On the third evening, the comrade offered to babysit me while my mother attended a meeting.
No. My mother couldn’t possibly ask that of the man.
It was no bother for him.
Was he sure?
Sure he was sure.
She’d be home by eleven.
Take your time.
Very nice of you.
And then my mother, happy to be free and unencumbered, kissed me on the head, told me to behave, picked up her knapsack, and closed the door behind her, shutting me inside, alone with a man whom she did not know except insofar as he was a revolutionary—and therefore a friend. A comrade.
“Let’s play,” the comrade said.
I was ecstatic, and I immediately reinvented the games my brother and I had played in the apartment.
“Look at me! I’m a monster!” I cried out.
“I’m so afraid,” the comrade cried, fleeing from me and cowering behind a chair. I was gleeful of such feigned terror.
My mother was blocks away now, descending the steps to the subway, fumbling in her bag for the token, dropping it in the turnstile, pushing through, looking down the empty tracks, wondering how long the train would take.
“The monster is coming to get me!”
My giggles filled the apartment as the subway arrived, as my mother entered, took a seat, crossed her legs, took out something to read, rocked on the train as it hurtled underground toward Manhattan.
When I had exhausted myself with being the monster, the comrade became the monster and did what my mother could not do, stooping down to pick me up by my legs and swing me over his shoulder. His power thrilled me.
“The monster has caught you! The monster has caught you!”
“The monster has caught me!” Laughing. Laughing.
“You’re laughing too much,” the comrade said, and his false entreaties made me laugh more.
And then my mother’s stop arrived, and she exited the subway and walked outside and around the corner onto Broadway and up the elevator to the eighth floor of the Socialist Workers Party meeting hall, where she greeted everyone.
And now I was sitting on the comrade’s lap in my underwear, and his face was larger now, closer now, his hands tickling me under my arms, then beneath my shirt, and then on my calves. And I wondered how I had ended up in my underwear.
“Stop laughing,” the comrade teased. “No more laughing.”
His voice was near my ear, booming away, and I could feel his hands traveling up toward my knees, then past my knees. I squealed in his grasp.
“If you keep laughing you’re going to make yourself sick.”
Then his hands were on my thighs, then higher.
And as I squirmed to free myself from his arms, and as my mother took her seat and waited for the speaker to take the microphone, the comrade pulled the elastic of my underpants back and put his hand inside, sending a shockwave coursing through my body.
“Comrades, thank you all for coming,” the first speaker of the night intoned.
“You’re sick,” the comrade said to me with playful banter. “You’ve made yourself sick. The doctor is now going to have to perform an important operation.”
Then he unzipped his pants.
6.
FOR NINE HOURS A DAY, five days a week, I sit in a white, bright office that belongs to Martha Stewart, the billionaire empress of all things homemaking. My job is to assist in the graphic design of boxes and bags and labels and tags, which will ultimately be filled with or pasted onto things like plates and lamps and sheets and burgundy sheer voile curtains. It is a boring job, to be sure, mindless and repetitive and without thanks, but it is a supreme pleasure to immerse myself daily in the lush fantasies of pink and chartreuse, while surrounded by pretty young women and the smell of cake baking in the test kitchen. From time to time, I will catch sight of Martha, tall, blond, majestic—confoundingly the same name as my mother—as she walks briskly through the hallway en route to another meeting that will make her richer than she already is. I have worked for her for several years, but she is utterly unaware of my existence. I am positive, though, that one day she will notice me, smile at me—“Who are you?” she will say—and she will invite me to spend the weekend as a guest in one of her palatial estates in Maine or Connecticut or Westchester, where I will gladly, and without reservation, go.
In the meantime, I have been infected by her sense of style.
Just a couple months ago my coworker Karen gave me some extra pillowcases to take home. Back in my studio apartment I happily exchanged my old gray-white pillowcases that I’d had for five years for the fresh lavender ones, picturing a girlfriend—Karen?—resting her head on them. Once the pillowcases were installed, though, I noticed how gray-white my sheets were and they, too, had to go. And once the sheets went, the blankets had to go. With each new arrival, no matter how small, I marveled at how transfigured my apartment became. And how transfigured I felt inside of my apartment. So on and so forth my purchases went, until I have reached my latest adventure of standing, staring, in the middle of the aisle at Bed Bath & Beyond trying to choose among an exhaustive array of tissue holders. I had no idea that there were so many styles.
It doesn’t matter, though. I’ve already concluded that brushed metal is by far the most attractive choice, the most sophisticated choice, and it is the one that I want.
“$24.99,” the price tag reads.
Which presents me with a quandary, because for $16.99 I can purchase the stainless-steel tissue holder, which is, when I stop to consider, pretty much the same as the brushed metal. And wouldn’t it be the sensible thing to save myself eight dollars? Of course, the sensible thing would be not to buy any tissue holder at all, as a tissue holder is a near-meaningless contrivance. When I was a child, my mother didn’t own a tissue holder, as the tissue already came in a box and what would be the need to hold something that was already being held? There were times even when we didn’t have tissue at all and instead relied on toilet paper to blow our noses. My dilemma, therefore, runs deep.
I feel the distant, nagging impulse to steal. It originates in my shoulders and extends into my hands. It would cleanly resolve the situation. I’ve stolen frequently throughout my life, from stores, people, and places of employment. Sometimes I was caught and rebuked, but often I got away. The things I took were always things I could afford but would not permit myself to buy. When I was thirteen years old I stole a stack of comic books from a 7-Eleven and was chased five blocks by the cashier. I ran for my life, barely able to breathe, my limbs swinging wildly. As I rounded the corner of my friend’s apartment building, I slipped and fell and the comic books went skittering over the pavement. I had no choice but to leave them in order to save myself. Down into my friend’s basement I ran, with the cashier on my heels. “Someone please stop him!” He had the comic books, but now he wanted justice. The first door I came to was the laundry room, and when I went inside I realized with horror that I had unwittingly cornered myself. There was no time, however, to turn and leave. In the corner was a blue wooden door, and I hurried and opened it. At first blush it was just a small dark closet, but when I stuck my head inside and looked to the right I saw a toilet bowl. I could hear the cashier coming, so I sat down on the toilet and closed the door behind me. Now that I was at rest, sweat began to drip down my chest and forehead, and the sound of my breathing was loud and labored. At the very last second I noticed a silver latch dangling from the door, but as I reached up to secure it, the footsteps entered the laundry room and I pulled my hand away. I held my breath and waited. There was silence. And then the footsteps approached the door directly. It swung open. Light poured in. All the cashier had to do was stick his head in and look to the right, where he would find the criminal sitting on the toilet, but miraculously he did not think to do this, and the door closed as quickly as it had opened, and the footsteps receded from the laundry room, and after a sufficient amount of time had passed I stood up, brushed myself off,
and went upstairs to my friend’s apartment. Any crime against society is a good crime.
I’m not a thief anymore. I’m too old and I’ve come too far. The impulse remains, though. It will be there forever, I’m sure. All around me in Bed Bath & Beyond customers, young and old, fill their baskets and shopping carts with all sorts of items. They find their many options delightful. And all at once, like a magnet leaping from the refrigerator of its own accord, I grasp the brushed-metal tissue holder in my hand and walk briskly, purposefully, toward the cashier. $24.99. The metal gleams. How nice it will look in my bathroom. I will light a candle and I will take a bath and I will look at my tissue holder. That is what I will do tonight.
And then I will come back next week and buy a shower curtain.
7.
ON A FRIGID AFTERNOON ONE January, just after my seventh birthday, I stood alone in a strange neighborhood, unable to unlock a door.
“Pay attention, Saïd,” my mother had told me the day before while she had demonstrated how to use the key. There was apparently an imperfection somewhere in the key’s relationship to the lock, but if it was jiggled just so and at just the right angle, the door would pop open. It had looked easy enough when my mother had done it, yet as I stood there the following day by myself, trying to turn the key first one way and then the other, and then fitting it in upside down, and then trying to force it with brute strength—which was an act of desperation—the lock could not be unlocked. Was it the wrong door?
It was getting dark and I knew my mother would not be home for several hours. To further complicate matters, I was not dressed properly for the cold. My coat was more of a jacket than a coat, and I had no hat or hood. The mittens I wore were not conducive to such a delicate operation as unlocking a door, but when I took them off, my hands froze and the key fell to the ground. The door had been equipped with a storm door, and as I worked at the lock, the wind from the river blew, causing this extra door to flutter and bang against me. I also had to go to the bathroom.
Sitting nearby was a discarded refrigerator with its door still intact. “That’s dangerous,” my mother had told me in the middle of our lesson. “You could suffocate inside it.” Together we had tried to turn it around so that the door would face the wall and be inaccessible, but my mother was a small woman, and I was a small child, and the two of us had not been strong enough. “The landlord should be doing this,” my mother had said to me, at me, as if I might be the landlord, “but I’m sure the bastard doesn’t give a damn!”
A black woman about my mother’s age had passed by with her son, who was also about my age, and my mother had called out to her abruptly, “Say! Do you live around here? Say! Excuse me! Do you live around here?”
The woman had blinked back, confused. “What did you say to me?” It must have been an unusual question to have been posed so unexpectedly by a stranger—a white stranger—and the woman seemed to take it as an affront.
“This refrigerator,” my mother said, pointing at it as if it were alive, “the landlord won’t take it away. Make sure you don’t let your son play around it.”
The woman had nodded and said okay, but still she seemed unable to discern by my mother’s tone if she was being helpful or hostile. Then she took her boy by the hand and the two of them walked off.
Our flight from Brooklyn had felt clandestine: things thrust in boxes hastily, like we were planning an escape. Furniture was sold for whatever the buyer was willing to pay. I watched it all go. With the help of a dozen comrades, my mother had loaded the moving van on a cold, sunny afternoon in December, four days before my seventh birthday. Able to carry only the lightest things, I had watched like a spectator as the boxes were placed one on top of the other, balancing high, all the unsold things of our life, even a potted plant. When it was time for us to embark, Britton emerged from our apartment building and put out his hand like an adult. Where had he learned how to make such a gesture? “Good-bye,” he said. I shook his hand. “Good-bye.”
By choosing Pittsburgh, my mother was again following the bread crumbs that led to her brother Mark, who was now an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, basking in the acclaim of his motion picture Bang the Drum Slowly. A film everybody will cheer! the advertisements said. It was my uncle who had been the one to suggest that a single mother with a child would have an easier life in a slower, smaller city like Pittsburgh. And it was only because of him and his largesse that, in the beginning, life for me seemed fanciful and the exact opposite of hardship. For the first week my mother and I lived with him and his family in his enormous house, which had a piano, soft carpeting, a backyard, a light-blue Mercedes, a black maid, and an extraordinary painting, twenty feet wide, maybe thirty, of a partially unwrapped chocolate bar. When I passed this chocolate bar hanging in the landing of the staircase, I wanted to stick my hand right into it and grab a piece and stuff it into my mouth and face the consequences of my action. My uncle was pleasant and friendly, a head and nose full of white hair, and would surface now and then from his den to speak to me as if I were an adult: “Martha tells me that you also have an interest in literature.” I spent most of my days playing with my cousin Henry, who was six years older and had built an elaborate toy village in his basement, with miniature houses and cars and people and through which wound an electric train. I would watch endlessly, tirelessly, as he steered the locomotive round and round.
I assumed, of course, that this was my home now and that I would live in it with them forever. But for some reason, only a week after my mother and I had arrived, we packed our suitcases and went elsewhere. The next house we found was not a house but a one-bedroom apartment that belonged to a cheerful couple from the Socialist Workers Party named Ed and Carla, who had graciously allowed us to stay with them. At night, since there was no extra bed or couch, my mother and I would cover ourselves with a blanket and fall asleep side by side on the living-room floor. In the morning, after Ed and Carla had left for their factory jobs, I would wash myself in the sink, since the bathtub had not been equipped with a faucet. After that, my mother would leave me behind in the strange home while she undertook the daunting, insurmountable tasks of finding a job, an apartment, and an elementary school, the latter search made even more arduous by the fact that we had arrived in the middle of a teachers’ strike.
For my seventh birthday my uncle had given me one of those plastic View-Master toys that you look into like binoculars while clicking through three-dimensional images that tell a variety of stories like Cinderella or Snow White. I had been given only one story with the gift—Superman—and during the day I would sit alone in the silent, unfamiliar apartment and stare over and over through the thing, clicking past the same dozen pictures of Superman flying high above the skyline en route to rescuing someone. I kept thinking that the story would somehow change to something new, or that I would see something in it that I hadn’t seen before, but it remained as it always was. Eventually I grew so ill of it, almost on the verge of real illness, that I resorted to a math workbook that had also been given to me as a gift. It turned out to be slightly beneath my aptitude, and so I was able to pass the hours by compulsively penciling in answers to problems that were without challenge. In the evening, when my mother returned from scouring the unknown city, she would sit next to me on the living-room floor and carefully check my work one by one, all of it without error. Then we would cover ourselves with the blanket and fall asleep.
The home my mother finally found for us was a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a small brick building in the middle of a ghetto. To get to it our first night, my mother and I boarded a bus filled with exhausted passengers, most of them black. We carried with us several bags of clothes and a broom. I had never known anyone to be on a bus with a broom, and I felt embarrassed to be seen with it and began to have a keen sense that something had gone far off-kilter. We rode for a while through dark Pittsburgh streets, until my mother was certain we had missed our stop and had to ask a fellow pa
ssenger if the bus was going in the right direction. The passenger did not know the answer, nor did the next passenger, nor did the bus driver, until it became clear to everyone involved that my mother was stressing the wrong syllable of the name of the street so that it was rendered incomprehensible to native Pittsburghers. Eventually we passed a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, and a gas station, and a parking lot, and shortly after that it was time for us to get off.
Through the neighborhood we walked, with the bags and the broom. It was very dark out, and I imagined that the lighted windows in the houses were eyes observing us as we passed. Halfway to our new home, my mother realized that it was past dinnertime and we had not yet eaten and had no groceries, so we turned and went back the way we had come, the eyes watching us return, and walked to the Howard Johnson’s. Sitting beside the bags and the broom—I had never known anyone to sit in a restaurant with a broom—I ate a hot dog and a pickle. For dessert my mother ordered for me, as a special treat, an ice cream sundae in the shape of a snowman dressed in a candy suit with a smiling chocolate face. It was disconcerting to be given such a thing, it was not at all consistent with my mother’s character, and I knew in that moment, and without equivocation, that something was terribly wrong with us.
“Look at the funny ice cream man,” my mother said, but it was the voice of a performer.
The snowman grinned up at me wildly. I felt indebted.
“Look how funny!” my mother said from the stage.
I picked up my spoon and gobbled him down.
Despite being occupied by other tenants, our new apartment building radiated a feeling of having been abandoned years earlier, decades earlier, neglected and unrepaired. The floors of the apartment were uneven and slanted toward the middle, causing the furniture to lean forward precariously away from the walls, as if it were preparing to take flight. The carpeting was brown, or green, or had once been green, but had been worn down and away by the feet of previous generations. If you stepped too heavily in the kitchen, the living room vibrated; if you tried to shut the bedroom door, it wouldn’t close completely; if you took a bath, the tub wouldn’t drain. The place, no matter how much you scrubbed, could not be cleaned. There were only a few small windows, and if it was a sunny day, the sunlight could not penetrate. Pittsburgh climate being what it is, most days were without sun, and so the rooms grew dark long before it was night. The front door of our apartment opened directly out onto the sidewalk, giving the distressing perception that anyone passing by on the street could walk into our home unannounced. In my bed at night, I would watch the headlights from passing cars illuminate the bedroom with red and yellow streaks of light, thinking that one wrong move and the car would come crashing through.
When Skateboards Will Be Free Page 5