My LIFE story instead of my SPACE story? Very well then.
My Father was born in Esfahan to a single mother of five boys. My grandfather was a man named Nasser, who was a Turkish-Iranian. His family moved from Iran to Turkey three generations ago, and had now returned, his prospects dried up in Turkey. He had two wives, my grandmother being the second. A few months before the youngest son, my father, was born, my grandfather was involved in a motorcycle accident which killed him. The first wife inherited 80% of Nasser's assets, and 15% went to his parents. My grandmother was stuck with five boys and had to support them through housework in other peoples' homes. This was all compounded by the fact that she was deaf and uneducated.
The youngest boy, my dad, grew up trolling the streets for odd jobs to perform, eventually settling as a shouter for a jeweler in the local bazaar, calling out to potential customers and luring them in with promises. He became very good at this, and when I was a kid, he would perform his fast-talking sales pitch to me and my sister and we would laugh constantly. He is a good, honest, hard-working man.
He just barely passed in school and applied to The University of Esfahan, where he met my mother. She grew up in Azerbaijan, and moved to Iran as part of an arranged marriage at age fourteen. But once she got to Shiraz, where her future husband waited, she ran away. She used her dowry, which she had stolen, and found sympathetic relatives, an aunt and uncle, in Esfahan. They changed her identity and helped her out. She was studying to be a communications expert, and he was studying economics. They had the same history class in their first year, and immediately hit it off.
Now, you have to understand, Iran is not Afghanistan. The Persian people are not Arabs. The upper class is Arab, having invaded and taken over after the fall of the Perso-Sassynid Empire. The Persian religion of antiquity is Zoroastrianism, and many Iranians practice a sort of fusion of Islam and Zoroastrianism. When in public, Iranians will act like proper Muslims, but in private they host wild parties with smuggled in wine and smuggled in western music. The women take off their chadors and kick off their shoes, and the men unbutton their collars and practice pick-up lines.
My father romanced my mother for a year before they got married. I was born four years later, when they had bought their own place in Esfahan, he had gotten a job at a local consulting firm, and she was at an entry level job at Datak Telecom. Four years after that, my sister was born.
I was raised mostly by my grandmother, learning her homegrown sign language and Farsi at the same time. For a while my mom was concerned that I'd be linguistically stunted, because I often combined the two languages while speaking, but I soon sorted them out, and helped my sister to do the same when she got older.
I went to school with all boys, saying prayers from the Koran before and after class. Woke up early in the morning to head out to school, and finishing before lunch time. The girls went to school after lunch in the same building and using the same materials. They thought that would keep us away from each other, but they were wrong. The year was 2020, and I was ten years old, just starting to like girls. This one girl was always waiting outside the school as we were leaving. One day I asked her why she was waiting there, and she said she wanted to go to school. I asked her why she wasn't eating at home, and she said she wasn't hungry. But when I handed her my sandwich, she ate it quick. I soon found out she came to school early because her father hit her, so she left before he woke up and stayed outside the school all day. Every day after class I would sit outside with her before her class started and share my food. Her name was Manijheh, and she was the nicest girl in the world. I sometimes think if things had been different, I could have loved her. I helped her in school, because they taught the boys better than the girls.
One day her father caught her hanging out with me, and grabbed her by the arm so hard it broke. She was crying so hard, and I wanted to protect her, but I was only eleven at the time, and her father was a seasoned football (soccer to you) player. I tried to stop him, but he hit me so hard I blacked out.
When I woke up my father standing over Manijheh's father's limp body. My father had heard what was happening from a neighbor while he was preparing to go to work, and ran three blocks to come to my rescue. The fight had lasted a half hour, and he'd eventually knocked out the bastard. Manijheh went to the hospital for a long time. She had been hurt really bad by her dad, and she had gone into shock.
This was the day I learned my dad was secretly a supporter of the Mossadegh secular movement followers, and that he had been organizing raids on known CIA moles. This was made worse with the revelation that Manijheh's father was a CIA mole. The problems stacked on top of each other when the Iranian police got involved, representing the Islamic faction of this three-way war. By the end of the year, my family was on a train to Turkey, where we flew to America.
Here I was forbidden from ever speaking Farsi again. When I was told to write my name, I wrote it in Arabic script (and for the idiots out there, the Iranians are not Arabs, they use Arabic script just English uses Roman script). For using these letters, I was hit by my mother. She wanted me to forget I was Iranian. Every time I used a Farsi word, I was hit. Now I can only remember some of my native tongue. I can speak English very well (I'm sure you've noticed) but my spelling is horrible. I spellcheck the crap out of everything before I post it, just so you know. But my most comfortable mode of conversation, the one I used with my sister and the one I actually think in, is my grandmother's sign language.
As I got older I became interested in history, technology, and punk rock. I was in several bands in my teens, playing guitar and bass. We were god awful, but we loved it. The highlight of my career was playing a show with my band "Pour Unfortunate Soles" at Studio Seven. The crowd danced for one song out of our half hour set. We sold two copies of out home-made EP, "Jam Packed Full of Crap".
I also loved history and literature. I had all eighteen books in the Roma Sub Rosa series by Steven Saylor, a series of historical fiction books that was basically Magnum P.I. in Ancient Rome. In fact, he's still writing them now, so check it out. I devoured knowledge about the classical era. In my Writing Composition class I did a report on Queen Arsinoe IV of Egypt and her involvement in the Alexandrian War.
My love for historical politics led me to follow current events closely. I wrote political opinion columns for the school newspaper, the Garfield Messenger, and was always ranting about local politics to anyone who would listen. At the age of sixteen I was a common sight on the "Letters to the Editor" section of the Seattle Stranger.
I turned 18 on April 17th, 2030, and was ready to graduate high school. I had a job at the local theater, Meridian 16, and was doing well for myself. I had just cashed my first paycheck and was walking on air. I felt generous, so when a deformed man covered in blankets asked me if I could spare "some currency", I handed him a ten dollar bill and wished him good luck.
As I was waiting for the bus, the man came running at me, screaming for help. It was late at night on a weekday, and I was on Broadway, Seattle's home to freaks, so no one but me noticed him. He told me someone was after him, and I asked him who. He seemed genuinely scared, so I tried to be calm and I offered to call the police for him, but he told me no, he needed a place to hide.
That's when I saw two men covered in what looked like, honestly, bondage gear, walk out of the Red Light. I thought that was odd, because the Red Light closed at about six. They pointed at the man and he began screaming. Now, I was very confused and very scared at this point. I also was used to living in a big city, so I took out my pocket knife. I lived in the Central District, which is not a nice part of city, so I always walked with protection. I told the two to stay away, but they walked straight for us. When they were just out of arm's reach, they hit a button on their chests and I was suddenly no longer on the streets of Seattle, but in a strange white room. The men in bondage gear were gone, and the deformed man was screaming.
That is how I came to be "contaminated" by a Yoorach pirate on the run from Hij'kule police. The Hij'kule identified me as a "cohort" of the Yoorach, whose name was never revealed to me. That's where my space story begins.
Now, you already know what happens there. How many years in space I spent, I'll never know. In imperative time it's hard to tell because we did so much time jumping in the Temporal War. Relative time, I'd say about four years. I ASSUME I'm 22, but can't be sure because we didn't exactly have Gregorian calendars on the Binx ships, and in war we hardly slept regularly. Made worse by the fact that the Binx consider four hours a good night's sleep, and their days are 18 hours long. It seriously screwed with my internal clock. And I had Lu'Pan attacks to worry about, I didn't keep a tally of days passing.
But once I got back, I was dropped off by a Lu'Pan unmanned craft in Volunteer Park, about three days before Thanksgiving 2006. It was the middle of the night, and I was in a loose-fitting gray jumpsuit that the Lu'Pan had given me while I was a prisoner.
I was homeless for about two weeks, but found some odd jobs in Pike's Place Market. The local fishmongers had me do dock work for undocumented pay, and I did calling for them, just like my dad in the Esfahani bazaar. Eventually I had saved up enough to get a fake birth certificate and California ID. I used these to get a Washington State ID, which I used at job applications. I assumed the social security number of boy who had died in infancy in 1985 in California, so it didn't look too suspicious in Washington.
One day, as I was sitting in a blanket I'd stolen off another homeless guy, a man passed me by and dropped his book. It was "Factotum", the American classic by Charles Bukowski. I started talking to him about it, and we hit it off. He asked me why I was homeless, and I just told him I'd come on hard times. I couldn't get a job because I had no place to live, and couldn't find a place to live because I didn't have a job. He said I could crash at his place until I got a gig. He's now my roommate, Roger.
I did find a job, and now I'm on the lease too. Me and Roger jam together, me on guitar and him on accordion, and we're considering saving up to record some of our songs.
I found a nice Iranian girl via Craigslist, and she lives really close. We're not dating officially yet, but I hope soon. Both Roger and the girl respect that I don't talk to them about my past (because they'd think I was crazy!) but I think it bugs her a little. It's a bridge we'll have to cross some day, but I'm just not ready to risk it yet.
You will never learn my real name, the name of my lady friend, my family's names any last names, or my place of work, because I do not want you seeking me out. My life is okay right now, it's going where I want it to go. It's hard to forget everything, but I'm trying. I came here to vent. To tell the story no one else can know, no one else can hear.
That's me. That's who I am.
