When Skateboards Will Be Free (23 page)

“No,” one of the boys answered, looking at me indifferently, as if he could not be bothered with such questions.

“No,” the interpreter translated for me.

When my plane landed in Miami, I had to go to the bathroom. Once again dread came over me, and I entered the airport restroom with trepidation. I was flabbergasted by what I saw: The restroom was spotless and bright. A wall of mirrors amplified the shininess. There was also air-conditioning. I chose a stall and found to my great relief both toilet paper and toilet seat. How absolutely happy I was to be back in the United States. How thankful. And while I thought this, I knew—as I have many times in my life—that this was the wrong thought to be having.

T
HE IVY ON THE PLAYGROUND
fence had grown thick that summer. I noticed it in the afternoons on my way home from school or while running an errand for my mother. Even though it was fall, it looked to still be climbing higher. Through it I could see boys my age playing baseball or football, shouting and running. Many of these boys I recognized from Reizenstein—some black, some white—but they were in other grades or other classes and I didn’t know their names. From the way they played, it looked like they had been friends for years, and I assumed they had attended the neighborhood elementary school together, whereas I, of course, had been bused an hour across the city. Sometimes I would think about entering the playground and joining these boys, but I had no real idea how to go about that, and so I would go back home, eat a snack, do my homework, and wait for my mother to return from work.

On my way back from the grocery store one afternoon, about a month into my eighth-grade year, I paused just at the edge of the playground to watch as the boys took turns throwing a tennis ball against the brick wall. It was a variation of the game I had played alone in my backyard where I had imagined that I was Reggie Jackson hitting the ball and then also fielding the ball. Standing on the periphery holding a grocery bag with a loaf of bread, I watched the action for a
while, unobserved. “I got it!” they screamed with their arms outstretched, each of them hoping to be the one to catch the prize. At one point, two black men dressed in work boots and the checkered pants of short-order cooks passed through with a basketball, interrupting the game.

“Hurry up!” one of the boys brazenly yelled out, and in response the cooks slowed further, sauntering leisurely with exaggerated strides.

“Is this fast enough for you, little man?” they called back, causing everyone to break out into laughter.

Soon a boy arrived with a baseball bat, and the group decided that they would now play a real game of baseball. But, after having divided themselves up, they saw that the boy with the bat had made them an odd number and that of course he would not be willing to sit out, nor would anyone else be willing to sit out. It was then that one of the boys turned and saw me standing by the fence.

“Do you want to play?” he asked.

The boy stared at me, expectation written across his face. The others waited too. Beyond them I could see the cooks dribbling up and down the basketball court.

“I have a loaf of bread,” I said, thinking they would understand, but even as I said it I felt my hand release the bag. I heard the sound of the thump of the bread as it dropped to the ground.

I should go home, I thought.

“I’ll play,” I said.

And so into the evening I scampered across the concrete, chasing after a bouncing tennis ball until it was time for
the boy with the bat to go home. And when I arrived at the playground the next afternoon, earlier than the day before, I hesitated only a moment before entering the fray and competing for that elusive ball as if it were mine by right. When it rained the following day, steady and light, I did not despair but remained in the playground with the other boys, skidding recklessly over the wet surface, throwing caution to the wind. By the time I collided with a boy named Eric and fell hard to the ground, I had become a part of the fabric of the neighborhood. “Holy shit, Saïd!” the others screamed. Eric was a year older than me but shorter, with curly hair and pigeon toes, and he had a white mother and a black father. He also had a younger brother, and in their bedroom later that day we reenacted the scene, now done in slow motion, twisting and falling onto the bed. Then the three of us sat on the couch in the living room, watching movies on cable television and gorging ourselves on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

My transition out of solitude was so immediate, so rapid, that it was not a transition at all. In addition to Eric and his brother, I became good friends with a boy named David, who wore tinted eyeglasses, had a dog named Zorro, and whose father, the owner of Steeler season tickets, took me with him one Sunday to watch them beat the Rams. And there was Jay, with an extensive comic book collection and a very soft Afro he was enormously proud of and constantly grooming. “My hair!” he would cry out if I ever dared touch it, which I wanted to often. It was Jay’s comic book collection that had compelled me to shoplift from that 7-Eleven
where I was chased five blocks by the cashier—“Someone stop him!”—running, slipping, and hiding in the basement of Jay’s apartment building. Then there was Erik, short, cherubic, dreaming of one day becoming a pilot, and who I had nicknamed Keebler—after those elves in the Keebler cookie commercials—so as to differentiate him from Eric. And finally there was John, gentle, soft-spoken, and the mastermind of amazingly inventive activities like treasure hunts and murder mysteries. On the weekends I would sometimes spend the night in his enormous red house, staying up past midnight, eating cookies and drinking soda, and then painfully rising at dawn to stumble along as he went door to door delivering the morning newspaper. It was during one of those sleepovers that he caught me scandalously masturbating beneath the covers.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

No matter. To have seen me from above during this period would have been to see me weightless and unencumbered, frolicking through a Pittsburgh neighborhood, going from house to house, each open and welcoming, none concerned with my peculiar name or where I came from—even when I admitted that where I came from was Iran. Every morning, Eric would ring my doorbell and the two of us would walk to school together, sometimes meeting up with Keebler or Jay or John. Since they were all in other grades or other classes, I would generally not see them during the day, but
in the afternoon we would meet up again and zigzag home, throwing footballs and snowballs, turning a fifteen-minute walk into an hour.

There was still no respite from the incessant, raging politics that continued to pursue my mother and me. The demonstrations, the
Militant
sales, the meetings, the emergency meetings, the conferences. These were the Reagan years, and the Reagan years were worse for the working class than the Carter years. The prospects had dwindled. The future had dimmed. There was the civil war in El Salvador, and the Contras in Nicaragua, and the eleven thousand striking air-traffic controllers who had been summarily fired. There was Reaganomics, the War on Drugs, and ten percent unemployment. This was the time when my mother left me home alone for the weekend so she could go to a disarmament demonstration at the United Nations. Within hours of her departure, I lost my keys somewhere in the playground and, unable to get back in my apartment, I spent the next two nights at Eric’s house, happily eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and watching cable television. Now it was her turn to be petrified coming home to an empty apartment. “I was so worried when I didn’t see you!” This was also the time I attended a special fund-raiser in support of something, or against something, and where, with my mother’s consent, a comrade had slipped me a ten-dollar bill, whispering that I should announce I wanted to make a donation. “Why?” But neither my mother nor the comrade could answer why. Beneath a chorus of adult voices, I stood and shouted out, “Ten dollars!” All around me the comrades roared their approval.
Look, they shouted to one another, look, even the youth understand what we are up against.

One afternoon I dragged out all of the
Militants
from the front closet and closed the door. The apartment was immediately transformed by that simple act. I had a sensation similar to the one I would get when our windows had been washed or our walls repainted and I would feel suddenly that I was living in an entirely different apartment.

On the living-room floor, I sat and proceeded to put every issue in chronological order. There were hundreds of
Militants
, and many of them had grown faded and brittle and dusty. But there they all were: 1971, 1972, 1973 … The grape boycott, Watergate, the Vietnam War, coal strikes and teachers’ strikes, the Equal Rights Amendment, desegregation busing. The
Militants
were a chronicle of our lives, and as I put them in order it felt like I was reviewing a diary of sorts. I remember that demonstration, I would think. I remember that U.S. invasion.

I came across old articles and book reviews by my mother. “N.Y. mothers, children, occupy day-care office.” “How day-care centers help children.” “Nonsexist children’s literature.” And I found a photograph of my sister, taken when she was about sixteen, marching with a small group in front of the federal courthouse in New York City, holding a sign that read “Stop INS Harassment. No Deportations.” In the photo my sister looks shabby, like a runaway, her long brown hair
matted against her head from the rain, her clothes big and baggy, but there is still a smile on her face.

The job of organizing took hours, and the ink from the newsprint stained my fingers gray and then black. I had not planned well and I often lost track of which pile was which, or I would discover that I had two separate piles for the same year, or that I had mistakenly mixed various years together. I was determined, though, to finish what I had started, and I pressed on, ordering and reordering, the living-room air becoming scented with mildew and dust. As I progressed, the words lifted themselves off the pages and jumbled and danced and repeated.

“Struggle.”

“Urge.”

“Fight.”

“Their fight is our fight.”

“Hit.”

“Strike.”

“Crush.”

“Killed 20,000.”

“Killed 100,000.”

“Killed six million.”

“Nine-year-old black girl shot by Georgia racists.”

“Help get the truth out!”

“We told the truth.”

“Afraid to hear the truth.”

“The truth about Afghanistan.”

“We showed.”

“We revealed.”

“They lied.”

“Lies, lies and more lies.”

“Stop the lies!”

“End the lies and secrecy!”

“Open the doors!”

“Uncover.”

“Distortions.”

“Myths.”

“Cover-up.”

“The story they tried to keep from American people.”

My eyes burned and glazed with these words.

When I was finally done, I waited eagerly for my mother to return home from work, and when she arrived at five-thirty she stood in the doorway, looking at the piles with delight.

“I can’t believe it!” she said. “Look at what you’ve done!”

And then, together, she and I neatly stacked them up into bundles and tied them tightly with twine and carried them year by year back into the closet, until it was completely filled and the door once again was pinned wide open.

A
LL GREAT REVOLUTIONARIES GO TO
prison. It is a defining feature of their biography. It adds to their lore. It becomes them. Trotsky went to prison. So did Lenin, and Malcolm X, and Castro, and Che, and Debs, and Rosa Luxemburg. Jack Barnes has never been to prison, but there are always exceptions to the rules.

My father was arrested on November 21, 1982, on what must surely have seemed an ordinary enough day for him when it began. He had chosen that morning to pay a visit to the ministry in Tehran to respectfully inquire about obtaining a permit to restart printing his newspaper,
Determination
, The previous May he had been called in for questioning by the authorities and told he must cease publication at once. He had complied immediately with their demand, but now six months had passed—six months of political idleness—and perhaps my father thought he had detected something softening in the outlook of the clerics. So on that November morning he got out of bed full of hope and made his way through those hopeless Tehran streets, past the veiled women, the unemployed men, the uncollected garbage, the young boys heading off to war, and entered the doors of the ministry, hat in hand and without a necktie.

It was comrades in Iran who had told comrades in New York City who had told my sister who had told my mother
who had told me when I came home that evening from playing football. “Mahmoud has been arrested,” she said, sitting on her bed in the living room, hugging her knees to her chin. Even though it was dark, she had not bothered to turn the lamp on and so her face was illuminated eerily, half in shadow, half in light. I stood in the doorway, looking at her, my coat on, my gloves on, stunned more by the mere mention of my father’s name than by the news of his arrest. How long had it been since I had heard his name? It was my mother’s face, though, bloated with dread and slowly disappearing into the darkness, that made unease spread through my body. It did not matter how long it had been since I had heard his name.

Where was my father being held? What were the charges against him? When would he be brought to trial? We did not know. There was nothing we knew. Nor could we have done anything if we had known. All we could do was wait.

And send a telegram.

“We’re sending a telegram,” my mother said the following Monday in the middle of my breakfast.

I walked behind her into the living room. National Public Radio was reporting on trivial and inconsequential matters, and she reached up and turned it off. On the floor was the phone, kept as it always was between a potted plant and the bookcase, and my mother knelt down in front of it, her back to me. The number was long and the process of dialing arduous, and she kept misdialing or kept being disconnected—“Hello? Hello?”—and then she would have to start the process over from the beginning, the long, slow uncoiling
of the rotary, many nines and zeros. “Is this where I send a telegram? Hello? I want to send a telegram to the president of Iran. That’s right. Hello?” And then she waited as someone was being connected. “Yes. Hojatolislam Ali Khamenei,” she said stiffly. “Hojatol—H-o-j …” The spelling of the president’s name was like the dialing of the phone. Once completed, there was another long pause, longer than the first, as some mechanism on the other end was being put into place. Beside her on the floor was a prepared statement that someone from the party had composed. Instead of picking the paper up and holding it toward her face, she bent down to it, curling further into the ground, until she was in the shape of a ball.