Ali Eskandarian
Golden Years 4 (a serialized novel)
I open the door to the loft and walk in. It’s quiet. Someone is asleep on my bed with the covers pulled over his or her head. My bed is in the middle of the loft and easily accessible to visitors. Siamak made the bed for me as a birthday gift. I look closer to see who the sleeper is. It’s Dari again. The bastard’s been spending a hell of a lot of time on my bed lately. He’s a free loader of the highest order though in his defense his immigration status doesn’t allow him to work legally. He comes over and stays for a week. Likes to time his visits on days when the kids are going food shopping, then stays and cooks our favorite meals for a few days. Of course our favorite meals are really his favorite meals and he has a heavy hand with the expensive ingredients like saffron, which the kids get sent over to them from Iran. He acts like a master chef and basically just orders people around in a rude yet funny manner while tasting and adding spices.
As if that weren’t enough he smokes our cigarettes and invites women over and uses our beds. He’s a metronomic, long distance fucker too and really makes these girls sing like the whorish devil birds they really are. He roams around looking like a goddamned homeless person until it’s time for a meeting with one of these birds, then undergoes a transformation fit for a Persian king of the Sassanid period. Being Iranian, hair removal is the most important part of his transmutation. He must also be oiled from head to toe. I keep telling him about chest hair being back in style but he won’t listen. His beard must be shaved in a certain pattern and trimmed to perfection. He’s always talking about potential threesomes but nothing ever pans out, not really, since the girls he brings over are for him only but the girls we bring over are deemed threesome worthy at a glance.
“Oh, her!” he exclaims. “She’s totally the type! Let’s have an orgy with her.”
Dari also likes to think of himself as a sort of intellectual. He speaks with a pseudo English accent although he grew up in Iran and came over here a few years ago. He’s a musician, came over with the first wave of Iranian underground Rock bands. Most of his one liners are recycled Woody Allen lines or something he might have picked up from Camus or Dostoyevsky, and he likes to lay it on thick and go real slow without citing his sources. Well, come to think of it, his wild ideas do pan out sometimes, and his intellectual mumbo jumbo does impress some more than others. Truth is last time I saw Dari his face was buried in a cunt, sucking and licking. The cunt had a face, arms, and legs, blond hair and blue eyes. I was engaged with her upper body, a nipple in my mouth, eyes fixed on her lower torso. She was enjoying herself, very much so. Her boyfriend was not present on this fortuitous night, had elected to stay far away on the other side of town, the dumb bastard. If he only knew what kind of depraved monsters were pleasuring his mate he might have stolen a jet pack and flown over for maximum and immediate vengeance.
After two or three tall glasses of absinthe on the rocks with a splash of water human beings are bound to try anything. I don’t have to have orgies to get my blood flowing but rather enjoy doing the deed with one person at a time in a semi-sober fashion. It was an empty experience. Not primordial in nature, very ephemeral and vacuous, nothing to brag about, one for the vault of human degeneracy and corruption, animalistic, and devoid of poetry. I should have walked away from it the second it started. We looked like the octopuses in Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, God help us. To make things worst the girl was a friend of mine.
Unlike me Dari is a genuine sex addict of the highest order, a serval, a serotine bat, a self professed coitus king, carnally knowledgeable, a deflowering inseminator, a penetrator, a copulating land shark with a powerful appetite for flesh. One day he will surely have a symposium on the art of coition and defend his points like Plato. I assume he is gathering all the necessary data now for this future sparging of knowledge and wisdom. Soon he will retire to one of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain to ponder his findings with a Hermit’s zeal and a solitudinarian’s fervency. He says I can visit him there anytime I like, and why the hell not? I could use some sun and sand.
I light a cigarette and stare out the window. All is frozen in the mercury dawn, steam is rising from chimney tops, a few birds fly about, looks like it’ll snow. It’s up and down all the time. I need to slow it down, need a job, need solitude and rest. Can’t keep running. Must keep running. I slide in bed next to Dari, without touching him of course, and try to get a few hours of sleep before the loft’s inhabitants awaken from their slumber. I need to shut off my mind for a spell. Please lord, no dreams and no nightmares. My mind starts to wonder again…
O but what shall remain of my infinite pipe dreams? So many dreams, so many ideas that die once chewed on or exclaimed. For every door you open another shuts in your face. There are very few streets to walk down, very few roads to travel on. The entirety of this city, country, and world even, has been made to fit into a hand sized magic device, one which contains almost all that has ever been written, recorded and filmed by man. All the supposed knowledge of the known universe is held within, without the wisdom of course, without care, and mostly for profit. Children barely able to speak are handed these terrible devices to idle away their time. God forbid the young should experience brief periods of boredom and bother the overwrought parents, better to let the children look into the abyss of the magic machines and shut up. With the magic comes wave after wave of arresting codes, spells of maddening numbness, mind programming, mining of the soul, dulling of the senses, easy slavery, from womb to slaughter. A soul/spirit slaughter complete with parental supervision, guidance, and permission signed on the dotted line. “We’d be happy to!” the parents say, “We love your product. We use it ourselves.” Oh, just shut up and go to sleep you fool, I think. You’re lucky to be here at all you damn dirty immigrant. You’ve got a roof over your head and a pot to piss in, be happy.
#
When I awaken the loft is in full swing. Dari’s cooking and yapping on about the girl he had the previous night. The kids are listening and rolling a joint in the process.
“Her face was disgusting, she was so fucking stupid, her feet stank a little too,” he’s saying in Persian.
“How did you meet her?” the bass player, Koli, asks.
“She was at one of our shows a while back, listen I’m pretty sure we can do an orgy with her, none of you guys were around last night or it would have happened. She liked to get spanked. God she was a dumb bitch, was buying me drinks all night, rich girl, trust fund girl, from Missouri or somewhere like that, maybe Michigan I don’t give a fuck. She was a good enough lay though. I made her come five or six times and she still wanted more. Wanted me to put it in her ass. Where’s the saffron?”
I stare out the window and wait for the bathroom to free up.
“Ali! Thanks for letting me sleep on your bed last night. Man you don’t move at all when you sleep, like you’re dead.”
“I am dead Dari, dead in the heart.”
“God damned dark bastard! Lighten up. Just wait till you taste what I’m cooking for you guys. Let’s eat this and hit the streets I’m gonna cheer you up.” He says clapping, then wringing his hands together.
“What do you have in mind?” I ask.
“There’s gotta be an open bar somewhere. You gotta get good and wasted before you leave to join that cult don’t you?”
“Eh… I don’t know. I hate open bars.”
“Well why don’t you call up that friend of yours, what’s her name, from the other night. The Croatian girl.”
“God damn you Dari. Why don’t you call her you pimp bastard, didn’t you get her number? What do you need me for?”
“You’re right, she wasn’t that good anyway. It wouldn’t be any fun without you.”
“Yeah, well. I’m never doing that again.” I say.
“Oh, come on! You’re telling me you didn’t like it?”
“No, I didn’t like it. You’re fucking sick you know that?”
“Look it’s not my fault mine is bigger than yours, is it?” he says with a laugh.
“No, you’re right, it’s not your fault.”
“Well, it’s pretty big isn’t it?” he says with a triumphant ear-to-ear smile.
“Yeah, it’s pretty big for a condor. You know, unlike other species of new world vultures though, your kind is not endangered, but flourishing.”
“Well, what do you want me to do, be like you and pass up a good carcass when I see one? If I am a condor, like you say I am, then I can’t help myself right? That’s just my nature.”
“Well done Dari, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say all month. Now is this Goddamn food ready or what? And take it easy with our saffron.”
After a while we sit around the large wooden dinning table and enjoy Dari’s Ghormeh Sabzi, a favorite dish of most Iranians. He really is a master in the kitchen.
“You son of a bitch, you’re the best goddamn cook ever, this is the best I’ve ever had,” I say.
“Yeah, Dari, wow!” Koli concurs, as do all the others with noises and nods.
“Did you learn this from your mother or what?” the lead guitarist, Manuchehr asks.
“Hell no!” Dari says, “She couldn’t even fry an egg. I started cooking when we came to America… out of desperation.”
These family meals are a daily occurrence at the loft. Besides a main dish we have to have plain yogurt, a salad of some kind, either coca cola or beer if possible, after the meal: cigarettes and a joint. While we’re smoking Dari tells us a story about his old cat that he used to walk like a dog on the streets of Tehran. One day there was a fight caused by the cat that involved a truck load of construction workers with axes and shovels.
“The judge says to me, why did you hit the guy? I said because he hit my cat, he saw the cat, said, cat, and hit it with a shoe! Cat? says the judge. Hit your cat? That’s what you’re supposed to do to cats, he says! Can you believe that! What kind of a shit hole country? I mean…”
Our cat is fat and lazy but great with girls. We smoke our joint and scatter about. I start to strum my guitar, Dari gets a phone call from someone, it’s getting dark out and the night will have to be filled up with some kind of entertainment.
The door opens and some people one of the kids had met the night before walk in. Before long others walk in and we’re drinking and smoking, talking about ordering cocaine. The dealer arrives after a while. Why the hell we can’t do something useful with our lives is beyond me. We have all the necessary tools and manpower at our disposal but we choose to ignore the real things and concentrate and contribute to the nonsense.
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.
