But the idea was flawed. Once the sellers learned there was a market for their parts, they were less anxious to sell, especially to competitors. The exchange never got rolling. The only way to save NIE, Mahmoodi realized, was to buy and sell the parts himself. That meant NIE was no longer a broker, it was a distributor. The setup was more complicated and more costly.
Within a year Mahmoodi had exhausted his personal assets, roughly $10,000. He kept his old Toyota but sold the Chevy Spectrum he had given to Parisa as a wedding gift. With cash trickling in through the company's front door and gushing out the back, he made a strategic decision to move his family out of its rented house and into a smaller one owned by another of Parisa's uncles; he thought the family connection might be useful in a crunch.
The day arrived when the cash was all but gone, the credit cards were exhausted, and the rent on his house was two weeks late. A package arrived at the office, a long-awaited Compaq motherboard, a very hot item, with $564 in cash due on delivery. Mahmoodi had to choose. He could pay for the motherboard or he could pay the rent, but he could not do both. So I said, "He's not gonna kick me out of the house, he's not gonna do that." But my calculation was wrong. He did kick me out.
The Mahmoodi family lived for two weeks in Mike's office. Eight-year-old Ramin slept on the couch ("Pretty neat and kind of exciting" is how he remembers the experience); Mike and Parisa shared a blanket on the floor. They took showers at the Motel 6 down the road. But before the week was over, Mahmoodi had sold the motherboard for $4,000. That was the breakthrough for me. Never again would NIE, or Mahmoodi, teeter so close to the brink.
July in Phoenix. 109 degrees in the shade. The breeze only makes matters worse; outdoors it feels like the inside of a convection oven. NIE's headquarters -- five stops removed from its old location in 1990, in the back room of a consignment shop -- is a smoked-glass and concrete slab on the south side of town. It's big, certainly, but not big enough; Mahmoodi recently surrendered his office to make way for a new executive recruit. Mahmoodi, pleased to accommodate growth, has made himself comfortable with a telephone and a computer in what used to be the boardroom.
Today happens to be Mahmoodi's first day back in town after a two-week visit to Iran. He makes the trip fairly often these days, ever since, at Parisa's urging, he reconciled with his family. That first trip home, compared with his anonymous departure so many years before, had felt almost surreal, as if it couldn't be happening.
By then word of Mahmoodi's success in America had spread throughout the extended family. His mother, along with more than 300 siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and assorted others, turned out to greet him. Most of them might as well have been strangers. When I walked into the airport, I had no idea who I'm gonna see, what's gonna happen. Especially because I haven't seen my mom. Now all these people, they are grown up, married, have children. My mom got really old. It was emotional, people crying. I was hugging the wrong people. I thought they were my sisters, but they were somebody else. From the airport the group drove in a caravan to Mahmoodi's mother's house. The celebration continued for days. From early in the morning until late at night, a mass of well-wishers streamed into and out of the house. Every meal was a banquet.
It was Mahmoodi's homecoming dream come to life. Here were the same family members who once tried to pretend he did not exist, claiming now to be his creators. "I made you" is the phrase he kept hearing. The whole episode was bizarre. It was, how would I say it? Not the things I was expecting. That was three years ago.
Later in this Phoenix afternoon, Mahmoodi leaves the office and joins the crowded highway heading east, away from the setting sun. He drives until the shopping centers and industrial parks give way to fertile stands of brand-new condominiums; then over a rise to where one can see, suddenly, a vast dense expanse of tile-roofed homes (one of them Mahmoodi's), laid down on the desert like a new kitchen floor; and then beyond, to a hill at the edge of settled Phoenix, where Mahmoodi has recently bought, for $450,000, four acres with a full-circle view of the valley and the mountains. Here, one day soon, he and Parisa (the couple now have another son, Neema) mean to build their next home.
Mike Mahmoodi is easy to like. In his presence it's impossible not to share his frank pleasure in his accomplishments -- his pride in his home and his cars and the stir he creates when he walks into the Iranian restaurant in town. It is impossible not to be drawn to the hopeful, forward-looking quality that dominates him, or to his willingness to express pain so plainly, so without design. It is impossible not to believe what he tells you.
But for all his ability to recount his life's events, for all the days he has now spent describing them to a stranger, he still doesn't see what his story adds up to -- doesn't feel its nobody-to-somebody completeness the same way his listener does. Some things have worked out, yes. But you sense that for Mahmoodi, nothing's settled yet -- his life could still go either way. The present and the future are what matter. The past is irrelevant.
I want to forget it because it wasn't such an exciting thing. What is exciting about it? Let's face it, what's exciting? Being 12 years old, working in a mechanic's shop, sweeping the floor, that's exciting? Being a waiter and busboy and cleaning the bathroom, that's exciting? Obviously not. Getting beat up is exciting? No. Everybody saying you're a dumb foreigner is exciting? No. What is there to be proud of?
Two things, perhaps. You weren't crushed, and your past only made you stronger. So strong you don't need it anymore.
