Iran Was Always the Mehdis

I t was 1978 outside the Valli, a college bar and restaurant by the University of Minnesota. A friend was backing up to park his ancient Buick in front of the hangout when a Firebird, complete with flaming avian decal on the hood, swooped into the spot. The driver got out. Iranian guy. He beams and raises his arms and says, “I WIN! I WIN!” Then he went inside to shoot pool.

There were a lot of Iranian guys at the U of M. They seemed like rich playboy types marinated in Drakkar who’d ski in the Alps with cosmopolitan parents who wore outsized sunglasses. (Dad was in the import-export business.) They had money and rakish insouciance. The guy who stole the parking spot and crowed about his victory summed these guys up, we thought.

But everyone loved Mehdi. He was a waiter and student. He explained to me one day that his first name meant Messiah, and his last name was the town of his birth. If that was me, I said, I’d be Jesus Fargo. (You could say things like that in 1978 without worrying whether people would get offended.) Mehdi was calm and cool, given to sullen bouts of brooding contemplation with a cup of coffee and a pack of Marlboros, but mostly he was just casually charismatic in a way you couldn’t help but like. He had a blonde American girlfriend with a Jayne Mansfield figure, also a waitress. He went to school, probably in engineering, and worked at the restaurant. Late shift.

One night a rock star I will not name came to the downstairs bar, having just finished a show. He collected all the waitresses and drove them around for a while in a stretch limo, then accompanied them back to the bar, where he sat accepting praise and awe from the patrons. At one point he went up the back stairs to find the restroom, not knowing it was for staff only. Mehdi stood at the top of the stairs in a weary mood, probably because his girlfriend had been scooped up for a ride by this reedy-bodied busker.

“You can’t come up here,” he told the rock star, who made the mistake of saying those fatal words. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

Mehdi did, of course, and said “I don’t give a (bleep) who you are. You can’t come up here.” The rock star retreated. It was a moment that entered the Valli lore, alongside the time the janitors, writers, and engineers chased down a frat pledge who’d been sent to steal a pie from the front case.

So it was a surprise to everyone when Mehdi one day announced he was going back to Iran. Khomeini is a great man, I remember him saying. He wanted to be part of a new Iran. It didn’t seem to fit his utterly Western ways. We had a little goodbye party and shook hands, and he disappeared.

Over the years, I would think about him when recalling the Valli days. I figured he was dead, conscripted for the ruinous war, or jailed for his secular style. Why he returned to Iran was a mystery, but the pull of one’s home is strong. We all have our own Fargo.

About ten years ago, the surviving members of the Valli denizens of the late ’70s and early ’80s met back at the old restaurant, now renamed and renewed. Those who couldn’t make it phoned in from elsewhere. I think it was Kitty who held up her phone and said, “Hey everyone, it’s Mehdi.”

What? I grabbed the phone, not sure he’d remember me, but he did, and he said it was good to talk after all these years. What the hell happened to you? He’d figured out very quickly that the New Iran was not for him, not at all, and he’d bugged out and beat it back to the States. He’d been in L.A. since then, running an import-export business. He’d done quite well.

I hope he gets to go back to his hometown soon. I hope his family is free again. Iran in my mind was never the mullahs. Iran was always the Mehdis.