The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

“Were the questions about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you characterize them as his business or not his business?”

  “Well…as an investigative reporter, it’s his business to go outside his business, isn’t it? Fourth estate? First Amendment? All those little things you’re constantly going to court about?”

  I know Mikey, and when he gets mad, he can be pretty cutting. But I managed to keep my tone even.

  “Would you consider telling me what some of his questions were?”

  “Public record stuff. Where you come from, where you went to school, what you do with yourself.”

  “And you told him?”

  “Let’s see—where you come from, where you went to school, what you do with yourself.”

  “I see. Hey, Mikey? You ever speak to a reporter about me again, and you’re fired.”

  “Hey, Mr. Grant? Go to hell.”

  My cell gave that horrid beep it gives when the line goes dead.

  I wondered if Kunstler’s assistants spoke to him like this.

  And while I wondered that, I saw myself surrounded by merciless young men: efficient, idealistic, bloodless young men who had no idea the damage they were going to do in the name of their ideals.

  And yet I had to admit to myself that if anything I’d ever believed in was worth anything—which, right that moment, I rather doubted—I could not criticize them for it.

  Head down, I walked slowly to court, pinching my lip and thinking.

  When I got there, it took me several long minutes, standing in the lobby, looking at the floor, to remember why I’d come.

  4.

  So I got my hit-and-run defendant dismissed, which may have satisfied the Constitution but earned me no friends at all. Afterward I hung around the courthouse, wasting some time. A couple lawyers made some reference to the Times article—Norman Bailey, who was helping Sharon Naylor buy a large portion of the Adirondacks with her Enron stock; Wayne Curry, who was doing a title search on a packet of land off Route 23C—but neither of them cared too much. Chances are, they believed that Sharon Solarz had in fact come to find me to negotiate her surrender—why not? I had handled First Amendment cases, labor cases, and was well known to have worked hand in glove with the ACLU on capital cases. My father-in-law was Bobby Montgomery, the third in what William Buckley once called the “Tristate Troika” with Bob Torricelli and Joe Lieberman. My soon-to-be ex-wife was always inviting people like Paul Newman up to her Woodstock home, or Katrina van den Heuvel, or Alec Baldwin. And Hillary Clinton had twice asked me to meetings with her committee exploring a run for the New York State Senate, which up in the Saugerties courthouse passes for very lefty indeed.

  Mostly, however, my colleagues didn’t care: the more work I took on for free, the less was assigned to their pro bono dockets by the court, and the more they could focus on getting rich, which, in the nineties, anyone with an opposable thumb could do. Bailey said to me, in passing, in this syrupy voice with his eyes half shut as if he were stoned, “Like, Sharon Solarz, wow man. Miss Days of Rage herself. That’s some far-out heavy shit.” And Curry said, hey, if the Hollywood Radical Chic was footing the bill, could he sit in as cocounsel? “Cause ah got to git me a new telescopic .22 and git my pickup outa hock in time for deer season, boy.” Of course in fact Bailey’s wife was a gynecologist down in New Paltz, and he probably sat on the board of the Metropolitan Opera.

  It was not lost on me that when four o’clock rolled around and I knew Molly was warming up for our afternoon run—leaving you with your hero, Leo—I suddenly found myself too busy to go: even running with Molly was a pensive activity, and I found myself entirely unwilling to think. Nor did I have to: not until that evening, after I had picked you up and fed you, played with you, gotten you to bed, cleaned the dinner dishes, and swept the kitchen floor, and put on the laundry, and paid a couple bills, and watched Ally McBeal, which only tragedy on the international level could make me miss, did I have to face my thoughts. Then, sneaking a can of Coke from its constantly shifting hiding place—always just one step ahead of your search—I turned on the computer and found that without my having to ask, Mikey had done research on Schulberg and e-mailed me the results, and the time stamp on the e-mail showed that the poor guy had been in the office till 10:30.

  Ben had been at the Times for a year. Originally, he was from New York, where he’d attended some fairly fancy private schools. At the Times he had been promoted three times but was considered, Mikey’s friend Andrew told him, an oddball: solitary and moody. Mikey had included the Nexis URL of Ben’s major stories, all of which were muckraking: a shabbily built school in Margaretville, an iffy land sale by a town alderman in Schuylerville, Medicaid fraud in Hudson.

  I thought about that for some time, wandering the living room, listening to the night outside the screens. How far was Ben going to look into the Sharon Solarz story? As if I could actually discern the answer in the night, I found myself standing by a window, squinting through the screen. And yet no matter how hard I looked into the future, I simply saw no way to predict what was about to happen, and no way to prepare.

  I remember that moment very precisely, because as I watched through the window, a recollection of my own father so profound, so detailed, came to me—my father in his fifties when I was in high school—and I must have been worrying about something, because my father was calling me by my family nickname and reciting the Hebrew proverb, Al tegid lilah, “Never say night.” Never think about your problems at night, little J. Night’s just a big lie, and you can’t find the truth until morning comes.

  But which was the lie and which was the truth? As that spring night in 1996 dipped into its blackest, I could find nothing, nothing to show me the difference, because night or day, the fact was that a period of my life and your own little life was coming to an end, and when it was over, I knew I would look back at it as a time when I was happier than I had ever been or would ever be again.

  Date: June 7, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 7

  As for me, I very nearly fell asleep at the wheel, driving back from Saugerties after interviewing your daddy. Maybe I should have—certainly would have simplified life for a lot of people to have me wrap my car around a tree. After a while, though, the way it will, my tiredness evened out into a kind of low-level cogitation, the impressions of the day—and night, and day before, and night before—following one another with their own logic, or lack of logic.

  It was quitting time when I got back—or close enough. Certainly time to retire to, as we liked to call it in the newsroom, the “other office”—namely the Shandon Star Lounge over on Western Avenue. Nonetheless, I went back to my desk long enough to run a Nexis on James Grant. The yield was copious, but it wasn’t until I reached a short item from, of all places, the London Star, that I paused. The rag—I mean tabloid—had a May 25 dateline, and here it is, pasted in from Nexis:

  Actress Julia Montgomery, daughter of former US Senator Robert Montgomery, now the chairman of Dreamworks UK, has filed in New York State Court to sue her former husband for custody of their seven-year-old daughter. Ms. Montgomery, who was reported by the Daily Mirror to have been brought to London by her father to recover from a long-term addiction problem, declared that her former husband was “unfit to raise her daughter,” although she declined to define the precise reasons behind her allegation.

  That interested me, and I thought about why for some time. That is, I thought about why it interested me for some time, while I paced the little concrete courtyard outside the paper’s offices, smoking. So Jim Grant was involved in a custody battle with his ex-wife. So what? So what, so what—I repeated the words to myself like a mantra, and while I did, I tried to list the reasons that it bothered me.

  That the custody suit had not been mentioned anywher
e in the American press, including my fine paper, didn’t particularly surprise me: you could call the Albany Times neoconservative, or neoliberal, or you could simply notice that Rick Harmon’s father and Bobby Montgomery dined together at the Century Club each time Montgomery was in New York, but either way, it was not in the habit of publishing anything that reflected badly on Robert Montgomery. And that Julia Montgomery apparently had a drug and alcohol problem? Well, that was the kind of thing that was harder to conceal, and besides, if it were true, Grant would have used it to quash the custody suit, wouldn’t he? I ran a quick check on PACER and learned that the custody suit had in fact been filed, whereas a Nexis on Julia showed no stories about her supposed drug addiction—that’s the London Star for you.

  But that wasn’t quite it, was it? For a long time I paced and smoked. It bothered me badly. It bothered me that Jim Grant had not mentioned his custody battle. It bothered me that two newsworthy things—Solarz and a high-profile custody suit—were happening to him at the same time. It bothered me that I had learned about Solarz through an anonymous tipster—one who clearly had some access to the FBI. Alright. In the end I decided that it was time to cut to the chase.

  See, somewhere, while I paced and smoked, without really noticing it, I had decided that I was going to go after this story. In fact, I decided that I was going to go after this story at any cost. And if I was going to go after this story, this would be my last chance for several weeks to do laundry, pay my nearly hilarious backlog of bills, and clean my apartment, among other matters requiring urgent attention: grocery shopping, finding a girlfriend, calling my parents, working on my novel, going to the gym, opening an IRA, doing my taxes, getting my car inspected, paying the tickets that resulted from my car having not been inspected, cleaning my bathroom, and getting some much-needed sleep.

  Of these imperatives, the first and the last got done, that Monday night. I did laundry and got some sleep.

  That is, I dropped my laundry at the Laundromat, gave the owner a sizable portion of my life savings, then sat in the Shandon Star drinking until my laundry was done, picked it up, then went back to the Shandon Star to celebrate my laundry being done, then went home, then went to sleep.

  Tuesday morning, on the other hand, all I needed to do was wake up, step over my clean laundry where it lay on the floor in a neat pile and into the shower—a cold shower, because during the night my electricity seemed to have been cut off. And after that, my main challenge was to ignore the fact that the surface of the kitchen table could not be seen for the weeks of unopened letters in which bills and junk mail vied for majority status, drink a refreshing glass of tepid tap water, and walk out the door. The temperature, fortunately, obviated the need for a jacket—I had no clean ones. On reflection, though, I turned back, shuffled through the envelopes on the kitchen table, and extracted an electricity bill, easily recognizable by the large announcement in red ink that my power was about to be suspended. This, I knew, I’d better pay right away to get the refrigerator running again, a task that, considering the last time I opened it had been to put in a half-eaten bagel with lox, rose to the level of civic duty.

  Sometimes I think, looking back, that the whole reason I had a job in those days was to prevent me from thinking about what a mess my life had become. For so long had I lived with a feeling of dread at the pit of my stomach—classes unattended in high school, incompletes not finished in college, retirement accounts not cared for, superiors not stroked, cigarettes not given up—that I’d come to question whether I actually could live without that feeling. Everyone, I know, simplifies life somehow: booze, television. Everyone, I know, has to find some way to direct their minds away from the horrible disappointment of adulthood, the horrible disappointment of finding out that you’ve been lied to all your childhood, that nothing you were taught to care about actually matters. An all-consuming job, a consistent feeling of remorse, for me, those worked just fine. Nights, of course—at least those nights when I went to bed sober—my dreams showed that nothing ever worked that fine. Nights, the past showed its face, and large, liquid feelings filled my stomach. In the day, however, there were the simple moves: step over the laundry, take a cold shower, pay the electric bill, leave the house. As for my refrigerator, for all I knew at that point, Jimmy Hoffa was in there.

  Tuesday morning I found my car where I’d hidden it on a side street, hoping to avoid another ticket for my overdue inspection. Once again, the strategy had failed. I removed the ticket from the windshield—it was rare that I avoided one, no matter where I parked, which I had to admit implied a certain efficiency on the part of the police—and was soon behind the wheel, driving to the office.

  And yet, as I drove, I found myself thinking again about Julia Montgomery. For a time I argued with myself about what I knew I had to do. And when I was done, I wheeled out into traffic and toward the highway, speeding to make it up to Great Meadows Correctional Facility in Comstock before the morning head count.

  2.

  I remember that drive so vividly. On the highway, the thick sun of June flooded the windscreen, the day’s air drenched: nine o’clock in the morning, the heat was stifling. Above was a pastel sky, blue with clouds developing like an overexposed photograph. Tentatively, as my heart picked up its pace to its morning dose of caffeine and nicotine, I felt a little excitement replace the dread in my belly. Dread, I knew, never went away. Fortunately, excitement was its flip side.

  Up at Comstock, Darryl Taylor, whom I had interviewed after his 1995 conviction for selling heroin to a seventeen-year-old model and her forty-five-year-old agent in Woodstock, was happy to be called down for a visitor just before the daily count. Sure, he knew Julia Montgomery. Yes, he used to sell to her, and yes, he was happy to give me her shopping list, which was headed by crystal meth and followed closely by coke and Klonopin, a monstrous strong kind of Valium, and just about the only recourse after the kind of amphetamines your mother had taken, Isabel—if you want ever to sleep again, that is. The reason he was so happy to spill all this was because he, Darryl, thought Senator Montgomery should have done more to protect him after his arrest. Like he was some kind of big-time insider because he had once sold drugs to a senator’s daughter. I tell you, Izzy, you want to find out how easily people fool themselves? Interview a few real, genuine jailbirds. Like Darryl Taylor, doing fifteen to twenty at Comstock. His first parole date comes when he’s sixty-five, and he’s HIV-positive from a gang bang his first week in. Now he’s eagerly spilling Julia Montgomery’s shopping list to a reporter because he thinks a U.S. senator should have protected him, and somehow this is going to get him out. But nothing’s ever going to get him out, and not five years after I visited him he was dead, unloved and forgotten, of AIDS-related lymphoma.

  I knew all about it. I knew that everyone’s got some vicious little illusion protecting them from their own utter obscurity. One of the first things you learn as a newspaper reporter is the degree to which people live in fantasies of their own importance, and how necessary those fantasies are for most of them.

  Darryl ended his monologue by suggesting that if I was interested in Julia Montgomery, I should check out the Lucy Freeland Clinic and speak to Alistair Bates, Hank Anderson, and Billy Friedman, whom, back in Albany, I saw in their respective lairs early that afternoon, one in his editing suite at his production company, one in the State Capitol Building, and one in SUNY Albany. Only the first had not been, pardon me, Isabel, intimate with Julia Montgomery, but knew a great deal about the many who had from his work as a news producer. The other two—simply could not keep from bragging that they had. That didn’t surprise me either, not one bit. I knew that nine times out of ten, men over forty won’t even have an affair if they can’t tell anyone about it. Instead, they’ll get drunk and go to bed, hope actually to sleep rather than, as usual, lie awake all night thinking about how they’ve been wronged and how they’ve failed. Hank Anderson actually said to me, “This is off the record, of course.” Oh, absolutely o
ff the record, I’m thinking. It’ll be off the record when, one day, I tell every soul I know in Albany politics about this little conversation, you mini-dicked, smirking shithead. Or words to that effect—this is only a reconstruction, of course, not a verbatim transcript. I might have thought, micro-dicked.

  As for the Lucy Freeland Clinic, I didn’t bother trying to hack the medical records, which was illegal and therefore kind of inadvisable for print, but I did social-engineer a night guard for confirmation of Julia Montgomery’s three dryouts there. Not a pretty picture. Her third admission had been after a hospitalization for hepatic failure. The guy said her eyes were as yellow as fog lights.

  Finally, late Tuesday afternoon, I went to see Lorraine Jellins, our entertainment editor. Julia Montgomery’s career had peaked, it appeared, just before her daughter Isabel was born in 1989, with a single lead in an indie opposite Mark Wohlinger. After that, for no apparent reason, her star more or less waned in the business. Maybe it had to do with her living on the East Coast, maybe it had to do with having bombed a key audition with Jonathan Demme, maybe it even had something to do with a lack of talent, though that last explanation, to me, seemed pretty far-fetched. I told Lorraine what I had learned about Julia’s drug use, and she shrugged.

  “Benjy my boykie, what do you think actually happens to all these people after they have their moments in the sun? It is a rough world on talent. Think of them all out there: all the people who starred in movies, or television shows, or rock bands, and then disappeared? We never hear about them again, but somewhere, on some private stage, they have to be playing out the drama of their disappointment.”

  I asked Lorraine if I could quote her on that for my new study of celebrity, A Moment in the Sun, but I was thinking, Does every failed actor do so much damage on their way down? Does no one practice an art for its own sake? And don’t these people recognize what stereotypes they are? Then I thought about the 118 pages of novel manuscript about an intrepid small-town investigative reporter and thought, Well, maybe not. Lorraine showed me some pictures of Julia, a lovely woman, slim and gorgeous with skin so pale the word alabaster came to mind. With yellow eyes, I thought, she must have looked out of Alien.