When Skateboards Will Be Free (24 page)

“I am a supporter of the Iranian revolution,” she read, “and an opponent of the U.S. government’s threats against it.” Her tone was firm and declarative, with a sharpness that made me wonder if the operator was someone who could be trusted. “I appeal to you for the release of Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh … M-a-h …” And she commenced with the spelling of that odd first name and that even odder and more colossal last name, “S-a-y—S like Sam—a-y—yes, y like yellow—r …” Interminable spelling, exhausting everyone involved, especially the operator. When it had been spelled correctly down to the very last letter, she resumed.

“I appeal to you for the release of Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh, who is currently imprisoned in Tehran. He is a member of the Workers Unity Party and a staunch anti-Shah and anti-imperialist fighter. He is innocent of any crime. I urge you to speed the release of Sayrafiezadeh—S-a-y …—which
would strengthen the Iranian revolution in the eyes of the world.” Was that all? That was all. “Thank you very much,” my mother said to the operator. When she hung up, she stayed kneeling on the floor, motionless, her head bowed. The piece of paper lay next to her, useless now, like a spent cartridge. I continued to stand behind her, over her, looking down at her back. It was the back of an elderly woman not yet fifty years old. I had the impulse to climb onto it like a monkey, like I might have when I was a little boy, but I knew that it would not withstand my weight.

It was the sound of the doorbell that roused us and returned us to Monday morning. It was time for school. I gathered my books while my mother hurriedly packed my lunch. Eric was waiting for me downstairs in the foyer, his face pressed against the window of the front door so that I could see the comic shape of his nose and lips smashed and widened.

“Look at me,” he said through the window, “I’m a frog on the glass.”

After sending the telegram, my mother and I did not mention my father’s imprisonment again, treading politely around each other like roommates who share an awkward secret. At supper we talked about other things.

“How was school today?”

“Oh, pretty good, Ma.”

“Did your math test turn out okay?”

“Oh, pretty good.”

Days passed. One after the other. Just like the hostage crisis. Except this time no one knew but me. At Keebler’s apartment playing Atari, or at John’s house eating Twinkies, I carried the mystery silently. I even forgot about it from time to time. It was easy to do, as nothing in my life had changed. But when I returned home at the end of each day and unlocked the door and saw my mother standing in the kitchen making supper, I would suddenly remember everything. Today, I thought, today I will hear that he has been executed. And I would brace myself for the news, for my mother to turn to me with tears in her eyes and say … But, no, there was never any news. Each day was like the day before. How long would we have to wait like this? Slowly my anxiety began to change into something like expectation, and slowly the expectation changed into desire: I was desiring my father’s execution—his final and permanent elimination from my life. It would be a spectacular end to the story, a fitting conclusion that would validate the power of his ideas, confirm his legacy, and add him to the pantheon. It would also give me a way to explain why he had disappeared from my life. He would be remembered as the man who would have been here if he could have been here. Death at the hands of one’s captors was what every revolutionary aspired to; anything less meant they must have compromised somewhere along the way. When Che, weak and suffering from asthma, was finally captured in the jungles of Bolivia by the special forces he had brilliantly eluded for months, he remained
defiant. “I know you are here to kill me,” he told the soldier who had come to execute him. “Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

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 underbrush, 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?;