When Skateboards Will Be Free (11 page)

When the voice was done, another voice would take its place, picking up where the previous voice had ended. As
evening turned into night, and night turned into late night, I would grow drowsy and begin to slump and fade. My mother would lay me down across a row of empty folding chairs, her jacket over me, and I would drift off to sleep listening to the sound of questions asked, points raised, matters discussed, secrets revealed.

I suppose I was not the best companion to have. Once, in the middle of a dream, I rolled and fell off the folding chairs, crashing onto the floor and bringing the proceedings to a halt. Another time, during a voice vote, I inexplicably shouted out “nay,” deeply embarrassing myself and my mother. To solve the problem, my mother took to confining me to the back rooms, where, among the piles of that week’s
Militant
and still within easy range of the amplified voice, I would pass the time playing with office supplies. There was a brief period when a little nameless girl would also attend the meetings, and together we would create entire adventures with rubber bands and staplers. On one occasion she was scolded for painting her nails using a bottle of Wite-Out and on another for boldly marching up to the podium and interrupting her father, who was in the middle of giving a report. After that she was seen no more.

At some point my mother came to the conclusion that it would be better if I also didn’t attend these meetings so regularly and instead remained home alone. So, aside from an occasional event here and there, I was relegated to the apartment on those Friday and Sunday nights. It did not go well in the beginning. I once woke in the middle of the night to discover that my mother had still not come home. From
room to room I scurried, calling out to her—“Where are you, Ma?”—living room to bedroom, bathroom to kitchen, quicker and quicker, thinking that I must have surely overlooked the obvious and would suddenly see her sitting there. Eventually I gave up the hunt and collapsed on the living-room floor, clutching my coloring book to my chest like a security blanket. That is how my mother found me—who knows how many hours later—when she finally came through the front door, her knapsack on her back and a perplexed expression on her face.

“Why aren’t you asleep?”

By the time I arrived in Pittsburgh, I had learned how to sleep through the night without incident. In my solitary waking hours, though, I was frightened by everything—the plunks and clinks of the building, the sound of footsteps in the hallway, the thought that my mother this time might not return at all. The shadows cast by furniture were lurking men; the sound of a neighbor’s toilet was the doorknob being jiggled; car headlights reflecting on the walls were flames; a fly was a cockroach; a cockroach was a rat. All was possible.

My mother had posted the number of the party headquarters by the phone in case of emergency, but it served only as a constant flashing reminder that danger was an ever-present possibility and that I would be helpless in the face of it. Everything I did while she was away went toward constructing an alternate reality, one of peace and tranquillity. The stories I chose to read were expunged of conflict. The games I invented were of the lightest fare, of the happiest people, of the brightest colors. The power of these modes of entertainment
to distract me was temporary, and the only thing that could keep the terror fully at bay was our thirteen-inch black-and-white television set. This was forbidden to me except for special occasions, but in my mother’s absence I would linger for hours in front of it, counting among my many friends the Jeffersons, the Bunkers, the Newharts. As the evening wore on, though, these programs were replaced by hour-long dramas that dismayed me with their heavier scenarios. Programs like
The Incredible Hulk, or Fantasy Island
, or
That’s Incredible!
where I once watched as a man, in the interest of science, dove into a swimming pool with twenty-pound weights attached to his wrists and ankles, so that researchers could monitor the effects of drowning on a human being. I was petrified by this nightmarish content, but I would forgo my bedtime and continue watching. The television set, no matter how terrifying it might become, was always a more palatable alternative than the reality that encircled me.

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 soundly 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.