Ali Eskandarian
Golden Years 2 (a serialized novel)
Every visitor was impressed by this loft I was living in back then, not that I was living there alone, or that a bunch of people living in a loft in Brooklyn is a rare thing, but this was a special place. To begin with it was in a very desirable location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I had tried to stay far away from Williamsburg in the previous years of living in New York but after a brief exile period in Texas found my only real option to be living in this loft with five or six other people, and many more coming and going at all hours. The loft was in the only older building standing in that part of the neighborhood. Amongst the dead shinny new nauseating architecture it stood, defiantly, like a mountain before the approaching mining crews.
There were four very large flights of stairs to walk up which could be ominous looking at night, even to those of us who lived there, since not all the floors were occupied. On the fourth floor a heavy iron gate opened to a long corridor with six separate loft apartments on opposite ends, some larger than others, but all large enough to house more than four occupants at a time. Ours was the largest one of all. The views were spectacular from the windows alone but through the bathroom window one could access a roof top the size of a football field which not only had unobstructed panoramic views of the city but a fifty foot high water tower and an eighty foot chimney stack both of which were visible from Manhattan if one wanted to find them. The plumbing was shoddy at best, the hot water never hot, if you wanted to make coffee on the stove you’d see a mouse jump from one burner to the other. If you turned on the toaster the whole building might lose power and often did, when the upstairs neighbors walked around it would snow dust on us. There was no real way to keep the place clean. The minute I walked in I knew I had to live there for a while and get my life back in order.
It was a terrific hideout and I was a fugitive after all, in need of a fresh start. No address, no telephone, no connection to the people of the past, and I hardly knew any of my roommates who were all recent arrivals from Iran, rock musicians who’d made it out. They knew me too, had seen me on The Voice of America TV back in Tehran, which is illegally picked up via satellite. All these guys were much younger than me but that was no problem, I didn’t feel very old. On the contrary I felt more alive than ever and in the next year we would go through countless wild times together. They gave me a couch to sleep on, it was the middle of summer and very hot. I owned a few T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, three pairs of socks, and my trusted black leather boots. Had almost no money and no job offers. I was a happy man. These kids were good to me and in time I’d be able to repay them for their kindness. The first order of business was to go on a two-month tour around the country with them as an opening act. I would get thirteen dollars a day to live on, a meager per diem no matter how you look at it.
The previous year during my self imposed exile from New York I’d gone through a transformation of sorts. I was no longer whole or holly, had been forced to scrounge, scratch, and claw. My music career and relationship with my long term girlfriend at the time had come to a fiery and sudden end and I’d found myself back in Dallas living with my parents and working as a waiter in a restaurant that served breakfast.
Just a few months before the end, the fantasy was in full swing. The end started with a small tour of England as opening act for a legendary and famous old singer, final arrangements for a new album with my record company were in the works, and I was a member of a super group of sorts, but the stench of death was all around. The dream was a lucid one and therefore a more painful illusion. Many lies would have had to be swallowed for the charade to continue. The whole thing was rotten to the core, a shinny turd as they say. I didn’t have what it takes to climb the ladder.
Or maybe it was the drugs and the visions. Years before I had sat beside a great river during a psychedelic hallucination. It was flowing along as mightily as the old Tigris or the Nile, and it was called the River of Artistic Creation. I realized that one could only sit beside this great river, put a foot in it, swim in it, pray to it, bring people to its banks, but never possess or own it, never dam or pollute it. One should protect it at all cost. At the very least, like the great Ganges, it should remain a sacred place, for all mighty rivers play a profound part in the eternal cycle of life. They are the great connectors. They will carry you. They are a symbol of impermanence in the universe, of perpetual flow, of ultimate freedom.
Back at the loft I knew I’d better keep the philosophy to myself for a while and swim with the current. We did the tour, it wasn’t easy, but I was glad to see the country again. Being back in New York meant no more per diem and despite the kid’s offerings I didn’t eat much for the first three days. Was I really finished with the business end of things? Probably not, balance is a hard thing to achieve.
It’s not just that either, I was after all involved in my own kind of resistance against the powers that be, or maybe it was just the people of my own generation, who seemed as complacent as security guards at an IRS office on a Tuesday afternoon with the nearest holiday a month or so away, that made me rail against the system. Who knows? These unpatriotic lemmings with minds full of upward mobile nonsense, still hanging on to the crumbs of a long gone era need a rude awakening, I had thought. They’ve been sold so completely, in most cases, that any attempt at retrieving them might prove futile in the end no matter how hard I tried. At least that’s what it looked like to me and god knows I was trying my near best. And perhaps that’s what doomed my insurgent efforts from the start. It’s very hard to have it both ways, and sooner or later, or at least every now and then, one must draw a line in the sand and hope to be joined by a few others.
#
“I’ll try to talk very calmly and slowly so you can understand everything that I’m saying to you.” I think to myself as I look up at Mana. She’s sitting across the table from me and staring straight into my eyes. Her minestrone soup is hot and the steam is rising up into her face. Her back is to the window. I try to speak but before I can get a word out a Harley Davidson with an orange gas tank roars up to the curb and rattles my brains scrambling my thoughts. I watch as the rider cuts the engine and dismounts.
“So?” Mana wants to know. “You were saying…”
“Oh, nothing really. Yeah, there’ve been a few. So what? Nothing special, nothing to say really.”
Mana had called this morning, out of nowhere, to see if we could grab lunch together. I told her I was broke and looked like a somnambulist. She said to take a shower and not worry about the money. I was glad and needed a familiar face that could assess the damage.
When I arrived at Union Square she was already sitting on a step by one of the blue domed subway entrances, her big brown eyes beaming with delight. We embraced and kissed each other a few times. We’ve always met here, since the very beginning. We walked southbound in the cold while smoking her foreign Camel cigarettes before picking this cozy looking place to eat.
“Go on,” she says.
I start talking, my spaghetti is steaming too, the capers and green olives’ fragrance take me back to the days when my father was part owner of an Italian restaurant in Dallas, Sweet Basil Italian Ristorante on the South East corner of Trinity Mills Lane and Midway road.
“How about a drink?” I blurt out suddenly.
“I thought you wanted to wait?” she says with that sweet motherly voice of hers.
“I need something to make my heart stop beating so god damned fast,” I say, then try to flag down the waiter who seems too busy to reach us.
“Well, so. You were saying about these women?” Mana says.
I try my best to explain the polarity of it all and how unsuited I was for crawling around the flesh piste, that monstrous godforsaken corridor between the East River and the Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway, full of modern day Minutemen and nymphs with semi synthetic souls, arms, legs, cunts, cocks, mouths ready to suck, hearts covered with stannic, spewing neuro-toxic poison from their mouths, thousands of cocks and cunts advancing and retreating to the tunes of the present and the past, sex juice everywhere, slime, trash, rats, vomit and piss, viscoid and devoid of mystery.
She listens while eating her soup and I can see how much better she has gotten in the eighteen months since our breakup. Not better in a good way but callous enough to handle me talking about other women. When it’s her turn she starts right in about her failed attempt at a good guy. “A regular guy” as she puts it. Irish-Italian, an old schoolmate of hers from the Brooklyn Tech days, an Army deserter, unemployed gas truck driver living with his parents on the Upper West Side, a serious drinker and chain smoker… so far so good.
They reconnected at some funeral, started hanging out, she fell asleep on his bed one night and after waking up at seven or so in the morning found him in the living room with two of his guy friends doing coke. He had initially sworn he wasn’t into drugs.
“At least you are a musician but he’s just an unemployed gas truck driver. He’s got a naked woman in his bed and there he is with two other men doing coke all night?” Maybe his prick wasn’t working at the time, I think. I hope she finds somebody soon. Last time I saw her was a few months ago when she called from Union Square where I later found her absentmindedly drawing on the ground with colored chalk and totally drunk out of her mind.
After a little more storytelling she’s ready for a drink too, orders a Bloody Marry. I order a beer. My heart stops beating so fast after a few sips. I hold my hand out in front of her to see if the shakes are gone and they are.
After a while we finish our meals and drinks, she pays for it, and we walk out into the brutal cold. I’m freezing to death. A few more blocks and I swear I’m going into hyperthermic shock.
“The station is close, come on!” she demands.
We quicken our pace, run down the stairs, jump into the train car, find a seat, and scoot in close to one another. We’re going to her place, our old place where it finally fell apart. Where we tried desperately to grasp and clutch to whatever remnants of love existed between us but finally perished, in the dark hours of a cool October morning.
Mana and I get off at 86th street and take the cross town to York Avenue, get out and start to walk south. She goes into a deli for a six-pack while I smoke outside. I haven’t been near the Upper East Side in a long time but being back in the old neighborhood doesn’t effect me in a negative way. This place, the place where she grew up, where I first fell in love with her, a young girl of twenty-one, a recent graduate and living with her parents, vibrant and confused, love sick and in need of more in her life. Where I looked into her eyes and let her know my feelings and intentions. Where we told her family about us, ate countless dinners and lunches, played kid games with her niece and nephew. Where her mother and sister owned and operated a family daycare in the adjoining apartment. The sister and brother in law lived there until they finally bought a place nearby. Where in a fit of desperation we decided to abandon our Park Slope Brooklyn apartment over looking the headstones, obelisks, and mausoleums of Greenwood Cemetery and moved in since it was cheap and I wasn’t bringing in any money.
This charming apartment with its magnificent backyard is where our love crumbled. The final days in this place were full of tempestuous encounters and then finally, as if by design, turbulent winds blew the whole damn charade down to interplanetary dust and the debris was scattered far and wide into our collective futures.
The key is turned, the door is opened, Madam and Monsieur walk in. The place is dark and smells of the past, a deep dark past, a frozen past, a past still lived, one ingrained in the atoms and cells, an inescapable past full of drama, magic, sorrow, loss, happiness, sex, lonesome yearnings, toenails, lotion, soap suds, contact lenses, cigarettes, laughter, childish games, masturbation, take out, television, dead rotting stinking mice, pain, pain, and love, undying and everlasting. She takes her time taking off her boots, then walks over to the light switch and illuminates the old battlefield. The dead have all been cleared off and the bomb craters filled but the stench of death remains.
I walk about the old place. Not much has changed. She goes to the rest room. I move over to the bookshelf and study the old books, every one connected to a time and place. Each title a marker for some distant memory like laying in bed together while we read or reading on the subway on my way home to see her, or putting down the book to greet her at the door, to embrace and kiss passionately, to take the boots off for her, to rub her legs and hold her for a while. Then the door opens and she’s asking if I want a beer.
We take the beers into her bedroom. She sits on the floor while I study her paintings and drawings that are spread out on a table. She has taken to painting and drawing since our breakup and they’re not too bad but she gives most of them away foolishly without a signature on the front or back. I pat some of the furniture as if to say hello. Hello again drawer, hello closet, hello table, hello chair.
I sit on the floor next to her and run my fingers along a boteh pattern on the old Persian rug. Feels nice but the floor is not my favorite place to sit, my ass is all bone. It doesn’t take long before we’re talking about “us”, the past, abandonment, having given our best years, why, where, when?
It’s getting heated but not out of hand. I’m still sore at her for not adoring me, not making me feel manly enough, not clutching and clawing at me after a great fuck, the same kind of fuck that makes other women melt but used to hardly register a smile from her. Mana says she knows now, has come to realize how good it was.
“Not that I’m admitting to anything,” I say, “but a man has to prove certain things to himself after a while and well…”
She knows. She knows everything.
The hours roll on as we lay there drinking and listening to Miles Davis, first Sketches of Spain, then Kind of Blue, then ESP. After a while we run out of juice and decide to order some Vietnamese food. She makes me lie down on her bed and lies next to me. The next moment we are holding each other tightly. We still fit. It’s incredible how well we fit. I brush her long black hair out of her face and gently caress her cheek with the back of my hand, then grab the back of her head and press her against me. She leans up and kisses me on the lips. I rub her back then gently move down to her legs.
“God, you’re so small,” I say.
“You’re so small. Where are you? You’re so skinny. Just bones,” she says tapping my hip.
She kisses me again, this time more passionately.
“Come on… the food’ll be here soon,” I plead.
“I just put in the order.”
“These Chinamen are fast. That’s why they’re taking over the world, baby,” I joke in an old timey voice.
“They’re Vietnamese.”
“Charlie’s even faster. Back in the shit…”
“Come on… kiss me…”
“Back in Nam’… we used to order lots of Vietnamese.”
“Kiss me.”
“I can’t get it out of my mind… Damn Vietcong.”
The buzzer goes off. “You see what I mean?” I say.
“God, how do they make it so fast?”
“They’re taking over the goddamn world, I tell ya!”
She left to pay for the food and stayed in the kitchen for a while preparing a tray and getting more beers.
I started to think about my big idea again, about leaving it all behind and going south, very far south, about the America down there past the equator. The idea had been getting kicked around my brain and endoskeleton for a good while now. There was no shaking it. It was a matter of saving money and breaking free, to book a passage on a ship to Buenos Aires or somewhere like that, to hear the ship’s horn, and go out to sea for a spell. To cut the chord and break free, to cleanse myself of the past, to purge, absolve, abandon, destroy, rebuild. I wanted to scour the earth on a silent quest.
Mana came back with a tray and I locked away my thoughts as quickly as I had sprung them free. There was no sense in going around in circles. There were lots of loose ends to tie.
“Can we eat in front of the TV? I haven’t watched any for so long,” I asked.
“Sure, if you want to,” she said.
We sat on the floor and ate while watching television. When finished she cleared it all away and after a bit of TV we went to bed. We only held each other, nothing else, and that was fine by me.
From: Golden Years (uncorrected text)
Ali Eskandarian is a musician and author of the novel Golden Years, which will be serialized on his medium page. Eskandarian’s transnational upbringing makes him a prescient voice for our era. The Iranian-American troubadour draws upon influences as discrete as American folk, rock and traditional Persian music to craft songs about love, travel, politics and loneliness. The results have earned him comparisons to greats like Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley. Ali was born in Pensacola, FL, on September 11, 1978. Growing up in Tehran, during the Iranian Revolution, Ali found strength in music and the arts. The family left Iran and was granted political asylum in Germany before relocating to Dallas, Texas, where Ali experienced an arts-filled adolescence. Ali has been living in New York since 2003. His debut album, Nothing to Say, was released on Judy Collins’ Wildflower Records, he has toured the States several times including as opener for Peter Murphy (Bauhaus) and with fellow Iranians The Yellow Dogs. Golden Years is his first novel, and describes the lives of young (artistic) Iranians in Brooklyn, New York.
