When Skateboards Will Be Free (2 page)

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door. Often she would inform me when we were late on the rent, or when she suspected she was about to be fired, or when the price of bread had gone up again. All of it categorical evidence against capitalism and how deserving we would be when the revolution came. At times our deprivation entered the realm of the absurd. Like
when she would stand at the entrance of the supermarket, asking shoppers if they would give her the classifieds from their newspapers. Or at the doctor’s office, filling her knapsack with towelettes. Or in front of the library, instructing me to go and place our overdue books on the counter and walk straight back outside. Later she would brag to comrades about what a good accomplice I had been. And if I ever questioned such dishonesty, she would reply, “Any crime against society is a good crime.”

On one occasion I mustered the courage to ask my mother to buy me a skateboard (they were all the rage at the time), and after much inveigling she finally agreed to have a look. There in the middle of the sports department sat a giant metal bin filled with skateboards in bubblegum-bright colors and a sign that read
$10.99.

“I want the green one,” I said.

“Once the revolution comes,” my mother said, “everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free.” Then she took me by the hand and led me out of the store. I pictured in precise detail a world of long, rolling, grassy hills, where it was always summertime and boys skateboarded up and down the slopes.

W
HEN I WAS FOUR YEARS
old there arose one morning an unresolvable crisis between my mother and me.

I was in my bedroom playing with my toys when she entered and knelt beside me on the floor. “We will not be eating grapes or lettuce anymore,” she said plainly.

I put my toys down and looked up into her face. It seemed odd and outlandish, this sudden rule. The kind of rule that comes from nowhere, out of nowhere, made solely at the whim of the adult world.

“That’s a dumb rule,” I said.

“It’s not a dumb rule,” she said. And she went on to patiently explain that the rule was not her own but the rule of the Socialist Workers Party, which was itself following the rule of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers, who had called for a national boycott of table grapes and iceberg lettuce. All of this she described in the simplest of terms that allowed me to understand and accept the edict.

“You’re such a good boy,” she said, and she kissed me on the top of my head.

As the days passed, however, and the boycott carried on, I found that my desire for grapes began to eclipse my compassion for the workers. Now it was my turn to interrupt my mother one morning.

“I’m ready to eat grapes,” I said. I said it as plainly as she had.

She closed the book she was reading and looked down at me quizzically. “You can’t eat grapes,” she said. “You know that.” And then she added, “And you can’t eat iceberg lettuce.”

“I don’t want to eat iceberg lettuce,” I responded brightly, thinking that she would see this as a welcome compromise.

“Well, you can’t eat that either,” she said with measure. Adult with child, adult instructing child. I detected, though, somewhere beneath her rational exterior, an undercurrent of satisfaction.

“I want to eat grapes,” I said.

“You can’t eat grapes,” she said.

And then I screamed: “I want to eat grapes! I want to eat grapes!” And I melted to the floor, rolling onto my back. “I want to eat grapes! I want to eat grapes!”

“Well, you can’t eat grapes,” the light and airy voice said, “and you can’t eat iceberg lettuce.”

From there on, the absence of grapes became a constant, unyielding presence in my life. It seemed I was never far from a political poster about not eating grapes, or a leaflet, or a T-shirt, or a conversation, or a forum. I descended into a state of perpetual yearning that intertwined so tightly with my desire that it soon became impossible to distinguish one from the other and that established a terrible equation for me. Desire = yearning.

All of this culminated in the button my mother made me pin to my jacket, which featured the logo of the United Farm Workers—a black eagle with wings spread wide against a blood-red background—along with the unequivocal
imperative,
Don’t Eat Grapes.
I interpreted this not so much as an entreaty to the outside world as a scarlet letter to remind me of my own sinful desire, which, if ever quenched, would be through the immiseration of others.

“Is the boycott over yet?” I’d ask my mother.

“Not yet,” she’d say.

“When will the boycott be over?”

“When the capitalists give the workers their rights.”

“When will that happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“When it happens, will we eat grapes?”

“Yes.”

Weeks passed.

“Is the boycott over?”

“No.”

Months passed.

“Is the boycott over?”

“No.”

Fall came. Then winter. Grapes were no longer in season.

“Is the boycott over?”

“No.”

I had become that fox I had learned about in Aesop’s fable who jumped again and again without success at the bunch of grapes dangling on the branch above him. The story that the fox concocts in order to soothe himself and allay his disappointment is that the grapes themselves are most likely sour and not, in the end, worth his trouble. The conclusion I drew, however, was of a different nature. I began to see what my mother saw: The flaw was inside me. Desire under
capitalism—
all
desire—was a shameful, unwanted condition, and one should never attempt to satisfy that desire but instead, through heightened consciousness of the world, transcend it and by so doing rid oneself of it forever.

Three blocks from our apartment in Brooklyn was the supermarket in which my mother and I would do our weekly shopping. This occasion presented a predicament for the two of us. Not only was I in close proximity to great mountains of grapes but I was also keenly aware that my neighbors, many of them black, most of them poor, would effortlessly and without any apparent compunction load up their shopping carts with the fruit.

“Look, Ma,” I’d say, “it’s okay for us to eat grapes.”

“No, it’s not.”

And once we had completed our shopping, I would have to stand beside her in front of the supermarket while she unzipped her knapsack and handed out an endless supply of leaflets with the black eagle, the red background, the three simple words.

Then one day, after untold months of my ceaseless and unending demand, we were standing in the middle of the produce aisle when she said to me with obvious exasperation, “Eat one grape!”

I could not believe my good fortune. Immediately I reached my hand up toward the piles towering above me and I plucked without choosing. The grape was heavier than I
remembered grapes to be. I popped it into my mouth and bit down; fluid squirted into my cheeks. I chewed happily, violating the farm workers without remorse. Then three things occurred all at once. The first was that I realized how delicious the grape was, vindication of all the effort I had expended on obtaining it. The second was that I resolved this would not be the last time I was ever permitted to eat a grape. Finally, and most essential, I understood that the simple act of eating instantly rewrote the formula between desire and yearning, creating a new equation: desire + yearning = theft.

What was paramount for my mother, though, was that I had not breached the sanctity of the boycott. If anything, the supermarket took a loss on their investment and therefore, in an indirect way, thievery actually strengthened the struggle of the farm workers. Desire + yearning + theft = revolution.

The next time we were in the grocery store, my mother, now unable to turn back from the course of her decision, again allowed me to have a grape. The next time I ate without permission. “I’m just having one, Ma,” but I had two. After that, I ate three. So on and so forth. It became so habitual that I would stand leisurely in front of the mounds of grapes as if they were a buffet and I was considering my options. I would pluck casually as my mother shopped elsewhere in the store, my button informing the world to do the opposite of what I was doing.

One afternoon, in the midst of my revelry, with my mouth full and my hand reaching, I had the uncomfortable sensation that I was being observed. Not too far away, an
elderly white woman was staring at me intently. I resented her interference in what I had come to think of as a private moment, and I stopped chewing.

“Go ahead,” she said sweetly. “Go ahead and eat another one.”

I wanted to follow her suggestion, but there was something in her voice that made me hesitate. Were her words really words of encouragement? I sensed that I was in danger of being entrapped by the indecipherable language of adult sarcasm. I peered at the woman, who in turn peered at me. She had snow-white hair and leaned heavily on a cane and did not appear to have an unkind face. Perhaps she supported the boycott and therefore saw me as an ally championing the rights of migrant workers. It struck me suddenly how peculiar it was that an adult would actually endorse thievery, and I somehow sensed that I was following a peculiar set of rules. They were, of course, the correct rules, but they had set me in opposition to the rest of the world, where my right was everyone else’s wrong, and where my wrong was everyone else’s right, and where I would be helpless in ever being able to distinguish for myself which one was which.

On a warm summer day, one year after the boycott had begun and with no resolution in sight, my mother took me into Manhattan to visit the Empire State Building. The excursion had been planned weeks in advance, and my next-door
neighbor and best friend, Britton, had been invited to come along as well. I had looked forward to the trip with such eagerness that when we finally surfaced from the subway station at Forty-second Street, I instantly spotted the tower, its antenna stretching into the clouds, and I screamed at Britton at the top of my lungs, “Look at that, will you!”

It was lunchtime, and so the three of us walked into Bryant Park directly behind the library to eat a snack before embarking for our destination. In the early seventies, Bryant Park was not the beautiful deep-green urban oasis that it has since become. It was a neglected patch of diseased and pockmarked grass, enclosed by a stark iron fence and enormous hedges and frequented by drug dealers and drug users, prostitutes and beggars. The three of us found a seat on a bench near the statue of the poet William Cullen Bryant, his face grave and paternal as he watched out over the unhappy state of his park. Britton sat across from me, his lunch bag on his lap, his legs swinging to and fro. He was a year older than me, tall, slim, black, the son of sharecroppers who spoke with Southern accents. I would often squander entire days in his bedroom, lolling about on the floor as we watched cartoons until his mom or dad said it was time for me to go home.

“Eat your lunch,” my mother said to us.

Britton and I began to extract the food, one by one, that our respective mothers had packed for us in our brown paper bags. When I withdrew my bag of carrot sticks, I could not help but notice that Britton withdrew a fat and yellow Twinkie. I watched as he unwrapped it slowly, as if it might be a birthday present, and then devoured it bite by bite, each
bite cautious and calculated, until there was nothing left except to lick the cream from his fingers.

“Eat your carrots,” my mother said.

I stuffed them into my mouth and chewed without tasting.

“Don’t eat so fast,” she said.

I ignored her: chewed, swallowed, burped, and then stuck my hand back into the paper bag like a gambler thinking that his luck is about to change. Instead, I pulled out a container of yogurt. I looked up in time to see Britton holding a small bag of cookies. Was there nothing but treats in his bag?

“I don’t want my yogurt,” I announced boldly.

“Then eat your crackers.”

The word
crackers
struck me heavily. I felt humiliated by the word.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“Well, you’re going to be hungry.”

“I don’t want my crackers!” My voice was loud enough to catch Britton’s attention and make him pause mid-bite. He looked at me curiously before he began chewing. Brown crumbs fell. Pigeons approached.

I handed my lunch to my mother. “I’m done eating.”

“You’re going to be hungry,” she said again, but I had no interest in foresight.

“Let’s go,” I said grandly. “I’m ready to go to the Empire State Building.”

“But Britton isn’t finished eating yet.”

I wheeled toward him. “It’s time to go!”

But he ignored me and sunk his arm deep into the
bottomless paper bag, feeling around to see what other goodies there might be. And then he withdrew, like a surgeon performing a delicate operation, an enormous bunch of grapes.

I stared in horror.

“Britton isn’t finished eating yet,” I heard my mother repeat in the background.

The grapes were green and shiny and they glistened with moisture, every one, and I was sure they had been purchased from the same supermarket in which my mother and I shopped. Britton cradled them in his hand and then lifted them up by their stem, as if he wished to display them to everyone in the park. Then he selected one, the plumpest one of them all, and ate it.

“Hey, you,” I said. “You shouldn’t be eating those.”

Britton looked at me, mystified. “What?”

“You shouldn’t be eating those!” My voice was shrill, my finger pointing in accusation. I stood up from the bench and took a step toward him, thinking that I would snatch the grapes and smash them against the concrete. My mother would applaud my action.

“Ma!” I said. But when I turned to her for assistance, she was gazing at me with a befuddled look.

“What?” she said.

What? Where had her outrage gone? I was swirling in bright lights of confusion. Britton laughed.

“Don’t laugh!” I said, whipping around to him.