I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV (5 page)

After the announcement, the protests went south as the regime cracked down and turned to violence to stop the movement. People were shot and many died in pursuit of democracy. I observed the news daily, like a soap opera I couldn't take my eyes off—a violent, bloody, real-life
Dallas.
I would go to bed late at night after reading as much as I could about the movement online, and wake up the
next morning to CNN to see if any progress had been made. One clip that kept playing on the news was of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, dying after being shot by the authorities. It was a poignant and sad scene to watch. I decided I would go to Iran and join the protesters in the streets to fight for our freedoms. No, I didn't really do that. I'm a comedian. Not a lunatic. And I have no experience overthrowing regimes. What I do have, however, is a monthly newsletter, which had until then been intended to inform people about my upcoming shows.

The newsletter went out to thousands of people and usually elicited only a few responses. This time, I dedicated the whole thing to my support of the Green Movement and asked others to please support it any way they could. I hit send and went to sleep, having done my part to support Democracy in the Middle East. The next morning I awoke to hundreds of responses. Most expressed their support. However, I also got some people challenging me. One e-mail came from a woman in Greece. How she got on my e-mail list I have no idea. She basically told me that if the people of Iran had voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then who was I to question it. She said that this was all a ploy by the West to overthrow the regime and that I should mind my own business.

This upset me—not just because she claimed it was none of my business, but that someone had the gall to question the Supreme Word of my newsletter. This led to an e-mail exchange that consumed hours of my life—hours that I could have used to write jokes about Ahmadinejad! After several exchanges I thought,
What the hell am I doing? I'm debating some chick in Greece who has no influence over any of this. Why do I care what she thinks?
It took a lot for me to stop myself from responding to her last e-mail. What can I say—I'm a man, I need to get in the last word. I finally let it go, but she
reached out to me one more time to provoke me back into the debate. I ignored it. I'm not sure what happened to that Greek lady, but if she happens to be reading this book, please know that you were wrong and that I was right. And now it's in print, with a title and fonts and on a bookshelf and everything, so you can't do anything about it unless you write your own book. In your face, Greek lady!

Tiburon, California

I
'm Iranian, but I grew up white. That's because I was raised in Tiburon, California, across the bay from San Francisco. Tiburon is a very affluent and gentrified city in Marin County, where the mountain bike was invented—at least that's what Wikipedia has to say on the matter. Mountain biking is a very white sport. When most Iranians hear “mountain” they think hiking or horseback riding—usually as a means of escaping Iran. When Iranians hear “biking” they think of riding on a flat surface. I'm guessing whoever decided to mix mountains with biking was an open-minded, adventure-seeking, and most likely stoned white dude. “Bro, you know that mountain we can barely walk up without falling off the cliff? Why don't we try to ride a bike up it?”

Growing up, most of my friends were white with a few Persians sprinkled in here and there. Before I go any further, I know that
any Iranians reading this right now are thinking:
But Iranians ARE white!
That is true. Iranians are ethnically white. The word “Iran” derives from the word “Aryan.” Our ancestors can be traced back to the Caucasus, so that makes us Caucasian—the original white people. Yes, Aryans were originally dark complexioned people with thick, hairy eyebrows. This is a point that many educated Iranians in the West insist on making. It's for this reason that when the census comes out every ten years, Iranians continue to mark the box that reads “white” and move on with their lives. Based on the last census in 2010, there are about 300,000 Iranians in America. Based on my personal experiences in Westwood, California, there are at least 300,000 Iranians at most Persian weddings. There have been estimates of between 300,000 and 1.5 million Iranians in America. The reason for this wide discrepancy is that Iranians are not into filling out census forms. That's because they want to lay low and avoid the government.

“If you tell deh government you're here, den vhen deh next revolution comes dey vill know vhere to find you.”

Many Iranians throw away census forms when they appear at their homes. If they do fill out the form, they try to be as vague as possible:

Age: 0

How many people live in your household? 0 or so

Income: About 0

Ethnic background? Vhite. Or Italian. Or whichever ethnicity is not currently making headlines.

In the West, despite our Caucasian heritage, Iranians are seen as more brown than white. If you don't believe me, try this test.
Get an Iranian with a thick Persian accent and a unibrow and have him run up to the front of an airplane before the doors close for takeoff and tell the stewardess he doesn't feel well and needs to get off the plane. No matter what, he has to
insist
that he needs to get off and he needs to make a big scene until they let him off. If the police don't show up to arrest this man then I will give you your money back for this book.

Recently, I was on a plane and a white American girl did this exact thing. No fuss was made. The crew let her off the plane, thanked her for almost flying that airline, and we took off. The passenger next to me asked, “Shouldn't they stop the plane and remove any baggage that girl might have checked in? What if she had a bomb in her suitcase?” I smiled and replied, “Nah, she's white. No bombs, but probably lots of mood stabilizers. We'll be okay.” So brown equals terrorist and white equals one individual crackpot who just really wants to get off the plane.

Growing up in Tiburon, there were so few Persians that if you ran into one it was an occasion for celebration. One time in high school I cut class with a baseball teammate who had the whitest name ever—good old American Mark—and we went to get a sandwich before the game. We ended up at a deli where the owners turned out to be Iranian. I could tell from the Persian accent that the old man behind the counter was a fellow countryman, but I decided to play it cool. I was trying to blend in and I didn't want to remind Mark, or myself, that I was Iranian. The old man looked at my dark complexion and tilted his head.

“Vhere are you ferom, young man?” he asked in a thick accent.

Trying to sound as American as possible, I responded, “Tiburon, dude.”

“Yes, but vhere are you
ferom
ferom?” This meant, “Don't try to bullshit me, son. I know you're a foreigner, just like me.”

Still, I tried to be coy. “Oh,
from
from? Downtown Tiburon.”

“Yes, but vhere are you
ferom ferom
ferom?”

The guy was relentless.

“
From from
from? You mean originally? Like where was I born?”

Even White Mark leaned in for my reply. He knew the answer but was confused about why I was acting so evasive.

“Fine, I'm from Iran. There, I said it! You happy, old man?”

Not only was he happy, he was ecstatic. It was as if he'd found a long-lost son. “Iran! I knew it! Me too! Dees eez gereat. Here, have a free cookie!”

“Free cookie?”

“Two free cookies. Von for your vhite ferend!”

This was always happening whenever we walked into an Iranian-owned business. Once we got cookies, once we got ice cream, often we'd get hugs. Mark enjoyed the benefits: “Dude, I love hanging out with you. We're always getting free shit!” “Yes,” warned the skeptical Iranian side of me, “but don't get comfortable. Today they're offering cookies, tomorrow it'll be their daughters. They're setting us up for something.”

My Parents, the Foreigners

Growing up with an Iranian family in a predominantly white county can present its own set of problems. No matter how hard I tried to blend in, my parents always managed to show up and give away the fact that I was different. When my friends were picked up from soccer practice, usually one parent would arrive to retrieve them. Often, my friends had parents who were divorced, which
was totally cool in America. However, with Iranians, that was a no-no. No matter how much your parents hated each other, or could not stand each other even for short durations, they had to hang in there and save face in the community.

“My vife? Do I love her? Love is such a relative term. I tell you now dat ve live in de same house together and at least vonce a veek ve say hello to von another.”

Even if my Iranian parents had fallen out of love, they would both come to pick me up from soccer and they would bring the entire family with them in one car—mom, dad, siblings, aunts, grandma, neighbors, roosters. If you ever see a car overloaded with people, breaking all kinds of occupancy and seat-belt laws with several generations of a family crammed in wherever there's room, they're either Mexicans or Iranians. We bring the whole village for every single errand. I'm not sure why that is, but perhaps it has something to do with the revolutions and bad political circumstances our people fled in the old country. We pack the car with the entire family in case a revolution breaks out between the time we leave the house and the time we get to the soccer field. That way, if the revolution does happen (which in our minds is inevitable), we'll have the whole family in the car and can keep on driving until we get to the next country.

Even if my parents ever came alone to pick me up from soccer, they still stood out. My father had ways of being noticed. As an example, he drove a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. “Rolls-Royce?” you might say. “How lucky.” No. There was nothing lucky about being the rich kid from Iran whose dad drove a Rolls-Royce during the Iran hostage crisis in America.

For those of you who are too young to remember and too lazy to google this historic event, here are the CliffsNotes. Iran
had a revolution in 1979. Many Iranians, including my family and me, fled the country and came to America to get away from the Islamic regime that took over. No sooner had we settled in than a group of Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Iran and took fifty-two American hostages for 444 days, which was when . . . oh hell, just rent
Argo
, starring Ben Affleck as the lead CIA agent who happens to come from a Mexican background and rescues a bunch of good-guy Americans from a bunch of evil Iranians, which leads to him landing the role of Batman in the
Batman vs. Superman
movie. (Iranians like taking credit for everything, so, yes, I'm taking credit for helping Ben land Batman.) In the late seventies, there weren't a thousand channels on TV. So every night Americans tuned in to watch Ted Koppel and his red coif tell us: “Day one hundred . . .” “Day one hundred and fifty-two . . .” “Day three hundred . . .”
All I could think was:
How long is this damn thing going to last? And how does Ted Koppel get his hair to sit like a perfectly manicured squirrel?

Marin County was filled with rich white people who tended to be low key with their fortunes. They would drive Volvos and Saabs; some would even ride bikes. Yes, mountain bikes! My father, on the other hand, decided to buy the Rolls and drive around town like a rich Saudi sheikh. It wasn't bad enough that there was a hostage crisis being played out every day on TV and that all my classmates likely thought I was the most spoiled kid in the school. But then my dad had to drop me off and pick me up in this gaudy car he had bought from a friend. My dad purchased most of his possessions from friends. Anyone who had financial problems would come to our house with items to sell and he would buy them. He was like eBay before there was eBay. He came home with old cars, ill-fitting suits, and anything else that was on the market.
One time he brought home a bunch of phones. We already had plenty of phones, and we certainly didn't have a bunch of extra rooms for the new phones. So they just sat in a cupboard in the kitchen waiting to go extinct. My mom made sure to remind him of his wasteful ways anytime they got into an argument.

“Have you thought about buying some new used phones for us? Zee ones in zee cupboard are getting dusty. And vhile you're at it, vhy don't you get some more undersized suits so ve can give dem avay de next time some fancy midgets visit us?”

I-ran, I-ran So Far Away

During the Iran hostage crisis, my number-one goal was to lay low, blend in, and find more friends with names like Mark, Bret, Jesse, Steve, and Chip. I didn't want anyone to know I was different, and I sure as hell didn't want the older kids to know that I was Iranian, which even back then equated to “terrorist.” That would just give them an extra body to beat up. I didn't even want anyone to know I existed. The less they knew about me, the better my chances of making it through the school days and getting home without a broken nose. Pops and his Rolls didn't help in this mission at all.

My attempt at blending in failed miserably when I was in the fourth grade. I was met with a verbal confrontation by a sixth grader named Jim who somehow figured out that I was the representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Marin County. After all, I had a funny name, beautiful furry eyebrows, strange-sounding parents, and a dad who drove a better car than his dad. I had to be involved with the hostage crisis somehow—I looked the part. This sixth grader came up with a clever nickname, calling me a Fucking Eye-ranian. That's what people called Iranians back then:
Fucking Eye-ranians. “First of all,” I explained, “it's pronounced Ee-ron-ian, not Eye-ranian. Second, you're bigger than me so it's whatever you want it to be. Third, I'm not sure where you heard a rumor that I'm Iranian. I'm not. I'm totally Italian—
ciao
!”

Such were the times that my only recourse was to stand there and take Jim's abuse. The only person who came to my defense was a slightly older black fifth grader. I don't remember his name, but I remember him walking with me and telling me to turn the other cheek and not take it personally. Given his advice, let's call him Martin Luther King Junior Junior. MLKJJ had gone through similar abuse and learned to deal with it. In his case, he was a big kid, so I'm guessing that's why the abuse toward him eventually ceased. I made a mental note to start lifting weights as soon as possible. Who knew how long this hostage thing would last? I either had to grow biceps or learn more words in Italian. You could only fool so many people with “
ciao
!
” “spaghetti!” “tortellini carbonara!” It was a race between my biceps growing and Jim coming up with a clever new insult the other kids would latch onto.

Then disaster struck, in the form of A Flock of Seagulls, the eighties band that wrote a song that gave kids plenty of ammunition in their bigotry arsenal: “I Ran (So Far Away).” For any non-Iranians reading this book, it was unfortunate to go right from the hostage crisis to this song. The lyrics had nothing to do with Iran, but kids would drag out the two words to make fun of me by singing, “I-ran, I-ran so far away.” It was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“It's Ee-ron, goddamn it! Ee-ron. Get your racial barbs right.”

“Oh, look who's the angry Eye-ranian now!”