M Otis Beard's Russian Travelogue

VOYAGE OF THE BLUE TURTLE, Part IV

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:37:00 GMT

I'm sorry I haven't made any entries to this journal in so long... I'm in China at the moment, and my Internet access has been restricted by the Great Firewall put up by the Chinese government. Thanks to Kerri Hicks, Nicholas 'Nicko' Kriho, Dag Agren, Bryan 'Jarai' Chase, Jacob 'JWGH' Haller, Nick 'Pentomino' Bensema, Joe 'Manfire' Manfre, John 'Talysman' Laviolette, the people at peacefire.org, and everyone else who helped brainstorm a way through the Wall. Information wants to be free, and it could also use a cold beer if you've got one handy!

_____________________________________________
...CONTINUED FROM LAST UPDATE

The afternoon was dying. Low in the sky, the Sun burned an octagenarian orange, and the chill of outer space began to slowly but surely overpower the ecstatic heat of the warm day, like an arm wrestler finally winning a tough match. The fields streaming by me on both sides of the highway were a singed golden color, their sameness interrupted only by sparse clumps of trees and the criss-crossings of rutted dirt tracks.

Four people and two small motorcycles stood in a gulley just below and to the right of the highway. Their heads turned at the sound of my engine, and they waved their arms wildly in greeting. I waved back and rode past them... but then it struck me: maybe they were waving because they needed help?

It wouldn't hurt to check; they didn't look dangerous, and if I could lend them a hand, I figured that was the right thing to do. I turned back and found the narrow inlet that led to the gulley they were in.

They were grinning like fools when I pulled up beside them. "Ural! Cool!" shouted the rangy kid nearest me. He was dressed in hand-me-down military clothes and leaning up against a little red two-stroke, his overdue haircut twitching and dancing in the capricious breeze as he threw me a thumbs-up.

"You guys need help? I saw you waving."

"No, no, we were just waving because you are riding an Ural." They gathered 'round and inspected my machine, then inspected me with equal interest when they realized I was a foreigner. They were teenagers. They seemed friendly enough, and too underfed to be any threat.

The usual questions came in rapid-fire bursts:

"Are you really American?"

"Why are you here?"

"Do you like Russia or America better?"

"Where do you live?"

They weren't broken down, they were just hanging out. In the dirt. Why not? There was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do in the tiny village where they lived.

They showed me around, not that there was much to see. A handful of houses in various stages of decay, some fields lying fallow, everything dressed in weeds and dust and stiff old dried mud baked into rough cement by the summer heat. A small river meandered through it all, with a rusty old beached trawler serving as a diving platform for swimmers. The village was too small to support even a meagre little kiosk selling vodka and cigarettes, so trips to the gas station out on the highway for supplies were the main source of excitement.

We hung around by the river for a while, watching the water and the fish, skipping stones and talking bike talk, swatting insolent mosquitos and just enjoying the hell out of one passing moment after another. Our little group had more than doubled while we were riding around town. Word travels fast where there's nothing to do but talk.

I figured I'd camp out by the river. It was getting too late to keep riding, and I felt as safe there as anywhere. I asked my new friends where I could find some firewood.

"Firewood? You're going to stay here tonight? No, no, you don't have to sleep outside. You can stay at my house," offered one of the boys through a grin.

"Fuck off, Sasha, he's staying at our house," insisted Sergei, the tall kid I'd met first.

"No, you fuck off! I asked him before you did," retorted Sasha.

They fought over me. Nothing too rough, just a bit of brotherly pushing and shoving and name-calling and goodnatured roughhousing. Sergei was older and a little bigger than his buddy, so in the end, it was decided that I would visit Sasha's house for tea, then spend the night with Sergei's family. I smiled and shook my head ruefully as I gave in to the plan, in spite of the fact that neither of them had bothered to consult me before arranging my social calendar to their own liking.

Our little caravan of bikes wound back up the trail away from the river and back into the cozy little huddling of tumbledown dwellings these kids called home. The sun was down now, really down, and the darkness closed in on us like a wolf pack.

I was a little worried about what Sasha's family would say when we showed up unnannounced, and especially about what Sergei's family would say. There was no need to worry; the grapevine had informed everyone well ahead of time that I was coming, and I had underestimated the hospitality of Russian country folk anyway. Sasha's parents met us at the door, Papa with a pair of house slippers for me to wear, and Mama with the kettle whistling on the stove. We gathered at the family dinner table, and the folks just sat there beaming at me, former Soviets overjoyed to see that the "enemy" also enjoyed tea and cookies and good company.

Ah, but Sasha's grandmother lived there, too, and the old babushka was a different breed altogether. She doddered out of a back bedroom and peered suspiciously at me. Her face was seamed and scarred, one eye looked dead in her face, and her knobbly hands clutched a hand-carved hardwood cane that she used to support her bent, nearly hunchbacked old body. Mama and Papa quickly tried to reassure her that I was a friend, and at first she seemed to relax a bit and even gave me a gummy, toothless grin by way of greeting... but then I spoke.

When she realized that I was American, the old woman recoiled in horror and hissed at me like some kind of venomous old snake. She began cursing fluently and throwing me the Evil Eye as she backed away, her poor family doing their best to calm her down, and for a moment I thought she was going to lash out at me with that cane of hers. Nothing they said to her meant a good goddamn to grandma: as far as she was concerned, I was one of those hell-spawned baby-eating monsters from the bad old decadent West she'd heard so much about in her youth, come to enslave the decent hard-working proles of rural Russia as mere chattel in the depths of my personal money factory. She might have reacted a little bit worse if I had been wearing a top hat with a dollar sign on it and holding my dick in my hand, but I doubt it. I beat a hasty retreat.

Sergei had a babushka too, but she was a little more progressive in her way of thinking. The whole big family gave me a warm welcome, and laid out their good china for me so that we could sit down to a good home-cooked meal. Sergei had a brother, two sisters, an aunt, his mother, and his grandparents all living together in that dilapitated little house, but I can't remember when I've seen such a harmonious family in such close quarters. Maybe they were on their best behavior because they had a guest in the house, but I never saw the tiniest hint of discord, and that's pretty unusual even when people are trying their hardest to get along.

None of them had ever seen a foreigner before, except on television, so they were fascinated with me. Everyone wanted to put food on my plate. Now, if you're a Yank like me, you probably figure that the polite thing to do when you're eating dinner at someone else's house is to clean your plate and then refuse seconds with a cheery patting of the stomach to show how full you are. In Russia, this doesn't work. Food is the one thing that is plentiful there. If you clean your plate, you must still be hungry, so they don't ask you if you want more or wait for you to take more, they just shovel it onto your plate for you. I thought I was going to throw up before I figured out how to say "NO MORE FOOD, THANKS" without giving offense... and the family dog, a gregarious little hairless thing with huge eyeballs, got very well taken care of under the table when nobody was looking.

Speaking of Russian dogs, there's something I'd like to get off my chest. Sputnik 2, the second spacecraft to orbit the Earth, had a passenger when it launched on November 3rd, 1957. Her name was Laika (which might be translated as "Barky" since nobody would call a dog "Barker"), and she was a mixed-breed dog, the first Earth creature ever to visit outer space. The Soviets never expected Laika to come back from her mission; they locked her in a cramped little padded cell and sent her up with a ten day's supply of food and water (in gel form), a bag around her ass to catch urine and feces, and no heat shield. She died, scared and alone, in a space too small to turn around in, and her body burned up along with Sputnik 2 when it reentered the Earth's atmosphere on April 14th, 1958.

There's a big, ugly statue of Yuri Gagarin in Moscow. It's a pretty tasteless piece of sculpture, stylized in an angular and vaguely aerodynamic way that is meant to make it look like Gagarin is about to lift off and head for the stars under his own power, thrusting heavenward like some Soviet Superman on a mission to save the universe from intergalactic Capitalism.

Gagarin got to volunteer for the mission. Gagarin got to come home again.

Where is Laika's statue? Laika was FIRST. Laika DIED up there. Gagarin gets a statue? I want to see a statue of Laika, First Earthling in Space, Laika, Heroine of the Soviet Union, Laika, the Very Good Dog. Now, damn it!

*grumble*

After dinner, we sipped tea and talked while the night outside got deeper and colder, and the rotting old house creaked and groaned quietly around us. I was pretty tuckered from my long ride, and I guess it showed, 'cause they bundled me off to bed early.

It was like going back in time. I was led to a bedroom, which proved to be not a guest bedroom, not a bedroom vacated for guest use, but the bedroom used by the whole family, grandma and grandpa excluded (they had their own room). The boys slept in the same bed that night so that I could have one to myself, and they gave me the best bed in the place. It was ancient, with a swaybacked set of springs rusting away underneath, and a fat feather mattress on top, sagging like a wino on a parkbench. The quilt was rough, but it was thick, handmade by someone who really needed a quilt, not patched together by some spoiled hobbyist in her spare time. We all snored away together that night, just like kinfolk.

There was a bookshelf next to the bed, and I noticed a book there that looked like it might be science fiction. The author's name was printed on the cover in Cyrillic, so it took me a moment to recognize it: Robert Heinlein. I can't imagine that good Soviet citizens would have been allowed to read anything written by Heinlein. It was really quite a surprise to see, a little piece of evidence that the minds of rural Russians are slowly but surely opening in spite of all the economic disadvantage they are suffering under.

Those of you who know me know that I'm no Christian, but I have read the Bible (how can you understand Western culture and literature without reading the Bible?). There's a passage in the Bible about a rich man who gives bags and bags of money to charity, and a very poor woman who tithes away a pittance that is all she's got in the world. The point of the story is that, since the poor woman gave more than she could afford, and the rich man gave only money he could easily stand to lose, the poor woman's contribution was the greater one, spiritually speaking.

These Russians, these country folk, these peasants in a house of worm-eaten sticks held together by threads of rust, had next to nothing for themselves... but they gave me the very best of everything that they had to offer. I had good company, a very good meal, and a happy, comfortable, warm night's rest nestled in the very bosom of the family. Before I left the next morning, I tried to give the lady of the house some money to pay for my room and board, but she was having none of it. After she refused three times, I gave up, and she cooked breakfast for me. As I prepared to ride off toward the highway, the townfolk gathered on the common green to shake my hand and wish me a safe journey.

CONTINUED SOON!

VOYAGE OF THE BLUE TURTLE, Part III

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Tue, 28 Jan 2003 19:12:00 GMT

Having fled the rotting smile of the shashlik-house chef with what I hope was a politely feigned cluelessness at her rather charmingly clumsy advances, I had a good postlunch walk at the edge of the forest before once again mounting my iron horse. Man, I was full.

I find Russian food in general very pleasant. For the most part, its far more wholesome and natural than the things we typically eat in America. The kind of processing and packaging that so effectively divorces American foodstuffs from the field, the orchard, the dairy, and the slaughterhouse is delightfully rare here. The use of artificial flavors, artificial colors, preservatives (other than simple salt), etc. is the exception here, not the rule. As an example, Ive discovered that, while its perfectly possible to buy (in the urban supermarkets, at least) a plastic container full of the impossibly bright yellow substance laughably known as mustard to Americans, genuine spicy stone ground mustard in glass jars is much easier to find, and far cheaper. In the States, this stuff would only be found on the gourmet aisle, and would be priced accordingly.

Processed cheese (which is fit only for use as fishbait anyway) is mercifully difficult to locate here. I suppose if you really had a jones on for the taste of pre-sliced squares of coagulated oil dyed bright orange, you could go to McDonalds go right ahead, and Ill see you later. All the cheeses in my local market are the real deal. On the other hand, theres not a whole lot of variety in the commonly available cheeses. If I want cheddar, I have to go into the city and hunt a bit.

When I buy meat here, I buy it from the butcher across the street. Hes a burly fellow with great big forearms, and he disassembles sides of beef right in front of me, adroitly wielding a meat cleaver with a comically gargantuan blade on an absurdly short handle, like a battle-axe meant for a dwarf. Hes very popular with the local dogs. Strays and slumming housepets are welcome in his shop and assured of a generous largesse, as long as they behave themselves and stay mostly out from underfoot.

Fruits and vegetables of all kinds are freely available even in the depth of winter. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers (being expensive) are very rarely used in this country, so things are a little earthier than what you might be accustomed to, not as pretty as the minutely inspected and lightly waxed artifacts of industrial civilization found in the produce section at Ralphs, but much cheaper and every bit as good as the premium-priced organically grown comestibles sold to the eco-conscious monied classes back home. Its all organically grown here, and dirt cheap to boot.

Milk is perhaps the most commonly processed and packaged food around, no doubt due to the difficulty of bringing it any distance to market without running the risk of contamination. Most of the milk sold in the city comes in boxes, hermetically sealed and lightly irradiated against all chance of spoiling. I usually buy mine in plastic bags, but purists get theirs from wheeled metal tanks that dispense milk on streetcorners, whole and fresh every morning, bring your own bottle. At Uncles dacha in Nikolsk, we just mosey on down the rutted dirt road bright and early, take a big bottle of pure unadulterated moojuice still warm from the cow out of a metal footlocker in front of a neighbors gate, and leave a few rubles behind in trade. Id rather have that and a bowlful of strawberries from Uncles garden for breakfast than anything you could order in any restaurant in New York or L.A.

All of which is not to say that I am particularly enamoured of Russian cuisine. The heavy-handed use of dill is not much to my liking, I dont care to have my food drowned in mayonnaise, and I prefer to avoid eating lemon peel if possible. Some of the traditional dishes are really good, but others are just nauseating to the American palate, like the weird cold soup they make with diced herbs and vegetables swimming in fizzy, fermented kvass and liberally doped with heaping glops of mayo. Happily, though, Russians tend to put a good variety of edibles on the table, and its pretty easy to assemble a good honest sandwich out of all the finger foods and dainties they serve up but be prepared for some highly bemused looks and comments. The sandwich is another of those technical innovations the Russians overlooked, so putting meat, veggies and condiments between two slices of bread is tantamount to fomenting a culinary rebellion round these parts.

Hot tea is the nonalchoholic beverage of choice. Good coffee can be had in select city cafés, but its expensive nearly all the coffee youll find here is Nescafé instant, just like they serve in American prisons and mental institutions. I do miss the easy availability of fresh ground mountain java, but Im learning to make do with chai.

I dont much care for vodka, but if I did, Id have a stunning array of choices. Oddly, Stolichnaya (for many years the most popular Russian vodka in America) is no longer made here, due to the political machinations of various oligarchs involved in the privatization and deprivatization of government-owned name brands, a long and occasionally interesting story in itself. Eh, whatever one vodka is much like another to me, though people who really like the stuff tell me that theres a great deal of variety in the vast panoply of brands available. The stereotype of Russian alcoholism is, sadly, about 90% true. Theres a shocking amount of hardcore imbibery going on here, throughout the socioeconomic classes and the age groups, and little stigma associated with it. A dreadful alky effluvium oozes from the pores of Russians in all walks of life. Its a little depressing to catch a whiff of a beautiful, fashionably dressed girl who looks like a supermodel, only to find that she smells like eau de alley-sleeping panhandler instead of Chanel No. 5.

Theres lots of beer being brewed in Russia, but so far I havent found any that I would call really good. Im admittedly spoiled, having sampled good microbrews from all over the world, so the lack is no small disappointment to me. The quality of domestic beer here ranges from a close approximation of the fizzy pre-urine crime against good taste that is American Budweiser (as opposed to Czech Budweiser, which is a different animal altogether), to some modestly decent offerings that are drinkable, but not spectacular. Even the imports reveal a sad failure of the Russian palate to properly distinguish between good beer and bad: of all the wonderful fermentations produced in Belgium, for instance, the Russians choose to import mostly Stella Artois, a mediocre fluid that puts the twerp in Antwerp.

If anybody in the general vicinity of Quebec is reading this, please drop whatever youre doing and send an emergency care package of Mauditte as soon as possible. Mmm, Mauditte now theres a fine beer! Just the thought of it, and Im both dry and drooling at the same time. If you cant send me any, for Bogs sake at least have the mercy to drink one and pretend that youre me, you fortunate soul.

Having wandered shamelessly from digestion to digression to begging, I will now set aside my Rabelaisian thirst and return to my narrative. Hopefully, the reader will forgive me for straying so far from my charted course. Better yet, the reader will take a quick break and pour him or herself a drink of whatever type pleases the reader most. Im having a Bochkarev join me, wont you? Nazdarovye!

****** INTERMISSION ******

My belly was full, my legs were stretched, and my journey back to the city was incomplete. I left the smoky fires and the tilted funhouse diners of the forest truckstop behind me, figuring I had one last good push to make if I wanted to get home before the late summer dark set in. The terrain was fairly heavily forested now, and the road traversed a long series of small rolling hills, providing me with the innocent entertainment that makes bikers and rollercoaster enthusiasts kin to each other. You dont get much of that kind of riding in this part of Russia, as Moscow is situated in the middle of a vast plain, but the general dreary sameness of altitude is amply compensated for by the wealth of wide, far horizons.

I covered good ground. It was late enough that the light had taken on a brassy quality, something perhaps added or subtracted by the multiplied halls of air through which the increasingly slanting rays travelled as the sun sank toward the rim of the world. Old Solly was beaming away full in my face now, hard and bright but not entirely unwelcome, as the cooling effect of the wind was beginning to overpower the heat that had oppressed the earlier hours of the day.

Foolish me, I was beginning to think about what I would do when I got home, and idly doing the math in my head to figure out approximately when I would get there. Naturally, such a train of thought only invites trouble. I should not have been at all surprised when my calculations were intruded upon by a very unpleasant grinding sound coming from my engine.

I was nearing the top of one of those rolling hills, shifting down into third so my great pig of a Soviet-built bike could handle the incline, and the obscene metal-on-metal noise struck my ears like a fart in a phonebooth as I released the clutch. I was looking for a place to pull over when another noise hit me, cutting through the blat and grind of my engine like a hot knife through a stick of butter.

There, standing all alone at the crest of the hill, was a small rectangular structure that would have been entirely forgettable had it not been for the sign out front. It was a café, which in rural Russia can mean anything from a produkti that has hot water for chai and Nescafé to a full-blown restaurant. The sign was actually more of a sculpture; it was a monstrous affair constructed primarily of a small garishly painted automobile turned at an odd angle and hoisted high into the air on a pole. This was strange enough in and of itself, but the proclamation of the power of randomness it broadcast was further enhanced by the fact that the text advertising the place and its featured offerings was in English.

As I switched off my engine and coasted closer to the lonely café, jouncing lightly across the generous dust-blown frontage that separated the building from the highway, the noise emanating from the tiny building resolved itself into some sort of weird pazouki music, blasting away at a psychotically distorted volume. A pair of unwieldy cabinetless speakers leaned like sentinels against either side of the doors frame, emitting the tortured voice of a shrieking, stereo-separated Janus, wires trailing vinelike back across the threshold and into the dark interior. A slack-skinned dog with exhausted, rheumy eyes lay just off the porch, wallowing miserably in the fearful sound as though moving somewhere quieter would be the ultimate exercise in canine futility. Possibly it was too late; the poor beasts nervous system may have already been pulverized by the waves of compressed and rarefied air that beat at my face like invisible fists.

There were no chairs or tables inside, just a long white counter behind which a doorway, obscured by a curtain of beads, led to an unseen back room. The place was meagerly decorated, but what there was proved to be, on closer examination, as mindbending as the sign, the music, and the dog outside. An old calendar depicting John F. Kennedy adorned the wall facing the door, but it was in Chinese, and JFKs eyes were drawn with pronounced epicanthial folds. Some sort of fringed, braided banner-thing, all bright red and gleaming gold, was on display on a small freestanding metal tripod affair dominating the counter, the banner bearing the overtly cheery image of a cartoon bird with musical notes dancing in the air around his head, bravely surmounting the enigmatic message I ALWAYS EAT A ONE.

Most amazing of all were the curtains. At first glance, they seemed ordinary enough, thin and threadbare and printed with a muted pattern of crudely drawn images meant to extol the joys of fishing. Repeated across the sun-faded surface were a trout on a line shown in closeup, a longer view of an archetypal fisherman in his hat and vest and waders with the pole in his hands bent in a long arc and the line stretched taut down into the riverwater at his feet, a round package of fishing line, a folded square of map liberally marked with lines representing streams and creeks, an open drawer full of hooks, bobbers, sinkers and other fishing paraphernalia, and a scrap of paper with a note or a list of some kind written on it. It was the package of fishing line that first drew my closer attention, as I noticed that, although the circle of the package itself was complete, the text on the label was missing a few letters. It read:

SPANISH SILKWOR
Sportsman
TAPERED
TROUT LEA

There was something strange about the map, as well. It was covered with place names that seemed perfectly ordinary and familiar to the casual glance, but which were all either truncated or mutated somehow:

NADISON
LINOLN
S. HXM
STUN
MICHSTER
FOPTAM
EHILLISOY
GRIM FIR
AKKNID
DIRBRAT
ROING
MRHOUT
PANGLASH
MAYNV

Perhaps strangest of all was the text of the note. It was written in a cursive scrawl that defied any disinterested attempt at reading. Intrigued as I was at this point, I took a good hard look at it and puzzled it out. It seemed to be more of a poem than a note, a poem that struck me as absolutely beyond brilliant:

Wispy blanked up I
she just ended high in ing
orange and back
shes men farther
wages becoming
he they we
spending has a true watching
mamse than their lines
toos saying was great
I wit bat
Italy
a ting
suing

(I did not know it at the time, but I was to encounter a matching set of curtains several months later, in my sickroom at the government-run hospital in Moscow. It was then that I managed to write down all the details of the text, which I have reproduced here verbatim. I do not pretend to understand the preternatural link that connects me to these curtains, or possibly to the author of the truly amazing poem printed thereon, but they do call to me, and at some point I intend to return to the hospital in the guise of a visitor and make off with the curtains after leaving some acceptable substitute in their place.)

The proprietor of this singular establishment emerged from the back room and turned the stereo off once he finally detected my presence at his counter, the deafening nature of the music being more of a sonic assault than an entertainment, and an absolute impediment to any attempts at conversation or the ordering of drinks. The truth be told, it was so savagely loud that, if not for the teenage years I spent as a member of that tribe known as punk rockers, I would probably have found the music inimical not only to conversation, but to life itself. Old rumors of secret Soviet weapons programs came drifting back to me as the bone-disintegrating sound cut off and rational thought became once again possible.

I checked my first impulse, which was to take the man behind the counter prisoner and interrogate him. Not having a pistol to whip him with, and not knowing what other exotic weaponry he might be packing, I decided that it would be imprudent to start demanding answers. Behind the carefully impassive mask of my face, however, I was silently screaming things like HOW DO I MAKE A NOISE LIKE THAT? and WHY DOES JFK HAVE CHINESE EYES? and WHERE DID YOU GET THOSE FUCKING CURTAINS?

He stood motionless, his tapered brown hands flat on the counter, and regarded me with an expression devoid of curiosity, waiting. His short hair was straight and black, and his skin was exceptionally smooth and dark, like old ivory dentures stained with a lifetime of chewing tobacco. His features were not at all African, however, and in fact were not unlike my own, which are amazing only for their regularity. His eyes were of an eerily penetrating emerald green color, absolute strangers to the rest of his face. A native of the Caucasus, perhaps?

Hello, I ventured.

He wordlessly and emphatically closed his laser-like eyes for a long moment, and then opened them again. It was clearly a greeting, but not a greeting that invited the sort of discourse I wished to have with this man. I kept my mouth shut, but a tiny anguished moan of frustrated need to know escaped by way of my nose.

Excuse me, but I dont speak Russian very well, I told him hopefully, my trump card in hand. I am an American. Do you speak English?

No, he said, without the slightest flicker of interest in his face or his voice. This was something new. Up until that moment, every person I met in the Russian countryside was instantly fascinated with me. Even Vanya, the Makshan pimp who had tried to browbeat me into renting a girl I didnt want, had at least been taken with the possibility of getting his hands on some of my money. I was clearly dealing with someone beyond the pale.

We stood there, he and I, and I burned to know his secrets. He seemed to stare right through me with those bizarre gigawatt eyes of his, and I couldnt help but think that he didnt have any curiosity in him because he already knew everything. The silence stretched, stretched, stretched out between us, awkward only for me. He looked eminently prepared to take my order if I should happen to want anything, and equally willing, in the event that I didnt want anything, to continue effortlessly scouring the inside surface of the back of my head with his astonishing eyes, empty of either interest or boredom, until doomsday.

And then, without warning, just as I thought I would either collapse screaming under the sheer weight of that sphinx-like gaze, or order a cup of tea, he smiled a very odd and very fierce smile, and his coruscating eyes sort of snapped into focus on mine as he lifted his hand and extended it, very solemnly, for me to shake.

American, he said as we shook hands, and he gestured mildly but eloquently at the café around us and nodded his head in a benign way as though to say that, here on this dusty windswept Russian hill, miles from anywhere, he had singlehandedly created an authentic slice of America just in case I might happen by and want one and it came to me then that it was true, he really had. This pinprick corner of nowhere was an embassy of that inevitable, inexorable America that is to be, a ghost of America a thousand years hence, translated by means unkown to rural Russia in the opening days of the 21st Century.

I dont like Coca-Cola, but I ordered one anyway. It seemed like the correct thing to do. He served me, took my money, and was gone, vanished behind the beaded curtain into the back room of the café.

I drank my warm, enamel-dissolving Coke and strolled outside to see about my bike. Some experimentation, a simple clutch adjustment, and the grinding noise that had stopped me on this otherworldly hilltop, so bulgingly pregnant with subtle destiny, disappeared.

As I rolled down the far side of the hill and bump started the engine, I heard a sudden cacophonous din of pazouki music rend the very fabric of spacetime behind me.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Voyage of the Blue Turtle, Part II

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Sun, 12 Jan 2003 05:05:00 GMT

NOTE: This is a continuation of my last update.

As I sit here typing, the snow falls in silent, politely miniscule flakes through the bright air outside my window. It is January, Russias greatest general, defender of Moscow against dread Napoleon and the mechanized barbarian onslaught of the Nazi horde. How quickly the time passes! Summer was here only yesterday, but to the hard frozen Earth outside my door, the languid warm embrace of June is a million years distant.

Makshan and the wide-open country fell behind me quickly. There were still many fields and forests ahead, but it seemed from that point that I saw more people, more tiny weathered cottages decaying organically in the squat vegetable comfort of their huddled villages. A troop of dogs paced and chased me as I roared out of the stoyanka, barking encouragement to one another. Half-wild dogs and semiferal cats are everywhere in this country; they invade the little marketplace across the street from my apartment with great regularity, nonchalantly ride the subway with no particular master in evidence, lay curled up nose-in-ass on the warm floors of cafes. Their presence would never be tolerated in any but the most rural portions of America, but I am not scandalized. Mostly, they behave themselves, which is more than I can say for humans of any nation. I often wonder how they make it through the winter without freezing or starving to death, but something deep inside me is convinced that, whatever privations the homeless domesticated critters of Russia may suffer, its better than being rounded up and gassed we rightly call such treatment a holocaust when its inflicted on Jews or Armenians, but when we do it to cats and dogs on the streets of Los Angeles, we sugarcoat it, nice and thick, with the word humane. Meaning, I suppose, that its for the benefit of humans, and not cats and dogs.

I rode.

All the roads in Russia, from city streets to rural highways, are dotted with little blue fortifications where the police sit and drink and extract bribes from passing motorists. Russian drivers, in spite of the intensely antisocial manner in which they typically operate their vehicles, treat each other with downright brotherly love when the cops are out. Drivers heading the other way warn you of a police presence by flashing their headlights at you. In theory, this should be enough to prevent you from ever being pulled over at all; in practice, the police pull people over for a variety of reasons other than actual lawbreaking. An expensive car is often enough to get you waved to the shoulder, where a friendly officer of the militsia will skillfully extract the standard 300 ruble (about US$10) bribe from you with a minimum of fuss.

My Tcheripashkoo is much too slow to ever be cited for speeding, and much too cheap to be targeted for profiteering. I was bearded, though, which makes me look like a Chechnyan terrorist, and my license plates displayed the two-digit code that meant my motorcycle belonged in the Penza area. About an hour and a half from Makshan, I got pulled over.

The cop shop where they stopped me was actually one where Id stopped by choice once before. My first trip to Nikolsk was not by train, but by car we have a cute little green Zhiguli-6 that I tool around in when Im in town. On that trip, I stopped because the police station happens to sit right next to a small fenced lot that contains several hundred motorcycles in various states of disrepair.

Dokumenti! demanded the cop after waving me over with his white baton. They always start out stern and frowning, and I think theyre trained to do things that way if youve got some reason to be afraid, this tactic stands a good chance of rattling you and making you slip up.

You want my documents? I said in English with a smile on my face. Sure thing. Here you go.

He looked absolutely baffled as I handed him my American passport and started digging out, at my own unconcerned pace, my international drivers license and the paperwork for the bike. He stared at the passport like it was a surrealist hologram and exchanged a look of pure wonderment with his partner, who stood nearby brandishing an assault rifle. An American? Here? Riding an Ural?

I had him right where I wanted him.

As a foreigner, your best weapon with the Russian police is friendly confidence. They really dont know what to think of us, and this is especially true way out in the country where foreigners are so rare as to be close kin to extraterrestrials. They dont quite know what we are, and they have no idea what sort of connections we might have. With no previous experience to go on, they have to interpret whatever signals you give them on the fly. I intended my easy smile to convey something along the lines of I dont have a damn thing to worry about, so check my documents and get the hell out of my way before I call my powerful friends and something bad happens to you.

Maybe he was intimidated, or maybe he was simply fascinated by my extremely out-of-context nature; in any case, the cops tough guy act was very short-lived. After an amazed scrutiny of my paperwork (which was, of course, all in order), he took off the funny hat that makes Russian cops look like South American dictators, and gave me a nice deferential smile.

Im sorry I stopped you, but I saw that your license plate is from Penza, and its unusual to see a motorcyclist so far from home.

I understand, I told him. No problem.

Where are you going on that thing, anyway?

Moscow. This floored him. He laughed and laughed.

So youre from America, he asked at length. Is it nice there?

Its nice everywhere, man. Its nice right here.

He nodded philosophically at what he chose to interpret as wisdom. His partner stood beside him now, smiling broadly and anxious to get a look at my passport, not out of any policemanlike impulse, but purely for the sake of his own childlike curiosity. I took the opportunity to dismount and stretch a bit, satisfied my own urge to gawk with a good long look at the cops guns, and presently ambled over to their outhouse to do that which no man can do for another.

Hey, called one of the cops to me when I emerged. You want to have a drink with us? We have some vodka.

They layed out a typical teatime spread on a folding card table, right out there on the shoulder of the road in front of their little blue fortress, and we fell to like old schoolboy friends at a picnic. We drank to America, to Russia, to Russian women, to fine weather, and to Russian women again. Between toasts, we carved brown bread and ate it with gleaming hunks of white cheese, slick little discs of sausage dotted with fat, plump and knobby homemade pickles from an ancient jar, slices of lemon with the peel on, sprinklings of dill torn from the green head of a gathered bunch.

Before long, the conversation turned to money, and I got a little suspicious. Were these guys going to hit me up for a bribe after all? But no they were just curious about America. When I answered their questions and told them what kind of money I was accustomed to making in the States, they stared at each other, and one of them whistled long and low.

But look, I said, its really not as much as you think it is. The cost of living is much higher in America. Look at this loaf of bread. I held up what was left of the standard economic indicator on the table. What does it cost you to buy a loaf of bread like this?

The cops shrugged at each other. Five rubles, maybe six, said one, and the other nodded.

In America, this would be considered really good bread, I told them. Most Americans eat very low quality bread, made in a factory from cheap ingredients, and very soft and light, because its full of air. This bread is much better. Its fresh, its dense, and its made from whole grains, not bleached flour. This loaf of bread would cost somewhere between two and four dollars in California 60 to 120 rubles.

Two jaws dropped. Four eyes popped. Lets have another, said the cop nearest the bottle after a long silence. To Russian bread!

When I swung my leg over the saddle to go, the sun was climbing disapprovingly toward noon. Have a stick of gum, offered my rifle-toting host. You dont want the cops up the road to smell vodka on your breath. Good advice, I thought as I rumbled away chewing.

I rode the rest of the morning away, rode into the grinning teeth of the afternoon, rode through villages, through fecund stretches of farmland, through fields full of cows, through wastes and beside ruins, over the bridges and fords of rivers and streams, along the shores of lakes, back and forth across the railroad tracks that shadow the highway, over asphalt smooth and new and asphalt pitted and gritty and old, dancing the catch-me-if-you-can dance of imminent death with Ladas, Volgas, Skodas, VWs, BMWs, and Mercedes-Benzes.

My engine was misbehaving again. The cylinder on the right was firing only intermittently. Without bothering to stop, I experimented a bit, and found that the cap on the end of the ignition wire was not making good contact with the spark plug. Since the Ural is a BMW copy, the cylinders stick straight out to either side, so it was not much trouble to ride for a while with my foot pressing the cap down onto the plug, which was only inconvenient if I wanted to use the brakes, which don't really work anyway.

I was getting low on fuel, too, so I pulled in at the next gas station I saw. I paid the cashier and turned back toward the pumps to fill her up, when I saw a line of bikes out on the highway. There were six of them, dressed too strangely and riding bikes too exotic to be local. They were headed south, so I knew I wouldnt be joining them on my northbound road, but at a signal from the lead bike, the whole pack came thundering in to the station where I stood watching them.

They were from Poland, they told me in English, and were riding across Russia for the summer with no particular goal in mind. We admired each others machines and exchanged tidbits of information about the road, as we were headed in opposite directions. Their bikes, high-tech racing machines all, were light-years away from my old Turtle. Nice, but definitely not my style. I can appreciate another riders bike no matter what style it may be, but I prefer to ride in an upright sitting position, speed be damned. That ass-in-the-air racing posture just makes me feel silly and unnatural and gives me a backache.

Our meeting was like an amicable clash of alien worlds in many ways. My plain, slow, sturdy old bike next to the extravagant splendor of their shiny and colorful new speeders was like a mechanical Taras Bulba in a crowd of flamboyant Polish princelings. I had by this time discarded my helmet, and was riding bareheaded and bearded, in sharp Neanderthaler contrast to the streamlined and highly decorated headgear the smooth-faced Poles wore. With their bulging chinguards and slitted airvents, their mirrored visors snapped down over unreadable faces, they looked positively insectoid. Their clothes were just as outlandish, and I must have looked like a farmer at the county fair standing next to them in my black denim jeans and heavy faded blue work coat. These guys were dolled up to the nines in the brightly colored space-age fabrics and futuristically quilted synthetic leathers that professional racers wear. They even had metal studded patches built into their pants over the knees, as though they were planning on making fully leaned-over high speed turns on the pocked rollercoaster run of the Russian highway not likely.

We all had a nice stretch and shared some good conversation before they hit the road, having vowed to cover another 800 kilometers that day. I turned my attention to the Turtles sputtering right cylinder, and soon found the cause: inside the cap on the end of the ignition wire, a tiny semiloop of metal designed to grip the little threaded cylinder at the top of the spark plug had lost its elasticity. I struggled with it for endless, tortuous minutes, bending it to a more closed shape and trying to get it back into place using the smallest screwdriver I had. It was such a ridiculously miniscule problem, but I couldnt even start the bike without fixing it. Twice the damned thing went spung! and leaped out of its niche, and I muttered and cursed fluently while I searched for it on the broken pavement beneath me. It took me most of an hour to get my engine running reliably again, and I kept a jaundiced eye on the faulty ignition wire cap for the next fifty kilometers, hoping I wouldnt have to resort to duct tape. I found out later that even brand new ignition wire caps, if theyre made in Russia, tend to have this problem.

My little teatime with the militsia was long past when I got to what passes for a Russian truckstop. Theres a spot out in the middle of nowhere on the road between Penza and Moscow where a couple of dozen weird old cabins and cottages, ranging from wacky log cabins to the highly decorative type of fairytale forest-house known as a teremok, line the road on both sides. These ancient ramshackle constructions huddle close beside one another as if trying to elbow one another out of the way. I doubt that any of them is even close to level, and most have a hastily moved look about them. Each one is absolutely unique, but they all have fires burning outside. Fires in pits, fires in the rust-colored halves of metal barrels, fires in odd little brick towers stacked up without benefit of mortar. You wouldnt think it to look at the place, but this bizarre conglomeration of crazily leaning smoke-clad wooden clapups is a damn fine place to stop and eat.

I picked one of the least unlikely-looking of the bunch and parked in the ruts made by a big truck in the dry, stiffened mud out front. A faded wooden sign fixed above the rickety porch promised me SHASHLIK in letters that had dripped and run horribly before the paint dried on the plain wood.

Inside, I was greeted by the owner, a rotund, beetle-browed fellow with hands like swollen baseball mitts. He grunted in surprise at meeting an American, and rushed off to brag to the neighbors, leaving me at the mercy of the cook. She was nice enough, maybe even a little too nice, in that scary sort of I-love-you-marry-me-quick-and-lets-get-the-hell-out-of-here way that some Russian country girls have, but the prices on the menu were right and the food was fantastic. I brushed my reservations aside and dug in, in spite of the common sense that told me this place was way too fifteenth-century to be safe. I severely maimed a huge salad, wreaked terrible havoc upon a big bowl of creamed potato soup, tore a basket of fresh bread limb from limb, and drank the herbal blood of a steaming teakettle. When the shashlik arrived, hissing and spitting from the fire, we took one look at each other and knew instantly that only one of us would be walking away (it was me, thank god).

The cook, fascinated with my exotic origins, sat down at my table for a while and tried to chat me up about America. She wasnt bad looking, a bit more robustly built than I typically like, but I might have been persuaded to toy with an impure thought or two until she smiled. Blackened stumps filled her mouth where teeth once where. Oh, ick. No, not, no way, uh-uh, wrong, nyet.

To anybody out there who still thinks that fluoridation of water is a Communist plot: shut the hell up, youre an idiot.

More soon, I promise!

Voyage of the Blue Turtle, Part I

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Fri, 22 Nov 2002 21:23:00 GMT

I have always been crazy about motorcycles.

Having recently moved halfway around the world, from Los Angeles, California to the suburbs of Moscow, Russia, I was very curious to find out what the locals had to offer by way of an iron horse. For my first month in country, my curiosity went largely unsatisfied. The city is not exactly teeming with bikers, and for good reason: Moscows environment is highly inimical to the breed. The winters are very harsh, and in the warmer months, the road is a kingdom of pain and sudden death. Judging from the way Russians routinely risk their own and each others lives behind the wheel, it is not entirely unreasonable to conclude that each and every automobile in Moscow is being driven by a pent-up, adrenaline-pumped serial killer.

On a summertime trip to the countryside to visit relatives, however, I noticed a marked increase in the number of bikes on the road as we drew further and further away from the city. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between the population density and the popularity of two-wheeled vehicles, so by the time we reached our extremely rural destination, a small town called Nikolsk located in the Penzenskaya oblast, motorcycles accounted for perhaps half of the local traffic. Many were teen-toy two strokes, their passage marked by low-level contrails of blue smoke as they buzzed anarchistically along, but I also noticed a large proportion of big, heavy-duty bikes, usually equipped with sidecars, being used to haul everything from lumber to livestock.

By the time I returned to the city, I was determined to own one of those big, loud machines before the end of summer. As soon as I could manage it, I made arrangements to go back to the country and find myself a bike. My mother-in-law wanted to take my two-year-old daughter back to Nikolsk for a few weeks while the weather was still warm, so we bought three train tickets and tied up all our loose ends in the city.

The appointed day found us spectacularly unready for the trip. Traffic was worse than usual in the city that afternoon, and we were running late. The train would be leaving with or without us in another thirty minutes, and we were far from the station. Worst of all, I couldnt find an ATM that would accept any of my cards, and although our tickets were bought and paid for, I didnt have enough money on hand to buy a motorcycle once we got to Nikolsk. Our driver, a stalwart friend by the name of Valodye, had been battling the traffic valiantly, zipping us futilely from bank to bank in his new Skoda, and there was sweat on his forehead from the stress. Things didnt look good to either of us.

The scenery around us suddenly became familiar to me, and I sat bolt upright in my seat. The Sheraton was only a couple of blocks away, and I knew for a fact that the ATM in the lobby would accept my bank card. Val, eliciting honks and curses from a score of other drivers, pulled us up in front of the lobby entrance. Before he came to a stop, I leapt from the car and hit the ground running.

I got lucky: nobody was using the ATM. I was back in the car and headed for the train station, cash in hand, as quick as boiled asparagus.

Personally, I like to travel light. My mother-in-law, however, is not so inclined, and given the frequency with which weve had to travel together in the last two months, I count it as one of her greatest faults. On this particular occasion, I found her penchant for large amounts of luggage especially irksome, doubly so because, as it turned out, we pulled up to the station on the wrong side. The train was already waiting on the track, which meant we had just scant minutes to board before it would be pulling out and it was a good quarter-mile away. I was wearing two backpacks, had a large and heavy bag slung over each shoulder, and in each hand I gripped the handles and straps of God knows how many other ponderous pieces of motley and mismatched luggage. The spine-compressing load of it all was torture standing still. Since we were in danger of missing our train, I was moving at a dead run, desperately trying not to stumble or let any of my bags swing for fear of being bowled over by my own implacable inertia.

Somehow, I made it to the gray, 1930s-looking train without a cardiovascular accident or broken leg. I thought we were home free, but a quick inspection of the car numbers revealed that we were at the wrong end of a long train. Rather than risk being left behind, we boarded where we were, and made our way forward through the interior of the idle train. It was oppressively hot, and the corridors were too narrow for me to walk through freely with all the bags I was carrying. I ssssshhhed along, slogging forward against the friction of nylon and canvas on wood as alarmed Slavs jumped out of my way and peered at me from the safety of their open compartments. Ahead of me, my daughter peeked curiously into every nook and cranny, and hesitated warily before jumping across the vertebral metal plates that separated one car from the next. As the train pulled out of the station and picked up speed, she began refusing to cross between the cars without assistance, forcing me to further strain my overtaxed bones in order to keep her moving along ahead of me.

Eventually, we found our compartment, which was very near the front of the train. By the time we got there, I was praying for sweet, merciful death, but as we were sharing our cozy little car with a nice young Hungarian couple, I was obliged to live long enough to make small talk. Fortunately, there was cold beer involved, and my will to live was miraculously rekindled in short order.

The compartment wasnt terribly comfortable, but it wasnt uncomfortably terrible either. Four bunks, a table, a window. The paneling on the walls and the dull chrome trimmings were plain and somewhat disreputable with age, but everything was sturdy, there were no sharp corners to be found, and I managed to find a subtle proletarian elegance about the place. I stowed some of our gear underneath one of the lower bunks, and stashed the rest on one of the upper bunks. Wed have to sleep in shifts, but it would do.

I was still pretty hot and sweaty from the ordeal, so I stepped out of the compartment into the main corridor and enjoyed the breeze coming in through the open corridor window. I was just starting to cool off when a dour-looking old woman wearing a railway uniform popped through the door separating us from the next car back, noticed me enjoying myself, and started angrily berating me in Russian. She shooed me away from the window and closed it with a bang, then pulled the shade and brusquely whisked the heavy red curtains together. She ignored every other window on the car, though they were all wide open too. How very Soviet, I thought to myself but the Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. Besides, Im an American, and Im hot, so the hell with her. She stood there and watched, mouth agape and eyes bugging out apoplectically, as I swept the curtains aside, snapped the shade up, and opened the window.

The old Soviet throwback shouted at me in Russian, but I stood firm and stood fast between her and the window. Face flushed and looking surrealistically stern in her faded old uniform, she suddenly abandoned her human air raid siren impersonation, spun on her heel, and stalked off purposefully. Babushka, permanently scarred by a lifetime under the Soviet system, looked very nervous and tried desperately to convince me that arguing with quasihuman railway personnel would get me a one-way ticket to a Siberian gulag. I pushed back my nagging doubts as to the advisability of my actions, smiled at her, and told her not to worry. I figured if Stalinetta came back accompanied by a flying wedge of flatheaded bully boys to throw me bodily off the train, Id just plead ignorance of the language. Frightened, Babushka retreated into the relative safety of our compartment and hid her face from the imminent shit storm.

I enjoyed the lovely breeze on my face and prepared my mind for whatever form the confrontation might take. I wasnt in the mood to behave like a cowed slave and let some potato-nosed old sovok dominatrix force me to sit in the heat with the window shut for 900 kilometers just to satisfy her residual sense of reasonless Soviet propriety. Dialectical materialism be damned. Outside, the concrete and the factories were quickly giving way to forest, rippling plains of grass and grain, and little clusters of rustic suburban dachas. I remembered something Id read years ago about Robert and Ginny Heinleins visit to the Soviet Union, something about how low-ranking Soviet officials understood only two fundamental mentalities: that of the slave, and that of the master.

It didnt take long. Stalinetta came marching back into the car with a little man in tow a few minutes later. His uniform was even older and more threadbare than hers, and his face bore a petty, supercilious, Im-in-command-here expression that must have sent chills down the peasant spines of rail-riding commie bottom dwellers back in the bad old days. I disliked him on sight. As they drew nearer, she stopped and pointed at me, and he advanced, curtly informing me in heavily accented English that the window must be shut, giving no reason whatsoever as to why this window was so special. We had an awkward moment as he attempted, unsuccessfully, to brush me aside and close the window. He was about half my size. I didnt budge a millimeter, just looked him straight in the eye, the way a police interrogator looks at a suspect, and quietly but firmly informed him that the window would stay open, and that was that. He began to argue with me, so I quickly but calmly turned to face him, pulled a pen out of my shirt pocket, and demanded his name. I didnt yell, I just drilled holes in him with my eyes and flatly interrupted his insignificant little tirade and what do you know? He backed down. His manner changed in a twinkling from imperious to scrapingly servile. For a moment I thought he might actually tug his forelock. It was like watching mean old Mr. Hyde shrink into the meek contours of mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll.

Jekyll explained apologetically that the window was the designated emergency exit, and that regulations required it to be shut but he quickly continued that there was nothing special about the window other than the arbitrary designation, so if I really wanted it open, that would be fine, and did I need anything else? I dismissed him.

The Hungarians sharing our compartment were very pleasant, once the ice was broken. They expressed a deep love of the natural beautiful of the lush Russian countryside, and a sophisticated appreciation of Russian high culture. They were either too young or too sensible to hold a grudge against the Butchers of Budapest, preferring instead to embrace their nations ancient enemy as the good tourist value it is. We drank beer, talked about the world, played cards, and pointed out particularly quaint features of the languidly passing scenery to each other. At whistle stops, where old women and little boys crowded the train to sell fruit and cold drinks, we gave our trade to the most desperate faces.

My two-year-old daughter Leah, normally endowed with a take-no-prisoners ebullience in any new or exciting situation, surprised me by zonking out almost immediately and staying that way for a good six hours. I almost suspected Babushka of drugging her up. She looked so cute, passed out on the leather-upholstered lower bunk with one leg on the floor, her face, excruciatingly angelic in sleep, turned toward us. The Hungarians beamed embarrassed goodwill every time their eyes lit on her.

Presently, her grandmother hit the hay as well, staking out the top bunk on our side of the compartment. The Hungarians passed out on their side, and I was left to stand watch. I passed a good deal of the time standing at my window, breeze in my hair, watching Russia roll by in an endless stretch of forests, fields, dachas, river crossings where country folk swam and splashed each other merrily under the trestles, tiny villages where small clusters of grim blockhouse apartment buildings and ancient rotting tumbledown houses paid homage to crumbling churches, grassy leas where cows stood hypnotized by the lazy rhythm of their own chewing. Leah woke up and joined me, clambering up to stand on the sill of the window with my arms around her to keep her safe, waving and wildly screaming DOSVEDANYE!!!!! at every cow and rock and blade of grass we passed until the sun went down and only the black night remained.

I woke the Hungarians shortly before their stop, and they packed their gear out, leaving me a place to sleep. Babushka woke up and took charge of Leah, and I crashed hard on a lower bunk. Something was bothering me behind my eyes, a nagging little knot of vertigo and pain, and I felt cold in spite of the summer swelter. I dreamed shivering dreams of a ponderous, inhuman game in which the players were faceless monoliths of stone and steel, their movements set to the clicking rhythm of the swaying train on its tracks. My sleep seemed to last for black, yawning centuries.

When I woke up, I was violently ill. I locked myself in the toilet and tried in vain to turn myself inside out at the mouth. I reached the end of my dry heaving right about the time that we reached the end of our line. It was the wee hours of the morning now, with sunrise just a promise on the clock, and I knew Id have to pull myself together PDQ, or wed be stuck on the train. I rinsed out my mouth and forced my tumbling guts into submission through sheer force of will.

Fortunately, I didnt have to carry all that baggage very far. A line of bandit taxis waited at the station in a circle of unfocussed light carved out of the fog, and soon we were barreling down a country road toward Nikolsk. The dust billowed out behind us, red-lit by the running lights of the little car, and was lost forever in the fog and darkness.

Nikolsk slept. The traffic lights at the main intersection of town blinked idiot caution at us over empty streets but in his high-ceilinged Stalin-era apartment, Uncle was awake and awaiting our arrival. He gave me a warm greeting, all grin and sparkling eyes, and sat me down in the kitchen while Babushka hastily put a sleepy Leah to bed before she could turn cranky on us. Knowing my tastes, Uncle offered me beer immediately, and began setting out his customary array of finger foods as soon as our luggage was squared away. I couldnt stomach any of it, though, and settled myself with a nice glass of fresh milk instead.

I began to feel better when the Sun showed up. Unlike our place in the city, where the dawn works you over mercilessly through East-looking windows, Uncles apartment admits the daylight in a humbled, unobtrusive form, cast high and filtered through the greedy fingers of the trees. Babushka was already puttering about in the kitchen, making galubsye for our breakfast, and humming along with the weird mix of tunes emanating from the ancient radio squatting fatly on top of the enormous refrigerator. The range of musical selections being served up was way beyond eclectic. This was full-blown schizoid radio, mood swing music programmed by a split-personality with no hope of ever living a normal life: a Brubeck composition played on a distorted pipe organ back-to-back with Tchaikovsky, followed by disposable Russian bubblegum pop, followed by the national anthem, followed by a scratchy old Scott Joplin rag, capped by the news. Something for everyone, and Babushka seemed to enjoy every bit of it, bopping and grooving along with the music as she captained her spatula with nimble, expert fingers.

Good for you, Babushka. You go, girl.

I spent the day looking at motorcycles. Uncle had already done a bit of legwork on my behalf, and had some good prospects lined up. We jaunted around the tiny town, peering into perilously leaning sheds at machines in various stages of death and disrepair.

Everywhere we went, I caught people surreptitiously studying me. There was nothing sinister in it, just a great deal of veiled curiosity. Word seems to travel fast whenever Im in Nikolsk, and as the first foreigner to visit in perhaps fifty years, I enjoy a status there that is someplace between albino Bengal tiger and rock star. People are not sure what to think of me, but they all want to get a good look. If I speak to them, they react with varying degrees of shy delight, reveling in the novelty of my presence. Old men shake my hand gravely, World War II in their eyes, and young girls in pairs and trios flirt shamelessly with me when they think nobody is looking.

We traversed much of the town that morning, ending up at the home of Uncles friend Sergei Sergeiovich. Sergei is a long drink of water, six foot three if hes an inch, and well-muscled in spite of being skinny as a snake. His build is the only snakelike thing about him, though wholesome, homespun-clad Sergei would look right at home in a Norman Rockwell painting. Well, almost right at home, anyway. Hes got that fresh-faced farmboy look about him like no one Ive ever seen before, but the pointy, upturned toes of his weird shoes give him a fey, elflike quality that is both subtle and jarring.

Sergei had two motorcycles, a 1969 Ural, and a 1983 Ural, both of them Soviet-made copies of the same 1940 BMW. The 69 sat on flat, ancient tires, bleeding oil from every part of its weary old engine and rusting delicately everywhere else. There was no way I was going to even think about trying to ride that dog all the way back to Moscow, but my heart warmed with disappointed love as I examined it.

The 83 was in much better shape. It fired right up after a bit of priming, and smoked only a little. The oil was low, and the tire on the sidecar needed a little air before we could take her out for a spin, but there was a full set of tools in the trunk, complete with foot-pump. We topped up the oil and the tire and went riding, me in the bitch seat and Uncle in the sidecar.

Ive never before ridden anything so ear-splittingly loud and so ponderously slow. This was a Soviet Harley, commie cousin to the Cro-Magnon hog my grandfather tooled around on in post-Depression California. I loved it.

Uncle felt differently. He does not have a deep and abiding love for motorcycles, and was only too happy to have us drop him off at home, obviously grateful that he hadnt been injured or killed.

Sergei and I spent the rest of the day working on the bike and tooling around, making sure everything was working properly, and taking frequent beer breaks in between. When we both felt confident that the bike would continue to run once we left the relative safety of Nikolsk proper, we picked up Sergeis dog and my wifes cousin Andrei and headed out of town for some highway riding. Sergei still didnt trust me with his life, as I had never ridden a bike with a sidecar before that day, so he drove while the dog and I shared the sidecar and Andrei clung nervously to the leather loop just in front of the bitch seat.

Open fields and long stands of forest rolled by deliciously, punctuated by occasional tiny clusters of geriatric tumbledown dwellings, bus stops with odd-looking assortments of people waiting for any vehicle with room, blue sky and sunshine and rippling grain and free, sweet wind. We rode the asphalt a long time before Sergei muscled us over onto a narrow dirt track, slowing down to a crawl so as to spare us the unkind irregularities of bumps and potholes, down through the tall grass to a lake of pure, clear water. With the engine shut down, it was quiet and still, and the water looked as smooth as a mirror.

With the wind of our passage gone, it was hot. We shed our clothes and stormed the lake, yelling and splashing and laughing like schoolboys playing hooky. The dog whined at us from the shore, afraid to enter the unknown depths of the water, but unwilling to be left behind. We pushed a big floating log over to shore and Sergei tricked the dog into walking out on it before gently shoving the impromptu raft toward the middle of the lake.

Later, as we basked dripping in the sunshine, we drank beer and talked business. A few questions, a handshake, and Sergeis Ural was mine. I promptly and proudly dubbed her Tcheripashkoo Galuboy (the Blue Turtle).

We rode my Tcheripashkoo back to town, but this time I drove, in spite of Andreis fearful protests at the idea. The sidecar definitely took some getting used to, what with the sickening feeling of imminent bloody mangled death that accompanies every right turn, but I was feeling my oats and saw no reason to be an old lady about it. The dog and I enjoyed the ride thoroughly. Every now and then I snuck a peek in my rear view mirror at Andrei, whose ghost-white face was locked in a rictus grin of naked terror. Sergei, meanwhile, won my respect by keeping his face composed in an unshakeable mask of Buddha-like serenity.

That evening, we all gathered at Uncles dacha for drinks and shashlik. My Russian friends and family, proud of their old-timey ways, were all eager to serve me my first taste of this traditional local dish, and I didnt have the heart to tell them that, back in the States, we call it barbecue. The marinade wasnt quite the same, but close enough, and shashlik is cooked on skewers, like what we call shishkebab, but it was barbecue nonetheless. The fact that it was very good barbecue made it easy for me to display the childlike gustatory joy they were all looking for. The vodka didnt hurt, either. Much.

Uncles dacha is a marvelous little hideaway. Its a short distance from town, an easy walk from the last bus stop on the local route, but far enough away to be private and quiet and superlatively pastoral. The patch of land it sits on is huddled together with a few dozen others like it in a peaceful, private, happy little village-without-portfolio that exists and thrives in an innocent, archaic manner based on nothing more substantial than mutual consent. All the unpleasantness of cities and towns, all the danger and ugliness of civilization, all of that is left behind when one goes to dacha. There is no graffiti, no blasting music, no brawling, no maniacally piloted automobiles. The surrounding forest is broken only by the muddy road to town on one side, and a wide cattle track on the other, where twice daily the local ruminants are herded to and from pasturage by horseless cowboys and cowgirls wielding sinuous switches. The dacha itself is delineated by a high old fence, secured by barbed wire and various strategically-planted stinging or thorn-bearing plants, within whose confines a staggering panoply of fruits, vegetables, tubers, herbs, and flowers grow. Two paths, painstakingly lain by hand and made of castoff lumps of smooth colored glass from the local glassmaking factory, wind from the front gate through the garden, along the edge of the cozy little house, back to the far end of the property, where the outhouse and the rainwater bathtub rise organically from the rich soil. Just off the main path, a venerable and still-solid picnic table sits rotting jauntily in the welcome shade of a carefully pruned tree laden with countless sweet green apples, just a few feet from the brick kiln where Uncle cooks shashlik for his guests.

The evening of the day I bought Sergeis Ural, we drank and ate well. Some of us, in fact most of us, drank a little too well, if you know what I mean. Beer and wine and vodka was flowing pretty freely, and soon the innate pessimism that all Russians seem to be cursed with began rearing its nay-saying head. Someone, perhaps Uncles dacha-neighbor Yuri, made some remark about the inadvisability of the trip I was planning, and it snowballed from there. Within minutes, they were all dead set against my going, and were advising, urging, practically begging me to let them put the bike on a truck and drive me back to Moscow. Try as I might, I couldnt get through to them the fact that the whole point of this trip wasnt just to buy a motorcycle; I wanted to ride my motorcycle across the Russian countryside. Im an adventurer, I told them, and this is my adventure.

I learned later that, in Russian, the word adventurer carries some very serious negative connotations but I have to admit that this fact only makes it more appropriately descriptive of me. Yes, Im kind of a bad guy sometimes. So sue me.

One by one, in shifts, they tried to talk sense into me. Uncle demanded to know what I would do if the motorcycle broke down along the way. Andrei insisted that it would indeed break down, as sure as milk goes sour. Sergei, no optimist but with a good measure of faith in his own skill as a mechanic, assured me that the motorcycle would make it to Moscow, nyeh probleem but predicted that the banditti would surely rob me and kill me long before I got home. Only Yuri, stubbornly loyal to his own cherished Ural, understood why I wanted to make such a trip, and even he expressed a dark foreboding when the subject of the banditti was raised. Uncle went so far as to say that, with me being an American and all, the police were at least as much of a danger to me as any gang of cutthroats.

I stuck to my guns, and they eventually gave up, but all the joy was gone from our gathering. These men honestly liked me, and they didnt want me to die. They had managed to convince themselves and each other that my proposed trip was certain death, and so they were simultaneously mourning me in advance, and cursing me for being so stupid and stubborn as to ignore their advice. Uncle scowled and brooded, and it hurt me so to make him worry that I almost relented but I couldnt give in, not if I wanted to look myself in the mirror again. There are just some things that a man has to do, not because they need doing, but because they test him and strengthen him and keep him happy to be alive. You hone a knife on a stone, not on a loaf of bread.

The day of my departure dawned miserably. A long streak of beautiful, sunny weather had suddenly and inexplicably given way to iron-gray clouds full of rain and lightning, buffeting winds and the angry tympani rumble of a warning thunder. It was as though the gods themselves were confirming the forecast of doom that my friends and family had made the night before.

I didnt hesitate much. When I lived in Oregon, I rode a motorcycle every day, rain or shine and Oregon gets a lot more rain than shine. No way would I let a little moisture get between me and the open road. Uncle found a sheet of plastic and helped me cut it to a size suitable for use as a ground tarp, then cut me another to use as a poncho if necessary. I wrapped my gear in plastic and packed the sidecar. While Babushka cooked breakfast, I sat at the kitchen table and dipped matches in candle wax to make them waterproof.

Uncle was quieter now, still opposed to my going, but resigned to my stubbornness. He did the best he could for me, supplying me with what weapons he could spare, and brainstorming with me on sundry items that might prove invaluable along the way. Uncle has a near-pathological fascination with weaponry of any kind, and loves nothing more than a discussion of tactics. He brightened considerably when I showed him how to use a newspaper to kill or incapacitate an opponent.

The rain let up just long enough for me to get out of town. I gassed up at the LukOil station and hit the road, and was soaked stupid within five kilometers but thats the difference between me and Jack Kerouac: I kept going. Ill never forget the feeling of utter disdain I had as a teenager when I snapped shut a copy of On the Road after reading how Kerouac wistfully turned tail for home and a slice of pie just because he got rained on ten miles from his house. Fuck Kerouac, I thought to myself as I twisted the throttle and squinted hard to keep the rain out of my eyes. He must have been made out of sugar.

Yes, I had to squint to keep the rain out of my eyes. One thing I couldnt scare up in Nikolsk was a decent set of goggles, or even a good pair of wind-resistant sunglasses. I had a crappy old helmet that Sergei gave me, but my face was bare to the elements. The helmet was a complete piece of shit, and I was only wearing it to comply with the loosely enforced local law requiring the driver of a motorcycle (but not passengers, oddly enough) to wear one. The helmet had a chinguard, making it a type of helmet I hate even more than the minimalist snoopy lids Ive grudgingly deigned to wear in the States. It was green, and green is traditionally a bad luck color for bikers. Youll never see an old Hells Angel riding a green Harley.

Before California had a helmet law, I never wore one, and when I lived in Salisbury, Maryland, I used to ride my old Triumph Tiger across the State line, stop five feet past the WELCOME TO DELAWARE sign, and take my helmet off before continuing but I always wore something to protect my eyes. In fact, Im accustomed to keeping two pairs of eyewear in my bike bag at all times: tinted aviator goggles for daytime riding, clear aviator goggles for night. I can handle the occasional rock in the face, the sting of dirt and dust, the mercifully infrequent tiny bitch-slap of a flying insect striking my cheek or my forehead, or the surprisingly painful needlelike sensation of rain tattooing my bare face (the small drops hurt the most), but Ive got to have my eyes covered. Call me a big sissy if you like, but I contend that not even the most hardened and grizzled of old sled apes, the guys in denim and leather that would disintegrate long before the stink was gone if they ever fell so low as to wash their clothes, could possibly face the prospect of a long, bare-eyeballed highway run without some serious trepidation. I was planning to stop in Penza and buy some eyewear, but meanwhile I had to slit my eyes and peer intently through wet lashes while the rain streamed down my face. Its a wonder I didnt run right off the road into a tree.

Half an hour out of Nikolsk, the rain let up. The sky was still a roiling hell of ominous grey cloud from horizon to horizon, but somewhere up above the roof of the world, the gods had chosen to smile faintly upon me. Or so I thought.

The rain had suppressed the ordinarily dusty quality of the road I was on, so now the only real threat to my abused eyes was the wind. The countryside was soggy, but beautiful. Huge hilly swaths of forest glittered wetly between long flat stretches where the potato harvest was beginning in now-muddy fields of rich black earth. I was wet and cold, but Ive been wetter and colder, so I didnt let it slow me down. In fact, I was just beginning to really enjoy myself when the engine died.

There are only three fundamental things that can go wrong with an internal combusion engine: no gas, no spark, no air. A running engine that stops running usually stops in a certain way depending on what the nature of the problem is. If its gas, it dies like a Shakespearean actor, with a bit of sputtering and drama before the final death rattle. If its air, the engine might backfire or bog down and lose power steadily before actually quitting. If the problem is spark, and you dont have a heavy buildup of carbon on your piston heads glowing and making your engine diesel after the spark plugs quit working, then it just plain dies without making a big production of it. I had a spark problem.

The manual for the bike was in the trunk of the sidecar, but it was in Russian. It wouldnt have done me any good anyway, because the electrical system on my Ural was a long way from stock. It had been tampered with, rebuilt, and retampered with many times. There were wires going every which way, some of which were leftovers from the original system and no longer actually attached to anything. Id call it jerry-rigged but that wouldnt even begin to describe the laughable messiness of the tangled spaghetti I was looking at. Ivan-rigged is more like it, at least to those of us who are acquainted with the Russian way of putting things together (get drunk, do it wrong using inappropriate tools, get even drunker, fiddle with it until you accidentally fix it just well enough to work for a little while before breaking, then throw up on it and head to the bar for drinks). For the first time in my life, the old Lucas electrics on the Triumph I used to ride seemed like relatively good engineering. Working without benefit of a volt-ohm meter, it took me twenty minutes of expert cursing to locate the trouble. Fortunately, it was a pretty simple wiring problem. I used my knife to strip insulation and managed to get things in roughly working order, and I prayed it would stay that way long enough for me to get to Penza and buy some electrical tape.

Penza isnt Moscow, but its no tiny village, either. Gigantic statues of the ubiquitous generic proletariat and generic soldier abound on the main thoroughfare, along with metal monuments commemorating real or trumped-up triumphs in war, science, industry, and space exploration. Abstract representations of Soviet pride in something or other make vast mute boasts in the parks, the crossroads, and the squares, flanked by row upon row of leninki, kruschevki, and brezhnevki apartment towers standing like dominos waiting to be toppled by the playful adolescent finger of emerging capitalism. Just like everywhere else, the little inconvenience stores called produkti dot the landscape in great abundance, and along the main road, several stretches of marketplace have sprung up, open air bazaars of carnival-like booths where bored girls and sharp-haggling babushki sell the spoils of what was once an empire. Fruit, vegetables, baked goods, clothing, household products, tools, car accessories, pirate videotapes, pirate cassette tapes, pirate CDs, and the cheap trinkets of the Far East lurk or are displayed in piles, stacks, racks, and bins. Things that are not on display can be bought here as well, if you know the ropes but I wasnt interested in heroin, hashish, or human flesh.

I didnt feel very good about leaving my bike unattended, but I had to if I wanted to prowl the bazaar and find the sunglasses and electrical tape I needed. All my stuff was in the sidecar, protected by a leather cover that hooks into place around the edges of the sidecar cockpit. I took the essentials with me, passport and money and so on, and parked the bike with the sidecar towards the street so that anybody bold enough to rummage through my belongings in broad daylight would have to either do it leaning over the bike with his back to me, or be brave/stupid enough to stand a matadors distance from the edge of the maniacal traffic pumping through town like blood through an Olympic sprinters aorta. As an afterthought, I retrieved the knife that Uncle had given me, and tucked it into an inner pocket of my jacket.

Its impossible to hide your foreign origins in a place like Nikolsk, and not at all easy in a place like Penza. I wandered away from my bike before revealing myself as an outlander, because I didnt want my ride associated with me when people figured out that I was an American. I picked a booth at random and asked the girl working there if she knew where I could buy some sunglasses. The tedium of her working day broken, she did just what I expected her to do: asked me where I was from, asked me all about America before giving me directions, and then opened her big mouth and loudly informed her friends in the booths nearby that, hey look, heres an American, how about that? My cover blown, I followed her directions to a booth on the other side of the marketplace, found a pair of goggles that fit the bill nicely, bought a roll of electrical tape at a tool booth, and got ready to skedaddle.

But I was being followed.

At first I thought it might just be coincidence and paranoia, so I took some fairly quick and random turns through the maze of booths, rounded a corner, and stopped short. It wasnt paranoia.

There were two of them. Both young, mid-twenties perhaps, but they didnt look at all alike. One was short and built brutish, with sandy hair and a lumpy nose that seemed to have been broken at least once. He wore the kind of dirty, unstylish clothing that far too many Russian country folk wear duds that look as though they were snatched from a garbage fire. His shirt and his pants were stained with grease and had holes in them. He had the look of a discharged Russian soldier, maybe one of the crazy atrocity-committing ones who had seen action in Chechnya. His friend was tall and built lean, dressed in the expensive but gauche style affected by the lower classes of banditti youth. He had elaborately coiffed dark hair in a sort of a vaguely rockabilly style, a shiny black leather jacket, and a pair of severely pointy cockroach-killers on his feet that had been shined that day. His black pants were pegged to his long skinny legs, and a pair of howlingly stupid-looking Oakley clone razor shades hid his eyes.

I pretended not to see them while I browsed a table full of well, junk. I had wandered into a section of the bazaar where people sell anything they can get their hands on. Layed out before me like the crown jewels was as random an assortment of unwantable second-hand crap as I have ever seen in my life. It was like a yard sale at a crack house in the industrial section of Compton.

I didnt really have a plan, but I did have everything I came for, so I ambled back toward the area where I was parked. I didnt want these guys to see my bike, so I stopped at a small building near the edge of the maze of booths. The building housed public toilets, a remarkable convenience for such a place. I rounded the corner and leaned against the side of the shithouse as casually as I could, slid the big knife out of my jacket pocket, and began cleaning my fingernails with it. Mutt and Jeff came along right on schedule, and this time I made sure they saw me looking at them.

They stood there, maybe five meters away, and regarded me. Bully-boy glared at me with the dull eyes of a low-IQ killer but he was looking mostly at the knife. Skinny pointed his sunglasses at me, and an ironic little smile played at the corners of his mouth. I gave him a nod in greeting, and by way of reply, he shrugged slightly, as if to tell me that he knew that I knew, and that maybe wed meet again sometime when I wasnt expecting him.

Fat chance, asshole. The day I let an amateur like you take me out is the day I deserve it.

I rode through the rest of Penza without stopping. On the outskirts of town, I gassed up and took the opportunity to fix my electrical system up a bit. I was having some new problems now, but it was nothing insurmountable. The constant, ass-rattling vibration of my ride from Nikolsk had rotated my commutator just a hair, and as a result the spark timing was a tiny bit off. I tightened everything down, but couldnt get the engine to fire up with the kickstart lever. After thoroughly annoying myself with trying, I pushed the bike to the top of a slight hill, gave it a good running push before jumping on, and popped the clutch in second gear. I had to start the bike that way for the rest of the trip.

Past Penza, the countryside is not so pastorally beautiful as it is on the road to Nikolsk. Heres how Jake Rudnitzky of the local underground paper the eXile describes it:

It's not so much the miles and miles of crooked, half-torn fences, the rotting houses and depressing khrushyevki apartment block slabs that sprout out of the trash-littered growth, the dead factories and abandoned slabs of concrete or rusted scraps you see over and over and over... it's the repetition of it, knowing that this goes on for eleven of Russia's famous time zones, that starts to really grate.

I have to admit that, in a superficial sense, Jake Rudnitzky knows what rural Russia looks like. I suspect, however, that he filters what he sees through a cynical depression that is probably borne of prolonged Imovane abuse. Conversely, one might easily accuse me of perversely finding beauty in the landscapes of other peoples misery but I never found anything charming about the ghettoes of Los Angeles, the miserable warrens in which the poorer residents of Mexico City gasp out their polluted lives, or the bleak, frostbitten fishing villages where native Alaskans stumble through their disenfranchised existence as fifth-generation victims of fetal alchohol syndrome. In other words, if the suffering and poverty of others are what enchant me so, then its only the suffering and poverty of Russians. Thats not likely to be the case, but if it is, who could blame me? Russians are like Americans: they tend to be either magnificently likeable or nerve-shatteringly annoying.

To be fair, Rudnitzky has been in country a lot longer than I have, but he seems to have lost the ability to look at the world around him with the eyes of a child. I am pleased to report that I, though older than Mr. Rudnitzky and having undoubtedly lived a shittier, grittier, and more painful life than he has led, have not lost that ability. I will always be able to look at the world with the eyes of a child I keep them in a small jar of formaldehyde in my suitcase. Yes, its a rehash of an old joke (sorry, Robert Bloch), but the point remains: at thirty-eight, Ive already abided more trouble and woe than most people see in their whole lives, but I have persistently refused to fall into the terminally negative patterns of thought that people like Jake Rudnitzky are hopelessly addicted to.

Enough digression. For good or ill, I rode many kilometers through a starkly simple landscape capable of inspiring a whole panoply of emotional responses, depending on the mood and inclination of the traveler. I enjoyed it.

Back in the late 90s, I broke my back skiing. I dont recommend it. Ive been plagued with intermittent back trouble ever since. Its almost always there, nagging at me just a little, but its become like an aggravating old friend, the kind you hang out with every day even though youd kind of like to kick his ass. I dont even notice the pain most of the time. The damp bumpiness of the road and the unnatural shoulders-forward posture that my low handlebars forced me to take had begun to take a toll, though. Id come quite a long way from Nikolsk, and the pain was no longer ignoreable.

There was a bottle of Vicodin packed away in the sidecar, leftovers from a prescription I had been given before I left the States, and I was tempted to dope my back pain into oblivion and keep right on riding down the road. I didnt really feel like getting high, though, and the prospect of driving a still slightly unfamiliar bike over long stretches of badly maintained road with a head full of Vicodin just seemed like a really bad idea. I had decided that sidecar driving is no joke. Lose your nerve or forget to pay attention just once on a right-hand curve, and you could end up with a mouthful of somebody elses windshield.

Makshan was not far ahead, I knew, and I wanted to get a look at more of it than can be seen from the road. Its an ancient little town with several towers and bits of barrier still standing from the time of the Tatar invasion. The towers, which were built without nails, allowed spotters to see and shoot arrows at the approaching enemy with a slight distance advantage. Theyre beautiful in their way, as is the nicely restored old church that the townspeople still use for Orthodox worship. I gritted my teeth against the tortured ache in my spinal column and resolved not to stop until I got there. I figured it was about ten kilometers, but it turned out to be more like thirty, and every bump in the road was like a hobnailed boot in the coccyx. I found some relief by standing up on the footpegs and stretching while I rode, an innovation that seemed to cause universal alarm or delight in the drivers of oncoming vehicles.

When I reached the turnoff that led to the center of Makshan, it was still fairly early in the day. The rain was behind me, it was summer and long on sunshine, and Id gotten a good early start from Uncles place in Nikolsk. The Makshan bazaar was no longer teeming with people, but nearly all of the little booths were still open, so I wandered around a while, stretching my legs and trying to get my poor aching back into some semblance of a proper S-shape.

Once again, it didnt take long for me to be stripped of my anonymity, but I wasnt too worried about it. Makshan is a village, not a big town like Penza. Where theres nothing much to steal, there are very few banditti about. Theres also more social pressure to behave in a civilized fashion in a smaller town, so long as your definition of civilized behavior doesnt include sobriety. There are drunken hooligans (and sober hooligans), and no shortage of them, but such people are, like most rural Russians, sufficiently dazzled by the glamour of an Americans origins to be dealt with fairly easily.

The proprietress of one of the booths in the marketplace chatted me up a bit, then stopped a passerby and introduced me to her. She was the local schools English teacher, and therefore more than ordinarily interested in talking with me. She had a very easygoing outlook on life, and we had a most pleasant conversation. This woman, like all teachers in that part of the world, lives on a State salary that equates to about thirty-five dollars per month. She supplements her income with private tutoring, and enjoys a certain amount of prestige in the town that often translates into gifts from other peoples gardens. Without the free fruit and vegetables, she said, shed probably starve.

The English teacher introduced me in turn to three friends of hers who happened to be passing by and stopped to say hello. They were the Russian equivalent of British pepperpots, aging housewives in dowdy dresses who congregate in flocks to cluck and gossip with one another like overstimulated chickens. The pepperpots asked me all the usual questions about America, my line of work, my impressions of Russia, etc. When I told them I was living in Moscow, they became very excited and asked me if I knew where a particular stadium was located. It seems they were planning on visiting the city within a couple of months for some kind of convention, and they wanted me to attend as well. They couched the whole thing in terms of an invitation, but on further inquiry I realized that what they were inviting me to was some sort of giant pyramid scheme gathering.

Man, I hate pyramid schemes. I hate them like hippies hate soap. I hate them like Louis Farrakhan hates white folks. I hate them like J. Edgar Hoover hated boxer shorts.

With the English teachers assistance, I explained to these women what a pyramid scheme was, and why they are to be avoided. I told them about the pyramid scheme that swept Albania a decade or so ago, causing a total collapse of the Albanian economy. They didnt quite grasp the concept of a geometrical progression, so I told them the following (apocryphal) story:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, in the land of the Persians, a very clever man invented the game of chess. He took his invention to the Caliph, who spent the entire afternoon learning how to move the various pieces around the board, and playing game after game with the inventor. The Caliph was so delighted with his new pastime that he offered to grant the inventor his hearts desire.
Just tell me what you want, anything at all, and it shall be yours, said the Caliph.
Sire, replied his clever vassal, my hearts desire is very simple. Place one grain of wheat for me on the first square of my chessboard, two grains of wheat on the second square, four grains of wheat on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, until you reach the final square.
The Caliph was amazed at the modesty of the mans request, and immediately ordered a servant to go and fetch a bushel basket of wheat. It soon became apparent, however, that a single bushel basket would not be sufficient to fulfill the clever inventors request. A bit of quick figuring, and the Caliph realized that, long before he reached the last square on the chessboard, he would have to give the man more wheat than had ever been cultivated in the entire span of human history. Since this was obviously beyond the power of the Caliph to do, he had the clever inventor beheaded instead...

At the end of my little fable, I tacked on a traditional Russian fairytale ending:

and after the clever vassal was beheaded, they had a big feast to celebrate the invention of chess, and I was there. We all had a wonderful time, and there were many delicious things to eat and drink, and I got SO FULL.

The pepperpots listened to my anti-pyramid diatribe and my illustrative fable very carefully, and then they amazed me.

See, in America, the enthusiasm that people work up over this sort of thing is practically inextinguishable no matter how much logic or common sense you employ. Americans believe with all their hearts in get-rich-quick schemes, because in America, some get-rich-quick schemes have actually been known to work. Years ago, in Alaska, an acquaintance tried to draw me into a classic Ponzi pyramid. I accompanied her to a meeting without knowing what it was about, and ended up trying to warn a whole roomful of people that they were headed straight for a big trap marked MATHEMATICALLY IGNORANT SUCKERS ONLY. First, they drew some diagrams on a piece of paper and tried to tell me that it wasnt a pyramid at all, it was a solar system structure that started with one person in the center, two people in an orbit around the center, four people in the next orbit, and so on. Which, of course, is the same damn thing. When I pointed that out, I was shouted down and quickly invited to leave. Within three weeks, two of them were in jail, and the rest had been divested of a considerable sum of money.

But the pepperpots were not Americans. Their innate Russian pessimism kicked in and overrode their desperate dreams of easy money. I pissed all over their parade, and they actually saw the light, changed their minds about going to the convention, and thanked me profusely for warning them off. It was the most gratifying conversation I had had in years.

After the pepperpots had gone on their way, the English teacher introduced me to one of her students who happened along, a young man named Sasha. She had an appointment, she said, but Sasha would be happy to show me around the town and help me find anything I needed.

Sasha had a car, a fairly new Volkswagen, which made me wonder. Its axiomatic that Russians who drive foreign cars (which are very expensive here) obtained them through some illegal and/or immoral means. He seemed like a nice enough fellow, though, and the English teacher had vouched for him in no uncertain terms. I followed him to the local stoyanka and made arrangements to park my motorcycle under guard for the night, and Sasha gave me a driving tour of Makshan. We ended up at his fiancees apartment, eating cheese, coldcuts, and pastry, and drinking not a little bit of beer.

Sasha seemed to see my presence as a welcome opportunity to ditch the old ball-and-chain for an evening and take in some local nightlife. There isnt much to do in a place like Makshan, so young people spend the bulk of their recreation time drinking and fucking. Sashas eagerness brought us to the small strip of bars in what passed for a downtown a little early, however. There was nobody around, aside from a few very dedicated alcoholics, several of whom were thoroughly polluted, with mostly-empty vodka bottles sittingly wanly near their nerveless hands and heads. Two of the bars we popped into contained a single patron each, passed out cold at a wooden table.

There was a small hotel in the middle of the strip. I hadnt yet made any arrangements for a place to stay, and I was half-afraid that Sasha would invite me to stay with him and his fiancee. Half-afraid because it meant we would be out all night, and then I would be trapped in a small enclosed space with two chain smokers. Fortunately, the hotel had a bar, and Sasha needed to use the restroom while we were there. I took the opportunity to get a room. It was only twelve bucks American, and worth every penny, if you know what I mean.

There were two beds, equally Procrustean in their lack of length, and both of them lumpy as hell to boot. A small side room that looked like it was once a kitchenette was home to a very sad-looking and nonfunctional minifridge, its door hanging precariously on broken hinges. The bathroom (I had to pay extra to get a room with a bathroom) had a gigantic bathtub, but the hot water heater was situated directly above it in such a way as to prevent the bather from sitting in it comfortably. As it turned out, the water heater didnt work anyway, so it was a moot point. The water was colder than US-Soviet relations in the Kruschev administration.

I kicked around town with Sasha for another hour or two, until he said that he had some work to do and would have to hook up with me later. I told him where to find me, and went back to my room. Im not fond of bathing in ice water, but I had road all over me, and I wanted to clean up.

There wasnt any soap in the room, and none available at the desk. The clerk pointed me toward a store just on the other side of one of the wooden archer towers I mentioned earlier. I hiked on over, and was surprised at how large the store looked from the outside. Nearly all the stores in Russia are tiny little produkti, most of which are only slightly bigger than phone booths. Some stores are a bit larger, and seem to have several departments, but each department has a separate cashier, and very often a separate proprietor altogether. In Moscow, there is a scattering of Western-style supermarkets, but theyre very modest compared to a full-sized American mondogigantomart. You could fit a good dozen Moscow supermarkets into the space occupied by the Ralphs where I used to shop in Long Beach, California.

The supermarket in Makshan was nearly the size of a Moscow supermarket, a big surprise in such a small town. Once I got inside, though, everything became clear. They had a lot of space, but there were far more empty shelves and aisles than there were full ones. A couple of cashiers oozed boredom at the front of the store, and a man who looked like he might be the owner or the manager was having a drink with the security guard. I cruised what there was of the aisles, grabbed a bar of soap and a packet of razors, and ponied up.

On my way out the door, I noticed a set of stairs going up to the second floor of the building. There was a sign with a large arrow pointing up, and the single word DZHINZI printed in huge Cyrillic capitals.

The space upstairs was every bit as big as the very unsuper supermarket downstairs, but almost entirely empty. In the corner farthest from the stairs was a meager display of jeans, jackets, and denim vests presided over by a young woman who seemed to be contemplating suicide, but looked far too apathetic to actually do anything about it. The rest of the huge room was blank and unfinished, full of dusty brick and exposed pipes, jagged holes and exposed electrical wiring that dated back to sometime in the Bronze Age. Having taken the trouble to come all the way up the stairs, I went ahead and took a polite look at the paltry collection of wares on display, but there was nothing in my size that was above my threshold of tastelessness.

As I left the building, I noticed that the owner/manager/whatever and the security guard had chosen to take their drinking outdoors. They were standing just outside the entrance, talking with a woman who turned out to be the English teacher I had met earlier. She was delighted to see me again, and introductions were quickly made. She had finished up with her appointment, so we stood around for a while with the two men, and talked philosophically about life in general. The men were both built like fireplugs, but they seemed jovial enough. The security guard was more or less a nonentity, but he smiled and laughed easily, and his boss had a pretty quick wit about him. Like all Russians do, they eventually got around to asking me how I liked Russia, and for the first time, I had a coherent answer.

America, I told them, is like candy. Its sweet, but too much of it will make you sick. Russia is like a loaf of bread. It isnt all that tasty, but its very nourishing.

They seemed to approve of this assessment. Mikhail, the market owner, fetched me a paper cup and poured me a drink.

It took us about twenty leisurely minutes to empty the bottle. The three of them told me that the streets and bars of the neighborhood would be full of people partying in just a couple of hours, and if I wanted a woman to take back to the hotel with me, I should just go ahead and bluntly ask anybody who appealed to me.

Youre American, said the English teacher. You can have anyone you want here.

If I wasnt such a jaded old evil-minded reprobate, I would have blushed.

Oh yes, she added, and if anyone gives you any trouble while youre here, tell them youre a friend of mine, and a friend of Mikhails. Nobody messes with us in this town.

I headed back for the hotel and had a cold, cold bath and a bad shave. I started to put on some clean clothes, but then I realized how tired I was. I knew that if Sasha came back, Id be up pretty late, and I didnt want to waste too much of the next days light, so I dropped into one of the unnaturally short beds and had myself a mansized nap.

I dreamed a muddle of archers in a wooden tower, shooting at invaders riding motorcycles.

A pounding at the door woke me up. It was dark out, and I had to fumble along the wall to find the lightswitch and my pants. The sounds of revelers and the distorted bass thudding of an abused car stereo floated up from the street through the open window. Sasha had come back, but he wasnt alone. He had a very unsavory-looking character with him, a leathery, taciturn skinhead with a double armful of crappy, blurry military tattoos done in cheap blue ink. Behind them lurked an obviously drunk girl wearing too much makeup and too little clothing. I hesitated to let them in, but the English teacher had assured me twice that I was absolutely safe with Sasha.

We brought you a girl, announced Sasha proudly.

I tried to introduce myself to his skinhead friend, but he didnt seem to want to know me. The guy had a little black cloud hanging over his head, and he looked like he was reluctantly holding himself in check for Sashas sake. I got the distinct impression that, if not for my local associates, he would just as soon kill me for the contents of my pockets and be done with it. His name was Vanya.

1500 rubles, barked the recalcitrant skinhead as he brusquely shoved the girl forward.

Im married.

OK, 1200 rubles, Vanya shouted back. The merchandise teetered on cheap badgirl shoes and giggled.

Uh Ill think about it, OK?

Vanya cursed at the air and hustled the girl out. He didnt even kiss me goodbye. The last I saw of the girl was a delicate little Cheshire cat of a hand, waving a drunken, girly little bye-bye as the rest of her disappeared behind the door. Her nails were painted sparkly metallic blue, and chipped all to hell.

Sasha just shrugged and smiled.

The next few hours were a blur of unlit streets full of young people dressed in their best finery, bars full of the same, and handshakes and drinks all around. Sasha was playing the big man, showing all the small fry that he, by god, had friends in America. I would have been less than comfortable with the situation, but what the English teacher had said seemed to be true: everybody knew Sasha, and if I was his friend, then I wasnt to be messed with. The only thing close to an exception to this rule was a very drunk young fellow who started loudly denouncing me as a fraud.

Hes not an American! He cant be! Americans dont come to Makshan!

He seemed pretty upset about it. Sasha told me to ignore him, but he didnt look too happy either. Some other drunk was arguing with my accuser, telling him he was a fool and that he should just shut up, and I was startled to see that the second drunk was the first ones twin brother. It felt like a bad scene shaping up. If nothing else, it was embarrassing the hell out of poor Sasha, so I let the sozzled little bastard go ahead and rant awhile, then took him aside and showed him my passport. He gazed at me in pickled, head-bobbing wonder for a long moment, then apologized and stumbled back to his seat. Ten minutes later he had forgotten it all, and was stridently denouncing me again. We left.

Outside, the party was in full swing. The street was almost as crowded as the good bars, and I flashed briefly on Hieronymous Bosch as I took in the spectacle. The whole scene had a dangerous, unreal quality to it that was greatly enhanced by the absolute lack of streetlights. There is very little light pollution in Makshan, and overhead the stars were all present and accounted for. Wending through and between them, the Milky Way cut a creamy swath across the speckled face of the sky. Alone now, the girl that Vanya had tried to pimp out to me staggered up blearily out of the darkness on her awkward heels and informed me very carefully that I could fuck her for 200 rubles.

In the morning it was all gone, evaporated like so much ether. The street was innocent of the nights noise and mayhem, and looked as though it had been freshly swept. My windows were open wide, and a tiny sparrow sat on the concrete ledge just outside and looked me right in the eye from a meter away, cocking his head this way and that, waiting to see if I would feed him or try to eat him.

I caught a bandit taxi outside the hotel and asked the driver to take me to the stoyanka where the Blue Turtle was parked. The driver had never met an American, and we went through the litany of the Usual Questions as he drove. He pulled up right next to my bike and refused to take my money.

It wasnt until I had my gear stowed and was ready to fire up my engine that I remembered the little problem I had with the kickstart. I was on flat, level ground, with not a ramp or a slope in sight. I sighed and took my helmet off.

The owner of the stoyanka saw me trying to push start the bike on level ground, which is no easy thing with a sidecar attached. I had to get the big bastard up to speed, then fling myself over the seat without smacking my leg on either the sidecar or the bars that held it fast to the bike itself. It was awkward, and I almost broke my leg the first time I tried it. When I saw the owner ambling over, my first thought was that he might be afraid I was trying to leave without paying, but he just wanted to help. He told me to go ahead and hop on while he pushed.

Its a lot easier when you can push from behind, instead of from the side while you hang on to the handlebars. Once the engine was running, I thanked him and asked him how much I owed for the night. He told me it was on the house, and then he asked me about America.

Some Reassembly Required

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Wed, 23 Oct 2002 06:00:00 GMT

To everyone who has been looking forward to more entries in this journal: my appy polly loggies. I've been writing about lots of things that have happened and will be updating pretty soon now, but two things have prevented me from doing so. The first is simple logistics, as I don't have 'net access at home yet, and until the other day (thanks, Dag) I was lacking a floppy drive cable in my computer, so I couldn't type at home and then save my work on disk to be uploaded elsewhere. The second, and more serious, of my two problems is my health. I just spent nearly a month in the hospital, underwent emergency surgery, and managed to hobble back out into the world just this morning. My medical insurance was still pending up until the last few days of my hospital visit, so I spent most of that time (and had the surgery) in a free hospital run by the Russian government... a place not fit for man, beast, nor anatomical dummy. I couldn't get the doctors or nurses to wear gloves for any reason, even after I bought gloves for them with my own money. Nothing in the place was even remotely clean, much less sterile, and I'm sure that includes the syringes. It was a filthy place where blood puddles and screaming are considered ambience. They botched my anesthesia so badly that, although the drugs kept me paralyzed and the tube down my throat kept me silent, I remained fully conscious while they sliced me WIDE open, removed some bits that I would have preferred to keep, and then stitched me up like an old pair of blue jeans.

I'll tell you more about all that later. Right now, I just want to rest, get past my pain, and recover some of my strength.

Thank you for your patience.

Catching Up, Part II

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Sun, 21 Jul 2002 14:57:00 GMT

Home at last!

Our apartment, as I mentioned in my last update, is in one of the newest buildings in Lytkarino, a suburb on the southeast side of the Moscow sprawl. With traffic light and Valodye at the wheel, the drive was smooth and very tolerable. I amused myself by trying to read the various signs in the short time before they flashed by, stumbling only slightly over my Cyrillic.

Moscow is surrounded by beltways, and this is how we got out of town. The turnoff for Lytkarino took us through a small patch of farmland, and then immediately into the forest, sunlight filtering sideways through the trees, until we came to the small road leading into Lytkarino proper, marked by a large steel hammer-and-sickle. Valodye piloted us expertly around potholes, pedestrians, and competing vehicles, and dropped us off on our doorstep. It was getting close to ten o'clock at night, and the sun was still shining in a blue sky.

The rest of my evening with my wife is none of your damn business. Suffice it to say that, if the phone line had been connected yet, we would have taken it off the hook.

We slept in the next morning. Enough said.

The afternoon of my first full day in Moscow was filled with paperwork and rushing around. We have a car, but I wouldn't be allowed to drive in Moscow until my international driver's license had been translated and notarized, and there was also the matter of my alien registration to take care of. Valodye picked us up and took us into the city, squired us around while we ran errands, and showed me the Moscow Metro while Olga stood in lines and took care of business. He doesn't speak more than a word or two of English, but we managed to communicate alright without the benefit of translation, and had a very satisfactory little outing. Val is a very good egg and a stout companion, the kind you always want to have watching your back.

The Metro... well, it's just amazing. I've ridden subways in many a North American city, all over the States, in Canada, and in Mexico, but the Moscow Metro floored me. I have always raved about how great the system is in Mexico City, and will never forget seeing a genuine Aztec pyramid looming over me in a Mexican subway station, but Moscow beats even that, hands down. For starters, it's cleaner than any other subway system I've ever seen. There was no evidence of rats, no graffiti, and no telltale smell of urine. The trains run remarkably often, so there's very little waiting involved. The tracks are very deep below ground level, but there's an escalator to take the pain out of the descent and ascent. The escalator ride itself was pretty impressive -- I can't recall ever seeing such a long escalator before, anywhere. If not for the crowd of people there to cushion any bodies falling from above, I might have been afraid of being overcome by vertigo. The escalator, however, is nothing compared to the stations themselves. We took a few hops here and there, and Val showed me around. Each station was different, each was amazingly beautiful, and some were just plain mind-blowing. They're like art museums with trains running through them. Go to Google, do a search, and look at some pictures sometime... do you know anywhere else in the world where the subway stations have stained glass, chandeliers, eye-popping statuary, and ceilings covered with fine art?

The next day, we still had a lot of errands to run, and Valodye was out of town on business. I took a chance and made the decision to drive into town, in spite of the fact that my license was not yet in order. We had a bit of a bad moment when I was pulled over for allegedly running a red light (a fiction devised by the police extortionists who stopped us). My documents were checked, and I was informed that the fine would be ten U.S. dollars, payable directly to the cops. A hasty conference later, the fine went up to thirty dollars (there were three of them). Being too green to know how to fight back, I meekly paid up and went on my way. If my documents had been in order, and I had known everything I know now, they wouldn't have gotten a cent. Money talks here, and it talks very loudly and persuasively. Putting a cop in prison is merely a matter of getting his badge number, and presenting the right official with a gift of the appropriate size. I don't actually have that kind of money, but the cops who robbed me didn't know that, they only knew that I was American, which they automatically equate with being wealthy. A cold smile, a conspicuous taking down of badge numbers, and a thinly veiled threat would probably have gotten me turned loose scot-free immediately.

Our apartment was only minimally furnished when I arrived, so we spent most of the rest of the day (and most of the next day) shopping at IKEA. There are two IKEA stores on the main beltway, one of them right in front of the WWII monument I mentioned in one of my updates a while back -- the one with the antitank "hedgehogs" featured prominently. The bed we were sleeping on, actually a fold-out couch with a broken back, resembled some sort of Procrustean torture device, and I was eager to find something better as soon as possible. Thanks to the difficulties I had with my American Express traveller's checks (by all means, take them to Western Europe, but if you come to Russia, just bring cash), it took us two days to actually purchase our new bed, plus some other items, like a pair of wardrobes and some shelving for our hallway.

After our second day at IKEA, when we had made all the necessary arrangements to have our furniture delivered, we drove through the center of Moscow and I got my first good look at the Kremlin. Red Square was full of tourists, beggars, wandering alcoholics, gypsies, nuns, con artists, couples in love, and policemen. A young couple asked us if we spoke English, and then tried to convince us that we were on Russian television via hidden camera, and had won some prizes. They put a bag filled with extremely cheap and crappy sundries (an electric razor, some perfume, etc.) into our hands and asked us to wave for the camera, then told us that we would have to pay a small tax on our prizes. The "tax" they were asking for was something like $75 at that day's conversion rate, and I laughed so hard that it didn't occur to me to just keep the "prizes" and tell them to go stuff it. I gave everything back, and we went on our way... but if it happens again, they're going to lose their bait.

We didn't stay long at the Kremlin (Lenin's Tomb and St. Basil's were closed), so I'll write more about that, and about GUM, when I've had a better look.

We spent one more night on our Torquemadean sofabed before taking delivery from IKEA and setting up the new bed. Since it hurt so much to keep sleeping, and there was no inquisitioner handy to take my confession and put me out of my misery, we got up early. I put on a pair of shorts and my 24-Hour Church of Elvis t-shirt, and we took a short walk through the forest nearby, where the locals line up to gather fresh clean springwater from pipes driven into the ground. It takes about ten minutes to walk from our apartment to Valkush Lake, a former sand quarry which has a reputation as one of the three cleanest lakes in the Moscow area. The water there is clear, cold, and deep, wonderful for an early morning swim, and full of small fish that have no qualms about swimming near people. We swam across the lake and back, towelled off, and headed home, having established a routine that will last all summer.

Once my documents were in order, Olga and I loaded up our little green Zhigouli and drove down the M5 to Nikolsk, a small town near the southern city of Penza. Olga's uncle has an apartment in Nikolsk, and a little dacha on the outskirts of town, and we went there to commune with nature, pick some berries, and retrieve our daughter, who had made the trip with her grandmother several weeks earlier.

I don't recommend driving in Russia to any but the most experienced motorists, Russian or American, and heartily urge you to take the train if you ever have occasion to leave the city, and the Metro if you want to see Moscow. Trust me, the highway system in Russia is a nightmare you don't ever want to have, and driving inside the city is even worse than the horror of the open road. Fortunately, the rail system goes everywhere, and in the city, extensive public transportation in the form of the world's finest subway system, augmented by countless shuttles, trolleys, and buses, is cheap and easy to use so take my advice: if you aren't an expert driver, and your killer instincts are not honed to razor sharpness, don't get behind the wheel in Russia.

Having given you this advice, I hope you won't think me too much of a hypocrite when I tell you that I drive in Russia every day. As a very young man, I worked as a courier in San Francisco, doing battle with some of the ugliest traffic in the States, risking life and limb forty hours a week on bicycles, astride motorcycles, and in delivery vans. I have also done stints as a long-haul trucker, driving big rigs throughout North America in all kinds of weather, road, and traffic conditions. I've earned my bread as a taxi driver in Los Angeles and Baltimore, and I've logged a couple of hundred hours in small planes. Even this wealth of experience, however, would not be enough if it weren't for the oversized brass testicles, nerves of spun diamond, and sheer Celtic cussedness with which God has seen fit to endow me. If circumstances allow, I always prefer to speak softly and politely and wait my turn, but I can be an aggressive son of a bitch when I need to be -- and as an habitual navigator of Moscow's highways and byways, I often need to be.

Russian driving boggles the American mind. The things I have seen on the streets of Moscow would make a hardened Manhattanite tremble and weep like a little girl from Des Moines. Is it the influence of Western television that makes them drive this way, or maybe something in the water? It wouldn't be so difficult to fathom if it weren't so out of character for the people one meets socially. I mean, nobody expects New Yorkers to drive politely -- New Yorkers are commonly perceived as being a little on the pushy side, and a certain amount of rudeness just goes with the territory there -- but in my experience, Russians in general (even Muscovites, once you've been introduced) tend to be fairly sweet-natured people, exceedingly generous to visitors, and possibly the best hosts on the planet. Even more curious in light of their driving habits, the average Russian seems at least as intelligent as the rest of the world's citizenry, and is certainly better educated than the average American... but put a Russian behind the wheel of an automobile, and a strange transmogrification takes place, a Jekyll-and-Hyde metamorphosis that subtly twists his mind into a new and monstrous configuration that causes him to operate his machine like some half-witted devil, gasoline-addled and hell-bent on the death and damnation of himself and everyone around him.

Part of the Russian driving mentality can be explained by the social custom of being utterly indifferent to anyone to whom you have not been formally introduced. This behavior is well known to New Yorkers and the residents of other very large and crowded American cities, but in America, unlike Russia, it's far from universal. Residents of the more spacious areas of the U.S. are, for the most part, relaxed and friendly with each other, whether they've been introduced or not. Even in San Francisco, where the population density is quite high, strangers often exchange pleasantries and casual introductions, and the socially adventurous find it very easy to make fast friends there. American Southerners, even in the city, place a high value on good manners, and are quick with a smile and a friendly word to kinfolk and stranger alike... but in Russia, strangers are strangers wherever you go, and in crowds, they are to be pushed, shoved, and brushed aside as necessary, without apology. This insight makes perfect sense of the rank opportunism and furiously competitive rudeness that typifies the Russian driving style, but it does nothing to shed light on the complete and total animal stupidity exhibited by motorists here, which is nothing short of suicidal. I reiterate: these people are intelligent, well educated, and sophisticated in their manners, but they drive like retarded, terminally depressed chimpanzees on a crack-fueled kamikaze mission to destroy Earth.

Several factors compound the problem of psychotic Russian driving, and these factors include the status quo, which dictates that expensive cars (possibly driven by banditti) are often given right of way over cheap cars, and, more importantly, the profound condition of disrepair in which many of the roads languish. These two factors are inversely proportional to each other: in Moscow, where many banditti sport police-style flashing lights on the tops of their expensive cars, the municipality appears to be patching the potholes and repaving the played-out stretches with acceptable efficiency and regularity in spite of the generally bad state of the economy, and even making upgrades, such as drawing lines on the pavement. In the rural areas, where there's no money to speak of for banditti to extort, skim, or just plain steal, the roads vary from moderately bad to positively lunar and beyond.

The concept of individual lanes on the road is fairly new here, and the locals are still getting used to driving between the lines. Some of them do it reasonably well, some do it quite badly, and others just ignore the lines altogether and drive the old-fashioned way, avoiding the other automobiles and calling that good enough. When the traffic is heavy (and that's all the time, in Moscow), it's common to see drivers steering their cars blithely between the lanes like great metal wedges, straddling the white line for miles, driving on the shoulder, and even, if just one of them is bold enough to take the lead, to misappropriate one or two of the lanes rightfully belonging to opposing traffic, which is also ridiculously heavy and driving too damn fast. This supremely idiotic tendency of Russian drivers to blindly stuff their vehicles into any possible space that is so much as a single millimeter forward of their proper position in line frequently causes insanely large and smoky traffic jams where only moderate slowdowns would occur otherwise. I say 'smoky' because there seem to be no real regulations on vehicular emissions here. Older trucks and cars spew out pollution like fishermen tell lies, making a traffic jam of any duration an eye reddening, lung searing, brain damaging proposition.

Our 750-kilometer trip took us deep into the wild, far and away across the great plain, following the M5. M5 is what passes for a major highway in this country, but there are long stretches of neglected asphalt along the way that strongly resemble the terrifyingly undriveable roads of Louisiana, which has the best food and the worst paved roads of any State in the Union. M5 narrows and widens capriciously as it snakes and rollercoasters its way southeast through the awe-inspiring forests, farmlands, and townships of rural Russia, a land of heartwrenching beauty whose sweeping pastoral landscapes, charmingly dotted with crumbling hamlets and ancient derelict churches, beguile the eye and soothe the soul but for most of the ride, the stunning scenery only serves to distract the driver and break the intense concentration necessary to navigate the ruts, steer around the potholes, and take evasive action against the other drivers (many of whom are blind drunk truckers) as they weave their way eccentrically across the pavement and routinely use the oncoming lane to pass at high speed on blind curves, on hills, in designated no-pass zones, and in every other outlandishly ill-advised location imaginable. The ornately decorated gravesites of people killed in automobile accidents are a monotonously regular (but entirely unheeded) roadside reminder.

Motorcycles are much more common in the country than they are in the city, and many of them sport sidecars. We saw quite a few of them on the journey to Nikolsk, and I'm quite sure that they are the only vehicles on the road that are driven in a purely defensive manner. To Russians, the outdated Soviet-era hogs one sees in the outlands are highly uncool, strictly for cash-strapped country bumpkins who can't afford the luxury of a car or the expense of a new Japanese crotch rocket, but I have an incurably American sensibility when it comes to old bikes, and I really don't care what anybody else thinks of my taste in two-wheelers. An orgy of curious rubbernecking has engendered within me a deep if newfound love for the heavy-duty Ural, and I firmly intend on buying one and fixing it up in time for next year's riding season. The locals may think of it as a mere utilitarian farm pig, but they don't know what they've got: it may not be flashy, but by American standards, the Ural is a class ride of the old school, a wicked sled for lifers only, low and slow, easy on the chrome, and loaded with fatboy charm. I spoke at length with an iron-assed old Russki biker, one of the few who rides two wheels when he could easily afford four, and he proudly showed me his 'cycle and gave me some tips on finding one of my own. In spite of the unfavorable attitude that most Russians have toward old motorcycles (and old cars, and inexpensive cars -- the Russian status quo is inextricably connected with car culture), this man truly loves his faithful old iron horse, and has nothing but disdain for automobiles. He's ridden the same Ural since it was new more than thirty years ago, and swears that it's an absolutely bulletproof machine, designed tough and built honestly. It's got a lot of the look, sound, and low-slung heft of an ancient Harley-Davidson, the kind that my grandfather rode in the 1930s, although the engine is designed differently, being a BMW-style sideways reciprocator rather than the V-twin so typical of Harleys. According to my biker friend, I can pick up a shabby one for about fifty bucks American, and one in good shape, with sidecar, for seventy.

We pulled into Nikolsk near sundown, right at the beginning of the long, persistent twilight that deepens every summer day so delightfully at high latitudes. It's a small town, centered on a public square containing a system of boxy concrete fountains and the obligatory statuary honoring, in abstract, the generic proletariat and the generic WWII soldier. The lifeblood of Nikolsk is glass and crystal, manufactured on the outskirts at a huge Soviet-built plant slowly dilapidating under the eternally watchful but now irrelevant eye of another piece of statuary: old Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself. All Soviet manufacturing plants were given names, and this one is known as Red Giant. The Giant's detritus is everywhere, from the smooth amorphous hunks of castoff that litter the edge of the forest to the decorative multicolored crystalline walkways of the dachas that grace the edge of the town.

My wife's uncle lives just off the public square, on the third floor of one of those exaggeratedly solid apartment buildings constructed in Stalin's time. His building is a monument to overkill, with fifteen-foot ceilings and walls a yard thick. Uncle is just a little fellow, not much more than five feet tall, with a fringe of hair standing like a stockade around the gleaming dome at the crown of his head. He reminds me powerfully of a bust of Voltaire I once saw. Uncle is a collector of encyclopedia, so we brought him an addition to his collection, a large tome (in Russian, of course) called 'Americana'. He seemed very pleased by this gift, and as we sat and drank chai with lemon, his always-busy hands kept straying to the cover, eager but too polite to immediately throw open this new treasure and begin scooping out the shining secrets within.

My wife's mother, who is Uncle's sister, was there too. Since our daughter was born she has ceased to be 'Mama' to anyone, and is now known in our little family as 'Babushka'. Like her brother, she's not very tall, but there's nothing squat about either of them. They are quick and slender, and have, even in their golden years, something of that elfin quality that marks the more attractive breed of Russian. Like many people raised entirely under the Soviet system, they tend to be quiet even when arguing.

Finally, I was reunited with my daughter, Leah. She's just two, and very precocious; but what a terrible, terrible two she is. Having been ministered to by all around her for her entire life, the little shrimp is convinced that she is the one and only Czarina, the Almighty Empress, unchallenged light of the world, and absolute ruler of all she surveys. She goes everywhere and does everything with a bold confidence that belies the dampness behind her ears, and she is cowed by nothing and no one. Her body is straight and she is surprisingly strong, stronger at two than many three year olds, and her face is an echo of mine and of my mother's when we were children. When she is sweet, she is sweet as pie, and when she scrapes a knee or stubs a toe or bumps her little head, she is tough as nails; she only ever cries in anger. This little girl is the biggest pain in the ass I have ever had in a lifetime full of pains in the ass, and I love her absolutely and unconditionally.

I'll write more about our time at dacha later. Olga's waiting for me to take her home so we can meet with some friends for dinner.

Catching Up

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Fri, 19 Jul 2002 17:12:00 GMT

It's been almost three weeks since I arrived in Moscow, and if I weren't such a wordy bastard, I'd be speechless.

I don't yet have Internet access at home, and I've been visiting relatives in the country for most of the last two weeks, so I hope those of you who read this journal regularly will forgive me for the lack of a recent update. There's a LOT on the way, I promise.

June 30th was my big day. I hopped a shuttle to the airport and wrestled my bags onto a cart, and then I waited several lifetimes for the line to move forward. I must say, I'm not particularly impressed by the new security measures in place at LAX, which I firmly believe could be breached by anyone determined enough to really try, but I will congratulate the airport and the airlines on making great progress in advancing the technology used to annoy and inconvenience passengers. If I recall correctly, the airlines begged for a big chunk of tax dollars shortly after September 11th in order to offset their losses due to the lack of business that followed the terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, they laid off a large percentage of their ground personnel... and then, (clever, clever!) when they got the money, they somehow forgot to rehire the people whose jobs had been cut. A lone harassed ticket agent served a seemingly endless serpentine line of anxious and upset passengers, and absolutely nobody was happy about it.

I was told to arrive early in order to board my flight on time, but early wasn't early enough. Fortunately, everyone else on the flight was also stuck in a line for hours on end, and indeed, everyone on every other flight was in the same predicament. All flights were delayed the day I left L.A., and I got the distinct impression that all flights were being delayed every day as a matter of course. Next time, I'm just going to pack a lunch, tie some weather balloons to a lawn chair, and hope for favorable winds.

The flight to New York was blissfully uneventful. There was a movie, which I couldn't hear because the headset was so badly designed, and a meal, which purported to be scrambled eggs, but (in an ironic foreshadowing of the Russian cuisine I am now growing accustomed to) was actually a large pile of dill with a small amount of egg mixed in. A limp, wretched sausage was served on the side, and I have never before seen a more forlorn and obvious cylinder of slaughterhose sweepings posing as a piece of meat. It was as if the airline had obtained their in-flight meals by plundering the dumpster in back of some State-run welfare hospital.

We arrived late at JFK, and I was a little antsy about it because I knew that my friend Ranjit Bhatanagar was waiting there to meet me and pass the time between flights over drinks. To make things worse, there was another aircraft still boarding at our gate, so we had to sit for another 45 minutes or so after landing before we were allowed to deplane. By the time I hit the gate and found a phone, Ranjit had given up and was in his car, ready to head back to Brooklyn. The airline representative assured me that my flight to Moscow would be boarding on time, so we decided to call it a wash, and Ranjit went home.

My flight did board on time, it's true... but someone had flushed a pillowcase in one of the restrooms on board, so they made us sit there for another two hours while they figured out the problem and fixed it. Damn you, Delta! I could have been spending that time with a FRIEND having DRINKS. You owe me bigtime, you bastards.

I was fascinated by the faces around me on the very full flight to Moscow. I made a game of trying to guess who was Russian, who was American, and who was something else. In most cases, it was impossible to tell just by looking, but there are a few dead giveaways that I managed to pick up on. Gold teeth, there's a pretty good clue. Square-toed shoes, that's another. I also noticed that many Russians seemed to be wearing styles that haven't been popular in the States since the 1980s.

The airline does offer a choice of coffee or tea on flights to Moscow, but I don't think anyone asked for coffee, and I wonder if they actually had any on board. Anyone who had dared to express a preference for coffee over tea would probably have been forcibly thrown out the emergency exit at 30,000 feet anyway. Russians love their tea, possibly even more than the English do. The stews brought the tea cart through at least seven times between New York and Moscow.

I slept a bit, and when I awoke, it was dark outside. There were lights below me, and I knew we were no longer in the States because of the utter lack of a discernible structure in the layout of the town below. We were over Iceland, and not a grid in sight.

I didn't see anything at all of Western Europe. The cloud cover was total. Lenin's sealed train? I was on Lenin's sealed plane, swaddled in white fluff, and surrounded by militant tea drinkers. I drank my tea like a good proletariat, ignored the in-flight movie, and slept as much as possible.

The clouds cleared shortly before we began our approach for landing at Sheremetyevo. I practically pressed my nose against the window as we shed altitude and the Russian forest gave way to farms, hamlets, villages, towns, and urban sprawl. At the edge of the city, I noticed an oddly-shaped lake, surrounded by forest, with an old trawler parked in the middle. A long gangplank stretched from the trawler to the shore, and I wondered what it might be for. As it turned out, this was Valkush Lake, just a short walk from my new home in Lytkarino, and I would be swimming there in less than 24 hours.

I still had to jump through the hoops presented by Passport Control and Customs, but overall, getting off the plane in Moscow was easier than getting on in Los Angeles. Passport Control is a mere formality, assuming that you have your visa in order, but as an introduction to Russia, they made all the foreigners wait and wait and wait in one line for an hour or so while five or six queues of Russian citizens were processed. Some overstuffed fathead just ahead of me began complaining loudly about how long things were taking. Were AMERICANS, he whined. Theyre treating us like FOREIGNERS or something. Dont these guys get it? I distanced myself from him as much as possible for fear of being mistakenly associated with him. We came in on the same flight, and I had already had quite enough of him for one lifetime. He was the worst kind of American abroad: loud, stupid, openly disdainful of foreign language and culture, and convinced that America is directly supervised on a daily basis by God almighty. He was the kind of American who wants to take America with him everywhere he goes, the kind of American who travels halfway around the world and then eats all his meals at McDonalds. The dumb son of a bitch didnt speak a word of Russian, and he had come to Russia to distribute bibles.

You never can tell whats going to happen when you pass through Customs, but if you fill out the necessary paperwork carefully and put a bored look on your face, its nothing to fear. They wont allow foreigners to leave Russia with more cash than they declare on the way in, but there are ways around that, so after grabbing my bag off the luggage carousel, I chose the express line used by people with nothing to declare. A bored-looking official ran my duffel bag and carry-on through an x-ray machine and waved me through. Over in the other line, it looked like Missionary Boy was about to get a nice cavity search, compliments of the Russian Federation. Im not often amused by the misfortune of others, but in this case I was glad to make an exception.

I had another piece of luggage checked, a huge blue Anvil case that my wife hates for some reason. As it was quite heavy, I was told at LAX that it would have to be shipped via air freight so after fighting my way gently through the press of people outside the Customs perimeter and locating my wife and our driver, I asked to be taken to the freight terminal. Naturally, there was a line there too. Unfortunately, after much gesticulating and the ceremonial examination of every single piece of paper in my possession, I was told (with my wife translating) that my Anvil case was not there, and was advised to return to the passenger terminal to look for it on the same luggage carousel where my duffel bag had turned up. This made me very uneasy, as it meant I would have to penetrate the security perimeter somehow, and then take another trip through Customs, whether my Anvil case showed up or not. I was also a little worried about the big blue box being stolen, but the sheer weight of the thing made that less than likely.

Getting through the security perimeter, which at Sheremetyevo is delineated by high walls of hastily erected pressboard and plexiglass, was a simple matter of pushing my way through the surrounding crowd and walking unchallenged through the Customs gate, which was momentarily unattended. I found my case pretty quickly, and discovered happily that, given a good push, it slid pretty easily across the smooth airport floor but, bummer of bummers, the Customs officials had returned to the unmanned gate in the space of the two or three minutes it had taken me to find my case. As I approached, one of them planted himself directly in my path and, apparently wondering why I was passing through Customs a second time, began asking questions in rapid-fire Russian. I replied in English, and although he understood not a word, the obvious complexity of my situation was made clear to him by my tone of voice and the theatricality of my gestures. I could see on his face that he was thinking about how much work it might be to deal with me and my incomprehensible problem, so I redoubled my efforts, rolling my eyes and slapping my forehead and shaking my head and shrugging, then gesturing wildly towards the gate, then at my luggage, then back towards the carousel. Suddenly his eyes glazed over with disinterest and he waved me on through. He didnt even put my Anvil case through the x-ray machine.

Russians tend to be pushy in crowds and in traffic, but they also tend to get the hell out of the way when outgunned. The crush of people just outside the security perimeter was as heavy as before, but a path magically opened up as big, heavy-duty me pushed my big, heavy-duty Anvil case noisily across the floor to the outer doors. I had arrived.

Hoping to wheedle a free upgrade to first class, I wore a suit on the flight from L.A. Suits, and especially ties, make me hideously uncomfortable, and I avoid them whenever possible. Wearing a suit and tie for fifteen-odd hours of cramped, delayed air travel was about as close to a worst-case scenario, clothing-wise, as I care to get. I was hot and dirty and eager to get home, ditch the monkey suit, and have a bath, stat. The very last thing I wanted to do was to go to a party straight from the airport and meet a lot of people, but this is exactly where our driver, Valodye, had been instructed to take me. Since the company was picking up the tab, I couldnt really complain but I wasnt very happy at the prospect, and I said as much to my wife. Valodye took stock of the situation immediately, whipped out his cell phone, and made a call. Minutes later I was enjoying a hot shower in the gym of a luxury hotel very near the airport.

There is a shadow economy, based on crime, in every nation on Earth. Whatever is outlawed drugs, guns, prostitution, gambling somebody is making some underground money on it. Russia is no exception to this rule, but here the shadow economy runs much deeper than in the States, and thats how I got my hot shower. Vice is just the tip of the iceberg here: most of Russias shadow economy involves the movement of perfectly legal commodities and services, and the whole thing runs not on currency, but on a vast network of favors. Valodye called a friend, who called a friend, who had a friend working at the hotel, and by the time we got there, everything was arranged. They even had my favorite toothpaste and deodorant waiting for me, wrapped in a clean bath towel.

When we arrived at the Millennium Cafe, the party was just beginning. They had a pretty good spread laid out, with cold cuts wrapped around hunks of garlicky cream cheese laced with fresh dill, hors d'oeuvres of all kinds seasoned liberally with dill, a riot of fresh fruit arranged enticingly on a bed of dill, and plenty of cold Belgian beer (no dill). A band had been hired for the occasion two guys with a guitar and a synthesizer who sang and pretended to play while the synthesizer churned out stored musical selections. Behind them, a big screen TV showed nonstop semipornographic French fashion shows. I had been told that the company director who organized the party was very big on karaoke, so after a brief huddle with the musicians and a quick look through their songbook, I gave the crowd a pretty fair rendition of the Beatles Back in the USSR.

We left as soon as we could without offending anyone, and Valodye drove us home. Our apartment is in Lytkarino, a suburb in the southeast quarter of greater Moscow. Its a strange sight to American eyes the surrounding forest, the plants growing wild everywhere, the rarity of sidewalks, and the neglected roads make it seem like a quaint little hamlet, but Lytkarino is home to many thousands of Russians. The few houses in our town are all very old, and nearly everyone lives in one of the many large apartment buildings that rise imposingly from among the trees of Valkush forest. The scattered houses predate the town, which was founded in 1957, and the oldest apartment buildings here were built in Kruschevs time.

Russian apartment buildings take some getting used to. There are several distinctive styles, all associated with the regime under which they were built: the thick-walled, high-ceilinged solidity of Stalin, the slapped-up featureless rectangles of Kruschev with their boxy balconies that look like an afterthought, the slightly more ornamented brick and concrete constructions of the post-Soviet era. From the outside, theyre all pretty scary looking. Our building, which is brand-new, looks less like an urban ghetto than the older buildings nearby, but the closer one gets, the less pronounced are the differences. Graffiti, some of it in mangled English (PUNKS NOD DET!), marks even the newest constructions here, and the stairways and hallways that lead to individual apartment doors are universally dirty, with bent metal rails and pitted walls. Everything has an unfinished look about it, as though the construction workers who built the place might return at any moment to resume working.

Apartment doors are a strange affair, consisting of a padded outer door (sometimes replaced by the tenant with an ornate wooden affair that has to be seen to be believed) concealing a sturdy metal security door inside. Basically, anything that doesnt belong to an individual is in a state of neglect and/or disrepair, but the ghetto stops at the threshold of each apartment. The interior of every Russian apartment that Ive seen so far has been neat, clean, elegant, and well maintained better living space, on the whole, than most middle-class urban American apartment dwellers enjoy. Interior doors are of the beautifully decorated solid-core type that costs a lot of money in the States, and the wallpaper, which is often richly textured, has a peculiar thickness to it that hasnt been seen in the U.S. since the 20s or 30s. The sprayed-on cottage cheese ceilings that are so common in America are wholly absent, and all the walls are thick enough to hide a body in, if only they were hollow, which they are not. Chandeliers are common, and huge Persian rugs are popular both as covering for the gorgeous wooden floors that abound here, and as wall hangings. As for furniture, styles and quality vary greatly. Beautiful, solidly built antiques mix freely with cheap, crappy Soviet stuff and affordable, utilitarian modern pieces purchased from the local stores. In newer places like ours, a great deal of IKEA can be found.

There are two really major differences between Russian living space and American living space: the first occurs only in the older buildings, where plumbing and electrical connections are right out in the open, instead of being hidden by the walls. Every pipe, wire and fixture is just right out there in front of God and everybody, and you can visually trace the connection from every electrical outlet all the way to the pole outside. Some older Russian bathrooms (the bathroom is the room where you take a bath, not the room containing the toilet) are madcap Dr. Seuss mazes of pipes, traps, and u-joints, with electrical wiring running across the walls and ceiling like ivy on a trellis. Oddly, there are no hot water heaters in most places, as water is heated centrally for each town but we have an uncle down south whose bathroom contains a water heater that actually heats the water on demand (it nearly took my eyebrows off the first time I turned the hot water on theres no tank, just a frighteningly large array of gas jets that turn on automatically when you open the hot water tap). His toilet, too, is a marvel to behold. Built in the time of Stalin, its what Ive always thought of as a water closet: the toilets tank is way the hell up there, right under the ceiling, with a long pipe running straight down into the top of the throne. When you want to flush, you pull a wooden handle hanging from a long chain, and gravity does the rest.

The second big difference between American and Russian housing is in the construction of the buildings themselves. Like Americans, Russians have a long history as technological pioneers, and we can thank them for many innovations, and admire them for many great accomplishments, including a number of firsts in space exploration. How curious it seems, then, that they have never made the scientific breakthroughs necessary to develop the plumb bob or the t-square. As God is my witness, I swear that if any house or apartment building in this entire country contains even a single right angle, it was put there by accident, and probably in a place where nobody wanted one. Everything is solid, but nothing is square, and nothing is level. Our hallway, for instance, leans drunkenly to one side by several degrees, an irregularity I first noticed while attaching some IKEA cabinets to the wall. The tops of the cabinets are flush, but the bottoms stand a good two inches away from the wall, which is so far from square with the floor that one wonders how on Earth they managed to frame the doorways properly.

I've got lots more to write about, but there's a party starting downstairs, and they're waiting for me. More soon!

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Tue, 25 Jun 2002 03:55:00 GMT

It's my last week in the States, and I've been frantically tying up loose ends.

On Sunday, I went to visit an old and dear friend (nearly my oldest, and certainly my dearest, as a matter of fact). I hadn't seen or heard from him in far too long, and it's been bothering me like a loose tooth, so I scoured the 'net until I managed to dredge up his phone number.

I'm fatter, but he's balder.

THE END.

No, wait, there's more!

The funny thing (for me at least) about going to see an old friend after a long time apart is the inescapable dread of being the only one who has changed. I don't just mean physically, although that's certainly a factor. It's difficult to picture the youthful beauty of your long-losts turned to wrinkles and chromedomitude, so one's own decline seems magnified immensely as the clock ticks its relentless way towards the appointed hour of reunion. And yet, when the door opens, there's your friend, and (thank god) he's approximately as decrepit as you are.

The real question is: has he grown up and straightened himself out yet?

For most people, this isn't an earth-shaking concern. Rank immaturity preserved well into senescence can be awfully obnoxious, but it can also be charming, and it's usually only relevant to how long it will be before you're ready for the next reunion. For me, and for this particular friend, it meant the difference between that epoxy-and-catalyst warmth that remakes a strong bond, and an afternoon of inwardly squirming discomfort followed by a hasty change of any contact information given out.

In case I haven't made it clear, I should point out that the anxiety was thoroughly mutual, and for very good reason. In fact, to be truly fair about it, I have to say that he had more to be anxious about than I did. Those of you who have not known me for many years may not be aware of just how masterfully I misspent my youth, but I certainly know, and so does my friend, because more than any other human living today, he helped me misspend it. It's even possible that the ONLY reason he agreed to meet with me was because, of all our many mutual friends from that time, the great majority are as dead as the Macarena.

We were and are different people, he and I, but our similarities have always been so profound in both their abundance and their uncommon character that, practically from the day we first met, they resonated between us in a constant, prolonged shock of recognition. In stark contrast that only served to accentuate our sameness, our differences were jarringly polar, and aptly externalized in the white-blond color of his hair, and the jet black of my own. Contemplation of the bond we shared always made me think of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and the story of their first meeting in the dusty streets of Uruk.

Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, we contested amicably with each other in everything, having no other, closer rivals... and like them, we often led each other into questionably advisable adventures. Unfortunately, we did not have the luxury of living in a relatively untamed world where opportunities for good, wholesome adventuring were readily available, and so the nature of our activities was somewhat less heroic than it might have been had we not been trapped in the ineluctable semicartoon that was Ronald Reagan's America. Thus, we drove each other to dizzying heights of oneupmanship, but to no good purpose other than our mutual entertainment.

Having no Humbaba or bull of Anu to slay, we sought our glory and our friendly competition in trading remarkably pointed aphorisms, epigrams, and in-jokes while performing remarkably pointless acts of wanton nihilism. To put it bluntly, we did stupid shit... and egging each other on, we did even stupider shit. Inevitably, having no other peers quite as equal to us as we were to each other, we effortlessly peer-pressured one another into doing the STUPIDEST shit, and then outdid ourselves again, vying mightily to push the very envelope of stupid, knowing full well the whole time that the incredibly dangerous things we were doing *just for fun* were so obscenely and undeniably retarded that to have to admit to them in case of a slip-up was just unthinkable.

I'm sure that many of you think that you know what I'm talking about, but trust me: you don't. You may think that you've been there and done that, too, but you haven't. I'm not exaggerating when I say that shooting heroin in the men's room at McDonald's was inconsequentially incidental to one of our typical nights out on the town together, a mere stupid aperitif, no more notable than cocktails before a seven-course dinner of stupid. We exceeded the speed of stupid so often and by such a frightening margin that, when I reminded him of the time we attacked two armed drug dealers in South Central L.A. by luring them to our car and then discharging a fire extinguisher point-blank in one's face before speeding off into the night while the other one shot at us, HE DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER IT.

I could spend all day and all night and all day tomorrow spinning anecdotes like that, each one the gospel stupid truth, but I won't. For now. Suffice it to say that, after all these years, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect from him, and vice versa.

As it turned out, we ended up having a pretty good day together... but within a few minutes of my arrival at his reassuringly normal-looking house, I found myself sitting face to face with him, both of us on the edges of our chairs, as he struggled and stumbled his uncharacteristically awkward way through the kind of stiff, impromptu speech that only righteously concerned family men make when some tumescent ghost of bachelorhood threatens to poke rudely into their happy domestic lives. He labored intensely to express his reservations about me both honestly and diplomatically, and I struggled not to finish too many of his sentences for him. I KNOW, I KNOW, I kept thinking. If we had been in my living room at the time instead of his, I'd have been making more or less the same speech.

Good for us.

Adios, Joe Sixpack

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Sat, 15 Jun 2002 15:31:00 GMT

Presenting people (especially strangers) with alien ideas or circumstances in order to elicit poorly thought-out (and therefore honest) reactions has always been something of a hobby of mine... once, for example, I spent the better part of an afternoon trying unsuccessfully to give away a quarter while strolling down Market Street in San Francisco. Go ahead and call it pointless, immature tomfoolery (though some prefer the term "assholism"); I like to think of it as a mixture of amateur psychology and Situationist performance art. Sure, it's more fun than a traditionally academic approach might be, but shouldn't a man enjoy his work?

My many years of dedicated experimentation along these lines has given me a pretty sharp eye for knee-jerk responses in general, even when I'm not deliberately trying to induce them. Case in point: the curiously inane comments I've been rewarded with during casual chats in which I introduce the subject of my impending move to Russia.

Let me just state for the record that, in spite of all the advantages of living in the midst of fabulous wealth and advanced technology, the average American remains an utter unreconstructed troglodyte. This is not to say that other parts of the world do not harbor vast numbers of clueless, mouth-breathing barbarians, but Americans are special in this regard, as they have so little excuse for their retardedly provincial mindset. Mr. Joseph Sixpack of Anytown, USA has an income and an access to education and information beyond the wildest dreams of any click-talking Kalihari bushbaby, and yet Mr. Sixpack would be unable to find water in the desert even if he had a map, an SUV, a GPS, a Palm Pilot with a wireless Internet connection, and three lifelines (to be fair, Joe prefers to drink Budweiser and Big Gulps anyway, and is quite skilled at locating 7-11 franchises).

The sheer savage pig-ignorance one finds in America, being swaddled so cozily and securely in tremendous affluence as it is, has a special quality to it, a certain savor that is lacking in the national character of all other peoples on Earth (mainly because I don't consider Canadians a "people" any more than I consider the subset of U.S. citizens who are very boring and talk funny about hockey to be a nation unto themselves. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and lives in North America... quack quack, Canada!). Americans have always been innovative, and the mixture of relative affluence and blank-slate trendiness that doggedly prevails in the post-post-modern West has, in recent generations, produced a style of transcendent ignorance that knows no bounds, acknowledges no higher authority, and will brook no insubordination... a style that can be summed up nicely as "STEP ASIDE AN' GIMME MY PROPS 'CUZ I DA MAN, BEEYOTCH! WORD!"

But I digress. Forgive me, but I've been chafed and intellectually victimized by American thudheadedness for just a little too long now to stop myself from ranting.

Back to the subject at hand: when I mention my intentions to expatriate, I am often met with comments like these:

"Dude, are you some kind of Communist or something? 'Sup, fool?"

"But dog, I heard there's no food in Russia!"

"You don't want to go there, yo! The government in Russia is run by criminals!"

And my favorite, always delivered unassailably with a knowing nod and smile:

"You'll be back, homey."

Yes, Joe Sixpack, you're absolutely right. The Soviet Union only *pretended* to fail, and Russian capitalism is just a Commie trick intended to lull us into a false sense of security. There's no food in Russia at all, and Muscovites actually subsist on some mysterious energy that is gathered by standing in bread lines at stores where there is no bread (this works so well that, as you've also told me many times, all Russian women are fat, dumpy weightlifters). The Russian government is, as you say, run by criminals, making it totally unlike all other governments in the world. And, no doubt, as you've asserted approximately twelve kajillion godzillion quinsquillion times in the last three months, I will assuredly become acutely homesick within minutes of my arrival in Russia, and will either return in great haste to the good ol' US of A (where I will passionately soul-kiss the tarmac upon deplaning at JFK), or end up spending the bulk of my waking hours mooning around inconsolably at the McDonald's franchise near Red Square (possibly the only source of food in the entire country, unless you count vodka as a food).

I'd send you a postcard, Joe Sixpack, but I'll probably be forced to use all my postcards as toilet paper. Sorry, dog.

Countdown...

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Sun, 2 Jun 2002 22:28:00 GMT

As I noted in an earlier update, time flies like an arrow (and fruit flies like a banana).

It's June, my last month in the States. I bought my ticket to Moscow a few days ago. I'm leaving Los Angeles on June 30th (happy birthday, Dad), and flying to New York, where I'll be spending a couple of hours between flights at JFK. I'm hoping my brilliant programmer friend Ranjit Bhatnagar will come and pass the time with me before I make the connection to Sheremetyevo, just outside of Moscow, where I'll deplane on July 1st (happy birthday, me).

There's a war monument between Sheremetyevo airport and the city, within circa-1940s artillery range of Moscow itself... the monument consists of a sort of minimalist sculpture, an arrangement of oversize replicas of steel "hedgehogs" -- simple antitank devices used to discourage the progress of German Panzers -- and it marks the place where the Red Army finally turned back the German push towards the capital during World War II. To most Americans, quite an obscure little event... a footnote, really, in the grand history of the War we fought and won to save our European friends from Fascism.

Of course, it wasn't really that way. We Yanks have a rather kneejerk habit of seeing ourselves as having more or less singlehandedly beaten the Axis and saved the world. This is endlessly reflected in and perpetuated by Hollywood's highly revisionist genre offerings of the last fifty years. Our British cousins, naturally, would beg to differ, and might opine that they were doing quite a competent job on their own of waging a war of attrition vs. Mr. Hitler et al. In fact, the British, more like the Americans than they care to admit, also have a bit of an automatic tendency to see themselves as having singlehandedly saved the world from Nazi oppression, and thrive on endlessly recounted tales of brave gentleman warriors with stiff upper lips holding the dread Hun invader at arm's length with one hand while calmly sipping from a teacup in the other. Just ask an Englishman, and he'll tell you: Winston Churchill practically did it all by himself, slugging it out with Adolph for years before we Yanks finally deigned to abandon our isolationist navel-gazing and join the party (which we did only after being sent an RSVP from Tojo that we couldn't possibly decline).

The truth of the matter is, the defeat of Fascism was a joint effort that probably could not have been accomplished had either the British or the Americans remained neutral... and, to be fair, we mustn't forget the admittedly less costly, but still important, contributions of the other Western nations involved (my own grandfather, anxious to see Hitler defeated, and too impatient to wait for Uncle Sam to throw his hat into the ring, joined the Canadian armed forces and volunteered for combat duty in Europe). Even France's lamentably meager resistance to German conquest and occupation must be acknowledged, in spite of the temptation to dismiss the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys for their pre-war cowering behind the "impregnable" Maginot Line and their disturbingly early capitulation once the Line had been breached (it might also be said that the French created the environment in which Hitler was able to fluorish in the first place, but I'll leave the finger-pointing for another day).

In the East, even where the necessary brute force to resist the Nazis was lacking, key blows were still gallantly struck against the Axis -- witness the Polish workers who took immense risks in passing an intact Enigma decoding machine to British intelligence, or the courageous Czech paratroopers who assassinated Reinhart Heydrich, an iron-fisted, weirdly androgynous, frighteningly efficient and draculaic character who was reportedly even creepier than Heinrich Himmler.

And then there is Russia. Credit being given where credit is due, we would be seriously remiss in failing to point out that Russia can reasonably lay claim to having played a greater role than any other nation in the struggle against the Axis.

Colonel-General G.F. Krivosheev's stunningly meticulous 'Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century' lists a grand total of 26,629,205 Soviet casualties of the Great War (Red Army troops and civilians combined). According to Krivosheev's breakdown of that mind-numbing figure, the loss of Soviet platoon commanders alone was greater than the total loss of British or American servicemen.

Skepticism comes easily to me, but I believe Krivosheev's numbers, mainly because the Soviets suppressed the data he culled from countless obscure archives so relentlessly (before Krivosheev's work was made public in Russia, even that country's top generals had to rely on the West for reliable statistics on wartime losses)... and rightly so, to the Soviet way of thinking. Awareness of such a staggering loss of men and materiel would have put the lie to Stalin's wartime propaganda, and severely demoralized the general populace... thus, if the Soviet-era Kremlin had been inclined to fiddle with the numbers that Krivosheev eventually managed to uncover, they'd have done their revisionist dirty work in the opposite direction, downplaying the glorious Red Army's losses in the same manner with which they habitually declared crushing battlefield defeats to be crushing battlefield victories. Under Stalin, to do otherwise would have been treasonous, and punishable by the gulag and/or death.

The Soviet Union is gone, and most people, both inside and outside of Russia, are glad... but each year on May 9th, the Russian Federation celebrates Victory Day, a national holiday marked by the odd site of the old Red flag bearing the hammer and sickle fluttering anachronistically in the hands of many a proud Russian in Red Square. Western newspapers and news broadcasts invariably thrust these images under the noses of the American people, and not only fail to explain the reason for the holiday and its attendant Soviet flag-waving, they actually encourage Americans to believe that what they are seeing is a threatened return to Communism in Russia.

26,629,205 dead. That's approximately one tenth the population of the United States. Ponder that number until the annual trotting out of the flag under which those people died stops being scary and starts making perfect sense to you.

Was Soviet propaganda any slyer than our own?

Funeral Poem

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Sat, 18 May 2002 02:36:00 GMT

My stepmother's funeral-at-sea is taking place in a few hours. She was better to me than my biological mother ever was, and I'm very sorry she's gone.

There are lots of things that one can say about mortality and the human condition. I prefer to take the view that causality, the strictly linear THIS then THAT then THE OTHER of life, is nothing more than an illusion imposed upon us by our own human limitations. I view space-time as a single unending whole, and figure that existence in any part or period of the universe is as good as immortality... in a four-dimensional overview, one is not long- or short-lived, one is either "bigger" or "smaller" in the eternal, unchanging, everpresent bloc of one's existence.

Eh, whatever. The arrow of human time points unswervingly to the future. I can't project my consciousness back and forth through my postulated four-dimensional physicality, so all my cosmological philosophizing is nothing more than a poor substitute for the religion that other people draw comfort from in trying times.

How I envy and pity them.

We have to deal with mortality as it seems to be, and not necessarily as it really is. Still, maybe there's some peace to be had in the reflection that all of us go down the same road, beggar and king, saint and sinner, brute and brainiac alike: born to live and die.

I wrote a poem about mortality for my stepmother (but mostly for my grief-stricken father, who, being coexistent with my poem, can hopefully take some sort of quiet comfort from it):

IN MEMORIAM: Elizabeth McClellan-Wilson

When all your thoughts have turned to days gone by
And dazzling dawn gives way to setting sun
Remember me, and know that you and I
Came to this place alone, and yet as one
There's nothing more to say. And still we speak
Of nothing this, and nothing that, and on
We ramble, pressing cheek to weathered cheek
Until our fading memories, too, are gone.

-M Otis Beard

Tilling the Fields to the East

atomdebris@yahoo.com (motis) — Thu, 16 May 2002 18:14:00 GMT

At the end of June 2002, I'll be relocating to Moscow, Russia (I currently live in Los Angeles, where I was born). This journal will be a chronicle of my adventures in my new country.