The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  It was that Jason’s actual success in making contact with me was the final proof that my life, as it had been, was no longer tenable. This careful construction of Tess’s identity, shielding me not only from the police but from my old allies and, in particular, from Jason: it was ending now, in Ann Arbor, where it had all started, and once again I was going to have to face the unknown of the future and, even worse, its promise.

  2.

  We met in 1968, freshman year at the University of Michigan. I was a work-study student, and the work I’d been assigned was at the cafeteria in East Quad: I was an efficient, neat person, good in a kitchen, not a hippie yet, nor an urban revolutionary—in any case, if you don’t know it, let me tell you that in those days, it was revolutionary girls, using the skills taught to us by our fifties moms in our clean kitchens, who kept the revolutionary boys warm, fed, and at least somewhat clean.

  My work-study job started when dinner was finished: to clear the tables of salt and pepper shakers, collecting them on a big tray and then taking them back to the kitchen to refill, as well as any odd crockery or silverware left by careless students. Behind me, another work-study student wiped the tables clean. By the time I began, the cafeteria was meant to be empty, but there was always a group left at one table, emptying the coffee urn, cup after cup, and talking. Jason was one of them.

  A thin guy, wiry, strong in black T-shirts with a pack of Winstons in the breast pocket, jeans, work shoes, curly black hair cascading onto his shoulders, a strong face with an aquiline nose, a brown-eyed man. Now, when the Michigan Daily was running pictures of Jason Sinai from the sixties, I saw a child, a child young enough to be my son, and I asked myself how I had ever thought this child sexy. Then he was beautiful to me, an animated, intense person, with a body always poised for fight.

  Or, I knew now, for flight.

  The group that sat talking with him, East Quad hippies, were a gang of guys who dressed like him, except one was black. The black guy went on to become a press secretary for Christopher Dodd—often I wondered if Dodd knew that his secretary’s political education had started in East Quad, listening to dark, intense Jason Sinai talk sedition. For what he was there for, no pretense was made. He was there as a representative of a far-left faction—the Action Faction—of the University of Michigan SDS; he was recruiting members; and what he had in mind for them to do, already in the fall of 1968, a month after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, was against the law.

  Later, I was to know exactly how few of the people Jason recruited actually became functioning members of the Weather Underground. In fact, the one person he convinced, those nights in the East Quad dormitory cafeteria, was the one person he was not talking to: the girl cleaning the tables, ignored by them, as they talked. Nor did he really convince me. He didn’t need to: I had come to the same conclusions as he—and the several hundred-odd members of what was soon to be named Weatherman—on my own.

  I was born in Ann Arbor. You know, by now, who my father was, Martin Luria, a physicist at the university, himself born in Germany, exiled to America before Hitler, not as a Jew but as a Communist, inducted into the Manhattan project, and then tenured at Michigan until, just after my birth in 1951, blacklisted by McCarthy. He committed suicide in 1966, on the beach in upstate Michigan, leaving his wife his insurance to bring us up, me and my older brother Peter. My mother survived to see Peter vanish: he disappeared on a dig in Turkey while doing an archaeology Ph.D.; and me be admitted to the university. Then she died of a stroke. I buried her during the summer after my high school graduation, alone: even if I did not really believe my brother was dead, I did not know where he was. On some level I understood that he did not intend to be found. Then I moved to Ann Arbor. When I got there, I legally amended the spelling of my last name. “Luria” was too known a name in Michigan.

  Nights after my mother died. Home from my work-study job, in Betsy Barbour, the all-girl’s dorm on the hill: my mother had insisted I live there, one of the last things she did before she died. For so long had I feared this death, the loss of this last tie, that at first I hardly felt it, a numbing sensation. Then, nights, in Betsy Barbour, it had begun to ache. Sometimes I thought that loving my mother had been the greatest, the only, success of my life. Now, when there was no longer anyone to love, I could no longer recapture the reality my mother had had for me. I knew only that I had adored her. I had adored every inch of the little clapboard house in Point Betsie, filled with Teutonic kitsch and the smell of cabbage. I had loved to touch her, hold her hand, kiss her cheek, put my slim, strong body against hers on the sofa, thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, and my mother, forbearing, had given in to her daughter’s constant demand for intimacy. Then she was gone, like a blanket falling off the bed at night, leaving my thigh, my shoulder, cold.

  Not even the house was left: I had had to sell it at once to cover death duties and pay my tuition. I did have enough left over to put its contents in storage until the eighties, when the FBI tracked it down and confiscated it, nearly following the paper trail of the storage rental to me, forcing me into Canada for six long months. As for my brother, a few years later I traveled to…well, to another country to be trained in the use of a new blasting cap, and on the way home, looked for him in Turkey, where he had disappeared from the Cornell-Harvard dig at Sardis. There was not the slightest trace—Peter Luria had disappeared from the face of the earth. But by then, so had Mimi Lurie, hadn’t she?

  So in the autumn of 1968, Betsy Barbour, with its oak-paneled hallways, its lamplit lounges, had become the only home I had; the dining hall my hearth; and the little room I shared with two girls from Dearborn my only privacy. Nights, I listened to Dana and Haley’s whispered secrets fade into even breaths and the silence of five hundred girls sleeping under one big roof. The big Michigan sky first quilted over with fall cloud and silver moon, then grayed with high storms and chilling air and began to snow. At first, a vast numbness had sheltered me.

  Then I began to ache.

  The house in Point Betsie yielded four years’ tuition for me and a good portion of my room and board. My brother’s half, as far as I know, still sits under his name in Washtenaw Savings and Loan, if Washtenaw Savings and Loan survived the S&L crash. Freshman year passed, 1968 to 1969; classes in the day, the East Quad cafeteria at night, listening to Jason meeting with an ever-shifting group of recruits. At the end of the winter semester, the Point Betsie Boat Club, where my father had sailed a little skiff, offered me three thousand dollars, a collection made after my mother’s death. That was a surprise: the club, like most of Point Betsie, was as Republican as Henry Ford. It made more sense when I found out that the collection had been organized by Douglas Osborne, Johnny’s dad. Three thousand dollars meant, I slowly realized, that I needed not work for the entire summer. It meant, I realized, that I could volunteer full-time to help in the SDS office.

  That was not what Doug Osborne had meant to make of me.

  I stood five-nine, a tall, slim, well-made girl, with waist and breasts of an adolescent but a woman’s hips under tight jeans. I was blond, gray-eyed, perfectly pretty but for the imperfection of my sloping shoulders and long neck, which made me, instead, beautiful. Now, looking at the picture the Michigan Daily ran—for they ran as many photos of me as of Jason—I understood, which I hadn’t really, then, how beautiful I was, my breasts bare under the cotton of an Indian embroidered shirt, my hips full in my jeans. In May, when school let out, the People’s Park uprising happened in Berkeley, and I became the corresponding secretary for the Ann Arbor SDS. It happened so naturally. Jason, Nan, Jeddy—articulate, passionate people, like I had met around my parents’ dinner table for years—they welcomed me into the Ann Arbor office and made me at home. We were motivated, oddly, I saw now, by the same naive optimism that had animated my father, before the blacklist, at least. But it was, so unexpectedly, the same naive optimism that would animate Johnny Osborne when, to my shock, I heard that he’d enlisted and was going to
Vietnam. A belief in his own possibilities; a belief in the country’s boundless capacity. It was, I saw now, an equal but opposite measure of the postwar American optimism—same as had caused educated, liberal men to undertake the war in Vietnam; same as had allowed our government to plant a flag on the moon. Now it was making us think we could end the war and reinvent our society.

  In June, New Left Notes published “You Don’t Need a Weatherman,” the primary accusation that the New Left as we had known it, the antiwar movement as we had known it, had failed to stop the escalation of the war as well as the intensification of governmental repression. This was true, and many people listened. And when, later in June, SDS split into Progressive Labor on one hand, and Revolutionary Youth Movement on the other, I naturally went with RYM, the same group as Jason and his friends. When, over the rest of the summer, RYM split again, a small group going on to start planning the Days of Rage in Chicago, I went too.

  Trotsky or Lenin or Mao, Sweeney or Baron, Marcuse or Mills, everyone had their own analysis much as they had their own taste in music. To lead in this environment the most immediate challenge was to discern whether people see beyond our attachment to our own analytic framework. If so, they were potential for cadre; if not, they were part of the well of people on which a vanguard depended: support staff, sources of money, covers, protection, alibis. That is not a pejorative: if you number those people, around Weather, in the low hundreds, you still have to measure on one hand the number who betrayed our trust in any serious way.

  In mid-August Bobby Seale was arrested in Berkeley.

  A week later, I traveled, with Jason and a group of others, through Canada and Niagara Falls to Woodstock.

  Richie Havens in his raw voice boomed out across the crowd: “It’s a long, hard road to Freedom,” and his words rolled out over the thousands and thousands of roaring voices, into the canopy of dripping sky.

  Neither J nor I went back to school in September, although only I—mindful of the little money I had left—bothered officially to drop out. J let his father pay the full, out-of-state semester’s tuition.

  In September four members of the Ann Arbor collective formed an affinity group, me, Little J, Jeddy, and Nan, and took forty sticks of dynamite out of the I-94 overpass construction in Dexter, Michigan, then traded it for an equal amount stolen from a construction project in Oregon.

  On October 7, the Oregon dynamite was used to blow up the Haymarket Police Statue in Chicago and launch the Days of Rage.

  Jason and I both spent the first days of the National Moratorium against the War in jail in Chicago. Then, on November 15, we joined a full million people at the National Mobilization to End the War.

  One day later, the My Lai massacre was revealed, and two weeks later, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Black Panther leaders, both of whom I knew, one of whom—Hampton—I loved, were killed, in their sleep, by Chicago Police.

  Nashville Skyline came out. Butch Cassidy came out.

  Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, suggested that demonstrators should be put in “detention camps.”

  In December, Weather held the Flint War Council.

  I traveled to it with Diana Oughton.

  Three months later Diana was dead in the town house bombing, and of our affinity group all four of us were chosen by the central leadership—the Weather Bureau—to go underground.

  Later, much later, I learned that Little J and I were very nearly left out, due to being the youngest members of a Weather Collective anywhere.

  In the end, it was the fact that both of us had Communist parents that saved us.

  And so, the myth of Martin Luria’s communism—and it has been proven by now that it was a myth—came to rescue his daughter, long after his death, and got me the thing that I wanted more than anything I had ever wanted in my life, that is, to belong.

  3.

  Five A.M., July 2, 1996. I had descended the wooden stairs from the parking lot to the Arboretum; walked into the park, directed myself to the railroad bridge over the Huron River and sat, on the edge, to watch the black surface of the river, on which I could now see a silver trail of half moon.

  I, Amelia Wanda Lurie. Most people my age have grown up most of their lives knowing that since Vietnam has passed into history and they have gone on to do the things they were going to do, most of these people, they’ve never really forgotten that somewhere out there, Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai still live underground. We’ve become icons, rather than people. We’re not the only ones. Just last month the New Yorker gave a full page to an Avedon portrait of Bernardine Dohrn from 1969, and it’s 2006 now. Do you know what a full page in the New Yorker costs?

  But it’s me, alone, who came for most people to symbolize never giving up. Lots of people don’t like me, lots believe all sorts of horrible things about me. How I killed the left in America, how I ruined the antiwar movement, how I played into the hands of the FBI—and indirectly, of corporate interests—in the cooption, commercialization, and parodization of the antiwar movement. True, or not true, for most people I’m something other than a person, a symbol. Someone who did something much more important than themselves. It’s hard, to be an icon rather than a person.

  And I was different from your father—different, in fact, from all of us. The others—they all came, eventually, to live much the lives we would have lived anyway. Parents, teachers, lawyers, activists. Some came closer than others to what they would have been had they not given ten years of their lives to clandestine activism—especially those with money and connections. Others paid a price: became high school teachers instead of university professors, lobbyists rather than elected officials. In this your father too was lucky: he was able to do much of what he wanted to do with his life, even though he had to do it under a different name.

  But I, I never wanted a normal life, not in any real way. I had, your father used to say, a taste for something like the gutter. Bars, dark in the morning, next to a Great Lake port. Working people, people who lived with physical danger; criminal people, who lived under the threat of capture. And as is often the case for those who live outside the law, I came to know my adopted dimension of American life better than the one into which I was born. I knew the places left untouched by the present. Depressed towns—Congers on the Hudson, Derby on the Housatonic, Ogallala. The wrong side of cities like Denver, or Philadelphia, or St. Louis. Places where the cars were still models I recognized, the telephones worked with a rotary dial, and the brands of things were the brands from the America where I had been aboveground.

  Desolate places had another advantage: in sparsely used bars and shuttered streets, in cheap hotels and lousy restaurants, you might be in danger but you were never surprised.

  Nights, in my opinion, should be lit either by the moon in places where no one ever went or, failing that, by the neon of a place where no one was wanted.

  The places we had: so many rented houses, they had all blended into one place where, like children playing a game of hide-and-seek, we were briefly safe. A bathroom with a stained sink, an aerosol can of air freshener, a plastic dish of dirty soap, mouthwash of uncertain provenance, a bent-bristle toothbrush, a copy of Rat, an empty toilet paper roll. Carpets: in my memory I have a vision of endless vistas of synthetic, stained carpets, patterned carpets, plain carpets, carpets with thick pile, and carpets worn practically to nothing. I see thinly painted drywall with water stains and mold, cheap light fixtures with insect stains, linoleum kitchen floors filthy beyond cleaning, veneered dining tables, sticky from countless dinners, sloppily cleaned, cheerless decorations—an embroidered platitude, a dog at a card table—lighting cheerless rooms.

  And yet each of the kitsch houses was a little refuge of light and heat against the night, filled with safety, with security. In each a fire could be lit and a cigarette smoked, a joint, a beer; in each bacon and eggs could be fried at the electric stove; in each were friends, united in danger, heartening and familiar; in each we, the brave, could sit an
d talk in safety far into the night. Safety? The safety, we found, was more solid then we might have thought. There came a point when you couldn’t hide anymore, and you couldn’t protect yourself anymore, so you might as well relax. You might as well smoke a joint in one of those endless rented houses and let whatever danger lurked out there come and get you, and when you did, night after night in house after house you woke to sun through the stained curtains and knew you were free.

  Sometimes it seemed to me that the whole thing was a vast riff on safety and freedom; that again and again I had been playing cat and mouse with dangers that existed for me only to prove, morning after morning, the possibility of safety. TAZs—temporary autonomous zones—Hakim Bey calls them now: these little bubbles of light and warmth in dark landscapes across the country, little places where for a night, for a few nights, you were not a fugitive and not a criminal but rather free, free behind a lit window and curtain, safe. This is exactly what we were: we were autonomous, and we were temporary. But that we were temporary was not a disrecommendation, it was an asset, because the drama of risk and safety could be played out again and again, the way a smoker courts withdrawal for the sweet safety of nicotine again, an endless game of cat and mouse with terror. Freedom, I came to understand, was only sweet in that it was transient. When it became the norm of life, then it became meaningless.

  No one ever found us. And it came to inform the rest of our lives, the knowledge that one could be hidden, and one could be safe.

  Until the day, of course, when nothing was safe.

  The day when nothing was ever safe again.

  I, Amelia Wanda Lurie, at five in the morning, sitting on a train bridge across the Huron, in the middle of Ann Arbor’s Arboretum. Not an icon, not a hero of the sixties, but a tired woman of nearly forty-five, watching water pass under me, and thinking about October 1973.