The Company You Keep Read Free

choice.
    That one day, you will be a bad parent too.
    Okay. That’s
why
we’re writing. And we all agreed on that.
How
to write, on the other hand, was harder for us. The finer points of how—that required the extended debate that your mother, no doubt, would havefound amusing. See, we agreed to tell you the truth. But as to what was the truth, that was not so clear.
    First we thought we’d write it together. Billy Cusimano got his computer geek to give us all e-mails on his Web site, so people like Ben and Rebeccah don’t have to use their work e-mails, and none of us have to worry too much about confidentiality: apparently Billy—who doesn’t quite understand that Cusimano Organics is actually a legal business—uses some pretty far-out encryption. So I get started, write a dozen pages, send them to the Committee. Not ten minutes later, Rebeccah IM’s me, that damn little AOL Instant Messenger window popping up on my screen. “This a walk down amnesia lane, Pops? Or are we trying to tell the girl something about what really happened?” Pops, for Christ sake. Then Jeddy chimes in, wondering whether I’m drawing on a Trotskyite historiographical framework, here, because he wants to know how to interpret my blatant falsifications of fact—propaganda or Alzheimer’s. Then Ben, always useful, asks if we’re trying to get Isabel to help us or to hurt us, cause from what I’ve written so far, it looked like we should
all
be jailed without parole, and soon it’s clear that no one is going to agree on anything. Until Molly suggests that we just each take turns, the five, six of us who played direct roles in what happened the summer of 1996.
    Here’s her plan: we’ll each tell you a piece of the story, and then hand it on to the next one, and like that we won’t have to agree with each other, but just let you see the whole thing. And furthermore, we each do it alone, so whatever contradictions there might be in our accounts, you can hear them yourself. I’ll go first, and when I’ve done as much as I can in one sitting, I’ll e-mail it to you and cc the rest of the Committee, then someone else will take the story a step further. And like that, unless you start blocking our e-mails, little by little, the whole story will come to you, and all you have to do is read.
    So everyone agreed to that, and everyone agreed that I had to start, and so the problem then became, Where? The day you were born? The day I was born? The day civil war broke out in Spain? I fretted over that for a good few days of Michigan spring rains. And then I thought, the hell with it, we are telling the truth, aren’t we? And trying to tell it in theway it actually happened, aren’t we? Well, if that’s the case, it all really started in Billy Cusimano’s Sea of Green in June 1996, and it is, therefore, with Billy that I am going to start.
    2.
    Today you know Billy Cusimano as the owner of a national chain of organic supermarkets that he runs from a loft in SoHo, runs with a vengeance: he’s paying three college tuitions, and still has one more to come. But in 1996, when I became Billy’s lawyer, he was a very different man than he is today.
    For one thing, he still had some hair. Not much, but enough for one of those phony little ponytails guys our age wore in those days. For another, he was enormous, with a huge fat belly that stuck out of his T-shirt: at forty-seven, before his first heart attack, Billy had not yet learned it was eat better or die—a phrase, believe it or not, he once tried to adopt as his supermarket’s slogan before his advertising firm told him to lose it, and quick. Last, but not least, in 1996 when he became my client, Billy had either not yet had the brilliant idea of opening Cusimano’s Organic Markets, or America wasn’t ready for them. In either case, he was not a successful and legitimate businessman but a criminal defendant in a federal case. Billy, you could say, came a long way in the past ten