The Wandering Dervish from Tehran, New York
Thank you, I want to say to Professor Sir. Thank you for helping me ferment my novel and age it like the good old Johnny Walker Black Label my mother loved to sip and savor before tucking me into bed and heading off to sleep herself.
Thank you, Professor Sir, for teaching me the difference between a Song of Love and the Song of Seduction. Thank you for letting me sing you the Song of Songs...
***
I have peace in my heart once again because I wonder less now about what Sir thinks of me. I wonder more now about what he thinks of what I think of him.
This is all progress.
When I was Sir’s student, I could not fathom what he was thinking as his eyes roamed over the landscape of my Iranian body, his mind gleaning from my person the essential ingredients for his imagination and the stories he writes.
Never trust a writer—any kind of writer. There are many variations of us, but as cliché as it sounds, there is only one successful type: the writer who writes on experience.
If you don’t go there, the familiarity with the appropriate emotions are not bound to the words and the effect falls flat. It’s that simple, intangible and metaphysical.
And, good writers are rarely nice because nice is a silly word.
***
The professor went there but not with me. Not in the flesh, anyway. It was too political, too dangerous (I assume). I was too unstable, too young, too vahshi, and too unwieldy (I think). He was too married, too respectable, too timid and too self-righteous (I know).
It (all of it) was too unsafe.
***
I called Sir Sir while the other students called him by his first name. I called him Sir because…well, who does that? I did it because it sounded so formal, so English. I called him Sir because his father was knighted Sir by the English royal family as a carrot for the esteemed architecture the monarchy despised behind his back (Prince Charles publicly went on to say that his famous building resembled a power plant in the middle of London).
I also liked to call Sir Sir as a way of alluding to the dynamics between a nokar, servant and an agha, sir. I called him Sir as a jab at sado-masochistic human tendencies and because he wasn’t really English like the title Sir implies.
“Remember, you’ll never be English. You’re a Jew,” his father used to tell him.
I know this anecdote, not because Sir shared it with me but because I read it in an interview at a time when I could not stop listening to the Doors’ song, “The Spy” on repeat while researching all Sir-related articles, stories, poems and random tidbits on the Internet.
[Side note; trivia; relevant though tangential information: other Sirs, not at all tied to the English monarchy or aristocracy by blood, include, but are not limited to: Sir Salomon Rushdie (Islam-bashing writer), Sir V.S Naipaul (Islam-bashing writer), and Sir Elton John (I’ve never heard his views on Islam)].
Like me, Sir was a foreigner in New York City. His Englishness made me wonder about his bathing habits and look closely at his teeth. My experience with the English is that have terrible teeth (stereotypes aren’t always based on nothing) and they bathe infrequently—or compared with Americans, anyway. Even those who bathe daily carry a certain scent.
Yes, I’m really saying that the English have their own smell. Every ethnicity does. My mother smells of saffron, even when she hasn’t cooked in days.
I’m not racist!
Sir had lovely teeth, full lips, curly Jew-hair, a sexy amount of which peeked out of the collar of shirts that never were ironed. He looked disheveled, un-professorial and uber-professorial, all at the same time.
I loved calling him Sir, sometimes spicing it up with other variations of the word: Guru, Master, Rabbi, Sensei Pir, etcetera.
I never did get to smell him.
***
“He always looks crumpled,” my ex used to say.
X was a fellow student in our writing program and the token genius in our bunch. Sir held X in contempt because X could dazzle the class with a style of writing that lacked substance. X was young, seven years younger than I, and Sir could sense that X and I were together.
Meanwhile, X could sense that Sir was curious about me and that I was curious about Sir. Also, X wanted to be a respectable writer like Sir and sensing that I respected Sir and placed him on a writerly pedestal made him very testy.
“When you discuss your book with him, do you flutter your eyelashes, sigh and ask, ‘Do you really think I’m a good writer?’”
This is what X asked me once, back when we were both disciples of Sir. “No,” I answered X, matter-of-factly, though I wanted to slap him across the face. “I only do that when Sir lets me put my head in his lap.”
My terse reply couldn’t have been farther from the truth. There was no familiarity, affection or even comfort between Sir and me.
It was always stiff between us.
***
Sarah was a WASPy, sexy, wealthy and utterly classless woman in our class. She was married to Wall Street Oil Guy. She was also the editor of Words Without Boundaries, a publication dedicated to insuring that selective voices abroad (voices of those who hold very Western values and have an inability to imagine a day of not being enslaved by one ruler or another) will be heard here in the states.
Sarah's personal connections upon marrying Wall Street Oil Guy had landed her a lucrative career in Political Propaganda Via Literature. It had also secured her an unwarranted place in our writing program.
I’ve always had great disdain for the conventional, for the disingenuous behavior of the upper classes and those who try and climb to meet their ranks and secure the same security. I also hate it when people climb down for fun. English, American, Persian… It makes no difference.
Amongst us writers, Sarah had won the grand prize as the most
poroo and talentless individual ever to attempt stringing sentences together for any purpose whatsoever. But she intrigued Sir, a “happily” married man with two children, a huge ego and a marginal profession as a relatively unknown but respected writer whose adolescence was a haunting tale of a dark, lanky, Jewish male, attending the most upper crust schools of England and being emotionally tortured by sadistic WASPS who hated him for his intelligence and for creeping into their milieu. His adolescent sexuality was a study in rejection by WASP-y, sexy, wealthy, and utterly classless women of the English aristocracy.
There was something in Sir’s story that I wanted to read but he would not write, only mention. He would not right it either. Instead, he acted out the same dynamics of his childhood trauma. Perhaps he needed to sleep with Sarah to further investigate the sado-masochistic tendencies of humans in order to write “from the know.” Or, maybe it was a personal revenge fantasy, with the twist of Sir growing up to become a mildly successful writer with the talent of seducing the prototypical Blonde WASP Wives of Sadists (same ones from the tortured teens but now grown up and with American accents!).
Because Sarah was married and financially tied to Wall Street Oil Guy as mother and wife, this sexual revenge fantasy could not and would not harm Sir’s own clinical marriage with yet another WASP woman who continually rejected him sexually in their state of matrimonial bliss (this I know to be a fact because the emotions ring true in Sir’s writings on this topic. He went there with this topic.).
All my blathering and analysis comss down to the main problem with Sir: Sir wanted to be respectable. Being respectable and being an artist, I hate to say with certainty, are mutually exclusive. The combination rarely a good work makes because intention and honesty become twisted when you try to avoid rattling cages.
Cages, I say…
***
My stalking of Sir began only a few days after I’d blindly sent out an unfinished manu scri pt of my novel-in-progress, without any SASE’s, all over New York City to a list I'd carefully made of literary agents. I later burned the list in effigy.
After Sir heard I’d sent out my work unfinished (my cover letter dropped his name in hopes of attracting attention), he contacted me and told me what I’d done was stupid.
I insisted we get together, despite my recollection of the stiffness between us.
I needed help.
My mind was slowing down from stopping the Legal Speed (Ritalin, a pharmaceutical drug consumed by a large percentage of American children in order to perform better in school and in extra-curricular activities). I had been taking Legal Speed to “finish” my novel in three months as had been advised by a money-hungry editor who fooled me with our past association into trusting her (I’m gullible).
I’d gotten the Legal Speed from a doctor who ran a medical clinic that looked like a M.A.S.H unit in the middle of the East Village. The Doctor had a degree in medicine from Columbia University and countless tattoos all over his arms. The Doctor also had a motorcycle and a disdain for Medical Insurance, which he refused, while caring for the minorities still clinging to their now ghetto-chic and highly valuable neighborhood in a city that had been gradually getting a “racial facelift” since the Reagan years.
The doctor also helped most of the artists he trusted to procure the drugs they needed for their artistic process. He’d put me on Zoloft, an anti-anxiety medication, after 9/11, when I went to him and said, “The helicopters fly lower than usual. The noise is making me crazy. I feel like the world is coming to an end!”
“The world is coming to an end,. Now, you won’t have to feel it,” he explained, while writing out the per scri ption.
What the Doctor didn’t tell me about Zoloft is that it leaves you sexually impotent. What he didn’t describe when I went back two years later for the Ritalin is the tunnel vision and the inability to tap into the most basic human instinct of self-protection.
I was like a blind, deaf and dumb animal while writing the novel but especially when I saw Sir again, two years after being his student, a time during which he’d knocked against the sexuality-blocking Zoloft only to be reunited with me under the influence of the sexuality-heightening effects of Legal Speed.
He fought me off with the proverbial stick by refusing to see me after that first reunion, after he quivered beneath the very loaded kiss I laid on his cheek.
***
I didn’t know that Sir had had an affair with Sarah because he shared the information with me. After Sarah learned about my floating, unfinished manu scri pt in the financial jaws of the publishing industry (we had never been friends in the writing program), she contacted me. She’d heard that Sir was helping me and began to send me clippings of Sir’s recent outpouring of poetry, which painted seductive images of me—sketches I liked seeing of myself, if they were in fact inspired by me (I know they were).
Sir's former mistress, Sarah, made me fall in love with Sir. I fell in love with the way Sir saw me or the way Sir saw the female muse behind his writing, which Sarah made me believe is me and I wanted to believe is me (it is me!).
Although she was bitter with Sir herself, Sarah swore she had reconciled the whole affair. She warned me off about Sir and yet antagonized me into probing further into Sir. All the while, she sprinkled her gossip with stupidly offensive comments like, “[Sir’s] mouth reminds me of Prince Charles’!” (Sir looks nothing like him or like any Englishman, only sounds faintly like one) and “I bought this purse..." (a cheaply made leather item with a camel emblazoned on its face) "...when I was in the Middle East…I can’t remember which country.”
I hated that Sir had been so typical as to sleep with Sarah just because she was beautiful according to an obsolete definition of ziba. She was ugly and vapid inside. How could he have missed how incredibly beautiful I am—and without fitting the depressingly stereotypical package that came with Sarah’s
addas-sized brain!.
To the end, Sir swore up and down that he'd never had an affair with Sarah, that she’d only imagined it. He also told me I’d imagined that he was mindfucking me all those times (past and then present) when I'd accused him of fantasizing about me.
“I'm here because I believe in your work,” he said, nearly choking on his words. “The work is all that matters.”
***
Sir is a very bad liar. Why he
gayideh Sarah and not the Wandering Dervish from Tehran, New York is beyond me.
