When Skateboards Will Be Free (10 page)

“Look at Martha’s rubber tree,” he says.

Down Forty-second Street I ride, past the library, past the pizza shop, past Bryant Park that’s filled with office workers eating lunch. The iron fencing is gone now, as are the high hedges, as are the drug dealers and prostitutes. There is no man being terrorized with sticks, there is no lost little boy standing on the corner. People sit on the plush green grass ringed by flowers. A sign announcing free knitting classes in the park on Wednesday evenings completes the end of an era.

When I turn down Seventh Avenue, a wind swirls behind me and I pick up speed like a boat on a lake. Traffic is thick, but I dodge and weave between the cars. I’m adept at navigating this city. I’ve ridden all over it. Once as far as Coney Island. Once to Yonkers.

At Twenty-eighth Street, the traffic thins considerably and I am able to ride without impediment or peril. I can see all the way down into the Village. A long row of green traffic lights unfolds before me. How beautiful the city looks. How peaceful. This city that I love and never want to leave again.

At the audition I give my head shot and résumé to a disinterested elderly woman. She tells me to stand against the wall so she can take a Polaroid of me. I try to smile, but I’m terrible at smiling on demand. The result is something in between, which I’m sure looks unflattering. I want to ask her if she’ll take another one, but before I can, she staples the photograph to my résumé and tells me to take a seat.

There are actors and actresses here for other auditions. I watch them come and go. They are attractive and glamorous, carrying themselves as if they are already stars. When they smile for the Polaroid, they smile broadly. When they exit, it is with a flourish. Even the disinterested woman finds them enthralling. Eventually a door opens and a pretty woman about my age appears in the doorway and loudly mispronounces my name.

“Did I get it right?” she winces.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “no one does.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. And she does seem sorry. I hope that I have used this opportunity to come across as charming and easygoing.

In the room she asks me to stand in front of a video camera while she looks over my meaningless résumé.

“It looks great,” she says anyway.

Then she presses a button and the room is filled with Will Smith singing his hit song “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It.” She presses another button and the room goes quiet.

“Do you know that song?” she asks.

“I love that song,” I say with enthusiasm. I want her to know I am enthusiastic.

“Great!” she says. Her enthusiasm matches mine. And
she briefly explains that such-and-such company is making a music video of “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It,” which will spoof the original music video of “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It.”

We both laugh at the clever idea.

Then she says, “When I press play, could you just dance along to the music?”

“Sure!” The enthusiasm again.

“And when the chorus kicks in, if you could just sing along.”

“Sure!”

“Oh,” as if an afterthought, “if you could do that with an accent…”

“Sure,” but the enthusiasm is gone now. Despondency spreads across my face. I can feel it spreading. I must recover quickly or all is lost. “What kind of accent are you looking for?” I say spiritedly.

“Well,” she says, pretending to mull the possibilities, “how about Middle Eastern?”

I understand the implication. It will be funny to see a Middle Eastern person singing a rap song, absurd and clownish. I’d probably laugh if I saw it too. However, I don’t want to be the one doing it. This is the problem with my acting career. I’m mostly called to audition for roles like deli owner, taxi driver, and “Third World despot.” Friends always tell me I look somewhere between Italian and Greek, but it doesn’t really matter what I look like, my name has firmly ensconced me in a world of stereotypes. “Well, you’re not quite right for the role of homeowner,” a producer once told me, “but we do have
deli
owner.” Often I’ve thought about changing my
name. How simple life would be if I became a Harris. Sam Harris. Maybe Stan Harris. My uncle saw the importance of this when, at the start of his writing career, he changed his name from Finkelstein.
Harris
effectively buried the Jew. And my mother followed suit shortly thereafter.

But I can’t do it. I’ve clung to this gigantic name my whole life. It was the only connection I had to my father when I was a little boy. In many ways it’s the only connection I have to him now. We are the last remaining Sayrafiezadehs in the United States, as my brother and sister have long ago changed their name. There’s irony in this.

So I do what the casting director wants and exactly how she wants it. I dance wildly out of rhythm because I know it looks buffoonish, and when the chorus kicks in I sing far off-key, with an accent that is some melding of my father and the Indian man who works at the coffee shop across from work. It is anything but authentic. The casting director doesn’t seem to notice or care. She is standing behind the video camera, smiling with encouragement as this is recorded for eternity. I am ashamed and fatigued. What would my father say if he could see me now? “Look what the capitalists are making you do.” That’s what he would say.

Back at the office, I sit on my soft chair and look at my computer screen filled with pictures of outdoor patio furniture on the porch, in the garden, by the pool. I have a headache, but the images are soothing. I would like to be there by the pool.

“Hey, Saïd,” I hear Karen say behind me.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “I promise I’ll have them finished by the end of the day.”

And suddenly she is standing next to me, very close, her hip dangerously close to my elbow. I look up and see her pretty face and her orange scarf and her eyes that are either blue or green. In her hand she is holding a slice of blueberry pie.

M
Y UNCLE’S PRESENCE HUNG IN
the background of my life in Pittsburgh, a smudgy figure who never fully took shape and never fully disappeared. We had moved to Pittsburgh because he had suggested we do so, but I don’t really know how much we ever benefited from him or his suggestion. I felt humiliated each time I entered his enormous house and sat down at his enormous dining-room table that reached up to my neck like I was standing in the deepest end of the swimming pool. Sitting across from me would be my cousin Henry, who, always handsome and self-possessed, looked at ease eating out of a bowl that matched the plate that matched the cup, fearlessly helping himself to seconds and thirds. How had he come by such good fortune? How had I not? When the meal was done, I would crawl onto the lush carpeting like an animal in search of a place to sleep and I would watch my uncle place log after log into the fireplace as he chatted with my mother about their own childhood and their own parents, neither of whom I had ever known. Later on I might go out to the backyard with Henry to play catch or down into the basement and watch his train choo-choo around the miniature village. It was always inconceivable to me that no part of this home belonged to me and that soon I would be asked to leave. I despised them for this. They were rich asses, after all, and I blamed them for what I did not have. My
cousin slept in a sovereign bedroom that his parents did not need to traverse in order to reach the bathroom, while my mother and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment, with me in the bedroom and my mother in the living room sleeping on a twin bed that doubled, without alteration of any sort, as a couch in the daylight hours. Each morning I would wake to the sounds of her using the toilet just a few feet away from me. I could only guess at what would befall my uncle and cousin—and their house—when the revolution finally arrived, and there was some half-empty satisfaction in that.

And too soon, much too soon, my cousin would flick the switch and the train would come to a halt and the village would go dark and we would ascend to the living room, where the fire was now just embers. My mother and I would gather our belongings and pile into the backseat of my uncle’s light-blue Mercedes, where he would commence to drive us home, a mere fifteen minutes away, but it always felt like we were being shepherded to the border.

“Did you enjoy yourself this evening, Saïd?” my uncle would ask.

Once back in my apartment I would become overwrought by how cramped everything seemed, how dingy, dingier than before even, the walls, the rugs, the furniture. Now, though, I turned the frustration inward, blaming and punishing myself. I tidied and straightened and organized, again and again, all my shoes in a row, all my clothes folded precisely. In the shower, I would stand beneath the hot water, letting it cascade over my skin, scalding it, believing that the water was disinfecting me and that when I finally stepped from the
tub, hot and flushed, something would be transformed. It would be months before I visited my uncle again, and while there was relief in knowing this, his presence remained inescapable in the books that lined our bookcase. It was the books in the end that really defined him for me, that made him flesh. Not what was written inside them—I had never read any—but the fact that my mother had taken the time to place them side by side on an entire shelf, an act of tribute. Many, many books. Dusty and musty and worn. The result of effort, of labor, a testament to what could be accomplished if one wanted to accomplish something.
Twentyone Twice; Mark the Glove Boy or, The Last Days of Richard Nixon; The Goy; Killing Everybody.
Two copies of
Bang the Drum Slowly
, one hardcover and one soft. His was the life my mother had dreamed of living until that autumn day years earlier when she had taken a stroll through the University of Minnesota with her husband and two children and stopped for a moment, just a moment, to hear about a newspaper called
The Militant. Trumpet to the World; City of Discontent; The Southpaw; A Ticket for a Seamstitch; Something About a Soldier; Wake Up, Stupid; Friedman &Son.
Each one given as gifts to my mother, some even with handwritten inscriptions in them, if I ever dared look.
Twentyone Twice, For Martha and Mahmoud. January 1967.

But as many books as my uncle had written and my mother had saved, the real author of our bookcase was Pathfinder Press. Lining the shelves over and around Mark Harris, answering his output by dwarfing it, belittling it, were books by Marx (for a long time I confused
Marx
with
Mark’s)
, Engels,
Lenin, Trotsky, Barnes—the parents and their offspring, the big and the small.
The Origins of Materialism; The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State; Empiricism and Its Evolution: A Marxist View; James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism; The First Five Years of the Communist International; The First Ten Years of American Communism; History of American Trotskyism, 1928-38; Defense Policies and Principles of the Socialist Workers Party; America’s Road to Socialism; Women and the Family; Teamster Rebellion; Teamster Power; Teamster Politics; Teamster Bureaucracy; Che Guevara Talks to Young People
,

I would look at these titles sometimes when I was home alone and I would wonder what they meant and what was inside. When I opened them to see if there might be pictures to entertain me, I discovered that the covers, the spines, the pages were still stiff and fresh. The books had barely been touched by my mother, barely read. The titles were powerful enough; they were all you needed to know about what the books contained. You did not need to venture within.

Something sad had happened in the past—that is what the titles conveyed. Something sad, something lost.
The Prophet Unarmed; The Prophet Outcast; The Revolution Betrayed; Lenin’s Final Fight.
All that had been achieved by the Russian Revolution, by such monumental work, had come unraveled in 1924 with the death of Lenin. That unhappy moment that set in motion Stalin’s ascendancy and Trotsky’s demise. If only the ailing Lenin had been able to pass the torch to Trotsky, things would be different now, things would be their opposite. There had been a chance for peace and plenty,
but that was several generations ago, and now we, the descendants, were stuck, and it was up to us to unstick ourselves. It was possible but it would take all our dedication, all our effort. It remained to be seen if we were up to the task. Not we meaning humanity; not we meaning the workers; we meaning the members of the Socialist Workers Party. The very future of the world depended on us.

E
VERY
F
RIDAY AND
S
UNDAY NIGHT
of my childhood was reserved expressly for the Socialist Workers Party. Friday night a forum was held that was open to the public, and where party members, or an invited guest, would speak on a current political event like the grape boycott or desegregation busing or the Equal Rights Amendment. Sunday nights were “branch meetings” for comrades only and pertained to the management and strategy of the Socialist Workers Party itself. This is not to imply that these were the only evenings of political activity. There were also “plant-gate sales,” i.e., selling
The Militant at
the gates of factories during shift changes; “paste-ups,” i.e., illegally pasting posters of upcoming events on walls and lampposts—done late at night to avoid being spotted by the police; the occasional party to celebrate an accomplishment of some sort; conferences; rallies; etc.

When I was very young and still living in Brooklyn, my mother would almost always bring me along with her to these Friday and Sunday night meetings. In the early evening we would catch the subway into lower Manhattan, where we would then ride a wobbly elevator to the eighth floor of an old office building. Upon entering the meeting hall, I would instantly be greeted by a roomful of comrades.

“How’s the little revolutionary doing tonight?” they would call out.

When it was time for the meeting to begin, I would snuggle down beside my mother and listen as the room fell silent and somber. The only sound was my mother’s encumbered, asthmatic breathing amid the clouds of cigarette smoke passing above our heads. And then out of the void would come the rustling of the first comrade’s shoes as they approached the podium. “Good evening, comrades,” they would say into the microphone, and the voice would boom over me. I was warmed by the voice. Lulled by it. I never really understood what it was saying, of course, but I could follow it like a film in a foreign language, tracking the cadence if not the meaning. At a very early age I became expert at knowing when a speech was reaching its climax or when applause was being elicited or when a question from the floor was opening up an entirely new path of discussion. There was always a learned confidence in the speaker’s voice, a complete understanding of why the world worked the way it worked, and this was heartening to me. It proved that it was possible to make order out of chaos. And since my mother never directly addressed the actual content of our existence, never ventured to acknowledge those things that by their very absence resounded so loudly each day, there was something alluring about being in the presence of men and women who had committed their lives to uncovering the hidden, unspoken secrets of the world. Secrets that had been buried by the sediment of years and that, if not for the mighty effort of the comrades—including my mother—would be gone forever.