In November 2013, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Ali Eskandarian was murdered alongside two members of the Iranian band, The Yellow Dogs.
In the months leading up to this terrible event, Ali had been in correspondence with a friend and Dutch publisher, Oscar van Gelderen, about his semi-autobiographical novel.
Golden Years is that book.
Set in the first decade of the 21st century in New York, Teheran and Dallas, Golden Years is a novel perfumed with excess and spirited decadence. It tells the story of a group of Iranian musicians in their twenties and our narrator, in his 30s, who is in thrall to the great American beats and has visions of Ancient Assyrian Futurism. Hungry and poor, high and hopping from bed to bed, and lover to lover, the characters in Golden Years are romantic exiles living with rock n roll as their religion.
Seemingly Semi-autobiographical and with a measure of Hunter S. Thompson and a dash of Kerouac.
Like a Survivor found in the rubble long after an earthquake, Golden Years came blinking into the sunlight and Ali's voice could be heard again
- Tim Burgess
"The novel is called Golden Years and is about someone like myself: immigrant, war child, rock n' roller, artist trying to live in a modern world he finds infuriating/exhilarating. There is an insurgent political bent to the writing, also lots of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. There are characters very similar to the Yellow Dogs as well. I lived with the dogs for almost two years and we got to have some fun. I think it could be the great Iranian- American novel, or at least that's what I'll call it until someone proves me wrong."
- Ali Eskandarian
I open the door to the loft and walk in. It's quiet. Someone is asleep on my bed with the covers pulled over his or her head. My bed is in the middle of the loft and easily accessible to visitors. Siamak is the lead singer of the band and he made the bed for me as a birthday gift.
I look closer to see who the sleeper is. It’s Dari again. The bastard’s been spending a hell of a lot of time on my bed lately. He’s a freeloader of the highest order, though in his defence his immigration status doesn’t allow him to work legally. He comes over and stays for a week. Likes to time his visits on days when the kids are going food shopping, then stays and cooks our favorite meals for a few days. Of course our favorite meals are really his favorite meals and he has a heavy hand with the expensive ingredients like saffron, which the kids get sent over from Iran. He acts like a master chef and basically just orders people around in a rude yet funny manner while tasting and adding spices.
As if that weren’t enough he smokes our cigarettes and invites women over and uses our beds. He’s a metronomic, long-distance fucker too and really makes these girls sing like the whorish devil birds they really are. He roams around looking like a goddamn bum until it’s time for a meeting with one of these birds, then undergoes a transformation fit for a Persian king of the Sassanid period. Being Iranian, hair removal is the most important part of his transmutation. He must also be oiled from head to toe. I keep telling him about chest hair being back in style but he won’t listen. His beard must be shaved in a certain pattern and trimmed to perfection. He’s always talking about potential threesomes but nothing ever pans out.
'Oh, her!’ he exclaims. ‘She’s totally the type! Let’s have an orgy with her.’
Dari also likes to think of himself as a sort of intellectual. He speaks with a pseudo-English accent, although he grew up in Iran. He’s a musician, came over with the first wave of Iranian underground rock bands. Most of his one-liners are recycled Woody Allen lines or something he might have picked up from Camus or Dostoevsky, and he likes to lay it on thick and go real slow without citing his sources. Well, come to think of it, his wild ideas do pan out sometimes, and his intellectual mumbo-jumbo does impress some more than others. Truth is, last time I saw Dari his face was buried in a cunt, sucking and licking. The cunt had a face, arms, and legs, blond hair and blue eyes. I was engaged with her upper body, a nipple in my mouth, eyes fixed on her lower torso. She was enjoying herself, very much so. Her boyfriend was not present on this fortuitous night, had elected to stay far away on the other side of town, the dumb bastard. If he only knew what kind of depraved monsters were pleasuring his girlfriend.
After two or three tall glasses of absinthe on the rocks with a splash of water human beings will try anything. I don’t have to have orgies to get my blood flowing but rather enjoy doing the deed with one per- son at a time in a semi-sober fashion. It was an empty experience. Not primordial in nature. Ephemeral and vacuous. One for the vault of human degeneracy and corruption, animalistic, and devoid of poetry. I should have walked away from it the second it started. We looked like the octopuses in Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, God help us. To make things even worse the girl was a friend of mine.
Unlike me, Dari is a genuine sex addict of the highest order, a serval, a serotine bat, a self-professed coitus king, a deflowering inseminator, a penetrator, a copulating land shark with a powerful appetite for flesh. One day he will surely have a symposium on the art of coition and defend his points like Plato. I as- sume he is gathering all the necessary data now for this future sparging of knowledge and wisdom. Soon he will retire to one of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain to ponder his findings with a hermit’s zeal and a solitudinarian’s fervency. He says I can visit him there anytime I like, and why the hell not? I could use some sun and sand.
I light a cigarette and stare out the window. All is frozen in the mercury dawn, steam is rising from the chimney tops, a few birds in the sky, looks like it’ll snow. It’s up and down all the time. I need to slow it down, get a job, some solitude and rest. Can’t keep running. Must keep running. I slide in bed next to Dari, without touching him of course, and try to get a few hours of sleep before the loft’s inhabitants awaken from their slumber. I need to shut off my mind for a spell. Please, Lord, no dreams and no nightmares. My mind starts to wander again...
Oh but what shall remain of my infinite pipe dreams?
About Ali
Ali Eskandarian is a musician and author of the novel Golden Years, which will be serialized on his medium page. Eskandarian's transnational upbringing makes him a prescient voice for our era. The Iranian-American troubadour draws upon influences as discrete as American folk, rock and traditional Persian music to craft songs about love, travel, politics and loneliness. The results have earned him comparisons to greats like Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley. Ali was born in Pensacola, FL, on September 11, 1978. Growing up in Tehran, during the Iranian Revolution, Ali found strength in music and the arts. The family left Iran and was granted political asylum in Germany before relocating to Dallas, Texas, where Ali experienced an arts-filled adolescence. Ali had been living in New York since 2003. His debut album, Nothing to Say, was released on Judy Collins’ Wildflower Records, he has toured the States several times including as opener for Peter Murphy (Bauhaus) and with fellow Iranians The Yellow Dogs. Golden Years is his first novel, and describes the lives of young (artistic) Iranians in Brooklyn, New York.
Visit AliEskandarian.com for more information
Global publisher information for Golden Years is below.
