When Skateboards Will Be Free

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

  It was in bed at night, with my mother away at her meetings, that the haunted vision of my father suffering in prison would rise to the surface. Having no solid information to go on, my mind painted the canvas for itself. I pictured my father’s prison, not as the infamous Evin Prison, where political prisoners in Iran were held and which Walter Cronkite would sometimes show us on the nightly news, but as the prison my mother had taken me to visit when I was nine years old. It was called Western Penitentiary and it was located on the north side of Pittsburgh, just a short drive across the Allegheny River. One winter afternoon my mother and I had traveled there to visit Stanton Story, a black man, about twenty-five years old, who had been sentenced to life in prison for killing a police officer. “Framed,” my mother had told me. Twice he had gone to trial and twice he had been sentenced to death, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had voted to commute all death sentences and so his life had been spared.

  Often when I was out walking somewhere with my mother, she would stop abruptly, remove a leaflet from her knapsack, and pound it into the telephone pole. Free Stanton Story. With a paragraph explaining the obvious injustice of his case, the racism of the police, of the media, of the American judicial system, and then a paragraph explaining how all of this was the result of capitalism. For as long as I could recall, Stanton Story had been a foremost cause for the Pittsburgh branch of the Socialist Workers Party—my mother and comrades had met with him on a number of occasions—and by the time of my visit, there was the real expectation that after four years of imprisonment he was on the verge of receiving a new trial and being released.

  From the outside, the prison reminded me of my school, clean and modern. There was a brown garbage can at the front door that also looked familiar. Inside, we stood in a line of families waiting to be checked in. Once the guard had located our names on the visitors’ list, my mother and I placed all of our possessions into a small locker, walked through a metal detector and then into a large room filled with men dressed in gray. The stories my mother told me had made me picture Stanton Story as a small, underfed teenage boy, but when he was led out to us I was surprised to see that he was tall, muscular, and handsome. He shook my hand with vigor. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said. Along the wall we found three seats that faced out onto the crowded room. I sat next to my mother and my mother sat next to Stanton Story. The first thing she did was to bring him up to date on what the Socialist Workers Party was doing about his case: the meetings, the mailings, the protests. They were also planning to join with a black community group to have a car wash, where the money raised would be used to help offset Stanton Story’s legal fees. This sounded promising. Then Stanton Story told her what the latest was from his lawyer regarding the police, the evidence, the witnesses.

  Halfway through the visit, my mother gave me some change to buy a bag of potato chips for Stanton Story and whatever I wanted for myself. I wound my way through the men, women, and children to the other side of the room, where I came face to face with a row of vending machines. I dropped the coins and pulled the lever for Stanton Story’s potato chips. Through the window I could see the bag being pushed to the edge and then falling over. Then I went straight to the ice cream machine, where pictures of all the various options were displayed, but I couldn’t understand how to make my selection.

  “We’ll have to figure it out another time,” my mother told me when I returned.

  “That’s okay,” Stanton Story said, “I can show him.”

  So back I went, following behind him now. His clothes looked like pajamas. At the ice cream machine he said, “All you have to do is put your money in over here and then you push this button over here.” Instead of putting the coins in myself, I handed them to him, but when I did he recoiled from me as if I had held a lit match to his skin. “I can’t touch money!” he exclaimed. I could not conceive of such a thing. It sounded ludicrous, comic almost. But he had acted with genuine apprehension, genuine panic. Never before had I seen a grown man so panicked, and in turn I felt panicked. I reached up and quickly dropped the money in the slot and the machine registered its presence, and then Stanton Story asked me which kind of ice cream I wanted. “Chocolate,” I said. And he showed me which button to push for chocolate.

  When the visit was over, Stanton Story said a few words to my mother and then he shook my hand one more time. “I hope to see you again,” he said. My mother and I watched as he was led through a door. The door had a window, so once it was closed we could see him standing there waiting for the guards to process some information. We waited while he waited. And soon I could hear the familiar sound of my mother beginning to cry, reaching into her pocket for a tissue, and muttering so only I could hear, “Goddamn fucking bastards. Goddamn fucking bastards. Goddamn fucking bastards.”

  Over the years the memory of that visit would pop into my mind at the most incongruent moments, and I would think of how Stanton Story was still sitting in prison, hoping any day for that new trial. While riding the bus to school, for instance, I would think, I am riding the bus to school and he is still in prison. Or while playing Ping-Pong with Daniel, or while walking through La Plaza de la Revolución, or, twenty years later, while sitting in Martha Stewart’s office: I am making labels for potted plants and he is still in prison.

  When the processing was all done, Stanton Story turned one last time and waved to us through the window, an optimistic wave, and I waved back. Then he was led through a second door and out of sight.

  And so when I lay in bed at night, I imagined that it was in fact my father waving one last time before being led through that second door. What lay beyond that second door I could only guess. It was terrible, whatever it was. Not just hunger, fear, and sorrow for my father, but endless hunger, fear, and sorrow. An eternity of it. And nothing anyone, anywhere can do for you. Except send a telegram.

  In December my mother and I celebrated my fourteenth birthday with a cake she had baked. The oven fogged the windows and the aroma filled the apartment. Fifteen candles burned. “One to grow on,” she said. I ate two slices. Later I roamed through the apartment like a forest animal hunting for the gifts she had hidden. It was a game we had played since I was a little boy, and it always worked to prolong my anticipation to an exquisite, almost unbearable length.

  “You’re getting warmer,” she teased as I danced anxiously around a corner of the room that concealed a surprise I could not for the life of me unearth. “You’re getting so warm that you’re standing by the sun.”

  “Here it is, under the bookcase!”

  When I had finally found and unwrapped them all—a journal, an encyclopedia of baseball statistics, a calendar for 1983—I thanked her.

  I was taller than her now and I had to bend down while she reached up to me, her arms around my neck, pulling me into her tightly.

  “Happy birthday, Saïd.”

  That evening John came over to spend the night, and he also ate two slices of cake while my mother plied him with friendly questions. Alone in my bedroom, we came up with the idea to devise a short theatrical play, where one of us was an injured baseball player and the other his teammate trying to convince him to make a comeback. When we had perfected our lines, we pulled a chair in from the living room and invited my mother to watch the performance. She was a good audience member, attentive and appreciative, and John’s voice was loud enough to be clear. At the conclusion, with the injured baseball player rising from his bed and declaring that he was going to give his career one more shot, my mother applauded heartily. “Bravo!” she said. “Bravo!”

  In January, it snowed and all the boys in the neighborhood gathered in the playground for a game of football. The concrete felt soft like a mattress and we tackled each other without fear of injury. The pristine whiteness was magnificent.

  And when the snow melted a week later, Keebler, John, and I went on an exploration of the woods that ran along the railroad tracks. We spent the day thrashing our way furiously through the under
brush, stopping only to throw stones at the passing trains and to eat from a box of Froot Loops that John had the presence of mind to bring along.

  And after that I woke one morning to the sound of the phone ringing. It rang only once. The conversation that followed was brief and muffled. “Saïd,” my mother called. In the living room she was sitting on her unmade bed, her knees hugged to her chin, and without preamble she asked, “What would be the best thing that I could say to you right now?”

  In a blink I rejoined, “That Mahmoud has been freed.” “Yes,” she said, “he’s been freed.” And she smiled. And I smiled. It was light and uncluttered. The smile of a mother and son being reunited with their husband and father. Sixty-six days of separation. That was all. Not so terribly long when one thinks of how terribly long it could have been.

  And thus ended my father’s political career in Iran. There would be no more Workers Unity Party, no more Determination, no more run for office. Nor would there be any more Revolutionary Workers Party or Socialist Workers Party. The first Trotskyist party on Iranian soil, which had become three Trotskyist parties on Iranian soil, had finally become no Trotskyist parties. Khomeini had seen to that. A decisive victory. And for my father, a decisive defeat. He had been transformed into an ordinary Iranian citizen, a math professor at most, walking the streets of Tehran like everyone else, with nothing very special to do. Almost four years would elapse before my father was mentioned again, this time entering my life with a flourish as he delivered the stunning and unexpected news that he had decided to return to the United States, where he could once again take up the fight for a socialist revolution.

  It was maybe a month or two after his release from prison that my mother showed me a little brown nut that had arrived for me in the mail.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A date pit,” she said. And she told me that if I looked close enough I could see that in the center was my name carved in Persian.

  I looked and could make out only indecipherable scratching?;

  It was from my father, she explained, who had passed the time in his cell by whittling three date pits, one for each of his children.

  “I’ll keep it in this drawer for you,” my mother said. “It’ll be safe here.” And she opened her dresser drawer and put the date pit inside and I never saw it again.

  29.

  KAREN AND I ARE DATING. We’re keeping it a secret from everyone at work, which makes it feel illicit and tantalizing. On the nights I go to her apartment in Queens, she’ll leave the office just a few minutes before I do and then we’ll rendezvous like spies on the subway platform. When we are sure the coast is clear, I will pick her up and swing her around.

  Other nights I’ll ride my bicycle down to the Village and meet up with her on Fourteenth Street, where we’ll walk the few blocks to my apartment. “I wish I was a kitten so you could put me in your basket,” she’ll say. And I’ll picture her small, fluffy, with a ribbon around her neck.

  My studio apartment comes equipped with a dishwasher, a microwave, an air conditioner, a gym in the basement, and a roof deck from which I can see the Empire State Building. The rent is so exorbitant in my building that it is occupied almost exclusively by lawyers and bankers, who must think that I am also a lawyer or banker. Studio apartments, for instance, easily rent for sixteen hundred dollars a month. I, however, pay the unheard-of sum of four hundred twelve dollars, far less than for even the most dilapidated apartments in the Village. It is a deal that I landed by way of the New York City Department of Housing just two years after moving to the city, when I was earning almost no money. There were three thousand eligible applicants, I was told, but only sixteen apartments available. What a miracle it was when I opened my acceptance letter. Now I make a considerably higher salary but by law the rent cannot be raised, nor can I be asked to vacate. In twenty years it will revert to market price, at which point I have no idea what I will do next. For now I treat the apartment as if I own it outright and will live in it forever. I am its first occupant, and it is as spotless as the day I moved in.

  Karen loves my apartment too and is appreciative of the little touches that I have made to it, like the lavender pillowcases, the cherrywood blinds, and, yes, the brushed-metal tissue holder. And at times she will offer insights of her own, such as “You should get rid of that lamp,” referring to the black halogen floor lamp that I paid fifteen dollars for at Staples.

  “I thought it was stylish and minimal,” I said.

  “It’s not,” she said. “It looks like a lamp in a dentist’s office.”

  So one weekend we went to Filaments on West Thirteenth Street and selected a dark-brown lamp with a scalloped glass shade, for which I paid a hundred fifty dollars.

  In the evenings we might work out in the gym where no other tenant is ever seen, making it feel as if it is an extension of my apartment. Or we might take a stroll down to Film Forum to see a movie. We hold hands and say nothing. The West Village, no matter what the weather or time of day, is always tranquil and romantic, the stately brownstones, the streets crisscrossing. Of all the streets in the West Village, I believe it is my street—Jane Street—that is the most beautiful of them all. And sometimes I will marvel at how far I have come from that street I once lived on that was also named after a woman: Ophelia Street.

  Karen has begun making art again. Never mind the minor in marketing, never mind the job as project manager. The first thing you encounter upon entering her apartment is a giant easel wedged in by the front door. We bought it together and then spent two hours rearranging all the furniture to get it to fit. When I visit she’ll show me the latest pictures she’s drawn or the collages she’s made. Once she collected various squares of toilet paper from bathrooms around New York City and then stitched them into a little booklet. “The patterns are quite pretty when you look at them up close,” she told me. I had not known that toilet paper had patterns, but when I studied them up close I saw that she was right.

  As for my acting career, I’ve given it up. The last audition I had was for a commercial for a video game that, had I been cast, would have shown me sitting in a tent in the desert, wearing a turban and playing Snowboarding Nintendo. “I’ll get you next time, Snowboarding Nintendo!” I said in that same accent I use for every audition. In my mind I imagined Daniel and Tab, wherever they might be, laughing uproariously. Mercifully, I was not cast. And now I have moved on to playwriting, which is much better. In my spare time I sit home at my desk and try to conjure up interesting people who will say interesting things about the drama they find themselves embroiled in. I dream of stardom and a brown-stone on Jane Street. Above my desk hangs the black-and-white photograph of my father standing behind the podium giving his speech on Che. Only the frame has changed, a custom black frame to replace the original brown one that had begun to splinter and sag after thirty years. When the guy at the frame shop opened it to remove the photograph, out fell the original label. “Happy Home,” it read. “$1.37.”

  Karen is turning twenty-eight years old. When I meet her at the subway station I am holding a pink balloon. “I love pink balloons!” she claps. “How did you know?” Then she ties it around my handlebars. As we walk, it bobs back and forth.

  At my apartment we order quesadillas and black bean soup from Benny’s Burritos, because that’s what she wants. While we wait for our food to be delivered, I surprise her with a bottle of champagne. “I can’t believe it!” she says. I’m such a novice at opening champagne that the cork shoots past my face and half the bottle bubbles onto the floor. Karen thinks this is hilarious. I’m worried my floor will be stained forever. “Don’t worry,” she says, “it’s parquet.” I scrub and scrub.

  When we’re done with dinner, I go into the kitchen and take out an ice cream cake that reads “Happy Birthday, Candy.” I call her Candy because the message on her office phone has always sounded to me like “Hello, you’ve reached Candy at Martha Stewart…” I stick two candles in the cake, the number 2 and
the number 8. Then I light them and flick off the lamp. “Happy birthday,” I sing. She whirls and shouts out in surprise. The 2 and 8 glow dramatically.

  Her gifts are a big colorful book about the painter Chuck Close and a fancy bar of soap. She flips through the book and smells the soap. “Mmmmm,” she says. The soap is blue and has an engraving of a flower in it and comes in a wooden box.

  Then I put the cake in the freezer, the dishes in the dishwasher, and the two of us ride the elevator up to the roof. We sit on a bench, her leg draped over mine, and we stare at the Empire State Building. Tonight it is illuminated solely in white, clean and austere.

  “It looks nice tonight,” I say.

  “Let’s sit and watch for the lights to go out.”

  “Okay”

  “Thanks for the book.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I like the soap.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “I’m not going to use it,” she says. “I’m going to save it.”