There was no maze of tunnels, camouflaged entrances and openings, cross gates and traps, escape routes, false walls and hidden rooms. I had imagined, perhaps, the drama of the black wig and paste-on beard, an enormous Raskolnikov-type overcoat to hide in as I slipped in and out of doorways, emerging only at night, back to the grotto at daylight. It was nothing at all like that.
I realized that the underground began two feet from my own front door, that the hidden world is a parallel universe somewhere side by side with the open world. We stepped off the hard surfaces of the everyday into a hidden room beneath the clatter of the city, something to invent and then extend and protect. Our mug shots were everywhere, every post office and police station, banks and bus stations.
Seeking an alternative to jail and the courtroom, we’d abandoned our homeland, and with an immigrant’s hope and an exile’s fear we’d cast out for a new and different place to live. We would measure our success by our ability to survive in this alien new world, and we would build whatever provisional satisfaction we could on our actions, on our dialogue of the deed.
The first impulse was to develop an alias, to hide inside an assumed name, and some of us had several for different purposes. Over time our given names faded and became foreign to us, just as the open world moved farther and farther away. Bernardine [Dohrn] became Rose Bridges, and I became Joe Brown. I loved those ordinary names, and whenever things got tough in the coming years, whenever we were feeling overwhelmed or defeated or terrified I kidded Rose, saying we should escape to Hanoi and open a quiet little restaurant called “Rose and Joe’s American Cafe.”
We invented all kinds of ways to obtain false identity papers and got busy building multiple sets of ID for each of us and for every contingency. We stole wallets and purses at first without much concern for our victims, but it was a risky business that could reel out of control without warning. We were trying to learn artfulness and stealth, and stealing purses was definitely from the old school. More important, these papers were unreliable and had a short shelf life. As soon as they were reported missing, everything stopped working, and it could prove disastrous to buy a car, for example, or rent an apartment on a sour ID. Instant tracking.
So instead we began to build sets around documents as flimsy as a fishing license or a little laminated card available in a Times Square novelty shop called “Official ID.” We soon figured out that the deepest and most fool-proof ID had a government-issued Social Security card at its heart, and the best source of those were dead-baby birth certificates. I spent impious days over the next several months tramping through rural cemeteries in Iowa and Wisconsin, Illinois and North Dakota, searching for those sad little markers of people born between 1940 and 1950 who had died between 1945 and 1955. Those poor souls had typically been issued birth certificates–available to us at any county court house for a couple of bucks and a simple form with information I could copy from the death announcement at the archive of the local paper–but had never applied for a Social Security card. Collecting those birth certificates became a small industry, and within a year we had over a hundred.
For years I was a paper-made Joseph Brown, and then an Anthony Lee, remarkably durable identities. My on-paper official residences: a transient hotel in San Francisco and a warehouse in New York. There were, of course, tiny unknown risks in naming, the risk of being unaware of the lore or deeper meaning of a given name, for example. One comrade named John was laughingly challenged by another John at a party: You’re the first John I’ve ever met, he said, who asked directions to the toilet using its Christian name. And when I used the paper identity of an Eric Gourdanian to buy a used car, I mumbled something confusing and abstract when the salesman fixed my eyes intently, asking, What part of Armenia is your family from?
I thought of the baby Joseph Brown, deceased, and wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Brown would ever be proud of the part their little boy played in the struggle, or, more likely, furious at us for our blasphemous appropriation of his name for our subversive purposes if they ever found out.
Our lives underground, in outward form at least, resembled the lives of a generation–moving from place to place, extending childhood indefinitely, entering and ending relationships, experimenting with love and work and all manner of ways of being. Some of us would move to rural communes, and some would go to work in mills or mines or factories and join the industrial working class. Some of us would marry, have kids, divorce, and remarry, and some would discover–or decide now to announce–that we were gay. A few left for good, and a few new recruits joined up, and so we were faced with the challenge–not unique–of inventing our lives and our projects out of whole cloth, without support and without any tradition whatsoever.
Like other immigrants we were careful–no shoplifting, no food stamp scams, no sneaking into the movies. A great sin among us was breaking traffic laws, and I worked for months to slow down, having never obeyed a speed limit before in my life.
The goal was to fit in, to disappear, to become entirely obscure, like fish in the sea, we said. We were on the run now, we were hiding out, and our camouflage would be, well, everybody else. The best place to hide a leaf, Jeff [Jones] was fond of saying, is in the forest.
And yet for all our efforts to be indistinct, we quickly created a quite distinct Weatherfeel and Weatherlook. Wherever we went, wherever we found ourselves, we were accompanied by the artifacts of a culture we were inventing. Take hair, for example–in the first days underground you could find the Weathermen in any group by the garish heads throbbing clearly from out of the murky crowd. We experimented with dying our hair, and for many the result was a blinding platinum or a flaming orange, for others a shiny black patent leather. We took to calling one another small, insulting nicknames: Carrottop or Goldilocks or Shoe Stain. We all sported gaudy, vulgar heads, and we were completely conspicuous.
We cycled rapidly through vehicles, avoiding long-term contact with the state at any fixed or followable point. We favored certain colors in cars, in clothes–forest green for a time and then smoky blue. The women had turquoise earrings and bracelets, the men denim vests with a rainbow patch sewn somewhere, and each of us carried lots of rolls of quarters for long-distance pay phone calls and, secure in back pockets, a K-55, the cheap but perfect little knife from Germany with a black panther etched into its sides.
Our language was one part necessity, a language of survival, and two parts youthspeak, an irreverent slanguage of sass with flavor. We said Shoes, short for Brownshoes, code for the FBI: The Shoes were all over them after the Big Top. Those two guys lurking around Petrograd Restaurant? Shoes. Dynamite became ice cream or pickles–so much easier to say, “I’m taking three pounds of ice cream to the Big Top” than, “I’m putting a three-pound bomb in the Capitol.”
When we were actually on the run, we inoculated ourselves from fear and called our status, our fugitiveness, the Joke–Have you told your new boyfriend the Joke? I don’t think anyone here knows the Joke–and our organization, publicly the Weather Underground, now became the Eggplant, from an obscure rock lyric about “the eggplant that ate Chicago.”
We expropriated an entire lexicon of Weather words from the music–“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” of course, from Bob Dylan, “Bad Moon,” our code word for the Haymarket statue from Credence Clearwater Revival, and the “Place” for the New York Police Headquarters from “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” by the Animals. “Rescue” from Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me” was the name for a two-year effort, finally successful, to break a Black Liberation Army comrade from jail.
In that first year I moved several times, organized 22 hiding places I could use in an emergency, built eight complete sets of ID, held 28 meetings with old friends–none of whom called the cops, most of whom offered support–and I was recognized on the street 12 times that I know of, and never turned in. Even though our numbers were small, each of us had dozens of reasons to feel connected and secure. I didn’t feel isolated.
Our underground life, we knew, could be undermined or even destroyed–externally or internally–if we fell into too much habit, too much complacency. When pattern betrayed us, we were quickly outsmarted and encircled, boundaries collapsed and we almost lost it all. . . .
[On one occasion in San Francisco] we’d planned to meet at Wing Fat’s at 6:30 but when I got there at 6:15 Jeff and Rose were already squeezed into a back booth, looking kippered, Rose’s face tight and red and worried. [Someone] who had developed a complicated and safe way to send us money had missed a drop, and we had agreed, just this once and because we were desperate, on a shortcut–he sent $200 through Western Union to “Tom Stewart,” an ID Jeff had built up. Now they told me that when Jeffrey went into the downtown office, red lights and warning bells started going off in his head. There was an older looking hippie–beads, head band, scruffy beard–lurking near a phone booth inside. Could be nothing. The transaction went smoothly enough, but the clerk kept glancing over his glasses at Jeff. Again, maybe just a nervous clerk, the way he always is with everyone.Outside Jeff hesitated, then walked around the corner, jumped into the pickup truck, and Rose started up. There was an old guy dressed like a hippie watching you from a doorway, she said.
Shoes, Jeff said. The place was staked out.
A car pulled out behind them–a beat-up Ford–and Rose knew he was right. She took two quick turns and then onto a one-way street, three lanes with heavy traffic and timed lights. The Ford eased up on the passenger side–Rose was holding steady in the center lane–and two carbon-copy hippies like the ones Jeff had seen close up–triplets now–stared up at Rose. The passenger smiled and held up a peace sign. Rose slammed the brakes, swerved left across two lanes and plunged onto a side street as the Ford shot through the intersection, trapped for another block at least.
Where’s Suzy Q? I asked, referring to the pickup. [They had abandoned it] in an alley beneath the underpass near downtown, and Jeff and Rose had, for the last hour, been trying to figure out what had happened and what to do next.
We left Wing Fat’s and two hours later met up at a safe house with two close above-ground comrades, Bert and Ernie. We agreed that Bert would walk up to Suzy Q first thing in the morning, open the door and get in, wait a minute and then, if nothing happened, leave. Ernie would watch the alley and then guide Bert through a complicated route to reconnect. Ernie made doubly careful contact with my brother Tim, a filmmaker and a generous soul who never hesitated; he took two days off work, loaded us into a VW bus, and drove us out of state where we could begin again.
Next morning at 8 we got a call at a pay phone from Ernie. The moment she opened the door Bert was surrounded by a dozen Shoes, guns drawn. She was in custody. Suspicion confirmed.
We worried about Bert, although she told us later that it was strictly pro forma. They were inefficient and lazy, she said, working from some outdated script: Are you a member of any secret societies? Do you know others who are? Are you in contact with any foreign agents? It all sounded so naive. She saw her job, she said, as miscuing whenever possible, steadily disrupting the scene: Foreign agents? You mean like the Rolling Stones?
The bigger problem dawned on us slowly. The “Tom Stewart” papers were linked to a transient hotel we’d used for two different sets of ID, and the second ID had been used to rent an apartment and open an account with the electric company. One of our cars, registered to another ID, had been ticketed outside that apartment recently, and, come to think of it, Jeff had been stopped in Suzy Q on a traffic safety check a week ago and the cops wrote down information from a clean ID he was carrying that linked to a bogus address, home to two more sets. And so it went. By 11 we realized that every vehicle was gone, every house unsafe, every ID tainted. We were back to nothing.
Contact with the open world was where the hidden world came into sharpest focus, and we built elaborate little mechanisms for connection. Emile D’Antonio, the radical documentary filmmaker, sent word through friends that he’d like to meet us to discuss a project that would bring the Weather Underground to life in the media. Here’s how Jeffrey and I met “D” for the first time.
Our contact person–an above-ground movement ally–received a preplanned route, a trajectory, that he and D would walk before contact would be made. I watched from half a block away as they stepped off the sidewalk at Van Buren Street heading north on Michigan Avenue, and within blocks they were already going underground. It was 8:15 a.m. They looked to all the world like just a couple of folks in the throng swarming up a crowded city street in rush hour. But from the start they had been in what we called the set, and halfway across Adams Street, click, they entered the underground. This part of the passage was called the tunnel, and from here on, every move was monitored by Jeff and me safely out of sight.
Just south of Madison they headed down a flight of stairs leading to the Grant Park Garage, cut into the second aisle, and then quickly walked north two blocks, never looking back. This was the trap, because any tail would become instantly visible. They surfaced then at Michigan and Washington, headed west to Wabash, into Marshall Field’s, and a quick diagonal through the store to the exit at State and Randolph. The breakaway. North on State to Lake Street, underground again, a second breakaway, west to Clark, up and north to the river where a steel staircase led down to Wacker Place. Along Wacker was the pickup, and it was Jeff’s and my responsibility to make contact. I signaled Jeff, he nodded, and they were in. If the pickup had been missed, they were finished for the day, and that trajectory would be scrapped. They were not to re-enter the tunnel, but to head to a prearranged payphone that would start ringing in exactly six hours.
Everyone we met, everyone from the open world, went through just such a passage. Journalists, lawyers, prominent donors, occasionally parents. It didn’t matter, everyone walked a trajectory. And the first words spoken after a handshake or an embrace were also part of the pattern: Who am I? Who are you? Where are we going? What’s our tale? We called this “the conspiratorial moment,” getting our story straight in the event of a traffic stop, an accident, an unforeseen encounter with the law.
