When Skateboards Will Be Free (12 page)

There was not a soul on the street. It was very dark now, very empty. Suddenly I understood how odd it was for a little boy to be outside in the streets alone at a time of night like this. I was like someone who has ventured far out into a driving rainstorm before realizing that it is in fact a hurricane. I took the long, most well-lit way home, walking slowly, hoping to affect an air of nonchalance that would dissuade a predator. With relief I entered the apartment building and walked the two flights of stairs to my floor. Perhaps my mother’s meeting had let out early and she was now home, frightened, irritated, waiting to chastise me for my senselessness. “Where have you been, Saïd!” I unlocked the door and the stillness of the apartment washed over me.

On top of the bookcase my mother kept a little brown sugar jar that she used for storing spare cash. It was always filled with coins and crumpled-up bills. When I had first discovered the jar, years earlier, it seemed miraculous to me. My mother had told me that the jar was Persian, so I had come to associate the jar and the money with my father, imagining that he had given it to my mother as a sort of onetime alimony payment when he left. That night, I unscrewed the lid and took out a dollar. I felt as if I was crossing an invisible barrier, but I could not make out the person crossing it.

I went out into the night again. This time without deliberation. The novelty of the experience had worn off. It was
completely dark, but I was not frightened by the darkness. Uncle Charlie was noisily sipping a Coke through a straw when I entered. He didn’t ask how I had come by another dollar. He gave me change. I played hard; I lost quickly. The clock read 10:12. There was a pinching in my elbow from the strain of gripping the joystick so tightly. I wanted to crush something in my hands. I had to pee badly, and the sensation incited me. The shortcut to my home was through an alleyway. It was jet-black, but as a punishment for having spent and for having lost, I walked through it anyway. There was a recklessness to it that I deserved. I fantasized about being accosted by the shadows. I had homework to do, but it was too late to do it now. I had wasted the night. I wanted the night back. The only thing that could alleviate this discomfort, that could redeem me, that could let me pee, was to play the video game again. I entered the apartment. The stillness. I did not hesitate; I went straight for the brown sugar jar.

I
AM GREETED AT THE
front entrance of the Iranian restaurant by a man I presume to be Iranian. He is wearing a shirt and tie, and he says to me with disturbing élan, “Table for one, sir?”

“No,” I say, “I’m supposed to be meeting someone here.”

“Please have a look,” he says, bending slightly at the waist and gesturing at the restaurant with a wide sweep of his arm, as if he is a doorman and I am the tenant.

The restaurant is small, and with the exception of an older couple sitting at a table, it is without patrons. Although I can plainly see that my father has not yet arrived, I continue to stand there, taking in the confines, looking from table to table in case I have overlooked the obvious. Then I walk back past the Iranian man, who says, “Thank you, sir,” as if I have done him a great service.

Tonight’s dinner with my father is something of a thirtieth-birthday celebration for me. My thirtieth birthday was six months ago. We had been planning to get together, until an important and unexpected event arose: a meeting. President Clinton had just begun a four-day bombing of Iraq under what was known as Operation Desert Fox, and in response the Socialist Workers Party called an emergency meeting to map out a strategy on how the working class should best respond.

“We will have to do this another time,” my father had said
to me over the phone. The distant gravity of his voice—as if he were looking over important documents as we spoke—gave the impression that the upcoming meeting would have an impact on global affairs. I had agreed to reschedule immediately and without objection; to do otherwise would have made me seem crass and uncaring regarding the suffering of others. A few weeks later I received a leaflet in the mail that was advertising the latest issue of the Socialist Workers Party’s annual journal,
New International: A Magazine of Marxist Politics and Theory.
There was no note included with the leaflet, but I assumed it had been sent by my father. This latest issue of
New International
was written by Jack Barnes and was entitled “The Opening Guns of World War III.” It had originally been published seven years earlier after the first Gulf War but was now being reissued as a “special war issue.” The cover showed a line of American tanks parked in the desert. Sitting atop the tanks were soldiers looking through binoculars, waiting for the order to begin their assault.

The journal was priced at twelve dollars but was being offered at a ten percent discount. I saved the leaflet for a while, thinking that I would buy it, or that I
should
buy it, but I never did. A month passed. Two months passed. I thought of calling my father, but is it poor etiquette to request a birthday dinner for oneself? In my moment of indecision, other political events occurred, then others, crowding in tightly on one another and presumably occupying my father in planning and strategy. In February, Amadou Diallo, poor, black, and unarmed, was shot nineteen times by New York City police officers, and Socialist Workers Party forums
were quickly planned. Then spring came and NATO began bombing Serbia,
STOP THE IMPERIALIST BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA!
read the headline of an issue of
The Militant.
And after that my father flew off to the Tehran book fair that he has attended each year for many years, acting as the party’s Persian-language editor for Pathfinder Press. And after that I turned thirty and a half.

Then one day, apropos of nothing, the phone rang.

“Sidsky!” my father cried out, his voice full of immense cheer, like a sailor who has survived rough seas and has finally made it back to shore into the arms of those who have been waiting for him. In that single word—
Sidsky!
—all was instantly forgiven by me, or forgotten, and that is how I find myself standing in front of an Iranian restaurant in the Garment District waiting for my father.

What if, while I was inside the restaurant, my father arrived outside and then, seeing that I was not there, did not think to look inside and simply decided that I came and went, and so he decided to leave? “You weren’t there, Sidsky …”

I make my way to the corner, past men pulling racks of wedding dresses, and look in the direction of the subway station, but there is no sign of a retreating man who resembles my father. What if he has not taken the subway at all and is coming from another direction entirely? I hurry the other way. And, sure enough, here he comes from the far end of the block, my father, just as I remember him, his gait long and purposeful.

No, it is not my father but a man who looks like my father. Suddenly I see him everywhere, as if a great wind has
gathered up all the approximations of my father in New York City and blown them in my direction. There is one who dresses exactly as my father would dress, and another who is bald but not as handsome, and another who is handsome but without glasses. It occurs to me that I was a fool to ever leave my post in front of the restaurant. So I hurry back, determined to stand outside without interruption, but it now behooves me to again go inside and see if my father has entered and taken a table for two.

And from out of the maelstrom comes a voice I would recognize anywhere: “Hello, Sidsky.”

I turn and there he is, smiling widely, his face a study in calm.

“Pop,” I shout as if I am faraway down the street. “I was getting worried, Pop.” There is irritation in my voice, and I regret the irritation.

“Am I late?” he says with concern. Then he pulls back his sleeve and checks his watch. “No, Sidsky,” he says, “I am on time.”

It doesn’t matter anymore. All that has come before recedes into faint outlines and I put my arms out to hug him, to greet him properly, but as I do I can see him stiffen slightly, like an ironing board put upright, and he extends his hand for me to shake. I have no choice but to take it. My hand is thin and his hand is permanently puffy, swollen, the hand of marshmallows. “From those Tehran winters,” he will say, “when I was too poor to buy gloves.” We shake firmly like acquaintances, acquaintances who are friendly toward each other.

If my father has aged since the last time I saw him, it is imperceptible. He has neither lost nor gained weight, and he is dressed as he is always dressed, which is to say in the attire of a mathematics professor: a blue tie, a white shirt—his big belly straining against the buttons—a pen in his pocket, a small notepad behind the pen, black slacks, black shoes. He looks somewhere between rich and poor and he smells faintly of BO, affecting without being repellent. My father has a round, pleasant face, and he looks at me from behind round, wire-rimmed glasses. “Ask me a question,” his face seems to say, “and I will tell you an answer.” I wish there was a question I could think of, because there is something truly inviting about him, like a bear, hearty, robust, comforting. Every time I see him he seems to be full of energy and zest. He stays up late, he wakes up early, he doesn’t complain. He seems never worried, anxious, ill at ease, plagued by the thought of things to come. He believes that the world is quickly spiraling downward, of course, that poverty is unresolvable, that wars are constant, but these thoughts do not distress him in the way they distressed my mother and me. Instead, he is invigorated by them. The revolution will come, certainly, and when it does, all will be well. Until then there is work to be done, food to be eaten, wine to be drunk, and sex to be had. I am sure my father will live to be a hundred.

The only thing that unhinges his outward appearance as a scholar is that sitting atop his bald head is a black baseball cap with white lettering that reads
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
I have never seen my father wearing a baseball cap before, and I find its presence disquieting. It
stands out in such sharp relief from the rest of his attire that it may as well be lit by neon lights. It is well worn and cocked just slightly to the side, giving him a rakish quality that undermines his obvious intellectual demeanor, like he is an urchin from another era who has come out of an alleyway to beg for food. Perhaps he was given this cap by a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers when he was selling copies of
The Militant
on their picket line. “It was given to me as an act of solidarity,” my father might say. Or for that matter he might say that he refused the worker’s gift and instead paid for it with his own money, and that
this
act was an act of solidarity. That is a question I suppose I could ask, but I know that we are in for a long evening of politics and it does not make sense to begin any sooner than we need to. Besides, I am concerned that if I draw attention to the cap he will think the cap is resonant and proudly leave it on in the restaurant, which to my way of thinking would be highly inappropriate. And if I were to say this aloud to him, “Pop, I think you should take the hat off,” he would then most likely perceive this as a direct attack on the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and on unionism in general. It is best to hold my tongue.

Lenin also wore a cap of a strikingly similar nature, rough and floppy and somewhat whimsical. His cap, though, was purchased when he was in Stockholm on the eve of the revolution and was favored not by the proletariat but by painters of the early twentieth century. He can be seen wearing the hat in a photo from 1919 where he converses amiably with Trotsky and Kamenev. It is also there, squeezed in his right
hand, while he leans over the podium in Sverdlov Square in Moscow, exhorting the soldiers of the Red Army before they depart for the Polish front. Or there it is, back on his head when he is at Gorki, sitting in a wheelchair, his health rapidly failing, the end near, Stalin waiting in the wings. Lenin’s cap contradicted his suit and tie, contradicted his appearance as an intellectual, and set him apart from other revolutionaries of the time, in much the same way that my father’s cap sets him apart. I believe that this is the point. Look at me, I am a math professor, yes, but my allegiance is with those who labor with their hands, those who organize, those who struggle, those who toil. Look at me, I am not the man you think I am but something else, something in the space between professor and electrical worker—a third thing altogether.
Ask me a question.

Easier to ignore, but no less disconcerting, is that hanging from one of my father’s shoulders is the strap of a blue knapsack. They are ubiquitous accoutrements for comrades in the Socialist Workers Party, these knapsacks. My mother carried hers every time she left home. Contained inside were all the tools necessary for revolutionary action: the latest copies of
The Militant
, leaflets for upcoming forums or demonstrations, a roll of tape, a stapler, a box of staples, another roll of tape. We were like hikers, she and I, ascending the mountain of revolution. Often on the way to somewhere my mother would stop abruptly in front of a lamppost or telephone pole, kneel on the concrete, unzip her knapsack, and remove a leaflet that might say something like:
U.S. out of El Salvador! March on Washington!
on such and such date,
with a paragraph or so summarizing the road that lay ahead for working people living under an imperialist government that was squeezing them tighter and tighter. I would stop beside my mother and stand to the side, observing the simple sequence of her stooping over her knapsack on the sidewalk, nearly wrestling with it, digging around for the leaflet, righting herself, pounding the stapler into the telephone pole—
bang, bang, bang.
It must be pressed with great force so the wind did not take it away. People passing by would glance at my mother, then at the leaflet, then at me. I was always deathly embarrassed by this. I felt as if my clothes had been removed. No one ever stopped to read what the leaflet said, no one ever said, “I agree, tell me more,” no one ever even said, “I disagree.” What was of great consequence to us was of no consequence to them.