MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Porochista
Khakpour
I have moved 19
times in the last 14 years of adulthood alone. Before that I couldn’t
tell you
how many times my family moved from country to country and city to
city. But I
imagine, all in all, I have moved as many times as my years on this
earth.
I am clearly the
wrong person to ask about “home.”
I remember some
homes more than others. I don’t know how I remember my first home, but
I do. A
big condo on Gandhi Street in Tehran that I recall only for its window
behind
my crib, revealing men on rooftops crying Allah
Akhbar, a very sudden anomaly, my parents later told me, a product
of the
Revolution. I was not yet three.
I remember the
first American home: the apartment complex that sadly came with a name,
“Tropical
Gardens,” where I grew up, a home that was supposed to be temporary but
that my
parents still live in. I remember sharing a room with my brother, five
years
younger than me, until I was 17. (Then we moved across the complex to a
new
apartment with an extra bedroom). I remember feeling simultaneously
irked and
comforted by the sound of his kiddie snores. I remember listening to
late night
radio under the covers, my only solace for persistent adolescent
insomnia.
I remember the
home abroad: 69 Vicarage Road in OX1, UK. I remember my room with its
fake
fireplace and a certain tattered nightgown I always wore and smoking
Benson
& Hedges and listening to the Muddy Waters and endless Sainsbury
beans-on-toast meals and constant self-loathing. I remember my anxiety
about
taking my first bath in that showerless bathroom that we six American
had to
share—how to wash all my all-my-hair?—and surviving.
I remember that
apartment in Baltimore, which I shared with my sick elderly greyhound,
where I
wrote my novel. I remember all our long walks through august Roland
Park and
how I became a glutton for solitude there, never feeling alone except
for that
one Christmas dinner of instant rice with canned tomatoes—a loneliness
tempered
by some relief, as it was in the aftermath of quitting the awful
hostessing gig
at the French bistro, the final shit job
I remember the
Chicago apartment in the Ukrainian Village that I moved to next, the
one where
all the junkies had died in before I got there, where my dog began to
disintegrate
slowly. I remember too-well the crazy old Polish landlady who claimed
she put a
curse on me, and the prostitute and the ex-con who became my only
friends, who
taught me how to run. In my spare time, I hair-modeled and blogged
under a fake
identity, finally flunking out of the last of my last fake selves.
And the final
Brooklyn apartment, farther out that any of our friends would go, the
only
place we could afford, me and the ex-monk boyfriend. And the mouse infestation and all
weeks of having $10 between the two of us
for dinner and the month-long fever that didn’t kill me and my yelling
matches
with the landlord. And the two ugly ancient chandeliers that I adored
and my
dream writing room that I had to give up.
Right now I am
writing from another home, one in Central Pennsylvania, in a tiny
village of
4000 with Rockwellian three-globe-lamppost-lined streets. It’s a
temporary one
again, one where I teach more than I live. I am about to need a new
home.
Where, I don’t know. I go where jobs, or their absence, takes me.
I have been in
exile in my exile, to put it mildly. Exile in my exile in my exile in
my exile.
. .
Here is where
things might get predictable, considering what I do, which has never
been in
question, it being what I wanted to be when I grew up since I was 4
(the
beginning of homelessness, come to think of it!) . . . so, today I ran
to my
friend’s house, the one other fiction writer I know well in town, and
I, long
story short, ended up in tears. It’s not important why. But I told him
at some
point, “Thank goodness I have my second novel. It’s a place I can go
when life
is like this. I have another universe.” And he nodded and added, “A
home.” And
I thought, yes, as odd—even to me—as my second novel is, it is in some
ways the
only real home I have right now, just as my first novel was home to me
for
years. Maybe I have only had two homes after all.
I am an
Iranian-American—read: there was never a bubble to fill in, Caucasian
and Asian
and Other all equally in and out. Lately I have taken to that hyphenate
tag,
sometimes on forms even putting “born in Iran, US citizen.” Then I
could also
add “raised in Los Angeles” (or if talking to an Angeleno, really pin
it down:
Pasadena; or to a Pasadenan: South Pasadena). Formative years in New
York? Raised
in LA, grew up in NY? Now lives in PA? Will some day be somewhere, for
a while,
presumably, when those invisible silhouettes I call my new family get
filled
in? Will one day be earth, dirt, and, who knows, if anything, energy?
For now,
there is just the home I built for myself, the home I invite others
into that I
will never know. This—literally this—is
the only place that I have to live, thank heavens.
Porochista
Khakpour is an Iranian
American novelist and author of Sons and Other Flammable
Objects
(Grove/Atlantic 2007). Born in Tehran, Iran, Khakpour was raised in
South
Pasadena, California, later attending Sarah Lawrence College in New
York for
her BA. She received her MA from Johns Hopkins University. Her writing
has
appeared in The Daily Beast, The New York
Times, The Chicago Reader, The
Village Voice, Paper, Nylon, Flaunt, URB, Bidoun and
nerve.com. Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a
New York Times Editor's Choice and was included on the Chicago
Tribune's 2007 Fall's Best list. It won the 77th
annual
California Book Award prize in First Fiction and was longlisted for the
2008
Dylan Thomas Prize. Khakpour currently lives in New York City.