It was during one of these dark nights that my uncle’s movie happened to come on. I had never seen it before. Bang the Drum Slowly, the television read. Screenplay by Mark Harris. Based upon his novel.
Our television was black and white, but my uncle’s name glowed in yellow light. I pictured his house instantly, the soft carpeting, the staircase, the painting of the massive chocolate bar that hung in the landing of that staircase. As the opening credits rolled, two baseball players jogged silently side by side in an empty baseball stadium, towels around their necks. The slowest, saddest music played in the background, all flutes and violins, indicating that whatever things lay ahead for these men would not be good things. And sure enough, the scene switched from the baseball stadium to the front of a hospital, where the men, now dressed in ties and carrying luggage, exited through the front doors, bidding farewell to a doctor, the violins still going.
I sat in my pajamas and watched the story unfold. The plot was thick and tiring and I lost my way in the adult innuendo. I had been expecting a movie about baseball; instead, it was about illness. A man was dying and another man was trying to keep it a secret. From time to time I thought of changing the channel, but it was my uncle’s movie and I felt to do so would be ungenerous. And so I watched as the brooding sadness wound around me, entrapping me. A man raced through a hotel in the middle of the night in search of a doctor. Another man collapsed on the baseball field. Another shot a gun in drunken triumph. And finally, many hours after it had begun, the dying baseball player stood with his suitcase, about to board an airplane.
“Thanks for everything, Author,” he said, smiling at his good friend. “I’ll be back in the spring. I’ll be in shape. You’ll see.”
And I understood, as each of them did, that these were just words and that he would soon be dead.
“Yeah,” said the other man, “I’ll see you then.”
And a few minutes later the movie was over. It was late. It was past my bedtime. The credits rolled. I waited for my uncle’s name to appear one more time, but it did not. I turned off the television and was quickly released back into the world of the apartment. The silence rushed into me, clogging my ears. I turned the light on in my bedroom before I turned the light off in the living room, trying to navigate my way into sleep in as little darkness as possible. And so I did. Lying next to my teddy bears and dreaming, I don’t know of what, until some moment when I sensed my mother’s presence in my bedroom, leaning over me in the blackness, kissing me on the forehead, the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to her clothes.
Over time my mother began to grow concerned with the unhealthy impact of such excessive television-watching on a young mind. It would destroy my intellect, she said. It would turn my brain to mush. “It’s a boob tube, Saïd.” I was instructed to read, write, or draw while she was away. I protested. She insisted. I disobeyed. She demanded. I would open a book and pretend to be engrossed as she readied herself to depart, but as soon as she was out of earshot I would turn on the television. She caught on to this, tiptoeing back up the stairwell and pressing her ear against the door, then bursting in like a cop in a cop show. When I denied my crime, she would feel the back of the set as if checking a feverish forehead.
“Why is it hot?”
“The light from the lamp must have made it hot.”
She tried being angry with me, but I could not be swayed by admonishment. She would then affect disappointment, hoping that would cause my conscience to kick in. It did not.
As fate would have it, one day she discovered that she could remove the electrical cord from the back of the television set. Now, an hour or two prior to her leaving, she would unplug the cord and hide it. This did not elicit the effect she desired either. As soon as she was gone, I would begin to forage for the missing cord. It was not such a terrible predicament to be in; the search kept me occupied, and I was able to fix my mind on a goal and pursue it with relentless fervor. Loneliness, anger, fright, boredom were all submerged. It was an attainable goal too; the cord was somewhere between the walls of our tiny apartment, and although there were quite a number of options of where it might be, the options nonetheless were finite. I rifled through everything like a seasoned burglar—her panty drawer, her bra drawer, her diary drawer, her jar of keepsakes. Nothing was sacred, and I always found the cord in the end.
Weeks of treasure hunts went by. Then months went by. Then a year. I became accustomed to the hunt, evolving from dread at my mother’s departures to anticipation of them as opportunities to indulge in the pursuit, with the prize being the terrible elixir of situation comedy. I would plot my viewing days in advance. If for some reason or other a meeting had been canceled or rescheduled and my mother stayed home, I would wallow in disappointment and frustration.
Eventually my mother had removed the cord so many times that it no longer stayed firmly connected to the set but would, in the middle of a program, fall straight out of the back. The flood of silent reality would propel me from my chair like a sprinter at the gun. The more I had to push the cord into the set, the more compromised it became, so that in the end I came to a well-reasoned childish conclusion that wetting the end of it would cause it to stick firmly in place, like a postage stamp to an envelope. With the electrical cord still plugged into the wall, I would put my mouth on the other end of it and lick, then lick again, then place it back into the television set and continue comfortably with my viewing.
Then early one Sunday evening when I was probably about ten years old, I watched in utter horror as my mother, in the somber ritual of a robed priest at Mass, unplugged the cord from the electrical outlet, removed it from the back of the television set, unzipped her knapsack, placed it inside, and left for her meeting. I listened to the key turn in the lock and her footsteps first in the hallway, then down the stairs, clip clip clip, and then gone. The war was over. My mother had won. The night stretched before me interminably. My punishment was imprisonment. A life sentence.
Just a few blocks from where my mother and I lived was a pizza shop called “Uncle Charlie’s.” It was a small, dim place that had a video game and a pinball machine. The pinball machine appealed to a previous generation to which I did not belong. The video game, however, was always crowded with boys eagerly watching the action like gamblers at a cockfight. On afternoons I would insinuate myself among the older, stronger boys and watch them play. There was a masculinity to what they could accomplish, deftly reaching levels the younger boys could only aspire to.
I was horrible at the game. I never fully understood the rules. I panicked quickly under pressure. I was too deliberate at aiming at the enemy spaceships. There was gratitude when it was over, like returning to the waking world from a horrible dream. Then I would step back and let the older boys take the reins.
The night my mother exited with the television cord, it occurred to me that, unlike a prisoner, I was actually free to go to Uncle Charlie’s if I wanted. I withdrew a lone dollar bill from my dresser drawer and looked at it. What evidence would there be that I had ever left the apartment? Not a trace.
At the present, Uncle Charlie’s was owned by an overweight man with black hair and bushy eyebrows whose name was Joel but whom everyone called Charlie. He was eating a slice of pizza when I entered. (I envied the infinite supply of pizza that was afforded him.) The place was empty. The floor had been swept clean, the small tables cleared of debris. The clock on the wall read 8:50. I was prepared for him to ask why I was out at this late hour, but he did not. With disinterest, he gave me four quarters for my dollar. I dropped a coin through the slot of the game. The machine beat out its drum-drum music as the enemy spacecraft flew in to attack. I fired at them, bullet after bullet, and the spaceships disintegrated on impact. It was satisfying to destroy. And in my mind, I began to play a different game than the one that was depicted. I imagined my spaceship was a communist spaceship and the enemy spaceships were the spaceships of the capitalists. The stakes of this duel energized me. On level one, I s
oundly defeated capitalism. And on level two as well. And then on three. As each subsequent level of the video game appeared on the screen, all I had killed before reappeared to be killed again, and each time there were more of them and they were faster and more resilient, and each time I was up to the task. I thought of the older boys and their video-game athleticism, and I wondered what they would think of me now. My left hand ached from clutching the joystick, and the tips of the fingers on my right hand were numb from pounding away furiously at the yellow button that dispensed my bullets. My weapons were the weapons of Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Jack Barnes. And the ships that came to kill me were piloted by Jimmy Carter, Andrew Carnegie, the “rich asses,” and Uncle Charlie himself. Eventually there was no chance whatsoever, the speed of the machine had grown exponentially, and in the midst of an impossible amount of capitalist spaceships I went down in flames.
I stood at the machine, dazed, spent, watching as it ranked me and invited me to add my initials. I had three quarters left. It was 9:20. I put another quarter in. I made a careless mistake and was killed on the first screen. It was 9:22. I put another quarter in. I was killed on the second screen. I slapped the side of the machine. “Hey, you!” Uncle Charlie cried out. I put another quarter in. I played with resignation, with defeat. “If I lose, I lose because I do not even care enough about you to try to win.” I lost. I had no more quarters. I looked at the floor for a possible stray. The floor had been swept clean. I was humiliated by my need. I felt sudden rage at the boys who always seemed in possession of an endless supply of quarters. The rage was replaced by sadness. It would be a long time before I came by another dollar. I wanted it back. I wanted to undo it.
There was not a soul on the street. It was very dark now, very empty. Suddenly I understood how odd it was for a little boy to be outside in the streets alone at a time of night like this. I was like someone who has ventured far out into a driving rainstorm before realizing that it is in fact a hurricane. I took the long, most well-lit way home, walking slowly, hoping to affect an air of nonchalance that would dissuade a predator. With relief I entered the apartment building and walked the two flights of stairs to my floor. Perhaps my mother’s meeting had let out early and she was now home, frightened, irritated, waiting to chastise me for my senselessness. “Where have you been, Saïd!” I unlocked the door and the stillness of the apartment washed over me.
On top of the bookcase my mother kept a little brown sugar jar that she used for storing spare cash. It was always filled with coins and crumpled-up bills. When I had first discovered the jar, years earlier, it seemed miraculous to me. My mother had told me that the jar was Persian, so I had come to associate the jar and the money with my father, imagining that he had given it to my mother as a sort of onetime alimony payment when he left. That night, I unscrewed the lid and took out a dollar. I felt as if I was crossing an invisible barrier, but I could not make out the person crossing it.
I went out into the night again. This time without deliberation. The novelty of the experience had worn off. It was completely dark, but I was not frightened by the darkness. Uncle Charlie was noisily sipping a Coke through a straw when I entered. He didn’t ask how I had come by another dollar. He gave me change. I played hard; I lost quickly. The clock read 10:12. There was a pinching in my elbow from the strain of gripping the joystick so tightly. I wanted to crush something in my hands. I had to pee badly, and the sensation incited me. The shortcut to my home was through an alleyway. It was jet-black, but as a punishment for having spent and for having lost, I walked through it anyway. There was a recklessness to it that I deserved. I fantasized about being accosted by the shadows. I had homework to do, but it was too late to do it now. I had wasted the night. I wanted the night back. The only thing that could alleviate this discomfort, that could redeem me, that could let me pee, was to play the video game again. I entered the apartment. The stillness. I did not hesitate; I went straight for the brown sugar jar.
13.
I AM GREETED AT THE front entrance of the Iranian restaurant by a man I presume to be Iranian. He is wearing a shirt and tie, and he says to me with disturbing élan, “Table for one, sir?”
“No,” I say, “I’m supposed to be meeting someone here.”
“Please have a look,” he says, bending slightly at the waist and gesturing at the restaurant with a wide sweep of his arm, as if he is a doorman and I am the tenant.
The restaurant is small, and with the exception of an older couple sitting at a table, it is without patrons. Although I can plainly see that my father has not yet arrived, I continue to stand there, taking in the confines, looking from table to table in case I have overlooked the obvious. Then I walk back past the Iranian man, who says, “Thank you, sir,” as if I have done him a great service.
Tonight’s dinner with my father is something of a thirtieth-birthday celebration for me. My thirtieth birthday was six months ago. We had been planning to get together, until an important and unexpected event arose: a meeting. President Clinton had just begun a four-day bombing of Iraq under what was known as Operation Desert Fox, and in response the Socialist Workers Party called an emergency meeting to map out a strategy on how the working class should best respond.
“We will have to do this another time,” my father had said to me over the phone. The distant gravity of his voice—as if he were looking over important documents as we spoke—gave the impression that the upcoming meeting would have an impact on global affairs. I had agreed to reschedule immediately and without objection; to do otherwise would have made me seem crass and uncaring regarding the suffering of others. A few weeks later I received a leaflet in the mail that was advertising the latest issue of the Socialist Workers Party’s annual journal, New International: A Magazine of Marxist Politics and Theory. There was no note included with the leaflet, but I assumed it had been sent by my father. This latest issue of New International was written by Jack Barnes and was entitled “The Opening Guns of World War III.” It had originally been published seven years earlier after the first Gulf War but was now being reissued as a “special war issue.” The cover showed a line of American tanks parked in the desert. Sitting atop the tanks were soldiers looking through binoculars, waiting for the order to begin their assault.
The journal was priced at twelve dollars but was being offered at a ten percent discount. I saved the leaflet for a while, thinking that I would buy it, or that I should buy it, but I never did. A month passed. Two months passed. I thought of calling my father, but is it poor etiquette to request a birthday dinner for oneself? In my moment of indecision, other political events occurred, then others, crowding in tightly on one another and presumably occupying my father in planning and strategy. In February, Amadou Diallo, poor, black, and unarmed, was shot nineteen times by New York City police officers, and Socialist Workers Party forums were quickly planned. Then spring came and NATO began bombing Serbia, STOP THE IMPERIALIST BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA! read the headline of an issue of The Militant. And after that my father flew off to the Tehran book fair that he has attended each year for many years, acting as the party’s Persian-language editor for Pathfinder Press. And after that I turned thirty and a half.
Then one day, apropos of nothing, the phone rang.
“Sidsky!” my father cried out, his voice full of immense cheer, like a sailor who has survived rough seas and has finally made it back to shore into the arms of those who have been waiting for him. In that single word—Sidsky!—all was instantly forgiven by me, or forgotten, and that is how I find myself standing in front of an Iranian restaurant in the Garment District waiting for my father.
What if, while I was inside the restaurant, my father arrived outside and then, seeing that I was not there, did not think to look inside and simply decided that I came and went, and so he decided to leave? “You weren’t there, Sidsky …”
I make my way to the corner, past men pulling racks of wedding dresses, and look in the direction of the subway station, but there is no sig
n of a retreating man who resembles my father. What if he has not taken the subway at all and is coming from another direction entirely? I hurry the other way. And, sure enough, here he comes from the far end of the block, my father, just as I remember him, his gait long and purposeful.
No, it is not my father but a man who looks like my father. Suddenly I see him everywhere, as if a great wind has gathered up all the approximations of my father in New York City and blown them in my direction. There is one who dresses exactly as my father would dress, and another who is bald but not as handsome, and another who is handsome but without glasses. It occurs to me that I was a fool to ever leave my post in front of the restaurant. So I hurry back, determined to stand outside without interruption, but it now behooves me to again go inside and see if my father has entered and taken a table for two.
And from out of the maelstrom comes a voice I would recognize anywhere: “Hello, Sidsky.”
I turn and there he is, smiling widely, his face a study in calm.
“Pop,” I shout as if I am faraway down the street. “I was getting worried, Pop.” There is irritation in my voice, and I regret the irritation.
When Skateboards Will Be Free Page 9