When Skateboards Will Be Free (13 page)

“Let’s eat,” my father says. “Shall we eat? I’m getting hungry.”

“Sure, Pop,” I say. “I’m hungry too.”

The two of us enter the restaurant and stand waiting for the man in the tie while he seats another table, bowing before them, smiling, thanking. Then he comes toward us.

“Hello,” he says. I do not think he remembers me. “Two for dinner?”

“Yes,” my father says.

“Please,” he says, and he bows slightly and my father bows slightly, and then he ushers us to a table near the back.

The restaurant is carpeted and has low romantic lighting and white linen tablecloths. On each table there is a tiny vase with a single daisy so precise in its detail that it is impossible
to discern whether it is real or fake. The door has been propped open to allow a breeze to blow over the patrons. The sounds of the Garment District drift in from the street. A busboy arrives at our table and lights the votive candle. My father smiles and waves his finger over the flame. In the darkness of the restaurant, his black cap seems to have disappeared, but the white words of
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
look like they are floating and dancing above his head.

“Hey, Pop,” I offer tentatively, “maybe you should take the cap off.”

“What?” he says with alarm. And then: “Oh, yes!” And he removes it from his head and stuffs it into his blue knapsack. Just like that the matter is settled.

The waitress appears at our table. She does not look Iranian. I think she may be Chinese. She is young and pretty, though her skin seems nearly drained of pigment from too many nocturnal shifts shepherding food. She speaks shyly and with an accent, forcing us to lean in to decipher her words.

“May I start you off with something to drink?” she asks.

“May I start you off with something to drink,” my father repeats to himself, mulling over the sentence for a moment like he wasn’t expecting the question but appreciates its grammatical construction. Then he asks proudly, “What kind of house wine do you have?”

“We have chardonnay,” the waitress begins. “We have—”

“Chardonnay! Chardonnay sounds good!” He looks at
me. “Does chardonnay sound good, Sidsky? If I order some chardonnay, will you have a glass with me?”

“Sure, Pop,” I say.

“Do you hear that? The birthday boy will have a glass of chardonnay with me. Therefore, I think we are going to need more than just a single wineglass.” My father smiles at the waitress as if he has said something clever. The waitress smiles back, but it’s apparent she doesn’t know what she’s smiling about, and it’s apparent my father doesn’t know that she doesn’t know. His smile widens.

“Let us begin,” he says, “with a carafe of chardonnay.”

And the waitress disappears.

My father looks at me. I look back. He says nothing. I say nothing. We could be sitting at a cafeteria table in Oberlin twenty-five years ago.

“How have you been, Sidsky?” he says eventually.

“Oh, pretty good, Pop.”

“How’s the acting career?”

“Not so good.”

“Little by little, Sidsky.”

“Thanks, Pop.”

“And how is Martha Stewart doing?” The name
Martha
bounces from wall to wall, but we both ignore this.

“Not bad,” I say. I think about my soft swivel chair. “She’s still a billionaire.”

He snickers. Then he broods.

“How about you, Pop? How have you been?”

He’s been waiting for this. Without answering, he bends
and removes the troubling blue knapsack from beneath his chair and places it on his lap. Then he looks at me sharply to see if I am watching him. I assume he is going to give me a gift for my birthday, and I look away and then down at my hands, because to look directly at someone when he is preparing to give you a gift is coarse, unmannered, and above all presumptuous. He unzips the knapsack, a delicate operation, but there is some confusion over which zipper belongs to which compartment, first this way and then that, and I return to watching him like he is a magician at work and if I blink I will miss the trick. Finally, thankfully, the thing opens and he puts his hand inside, rustles around, and pulls out something and lays it on the table in front of me. I look down and
The Militant
looks up.

I see that my father has circled or underlined things in red pen, and he has written notes in the margins—
layer of peasants aligning with proletariat; effect of Stalinist decay.
There is something touching about this, something about a bright schoolboy, one with interests and aspirations, who can be seen running home with the thing he has discovered that day. My father was a smart boy, at least the way he tells it, far advanced from other children his age. I have no reason to disbelieve this one clear detail in what remains a mysterious childhood. He once described to me how, when he was a six-year-old in Tabriz, his mother would greet his playmates at the door by saying “I’m sorry, but Mahmoud cannot come out to play right now, he’s reading Hafiz,” referring to the fourteenth-century Persian poet and mystic. According
to my father, the Western equivalent of this would be “I’m sorry, but Mahmoud cannot come out to play right now, he’s reading Shakespeare.” When he recounts this anecdote, he does not recount it with arrogance but with disappointment and regret, a boy looking out the bedroom window on a sunny day. He understands the pretension involved and the damaging effects of that pretension on a young person. But the legend of an exceptional mind has done nothing but grow greater with time, until it has become accepted by all who know him. And for the briefest of moments I am with my mother again, it is morning, she is making breakfast, I am playing on the floor near her, and she is saying to me regarding some conversation that is taking place inside her: “If only I could have kept up with Mahmoud’s politics. I think then things might have turned out differently for me.”

The waitress places a carafe of chardonnay in front of us. My father looks at her ass as she walks away. Then he looks at the carafe of chardonnay. Then he looks at me.

“This is white,” he says to me.

“It’s chardonnay.”

“I wanted red.”

“Chardonnay isn’t red.”

“Never?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shit,” he says to himself.

There’s a difficult interlude while we both contemplate the ramifications. Then my father perks up. “Sidsky, have you been following the coal miners’ strike?”

“No, Pop,” I say, wishing I had been following it. “Actually, I haven’t even heard about it.”

My father nods. “The capitalist media is trying to keep it out of the news, of course,” he says, remarkably without bitterness. “Very interesting the way things have developed.” His accent causes him to stress the wrong syllable, so rather than
develOPED
, it comes out as
develOPED
.

He points to
The Militant
.

NATO BOMBS KILL SERB AND ALBANIAN WORKERS
. the headline announces,
RIFTS GROW BETWEEN WASHINGTON, IMPERIALIST ALLIES.
A photo shows a group of Chinese men and women holding a banner that reads in both Chinese and English,
Stop Murderous Bombing
, and beneath that photo is a second photo, a smaller one, of a bomb exploding spectacularly, like fireworks, on a pleasant sidewalk lined with potted pants.

“No, Sidsky, look here,” and he unfolds
The Militant
and smooths it out, and sure enough, just as he has said, there is an article reporting on the coal miners’ strike.

“This is the only publication where you’ll be able to find out the truth,” he says, as if this might be the first time I’ve ever seen a copy of
The Militant.
Then he says nothing. The silence makes the implication clear.

“I guess I should buy this,” I say. “How much does it
cost?” It’s a calculated question, of course. I know how much it costs. I ask because I want him to say: “Oh, Sidsky, come on, you don’t need to pay me for it. Just take it.”

“A dollar fifty,” my father says. There is an undercurrent of ruthlessness in his voice that makes me certain that if I came up one dime short he would refuse me the sale.

In the penultimate apartment I lived in with my mother, we were lucky enough to have been given access to a storage bin in the basement. Nevertheless, my mother chose to keep all the hundreds of disorganized
Militants
in a closet by the front door. It was a deep closet, deeper than any we had had before, but it was our great misfortune that the architect, whether through oversight or malice, had designed the door to open into the closet rather than out of it, which meant that the tenant was deprived of about fifty percent of the storage space. In order, therefore, to make full use of the closet, my mother simply kept the door open at all times. The first thing someone paying us a visit observed upon entering our apartment was my mother’s plaid wool coat hanging from the coat hook and beneath it piles of
Militants
running all the way to the very edge of the closet, pinning the door wide open.

I take out my wallet and withdraw some money.

“Now your perspective will be broadened,” my father says happily. And I am happy too. This evening I have endeared myself to him. “The coal strike is in an anthracite region, Sidsky. Do you know what an anthracite region is?”

“No, Pop,” I say. “What’s an anthracite region?”

He lowers his voice and leans toward me conspiratorially. “On the surface this strike is about wages and the right to organize, but what is it really about?”

“I don’t know, Pop.”

He takes a breath and says with great conviction, “It is about human dignity.” Each word is emphasized. Then he looks me dead in the eye like he is anticipating that human dignity will be a concept of some controversy for me and he is prepared to defend it with all he has. I think briefly about responding, just for fun, “I’m actually opposed to human dignity, Pop.”

“We’re having our subscription fund drive now, Sidsky. Maybe you want to think about buying a subscription. We have a twelve-issue introductory rate for ten dollars.”

“I guess I should buy that.” I remove more money from my wallet. My father takes it from me and places it into an empty white envelope, which he scribbles something on. Then he puts it into his blue knapsack and zips it closed.

The waitress returns to us. “Would you like to hear tonight’s specials?” she asks.

My father looks up at her apologetically. “I’m very sorry,” he says, “there seems to have been a mistake.” His gaze moves to the carafe of chardonnay, hoping she will intuit the problem. “What I really meant to ask for, you see,” he laughs shyly, “what I really wanted, you see, was red wine.”

“Oh?”

“I am very sorry,” my father says again. “Would you by any chance have zinfandel?”

And without continuing with the specials, the waitress swiftly removes the carafe of chardonnay and departs.

In a year or so, the Socialist Workers Party national office will be sold and relocated to just a few blocks from where we now sit in the Garment District. The idea is that it should be closer to the garment workers whom the party has identified to be central players in the upcoming working-class struggles. Meatpackers, coal miners, and airline workers are also believed to be central players. Now, however, the national office is on Charles Street in the remote West Village, where it’s been since I was a little boy, both headquarters and printing press, housed in a six-story building that is, coincidentally, just five blocks from my studio apartment on Jane Street. When I ride my bicycle down the West Side Highway to Battery Park City I will pass it, sitting there facing the Hudson River next to million-dollar condos as it churns out
Militants
and Pathfinder books. It is as plain and unadorned as every comrade’s apartment. But in the late eighties the party managed to raise the impressive sum of one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars and commissioned eighty artists from twenty countries to paint a giant mural covering the entire side of the building, seventy feet high and eighty-five feet wide. There were colorful portraits of all the major players in the struggle, from Marx to Lenin to Trotsky to Che to César Chávez; every revolutionary imaginable was depicted (except Stalin and Mao), all floating around an enormous
printing press that was in the midst of dispensing flowing rolls of newsprint with Castro’s cumbersome maxim, “The truth must not only be the truth, it must also be told.”

The mural was a huge achievement for the Socialist Workers Party and was covered each week in
The Militant
for months prior to its completion. When it was finally unveiled in the frigid cold of November 1989, it was heralded as an accomplishment born from the fruits of the Nicaraguan Revolution and dedicated to the working people of New York City and the world.

Then one night a few years later, some troublemakers threw paint on it, obscuring Castro’s face, and immediately a “mural defense league” was set up. This entailed comrades sitting inside the building, watching the mural twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Every once in a while I’d get a phone call from my father saying that he was going to be working the midnight shift of the mural defense league and would I like to meet up for breakfast the next morning. Of course I’d say yes, and the next morning I’d wake up an hour early and walk two blocks over to La Bonbonniere on Eighth Avenue, where I would shovel in pancakes and sausage before heading off to Martha Stewart. Despite having been up all night, my father would be as energetic as always.

But the mural defense league could not defend against poor planning, and less than eight years after the mural had been completed, the colors faded and the paint peeled and the brick wall was discovered to have stress cracks and would need to be completely replaced before the entire building itself was compromised and demolished. So another one
hundred thousand dollars was raised, and the faces of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and Che and César Chávez and the words
The truth must not only be the truth, it must also be told
were pulled out brick by brick. This, too, was covered for weeks by
The Militant
and somehow was also celebrated as an accomplishment of sorts—
Honorable removal of mural
—until no trace of the mural remained, replaced instead by huge pink-colored plastic siding.