When Skateboards Will Be Free (21 page)

And so in lieu of any assistance I took to carrying a little piece of metal that I had found on the floor of occupational/vocational training. It was about the size of a paper clip, with a sharp, jagged end, and I was determined, if ever there was cause, to poke my assailant in the eye. I knew I would never
actually be brave enough to do this, but the thought of doing it empowered me. When I sat at my desk, when I walked the halls between classes, when I ate my lunch, I would finger the piece of metal in my pocket, and I would feel soothed by its presence.

M
EANWHILE, IN
I
RAN
, M
AHMOUD
S
AYRAFIEZADEH
and his recently renamed Revolutionary Workers Party—so as to distinguish themselves from the faction calling itself the Militant Wing of the Socialist Workers Party—were diligently preparing for the first presidential election in the history of the nation. One hundred twenty-four candidates registered for this historic event that would finally, irrevocably, bring an end to twenty-five centuries of monarchy. The dream that Saïd Salmasi had fought and died for had finally come to pass, and my father, having lived his life under the shadow of such sacrifice, respectfully accepted his party’s nomination.

The cover of an accompanying manifesto showed Jimmy Carter’s head either resting on or emerging from a giant pile of skulls. And escaping into Carter’s gaping, yawning mouth was a diminutive version of the Shah clutching a suitcase in each hand, presumably stuffed with seventy billion dollars in cash.

“The presidential elections are being held,” the campaign platform read,

Against this unhappy end, my father proposed a half dozen solutions, the first and foremost of which was support for the “anti-imperialist campaign” being waged by the Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam, who continued to hold fifty-three Americans hostage.

I learned about my father’s candidacy by way of another envelope that arrived for me just a week after my eleventh birthday. “Here you are,” my mother said again. Inside, I found a leaflet written entirely in Persian, with densely packed text on both sides, much of it black, some of it red. Next to the text was a small, closely cropped photo of my father’s clean-shaven face, with that same inviting, confident smile. There was no
note included, no explanation, no translation, and except for the fact that someone had written
For Saïd
at the very top of the leaflet, there was nothing to indicate that it was actually for me. It was a leaflet, after all, printed and distributed for the multitudes. Still, it felt like an acknowledgment of sorts for my birthday—if not a gift, then a sound reason for there not being a gift.

I sat for a few minutes at the edge of my bed with the wincing understanding that the news of my father’s candidacy was spectacular and that any other boy would be proud of it. So instead of putting the leaflet in my sock drawer, I thumbtacked it next to a picture of John Travolta on the bulletin board above my desk for all to admire. Here I was, in possession of a powerful secret that would astonish the world if it were ever to find out. It was so enticing and irresistible a secret, in fact, that when Mr. Petrisko announced to the class that we were each to bring in something to present for current events, I hesitated not at all and chose the leaflet. Not until I was sitting in the back of the classroom, watching the students stand and deliver, did I understand how absolutely compromised I had made myself. In front of me on my desk sat the leaflet, and in front of the leaflet sat Daniel and Tab and an entire room of likeminded boys and girls. I watched with growing apprehension as each student took center stage and proceeded to teach us about what was going on with things like the state of the steel industry in Pittsburgh. My relief each time Iran was not mentioned was counterbalanced by the knowledge that I was the one who was going to be
doing the mentioning. I thought for a moment of crumpling up the leaflet and claiming I had misunderstood the assignment, but that seemed beyond forgivable.

Finally it was my turn to present. There was no getting around it. I stood and walked to the front of the class, my knees barely bending, and took the spotlight. I held the leaflet gingerly in front of me, with my other hand deep in my pocket fingering the small piece of metal. I looked out into the rows of faces that ran from disinterested to murderous, judiciously avoiding Daniel’s and Tab’s.

“This is a leaflet for someone who is running for president of Iran.” I said. Then I waited. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for someone to ask me who the man in the leaflet was.

This is a leaflet for someone who is running for president of Iran
.

Who is the man in the leaflet, Saïd?

To freely offer that he was my father felt like cheating. So I waited. And the class waited. And Mr. Petrisko waited. And I realized, standing there in a sea of silence, that I had nothing whatsoever else to say about the leaflet in my hand. It began and ended with my father. My gaze dropped from the faces in front to my shoes below, the gray canvas Nikes. Then I studied the carpeting. It was such soft carpeting, and I wondered what it would be like to take a nap on it.

Soon I heard Mr. Petrisko’s voice waking me, asking, “Can you tell the class something about the language the leaflet’s written in, Saïd?”

I looked at him. I blanched. I did not know anything about the language the leaflet was written in. The language was beside the point.

“Can you tell the class something about the history of Iran, Saïd?”

I saw that I was trapped in a student-teacher exchange from which there was no exit. I stood in front of the class, undressed, tilting to one side, examining the leaflet as if I was just about to say something interesting, fully aware that I had failed the assignment. Under the bright lights of the classroom, the quality of the leaflet appeared to me as shoddy and amateurish, a thing you might find at a community center. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? The single hole I had made with the thumbtack looked at me.

“Okay, Saïd, thank you,” Mr. Petrisko said, mercifully giving me permission to take my seat. Which I did at once. Returning again to the piece of steel in my pocket, while I watched the next student rise and begin to effortlessly expound on the debate over nuclear power. “This is a photograph of Three Mile Island …”

When class was over I stayed behind, hovering around Mr. Petrisko’s desk until he was done shuffling his papers.

“I just wanted to tell you,” I said, once we were alone, “that the man in the leaflet is Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh.”

He looked at me without effect.

“He’s my father,” I said.

I said it with understatement, with false humility, so that Mr. Petrisko would have room for his response.

Why didn’t you say something, Saïd? That changes everything
.

“Is that so?” he said, with an understatement that equaled mine.

“Yes,” I said.

Then neither of us said anything, because there was nothing else to say, and soon Mr. Petrisko returned to the mound of papers on his desk.

M
Y FATHER LOST, ANYWAY
. M
ORE
than fourteen million people went to the polls in Iran, and eleven million of them cast their ballot for Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. Ahmad Madani took about two million, Hassan Habib five hundred thousand, and the remaining sixty or so candidates—another sixty had already dropped out by the time of the election—divided up what was left. The fight for a socialist Iran had been stalled.

A week or so after I presented the leaflet, I was sitting in English class taking a test on verbs and nouns when the door opened and a classmate I had once been friendly with entered the room. Everyone automatically looked up to see who could be so late for class, and when we did we saw Charlie, with his faded jeans and his dirty-blond hair and a black T-shirt with a grotesque caricature of Khomeini’s face—all eyebrows and nose—in the center of a bull’s-eye. Above the bull’s-eye, in giant white letters, were two simple words:
Iran Sucks
.

There was a clean space of silence as fifty eyes in the room absorbed the meaning of what was emblazoned on the boy’s chest, absorbed that a boy could indeed be so bold as to wear it to class, and when it was all fully processed every mouth in the room opened up and laughed. It had the timbre of a shriek, high-pitched and prolonged. Add to it that the fifty eyes had now turned away from the bull’s-eye and on to me,
keenly seeking my reaction. I sat in my chair, thinking
I support the struggle of the Iranian workers and peasants against U.S. imperialism.…

The class was taught by a tall pretty blonde who I had a crush on, and she waited until the sound had all but died away before suggesting, respectfully, that the boy go and put a jacket on. “That’s not an appropriate shirt to wear to school, Charlie,” she said with a boys-will-be-boys tone that infuriated me. Charlie dutifully departed, but when he returned wearing a plain brown jacket, it elicited its own squeals of delight. Beneath it, we all knew, resided a terribly tantalizing thing. The thrill was now in what was unspoken. And throughout the rest of the day, whenever a teacher stepped out of the classroom or turned to the chalkboard, Charlie would stand and unzip his jacket, exposing his chest defiantly, delighting the classroom. “Tell me what is so funny!” Mrs. Irani exclaimed, which made everyone laugh even more.

I resolved finally to do what my mother could not do, and I asked Mr. Petrisko to move me into another class. He didn’t ask me why and I didn’t tell him why, but I knew he knew. Since there was only one “scholars” class on my floor, there was nowhere to put me except into the class known as “regular.” I agreed to it immediately, and the following Monday, not a day too soon, I took my seat in a room filled with black boys and girls, where I instantly reverted back to a white child.

And that is where I stayed for the remainder of the school year, quietly, anonymously, doing work without challenge, but entirely content. The only time I was noticed was when
there was a substitute teacher, who would mangle my name and everyone would laugh. Other than that, my classmates barely paid attention to me. Even that April, when the helicopters crashed in the desert in an attempt to rescue the hostages, Iran was not mentioned. I made no friends in that class, but that was okay. I no longer had any interest in making friends.

T
HINGS DID NOT GO WELL
for my father after he lost the presidential election. And things did not go well for Iran. The balance of power, already weighted heavily in favor of the clerics and Khomeini, tipped further. A cultural revolution surged through the country, and vestiges of the West—including neckties—were banned, journalists were imprisoned for criticizing Islam, and women were ordered to wear the veil in public, reversing the previous five decades where women had been ordered
not
to wear the veil in public. Universities became engulfed in deadly riots. Thousands were hanged or shot for the crime of counterrevolution. The Mujahideen, with a guerrilla army of a hundred thousand, fought back against the government with bombings and assassinations. Reprisals followed reprisals. Unemployment soared. To make matters worse, Saddam Hussein bombed the Mehrabad Airport on September 22, 1980, blacking out Tehran and beginning a war that would last eight years and take a million lives. And, of course, there were the hostages.

Even the Revolutionary Workers Party—which had already split from the Socialist Workers Party of Iran—was beset by more discord and disagreement, and sixty members broke off to found the Workers Unity Party. The party printed its own newspaper,
Hemmat (Determination)
, with my father as editor, and a platform that claimed it was the
only party
which shows the road to victory for the working class.
What Barnes had triumphantly proclaimed just two years earlier as “the first Trotskyist party on Iranian soil” was now three Trotskyist parties on Iranian soil, opposing Islam and one another while struggling for relevance in a country that was descending into chaos. My father did not stop advocating for his vision of Iran, softened now to include critical support for the clerics, but, even so, the space for dissent was growing more narrow by the day.

The Socialist Workers Party in the United States continued to support the revolution, arguing that while it might be Islamic it was also anti-imperialist and that it should be defended without condition. But there was no mistaking that the enthusiasm had worn away and the time had come to move on. It was not going to be the revolution we had hoped for. My mother still listened to National Public Radio every morning, pausing as she always did when the news turned to Iran, but now she listened without reproach or recrimination. And my father was no longer mentioned in our household. There was nothing more to say about him, really. It was just the two of us once again, my mother and me, sitting together at the kitchen table.

By the time I started seventh grade, the hostage crisis was well into its tenth month. I had been returned to the scholars class, but I was prepared my first day to ask to be transferred straight into regular if need be. There would be no delay this time. Much to my relief, however, an influx of new students had shuffled things, and by the luck of the draw Daniel and Tab had been placed far away on another floor. And as for
the students in my classroom, Iran had ceased to be an urgent topic of conversation. It scarcely mattered, though, as I had already made up my mind that under no circumstance would I make my opinion known. Furthermore, I had devised the clever strategy of telling anyone who inquired that I was Persian. No one, including me, knew exactly where or what Persia was, but everyone seemed satisfied with the answer.