When Skateboards Will Be Free (8 page)

Not very long after that, with my mother still unemployed and the teachers still on strike, she and I woke one
day before dawn and, along with a few other comrades, caught a Greyhound bus to Richmond, Virginia. The ride took six hours, and the combination of the cold winter air, the stale heat blowing through the vents, the uncomfortable seats, and the incessant swerving along highways caused me, midway through the trip, to vomit into an empty paper cup that my mother held in front of my mouth. It felt like an act of penance for what I had done with Michael, and I accepted it as such. Once in Richmond, we had joined about five hundred other protesters, mostly women, including comrades from other branches, and listened to speaker after speaker, also mostly women, as they demanded that Virginia pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

Richmond was no warmer than Pittsburgh, but I accepted this also as penance. When the last speaker had spoken, all five hundred of us marched through downtown toward the statehouse, chanting and holding our banners aloft, passing shoppers and office workers who stopped to stare at us curiously as if we were a circus come to town. I felt the familiar sensation of being naked, on display, a monkey being led through the streets for the townspeople to gape at. A woman leading the throng chanted through her bullhorn, “Hey, hey, what do you say? Ratify the ERA!” Voices rose up in unison, and soon my mother joined the chorus, her voice sounding frail in the open air of the city. I shouted along as well. To remain silent would have made me conspicuous in the eyes of both the bystanders and the people with whom I was marching.

“What do we want?” the bullhorn asked.

“The ERA!” I screamed.

“When do we want it?”

“Now!” I screamed.

There was comfort in being able to see the problem before me, contained and defined, and understanding clearly what the remedy for that problem was. There was comfort also in knowing that there were five hundred other people who understood this problem as well. And as I marched and shouted, I began to feel that we were the ones who were on the inside and those who stood idly on the sidewalks with their bags and their briefcases were on the outside, lost and confused. They were the circus, and
I
had come to watch
them.

When we finally arrived at the Virginia statehouse, a few women took the microphone to again make our demands known. Behind them was a well-scrubbed flight of stairs ascending toward a gigantic white building surrounded by impassive columns. “The seat of ruling-class power,” my mother had said with bitterness. Its grand, imperial architecture had a sobering effect on the day’s events, putting into perspective what the odds really were. By late afternoon the protest broke up, and with the winter sun beginning to set, my mother and I rode six hours back to Ophelia Street on the Greyhound bus, where I once again, midway through, vomited into an empty paper cup that my mother held before my mouth.

After that, my mother landed a job as a secretary at Carnegie Mellon University, and the teachers’ strike ended, and I found
myself standing in front of a door that I could not open. Was it the wrong door?

I had worked at the lock calmly at first, operating under the premise that it would only be a matter of time before it would click. I had assumed that the defect was in me, not the lock, but soon I began to feel that I was attempting something that could never be achieved. It was freezing, and I sensed that I was in grave danger, or would soon be. I thought perhaps I should go to Michael’s house, but I was so unfamiliar with the neighborhood that I didn’t know how to get there. As the sky darkened toward evening and it grew colder, I became delirious with the thought that eventually the key would find the right groove and the door would swing wide. The key fitting, the door swinging, the key fitting … I knocked on the door. “Ma!” I called out, and the sound of my voice startled me, emphasizing the silence of the neighborhood. Then I kicked on the door. I pulled on its knob. Then I pushed on its knob. I knocked again, this time louder and with both fists. “Ma! Ma!” And from down the street I could hear, “Saïd! Saïd!” But when I turned to greet my mother, she was not there.

Without bothering to consider what I was doing, I turned and stood flat against the unyielding door, my back pressing into the cold steel, giving myself up to its mercy. Then I pulled the fluttering storm door closed around me, so that I was sandwiched between the two doors, protected as best I could against the elements. My head reached just high enough that I was able to look through the glass of the storm door, out onto the world. There was nothing to observe. Everything
was blank. It grew darker. It grew colder. The wind picked up. The storm door rattled. In the darkness the refrigerator smiled at me, its white body glowing like it was alive and well. I imagined my mother arriving at any moment, now, now, now. Then I imagined Michael March coming to find me. After that, I imagined my uncle’s light-blue Mercedes rounding the corner.

At one point, two older boys came running down the street, happily tossing a football back and forth. They stopped for a minute in front of my building, laughing loudly and chasing the football as it bounced around and beneath parked cars. Their shouts flew in the face of the general order of things, as if they were violating a code of conduct of the neighborhood. Then they decided to take a shortcut through a small opening beside my building, and as they did they noticed me. I looked at them through the glass and they looked back at me. They hesitated for a moment before walking off, unsettled by the sensation of a door seemingly come to life. Then a small man appeared at the far end of the street and the boys ran on.

I watched the man as he approached. He was wrapped in scarves and bent against the wind, carrying with some difficulty a small bag of groceries that made him look a bit like a cripple, the weight pulling one shoulder unevenly toward the ground. As the man drew closer, the wind blew straight into him and he turned slightly to one side, trying to deflect the blow from his face. Then the wind subsided and the man moved forward quickly until he was directly in front of my door, peering at me through the glass.

“What are you doing in there?” my mother asked, and it was asked with displeasure, as if I was playing a naughty game she had asked me not to play.

“The lock doesn’t work, Ma!” I said.

“What do you mean the lock doesn’t work?” Again the tone of displeasure, impatience. “It worked this morning. How could it not work now?”

“The key doesn’t work, Ma!”

“Which is it?” she said.

“I have to go to the bathroom, Ma!”

She undid the latch of the storm door, and I was released back out into the air of the neighborhood. I handed her the useless key.

“Why didn’t you walk over to the party headquarters?” she asked. “It’s only a few blocks away.” When she said it, I saw myself from above, a bird’s-eye view, wandering through foreign streets that crisscrossed one another. “There will always be a comrade there,” she said.

The word
comrade
was fluffy and sweet, like cotton candy, and I faulted myself for not having thought of it. The error had been mine.

“Next time,” my mother said more gently now.

“Next time,” I said.

Then my mother put the disobedient key into the lock, jiggled it once, and the door clicked and swung open as if it had been waiting to do that all along. And the two of us entered our new home, with the boxes still unpacked and the broom propped against the wall.

T
HAT SPRING WE HAD A
picnic. All the comrades were there, twenty maybe. Plus about ten “sympathizers,” those who were not yet officially comrades but whom everyone hoped would soon decide to be. “They don’t have parks like this in New York City,” my mother told me. I helped Ed carry cans of soda from the trunk of his car. Ed, whose apartment floor I had slept on not too long ago. I liked Ed. Maybe I even loved him. His hands were big and his arms were strong. Machinist’s arms, or steelworker’s, or coal miner’s. Whatever it was my mother had told me. Today he was shirtless, and his broad chest glistened with sweat. On one of his shoulders was a giant scar—really, many scars, all in a bunch like shredded cheese. He had explained to me that when he was in the military he had gotten a tattoo of an American flag on that shoulder. Then he discovered socialism and had the tattoo destroyed.

Sitting in the shade beneath a tree, my mother spoke animatedly. I watched her hands move up and down in quick succession. “That’s right, Martha,” a sympathizer said. “You got that right.” Some other comrades came and sat down on the grass beside her. Everyone was expecting the arrival soon of an old party veteran who was coming from New York City to give a special speech that weekend. He was due any minute. In the meantime, the grill was started.

I had been to a picnic once before. That was when I lived
in Brooklyn. My brother and sister were there too. I hadn’t seen them for a long time. There had been a pond with lily pads, which I played on the edge of all afternoon. At some point I went looking for my brother and sister but was unable to find them among the dozens of comrades. Around and around the pond I went, until it was dark and time to go home. Only at the very last minute did I see them standing together under a tree.

“Where have you been?” I stomped my feet.

They looked at me with startled eyes. “We’ve been here the whole time.”

When the party veteran arrived, we tramped up the hill to greet him at his car. He was bald and wore thick eyeglasses and carried a cane. I was alarmed by how old he was. There were not many old people in the party. Most of them had been driven out over the years by the various factional disputes concerning policy or strategy.
The Shachtmanites. The Cochranites. The Global Class War Faction.
Each time the party had grown smaller, and each time the members had assured themselves that now only those with the correct ideas remained. Somehow, though, this party veteran had managed to endure. Comrades welcomed him warmly and helped him to the picnic table. A paper plate of food was handed to him. He ate slowly. We all sat around and talked about things I did not understand. I drank a can of soda. And then another one. Then I had to pee.

“Don’t drink too much,” my mother said.

“That’s right,” Bill said with false admonishment. “No more beer for you.” I looked up into his face and grinned. I liked him almost as much as Ed. He also had big hands and strong arms. He also was a machinist or a steelworker. Or he wanted to be. I liked all those who now sat at the picnic table or hovered around the grill. Most of them had come from other branches in other cities. Most of them would one day leave for other branches in other cities. That was the cycle. Tom was a student. And Ginny was about to get a job in a steel mill even though she was a woman. And Mark was going to run for governor so he could “put forward a working-class alternative.” And Carla, the woman who lived with Ed, was looking for work in a factory and was good at giving speeches. “Is that his wife?” I had asked my mother. “That’s his
companion,”
she had corrected. There were no husbands or wives in the party. There were no boyfriends or girlfriends. There were only companions.

As a little boy I assumed that the preponderance of manual laborers in the Socialist Workers Party was the natural result of its appeal among the working class. It was only logical, inevitable, that socialist workers would gravitate to a party of socialist workers. The truth, however, was that the occupations were a contrivance. Most comrades, including my mother, were middle-class students and professionals who had
chosen
to give up their careers for an opportunity at an
authentic working-class experience. Experience that would be useful later when the time came to lead the revolution. In 1978 the voluntary nature of this suddenly changed when Jack Barnes, perhaps fearing that the party was still not working class enough, issued an ultimatum that now
required
all members who had not already done so to immediately find work in the industrial sector.

“Every comrade,” Barnes wrote, “without exception—employed and unemployed, new and experienced—should now sit down with the leadership and collectively review their situation—their job, their assignment, the city they live in, their various contributions—and decide how they fit into this decision.”

Within the party it came to be known as “the turn to industry,” or simply “the turn,” and it was perceived as a defining moment in the evolution of the party. The immediate result, however, was not revolutionary upsurge but bloodletting of its membership. Many of the doctors, lawyers, and students who had preferred to remain doctors, lawyers, and students simply resigned. And those who did give up their careers and were relocated for industrial work could take cold comfort in the fact that they were now true worker-Bolsheviks in the mold of those worker-Bolsheviks who had fought in the Russian Revolution sixty years earlier. In a report delivered about a year after the initial decree, Barnes admitted to the inherent difficulty in what was being asked. “The turn means a change in the life of thousands and thousands of comrades.… Everywhere that we’ve begun to carry out the turn in a systematic and thorough way,
there have been some losses of individual comrades. There are comrades for whom the turn sharply poses the question of what they are doing with their lives, what their personal commitments and priorities are.”

Barnes reassures members that, “Comrades cannot be ordered or shamed to make the turn.” Just as he reassures them in a subsequent report that, “Of course, there are certain physical and health problems that preclude working in most factories. We know that.”

He goes on, though: