The Last Living Slut (38 page)

And I had been with a member of Papa Roach at the Download Festival. Tiger eyes blazing on a mischievous face, rippling muscles roaring on his chest, and unrelenting slices of ink tattooed all over his G.I. Joe arms. “All–American soldier you are,” I had muttered to him as my two vixen vampy girlfriends and I had pulled him into our hotel room at Download. There the Papa Roach soldier had fucked me and two of my friends all night, taking turns, blowing his load over and over again until I wondered whether he was on Viagra or just a natural scientific marvel. His tattooed arms were giant bulks as he held me down again and again, then Tasha, then Vanna until my friends and me got out of breath and exhausted, and told him to leave our room.

But none of these experiences gave me the feeling of liberation, recklessness, degeneracy, and depravity I’d thought rock ‘n’ roll embodied. At most, they were amusing diversions. I couldn’t let my heart get taken back to a place where it would be trampled on again, so I ignored Scott’s messages and tried to get on with my life.

Eventually, he pulled me back in—taking me out on proper dates, showing me off to his friends, and being considerate and romantic. Soon I found myself telling him I loved him—that I wanted to cook for him, buy him gifts, bring him women to have threesomes with, and give him all my love.

But once again I paid the price for breaking the rules of groupiedom. One night, two days before a show he was playing with L.A. Guns at the Whisky, he told me he’d be bringing another girl to the gig.

“You’re very pretty, but you can’t just have sex,” he said. “You get emotionally involved. You want to be special. But you’re not.”

I felt my heart just cave in.

“There’s so many guys out here tonight—go have fun with them,” he said.

“But I just want one guy,” I said, feeling the lump rising in my throat.

So while Scott played the Whisky, I walked up and down the Sunset Strip like a zombie. I must have looked destitute. When Taime Downe of Faster Pussycat saw me standing outside the Roxy, he took one look and gave me a massive hug. I just stood there, frozen, staring into space. I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to get here again.

That was the moment when I understood it all at last.

I was full of heart, full of beautiful love, full of the sunshine my mother and grandmother had fed me every morning, noon, and night in Iran. I wasn’t the simple, stagnant, sexless, meek, subservient accessory these rockers seemed to want as girlfriends. I had tried my best to be, but my mind had kept getting in the way. I had too much passion, sexuality, and wild spirit for them.

I was coming to terms with the fact that I was made up of two very strong, conflicting sides. One was the academic, whose home was the university library and whose passion was absorbing books on gender theory and postmodernism. The other was the nymphomaniac in love with rock ‘n’ roll, who only felt at home sidestage at a concert watching her favorite bands and lovers performing.

Living these two separate lives had exhausted me. It had split me in half.

But that moment of self-knowledge wasn’t enough to heal me. When I went back to England a few nights later, I began to get panic attacks. A weird feeling of fear would come over me, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. Then I started feeling disconnected from reality, as if my senses were underwater. This scared me even more, which only increased my panic attacks. And then came the horrific nightmares. I felt drained. I would sleep all day, and wake up with my left hand shaking. I felt like I was losing my sanity.

Around April of that year, my doctor finally checked me into a psychiatric ward. The psychiatrist there diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder. I was given Valium and antidepressants, and put in the ward for a month.

It was a hellish existence. Patients wandered the corridors in a zombie-like state. Some had Parkinson’s disease; others had post-traumatic symptoms like I did. We had to have the lights out by eleven p.m. and were awakened at seven a.m. Even so, I had no desire to leave, although I could have checked myself out whenever I wanted. I couldn’t understand why I was so ill—why the panic attacks and nightmares, so horrific they seemed sent from Satan, had engulfed my existence. I wondered if my shredded heart had made my brain give up on me. I had been so in love, and suffered one crushing letdown after another in the space of fourteen months at the hands of two men I had absolutely adored. I think I was experiencing a nervous breakdown. But the antidepressants eventually helped numb my heart to the pain of Dizzy and Scott.

I had once thought of the world of rock ‘n’ roll as a wondrous place, full of free love and free spirits. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t the sex that had led me to this place—it was the love. And in rock ‘n’ roll, love is a dirty, dirty word. Perhaps the backstage world was actually too conservative and limiting for my wild spirit. Rock ‘n’ roll had sold itself as a utopian playground, but as a groupie I wasn’t allowed to be as wild as I wanted to be. What was required of me was just a mere fraction of who I was. I wanted free love, creativity, an abundance of sex and poetry, broken taboos; I wanted to be taken places I’d never gone before. I wanted that thrill I’d felt climbing down into my grandmother’s cellar all those years ago.

This is why my encounter with the embodiment of rock ‘n’ roll, Nikki Sixx, for dinner, was the final nail in the coffin. The god of depraved sex and degenerate acts, the epitome of excess and free-spiritedness, the human whose quest for experience knew no boundaries turned out to be nothing more than a businessman, committed to marketing, gardening, and early nights. That night took the color out of that world for me. Having moments of fun here and there with rock stars had splattered me with fleeting orgasms but no continuity. They were nothing more than a series of little snapshots, like the fleeting images spliced together in the moving-picture box from my childhood in Tehran.

The week after my dinner with Nikki Sixx, I agreed to a date with another kind of man: a well-known politician who had been working tirelessly on environmental issues. Finally, here was someone honorable, intellectual, and compassionate I could sit down with for an intellectual conversation. It was about time I left the world of rock ‘n’ roll and went forward in life with a respectable man.

My mother was ecstatic when I told her about the date. “Finally!” she said, beaming. “He is educated, dignified, and a decent man. I am so glad you’re finally getting away from low-class, disrespectful men.”

Chapter 62

“Y
our place or mine?” was the first thing Mr. Politician asked me. We had met outside the Leeds train station, where he was picking me up for what I had assumed was a dinner date.

“Ermm.” I swallowed nervously. My hands were clammy. I still couldn’t quite believe I was going to spend time with such a huge personality, whom I’d seen only on the news. But I had imagined we’d be spending it at a public café, not his place or mine.

It was summer, yet he was wearing a heavy coat. In his mouth, a foul-smelling canoe-shaped pipe chimneyed away with pomp and ceremony, the plume of a man who defended the environment.

The politician and I had met briefly at a fund-raising party the previous year and swapped e-mails so I could send him some of the politically themed essays I was planning to deliver at American and European universities. It was only now, a year later, that we were finally meeting again to discuss politics.

The interior of this respected politician’s vintage Jaguar was a fairground of candy wrappers, empty soft drink bottles, and papers. As I tried to keep up with his political chatter, wondering if my university education was too flimsy for his rants about the prime minister and the lunacy of war, the foul fumes of the pipe he perpetually puffed on made me want to vomit.

We pulled into his driveway. Willowy and dusky, his house loomed like a shadow from the distant past. Persian carpets swooned the floors inside like seductresses, curvy and come-hither. Beautiful Arabic paintings and rugs roared from the walls and exotic lanterns hung from every face of the ceiling. Rich cushions with Middle Eastern motifs, curling in deep blushes and tawny yellows, writhed on the settee.

In the sooty black, he didn’t turn on any overhead lights—just a small lamp and candles. The flicker of the TV lit up the murky corners of the living room.

“Champagne?” he asked from the kitchen. “I kept it chilled for you.”

“I don’t drink, sorry.” I felt bad. So he came back to join me, and soon he was off on a rant about Tony Blair.

I was enthralled by his knowledge of the world: the Iraq War, Parliament, the well-known politicians he worked with, Islamic fundamentalists. He seemed to know it all. He was very charismatic, his savage alpha-male fighter’s spirit and rebel’s tongue crowned by a genius political brain. His monologues in support of the downtrodden were inspirational. But his love of the limelight and hero-worship gave him away as the frustrated wannabe rock star he was.

If he couldn’t be a genuine rock star, he seemed content to act like a Spinal Tap version of one. “When was the last time you were fucked?” he blurted, interrupting our talk about Hugo Chavez.

“Huh?” I was too shocked to answer.

“I fucked a nineteen-year-old Somalian girl on that couch last night. Just where you’re sitting.”

I glanced down, looking for stains.

“Met her on Facebook. It’s a great place for getting pussy, let me tell you.”

I nearly choked on my cranberry juice.

“I took her to quite a few sex parties. Have you ever been to one? There’s a beautiful sex club in Paris. No one knows me there.”

“Yes, I like sex, too,” I stammered. “It’s nice.”

I checked my choice of attire: Long skirt? Check. No revealing bosom? Check. Sensible shoes? Check. Nothing that revealed any skin. I hadn’t been this dumbstruck for a long time.

With a flick of the remote control, he hopped through the TV channels. The room was dark and cold. My drink was gone.

“Aha! There!” he stopped at the movie
Braveheart.
Mel Gibson’s Scottish accent hacked at the screen. He left the movie on, with the Scottish fighting the English in bloody battle, and moved on to me. Pulling up my skirt, he dove down between my legs to suddenly lap at my pussy with little bobs of the head like a terrier.

“I’m gonna pick a fight!” Mel Gibson snarled from the TV.

“Ooh. Ahhh,” I fake-moaned, trying hard not to laugh. I was frozen to the couch, wondering what the fuck was going on.

“Oh, yeah!” the politician snarled like Mel as he lapped ferociously at my pussy. I wanted to be kind to him—he was trying so hard to do a fantastic job—but he was nothing more than a barrel-shaped old man trying to be sexy.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said when he came up for air. And I agreed, because I was curious.

The staircase was lined with photo after photo of famous politicians; his bedroom was enveloped in darkness. He switched on a tiny lantern by the bed and we were off. I lay there and stared into the faces of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as he humped me, crushing me with his dead weight until I couldn’t breathe. After a few minutes, he stopped, wheezing and gasping for breath. He had come. Rolling over, he re-lit his clunky pipe, talked a bit about Bill Clinton, and thrust a book about the Amazon rainforest into my hand. And that was that.

A few days later, the politician called to say he was speaking at a rally and was having a tough day. He asked if he could see me afterward, but I had plans with my family.

“One day soon you’ll be at my side when I’m campaigning,” he said proudly. “Would you like that?”

“Yes, that would be very interesting.” I swooned with genuine excitement.

The next time I saw him, he took me to an actual restaurant. It was an Iranian place where a weepy Persian singer curdled out grievings about love and roses. I ordered
chelo kabab
and rice with
mast-o-moosir
(yogurt with shallots) and various other dips, pickles, and fresh herbs, because I wasn’t worried about having garlic breath. I really hoped this time we could talk about literature and politics, and not about how many young Somalian and Middle Eastern girls he was fucking every night.

Velvety compliments dribbled from his purring tongue. His almond-brown eyes narrowed in a catlike slant. “I want you to be my girlfriend,” he announced. And before I had a chance to respond, he continued: “And I want you to come on holiday with me to Portugal.”

It was a lovely gesture, and I was touched. I swallowed divine apple juice and blushed apple blossom. “Thank you,” I stammered, shyly. “That’s very sweet.”

But there were other things about the way he carried himself that made me queasy—like the way he tossed off stories of how he fucked a different young Somali or Middle Eastern girl every night. Then he told me he wanted to take me to sex parties. “I wanna watch you get fucked by ten guys,” he said, bringing his face close to mine. “Ten big black guys with huge cocks. Would you like that?”

He spoke as if he were giving me the gift of a lifetime. The kabab was oozing grease in my stomach. Be his girlfriend? Was part of the deal going to sex clubs so he could watch me get fucked by ten big black guys?

By the time we got back to his house, I felt uncomfortable. Here was a man worshipped by untold thousands of people who voted for him because of the respectful, ethical image he projected—but who spent his free time trawling the Internet for young Somali and Middle Eastern girls to fuck.

“I’m going to New York next week for a conference,” he said as we lay in bed. “I’d ask you to come with me, but I’m meeting an Iranian girl there. We’ve been having phone sex. She’s got big tits.”

“So why exactly do you want me to be your girlfriend?” I asked.

“Oh, I would want you to be free also. Free to fuck as many guys as you want. In fact, I insist on it.”

My stomach began to turn. Looking up at the Fidel Castro portrait was a comfort in comparison. Still, I followed him upstairs again.