The Last Living Slut

by Roxana Shirazi

  The older boys are always at the front, with sagging tattoos and hackneyed talk of the good old days. They want to catch the shit hitting them in the face, the head, whatever. It takes them away that much from their two-by-fours and kids’ packed lunches and PTA meetings. Their once-long hair is now in violent retreat. But they saw it all: the Pistols, Sabbath, the Sweet, the rest. They saw the blood, the shit, the razors and needles, the vomit, the pretty little chickens. This is beautiful, like their morning wood at fourteen and the spotty teenage-boy need for getting laid that came with it. They know all the songs and try to make every gig. The cash they spend on seeing bands is supposed to be milk money for their children, but this is their life, their blood, their every happiness. Just like me. Because rock ‘n’ roll is my type O.

  When all your thoughts and emotions are consumed by rock ‘n’ roll and all your actions are dependent on the movements of a rock band, then your life becomes like that of a junkie. The blood that rushes through your veins, the breath that catches your throat, your tears, your cash, your enormous love, your brainwaves, your perfume, your orgasms . . . everything. Everything. But it’s all an illusion: the love you feel so passionately, the bond of friendship, the endless hotel rooms, the emotional support you give and take, the food you eat, your guttural hollers of ecstasy, your jealousy, your thirst. The exhaustion and the cold and the heat, the heels that swat your skin, the condoms you use and don’t use, the STD tests, the locked jaw. It is a high, a new realm, a space you can enter without warning or awareness. And it can become your pulse, permeate your genetic makeup. This I know.

  When it does, suddenly all the decisions you make are not entirely yours. And you don’t know how it happened. You have little control over your emotions and actions. And it’s all because of a rock-and-roll band.

  This is my life.

  Gottfried Helnwein: Beautiful Victim

  Chapter 2

  I was a Child Basked in Gunfire, Islamic Law and Sexuality

  I was born in a military hospital in Tehran, Iran. My mother was a twenty-four-year-old political activist who’d chosen the Russian-run hospital as a nod to socialism, the political movement she’d aligned herself with in her resistance to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime. I was born into a totalitarian society with little social and political freedom, where only the Shah and the ruling elite benefited from the country’s wealth while ordinary people didn’t have access to decent health care and education.

  As soon as her belly swelled, my mother knew I was going to be a girl. She just didn’t know how naughty I was going to be. When her water broke, my eighteen-year-old aunt proudly accompanied her to the hospital. Once inside, my mother learned that the hospital’s sanitized and celebrated reputation was a sham: it was an institution of clinical cruelty. My mother was in labor for sixteen hours—my head was so big that I couldn’t easily come out—but labor drugs were strictly against hospital policy, regardless of the situation. Instead, the nurses believed in discipline, so they slapped and kicked my mother to make her push harder. They screamed and shouted at her to get on with it. A fine mist of blood rose on the veins of my mum’s milk-white neck. At one point during the ordeal, my mum thought about running out of there with me still inside her. But before she could, she passed out on the table.

  I was born in the early hours of the morning. The nurses whisked me away to prevent physical contact with my mother, which was also against hospital policy. They left her alone, lying on the operating table in the vacant room without water for three hours. Unable to get up, she resorted to licking droplets of sweat from her face.

  Every day for a week, the nurses brought me to my mother for five minutes of breastfeeding, convinced that their military regimen was for the good of the patient.

  A few weeks after I was born, my eighteen-year-old aunt and uncle were arrested, tortured, and interrogated for being anti-Shah activists. From that day until the revolution in 1979, various friends and members of my mother’s family were constantly getting arrested for their political beliefs and activities. My mother and I made countless trips to Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison to catch a glimpse of them behind bars.

  My first childhood home belonged to my grandmother, Anneh. It was there, in the middle of Iran’s revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq, that I remained, basked in pure love and happiness during the terror of revolutionary gunfire, Islamic law, and my initiation into sexuality.

  Chapter 3

  I was six months old when I went to prison with my mum. It was only for twenty-four hours, but it was enough to affect her for a long time.

  My grandmother, my mum, and I were at home one afternoon when the savak, the Shah’s secret police, broke down the door. There were four or five of them. I was in my mum’s arms as she watched them break and tear everything apart in my grandmother’s house, looking for leaflets, literature, books, and any other anti-Shah paraphernalia that would prove my mother was a political activist. My mum’s face was sheet-white. I screamed while my grandmother prayed in the corner.

  “Get up. You’re coming with us,” the men barked at my mum.

  Though she obeyed, she insisted that she had to bring me, my nappies, and my milk bottle. They marched her, with me in her arms, to a car waiting outside and sat on either side of us as they drove to Komiteh Moshtarak Zed-e-Kharaabkaari Prison, used by the savak for interrogation. Once inside the prison, my mum was blindfolded and led along a hallway, still carrying me. When they took off her blindfold, she saw that she was in a small room. They left her there overnight, where she watched me sleep as she awaited her fate.

  The next morning, she was taken to an interrogation room and I was handed to the guards. She was petrified that she’d be raped, tortured, and killed, and there’d be no one left to take care of my grandmother and me. Fortunately, the interrogator was lenient. He questioned my mum about her and her brothers’ political activities. She must have convinced him she didn’t know anything, because suddenly he snapped at her to get out. She grabbed me from the guards, ran out, and found a taxi to take us to the safety of our home.

  I led a fairy-tale existence in the sunshine-soaked dusty back alleys of Narmak, a small, up-and-coming lower-middle-class neighborhood in northeast Tehran. I played day and night in the alley outside my grandmother’s ancient two-story house.

  The air outside was arid, and smelled of trees and dry clay. In the summer at about five p.m., after their afternoon siestas, the adults would soak the scorched ground of their doorstep with splashes of cold water, and the air would dampen with the smell of just-rained-on ground.

  The house had a vast roof. On blazing hot summer nights, like everyone else in the neighborhood, my grandmother, my mother, and I would put our bedding outside and sleep under the stars that crammed the raw Persian sky. We slept in a pasheh–band, a white gauze tent that kept the insects away. It was held up by nails in the squat wall surrounding the rooftop. In the night, I’d see chimneys like gap teeth in the blackness, and hear the low hum of the neighbors’ murmurs and velvety laughter coming from their rooftops.

  In our home, there were four small spaces on the ground floor sectioned off as rooms by a wall in the middle. Just past the front door was a small foyer with nothing except a gold-leafed mirror, a telephone, and a storage cupboard for stacking bedding sheets and duvets—this was our reception area. Just past it was a room with biscuit-fragile windows and a glass door that led into the garden, the window frames all painted in the same chipped lemon–yellow paint. This room was where my mother and I—and sometimes my aunt and cousin—slept on yards and rolls of cotton sheets and puffy rose pillows that my grandmother had kept immaculate for years. On the other side of the wall was a living room with an old clunky black heater that let out foul fumes. The room had sliding doors to create a space for my great-grandmother to sleep at night. With her raven-black braids hanging to her knees, she’d sit in a dark corner of that space, vacant with Alzheimer’s, dressed always in a long white gow
n, a lone figure staring ahead.

  Every inch of the downstairs floor was covered in layers of thick Persian carpets, which crashed into one another like watercolor waves. Intricate squiggles, flowers, and curves exploded in a frenzied dance on electric turquoise, deep browns, and shameless reds, hypnotizing me. I’d sit there trying to make sense of their designs but eventually give in, preferring to join them, lie on them, kiss them.

  The second floor was unoccupied. It had two rooms, one with its own balcony overlooking the garden, an ancient kitchen, and a decaying bathroom. Gray stone steps led to the ground floor, which was where we lived. The front door was short but thick. It was never locked. Instead, it stayed open to let in the constant stream of relatives and neighbors who ate, slept, gossiped, loved, cried, and laughed with us. Immediately to the left of the main door was a tiny bathroom with a porcelain squat toilet and a shower.

  Next to that was the crumbling kitchen where my grandmother sat amid a palace of pots and pans, creating the most intoxicating carnival of dishes: ash-e reshteh, ghormeh sabzi, zereshk polo, sholeh zard, and my favorite, koofteh tabrizi, from the northern city of Tabriz where my mother’s family was from. The dish is a heap of minced meat mixed with crushed walnuts, tarragon, and zereshk (tiny dried sour berries) and rolled into a massive, round meatball with a boiled egg planted in its delicious heart after it’s cooked.

  The kitchen where my grandmother cooked had a dungeon-like cellar. It was a place of dread, accessible only through an iron hatch hidden under a rug. One day curiosity got the better of me and I slipped my fingers through the bars of the hatch and lifted it. I peered into a bottomless black hole. Climbing down the greasy cloth-bound ladder, I could feel the presence of monsters waiting for me. The cold air gripped my head and seeped into my widened eye sockets as I struggled to see in the pitch-black. My feet touched the ground and I stood there, shivering with cold and fear, terror and repulsion swimming through my wrists and throat as I awaited some unspeakable horror.

  I knew there must be rats and cockroaches crawling everywhere, but I just stood there like a scarecrow in my thin cotton dress, letting the thrill of fear give me a fantastic rush in my tummy. I didn’t dare walk around in case I bumped into something—maybe even my dead grandfather. (An uncle had once told me that his body lay down there among the musty papers from the past.) After a minute or two, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I climbed back up the ladder, to the light and warmth. My soul and heart embraced and fed on the thrill I’d experienced. So whenever I felt the yearning, on silent afternoons, I would tiptoe once again to the kitchen, lift the heavy, cold, iron hatch, and climb down so I could see beyond my world. Sometimes I even felt a sense of holiness elevate me in those confines. My grandmother would always call after me, but in my mind I was far away, ready to be transported to the dark side.

  Chapter 4

  I Found Shelter in Her Lap and Heaven in Her Protection.

  My grandmother was goddess-like in her aura. Her motherly instinct extended to everyone she encountered. Her nickname, Anneh, means mother in northern Persian dialect. Her lungs racked by years of asthma and her heart swollen by unconditional love, she constantly gave her energy and time to the people in her life. She always worked hard to ensure that the banquet of dishes she carefully prepared delighted everyone. Sunny by nature, she relished life, always dancing and laughing. The sheer pleasure she took from the smallest things—like selecting shades and textures of cloth for dress-making—gave her pure joy.

  “My home is everybody’s home,” she’d say, glowing with pride while dishing out dinners to random relatives and neighbors who dropped by. Sadly, though, as her eyesight faded, she sometimes made little mistakes in the kitchen—like adding sugar to the stew when she meant to use salt. And the antiquated horsepills her doctor prescribed for her asthma thinned her skin. Over time, we would see her veins, bulging and blue, swimming beneath the translucent white skin of her frail hands, decorated by a treasured ruby ring her children had given her on Mother’s Day. “One day it’s going to be yours, my princess,” she’d say whenever I tried to play with it.

  Still, she remained beautiful, with chestnut brown hair fashioned in a bob and honey eyes glistening with natural seductiveness, just like my mother’s. “Ashraf khanoom, you’re always dressed so chic,” I’d hear women tell her at mehmoonis (family parties). “Is it from Paris?” They’d sniff around her bags and dresses, and she’d always end up giving away one thing or another.

  Even though this was the peak of the Shah’s rule, a time when Westernization was being heavily promoted, she still covered her body with a long, flowery chador—the Islamic head-and-body covering—when she went out of the house. She didn’t do it for religious purposes but strictly because she liked tradition.

  People gathered at our house at night, and Anneh always started the dancing, getting everyone on their feet to move to the Iranian pop songs blasting from the cassette player. She was happy, always singing, always full of light. She welcomed everyone into our home with such genuine love and warmth that I wondered if anything ever really upset her. I found shelter in her lap and heaven in her protection when I put my head against her fat tummy, hearing the clutter of her insides and sniffing the faint smell of her Western perfume, while my mother went to work every day teaching teenagers at the local school.

  My mother had a psychology degree and taught literature, psychology, and Arabic, leaving early in the morning and coming back at dusk. She had gone back to work four weeks after giving birth so she could provide for me and my grandmother. Sometimes her breast milk seeped through her shirt mid-lecture.

  In many ways, my mother was the opposite of my grandmother. Even though she was only in her mid-twenties, she was serious, quiet, and pensive—and an active revolutionary. She’d rush home from work and demonstrations to do chores, pay bills, find doctors, and fix the home.

  “Don’t forget the duck-shaped bread,” I would yell after her as she left the house. She never did forget to bring back a piece of duck-shaped brioche. I remember waiting for that bread with uncontrollable joy rushing through my body.

  My mother shunned makeup and fancy clothes, embracing simplicity and somber colors as a revolutionary stance. The only beauty routines she adored were ironing her hair fire-poker straight with the household iron and waxing her legs to gleaming marble smoothness with homemade wax.

  “Here, help me rip these sheets, my darling,” she said one afternoon, looking up from the fraying garments strewn around her on the floor, gooey, yellow, hot wax on her leg and spatula in hand. Rip, rip, rip, went the old sheets to become strips for her legs. I watched my mother squeal in pain for the sake of beauty as she applied and then ripped the cotton strips away.

  “I wanna do it!” I whined. I wanted to be glamorous, too.

  “Not until you’re twenty,” my mother snapped, tending to her slim white legs. She wanted me to be a child, not to rush into womanhood. But by the age of five I already loved makeup. I was obsessed with dressing up in the latest fashions, and desperately wanted platform shoes and flared trousers.

  I screamed and howled, driving my poor mother to tears. As far as I was concerned, it was detrimental to my existence to be denied a pair of platform shoes. And my mother went mad if I touched makeup, so when she was off at work and my grandmother had her afternoon siesta, I would sneak into my grandmother’s makeup bag and cream on her neon-pink lipstick and chalk on nightclub-blue eye shadow.

  We hardly had any money, but I was a spoiled princess. Everyone in my family doted on me, especially my grandmother, who bought me so many dolls that they overtook the living room and made for quite a lively tea party. Still, I stamped my feet and cried through my whistling snotty nose because it wasn’t enough. I wanted her to buy me a bride doll that I’d seen in a shop window.

  Even then, I always wanted more than I had.

  Chapter 5

  Every morning, after my mother left for work, my grandmother and I began our
day. First I’d run to the neighborhood bakery to get nooneh sangak—a foot-long triangular bread the man would bake while I watched. They would throw a slab of dough into the clay oven. It was still steaming when they brought it out, with tiny stones from the oven clinging to its underside. As they folded it, they would tell me to watch my fingers, but I didn’t care; I let the hot bread sting my mouth as I gobbled it down while running back to the house.

  When I got home, we’d have breakfast sitting around the sofreh—an oil cloth spread on the floor for serving food—or sit by the fishpond in the garden. On the sofreh, feta cheese, herbs, fresh double cream, honey, and sour cherry jam were laid out with the hot tea. My grandmother brewed tea in the samovar, an hourglass-shaped decorative metal container that boiled water as steam escaped from its head, allowing the tea to brew slowly.

  After the dawn prayer, an old, toothless lady by the name of Masha Baiim would come by most mornings to help my grandmother around the house. Her face was a brown, weathered map etched with deep lines. She had the patience of a saint and long black hair, which she wore in two braids hanging by her waist like rope. I was generally horrible to her, giving her hell and the occasional bite on the arm when she wouldn’t let me do the things I wanted to do.

  After breakfast, I would go out to play with my friends in the alley. All the neighbors in the little houses knew one another. Our mud alley was always sunny and orange. Then we would roam the maidoon—or square—in the center of the neighborhood. In Tehran, every square had a number and was the social hub of the surrounding area.