Tehrangeles Tour Aftermath Reflections!

It's been a week, a month, a year!

Apologies for being so terrible about updating here. On the one hand, this is all free, so what did we expect? On the other hand, after nearly 6 years on the site, perhaps it should not be free? I have a dream of updating three times a week again, with one day focusing on health/wellness insights, another day on book/literary reflections, and a third day for baking/food journeys? Would people pay for that? I could rally if I had that kind of structure.

Anyway, it’s been half a year since my 5th book Tehrangeles was born and it’s been quite a ride since. The book got much more love than I ever could have imagined, I even got on a prize list, even the cover was so beloved, etc. But I realized I had been writing notes about the tour, intended for this very audience, and I never posted. Possibly because book years are always way more consuming than you imagined. It just seems like the work is done and you show up places, read the same old passages, sign a few books, take a few photos, go back to your hotel, and fly away—REPEAT. But somehow it’s all much more taxing than that. Plus don’t forget to allot all the time you need for going completely crazy. The composition of a book feels like the most grounded, stable, solid affair compared to its entry into the cosmos of commerce. There is no writer whose psyche can go unscathed in those years.

And so in relaying all this, please know there is a lot I am leaving out. Not that it won’t be interesting—all that stuff is actually way more interesting—but part of me trying to atone for my many months of madness is refusing to indulge in any more of it. To think back to all that and spill all the details would be to re-experience some of that mayhem and I just can’t do that to myself right now. As I get older, I see the wisdom in those who share less. So please imagine at least nine or ten other paragraphs here and imagine them as juicy, insufferable, bonkers, and unrelatable as possible and there: you will have the full story of my year of no rest and no relaxation.

So here we go, a post I wrote the first week this book came out that I neglected to post (by neglected, I mean, I was so busy with this work plus my other jobs and their deadlines that I could not come up for air). Anyway:

Hello from the first week of my novel Tehrangeles’s existence! I am on a plane from SFO to JFK—I love writing in planes—and typing like that mad meme muppet because I got book tour nails and I am a bit out of practice with my fave, Apres Gel-X nail extensions (thank you Vanity Projects, a splurge but your fifth baby only comes once!) Hot pink french manicure square with blue flame design, if you must know. . .)

This has been one of the wildest weeks of my life, in mostly good ways but a few bad too.

The best part, let’s just get out of the way: the launch at McNally Jackson’s Seaport location was a blast! Tons of people came (standing room!) and we had a great cake from Mia’s Brooklyn Bakery (strawberry shortcake plus the edible image of the cat, with pink frosting trim). Layla Halabian was the most perfect conversation partner! Here are some photos:

In the days to come all sort of great press appeared: NPR’s All Thing Considered!* (Guess what Porochista, next week it became an NPR Book of the Day!)

It’s all a bit of a blur but I stuffed it all in my Instagram Highlights folders (there are FOUR*—actually, Porochista-editing-from-the-future here again: NINE—for Tehrangeles now!)

Then the bad stuff.

It began with my puppy Canelo not coming on the West Coast tour. Canelo was a huge hit on launch night and I had promised everyone I would take him to California. I had felt so prepared, buying Canelo a perfect backpack carrier after trying several he hated. This one, he liked. I realized at the last minute that he had another round of vaccines due the day before, so off we went to his vet and they gave him the leptospirosis vaccine. I had a doctor who was a borderline anti-vaxxer at one point (a real MD! Maybe this can explain things: his practice was in Santa Fe!) so I’ve heard it all, and I myself have been big on vaccines and booster since the early pandemic days. (I even got the Novavax one a couple months ago. I am updated!) This is all to say: I didn’t think to worry about my dog’s vaccine experience too much, especially as he’d done really well with the rabies one weeks before. Well, enter lepto vaxx! Canelo was in so much pain and so groggy, I panicked. I consulted with vet several times but they just said it was fine and it would pass in a couple days. A couple days?! We were due to fly in less than 24 hours and I was about to stuff the guy in a nice but, um, VERY cozy PetAmi backpack/carrier. Empath that I am, I started recalling all the times my body ached from Lyme pains and I tried to imagine going through that but in a backpack?! Yikes. The vet said it could be fine, but Canelo seemed off to me. I consulted with my lovely boyfriend Bing (UPDATE: NOW EX!) and he said he could dog-sit him with no problems as he’d been dealing with his hand injury and mostly stuck home anyway. So I left without Canelo, and that felt so heartbreaking. (I am in extreme dog lady mode these days, as I am still grieving my old poodle Cosmo, who died last Feb.)

Not to be all everything happens for a reason but, well, yeah, it ended up being an excellent decision to go Canelo-less as a 6 hour flying day turned into a 14 hour nightmare. I should explain something first: in Dec 2000 I had an emergency landing at JFK on the old TWA, going to LAX. Same flight route, just 24 years younger! It was a bird strike many years before good ol’ Captain Sully made that a household word. Because of that—plus witnessing 9/11 outside my bedroom window—I don’t really love to fly. Travel is great but flying? Um, nope. But I do it because I of course have to. But I always feel like every flight has some very likely chance of being my last (I actually just got chills typing this on a plane. Hey, God, please ignore me, you know how unwell I am!) Anyway, I got to the airport a bit late—my usual style—dashed to the few airport bookstores in the terminal to see if they had my book (they did not! UPDATE: I would find many at many stores in days to come!) and boarded the flight. I was seated next to a lady with a pretty giant cat in a Sherpa carrier that Canelo had flunked a few weeks ago when we were trying out carriers. We had a pleasant chat about it and my publicist sent a sweet message to reach out if I need anything, and we were off. Except we were not? So the plane accelerated as planes do on the runway and then tilted up and then came right now and slowed down as it someone had hit the eeriest brakes ever. The sound. Not a good one. The lady with the cat looked at me nervously. Everyone was quiet and acting like all was well, as people do on planes. The pilot suddenly announced “a light had gone on” and something about an “indicator” and that we needed to get back to the gate.

Long story long: the plane had experienced some kind of mechanical failure and needed repairs. This was not reassuring. I was seated close to the flight attendants, and we chatted, and I realized they were nervous. “Yeah, I don’t know, I’ve never experienced anything like this,” one of them said—and the guy had a white beard so he was not a newbie, I gathered. “Good thing we caught it or—?”the other flight attendant laughed in that way you laugh when you know shit is not funny. Luckily after an hour on the tarmac, they announced people could disembark and get on a shuttle right on the tarmac to the gate and get rebooked. About a dozen of us did this—I was the second one out, no thanks, scary plane!—and that was that. The pilot, an AirForce guy, told us as we filed out that he’d experienced on two aborted flights in his 30-year history as a pilot and that was one. Okay!

So that was not an auspicious start. Apparently the plane was at the gate for another 4-5 hours for repairs. I have no idea if most those people just stayed or what but we, the little group of intrepid survivor types, got rebooked pretty easily. (“Damn, that’s insane, I mean, even turbulence freaks me out and I get on planes for a living!” an agent told us. I love how no one bothered to be reassuring at all.) Meanwhile I put it all on social media, and everyone from boyfriend to mom to publicist was like WTF why do these things have a way of happening to you.

God loves to keep me on my toes, I thought.

I don’t know I fucking hate it, I thought.

I am cursed, I thought.

I am blessed, I also thought. I live to tell, after all?

So you’d think this is the end of the story and I probably got to LAX fine and the worst of it was being apart from my checked bag, right? Wrong, wrong. The story gets worse and I will condense just so we can move on. . . so. . . THERE WAS A GUY. This guy was the first one to disembark actually, so me and another guy on the shuttle started joking around with him. The other guy was a fairly well-known restauranteur who was not shy about namedropping himself and others in his world, but The Guy I want to talk about was something else altogether. Let’s just call him Jack—even though his name was something else obvs—but Jack was what many would affectionately call a “character.” A short muscular loud white guy who looked a decade younger than me (he was closer to my age than I thought actually) from Staten Island (not exactly but think of the two places most like that borough in New York and he was that). He told us both about how he lived in LA and worked in construction and was recently unemployed. He had a kind of fun happy spirit about him and so at first me and Jack were laughing a lot. I felt genuinely grateful that a fun nice dude was here to provide cheerful zany quips. It somehow made me feel like I was less likely to die, because in a movie about dying there would never be a guy like this. (Did I mention I am unwell??!)

Then I realized Jack was not just by me, but with me. He was basically tagging along with me to the point where, when we got rebooked, they seated us together assuming we were together. A flight attendant joked about that when we told her how and why we met. I was mortified but Jack loved this and began telling me how “hot” I was. I was very open with the fact that I had a boyfriend and that I was considerably older—somehow I hoped that would make him go away, as it sometimes does with men—but it was as if he didn’t hear it. He kept saying I reminded him of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny (a new one! but flattering even if a big stretch!) and I suddenly realized this was the kind of person who was gonna chat with me the entire flight. It didn’t matter that I took out a laptop and tried to focus at one point, or looked at my invisible watch and yawned audibly at another point, or simply lecture him about cops being bad after he told me how great he thought cops were because his whole family were all cops. . . nope! At some point, I just gave up and pretended this guy was a student I was to simply endure for the semester, the student who would be at my every office hours for no good reason but to challenge my patience apparently (I love my students almost always, but there is this one type of bro that I have never been able to crack who clings to me. They seem to disagree with everything I am about, all I teach, every ounce of my being, and yet! They are always at my side.). Jack had no interest in anything involving books and instead was obsessed with talking about his past heroin addiction and this Navy SEALS rehab he went to and all kinds of stories that all ended with a variation of: and that is why I am a great guy. He also told me a story about meeting a Persian porn star and how much he loved Persian girls. Sigh. (He also claimed to be cousins with a very famous actor with an even more famous supermodel wife, but I will omit that detail too. It’s a good one, but this guy may be reading, yikes!)

We landed. We had hours until our luggage would get there. I started to realize he was of course a bit low-key racist and conservative, and maybe even a Trump guy. His “jokes” were starting to get more and more grotesque and his mood started shifting from wholesome dog-like affability to bitter white-nationalist-lite bro. I tried to lose him a bit and texted a couple friends. It was very late in LA—our 6pm arrive had turned into nearly midnight and I didn’t want anyone to come get me. Lyfts/Ubers are very annoying to catch these days from LAX but I didn’t care.

And I also was low on money. This is a big key to why weird things happen to me. Everyone I know who struggles with money also makes more poor choices than many understand. My old agency had not yet cut the check for the last part of advance installment, so I was left with whatever money I had saved from my various editing and freelancing jobs. (I had already been dead broke at one book tour and did not want to relive that!)

Still, this part gets fuzzy. For reasons I don’t quite understand—I was tired? traumatized? Stockholm Syndrome? IDK!—I let this guy drive me to my hotel. Not before I paid for his car to be let out of the lot—somehow he was low on money too? But so low that he was twenty dollars short and had no way of paying for it other than me? I was astounded. He said he was getting wires from his mother because he was unemployed and the parking lot was quoting him something he did not agree to. So after many many minutes of negotiating with an indifferent employee, he agreed to let me pay and that was that. A low point, but I could not imagine lower, so I just let it go.

He made lots of jokes about wanting to sleep over while also offering very kindly to drive me around on my three days in LA before the SF leg of the tour. I kept trying to politely decline and focused on my phone so I could look way too distracted to take in what he was saying.

But then he did something I could no longer ignore.

Reader, please believe me when I tell you this next detail. I would never put it in a piece of fiction because it makes no sense and would just not be believed.

He took out a glass pipe, but not one I recognized—clear glass with a bulb on one end, very clearly used. And then he explained: he was sober, except for occasional usage of this. Just once in a while. It helped him. He was going to quit it but for now it was helpful. But he’s sober. Just except for this. Because it helps. Only occasionally. Sober except. Really. Okay, so sorry for this—

And he smoked, at the same moment I realized wait a second: THIS WAS METH.

I immediately rolled my window down, worried about getting a contact high, but also just not wanting to watch this man in this clearly low moment. I also didn’t love that he was driving while on drugs.

He kept smoking and kept apologizing and kept smoking and kept apologizing and eventually it was over. We were at my hotel and I was so tired—no contact high, thank goodness, or I assume I would have been more alert—that I said nothing to him when he opened the door to get my suitcase. He again made a joke about wanting to come upstairs, about how meth was great for sex, and I just stared and blinked blankly and rolled my suitcase and my self far away from that man, who of course lingered far too long in the lost.

Welcome to LA, I guess. My mess of a hometown.

For the next few days, he texted me a lot, again offering to drive me around, no mention of the meth or anything, just checking in like he was some good guy who had found himself a good girl on some run with disaster at an airport. I ignored his texts and eventually blocked him and tried not to think about any of it anymore.

But it did set a tone.

In the days to come, the CA stops were lovely. It was a joy to be in conversation with my wonderful Gen Z friend and Tehrangeles muse Helya Salarvand. We also spent the hours before at Erewhon buying Hailey Bieber smoothies ($22 ughhhh) and this one sushi sandwich ($20.99 eeeeew)that had gone viral on TikTok. We decided to film ourselves doing Erewhon hauls as Tehrangeles promotion but then we forgot to post it! Sigh! Anyway, we had decided to compare various fancy waters they sold, because it was all we could afford there.

The reading was so joyful, at my favorite LA bookstore Skylight. Seeing everyone from my best friend to various high school friends to Iranian American queer all-stars to all sorts of amazing readers was a blast! It was packed and people were standing again, hooray! (Incredible how people’s inconvenience can mean high praise when you are an author!)

The Iranian crew and I headed to Le Figaro after for drinks and burgers (we wanted to go to Azizam but they were closed), and it was the most fun I’d had in ages! I ended up going to Glendale to have an early Father’s Day dinner with my family. We all wanted to go to Raffi—the best kebabi in LA, which happens to be quite close to where my parents live—but the wait was 1.5 hours. We went to nearby Pardis where they were hosting a Persian-Mexican wedding party—you can imagine how extremely awesome our dinner soundtrack was. And my final day, I got a whole hour at The LINE Hotel pool. I was pretty excited to see my publicist had booked me there, as it’s a pretty nicely located hip boutique hotel. I had stayed there years ago with my ex and Cosmo and it had been a good time. Last time I had no pool time, so I made sure that after I did a bunch of interviews, to reward myself with the pool.

And then there were just a whole bunch more stops. More highlights: headlining at the Columbus Book Fair where my event had an audience of hundreds, Miami Book Fair and Texas Book Festival fun with friends and perfect weather as the East Coast plunged into winter, my favorite event of all my tour Books and Burlesque with brilliant drag superstar Malai doing the most fabulous interpretation of Tehrangeles, etc.

I also spent all autumn and most winter at residencies—Civitella in Italy and MacDowell in New Hampshire—so all that plus my March at VCCA meant that I spent a third of this book year being out of town at these artist residencies, eating free food, having free board, frolicking in nature, and dreaming of new art. Not a bad way for an avoidant to spend a year they were supposed to be immersed in book promotion. In many ways, it was the opposite of that, my escape from the book and all things Tehrangeles, looking above and beyond it and shutting myself off from the machine.

I still can’t believe that guy and his meth pipe though.