When Skateboards Will Be Free (22 page)

I saw Daniel and Tab rarely, one of the benefits to being in a school of two thousand, but when I did, the old panic would rush back into me, all the feelings of humiliation and docility and betrayal, fresh and clear, and I would escape down another hall. Years later, just before graduating from high school, I happened to run into Daniel at a party. He was drunk when he saw me, and it took him a moment to register who I was. Finally he exclaimed, “Saïd!” As if we were long-lost friends. “How have you been, Saïd?”

“I’ve been fine” is all I said.

And I watched him wobble back against the wall, start to say something more, lose the words, start again, but before he could put the sentence together I had already hurried past him out the door.

The hostages were finally released on January 20, 1981, after four hundred forty-four days of captivity. I had been ten years old that November morning I stood in the living room listening to National Public Radio report their capture. Now
I was twelve. The principal interrupted class to deliver the news. “Attention all students and teachers,” he said over the loudspeaker, obviously excited to have his moment to shine. But his announcement was imbued with anticlimax, and the class seemed to receive it with vague indifference.

And not long after that, in the privacy of my bedroom, I removed my father’s presidential leaflet from the bulletin board. It seemed like a relic from a bygone era, and its presence served only as a constant reminder that there was no longer any word from him. Into the empty rectangle of space I thumbtacked what had become the foremost issue of the times for the party: an illustration of a despairing American soldier, head in hands, sitting next to the grave where his brother-in-arms had just been buried.
No Draft. No War. U. S. out of El Salvador. Vote Socialist Workers.
As for my father’s leaflet, I carefully folded it back into thirds and placed it in my sock drawer, alongside his letter. It was only his photograph that remained, hovering above my bed, fixed and immovable. The rest of him was gone.

T
HAT SUMMER OF
1981 I went to Cuba. “Now you’ll be able to see socialism firsthand,” my mother said. The tour was being organized by the Socialist Workers Party and was billed as a possible final time that the U.S. government would permit travel to the island. (Which actually ended up being true.)

I tried to act like I was excited about going, but I wasn’t. The prospect of spending a week in a strange place without my mother perturbed me. Plus the only way to get to Cuba was to fly out of Miami—approximately a thirty-minute flight—but in order to get to Miami I had to ride on a Greyhound bus for twenty hours. I also realized that in order for my mother to send me on a trip that cost seven hundred dollars, she must have had a lot more money than she admitted.

A week before I was to leave, my mother and I sat down to a supper of spaghetti and meatballs. It was by far my favorite meal, and it helped to break the monotony of a consistent diet comprised almost exclusively of frozen peas, white rice, and bread and butter. No sooner had we begun to eat than my mother launched into yet another cheerful monologue about everything I was going to see and experience in Cuba. And without giving any thought to what I was saying, I blurted out in the middle of a mouthful of spaghetti, “I hope the United States bombs Cuba!”

My mother’s face went ashen. Then her eyes filled with
tears. Yellow Castro stared down at me from the bulletin board. I realized in an instant the tremendous power of my words, their unbearable weight. There was a moment of calm silence, but it was a false calm, as when a gentle wind blowing across a meadow signifies an approaching storm. Then my mother exhaled.

“Don’t you ever say that!” She screamed this, and at the top of her lungs. I thought immediately of our neighbors. “Don’t you ever say that!”

I recanted immediately. “I’m sorry, Ma!”

My apology went unheeded. “Don’t you ever say that!”

“It was a joke,” I said, and I tried to laugh as if we were merely dealing in misunderstanding.

“Don’t you ever joke about that!”

“Really, I’m sorry, Ma. I won’t joke. I promise I won’t joke.”

“Don’t you ever joke!” Louder still.

“I won’t joke, Ma.”

Then there was quiet. Anger replaced by dismay. Only time could heal the wound between us. I looked down at my plate of red spaghetti, red like blood, and I wondered how I could have gone so wrong. I also wondered if it was possible to begin eating again or if I would be seen as being not only callous but gluttonous as well. “Look at the rich asses stuffing their faces at a time like this!” Not to eat, however, would be elongating the crisis, so I picked up my fork and dug it tentatively into the food. My mother said nothing. I took a bite. I waited for her to respond. She did not. I took
another bite. I waited. Then my mother picked up her fork and together we ate our spaghetti.

I arrived in Havana at night. It was very dark and very warm, a soggy warmth that I had never experienced before and that added to the stultifying twenty-four hours of travel. My clothes clung to my skin and my feet felt swollen. There were dozens of other comrades and sympathizers along on the tour, but I had something of a personal chaperone, a burly blond man named Paul, who was new to the party and I didn’t know well but to whom my mother had felt comfortable entrusting my welfare. We all climbed into a van and were driven about an hour out of Havana to our beach resort. All the cars on the street were antiques, like toys. “The effects of the imperialist embargo,” one of the comrades said. Next to me sat a boy named Roger. He was sixteen and about to join the Young Socialist Alliance. I listened while he talked to the adults about Cuban politics. Everyone sounded so excited to finally be here that my overriding emotions of exhaustion and disinterest were brought into high relief. I felt a growing sense of impatience and irritation toward myself, as if one part of me was scolding the other part of me. The adventure was just beginning for the comrades, but here I was already missing my mother and wanting to be back home. I knew this was the thought of a child and that I had been sent on this trip precisely because I had been deemed mature
enough. To act like a child now would be to fail at some very important test and waste my mother’s money.

That night at dinner, glasses of water with pink and purple umbrellas were set in front of everyone. I happily put the umbrella in my pocket, but when I sipped the water, it seared my mouth and I gasped out loud.

“That’s rum,” Roger said. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”

No, I thought, I’m going to drink it. That’s what I’m going to do. I sipped again and my mouth caught fire again.

A waiter put a plate of chicken and vegetables in front of me. I ate and drank. I’m going to eat and drink everything! My head swirled. I thought about my mother and what she might be doing at that exact moment and if she would be angry with me if she knew I was drinking rum or if she would say that I was having an adventure.

“Can I have your umbrella?” I asked Roger.

“I want mine,” he said.

“Can I have your umbrella?” I asked the comrade next to me.

“Of course, said.”

I put it in my pocket.

The next morning, before we headed off on our first excursion, I stood on the beach with my knapsack and a headache and watched blue waves gently rolling in and out. The sand was soft and the sun hung low over the horizon and everything looked beautiful. “Just ninety miles off the coast of imperialism,”
everyone was fond of saying. Roger came running by in a bathing suit. “There’s still time to go swimming,” he said. Then he splashed into the water. “The water’s perfect!” I watched his head go under. The last time I had been on a beach was when I still lived in Brooklyn. My mother had landed a job one summer working for the National Opinion Research Center, which required her to canvass large swaths of area. Each weekend the two of us would take the subway out to Coney Island, where I would play in the sand on the edge of the ocean while my mother walked around asking sunbathers personal questions. I knew how much she loathed the job, how demoralized she was by it, and I always felt bad for her. One day on the beach we had become separated, and in my barefoot confusion I stepped on a burning cigarette and instantly crumpled to the ground. A strange man saw that I was in need and knelt down and scooped me up into his arms.

The first stop on our tour of Cuba was a cigar factory. I had never been in a factory before and I was mortified by what I saw. It was dark and dirty and hot, much hotter than outside even, and it smelled of a thick, heavy tobacco sweetness that nauseated me. I could not imagine surviving more than an hour inside the factory, let alone the eight, ten, twelve hours that the workers spent there each day as they picked their way through great mountains of tobacco. Roger and all the comrades, however, thought everything was great, being able
to look past the external discomfort and see a fair and equitable workplace like none that existed in the United States. We crowded together in the stifling heat, passing around a tin cup filled with water, while comrades asked questions of the workers, which would then be translated into Spanish. I was bored out of my mind and didn’t care about anything that was being asked or answered. But when everyone laughed at something, I laughed, and when everyone turned grave, so did I. I kept thinking that I should ask a question so that everyone would be impressed with me, but I had no idea what that question should be. Our guide told an anecdote about how Castro had once proclaimed that a single Cuban life was worth more than all the tobacco fields in Cuba, and I pictured a Cuban being kidnapped by the United States and Castro then burning all the fields so that he could get that Cuban back. At the very end of the discussion, Roger raised his hand and asked the guide how he could go about moving to Cuba. Everyone laughed—including me—and then we shook our heads wistfully.

The sugarcane farm we visited played out the same. Questions, answers, and complete admiration. And so did the random person’s living room we sat in for two hours. And so did everywhere else we visited on our tour. But for me, fifteen minutes could not pass without my mind becoming preoccupied with how hot I was, or how thirsty I was, or what my mother might be doing. I was also terribly concerned about misplacing, losing, or confusing the three forms of currency I carried with me at all times, and so I
had devised a system of putting my traveler’s checks in one pocket, my Cuban pesos in another, and my American dollars in a third. During the various tours and discussions I would find myself repeatedly tapping first my back pocket, then my left, then my right.

Outpacing all other concerns, however, was my fear of having to go to the bathroom. One of the first observations I made about Cuba was that the public restrooms were filthy and decrepit, generally without toilet paper or toilet seats, and overrun with flies, even in the restaurants. I knew that the effects of the U.S. embargo against Cuba were reflected in these restrooms and that I should be above such pedestrian concerns, but I was not. I was constantly hounded by the prospect of having to go, and I would do my best to hold on until I returned to the resort at the end of the day. When that proved unfeasible, I would rush at the last possible moment to the nearest restroom, where I would hover uncomfortably above the seatless bowl.

As the days passed, my frustration with myself mounted, exacerbated by everyone’s outsize enthusiasm, especially Roger’s. I began to entertain thoughts of joining the Young Socialist Alliance myself. That would dazzle my mother upon my return and make her think the money well spent. I was twelve, but twelve wasn’t too young to join, my sister, after all, had become a member when she was eleven or twelve. Besides, it was my destiny. Wasn’t I to one day be a great revolutionary like my father? I had always assumed so, as had everyone else. One night in the loneliness of my
mother’s apartment I had passed the time by staring at my reflection in the living-room window and making my face look the way I thought a revolutionary’s face should look, proud and solemn, like Castro’s when he had been brought to trial by Batista. “History will absolve me!” he had told the courtroom. For a long while I stood there, trying to get the features of my face just right, imagining that many people were looking at me and that they were all applauding.

In the middle of the week we went to Havana by way of a public bus, which was long in coming and completely filled when it arrived. A Cuban man stood and gave his seat to one of the female comrades. Even as the bus emptied, the man continued to stand, allowing everyone else the opportunity to sit. All the comrades were really happy with the man, and some of them spoke Spanish to him. I understood that the man’s generous behavior was not because of his personality but because of the revolution. That the revolution had created a new, selfless kind of person, a kind of person that no one had really ever known before. At La Plaza de la Revolución, an enormous portrait of Che hung from the side of a building, and my earlier declaration—“I hope the United States bombs Cuba!”—resounded in my ears, shaming me until I felt fully and unconditionally cured. Children my age held out their hands, begging for candy. “Chiclets! Chiclets!” they pleaded. For some reason all the comrades
had said never to give them anything, and so I cruelly ignored them and wandered into shops, trying to find a gift for my mother. I wondered what she would look like when I saw her again.

The day before we were to leave, a group of Cuban children gathered around us at the beach resort and we had an impromptu discussion regarding Cuban society. It was obvious that all the comrades were impressed not just with the answers the children gave but also with the sophisticated way in which they gave them. Here were yet more examples of the kind of person—the kind of
children
—a socialist revolution could create. I seethed at the attention they were getting and the way they elicited both laughter and sympathy from the comrades. And, as I had done every time before, I racked my brain for a question that would make people impressed with me also. Eventually I tugged at the interpreter’s arm and asked her to ask the children if it was common for Cuban teachers to beat them in school. I asked it in a certain underplayed way that I hoped would imply that, while it was a very important question for me to ask, it was also a very difficult question for me to ask, because
I
was being beaten by my teachers in school. That way I could engender both pity for having to live in the United States as well as praise for being brave enough to speak up and reveal its dark side. I had the added satisfaction of having the interpreter pretend
to slap me so that she could better illustrate the meaning of the question to the children.