When Skateboards Will Be Free (16 page)

Each morning while I’m riding my bicycle to the office I tell myself that today’s the day I’m going to ask Karen out. And
each evening while I’m riding home I bemoan my lack of nerve. Sometimes I reason with myself that most likely she’ll say no anyway and all I’ll end up achieving is a permanently awkward work environment for the two of us. But the next day we’ll have a fun, friendly chat about something like how to find a good apartment in New York City and before we know it an hour’s passed. Or I’ll happen to turn around in my chair to get something and I’ll catch her staring at me. When our eyes meet she’ll smile and look away.
Ask her now!
But I don’t. I can’t. And once again on the way home I’ll berate myself.

In seventh grade there was a pretty girl in my class who I would often find watching me when I looked up from my desk. I enjoyed her stare but I was also confused by it. I did not believe that she found me handsome, that anyone found me handsome. And after a month of her smiling and blushing and getting no response whatsoever, she turned her attention to a good-looking boy in our class. Which made sense to me.

This morning it is not just Karen’s presence at the edge of my desk that’s causing me my usual turmoil but also what she’s chosen to talk about: a strike at the Museum of Modern Art, where she once worked. Last night, she tells me, she went to stand with former coworkers on a picket line in front of the museum, where she screamed at the top of her lungs, “Modern art! Ancient wages!” And also, “Lowry, Lowry,
what’s your salary?” Referring to Glenn Lowry director of the museum, whose salary is, of course, immeasurably higher than the secretaries’, librarians’, and cafeteria workers’ who have been on strike for three months now.

“I never get to scream,” she says, laughing. “It was cathartic.”

I’m not able to share in her good humor. As she talks, my mind races to come up with something to say that will lead her from her experience last night to a greater understanding of socialism. Or something to that effect. I’m not sure what. There’s always something, though, to be said, something to be done, something to nudge the masses into consciousness.
The Militant
was always phrasing things like
we argued
, or
we explained
, or
we discussed
when describing conversations with workers. And by the end of the article the workers always bought an issue. Or a subscription.

“It’s good you went,” I say. “It’s an important thing to do.” I can hear the patronizing sound in my voice, but I’m powerless to stop it. All I can hope is that she doesn’t notice. There’s a smile plastered on my face, trying to hide my condescension, which in turn is trying to hide my ignorance. It’s my ignorance that feels the most troubling. I’ve never stood on a picket line in my life. Nor do I want to. Yet I feel like I should have some authority over Karen on this matter. I once got into a shouting match with a girlfriend over the Soviet occupation of Poland during World War II, even though I knew nothing about it and my girlfriend was Polish.

“Don’t go in there!” Karen says she screamed at the patrons about to enter the museum. “Don’t fucking go in
there!” As if it were a haunted house they stood before. Some went in regardless, but many turned away. And when they did, everyone cheered.

“Are the workers planning to link up with other struggles?” I ask.

She doesn’t know.

“Did it have an international tone?”

“A what?”

Words rush into my throat, trying to get out all at once. Words like
working class, ruling class, dictatorship of the proletariat.
I feel choked by them. I want to change the subject.
The subject must not be changed!
I want to crawl under the desk.

“The union organizer gave me a whistle,” she says, but before she can continue with her amusing anecdote I cut her off.

“I should probably get back to work.”

She’s startled. “Oh.”

I am full of relief when she leaves. Then full of regret. What does she think of me now? The words in my throat recede, and I am left remembering how I’d watch my mother on those Saturday mornings as she “discussed” that week’s topic with a passerby until my mother grew frustrated and would nod and smile, as if to say “I’m sorry you’re such a fool,” and walk away. “Some workers cannot be won over,” she’d tell me.

It’s noon and I’m hungry. A few blocks away is a Caribbean restaurant and the thought of going there to eat something
good makes me happy. On my way out, I pass Karen standing front of the copy machine. Her back is to me and she’s holding a giant stack of magazines.

“I’m going to get some lunch at the Caribbean restaurant,” I say.

“That sounds tasty,” she says, without turning around. “See you later.”

“I’ll finish everything up when I get back.”

“Okay,” she says.

“I won’t be long.”

“Okay”

“Do you want to come with me?”

She turns and looks at me. The machine whirrs and whirrs.

“Do you want to come with me to the Caribbean restaurant to get some lunch?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’d love to.”

A
CCORDING TO
The Militant
,
THE
very first thing my father and a dozen other Iranian exiles did when their plane touched down at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran on the afternoon of January 22, 1979, was to catch a taxi to a news conference at the Intercontinental Hotel, where they announced the official formation of
Hezb-e Kargaran-e Sosialist
(the Socialist Workers Party). It had been twenty-five years since my father left Iran for the University of Minnesota. The likelihood that the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, would have tossed him in a torture chamber the moment he stepped from the plane had prevented him from returning for even a visit. Now, though, SAVAK’s agents were being hunted, millions were marching through the streets, and the Shah had packed his suitcases to go on an “extended vacation.”

“Dear comrades,” Jack Barnes wrote in greeting, “the formation of the
Hezb-e Kargaran-e Sosialist
—the first Trotskyist party on Iranian soil—is an historic and inspiring event.… You have taken a major step in building a mass revolutionary party based on the principles of Lenin and Trotsky. Only such a party can lead the fight for a socialist Iran to a successful conclusion. Long live the Iranian revolution! Long live
Hezb-e Kargaran-e Sosialist.
”

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.

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.