Read an Excerpt from the Posthumous Novel of Murdered Iranian Punk Ali Eskandarian

In November 2013, Ali Eskandarian was shot dead in an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, along with his friends Soroush and Aresh Farazmand, two members of the Iranian punk band Yellow Dogs. Their killer, a fellow Iranian musician, then shot and killed himself.

Before the tragedy, Ali had been in touch with a publisher about the semi-autobiographical novel he'd written. Now published posthumously, Golden Years is the story of a young Iranian dissident who left his country for the promise of artistic freedom in the United States via a haze of drugs, alcohol, sex, and poverty. Below is an excerpt from it, published exclusively on VICE.

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I salute the dead of the war that engulfed the better part of my childhood, the children especially, for they were the lucky ones. I on the other hand have never known luck and was spared. In the years that followed and through some fiendish thought process I was made to feel lucky to exist, but to my thinking the lucky ones were taken away with the bombs and the bullets, the gas and the missiles. They went right back to the eternal comforts of the spirit world.

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My alarm clock goes off at 5.45AM. I lie there in a daze and after realizing who, what, and where I am, get up and drag myself into the bathroom. The beard has to go. According to Koli's lawyer it is best not to resemble a terrorist when you walk into an office belonging to the Department of Homeland Security. I start to take my winter beard off then jump into the shower and pray to the hot-water gods to give me time to wash and condition my hair.

"My hair won't look like this tomorrow," I had promised Koli's lawyer and her assistant the night before at our pre-hearing meeting.

"Good. You guys need to clean yourselves up. If you show up looking like this tomorrow I'm dropping the case," the lawyer had said only half jokingly. We looked like musicians, as far as I was concerned, but you can't argue with a lawyer who has never lost a case of this kind. Sitting there in the lounge of the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, tired and hungover, listening to the endless stream of information, I was forced to quickly grasp the seriousness of the game at hand. I was to be the interpreter at the asylum hearing after all, with the important job of translating English into Farsi and back into English again. My Farsi is not as good as it should be, but Koli and I understand each other perfectly well.

"Now as we've already told you, we're trying to be as harsh as possible with you guys so you'll be ready for anything they can throw at you," the assistant said before tearing into us: "What about this?" and "Oh, really? Your statement seems to indicate otherwise…and when was that date again? No, wait for the translation. Go ahead and translate please."

Koli certainly had a strong case by all standards of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, hey, you never know what can go wrong at these things, according to the attorneys. My head was threatening to explode with all the information and the constant switches between languages. My circulatory system was already in bad shape from a bout of heavy drinking the night before at a renowned Iranian-American artist's home. The kids (which kids?) were there too and it had been an okay night. I had played a few songs at the host's request and so had a few others. The wine and liquor were flowing, it was a good time, but now they were having grievous effects on me after only one or two hours of sleep and a full day at the office to pay the bills.

The left atrium of my heart wasn't getting the proper amount of blood, and apparently my pulmonary vein needed something it wasn't getting. That was my self-diagnosis, anyway, and I couldn't wait to move on to the self-medication phase. After about three hours the attorneys were finished with us and sent us home with lots of homework and last-minute fact-finding missions, omissions to the official statement, and lots of material for memorization. Koli seemed to prematurely age a few years. We don't fall asleep at normal hours, Koli normally goes to bed around 8:00 AM, so there was no point in trying to sleep. We decided to gobble up as much speed as we could and push it all the way through to the next day. Hell, the more meek and distressed Koli looked, the better, right? He was after all supposed to be afraid for his life. If he gets sent back he'll be imprisoned. As soon as the plane lands in Tehran he'll be seized and dragged through the streets to be publicly flogged and later hanged in the center of town. Or that was the way I understood it anyway and my job as the translator called for me to put myself in Koli's place and feel every ounce of fear he felt.

This was no joking matter. This was the moment of truth. One gets more than a single chance for asylum but after a first rejection the odds for success naturally diminish a bit, so it was absolutely imperative that we charmed the pants off of the judge or agent or whatever they call themselves to get this young man asylum in these here United States. So we stayed up all night and memorized his statement, which was almost 40 pages long, with many names, dates, and places to remember. By 5:00 AM I was beginning to feel a little sideways so I smoked some hash and told Koli to make sure I was awake in time to take a shower.

"You want to eat some breakfast?" Koli asked me after I got out of the shower.

"Shit, no, just give me another pill. I can't eat anything yet," I said.

The asylum office is out in the boondocks, all the way out on the edge of Queens. It's a hell of a weird place to make all the immigrants go to beg for their lives. I really wonder what kind of a sadistic bastard picked the location. It's one of those office buildings that were built all over America in the 80s, you can see them all over Dallas for example, or Atlanta, Charlotte, anywhere really, and it reflects that decade's monumental obsession with ugliness, greed, and efficiency—in America anyway. In the lobby, which sports a semi-atrium, there are horrendous copies of Greek statues, fake plants, a non-working fountain, and a dirty diner that serves cheap food. All appointments are set very early in the morning and if you're late then you're fucked. That's one of the reasons they put the office way the hell out there I think. There is no subway stop close by. You have to take the subway to the end of the line then transfer to a bus for a 45-minute ride out to the edge of the city for a 7:00 AM appointment. But hey, if you want to stay in the US then you better do what it takes, right? We were taking the kids' van and didn't have to concern ourselves with public transportation but it was still hard to find the place even with the GPS on Koli's phone. We got there with a minute or so to spare and waited in the long line with all the other immigrants. Most of the people looked to be Chinese, many others were from Arab nations, and of course there were many Africans, too.

"Take everything out of your pockets and place it in the bin, take off your belts, have your ID in hand," a very large and serious black female security guard was yelling at everybody.

"Hey, it's the Beatles," she said with a big flirtatious smile as she passed us. Koli and I smiled and nodded back at her.

Once past the security we sat down in the waiting area and waited for Koli's lawyers to arrive.

"You better give me another one of those pills," I told Koli, and he did before saying, "Look at all the Chinese, they're dressed like they don't give a shit."

"They don't," I said before swallowing the pill. "Look at them, it's one lawyer per ten or 15 of them. They come over here as indentured servants basically and their boss gets them a cheap lawyer while they work off their insurmountable debt. Hell, they can get rejected and keep working illegally, it doesn't matter. Look how relaxed and uninterested they all are. That's the look you get when you're fucked on all fronts."

"Yeah, well, I'm scared shitless," Koli said.

"Good, good. Stay that way," I said.

Just then the lawyers arrived. Koli was paying a steep price for his legal counsel, they were not here to disappoint, and looked like they meant serious business. Also they were showing lots of leg and cleavage.

"I hope we have a male judge, Koli, look at these two."

"Yeah, they look about ready, don't they?" he said.

The lawyer and her assistant sat down next to us and were impressed by the way we looked as well. "You guys cleaned up very nicely," the lawyer said, and her assistant confirmed this by nodding. Everybody in the place was now staring at us. Who are these people? they seemed to be saying. We looked like a serious case. The look on the judge/agent of the Department of Homeland Security's face when he came out to greet us was one of bewilderment and excitement. From this point forward I can't say much what happened unless I want to violate my confidentiality agreement with high-powered lawyers and the United States government, but I can say that it was one theatrical hoot. The trip we laid on the poor agent, all true of course, was one for the ages. He didn't know what to make of all the grim details reminiscent of Nazi interrogation techniques, along with ghastly tales of imprisonment, torture, and a campaign by the Iranian government to wreak havoc on a young man's life and all others like him. Needless to say, we felt pretty confident walking out of that office after about six hours of back and forth questioning, with very few breaks in between.

"Let's celebrate," the lawyer said. "Drinks on me." Which of course meant that the drinks were on Koli's tab, but what the hell, he has a rich father.

"You're pretty good at this interpreting thing," the assistant said to me on the way to the van.

"Yeah, I'm seeing a bright future ahead. I can rent a kiosk at JFK and snatch them up right after they step off the plane. Charge five hundred bucks a head and make a thriving business for myself. I'll of course need plenty of legal counsel before then so I guess we'll be in touch."

Golden Years is out now published by Faber and Faber. © Estate of Ali Eskandarian 2016