When Skateboards Will Be Free (3 page)

“I didn’t laugh,” he said.

Then my mother laughed, but when I whirled back to her, she had stopped. A crazy man tossed a handful of
bread crumbs into the air and cried out in delight, “Whee! Whee!”

I turned and hurried through the pigeons, which rose above me in agitation. At the edge of the park I could see cars speeding by in all directions. I waited to hear my mother call for me to return—“Saïd! Saïd!”—but she did not. When I looked back, I saw that she was still sitting on the bench, watching me dispassionately. The bunch of grapes remained in Britton’s hand, but he had stopped chewing. I walked to the corner, slowly enough so that I would be able to hear my mother’s voice. The light was red, and I waited for it to turn green and then I waited for it to turn red again. Then I remembered that we had come all the way from Brooklyn to see the Empire State Building. The thought startled me into the present and filled me with something like hope, and I turned back to my mother, but when I did it was as if I had stepped into the rabbit hole and the park was gone. I turned again. Was I facing the way I had come or the way I had gone? I ventured from the curb and a car horn boomed loudly, sending me scrambling back to the sidewalk. I could no longer see the Empire State Building; it had been swallowed by the faces of adults who loomed above, a sea of faces, each one hideous and unfamiliar.

“Is there something wrong with the boy?”

“Is the boy lost?”

“What’s your name, honey?”

“I think he’s lost.”

“Are you lost, honey?”

The faces of elderly women surrounded me, looking
down with smiles. A police car drew up to the curb, its lights flashing red, and a door opened and I was escorted into the backseat.

“Don’t worry, son,” one of the officers said to me. “We’ll find your mother and father.” He smiled at me. “What’s your name, son?”

I told the officer my name. The name was repeated into the radio. The radio responded. The police car pulled away from the curb and into snarled traffic. And all of a sudden, from out of the bubbling cauldron of the city, a shirtless old man appeared, thin and drunk, rapping urgently on the window.

“Officer! Officer!” the man cried breathlessly.

The officers ignored him and inched the car forward.

“Officer! Officer!”
Rap rap rap.

With a casual air, one of the officers unrolled his window. “How can we help you today, sir?”

“Officer,” the man implored, “there are men in the park hitting me with sticks.”

I felt alarm, but the officer showed no concern. “Can’t you see we have a lost little boy here?” he said.

The thin man absorbed me with his pink eyes and then quickly returned to the officers. “Officer, they’re hitting me—”

“There’s an officer on duty in the park,” the officer said.

“He’ll handle the matter for you.”

“Please!” the man said, but the traffic was unclogged now and the officer was rolling his window up, muting the sounds of the city. The old man’s voice faded away. And I sank comfortably into the cushions of the backseat, thinking that I
could sit there forever, happy within the insulated bubble of the police car with the world floating harmlessly by. I knew, also, that this was the wrong thought to be having. “The police are bad,” my mother had told me many times. “They are not part of the working class. They help the bosses to oppress.” I had also been haunted by a photo that seemed to run nearly every week in
The Militant
, showing a young black boy being choked by an enormous white New York City police officer. Suddenly I realized that my mother had dressed me that day in a big blue T-shirt supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. I was positive this T-shirt would be seen as an affront by the police officers, and I curled into myself in the backseat to make it less conspicuous. Through the window I could see the top of the Empire State Building come into view, its antenna still in the clouds, then we rounded a corner and it was gone.

At the police station I sat on a plastic chair beside filing cabinets. The officers who had found me joined with other officers in discussing my situation. I waited patiently and with my arms folded. Soon a very large officer—larger than all the rest—took me by the hand and led me down a hallway and into another room, which was empty except for a vending machine. We stood in front of the machine together, he and I and my T-shirt.

“Which kind do you like?” he said.

Rows of ice cream spread out in front of me.

“Nothing, mister,” I said.

“Come on,” he said, “what’s your favorite flavor?”

“Chocolate, mister.” It seemed a painful admission.

“I knew it,” he said, and he reached into his pocket and took out some coins and dropped them into the machine. I listened to them clink. Then he pulled the lever and out came a chocolate ice cream sandwich. He gave it to me.

“Thank you, mister.”

Then he put his hand in mine and led me back to the plastic chair, where my mother and Britton sat waiting.

We did not embrace when we saw each other. My mother told me that because of this unexpected, inconsiderate diversion, we had run out of time to visit the Empire State Building and would now return home straightaway. There was still paperwork to fill out and things to sign, and the three of us sat on our plastic chairs, staring ahead wordlessly. After a while, Britton produced a small rubber ball from his pocket and proceeded to bounce it up and down in front of him.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to bounce that in here,” my mother said. She said it quietly, like she was passing a secret from one person to the next. Did she mean that he shouldn’t bounce the ball because black boys who bounced balls in police stations would have their heads split open? An officer came by with a pen and paper, and my mother stood and conferred with him. Then another officer came by. Britton swung his legs casually in front of him. One, two, three. One, two, three. The ice cream lay in my lap. It was growing soft and warm. I could see that it was quickly melting and beginning to ooze against its wrapper. Soon it would become nothing but chocolate liquid. If I was going to eat it, I had to eat it now.

“Are you going to eat that?” Britton asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“When?”

“Soon.”

He went back to swinging his legs. One, two, three. I looked at the ice cream in my lap. I did not unwrap it.

I’
VE JUST WALKED OUT OF
a coffee shop at Union Square to see a Socialist Workers Party book table set up on the corner. “Olga Rodríguez for Mayor. Vote Socialist Workers,” the banner reads, because it’s October 1997 and everybody in the city is gearing up for the forthcoming mayoral election between Rudy Giuliani and Ruth Messinger. Everybody but me, that is. I’ve never voted in any election—mayoral, presidential, or otherwise—and I don’t intend to do so now. To cast my ballot for Olga Rodríguez would be to bend to my father’s will; to cast my ballot for someone else would be to betray him.

There are a half dozen comrades standing in front of the table, holding out that week’s
Militant
to the people walking past. It’s Saturday, and the streets are teeming with NYU students, and couples out for a stroll, and boys with basketballs, but no one stops.

“End police brutality. Defend immigrant rights. Vote for a working-class alternative,” one of the men says to a group of young black women carrying violin cases. They walk on as if they’ve heard nothing. The comrade follows after them for a moment and then retreats. His hair is bushy and uncombed and his shoes are scuffed. He is young but looks old. An enormous knapsack hangs off his back.

Maybe I should buy a copy of
The Militant
from him.
Why not? It’s only $1.50. Plus if my father shows up he’ll be delighted. “Sidsky! Let’s have lunch!”

I spent my Saturdays as a little boy playing on the sidewalk next to these book tables, hoping that someone would stop to buy. The locations varied from week to week; sometimes it was in front of a supermarket or a school or a public library, sometimes on the sidelines of a demonstration, sometimes just a corner on a crowded street. Sometimes it was in the rain and sometimes the dead of winter. I can still hear my mother’s voice, slight but grave, as she repeated the week’s headline over and over like a mantra, hoping to interest passersby in purchasing that issue, or in purchasing an entire subscription, or in purchasing a book. Or in joining the party.

“End U.S. imperialist domination of the Middle East,” she might say one hundred times on a Saturday, five hundred times, a thousand times.

From my place on the sidewalk I would look up and watch her every so often. When a person neared, she would take a few quick steps toward them with
The Militant
outstretched, her body language such that it seemed as if she was considering taking a stroll with that person, and the person, acutely aware of her proximity, would stiffen and quicken their pace, leaving my mother behind. The whole interaction took only seconds. She had at most ten words to make her pitch.

“End U.S. imperialist domination of…”

“End U.S.…”

As the strangers approached, one after the other, I would will them to buy
The Militant
from my mother. Maybe this
person is going to, I would think. Maybe that other person is going to. I willed a thousand
Militants
to be bought, ten thousand, one million. And for every thousand people who hurried past without stopping, there would be that one who, like a miracle, would stop to discuss, or to buy, or to put their name on a mailing list to receive announcements about upcoming events. And for every million, there would be the one who would actually join the party.

But whatever happened that Saturday, whatever contribution big or small—maybe just a car honking in support—would be enough to give my mother the sustenance to show up the next weekend to do it all over again.

It was a table just like this table that my parents passed by one autumn afternoon in 1964 on the campus of the University of Minnesota and stopped for a moment, only a moment, to listen to what it was all about.

They had met each other by chance seven years earlier at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend. My mother was an aspiring novelist studying for an undergraduate degree in English literature, and my father was working toward a doctorate in mathematics. His journey from Tehran to Minneapolis was a long and improbable one that began when he was eighteen years old and had entered an essay contest on the theme “What is liberty?” The contest had been sponsored by the U.S. government, and offered, as grand prize, a scholarship to study at an American university. The irony that my father would hold forth eloquently enough on the subject of liberty to win the scholarship and then spend the rest of his life trying to overthrow the very government that had
provided him with that scholarship is trumped by the irony that the government that had asked him to consider the idea of liberty was itself plotting to overthrow the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. My father has recounted that on the night of that coup in 1953, he gathered in the darkened streets of Tehran with a group of other young men his age, all of them trying to figure out what, if anything, they could do to help their country. When the Shah’s tanks rolled past, they realized there was nothing they could do, and so they went back inside their homes and locked the doors, and a few weeks later my father was happily, thankfully, learning math in the United States.

My mother, on the other hand, had chosen the University of Minnesota because her brother was there studying for his doctorate. It had been an easy decision for her to make, as her brother was Mark Harris, already an accomplished novelist who would go on to write nearly twenty books, most famously
Bang the Drum Slowly
, which was turned into a film starring Robert De Niro. My mother did not arrive at the university alone, however, but with her own mother, who was crippled from rheumatoid arthritis and confined to a wheelchair. Her mother had been a frail, infirm woman nearly all her life, suffering from one debilitating illness after another. And her father had been the opposite: a lawyer and landlord, stormy and contentious at both, who allowed his New York City apartment buildings to fall into disrepair, suing and countersuing tenants with verve until he was eventually disbarred for having swindled a business partner. When my mother was four years old, her mother contracted
rheumatic fever—for the second time—and during her struggle to regain her health her husband proposed she go to Clearwater, Florida, for six months while he remained behind. This was just the first of many times that my mother’s father would devise a way to separate from the family under dubious pretenses. Lonely, bewildered, and unable to properly care for her children in a strange city, my ailing grandmother made the decision to place my mother into first grade at the age of four. It was a decision from which my mother would never recover: held back in fifth grade, put on probation in college, and constantly shadowed by her own sense that she was intellectually deficient. “Martha seems immature for her age,” her first-grade teacher wrote home on her report card, apparently not taking into account that the little girl was nearly two years younger than her classmates. When her father abandoned the family once and for all eight years later, disappearing into Manhattan forever, he left behind his twelve-year-old daughter (both sons were already grown and gone) to care for a wife who was on the verge of becoming an invalid. Before leaving for school in the morning, my mother would dress her mother, comb her hair, and tie her shoes. And each night, without fail, she would wake and pad into her mother’s bedroom, where she would slip her arms under the wasted body racked with pain—sixteen aspirin a day—and turn her from one side to the other. But by the time my mother was nineteen and a sophomore in college, she had managed to extricate herself from her mother, sending her on a train back to Mount Vernon to be cared for by others.

So at that dinner party in 1957, the young Jewish woman
and the young Iranian man were introduced for the first time, and saw something in each other, and fell in love, and about one year later they were married, and one year after that they had a son named Jacob, and three years after that a daughter named Jamileh.