When Skateboards Will Be Free (15 page)

I skim some of the articles. The reporting rings familiar and I realize that much of the information has been culled from things I’ve read in
The New York Times
, rewritten now with a Marxist bent. The words
imperialism
and
capitalism
have been inserted throughout, and Bill Clinton is always referred to as William Clinton so as to eliminate any traces of bourgeois familiarity.

The subway stops, and the black man stands and exits. I watch him walk away. His pants are fraying and he has a slight limp, a hitch in his step that causes him to lean to his left. The doors ding-dong closed and the train pulls out of the station, passing him resting against the railing at the foot of the stairs, summoning his strength before he attempts the ascent.
Socialism will save you.
I look down at
The Militant
and I’m suddenly struck by how much it resembles a high school newspaper. The type seems too big, for one thing, the photos too grainy, and, besides, the entire thing is only sixteen pages thick. You can feel an earnestness behind the effort, a diligence that doesn’t quite live up to the size of its ideas. It’s a newspaper aspiring to be a newspaper aspiring to world revolution.

There’s an article about the latest subscription drive. I study the table that has been provided to show the weekly progress. The goal for the entire United States is listed at 968. That is to say that out of a possible three hundred million
people the Socialist Workers Party hopes to sell 968 subscriptions. Out of eight million people in New York City the goal is listed at 120, of which fifteen subscriptions have already been sold. There are five more weeks to go. They will most likely make their goal, of course. They almost always do. There is always the extraordinary distance to reach, the insurmountable odds that can only be overcome by a disciplined, fighting cadre. There are always the articles each week that chronicle how many subscriptions have been sold, how many are still needed to be sold, and what it reflects about the overall class consciousness of workers in the United States. There are the editorials that urge the comrades on to sell and sell. Then there is the blazing headline that heralds a miracle in the eleventh hour. As a little boy I had dreamed of those goals being met. We were always just one more subscription away, one more
Militant
, one more pamphlet, one more book. All we needed was one more and we would win, the revolution would come. Sometimes we made that goal and sometimes we didn’t, but no matter, it always resolved itself the same way: In a few weeks there would be another subscription drive, and we would begin again.

I realize I have now become the sixteenth subscription for New York City.

M
Y FATHER DOESN’T KNOW, BUT
when I was a little boy my mother hung a black-and-white framed photograph of him over my bed. It had been taken about a year before I was born, and it shows my father standing behind a podium giving a speech to delegates at a political conference somewhere in the Midwest. In the photograph he is wearing a white shirt and a dark tie and a dark wool jacket, and pinned to his jacket is his name tag, and he is balding and slightly unshaven, and he has his glasses on. Covering the front of the podium is a portrait of a man or woman whose face is entirely obscured by a sign that says
Dekalb.
My father is glancing down at his notes as he speaks—looking as calm and self-assured as always.

Eventually I figured out that the hidden face hanging in front of the podium was not that of an Iranian revolutionary, as I had originally assumed, but of Che Guevara. This was an exhilarating revelation for me, because while my father felt like a stranger, Che did not, and so I felt somewhat included. My mother had been sure to inform me on all the major aspects of Che’s life: his contribution to the Cuban Revolution; his famous, belligerent speech at the UN; his execution in the jungles of Bolivia. Years of falling asleep and waking beneath the photograph slowly fused the two revolutionaries together for me until Che began to seem so personal that I believed he belonged to me, and that he was
my father and my father was Che, and it was now my father in the portrait and Che standing before the podium giving a speech about my father.

What I also learned from my mother was that my parents had considered naming me Che; his execution had taken place the year before I was born. In the end, though, they had opted against it, reasoning that a name like Che Sayrafiezadeh would have presented far too many obstacles for me in my life. I have always found this explanation highly dubious, considering that the alternative my parents finally settled on was certainly not picked with the thought of easing my passage through this world. My father once confided in me that the names of his three children could be viewed as a way to track his political maturity. When he told me this he meant it not as a compliment but as a
supreme
compliment. We were walking through Prospect Park and it had just rained, and there was such an air of confessional intimacy that I could not help but be captivated.

Presumably, my brother was not named Jacob with any political considerations in mind but rather familial ones. There are three Jacobs on my mother’s side: Jacob Finkelstein, her grandfather, a landlord; Jacob Klausner, her great-uncle, a florist; and Jacob Epp (née Epstein), the hero in my uncle’s novel
Something About a Soldier.
There is a nice symmetry in the first Jacob being from her father’s side, the second being from her mother’s, and the third being altogether imaginary. That my father—who has no Jacobs on his side—would have conceded the indulgence of naming a child after a florist or a landlord is evidence to me that his personality, his world
outlook, his relationship to his wife were once so vastly different as to be virtually unrecognizable. By the time my sister was born three years later, though, my father had begun gravitating toward ideas of revolution, as Jamileh was named after Djamila Bouhired, a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, who had been imprisoned, tortured, and nearly executed in her struggle against French occupation.

When we arrive at me, five years later, my father returns to matters of ancestry, but this time it’s his own ancestry, his uncle Saïd Salmasi, an Iranian revolutionary who has been credited with establishing the first modern school in Iran. In 1907, nearly three decades before my father was born, Saïd Salmasi was killed fighting against the Shah in the failed first Iranian Revolution. What a powerful antidote he must have been to my father’s own father, a former businessman who had lost his wealth years earlier. By the time my father was born in 1934, he was impoverished and unemployed. He was also fifty-three years old. And what a powerful antidote Salmasi would have been to my father’s mother, who was blind, or nearly blind, and just as helpless as her aging husband. They were apolitical parents. My father has told me so. Powerless and apolitical, content to wait out World War II and the occupation of Iran without protest or complaint. My father, however, has described how as a little seven-year-old boy he would climb a hill after school and watch the long lines of Soviet vehicles rumble below him, ceaseless and disinterested, one after the other, until he became so incensed that he would pick up a handful of pebbles and hurl them at the trucks,
ping ping ping.
Day after day he would enact
this ritual, until one day his pebble shattered a windshield and the snaking traffic came to a halt. The little boy was apprehended by the soldiers and taken to the local authorities, who in turn took him home, where he was instructed to sit out the rest of the war with his parents, waiting for others to decide what should happen.

Saïd Salmasi surely would have done something during World War II. And he would have done something that night in 1953 when the Shah’s tanks rolled past and all my father could do was go back inside. And he would have done something in 1979 when the revolution he had been killed in seventy years earlier finally returned in full fury.

My father called the night before he moved back to Iran. I was in bed with the lights off when the phone rang. Our phone never rang, and the sound startled me out of the early stages of sleep. Through the bedroom door I could hear my mother answer, and by the voice she was using I knew immediately that it was my father on the other end. It was a confident voice with a touch of breeziness, the kind of voice that one might use at a job interview to impress a potential employer. There was no other time when I heard that voice.

“The workers and peasants of Iran have been struggling for one century,” she said with aplomb.

Then my father’s response.

“Imperialism’s boot,” my mother said.

My father’s response.

Her response.

I listened to hear mention of me, of my recent tenth birthday, but there was no mention. Nor was there mention of my brother and sister. The two would fend for themselves. They were still teenagers, but they were solid, upstanding members of the party. Future leaders. They had no real need for a father anymore.

And then they wound it up, my parents. My mother said good-bye. There was something good-natured in her good-bye. It wasn’t a good-bye that implied permanent separation; it was a so-long-see-you-around-sometime good-bye. Then she hung up the phone.
Click
,

And then she sobbed. Great sobs. Shakespearean. Her wails shook our tiny apartment and the other tiny apartments in our building. They shook me in my bed, lying there in the darkness, pretending to be asleep.

When morning came, I played dumb when she broke the news to me. Neither of our faces betrayed a thing. It was January and a deep chill had descended over Pittsburgh, but after breakfast I went outside anyway. I tossed a tennis ball against the brick wall in the backyard, imagining that it was summertime, that I was Reggie Jackson throwing the ball, and that the wall was Reggie Jackson hitting the ball. The green ball would bounce high into the air and then come down hard, roll and stop. In my mind, each hit was the hit that won the game.

It made no difference, of course, in my mother’s and my day-to-day life if my father lived in the United States or Iran. In the same way it made no difference to my brother and sister
what became of their mother. My parents had succeeded in building an insurmountable wall between the two factions of the family, and one can only imagine the calisthenics it takes to avoid fellow members of a small organization founded on the idea of universal brotherhood.

After my father’s departure, my mother took to removing the telephone from its hook each night. This was her way of declaring “You are still my husband, but you are never coming back. I know that now. And I honor it by taking the phone off the hook. We are now, both sides, unreachable.” The phone could not be unplugged from the wall, or the ringer turned off, so after she had kissed me good night she would simply set the receiver on the floor. In the dark, the dial tone cried out as if it were a strange animal, its long, steady beep filling up the quiet apartment. I would listen to it and stare off into the black. After a good amount of time had passed, a male voice would appear, pleasant but urgent, like a messenger bringing news that could potentially be troubling.

“There appears to be a receiver off the hook. If you’d like to place a call, please hang up and try your call again.”

There was something embarrassing about this recorded voice assuming that the receiver could have only been displaced by oversight.
I only need to make you aware of such an oversight and the situation will of course be immediately remedied.
Three times the man would repeat this—“There appears to be a receiver off the hook …”—and three times my mother would ignore him. After his third try he would give up and let a shrill, high-pitched beep take his place. Despite
knowing the pattern, I was always shocked by the sound, incessant and slightly chemical, as if alerting us to a fire. My heart pounded along with its rhythm. Fire. Fire. Fire. On and on it went, threatening to continue unabated until the morning. Had my mother developed some type of immunity and now I was the only one who could hear it?

Then the sound would stop abruptly, so abruptly that it continued roaming through my head. Eventually silence would drift in, take over, permanent silence. It was as if the phone had exhausted itself trying to get placed back on the hook.

My mother and I were on our own. We were floating on a raft in the ocean. It was night, and the waves were gently rocking us up and down and from side to side, and all we could do was hope that the raft would not spring a leak or water spill over the edge. There was no one anywhere in the world who could save us now. The black silence covered us, a silence so encompassing that I found myself desiring the return of the phone’s harsh, grating cry. Then I would drift off to sleep with Che hovering above me.

I
RUN INTO
K
AREN IN
front of the public library on Fifth Avenue. She has gone there on her lunch break to check out a book called
Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood.
There are giant rainbow stripes on the cover. We stand on the street for a while as she tells me about how she’s wanted to be an artist since she was a little girl and her father would take her to buy supplies at the art store on weekends. When it was time for college, though, her parents thought she should have a more “practical” education, so instead of going to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, she ended up studying at a liberal arts college in Connecticut, where she balanced a major in art with a minor in marketing.

“Now look at me,” she says. “I’m a project manager for Martha Stewart.”

I tell her I know how she feels because I’m also hoping to one day do what I love and have the money follow. And then, since we happen to be standing in front of the library, I describe how when I was a little boy my mother would send me in to return overdue books without paying the fine.

She laughs. Then she stops. “That’s a weird story,” she says.