Ali Eskandarian
Golden Years 10
The tour was mostly great until we arrived in LA and everything died. What’s wrong with that godforsaken city? What compels people to behave in the manner they do there? The show was all right but the next few days were spent chasing tail and smoking opium, two things that don’t go together at all. One can’t really give two shits about anything on opium. Women and sex are still things one desires, but upon the slightest hint of failure the mind recoils and retreats back to its den of comfort and despair, provided there is opium waiting in that den.
I’ve given up on sex for the time being. It’s too difficult when there are five other guys around at all times. Four horny musicians and one even hornier manager. Most of the time I have a chance with one of the best looking girls around but somehow the opportunity gets squandered. I’ve lost the killer instinct. Some of the other guys are fucking-machines. Koli got laid by three different women in a forty-eight hour period and still found time to smoke some opium in the interim. The first one he had was a rich widow with a gigantic house on the Hollywood Hills. She invited us over to her mansion where other available “ladies” waited with delight and candor, the sort of fair-mindedness any rock n’ roll musician looks for in the eyes of a woman/girl. I immediately locked in on a long legged brown haired siren who had, it soon became apparent, a ping pong fetish.
“Hit it hard! Harder! Make the ball hit me, come on! Can’t you hit me?” she kept yelling. I could hit her but not in the way she really wanted to be hit. What can you do? She still seemed to like my company but after the cocaine arrived and I started to get into it full force, her friend kept pulling on her shirt and asking her to leave. One can always count on a friend to screw it up for everybody. Siamak had a girl and so did Manuchehr but the Manager was in some kind of a stupor so we decided to drive to the beach and see the sunrise. On the drive my mind started to drift like it often does. For some reason I started to remember Amber. I met Amber on the highway a few years back, she was traveling with a friend.
My old pal Jake and I were on tour, driving across Kansas, had just been pulled over and searched thoroughly by some ding bat cop with an SS hairdo and piercing Nazi eyes. The fucker could have found all sorts of goodies if he’d only looked hard enough, but what can you expect from a dumb Kraut pig? Needless to say we were not in the finest of moods, but suddenly a car pulled up next to us and after a moment Jake informed me that the occupants of this vehicle were two attractive females. I didn’t care about any females, there’d been lots of them along the way; treacherous young witches, old sorcerers, students, mothers, girlfriends, daughters of the revolution, good timing whores, sluts, broads, intelligent ingenues, wildcats, cougars, drunkards, closet lesbians, mid-western midwifes, nurses, lawyers, painters, assistants to Congressmen, strippers, pole dancing specialists, bohemians, yuppies, yippies, hippies, honkies, hipsters, screamers, moaners, quiet types, skinny, voluptuous, blonds, brunets, red heads. Not that we’d gotten our end in with them all, but close.
Thirtysix cities in fortytwo days, opening up for an icon of sorts. Coast to coast, up and down, side to side rock n’ roll fantasy. Intense madness that had mushroomed into something unmanageable by the end. We had crossed mountains, rivers, gorges, canyons, lightning storms, floods, bridges, ghost towns. Slept in five star hotels, roach motels, strange apartments, on greasy linoleum floors, parquet floors, grass, gravel, dirt. We had become monsters Jake and I.
All innocence was lost within us. We had morphed into politicians, pawnbrokers, pragmatists, hustlers, midnight ramblers, mutant methodologists grappling with the inescapable horrors of our free enterprise system, or so it seemed.
I decided to glance over and have a look and, low and behold, my steam loving, dried fish eating, Swedish friend was right. These two were really something, a blond and a brunet, probably from Scandinavian stock and eager to boot. A few more miles, a few more looks, then phone numbers were exchanged via the trusted big marker on paper trick. We decided to pull over at the nearest rest stop which happened to be pretty far away and a Native American store. Once out of the car we all realized a connection was there.
Amber was an amateur photographer and her friend Sara, an amateur musician. They were coming from Las Vegas and on their way to Austin where they planned to pack up all of their belongings and move to Los Angeles. Sara had spent the better part of the week fucking the shit out of some rich dude in Vegas, while Amber had watched and participated when the mood was right. Sara was a kind of S&M freak I noticed, after she spotted a black leather whip at the Native American store and proceeded to whip me, rather hard, on the back and ass while laughing sadistically. There was nothing more Jake and I could do but to press on to the nearest motel and see about learning a trick or two from these wild vamps.
We hardly had any money, hadn’t made any money the past few shows, and were planning to sleep in the van but what the hell, we just figured on not eating tomorrow. These girls were used to that rich guy in Vegas and we had to play up the cheap motel, rough sex factor to our advantage. They insisted on getting their own room and we were soon separated into couples. Once in the room I pulled out a half full bottle of Whiskey and a few Hydrocodone. The girls had a little coke and we did that at the natural entr’actes.
It wasn’t so much the sex I was thinking about on this drive with the manager down to the beach but how easily I gave in to it. How easily I cheated, how easily I became a deceiver. It was a long time coming and once the floodgates opened there was no stopping the flow. A woman should always keep her man feeling manly or it just won’t work. Men are stupid and should be treated like children most of the time. Amber made me feel like a man. She wasn’t such an S&M freak after all, just a girl looking for a good lay in the middle of nowhere. After we were finished she lay there beside me and wanted to cuddle.
“Listen Amber… I’d rather sleep in the other room, I’m gonna go check and see if they’re done.”
“What? Why don’t you sleep here?”
“Well… I’d be more ah…”
“You have a girlfriend don’t you?” she asked.
“Eh… yeah.”
“I knew it! Okay, I understand… I mean, yeah all right… but make sure you say goodbye before you guys leave, will you?”
We left the next morning bright and early without saying a damn word to them. My girlfriend called from her job back in New York and we talked as if all was normal. Am I a monster? What is a monster? A lier, yes. A cheat, yes. A charlatan, yes. How did I manage to look my girlfriend in the eye and lie to her over and over again? I chalked it up to dissatisfaction and the law of keeping your guilt to yourself and not spreading it around. I don’t know. None of it was making sense anymore. I felt farther and farther away from having a meaningful relationship with a woman every day, thought it was truly the end of the world.
I was hanging in the balance, somewhere between fantasy and reality. A total fool completely engaged in a loosing proposition, a masochist, a contrarian, a liar, a cheat, a whore, a ghost, a shell, a dope fiend, pot head, coke head, speed freak, pill popper, boozer, sex fiend, loner, alone. Artist?
From: Golden Years (uncorrected text)
Ali Eskandarian passed away on sunday, november 10th, in Brooklyn, New York, only 35 years old. We, the people of Lebowski Publishers, are, like you, sad beyond words that Ali is no longer with us. Ali was not only a very talented musician, but also, in our humble opinion, a very talented author. We fell in love with his manuscript, which Ali sent to us in September 2012, and started serializing it on medium.com on October 22nd this year. This is what Ali wrote about it, in his very first email to us:
The novel is called American Immigrant and is about someone like myself: immigrant, war child, rock n’ roller, artist trying to live in a modern world he finds infuriating/exhilarating. There is an insurgent political bent to the writing, also lots of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. There are characters very similar to the Yellow Dogs as well. I lived with the dogs for almost two years and we got to have some fun. I think it could be the great Iranian-American novel, or at least that’s what I’ll call it until someone proves me wrong.
In agreement with Ali’s parents and his brother Sam, we have decided to keep on serializing parts of the novel on his medium page. Along the way, while making plans, for we had many, we changed the title in Golden Years, a reference not only to David Bowie, but also, in retrospect, to a future that was not meant to be.
We hope that one day, not too far away from now, you, dear reader, will hold this wonderful book in your hands, cherishing its beautiful language, its vibrant stories set in Iran and New York, full of love, life and bittersweet memories.
Let’s keep on calling it Ali’s Great Iranian-American Novel, until someone proves him wrong.
