Crasses et Voluptés

BEN MOREA AND THE FOUNDING OF THE

MOTHERFUCKERS

When Angry Arts week ended, a group of Lower East side artists continued

to meet with the intention of carrying on where Angry Arts week had left off.

We eventually decided to call ourselves “the Motherfuckers,” short for “Up

Against the Wall Motherfucker.” The name came from a line in Leroi Jones’s

prose poem “Black People!” that he’d written as his hometown, Newark, was

erupting in a riot sparked by police brutality:

. . . you can’t steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you

anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the

magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is

a stick up!

Our name had the advantage that it could not be spoken in polite company.

That which could not be spoken, could not be co-opted.

The unacknowledged leader of our group was Ben Morea. His life story

could not have been more different from my own. He had grown up in Hell’s

Kitchen on the West Side of Manhattan and lived all his life on the streets of

New York. He never knew his father. He loved jazz and learned to play the

vibes. He hung out in clubs where heroin was hip and got hooked. That

period of his life ended after he was busted for possession. He kicked his

heroin habit cold turkey in prison, but in the process became so sick that he

almost died. He was transferred from his cell to the prison ward of a hospital.

There, in the art therapy room, he did his first paintings.

Ben had tried to kick his habit many times, but always he would go back to

the jazz scene and get hooked again. When he left the hospital, he decided he

was done. He put away his vibes, stopped going to the clubs, and started 

painting. While looking to fill the void in his life left when he abandoned the

jazz world, he met Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the founders of the Living

Theater, an improvisational anarchopacifist theater of communal ritual and

provocation. Judith and Julian were Ben’s introduction to anarchism. After

meeting them he joined a study group organized by Murray Bookchin. It met

in Murray’s apartment on 9th Street east of 1st Avenue. Murray was a

pugnacious working class intellectual, committed to anarchism and interested

in technology and ecology. Ben was never entirely comfortable with the

intellectual theorizing that went on in the group. According to Murray, he

would show up, listen impatiently for a while, and then start screaming. He’d

call everybody a petty bourgeois white honky and storm out. Everyone

thought that was the last they’d see of him, but the next meeting he would be

back, and go through the same ritual. Even after the group disbanded, Ben

would show up regularly at Murray’s home to talk and argue politics.

Ben began searching for a way to turn art into an instrument of revolution,

which meant to turn art against itself. He wanted to destroy art in the name of

art—and life. With Roy Hahne he put out Black Mask, a four-page magazine

in which he published his manifestos. Ben gathered together a group of

likeminded artists. They called themselves Black Mask after the magazine

and proceeded to stage a series of theatrical provocations.

On October 10, 1966, they traveled uptown from the Lower East Side, with

the intention of shutting down the Museum of Modern Art. They had handed

out fliers announcing their action in advance. At the entrance to the museum

they were met by barricades and a line of cops. Art, which refused

engagement, now required police protection. It was a victory.

On another occasion they announced they would change the name of Wall

Street to “War Street.” Ben and his fellow provocateurs concealed their faces

behind black woolen ski masks and paraded down the street carrying skull

masks on stakes while handing out fliers proclaiming the name change.

A January 1968 action targeted the poet and playwright Kenneth Koch.

Koch was a friend of abstract expressionists and a beloved professor of

poetry at Columbia University. His poems were often playful, endearing, and

somewhat obscure, but never “political” or angry. He did not write to put

anyone up against the wall. Ben learned that he was scheduled to give a

reading at St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side. Newark was erupting

in riots, and Leroi Jones had just been arrested for carrying firearms and

resisting arrest. Black Maskers made a flier with a picture of Jones, shackled

and chained, his arms behind his back. He had what looked like a bloody welt

on his forehead. Below the picture were three words: “Poetry is Revolution.”

Ben and his cohorts took seats in the balcony. One member of the group, a

man over six feet tall with a great head of tousled black hair, wore a trench

coat. He looked impressively sinister, the very image of a turn-of-the-century

anarchist bomb thrower. Concealed under his coat was a pistol. As Koch

began to read, the man stood up. He shouted, “Koch!” When the poet looked

up, the man aimed the pistol and fired. It was loaded with blanks. There was

a loud explosion, and according to Ben, Koch fainted on the spot.

b Ben and his cohorts threw their fliers from the balcony and ran out of the church.

Ben was short, wiry, and intense. He spoke in little thrusts and jabs that

mirrored his physical mannerisms. His walk had a slight swagger and he had

a way of cocking his head to one side and hitching himself up when

preparing for a confrontation that might have seemed ridiculous in someone

else.

But Ben was not ridiculous. Ben’s strength lay in the fact that, in a nontrivial sense, 

he was true to his word. A lot of words flew around recklessly

in the Sixties, but the gap between rhetoric and reality seemed smaller with

him than with anybody else I knew at the time. He did what he said he would

do. This was his code of honor, the code of the street, to which he adhered

with the discipline of a martial artist. He was calm and focused in battle, able

to calibrate his actions in moments of tension, while all around him, less

hardened street fighters like me panicked and struggled not to flee from

danger. In those moments of confrontation, with the police charging down on

us, I was acutely aware of the limits of my courage. The little bird of my

being, silent, private, separate, would become frantic to protect itself. I could

no more force myself to take risks than a drowning man could keep from

struggling for breath.

At the time I thought of Ben as possessing street intelligence that was the

equivalent and polar opposite of Herbert’s book intelligence. Ben’s code of

honor challenged all the training of my childhood in the relation of word to

deed. As a child, listening to the grownups talk, I concluded that thought

must be isolated from action. My fathers’ minds floated from thought to

thought in a thought-world separate from the world of doing and making.

Ben’s thought flowed naturally and directly into action. Before joining the

Motherfuckers, I had lived isolated in a whirl of words and guilty fantasies.

My encounter with Ben hurled me from my isolation with awful suddenness.

I felt I could only imitate, posture, make tentative steps to follow where he

led, and hope that no one would notice my cowardice, my fear, my

innocence.

Very quickly, or so it seems to me now, the Motherfuckers was

transformed under Ben’s leadership from a group which met to plan activities

into something quite different—an identity. Involvement stopped being a

matter of merely attending meetings. It became a question of “being” a

Motherfucker. We lived to throw ourselves into the fray. We gave up

attachments to the past. We abandoned our family names in favor of

“Motherfucker.” Tom Neumann died and Tom Motherfucker was born.

Osho Neuman