When Skateboards Will Be Free Read online

  Three blocks from our apartment in Brooklyn was the supermarket in which my mother and I would do our weekly shopping. This occasion presented a predicament for the two of us. Not only was I in close proximity to great mountains of grapes but I was also keenly aware that my neighbors, many of them black, most of them poor, would effortlessly and without any apparent compunction load up their shopping carts with the fruit.

  “Look, Ma,” I’d say, “it’s okay for us to eat grapes.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  And once we had completed our shopping, I would have to stand beside her in front of the supermarket while she unzipped her knapsack and handed out an endless supply of leaflets with the black eagle, the red background, the three simple words.

  Then one day, after untold months of my ceaseless and unending demand, we were standing in the middle of the produce aisle when she said to me with obvious exasperation, “Eat one grape!”

  I could not believe my good fortune. Immediately I reached my hand up toward the piles towering above me and I plucked without choosing. The grape was heavier than I remembered grapes to be. I popped it into my mouth and bit down; fluid squirted into my cheeks. I chewed happily, violating the farm workers without remorse. Then three things occurred all at once. The first was that I realized how delicious the grape was, vindication of all the effort I had expended on obtaining it. The second was that I resolved this would not be the last time I was ever permitted to eat a grape. Finally, and most essential, I understood that the simple act of eating instantly rewrote the formula between desire and yearning, creating a new equation: desire + yearning = theft.

  What was paramount for my mother, though, was that I had not breached the sanctity of the boycott. If anything, the supermarket took a loss on their investment and therefore, in an indirect way, thievery actually strengthened the struggle of the farm workers. Desire + yearning + theft = revolution.

  The next time we were in the grocery store, my mother, now unable to turn back from the course of her decision, again allowed me to have a grape. The next time I ate without permission. “I’m just having one, Ma,” but I had two. After that, I ate three. So on and so forth. It became so habitual that I would stand leisurely in front of the mounds of grapes as if they were a buffet and I was considering my options. I would pluck casually as my mother shopped elsewhere in the store, my button informing the world to do the opposite of what I was doing.

  One afternoon, in the midst of my revelry, with my mouth full and my hand reaching, I had the uncomfortable sensation that I was being observed. Not too far away, an elderly white woman was staring at me intently. I resented her interference in what I had come to think of as a private moment, and I stopped chewing.

  “Go ahead,” she said sweetly. “Go ahead and eat another one.”

  I wanted to follow her suggestion, but there was something in her voice that made me hesitate. Were her words really words of encouragement? I sensed that I was in danger of being entrapped by the indecipherable language of adult sarcasm. I peered at the woman, who in turn peered at me. She had snow-white hair and leaned heavily on a cane and did not appear to have an unkind face. Perhaps she supported the boycott and therefore saw me as an ally championing the rights of migrant workers. It struck me suddenly how peculiar it was that an adult would actually endorse thievery, and I somehow sensed that I was following a peculiar set of rules. They were, of course, the correct rules, but they had set me in opposition to the rest of the world, where my right was everyone else’s wrong, and where my wrong was everyone else’s right, and where I would be helpless in ever being able to distinguish for myself which one was which.

  On a warm summer day, one year after the boycott had begun and with no resolution in sight, my mother took me into Manhattan to visit the Empire State Building. The excursion had been planned weeks in advance, and my next-door neighbor and best friend, Britton, had been invited to come along as well. I had looked forward to the trip with such eagerness that when we finally surfaced from the subway station at Forty-second Street, I instantly spotted the tower, its antenna stretching into the clouds, and I screamed at Britton at the top of my lungs, “Look at that, will you!”

  It was lunchtime, and so the three of us walked into Bryant Park directly behind the library to eat a snack before embarking for our destination. In the early seventies, Bryant Park was not the beautiful deep-green urban oasis that it has since become. It was a neglected patch of diseased and pockmarked grass, enclosed by a stark iron fence and enormous hedges and frequented by drug dealers and drug users, prostitutes and beggars. The three of us found a seat on a bench near the statue of the poet William Cullen Bryant, his face grave and paternal as he watched out over the unhappy state of his park. Britton sat across from me, his lunch bag on his lap, his legs swinging to and fro. He was a year older than me, tall, slim, black, the son of sharecroppers who spoke with Southern accents. I would often squander entire days in his bedroom, lolling about on the floor as we watched cartoons until his mom or dad said it was time for me to go home.

  “Eat your lunch,” my mother said to us.

  Britton and I began to extract the food, one by one, that our respective mothers had packed for us in our brown paper bags. When I withdrew my bag of carrot sticks, I could not help but notice that Britton withdrew a fat and yellow Twinkie. I watched as he unwrapped it slowly, as if it might be a birthday present, and then devoured it bite by bite, each bite cautious and calculated, until there was nothing left except to lick the cream from his fingers.

  “Eat your carrots,” my mother said.

  I stuffed them into my mouth and chewed without tasting.

  “Don’t eat so fast,” she said.

  I ignored her: chewed, swallowed, burped, and then stuck my hand back into the paper bag like a gambler thinking that his luck is about to change. Instead, I pulled out a container of yogurt. I looked up in time to see Britton holding a small bag of cookies. Was there nothing but treats in his bag?

  “I don’t want my yogurt,” I announced boldly.

  “Then eat your crackers.”

  The word crackers struck me heavily. I felt humiliated by the word.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Well, you’re going to be hungry.”

  “I don’t want my crackers!” My voice was loud enough to catch Britton’s attention and make him pause mid-bite. He looked at me curiously before he began chewing. Brown crumbs fell. Pigeons approached.

  I handed my lunch to my mother. “I’m done eating.”

  “You’re going to be hungry,” she said again, but I had no interest in foresight.

  “Let’s go,” I said grandly. “I’m ready to go to the Empire State Building.”

  “But Britton isn’t finished eating yet.”

  I wheeled toward him. “It’s time to go!”

  But he ignored me and sunk his arm deep into the bottomless paper bag, feeling around to see what other goodies there might be. And then he withdrew, like a surgeon performing a delicate operation, an enormous bunch of grapes.

  I stared in horror.

  “Britton isn’t finished eating yet,” I heard my mother repeat in the background.

  The grapes were green and shiny and they glistened with moisture, every one, and I was sure they had been purchased from the same supermarket in which my mother and I shopped. Britton cradled them in his hand and then lifted them up by their stem, as if he wished to display them to everyone in the park. Then he selected one, the plumpest one of them all, and ate it.

  “Hey, you,” I said. “You shouldn’t be eating those.”

  Britton looked at me, mystified. “What?”

  “You shouldn’t be eating those!” My voice was shrill, my finger pointing in accusation. I stood up from the bench and took a step toward him, thinking that I would snatch the grapes and smash them against the concrete. My mother would applaud my action.

  “Ma!” I said. But when I turned to her for assistance, she was ga
zing at me with a befuddled look.

  “What?” she said.

  What? Where had her outrage gone? I was swirling in bright lights of confusion. Britton laughed.

  “Don’t laugh!” I said, whipping around to him.

  “I didn’t laugh,” he said.

  Then my mother laughed, but when I whirled back to her, she had stopped. A crazy man tossed a handful of bread crumbs into the air and cried out in delight, “Whee! Whee!”

  I turned and hurried through the pigeons, which rose above me in agitation. At the edge of the park I could see cars speeding by in all directions. I waited to hear my mother call for me to return—“Saïd! Saïd!”—but she did not. When I looked back, I saw that she was still sitting on the bench, watching me dispassionately. The bunch of grapes remained in Britton’s hand, but he had stopped chewing. I walked to the corner, slowly enough so that I would be able to hear my mother’s voice. The light was red, and I waited for it to turn green and then I waited for it to turn red again. Then I remembered that we had come all the way from Brooklyn to see the Empire State Building. The thought startled me into the present and filled me with something like hope, and I turned back to my mother, but when I did it was as if I had stepped into the rabbit hole and the park was gone. I turned again. Was I facing the way I had come or the way I had gone? I ventured from the curb and a car horn boomed loudly, sending me scrambling back to the sidewalk. I could no longer see the Empire State Building; it had been swallowed by the faces of adults who loomed above, a sea of faces, each one hideous and unfamiliar.

  “Is there something wrong with the boy?”

  “Is the boy lost?”

  “What’s your name, honey?”

  “I think he’s lost.”

  “Are you lost, honey?”

  The faces of elderly women surrounded me, looking down with smiles. A police car drew up to the curb, its lights flashing red, and a door opened and I was escorted into the backseat.

  “Don’t worry, son,” one of the officers said to me. “We’ll find your mother and father.” He smiled at me. “What’s your name, son?”

  I told the officer my name. The name was repeated into the radio. The radio responded. The police car pulled away from the curb and into snarled traffic. And all of a sudden, from out of the bubbling cauldron of the city, a shirtless old man appeared, thin and drunk, rapping urgently on the window.

  “Officer! Officer!” the man cried breathlessly.

  The officers ignored him and inched the car forward.

  “Officer! Officer!” Rap rap rap.

  With a casual air, one of the officers unrolled his window. “How can we help you today, sir?”

  “Officer,” the man implored, “there are men in the park hitting me with sticks.”

  I felt alarm, but the officer showed no concern. “Can’t you see we have a lost little boy here?” he said.

  The thin man absorbed me with his pink eyes and then quickly returned to the officers. “Officer, they’re hitting me—”

  “There’s an officer on duty in the park,” the officer said.

  “He’ll handle the matter for you.”

  “Please!” the man said, but the traffic was unclogged now and the officer was rolling his window up, muting the sounds of the city. The old man’s voice faded away. And I sank comfortably into the cushions of the backseat, thinking that I could sit there forever, happy within the insulated bubble of the police car with the world floating harmlessly by. I knew, also, that this was the wrong thought to be having. “The police are bad,” my mother had told me many times. “They are not part of the working class. They help the bosses to oppress.” I had also been haunted by a photo that seemed to run nearly every week in The Militant, showing a young black boy being choked by an enormous white New York City police officer. Suddenly I realized that my mother had dressed me that day in a big blue T-shirt supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. I was positive this T-shirt would be seen as an affront by the police officers, and I curled into myself in the backseat to make it less conspicuous. Through the window I could see the top of the Empire State Building come into view, its antenna still in the clouds, then we rounded a corner and it was gone.

  At the police station I sat on a plastic chair beside filing cabinets. The officers who had found me joined with other officers in discussing my situation. I waited patiently and with my arms folded. Soon a very large officer—larger than all the rest—took me by the hand and led me down a hallway and into another room, which was empty except for a vending machine. We stood in front of the machine together, he and I and my T-shirt.

  “Which kind do you like?” he said.

  Rows of ice cream spread out in front of me.

  “Nothing, mister,” I said.

  “Come on,” he said, “what’s your favorite flavor?”

  “Chocolate, mister.” It seemed a painful admission.

  “I knew it,” he said, and he reached into his pocket and took out some coins and dropped them into the machine. I listened to them clink. Then he pulled the lever and out came a chocolate ice cream sandwich. He gave it to me.

  “Thank you, mister.”

  Then he put his hand in mine and led me back to the plastic chair, where my mother and Britton sat waiting.

  We did not embrace when we saw each other. My mother told me that because of this unexpected, inconsiderate diversion, we had run out of time to visit the Empire State Building and would now return home straightaway. There was still paperwork to fill out and things to sign, and the three of us sat on our plastic chairs, staring ahead wordlessly. After a while, Britton produced a small rubber ball from his pocket and proceeded to bounce it up and down in front of him.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to bounce that in here,” my mother said. She said it quietly, like she was passing a secret from one person to the next. Did she mean that he shouldn’t bounce the ball because black boys who bounced balls in police stations would have their heads split open? An officer came by with a pen and paper, and my mother stood and conferred with him. Then another officer came by. Britton swung his legs casually in front of him. One, two, three. One, two, three. The ice cream lay in my lap. It was growing soft and warm. I could see that it was quickly melting and beginning to ooze against its wrapper. Soon it would become nothing but chocolate liquid. If I was going to eat it, I had to eat it now.

  “Are you going to eat that?” Britton asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  He went back to swinging his legs. One, two, three. I looked at the ice cream in my lap. I did not unwrap it.

  3.

  I’VE JUST WALKED OUT OF a coffee shop at Union Square to see a Socialist Workers Party book table set up on the corner. “Olga Rodríguez for Mayor. Vote Socialist Workers,” the banner reads, because it’s October 1997 and everybody in the city is gearing up for the forthcoming mayoral election between Rudy Giuliani and Ruth Messinger. Everybody but me, that is. I’ve never voted in any election—mayoral, presidential, or otherwise—and I don’t intend to do so now. To cast my ballot for Olga Rodríguez would be to bend to my father’s will; to cast my ballot for someone else would be to betray him.

  There are a half dozen comrades standing in front of the table, holding out that week’s Militant to the people walking past. It’s Saturday, and the streets are teeming with NYU students, and couples out for a stroll, and boys with basketballs, but no one stops.

  “End police brutality. Defend immigrant rights. Vote for a working-class alternative,” one of the men says to a group of young black women carrying violin cases. They walk on as if they’ve heard nothing. The comrade follows after them for a moment and then retreats. His hair is bushy and uncombed and his shoes are scuffed. He is young but looks old. An enormous knapsack hangs off his back.

  Maybe I should buy a copy of The Militant from him. Why not? It’s only $1.50. Plus if my father shows up he’ll be delighted. “Sidsky! Let’s
have lunch!”

  I spent my Saturdays as a little boy playing on the sidewalk next to these book tables, hoping that someone would stop to buy. The locations varied from week to week; sometimes it was in front of a supermarket or a school or a public library, sometimes on the sidelines of a demonstration, sometimes just a corner on a crowded street. Sometimes it was in the rain and sometimes the dead of winter. I can still hear my mother’s voice, slight but grave, as she repeated the week’s headline over and over like a mantra, hoping to interest passersby in purchasing that issue, or in purchasing an entire subscription, or in purchasing a book. Or in joining the party.

  “End U.S. imperialist domination of the Middle East,” she might say one hundred times on a Saturday, five hundred times, a thousand times.

  From my place on the sidewalk I would look up and watch her every so often. When a person neared, she would take a few quick steps toward them with The Militant outstretched, her body language such that it seemed as if she was considering taking a stroll with that person, and the person, acutely aware of her proximity, would stiffen and quicken their pace, leaving my mother behind. The whole interaction took only seconds. She had at most ten words to make her pitch.

  “End U.S. imperialist domination of…”

  “End U.S.…”

  As the strangers approached, one after the other, I would will them to buy The Militant from my mother. Maybe this person is going to, I would think. Maybe that other person is going to. I willed a thousand Militants to be bought, ten thousand, one million. And for every thousand people who hurried past without stopping, there would be that one who, like a miracle, would stop to discuss, or to buy, or to put their name on a mailing list to receive announcements about upcoming events. And for every million, there would be the one who would actually join the party.