Greetings Friends: Before The Fall Part One
Thanks for Reading
Greetings friends,
Thanks if you're reading or even skimming this lengthy email and rest assured I am not asking you for money. So, Welcome to Thee Bat City Vangarde! Due to the overreaching and overbearing influence and encouragement of several trusted friends (which might be termed a conspiracy, and which includes my dear old dad who is a firm believer in the power of Substack), I have decided to reach out on a limb and put in the gratifying work to launch my own little writing site, a FREE subscription service. The rattling sabers of this disaffected anarchist cell have insisted I make a home for some of my less dreadful musings about art, literature, cinema, music and (non)popular culture, as well as random snatches of fiction, poetry, memoir, journalism, travel notes, history, and hauntology. My posts will consist of new writings, excerpts from works-in-progress, and archival writings from throughout my writing life. What you will not find here are political rants and topical protests and the like, which I for one need a lengthy break from. So, if your e-reading tastes run more toward those volatile subjects, you may be disappointed but rest assured there is a lot of that elsewhere.
Still with me? Thank you. I’m going to start off quite gently with only one to two emails a month. I may at times send weekly emails and post additional writings on the site unannounced. Another feature I want to implement at some point is the hosting of guest writers, so I hope some of my literary friends will allow me to feature their work as well (You know who you are!). I also look forward to sharing the work of some of my fellow scribes and artists who are already on the Substack platform. This site will act as a networking tool as much as anything.
I think you will enjoy some of the scribblings I share. Read a little, read a lot. Rarely will you find me on social media but here you might find me. And again, I am accepting no donations at this time, so please ignore the pesky Donation buttons that Substack insists on embedding on the site. Likewise, I am not offering paid subscriptions at this time and you may of course unsubscribe at any time. However, if you like what you read please do share with others. And please feel free to comment if you are so moved.
I’ll launch with a tale of childhood here, where all our stories begin and all our journeys depart from. Thank you for reading and hope to hear from you soon.
Love, peace, and happiness to you,
Philip Randolph Fagan
Before The Fall
In The Decade of Our Lord 1970
Part One
I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-changes…
~David Bowie
1. “Lonely Planet Boy…”
You were protected and looked after and made safe. You couldn’t remember a time before a man had walked on the moon. Who were you? A colonial child some might say; the proverbial wild colonial boy, if a late-era American variation. Your boyhood home would soon be Iran during the reign of Shah Pahlavi. Your father was an agent for the CIA, or Bell Helicopter as it was euphemistically called at the time. But before that, your earliest memories are of a decidedly working class and slightly ramshackle house on Elton Road in Fort Worth, Texas. Your father, whom you rarely saw, brought you rubber dinosaurs home from some sort of vending machine at his mysterious night job. He rarely came home before you were put to bed. Although you had no knowledge of it at the time, Dad’s brother had recently died in a very tragic manner at your grandmother’s home.
The brother, your uncle, had returned home to her house on Eden Avenue one night. It was a twilit hour, either late in the evening or very early in the morning. You heard your Nana shriek with excitement at the backdoor, talking loudly and lovingly to someone. Your older brother Louis and you were sitting up in your pajamas in the indescribable comfort of a foldout sofa bed. The house on Eden Avenue in Fort Worth, Texas was your second home and Nana and Gramps were your second parents for all practical purposes. You were around three years old then, your brother near five. You looked at each other, wondering who could be coming over at such an hour. Then a dark and astonishingly handsome man entered the den, for a moment you think it’s your father. No, he’s not Dad at all; he looks like he stepped off the TV screen, perhaps some eerie combination of your dad, Elvis Presley, and Tarzan. He wears a white T-shirt and faded dungarees and tosses a seabag down as he crosses to your makeshift bed. As the stranger approaches, you continue to become aware that he is not your father. He is shorter, thinner, his features slightly more aquiline. His hair is thick and greasy in a well-groomed way and his eyes seem to burn in his skull and you are frightened of him. Your toddlerhood has been exceedingly comfortable, filled with love and a sense of permanence. This animal is an unwelcome intrusion. You have entered a world marked by the mysterious, the ineffable, the unknown. The stranger smiles at you and Louie, Nana following him in and smiling also. Then suddenly the familiar stranger grabs you and repeatedly tosses you into the air, proceeds to mercilessly tickle you. You scream in fear and begin crying. He smells of the sea, of mystery, of romance and adventure, but you will only come to recognize these scents years later after discovering such things on your own road to manhood.
He sits down between you and Louie on the pullout bed, his arms about your shoulders, and you think it’s all right now but you’re still a bit cautious. You seem to understand he is in some way of your father, of Nana, but somehow apart from the family, unknowable to you. Nana takes a chair and she and the strange one talk about adult things you don’t understand. You never knew for certain where your uncle, your father’s older brother, had been or how long he had been gone.. This incident would become your only memory of having ever known him. But his presence, or more literally his non-presence, his specter and shadow, would remain with you throughout your life. You would be haunted by him, perhaps even literally. You shared your Christian name with him and for years you would call your imaginary playmate by your own name; thus, his name as well. You would contend that this imaginary playmate was someone with your name, not a part of you, and that he was not imaginary at all. And he only visited you at Nana’s home.
Your parents were very young, athletic, adventurous, and extremely beautiful. You were often surprised that other kids’ parents didn’t look at all like Hollywood matinee idols. You were your mother’s boy. She loved you and you loved her in a way you would never recapture. In the mornings, she often woke you up with your Pooh Bear, making it talk to you and gently tickling you. She would make up stories for you and play with you; you lived together in the Forty Acre Woods; “In that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” You felt you were the center of her universe and she certainly was the whole of yours. When you were first dropped off at pre-school, you screamed and cried at the thought of a day’s separation from her as she waved at you with tears in her eyes. Thankfully, your new teacher in kindergarten was, just like Mom, also a beautiful and sweet blonde, so you fell madly in love with her and were able to adjust after a week or so. You attended a local kindergarten under the tutelage of a grandmotherly teacher and began to love reading and writing. At five, you briefly attended first grade in Texas before the move to Iran. This was at Saint Vincent’s Episcopal School where the Mass was held in a chapel before class each morning. You experienced your first religious longing there and sang hymns with great fervor. One day in class, you stumbled and fell hard onto a sharp wooden stick which held plastic rings; the stick went into your armpit with great force and though you were not seriously injured, it was the worst physical pain you had yet experienced and you screamed and wept. A sweet classmate hugged you to comfort you and you saw that her bare little arms were horribly scarred with burns. She told you her mother had poured a cup of hot coffee onto her. The boy next door on Elton Road was named Tommy and was a wonderful friend to you and your older brother Louis. One day something was very wrong in the neighborhood; all the adults seemed extremely upset. Your mother sat you down and tried to explain to you that little Tommy had been killed in a car wreck. Your mother’s father, your Papaw, came to live with you for a while; you weren’t sure why. Later you learned that he had become a serious alcoholic who sometimes drank after shave and that he was attempting to dry out. Papaw had also gotten dangerously mobbed up due to his involvement in the operation of a series of tough night clubs in the Jacksboro Highway red light district, and had recently been involved in the shooting and slaying of a well-known gangster in one of the clubs. Papaw’s partner in these endeavors was his son-in-law, at the time the husband of your mother’s sister Aunt Janie.
Fragments of memories. Sadness and joy, darkness and light, like the flicker of grainy old home movies. There was a dog named Mitzi and a kitty called Bandit. One of your earliest recollections is more of a feeling rather than an event: The overwhelming fear that Charles Manson would escape from jail and make a beeline right to your family’s door and slaughter everyone inside. Other than your mother reading the paperback Helter Skelter around the time, there is no memory of how you even knew of the Manson Family murders, much less how this peculiar phobia developed and festered. You remember early days of family entertainment; of rides at fairgrounds, of circus sideshows, of cowboy films, monster flicks, and Tarzan movies at the Belknap Drive-in. Flip Wilson, Daniel Boone, Batman, Rawhide, Howdy Doody, Gumby, Star Trek, Land of the Giants, H.R. Pufnstuff, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Wonderful World of Disney, Room 222 and Lost in Space on TV; Saturday morning Warner Brothers cartoons and The Johnny Cash Show every Saturday night. Once at a rodeo in Fort Worth, the Man in Black himself rode by you and shook your tiny hand, or so you have been told very often. So many magical first moments; single frames of consciousness, memory. Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs playing on a loop in the living room, the first long play record you knew by heart and could sing every magical lyric of. Crying in terror during an early visit with a strange and sinister man known as Santa Claus and being made to sit on his lap. Going to Montgomery Ward and JC Penney with Mom and hiding within the racks of clothes while she called out for you, then you emerged with a Count Dracula flourish and you both laughed. Big family dinners at Pancho’s, where you insisted on playing underneath the table and resurfaced covered in sticky sopapilla honey and black floor grime, your mother chuckling and your father shaking his head. Exploring Forest Park with Dad and Brother and riding the train in downtown Fort Worth. Dad crossing a slick drainage pipe suspended over the deadly abyss of a dry riverbed far below, then slipping and somehow managing to save himself by grabbing onto the pipe with arms and legs as you gasped in horror. Visiting the Alamo in San Antonio and getting your own Davy Crockett coonskin hat and powderhorn. Riding on motorcycles with Dad and his friends at Red River and camping there with the families in a log cabin. One day you jumped off the high porch there and found yourself hung on a nail by the seat of your pants, your legs dangling in midair. Your brother witnessed the event and was bent over with laughter as you screamed for help. When your father and his friend Buzz arrived, they too were so overcome by the hilarity of the spectacle that it was several more minutes before anyone helped you down. There was horseback riding at the beach with your family and a trip over the border into Mexico, bandito marionette and sombrero souvenirs, and your first bullfight.
Your father and his parents bought a lake lot together, and your weekends in the warmer months were spent with the adults boating, waterskiing, and playing volleyball with a crowd of friends and family as well as killing infestations of poisonous snakes, scorpions and gargantuan tarantulas. You still remember the deliciously rich potpourri of lake water, suntan oil, sweat, gasoline, hot dogs and burgers roasting on the grill. Childhood loomed endless and eternal, mythological. Perfect.
Your older brother Louis was mostly aloof when he wasn’t tormenting you ceaselessly. He was your father’s pride and joy, and they often seemed aligned in their harassment. Some of your earliest memories are those of punishment and other cruelties. From the time you began to toddle, you spent your days outside in the sun, and due to your general filthiness as befitted an outdoor Texas kid, your father delighted in calling you Chief Blackfoot which for some reason embarrassed you to an insane degree and caused you to cry in shame, which he found hilarious enough to subject you to over and over again. It never got old. You were often hit with a belt and confined to your room for your toddler transgressions. You learned the power of language very early on, when Father asked you if you were “telling the truth” about some now-forgotten controversy. You had not learned this word “truth” so you took a guess and answered no, which was the opposite of what you intended (you had in fact been “telling the truth”). Based on this response, you were banished to your room for the rest of the day. Later, your mother asked if you knew what the word truth meant. You shook your head no and exploded into tears again. The confusing trauma would not cease.
Louie, for his part, spent much of his early childhood energy and imagination devising new methods of torturing you. The bedroom you shared was a chamber of horrors, filled with horror movie posters (including a six-foot-tall glow-in-the-dark Boris Karloff Frankenstein on the door) and Louis’ elaborate collection of Aurora Universal Monster model kits, which he had assembled and painted in loving detail. You believed without question in monsters and ghosts for a few years and no amount of counseling by your parents could dispel your superstitions. Stranger still, you loved monster movies. Louis would frighten you at night by telling you ghastly horror stories he claimed were true (The Goat Man, “people can lick hands too”, etc.) and dangling his arm down from the top bunk in a manner that caused you to shriek in terror. Sometimes he would pretend to transform into some demonic creature and lurk menacingly toward you as though to possess your very soul; this never ceased to traumatize you and leave you screaming bloody murder. Other than such purely psychological tactics, he was equally adept at inflicting physical harm by punching, kicking, biting, strangling, suffocating, and striking you with foreign objects. Once, apparently in a subtler mood, he convinced you that the dirt in your yard was actually your coveted Nestle’s Quik chocolate powder. You swallowed the two big handfuls he offered before you realized the joke and became violently ill.
You were a very sickly child. You suffered from a chronic lung infection which was called, in full-fledged horror film title glory, The Croup. This necessitated you having a vaporizer in your room at night and at one point you ended up in an oxygen tent. Many nights, your mother would steam up the bathroom by running hot water in the sink, and she or your father would sleep in the tub on blankets holding you all night as you coughed and wheezed. You also developed chronic ear infections that were excruciating, finally resulting in having drainage tubes installed in your ears for a few weeks, followed by having your tonsils removed. All this occurred before you were four. To protect you from illness, your mother would keep you indoors in the winter, and would particularly guard you from what she cryptically called “The Night Air” unless you wore your white plastic space helmet or Spiderman ski mask. You were also rendered powerless by a pronounced sweet tooth and were very much an opportunistic eater (refer to previous Nestle Quik anecdote). On one occasion, you alarmed your mother by scarfing down half a bottle of the colorful and delectable Flintstones vitamins before she was able to put the bottle away.
You were surrounded by a large and loving family and circle of friends. There was Nana and Gramps, your father’s parents, and Nana’s sister Aunt Annie and her husband Uncle Tom. On your mother’s side there were her divorced parents Mamaw and Papaw, along with her sister Jane and your cousins, Jane’s two children. There was Dad’s best friend Buzz, his wife Mary, and soon enough their three children. The whole clan ate and played games at your beloved Nana’s house several nights a week, Gramps frying up the fresh catfish he had caught at Lake Granbury in the backyard. One night as you entered their house (always through the back screen door) with the sounds of Buck Owens on Hee Haw blaring from the living room, your Uncle Tom got up from the domino game at the kitchen table, greeted you with a hearty “Hello Flippy Dip” (a variation on your nickname Flipper, culled from the dolphin you loved on TV), snatched you up, and went to plant a kiss on your cheek. Unfortunately, he had a lit cigar in his mouth at the time, and as you twisted to avoid it, it sank into your ear and sizzled. You screamed and Nana shouted, “Get the butter! Put butter on it.” Ancient Texas wisdom. You stayed with Nana and Gramps as often as at your real home. You would often agonize over where you should spend the night, changing your mind again and again to your parents’ great consternation. Nana inaugurated a beloved tradition called the Thursday Surprise; on that day each week after she got off work as a nurse she would come by the house and give you and your brother some incredible toy, a spaceman or cowboy action figure loaded with accessories as often as not.
One day, Father came home and broke the news to you that you were all soon moving to someplace called “I ran”, which was “in the Middle East.” You cried and sulked because you loved your grandparents so much as well as Cindi and Pam, the young girls down the street who watched over you and played with you most days, and what would you do without them? “‘It is hard to be brave,’ said Piglet, sniffing slightly, ‘when you’re only a very small animal…’” Your father was deeply disappointed by this display of emotion as well as your utter lack of intestinal fortitude and adventurous spirit.
2. “I’m stranded on my own; I’m stranded far from home…”
On the long flight to Iran, you quietly played with your new pirate figures to entertain yourself. An old Turkish gangster type sat in the seat in front of you, and the toes of your tiny cowboy boots kept inadvertently tapping the back of his seat. Pure physics, but no doubt annoying. You were seated with your mom, who apologized repeatedly to the man as he kept turning around and yelling at her. Your father and brother were seated in a different section of the plane, and Mom finally walked down the aisle to let your father know what was going on. Father then took Mother’s seat beside you, terrifying you with his forbidding countenance. You tried to explain to him: “I’m sorry, Daddy. My feet just click on the back of his seat ‘cuz of the way they are.” Your father nodded to you, then reared his own legs back to his chest, and with all his might kicked the living hell out of the back of the Turk’s seat. The swarthy curmudgeon bolted out of his chair, ready to verbally if not physically assault you and your mother only to find your father smiling at him and seeming to welcome a physical confrontation if he chose. The Turk abruptly turned around and sat back down without a word. The rest of the flight was peaceful until you touched down in Germany.
It was the early 1970s, a grand era for hijackings and sundry acts of terrorism (the Charlton Heston film Skyjacked had been playing in theaters when you left Texas), and the Lufthansa Airline authorities were not impressed with your cap-guns and plastic knives and swords. Lufthansa had a reputation at the time of being particularly targeted by terrorists, so the security staff was being extremely thorough. Your father patiently tried to explain things to you as your toys were confiscated and you boarded yet another airplane. There were several connecting flights in order to get to Tehran and at another airport security station, the agent discovered another toy weapon on you that you had managed to secret away in your boot and smuggle past the last checkpoint. The contraband was again seized and your father took you into the bathroom and gave you a quick spanking before you boarded the next plane. At one point, the family was split onto different flights and you and Mother flew without Dad and Brother and had to navigate a long layover and connecting flight in Amsterdam on your own. It seemed to take the better part of a week and a dozen foreign airports before you finally arrived at your new home. It was the small hours of the morning and it was snowing, ghostly. And very, very foreign. It was your sixth birthday.
Shortly after being installed at the Hotel Commodore in Tehran, permanent lodging pending, your father disappeared for several days. You never knew until years later how nerve-wracking this was for both your parents. You and your brother holed up with her in your hotel room, watching the English language TV station. You watched It’s a Wonderful Life there for the first of many, many times and you also fell in love with a film you would never forget but whose title you would never be able to recall. It was late 1960s arthouse fare; the tale of a sailor and his wife in some remote British fishing village, the sailor is eventually knocked overboard and unconscious by a shipboard pulley rig, nearly drowns, and is only able to recover in the arms of his true love. It would strangely haunt you all your days; a lost film you could never uncover again. There was also the comfort food of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers in the mornings. Eventually, you would age into The Electric Company, and Morgan Freeman would forever remain the jazzy hepcat from that children’s show in your mind. It was also during this period that you expressed your incomprehension at not being able to watch a certain cartoon you dearly loved; Mommy immediately set about sewing you a plush toy of the canine superhero in order to pacify you. Imagine such a scenario. Annoying Child: “Mom, why can’t we watch Underdog?” Beautiful mother: “I don’t know, but I’ll make you one you can play with instead.” Precious and rare things.
Your mother loved you with an indescribable determination and could cuddle you into a peaceful oblivion you can now hardly recall or comprehend. Pooh Bear was the thing; and Mom could make that stuffed animal sing. In Dad’s mysterious absence, you sang songs with her; you told each other epic stories; you lived with her in the forests and in the trees of a shared mindscape beyond imagination. It is rare good fortune to experience such love and nurturing; divine comfort. Your mom was the constant throughout your days in the hotel as you wondered what the three of you were waiting for and where the hell your father had gone to. You were in a foreign land, your dad was missing, and you were practically at your mother’s breast like an infant. You had just turned six years old.
Some mornings, you roamed the hotel halls, restaurant and lobby, seeking out your fellow Americans. You made the acquaintance of an impossibly cool late-middle-aged 1973 hipster named Walt, who never seemed to move from his chair in the lounge. His face was lined, brown and leathery and he always had a fine-looking small drink in one hand and a Pall Mall cigarette in the other. Walt wore impeccable corduroy suits and styled his thinning hair as he had done since the 1950s, very classy to your mind, a bit like your grandfather and uncle back in Texas; Papaw the stylish lounge lizard and dear old tubby Tom with his Brylcreemed hair, bowling shirts and white patent leather loafers. You always dug the styles of the bygone world from before you were born. Walt would frequently call you over in the lounge of the Commodore and was very kind to you; interested in what you had to say. He insisted you call him Uncle Walt and as he spoke tenderly to you, his sad rheumy eyes would sometimes fill with tears. One morning, you told Mom you were going downstairs to see if Uncle Walt was around, and she took you by the shoulders gently and explained that Uncle Walt was actually a very unfortunate man who shouldn’t be around little boys like you, that he had what people called “a drinking problem” and shouldn’t really be around children at all. Still, you managed to see Uncle Walt a few more times before your dad’s sudden and dramatic return to the hotel.
3. “He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature…”
He had a black beard now and there was much rejoicing when he strolled into the lobby of the Commodore that day. Apparently, he had fallen ill at work and was rushed to the hospital where he spent the better part of the week with an ailment called kidney stones. The communication infrastructure in Tehran was such that no one seemed to be able to figure out how to let his wife and two small children know that he was in the hospital. You were deeply confused by the whole weird Houdini act and it was a while before you saw your dad the same way after that. The world was cleaved in half in some strange way that day. There were people like you and Mom, warm, gregarious, fun-loving; and there were those that were brooding, standoffish, rather cruel even, like your father and your brother. Mom cried tears of relief but you felt Dad hadn’t looked after his family very well. Your allegiance to your mother did not go unnoticed by him. Your mother was a comfort you would never outgrow. Your father was preoccupied (for very obvious reasons which you couldn’t fathom then), he was remote, and he was away on business a lot of the time, “recruiting employees” in London, Germany, Amsterdam. These feelings aside, your goal was forever to seek his approval, to break through the wall around him and somehow reach him, to make him love you in a more demonstrative way. He was your hero, of that there was never any doubt. But your brother was his first born, your brother was fiercely independent and prodigiously talented, and your brother would remain your father’s favorite- and your terror- for years to come.
Still, your father and brother were each capable of great tenderness toward you at times. In rare displays of affection, Dad would snatch you up and hug you madly, wonderfully scratching your cheek with his stubble and smelling deliciously of Aqua Velva. “Do it again, Daddy!” you would squeal. When your childhood illnesses came on strong again in Iran, accompanied by some deadly Middle Eastern virus, you were given a terrifying regimen of excruciatingly painful daily shots as you lay in your bed for days, too weak to move. You still remember the names of these insidious injections- penicillin and gamma globulin- administered by the sinister Iranian physician who would arrive by bicycle with his satchel of torture implements and their sickening medicinal smells. They hurt beyond description, and the dread of the next one colored all the hours in between them; you would plead with your mother and hyperventilate, please no! Your dad would stop at the market on his way home and buy you comic books and candy, and would let you bite his hand until it bled as you were shot up again and again. It was truly horrible, but Dad helped you through it and cuddled you after. He loved you dearly. A companion scenario some fifteen years later mirrors this scene exactly. You and your father had ceased to even try and get along with each other and rarely even spoke, but you continued to work for his building products company. While unloading a truck one day, you sliced the palm of your hand open rather gruesomely to the bone, spilling much blood. Your father drove you to the hospital himself and as you were stitched up amid writhing pain, he held your other hand and brushed the orange mohawked bangs from your eyes. He loved you dearly.
Each Christmas in Iran, a huge black steamer trunk would arrive from the states, filled to the brim with gifts for you and your brother which your parents had ordered from various retail catalogues. Mego superhero and movie character action figures, adventure and Colorforms playsets, books, cassette tapes, new clothes…You were spoiled rotten but to you it was just how life was. One Iranian Christmas, you and Louie were so stressed out about whether or not your parents would deliver on the coveted Fort Apache playset you had jointly asked for that you could not resist the urge to peek through the door while Mom was wrapping presidents. Indeed, you saw Fort Apache sitting there on the bed and cried out, “Fort Apache!” as your brother clapped his hand on your mouth. Your father heard this and busted you as you tried to scamper back down the hall; he yelled after you that he was sending all your presents back to the States. He did not do so. In addition to the Calvary troops and wild Indians of Fort Apache, you amassed an impressively diverse collection of plastic toy soldiers, including boxed sets from England, France and Germany from the great wars throughout history. Along with your larger action figures, the toy soldiers were incredibly important to you, fetishistic you might say (or as Terry Allen has described this violent obsession so common to young boys, “…To you they are a very perfect and eternal horde and very pre-sexually aesthetic. You love to touch them and move them around and make them die. Just like some president.”).
For your brother’s part, he collaborated with you on the production of two long-running playacting scenarios involving bears, your favorite animal of the moment (thanks to Pooh). The first of these involved a talking koala cub rather inexplicably called Pippa Man, played by Louie. The etymology of the bear’s name was a bit convoluted to say the least. Pippa Man was given his curious name because you portrayed the Australian hunter who had discovered the bear portrayed by Louie. Due to the koala cub’s pronounced speech impediment, he was unable to enunciate your nickname Flipper so instead called you “Pippa.” And call you Pippa he did; doing so with his whimsical lisp was the defining motif of the drama: “Pippa…Pippa…” Therefore, the white hunter character was known as Pippa, while the bear cub he befriended adopted the unlikely moniker of Pippa Man, even though he was neither human or adult. Somehow this made sense at the time, while it was also extremely derivative of the Curious George books you and Louie were reading during the period. Eventually, Pippa Man grew a bit tiresome, so the general idea was transferred to a similar scenario involving my same white safari hunter type and a character called Pop the Panda Bear, played by Louie who also wasn’t concerned about being typecast. Louie’s Pop was a much more developed character, not least because he possessed a more advanced vocabulary and could do more than just call out for Pippa. The narratives of this iteration were also more complex jungle adventures, rather than just the hunter rescuing the bear from trees and cliffsides. During a long road trip in Iran one day, Louie and you began playing Pop the Panda in the backseat. There had been some misunderstanding between the bear affectionately called Poppy and his keeper, the man formerly known as Pippa, so a bit of slapstick was being developed. You would say to your brother, “Poppy, don’t touch me” and Louis in panda mode would push you. “Poppy, don’t hit me,” and he would slap your face. When you got to “Poppy, don’t kill me!” your father exploded from the front seat. “Poppy’s gonna kill you pretty soon. He’s gonna pull over and spank the hell out of you both!” It took you a shocked moment to realize that Father knew nothing about the rich inner world you and Louie had invented together, and he had assumed he was being taunted and called “Poppy” by his kids for a number of miles before enough was enough.
Your parents were invested in a rather traditional mode of gender-based parenting roles. Love and nurturing were Mom’s responsibility while Dad was the strict disciplinarian to be feared and respected. On an early road trip in the States, in which the denizens of the back seat had apparently grown a little bit too rambunctious, Dad surprised you and Louie by buying a wooden paddle at a roadside souvenir stand in Arkansas. “What’s that for, Daddy?” you asked. “It’s to spank you and your brother with when you act up,” he calmly replied. You and Louie shared a concerned glance and were very quiet for a number of miles. Later that day, when Dad was outside the car paying for gas, you leaned up from the backseat and asked your mom, “That’s not really what that’s for, is it Mom?” She grasped your hand and without taking her gaze from the windshield in front of her, sadly responded, “Yes, I think it is.” Your mother would confess to you years later that the only significant thing she and your father truly disagreed about over the years was the way her boys were disciplined and punished. But in fairness to your father, it should be noted that his sons could be quite annoying and obnoxious at times and would have tried any man’s patience. Even your Nana, the gentlest and sweetest soul you ever met, sometimes had you and your brother “pick a switch” so that she could give you a proper “switching” for your brattiness. The only time you recall your mother ever attempting corporal punishment was also back in pre-Iran Texas. She was fed up with the shenanigans of you and your brother and had reached her limit and told you both you were to be spanked. You and Louie immediately crawled under the couch in the den on Elton Road screaming bloody murder and refused to come out as she kept trying to grab you and pull you to her. Finally, unable to control her laughter, she told you to just come out and she promised not to spank you. Suffice it to say, you were cuddled and comforted rather than spanked.
Throughout your young life, your father was fixated on a phenomenon known rather mysteriously as “Tone of Voice.” All conversation and debate would cease with his shouted command to “Watch your tone of voice!” This time-honored rebuttal ended virtually every conversation and dispute you had with him until you joined the Navy and went away from him for many years. You never quite learned how to modulate this tone to his satisfaction. It was an impasse in communication that could not be overcome. It seemed to be his way of ending virtually any discussion, and conversation with you was never at the top of his list of good times. It provided a quick way out for him as the very sound of your voice seemed to put him either on edge or to sleep. You were quite insufferable and simply not interesting enough to listen to past a certain point of general information-sharing. He was a man who was raised by the sword and lived by it in his own parenting. Spankings and paddlings were the method of choice for most disciplinary infractions. When in a group of family and friends, you would attempt to say something witty and profound and all the grownups would laugh and encourage you, such a smart and funny kid, and when you would look at your father he would be laughing along with them for a moment as well. But then, when they weren’t looking, Dad would fix upon you an icy, squint-eyed glare, flex his jaw, and shake his head subtly in disgust, letting you know that you had breached some sort of etiquette and would be punished accordingly later in the evening. It was very much the Dirty Harry death stare before he shoots a man down; outside the world of the movies, you have never seen that kind of look since except in the rare instances when someone was actually preparing to try and kill you. By end of many nights, you were hit with a belt or paddle and marched off to bed. This was all bad enough, but not the worst part. The worst part was the emotional disconnect from your father. You hated that you unintentionally made him so angry so much of the time, and that you could never hold his attention, have a conversation with him, relate with him in any way you thought meaningful. And no transgression or fault in your personality or performance was too small for him to overlook and not comment on, dating back to the early trauma of Chief Blackfoot in Texas. Although he was rarely one to cut up and share a laugh or a joke with his kids, he would guffaw uproariously anytime something happened that deeply embarrassed you and made you blush or cry. And he was highly critical as well. You were made to feel ugly, stupid, untalented, in the way, and useless much of the time. For example, you had a highly unattractive habit of gawking when you were trying to comprehend or figure something out, and Dad would forever mock your slack jawed, squinty-eyed expression, demonstrating for you what a mongoloid you looked like. Still there were those rare moments of tenderness with both your father and brother. You never hated them; far from it, you adored and idolized them. A form of Stockholm syndrome perhaps.
Some of Dad’s disciplinarian actions left a lasting impression on you. On one occasion, you and your brother padded yourselves by placing rolled washcloths down the back of your blue jeans to absorb the impact of his horrible paddle or belt. When you presented yourself at the lashing post, Dad was so amused by your bloated Micheline Man asses that he burst out in laughter and gave you a pardon, much to your mother’s delight. On another occasion when the whipping of your brother was imminent, Louie asked you to take the beating for him, promising he would do the same for you next time. You went to your father and told him you would be taking the beating for your brother. “Alright then,” Dad said, and he bent you over and made to swing the deadly paddle, only to gently tap you on the rump with it. “You are a very good boy,” he told you. “That’s a fine thing to do for your big brother.” When Louie tried the same subterfuge by offering to take your dreaded licks a few days later, Dad really let him have it with the paddle. There was some grand Stoic lesson to be learned by all this, even if you still haven’t quite parceled it out.
One evening while driving through the impossible traffic of Tehran, Dad had had more than his fill of you and your brother’s incessant annoyances. “Damn it,” he hissed under his breath as he pulled the red Citroen over to the side of a busy city street. He leapt out of the car, opened the back door, and proceeded to ruthlessly slap the hell out of both boys as you and Louie screamed in terror and pain. Physically exhausted by his parental exertions, Dad slammed the door shut on you and made his way back to the driver’s seat. A poor little Iranian boy stood at the side of the busy boulevard with his dog on a makeshift rope leash, looking on slack jawed with horror at the spectacle. Rather than mock the child’s gawking expression, your father gave him his best American smile and a friendly wave before jumping back in the car and resuming the family journey. Mostly, he was a great father. No absentee one either, he took you EVERYWHERE. He knocked himself out for his kids.
4. “In the City there’s a thousand things I wanna say to you…”
Soon after Dad’s return to the hotel, the family moved into the third floor of an apartment building next to a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Tehran. The other three sides of the building were surrounded by a mysterious labyrinth of very narrow Moroccan streets. The building was protected by an eight-foot stone wall and the gate opened up onto a lovely courtyard terrace that resembled an English garden. The rooftop looked out onto the smoggy sprawl of Tehran and far off onto the desert dunes and purple mountains. It was walled along the sides, so you were allowed to play safely up there; it became your stage for enacting the dramas of Peter Pan and Tarzan, complete with costumes lovingly designed by your mother and grandmother. You spent your first summers in Iran in a leopard-skinned loincloth and the springtime in green tights, while your trusty plastic knife was a tool for all seasons.
The apartment itself had an industrial feel to it, with dusty granite floors, high ceilings, and a primitive heating and air system. The kitchen floor was gently sloped on all sides with a drain in the middle of the floor. To clean the kitchen in the native manner, water would be poured on the floor and swept into the center. There was a modern western-style bathroom with a commode as well as an Iranian one with a porcelain hole in the floor, the latter of which was never used. On one memorable occasion, the ceiling of the American bathroom suddenly fell in, nearly killing your friend Christopher Williams who was staying over and washing in the tub at the time. The sewage regularly malfunctioned, leaving the floor of the bathroom covered in a noxious slime of the piss, fecal matter, used toilet paper, and cigarette butts of your fellow tenants.
The building was owned by an Iranian doctor, who occupied the entire bottom floor with his family. He disliked Americans, or disliked your family at any rate. He refused to even acknowledge his tenants’ existence. Your father would say hello to him in passing only to be ignored, then would mutter “asshole” under his breath. The doctor employed a handyman for the building named Ali, who was equally unpleasant and far more sinister. Your mother instructed you to stay far away from Ali. He had a shaved head and a dead yellow eye, and he glared at the American children whenever they crossed his path, sometimes yelling gibberish at them in Farsi until they scampered away in fear. One day, you and your brother were having a friendly cowboy versus Indian rock fight in the courtyard, and Ali appeared out of nowhere, yelling madly. He shoved you to the ground then grabbed your brother by the hair, pulling his neck back and whispering menacingly in his ear. You both ran upstairs and told your parents about the incident and soon enough Ali was at the door crying real tears as he apologized to your father in Farsi and seemingly begged him not to tell the good doctor. Your father took him by the arm and had a threatening word downstairs with the surly landlord. To the great surprise of the whole family, the doctor actually fired Ali. Nevertheless, your family moved to another apartment building in downtown Tehran shortly thereafter. There, you made your first Iranian friends, two wonderful sisters a little older than you and you played soccer in the street with them.
As was the custom, your family hired a “badji”, an Iranian maid, for housework and babysitting. Her name was Shuku and she became a surrogate grandmother to you. She would arrive and leave each day in her chador (which, like other Iranian women, she held in place by holding it between her teeth), but didn’t wear it while she was in your home, which was a sign of both respect and comfort. It was love without language, acted in pantomime gesture. She played games with you and made delicious cups of hot tea with milk and sugar as an afternoon snack. You cried when you misplaced your Spiderman doll and she would immediately find it for you. Sometimes when you cried, she cried too, and made gestures to let you know her heart was hurting for you. After the fall of the Shah’s regime, you all wondered what had become of her. She was a truly extraordinary and caring human being who helped fill the void of being separated from your Nana.
5. “Dirty Old Town, Dirty Old Town…”
Although you had scarcely been alive long enough to have much of an impression of your homeland (or even the fact that the Vietnam War had just finally ended), Iran was still a very dramatic culture shock. Ancient tribal people in turbans from the desert lands would arrive on camelback to sell their wares in the city, traveling down the narrow alley-like streets that surrounded your family’s apartment with the ringing echo of their camel bells. “The gypsies are here,” your brother would say. Sometimes your father would pay the gypsies to give you and your brother a ride on their camels. Images of the Shah and his beautiful and glamorous Jackie Kennedy-like wife Farah were ubiquitous throughout the country, plastered on walls and billboards at every corner of the city and immortalized in fine statuary. Iran was the epitome of a dictatorship, a society with only the very poor and the very well-to-do. Backed by the CIA, the royal couple were determined to move Iranian culture away from third-world Islam and poverty and into western modernity and prosperity. While the Shah’s dictatorial reign was great for the westerners living in Iran, he seemed to do very little to improve the lives of Iranians living in abject poverty; indeed, he mostly just imprisoned them for minor offenses or otherwise tried to hide them out of sight. Of course, you knew nothing of all this at the time. In many areas of Iran, starving women and children lined the streets, too weary with hunger to do anything but lay down on the filthy sidewalk and hold a beseeching hand out.
Generally, you encountered two distinct types of women on the streets: The witchy old-world crones engulfed in their spectral black chadors and the westernized modern women in short skirts, go-go boots, and bouffant hair. They were so startlingly different as to appear different species altogether. There was also the cultural difference of staring and glaring at foreigners. Iranians would stare you down dreadfully in the streets and often their expressions suggested they meant you ill will. But they refused to avert their eyes. They bored into you, your mother, your father, your brother. Your parents repeatedly drilled it into you that it was rude to stare, no matter what the Iranian custom seemed to be. Despite the Shah’s efforts to westernize the country as quickly as possible and despite the influx of Americans and Europeans, it was a country whose citizens were largely hostile to the foreign invaders. They seemed to relish any opportunity to engage in misunderstandings and controversy. Mr. Harlowe, one of your father’s closest friends and colleagues who looked quite a bit like Sylvester Stallone and was alternately known as both The Reverend and Colonel Mustard, hated the country and its people so intensely that he turned down a lucrative job extension and returned to the States after two years. Your brother became a virulent racist almost as soon as he arrived in the country, never referring to the Persian people by any other term than “Ragheads.”
The traffic situation was otherworldly by any civilized person’s estimation and the sheer number of belching, coughing vehicles led to terrible, sickening air pollution citywide. This was compounded by the fact that Tehran was situated in a valley surrounded by mountains, much like the Los Angeles Basin. The poor quality of air was compounded by a citywide morning cleansing ritual in which the wives and mothers of the peasantry would all bring their beautiful Persian rugs outdoors, hang them from wires, and beat the dirt out of them with sticks for several minutes, raising a thick dust cloud throughout the city. The air was so disgustingly filthy that it seeped into every crack and crevice of the apartment, providing a constant uphill struggle for the cleaning efforts of your mother and Shuku. When you returned from shopping with your mother, your hands would be blackened by filth although you had tried not to touch anything as instructed. The people themselves often had a very peculiar and remarkably unpleasant odor and the poor were generally filthy and more or less dressed in rags. In addition to the carbon monoxide of auto fumes, there was a pervasive odor of slaughtered goats and other charnel. The atmosphere was made more pungent by the so-called jubes, which lined most of the city’s streets. These were small canals that ran between the sidewalk and the road filled with barely moving water. Because of the jubes, the poorer Iranians were forever squatting on the sidewalks, impeding foot traffic as they washed their clothes, dishes, and bodies in the noxious liquid. They also threw their garbage into it one moment and drank from it the next and it wasn’t an uncommon sight to see babies, children and even grown men defecating and urinating in it. It was an all-purpose city water supply and absolutely disgusting.
There were the usual rules of the road in Iran, but no one gave a damn for them and there seemed to be no enforcement whatsoever by the traffic police. If one driver impeded another’s progress in any way, even in the name of safety or the law, go to the devil! Cars would pass each other on the sidewalks and in the jubes, traffic would flood through red lights for a full rotation, bicyclists and moped riders darted in and out of lanes alarmingly and collided, shouting curses and kicking cars. People and animals were mowed down minute by minute by speeding cars. The city was a cacophony of honking horns, accelerating engines, squealing brakes, and the ring, crash and thud of impacts and collisions. No one was safe. The taxi drivers were by far the most aggressive of the lot, determined as they were to get a proper tip; the radios from their open windows blaring the hit Farsi version of “You’ve Blown It All Sky High,” the theme from The Man from Hong Kong. Your father quickly learned that the Iranian equivalent of the middle finger was, ironically enough, the thumbs up gesture so he employed this liberally as he navigated the perilous Tehran boulevards. Mother repeatedly cautioned him that this was both aggressive and vulgar, so he modified his go-to road rage signal to a repeated up and down flat palm-up number, which seemed to confuse the locals and appease her. When your beloved grandmother visited the family in Tehran, a moped rider sped across the sidewalk and ran her over outside the downtown bazaar. Miraculously, she was relatively unharmed. The Iranian “mopeds” were in no sense the hipster machines of London and Rome; instead they were essentially pedaled bicycles with a gas engine attached for speed when you needed it, which was apparently always.
Early on, you experienced your first car accident in Tehran. The family’s red Citroen was stopped at a red light when an Iranian driver rear-ended it rather hard. Dad got out to talk to the careless perpetrator and you were all very surprised to see that the man apparently felt your father was the one at fault. He was screaming in Farsi, wildly gesticulating, and frothing at the mouth a bit, pointing from car to car as he continued his dramatic tirade. Finally, the furious Iranian summoned up a bit of broken English and shouted, “I kick your car!” After doing just that, he jumped back in his own car and sped off. Dad actually seemed to think it was pretty funny, probably knowing Bell Helicopter would pay for the damage and that it was always best not to have any involvement with the slow, shiftless, corrupt and time-consuming police force if it could be avoided. The driver who had hit your car likely knew he would rot in jail for a month or be forced to pay money he did not have if the police were summoned, so he had given his best performance of victim outrage and quickly fled the scene.
The food was very different than what you were accustomed to, but much of it was delicious. As advised by the Embassy, Mother insisted on sterilizing all fruits and vegetables. You especially loved the Barbari bread, which was bought fresh in the markets. It was baked over piles of hot rocks, so occasionally you hurt your teeth on a hidden pebble. There was a slightly upscale downtown restaurant where the family ate once a week before going to the movies that served delicious kababs; it was always almost completely empty and the owner seemed to really like your father and treated his guests well. You were also exposed to foods from all over the world; the Chicken Kiev at the Commodore Hotel made a lifelong impression on your palette. You fell in love with the hot Persian tea with milk and sugar from the very first taste, and marveled at how the locals would sip from their tiny cups with a sugar cube clenched in their front teeth. You had been raised on sugary carbonated beverages and were relieved to discover that Coca Cola was manufactured in Tehran and readily available, with the English logo on one side of the bottle and Farsi on the other. It did taste like American Coke, but was thicker and sweeter; occasionally there would be tarry silt at the bottom of the bottle and even pieces of string. There was also Canada Dry ginger ale and an Iranian knockoff of 7Up called Bubble Up 7. However, you and your mother were singularly devoted to Dr. Pepper and there was none to be had in that wretched land. On one of your father’s trips home to the States, he managed to sneak a 6 pack of Dr. Peppers through customs for Mother, telling you in no uncertain terms that they were for her alone. She secretly shared them with you and seemed to enjoy them all the more for it. On another trip home, Dad returned with a tube of Dr. Pepper brand lip gloss for Mother. After she allowed you to put some on your lips, you later sneaked into her bathroom and ate a chunk of the waxy stick in a sort of feeding frenzy. If she knew (and how could she not), she never confronted you.
Because of her love for her children, your mother would later become obsessed with the dangers of drugs and Satanic cults, but in Iran it was pedophiles and terrorist kidnappers. She seemed certain that her kids were prime candidates for such victimizations. There was some warrant for her concern. The sprawling, labyrinthine bazaar in downtown Tehran that contained absolutely everything on the Iranian market was a predator’s wet dreamscape. It seemed to twist and turn for miles with no rhyme or reason and no geographical reference points. You would establish that here is the toys alley, here is the pots and pans alley, here is the brass statuette alley, here is the hookah alley, but each area just stretched on seemingly forever, gently winding its way into some strange eternity so that you completely lost any sense of orientation. You just had to somehow find your way back out. On more than one occasion, even your dad got lost and finally just led the family to the nearest exit in order to find his way back to the car from there. If a child was separated from his parents here, it would likely be forever. And the Iranians did strike westerners as being a bit perverted, with all that bold incessant staring and glaring and a general effeminate, homoerotic vibe among the male populace. Men walking together tended to hold hands. Mother would give you and your brother regular lectures on the lures and snares of kidnappers and child molesters and what to do if you were approached by one. During one such workshop, you asked her, “But what do these kidnappers and molesters do to children, Mommy?” She shook her head sadly and her eyes glazed with tears before she replied. “Well, sometimes they take all your clothes off and just touch you all over…” She could say no more. You didn’t understand what the harm could be in that but it did sound weird. One afternoon, you and your brother were playing on the sidewalk outside the apartment building when a man pulled up on a moped and began talking to you in Farsi. He patted the seat of the bike, offering to take you for a ride. Your brother whispered to you, “Child molester!” and you both ran screaming into the building to tell your mother all about it. Years later, you reassessed the event. The man probably lived in the neighborhood and knew who you were and was simply offering a local child the thrill of a ride around the block on his moped. Or perhaps he was in fact a terrorist kidnapper or pedophile. You will never know.
Your father experienced the madness of Iran on a daily basis, and sometimes related his experiences to the family over dinner, while other stories he would only reveal to you years later. Driving home from work one day in his company car, he was involved in a major accident, a pileup of several cars, thankfully no injuries. A policeman showed up and directed a large truck to simply push all the damaged cars, including your father’s, to the side of the road. He ordered everyone to wait around until he could get a statement from them. The head of security for Bell Helicopter happened to drive by at that very moment, happened to see your father, and told him to just get the hell out of there, which he did. The Iranian police were notorious for their extreme corruption and violent tendencies, as well as their utter laziness and unfounded arrogance. They would use any incident as an excuse to do nothing and waste everyone’s time. The following day, the police called on Father at work, insisting he go down to the station with his interpreter and make a report. When he arrived at the courtyard of the station, he witnessed two men being “interrogated,” repeatedly and viciously struck across the face. When this failed to get the desired answers, the prisoners were laid on the stone floor and the soles of their bare feet were brutally beaten with Billy clubs. Then they were made to run around the courtyard at gunpoint. Father’s interpreter explained that the men had raped a young boy and that they would soon be executed.
Zolton Zally was a Hungarian man who had worked with your father in Texas and followed him to Iran with Bell Helicopter, and was one of Dad’s dearest friends. Zolton had escaped the Russian invasion of Hungary in dramatic fashion through forests and mountains, finally ending up in New York and becoming an American citizen. He was a very charismatic and interesting guy; there was something of the young Roman Polanski about him. One day, your father informed you he had been killed in a car wreck. It was only later you found out that it might have been a case of Jihadi murder related to Zoltan’s extramarital affair with an Iranian woman. Another close associate of your father at Bell who tried to investigate the case later worked with Ross Perot to free American hostages in Lebanon and slip them over the border into Turkey.
To Be Continued…