Mahmoodi had read in a catalog at the public library about the University of South Alabama, in Mobile, which offered a program in computer science and where tuition for state residents was only $200 a quarter. I said, "This is where I'm going." Those guys said, "Do you know where Alabama is? Nobody goes to Alabama." I said, "It doesn't matter, I am going." They said, "Do you know anybody?" I said, "It doesn't matter. I didn't know anybody here. It cannot be worse than what it was here."
Alabama is a desert, they told him. It's windy all the time, nothing but rocks and dust. Mahmoodi half-believed them, but he went anyway. He arrived on an Eastern Airlines red-eye in the middle of the night. "Welcome to Mobile Airport," the sign said. I see a lot of trees, and it's raining. The total opposite of what they said. That tells you how much people really know what they're talking about.
This was Mahmoodi's plan: to finish college, return to Iran, and make a showy success of himself. Go back there, be that big guy that everybody wants to be. Show the family. My family didn't want to talk to me anymore because I was the so-called bad boy. But I wanted to go back there and say, "See, I made it without your help." By the winter of 1979 Mahmoodi had two things to be proud of: a degree in computer science from an American university and a skinny, blond, six-foot-tall American wife, recently converted to Islam and willing to follow him to Iran. After nine years in exile -- first from his family and then from his country -- he looked forward to a dramatic return. Dreamed it, the whole thing.
That dream died on November 4, 1979, the day Iranian militants captured the American Embassy in Tehran. There could be no thought of a homecoming now. So what happened was, I said, "I've got to get a job." But that would not be easy, either. Ted Koppel was introducing Nightline every night with "Day 44 of the hostage crisis...," "Day 45...," "Day 46..." No one cared what Mahmoodi might think of the Ayatollah. It was enough that he was from Iran.
Mahmoodi visited Houston in the spring of 1980, hoping for a breakthrough. At first it was more of the same. I think I went for, like, eight interviews, all rejects. Even though I was qualified, I was rejected from all the jobs and everything. I was just asking them, "Why am I not qualified? Is it something I have done? Or you don't like my face? Is it that I'm dressing bad? My degree is the wrong degree?" Finally, someone at an employment agency suggested he pick a new nationality. I said, "Which one do you guys like?" They said, "Anything." Which is how Hadi Mahmoodi from Iran became Mike Mahmoodi from Egypt . I walked into the place for the first interview: "I'm an Egyptian." I got the job. Case closed.
The Egyptian ruse nearly backfired. On Mahmoodi's first day at Compass Information Systems, his boss introduced him to two Jordanian colleagues. They start talking Arabic to me, and I just sat there and stared. But by the time Mahmoodi confessed to his boss, three months later, he was doing so well that nothing else mattered. That was the beginning of a productive, hopeful period in Mahmoodi's life. Over the next several years he earned a master's degree at the University of Houston, became a U.S. citizen, left Compass for a better job at NASA, saw his income steadily rise, bought a house, and became a father. So now I'm rolling. I was on the fast track, and life goes on.
But there were problems at home. His marriage, a flimsy proposition from the start, couldn't keep pace with the changes in the couple's lives. In 1984 Lee and Mike Mahmoodi divorced, agreeing it was best but at bitter odds over custody of their infant son, Ramin. The divorce wasn't a good divorce. It was fights. When the courts turned Ramin over to his mother, Mahmoodi was back where he started -- estranged from his family, utterly alone. It was almost the same feeling as when I lost my father. Dark days of your life. When you have a family, you open the door and you get your children and your wife -- and everybody comes to you. And now from that home that you created, you walk into a one-bedroom apartment, and you have one chair and one TV in it and nothing else. I was in that apartment eight months. I never opened the refrigerator door. I never turned the oven on to cook or do anything. I just had weekends with Ramin. All we were doing was just staying home. I was just looking at him. Just playing with him at home.
On Friday, January 10, 1986, while driving to work on a Houston freeway, Mahmoodi decided to quit his job. He had been with NASA for seven years and was making a salary of $87,000. His boss offered him a raise if he would stay. But Mahmoodi's mind was made up. Partly it was a bad case of the career jitters. That was also the day Mahmoodi turned 30. He knew that without a Ph.D., he had probably reached his limit at the space agency. Partly, too, he was tired of the long hours his job demanded. Within months of the divorce, Mahmoodi's ex-wife had voluntarily relinquished custody of Ramin. That meant that many nights, after Mahmoodi collected Ramin at the day-care center and fed him dinner, father and son wound up back at the office. Problem was, sometimes, not sometimes, a lot of times, he would run a fever and have diarrhea and all kinds of things, and I had him on my lap because he couldn't go to sleep, and working on the computer -- it wasn't a very exciting time. It's past. But it wasn't that easy. It was very difficult. A lot of times when people say "single parents," I really know what they mean. I really do know.
There was a third factor, perhaps the determining one. Mahmoodi had a new wife, Parisa. She was Iranian, a student at Arizona State University, the niece of a friend who lived in Phoenix. On the night they met, Mahmoodi abandoned his resolve never to marry again. I remember she had a white dress on. He courted her for six months, mostly over the phone. And as we were talking and talking, I was getting attached to her more and more and more. She was 19, recently arrived in the United States, with plans that hadn't included getting married so soon. He was more than 10 years her senior and divorced, and brought a child into the bargain. When she agreed to marry him and to help raise his son, Mahmoodi made a vow: I promise I'll make you the luckiest person. Just trust me.
