I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV Read Online Free PDF

spoil my sister and me with gifts and sweets. My father made lots of money owning an electric company, so he had built a compound with two houses—one for us and one for my grandmother. Not an Osama bin Laden–like compound where we were hiding in plain sight by wearing white cowboy hats, but more of a benevolent compound. Do those exist? Why is it always bad guys who have compounds? We had a pool and a big grassy area where my cousins and I would play. I never really understood how my father came to own the electric company. I always thought I was the only one who never knew what his dad did until later in life I asked other people what their dads did. It’s amazing how many people really don’t know. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of the generation I grew up in or if it’s an immigrant thing, but somehow dads didn’t do a good job of giving their kids the full story.
    â€œDad, what do you do?”
    â€œMake money.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œVork.”
    â€œWhat kind of work?”
    â€œVork that makes money. Eh-stop asking qvestions and eat deh food I paid for.”
    I was able to piece together stories to discover that my father had come from Tabriz, a city in the north of Iran, and moved to Tehran as a young man. He was employed at an electric company and slowly worked his way up until he was the boss. When the shah nationalized electricity in the 1950s and 1960s, his regime contracted out the work to a few companies, and one of those was my father’s. I say 1950s or 1960s because my dad was never good at giving me the timeline of when anything happened.
    â€œHey Dad, when was I born?”
    â€œSometime in deh seventies.”
    â€œEarly or late seventies?”
    â€œVhat am I, an accountant? You vere born. Be happy you’re here.”
    My dad’s company would get contracts to do the lighting for roads and buildings all over Iran. This helped him build considerable wealth and eventually become very powerful. When I describe my dad, I often reference Don Corleone from The Godfather . My dad was a rich, well-connected man; people would come to ask for favors and he would help them. As a kid I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that whenever I needed money I would ask and he would hand me twenty- or hundred-dollar bills. This was where his indifference toward numbers worked in my favor.
    â€œHey Dad, can I get some cash?”
    â€œHow much do you need?”
    â€œI don’t know. Five, ten, a hundred.”
    â€œI’m no accountant. Take vhat you need. Give me back deh rest.”
    I was too young to ask why this man always had so much cash around. Was he a drug dealer? A stripper? An electric company CEO? He sure as hell was no accountant—he made that clear.
    Escaping Revolution in First Class
    I left Iran at age six for New York City, where my dad was on business. He was staying at the Plaza Hotel in a suite when my mother, my sister Mariam, and I joined him. We thought we would only be there for two weeks during our winter break, enough time to let the protests in Iran settle, but things never cooled down. We even left my baby brother, Kashi, back home and had to get him out later as things got worse. We packed for two weeks. We stayed for thirty years.
    My first few months in America, my father would take business calls in the hotel room, forcing us to go shopping at FAO Schwarz or Macy’s. One of my earliest purchases was an orange and white Snoopy winter set—a hat, scarf, and gloves. (I’m not joking. We Iranian children were OBSESSED with orange soda. The color orange became my favorite color. Anything I found with orange in it was something I loved.) I would spend the days running around Manhattan in my orange regalia and the nights going to dinners with my family ordering strawberries and whipped cream for dessert. I didn’t know the details of the revolution taking place back in Iran, but it was