When Skateboards Will Be Free (18 page)

The table fell silent. I put my fork down and then picked it back up. It was the first time I had ever been in the presence of someone outside of the Socialist Workers Party who had mentioned Iran. The question had been asked with genuine curiosity, but I disbelieved that curiosity. I was sure there was buried meaning in the inelegant phrase
over there
, I quickly chewed and swallowed what was in my mouth, and then, without thinking, I said loudly to everyone at the table, like I was a man standing behind a podium: “I SUPPORT THE STRUGGLE OF THE IRANIAN WORKERS AND PEASANTS AGAINST U.S. IMPERIALISM.”

The words came out like a rush, reflexive and unedited. I was proud of my words. And then I was mortified. What did I just say? There was an awkward interlude where Victor’s father looked at me curiously from across the expanse of the table, a smile at his lips. The guests looked at me with interest.
As did Victor. A brief image flitted past my eyes where I was standing up from my chair and running from the house. That was followed by an image of me smashing my plate on the floor.

I waited for Victor’s father to rejoin, but he said simply, “Well, I just hope those folks over there can work it out.”

I
GRADUATED FROM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
that year. For the commencement ceremony I wore a turtleneck sweater and corduroy pants that my mother had bought the week before from Sears. Everyone else was dressed in a suit. “Where’s your suit?” a black boy named Robert asked me. “I didn’t feel like wearing it today” I said. In the gymnasium we all sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I sang at the top of my lungs and with great feeling, imagining myself an actor onstage being admired by the audience.

“I have something for you,” my mother said to me one morning that summer as she was preparing to leave for work. I was lying in the middle of the living-room floor, obsessing over alphabetizing my stamp collection, and I looked up just in time to see my mother unzip her knapsack and withdraw a small white envelope.

“Here you are,” she said.

The envelope was for me but it was unaddressed. It had apparently been passed from my sister onto comrades traveling from New York City to Pittsburgh, who had passed it along to my mother at last night’s meeting, who was now passing it along to me. Even before I knew its contents, the
envelope had already grown heavy with the acquired weight of legend. I took it carefully and with both hands.

“I’ll be home by five-thirty,” my mother said, and she shut the front door behind her.

I went into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of my bed. The envelope was already open. Had the contents been read by someone in transit? Inside was a piece of notebook paper, which I removed and unfolded. The paper had been torn cleanly, precisely in half, and on it, written in green ink in an odd mix of both cursive and print, and flaunting the ruled lines, was a letter from my father dated one month earlier, July 23, with the year omitted.

Dear Saïd.
He began by saying a comrade had told him I had sold the most number
of Militants
in one demonstration. He said that it had been exciting to hear that. He also said he had received letters and photographs from Martha and that he was proud of me and hoped that I didn’t believe what I heard on television about Iran. Iran was in the midst of a revolution, and in fact I had been named after my great-uncle who had fought and died in the first revolution seventy years earlier. Young people were now going around the country teaching other young people how to read and write, because the Shah had never built any schools for them. And then he ended by saying that he hoped my summer was good and that he’d like to hear about it.

When I was done reading, I carefully refolded the piece of paper and put it back inside the envelope. Then I put the envelope in my dresser drawer under a pile of socks. After that I walked back into the living room and was about to
sit down with my stamp collection when I was interrupted by the thought that my mother was expecting to have the envelope returned to her. So I went back to the bedroom, retrieved it from my dresser drawer, and then returned to the living room, where I placed it on the edge of her bed. The sun was pouring in through the windows, and I was reminded that it was summertime and that I was inside when I really should be outside. I put on my shoes and went out into the heat, determined to do something. Two blocks away was a shopping district, lined on both sides with restaurants and boutiques, and I strolled the length of the street with the shoppers, pretending that I was also a shopper, stopping here and there to peer into the various window displays of belts and ties glowing with vibrant color, as if they were things that could be eaten. Men and women with shopping bags passed me on both sides, and I heard my mother’s voice inside my head saying Look at them, the rich asses. I felt the urge to steal something, but when I reached the end of the street I turned and walked down a different street, this one fronted with modest two-story homes. The sun was at the top of its arc and the pavement had become so hot that my shoes felt as if they were sinking into it, sticking like a fly’s feet in chewing gum. Soon I came to a bridge that signified for me a boundary of sorts, and I turned back the way I had come. In the playground by my apartment, I saw a group of boys my age playing football. “Throw it to me, Eric!” “Throw it to me, Michael!” I watched them as they threw it back and forth, and I thought of approaching them, of joining them, but the thought took the place of action.

Back home I reclaimed the envelope, taking it with me into the bedroom and shutting the door, even though there was nothing to shut the door against. I removed the slip of paper and unfolded it again.
Dear Saïd.

I had never received anything from my father, and to receive now a letter written in a tone so casual, so familiar—composed as if it were not the very first letter but one in a series of letters—confused me. There was also an underlying cheeriness in it that seemed to contradict what I thought I knew. I was embarrassed by my confusion. The confusion in turn stoked my embarrassment. And then I was embarrassed by my embarrassment. Add to this my utter disappointment that I could not claim the honor of having sold the most number of
Militant
s in one demonstration. That accomplishment most likely belonged to my brother or sister, who must have been mistaken for me. This made me think that the letter had been composed under a false premise, and I was troubled by a feeling of fraudulence. Not only had I not sold the most number of
Militant
s in one demonstration, I had never sold any
Militant
s at any demonstration. I was too young to sell them, but I knew I should be selling them. I
wanted
to sell them. My only financial contribution was to have once stood on a street corner in the middle of a demonstration in Washington, D.C., with a sandwich board around my neck stuck full of buttons reading
Stop Police Brutality. Vote Socialist Workers
, going for twenty to fifty cents each. I can remember the magnificent sensation of an enormous pot of coins inside my pocket, tilting me to one side and jangling conspicuously with each step. “Money for the revolution,”
the comrade said to me when I relinquished them at the end of the day, each and every one.

I was further spun by the surprising revelation that all along my mother had been sending my father news of my life. It had been done unbeknownst to me, undertaken perhaps while I was asleep. If it had ever occurred to my mother that I should participate in communicating with my father about myself, she had never said so. Whatever elements of my life she decided to share, I am sure they were chosen so the portrait that emerged was one where all was well and the future was bright.
Here’s Saïd on his bicycle. Here’s Saïd in the park. Saïd is getting tall.
When she was done gathering the bits and pieces, she swept them into an envelope and sent them off to Iran. And shortly afterward, my father opened the envelope and from those same bits and pieces set about putting together his own portrait of his son, also one that showed all was well and the future was bright. This is why I had the sensation that I was reading a letter written for someone else, a someone else who vaguely resembled me but was not me.

I determined to become that boy in the letter, and I took out a piece of notebook paper and set about composing a response. In my head I invented a story that would regale my father with adventures from my summer.
Today I did… ! Yesterday I did… !
For many minutes I stared at the blank page, thinking about what I might say and the way I might say it. As I sorted through the details of my life, hoping to find a place to launch, I could feel the assumed identity of that confident boy seeping away from me, being replaced by
the boy I was. I saw myself penning the words
I sold the most number
of Militants
in one demonstration
, but I could not bring myself to lie. Finally I decided that I would begin by simply telling him that in a few weeks I would be entering sixth grade at a new school. But when I lifted the pen and wrote the word
Dear
, I saw that I was facing a grave and perilous obstacle: I had no idea to whom I should address the letter. All the many possibilities seemed to mock me.
Dear Dad. Dear Daddy. Pa. Papa. Poppa. Poppy. Pop.

The salutation revealed the facade.
Dear Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh.

My father had encountered this quandary as well but had encountered it at the end of the letter rather than at the beginning. He had resolved the problem by eluding it, closing his letter by writing the word
Love
and then beneath it—in a rapid, indecipherable hand, squiggling and wiggling and disappearing into illegibility—the only illegible word of the letter:
M˜˜
. He must have begun to write his first name and, realizing how absurd it was, had decided to cut his losses.
Love, M˜˜.
It was a signature that landed nowhere. Anyone, anywhere. A ghost.

I never responded to my father, and despite the promising tone of his letter, a tone that looked forward with optimism, I never received another one from him either. Nor did I return the letter to my mother as I had intended but kept it with me, buried deep within my sock drawer.

M
Y YEARS OF SCHOOL BUSES
were over. Not a moment too soon. My mother went with me the first time as practice. It was Sunday and it was sunny. We walked out of our apartment building, up the block, and turned left.

“That’s all you have to do,” she said. “You just turn left and keep walking.”

“What if I get lost?”

“You won’t get lost.”

There was a little grocery store on the corner, and a man in an apron was putting apples in the window. After that it was just houses. Houses and yards. Someone was grilling somewhere. I could smell the smoke. Everything was very quiet, very tranquil. We passed a church with people in suits gathered in front, talking and hugging. Then we turned a corner and came face to face with a steel fence. Standing behind the steel fence was a giant brown-and-white building, windowless, modern, encircled by trees. The trees cast long shadows. A parking lot stood empty.

“There it is,” my mother said.

I squeezed through the fence with ease and stood with my hands in my pockets.

Aside from the fact that my new school was four times the size, it was similar in many ways to my old school. It was new, it was carpeted, and the student body was almost entirely black. Once again each morning school buses filled with white children would pull in front, and once again each afternoon they would drive away. The school had been named in honor of Florence Reizenstein, a Jewish civil rights activist from Pittsburgh who had fought for the integration of public schools. But the first thing we did my sixth-grade year was take a series of reading and math comprehension tests, one after the other, lasting for several weeks, mind-numbing in their detail. This, it was explained to us, would determine our academic aptitude. When the exams were finally completed and the thousands of answers tallied, the results clearly fell along racial lines, with the majority of the black children being ushered into what were referred to benignly as the “regular” classes. While everyone else, most of whom were white, found themselves at the beginning of October sitting in a classroom that was labeled “scholars.”

The separation was absolute. Even the few times that the black and white students came together—lunch, gym, occupational/vocational training—they barely interacted. The school was lavish, with television sets in each classroom and a swimming pool, but I did not feel that the black students benefited from such lavishness. They seemed to be constantly at odds with teachers, who were reproaching them for poor grades and poor behavior. From time to time I would see a black boy or girl I had known from elementary school and
they seemed strange to me now, distant, like I was viewing them from afar. Fear and resentment gripped many of the white students, and they would tell stories in private, possibly apocryphal, about someone who had known someone who had strayed into a deserted part of the school, where they had been cornered and beaten by black children. And there were whispered warnings about avoiding the swimming pool, which was said to have been made “greasy.”