When Skateboards Will Be Free Page 4

  In her absence, my brother and I filled the apartment with elaborate games. He was twelve years old, and so I was more than happy to parade behind him as his second-in-command. “Our bedroom is the jungle,” he would say, “and our beds are lions.” Or he would say, “I’m Superman and you’re Batman.” But just a few months after my sister left, my brother was also packed up and sent away, leaving me with a final image of him digging his hand into a cereal box and withdrawing a free prize, a plastic yellow dinosaur, which he graciously handed over to me.

  So by the time I was four years old it was just my mother and me. And I became friends with Britton, spending my days in his bedroom, lolling about, watching cartoons.

  Then one day my sister magically returned to us, just like that, saying she had been unhappy with my father, saying she didn’t like his girlfriend, and giving me the impression that things had reversed themselves and soon my brother would return as well. The single memory of my sister trying to untie my shoelaces now became many memories. There we are in the morning, walking to school together. There we are in the afternoon, returning home. There we are at night, my sister tucking me into bed, kissing me, and then, inexplicably, plucking a single hair from her head, which I place inside my security blanket so it tickles my face as I sleep.

  One afternoon while playing outside in the playground, I tumbled from my tricycle and was knocked unconscious. When I awoke from my daze, my sister was sitting beside me.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said, and she bent down and picked up me in one arm and my tricycle in the other.

  At the entrance to our building, a strange man saw the dilemma and came to our aid. “Let me carry your brother,” he offered.

  “No,” my sister said, “I’ll carry my brother. You carry the tricycle.”

  Shortly after that incident, she went to visit my father for the weekend and upon her return to us made a careless remark about what a good time she had had. My mother abruptly flew into a rage. “Which one of us do you want to live with?” she screamed from across the dinner table.

  “I want to live with you, Ma!”

  “Decide tonight! Once and for all!”

  “I said I want to live with you, Ma!”

  My mother’s fury escalated and then raged on like a storm. I followed along, watching from the outskirts, as it moved from room to room. My sister stayed silent throughout, her face an expression of blankness. An hour into the ordeal, my mother, in order to emphasize a point she was making, picked up a dozen of my sister’s coloring markers that were near at hand and flung them across the room. They skidded over the floor and under the furniture, each and every one in its own direction. Instantly I fell to my hands and knees and set about retrieving them, happy to work toward a fruitful end. When I had gathered them all up, I presented them to my sister. Even in the midst of my mother’s rampage, she had the presence of mind to turn and thank me.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “Decide! Decide!”

  Later that night, near midnight, in the quiet of the apartment, I watched from the bedroom doorway as my sister packed a small bag of her belongings.

  “Will you be coming back again?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. And she never did.

  During the long days at Oberlin while everyone, including my brother and sister, was sequestered behind closed doors for their meetings and plenums, I passed the time by playing with the other dozen or so children of comrades. My favorite was Frankie Halstead, son of Fred Halstead—a leading member of the party, presidential candidate in 1968, and something like four hundred pounds. Frankie was just a few years older than me, and he was not so big as his father; in fact, he was short and skinny, but he carried himself with an outsize bravado that I admired. Once I had watched him argue with a pompous thirteen-year-old from the Young Socialist Alliance and then resolve it by pushing him clear over the hedges. He was also excellent at baseball and seemed to have every statistic committed to memory. He had baseball cards, and baseball programs, and a foul ball that he had caught at a Dodger game. “You can have it,” he told me, “I catch thirty of them a year.”

  With Frankie in the lead, us dozen children would move like cattle over the campus, going from one grassy lawn to the next, discovering new things as we went, until the entire campus had been traversed. Everything was silent and still. No adult was ever sighted. We frolicked unobserved. “Let’s go climb the tree behind the library,” Frankie might suggest, and off we would go. If the sun grew too hot, we took sanctuary inside the dormitories and ran wild through the empty lobbies and lounges. Occasionally we broke things, like a vending machine, and would slink away, covering our tracks as best we could. We were always the first in line for lunch, crowding impatiently at the entrance to the cafeteria as the comrades began trickling back from their morning sessions. When we were finally allowed in, we rushed rudely ahead of everyone to load our trays with goodies, going back for seconds and thirds, becoming so stuffed that we had no choice but to leave behind entire plates of uneaten spaghetti and pie.

  When lunch was over, the comrades congregated on the lawn to play a few minutes of volleyball before the afternoon meetings began.

  “Hey, kids, let’s sing a song,” said a comrade with a guitar.

  And we gathered around on the grass as the man sang, “I’m tired of the boss exploiting me. I’m tired of being oppressed.” His voice deep and loud, his fingers moving up and down the guitar.

  “I’m tired of the boss exploiting me,” we sang along. “I’m tired of being oppressed.”

  Then the comrade asked us to suggest someone else who exploited and oppressed us, and as he strummed the notes we all thought long and hard but couldn’t come up with anyone.

  “Come on, guys, I know you can think of someone.”

  “Teacher,” a girl finally offered, and we all agreed, but the comrade said that was wrong, that the teacher was a worker too and just as exploited as anybody. So no one knew what to say. It was apparent that the comrade was growing frustrated, and finally he said, “Landlord.” And so we all sang, “I’m tired of the landlord exploiting me. I’m tired of being oppressed.”

  One evening, toward the end of the week, my sister came and found me, and together we walked hand in hand to the cafeteria on the other side of campus, where my father ate his meals. Our pace was rapid and focused, and I rushed to tell her about my many adventures from the week.

  “Hey, Jamileh,” a comrade called out, “is that your little brother? I didn’t know you had a little brother.”

  Along the way we passed a small table covered with pamphlets and surrounded by sad men who had been expelled from the party years ago. “Those are not comrades,” my mother had once scolded me when I had gone over to their table to say hi. “They’re here to cause problems.”

  “The revolution needs a revolutionary party,” the men said to my sister imploringly, coming toward her with their pamphlets outstretched. “The revolution needs …”

  But my sister ignored them and put her arm around my shoulder and steered me away.

  At dinner I was exceedingly polite. I sat bolt upright in my chair, ate in moderation, and tried not to spill anything. I also made sure to say please and thank you.

  “Hey, old man,” my brother shouted to my father with a joking familiarity that frightened me, “can you hand over the salt and pepper shakers?”

  “Yass, yass,” my father said, his long arm reaching from far away.

  “Yass, yass,” my brother said, imitating his accent.

  “Yass, yass,” my sister said.

  As the meal progressed, the table grew wild with a carnival of voices that contended for my father’s attention. There was something kingly about the way he sat there, a friendly king, his hands laying flat on the table as he listened respectfully to the Iranian comrades who had pulled up a chair to discuss the Shah. They spoke in Persian first, and then in English, so that A
merican comrades could also offer their views. And then my brother and sister, who had now affected a cultured, sophisticated air, took out their notebooks and pens and also plunged their way into the conversation.

  Amid the rising chaos, my father’s girlfriend put her arm around the back of my chair and took the opportunity to teach me things I had already learned a long time ago. “This is a circle,” she said with friendship, tracing her finger around the rim of my chocolate-milk glass. Her name was Dianne, and I was aware that she was the opposite of my mother. She was tall and confident and had once run for senator of California, whereas my mother was short and anxious and worked as a secretary. She was also prettier than my mother and had long hair, and this made me feel troubled. I knew that she was my father’s girlfriend, and from my six-year-old way of thinking I thought that this meant that she had become my brother and sister’s mother.

  Midway through the meal I got the overwhelming urge to tell my father something, to tell him something about my day, but I did not know how to get his attention because I did not know what to call him. In nursery school I had had a teacher who was Filipino and whose name I could not pronounce, so I had taken to prefacing anything I said with “Hey, guess what!” I said it so often that it must have begun to sound like I was saying it as if it were her name—maybe I even began to think that it was her name—because one afternoon a teacher said to me sharply, “Her name is not ‘hey, guess what.’”

  “Hey, guess what!” I shouted at my father. The table fell silent. My father looked at me from behind his round glasses—round glasses on a round face. His stomach was also round and it pressed against the table. He was bald but had stubble on his face. His skin was dark because he was Iranian.

  “I climbed the tree behind the library!” I said.

  My father blinked his eyes. “Say, is that so?” he said as if this was special news. “The tree behind the library.”

  “Like a monkey,” I said.

  “Like a monkey,” he repeated.

  The table laughed. My brother and sister looked at me with disappointment.

  “He’s so cute,” one of the women comrades said, and reached over and rubbed my head. And then someone said something about the Shah, and my father’s attention was quickly drawn back to the matter at hand.

  Dianne picked up a napkin and said to me, “This is a square.”

  The final night of the convention, everyone convened in the campus chapel for the fund-raiser. I sat next to my mother in the first row of the balcony and looked down over the railing. I knew that somewhere below was the rest of my family, and I also knew that sometime during the week my mother and father had met briefly, courteously, but I had not been privy to that meeting. Now I could see only a great mass of comrades filling the pews and overflowing the aisles, the hum of conversation excited and eager. When everyone had taken their seats, the speakers approached the podium and one after another they laid out in detail the unhappy situation of the world. “Comrades, the ruling class is consolidating power …” I could sense a heavy, brooding silence blanketing the audience and I sat as still as possible, feeling the somber mood drape me. “Comrades, we are on the verge of a worldwide depression …”

  But at some point the speeches began to change in tone as they described the state of the Socialist Workers Party, and what had been accomplished that week, and what would be accomplished that year, and the various projects the party was undertaking, like modernizing the printing press, for instance, and how much more effective the party would be in fighting the ruling class once this printing press had been modernized and all the Militants and books and pamphlets could be printed more efficiently and cheaply. And now, as the speakers spoke, the audience began to come alive with energy and optimism, and the first tentative bursts of applause broke out, short bursts that soon grew longer and more sustained until it was time for Jack Barnes, national secretary and leader of the party, to take the podium.

  “Comrades,” he said, and the chapel fell quiet with expectation as he adjusted the microphone and looked out into the sea of faces and then up into the balcony.

  I was unnerved by Barnes and I always dreaded his appearance. He was a thin, bald, plain man—from Minneapolis—with a long face and a sharp voice, who would be wholly unremarkable looking were it not for the gruesome fact that he was missing his left arm about two inches below the elbow. He had the unfortunate preference for wearing short-sleeved shirts, and when he gestured, the remaining fragment of his forearm would swivel back and forth, causing me to believe that he was in ghostly possession of a full arm, a full hand, full fingers that were pointing emphatically toward the struggles ahead. It reminded me of a worm that, after being cut in two, continues to live.

  “Comrades,” he said to the rapt audience. “Comrades, the Socialist Workers Party is now at the vanguard of the working class.”

  And at that the chapel erupted. Long, loud, and continuous. Everyone clapped and stomped, including my mother. On it went, as if it might go on forever. I am sure my brother and sister and father and Dianne clapped and stomped as well. I joined too, pounding my bare feet on the wooden floor, adding to the tumult. The building shook and vibrated with sound, trembled with it. And finally, after much time had elapsed, Jack Barnes put out his one good arm to calm the audience. “Comrades, please,” he said. “Comrades, please. I’ve just been informed that the applause is threatening to compromise the chapel’s structure.” Which, of course, made everyone applaud and stomp even louder.

  And then it was time to collect the money.

  Early the next morning I congregated with Frankie and the other children in the cafeteria and stuffed my face one last time with pancakes and waffles. Then I said good-bye until next year and went to my dorm room and packed my suitcase and put on my shoes and went with my mother to the lobby, which was now being emptied of the banners about the Vietnam War and the Fourth International.

  “Let me help with those suitcases,” a comrade said, and I followed them out to the long line of Greyhound buses that sat waiting to be boarded.

  On the wide, clean sidewalk, I walked up and down among the luggage, looking for my brother and sister, but eventually I was told that they had already left for Brooklyn and that they had said to tell me they would see me soon, definitely soon. And then my mother and I climbed aboard our bus and the driver pulled away. Through the window I watched as the campus receded into the distance.

  Weeks later, months later, after the memories had begun to fade, I would sometimes crawl onto my mother’s lap when she returned from her secretarial job, tired and unhappy, and I would sit with her quietly, just the two of us. Her arms would enfold me and she would press me against her and I would feel her breathing, her chest rising and falling.

  In the warm stillness I would sometimes ask her when she thought the revolution was going to come.

  “When will it come, Ma?”

  “Soon,” she’d answer, quickly brightening, smiling. “It’s inevitable.”

  “Will I be seven years old?” I’d ask.

  “Well, no,” she’d say with the greatest of patience. “The revolution is going to take a bit longer than that.”

  “Will I be ten?”

  “No.”

  “Will I be eleven?”

  “No.”

  “Will I be eighteen?”

  And then she’d say, “Yes, Saïd. Yes. You’ll be eighteen.

  When you’re eighteen the revolution will come.”

  5.

  ONE OF THE BENCHMARKS FOR being a dedicated member of the Socialist Workers Party is the willingness to open your home to comrades who might be traveling to New York City to help out with a campaign, or to give a speech, or to modernize a printing press. Communists should have no sentimental attachment to their homes; they are there to provide shelter, and like any other material object—socks or spoons—they are good only as long as they are useful. “After the revolution comes,” my mother would tell me, “people will live whe
rever they want to live, because private property will be a thing of the past.”

  And so just a few months before I turned five years old, my mother agreed to let a comrade stay with us for a few days while he was in the city from San Francisco to help renovate the party’s national office. We had my brother and sister’s spare bedroom, after all.

  “I am ____,” the comrade said upon his entry into our home, shaking my mother’s hand. His face was wide and friendly, covered with a beard and topped with a huge head of hair that made him look something like a lumberjack.

  “I’m Martha Harris,” my mother said. “It’s nice to meet you. Please come in. Set your bags down anywhere. I’ll show you around. This is my son Saïd.”

  The man knelt down in front of me and put out his hand.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Saïd,” he said.

  “You look like a lumberjack,” I said forthrightly, and this made him shake with laughter.

  On the first evening, in order to repay my mother for the kindness she showed in opening her home to him (although such sacrifice was of course made selflessly), he repaired a lamp of ours that had been broken for some time.

  I watched him repair it.

  “First I’m going to make sure it’s unplugged,” he said to me patiently. “Now I’m going to take off the lamp shade. Now I’m going to unscrew this screw.”

  I was even allowed to hand him some of the tools, but my hands were so small that the tools clattered to the floor in the midst of the exchange. My mother and the guest found this adorable.

  When the man had finished tinkering, he turned the switch and the room was filled with light.

  “Look how wonderful,” my mother said.

  On the second evening, we all sat down together for dinner. This was unusual, as no man had ever eaten with us before. I was awed by the tremendous amount that the comrade consumed, spoonful after spoonful disappearing into his mouth. The comrade was also extremely gracious, and he would ask for the salt politely, almost daintily, and he would pass the butter if you needed it and he complimented my mother’s cooking and he said that I was such a good boy.