When Skateboards Will Be Free (17 page)

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 served 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.

I was, of course, beset by my chronic uneasiness and anxiety whenever Victor visited me in my apartment. And it just so happened that one Sunday afternoon, while eating our way through boring cheese sandwiches with my mother, Victor looked up at the bulletin board above the kitchen table and asked, “Who’s that?”

The bulletin board was thumbtacked full, as it always was, with the latest clippings and flyers that announced the next meeting and the next demonstration. For many years, though, a
New York Times
clipping of Castro had remained a permanent feature, his beard bushy, his military uniform crisp, his finger jabbing at the air. I observed the image yellowing with time, curling in on itself, as a hundred meals were eaten beneath it, and then a thousand. It was at Castro that Victor pointed.

“That’s Fidel Castro,” my mother said.

“Who’s that?” Victor asked.

“He’s the leader of Cuba.”

“Why do you have a picture of him?”

“He’s a revolutionary.”

“What’d he do?”

“He fought for communism.”

“Communism’s bad.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Capitalism is what’s bad.”

“I like capitalism.”

“Capitalism makes people poor.”

“No, it doesn’t. It makes people rich.”

“That’s what they want you to think.”

“Who wants me to think that?”

On it went. Neither would relent. My mother took on a patient, patronizing tone that I recognized. “And how do bosses make their money?” she asked Victor, as if she had all day to lead him to the truth. “And what about the workers’ right to organize?” Inside, I knew she was seething. Filled with disappointment not just with Victor but with me for the poor judgment to have chosen a friend like Victor. “Are his parents right-wingers?” she would later ask.

And Victor smiled like the whole thing was amusing, like he couldn’t believe he had actually found someone who thought communism was good. It was only because he kept using the corner of his shirtsleeve to obsessively push together a small pile of crumbs from his cheese sandwich that I understood he was nervous. And my mother, finding this unsanitary and annoying, kept asking him to stop. But no sooner would Victor stop than he would begin again, so that the debate over communism and capitalism was continually being interrupted by my mother’s admonishing voice saying “Please, Victor. Please don’t push the crumbs with your sleeve.”

Not long after that, I caught the school bus home with Victor to spend the night. His parents were having company, so when it was time for dinner, the table was lively with adult talk. A large plate of chicken and mashed potatoes was placed before me and I dug in. “How was school today?” his mother asked us. “What did you read?” “What did the teacher say?” In the middle of making my way through my food, I looked up to see Victor’s father staring at me inquisitively, and without any sort of warning he asked: “So, Saïd, what do you think about what’s going on over there in Iran?”