June 12, 2018
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, missing for more than half a decade, died last week at the hands of an assassin.
He’d been living quietly in St. Joseph, Missouri under the pseudonym Robert B. McCoy. According to investigators, he’d taken in a former colleague, Mahdi Mostafavi. Friends say Mister Mostafavi, who'd legally changed his name to LeRoy Neiman, had fallen on hard times after the collapse of the Iranian Theocracy and Ahmadinejad was letting him stay in the Victorian-style home he had leased in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. At ten in the morning on the day of his death, Ahmadinejad was on a ladder hanging a print of da Vinci's The Last Supper when Mister Mostafavi came up behind him with a pistol, shouted, "Sic semper tyrannis!" and fired two shots and fled. Ahmadinejad’s fourth wife, Candy, heard the shots and called police. She reported his last words to be "Rosebud."
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an anomaly, a mystery wrapped in an enigma slowly sinking into a deep muddy quagmire. Beloved by thousands, hated by millions, there was never a dull moment when he was at Iran's helm. What were the influences in his life? What social forces propelled him to become the most talked-about man in Iran, the man 99% of Persian women voted as "the guy least likely to get a sympathy fuck from me?"
He was born of Jewish-Scotch-Irish-Armenian parents in Aradan, Iran. Aradan is famous for two things: dog food and house painters. When he was five, his Uncle Krikor, a senior supervisor at Aradan Dog Food Plant Number 5 and a part-time house-painter, promised to get young Mahmoud "a good job on the assembly line" as soon as he celebrated his bar mitzvah. But his mother was heard to remark that she didn't want any more Saburjians (the family surname) "humping dog food." She sent him off to live with her Jewish-Gypsy cousins in Azerbaijan. He remained there eight years until Uncle Krikor keeled over from emphysema.
The Mahmoud who came back as a teenager was very different from the sweet little six-year-old boy the family remembered. Now he was described as a "shifty little weasel" who never looked you in the eye and someone you had to hide your wallet from whenever you took a shower. Some family members blamed the Jew-Gypsies. Professor Fawaz Younis Firouzbacht, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a recognized authority on Iranian Jew-Gypsies, commented, "those people can really fuck you up." Indeed, after Mahmoud returned, one Aradan resident recalled he taught every boy in the neighborhood how to pick pockets and every girl how to do the strip tease. It was then that his Uncle Koorken stepped in and ponied up the cash to send him off to Teheran to truck-driving school. He told Mahmoud's mother that the drug dealers were paying "big bucks" for long-haul drivers. Hearing that made her very happy.
So off Mahmoud went to Teheran, a suitcase in his hand and a song in his heart. Unfortunately, this was the time of the uprising against the Shah. And Mahmoud, by chance or design, fell in with a couple of ne'er-do-wells named Mirdami and Habibollah. These two con artists had concocted a get-rich-quick scheme: take over the American Embassy and hold it for ransom. Mahmoud, being a country boy just off the proverbial turnip truck, thought it sounded like a really cool idea, so he said, "Can I write home and tell my mom?"
Well, the rest is history. The US Embassy hostage spisode jump-started Mahmoud's career as a professional terrorist, torturer and all-around thug. Over the next thirty years he rose in the ranks of the revolutionaries right up to President of the Islamic Republic. It was a heady time. His mother bragged to her friends in the tea circle back in Aradan about her "big-shot son, the President." Interestingly enough, he never learned to drive a truck.
But you know the saying, whatever goes up, must come down. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Presidency crashed like a bowling ball on a fat man's big toe the day General Salehi changed sides and pledged his support to Mehdi Karroubi. Mahmoud saw the handwriting on the wall, quickly donned the emergency burka he had hanging in his office closet and made a beeline for the Armenian border.
Soon enough, in the euphoria of the mass executions of Mullahs in Teheran, the world lost interest. But every so often, there would be tidbits of information referred to in the National Enquirer as "Mahmoud sightings." There was the unnamed naked male in a grainy Czech porn film who had an uncanny resemblance to you-know-who. There was the middle-aged pick-pocket in Rome who lost his temper and beat up four Gypsy kids for "crowding him out." There was the strange man in the public park in Denver who bragged to a group of drunks that he used to be the "Prince of Persia." And finally, there was the shaky little man with the accent who showed up at a US Serviceman's funeral in Kentucky with a "God Hates Fags" sign.
Strangely enough, when the St. Joseph police first arrived at the scene, they referred to the decedent as an "unidentified male." It wasn't until two days later that they found out Robert B. McCoy was in fact the former Iranian dictator. And this is how it happened. It seems at the time of the US Embassy takeover, Mahmoud was sent to the Soviet Embassy with a "You Assholes Are Next!" message. He was drinking Coca Cola from a can. When he delivered the verbal message to the Russian Guards, he hurled the can into the compound to emphasize his point. The Russians saved it and it was DNA from that very can on an Interpol terrorist database that confirmed Mahmoud's identity. Crazy stuff, huh? Like the Grateful Dead song says, it's been a long strange trip.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will definitely be missed. Or perhaps not.
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