The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  But I will tell you one thing Mimi Lurie did not do. She did not return to the great love of her life, for my father and Molly Sackler were married in the summer of 2002. A year after, Leo Sackler—Molly’s son and my childhood hero—and his wife were both killed in a bombing at the USMC station in Kabul, where Leo was stationed during the war, which was by then over in Iraq but still smoldering in Afghanistan, and so as if my father hadn’t screwed up enough daughters by then, he set out screwing up a few more: Leo’s two infant daughters, my other half sisters, whom Molly and my father more or less raised from then on.

  Who else is there? Well, Jed Lewis took some substantial heat for his role in the whole thing when a group of big donors to the university raised a fuss over the prominence of a former fugitive in the American History Department and withdrew quite a bit of money. The university, however, held firm, and indeed the Michigan Daily published an editorial by one Rebeccah Osborne, who pointed out that having been a revolutionary was a pretty appropriate qualification for an American history professor. Still, in retrospect, Dr. Lewis came to feel that the publicity had cost him the chair of his department, and rather limited the second half of what had been a pretty illustrious career, a fact that failed to move many other former members of Weather, whose lives had been limited to high schools rather than universities by taking orders from Jed Lewis in the days when Jed Lewis gave orders, and who thought that Jed had a lot to be thankful for—and sorry for—whatever happened.

  Mac McLeod, with predictable prescience, began the process of extracting himself from the marijuana trade the moment Mimi Lurie left California for Ann Arbor. His name never surfaced in connection with the whole story, which was a good thing, for it enabled him ultimately to funnel his fortune into a number of charities, where thousands of people all over the country benefit from it still, blissfully unaware that the money buying them medicine, or sending them to school, or helping them with their houses, or researching their diseases, started as a jagged, hairy, glistening leaf in one of McLeod or Cusimano’s Seas of Green.

  As for Billy Cusimano, with whom my father started this whole story and with whom, therefore, I will end it, he never grew a Sea of Green again. He was rearrested in the midsummer of 1996, and although his case was thrown out due to the illegality of the FBI’s wiretap—the same one that caught them Sharon Solarz—when he got his house back he found that the harvest had been burnt, the planting beds smashed, the gro-lights broken, the computer circuitry torn out.

  It was a sad thing for Billy to inspect the ruins of his summer harvest. His last visit to his basement Sea of Green, just before he moved his family out of Tannersville altogether, his house packed and the moving vans waiting, he was sentimental enough to take a J with him and smoke it down there, a last look at the ruins of his lifework.

  Dope growing was the thing he had been best at, and he had been doing it for thirty years, spreading his bud all over America, where it made thousands and thousands and thousands of people, one way or another, see the world in a different way than they ever had before. It was a good thing for him, of course, that he was no longer a criminal, with McLeod altogether out of it, now. The future would definitely prove this: because Billy really couldn’t plant the seed again, he was forced aboveground, and of necessity—he had three children in high school and one still in middle—founded Cusimano’s Organic Market, and from then on everything Billy touched, more or less, turned to gold. His kids went to college, one to Bard, one to Antioch, one to Skidmore, and the fourth, surprise, to Yale and then Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. He and his wife lived in great comfort in SoHo, and then, after 9-11, moved out to Brooklyn.

  But all that—all that was going to happen in the years to come. Billy didn’t know any of it when, in the late summer of 1996, the moving vans packed and waiting, he climbed down to look at what was once his Sea of Green. And whatever he might have become later, that’s how I will always see him: standing stoned, bemused, next to the ruin of all he had worked on for so much of his life, and knowing it would never come back. Perhaps he shut his eyes tight and saw, in their darkness, the resplendent, resinous thick growth of marijuana, hairy and seedless, shocking green, and somehow joyous, as a loud electric switch turns on the rain and water fills the air, water that the plants reach up to with their arms, bathing themselves, full of life. Then he opened his eyes again to his ruined aspirations and leaned heavily against the basement wall.

  Knowing that he would never produce that kind of life again, nor would his product produce the kind of insight, and experimentation, and visions, that so much of his own life had been given to. And maybe that’s the first time that Billy saw himself for what he had become, a man moving over to the other side of middle age, with children to raise in a world that he would, from then on, only live in, never think that he could change.

  Well, what the fuck. He smiled a little, stoned, realizing where he was at. So was this, then, it? Like poor Oedipus, dying at Colonus, realizing that it was only now, because he was nothing, that he became a man? Settling all the big questions of life with the simple necessity of children? Giving up?

  Well, maybe. With a huge, huge sigh he exhaled the last hit of his J and flicked the roach onto the floor. Fact was, the age his children were getting, it was about time he stopped smoking joints anyway, and why not stop now? The thought made his heart tear a little. Such a long time, defining himself by the things he believed, the herb he grew, the company he kept. Well, the company would never change, that was sure. But maybe it was time to let the kids grow their own dope and plan their own revolution, and who knows? With parents this good—parents like Jason, Molly, the Osbornes, McLeod, and even, in his own small way, Billy himself—maybe it would be their children who’d at last, at long last, do better with this rotten, corrupt world.

  After all, everything they’d done themselves, it was like Chrissie Hynde said, right?

  It’s the children who’ll understand why.

  And it was with that thought that he climbed out of the basement and turned off the lights for the last time on what had for so long been the source for so many people of so many dreams, Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green.

  Acknowledgments

  During the writing of this book, a number of people agreed to speak to me about their experiences on both sides of the war in Vietnam. Foremost among them is Eleanor Stein, who was a steadfast friend to me and to this book throughout its writing. Like Ben Schulberg, I have been lucky enough to have the help and friendship of William J. Taylor. And I am deeply appreciative of interviews and insights given me by Bill Ayers, Chesa Boudin, Lieutenant Colonel John W. Capito (USMC, ret.), Joshua Cohen, Bernardine Dohrn, Lieutenant Colonel David Evans (USMC, ret.), David Gilbert, Ron Jacobs, Michael James, Jeffrey Jones, Vivian Rothstein, and, not least, the interviewees who spoke to me, with such generous honesty, on condition of anonymity.

  Four books were indispensable to this book. Ron Jacobs’s The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Verso); Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert’s The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Praeger); Harold Jacobs’s Weatherman (Ramparts Press); and David Wallechinsky’s Midterm Report: The Class of ’65 (Viking). Other published sources include Jane Alpert, Growing Up Underground (Morrow); Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days (Beacon); Tom Bates, Rads (HarperPerennial); Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, James Peck, ed. (Pantheon); John Castellucci, The Big Dance (Dodd, Mead); Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (Knopf); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam); Brian Glick, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (South End Press); Larry Grathwohl (as told to Frank Regan); Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen (Arlington House); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (Penguin); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (Random House); Biographical Dictionary of the American Left (Johnpoll and Klehr); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in
the 1960s (Hill and Wang); Thomas Powers, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist (Houghton Mifflin); and Susan Stern, With the Weathermen (Doubleday). Filmed sources include The Weather Underground, directed by Sam Green and codirected by Bill Siegel (The Free History Project); Rebels with a Cause, a film by Helen Garvey (Shire Films); and Underground, a film by Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler (First Run Features).

  At Viking, I was and am in awe of my amazing, perspicacious, subtle, hilarious, brave editor, Molly Stern; and grateful to Peter McCarthy, and to Katherine Griggs. John Karp’s early encouragement for this book was of inestimable help. In California, Michael Siegel gave this book a level of support so far beyond the call of professionalism that I am literally humbled, as did Priscilla Cohen. And finally, as always, to Eric Simonoff, my friend and agent, my deepest thanks.