I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV

by Maz Jobrani

  When my dad came to stay with us, he wasn’t in good shape. It was sad watching illness consume a man who had been such a lion in life. He was the one who taught me that anything is possible and to never sweat the small stuff. My dad had always given me the feeling that you can take on the world and win. I get a lot of my confidence from him. But there he was, at seventy-six, unable to beat time. All those years of living hard caught up to him. He liked to say he was seventy-six but had lived the life of a seven-hundred-year-old.

  It was important for me to have my dad meet my son even in the state he was in. My son was an infant when my father arrived in Los Angeles. Quickly I was reminded of how things were done old school versus how they are done today. At one point the baby was crying and my dad needed a glass of water.

  “Son, can you pelease get me a glass of vater?”

  “Give me a second, Dad, I have to soothe the baby. He’s crying.”

  “He is a baby. Dat’s vhat babies do. Dey cry.”

  “I know that, Dad, but I need to rock him.”

  “Rock him? You vant him to be a man or a pussy?”

  “He’s a baby!”

  “And I am your fadder. Get me deh vater.”

  “Dad, chill! Here, have another Xanax.”

  “Tank you. Now, I need some vater to take it.”

  It was like having two babies in the house.

  My father had been in the hospital because of complications from an operation he had to remove a benign tumor above his eye. Once the tumor was removed, there was a space in his brain that eventually caused seizures. It was one of the toughest things in my life to watch my father have seizures in front of my eyes and not be able to do anything about it. I remember New Year’s Eve 2008 going out to celebrate with my wife and then having to go to the hospital to spend the night with my dad, who had been put into a coma to stop the seizures. We had hopes that he would make a comeback, but that was not to be.

  He hung in there until March 2009, when we got a call from the hospital telling us that he’d had a stroke. I will never forget the nurse who was so good to us at the hospital. When you are going through something like that, once in a while you have an angel come into your life. For my family, that angel was our male nurse Colin. He was very sensitive and caring to my dad and he called my sister the day my dad had the stroke to let her know. He told her they could resuscitate him but that he would not make a good recovery and it could just extend his misery. My sister asked what Colin would do if it were his own father and he said, “I would let him go with some dignity.”

  I was due to fly to Rutgers University for a show the next day and then on to Houston for shows that weekend. I was in the hospital room with my sister, aunt, cousin, and wife trying to decide if I should cancel the shows. That’s the difficulty of having a job in which you really can’t call in sick. There’s not someone who can do your job if you’re the headliner and don’t arrive. I felt extra bad because the kids at Rutgers who had organized the show had been in touch with me for over a year and they said they were really looking forward to finally having me out. I felt obligated to make the shows, but we really didn’t know how long it would take my father to pass. It could be a few weeks, so there was a chance that I could go do the shows and come back in time to be next to him when he passed.

  I decided around two in the morning that I should go home and pack so that I could make my flight at eight. I felt that that was what my father would want me to do—handle my business. As I was walking to the parking lot with my wife, she reminded me that if I went to New Jersey and my father passed while I was gone I would never forgive myself. Furthermore, she made the good point that I would have a tough time performing if I got there and found out that my father had died. Right then I knew there was a reason why I had married a lawyer. She knew how to make an argument and seal the deal.

  Fortunately, I listened. The next morning, when I would have been on a plane to the East Coast, my father passed away while I was in the room seated next to him. I was happy to have stayed by his side. His passing occurred only nine months after my son’s birth. It was as if my son came into my life to replace that relationship. Dhara was too young to know what was happening, but we dressed him in a white Indian outfit for the funeral and took him with us. His jolly little face helped me get through what felt like a long day of Tide commercials and dead horses.

  My father’s funeral was the second funeral I had been to for a close relative. The one before had been in 2003 for my grandfather, who also had been a great influence in my life. He was the one who taught me to never live your life saying “what if.” He would say the word “if” is a bad word. It is a word that takes you away from your reality. The way he put it was, “Never say what if I had done this or what if I had done that. You’ve got to live with what you decide to do because that is your reality. For example, if my aunt had a penis she would be my uncle. End of story!” I told you he was a poet.

  With my father, I had my son to lean on to get me through, while with my grandfather I leaned on my family. There was also an alcoholic lady who lived in our building when my grandfather passed away who tried to console me. Here is some advice: If you are drunk, don’t try to console anyone who’s grieving. This lady came over to our apartment the night my grandfather passed, looked up at the sky, and issued some tender words.

  “Don’t worry, Maz. Your grandfather hasn’t left us. He’s with us. His spirit is with us.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate the kind words.”

  “No, really, look up in the sky. You see that star? That’s your grandfather.”

  I looked up and noticed the star was moving. She stared at it, and then we both stared at it until she finally took a sip of her drink.

  “No, wait,” she corrected herself. “That’s not a star. That’s an airplane. Your grandfather is definitely not on that plane. But trust me, he’s with us.”

  Santa Might Be Muslim

  People often ask me if my wife is religious. It usually means that the person asking is religious and they want to know if we’re raising our kids Muslim or Hindu. I think to them it’s like a football game, and they want to know who won. They’re often taken aback when I tell them that neither of us is really religious and that I was born in a Muslim family while she was born in a Christian family. When I say that my family was Muslim, it just means that we lived in Iran, which is a Shiite Muslim country. My parents never prayed or fasted or made a trip to Mecca. The closest thing we had to a religious person in my family was my grandmother, who thought she was religious but really was just superstitious.

  “Vhen you go to a casino,” Grandma would preach, “say a prayer to Allah and den put all your money on be-lack. You are guaranteed to vin.”

  “Grandma, isn’t gambling a sin?”

  “Only if you lose.”

  My grandmother also taught me to appreciate what I have in her own religious/superstitious way. When I was five years old in Iran, she told me that whenever I saw anyone who was less fortunate that I should look up in the sky and say a prayer where I thank Allah seven times. It was the equivalent of saying seven Hail Marys and thanking God. This became a full-time job, since living in a busy city like Tehran you saw a lot of misery and poverty. I would be in the backseat of my mother’s car and see someone in a wheelchair. I would look to the sky and start thanking Allah seven times. By the time I was at my sixth thanks, I would see a homeless person slouched in a doorway and start thanking Allah again. Next I would see a midget then a blind person then an albino. I wasn’t even sure if albinos counted, but I would thank Allah for not making me one anyway. Pretty soon, my trips into downtown Tehran with my mom and grandmother became full-on sermons. To this day, whenever I see someone less fortunate than me, I thank God, but only once, and a nonspecific god. Such are the ways of a busy Muslim-ish person in the twenty-first century.

  I’m the only person in
my immediate family who has actually visited Mecca. I did this on a trip to Saudi Arabia where I was doing a show in Jeddah. I asked the locals how far away Mecca was, and they told me about forty-five minutes. I was tired from my flight and wanted to nap, but I was not about to get that close to Mecca and not see it. Not because I was religious, but out of curiosity. Also because I knew that when I told people I had been to Saudi Arabia, someone would ask, “Did you go to Mecca?”

  It would be like going to Anaheim and not seeing Disneyland, or going to the Vatican and not seeing the Sistine Chapel, which almost happened to me as well. This was when I was on a junior year abroad program in college. I was never a museum type, so I would get bored listening to the docent go on and on about a painting or sculpture. When I was in Rome, I decided to go off on my own to see the Vatican and made a point to see the Sistine Chapel. (Not because I wanted to, but because I knew that when I told people I had been to Rome, someone would ask, “Did you see the Sistine Chapel?” It seems like throughout my life I’ve experienced a lot of things just so I can tell people I have done them. You can say I like to please.) The problem with my trip to the Vatican was that I wasn’t 100 percent sure what the Sistine Chapel looked like, or what it was, and I didn’t go with a tour guide. All I knew was that it had been painted by either Michelangelo or Leonardo or one of the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I wasn’t sure which one. Anyone who’s been there will tell you that the Vatican is a really big place, and I was on a deadline because I had to meet someone for lunch. At that age, lunch was the priority.

  As I walked in and out of rooms, I tried to listen in on the docents taking other people around on tours to see if one would say something like, “And now, please turn your eyes upon the Sistine Chapel.” I never heard those words. When I finally found myself in a small room with a cool painting on the ceiling, I figured this must be it. I looked around and there weren’t that many people in the room, which I found odd. I would have thought that there would be crowds of people observing it, sketching it, posing for pictures with it, but nothing. I looked up for about ten seconds and tried to act like I knew what the hell I was doing. I put my hand to my chin and fake pondered this classic’s relevance to my life. In reality I was just counting backward from ten so that I could make it seem like I had spent enough time appreciating what I thought was the Sistine Chapel in case someone was watching. Then I took off and started following the exit signs out of the place. It wasn’t until a few minutes into my exit route when I walked into a huge room where I saw people looking up and camping out, observing the art above in awe. I recognized the famous touching fingers that Michelangelo had painted. Oh shit, THIS was the Sistine Chapel? How stupid of me to have thought it was the other room. This was the real deal! Once again I put my hand to my chin and started pondering the magic of this historical piece of art. In reality I was just counting backward: “Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .”

  So I’ve been to the Vatican and I’ve been to Mecca—not because I wanted to, but just so I could tell you that I’ve been to the Vatican and Mecca. I hope you appreciate what I’ve done for you. I’ve also been to many bar mitzvahs and eaten matzo balls at my friend’s Shabbat dinners. All these experiences have had some spiritual effects on me, but I still don’t consider myself religious. I would say the closest religious belief I have is Zoroastrianism, which was the first monotheistic religion. Their tenets are “Good words, good thoughts, good deeds.” As long as you live by that then you send a positive energy into the world. Live and let live. However, in honor of those trying to keep score, I’ve found a way to create a tie in the Muslim vs. Christian competition. Next Christmas, I will give the kids a dose of East meets West when I dress up in a Santa Claus outfit and put a turban on my head. I will call myself Sunni Claus.

  If you happen to be Chuck Norris reading this book, I’m sure I just gave you a heart attack. After all, Santa is white and he wouldn’t wear a turban. That’s sacrilegious. But Chuck, let’s not forget, it was you who insisted I wear the turban in the first place.

  If you’re reading this and you work for Fox News, you’re probably thinking I’m trying to infiltrate Christianity and spread Sharia law to the children of America. You might assume I’ve gone deep undercover as an al-Qaeda operative who has even written a book to fool you. Let me put you at ease, Bill O’Reilly: I’m not a terrorist! But I’ve played one on TV.

  Epilogue

  Now that I have written this book, I realize that a lot of my issues have been created in my own head. Like I said at the start, writing a book is like doing therapy, and I feel like I’ve made really good breakthroughs. First of all, I can say without a doubt that I am not a terrorist. I mean, I knew that from the start, but given what the media and movies have been saying about people who look like me over the past thirty years, I was beginning to question myself. If I wasn’t a terrorist, why was I playing so many of them on TV? Why was I feeling guilty going through airports? Why was I so good at ululating at weddings?

  Furthermore, what I’ve learned from reflecting on my travels and writing this book is that most people are inherently good. However, there are also people who just don’t get it. They are out to hate and judge you just because of the label that you fit. There are those who will think that just because I’m of Middle Eastern descent that means that I have it in for America and am just waiting for the right opportunity to open up a can of jihad on this country. They won’t look at the fact that the majority of Middle Easterners and Muslims really don’t hate America as much as Fox News would have you believe. And technically, I’m not even that Middle Eastern, given that I grew up in the United States. If anything, I’m Middle Eastern light. I swear, look at my picture on the cover of this book. I’m not even that hairy! I’m bald, but even worse, I’ve got receding eyebrows. How the hell do you get receding eyebrows?

  I knew I was Middle Eastern light after September 11 when the airport profiling never happened. The only person profiling me turned out to be me! After a while, I started to get offended that they weren’t stopping me. I felt like running through the airport just randomly screaming Middle Eastern and Muslim names in hopes they would stop and search me: “MOHAMMAD, ABDULLAH, RAHIM!” But I’m sure that my receding eyebrows would have kept me out of trouble. “You can’t be a terrorist. Look at your eyebrows. Come on through, buddy.”

  I’ve come to live my life with this philosophy: Chances are that at some point you will either get hit by a tree or eaten by a bear. I haven’t done the scientific research to prove this, but I know that something random will happen at some point in my life. This happened to me between the time I wrote this book and the time I edited it: One Tuesday I awoke to several messages left on my phone by my mother. You know something bad has happened when you see three messages from your mom at seven in the morning. When I called her back she gave me the bad news. My brother Kashi had died.

  This was a shock to my family and me and it hit us all very hard. I rushed to my mom’s house, where he lived with his seven-year-old son, and found him passed away. This was the hardest thing I had ever experienced in my life, and as we sat in my mother’s living room discussing the funeral options I decided to repeat what I had done so much of in my life: travel. I had shows to do in Chicago that weekend; I figured I should stick to my work, since there wasn’t much else for me to do. I told my friends I had read once that Brett Favre played in a football game when his father died, and that my brother would have wanted me to stick to my schedule and do the shows.

  As I got closer to Thursday, when I would be traveling, I began to have my doubts. Still, I got on a plane from Los Angeles and flew to Chicago. It wasn’t until I landed on the tarmac in Chicago at noon on the day of a show that it hit me: How the hell was I going to be funny when my brother had just died? Why was I running, and what was I running from? I guess it was a coping mechanism, trying to convince myself that life goes on and not allowing myself to mourn. I got off the plane,
called my manager and asked him to get me out of the gigs. I was coming home. That weekend I was able to be home with my family and I was so happy to be there and mourn and hug and cry and give myself a chance to feel the pain. In the weeks that followed, I leaned on the love of friends, family, and strangers to get me through this hard time, and I also was surprised to see how many other people had lost loved ones unexpectedly. My wife sent me an article claiming that a twenty-second hug has healing qualities, and so I went around hugging people for as long as I could. It took a tragedy like this to remind me how much love is in the world and how petty we can become if we forget it.

  So I say to you people who are reading this book, be nice to one another. Why hate someone simply because he has a different belief or different skin color? It’s amazing how far out of their way people will go to differentiate themselves from their enemies, when the reality is that we have so much in common. For example, did you know that both Jews and Palestinians eat falafel? Did you know that both Muslims and Christians believe in Jesus? Did you know that Iranians, like Americans, enjoy pizza? If we could stop fighting one another because of color and race and religion, and concentrate on who the real enemies are . . . our children! If we could just get them to go to sleep!

  What I’m saying is if we could all concentrate on the things we have in common and celebrate those things together, then we might succeed in making the world a better place and looking up, so that the next time a tree is about to fall on us we could zigzag and survive. Only to later be eaten by a bear.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to begin by thanking the three essential people who made this book possible: Jesus Christ, Elvis Presley, and, of course, Justin Bieber.