When Skateboards Will Be Free (19 page)

I was considered a scholar. And I was an excellent student. Attentive, respectful, engaging. For instance, when the science teacher gave us an assignment to construct a periodic table, I went above and beyond what was required and, with assistance from my mother, attached a penny for copper and a nickel for nickel—bested only by the boy who had used a plastic banana for potassium. I became friends almost immediately with a classmate named Daniel. And Daniel became friends with Tab. And the three of us would sit together in class and in the lunchroom, eating amid the spectacular noise of five hundred other students. Whereas I had always thought Tab odd-looking, with his moles and box-shaped head, Daniel was handsome. He was half Jewish like me and had brown hair, but he was tall, muscular, and, I thought, had a perfect face. When he would saunter to the front of the class to sharpen his pencil, I would take the opportunity to examine the details of his body: his shoulders, his legs, his blue jeans, the way he walked, the way he stood. All of these qualities seemed to flow with the pull of gravity down toward his feet into the most crowning quality of all: white leather Nikes. At the shoe store I had begged my mother to
buy me those same shoes, but, unable to afford them, I was forced to settle for the canvas version, graying and fraying at the first rain.

I fantasized about being Daniel, literally, his body taking the place of mine. I was sure that the girls liked him, or loved him. The first time I was alone with him in his house, I asked him in as roundabout a manner as I could conceive: “If you were a girl, which boy in our class would you think was the best looking?”

“What do you mean, ‘If I were a girl’?”

“You know, if you were still you but a girl. Who would you think would be the most handsome boy in our class?”

“ltd be me,” he said, “of course.”

To which I had replied candidly, too candidly, “I can see why!”

In my mind Daniel had one flaw, only one, and that was his blatant and unconcealed racism. “Last year I went trick-or-treating dressed as a nigger,” he told me one day while playing in his backyard, causing me to flush, stammer, change the subject. Another time he jokingly used the word
Gerzenstein
, which he explained was a contraction of
nigger
and
Reizenstein.
And when he feigned a stomachache in gym class, it was done so as to avoid having to swim in the pool.

I overlooked all this as best I could. Evading and ignoring. Never laughing, never encouraging, and also never taking a stand. After school I would wait patiently for him in the parking lot, and when he arrived we would board his school bus together and head up into the Pittsburgh hills. In his basement we would watch television or play Ping-Pong
or roll around on a big beanbag chair, the likes of which I had never experienced before. Later we would go out into his backyard, where we would join up with other boys from the neighborhood to play football. It was the waning days of October, and the leaves had changed colors and fallen from the branches and been ground into a thick paste by days of rain and boys’ sneakers. It was cool but it was getting colder; winter would arrive soon. I would be turning eleven.

“Throw the ball to me, Daniel!” I would yell out. And he would throw the football and it would sail up into the late-afternoon sky, darkening toward evening, and then down, down, into my hands.

O
N THE MORNING OF
M
ONDAY
, November 5, 1979, as my mother and I were sitting down to eat our breakfast, a peculiar report from Tehran came over National Public Radio. “Shh.” The day before, a group of Iranian college students had broken off from an anti-Shah demonstration, scaled the wall of the U.S. Embassy, and taken a large group of diplomats hostage, almost all of whom were American.

I watched my mother, who was watching the radio. Her face seemed unaffected, calm almost. Was this good news? I had learned well that often what sounded like bad news was actually good news, and vice versa. I seem to remember that the broadcast did not end at the usual time but went on, moving back and forth between correspondents in the United States and Iran and Britain, each one adding to the bulk of information that was only just being unpacked.

Then it was time to leave for school, and in the middle of sounds and voices and my mother’s contented demeanor, I gathered up my knapsack and my lunch.

“Good-bye, Ma,” I said.

In the cafeteria that afternoon, while sitting with Daniel and Tab, I overheard a classmate mentioning to another classmate, “Did you hear what they did in Iran?” The comment was toothless and without opinion, but I registered it
with displeasure. It was the first time Iran had found its way into school, and I did not approve of its appearance. I felt like pounding my fists hard on the table and upending the lunches.

On my way home after school I passed a vending machine stuffed with newspapers. The front page had a giant photo of a slightly overweight American woman, her eyes blindfolded, her mouth agape. Next to her, standing resolute and well poised, was one of her captors, a woman veiled entirely in black. Briefly, I considered trying to pry open the machine so I could remove the newspapers and dump them in the trash.

That night after dinner I sat with my mother in front of the television as we watched Walter Cronkite informing us of all that had transpired that day. The news was not good. (Or do I mean the news was good?) The television cut first to footage of Iranian men cheering and dancing maniacally around a burning American flag; then to the occupied U.S. Embassy, hung with a sign that read
Khomeini Struggles, Carter Trembles;
and then to the Iranian prime minister assuring everyone that he would be bringing a quick end to the siege. But when I awoke the next morning, the siege had not been brought to an end. During breakfast I was greeted with a report from National Public Radio that Khomeini’s son had declared all ties with the United States to be severed immediately. In the cafeteria, not a word was said about Iran, but on my return home from school the afternoon paper dripped in colossal black type, u.s.
HOSTAGES FACE IRAN DEATH.
The use of
Iran
as a modifier added to my vexation. It seemed to imply
that death was one thing, but an
Iran
death was another thing, gruesome and unimaginable.

On day four of the crisis, the prime minister’s government dissolved itself, with all authority immediately being ceded to Khomeini. On day five it was discovered that one of the hostages was a twenty-two-year-old Pittsburgh woman. And a few days after that, on my way to school, I observed for the first time a yellow ribbon wrapped around a tree in front of someone’s house, fluttering gently in the wind.

It will all end soon, I assured myself. Of course it will. It cannot go on forever.

But even as I thought this, I was also well aware that
I should not be desiring the end of the hostage crisis.
The taking of the embassy was a blow against imperialism, my mother had told me. It was deepening the revolution, galvanizing the masses, emboldening the Third World. Besides, the real cause of the crisis was President Carter, who had allowed the ailing Shah to enter the United States for treatment for lymphoma, an act of willful provocation. Now there was a clear and simple remedy to the dilemma: return the “Hitler of Iran,” along with the seventy billion dollars he had absconded with, so that he could stand trial for his crimes against humanity. As for the breaching of diplomatic etiquette, Trotsky had already dispensed with absolute views of morality. The ends justify the means, and in the pursuit of working-class revolution, all is fair game.

“The lives of sixty-two Americans in Iran,”
The Militant
declared, “are being held hostage—by the Carter administration, not by Iran.”

Every evening I would sit with my mother when she watched Walter Cronkite. These were the warmest moments of my day, cozy, just the two of us, locked in against the elements. My mother would pull up the armchair in front of the television and I would, at some point in the broadcast, squeeze in beside her and lean into her body. As the cast of characters appeared on the television screen, I would ask my mother, “Good or bad?” Carter, Khomeini, Brzezinski.

“Good or bad?” I’d say to my mother. “Is he good or bad?”

“Bad,” she’d say.

“What about him? That one. Is he good or bad?”

“Bad.”

There was something playful about this, something like a game. According to my mother, almost everyone was bad, Americans and Iranians alike. It seemed that we were helpless and in a world without hope, where everyone was a wolf. There was hardly a single person who could be called a friend. The Americans were capitalists and the Iranians wanted to become capitalists. What made the question-and-answer so compelling for me, what made me continue asking night after night amid the endless onslaught of bad, bad, bad, was the physical rush I would get, like a gambler at the poker table, when my mother would finally respond, in reference to some new figure who appeared to make a cameo—Arafat, perhaps—“Good!”

Good! There was good, after all. It was mainly bad, yes, but there was also good. And that small dose of good, that single drop from the eyedropper, was enough to sustain me.

The next time Iran was mentioned in school was not in the raucous open air of the lunchroom but in the enclosed silence of my final class of the day. It was my reading class, taught by a pudgy, humorless Indian woman with a thick accent and bad breath and the improbable name of Mrs. Irani. Everyone had been working diligently at their desks, trying very quietly to map out the plot of a tedious story, when a classmate burst out with “Mrs. Irani, are you from Iran?”

The class came alive with giggles. Everyone giggled, including Daniel and Tab. I regarded their happy faces with dismay. There was perceived comedy in the prospect that someone, anyone, could actually be from Iran. Even the word itself was given the added indignity of being pronounced incorrectly, as if it were the phrase
I ran
, rather than the way my mother pronounced it,
E ron.
Again I wanted to pound my fists and shout out, not words but sound, disruptive sound, but the heavy weight of a laughing class had a sobering effect. The desire to set the record straight was replaced by a desire to leave well enough alone. I stared down at my desk, pretending to be absorbed by the story in front of me.

Mrs. Irani had not understood the question. “What did you ask?” she said, her bewilderment combined with her heavy accent causing the class to laugh again. This time louder.

“What?!” she demanded severely. “I will not have this!”

The class shushed, and the student who had first asked now affected the air of a sincere student posing a sincere question. “Are you from Iran, Mrs. Irani?” And giggles could not be suppressed.

I wondered if anyone in my class knew I was Iranian. Did Daniel and Tab know? Maybe they didn’t. Maybe I had never told them. Why should I have told them when I barely considered myself Iranian in the first place? Now the ethnicity was thrust upon me all at once. There was no hiding from it. If fate had worked differently and my mother had put her foot down and named me after
her
uncle, Julius Klausner (salesman of floor coverings), I might have been sitting in Mrs. Irani’s class laughing along with the other students, sheltered behind the name Julius—Julius Harris. “Stop laughing, Julius Harris!” Mrs. Irani would demand.

I stared down at the story on my desk and saw the name I had penciled in at the top of the paper come into horrible focus.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh.

It looked up at me with wide eyes. No, do not make a sound, I thought. You must be as quiet as you can. When this is all over I will let you return.

O
N DAY THIRTEEN
, K
HOMEINI DID
a surprising thing and ordered the immediate release of thirteen hostages, all of them black or female. This was seen by Americans as the opposite of progress. The headline of the
Pittsburgh Press
stated it plainly:
IRAN HOLDS ON TO WHITE U.S. MEN. AS
for the future of those white men, Khomeini assured us they would be tried for espionage forthwith, and, if found guilty, he could not guarantee their safety.

Two days later President Carter ordered a naval task force to the Arabian Sea.

“Do you see what the imperialists are doing?” my mother asked.

The next day, I waited after school for Daniel and caught the bus with him as if all was normal. We played Ping-Pong in his basement until it was time to go out in the backyard. When the other boys from the neighborhood showed up, I withdrew to the edge of the grass, tossing the football stiffly.

“Saïd! Saïd!” Daniel called out, and I cringed at the sound of my name.

On day twenty, it was reported that Khomeini was proposing to train twenty million Iranians to defend the country in the event of a U.S. invasion. And that afternoon, the
Pittsburgh Press
ran a photo of a cute little blond boy, about
five years old, sitting atop his father’s shoulders at a rally in New Jersey. In one hand the boy held an American flag, waving it in a sea of a million other American flags; in the other hand he held a toy rifle. I knew that the boy, despite being younger than I, could overtake me, force me to the ground with ease. I would be defenseless against that little boy.