The Company You Keep (43 page)

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 and 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.

Thinking now, as I had before, that October 1973 had been my last chance. By then I had been living as a fugitive for three years, and yet, I found in those weeks in the cabin with Jason, I had not yet become a criminal. I was still a college student gone awry, and everything was still possible for me: I could still keep a house, finish college, get a job. It could be a good job, too: a job that helped people, a job devoted to a cause. I wanted that. I wanted it very much, that October in northern Michigan. And as if we had been waiting for just such an opportunity, our lives fell into a domestic pattern nearly immediately, a deeply satisfying one.

We stayed until the first snows drove us out: two full months. For two months we lived in total seclusion in the little cabin, cooking tinned food from an occasional trip to town, catching fish and finding local mushrooms, and once, when Jason found a gut-shot deer dying in the woods, a few weeks of venison. I baked from my mother’s recipes, breads so rich and varied that we could have lived on that alone. Jason
pulled trout after trout out of the lake, which had once been stocked but not fished in years. We read: old Mr. Linder had left a copy of
Buddenbrooks
, and I read each evening to Jason, translating the German fluently, if sometimes approximately. We made love on our sleeping bags by the stove. We slept, bodies as close as we could be without becoming one.

That was when I taught Jason what my father had taught me about the woods. How to keep the cardinal directions in mind, how to travel by topo map and compass, how to read a trail for animal spoor and tracks. I taught him the recognizable declensions of sun and moon, which allowed an approximation of the time as well as direction, and a few key stars. I taught him what mushrooms could be eaten, how to build fires, how to find water, what the noises were at night, and on one memorable occasion, how to deal with an angry black bear.

A logging road, disused for decades, led out of the little clearing of the cabin and northeast for some miles, probably following an old Indian trail, itself probably originating as a deer path. Where it ended, bootleggers had cut it to the coast to meet boats carrying Canadian whisky; that path too was still discernible, these years later. That was where Jason, who had grown up in the city, developed what was to become a lifelong running habit, running those trails miles and miles through the woods.

Watching him through the kitchen window one day, returning from his run, his thin, muscled body glistening with sweat, I had realized that I had never been so happy in my life.

4.

October 1973. The season’s clock ticked, a degree colder each day. We knew we could not survive a winter in the Linder cabin. But what were we going back to? Days, the questions were held at bay by the business of living, the hard work of surviving in the woods. Nights, by the fire, there was nothing to do but think.

Little J. Struggling with loyalty to a group of people he no longer felt a tie to, with commitment to causes that he no longer felt he could
affect. I can see him, your father at twenty-three, standing by the window of the cabin, shaking his head. “The time for Weather is past. At this point we’re just giving them an excuse to crack down on the left.”

And me? My voice, echoing through time, a fatal weight carried in every word. “But that’s just the point. Their crackdown has taken on a life of its own. COINTELPRO is becoming the mainstream law of the land. Watergate’s proved that, Jasey—the FBI can do whatever it wants to dissenters, whatever it wants, and if they won’t do it, then the president can collect a few thugs instead. People aren’t going to put up with this forever.”

“Aren’t they?” He seemed tired, which frightened me more than if he had been angry. “What’s going to change them?”

“Stop it, Jasey.”

“No, I mean it, Mim.” He turned now, lit a cigarette from his breast pocket, and leaned against the sink. “You can’t get a country awash in a wartime economy to take any serious notice of its government’s destructive role in the world, or of its own disenfranchised underclass. Never going to happen. Yeah, yeah: you can get them to try to stop the war—when they run out of blacks and have to start drafting white folk, that is. But even then, we’ve proved—proved, Mimi—that the government is completely impervious to popular protest. The higher the level of protest, the higher the level of repression.”

Patiently, I explained the obvious. “So we give up? What then? How long do you think the third world’s going to stand being raped by us? How long you think it’s going to be before they find a way to slaughter innocents here, just like we slaughter innocents there?”

“Mimi.” He crouched in front of me now, and while he talked, I looked into the black pupils of his eyes, as if hidden back there somewhere were a magic door, and if only I could find it, I could find the way out of our own logic. “There isn’t going to be a revolution. We did what we did. It’s time to move on.”

“Jason. We’re already committed to Sharon’s operation.”

“I don’t want to do it. It’s not even a Weather action.”

“But I have to do it. It’s just a little thing.”

“And after?”

“Jasey. After, we surface. It’ll be our last job.”

On an early December morning, as the first flakes of snow started to fall from a low gray sky, we packed our few belongings for the hike out. Cleaning the cabin’s tiny kitchen for the last time, watching the lowering sky, I felt tears in my eyes. And in that moment, I think, everything could have changed, then, before it was too late. Had not Jason approached me from behind, linking his hands across my stomach, and speaking softly.