Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 174 - 3200 words
Columns :: Sergei’s return doesn’t change Zhorik scenario

MOSCOW, November 17, 2005 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Zhorik and I: Alone at last
Small dick?
Enter: Sergei
Threat to relationship?
U.S.: Wheels off the trolley
Putin bears down on NGOs
“Iron Felix” rears ugly head
Andrei revives Stavropol dream



MOSCOW, November 17, 2005 -- After Andrei – loving, responsible, loyal, frenetic, nerve-wracking, stressful Andrei -- exited Moscow Wednesday evening bearing with him what he promised was the last $ 200 he’ll ever borrow from me, Zhorik and I suddenly found ourselves alone in the big empty nest -- both, I think, a little nervous: like a bride and groom on the first night of their honeymoon.

I still wasn’t sure what I might expect – or demand -- from my 18-year-old “grandson” cum fantasy – or is it the other way around?

I was encouraged when he switched off the TV and the light at around 11 p.m., and even moreso when he took off his pants and shirt and crawled into bed beside me in his shorts. Earlier in the week I had written in my diary:

I find myself feeling different about Zhorik than I feel or have felt about others. I’m afraid that I’m falling very deeply in love with him in the most committed sense – a love that I’m afraid he can never return.

I find myself not caring about sucking other dicks. I fantasize about them, but then I start thinking of all the baggage; and Zhorik is so young and unspoiled and honest and good and noble and high-minded. I can’t really even get it up thinking about bedding down the new Dima, for intance. I could happily develop a relationship with Peter, but I think the probability of that is extremely low -- although he did seem genuinely disappointed when I said I couldn’t spend time with him after our class because I needed to get home (to see Zhorik, but I didn’t tell him that).

Zhorik and I have such a good time just being together – talking, kidding, touching, planning. I think such a relationship is new and unique to him, and I’m not sure he’s figured out how to deal with it.


So what does the script call for next?

“Dane, can you give me 100 rubles a day?”

Not exactly what I had in mind; but yes, if you’ll just be my boyfriend.

“No, but I can loan you 100 rubles a day.”

He raised his head from the pillow. I could see in the reflected light that he was smiling. “But you’d give me the 100 rubles if I weren’t working?”

“Yes, probably.”

“Maybe I’ll quit my job,” he said, still smiling.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Just joking.”

“The idea is for you to become independent,” I elaborated. “If I still continue to support you, you’re not independent.”

If you’d just be my boyfriend, you little turkey, you could have everything I own, I added silently, with more than a little anguish.

Maybe it was time to clear the air.

“Dane, could you rub my back?”

Well, that’s a good place to start.

As I let my nails skate over this soft skin, I broke the ice:

“Honey, you know how much I love you.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I want to hug you and kiss you always.”

“Okay.”

I put both arms around him and pulled his body to mine and we kissed in the mouth.

“And I want to play with your cock -- while you’re asleep.”

“Okay, if I’m asleep and don’t know it.”

“I haven’t loved anybody like I love you for a long time,” I added. “I’m very, very happy being with you.”

“It’s hard for me to say ‘love,’” he responded.

“I know. But I can feel your love,” I replied. “If I can hug you and kiss you when you and I are alone, and if you love me, then I’ll be happy.”

“Okay,” he said, with a noticeable lilt in his voice.

“And I will do everything for you.” I kissed him again.

After a pause, he announced that perhaps his friend Igor could come live with us in December or January. “He could sleep in the other room.”

“But if you and I are sleeping here together, he’ll think that’s strange.”

“I don’t know if I’ll invite him,” he replied. “I’ll think about it.”

I hugged him again: “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me.”




“My dick is very small, isn’t it?” he said suddenly after another pause.

“No, honey, it’s not small. It’s average.”

“It is?”

“Yes. Your problem is that you’re judging yours by your brothers’, and they’re abnormally big. Theirs aren’t normal. Your dick is normal.”

“Remember the night Igor peed in the bed?” I continued. “I saw his dick that night. It’s smaller than yours.”

“It is?” he said, almost glowing in the dark.

“It’s pretty,” I added, “but it’s smaller than yours.”

We went to sleep with my arms around him and our bodies tight against each other. I felt his dick several times that night. The first two or three times, he woke up and gently moved my hand up to his stomach.

But finally, he didn’t wake up. I reached my hand under his shorts and gently stroked his semi while I quickly came in my other hand.

Gushing back to the surface is the puppy love that I first fell victim to a year ago (Chapt. 121). For the first time in a long time, I feel joy, contentment, ecstasy.


Since then we’ve been touchingly close, like a couple of newlyweds or two teenage gays discovering the delight of living together for the first time.

When he left for his courier job Thursday morning, we hugged and kissed lovingly. He came home about lunchtime for a little while. I quickly threw together some “grechka” (buckwheat groats), onions, spices and eggs.

“Thank you,” he said after downing it, and for the first time kissed me in the mouth.

It’s been like that since. Lots of hugging, lots of kissing, lots of stolen strokes from his cock, a few orgasms. If he watches TV, he wants me to watch it with him. Sometimes I stroke his arm, sometimes we hold hands. If he takes a smoke break, he wants me to come to the kitchen with him. We go to bed together and snuggle and “pillow talk” before we blissfully doze off.

Just last weekend I read about Christopher Isherwood, author of Berlin Diary, with which these blogs have been flatteringly compared. He met his lifelong – what was left of it – lover Don Bachardy when he was 48 and Don was 18 – the same as Zhorik. They remained inseparable until Isherwood died in 1986 at age 81.

By Isherwood’s timetable, I’ve still got 9 years, and what a blissful and rewarding way to spend them. Of course, he had a few things going for him that I haven’t: They were both cut from the same mold – sophisticated, artistic, and highly educated. And his 18-year-old was unabashedly queer. But I think their happiness, like ours, arose more from commitment and chemistry than anything else.

We can only wait and see.

In the meantime, we make plans for the future together. Our trip to Stravropol at New Year’s; a trip to Egypt next New Year’s after he gets his international passport; enrollment in the university next fall. We go shopping together nearly every night and chat aimlessly after my last student leaves.

Our commitment is undefined, but genuine. I’m awash in love and happiness.

When Dima of my “ex-files” called just before we left for our shopping trip on Thursday night, I handed the phone to Zhorik to answer it, shaking my head that I wasn’t here.

“That was Dima,” he announced after he hung up.

“That’s what I thought. I didn’t want to talk to him.”

He threw his arms around me and kissed me.


Sergei wants to talk to you,” Zhorik announced Saturday afternoon between my private students. “I don’t want to talk to him,” I replied, and then thought better of it. I should at least face him.

Sergei was waiting on the stair landing below our apartment. We walked out and sat on my and Zhorik’s bench, our “lavochka.”

“Dane,” he said, “I want to come back and live with you.”

“Sergei, how could I trust you after what you’ve done?”

“I beg your forgiveness,” he replied. “I don’t know why I did it.”

“But how do I know you won’t do it again?”

“I promise. I won’t ever gamble again, and I won’t ever take money again. I don’t want to live with Andrei in Stavropol, and I don’t want to live with my father, and I don’t want to live with Valeria Dmitrovich here in Moscow. I only want to live with you and to be happy like we were when we first met. I have a job starting Monday, and you won’t need to give me money. I just want to live here.”

“By the way,” I asked, “What did you do with the last money you stole from me?”

“I gambled it,” he replied.

I gave him no encouragement. “I’ll think it over and we’ll meet again tomorrow afternoon or evening.” But in my head I was already resigned to making space for him again in our apartment and in our lives.


“What did you talk about?” Zhorik asked as he and I headed for a quick shopping excursion before my 2:30 class at the Inst. of Diplomacy.

I told him. “Of course, I can’t not give him a place to live,” I continued, “but there will have to be some conditions.”

When I got back from my class Saturday evening, Zhorik had fixed some fried potatoes and we ate some Korean salads we had bought at the store.

“What conditions are you thinking of for Sergei?” he asked.

“Well, first of all, if he takes so much as a kopek, he’s out of here. Secondly, he can’t disturb us at night – no TV, no music, no noise….”

“And he can only stay a month or two,” Zhorik injected. “Maybe a month or two until he has enough to get an apartment of his own.”

By this time, we were snuggling on the bed together watching TV.

“I don’t want him interfering with our relationship,” I added.

“Of course, he will interfere with our relationship,” Zhorik replied.

“You think he will?”

“Yes,” he said moodily.

And then I realized that of course he would, and Zhorik was angry about it: He would demand time from me that I’m now spending with Zhorik. There could be no more “pillow talk” if Sergei were on the other side of the bed. Zhorik wouldn’t feel comfortable hugging and kissing and showing affection with Sergei in the apartment. There’d be new periodic eruptions of Mount Sergeius and dealing with his anger and fury and demands.

“It’s been so peaceful the last few days,” Zhorik said wistfully. “If Sergei is here there’ll be all that stress again.”


I hit the brakes: No way am I going to let anything come between me and Zhorik and our newfound contentment and joy. If Sergei re-enters our lives at this crucial stage, the tentative happiness and bliss that has just found its way out of its shell could be snuffed out altogether.

I will not let this happen.

But what can I do?

“Do you think if I gave him $ 200 - $ 300 he could rent his own apartment?” I asked Zhorik.

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t know either.

I could tell him that I simply can’t trust him, and I won’t live with somebody I can’t trust. He knows that full well and can’t argue with it. I’ll offer to help him rent an apartment or room for the first month until he gets his first pay from his new job.


Sergei showed up at about 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon, a couple of hours earlier than I had said.

We went into the kitchen and I braced for what would be the hardest thing I’d ever done.

“Sergei, I can’t let you live here.”

“Why?”

“I can’t trust you, and I won’t live with somebody I can’t trust.”

“Dane, I’m so ashamed of what happened; it won’t ever happen again. And I’ll give you my passport and other documents so that if anything happens, you’ll have them, and I can’t go anywhere without them.”

What could I say?

“Okay, we’ll try it for a month.”

Sergei was ecstatic. He said he would be sleeping with a girlfriend and Zhorik and I would still be sleeping alone.

And now, three days later, so far so good. Sergei has created no stress. The first night he slept with a girlfriend. The second night he and I had sex and he slept the rest of the night in the bathtub. The third night he slept with a girlfriend again.

Zhorik and I still have our pillow talk and our times of intimacy. Zhorik says he hasn’t created any stress for him either. Sergei has a job and has asked me for very little money.

Maybe this is going to work. I am happy and content and stress-free, and Zhorik says he is too.


My student Lena at the McK Company is taking extra lessons in pronunciation, and for discussion I gave her a recent column by former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan observing that “America is in trouble,” and nobody’s doing anything about it.

In her essay, published on-line by “From the Wilderness,” Noonan points to the “unspoken subtext...to our society…that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks.



“That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with ‘right track’ and ‘wrong track’ but missing the number of people who think the answer to ‘How are things going in America?’ is ‘Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.’”


“I would expect this kind of article coming from a Democratic opponent of the Bush Administration,” I noted, “but it’s surprising that this is coming from the main speech writer in the administration of Ronald Reagan, who’s the ideological ancestor of the present administration. Reagan’s vice president and successor as president was George Bush Sr., whose son is now pursuing these same policies.”

I was a bit shocked when Lena replied that for someone from the same political tent to criticize others in the tent smacked a bit of treachery, no matter how accurate it might be. Old Soviet tradition?

At the same time, “It seems strange to me to openly talk of ‘the elite.’” Soviet doctrine held that there was no such thing, that any housewife could step in and run the country. “Of course there was an elite,” she added (‘All animals are equal, but some or more equal than others’) “but it was never openly discussed.” Only in the past couple of years, she said, has the word even begun to appear in Russian newspapers.

What has struck her, she continued, is that – judging from Noonan’s article – there doesn’t seem to me much difference in the agendas of the various American elites.

“I’m a little surprised by that observation,” I said. “Although if you look at the last election, there was very little substantive difference between Kerry’s platform and Bush’s; but I think – at least up to now – there has been a substantial difference in the agendas and policies of the various political camps. It’s true,” I added, “that probably most of America’s elites share the same basic vision of America, the same assumptions….”

“Maybe that’s it,” she said. “They all share the same goals. In Russia, there is no shared vision, no shared assumptions. They can’t even agree on things like the right to own property. There are very few assumptions that are shared by everyone here.”


Putin is taking another step to eliminate competition in the 2008 election. A bill is being rushed through the Duma that will bring closer scrutiny to all civic organizations to try to make certain that no non-governmental organization (NGO) is using foreign money to fund political activities.

It assumes – no doubt correctly -- that any foreign-funded political activities will be anti-Putin.

The Kremlin suspects that a lot of the support for Georgia’s and Ukraine’s recent revolutions – again, probably correctly -- came from foreign money channeled through local NGOs.

And Kremlin paranoia has risen further in the wake of a recently-passed bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would specifically provide $ 4 million to help develop political parties in Russia.

A soft revolution in Russia is still the stuff of Putin’s nightmares.

Russia’s NGOs are attacking the bill as unconstitutional, but of course in this country where the Constitution says whatever the Kremlin says it says, unconstitutionality no longer has any meaning.

For instance, the National Bolshevik Party’s conviction was recently reversed by the Supreme Court (Chapt. 161); but the howls and screams from the Kremlin were too loud and yesterday the Supremes reversed themselves and said the NBP is illegal and must disband after all. No explanation was given, but none is needed. What Vladimir wants, Vladimir gets.


Another hint of the political winds is that the bust of “Iron Felix” Djerjinsky, the “father” of the KGB and one of the most cruel and hated men in the Soviet Union, has been put back on its pedestal in front of one of the local police offices.

Its reinstallation is another less-than-subtle sign that the repression of the worst years of the Soviet dictatorship was not so bad after all. It also gives a hint of what we can expect over the coming months and years.

But Lena reminded me again yesterday: Russians do not cry for democracy. They cry for stability. And they are getting it under Putin. They can do without Western-style Democracy for a while longer.


Before he left, Andrei began reviving his dreams of just him and me living together in Stavropol – with others around – like Natasha, the mother of his child-to-be and sometimes Zhorik, his father, sisters, etc., -- but it would be he and I living happily together, forming the core of the relationship. I would work for English First, he would build a home, I would have my antique Moskvich car, etc.

I told him that if his business is going well, I would consider it next summer. By that time, I should have saved 30 grand, and with about 2500 a month guaranteed (1200 from English First, 850 from my pension, 200 from Katz, and 300 from Yegor), I should be able to bank 2 grand a month, giving me 50 grand by the next year, 100 grand by the 3rd year after that, etc.

So it depends on two things: Andrei’s business and Zhurik’s plans and our relationship. If Zhorik and I should develop a sexual relationship, then you couldn’t drag me away with a team of Siberian oxen. But if there’s not a sexual relationship, I probably would consider leaving him to live with Andrei.

But what about Sergei?

We’ll wait and see