The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  And we were lucky. Endlessly lucky, as I had been tonight.

  And so as a stranger started to drive me hundreds of miles out of my way to Chicago, as the sweetness of nicotine spread through my bloodstream, I remembered something: luck is never surprising, always inevitable.

  Perhaps that is because you only see your luck when, as few people ever do, you put yourself in a position truly to need it.

  Date: June 13, 2006

  From: “Amelia Wanda Lurie” mimi@cusimanorganics.com

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 20

  Little J. I must have been somewhere in Utah, on the 80 East, before I stopped inventing Cleo Theophilus’s identity, and let my mind go where for so long I had kept it away, to thinking about your father.

  Jason Sinai. There were so damn many Js in SDS, not just Jeff Jones and JJ but all manner of Joannas, Jaffes, Johns, Jeans, Justins, Jennifers. First person to call your father Little J, that was JJ, and when he did, your father’s face fell. Years later I found out why—Jack Sinai and Jason, in the big extended family that gathered in the Sinai’s house on Bedford Street: Big J and Little J.

  Little J. I’ve tried a thousand times to see him, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge that midnight after leaving you, a man who had moments before abandoned his daughter in a hotel room, and like that, he finds himself watching across the black water at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the same view he had seen with his father in 1962.

  Little J. I’ve tried a thousand times to see him, waking on that bus to Chicago, that June day of 1996.

  I see him in a room on the Cape, sprawled naked on white sheets, the long autumn sun crossing the wooden wall, lowering, lowering, until it sweeps over his face: his thick red bangs, his forehead, his eyebrows. In houses upstate, lent to us, rented, or stolen. Apartments in the Mission, Hyde Park, Williamsburg, the cheap neighborhoods of cities across the country. Always off-season, the time when the radical chic, not needing their pricey country houses, could lend us them in return for a daring dinner party story, a thrill up their spines, and that without interrupting their summer. Stay as long as you want, but be out by Thanksgiving, because the kids are off school and it’s the last time we can get out of the city till Christmas. Cars and trains, buses. Tents. A precious collection of mornings, waking in places where we had been safe enough, provisionally, to sleep, to fuck, to hold each other in the protection of the dark.

  When you are a fugitive, it is in the day that the regrets, the terrors, the awful memories come. “Whatever gets you through the day/It’s O-kay, Okay—” We rewrote the words to the song, our first year on the move, and I remember wondering how night could ever be a threat to anyone. Night, with the amazing chances it offers to hide, is always the respite. Mornings, only the innocent—like Jason—wake unafraid.

  That is why it is so hard for me to imagine how your father woke, that day on the bus to Denver after leaving you in New York, the swirling of blood-pink before his eyes. I can’t, or I won’t, accept that as a man your father no longer wakes as he did as a boy, no longer wakes happy, no longer wakes hopeful. That, in my opinion, is the greatest casualty of his marriage to Julia, and I will give you any odds that it only became the case after Julia became an addict. I will bet you anything that those magical first years, as your father realized how solidly James Grant was holding, as your father floated on the safety net of the Montgomery fortune, as life unfolded to him with magical ease, I will bet you that he woke happy and rolled toward Julia’s beautiful naked body as he once rolled toward mine. And I will bet you that it was only after you came along and Julia, a line of coke at a time, started abusing first herself, then herself and Jason, and finally her daughter too, that at long last peace began to drain from your father’s nights.

  For this, I will never forgive your mother. Not only for taking hope from your father, but for taking its possibility, its very possibility, away from me.

  For as I came to understand your father’s part of this story—and I have had ten years to learn it in its every detail and imagine its every thought—I realized that for all the time that I lived as Tess Sanders, for the entire central period of my life, the belief that happiness might be possible, not just for me but for others, was founded on your father’s way of waking into happiness, each morning, his ability to face the day with hope. Later, when your father was often described as foolish, even naive, how it must have galled him to have those things for you to read, someday, yourself. Let me tell you something, Isabel. To be an optimist like your father is not naive, nor is it an error. Only the naive would think so.

  I, who lost my naïveté the day my father put a gun in his mouth on the dunes at Point Betsie; I, who have lived without the slightest fantasy ever since, know that optimism is the highest of spiritual developments, and I would trade my soul for it, if I had a goddamn soul.

  Shit. I keep writing exactly what I promised I wouldn’t. Promised myself, that is. I promised myself I would just tell you what happened. Here’s what happened in June 1996, Isabel Sinai: I drove east from San Francisco. On the 80. I got the story every hour, on the hour, on NPR as I headed east, not sleeping, living on coffee. In the evenings All Things Considered gave background, interviews, human interest. And in between broadcasts I could hear, rather than just imagine, the conversations that were taking place, that day, in hundreds, even thousands of ex-Movement houses, telephones, e-mails.

  See, people love to see us fall. I can’t complain about it, because we asked for it. With all our proclamations, communiqués, declarations. Each time we set a bomb, it was nothing if not a dare. Daring the law to find us, daring other lefties to follow us, daring both ends of the spectrum, we were in nothing so successful as getting them both to hate us. Now, looking back, I see that each time we were a little further away from the people we thought we were communicating with.

  Now, looking back, I wonder what we thought was going happen to us after the war was over. I ask myself, did we actually think that we were going to head a revolutionary government, a kind of collective American Castro, and make of our fallen comrades the collective American Ché? When the Mitchell Justice Department so violated the Constitution that most of us became unprosecutable, I remember watching with awe as one by one, people began to surface and return to normal lives. For me, even without Bank of Michigan, I don’t think I’d have been able to. I think I’d just have been too embarrassed.

  You want to know what we thought was going to happen? The best answer I can give, it’s that basically, I don’t remember. The best answer I can give is, when you are engaged in a project like, say, trying to lead the second American revolution, wipe out war and imperialism, and render justice to the oppressed black minority—just to pick a wild example—you don’t think that way. You can’t. The way you think is: What Castro accomplished seemed impossible. What Mao accomplished seemed impossible. And what Ho Chi Minh is accomplishing—and at the time, it was the actual present—is impossible. He was fighting off the United States of America, and in the end would give two million lives against our 58,000, and would win.

  Did we think we were going to lead a revolution? I don’t know. Did you ever think that a handful of suicidal fundamentalist maniacs with box cutters would be able to collapse two of the tallest buildings in the world, kill three thousand people in the center of New York, bring the country’s economy to its knees, cause hundreds of thousands of people to lose their livelihood, redraw the map of Asia, and launch a cycle of world war that, today, five years later, is still raging?

  Maybe you did. I didn’t.

  So I don’t know what we thought we were doing. I just can’t say anymore. What we didn’t imagine, however—and as I say, I’m not complaining—was how notorious we would become. Not only at the time, but afterward. That we would take on the aura of an American myth: the underground sixties radical. Or that the last few of us who refused to surface would
be such big news when we were found.

  Want to know what I think? If you ask me, we came to partake of the American myth of the maverick, the last wild horses, roaming free across a western frontier. We were the last mavericks, the last ones who refused to admit that it was over, that it was all over, that everything we believed in had either been forgotten, discredited, or packaged by corporations and sold for a profit. And certainly we didn’t guess how fervently our ex-peers—thousands of people who made up the Movement—would hope for us to fail.

  Here’s the rule, Isabel. With criminals, people root for them secretly, secretly hope they will evade the police, even while they publicly moralize against them. With us, they root for us publicly, and secretly, deeply, profoundly, they hope we will fail. The thousands of conversations that I knew were taking place among ex-Movement people while the manhunt for Jason was on, I guarantee you that not one of them ever expressed the hope that he be caught. They talked about the ridiculous scale of the manhunt for a man who had lived as a model citizen for the past twenty-five years and who was only tangentially involved in the crime in the first place; they talked about the disproportionate punishment of criminal and political defendants; they talked about how desperate a man must be to abandon his daughter, and by all accounts, Jason was a model father too.

  And behind it all, I knew that these thousands and thousands of people were looking at each other in the deepest satisfaction, and saying to each other, Sinai’s gone nuts. Just like Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, David Horowitz, even Ira Einhorn. Yet another icon of the sixties had abandoned his principles, had proved that it was all a delusion, all a childish fantasy. And in their hearts they are comforted, reaffirmed, to know that it was a dream that the machine could be stopped, that a society could be fair, that the planet could be saved and people could be free—a dream of children, and now the very last holdouts have made fools of themselves, have ruined their lives and abandoned their principles, whether by inventing a ridiculous pair of trousers like Eldridge Cleaver or by committing suicide like Abbie Hoffman or by becoming a neo-conservative like Ronald Radosh.

  Or by abandoning their daughter in a hotel room.

  See, now we can get on with the real work of going to jobs we hate, of raising children who hate us, of finding and defending our place in the status quo, the grim, competitive, bitter status quo, which is a relief, because it is frightening to step out of the status quo; it is a relief because even the quiet desperation of daily toil in corporations is less frightening—in fact, nothing is more frightening—than the possibility of freedom.

  Never mind that Jason, Sharon, and I, we’re not icons of anything. Never mind that for hundreds of thousands of people the revolution never stopped. Never mind that in fundamental ways, real ways, and irreversible ways, our lives were transformed, and each one of us and our children feel the benefits of that transformation, every time one of our daughters graduates from medical school, every time one of our sons cooks dinner for his family, every time a public school class studies Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, every time a black woman marries a white man, every time a court stops a corporation from emitting pollutants. If the Committee will look the other way for a moment—and even if they won’t—I’ll show you a quote. Ready? It’s from an interview with Chomsky, and don’t tell anyone I snuck this in.

  The movement against the war in Vietnam had long-lasting, I hope permanent, effects in raising the general level of insight and understanding among the general public…. Despite the intense efforts undertaken in the 1970s to reverse this general cultural progress and enlightenment, much of it remains…. The accomplishments, which were very real, can be credited largely to young people, most of them nameless and forgotten, who devoted themselves to organizing, education, civil disobedience, and resistance.

  I felt it so intensely, driving east after I heard on NPR what was happening to Jason. I felt so intensely the gloating of a certain portion of my generation, the whole country over.

  And I felt something else, even more intensely. I felt the endless strangeness of the fact that in the whole of the United States of America, there were only two people who understood how fantastically, enormously, not crazy Jason Sinai was.

  So I thought, in any case. In fact, besides me and Jason, there turned out to be two others: your aunt Maggie and your uncle Daniel.

  Like them, I understood that everything he was doing, your father, he was doing to find me.

  Was he going to succeed? I didn’t know.

  Know something, Isabel? That was a kind of peaceful feeling, not knowing.

  Because if he did find me, then I was going to have to decide what to do.

  Did I want him to find me?

  How can I answer that? No, it was the last thing in the world I wanted.

  And yet with everything I had ever believed in my life, I knew that he must.

  There was only one way I could help your father find me, Isabel. I like to think that had I been able to do more, I would have tried. I like to think that I went to Ann Arbor, which was the worst place in the world for me to go, in order to make it just that little bit easier for him to find me.

  I like to think that there was nothing I could do but wait, and wonder whether Jason was inventive enough, and persistent enough, to put the trail to McLeod together, the single trail that could connect Mimi Lurie with me.

  Meanwhile, fittingly enough, I would go back to where it all started and wait.

  Don’t say that was nothing different, Isabel. Do not tell me I had been waiting for Little J since 1974.

  It is not true. I had been waiting for him much, much longer than that. All the way back to the time I first saw him, in a dormitory dining hall at the University of Michigan, in 1968.

  And I was still waiting for him on June 21, 1996, as what was to be a historic summer heat wave swept in over the Huron River Valley; I drove into Ann Arbor on the 94, crossed town and campus, my head literally swimming with the uncanniness of the experience, as if I had never left but been there my whole miserable life.

  Which, in a way, I had.

  In a way, after all, nothing had changed. In my head, I was still a young woman bringing dope to the people. In my head I was just the same person as a quarter century ago when I first came into the Del Rio. The only thing that had aged at all was my body.

  Which, Isabel, is both a depressing and a heartening thing to say, at forty-five years old, depending on what it is you want from your life.

  Date: June 13, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 21

  Run, hide, and think. The rules were simple enough. I had had identities blow up on me again and again. Everyone had. And when they did, the rules of what to do, like most of the things in criminal life, were so simple as to be obvious.

  Run: intelligently, instinctively, or from panic, but always somewhere you had never been before and always alone. Don’t go home again. Don’t go anywhere you have ever been again. Run, and in one direction only: away.

  Hide. As soon as you can, hide to rest, to change, to recover, but mostly, hide to think. And when you think, try to clear your mind of everything except what was ahead of you. No regret, no remorse, no confusion, and no fear.

  There would be time for all that later. Time to experience each and every one of the distinct kinds of pain that were available to you: mourning for lives and neighbors lost, fear of an utterly unknown future, shame of failure; time to think of all that and leisure to wallow in its multifaceted pain. But now, think only of what you had to do to stay alive, and free, so that when the time came, you could regret all that had happened, all the mistakes, all the stupidity, all the bad luck that put you in the position where your life was whittled down to three lousy actions to preserve your freedom a few moments, hours, days longer: running, hiding, and thinking.

/>   Simple, and so hard to follow; it makes you wonder how any criminals ever get away with anything at all.

  • • •

  The highway to Chicago. The French kid, his wide face appearing briefly in oncoming headlights, skin oily and eyes long, then disappearing again as for long stretches of black road, no one passed.

  We stopped once at a truck stop, where the kid ate enormously and I paid. I also bought a carton of Marlboros while the kid got gas. Then the night again, where he disappeared behind the wheel again, the lights of the occasional passing car the only proof that I was still even there, and I, in darkness, sat open-eyed, although there was nothing to see. Just the few yards ahead of headlighted air, bug-infested and hot, and the flashing white line of the road west.

  The kid let me out near Grant Park at four, the heat of the night only slightly more bearable than the day. Through the doorway I offered him the carton of cigarettes and the money I had promised. In exchange, however, I took the half-full pack of Export A’s from the dashboard. I slammed the door and walked north, waving at the car as it passed and watching it go all the way to the curve to Navy Pier. In the ambient noise of the city at night, the lake could not be heard, but the lights of Lake Shore Drive, lying flat on slowly shifting water, allowed me to imagine the little lap and hiss of the tiny shore waves landing on rock beach. When the kid and his car were out of sight, I crossed Michigan Avenue, suddenly and at a slight run, then slowed back to a walk and, holding my bag close to the side of the buildings, walked south. As soon as I could—which was very soon—I then turned right into the alleyway behind the Congress Plaza Hotel, and then right again.

  Now, in the loading dock of the hotel, or more precisely, a little bricked courtyard in front of the loading dock’s office door, I dropped my bag. Then I sat on it. And then I lowered myself flat onto the ground, head on the bag, and stared up the thin canyon of brick—the brick backside of these marbled buildings—up to the sky.