American Subversive (42 page)

“Like the entire student left,” Paige said.

“Unfortunately, yes. But remember the historical moment, how much was happening and how quickly. Especially in Chicago. The Democratic Convention in '68, the SDS convention a year later, which Weather more or less hijacked. And then, of course, the Chicago Eight, the Days of Rage, and the murder of Fred Hampton, and all of this set against the background of Vietnam. That America could do such a thing . . . I'm sorry. I'm not sure how much you know about this stuff.”

“A lot,” Paige said.

“Not much,” I said.

Simon shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We were kids, most of us, sons and daughters of Jews who'd had it hard, who'd survived European anti-Semitism and eventually found success on these shores. And when America cracked open just as we were coming of age, well, we
decided we could fix it. We had the earnestness of intellectuals, the anger of the persecuted, the vanity of youth. And with the war and the assassinations, the music and the drugs, the
scene,
there was a feeling in the air that nothing was settled, that history could be budged, if only we had the guts to start pushing. It sounds na
ϊ
ve,
amusing
even, to talk about revolution in an age when nothing is vital, when America has accepted its own mediocrity, settled for a lesser version of itself—action replaced by sarcasm, cynicism, muted displeasure. . . .”

Simon was regarding me curiously.

“What?” I said.

“You've come a long way in two weeks.”

“Not that far,” I told him, grinning. “Just a mile across town.”

“Indeed.”

“What's your real name?” Paige asked.

“Jonathan Glassman. Or at least it was until March of 1970.”

“The town-house explosion,” Paige said.

“What town-house?” I asked.

Simon told me the story. How wires got crossed in a basement. How three of his friends had died, and two others, dazed and ears ringing, disappeared into the crowd. Then all of them disappeared, went underground. “March, 1970,” Simon said. “The beginning of the end. Because how effective could we be after that, with no central structure, with the police and FBI after us? We kept at it, of course, planting bombs and all the rest, but it was already too late. America wasn't going to turn, and our nascent revolution died a slow, splintered death. We shuffled from safe house to safe house, motel to motel. Some crossed into Canada or Mexico. Others cut deals and gave up—the lunatic fringe coming in from the cold. I spent the next few years on the run, from New York to Baltimore to D.C., and then out West.”

“The Weather Underground set bombs off in all of those cities,” Paige said.

Simon raised his eyebrows. “You really do know your history. Alas, those Actions—the National Guard headquarters and the U.S. Capitol—they were the work of others. I came into my own in California, with the Presidio . . . and Timothy Leary.”

“The acid guy?” I said.

“Yeah,” Paige answered. “The Weathermen broke him out of prison and snuck him off to Europe.”

“Africa, actually,” Simon said. “A Black Panther compound in Algeria.”

“And when Leary got busted again a few years later, he ratted everyone out to get a reduced sentence,” Paige said, shaking her head.

“Well, yes and no. It certainly wasn't his shining moment, but he didn't tell the Feds everything. And he didn't give me up. By then—this was '75 or '76—I'd pretty much disassociated myself from Weather, or what was left of it. Everything had come to an inglorious end. The war was over, Watergate was through, and people were tired of fighting. Radicals had earned themselves a bad reputation. For years we'd shouted from the mountaintops, demanding a society free of class and racial divisions, and we'd never once descended from our lofty heights to meet anyone halfway. We'd forced our ideas down people's throats: a perfect world, liberated not just from the tyranny of government but from the constraints of our own minds. Hence the drugs, the mental manipulation, the endurance training, the orgies . . . Mandatory nonmonogamy: Jesus.”

“And yet here you are in a safe house thirty-five years later,” Paige said.

“How about that.”

“Why?”

“That's a good question. I suppose it has a lot to do with our friend Keith Sutter.”

“You knew him back then?”

“No, he was much too young for all that. I spent the eighties bouncing around northern California. Different jobs. Different identities. Most of my friends had surfaced by then. The Feds had broken so many laws coming after us that they couldn't mount prosecutions. I'd have come up, too, reclaimed my name, sought out what was left of my family and friends, except . . . suddenly there was this art thing.”

“This art thing?”
I repeated. “Paige, his sculptures sell for tens of thousands.”

“Occasionally.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

The room was getting warm, but opening the window—even a
crack—wasn't an option (if Keith suspected we were there, Simon said, then he'd never come upstairs). It would be a long day, I could tell. Already Paige seemed anxious, pacing back and forth every few minutes to peek outside. Simon remained seated on the bed, but he was sweating. We all were.

“How'd it happen?” Paige asked. “You becoming an artist, I mean.”

“I'd been working the wharf in San Francisco, but then the city renovated the waterfront and the tourists rolled in. They'd watch us unload the crab boats as they waited for the ferry to Alcatraz, and every so often I'd glance up and see a face I thought I knew—an old comrade reborn as a family man with a chubby wife and sunburned kids. It was probably just my imagination, but still, it was getting too dangerous with all those people milling around. So I took a job at a scrap yard in the East Bay—no questions asked, and they paid in cash. I worked under the lights at night, surrounded by acres and acres of scarred and twisted metal. Well, pretty soon the stuff took on a weird significance to me, and I began working with it in my free time, shearing and bending, searching for a kind of beauty in all that decay. The owner of the yard displayed one of my early monstrosities up by the entrance, and a few weeks later some art collector driving past in his BMW stopped and made an offer. And that was the beginning.

“I'd been living as Simon Krauss for a few years by then, and my IDs had held up well. It sounded like an artist's name—rough and a bit foreign—and I thought . . . maybe I can go with it, build a whole persona, become someone else forever. So I gave it a shot. I sold a few more pieces, then hooked on with a gallery in SoHo and moved to New York. I'd been in the Bay Area too long anyway. As it happens, the art world was the perfect cover. Every artist since Warhol has had a bullshit backstory, because it helps with the marketing. No one ever asked where I'd grown up or gone to school. They asked about my influences, what artists I hung around with, what women I slept with, and when I didn't answer, they liked that, too. Mystery sells most of all.”

Simon stretched out his neck and arms. He was caught up in events of a magnitude I couldn't fathom, but there he sat, exuding a serenity that was almost contagious—until, that is, I glanced over at Paige, nervously tapping on her thighs, and remembered what was at stake, what could happen
.

Anything. At any moment.

“. . . So I found a warehouse space in Greenpoint,” Simon was saying, “and buried myself in work. The eighties became the nineties. The galleries moved to Chelsea and artists got rich. America got rich—rich and lazy. And I watched it all at a comfortable remove. Sculpture like mine had become the rage, art on a grand scale, swollen and overwrought—like the money that came with it. Soon, people began tossing my name around with the legends of abstract expressionism. I was the next Richard Serra, the next David Smith. Heady stuff, though I never bought into it. I always thought it was luck—luck to be working in an artistic field with hardly any competition. Massive welded ironworks? Believe me, it's not for everyone. The downside was the publicity—the openings and interviews—which I endured to an extent, because the other option, reclusiveness, came with its own form of notoriety. Look at Salinger. Look at Joseph Cornell. I was as careful as humanly possible, but being recognized was inevitable. I always assumed it would be the Feds. Instead, it was Movement people—old friends at first, and then strangers. It was typewritten letters and tentative phone calls. A forgotten face at a gallery. A late-night knock on my door. Some had put their pasts behind them; one or two were still running. Most, though, I'd never met. They were young radicals who'd done their homework, the next generation of earnest contrarians, some sickened by the dot-com boom, others primed by the protests in Seattle, and somewhere along the way they'd heard my name whispered, like a secret password to the big time. The Weather Underground was suddenly in vogue again, but I didn't care. These were kids, green and ill-prepared, and I had nothing to tell them. I was out of that business.”

“So that was it?” Paige asked, from her lookout post across the room. “You just turned your back on the world while you lived the high life?”

“Jesus, Paige, that's a bit harsh,” I said. “He'd been on the run for almost thirty years. I think he'd done his time.”

Simon winced. “Certainly that was part of it. I
was
tired of running, of pretending. And, yes, I'd fallen into this strange lucrative career, transparent as it was, as it
is,
but when you've spent your adult life working the docks and tarring roofs and frying eggs in boxcar
diners, all because you cared too much, because you took
action
where others wouldn't, I'll just say my new circumstance was something of a pleasant change.”

“I'm sorry,” Paige said. “I didn't mean to—”

“No, don't be. Because you're right. I'd been saved by strangers time and time again when I was underground, and now here I was turning away the next generation. It took Iraq to finally wake me up, to make me realize there was something left to fight for.
Everything
left to fight for. And so I finally got involved. Just small-time stuff at first, meetings with the leaders of this group or that—ELF, ISM, UFPJ, even a revamped SDS. There was talk of carrying out an Action in the lead-up to the invasion, and then again at the Republican Convention in New York. But it never went anywhere; we weren't ready, and neither was the country. The Bush administration had done so many awful things, but the sad truth—and, Paige, please don't take this the wrong way—is that it would take something far worse than Iraq, perhaps worse than Vietnam, to bring about mass civil disobedience in America today. I'm talking about a total collapse of the financial system, or an unjust war with a body count in the hundreds of thousands. Iraq, no matter how drawn out, was never going to be that war. Not for Americans, anyway. Besides, we were gun-shy, us old-timers. We'd preached revolution and no one had listened. We'd brought the war home and no one had joined us. We'd come to realize we were wrong.”

Paige shook her head. “How can you say you were wrong when—”

“Hold on, hold on,” Simon said, raising his hand. “We were wrong about our goals, which were immature and ill-conceived. Revolution was always out of reach, and ultimately unnecessary. But what
had
worked, beyond any doubt, were our methods—the Actions themselves. The bombings achieved exactly what we hoped they would: they shone a spotlight on their targets. And in the end, they helped get us out of Vietnam. Sure, it took failure in the battlefield and ineptitude in Washington. It took speeches and marches and riots.
But it took bombs, too
. Every movement needs a jagged leading edge, a front line willing to sacrifice. It makes the second wave stronger and more legitimate. I believed it in 1970 and I still believe it forty years later: that targeted, nonlethal violence can be used for good. And I'm not the only one.”

Simon sipped his coffee contemplatively. We waited, entranced.

“Iraq got worse,” he continued, “and we got more serious. We spent late nights in the back of Greenpoint bars, discussing, debating, arguing, about what we might do—what we
could
do—to combat the War on Terror, that awful euphemism, catchphrase for all the massacres to come. For when the smoke cleared ten years from now, or fifty, and the world's survivors looked up through weary eyes to assess the damage, what would they say about America, about Americans?
That we should have stood up, should have tried harder
. And so a small group of us set out, once more, to do just that. We put the word out, carefully, to what few pockets of experienced resistance were left—people with the right skills and beliefs, the right temperament—and the name Keith Sutter came back, again and again. The ELF was the only legitimate group still carrying out Direct Actions, and they were brilliant at it—secretive in their planning and meticulous in their follow-through. What's more, they knew how to manipulate the press. I'd moved upstate by this point; I needed more space for my work, but I was also getting that old itch again—to keep moving, to avoid routines. There'd been too many meetings in Brooklyn and—”

“Fuck,”
Paige hissed, and abruptly slid down under the window, out of view.

“What?” Simon jumped up and in an instant had joined her.

“The girl across the street. It might be Lindsay.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. I just saw her for a second. Coming up the block. Skinny, right hair and height. She has a messenger bag over her shoulder.”

“Was she looking up here?” Simon asked. “Did she see you?”

“I don't think so.”

“Then take another peek.”

Paige raised a slat ever so slightly and peered outside. I held my breath. I think Simon did, too.