When Skateboards Will Be Free

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

  My father and his comrades wasted no time. One of their first acts was to go against the wishes of Khomeini—who was just about to arrive from his exile in Paris—and call for the democratic election of a constituent assembly by secret ballot. They also began publication of a fortnightly newspaper called Kargar (the Worker). In addition, they printed and distributed thousands of copies of a fourteen-point Bill of Rights for Workers and Toilers of Iran, which included the demand for a forty-hour workweek, the abolition of business secrets, full rights and equality for women (“this great mass of humanity”), and the confiscation of land from big landowners without any compensation.

  “Capitalists,” the second point reads, “property owners, landlords, the bosses of the big companies … have maintained total secrecy. All the books and accounts of the secret transactions of these rich must be opened so that their robberies will be known to everyone.”

  In the face of such excitement and enthusiasm, there could be no cessation in my mother’s commitment. On Friday and Sunday evenings she continued to attend her meetings, seemingly unfazed that many of those meetings were now about Iran. And on Saturday mornings she rose at dawn and went off to sell The Militant, even though within its pages were not only articles extolling the efforts of her husband but photographs of him as well, handsome and smiling in a suit and tie.

  What had first looked like a clean and final break with my father had become a deeper engagement. In the morning he appeared at our breakfast table while my mother and I listened to National Public Radio. “Shh,” she would say to me when the American correspondent in Tehran had been introduced. I was not astute enough to be able to discern what was good news from what was bad news and had to rely on the expression of my mother’s face for clues. I would watch her intently as she watched the radio intently, her head cocked like she was listening for footsteps in the hallway.

  The news was chaotic, uncertain, above all portentous. There was talk of closing American embassies; of the rise of Khomeini; of the chance of an oil embargo; of U.S. troops being trained for possible deployment.

  “There are dark clouds on the horizon,” National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told us.

  “What about the shoras that are being formed all over the country?” my mother would ask, referring to the workers’ councils that were being likened by The Militant to the soviets of the Russian Revolution. “Are those the dark clouds you’re afraid of?”

  But her question would go unanswered, and soon the radio would switch to another topic, a happier one. As it did, my father receded and the two of us who remained at the table would go about the business of eating breakfast.

  In the evening, after we had finished our dinner and the dishes had been cleared away, we would sit together and watch Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News as he informed us of all that had transpired that day in Iran. Cronkite’s voice, authoritative and genial—the voice of a grandfather—would be juxtaposed unkindly against the images of violence and tumult, tanks in the street, dark men with dark beards intoning in a foreign language. My father was somewhere among those men.

  “What about twenty-five years of U.S. imperialism?” my mother would ask. “You don’t want to talk about that, do your?”

  “And that’s the way it is,” Cronkite would respond, closing as he always did with his trademark line. “Monday, February twelfth, 1979.” Then my mother would switch the television off. After which I would sit at my desk in my bedroom and finish my homework and then get into bed. My mother leaning above me to kiss me on the forehead, wishing me sweet dreams, turning off the light, and closing the bedroom door. In the darkness, I would wait to hear that man’s familiar voice filling the apartment. “There appears to be a receiver off the hook. If you’d like to make a call …”

  My father’s presence in our lives did not limit itself solely to current events but found other ways to make its appearance.

  “You know, your eyes are like his,” my mother said to me one day.

  In the bathroom mirror I looked at my eyes. They were brown eyes. My mother had brown eyes. Why were my eyes not my mother’s eyes? I had always assumed the only inheritance I had received from my father were my unpronounceable first and last names. All else I had conceded to my brother and sister long ago.

  A week passed.

  “You know, your hair is like his,” she said.

  “It is?”

  “Brown wavy hair.”

  And sometime later, standing in the kitchen: “Your hands are like his. Just like that. Just the way you’re holding that glass like that.”

  “Your eyebrows are like his.”

  “Your eyelashes are like his.”

  Did everything belong to my father? Yes, my mother was saying, yes. Take it all. You don’t want to be left looking like me. I am ugly, but he is handsome.

  “Your teeth are like his. He had strong white teeth. He could crack walnuts with his teeth.”

  “Your fingernails are like his.”

  And once, inexplicably, uttered as if it were a dream and I was walking through thick dream smoke: “Do you have a brown ring around your penis like he had?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

  17.

  I HAD NO FRIENDS IN my neighborhood. We had moved so many times that I had lost the ability to breach that childhood wall of shyness. Even two years after our arrival in what was to be the final neighborhood my mother and I lived in together, I still felt like a newcomer. It was a pretty neighborhood too, much prettier than any we had lived in before, with trees and yards, an indication that my mother had either gotten a raise or had simply grown exhausted from such unremitting bleakness. Or both.

  Just around the corner from my apartment building was a wide concrete playground, one block wide, that I had always—always in passing—seen filled with boys my age. It was part jungle gym, part basketball court, part baseball field, all encircled by a tall chain-link fence that in the summertime became overgrown with ivy.

  “Why don’t you go out and play with the boys in the playground,” my mother would encourage. “It’s such a nice day today.” But I would never go.

  The only friends I had were from the elementary school I attended, and that was miles away. My mother had applied to this school when we first moved to Pittsburgh because it was considered a fine school and a paradigm of integration. Located on the eastern edge of the city, in the middle of a poor black community, it would have been almost entirely black if not for the busing in of white children from more distant, more wealthy neighborhoods. I was white and so I had been accepted.

  In the beginning, the bus ride had been torturous for me. A swirly, whirly, hour-long affair that had caused me to vomit on several occasions and be kept in the nurse’s office. There was some irony in the fact that the first demonstration I ever recall attending was in support of desegregation busing. It had taken place in Boston just a few weeks after a thousand white people had surrounded a high school there, chanting “Lynch the niggers.” We had driven up from New York City with comrades, arriving in what felt like the dead of night. It was also the dead of winter, and I wasn’t dressed warm enough. Midway through the march, my mother had no choice but to leave me inside the cab of a truck as she continued onward. I have a single image of sitting next to a strange comrade as I stared down at my blistering five-year-old feet, unable to draw a correlation between the cold weather and the pain in my shoes.

  In Pittsburgh I lived farther from my school than any of the other students and so was always the first one picked up in the morning and the last one dropped off in the afternoon. It was hard for me to disregard the fact that just half a block away from my apartment was an elementary school that I could have walked to in about thirty seconds. I was even on the school bus before the bus monitor got on, a chubby, cheery black woman—the only black person on the bus—who had freckles and whom I had once tried to have vote for the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor
. “Oh, sweetie,” she had said, “he’s not going to win.” There were always at least fifteen minutes where it was just the bus driver and me riding along in bored silence as we slowly passed out of my unfamiliar neighborhood or slowly back into my unfamiliar neighborhood. I would spend the time staring absently at the driver’s hands as he spun the enormous steering wheel like he was navigating a boat over the ocean.

  The first children to be picked up after me were a brother and sister whom I despised. It had something to do with the fact that they looked even more poor and uncared for than I, especially the little girl, who was my age and whose knees and elbows always seemed to be dirty. She had blond hair and wore thick eyeglasses, and other children—myself included—would tease her with no apparent impact. Rather than being despondent or humiliated, she affected a pompous, superior attitude toward us. Once, I cornered her at school when the teacher was nowhere to be seen and stood in a row with other boys as we took turns punching her as hard as we could in the arm. This, too, did not seem to faze her. Later, when she reported what I had done, I denied all, affecting my own pompous, superior attitude, which was good enough to convince the teacher that it was the little girl who was lying.

  Soon, more prosperous children would board the bus and it would quickly fill with the sounds of chatter and laughter, which I would happily join. Often I would crouch behind the seats with other boys and play a game called “pencil fighting,” where two players took turns using their pencil to try to snap their opponent’s pencil in half. The game was immensely popular but it was against the rules to play, both in school and on the bus. There was a rumor that someone had once lost an eye from a flying pencil shard. Generally we played with thin, brown, anemic Pittsburgh Public School pencils that had no eraser. We had gotten the pencils for free and therefore risked nothing.

  The school had been built just a few years earlier, and it radiated a sense of grandeur and opulence. The floors were carpeted, the classrooms spacious, and everything was clean, brightly lit, and perfectly in its place. I believed that everyone who attended this school was wealthy. Even the black children whom my mother told me were poor seemed wealthy. My friend Jesse was black and had no father and lived in the housing project around the corner, but his clothes were always new and his mother owned a car and his apartment building looked nice from the bus window. “It only looks nice from the outside,” my mother said. Even so, I could not bring myself to pity him. I thought he was the most handsome of all my classmates, with smooth dark skin and broad shoulders. He was also the strongest. When we were in third grade I had watched him lift a bullying older boy off his feet and throw him to the ground. He was a master at both pencil fighting and dodgeball, and at lunch he would open up his packet of plastic silverware by slamming it on the cafeteria table so that the knife sliced clean through the top. I admired him to such a degree that once during free time he had persuaded me to help pick up scraps of paper off the classroom floor. Together we had crawled on our hands and knees under and around the desks until it became apparent that the purpose of this was not to clean the room but to look up the girls’ skirts. A service to the community had become a violation to the community. Nevertheless, it fascinated me that he was interested only in the black girls’ panties, while I was interested in both, even those of the girl I had punched. When the time came to sit in a circle and read aloud, I could make eye contact with no one.

  He had come to visit me only once. A Saturday afternoon that had been made possible because his mother was willing to drive him. We spent the day playing football in my backyard, and he won every game. Then we played baseball with a tennis ball, and he hit the ball on the roof. For lunch my mother served us tangerines and cheese sandwiches. Jesse consumed great quantities and asked for more. I feared she would refuse him. She asked him questions about school and his favorite classes and what he wanted to be when he grew up. “A football player,” he said. Afterward we went into my bedroom, closed the door, selected two pencils from my desk, and pencil-fought.

  That evening, when his mother came to take him home, she stood by the front door of the apartment but did not come in. She was wearing slacks and had long hair. There was glamour about her.

  “Did you boys have fun?” she asked.

  “Yes,” we said.

  I watched as she stood there awkwardly in the doorway, taking in her surroundings. I saw what she saw: my mother smiling, with short graying hair and baggy pants; socks dangling over the arm of a chair; the bed/couch piled with papers; the unfortunate closet door, flung wide open, with a million Militants running all the way to the edge. I was prepared for her to exclaim “What are those?” At her feet, as if it had floated like a leaf and happened to land there, was the latest issue. She looked down, WHY WORKERS NEED A LABOR PARTY NOW.

  “Did you boys clean up?” she asked us.

  There could be no disputing that my white friends from school were wealthy. Tab’s father was a doctor who had once paid a visit to class to talk to us about how to grow up to be a doctor. I didn’t know what his mother did for a living, but she was always at home when I went over to play. In order to get to his house I had to ride on a different school bus, which went through different neighborhoods. I would usually go after school on a Friday with my toothbrush and a small bag of clothes so that I could spend the night. His house was not nearly as large or resplendent as my uncle’s, but I thought it was spectacular nonetheless. Rooms opened onto other rooms that opened onto a deck that overlooked the backyard. Dinner might be chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy and a bowl of ice cream. I would eat from a plate that matched the other plates, sitting in a chair that matched the table. “And how was school today, boys?” his father-doctor would ask. In the basement was an air hockey table that we had once tiptoed down from his bedroom to play in the middle of the night. The cool air of the table had blown up into my face as we slammed the plastic puck back and forth, back and forth. “Get back to bed!” his father had shouted.

  Tab had befriended me when I first arrived from New York City in the middle of my second-grade year. This despite the fact that I had spent a whole month inquiring cleverly, “How much do I owe you, Tab?” He had a rectangular-shaped head and moles on his face and had read, or was in the process of reading, every Hardy Boys book ever written. Because of this I considered him supremely intelligent.

  The first time Tab ever visited me in my new neighborhood, I was violently aware that the bus ride I had grown so inured to was relentlessly long. Even as we played and joked with the other children, I feared that he would at any moment stand and demand to go no further. Upon arrival at my apartment building I had played a clever joke where I walked right past the building as if my house were farther up the street. “Just kidding,” I said. Once through the front door, I was immediately overcome with that same despondent feeling I would get after visiting my uncle. Except now a witness had come along with me. I saw how obviously unkempt the foyer was and the way the mailboxes had all been broken so that the doors hung loosely from their hinges. Names of previous tenants had been written directly on the metal and then scratched off and replaced with new names that had then been scratched off and replaced. On and on. My mother, however, had placed a clean white label across our mailbox that clearly read Apt. 4 Harris/Sayrafiezadeh, as if roommates resided there, or an unmarried couple, or a married couple who had decided to keep their names.

  I led Tab up the two flights of stairs to the apartment and unlocked the door. We had arrived an hour and a half before my mother would be home from work, and the place thrummed with silence. “You have to take your shoes off,” I said, and even this embarrassed me: a proscription before he had entered. I was aware of how small the apartment was, how fragile, like the floor might break if we both stepped at the same time. When he asked for the bathroom, I played another joke by telling him to go through my bedroom, down the hall, and up the stairs. Of course there was no hall and there were no stairs. “Just kidding.” In the kitchen I se
rved him a plate of graham crackers and a glass of milk. When he had finished, I gave him more without asking so as to display some sense of abundance.

  At dinner, I grew angry when I saw the unexceptional meal my mother had prepared. Peas, carrots, rice, an acorn squash. My mother had sprinkled the squash with brown sugar, and so I knew she saw it as a special treat. Tab ate only the brown sugar. “You’re supposed to eat the rest,” my mother said. Tab didn’t understand. She showed him, bending over his shoulder and scooping the yellow flesh away. “See,” she said, “look at all of that.”

  We talked about school and our favorite classes and what we wanted to be when we grew up.

  “I want to be an actor,” I said.

  “I want to be a detective,” Tab said.

  “I see,” my mother said. She didn’t approve.

  For dessert she served us each a bowl of Jell-O.

  “Do you have whipped cream?” he asked.

  No.

  I was relieved when dinner was over and we could go to my room and shut the door. On the floor we played a game of Scrabble. Halfway through, my mother opened the door and walked by on her way to the bathroom. She stopped and examined the board with interest.

  “What good words!” she said happily. Then she went into the bathroom, where we could hear the tinkle of pee, the flush of the toilet, the running of the faucet.

  I didn’t know what my friend Victor’s parents did for a living, but his house was just as big as Tab’s. In fact, he lived not too far from it. He was a tall boy, with brown bushy hair that was always falling in front of his eyes, like a sheepdog. When he spoke, saliva would sometimes gather in the corners of his mouth, so that if he was not wiping the hair out of his face, he was wiping the saliva from his lips. One day after school his mother had shown us how to make “pies” using paper plates and his father’s shaving cream, which we then carried out into the backyard to smash each other in the face with. This was spectacular, unheard-of lawlessness, and I held his mother in high esteem because of it. For his tenth birthday we had gone roller-skating with a group of his friends. At the entrance to the rink, Victor’s father had handed him a twenty-dollar bill and said he’d be back in two hours. “I want to see some change from that twenty,” he told Victor. We spent the day eating pizza and playing video games until there was less than two dollars left and we had to stop.