these stories—kids getting into drugs. Crazy politics. Blowing stuff up. It’s a dangerous world out there. You have no idea.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen.” Her eyes narrowed—she’d never heard him use this tone before. “And if something does, I’ll come home. Okay? I promise. But this is something I have to do.”
“It’s all your father’s fault,” she said, staring straight ahead with her hands on the wheel. “If only he could control his temper.” Then she started the car.
“What? You’re driving me to reform school? Prison?”
“No. I’m taking you home.” But before she could put the car in gear, Sam was out the door. He didn’t slam it. He didn’t stride away. Instead, with one hand on the rim of the passenger window, he bent at the waist until his head and shoulders were back inside the pocket of warmth. “Don’t make it worse than it is, okay, Mom? You can’t control me anymore. You think you can but you’re wrong.”
Then he withdrew. He didn’t turn but he raised a hand over his head and kept walking.
Penny Stein watched her last son stalk away. When he disappeared behind the hedges, she shut off the car, got out, and crossed the parking lot to the high school entrance.
On Thursday afternoon and again on Friday, Sam scanned the lot, but there was no sign of her. Of course. There was only so much time she could take off from work.
Then came the weekend. Sam and Kim pooled their money and splurged on breakfast at a diner on Second Avenue. The best bacon and eggs he’d ever tasted. Endless cups of muddy coffee in chipped white fat-lipped mugs. They found a hardware store and laid in industrial-strength insecticide and cleaning supplies. They scored some secondhand sheets, towels, and blankets at the local Salvation Army. Kim drew up a rotating chore calendar and tacked it to the wall: shopping, cooking, dishwashing, housecleaning. “Like a kibbutz,” said Eli. “A collective,” said Kim. “Let’s call it Casa Riccardo,” suggested Richard, who’d been running with some coke-sniffing Italian aristos. “How about Zee Reekie Project?” “Dick’s Hole,” Sam chimed in and they all howled.
The days were getting longer but it was still freezing on the streets—a cold more pitiless and penetrating than anything Sam had known in the suburbs. There was no place to hide from the wind. Airborne garbage scoured the canyons like flocks of crows. Inside, the radiator hissed morning and night, turning the apartment into a sauna. Sam didn’t care. He was enchanted at being free and unsupervised in the City for the first time in his life. The Saturday streets were like a giant polar party. Everyone was wrapped in streamers of riotous wool and alpaca. Eyes peeped from between scarves and hoods, checking him out, challenging him, greeting, inviting, dismissing, lusting, probing. Each block housed a library of stories. On the sidewalk, foreign languages faded in and out like nighttime stations on a car radio. Sam knew it was a tight narrow island but the cityscape felt infinite—brick and stone and glass and asphalt and wrought iron endlessly replicated in every direction, all of it teeming ceaselessly with people and cars. He was intoxicated and flattened. He wanted to rush down every street, sample every cookie in every bakery, eavesdrop on every conversation even he if he had no idea what language they were speaking, stalk random beautiful strangers on their mysterious rounds to clubs and cafés and dark little closet bars and bedrooms humid with flowers and rumpled sheets. Lovers, haters, vendors, buskers, pushers, preachers, crazies, hippies, saints, models, spies, runaways, bums, junkies, flunkies, wannabes, has-beens, wash-outs, paranoids, poets, rockers, mockers, punks, cons, soldiers, winos, debutantes, and deadbeats—all of them freezing together on the patchwork jingle-jangle sidewalk. Sam felt himself spiraling up to heaven like a helium balloon.
Two Saturday mornings in, Sam and Kim strolled over to the funky radical bookstore on St. Mark’s Place. He scanned the poetry shelves in the back for anything by Frank O’Hara or Gary Snyder, while she flitted restlessly from political science to history to comic books. When Sam caught up with her, Kim was standing by a rack of underground newspapers (Rat, Kudzu, Avatar, The Other, The Organ, Vortex, Zapp, Splat, Bent, Hung, Lilith, Off Our Backs) chatting up a tall skinny whiskey-colored guy with a red Afro and strawberry freckles. “Sam—Jeff. Jeff—Sam.” They shook hands.
“Jeff was telling me about this alternative printing press a couple blocks away,” Kim said breathlessly. “It’s where The BP gets distributed from.”
“The what?”
She lowered her voice. “The Black Panther—you know, the party’s newspaper? Wanna come check it out?”
Sam looked from one to the other. Jeff slouched and winked. Kim was glowing. Sam felt a blade twist in his gut. Had she really fallen for this caramel character in the last two minutes? Should he tag along just to make sure nothing happened? That would be so uncool.
“Nah—I’m gonna get back. Big calculus test on Monday.”
“Calcu-whut?” Jeff’s face split with mirth.
“Yeah, I know.” Sam hoped he sounded nonchalant. “But if I fail, I’m toast.”
“Okay, see you later then.”
“Yeah, man, later.”
And out they waltzed.
Shit. Fuck. Piss. Sam was muttering under his breath like a crazy person as he kicked down the sidewalk. How could she just ditch him like that and go off with another guy? He walked blindly, crossing avenues and plunging down random side streets until he found himself in a part of the Village he’d never seen before. Beautiful brick and stone houses lined the blocks. Trees etched black shadows on the sidewalks. The streets had names like English lapdogs—Barrow, Perry, Bedford, Charles, Bethune, Christopher. Sam turned down the last because there were more people on it—all of them young men with tight pants, willowy waists, and leering eyes. Shops hawked leather jockstraps, studded cat o’ nine tails, and executioner masks. Shuttered bars sported names like Ramrod, Blue Boy, Hidey Hole, Scrotum, Up Yours. So subtle. “Whatsa matter, sugar?” a teetering linebacker in high heels, purple miniskirt, and yellow wig hooted at him. “Can’t find your daddy?” Richard would have had a snappy comeback—but Sam just turned tail and fled. The laughter rang in his ears all the way to Seventh Avenue.
It was dark by the time Kim blew back in. She didn’t even take off her coat. Didn’t greet Sam. Didn’t sit. Didn’t seem to realize where she was. She just stood there in the middle of Richard’s dumpy living room with her arms wrapped around her tiny torso and her eyes fixed blankly on the window bars. She didn’t say a word but Sam could tell she was on fire.
He made believe he was still studying—but in fact he was holding his breath, waiting for her to crack first. Finally, she dropped her dazzling eyes to his face. “Weatherman” was all she said. “I just met the Weatherman.”
Sam waited a couple of beats, then a couple more, and when she still didn’t say anything else he piped up: “What—is it going to snow?”
Kim burst out laughing, collapsed on the sofa, and started motor-mouthing. “Oh my god, it’s happening, Sam. Right here right now—and the Weatherman is making it happen.”
He raised his eyebrows and spread both palms out beside his shoulders. Huh?
“Okay, okay, lemme back up. Remember Jeff?” How could he forget? “The guy with the red fro? So after the bookstore, Jeff took me to that printing press and sure enough there were bundles of The Black Panther stacked all over the place. It’s gotta be the coolest underground newspaper ever—like a blueprint for revolution, you know? Anyway, Jeff and I volunteered to help load papers into the back of an old hippie van—and when we got through, the guy nodded us into the back room so we could meet this lady—woman—whatever—this dark-haired hatchet-faced revolutionary earth goddess. Hardly bigger than me—but oh my god she has an aura about her. Lee is what everyone calls her—not her real name—her whatchacallit?”
“Nom de guerre?”
“Right. Nom de guerre. Nom de guerrilla—I’m not kidding, Sam. This is real. There’s a war going on out there—multiple wars—all connected. Vietnam, Harlem, Oakland, Indians on the reservations, Palestinians on the West Bank, women everywhere—they’re all fighting against the same system. And now is the time for us to rise up and bring it down. I know we’re just kids but kids can change the world. I mean, who else if not us?”
“So the hatchet-faced goddess lady—Lee? She’s the Weather boss?”
“No—yes—I don’t know—I think she’s only in charge of one cell. Anyway, she sizes us up—me and Jeff—and she says, ‘Who are you guys?’ And I say, ‘We’re whoever you want us to be.’ I guess that was good enough because that’s when she keyed us in to what’s going down. Okay, listen. The Weatherman is not about rain and snow—it’s about revolution. You know Dylan’s line about not needing a weatherman? That’s where the name comes from. And right now, on starship earth, the wind is blowing to global insurgency—armed uprising—radical action—marching in the streets!” Sam thought she was going to levitate. “You know about SDS?”
“Students for a Democratic Society? The guys behind those sit-ins at Columbia—Harvard—that SDS?”
“Yeah—well, from what I hear that SDS is over. Peaceful protest—compromise—playing footsie with the pigs—all that shit is history. The only way to win is to beat the man at his own game.” Kim stood, stripped off her coat, dropped it on the floor. “You gotta hear Lee tell it—she knows everything. Everything, Sam! She took me and Jeff to this brown—” She caught herself. “To this pad in the Village which is like Weatherman central command. The Weather Bureau. They’ve got a plan—oh my god, it’s so brilliant. No more demos. No more sit-ins. ‘If it’s only talk, it’s not revolution’: Lee’s words. It’s time to fight—to start blowing stuff up—their stuff—you know, banks, courts, draft boards, police stations, military bases. Whatever it takes—as long as it gets on the evening news. That’s the key. It’s all about the media—I totally get that now. The press went crazy last fall when the Weatherman blew up a statue of some fascist old cop in Chicago. No one was hurt but from the television news you’d think it was World War III. The media are our best weapon.”
“Our? So now you’re on board with bombing?”
Kim let that slide. “Nobody’s gonna die except ideas and statues. It’s not about killing people—it’s about the circus, the coverage. The medium is the message. Attention is everything! The more outrageous we are, the more attention we get. The more attention, the more followers. One well-placed bomb is worth a thousand peaceful protest marches. Can’t you see? We light the match—but the media are the gasoline. They’re fighting half the battle for us. More than half. Once the news hits, kids are gonna rise up everywhere and join us. High school students like us—we’re the vanguard. When it starts it’s never gonna stop. This whole fucking thing is gonna blow.”
“And the Weatherman is gonna make it blow? You—and this Lee lady—and Jeff—and a buncha other kids playing with matches?”
She shook her head. “No.” The flush dimmed. She quit pacing. “Weatherman alone is not enough. But with the BPP—”
“The Panthers.”
“With the BPP fighting alongside us, we’d be unbeatable. They already have a national network. They’ve got a newspaper—chapters in every city—zillions of members. They’ve got guns and they know how to use them. If only we—I—can get the Weatherman and the Panthers to join forces, we could do anything—everything!”
“Okay—now I’m lost. What does the BPP have to do with any of this? I thought the Panthers were like un-gawah—black powah—right on! But it sounds like the Weatherman is more like—you know—white power? punk power? guerrilla theater with real bombs? Why would they team up?”
Kim took a deep breath. “FBI pigs say the Panthers are violent extremists—but they’re not. For them, it’s not about violence, it’s about resistance. Self-defense. They’re saving lives, not taking them. When some shyster landlord kicks an old lady out of her apartment, the Panthers are the ones who get her back in. When a supermarket charges double in the ghetto, the Panthers show up and set things straight. They’re giving free breakfast to hundreds of kids every day. Free doctors and lawyers too—you name it. They don’t talk about justice—they enforce justice. Fight the power by seizing the power. Do you have any idea how many innocent black men, women, and children are gunned down every year by trigger-happy cops? The pigs are waging war on black people, no different from Jim Crow, no different from slavery. But the Panthers are fighting back. Arming themselves and using weapons to protect their lives, families, property, and rights. Policing the police. You know what put the BPP on the map? A couple years ago, thirty of them marched into the California State Capitol building carrying rifles and Magnums. Can you picture it? Dudes with fros armed to the teeth and marching in the halls of power. The police couldn’t lay a finger on them because the right to bear arms is protected by the Second Amendment, though whoever wrote that one was definitely not thinking about black dudes pointing Magnums at state troopers.”
“James Madison,” Sam interrupted.
“Huh?”
“James Madison—he was the author of the Bill of Rights.” Sam had been boning up for the American history AP test.
“Right. Madison was cool with civil rights, except when it came to his own slaves. Anyway, the Weatherman and the Panthers are the perfect combo—the revolutionary dream team—only . . .”
“Only?”
Kim sighed. “I went up there this afternoon.” Sam drew a blank. “You know—to the BPP chapter in Harlem.”
“You went to Harlem? Alone?”
“No—Jeff went with me.”
“So—what—now he’s your boyfriend?” The second Sam said it he regretted it.
“Jesus, Sam, why do you have to be such an asshole!” Suddenly she was blazing. Sam’s heart took off at a gallop. If she had a gun, she’d shoot. “I’m talking about revolution—changing the fucking world—and all you can think about is having a girlfriend? Why’d you leave home, anyway? You haven’t gone underground—you’re just playing house in a slum. I thought you were different—I really thought I could trust you!” She bolted for the bathroom and slammed the door. “Fuck you, Sam!” He sat there stunned. It was the first time she’d turned on him.
Eli, roused by the racket, stumbled out of the bedroom in his underwear. “What happen? Keemee sounds really peaced up.” “Off,” muttered Sam. “Off what?” “Pissed off, not up.” But Eli just shook his head and pulled a beer from the fridge. Richard had still not come back from wherever he’d been the night before. Sam felt like crying—or battering down the bathroom door—or punching Eli in the face. He was on the verge of storming out—revolution my ass! let her see how it feels!—but where?
Kim stayed locked in the bathroom so long that Sam was convinced she’d slit her wrists. Finally, he heard the shower splutter on and ten minutes later she emerged wrapped in a towel with her hair streaming down her face. She sat down next to him on the sofa and put her wet head on his shoulder. The smell of shampoo made his legs tremble. Eli, hunched over a magazine, kept darting his eyes over to see if the towel had slipped off Kim’s boobs.
“Sorry . . .” she started, but Sam put two fingers to her lips.
“Don’t—”
“No, but I want to explain. It’s not you. I’m just upset over what went down in Harlem.”
With Jeff, Sam was thinking but didn’t say.
“When we got to BPP headquarters, two women in black leather jackets and berets came outside to check us out. Women are in charge now, Jeff told me, because all the men are either dead or in jail. The Panther 21 trial has practically wiped out the New York chapter. They let Jeff go inside with them—he’s like one-quarter black but it’s enough—but I had to wait on the street. People started to heckle—you know, like I was revolutionary Barbie or something. Finally I pounded on the door and someone let me in—Jeff had vanished. The lady goes, ‘Whoa, the sistah’s still here.’ So I say, ‘Yeah, the sistah wants to make a deal.’ I told her about the steno pad you grabbed off that FBI pig. ‘It’s yours,’ I said, ‘on one condition: from now on, Weatherman and BPP band together—common cause!—with me as the liaison.’” Kim shook back her wet curls and hitched up the sagging towel. “But she just looks me up and down and snorts. ‘Okay, honey,’ she finally says. ‘We definitely need to rearm. So you come back with that notebook and a crate of Uzis and then we’ll talk.’” Kim clamped her chin between thumb and forefinger and squeezed. “Jesus, Sam, what am I gonna do? I don’t even know what a freaking Uzi looks like.”
At which point Eli dropped the magazine and sprang to his feet. “Uzi? Uzi?” he squawked. “Israeli submachine gun—that Uzi? Who wants Uzi crate? I know where to find.”