Eskandarian Golden Years

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32108-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

We were once again going on a cross-country tour. In November 2013, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Ali Eskandarian was murdered alongside two members of the Iranian band, The Yellow Dogs. In the months leading up to this terrible event, Ali had been in correspondence with a friend and Dutch publisher, Oscar van Gelderen, about his semi-autobiographical novel. Golden Years is that book. Set in the first decade of the 21st century in New York, Teheran and Dallas, Golden Years is a novel perfumed with excess and spirited decadence. It tells the story of a group of Iranian musicians in their twenties and our narrator, in his 30s, who is in thrall to the great American beats and has visions of Ancient Assyrian Futurism. Hungry and poor, high and hopping from bed to bed, and lover to lover, the characters in Golden Years are romantic exiles living with rock n roll as their religion.

Ali Eskandarian was a singer, songwriter, and novelist. He was born in 1978 and died in 2013.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Eskandarian, Ali

Leseproben

Manhattan

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 brain, 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 to see a familiar face.

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 south in the cold, smoking her foreign Camel cigarettes, before picking this cozy-looking place to eat.

‘Go on,’ she says.

I start talking. My spaghetti is steaming, the fragrance of the capers and green olives takes me back to the days when my father was part owner of an Italian restaurant in Dallas: Sweet Basil Ristorante on the southeast 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 goddamned fast,’ I say, then try to flag down the waiter.

‘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, cunts, cocks, mouths ready to suck, tin-plated hearts, spewing neurotoxic 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 being with 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 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 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.

After a little more storytelling she’s ready for a drink too, orders a Bloody Mary. 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 hypothermic 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 crosstown 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 affect 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, lovesick 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. In a fit of desperation we decided to abandon our Park Slope Brooklyn apartment overlooking the headstones, obelisks, and mausoleums of Greenwood cemetery and move up here since the apartment 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 past frozen in time, 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.

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 lying 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 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 art since our breakup and the paintings aren’t 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 lie 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 leaves to pay for the food and stays in the kitchen for a while preparing a tray and getting more beers.

I start to think...