When Skateboards Will Be Free (7 page)

The woman had blinked back, confused. “What did you say to me?” It must have been an unusual question to have been posed so unexpectedly by a stranger—a white stranger—and the woman seemed to take it as an affront.

“This refrigerator,” my mother said, pointing at it as if it were alive, “the landlord won’t take it away. Make sure you don’t let your son play around it.”

The woman had nodded and said okay, but still she seemed unable to discern by my mother’s tone if she was being helpful or hostile. Then she took her boy by the hand and the two of them walked off.

Our flight from Brooklyn had felt clandestine: things thrust in boxes hastily, like we were planning an escape. Furniture
was sold for whatever the buyer was willing to pay. I watched it all go. With the help of a dozen comrades, my mother had loaded the moving van on a cold, sunny afternoon in December, four days before my seventh birthday. Able to carry only the lightest things, I had watched like a spectator as the boxes were placed one on top of the other, balancing high, all the unsold things of our life, even a potted plant. When it was time for us to embark, Britton emerged from our apartment building and put out his hand like an adult. Where had he learned how to make such a gesture? “Good-bye,” he said. I shook his hand. “Good-bye.”

By choosing Pittsburgh, my mother was again following the bread crumbs that led to her brother Mark, who was now an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, basking in the acclaim of his motion picture
Bang the Drum Slowly. A film everybody will cheer!
the advertisements said. It was my uncle who had been the one to suggest that a single mother with a child would have an easier life in a slower, smaller city like Pittsburgh. And it was only because of him and his largesse that, in the beginning, life for me seemed fanciful and the exact opposite of hardship. For the first week my mother and I lived with him and his family in his enormous house, which had a piano, soft carpeting, a backyard, a light-blue Mercedes, a black maid, and an extraordinary painting, twenty feet wide, maybe thirty, of a partially unwrapped chocolate bar. When I passed this chocolate bar hanging in the landing of the staircase, I wanted to stick my hand right into it and grab a piece and stuff it into my mouth and face the consequences of my action. My uncle was pleasant and
friendly, a head and nose full of white hair, and would surface now and then from his den to speak to me as if I were an adult: “Martha tells me that you also have an interest in literature.” I spent most of my days playing with my cousin Henry, who was six years older and had built an elaborate toy village in his basement, with miniature houses and cars and people and through which wound an electric train. I would watch endlessly, tirelessly, as he steered the locomotive round and round.

I assumed, of course, that this was my home now and that I would live in it with them forever. But for some reason, only a week after my mother and I had arrived, we packed our suitcases and went elsewhere. The next house we found was not a house but a one-bedroom apartment that belonged to a cheerful couple from the Socialist Workers Party named Ed and Carla, who had graciously allowed us to stay with them. At night, since there was no extra bed or couch, my mother and I would cover ourselves with a blanket and fall asleep side by side on the living-room floor. In the morning, after Ed and Carla had left for their factory jobs, I would wash myself in the sink, since the bathtub had not been equipped with a faucet. After that, my mother would leave me behind in the strange home while she undertook the daunting, insurmountable tasks of finding a job, an apartment, and an elementary school, the latter search made even more arduous by the fact that we had arrived in the middle of a teachers’ strike.

For my seventh birthday my uncle had given me one of those plastic View-Master toys that you look into like binoculars while clicking through three-dimensional images
that tell a variety of stories like Cinderella or Snow White. I had been given only one story with the gift—Superman—and during the day I would sit alone in the silent, unfamiliar apartment and stare over and over through the thing, clicking past the same dozen pictures of Superman flying high above the skyline en route to rescuing someone. I kept thinking that the story would somehow change to something new, or that I would see something in it that I hadn’t seen before, but it remained as it always was. Eventually I grew so ill of it, almost on the verge of real illness, that I resorted to a math workbook that had also been given to me as a gift. It turned out to be slightly beneath my aptitude, and so I was able to pass the hours by compulsively penciling in answers to problems that were without challenge. In the evening, when my mother returned from scouring the unknown city, she would sit next to me on the living-room floor and carefully check my work one by one, all of it without error. Then we would cover ourselves with the blanket and fall asleep.

The home my mother finally found for us was a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a small brick building in the middle of a ghetto. To get to it our first night, my mother and I boarded a bus filled with exhausted passengers, most of them black. We carried with us several bags of clothes and a broom. I had never known anyone to be on a bus with a broom, and I felt embarrassed to be seen with it and began to have a keen sense that something had gone far off-kilter. We rode for a while through dark Pittsburgh streets, until my mother was certain we had missed our stop
and had to ask a fellow passenger if the bus was going in the right direction. The passenger did not know the answer, nor did the next passenger, nor did the bus driver, until it became clear to everyone involved that my mother was stressing the wrong syllable of the name of the street so that it was rendered incomprehensible to native Pittsburghers. Eventually we passed a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, and a gas station, and a parking lot, and shortly after that it was time for us to get off.

Through the neighborhood we walked, with the bags and the broom. It was very dark out, and I imagined that the lighted windows in the houses were eyes observing us as we passed. Halfway to our new home, my mother realized that it was past dinnertime and we had not yet eaten and had no groceries, so we turned and went back the way we had come, the eyes watching us return, and walked to the Howard Johnson’s. Sitting beside the bags and the broom—I had never known anyone to sit in a restaurant with a broom—I ate a hot dog and a pickle. For dessert my mother ordered for me, as a special treat, an ice cream sundae in the shape of a snowman dressed in a candy suit with a smiling chocolate face. It was disconcerting to be given such a thing, it was not at all consistent with my mother’s character, and I knew in that moment, and without equivocation, that something was terribly wrong with us.

“Look at the funny ice cream man,” my mother said, but it was the voice of a performer.

The snowman grinned up at me wildly. I felt indebted.

Despite being occupied by other tenants, our new apartment building radiated a feeling of having been abandoned years earlier, decades earlier, neglected and unrepaired. The floors of the apartment were uneven and slanted toward the middle, causing the furniture to lean forward precariously away from the walls, as if it were preparing to take flight. The carpeting was brown, or green, or had once been green, but had been worn down and away by the feet of previous generations. If you stepped too heavily in the kitchen, the living room vibrated; if you tried to shut the bedroom door, it wouldn’t close completely; if you took a bath, the tub wouldn’t drain. The place, no matter how much you scrubbed, could not be cleaned. There were only a few small windows, and if it was a sunny day, the sunlight could not penetrate. Pittsburgh climate being what it is, most days were without sun, and so the rooms grew dark long before it was night. The front door of our apartment opened directly out onto the sidewalk, giving the distressing perception that anyone passing by on the street could walk into our home unannounced. In my bed at night, I would watch the headlights from passing cars illuminate the bedroom with red and yellow streaks of light, thinking that one wrong move and the car would come crashing through.

If the neighborhood had ever amounted to anything, it
was a long time ago. Now the only claim it could make was the fading memory that forty years earlier Andy Warhol had lived there as a little boy. The street I lived on was called Ophelia Street, and it was narrow and fronted on either side by worn-out brick houses packed tightly together and inhabited by ex-steelworkers. There was a playground nearby with swings and a giant metal turtle that could be climbed on top of, or under, but no children were ever seen. Across the street from our apartment was a small corner store that sold candy and soda and did a brisk business, but other than that the area had a deserted feel, a ghost town where only a few remaining holdouts continued to live. One block away was the Monongahela River. In a few miles it would connect with the Allegheny, and the two together would form the Ohio. For more than a century these three rivers had been busy day and night, bringing in coal and taking out steel, but by the time my mother and I arrived, the steel industry was collapsing, and one century of booming prosperity was coming to an end, leaving Pittsburgh an aged and decimated city. The Monongahela River carried nothing now, lying empty and still like a parking lot that had been thoughtlessly constructed in the middle of nowhere. Our neighborhood sloped down toward the water and gave the impression that in due time all the streets and houses would slide completely into it and be no longer.

Up the hill from us, strategically placed so as to be easily accessible to the downtrodden of the neighborhood, was the headquarters for the Pittsburgh branch of the Socialist Workers Party, both meeting hall and bookstore, with twenty
or so members. It was a small building, just a few rooms and a basement, with a storefront that was always pasted with signs calling out to the workers.

Our move to this neighborhood and to this apartment made me feel that I had descended from a great height and fallen hard to earth. For this reason I took to referring to our apartment as “the cave,” and my mother, rather than seeing this as a troubling indicator, instead found it delightful, asking me to repeat it to comrades, who also found it delightful.

“Go on, Saïd, tell Ed and Carla and Bill and Ginny what you said about our new apartment.…” And I would repeat it, finding myself strangely happy, reveling in the gales of laughter that greeted me.

The difference between us and the other poor families in this neighborhood was that our poverty was intentional and self-inflicted. A choice chased after, as opposed to a reality that could not be avoided. There was no compelling reason for such deprivation. From the secondhand clothing to the secondhand furniture, from the unpaid library books to the unbought skateboard, it was all artifice. We were without money, yes, but we were not without options. My mother was highly literate, well read, well spoken, and she held an undergraduate degree in English literature from a time when many women did not even attend college. Not to mention that fifteen
minutes away lived a wealthy brother who had generously helped her throughout the years, had even helped pay her tuition when she had wanted to return to school. Then there was the matter of the missing husband, who, with some cajoling—or the cajoling of the judicial system—could be pressed into aiding us.

Instead, my mother actively, consciously, chose not only for us to
be
poor but for us to
remain
poor, and the two of us suffered greatly for it. Because to suffer and to suffer greatly was the point. It was the fulfillment of ourselves. My mother was no doubt emboldened by the philosophy that there was honor in wretchedness, virtue in misery, nobility in hardship. Members of the Socialist Workers Party might outwardly deride Christian ideals extolling poverty and the renunciation of material goods, but inwardly they were convinced that there was nothing more ignominious than to succeed in a society that was as morally bankrupt as ours. It was no accident that almost every comrade was from a middle-class background and had repudiated their upbringing and their college degrees in order to pursue a higher, more profound calling. If you flourished in this society, you flourished because you were deviant and unethical, an exploiter of the working class. Marx had believed that it was the oppressed who would inherit the earth, and every communist since him had believed it as well, including Lenin, Trotsky, and the members of the Socialist Workers Party. My mother and I lived within a slightly retailored version of the Sermon on the Mount—but only slightly. When the revolution
finally arrived, we would stand first among the deserving. My mother would see to it.

I was not without my own resources in this neighborhood. I refused to be without them. A week or so after our arrival, I was befriended by a boy a year or two older than I, blond-haired and blue-eyed, named Michael March. He was also the single child of a single mother, and he was also left to his own devices, but while my early life had caused me to shield myself from danger and confrontation and turn inward, his had caused him to seek out precarious situations and place himself in the middle of them. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to play with that boy,” my mother had said upon meeting him, sensing danger—and she had been right. Not more than ten years later he’d kill himself playing Russian roulette with a group of friends.

One night, as we wandered the neighborhood looking for something to do, I had unwittingly followed him up the stairs to the front door of a stranger’s house. Hardly registering what was transpiring before me, I watched as he soundlessly turned the doorknob and crawled into the home unannounced. Unable to turn away—because I had nowhere else to go—I had slunk after him down the dim hallway. From an adjacent room came the sounds of the family at dinner. It was a peculiar, distressing sensation to be inside a stranger’s home when the stranger did not know I was there. The house felt haunted and I knew, distantly, that I was the
one doing the haunting. Silently, Michael and I had crawled on our hands and knees down into the basement, where, in the clammy darkness, we rummaged through boxes of old clothes and books until we found what it was we were after: toys. Through the box we went, examining each ball and game and car, as if we had been taken on a shopping spree. Finally I settled on a Barbie doll in a pink dress, one shoe missing. Michael, in response, took for himself Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken. That we had allowed ourselves only one toy apiece was a bizarre limit in what could have been a limitless transgression. Just as the two of us were preparing to make our getaway, we heard the family’s conversation cease abruptly, and the sound of a chair scraping out from the table, and vigorous male footsteps rapidly approaching overhead. In a panic, we scurried around the basement looking for a place to save ourselves. Michael managed to conceal himself expertly beneath the laundry table. “Hide me!” I had whispered in desperation, but there was room for only one. Not knowing what to do, I had buried my head in my hands in the hope that if I could not see, I could not be seen. But the footsteps passed over and faded away, and once we were sure the family had safely resumed their dinner, the two of us crawled back the way we had come, our hands and knees making impressions in the carpeting. Later that night, in Michael’s empty apartment, showing no signs of remorse, we stripped Barbie and Ken of their clothes and, in feverish child’s play, pressed their plastic bodies against each other.