CHAPTER ONE
SOMETHING EXTRA
When I’m on the tour bus interviewing Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and she hands me a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, I’m taking a swig. It would be rude to refuse. The last thing I’d want to do is piss Chrissie off.
My import single of “Stop Your Sobbing” is already warped from listening to it over and over. And over. I’ll be first in line at Tower Records when their debut album comes out in January. All I have to do is convince the editor of the school newspaper to let me be one of the first college reporters to interview Chrissie when they tour next fall. If I get into NYU.
I have to get into NYU.
I grab my notebook and pen from my nightstand and start jotting down notes.
Chrissie Hynde, leather-clad lead singer for the Pretenders, is surrounded by male bandmates. “A sausage-fest,” she calls it. The bus reeks of clove cigarettes and Jack Daniel’s.
Leather-clad. Ugh. Too cliché. And who even knows if she smokes clove cigarettes?
Chrissie’s face is etched with defiance: lip semi-snarled, eyes underlined in black—a bid for attention belied by the curtain of fringe that obscures them.
Curtain of fringe. Mr. Ramos would like that metaphor.
“Jasmine-joon, you are helping me with the rice?” Auntie Minah calls from the kitchen.
“Coming,” I answer sharply. I’m right in the middle of my interview.
“They’re all men.” Chrissie gestures to her bandmates and crew. “Nobody to talk to about sex or commiserate with when you’re on the rag.” She upends the now half-drunk bottle. “That’s why it’s so nice to have someone like you here to interview me, Jasmine.”
She hands me the bottle.
“You are coming, Jasmine-joon?” Auntie Minah calls again from the kitchen.
My editor would probably strike through the last paragraph. Rock chicks never get to talk about their periods. Male journalists write about gawking at groupies or plaster-casting their penises with Mick Jagger all the time.
New York University. My one-way ticket out of Bumfuck, California, and into the New York music scene to write for Creem, the only rock magazine that cares about artists with integrity like Chrissie Hynde and Elvis Costello. The LA scene is deader than Jim Morrison (and a two-hour crawl from our house to the Sunset Strip). Your reign is over, Aerosmith. It’s 1979: fossilize the dinosaurs of rock already.
Mr. Ramos says I’m one of his first students with a real shot at acceptance. I have “a voice” and “a point of view,” and I’m “dogged,” which doesn’t sound like a compliment but is.
The Heidi and Ruthie dolls Mom got for my first Christmas stare at me with feigned indifference from their perch on my pink scalloped shelves. I can’t take them with me. East Coast girls are way more mature. They wear pearls and blazers and go to private schools with names like the Covington Academy.
“Joonam,” Auntie calls with more urgency.
I stuff the notebook into my nightstand and run downstairs to help Auntie Minah with the rice.
* * *
Making Persian rice is a whole production. First, you rinse the basmati—it has to be basmati rice from the Persian market—then soak it in salt water overnight. Rinse again and transfer to a pot to parboil, which Auntie Minah says means to cook halfway.
She quizzes me. “What is next, joonam?”
I said we didn’t need Auntie Minah to babysit us while Mom’s in Kansas with Grandma Jean and Dad has to travel for work—I mean, I’m almost eighteen—but nobody listened.
“Drain the parboiled rice and add oil to the pot, Auntie,” I say, sliding on Mom’s hideous, moss-green oven mitts, which match the flocked wallpaper and hanging ferns.
“Amme Minah, Jasmine-joon,” she huffs. “Why your father never teach you the Farsi?”
I pick up the pot and dump the steamed rice into a colander in the kitchen sink. “He was too busy trying to be American to teach us how to be Iranian.”
“I teach you,” Auntie says, brushing her thick auburn hair away from her face.
Maybe she’ll teach me how to do a henna rinse, too. We’re two days into our crash course in All Things Iranian. Somehow, Dad was able to coax her out of her apartment in San Francisco. To her, Los Angeles is nothing but one big five-lane freeway. She’s not wrong. Everyone thinks Southern California is all bikinis and beaches, but we’re more than an hour inland, a blur of recurring tract homes and mini malls inhabited by the same combination of a nail salon, 7-Eleven, Winchell’s Donuts, and “ethnic” restaurant.
Dad says we’re probably the only Iranians within a twenty-five-mile radius.
“If your father marry an Iranian woman, he would never be divorced. You would speak the Farsi,” she declares.
I turn the heat up under the pot and add a layer of corn oil, then grab a couple pieces of lavash flatbread from the package on the kitchen counter. “They’re not divorced yet. Not totally.” Legally separated. They could still reconcile. They have every other time.
Although, Mom has never left before.
Auntie raises a hand. “No, Jasmine-joon. Wait. The oil is not hot enough.”
I reach for the November issue of Creem magazine on top of the pile of mail on the kitchen counter. Why is Jimmy Page on the cover when Zeppelin is so played out—
Oh my God! The letter I’ve been waiting for, it’s right here under my magazine. No one even told me. My notification from the Aspiring Young Journalists Award Committee: after my grades and my writing samples, the finishing touch for my application. Finally.
“Now, joonam.” Auntie motions to the pot. “Layer in the lavash. Oil is popping.”
“Wait, Auntie, let me look at this—”
“Now.”
I put the letter aside and quickly layer the flatbread on the bottom of the pot, then dump in the rice, grabbing a wooden spoon to make wells with the handle end. I pour in more corn oil so the crunchy bottom layer of tahdig will taste like movie popcorn, only better.
While the rice cooks, I snatch the envelope and open it. Did I get first place, second, or third? Even an honorable mention will do.
“Dear Miss Zumideh,” the letter reads. “Thank you for your interest in the Aspiring Young Journalists Award. Unfortunately…”
Unfortunately?
Unfortunately.
My chest collapses in on my stomach. It’s not possible. I didn’t even place in this competition. Mr. Ramos told me not to write about David Bowie, how he’s the only artist reinventing himself—he’s cycled through three musical personas in the last decade alone: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke—while the Eagles and Led Zeppelin are still suspended in the resin of the 1970s like prehistoric insects. The 70s basically ended in ’77 with the Sex Pistols.
Write a straight news article about a town council ordinance or mayoral malfeasance, Mr. Ramos said. Why didn’t I listen?
“Something wrong, joonam?” Auntie asks.
“No, Auntie.” My voice cracks. “I mean, Amme.”
Nothing, except the something extra for my application just went up in smoke. I can practically smell it burning.
“Oh no, joonam,” Auntie cries. “The rice. You turn the oil up too high.”
Auntie performs a rescue operation on the rice while I toss the rejection letter in the trash. Now I’ve got absolutely nothing for my something extra.
“Dinner ready?” Dad emerges from his office cocoon.
“Jasmine burned the rice,” Ali says, bounding down the stairs. “I could smell it all the way upstairs.”
“How do you know? Your room smells like a wet dog—and we don’t have a dog.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Auntie says. She skims the unburnt portion from the pot. “Go. Sit.”
We take our places around the dining room table. No reruns in front of the TV with Auntie, which means Dad, Ali, and I have to engage in idle chitchat. I’m not telling them about the contest. Dad’s too wrapped up in his business trip, and it’s not like I’d get any sympathy from Ali. We’re certainly not going to talk about Mom.
“Um, what time is your flight?” I ask, tearing off a piece of lavash bread Auntie has set on the table along with the sabzi: raw onion, herbs, and, inexplicably, radishes.
“Five a.m.,” Dad says with a sigh.
He looks so tired. His tan skin is sallow, his dark hair is thinning at the temples. Ten cities in four weeks to introduce a new fighter jet to the other engineers at his defense contracting firm. He’ll be even more exhausted by the time he gets back.
Ali grabs a piece of lavash. “Did you get a window or an aisle seat?”
“Window,” Dad says as Auntie carries in the platter of rice with tomato and eggplant stew. “Kheili mamnoon, Minah-joon,” he says. “Khoresht-e baademjoon. My favorite.”
“Khaahesh mikonam, you’re welcome,” says Auntie. She takes Dad’s plate and piles it high.
“Aisle’s better,” Ali says. Now that he’s a junior, he thinks he knows everything.
“Window is way better,” I say, handing her mine. “You can see the clouds and the cities all stretching out below.”
“You can stretch your legs in the aisle,” Ali says, popping a radish in his mouth.
“Window’s still better.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Guys,” Dad nearly shouts.
We get quiet.
“None of this while I’m gone, understood?”
We nod. But asking us not to argue is about as realistic as asking the same of him and Mom. By now, I’ve lost my appetite. All I want to do is go upstairs and figure out a plan B for my application. I make crazy eights with my fork to make it look like I’m eating so Auntie won’t be offended. “It’s delicious, Auntie,” I say. “Thank you.”
Her face crumples. “Daadash, why you never teach them the Farsi?”
“I got them that Learning Language series,” Dad says, mixing his rice and stew together.
Thirty cassettes to learn a language. Ali listened to every … single … one.
The only way you’d know he’s Iranian is his full-on Starsky & Hutch ’stache and wild, puffy hair. He got Mom’s green eyes and slender, Irish American nose. But Ali is the one who learned the language, follows the politics. I got Dad’s “sleepy” brown eyes and “strong” nose. And Auntie’s figure. “Zaftig,” Grandma Jean calls it.
“Anyway, we’re never going to Iran now that the ayatollah took over,” Ali says with his mouth full.
“Ali,” I hiss at him. Talk like this upsets Auntie.
Auntie’s eyes well. “Your grandmother says protesters are still in the streets every day.”
As a half ’n’ half, I never paid much attention to what was going on in Iran, a faraway place we would visit “one day.” As long as Grandma Zumideh was safe. Now we get updates on the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the king daily.
Copyright © 2022 by Susan Azim Boyer