MOSCOW, December 18, 2005 -- When Zhorik came to bed about 3 a.m. Monday night, I massaged and fondled as usual. “A little bit?” I asked, dipping toward his crotch.
“Just a little bit,” he agreed, adding, “I don’t like to do this so often.”
“What do you mean, so often?” I asked. “You mean like every night?”
“I’ll tell you when I want to do it.”
“Do you mind if I jerk off?”
I stroked and played, but he didn’t get hard. “Let’s try this,” and I put my lips and mouth over the head of his cock. It worked.
“Would you like to come?” I asked.
“Well, now that we’ve come this far…..”
That’s what I was hoping for. So I sucked and jerked, and he jerked, but he couldn’t come.
“Maybe some porn would help?”
He put a nubile little twat on the computer, got very hard, and came rather quickly in my mouth – not profuse, but he ejected several times and I could definitely taste it.
Do you mind if I jerk off?
“Huh-ugh.”
It took me a while too. My empathetic dick starts shrinking with my partners’; but after I took his dick into my mouth again, and he started getting hard, I started getting hard again too.
“Can you erect it?” I asked.
“I’ll try.”
On about the 3rd or 4th erection, I erupted.
“Did you come already?” he asked in surprise.
“When you erect, it doesn’t take me long.”
I hugged and kissed him and we both passed out and slept till 10:00 Tues. morning.
I think the novelty of sex for sex’ sake is wearing off for him. But now that we’ve discovered porn, I think he will be more interested; in the meantime, I can still jerk off to his comatose erecting cock, which I have done several times this week.
And if nothing else, these sessions seem to bring us even closer together.
“Can I borrow $ 200?” asked Sergei on Wednesday. Well, at least he asked for it instead of stealing it: Progress.
“What for?”
“I just talked to Denis, and he wants to come back.”
“Well, honey, I want him to come back too, but Zhorik and I have a special relationship, and I won’t be having sex with Denis. And where will he sleep?”
“In my room.”
“There’s already you and Anton and Yegor . And what about Zhorik’s friend Igor when he comes?”
“Denis and I will get a place to live together. He’s going to get a job and he’ll pay you back the $ 200.”
I’m very skeptical, but I loaned him the money anyway.
“Can I borrow 4,000 rubles and pay it back on payday?” Zhorik asked as we sat in the kitchen Friday night.
“What do you want to borrow it for?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“No, I want to know now. What do you need 4000 rubles (about $ 135) for?”
“I want to buy my girlfriend in Svetlograd a present, and I want to buy Papa a present. I won’t have time to buy them after I get paid on the 29th. I want to buy them tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
So Saturday as I headed toward the Inst. of Diplomacy class, he went with me and I took the money out of the ATM at the metro. Then, he – I supposed – went shopping.
It came as a complete shock! I had dozed off as we were watching TV Saturday night. When I woke up Zhorik was gone.
“Where’s Zhorik?” I asked Yuri.
“He went for a walk.”
Earlier in the evening I had heard him talking to nasty Nastya on the phone and figured he had gone to her place to get fucked.
Oh well, I shrugged. Boys will be boys. But Nastya? The little slut/thief? I have made it clear that I don’t want her in this apartment, and still he’d go fuck her?
A few minutes later he returned.
“Where have you been, honey?” I asked.
“Nowhere.”
What did I expect?
I hugged and kissed him and went back and turned on TCM television. Some old spy thriller that I’d already seen three times.
Unexpectedly, Zhorik came in and lay down on the bed still wearing his pants.
I turned off the TV and rolled over to massage his naked stomach.
“Do you want to zavalit’?” he asked.
“Do I want to what?” I asked.
“Damn,” he replied, “do you want to suck my cock?”
“Hell yes. Let’s get at it. Turn on the porn.”
I sucked and jerked. He came. I continued swallowing and sucking and pulled out my own dick and started jerking. As I continued sucking, he started getting hard again.
“Jerk it,” he said.
So I jerked his with my right hand and my own with my left. Didn’t take long. I crammed my dick back in my shorts and could feel the gism squirting like a fire hose into my palm through the shorts.
By this time, he was well into the second coming.
It took a while, but we succeeded. Again, I continued sucking and swallowing, and finally raised my head to his chest and kissed him.
He pulled up his shorts and trou and I hugged and kissed him lovingly.
After he had said he would let me know when he wanted sex, I had figured it was going to be one of those “second Tuesday of next week” kind of deals. And here he was asking for it….twice….tonight.
I told him about Denis’s arrival and lending Sergei the money.
“You didn’t ask me,” he said.
“Honey, this was in the middle of the afternoon. Sergei said he wanted to send it right away so he could call Denis the next day. I didn’t have time to discuss it with you,” but I told him what I had told Sergei about Denis’s not interfering with our relationship. He seemed pleased.
As I stroked and kissed Zhorik’s chest, he said:
“Tomorrow night I will tell you something awful about me.”
I raised my head and looked at him.
“About you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in trouble?”
He didn’t answer.
Christ, I thought; has he gotten some dizzy little broad pregnant?
Finally, he said, “I didn’t buy a gift for my girlfriend today. I went to the casino. I gambled away all the money you gave me.”
“Oh shit!” I sank down on the bed.
It was déjà vu all over again. I thought back to Sergei’s confession almost exactly a year ago (Chapt. 96) and everything that came afterward – the disappearing money, his inexplicable disappearances, the denials, the lies, the treachery.
“Honey, you’ve seen what happened to Sergei. You know that a gambler never has anything.”
“I know. I don’t know why I did it.”
“Was it the first time?”
“Yes, I’ve never gambled before in my life.”
“The first time is a mistake,” I replied. “The second time is an illness. Do you think this was a mistake?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you’ll ever do this again?”
“No.”
After a pause, he asked: “Do you think I should tell Kreutz?”
“If you tell Kreutz, he’ll never believe that it was a one-time mistake, and he’ll kick your ass out of there. He remembers Sergei.”
“I don’t know why I did it,” he continued. “Except I remember the first time Sergei gambled. He won 10,000 rubles. I thought I might win some money.”
“Honey, poor people must never gamble. It will take their food, their clothes, everything.
“I won’t give you another 4,000 rubles to replace what you’ve thrown away,” I continued. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can borrow it from Sergei if he has it and pay him back in February.
“You won’t tell Sergei, will you? Or Kreutz?”
“Honey, it’s our secret. I won’t tell anybody -- unless it happens again.”
He got up for a smoke. While he was away, I started thinking. He’s not going to go to Svetlograd without buying what’s-her-face a present. He could do something really stupid like borrow it from somebody at a mafia rate of interest.
“Honey,” I said when he came back, “I’ll lend you another 4,000 rubles, and you can pay me back in February. I believe it was a mistake. But if it ever happens again, our relationship is ended. I won’t live with someone I can’t trust. If I can’t trust you, I don’t want to live with you.”
“Thank you, Dane. It will never happen again.”
I believe him. He’s shown no earmarks of an addictive personality, and he has an awful lot to lose.
I went for my Potemkin U. interview in my one decent suit of clothes – a suede sport coat I bought at a thrift shop in Seattle, the yellow dress shirt I bought for Anton’s French passport interview three years ago, an old maroon tie from America, and a pair of dress pants I bought second hand from my landlady at Petrovsko-Razumovsko five years ago. Oh, and the black cashmir coat I inherited when Mal Kildale died of alcoholism back in ’71.
I looked dignified and prosperous. Sergei was mightily impressed.
My biggest worry was my voice, which was visiting me only intermittently. I ate honey with onions, gargled in hot salt water, and chain-chomped Hall’s cough drops. It was sounding pretty much like a voice by the time I found my way via the map on the web site.
Security showed me to Irina’s, the assistant administrator’s, office. She had e-mailed to thank me for the “very impressive” resume I had created. It turns out I needn’t have worried about how I looked or sounded. They were desperate for warm native-speaking-English bodies and didn’t really care about the non-essentials like dress and voice.
“How would you like to teach a course in marketing?” she asked. “Well, it’s not really my forte,” I countered. I told her about former English Exchange colleague Bill Skyrme, who’s background in marketing is very strong.
“Well, would any of these interest you?” she asked: Organizational Behavior, English Composition, Public Relations, Mass Media, Modern History of Russia, American Politics – all of which, I told her, were more my cup of tea than Marketing.
There were three possible time frames: 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. Mon., Wed., Fri.; 2 p.m. – 5 p.m. Tues., Thurs.; or 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. Tues., Thurs.
Tarp had said they “paid pretty well.” How much is pretty well?
There are 120 academic hours in a semester, and for a teacher with less than a Ph.D., they could pay $ 1500 to $ 2500 depending on – something.
By now it was 2 p.m. Friday. “I’ll go home and see how I can juggle my schedule and call you back,” I promised.
But when I started adding, subtracting, and dividing, even the highest rate -- $ 2500/semester – was barely $ 20/academic hour. I’m already making that at School #69 and more than that in some of my private classes.
I wrote her that I couldn’t justify disrupting my other classes for that amount and suggested that before the fall course we meet and block out the hours she would need and I would arrange the rest of my classes around those.
She wrote back: “Let’s discuss the possibility of teaching just Organizational Behavior in the evenings on Tues and Thus, during 7 weeks (let it be 3 academic hours from 5pm till 7:30 pm), the total amount of hours - 42 and the compensation would be 50/hour = $ 2100 per course.
Fifty bucksi per hour: That puts things in a different light. So I wrote her back that I could probably do it, but would let her know definitely Monday. It means I will have to do some serious juggling, but financially it would be well worth it. And perhaps for the second half of the semester that begins in March, I could free up some more time for an additional course or two.
So maybe at age 72 I’m going to launch my new career as a college professor! And I’ve never even had to write a thesis! Eat your heart out, Crutchfield!
In the meantime, I’ve been seriously attacking my voice. I was already using honey in tea and honey mixed with onions, and for the past 24 hours I’ve been gulping down raw lemon slices in sugar. Today my voice is – if not normal – at least recognizable as a voice.
That’s a decided improvement.
In talking with Bill Skyrme, he says the British Union is pulling a lot of shit and is demanding that all teachers sign a new contract; they’re reducing the pay and demanding that teachers be insured against damage to classrooms!
I’m only teaching one class for them – the McK consultants – so I will simply tell them (BU) to take their contract and shove it. That will free up Tues. and Thurs. mornings for juggling some of my other classes. Although I rather think that McK may opt to hire me directly. It would be flattering, but would actually cause more juggling problems. We’ll see.
As if peak oil and melting polar caps weren’t enough, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ordered Israel’s armed forces to be ready in March for possible strikes on Iran’s uranium enrichment sites.
If this attack occurs, warns Michael C. Ruppert of “From the Wilderness,” it will mean “the end of the world as we know it, because China, India, Europe and most of the rest of the world would have to defend their access to Iranian oil.”
Iran would likely retaliate by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz or stopping oil sales to Europe, he predicts. Iran “would certainly stage multiple retaliatory attacks throughout the region, which would threaten to destabilize Saudi Arabia and plunge the Gulf into utter chaos.”
Ruppert, who does sometimes tend to be a bit shrill and panicky, calls this threat “one of the most alarming developments I have seen in a long time.”
One of Israel’s concerns is that Iran is enhancing its intelligence-gathering capability, using Russian space launchers.
“If and when we launch an attack on several Iranian targets,” observed one Israeli defense official, “the last thing we need is Iranian early warning received by satellite.”
Russia just last week signed a $ 1 billion contract — its largest since 2000 — to sell Iran advanced Tor-M1 systems capable of destroying guided missiles and laser-guided bombs from aircraft, which Israeli defense officials admit “will make our life much more difficult…”
There’s one frail thread of hope that this might not come about: Since the date of the threatened strike against Iran also coincides with Israel’s March 28 general election, some think – and most of us hope – that Sharon may be simply rattling sabers for the benefit of Israeli voters.
The alternative: WW3?
As we approach the Christmas season, we once more have the major religions of the world to thank for putting us on the abyss of international nuclear war. The fundamental Christians, the fundamental Jews, and the fundamental Muslims seem to have completely forgotten the major role of religion: to bring peace and joy to men and mankind.
So to the extent that any of us enjoys the illusion of serenity and contentment next Sunday, it will be despite, not because of, the religious pooh-bahs of the world.
And lest the Russian Orthodox feel left out, there’s something to offend everyone. They’re all in a huff because the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has had the audacity to call for an end to “religiously motivated stereotypes” of female and male roles within religious institutions.
These stereotypes of female subservience are as Russian as vodka and caviar, and to criticize them shows shocking “contempt for views shared by millions of believers,” the holy ones pontificated.
In the meantime, a new Amnesty International report has found that every hour in Russia, a woman dies of violence at the hands of her family, her partner, or her ex-partner. But after all, if they don’t “obey their husbands,” as their religion tells them to, what can they expect…for God’s sake?
Chapt. 179 – 2745 words
Columns :: Zhorik: two steps forward, one step back
MOSCOW, December 18, 2005 -- Comments: Ratings: 
Average members rating (out of 10) : Not yet rated
Votes: 0
Votes: 0
