The Company You Keep (39 page)

And thinking of that, now, in a bar in Dexter, Michigan, I experienced what I now think of as my third glimpse of freedom.

It was the first time I was here, with Jed, that I had first committed myself irrevocably to ending what I had been becoming and to becoming who I was, in fact, to become. Jed was older than me, had been in SDS while I had been in high school, and in his person I had first seen the possibility of transforming myself. They were still so clear to me, then, the inexorable dullness of the years that came before, living in my parents’ vast West Village town house. The big Sinai family gathering for Passover, for Rosh Hashanah, in the same rooms where I could still remember watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on my parents’ first black-and-white television. The Sinais, Singers, and Levits: a collection of vested American interests and middle-class ambitions that gathered a few times a year in my father’s rambling house; a collection of hypocrisies too varied for me to catalog, and yet which I knew, at sixteen, at seventeen, at eighteen, were more than I could bear.

There in that bar in Dexter, Michigan, where I had been twenty-five
years before, drinking beer after years of abstinence, I remembered how I had seen myself, the product of a liberal arts education, carrying the expectations of postwar America. Twelve years of private school education, an education specifically arranged by Old Left New Yorkers virtually indistinguishable from my own parents, Little Red Schoolhouse, Elizabeth Irwin. And all the while my parents and their self-congratulatory friends built their schools, and did their jobs, and had their parties and meetings and arguments; all the while they carried their candles in midnight vigils, voted for Kennedy, Humphrey, McCarthy, the big machine churned on.

Why couldn’t they see it? To me, it was so obvious, and I was only a high school student. Their pacifism and their complacency, their money and their houses and country houses, the steady rise in their fortunes through the farce of the war against Hitler, the Holocaust he carried out with virtual impunity, the cold war evil of America’s compromised process of de-Nazification. And all the while they got richer, had children, collected honors, and argued their arguments in the pages of the
Nation
, all the while, McCarthy rose, the Rosenbergs were killed, Mississippi happened, and the war in Southeast Asia grew, and grew, and grew.

Sitting there, drinking, waiting for Jed, I could remember the exact feel of it, the texture of evenings in the Bank Street house, smoking dope in my room, door locked against my brother, while outside in the garden my parents and their friends drifted in one of their endless arguments, Israel, Castro, Czechoslovakia. SNCC, Marcuse, Mills, Mailer. Phil Ochs and Lenny Bruce. My father had fought in Spain. My father still limped, in 1969, from shrapnel taken at the defense of Cape Tortuga. And now what was he if not a
liberal
, a comfortable New Yorker arguing in the backyard of his town house while that red-hating, imperialist, warmongering pig Johnson and his henchmen rained liquid fire on Southeast Asia. I was thirteen when JFK was killed, and even then I’d known that the world had tragically, horribly, lost a murderous, dangerous phony. Why hadn’t my father known?
Liberal.
It was the worst insult I could think of.

I, Jason Sinai, your father. Forty-six years old. In a bar in Dexter, remembering with drunken clarity the rage that had animated me a quarter
century ago when I was barely older than you are now, and the freedom I’d glimpsed, one day, in this same bar. It was that I couldn’t stand the roles available to me. I couldn’t stand it: doctor, lawyer, professor, politician. Living and dying in the compromises of my parents. Nothing that was available to me in my parents’ expectations could offer me a way out. I could make more money, I could have greater exposure. I couldn’t, however, be any more involved than they were, nor could I be any less of a phony.

Unless I got out.

And as my mind cycled into that train of thought, that familiar train of thought that I had followed all those years ago, I remembered, not for the first time, but more strongly than I had before, what it had felt like, the very first day I came to Ann Arbor in 1968, when I’d walked into the SDS offices on Hill Street—before I even went to my dorm room—and met Billy Ayers and Diana Oughton.

Now, in 1996, I was not sure I could even stand to be in the same room as Billy, and Diana, of course, was dead. For so long had I felt such horror at having been a part of Weather—regret at the risks we had taken, remorse at how mean we had been to each other, and foolishness at what we had done to the left—that the real experience, the original experience, had become lost to me.

Sitting at the bar in Dexter, drinking too much and waiting for Jed to show or not to show, it came back to me with shocking clarity, those fall days of 1968 when I first came to Ann Arbor, and first went to the SDS headquarters on Hill Street, and first realized that all the while I, in New York, was figuring out for myself what liars the Kennedys were, these guys already knew it. All the while I, an adolescent smoking dope in my room, was figuring out why my parents’ long history of leftism that started in Spain had become a compromise, a lie, these guys already knew it, and not only did they know it, they had argued it, analyzed it, written it, and were, most importantly, acting on it.

Not for the first time, but with a clarity fueled by alcohol and the absolute bizarreness of the fact that I was back in Dexter, a place I had never thought to visit again as long as I lived, I remembered the clean, serious awareness I had experienced, standing at this bar with Jed while
we waited for Mimi’s signal. Pretending not to be scared. Aware that we were taking steps from which there was no coming back, no coming back. And in the glow of Jed’s eyes, I knew that Jed was feeling it too.

These people. I saw them suddenly neither as I had come to see them over the quarter century of my adulthood—as arrogant, violent, deluded young children of privilege, stealing SDS and cheating their friends—nor as I thought of them now, as middle-aged people with only a hint of the beauty that had once been theirs, but as I saw them then: big-hearted, articulate, brave, beautiful. Billy Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Ellen Radcliff, Bernardine Dohrn. Suddenly I could vividly see each and every one of them, their names, their aliases, the actions they were in. Cathlyn Wilkerson, David Miller, Nancy Ruth, Paul Millstone, Marsha Cole, Richard Rudd, Lou Cohen. Michael McGinn, Sharon Gresh, Judith Freed, Ann Delaney. Their names flooded into my consciousness, names of people I had not thought about in years and years. Teddy Gold and Terry Robbins. David Gilbert. They had, to a one, been older than me, upperclassmen when I was a freshman, the ones who had gone before. After the town house bombing, and the decision was taken to go underground, Mimi and I had been two of the very last to be picked to join them. The ones left behind, the ones who had not been picked, they were devastated. But the ones who were picked, the ones who made the cut, we had been free.

I had been waiting too long, I knew. I had been drinking too much: after years of not drinking, the beer was buzzing in my ears, and my vision had the clarity of real drunkenness. And yet it was there, sitting in this bar in Dexter, that for the first time in twenty years and more I remembered what it was we had fought for, what it was we had risked our lives and even worse, made fools of ourselves for. It was for this feeling: this feeling of clarity, of courage, of strength—of freedom.

Life, I thought in words that pronounced themselves with clarion clarity, hardly ever gets this clear. There were three choices. I would be okay, or I would not be okay, or nothing would change. Jed would show up, or I would be arrested, or I would go on looking. There was simply nothing else that could happen, and therefore nothing to imagine, nothing to plan, and above all, nothing to fear. And for long seconds, as I sat, I
glimpsed, for the third time in my life, what it was to be free, not because of an ideal or a hope, but because there were simply no more choices.

And in the middle of that feeling, the door opened in the front of the bar and out of the square of blinding sun framed in the open doorway a silhouetted figure entered, stopped, observed, then crossed the room toward me slowly. I, blinking against the light, watched as my eyes adjusted again to the darkness and the figure revealed itself as a middle-aged man who once had been my friend and comrade in freedom.

2.

“Are you the person I’m looking for?”

It had not occurred to me that Jed would not recognize me, but of course he didn’t. Nor did it occur to me that there would be so little affection in his manner. It should have: Weather was a competitive organization, and Jed and I had competed for status, for assignments, and for women. These were old wounds, and they did not appear to be healed now. Looking up from my seat at the man in front of me, a portly, somehow outsize middle-aged man who bore some distant, nearly imaginary resemblance to a kid I had known, I nodded. “I am.”

“Mind giving me some proof?”

“Not at all.”

Jed had evidently thought about this, for he asked two questions relating to specific crimes, one committed by him, one committed by me, neither of which I intend to describe to you now. When I’d answered correctly, he sat down.

“You’re in a great deal of shit, aren’t you?”

I nodded again, and this time I smiled. “Hi, Jed, how are you these twenty-five years? Nice to see you, old friend.”

Lewis actually grimaced. In a false voice, he answered: “Fine, thanks. Great to see you, too. What do you want?”

But I went on. “You look awful. Fat and fifty.”

“You probably do too, under that disguise. What the fuck do you want, Little J? I don’t have time for this.”

“I want to know where Mimi Lurie is.”

Jed shrugged, unimpressed. “Why, you planning on turning her in?”

This time, I didn’t answer. Finally, Jed ran his hands over his face.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that.”

“That’s okay.” I answered in a softer voice now. “Why you coming on so strong, Jeddy? Seems to me our differences have aged a lot quicker than what we had in common.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what you want from me. You know the risk I’m running to be here. For Christ sake, Little J.” He looked up again now in a fresh access of anger. “I’m the chair of the Honors Program. Do you know how hard I worked to get to this? Do you know how many people would love to see me get screwed for failing to report a known fugitive?”

“Yes, I do know.” I answered without any hesitation, I assure you. “I know exactly the risk you’re taking, and I know exactly how many people there are in your horrid profession who’d like to see you lose your job. Okay?”

“So why are you making me run this risk?”

“Give me a chance, I’ll tell you. Listen: you came here, I assume you felt you were clean?”

“Sure of it.”

“Then let’s have a couple drinks, okay? I been living out of the back of a car for the past week. And I don’t have that many friends right now.”

And so we talked. For a great long time, we talked. Talked like I had never, in all of my time as Jim Grant, talked with anyone. You know what it was like, Izzy? It was like singing. Open-throated, full-chested singing. For the first time since 1974, I talked openly with someone who knew who I was, who knew where I came from, and from whom I had nothing to hide.

Maybe for Jeddy, too, it was a pleasure. Gradually he relaxed, and then he began drinking beer, and then—with me—bourbon, and after a while we took turns walking out and smoking one of a few joints that Jed had brought with him. We did it purposefully, with the same abandon with which we’d gotten together and dropped acid when we were on
the run: an act of faith, to lose control, to risk everything, and feel the faith that we’d come out okay on the other side. Like we used to say: “We’re not free unless we act free. And free people get high.”

And I remember saying to him, at one point during what turned into an afternoon and evening of serious drinking, something like this:

“Jesus, you know, all those years of being Jim Grant, man. I was so
focused.
All the time, I was like…like when you’re stoned, and you have to cook dinner, and you get analysis paralysis? And the thing looks impossibly complicated to you, you know, you’ve got all the details blown out of proportion, and you see the clock moving, and you can’t decide what’s the first step, and you’re overanalyzing each thing? Should I get the water boiling for the beans first, or start sautéing the onions, or put on the rice, and fuck—do we have garlic? That kind of thing?”

“Sure.” Laughing, Jed looked like himself now. “Sure I know. Happens to me twice a week, still.”

“Yeah. So you take a page from the Buddha, right? You think, here I am, I’m cutting this fucking carrot, and all the hell I’m going to do is cut this fucking carrot. Then I’m going to do something else. Right?”

“Right.”

“That’s how Jim Grant was. So focused: first on school, then on marriage, then on work, then on…on fatherhood.” I paused for a moment, focus lost, looking into the distance. Then I shook my head. “And I never thought about anything that happened before ’76. Before B of M. I mean, I
was
Jim Grant, through and through. And I hated everything I’d ever been before. And now…now that I’m myself again, now that I’m on the run again, you know what? It’s all coming back to me. Jeddy, we fucked up so bad.”

He was still smiling, as if he’d heard it all before. “I know we did. But we did a lot right, too. Never ratted anyone out. And we took the whole thing at its word, didn’t we? Didn’t we? I mean, forget the domestic shit. What about the international contacts? Make an identity strong enough for a passport, get the money together, travel behind the Iron Curtain, right? It’s not easy, it’s hard, and we did it, time and again. I’ve seen the FBI FOIA yields. They don’t know the half of what we did. No—you can’t say we didn’t go all the way.”

“Uh-huh.” I put my head in my hands a second, and shut my eyes. “I read a couple interviews over the years with Billy and Bernardine. Saw them on TV once. They sound proud of themselves.”