Pooya Mohseni
Pooya recounts life in Tehran during and after the Revolution of 1978, as well as her time in England and the United States, as she navigated life as a transwoman within these various places.
Annotations
Learn More : “U.S. Asylum Law — Precedential LGBTQ/HIV+ Decisions.” Asylum: Case Law, Immigration Equality, last updated June 3, 2020.
Learn More [2] : “Trans Legal Mapping Report.” Resources, ILGA, ILGA World - The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, accessed 2020.
Learn More [2] : Bach, Jhana. “Assessing Transgender Asylum Claims.” Forced Migration Review 42 (2013): 34-36.
Learn More [3] : Gartner, Johannes Lukas. “(In)credibly Queer: Sexuality-based Asylum in the European Union.” Germany: Knowledge Resources, Humanity in Action, Feb. 2015.
Learn More [3] : Gramigna, Joe. “Transgender Individuals With Mental Illness Benefit From Modernized Psychiatric Care.” Psych Congress, Healio News, Sept. 11, 2020.
Learn More [2] : “History of the Community Center Movement.” About Us, CenterLink, Inc., accessed 2020.
Learn More [2] : “Electrolysis for Transgender People.” Home: Electrolysis Solutions, American Electrology Association, accessed 2020.
Learn More [3] : James, Andrea. “Transgender Electrolysis.” Medical: Hair Removal, Transgender Map, Deep Stealth Productions, Inc., accessed 2020.
Learn More [4] : “How Electrologists are Regulated.” Regulations, Electrolysis Lounge, LLC., accessed 2020.
Learn More [3] : Serpico, Erin. “How Nonprofits are Addressing Domestic Violence Within the LGBTQ Community.” The Press of Atlantic City, Nov. 4, 2018.
In collaboration with Rutgers Oral History Archive
Interview conducted by John Keller
Transcription by Christina Briskin
New York, NY
September 16, 2017
Annotations by Samantha Resnick
JK: Great, so this is September 15? September 16. It is Saturday September 16, 2007. 2017. Great, we are off to a great start (laughter). It is Saturday, September 16, 2017. This is John Keller from coLAB Arts and Rutgers University interviewing
PM: Pooya Mohseni.
JK: Great.
PM: Hello
JK: Hi and we're located at Pooya's residence in New York City. So first of all, thank you so very much for doing this. Um, so let's start at a very good place to start which is at the beginning. Where were you born?
PM: I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1978.
JK: And were you an only child?
PM: I am the second of two. I have an older brother, he is about 7 and a half years older than me. At the time that I was born, I was the only baby in the family, so my uncles, my aunts, they all treated me like I was the baby of the family.
JK: Nice, so when you were growing up or when you were a young child, who were kind of like the family members who you were surrounded by on a regular basis?
PM: See, I should also add that I was born about a year before the Iranian Revolution and most of my childhood was spent through the unrest that came before the revolution and then the revolution itself, the cleansing, the executions, the political assassinations, that came after that, so basically, from the age of one to three, that was what my childhood was, and then the Iran/Iraq war started which lasted for eight years. So the rest of it was bombings, and air raids, and food rations, power outages, all of that lovely stuff. Which now looking back, I realize, what it does, it um, brought my family closer together because there was really nothing else outside of it. So it was my mother, my father, my brother for most of it, and then my maternal grandparents, ah, my aunt on my mom's side, and her husband, um, I had three uncles but one of them left for America in 1978, so I didn't really know him. Another uncle and his wife left, I believe, in '81 or '82.
JK: Where did they go?
PM: They also went to the states. My first uncle went to St. Louis, Missouri, um, my second uncle, um, who was actually my oldest uncle, he came to the New York area, and they live in Long Island. But the most constant fixture were my maternal grandparents, because they had also just had an empty nest. You know their youngest boy had left for the states right when I was born, and the kids had grown up so I kind of became their surrogate child and they showered me with such love. I was, I was their baby.
JK: During the time you said, you know, from the time you were about basically born until about three years old, was that kind of first phase of turmoil during the revolution.
PM: Yes
JK: Did you have an awareness of that as a kid?
PM: I do remember there was, um, an incident I mean there are things that you know later as you grow up, people tell you oh that little bullet hole in that thing, that's when that had come from, uh, I guess this is a little anecdote that everybody in my family said was that the first year which was the unrest before the revolution and then the revolution itself, um, my grandmother used to put cotton balls in my ears and put me in the bathtub because the bathroom was the only room in the middle of the apartment and had no windows. And they would do that because my grandparents apartment was in a strategic part of town that was close to artillery and the infirmary and so there was a lot of loud noises going on in the area. That is what they told me, that is not what I remember because I would have been, I don't know, 8 months old, 9 months old.
JK: Yeah sure
PM: The first thing I remember I think I was two maybe three, was my mom and I were in a clothing boutique in downtown Tehran and I just remember the visual of this man pushing my mom and I behind, um, one of the, one of the showcases or I mean I don't remember exactly what it was, it may have just been a closet or a bookcase or something in the boutique. I remember this whole idea of us basically ducking. Um, and later I found out what it was, there was an altercation between a certain sect of university students that were protesting something, um, and there were a lot of sects. You know they were all Muslim, they were all fighting for equality and all of that, but one was more religious. One was more socialist leaning, one was probably more communist sect of the religious movement, so on one side of the altercation were university students, and on the other side, there were I believe revolutionary guards, um, and they gunned all of them down on the street and um, apparently as everyone was running around, people were trying to seek shelter so that's when the boutique owner closed the front of the shop and pushed my mom and I behind some of the showcases that he had, to make sure that you know at least I think it was just the three of us in the store, that we would be safe from gunshots. That is the first thing I remember of it.
JK: You talked a bit about your family and saying how close, how this time had kind of brought you all close together as a group of people. What was, what was home life like, what was kind of a daily routine?
PM: Well, ah, see, again I don't have much to compare it to. It had a routine, I would imagine, like any other place in the world, you know we had one TV channel, one and a half, I don't know one of them came on at noon and went out at like 10 PM. And it was mostly propaganda of sorts. War propaganda, and revolutionary propaganda. Even when it was children's programming. When I was, and this is the very young part, um, when I was at my grandparent's which was a lot of the time, um, you know they were retired, it was around sitting listening to their stories. My grandmother being in the kitchen all day with her little stool in front of the stove which probably there was just maybe a foot or two distance. She would sit on it, she would chop, she would sautee, she would do all of those things and before I started walking, she used to have a dirty laundry basket that she would put pillows around so I could sit up in and I could, I could stand up in, and she would sing to me as she was you know doing her thing in the kitchen. And that's where I was, that's...
JK: Do you remember the stories she used to tell you?
PM: There were many stories which were old fables. There's, you know, this old husband and wife called Adi and Budi which basically is I don't know what the literal translation would be, but is almost like the three stooges. Ah, everything they do is questionable. But, the essence of it is how people with good intentions can do really stupid things. You know, they go, they go to their daughter's house and the daughter's house is all mirrored you know this old luxurious way the mirror hall. And the daughter puts them up there one night and they wake up in the middle of the night and they see their own reflection and they think people have come to kill them, so they get up and they proceed to kill all the assailants that they think are there and they end up destroying the whole hall of mirrors. Or they're put in the stables with the animals and they think they smell bad so they need a bath, so they put all the animals through a hot bath and they kill all of them. But it's a fable about how you know people with the best of intentions can do really stupid things. Well now you look at 2017 United States, you realize they're not such old fables.
JK: Yeah, yeah
PM: That was one of the stories my grandfather was a retired army general, um, so there were stories of having been stationed at some far corner of Iran in I don't know 1950s or 1960s with the whole family. Um, this story of a different Iran that I never saw because it was at the brink of Iran being modernized and going from an older part of its history to this modern civilization that kept being talked about by the Pahlavi dynasty. Movement towards the gates of civilization which turned out to be oh one huge hoax. Those were the stories. My grandfather taught me to sketch. I sketched from when I was about five til I was about twenty. I worked, I , I then went to FIT I became a designer. He taught me how to sketch, um, I watched my grandmother cook so I kind of learned how to cook. More than anything I learned the love of cooking which is different from actually learning cooking. It is even better because it doesn't just teach you a recipe, it teaches you what food really means. And you'd come to that table whether it was three or eight which I had a lot of three people tables with them because even when I was in first grade, my school was close to their house, so I would come from school to them and I would have lunch with them. In a way I've never had with my own family and they'd be there, you know, exactly where they sat everytime I came and there would be these heaping plates of rice with something, and you know one of those days it might be a day that there was an air raid. And there'd be an air raid and you'd the sirens, and you'd hear the, um, what do they call them? Anti aircraft artillery from the ground, and you know you'd hear an explosion, you'd hear a bomb drop and it didn't hit you, so ok, you move on to the next time they'd come or the next day. It was food, it was cozy, it was being loved because also there was a lot of power outage and fuel shortage. It's like the unromanticized version of what you see in war movies. And not war on the ground from the point of view of people who are fighting it, but the civilians who are enduring a war behind the scenes.
JK: Did you, so you're ostensibly living at home with your parents but you spent a lot of time with your grandparents.
PM: Yes
JK: Did they all live near each other in the same building, in the same neighborhood?
PM: Until I was two my parents, my immediate family, we lived on the fourth floor of an apartment complex that my grandparents lived in the first floor, that they whole complex was built by my grandfather. There were only eight apartments. Eight apartments built on my mom's family home.
JK: Ok
PM: So my grandparents had had this home for I don't know, twenty years at that point. A two story house in Tehran and then they knocked it down and they built this eight um, eight unit apartment complex with the idea that their children would move into it and they did, but then they also moved out and not too far out from that point. But when I was born we lived on the fourth floor. Then I believe we lived on the second floor and my grandparents lived on the first floor. After that we moved to another apartment. I don't know if we were particularly close, but considering I only had one set of grandparents, they were really the caretakers since both my parents worked and that is a notable uniqueness about my family is that my mom worked. That's not to say a lot of women didn't, but more women did not work than did. So my grandparents were kind of my caretakers and I did go to pre-k, I did go to Kindergarten, but sometimes I would be sick, sometimes I wouldn't go or there would be summer or whatever it would be. My grandparents were the people I stayed with. So I think I was basically raised by two sets of parents. Ones that were actually present emotionally as well as time wise and one that just happened to be my actual parents. And they weren't the same cause my parents, my parents didn't have a good marriage. It wasn't filled with love. It was filled with something, love it was not. And I think I loved when my grandparents were around because that meant that my parents didn't fight. I love them and you know they loved me until my cousin came when I was about six or seven. I was the only baby. You know my grandmother raised me, she would put me on a pillow on her lap and rock me back and forth and sing to me which you know when Ari cast me in her play so much of the inspiration was trying to think, trying to think what was going on unsaid in my grandmother's life at that time as a woman who bore five children and now they were all out. And here was this you know little half pint a grandchild that was there and she always said this one story that I, when it was nap time I would bring the pillow. I would drag the pillow and I would say nap time. So in that way, she always remembered it with much joy because my cousin was definitely not that way. He was rambunctious and knocked the hell out of everything whereas I was a class act.
JK: The angel child.
PM: Even at two (laughter) I was a class act. I obviously don't remember that, but my grandmother always said she said you dragged the pillow that was the same size as you and you would be dragging it and say la la [I’m not sure what word is used here] which in English you would say lullabye, but lala [same note as above] basically means sleep. In kid’s language, adults wouldn't say that. Ah, that was my childhood.
JK: What ah, you said both of your parents were working.
PM: Yes.
JK: What were they doing?
PM: Um, both my parents, had been in business administration. And they worked in one of the ministries before the revolution. I think it was the ministry of Agriculture I think. Again, because I was very young at the time and because it was a government sector, there came kind of like a second wave revolution because the first revolution was the one everybody knows about but then there was this cultural revolution. This cleansing revolution that was meant to cleanse the system of all the remnants of the previous decadent regime. So people were brought in, people were questioned. People were interrogated. My dad being one of them, my mom being one of them. Just because they worked in government sector. Not because they were particularly high ranking. You know my dad was I don't know the advisor to the advisor to the minister of this. My mom was the assistant buyer for agricultural machinery from the eastern bloc. Things like tractors and bulldozers you know that kind of stuff from Czechoslovakia. So not a particularly political position, but my dad always spoke his mind. He wasn't a royalist. He definitely wasn't a royalist. He considered himself a Persian Nationalist. Um...
JK: You roll your eyes, why?
PM: I roll my eyes because I believe there are people who are not in touch with reality. There are people who are in touch with ideals and I have come to realize that in order for one's dreams to have validity, one's feet should be very firmly planted on the ground because otherwise there just clouds and the Iranian Nationalists they had their martyr. Dr. Mohammed Mosaddegh who was really the leader of the only democratically elected government Iran had every had in 1953 and then he was toppled by CIA backed coup in 1953 and there were these hordes of intellectuals in Iran who had Dr. Mosaddegh as their patron, as their patron saint. But they didn't do anything about it. They just kept talking about it. You know they'd sit so they didn't like the Royalists because they had been brought back with the CIA backed coup. But they also didn't particularly like the revolutionaries. See it's this not being in touch with reality that you know there's a left, there's a right, there isn't a third direction. Um, I mean sure you can say forward, but you know when they're giving you two options, you kind of have to pick one or the other. Especially if you want to actually bring about change beyond just you know sitting and having political conversations over half a bottle of vodka. My dad was one of those people. He knew so much, he knew so much about this history, but he was part of that intellectual sect that really didn't do anything about it and they got squashed in the revolution because they thought the revolution was really against all encompassing tyranny. So it wasn't just Pahlavi tyranny. It was religious tyranny and any kind of tyranny but we basically exchanged one kind of tyranny to another kind of tyranny. And historically when you look at it when one kind of oppression leaves another oppression takes its place, you just you can't suddenly re educate people about an entirely new form and structure of the government. You just can't you know. It's like you know a particular language and there's certain words you use and somebody says well ok you can't use that word and that's great that doesn't mean you're going to learn a whole new language. You're just not going to use those words. The language is still the same. And that's really the tragedy of the revolution is that there were people like my dad that were never really on one side and then after the sides changed he wasn't also on the other side and in a way I guess you can applaud it for its idealism, but then you also acknowledge its really nothing more than just dining room conversation. Um, so that was my dad and I guess he was sassy in his interviews after that he was dismissed from his position and that's an understatement. He was fired. And then so was my mom because my mom was married to him. And they thought it may have been because of nepotism that she got the job which it wasn't because my mom was actually overqualified for the position. And that was when I was about two. So here I am in post revolutionary Iran, both parents out of work, at that time there's not really unemployment, things like that and my mom was out of work for I would say about two, three years. My dad was out of work for about a year, you know. We got to a point of like selling things. Again I was very young two, three, and right around this time, the war is starting. See it's like you can't write this stuff. This is a soap opera. And then from that point on my dad went into private sector um, and he was, he was an accountant so then he was financial advisor to different companies along the way until his passing and my mom um, now that she had left the business administration world, at first she tried her hand at being a baker. You know there were a whole lot of cookies baked, let me tell you. Good cookies, but now when she talks about it she's like I just realized that I don't want to have a life that's um, all encompassing of how much butter you put in something or how much sugar you put in something or how long you have to bake something to get the right texture she's like I just realized that was just not what I wanted to do and then she got into teaching. Um, that would be about 35 years ago now. So I would have been about four or five. Early eighties and she got into teaching and that's what stuck. You know she went on at one of the leading english institute well it was called the Iran Amerca Institute. Which was very well known institute for learning English and they also had I believe French, German, and she was a teacher and she became a supervisor. That's where I learned English. The she went on to be university professor teaching English and that became her life. You know so pretty much from when I was five or six that was how I knew my mom. My mom as the teacher. I think sometimes she forgets that she's my mom and not my teacher, but you know we all need to be reminded what we are once in a while.
JK: What was your relationship like with your brother around this time?
PM: Well my brother and I age wise were very far apart. I was three or four and he was twelve. So it's just you know at that age, it's all the space you can really have. He was loving, he was protective, and I sometimes think more protective in the house than outside because as I said, I didn't have the happiest of families. My dad was the right word would be, I want to use the word violent, but he didn't shy away from corporal punishment. Even if it had no reason. I, yeah, I remember being scared of my dad. And you know, kind of like out of fear of pain, and there were times that I think you know my brother kind of like put himself between me and my dad. Why would someone want to hit or beat a three year old child is beyond me, but there were times that my brother put himself as my shield. And that time until I was about seven then he was sent to England for about seven months and then he came back and then he was sent to England again when I was about nine. And that was the last time we lived under the same roof. So, he was my protector, I loved him. But, then when I was nine, he was smuggled out of Iran because of the war, that's '87. And we ceased to have a sibling relationship because then I didn't see him for ten years. And then I went to England for six months and here we were trying to forge this relationship that really didn't exist. And it was hard on the both of us. And then I moved here and he lives in England. So my brother and I haven't lived under the same roof or even in the same town since 1987. Except for the six months that I kind of lived with him in England in his apartment. And it's hard. I don't know what other people's experiences are with siblings that they haven't lived with or close to because being a sibling is being more than just sharing blood. You also share experiences. And our only shared experiences go back to the early eighties. Which is also war and revolution and food rations and power outages and our parents fighting and trying to kill each other, so we don't have a lot of happy shared memories. But, at that time, he was my protector. He was you know the only sibling I had. And since then, well, he is someone I am related to. But I don't have a relationship that most people I know have with their siblings. And that's just because we don’t have a shared life. See my life is a soap opera. You know you get what you get.
JK: So you said that around the time you were five or six was when your mom started teaching, and then so you started attending the same school that she was teaching at?
PM: Ah yes, it was the same institute, at first I was having private lessons by some of her colleagues who specifically focused on children because I think below a certain age wasn't admitted to the institute that she taught at. And then when I turned I think seven or eight, that's when I actually entered the institute and I started from the bottom and I finished at the top. I think when I was about fourteen or fifteen, but my mom and I had also lived in Dubai for a year when I was twelve/thirteen. Again she taught English there at a university and I was at the Choueifat International School in Sharjah. That was quite an experience. But then we went back to Iran for family issues in '91 and the I went back to the institute and I kept studying until I basically finished it and I got my final certificate from there and there was something which was kind of like the TOEFL exam but it was the English version because TOEFL is the American equivalent, but this was the English equivalent and it was done in conjunction with the British embassy in Tehran so I sat for that and I had the interview for that and I passed that. That was my life. That was my life.
JK: What was school like? Did you like school?
PM: I've always hated school.
JK: [laughter]
PM: I ‘ve always hated school. I was always the outsider. I never fit. I lived in my own world, you know. When I was six or seven, I mean here these kids talking about Michael Jackson and modern talking. And I wanted to be in a Susan Hayward movie. I may have been very much a reaction to the bleak world that I was growing up with in you know, think of it. What I knew to be my truth, to be the truth around me was that there was [a Persian word I cannot discern], which meant that winters were very cold. That there would be power outages on a daily basis so there'd be two, three, four hours of power outage. Me being at our apartment by myself in this big apartment with big windows, with tape on the windows in case of a blast so it wouldn't shatter all over the place. And to this day I am terrified of the dark. And I think just because I remembered being in the dark me being by myself, it was terrifying. I mean now it sounds ludicrous, but I am still afraid of the dark and I can only trace it back to that. We had one TV channel which all it showed was news from the front lines and or old black and white depressing movies from World War II. Russian movies. That was what I was being attacked by from every side. And this is not even counting the trauma every time there is an air raid. You know. Rushing to the basement. Waiting for the explosion. It's all it’s trauma. As a child, especially as a child you think this is life. It's life to wake up at two o'clock in the morning because your city is being bombed. And then it happens again when you're three and then you're four and then you're five and then you're six. And it goes on and you think this is life. You just take it as life. And when there would be a Hollywood movie or a Western movie there were all of these movies from the fifties, sixties, seventies, most of them dubbed in Farsi. This was my, this was my escape. And I mean this is nothing novel. There's a reason why movies in the thirties were very fantastic and very unrealistic in so many ways. It's because the real world was really bleak. So for me, when I would see a beautiful 1950s movie with you know the beautiful and stunning Ava Gardner or something, that was my world and then I go to school and there's these kids talking about Michael Jackson and I'm like I don't know what you guys are talking about. I actually think probably one of the reasons I am a performer is because I believe in the power of entertainment. Which also means I believe in the responsibility of entertainment. School? I hated school. I also think I have some attention issue which meant writing has always been very hard for me. I hate writing to this day. LIke there are pupils who love taking a pencil and writing and to me that is a like that could be a form of torture for me. You put me in front of the computer and get me to type. I can type, type, type, for hours I don't have a problem. I hate writing. I have an artist callous, but considering everybody always thought I was so smart I had a very hard time finishing my homework in first grade. I was afraid I was going to fail first grade.
JK: [laughter]
PM: I had a hard time. I was bullied a lot. I was the coastal elite of my class if you may. I was always in the top two or three students in class and everybody always thought I was such a genius, but I hated school. I hated kids at school. You know there are no protections for kids who were different. So I learned to survive. But I hated it, if anyone ever asks you tell them I hated school. To this day, when fall comes, I hate the concept of fall and people going back to school. Even now.
JK: Noted. I won’t tell you that I teach.
PM: I don't hate teachers, I just hated school. I mean my mom is a teacher. When I go into a class if anybody ever asks me to go into a class and talk to people or kids, I love the idea of learning. It's just that, I think there are two cruelties that are committed towards children. One, you wake them up before their bodies wake up which is a torture. And I don't know why to this day we still haven't figured out that if all children are always tired in the morning then maybe there is something wrong with the time and not generation after generation of children. And I think there is something to be said about that we, I don't know, we have adapted this schedule of kids have to get up when the roosters do. I don't know who decided that that's how we should do it, but that's how we do it. I think that's a travesty because kids learn to hate waking up and on the other side of it, it's teachers who are not happy about being there. About being in classes. Then they convey that to their students. And when students come into a class where they feel that they're not loved, that it's not a joyous experience, it makes learning and teaching hard. And I don’t think it's the teacher's fault, but when they are not taken care of, when they're not paid enough, when they're not treated with enough respect, then how can they be filled with this energy this positivity to then share that with the students which I think would then enable and encourage the students to really want to learn? You know, when I look back at my life I think one thing I have learned without a shadow of a doubt is that internationally, we do not value children. We say a lot of things but our actions show that we do not value children. Whether it comes down to the snacks we allow to be produced for children, whether it's entertainment we allow to be targeted at children, whether it's the way we treat children, whether it's the way we talk to children, I don't think we understand children. I don't think we value children and then we wonder why they are so angry, why they're so isolated from the world around them when they grow up. I think because we don't give them self-worth. We spoil them from one side and then we undervalue them from the other side. We treat them as adults and then we treat them as minions. And my experience as a child is that. Children are seen and not heard and Lord help anybody who ever thought that was the kind of child I was going to be. I was always heard I assure you. And I always got myself in trouble, but I always thought that, I said, well why should someone just be respected because they are older. Respect is earned. Can you imagine how revolutionary all this must have sounded?
JK: [laughter] So what was it, you know, this beautiful kind of articulation of the world, by the way, you know as you're growing up...
PM: In case you don't know, I am an advocate of my own.
JK: [laughter] We all need to be our own advocates unfortunately, frequently we are not.
PM: Sometimes we have no other choice. That's my excuse.
JK: Yeah. You know so at this time as you're kind of like figuring out what your interests are and who you are, are you being encourage to you know is your identity being anywhere either in your family, or in public, or amongst friends or?
PM: In my mom's, not defense because no one is attacking her, but to my mom's credit, the first time she had taken me to a therapist, I was three. And then when I was eight. I remember that. I don't remember the three year old. That I was different. You know and somebody said well what does that mean? In that world again, you know, people kept taking things out of context, and say well in 2017 New York that would be like you know in 2017 New York there are a lot of things that like 1982 Iran wouldn't have thought that, ok? Playing with dolls, playing house, wanting to play mommy. So she had taken me to a doctor and apparently that first one had said you know, just let Pooya do whatever at that time whatever he is doing and he'll grow out of it or something like that. And it was when I was eight and then my mom was told that I don't have strong enough of a male influence in my life and that I should hang out with my dad more you know do manly stuff. And my dad, my dad didn't do I mean one, whatever manly stuff is he didn't do it, whatever that was. Um, and so then I kind of started feeling isolated because suddenly now I was being forced to spend time in circumstances that one like wasn't truthful and natural to my dad and here I am in it whereas I wanted to be with my mom and her friends and you know listen to food recipes and hair. It was the eighties of course everyone would talk about hair. And that was what I wanted. And then when I was eleven she took me to another therapist and that therapist kind of interrogated me and my mom now when she looks back she's like how did I let that happen because she was there and he was interrogating me he's like well don’t you feel that your mom wants to feel secure having you around that you could like you know, protect her? And now I'm looking back, and if I remember who that person was I would go and have a serious talk like, not only are you questioning this kid's identity, but then you're also putting the burden of protecting their parent at the age of eleven? But then you realize, you know you see old movies you realize like when they put a little boy and they put him in charge, there's this idea again not understanding children. Thinking they don't understand the things they do and thinking they don't and they do understand the things they don't . Kids understand subliminal messages. But they're not sophisticated enough to understand the social structures of a particular society. And most people do the reverse. They expect them to understand things that are very arbitrary that even adults don't understand but then things that they do understand, you know, when someone doesn't know what to do with that. When someone doesn't respect them. They understand fear, they understand hate. It's almost like a electrical field. You know they can feel it. Yes like you can. Like you can. And I think I was just this child I watched everything. And everyone. I heard everything that people thought I wasn't hearing. I saw everything. And so I retreated. I retreated in and then more and more became this other Pooya that other people didn't see. And then the Pooya that people saw. Which you know, as I kept getting older and older, the one that people didn't see grew larger and the one that people did see kind of became more of a shell. But I imagine that story is also not quite specific and you need just me [inaudible].
[ Annotation 1 ]
JK: How would you I mean, how would you define the Pooya that you kind of kept to yourself or that you kept hidden versus that Pooya that was public?
PM: I think that is the Pooya that has kind of carried through you know I am going to be forty in January. The four decade mark which looking back at my life is quite a milestone. That Pooya was, is, loving, incurably romantic, incurably romantic. I think it's all the love that lived in my own imagination where I saw the outside world that is grey and dark and savaged by war, seeing people coming back from the war having lost an arm, or shell shocked. And the Pooya behind was kind of like this technicolor Pooya. Still you know having my tiny little miniature tea set that you know I kind of did for myself, that I loved I loved doing my grandmother's hair, I loved cooking, I loved taking care of my brother even though he was almost eight years older than me. I loved pretending to be a movie star. Oh no actually my first fantasy of being, I wanted to be a James Bond girl. That was my absolute fantasy when I was eight. That was the Pooya.
JK: Where did you get exposure to all of this from? You talked about that you had the one station or one...
PM: The magic of VHS darling, and then came Beta, and then came VHS again.
JK: [laughter] And did your family just did your family get access to those or buy them?
PM: My parents had lived in England from '69 to '75, We were very so called you know westernized in ways so the tapes somehow made their way to Iran. I don't know how, I don't know who brought them, but you know and there'd be this whole ring of underground VHS memberships. So every week your guy would come and drop three random tapes and one of them might be Superman, the other one might be some really inappropriate movie which showed things that now remembering a whole family would sit and watch and now I remember everybody being awkward and everybody thought everybody watches this but I'm like no! Probably in the western world probably everybody didn't sit and watch this with their seven year old when somebody is getting slaughtered or Omen. I saw Omen when I was six and I'm like oh my God. That scarred me for life. I still love it, but it totally scarred me for life. And that's how they made their way in. I could tell you most of those films and how old I was when I saw them. And a lot of those movies and TV series as an adult I have bought and accumulated and some of them let me tell you, some of them, they’re some of the shittiest things I've ever seen, but it's part of my childhood. There's this movie with William Holden from the late sixties called Christmas Tree? I think it's called Christmas Tree? But it apparently has two names. With Virna Lisi. It's a really crappy movie. It's a really crappy movie. We owned this movie and I can't tell you how many times I watched this movie dubbed in Farsi, uh Persian. That would be my mom's correction. Farsi is not an English word. Farsi is the Persian word for Persian. So the English word for Farsi would be Persian. Superman, the 1978 Superman. I saw that God knows how many times. 101 Dalmatians. One of the first movies I ever remember my brother taking me to a movie theater to watch when I was three was Susan Hayward's I Want To Live on the day my mom was getting an abortion. See when I told you my life is so proper you're like as I'm telling you you're like yeah kind of. I remember these movies, I grew up with Doctor Zhivago and Gone With The Wind and a lot of also crappy movies. And they, they gave me this fantasy world. This fantasy world that was my world. And nobody else's. It was mine. All mine.
JK: How long did you live in Tehran for? How long, when was the last time you left Tehran?
PM: Well the last time I left after having been a resident, was 1996. December of '96. But then I went back almost four years ago, when my dad was very sick. And he was dying. So technically that was the last time I was in Tehran, but the last time I lived in Tehran was in 1996. When I left to go to England my mom had come to the states and I was going to England to wait for my America visa to come to the states to start my transition. I came to the state in June of '97 and I started my psychiatric evaluation in September of '97 and I started the medical transition in January of '98.
JK: And was the decision made, was the United States the one place you felt safe doing that?
PM: Well there were only two options because my brother was born and had lived in England for about twenty years, well for about fifteen years at that point. And we were trying to get me residency in the U.K. but that proved to not be possible. At that time, you know there wasn't such a thing as what do you call it? Like political asylum for the point of transitioning. So they didn't have that. All they were giving me was like six months to come have surgery and go back. That wasn't what we were after. That wasn't doable. But then my mom came to the states. My uncle lived here and with their help my mom got a job and then she got me a visa and then I came here and then about six, seven months later, no less than that, maybe about four months later I met an immigration attorney who basically opened my eyes to what my options were and that's when I filed for political asylum and at that time, being transgender wasn't a category. So it was, you know, fearing for your life as a gay man in Iran. Which it didn't seem authentic the things I said in my affidavit were true, it's just that because there is no language regarding being trans so it all went into under the umbrella of being gay. Well, it didn't seem right to me, but to them it didn't make a difference and that was the only category that I could do it under. And again I want to reiterate the stories themselves that I told weren't untruthful, it was just there was no trans language twenty years ago. So, ta da.
[ Annotation 2 ]
JK: And you kind of you said that your mom and your brother were all part of this journey with you?
PM: Well my brother was already living in England at the time. I don't know what your schedule is, my appointment is for an hour. I don't know if it is possible for you to come after or not.
JK: This is actually a good place. Why don't I stop the recorder here.
Part 2
PM: Would you like a little something, something in your tea?
JK: Oh dear. [laughter] And so we begin. This is John Keller from Rutgers University and coLAB arts and I am here in Manhattan doing a second session with….
PM: Pooya Mohseni
JK: [laughter] Very nice. So the last time we chatted we had basically gotten up to the point where you were I believe a teenager at the time and you had left Iran with your mom, right?
PM: Well technically, technically I don’t know if I went into detail. I probably did. If I didn’t go into detail, I apologize. My mom actually left about six to eight months before I left Iran.
JK: Oh, ok.
PM: I believe I talked about my grandfather’s death. And you know, everything just happened at the same time. I don’t think my parents, especially my mom could really figure out how to do everything the best way so she just did it the way she knew. Now looking back I think it would have been nice if my mom had actually spoken to me about what was happening, you know a little validation, maybe, but I think I’m judging that based on what we know now and who I am now, what I’ve seen and what I’ve been exposed to but at that time apparently my parents were deciding that the only way I was going to survive was to get out of Iran. And so the first stop for my mom was England. So I came home one day and there was her luggage and she was leaving. Not a single word was spoken to me as to what was happening. I was told in a very curt manner that this is what was happening. I think a little sprinkling of love and maternal compassion would have been nice at the time, but I think that would have been a luxury at that time and I am very sad to say that. So my mom had left, earlier in ‘96. I don’t remember exactly when but it was sometime early in ‘96 and had gone to England which was where my brother was born and was living at the time to try to get me a visa in England so I could go and I could transition there and I could stay there. But the problem was the fact that I actually failed a couple of interviews at the British embassy because they didn’t have, that did not fit into their regulation of somebody coming and wanting to stay for years. It was, “ok you can come for six months.” So I kept failing. And I guess my parents weren’t good enough at coaching me in what to say because I could have if someone told me what to say, but no one coached me. So I kept failing that, and…
[ Annotation 3 ] [ Annotation 4 ]
JK: So the failing was about whether or not you would get asylum, or?
PM: I don’t think at that time we were even thinking asylum because that was not something that was presented to us. We didn’t even think about asylum until I was already in the U.S. and then an immigration attorney told us about it. You know, you take for granted things that you know and how can people not know that well when you don’t know something, you don’t know that you don’t know it.
JK: Right
PM: So after two or three attempts my mom decided that ok this wasn’t going to work so there had to be another way, and I think the last resort was to, my mom always says, she says, “I just decided to take one last chance and come the U.S.” which is where my uncles lived. And she came here and she started looking around and she got a job at my uncle’s small business and through that she was then able to, with great difficulty, get her own visa so then she could get a dependent visa for me because I was under 21. By the time she had gotten to the U.S. that’s when I went to England. December 1, 1996. I remember sitting on the plane leaving my home behind. I sat in the smoking section of the airplane. That existed at that time. It was not very crowded because It was me and maybe five other people. I felt so grown up so elegant. So we get to London and again there at the customs they ask me questions, and again apparently I don’t have the right answers. I don’t know why nobody told me what is the right thing to say. So then I was held at customs for a few hours while my brother was waiting for me outside. And so I think after, I don’t know two, three hours maybe four, I finally got out. My brother was flustered at the time. I was, I was still eighteen, and my brother would have been twenty five, twenty six at the time. And we hadn’t seen each other in almost ten years. So, he gets me from the airport, we get on the bus to go back to Leeds which is in Yorkshire, it wasn’t a happy trip. It wasn’t. According to him, I fitzed [I think this is the word she uses] with my hair too much on the bus. And so we finally get to Leeds and that’s where I was for six months. Just my brother and I. It was very hard for both of us, you know he had been and independent young man up to that point and here he had to play the older brother and caretaker and he wasn’t equipped to do it, and here I was, this kid that less than a year ago had tried to commit suicide, you know more than ten times with a chip the size of Titanic on my shoulder probably. So two damaged people trying to live under the same roof and not disclosing the horrible things that they had both lived through in the ten years since the last time they had lived under the same roof.
JK: [sneeze]
PM: Bless you my love.
JK: Thank you.
PM: There were some good moments. Not a lot, but some. I remember there were many times I would write to my mom and I say I can’t stay here anymore. And I can’t tell you now why I, it was, I had no friends. Not a single one. I didn’t know anybody. The only time I would go out was three times a week. I would go to a gay pub once a week that I had found in downtown of Leeds. In downtown of Leeds. I don’t know what it was called. My party budget was one pound a week that I had set for myself. One pound. The equivalent would be a dollar fifty. In 1996, you can see I was a huge spender, but I was an immigrant. I had suddenly realized how very little money I had. Cuz in Iran I didn’t know that. I was a middle class kid, I was an upper middle class kid. And suddenly my buying power had dropped by ten thousand percent. You know, before I left Iran I used to make these lovely little afternoon tea trays for myself, again because I had no friends. I think I should emphasize I’ve gone through my whole life feeling isolated. My whole life. And maybe it’s not the worst thing, but I can tell you it’s definitely not the best thing. It’s almost like you feel like if you died, not a single person would know. But anyway, so I used to make these tea trays for myself, it would be very balanced. It would have a large cup of milk, full fat of course at that time, a scone, buttered and honeyed, an apple, maybe a peach, and of course I would peel the peach so I could put the peeled peach on my youthful skin so it would hydrate. [laughter]
JK: [laughter]
PM: At 17. But here I was in this cold damp country, where I was very close to poor. And now in retrospect, I can also see why my brother’s life had been so difficult. Not having enough money to feel that you can eat a full meal, or to go to sleep in a warm room, or all of that it is hard. And when you’re middle class these are things you don’t understand. But these are things that I suddenly had to understand very quickly. And he lived in an apartment that my mom had bought so it was relatively warm but it was Leeds. It was like north England it was cold and it was December that’s when I arrived. It was cold, it would get dark at three. It was damp. I got to watch a whole lot of cable. I got to watch so many cooking shows, soap operas, I got to watch Sunset Beach, the ill fated Aaron Spelling daytime soap opera of the nineties with Terry Spelling his son that nobody knows of. And Antonio Sabato, Jr. [laughter] It was the nineties, it was the nineties, ok? I got to see Seinfeld for the first time, I got to see Friends for the first time, I got to watch a lot of classic movies, I got to meet some lovely middle to lower class, lovely English gay men.
Who could also not understand or get their head around why would a nice, cute, young gay boy as they saw me want to transition into being a woman and I heard some horrific tales about people that had transitioned at that time and the horrors of it physically, emotionally, socially. That didn't deter me. It did not deter me. Looking back I also engaged in some very dangerous behavior. How I survived I can’t tell you. Now looking back I think there were a lot of people that did the same things and they did not survive. Apparently, there was a serial killer roaming Leeds and Leeds University grounds during that time when I used to get out of the pub at like one, two o’clock in the morning and walk for about an hour and a half, two hours all across Leeds to get home because I didn’t want to have to pay for a bus and somehow I didn’t get killed. I did have a very weird experience one night though. I think it was one, two o’clock in the morning and I was walking home, and the whole town was asleep and there was this one naked guy baying at the moon in the front garden of an apartment, a house that everyone was asleep and I later found out it was actually not even his house that he was butt naked and I guess at that time he thought I looked like a girl and he asked me to go in the front yard and he started kissing me and as he started feeling me up he realized that I was trans and he was caught off guard and he like very efficiently proceeded to put his clothes back on and just basically kind of like ran the other way, and who knows what would have happened so maybe it was a blessing.
I remember getting into someone’s car who you know, one time found me, these were kind of tricklings of behavior I had had in Tehran and I think it’s a combination of a death wish, a lack of self worth, youth, congenial insanity, I don’t know. And somehow I survived all that. I remember for a month when I used to do grocery shopping I would go to Safeway and for a month my diet was store brand white bread, store brand margarine, and store brand jelly and jam. I felt very frivolous when I got two brands of jam. One was orange marmalade which I still love and the other was rasmerry schmutz. God knows what it actually was. Because it was literally the cheapest thing. It was a pound for this, and I don’t know, a pound for that, so I could feed myself on three pounds for three days. Don’t ask me about nutritional value, it probably had none. But I was trying to be frugal. I started having electrolysis which was painful. I went to London a few times to start getting my psychiatric evaluation because I didn’t know how the transition goes, how long it takes, what you need to do and all of that and one of the psychiatrists I saw, in his report he had written that he didn’t think that I was mentally fit. I don't remember if it was just in general, or mentally fit to have the surgery because he had asked me something about HIV and I had given him I guess a slightly sarcastic remark and he had taken it a certain way, and so had said that I was not well. I don't know something to the effect that I guess I didn’t care if I had HIV or I was spreading it, which I didn’t have it. I don’t know what he thought he was asking an eighteen year old, but anyway, in his estimation I was not fit. It was a hard time, it was a hard time. Six months of it I remember letters being sent to my mom and my mom sent, when we still sent letters pre internet, but it was not a good time. It was a transitional time and then finally in...I got to know my brother. He got to know me.
[ Annotation 5 ]
But finally by about April, May my visa was getting straightened out to go to the U.S. So I went to Vienna because that was apparently the embassy that the application was sent to for whatever reason. I guess some are more friendly, some are more crowded, some of the embassies depending on which country they are and this was the one that seemed to have more openings so it was easier to go there than to just wait to go to the one in London. I went there, I got there at 10:30-11 at night, so I knew the bed and breakfast that my dad and I were supposed to be at wasn't going to be open, so what does this genius do? Oh I decide not to take transportation from the airport in Vienna, a country I have never been to before at like eleven o’clock at night. What do I do? I decide to hitchhike from the airport to Vienna. I’m walking on the side of the freeway. See when I tell you how I am still here is beyond my wildest imagination how this is all… how I haven't been killed in so many instances. I like to think that God looks after children and crazy people and a crazy child and gets a double whammy and that’s why I am still here. Blame it on that. So someone picks me up and with my luck, all of these people are good intentioned people. None of them like, I don’t know what could have happened to me. Literally like anything could have happened to me, I guess the same way that anything could have happened to me in Iran when I got into a car with people, but even there, I just opened the door, I put my foot on the ground as car was moving, so I guess I am kind of crazy. And he dropped me off close to wherever the bed and breakfast was which was not going to be open for another like six hours. Me, no money, nineteen in a German speaking town that I have never been to and I don't know a single person. So I walked for six hours until the sun started coming up, thank God it was May. Thank God it was May. I walked, the sun came up. I want to the pensione. I think I slept all day. Then I went and had dinner at I think a gay restaurant by myself. I remember it had capers. I don’t remember anything about it, but I remember it had capers.
JK: Whatever you ate?
PM: Whatever I ate. I was something schnitzel and capers. I was in Austria. What do you think? Then my dad came the following day and to be absolutely honest I think it was probably the most intimate week I have ever spent with my dad. It was just the two of us. We walked a lot. It was right before Memorial Weekend and we didn’t know what Memorial Weekend was so it was like on Friday we show up and usually they were open until, I don’t know, four, five. We get there at like twelve and they’re like, “oh we’re closing.” So that meant we had to stay the weekend, which I guess in retrospect maybe wasn’t so bad, because we got two, three days more to spend together. We walked by the Danube, we would go to a grocery store everyday. So we would have our breakfast at the pensione, and there was this lovely German woman who didn’t speak a word of English. She kept saying, “bitte, bitte” whatever that means and apparently she thought I was so thin because I didn’t eat so she made sure I ate and let me tell you it was the most glorious breakfast. It was warm bread and butter and, and variations of marmalade and jelly and tea and so we loaded up on that because it came with the room. And then we would walk all day. We wouldn’t go to any museum or anything because again, you know money. But it was the glory of Vienna in May. It was the sound of waltz, we walked through imperial gardens, we looked at statues, we talked, actually come to think of it, we didn’t talk about deep things, because I guess what my dad saw was that he was losing his kid. At least that’s how it turned out. We would go to the grocery store everyday we would get a loaf of bread, a block of cheese and maybe a dry sausage or a kielbasa of some sort and a bottle of something. And that would be our lunch and dinner everyday. We would get back, we would slice the bread, and there would be whatever dried, cured meat we had gotten. It was a special week. With all the worry and the tension of am I going to get the visa this time or not? With all of that it was still, when I look back on it, I think it was the most special time in my life that my dad and I ever spent together. And he always said, “you know I was so tense, because I just wanted you to get the visa,” and we got the visa and I arrived, we arrived, in Dulles airport in Virginia on June 3, 1997. That is when I arrived in United States. June 3. My mom had originally come to the northeast, which is where my uncle was, but as she had gotten settled, she had gone to Maryland because one, it was cheaper, it was warmer and there were more friends in that area. She had taken residence in Rockville, Maryland. Take note of my eye roll.
JK: [laughter]
PM: It was in garden apartments and I took I think six or eight courses, credits in the six weeks that we were in Rockville, Maryland at community college there. Just you know kind of like credit fillers. I took an aerobics class and I have to tell you my bun has never been as perky. And I took an English class and someone actually told me, they said, “you know there are some people that are uncomfortable with you,” one of my classmates said. Well Maryland, welcome to homophobia. Apparently it didn’t deter me at all because I had seen much worse, so I was like, ok yeah. What am I going to do? I managed to get myself in a little bit of drama back there too. Apparently everywhere I go just a little dash. But while we were there FIT reached out to us because my mom had submitted my portfolio for the fashion department, but the fashion department was full for the fall semester, but the textile department seemed to have an opening and so they called us and they said we have reviewed your portfolio and we are interested in interviewing you. So my mom, my dad and myself, I think we got on a bus from Maryland and came to New York. The first time I ever arrived in New York, I think it was late June maybe early July and so we came to port authority, I walked out, the sound of cars honking, seeing taxis, the look of concrete, the smell of gas, the porn stores. I looked out and I thought I am home. Yeah 21, no 20 and some years ago. We go to FIT, we have an interview, I still remember the chair adviser for the textile department: Eric Ramirez. Tall, dashing, gay man. And here I am you know with my parents, I’m like 19. And of course I thought I knew everything, what 19 year old doesn’t. So we do the interview, go through the portfolio, and then we go back to Maryland and we get a call that I was accepted, so then we’re down in Maryland for a while, my mom comes up with another friend of ours to find housing around New York. Something we can afford, something that’s close enough to FIT and we end up taking residence in Leonia. By time we move, my dad had already gone back to Iran and that becomes the story for the next fifteen years. He comes, he goes, he comes he goes. He kept saying, “I’m going to move,” but it just never happened. And then on August 14th or maybe it was the fifteenth, on August 15th, we set out for New Jersey with our U-Haul and we move into our first garden apartment residence in Leonia. It was Leonia Terrace Apartments or something like that. On the top floor corner August 15th and oh my God it was hot as…
JK: [laughter]
PM: and humid. And we moved in and you know we got settled. My mom and I and that is when that part of the journey began. And then it was a matter of signing up at FIT. I remember the first New York pizza I had. I didn’t buy it because that was a luxury for me. Can you imagine? This is where my life was, buying a slice of pizza was luxury for me, but I was in a four hour line to sign up for classes because I had just gotten there so I pretty much had to take whatever classes were still available. I had the weirdest schedule. Fridays I was at school until, I don't know, nine o’clock at night. But as I was standing there, there were also other people who were late, and a lot of them immigrants. And two of them, I think it was this lesbian pair, they went and got a pepperoni pizza and they came back and we sat and we ate. And I signed up for those classes and I started FIT. That first year, that first fall and winter was very difficult. It was cold, no money, new language, new city. I don’t have the right clothes for the temperatures. I am just starting transition. Where do I go like counseling all of that. Somehow magically, I found Hetrick-Martin LGBT High School and they also had counseling and somehow I found the LGBT center. Because now it is easy, you can look for all of these things on the internet. This didn’t exist in ‘97, at least I didn’t have it. And there’s some things I am going to say and I want to know if it’s ok to say it or not, but I guess if it’s not ok should I say it and then you can edit it? I don’t know…
[ Annotation 6 ]
JK: You can say whatever you want...
PM: See before moving to New York, I had become aware of these underground sections of newspapers like Village Voice where people offer companionship for money and so when I was still in Maryland I started being interested in this, because I guess you know, before getting out of Iran I had been propositioned a few times. I had never taken it, because I had never needed the money, but here I needed the money. And the first, I actually auditioned for a couple of these places. I don't know if this still exists, but it did back in ‘97. The one I think I ended up working with for a short period of time was I think it was called like “College Guys” or something. And I met with this kind of skeevy guy who was running it out of his apartment and it was interesting, it was new. I saw a few people through them. And also some not very good experiences through them. And then came, well and then I started actually transitioning. I started seeing a therapist at Hetrick- Martin and at Streeetworks which I believe they're still around. They mostly cater to runaway youth, a lot of LGBT people. It’s like center of sort on 8th Ave. and 38th or 39th. They kind of saved my life. All of them. We had group counseling sessions, we had Thursday movie night. We also ate Wonder bread with bologna. But that’s what they could afford. They didn’t have more than that. But I got a lot of counseling out of that and the what is now Callen-Lorde which at that time was just two rooms on the second floor of the gay and lesbian center. That's when I started in the fall of ‘97. That’s where I also met the lawyer who helped me get my asylum who is a huge immigration lawyer now in L.A. I love him dearly, he helped me a lot. And you know, this journey has had a lot of moments like when my mom sent me to Dallas, Texas for a week long electrolysis session because we had heard from support group that they were really great and the things we didn’t take into consideration, here again I was being sent somewhere alone by myself. Of all places Dallas, Texas. So they could do electrolysis for up to seven, eight hours on my face a day. I mean you know I would be hit with Novacaine and stuff and the reason they could do it was because they had dentists on site, but by the end of the day I literally would look like I had been hit by a car. My face was so swollen and this keeps coming up again because we had very little money, my mom had sent me to Dallas with food, canned food. Baked beans cans and tuna and bagels. And let me tell you when you're getting that kind of intense electrolysis during the day and all you eat in the morning is bran flakes, supermarket brand of course, and then you go back to your room after seven, eight hours of electrolysis, you go and you have to take a shower so the swelling can. And you sit in the bathtub by yourself and you cry. And then your dinner is a cold can of baked beans with tuna every night. You kind of get to appreciate life a lot. So I came back after that week and I finally started my hormones in January of ‘98 and I think that’s kind of where my new life started. The first weekend was, oh my God. I think my body was just adapting to the hormones so I was having shivers and my mood was very unstable and...but starting in ‘98 that’s when I first met my first boyfriend.
[ Annotation 7 ]
We were together for two years. I started kind of falling into the groove of New York and FIT and it was no longer fall and winter. My GPA started going up. I started slowly transitioning. It actually started happening. I used to drink more than I should have. I, you know, my life just started moving forward. So the first year came to an end, and a little side note, with what universities cost now, I don't know how I would have done it, but back then for Associates at FIT, and FIT is not a shabby place, you know it’s a CUNY school. It’s a well respected international school of design and I think every semester, every full 12 credit semester at FIT for Associates was, I don’t know like 1600. After Pell grants and stuff it would be I don't know like 1000 or 1100. A little more by the time it came to Bachelors. By that time I had my first job out of college I had worked at Lord & Taylor for six months, which was a nightmare. Oh my God was it a nightmare. Then I started working at the computer lab at FIT which was paying me ten dollars an hour. Oh my God! It was the most amount of money I had seen!! Ten dollars an hour and I used to work fifteen hours a week so like a hundred and fifty dollars a week! I’m like, I know, I know it sounds so insane but we were at a point when my mom would give me a hundred dollars for the month pass for NJT, you know that was hard, it was hard for us because my mom wasn’t working, I wasn’t working, it was hard. But the first year passed, I got my boyfriend, then came the second year, I was signing up for the classes that I really wanted, I was getting an internship here, an internship there. One thing I forgot to mention was that I had an internship. I had an internship my first, second year that I was at FIT and it was basically during the month break between fall semester and spring semester and so I was kind of like a little girl Friday at this design firm. I was there for about a week, and one of the critiques I got from the general manager was that I wore the same thing every day. And that I probably should change and not that I smelled or anything and I make a comment about it that it is very easy to make that comment when you don’t know what that person is going through. And I guess that is what privilege is because you judge other people based on your experience and the fact that she couldn’t understand that I was just transitioning, that I didn’t have a lot of female office clothes, if any, that would also be weather appropriate. That just having that internship, that didn’t pay, that in itself was such an accomplishment for me to even get that. But, you know, that was one of the critiques. It made me feel very small. But then there was the next internship which was like a two, three month paid internship and I had my checkered grey mini dress with matching suit and I worked at Cotton Incorporated. You know, I was moving up in the world so to speak. I had a high heel. I had one pair of high heels. I had this one suit and dress. This brought me to the end of my Associates and then I signed up for my Bachelors. Transition was moving along, electrolysis, hormones. I was growing up, I was going through therapy. I was with that boyfriend for two years. He was the sweetest boy in the world. He came from a republican family in Delaware. White as white can be. With names that were white as white can be. You know things like Bill and Mary and John and Tom, and another Bill.
JK: [laughter]
PM: They owned a Pontiac dealership in Wilmington Delaware. Of course they did. And it was good for the most part, until they met me and I went on a winter trip with them to Vermont. I had never been to Vermont and I guess I left my mom by herself, I don’t know what the alternative would have been. And so they got to see me and then they started wondering about me. That I was trans and then they asked him and of course he didn’t lie. He said yes, they obviously had problems with that. So much so that the mom had actually called my mom and insinuated that it was I who had deceived or caused their lovely son to stray from the righteous path. [Sigh] He was also in the Army Reserves. For six months out of the two years we were together he was actually in the Air Force Reserves in Biloxi. I went down there to see him a couple of times, by that point our relationship was falling apart. Not because he did anything. He was amazing. I was just a little wild for him. And he, he was very sweet, very handsome. Thomas Akins. But I was just too wild for him, I was. Maybe too selfish. Maybe my head was too far up my ass. I don’t know. I was young, he was just a couple of years older than me. He also had his own issues, we kind of broke up, got back together, broke up, got back together, after he moved up. I did love him as much as I could, as much as I was or am capable of, but we finally broke up. There were some amazing times we had. I mean I don’t know how likely it was for me to have a very long term relationship with a republican. I didn’t even know what it meant back then. So then that was over, I think it was over in ‘99. No, no, it was over in 2000. The whole Y2K thing? We went through that together. I spent some time in Wilmington, Delaware in their kind of exclusive area that they lived. They ate a lot of steaks, that much I can tell you. A lot of meat, but one of the things he and I had that was very special was on Friday nights when he would drive up to New Jersey to spend time with me, we would go to Safeway, ShopRite, I always say Safeway, ShopRite, and we would get a hero of some sort with Doritos and lots of gummy bears or sour patch kids or when we really wanted to be wild we would go to this one Taco Bell which was Taco Bell and KFC together and you could get the Taco Bell/KFC combo meal which you have not lived until you’ve had that. Fried chicken and tacos, oh my God, rock on. Things you find luxurious when other things. And after I broke up with him, which I think one of the reasons was because I wanted to go back into escorting and well of course he had a problem with it. And after we broke up then I did. I met some lovely people, and I met some horrible people. I put my sense of self worth on the line. Alot. I managed to pay my school loans off. I put myself through school and I think I learned a lot about life. Because these people were older, worldly people and I kind of absorbed their knowledge. Then, I graduated from FIT, I can proudly say that I’ve almost never been out of work until I really came out and, well, I’ve kind of managed to find my way through that. One thing I want to mention about FIT was that I was also the first time I was acting as an adult. I joined the theater ensemble. I was part of it for two years. I got to do improv, I got to do background work on television series that were shooting in New York.
JK: Was this school based drama?
PM: The drama ensemble was yes, an extra curricular group within FIT
JK: Oh, cool.
PM: Because the model forum wouldn’t accept me because I was trans. They told me that I was lovely and elegant but the other girls would feel uncomfortable. So they didn’t accept me, but the theater ensemble did. And I was also in the LGBTQ support group which was also an extra-curricular group. And we would go to classes to kind of educate people and I remember in one of the classes, one of the kids, he thought I was really hot until I showed him a picture of me before transition. He literally got up and left the class. The teacher apologized, of course. You think of FIT as this beacon of openness and liberalism, and let me tell you that’s horseshit because I was misgendered, I was talked about, I was looked at, gawked at, gossiped about, all of those things while I was there, but you know when you are who you are, you just take everything that comes at you with a grain of salt. A lot has changed since 2000, ‘99, since 2001. Like when I was at FIT, this guy started talking to me and I said I used to be, I think I may have said, I used to be a boy or something like that, and he didn’t even take a breath. Literally that sentence ended and he just got up and left. And that happened on many occasions. On many occasions. So I graduated. For our senior class I was the person who put this multimedia piece together it was a fifteen minute fashion show that I put together because I had taken all of these computer classes and apparently nobody else in my program had taken those so they scanned the pictures, and then I had to resize and reshape them and do all the backgrounds, and they said well we could have done it and I said no, because then you would have needed me to teach you what to do and then you would have done it. So it wasn’t that I could just say this is what you need to do and do it. I would have to teach you and I didn’t have the time or the patience to teach you so that’s why it ended up being produced and directed by Pooya Mohseni with special thanks to X, Y, and Z. And people were like “well you took it on’” well you were more than welcome to jump in, it wasn’t my project. It was just that you guys didn’t put the time into it. Even when it came to music clips, which they gave me a whole CD of music, I didn’t use any of it because they didn’t give me clips. They gave me a CD with music. I’m like, ok if that’s what I’ve got to do, I’m going to make my own clips. So I did. It was all Donna Summer. [laughter] But, I then was also speaker because the class said I had a girlfriend at that time who I loved very much, we had gone to almost every class since the first day of class until we graduated four years later, she was kind of my role model. The first time I smoked pot she was the one that gave it to me. The first time I took a pill, she put it in my mouth. The first time I did many things. We had a lot of fun, a lot of fun. We used to make a lot of trouble going out to clubs because she knew everybody because she was a model and she kind of took me along. We would get dressed together and all of that. I guess I really needed her in that time of my life. I had nominated her as the speaker but only because I was madly in love with her. The class said if you want to be the speaker, we give you that. But if it’s her, no, we’re going to pick someone else. Because they said we are offering you the chance to be the speaker because you did it. You made the piece. But as for her, no. No, we don’t want her. So I’ll speak and I did. I graduated with a 3.85 average. Technically it would have been 3.87 if one of my teachers who had propositioned me had actually rightfully changed my grade, which he didn’t. I guess I could have gone and complained, but oh well, life is too short. Now people talk about it, “I was propositioned by my university teacher,” with all of his eczema. But you live you learn right? It was the nineties. I graduated in May of 2001. That’s when I got my first tattoo. Under my belly button, which was originally supposed to be a belly piercing but as the person was describing it to me, I was like, Ok, that's not happening. And so were born the snake trilogy. Which this one is the second one of. The first is under my belly button, and then came this one on my sternum and then there is the one in the middle of my back. I graduated and I had the multimedia piece and I was shopping that around for a while. A design studio was interested in hiring me as a junior designer so I literally finished my last day working at the computer lab on a Friday and I started my new job on Monday. Talk about blessing. I worked like a dog that first year. I think my average week was somewhere between sixty and sixty five hours a week I worked. I made thirteen dollars an hour which was oh my God. And then September 11th happened. I remember that day. It was a Tuesday. And all I kept feeling was that war had followed me. It wasn’t a good feeling. It was like I can’t escape my fate. And then it was a very dramatic day. I mean anybody who was there would know. I remember looking at Herald Square, because that's where my office was. We were on 32nd between Fifth and Broadway. And I remember coming out towards Herald Square it was like a Gone With The Wind you know that moment where everybody is scattered and there’s things blowing up and people are running. That was Herald Square because people didn’t know what was happening or what was going to happen. I was right next to Empire State Building. People thought Empire State was the next target. So then all the bridges are closed. All the tunnels are closed. I had come from eight years of war trauma. I don’t know if I was scared. I think I was just going through the motions. I get out of the ferry after like waiting two hours to get on it. Then from the other side, I walked about an hour and a half or two hours from there to the house just wondering what happened. I also somehow vividly remember that my mom had somehow gotten or I had gotten or I had requested it, Halloween from the Leonia library. So I remember watching Halloween, which was probably not the best idea, but somehow I did it. And my mom then was afraid of if I would be safe to go back to New York. I guess that never crossed my mind, because I had never felt safe in my life, so it just didn’t seem that it was that much worse. And my boss at the time who was a lovely woman who had started the business on her own, she had assured my mom that everything was good at the office and I came back. They let go of one of their senior designers, because you know New York changed. Businesses change. They kept me on because they thought that I had great potential. That later proved to be quite a pain in my butt, let me tell you though, because, so I was there for the first year. The senior designer who was basically my mentor was there for the first year. And then she left. And so then I was left for about six months to do the job of three people. And then my boss had health issues, like her lung collapsed, she couldn’t make payroll so, the reason I say it became a pain in the butt, yes I had a job, but I also had a job that my checks were like two months late at a time. It was difficult. It was very difficult. But I guess the essence you’re getting from me, I, something inside me is like this warrior that I just go. Some people see something coming at them and they run. I see something coming at me and I just move straight head on. I learned a lot, I learned a lot. I also earned everyone’s respect. But I was also escorting on the side because there was no money coming in this way. And that’s how I met my ex-husband. He was this guy who had just moved north from North Carolina. His life had decimated back there, he told me stories but later I found out that you never really want to go too much by Kevin’s stories because they’re mostly not true. But he’d come up here to kind of start his new life. He was working in Nyack at the time. He had just broken up with his ex-fiancée, he was about seventeen years older than me. He and I before actually meeting, we had gotten into a fight and I basically left him a message to the effect that, “you apparently don’t know how to make an appointment and hold to it so maybe you should just go back to where you came from.” Something to that effect. I think he made appointments and kept canceling them or not getting back to me or whatever. But we finally met. I have to make again a side note. 2001 ended very badly for me. 2001, I remember Thanksgiving I had felt kind of discarded by my very close girlfriend at the time you know she left her job after September 11th and then she couldn’t get a job for a while and she traveled to California for a few months and I was staying at her place and looking after her great aunt. But I loved her. I always thought if there was one person that I could be monogamous with, it was her and that didn’t quite work out as I had hoped. Maybe for the best, maybe for the best. Come Thanksgiving, or around Thanksgiving, I bought her an aerobed for her birthday because I was working and well what is the point of working if you don’t get to get a fabulous gift for your loved one? So I got her an aerobed and then we went out to this lovely decadent party, who I remember I used my tongue to lick cocaine from the inside of a couple of guy’s mouths. Uh, yeah it was a rather exciting, yet abysmal end of the year. I remember Halloween of 2001 where she and I went out. The only Halloween I have ever dressed up and I will leave it as the only Halloween I will ever dress up for. I was Godiva or something like that and we were at this party and oh my God, drugs galore. From ecstasy to whip-its, I remember it was 8:30 the following morning and we were sitting there and a lovely young boy named Jesus, that was his name, sitting behind me, biting my neck as my girlfriend is sitting behind him rubbing his shoulders. And I suddenly look at the clock and I’m like, oh my dear Lord, I have to be at my office in half an hour. Nobody can say I didn’t live. Nobody can say I didn’t live. But I’ve also learned happy people don’t do that. So I went to work, I don’t know how functional I was at work, but I was at work, designing. I very clearly remember there was a moment that I was looking at the screen and I lost myself. I was like, where am I? But that year also kind of ended that way, because the weekend after Thanksgiving, I had gone to another lovely decadent party. I also have to say the morning of Thanksgiving, I actually proceeded to make some very deep cuts on my arm with a very dull knife as I was sitting on the floor of the kitchen of my girlfriend’s apartment watching her sleep. Try to unpack that. Happiness, right? It’s just dripping from the seams. I was very unhappy. I was extremely unhappy. But then that weekend, we went to this glorious party and I dressed up and I was an eye catcher. I was young, tall, thin, sassy. Other people thought I was attractive. I didn’t. We went to this glorious penthouse party downtown and again, drugs galore. People from advertising and marketing and photographers, and design people and all of that stuff. And we were there, and I was the belle of the ball in my. I still have those pants and I can still fit into them. I don’t wear them anymore because they’re just, good Lord. My faux snakeskin textured black pants from H&M. And at this party and I was like Scarlett O’Hara. There were like these five beautiful men hanging on my every word. And I’m all, “do you know what’s my favorite part of my body?” And oh it was flirting magnified. I can’t tell you to what degree, but it was definitely magnified. And one thing I’ve learned, it is not the greatest thing to become best friends with the drug dealer at a party like that because that means you do more drugs than you should. So then later that evening, he proceeds to, well he told me when we were in the car driving to the party, he said, “what do you want tonight?” And I said, “I just want it to be a great night that we just roll through.” And he said, “I’ll take care of that.” Now if somebody says that to me I will walk very far but at that time you should have seen the glean in my eye. And I remember I was talking to a guy and he just came and like popped a pill in my mouth. And that was how the night went. Oh, yeah. But later on, my girlfriend and him and I were in the bathroom and he opened this bag of coke and he just made four lines, this is how much of a novice I was. I didn’t know how much you can use, or what is bad or what is good. He did the four lines, he gave me a rolled up dollar bill and I snorted all four lines in one go. I snorted a gram in one go.
JK: Oh my God.
PM: My ex-girlfriend, she’s looking, she’s like, “did you just do that?” I was like, “yeah, why?” She’s like, “are you ok?” I’m like, “yeah.” Well, I spoke too soon. About thirty seconds later, I felt like my heart was about to just burst, which is what can happen to you if you do too much. I guess I had done too much. This was, I also have to say, this was kind of like the end point of my coke phase which lasted about six months. I had been at a couple of other fun and scandalous parties. They were very fun, they were very scandalous, but none of them ended well. And I almost OD’d that night. And then to make things better at nine o'clock in the morning you’re looking around and everybody looks like zombies and I think in retrospect, whatever would have happened to me? None of them would have done anything. I could have literally died there. And then I go to a hotel room with the drug dealer. I can’t say if it was a good decision or a bad decision. I don’t know if it was much of a decision, it was just, he asked, I went. I wanted to feel validated, I wanted to feel loved. And he just wanted to fuck. So we did. It was not a pleasant experience I can assure you. I did not get raped. It wasn’t anything like that. I knew what I was doing. Well as much as you can do when you haven't slept and you have more coke going through body than you should. And I, the rest of the day I was just crashing bad. And then there was the following day. So this was kind of how I had ended my Thanksgiving weekend. And then the year itself ended on kind of a similar note. No cocaine. I was at a club dancing and moving my stuff about and shaking all my goodies and all of that. And someone stole my bag with my cell phone in it and my credit cards and all of that. So that is how I started 2002. And my ex-girlfriend was kind of out of the picture at this point. And there was a guy I was seeing and he could not live with the fact that I had two-timed him. Even though we weren’t really seeing each other. We had just seen each other a couple of times. And so came my ex-husband literally like four, five days after this. I don’t want to skip this experience. So January 2nd was a Wednesday. January 2nd was a Wednesday, yes. And I met up with this guy that I had met at one of the earlier parties and he said he had a phone because my phone had gotten lost, but he had his own intentions of what he wanted. I mean this is a guy who the first time I met him, he took me behind a door and whipped out his penis to show me what I could have. I was not interested. At anytime. He was so not my type. But that didn’t stop him from you know whipping out his goodie. And so because I didn’t have a phone and all of these things had happened to me, I was like sure, yeah, let’s go out and I’m going to get a phone out of it. So then he takes me out, he gives me this cool shirt. He dresses me up and takes me to this bar downtown, and then he meets his other friend who has come with his other friend, who happens to be a tennis pro. A beautiful, beautiful tennis pro. And we kind of hit it off. He was my type whereas the person I had come with was not my type. And so we kind of come up with this plan of how I can get out of where I’m supposed to be staying that night. So we get back to this guy’s apartment and I say you know, “I just got a text from my girlfriend and she’s feeling really horrible and I have to go” and he’s like, “can I come with you so we can come back here?” And I’m like, “no, no.” And it wasn’t because he was being sweet, I knew what he wanted and I just didn’t want to give it to him and I felt that I was in this condition, situation, circumstance that even if there wasn’t this other guy, you know, I wanted to get out of this. And so, the tennis pro is, has gotten into a cab and is there waiting around the corner. And so, you know, he takes me back to his apartment. Still every time I pass his apartment on 30th and Second Ave. I still remember it. It’s right next to the Loew’s theater. That night in his apartment we smoked pot and we danced for about three, four hours on one song on loop. What was it? We’ll Meet Again, We’ll Meet Again. And we just pretended that he was a soldier going away and I was his sweetheart and we were just talking and so for hours and hours, I think it was close to morning, we just laid in bed, we made out, and he needed to relieve himself which was fine. I was still pre-op by this point. And he put Visine in my eyes the following morning because I hadn’t really slept. And he gave me the key to his apartment. He said, you know, tonight come back here and we’ll have dinner. And I had a horrible day. I had a wonderful day and I had a horrible day. I had a lovely day because the night before had been magical. I had a horrible day because he didn’t know I was trans. And I knew I had to tell him. And I kind of knew that it was not gonna go well. And so through the whole day I was on edge because here was this fantasy and here was the reality and I knew that when I opened the door that everything was just gonna go poof. And so I go, I have my electrolysis session and I come back, I’m there. He’d had dinner with his sister, he comes back, he brought dinner we have dinner then we have a puff and then I tell him. He was very angry. Hurt. Angry. He was angry, he was angry. So I cried myself to sleep on the couch. ‘Cuz he said, he’s like, “how could you not tell me? You know, what if like I accidentally touched?” I’m like, “I’m sorry.” So I cried myself to sleep on the couch and I woke up the following morning with beautiful puffy eyes and I got up and I went to work. I was devastated. It was Friday. I was devastated. So much so, that I think the only time in my life I’ve ever dry heaved because I was crying so much. It was that day. And then that Sunday in all my devastation, here’s this guy who makes an appointment to see me, he ends up being an hour and a half late and I’m still in Jersey. He shows up, it’s raining, he kind of has his head tilted to the side, his belly a little out, and he comes with his little pick up truck and we go to have sushi. And we have sushi, and we have mango chili ice cream. Then we go to a motel and he has his you know one hitter pipe, and he takes care of me and he’s on the phone with his thing, and we have sex. And I didn’t really want to, but you know he had done all of these things for me and that’s just what I have to do. And then the following, two days later. This is Sunday, so two days later I talk to the tennis pro and he says, “I can’t, I can’t” but then Kevin, he calls me and he says, “I wanted to reach out yesterday, I just didn’t know what is the etiquette and I just really like you and I want to see you again.” And so we have dinner another night that week and he gives me a hundred. We kind of see each other and he was kind of my really damaged knight in shining armor. Seriously damaged. I could tell from early on that he was unstable. He got so drunk he blacked out on a couple of occasions and as he was like yelling at people on the street, he fell into the rose bush and cut half his face. And it was just, it was a lot of stress. It was a lot of stress, but I didn’t have anything else in my life, so I put up with it. I mean here was this guy who was parading me in front of his friends like his arm candy and why wouldn’t I like that? Of course I would like that at that time. And he always had pot, which was great and he was so flattering to me. He was taking care of me, kind of. And then I got to see the not so good side of him. The angry parts. Then I also made the mistake of kind of trying to move in with him in Nyack and after a week I’m like, ok this is not happening. I just really wanted to move out. My mom and I were, we were not seeing eye to eye on anything. My mom in her own way of trying to protect me, she was trying to restrict me, and well, I tried to escape, and I escaped into the life of a very unstable man. I own up to that. I escaped from one life and I ended up in another one that I later had to run out of. Then we decided to move in because I really wanted to move into the city and he was kind of new to the area and he said, “well why don’t we move in together,” and originally it was the idea that we were kind of going to be roommates and well that never happened quite that way. We became significant-ish others who kind of reminds me of War Of The Roses of how things ended. He manipulated me a lot, he threatened me a lot. He was like, “if you do this, so and so that’s going to rent us our apartment, well they’re not going to rent it to you.” And then I would check with them and they’re like, “I didn’t say that.” It was a lot of back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and I was 24, he was 41, I think. Finally, with a whole lot of drama we moved in together, our first apartment on 17th Street, overlooking the morgue entrance for Beth-Israel, very appropriate. It was, there was this rift between my mom and him and I was kind of in the middle. I can totally look back and see I was their turf and each one wanted me on their side. It was bad. It was a bad time. He lost his job, he always blamed him losing his job on me because he said, “because someone had called my office and said I was dating a tranny and it was your friend,” and I don’t know who it was. I don’t know why my friends would call. That’s what he said, that's what he always said. He said that somebody had called, and said you know he was dating a tranny and he was working in construction and that kind of made things bad for him, but I assure you Kevin was more than capable of burning his own bridges, as he did, as he did. Here we’ve moved to New York and he loses his job. So then what do we proceed to do? Me, the person that’s working, 60-70 hours a week, he starts discovering my value on AOL. AOL chat rooms. This is 2002. What people would give to watch a live sex session of a trans person having sex. And somehow he found that, he found that there was a market for that. And I remember the first person. We went to his hotel room so he could sit on the chair and watch us have sex. We would have to smoke pot beforehand because it would calm his nerves and put us in the mood. Some nights there would be a couple of watchers back to back which meant that we had to have sex, I don’t know, like three times in a row. So, yes, I was not escorting anymore, but, and some of them would get a little handsy which then Kevin would have to put them in their place and some of them were lovely people. Strange, but lovely. And it was an array of people. Gay couples, straight, single men, straight couples, you know, kind of like how people go to watch monkeys in a zoo. I was the monkey. Yeah, so he would use me as the bait and then after it was for business purposes. I have to clarify something about Kevin. I think if Kevin was not a child of the south and of a particular generation, and a particular industry, I think he probably would have been able to just be gay. But because, how old would Kevin be now? He would now be in his late fifties in the south and all of that. So, he was in his own closet and all of the damages that had been done to him with his parents. His dad deserting them when he was a child, his mom being a free love mom that wasn’t taking care of him. They were basically white trash and I don’t have judgement, I just want to quantify so you know where he came from. Neglected, abused. He said that he had heart failure because of abundant cocaine use, and alcohol and pills and all of that. And I thought that was awesome. I thought, talk about, I don’t know an achievement, a medal, an ex-party boy. I mean what else could I ask for?
During the first year that we were together I didn’t really register that he was abusing me. I guess because I had just dealt with so much before that. You know like when he would just push me, or get in my face, or yell, or slam the door and leave for three, four hours and then call me in his you know down trodden voice and says, “Pooya, I miss you, I’m sorry, it will never happen again.” And when he would push me, or yell at me, or break something, then the following day there would be a card and flowers or then I said, “if you’re going to get something, at least don’t get flowers because flowers die.” I love fruit and then the fruit baskets kept getting larger and larger. This is all before we moved in. This is all before we even moved in together. I knew, I knew but what was my other option? I didn’t have any. I want people to understand this. People, people who experienced domestic violence cannot see things as clearly as other people can. It’s not their fault. It’s just what they can see at that moment. And they try to make decisions as best as they can at those moments based on what they know. And what they see in themselves. Based on what I knew and what I thought and what I saw, I tried to do the best I could. So it took me a year to figure out that he was abusing me. I thought this is what love is, I thought it will get better. I remember this one night. It was summer. We had moved in together. I think it was summer, maybe it was early fall. And he was taking me to see The Village People at B.B. King’s. We took our ecstasy pills and we’re going and I’m wearing this short skirt with my favorite flat sandals and my see through top and we go and there’s The Village People and there’s our waiter who apparently caught Kevin’s eye and he kept saying his arm was so smooth. I’m like, “ok yeah that’s great” and he said, “well if you want to ask him to come home with us, you can.” Just take that phrase in. Now I look at it and it reeks of manipulation. I didn’t know enough to know that. I thought oh my God, he’s doing this for me because he knows this is what I would enjoy. So I’m standing and watching The Village People and this kid, this young kid, when I say young kid, he was my age, cuz I was a young kid. He passes and I say, “oh my husband is quite taken with you, he seems to think you have very smooth arms.” He’s like, “well thank you.” I said to him, “he said, well if I wanted you to come home with us, that I could. Isn’t that funny?” He said, “well what do you want?” I was like well, I looked at him and I said, “sure, it would be fun” and he said ok. Like I said, I’ve had a colorful life. He had to stay after we left because he had a longer shift and, here, whatever you need it for. Hug it sit on it, put it next to you, whatever.
[ Annotation 8 ]
JK: Oh.
PM: And so we go back to our apartment and we’re waiting for him and he shows up, he comes. He comes with a six pack, not on his abs, but actually coming with a six pack. And he comes and we sit there and I think we may have a puff or two. And we’re sitting on our futon which was also our couch and I’m sitting between the two of them and kind of one side of me is leaning on one, one side of me is leaning on the other one and somehow I’m laying there topless. And funny enough, I think each of them were holding one of my boobs. And it gets, it ends up getting late. I mean it doesn’t go beyond that, that is where it is. And I think in all honesty, I think Kevin was just love deprived, intimacy deprived and that had fucked him up really bad. So was I, and this guy, I don't know what he thought was gonna happen, but I mean nothing happened and when he was about to leave, I think it was probably two, three o’clock in the morning, he says, “so whose idea was it?” Well, he said you know, “I liked the idea.” And we were going to see each other again but it never happened. But that wasn’t enough for Kevin that night, so he had to go back on the internet to find the next guy to come and take his place. Looking back, I mean what do you think you’re going to find when you’re looking for some guy who is cruising the internet at three o’clock in the morning. Do you think he is going to come there to talk about his deep reflection on life? Especially when you’re dangling my photo in front of them? What do you think? So here comes this kid, good looking kid. He’s on the couch and we’re talking and we’re flirting and Kevin was there, but by this point, dark Kevin was coming to the surface. And his eyes were, you know that look that I’m giving you, of staring at me, and I learned to look out for that look. And he got mad because he said, “So why don’t you guys just fuck already?” And Kevin was a big guy, he said in college, “they used to call me the bull.” So, well, that’s kind of as far as that went. But that still wasn’t enough for Kevin. So he went back online and found this coked up kid. And this one was a kid. He couldn’t have been more than 20, 21. And he was crashing. To be honest with you, I don’t know what Kevin thought or wanted to happen. I don’t know. So here’s this kid crashing on our couch and I’m holding him through his crashing. And that’s how that night ended. That was the essence of our relationship. More couples, more singles, coming, being presented to me. And less and less they were presented to me and more and more I was told that this is what’s happening. You know for some period, oh then came my surgery, so from when we moved until my surgery, about six, seven months. And Kevin was angry that he was not consulted for the surgery. And as I said in my Advocate article, I mean it was non negotiable. I had come to this country to do that. There wasn’t a person that was going to stand in that way. There wasn’t a consult. I mean if I’m going to have a hysterectomy I’m not going to ask are you ok with me having a hysterectomy. It’s none of anybody’s business. But then I made the appointment for the surgeon. It ended up being February of 2003. I also bought his ticket so that he could come and be there for a couple of days with me. It was bad. It was bad. He came, but we were all staying at a convalescence home so there were other people who had their surgeries or were going to have their surgeries, this is something that people know more about now. There’s actually a play written about it in Thailand. It’s kind of like a community of people who have just had their surgeries, people who are gonna have their surgeries. People and so you kind of get these people who are different places in either their convalescence or who are getting ready for their surgery. I would say there are probably ten other people in the house. And the night before Kevin was fighting with me. The night before probably the biggest surgery of my life. He was fighting, yelling, threatening to leave me. And of course, since I can’t not do anything cinematically, it’s February in outskirts on Montreal, with like six feet of snow and it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s isolated, and just the night before my surgery that’s how it instead of, “Pooya, I love you,” “Pooya, it’s going to be ok,” I guess what do I need that stuff, right? So then comes the surgery, thank God I was out during. And then they bring me back to my room, I’m on morphine. Apparently one of the first things that came out of my mouth was, “Let’s all have an orgy!” Very Pooya, very Pooya. And as I’m slowly coming to, and I’m on morphine and I don’t think Kevin could understand, that’s how damaged he was. Because I remember he was fighting with me and I was on morphine. If for no other reason, you can’t fight with someone on morphine, they understand only half of what you’re saying! Why would you fight with someone on morphine? Like what can they fight with you with? And he did. Again, of course his threat that he was leaving. And there I laid in the bed for hours on that day as there were moments that I needed morphine. He was gone for like four, five hours and then he came back at some point. So the surgery itself was hard, kind of reeling back from that, it was hard. But it was wonderful. I don’t regret anything. Hi my love. Who loves you? And then we went, I think by the time I had gone back to the convalescence home, Kevin was back in New York. And people ask me, they say, “why do you let him do that?” I don’t know if I had an answer. I did because I didn’t know better. And then I was there for a few weeks. There were these lovely nurses that took care of you and fed you and taught you how to take care of yourself and dilate and eat and it was really cold. It was really cold, let me tell you. Taking two, three baths a day, oh my God it was cold. But I got to have a certain sense of community. There were people who had surgery when I had. There was one woman who was actually refused to have the surgery because last minute as they were about to go into surgery they realize she has latex allergy. And then it was time for me to come back. I did. I had my little donut that I could sit on and I lied when they asked me what is it. I said I had hip surgery. What was I going to say? I come back to New York. I was so happy to be back in New York. I think isolated in the middle of nowhere so I come back and my mom is at our house and while I was there, Kevin had moved us. Like we had looked at a new apartment. Like the move was also happening while I was away. Which I guess was great because then I come back to this new house. Then the second day that I’m there and my mom is there to take care of me things weren’t good between my mom and I back then. I don’t know I guess I didn’t want her to be there and the first day I was back I started vacuuming and moving around which caused me to start having bleeding for like non ending but very slow bleeding for like two days which made me very weak. And they basically say, “she shouldn’t have been vacuuming because there’s the vibrations of that which are opening the wound.” No one can ever say everything I do is smart. But it took me about a month after that to be able to move around and all of that stuff. Kevin was always accusing me of having affairs and then as soon as he kept accusing me, I started having affairs. Not good ones, but affairs. I still had my stitches and I don’t know what he thought was going on on my phone, but whatever it was at that moment it wasn’t. I’m not saying at no point there wasn’t, but I was faithful to him for a while. And then he was just accusing me and just thought it was like my shadow. He was having a hard time if I was talking to myself in the mirror. That’s how psycho he’d gotten. And he wanted to see what was on my phone and I didn’t want to give him my phone. I don’t have to. So he just took the phone and he pushed me against the brick wall and so I was kind of like here and I ended up there. That’s how much strength he put behind that push. So much so that I actually scratched my shoulder on the bricks. That’s how hard of a push it was. Then after the surgery we had a couple of good months. We had a few good months. You know I had healed. He was kind of used to the new me and he realized that I wasn’t leaving him. It was a good little while. He was still going and finding people online and telling me, “what do you think?” “Ok, sure”. I would cook, I was kind of like a risqué June Cleaver. I’d be cooking for our guests and believe me our guests ranged from ok, to great to not so ok. And he was always surprised that he was using me as bait to attract these people, but when they spent more time with me and they gave me more attention, he felt left out. Which I totally understand but then I’m like why do you do it the way that you do it and expect this other result, which would totally not come from that thing that you’re doing. Long story short, it was a whole lot of feeling manipulated. I don’t think it even registered as being manipulated at that time. It was just that it was strange. There was this young couple, and they really liked me and as they were leaving they look at Kevin and say, “Can we take her home with us?” You could imagine how that comment went. And one time, one night when Kevin was really fucked up, seriously fucked up. He actually said, he said, “If it was as easy for me to find people that are attracted to me, maybe I wouldn’t be so afraid of you going away.” But it’s almost like the cliche, when you are so afraid of losing something, you do things that is gonna make you lose that thing. And that’s exactly what he did. Because it was kind of fun. We were playing house. I was cooking, we had gotten a rhythm in. But he was kind of, his inner demons, it was very hard. And then we got separated for two months, we got back together after two months. We got married two weeks after that because of course it’s always great to get married on a whim. We all know how well that turned out for Britney. We did get married, October 17, 2003. And this is when I had also just started massage school at night. I was working part time during the day as a designer. I was going to school at night. And apparently I was being a frisky swinger momma in between. It had potential, life had potential, but then there was always head butting. But there were times when it was like, maybe, maybe, maybe we can get past this. Somehow. We didn’t. We never did. And we were together for six months, then we got separated for a month. For some reason I still can’t remember if this six month period ended the night he tried to kill me or if that was the last time we got together. So six months, got separated for a month, then got back together for a month and that was it. During this time, he managed to smash my laptop, he managed to staple a guy’s hand with a stapler because he thought I was having an affair with him. Whereas it was actually him pretending to be me online to lure him you know. I mean I don’t want to say I’m ashamed of this part of my life because I am not ashamed but there are parts of it I look at and I’m like, I have nothing to say. Then there was the marriage counseling we were going to. We went to for five weeks and it ended by me just saying I think it’s over and I just want to end it the best way we can with as little collateral damage as possible. But by that time, Kevin had started talking because in the first sessions he didn’t think we had a problem. But by the last sessions he said, “well,I want us to stay together.” I’m like, “where were you when we started these?” And then when we walked outside the counselor’s appointment, he was grinding his teeth and mumbling under his breath, “you did this to me”. We get home, then he leaves, then he comes back five hours later which wasn’t new to me because he did that a lot. When I’d actually wake up at two o’clock in the morning in the dark and seeing this body standing next to me and looking up and seeing that he’s watching me sleep and saying, “Who’s Jim Danner?” Jim Danner had been a benefactor of mine before I met Kevin and we had kind of stayed in touch. I mean we didn’t meet but we had kind of stayed in touch. And I guess I had emailed him and he had found that email on my computer. When I tell you psycho. Psycho, psycho. But that night after the counseling was really the most memorable thing I remember which I talked about in the one woman show. And that’s the night where he came back home and he was in bed and I think he was crying and he wanted me to hold him and I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I wanted to but I don’t know if I wanted to. I wish I could have, but I couldn’t and then he just lost it and turned and got on top of me and started choking me. And I was fighting back. I couldn’t hear sound anymore, like I, because there was no oxygen getting to my brain, my senses were, I don’t know what was happening. I don’t know physiologically what it was, but I remember not being able to hear anything. I could see him doing it, I could see me trying to fight back, but I couldn’t hear what was happening. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, your brain goes off, I guess it’s like a blackout almost. And then he let go. Then he got up and we had posters, old posters that were framed and I don’t know how or why, but he like took those and like started smashing them and then he walked out and he was yelling at me. The next day I had bruises and stuff. I still for some reason don’t remember if that was the last time we were together or if that was the second to last time that we were together. He had called my office and I don’t know what things he had told my boss about me. Whereas my boss came into my room and said, “you know he said some really disgusting things. And you tell him that if he ever calls here again, I will call the police.” I guess he was trying to get me fired. That’s what Kevin was trying to do. He was that vindictive. I didn’t cave, I didn’t cave. He left me to my own devices. I couldn’t really afford the rent, but I was resourceful, if you may, and I figured out a way to survive. I mean there was a lot of bickering back and forth of, “oh I would come back if you asked me to come back” and I basically told him, “I guess it’s not your good day. Because I don’t want you to come back.” Things had happened in such a bad way that I had ordered a Jack LaLane juicer for him. It arrived, I think it was on his birthday. And that’s why I always remember his birthday and the day he left me because it was the same day. We’d had a fight, and he’d gone and the juicer came, and I told the person who’d brought it right as she brought it, “let me just sign. You can return it. I don’t want this.” And he said “I don’t feel loved.” It was a Saturday, Saturday. I didn’t know how I was going to survive, but I guess that is just in vein with everything else that I’ve ever done. I don’t usually know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it. I didn’t ask him to come back. I didn’t want him to come back. I was also a little emboldened because there was this guy who said he would help me and later he found out that he didn’t really mean it. That, “oh you shouldn’t have left him because of me.” That’s ok, that’s ok. Then after everything had settled, a few months later he called me and said, “oh how are you? Let’s get together.” I’m like, “no we’re good, we’re good.” I’ve also learned in my life that you should rely very little on what people say. Very, very little. So there was last six months of being at that apartment that Kevin and I shared. It was very uncomfortable because for a few months after that night had happened, I would come home and I would leave the door open and I would go from the first door and the first light and I would open every door and turn on every light just to make sure he wasn’t waiting there for me. I would go all the way to the end of the apartment and I would come back and I would close the door, I would go and I was scared. I was scared. I don’t usually say that, but I was scared. We had four cases of domestic violence. Our neighbors. I never, I never called the cops on him. I never did. Other people did. I didn't. But finally things kind of moved together. At the same time, the job I was freelancing at one of their permanent designers left and well I’d been freelancing there and I came very highly recommended by one of the other designers who had worked with me there. They liked my work. So I got asked to come on full time. I said I’m going to school at night and at first they didn’t want someone who had other obligations, so then I had another deal. So then what they ended up having to do, they ended up paying me four thousand dollars more than they had originally anticipated, because the other designer they had taken, the day that she had shown up, it turned out that she did not actually have the qualifications she claimed she had. And that allowed me to then rent another apartment and move out of this place, which meant I didn’t have a link with Kevin with that. That was New Year of 2004 going into 2005. Yes. We got all of our stuff out of that apartment I think between Christmas and New Years. He didn’t lose the opportunity to berate me in front of the movers which was fine. He took things from the apartment not because he wanted to use them but he wanted to make sure that I didn’t have them even though they just went into storage including my very beloved stove top waffle iron that I had that I used to make waffles with for us on Sunday mornings. I have to tell you they were kick ass waffles I used to make.
JK: I have no doubt.
PM: They were. They were big and square and I would cover them with sliced strawberries and sliced bananas with a drizzle of cream and honey. And so when I finally moved it was a few days before I think New Years and I got in my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and when he left me on that corner and I said goodbye to him, I cried all the way. But it was a cry of freedom. I didn’t have to deal with him anymore. I was done. That was great. So then after that it was kind of a, things were ok. I had a full time corporate job. I went to massage school at night. This went on for about a year and a half, you know, crazy schedule during the day, school at night. New apartment. I met my boyfriend after that, that I’ve now known each other twelve years. We haven’t dated seven out of those twelve, but I still know him and he’s become very much a part of my life. He’s her papa actually. And you know moved on. I enjoyed my summer Saturdays going to Film Center Cafe. Having a little wake and bake before and then going there and having unlimited mimosas and then going and laying out in my bikini in Bryant Park. I was about twenty-seven, twenty-eight. And it was good, it was good for a few years. Then I finished massage school, I got licensed, I was still at my old apartment. I started building a massage practice from there and when I felt that it was the right time to make the move, I bought this, I moved, I resigned from my design job and on August 17, 2007 is the day that I started only doing massage. Which funny enough. August 15-17 is also when my mom and I had first moved to Leonia. And it also happened to be my first day of doing just massage here. I was also working with a chiropractor for a while. That first year I was making a good deal of money. I was also working seven days a week, I was having somewhere between twenty and thirty clients a week. The things I’ve seen, the advances people have made, the things I’ve put up with, I think my whole life is just wrapped in patriarchy, and sexual harassment and misogyny and all of that. I don’t know how to judge it without judging my whole life. I just know that what I’ve tried to do in my life is survive the best I can. Sometimes when you have to do that, you also have to give up a lot of your soul and I have, but I can say I don’t think I’ve ever given up any of my heart. I have had wonderful people come through my life. I’ve healed people. Sure, I’ve also had people that have done things that need not be mentioned, but I have fallen in love many times, I have healed people. I have made connections with people, I have paid my mortgage. I was able to pay back an additional sixty thousand dollars that I borrowed from my parents to buy this place. I was able to pay that back within three years. My childhood friend used to have his birthdays in Vegas. I went there for a few years, into my early thirties. I met a lot of young—
[Editor’s Note: The audio recorder involuntary malfunctioned at this point in the interview, concluding the available transcript.]