Ali Eskandarian
Golden Years 9
Our travel plans seem very vague at this point or maybe I haven't been paying attention. We leave for Atlanta in two days or perhaps even tomorrow. I have to buy some strings for my guitar but can't seem to leave this loft and I have little money. Everybody is always coming and going in this business. Timmy just flew to Amsterdam, Dariush is back from Prague, Gena just moved to Athens, and so on. The rest of us are about to scatter all over the country.
I think I'm loosing all sense of modality. Way too much booze, or maybe not enough and the tour hasn't even begun. It's OK, I'm an old pro. I used to be a musician remember? Toured the country and everything. Yes, allow me to toot my own horn for a second. So, yes, I can't seem to leave this loft. I'm not sure I would ever leave if I didn't have to. Why not sit here and write? I call myself a writer now after all, if I can only get away from music long enough to write. One of the kids just bought a concert ticket from a scalper on the street and it turned out to be a fake. Thirty-five dollars down the drain. That's a lot of money these days. Oh, well lesson learned.
What will I do tonight? Don't want to go to any bars, don't want to see any people, don't want to sit here all night. New York, New York, a couple more days of being your crestfallen guest and then goodbye for a while.
New York is a state of mind. The best thing it can do for you, especially in America, is show that living like an artist is okay, or at least plausible. Living like an artist? What is an artist? I won't begin to try and define it, but will confess to knowing a little bit about the affair. Artists are considered crazy even by other so called artists in this country. What a crime it is to be an artist in America, and rightfully so come to think of it.
It's a life lived near or below the poverty line, dotted with countless calamities of the spirit, suicidal tendencies, gross misunderstandings with other human beings regarding every aspect of existence, and those kinds of things. Not to mention cheap beer and whiskey, loneliness, pain, sickness, sorrow, mournfulness, compunction, malnutrition, cheap sex, booze, tears, regret, shame, guilt, vice, distress, misery, exultation, boasting, retreating, advancing, fucking, sucking, getting fucked, going broke all the time, always broke, sometimes a star, star for a night, promises, promises, machinery in motion, big wheels turning, potential, girls, money, sex, power, cool, rock n' roll, fantasy, dream come true, art galleries, paint, canvases, papers, pens, computers, drugs, booze, girls, guys, dudes, bitches, witches, whores, fuckers, drunks, druggies, yuppies, rich ones, poor ones, managers, agents, girls, girls, girls, light, dark, hair, clothes, guitars, drums, roadies, setting up your own gear, write a song, good song, bad song, shitty song, sells a million copies, Youtube hit, "MTV doesn't play music videos anymore", everybody plays music, music is big, art is big, entertainment is big! Biggest it's ever been, gigantic, huge, HUGE!
Oh well. Just need to get away from a sort of thinking. Hope to slowly drift away from certain notions of self and existence in a modern society. Too much noise in this loft now, the kids are watching Youtube, there is a neighbor eating one of the hamburgers they made, my mood is not an easy one, I am drunk and stoned, again. Nothing special to report here. If you want to know what’s going on anywhere, if you want to know what the shot is anywhere in the world, then go there and stay a while. I wish I was going somewhere (Paris, London, Asuncion, Tokyo, Arles, Casablanca, Nairobi, etc.) to stay for a while but instead my home will be where these crazy Iranian rock n' rollers take me for the next few months. God/Universe/Mother Earth, save us.
O how I yearn for intellectual clarity. I wish to learn and convey wisdom and the way towards wisdom but got lots of baggage in tow, and very little money. In America, my friend, you need money. Wisdom costs money. Once you can afford to pay for it you'll be wise enough to know what it's actually worth. That's what all my friends with money seem to convey to me with their actions anyway. It's all right, I already knew the line. Here it is again, "In America my friend, you need money." Money, money, money.
New York is where I started to write in earnest. In that upper west side apartment so tastefully decorated with imported vintage furniture and sculptures. Mana’s gay old uncle who’d long ago moved to Tunisia had handpicked each piece and purchased them in places like Laos, Morocco, Nigeria, and so forth. Lots of paintings too and great big lively plants that gave the three-bedroom apartment life. I put pen to paper immediately in that maid’s room I slept in. How romantic it all was and to the tune of jazz, that very first morning with the sun rising slowly above the old buildings. I didn’t sleep a wink the first week in town, watched the sun come up every day, used to write on subways, in the park, on stoops, mostly songs back then but some prose as well.
It was a new world and wide open for me. I remember all those older Iranian artists that Mana’s parents knew. Most of them had come over during the late seventies and early eighties. They did it right, dug in their roots and stayed put, some of them accumulated wealth and some came from money. There was the gay Assyrian Poet and Playwright who had a face like Hemmingway and spoke the most velvety fine pomegranate scented breezy English I’d ever heard, liked to call you “dahling” and speak of Christ whenever possible. The Assyrian gay blade with a crimson fiery soul like Ashurbanipal and a belly like Socrates, used to be rich in the late seventies on account of his car blowing up and him wining the lawsuit.
“My more industrious friends advised me to invest my million or so in real estate dahling, why don’t you buy a building? They asked. I was busy putting on plays and became at once disturbed by their vision of me as a person. My dissatisfaction was total. What? Me? I kept asking them in disbelief, you must be joking. A land lord! I am an artist dahling. Can you imagine me collecting rent from poor innocents? I would go bankrupt in a year!”
Of course he did go bankrupt and was working at Starbucks at the end of his life while living in a halfway home in the Bronx but kept putting on one-man shows that were stuff of magic. He had a bewitching stage presence and a voice that seemed to come right out of the Delphic fissure.
There were a few filmmakers, many musicians, painters, and writers too. We’d always spend fourth of July at one of their homes on Staten Island, right by where the ferry docs and one can see the fireworks all over the city. They were a merry bunch and loved to drink as much as I did. A few master chefs hovered among them too, there was always a table adorned with the best dishes for all to enjoy.
Watching the exiles celebrate forth of July was a strange experience because the duality in their emotions was nakedly exposed. They all longed for a homeland where they might be appreciated by their countrymen but instead were now growing old in a foreign land that guaranteed them freedom but little in the way of recognition. Of course some of them got more recognition than they knew what to do with from the art world and lots of money but that didn’t seem to be enough of a substitute because they wanted more than anything to be in recognized in their homeland. Their hearts still beat to distant memory drums of home.
They would still embrace, raise their glasses towards the exploding fireworks, and sing merrily. At each other’s funerals they’d read poetry and recall positive attributes. I was at a few of those funerals and sensed the exclusivity they hung on to. The torch was theirs and none of us young folks were worthy of it. They were the generation that lost everything, was uprooted, and mangled. Us, the young didn’t lose anything as far as they were concerned because we never earned anything in Iran.
On the other side of town, that Upper West Side apartment was saturated with the echoing voices and invocations of the old artists.
“And don’t you know Lee J. Cobb was the best ever in Death of a Salesman? And Talula Bankhead wanted to fuck Marlon Brando? Monty Clift killed in Lillian Hellman’s The Searching Wind… and what about Paul Robeson’s Othello? The best ever! Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife…”
On and on up to the sixties now.
“Al Pacino in The Indian Wants the Bronx? Oh my god, genius, go up to the New York public library central branch and you can see it on video by request, genius, genius!”
In another room in between discussions of politics and sociology some talk of music.
“Have you heard Arthur Rubinstein’s recording of Manuel de Falla’s The Fire Dance? It’ll change your life”, and some young guitar prodigy from Julliard is playing a tune surrounded by wine drinking people throwing shadows on the wall, “Nobody can touch Yehudi Menuhin on violin… I love Toscanini! I don’t understand John Cage?”
The shadows are dancing on the paneled walls of the living room. Down the hall people laughing and smoking, the smoke curling up and more shadows, the paintings behind them taking on a different dimension against the honey beige straw cloth walls. A professor from NYU is lounging on graceful curvy furniture in another room behind him some crimson velvet curtains and in front a marble column supporting a bleu-de-roi vase and candelabras and plates of fruit. He’s talking about sex in the sixteenth century with an air of pugnacity.
It was all very normal somehow. And what about Rogers and Hammerstein? Present. Ethel Merman? Also present. Ertha Kitt, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bette Davis, Marilyn, Oh, Marilyn! Everybody was there in speech and thought. Einstein and Rabelais, Nietzsche and Rumi, Maria Tallchief and Balanchine, Basquiat and Vermeer.
Some guy is telling another guy about the old Patagonian Express, another is cursing the Iranian regime, another the American regime. All swirls with magic and wine spinning faster and faster day after day. From hollow viscera to somatic tissues, from deep and unknown to familiar, known, undeniable. Precambrian rock rising out of the earth in one room, in another mangroves and palms, azaleas, great crowned oaks, pawpaws, crape myrtles. People are standing on upland steppes and shouting at the ones walking around the deserts, pointing to forested mountains and pasture lands with grazing herds of cattle, their ventral horns buzzing with rhythmic contractions. Happily they probe into the crevices of life with their somatic efferent neurons rushing to and fro. I’m there with my vestibular impulses dead not knowing weather I’m floating or standing on solid ground and I’m saying to myself, where are all the telephone booths, the long shinny Cadillac’s, where are the typewriters? Is there any room left for artists in this saturated ghost town? My head aches and I’m dizzy again. I’m an immigrant awash in immigrant finalities without sharp teeth with which to tear off a nice juicy piece of America’s flesh for myself. American prosperity dreams bounce around my tired brain but don’t stick to the gooie walls. Where are all the songs? It’s different now and you know it. Change with the ever changing times my boy and never fret, I repeat over and over with a glass of scotch on the rocks in my hand.
But that was a long time ago. I’ve been to Niagara falls since then and been hypnotized by the mystical deadly waters, I gave it a piece of my soul. I’ve scattered little pieces of my soul all over America, stashed them away in small towns and sides of roads so I can go and gather it back up if I ever needed to. Don’t you know that the party never stops in New York? I’m sick of parties, you can’t ever talk to anybody. I’ve been on the trains, the planes, the busses, the cars, what to do, what to do?
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.
