The hyperventilating sweating fat mullah was devilishly portraying himself as the chosen on earth messenger of a god to pledge a special paradise nook with 72 voluptuous virgins only to those demagogues blindly following in his holy Jihad fatwa. He was orating his scolding sermon to a testosterone pumping and yet frightened herd of youth boys in a schoolyard on a scorching hot late spring day in northern Tehran. Whirling his green turban wrapped around his crimson Kippa Fez on his bald hot air hollow skull, he was also tossing in the air his Palestinian Keffiyeh around his thick camel neck and as he sipped his chilled Keffir yogurt drink to keep his throat clear. Deeply entranced in his kabuki style act, he portrayed himself arrived just out of occlusion and as a self-righteous shadow to a supernatural god. With melancholy, he was singing hymns, moaning, lamenting and reciting his FATWA in a most excruciating tongue-twisting Arabic vocal incomprehensible not only to Persians but also to the native Arabs.
In so doing, he was struggling to convince the 10-15-year-old mesmerized teens, that they needed NO parental permission to sacrifice their lives for the more sacred cause in the “army of god” serving as “mine sweepers” and in the holy Jihad out west. The 1980-88 “no-win” war of aggression imposed on Iran by the Iraqi “Sunni-Baathists” had only intensified with the instigation of the Angelo-Americans who felt their sphere of hegemonic colonial influence was rapidly shrinking post the new Islamic Republic regime in Iran. This yet another round of human tragedy against Iranians in history could only conjure up in mind the British crimes of biblical proportions amid WWI, when they led to annihilation of up to ten million-half the Iranian population-by wreaking famine, cholera and anthrax havoc. The ever-envious and vindictive Iraqi’s unilateral aggression against the historic Persian adversaries was the last in a long series of such bloody skirmishing rivalries spanned the prior millennium again, whereby civilians had on each instance, taking the heaviest tolls.
The Iraqi Sunni Arabs had again afflicted utter pillage and plunder on Iran as it has just become under the yoke of its new theocratic regime. Iraqis had killed, maimed, injured and disabled more than a million mostly civilian Iranians and the Kurds on both sides of the border; this alone included one hundred thousand civilians annihilated with biological and chemical weapons manufactured, licensed and exorbitantly sold by the Americans to Iraqis and to their local linchpins the Saudi Sheiks. The protracted atrocious war had also afflicted a regional economic catastrophe amounting to a loss of half a trillion dollars, equivalent to twenty years of gross domestic national product, in Iran alone. The war, however, inconclusively fizzled out later when Khomeini recognized the grassroots dissent and conceded to an inconclusive ceasefire by “drinking the jug of poison” and died less than a year after of old age and “natural cause” in 1989. Administering poison by an infidel onto a “pious puritan” in Shiite Islam conjures up in believers’ mind the memories of most its 12 Imams “martyred” by the Sunni Omayyad and Abbasid caliphs.
In retrospect, however, the deliberate downing of an Iran Air passenger airbus by the American Navy ship Vincennes at the time over the deep blue waters of the Persian Gulf killing all 297 passengers aboard was the decisive lethal “poison” delivered by the Americans to Khomeini and his ever-failed IRI. The astute Khomeini and his ever-extended cadre of crony mullahs and lackey Basijis had clearly signaled the masses could overnight topple their new theocratic regime and eradicate the revolution if IRI did not submit to capitulation to the oil thirsty western and American instigators again.
Mullah Jafar Jenni Mousavi (aka JiJi) scolded the frightened kids to board up promptly the trucks out the school gate, and to head to warfront westbound. Self-righteous as he was, the sayed descendant of Prophet Mohammad through his daughter Fatima and pedigreed back to holy Moses and Abraham, JiJi portrayed the Iranian western frontiers as a surreal place where a paradise of concubines bathed in streams of milk and honey and had just miraculously appeared on earth. However, the youth “volunteer” conscripts would soon wake up to realize they must sacrifice their lives as mine sweepers or as decoy shields, defending what in the word of JiJi amounted “to defend our righteous Shiites Islam as far more sacred than protecting your mothers’ and sisters’ honors.”
JiJi provoked the young men’s wrath for revenge by invoking the most heinous crimes against humanity; he shook them up as to how the savage fucking Iraqi “elite” republican guards had occupied and wreaked havoc against Iran’s city of Khorramshar four years earlier. Iraqis relied on Mohmmad’s Ghazavat (holy wars of conversions) when he had declared Islam as the last monotheistic religion. He had invoked savagery against and inflicted the holy jihad wars on idol-worshipping Kafaroun/infidels and the “Judaic” deviants. The bastard Iraqi soldiers atop their Russian tanks had literally gang raped, tortured, tormented, dishonored, dismembered and killed thousands of Iranian women civilians some three generations from the same family. They then threw them quasi-alive into mass graves before they practiced grenade and bazooka launchers at these most horrified women and children; they bulldozed rocks and boulder mounds over them. Such heinous tragedy especially afflicted against defenseless children and women still conjures up with most equally painful memories of the gas chambers crematoriums at Auschwitz or Dachau, Genocide of the Armenians in Turkey, or the killing fields of the innocents in Rwanda, Vietnam or Cambodia.
JiJi the Basiji was now a pious “construction Jihadist.” Before the revolution, he was a drunken gangster in the nearby Tajrish Bazaar collecting protection money from merchants, pimps and sigheh prostitutes. However, he had become a spiritual orator of vices and virtues overnight and for war propaganda purposes. He was ecstatic as he indoctrinated the several hundred middle school mesmerized students as they sat stunt sobbing on the asphalt grounds.
Reza aka Omid the “RAY ROCK” was a first ranked primary school student before the 1979 revolution. However, he had turned into a mediocre revolt lewd lad post revolution. As he stood up in the school courtyard to board the first cranked up idling truck in line, most others blindly followed him as if they were the herd following the horned alpha male goat pastor toward the greener and sweeter pastoral promised paradise and luscious prairies. Glaring at and smirking back one last round on a dozen classmates still refusing to come along, he nodded his head sternly pledging he would remember and avenge them in due course.
The triumphant JiJi sat in the Toyota Pathfinder to lead the truck processions to the western war frontiers several hundred miles away. He recited the Quran with a hazanout melody through the PA system mounted on his Ashoura black-clad covered Pathfinder SUV. However as the pitched dark dusk masked all other colors and light, Jiji cunningly got out pretending to do ablution and night prayers. A bit after the truck caravan disappeared on the dusty road, he simply turned around at his piss stop and vanished to return to the palace and the concubines he had confiscated from a “taghouti” royal family he had killed a month after the revolution. The trucks continued and Omid moved himself up front to be the “chosen” deputy to the only main Basiji commander left in the herd.
Omid the second to last sibling of six from a modest family was actually nine when the 1979 revolution had erupted. In retrospect, the regime change was in part, instigated by the Americans to create an “Islamic green belt” against the “atheist” Soviet Union. Omid’s soon to be married first sibling Cyrus with a college degree was gullibly breaking into the nearby notorious Evin Prison where hundreds of political intellectual prisoners of conscience, tortured and tormented but luckily not killed yet, were rotting away into oblivion. On the same day, Omid, soon to adopt the cool alias ROCK, had his first poke at a Winston weed latent cigarette butt in the Hotel Evin Parking lot where the American military attaché, fifty thousand in Iran at the time, had hastily vacated in order to return to the U.S. That opened up whatever other vices Omid could engage in adventurously.
At the same time, Cyrus and his gullible puritan lads were breaking into the Evin Prison (ironically referred to as the other Hotel Evin by the natives) to liberate the hundreds of political prisoners of conscience. Caught between the remerging schism of the now politicized Shiite ideology and the old and new flamboyant upper class lads lurking all around him, the ostentatious Omid the Rock fast mastered the uncanny art of mingling with them all to benefit from and stroke his ego. At home though, he had increasingly become a dangerous self-entitled pest resorting to harsh mental and physical abuse against his siblings and manipulation of the rest, but above all beating and abusing his parents. He would demand from his hard-pressed parents’ weekly allowances equivalent to a month’s family income so he could keep up with the spending style of the most affluent and mischievous teen friends with whom he spent most his time with. One family member who took the frequently excessive beating by Omid was the frail Navid who was three years younger. Cyrus and his soon to be married companion Faranak had taken Navid at six to the emergency room at Azad Hospital where Faranak’s cousin the chief pediatrician rescued him from an otherwise dysentery and utter dehydration.
Meanwhile, after squeezing the last penny out of his poor parents and siblings, he would go after anyone else, neighbors, shopkeepers or relatives for extortions or protection charge. He had even had set up an “I owe you bookie scheme” for his close-knit friends and out of his father’s small grocery store cash box, giving them merchandise and collecting cash later.
Omid dozed off in the back seat of the first truck in the caravan heading to the war-razed western frontiers. He would wake now and then due to shocks caused by huge potholes presumably created by bombs. Meanwhile, his parents stared out the front door until midnight, not knowing who to call or where to turn to for Omid. They were worried sick of his not entering their two-storied modest house along the northern parkway. Parents’ insomnia turned into nocturnal anxiety of walking hopelessly up and down the alley to the nearby parkway. At dawn when his father hastened to Omid’s vocational school on the upscale Pahlavi Avenue.
As Omid’s father had as a clerk just retired, he passed the gate-guard and walked right up to Principal Kashani’s office on the third floor and above two full floors of vocational workshops. As he entered and said Salaam Agha Kashani, he could not help but sense that something had gone horribly awry. After a brief pause that felt like a year, Mr. Kashani chinned up whispering: I am sorry I was incapable of preventing him when he volunteered for the warfront, reckoning for martyrdom and ascend to heaven to receive his rewards “the 72 virgins.” What was more baffling was he said how Omid became the gang leader of the herd and dragged and loaded hundreds of them onto trucks before they headed west.
The outraged father raised his voice while Mr. Kashani begged him for his silence, whispering again, “A make shift Basiji revolutionary man has occupied the board room next door to oust him. The principal Kashani further mumbled that this Basiji and his extended family of 30 confiscated my residence yesterday; we are back to live with my ailing parents in their one bedroom apartment in the ghetto south over the railroad track. As if the two old-timer colleagues and lifelong friends had not already endured enough agony, their melancholic silence was abruptly shattered when the door slammed wide open. Storming in, the monstrous beastly bearded and primitive hominid rushed in and threatened them shouting with a peculiar Persian accent later traced back to his having been expelled as Iraqi Shiite by the criminal tyrant Saddam Hossein as the fifth column linchpin in the early 1970’s.
“What the fuck you mother fuckers are whispering about? To overthrow us you blasphemists? We must annihilate you ASAP as you must be the clandestine lackey loyalists of the deposed despotic Taghout regime.” He in essence was denigrating the royal Pahlavi dynasty dethroned and expelled a few years earlier. And as the Basiji Jihadi kingpin kept raising his high vulgar voice, the upper floor room filled with morning sunshine to went pitch dark; their souls drained off their pitched white dead faces in intense horror, the principal and Omid’s father were literally frozen in time and place.
Awoken by the percolating stream irrigating the century old sycamore trees, Mr. Shirzai and Omid’s father impoverished and pious father found themselves hopelessly walking on the pedestrian path of Pahlavi Avenue. It is an old saying, “Revolution would fast devour and strip its own children.” Déjà vu all over again, the case was being unraveled as the two pious were among the staunch majority Shiite populace who dreamt of a secular socio-religious and econo-political reformations. However, the thugs, hooligans and hoodlums literally hijacked the whole country the last minute when they secured the FATWA for establishing an exclusionary rule of Velayate Faghih (the Guardian Rule on the premise that masses are not sane) by the grand ayatollahs Khomeini and his protégé Khamenei. These self-anointed and self-righteous caliphs of a god on earth, in essence took it upon themselves to establish the kingdom of god on earth and for the return of their 12th Imam Mehdi to arrive from occlusion to rein over the throne.
As to Omid’s poor family, they knocked on every door and called on anyone that they humanly could. Their hope was to at least hear about Omid’s whereabouts and learn if he was still alive. They were desperately struggling to bring Omid home by appealing to the grand Ayatollah or to plea with him to simply escape and go into hiding from the army. .
Omid was shell shocked when he passed through the mass killing fields of at least 100,000 annihilated by Iraqi chemical bombs acquired from the Americans. He held an RPG propeller over his shoulder riding on the back of a super-fast cross-country motorcyclist night after night. He aimed it at and decimated dozens of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles and hundreds of Iraqi Republican Guard bastards. He even heard of forcing heavy doses of opium and heroin onto other teen-age youth so they would have sex with Basiji leaders and so they would zombie walk in minefields to clear a safe path for military division to pass through and sacrifice their lives. Omid could not sleep for a few minutes at the time for weeks at a time as he even heard of a number of his female classmates (ab-) used as sexual objects for the pleasure of the senior revolutionary guards in the camp.
At odd hours when the dusk stretched from the east to mask the sunlight, Omid could not help but glare at a distant image of a green-turbaned most charismatic makeshift 12th Imam riding against the sunset on a tall slender white horse in the distance. He was not however certain whether this was the Imam promised for over 1000 years to return, or if he was a paid imposter by the war propaganda machinery to boost up the warriors. He had even heard of an airborne division still around from the former royal army who had captured one of these Imams aboard a helicopter. They had asked him who he was. When he answered, “Imam Mehdi,” they had pushed him off the chopper and told him then you could save your life as you fly away. Well, he died on impact to the ground.
It was close to impossible in those years to make direct phone calls between Iran and the U.S. A dual operator assisted an expensive phone connection sporadically. The two operators eavesdropped to snitch on the violators and cut off the line. The desperate father waiting in the central telephone and telegraph office in central Tehran for weeks finally got through to Cyrus, his eldest son in the US, and begged in his own family style tongue for Cyrus to resort to anything possible from outside the country to relieve certain “maladies.” Frightened by the imminent possibility of losing his brother as a martyr, Cyrus felt as if his own soul was hovering and looking down at him from above unless he did the right deed. He reviewed every plausible scenario to reach out to Omid in desperate hope of getting him out of the killing fields before it was too little, too late.
As Cyrus weighed the pros and cons of his action plans, their friends Soraya and her spouse the NASA Scientist Shahram Shemrani intervened to give advice. Shahram’s father had just been promoted from the rank of major to colonel at the Iranian air force when he had, with his American Phantom bomber obliterated an entire Iraqi army infantry division about to take over the City of Sanandaj in Iran. Shahram’s brother was also a Basiji leader at the war front. Cyrus explained the impasse and Shahram was eventually able to speak with his father via a secure phone two weeks later. His father then arranged for Omid to call back Cyrus in the US later from the Colonel’s CB connected to a special landline at the war front. To his shocking but pleasant surprise, Cyrus heard his brother Omid crying like an infant fearful for his life and yearning to go home. This would have been all but impossible as all who joined voluntarily, knew damn well it was a one way path to fast martyrdom with no purgatory but direct ascension to “paradise and the 72 virgin” men or women or Aphrodite as a martyr may choose or desires (just to find out the 72 were ordinary raisins).
Meanwhile, Omid had witnessed teens running randomly over the minefields like a flock of innocent Persian lambs to detonate mines. The object here was to create safe passage for the army battalions. Some female looking and feeling boys stayed behind in the camp for sexual pleasures of the commandos so they could more effectively focus on the chores of advancing the kingdom of a god.
A month later, Cyrus received another unexpected phone call from his father with poor intermittent reception: “Omid has just mysteriously and out of the blue resurfaced at home, sleeping, eating, and of course abusing and cursing them again 24-7!” So Omid was back again to his routine mischiefs. A few months thereafter, Shahram called Cyrus crying his heart out to tell him that his father the Phantom falcon pilot shot down and killed by the Iraqi surface to air batteries directed by the American AVACS surveillance in the area. He further said as his brother was under stress and duress of his father’s loss and was about to flee the war frontline and dodge into hiding, one of his senior commandos shot and killed him by a barrage of AK-47 bullets on the back of his skull which gouged out both his eyes.
Omid was not entirely out of the woods. He remained fully alert, as he had to guard all around him day and night for fear of being eliminated or as an army deserter. It was enough for one of his classmates who stayed behind at the warfront until 1988 when the fighting ceased indecisively, to report he had gone home let alone that he had given up on his loyalty to the IRI regime. Over time, he had as most Iranians learned how to play the dubious hypocritical game of speaking from both sides of his mouth. For instance, he kept his updated Basiji ID and later revolutionary cards close to his chest to advance his ulterior motives, which like everyone else he called life survival tools. He had even fabricated a 40% handicap status on his ID due to war on his cards to receive additional veteran’s privileges.
What a true contrast Omid’s self-indulgent life was, compared to Cyrus’ harsh earlier life. In fact, Omid’s attitude of self-entitlement toward his parents and society had become routine among teens after the 1979 revolution. Cyrus struggled to forgive it but could not forget his own excruciating past. He still remembered vividly his toddlerhood carrying two and four bricks at a time on a shaky plank from dawn to dusk to hand them over to a mason so he would build their first three-room house. He remembered how at age six weighing 21 Kg, he picked cherries from tall trees from dawn to dusk. He would rope down the five-gallon tin pail filled with cherries to Ms. Heybati, their neighbor next door for a five Rials (equivalent to dime a day); he had to endure heat, bee stings and skin irritations all day. Cyrus yearned to descend the tree if for only a short moment to join the four Heybati children around his age enjoying fancy foods and having fun; however, he would not dare as such an act was off limits to him.
How about after school when Cyrus had to make penny when he filled and carried a heavy water-can he filled from a murky pond a few yards away and twice his own weight. As he dragged each bench and desk for four students diagonally, he sprinkled water to tame the huge tuberculous dust. His father swept clean the floors before Cyrus again put the benches and desks back in straight order for the next morning. They then had to walk home for an hour after dusk saving a few Rials (a few pennies) of bus fare. Where was Omid, born fourteen years after Cyrus, to be the equal partner in such harsh lifestyle so to earn his right place in the family hierarchy?
Over time, Omid felt he had become sophisticated enough to get away with murder, literally. He took his immediate abuse of his family members and expanded it to his relatives, neighbors, work place, high school, etc. His classmates cheered him each time he picked on or even beat up a vulnerable teacher. Although he was no longer the model student he had been in primary school, nonetheless, he extorted and threatened the teachers and principal alike and demanded passing grades so he was not held back. As usual, he demanded weekly allowances far beyond what his parents could afford, while treating himself to money from the cash box of the grocery store his parents had next to the house. Alas, he finally had his vocational diploma with a major in electronics and a GPA of 10.66 out of a scale of 20.00!
Since at 18 every young Iranian adult is draft eligible, Omid had to register as a conscript, otherwise, he would again become a draft dodger and thus persona non-grata for life. The new government was developing a new army to phase out the former imperial army and thus gave the far more preferred and lucrative options to those “selects” who served in the Revolutionary Guard & Basiji Corp. For serving on this super elite military path, a conscript had a special daily bus service to go home after having a free lunch and pretend prayer session. The soon outgone option called for the conscript to undergo six months of harshly strict military training a 1000 miles away from home and in deprived rural regions and to complete the balance of his 18 months at the outskirts too. Your guess is as good as Omid’s and mine too, who took the first privileged option while bolstering his networks and influences to his own advantage. Since day one and with only a few weeks of military training as if he was already a senior officer, he in essence served as the secretary for a black sayed turbaned clergy in charge of the religio-political division of the Revolutionary Guard Corp.
A major part of the job the Mullah loved the most, was to have Omid scope out the most voluptuously beautiful widows whose husbands had become martyrs in the war. The Mullah then courted them one or a few at the time into the concealed sex-orgy chamber in the back of his office where upon groping-raping-fucking-roughing them up, he would grant them a bit more generous monthly alimony allowance and other perks. And he would selectively keep in touch with his select sex slaves, with a few he enjoyed the most. His harem over time encompassed over a few hundred sex objects, unrivalled by the best harems of the Ottoman Caliphs.
Omid once led Moshe his brother-in-law and his elder brother Akbar to Cyrus’s ailing and aging and thus vulnerable parents in-laws, where they demanded “interest free loans and with no collateral.” Moshe’s brother once the manager of a local government bank branch was a bankrupt fugitive who had lived well above his meager means by extorting bank customers and borrowing and not paying back. Akbar had gone back and forth to jail all his life. The three, without Cyrus’s knowledge let alone preapproval, were once again triangulating the two elderlies and about to commit the same fraudulent mischief. The in-laws out of respect for their son-in-law Cyrus abroad and for the fear of reprisal from Omid and the other two caved in and handed over the huge cash and with no expectations for return. And realizing how easy grabbing money was, Omid and his cousin Eli who had just returned from day laborer jobs in Japan for years, approached the two aging in-laws again claiming to be “professional” house painters. The fact that none of the two had ever painted a room or a piece of furniture did not deter them from acting as imposters. In doing so, they created a job lasting for months and with generous wages at the time.
Meanwhile, the elderly mother constantly fed the two “painters” three major meals a day, snacks, hot tea, sweets and fruits in one of the four vacant floors of their residence for many months. Decades later when Omid by the direct and indirect vouching of his American citizen brother Cyrus came to the US becoming a “high end” painter, he still lamented that the two elderlies ripped him off when he did the same painting as he now delivered in the US and only got paid for a fraction of his labor’s real worth?! Shame to some has no bounds irrespective of where they reside or how old they are….it’s as if a just self-promoted army general retroactively demand a general scale pay even if he joined the army 30 years ago?! Ludicrously absurd it honestly was…even by a megalomaniac narcissist! Omid would not even let go of his own aunt Azar off his hook until he mated with her in the face of his step uncle!
After fifteen years of studying, raising children and securing a professorship in the U.S., Cyrus and his family returned to Iran in the mid-90s via a UNDP invitation as a higher education consultant. They were surreally welcomed at Mehrabad Airport by nearly a hundred family members, parents, siblings and relatives. Shocked however, was not to see his two younger brothers Omid and Navid amid the first few days. Cyrus’s parents simply said, “They were traveling at the outskirts and should soon return home.” When the two youngest siblings eventually resurfaced, they exposed their body backs with huge infected wounds. They had each been whipped 70 lashes by the local Basiji force in the village of Valyan in Karaj when the Morality police had arrested them in an “immoral birthday co-ed party.” Cyrus, gravely outraged for this excessively harsh penalty when asked by the two, pledged he would resort to all means necessary to bring them out to the U.S.
Upon returning to the U.S., Cyrus worked on a long-term strategy to apply for and secure a senior Fulbright Fellowship in Denmark. His main intent was to exploit the prestigious “networking” opportunity to bring out the two siblings and afford them settle in the US. In the meantime, he also utilized a personal relationship with a second doctorate environmental law adult student, Khajeh Ahmad one of the senior environmental law advisors to the President of India. Cyrus’ aim was to first get Omid out to India so he could study English while his elder brother worked on ways to secure him the US entry visa.
Navid was becoming more piously religious, at times more catholic than the Pope he was per se, and so he resisted moving to the west. Osmani the Indian Counsul-General in Tehran called Omid one day unexpected to tell him to bring in his passport so he could get his visa for India! This was next to impossible at that time for most Iranians requesting exit visas. Omid moved to Hyderabad where a room in a local government bureaucrat’s home was leased for him. He hung out with the property owner’s sons0his own age-while studying at the nearby English institute. For the following year, he pushed aside mastering English and as he regularly slept with every young Indian teacher he could get his hands on, and bragged all about it to everyone across the high seas and low lands.
After Cyrus as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar and his family moved to Denmark for a year in the 90’s, he fast established direct liaison with the Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen, and the U.S. Ambassador Edward Elson and the Consul Generals Mike Kirby and George Aldridge. It took another year to move Omid from south India to the Netherlands, Germany, and finally Denmark. After getting Omid’s U.S. F-1 student visa – an all-out impossible and daunting task at the time – Omid arrived at New York’s JFK Airport in the summer of 1994. His two- decade long dream took over five years of painstaking maneuvers by Cyrus to bring it to fruition. Beyond that, Cyrus’s long-term dream of reuniting with his brother to strengthen their fellowship, fast became a nightmare of biblical proportion and as it took one last giant regressive step for the worse forever.
Alas with Omid moving into their home, hell once broke loose. As aptly stated by the sage, “You fool me once, shame on you. You fool me twice, shame on me.” When Cyrus had reunited with the family back in Tehran after fifteen years, Omid had already created himself to be the monster in the minds of the family there. Before Cyrus had offered to help him out of his misery, Omid had pledged to become the great person he truly once was earlier in life and to change himself from being from the nasty megalomaniac he had become back to an innocent sweet young boy he once was. After just a week in the U.S. living with Cyrus and his family, however, the gullible Cyrus grudgingly confessed at least to himself, what a grave mistake he must have made when he spent years to bring in this grey wolf in the skin of a Persian lamb out of Iran and into his own family. In nearly a year of living with them, Omid turned into Reza Ray Rock alias RRR. Despite his earlier pledge of remaining out of Cyrus’s family private daily lives, he literally meddled into and ridiculed every aspect of Cyrus and his family’s lives. Ray despised to work, as he wanted to sleep until noon, have his foods served to him three times, go party in the evening, and have his clothes ironed out too. Ray fast encroached on and placed himself as the superior between Cyrus’ and their friends. In so doing he not only sabotage the long-standing friendship between Cyrus’ and their friends, but that over time, he picked on them as well to the point of utter self-isolation.
Since day two of his arrival and through Cyrus’ network, Ray began to work in a gas station/convenient store owned by Cyrus friend Mamali, in the afternoons 3-11. Soon he moved on to be a handyman/lawnmower person on the block; two months later, he started in the university where Cyrus worked as a professor for a year and as a paid lab tech with free tuition through his brother’s influence. Never mind a minuscule appreciation or reciprocity by Ray, as no one expected it. Instead, nothing could stop Ray’s toxic mouth from spewing poison in his own life as well as to Cyrus’s family and their friends. Such an awkward ordeal for all especially Cyrus’s family was created/fabricated by Ray and his bombastic, confrontational and acrimonious self-entitled attitude that many months later and only after he physically altercated with them, Cyrus had to demand that Ray move out and live on his own at 26 elsewhere. And the shaky relationship between Ray, and Cyrus and his family was all but ended astringently forever….
Although they tried and failed to maintain a minimal level of a humane relationship (never mind at the brotherhood level), Ray’s bogus claims never ended but lurked in the background. Ray having lived in the US now for 25 years has become more inhospitable toward Cyrus and his family than any other person one could ever surmise. Cyrus or his children invited to Cyrus and his family to their weddings. He saw his two nephews in NYC Grand Central Station and told them if they gave up on their parents permanently that he might reestablish a “normal” relationship with them. Despite all these ordeals, Cyrus petitioned and continued his support for Ray’s green card and later citizenship when contacted by ICE the Immigrations Division. He did so despite Ray lies on his multiple applications, his continued threatening gangster attitude against Cyrus or for having served and disguised his service as both Basiji and revolutionary guards in his prior life, lingered on to all losses borne by those around him. Ray’s prior illegal acts later denied Cyrus some of the best executive positions in federal government with twice the salaries and benefits, which Cyrus never earned despite his selection as finalists. Ray simply knew no bounds, no shame, no self-reflection, confession and no remorse. Wreaking havoc on others while playing the fallacious victim card was his mischievous Modus Operandi in life. To him, he always had to come first despite his ever-shifting tactics. It was as if when playing soccer with him, that Ray as a goalie would in a lightning shift both goal post to his own advantage to avoid a goal against him. Irrespective, being smart is a virtue, but act as the smartass is a vice.
The good ole self-entitled egotistical Ray has since become so vindictively bitter that on occasion he has later admitted to Cyrus of having desperately searched to get a gun to “kill Cyrus and his family.” On several occasions, Cyrus and Ray struggled to mend fences and miraculously reconcile. And although in each instance, they both seemed to start off on the right leg, pretty soon their conversation went astringently south in that only defamation, slander, threat and intimidations were the outcome Ray spewed. And here is the unfortunate case of the two so-called siblings who each left their country of birth for better, securer and more prosperous opportunities for their families. And paradoxically, family feud, terror, fear, insecurity, apprehensiveness, anxiety, and uncertainty followed Cyrus and his family into their adopted beloved land…. Whilst Cyrus wishes all the best for anyone, friend, or foe including Ray, he should not wish such sibling ordeal endured by anyone. The moral of the story is, “when turned into a freaking Basiji punk OG, one would always remain a freaking Basiji punk OG in any hood, block, or a country….”
