I have two young children, a boy and a girl. Anyone who has children will tell you they are the best things in the world. They’re also the most exhausting things. When you have young kids at home, your entire goal, from the moment they wake up, is to make them tired. All day you’re saying things like, “Run, run! Climb, climb! Fly! You can fly! Try flapping your arms. You’ll fly!” I even purchased a trampoline to accelerate their exhaustion—sort of like playtime steroids for children. I’ll sit outside with a cold glass of lemonade watching them bounce, for hours if I have to, whatever it takes to get the job done. “Do a flip! Okay, now do another flip. Now flip your sister. Now flip her while flipping yourself. Now bounce for forty-five minutes while flipping the dog. I know we don’t have a dog. Go chase one and bring it back and bounce it on the trampoline while flipping your sister.” All the while I’m smiling at how tired this is making them, and how smart I am for thinking of it, so long as no one falls off and breaks an appendage.
No matter how elaborate your scheming, when it comes time to go to bed, kids don’t want to sleep. It’s like they’re allergic to it. They think if they sleep they will be missing some of the fun that’s coming when they’re conked out. But there’s no fun coming. As a parent, you’re too exhausted for fun. You’ve been watching them bounce on the trampoline all day. Watching kids bounce can be an exhausting exercise when you’re over forty.
Here’s what you have to do if you have babies or are expecting babies at some point: sleep train. Let the little, ungrateful, time-consuming brats cry it out when they’re about six months old. You just let them cry and cry in the crib until they cry their bald little heads to sleep. Your wife will want to go in to pick them up and soothe them, but you have to be strong and do anything you can to keep her out. Sing to her, write her some poetry, turn on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Whatever it takes, because after three or four days of crying, the baby will learn to sleep and life goes on. It’s a very modern, Western, and cold-blooded method, but it works. Unfortunately, my wife and I come from immigrant backgrounds. Immigrants don’t sleep train. Immigrants are all in the bed together. I’m in the bed. My wife’s in the bed. The baby’s in the bed. My mother-in-law is in the bed. There’s a rooster in the bed. My cousins are under the bed. No one is sleeping. And we’re all watching the Kardashians!
Always Pack Ice Age
I’m not sleeping much anyway. But like most parents, I love my kids, so I try to work my schedule to be around them as much as possible. Sometimes that means taking them on the road with me. We first did this when my wife and I only had our son and I had a one-month tour in the Middle East. At the time he was a year and a half and we quickly learned a great lesson—Ice Age can be your best friend. Or better said, any animation can calm your kid down, get him quiet, and stop the other passengers from giving you the dirty looks they’ve been issuing you since the plane took off and your kid began screaming. When this would happen, I would usually hand the kid off to my wife and start smiling at the other passengers: “Yeah, his mother really hasn’t done a good job with him. If we had moved to Iran when he was born like I suggested, he would be much better behaved. Because in Iran, if you cry on a plane they cut off your hands. It’s true. I heard it on Fox News.”
That was our first trip, with our first kid. We had no idea what we were doing. We packed the stuff we thought we needed—milk, diapers, toys, whiskey (just in case the kid needed to be drugged), extra whiskey (just in case that didn’t work and we needed to be drugged). Halfway through our flight, my son was getting restless and had to be walked. This is something kids do, walk up and down the aisle for hours, with no destination, just seeing what everyone else is doing. You would think they’re training for a marathon—some little toddler marathon where they walk for 26.2 miles, just waddling along and taking milk breaks, but no pee breaks because they’re racing in diapers. (By the way, if any marathoner is reading this now, that’s not a bad idea. Next time you’re in a race try wearing a diaper and see how much that cuts off your time. You’re welcome.)
As I walked him up and down the aisle, acting like his personal trainer, the boy caught a glimpse of Ice Age on someone’s screen. He froze. It was a magical moment because I had been pleading with him for an hour to relax and take a seat. I had tried every ploy and then, bam! It happened. He saw the cartoon and he gave up on his ambition to set the world walking record at thirty thousand feet.
Soon after that flight, we purchased every video viewing device we could get our hands on. First it was a video player with a headset. Then it was an iPad where we downloaded a ton of programs. Then it was an iPod, which had the same programs but on a smaller screen. Every time our son would act up on a plane, we would queue up Ice Age, shove a device at his face, and he would be hypnotized. We even bought an old DVD of Tom and Jerry in Dubai, most likely a bootleg. The combined efforts of that cat and mouse beating the shit out of each other with pots and pans got us through our one-month journey across the Middle East. I don’t know if I will regret this one day when he comes home from school and they tell me he banged someone over the head with a frying pan, but for those few weeks traveling was magical.
The Minibar, My Wingman
Traveling with kids has its own set of challenges. A friend gave me sound advice when she said that you should book the flight for their sleep time and make sure you don’t have any layovers. Just make it as streamlined as possible. It’s like you’re a Navy SEAL team and you need to get them from point A to B in the most sedated state possible.
And getting them there is only half the battle. When you’re traveling without kids, you get into a city and ask the concierge if there are any plays you should see, or if there are any restaurants you should visit, or, if it happens to be your thing, is there a specific park you should go to in order to score some weed, hash, heroin, crack, ice cream, etc. Sometimes you just check into the hotel, go upstairs, and take a nap. Who knows, maybe you watch TV. CNN? Sure. ESPN? Why not? Adult channels? Hey, you only live once.
When you’re traveling with kids, it’s a whole different experience. Arriving in the hotel, you spend the first thirty minutes dragging the kid away from the fountain they’ve put in the middle of the lobby. Why do hotels feel like they need a fountain in the lobby? Do they think the guests checking in will want to go for a quick swim? Is it the soothing sound that’s supposed to distract you from the fact that you’re in a concrete building in a chain hotel in some bustling city that’s anything but soothing? A toddler during check-in turns you into a lifeguard, the lobby warden, and a grief counselor, all at once. “Come here. Here! Let’s go. Come on. Yes, that’s water. Yes, fishy. You want to throw a coin in there? Here’s a coin. Ow! Don’t throw it AT Daddy! No, Daddy’s not angry. Stop crying! STOP CRYING, GODDAMMIT! Sorry, Daddy didn’t mean to cuss. No, don’t tell Mommy! Here, watch Ice Age!”
When you travel with a toddler, the first thing you do in the hotel room is empty the minibar because your kid will insist on opening it and fondling all the items. You place the mini bottles of whiskey, vodka, and tequila on the top shelf in the closet in hopes that you will return it at the end of your trip. But you’re only fooling yourself because after a full day of wrestling with the kid, you will see those bottles just sitting there speaking to you: “Drink me! You know you need me. Just a taste won’t hurt. Open me up and drink me with your wife. If you get her drunk enough she may actually have sex with you. I can be your wingman. I know I’m overpriced, but the kid’s asleep. Anything is possible! You deserve a little luxury.”
The concierge at a hotel is your best friend—the third parent in this deal, really. This is a person who is in it with you—he wants to help because, like you, he wants to tire the kid out so he or she sleeps instead of irritating other guests and swimming in the fountain. Does the hotel have activities? Is there a pool? Is there a kids’ space where you can take the kid and run him around? You’re exhausted from your twenty-hour flight into a completely different time zone, but you can’t just tell the kid to chill. He won’t do it. He’s on Los Angeles time, and even though it’s 9:00 p.m. in Dubai, it’s only 9:00 a.m. in Los Angeles. He’s just waking up! So you take the kid down to the lobby and have him play with the fountain again because the pool and the kids’ space are closed. Besides, the kids’ space will cost you fifty bucks for a half hour, and it’s just a room with a few books, some videos, and enough phlegmy viruses to cause an influenza outbreak in most American cities.
Soon the time difference, a near-fountain-drowning, and subsequent sea rescue by you have the expected effect and the kid runs out of energy. Then you put him in bed with a mountain of pillows around him so he won’t roll out and onto the floor, and eventually out of the hotel room, which is totally possible because you’re about to get pretty damn drunk. Now it’s party time. You and your wife get situated in the TV area (yes, you have to get a suite when you have a kid), and you quickly realize that the baby will be getting up in a few hours, which means you have to down those miniature bottles pronto! You drink, you flirt, you stretch. Looks like the sex is finally going to happen. You go to the bathroom to freshen up, and by the time you return, you look over and you’ve managed to put your wife to sleep with all the booze you’ve given her in such a short time. You glare at that tequila bottle and think, What happened to the sex? What kind of wingman are you? You lied to me.
The next day, you wake up exhausted and take your kid to the hotel fountain for his morning exercise, only to learn he’s now tired of that activity. So you consult with your old friend, the concierge, about local parks or children’s museums. In Amman we took him to the king’s car museum, where a collection of cars the king and his father had accumulated were on display. This also included the task of keeping him behind the velvet ropes and not touching the cars. Velvet ropes are meant to keep kids away from pricey items, but they have the opposite effect. Kids see these ropes and think it would be fun to go under them and around them and over them. Instead of looking at it nicely, they eventually fall into the pricey item that the rope was supposed to protect and break it. It’s a disaster!
In Beirut, my wife took our son to the kids’ play area to give me time to nap. I hadn’t noticed, but most of the nannies in Lebanon were Indian, and so is my wife. Just as I was settling in, she came barging back into the room.
“I’m appalled!” she shouted.
“What happened?”
“They thought I was his nanny.”
“Why would they think that?”
“Because all the nannies are Indian.”
I needed to sleep. And in order to do that, I needed to get in front of this situation. “I know. I’m appalled, too,” I replied. “You go back and let them know that he’s your son. I’ll stay here in bed thinking of a long letter we can write the Lebanese government as soon as I’m up from my nap.”
“I’m not going back.”
“If you don’t go back I’ll be forced to call the hotel management and let them know my nanny is acting up!”
That joke didn’t go over too well. A few minutes later I found myself in the kids’ play area with my son and the Indian nannies while my wife was upstairs napping.
Dead Horse, Wet Tears
One of my best feelings is when I’m returning from a trip and my plane is hovering above Los Angeles. I’ve traveled the world and there really isn’t any other place that has the L.A. weather. No matter where I’m coming from, chances are the weather I’m flying home to is nicer. The bigger excitement comes in knowing I will be seeing my family soon. Having children is like being Fred Flintstone and coming home to Dino the dinosaur. They rush to see you and hug you and hold your hand. You’re their hero and those first moments back are magical. Of course, ask any parent and they’ll tell you this feeling fades when that same night they start getting tired, having meltdowns, and screaming in your ear. Quickly you go from being happy to be home to screaming at them to go to bed. Someone once said, “If you’re not yelling at your kids then you’re not spending enough time with them.” At that point you start planning your next trip away from the little runts.
My kids have managed to make me more sensitive. Before my children were born, I didn’t get emotional that often. But ever since they came into my life, things have changed. When my son was an infant, I started getting teary eyed watching commercials. There was one Tide commercial where a dad was drying his son with a towel and I remember thinking how beautiful it was. The next thing I knew I was tearing up. Soon I wasn’t just crying about being a father, but also about becoming such a pussy, and contemplating when all this nonsense began, and how pissed off my wife would be if she caught me crying during Tide commercials. We don’t even use Tide!
It wasn’t just the one time either. Another time I was watching an HBO show called Luck on an airplane where a horse had fallen in a race and had to be put to sleep. They showed a close-up of the horse’s eye as it lay on the ground. I’m not an animal person, but I found myself inexplicably weeping. Crying on an airplane is extra awkward because you’re surrounded by people and you try to hide it by continuing to look straight ahead as you weep. That works until you begin sniffling and then the people around you start giving you weird looks, so you have to point at the screen to show them the dying horse.
“They’re putting him to sleep. Can you believe it?”
“It’s a TV show. Get ahold of yourself.”
“I don’t know who’s playing the part of the horse,” you mutter, trying to save face as you wipe away snot, a giant, man-sized booger. “But they’re doing a really great job. Must be Daniel Day-Lewis. Totally believable.”
Double Baby Duty
When I was a child, my dad taught me that men don’t cry, but growing up in Iran we didn’t have laundry detergent commercials with such exceptional acting. Once I had my own kids, they taught me that it’s okay to cry, just not on airplanes. These two worlds came together when my dad came to Los Angeles to spend the last few months of his life with us. He had been living in Tehran and had been sick. Toward the end of his life he was on all kinds of medications: Xanax, Percocet, Ambien, you name it. He was a pharmaceutical company’s wet dream. I don’t know if it’s an Iranian thing, but every older Iranian I know seems to be on a bunch of medications at the same time. I don’t think they go to the doctor. They just meet at parties and prescribe medications to one another. Everyone has a doctor in the family, so getting the prescriptions filled is easy. No one monitors if the drugs are safe to take together. They just take them, zone out, and relay the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals at the next gathering. I’m guessing that teenagers do this same sort of thing, but with ecstasy, cocaine, and other mood-enhancing drugs. The old folks take stuff to slow them down, and the young folks take stuff to speed them up. Same idea, just fifty years apart.
When my dad came to stay with us, he wasn’t in good shape. It was sad watching illness consume a man who had been such a lion in life. He was the one who taught me that anything is possible and to never sweat the small stuff. My dad had always given me the feeling that you can take on the world and win. I get a lot of my confidence from him. But there he was, at seventy-six, unable to beat time. All those years of living hard caught up to him. He liked to say he was seventy-six but had lived the life of a seven-hundred-year-old.
It was important for me to have my dad meet my son even in the state he was in. My son was an infant when my father arrived in Los Angeles. Quickly I was reminded of how things were done old school versus how they are done today. At one point the baby was crying and my dad needed a glass of water.
“Son, can you pelease get me a glass of vater?”
“Give me a second, Dad, I have to soothe the baby. He’s crying.”
“He is a baby. Dat’s vhat babies do. Dey cry.”
“I know that, Dad, but I need to rock him.”
“Rock him? You vant him to be a man or a pussy?”
“He’s a baby!”
“And I am your fadder. Get me deh vater.”
“Dad, chill! Here, have another Xanax.”
“Tank you. Now, I need some vater to take it.”
It was like having two babies in the house.
My father had been in the hospital because of complications from an operation he had to remove a benign tumor above his eye. Once the tumor was removed, there was a space in his brain that eventually caused seizures. It was one of the toughest things in my life to watch my father have seizures in front of my eyes and not be able to do anything about it. I remember New Year’s Eve 2008 going out to celebrate with my wife and then having to go to the hospital to spend the night with my dad, who had been put into a coma to stop the seizures. We had hopes that he would make a comeback, but that was not to be.
He hung in there until March 2009, when we got a call from the hospital telling us that he’d had a stroke. I will never forget the nurse who was so good to us at the hospital. When you are going through something like that, once in a while you have an angel come into your life. For my family, that angel was our male nurse Colin. He was very sensitive and caring to my dad and he called my sister the day my dad had the stroke to let her know. He told her they could resuscitate him but that he would not make a good recovery and it could just extend his misery. My sister asked what Colin would do if it were his own father and he said, “I would let him go with some dignity.”
I was due to fly to Rutgers University for a show the next day and then on to Houston for shows that weekend. I was in the hospital room with my sister, aunt, cousin, and wife trying to decide if I should cancel the shows. That’s the difficulty of having a job in which you really can’t call in sick. There’s not someone who can do your job if you’re the headliner and don’t arrive. I felt extra bad because the kids at Rutgers who had organized the show had been in touch with me for over a year and they said they were really looking forward to finally having me out. I felt obligated to make the shows, but we really didn’t know how long it would take my father to pass. It could be a few weeks, so there was a chance that I could go do the shows and come back in time to be next to him when he passed.
I decided around two in the morning that I should go home and pack so that I could make my flight at eight. I felt that that was what my father would want me to do—handle my business. As I was walking to the parking lot with my wife, she reminded me that if I went to New Jersey and my father passed while I was gone I would never forgive myself. Furthermore, she made the good point that I would have a tough time performing if I got there and found out that my father had died. Right then I knew there was a reason why I had married a lawyer. She knew how to make an argument and seal the deal.
Fortunately, I listened. The next morning, when I would have been on a plane to the East Coast, my father passed away while I was in the room seated next to him. I was happy to have stayed by his side. His passing occurred only nine months after my son’s birth. It was as if my son came into my life to replace that relationship. Dhara was too young to know what was happening, but we dressed him in a white Indian outfit for the funeral and took him with us. His jolly little face helped me get through what felt like a long day of Tide commercials and dead horses.
My father’s funeral was the second funeral I had been to for a close relative. The one before had been in 2003 for my grandfather, who also had been a great influence in my life. He was the one who taught me to never live your life saying “what if.” He would say the word “if” is a bad word. It is a word that takes you away from your reality. The way he put it was, “Never say what if I had done this or what if I had done that. You’ve got to live with what you decide to do because that is your reality. For example, if my aunt had a penis she would be my uncle. End of story!” I told you he was a poet.
With my father, I had my son to lean on to get me through, while with my grandfather I leaned on my family. There was also an alcoholic lady who lived in our building when my grandfather passed away who tried to console me. Here is some advice: If you are drunk, don’t try to console anyone who’s grieving. This lady came over to our apartment the night my grandfather passed, looked up at the sky, and issued some tender words.
“Don’t worry, Maz. Your grandfather hasn’t left us. He’s with us. His spirit is with us.”
“Thank you. I appreciate the kind words.”
“No, really, look up in the sky. You see that star? That’s your grandfather.”
I looked up and noticed the star was moving. She stared at it, and then we both stared at it until she finally took a sip of her drink.
“No, wait,” she corrected herself. “That’s not a star. That’s an airplane. Your grandfather is definitely not on that plane. But trust me, he’s with us.”
Santa Might Be Muslim
People often ask me if my wife is religious. It usually means that the person asking is religious and they want to know if we’re raising our kids Muslim or Hindu. I think to them it’s like a football game, and they want to know who won. They’re often taken aback when I tell them that neither of us is really religious and that I was born in a Muslim family while she was born in a Christian family. When I say that my family was Muslim, it just means that we lived in Iran, which is a Shiite Muslim country. My parents never prayed or fasted or made a trip to Mecca. The closest thing we had to a religious person in my family was my grandmother, who thought she was religious but really was just superstitious.
“Vhen you go to a casino,” Grandma would preach, “say a prayer to Allah and den put all your money on be-lack. You are guaranteed to vin.”
“Grandma, isn’t gambling a sin?”
“Only if you lose.”
My grandmother also taught me to appreciate what I have in her own religious/superstitious way. When I was five years old in Iran, she told me that whenever I saw anyone who was less fortunate that I should look up in the sky and say a prayer where I thank Allah seven times. It was the equivalent of saying seven Hail Marys and thanking God. This became a full-time job, since living in a busy city like Tehran you saw a lot of misery and poverty. I would be in the backseat of my mother’s car and see someone in a wheelchair. I would look to the sky and start thanking Allah seven times. By the time I was at my sixth thanks, I would see a homeless person slouched in a doorway and start thanking Allah again. Next I would see a midget then a blind person then an albino. I wasn’t even sure if albinos counted, but I would thank Allah for not making me one anyway. Pretty soon, my trips into downtown Tehran with my mom and grandmother became full-on sermons. To this day, whenever I see someone less fortunate than me, I thank God, but only once, and a nonspecific god. Such are the ways of a busy Muslim-ish person in the twenty-first century.
I’m the only person in my immediate family who has actually visited Mecca. I did this on a trip to Saudi Arabia where I was doing a show in Jeddah. I asked the locals how far away Mecca was, and they told me about forty-five minutes. I was tired from my flight and wanted to nap, but I was not about to get that close to Mecca and not see it. Not because I was religious, but out of curiosity. Also because I knew that when I told people I had been to Saudi Arabia, someone would ask, “Did you go to Mecca?”
It would be like going to Anaheim and not seeing Disneyland, or going to the Vatican and not seeing the Sistine Chapel, which almost happened to me as well. This was when I was on a junior year abroad program in college. I was never a museum type, so I would get bored listening to the docent go on and on about a painting or sculpture. When I was in Rome, I decided to go off on my own to see the Vatican and made a point to see the Sistine Chapel. (Not because I wanted to, but because I knew that when I told people I had been to Rome, someone would ask, “Did you see the Sistine Chapel?” It seems like throughout my life I’ve experienced a lot of things just so I can tell people I have done them. You can say I like to please.) The problem with my trip to the Vatican was that I wasn’t 100 percent sure what the Sistine Chapel looked like, or what it was, and I didn’t go with a tour guide. All I knew was that it had been painted by either Michelangelo or Leonardo or one of the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I wasn’t sure which one. Anyone who’s been there will tell you that the Vatican is a really big place, and I was on a deadline because I had to meet someone for lunch. At that age, lunch was the priority.
As I walked in and out of rooms, I tried to listen in on the docents taking other people around on tours to see if one would say something like, “And now, please turn your eyes upon the Sistine Chapel.” I never heard those words. When I finally found myself in a small room with a cool painting on the ceiling, I figured this must be it. I looked around and there weren’t that many people in the room, which I found odd. I would have thought that there would be crowds of people observing it, sketching it, posing for pictures with it, but nothing. I looked up for about ten seconds and tried to act like I knew what the hell I was doing. I put my hand to my chin and fake pondered this classic’s relevance to my life. In reality I was just counting backward from ten so that I could make it seem like I had spent enough time appreciating what I thought was the Sistine Chapel in case someone was watching. Then I took off and started following the exit signs out of the place. It wasn’t until a few minutes into my exit route when I walked into a huge room where I saw people looking up and camping out, observing the art above in awe. I recognized the famous touching fingers that Michelangelo had painted. Oh shit, THIS was the Sistine Chapel? How stupid of me to have thought it was the other room. This was the real deal! Once again I put my hand to my chin and started pondering the magic of this historical piece of art. In reality I was just counting backward: “Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .”
So I’ve been to the Vatican and I’ve been to Mecca—not because I wanted to, but just so I could tell you that I’ve been to the Vatican and Mecca. I hope you appreciate what I’ve done for you. I’ve also been to many bar mitzvahs and eaten matzo balls at my friend’s Shabbat dinners. All these experiences have had some spiritual effects on me, but I still don’t consider myself religious. I would say the closest religious belief I have is Zoroastrianism, which was the first monotheistic religion. Their tenets are “Good words, good thoughts, good deeds.” As long as you live by that then you send a positive energy into the world. Live and let live. However, in honor of those trying to keep score, I’ve found a way to create a tie in the Muslim vs. Christian competition. Next Christmas, I will give the kids a dose of East meets West when I dress up in a Santa Claus outfit and put a turban on my head. I will call myself Sunni Claus.
If you happen to be Chuck Norris reading this book, I’m sure I just gave you a heart attack. After all, Santa is white and he wouldn’t wear a turban. That’s sacrilegious. But Chuck, let’s not forget, it was you who insisted I wear the turban in the first place.
If you’re reading this and you work for Fox News, you’re probably thinking I’m trying to infiltrate Christianity and spread Sharia law to the children of America. You might assume I’ve gone deep undercover as an al-Qaeda operative who has even written a book to fool you. Let me put you at ease, Bill O’Reilly: I’m not a terrorist! But I’ve played one on TV.