Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. # 25 – 1736 words
Columns :: Temporary flu in Russia; terminal ennui in US

MOSCOW, Nov. 18, 2003 -- Comments:   Ratings:
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Flu cancels Volodya
Seryozh and I get down to business
Flu also decimates Anton
Americans’ Hypocrisy: Bush vs Putin
Living in Americans’ future



MOSOW, Nov. 18, 2003 -- My nerve didn’t get the Volodya test Saturday night.

When I called him Saturday afternoon to find out what time he would be coming, his flu-laden voice informed me that he wouldn’t make it.

But he sort of promised to take a rain check and “I’d like to invite you to a basketball game.”

Yay!

“With my girlfriend.”

Boo!

“And maybe you can bring Shurik.”

Yay!

But I got my consolation prize: Seryozh called and asked if he could take a break from the hospital and come visit me on Sunday about 1 p.m.

Yay!

But when he arrived, he was accompanied by Nikolai, a thoroughly disgusting old queen whom my ex-Misha had brought by a time or two.

Boo!

But Volodya brought with him a half liter bottle of vodka.

Yay!

But no juice to drink it with.

Boo!

So I sent Igor to buy some juice and we had a few rounds of beer and vodka before we had the traditional vodka lunch of bread, lunch meat, cheese, and dill pickles.

Shurik had already left to go to what he calls his “job” – a sort of OJT training course in which the mother of a friend of his is teaching him sewing and stitching to bring him closer to his dream of becoming the Jean Paul Gautier of Russia.

Yegor was headed out to the library, but first went to our bedroom to get something. When Volodya followed him in and started pawing him, Igor removed Valodya’s hand and informed him that he wasn’t interested.

So after Yegor’s departure, only Anton and I were left to cope with Nikolai and Seryozh.

We continued chatting for a few minutes before Nikolai suggested watching some gay porn movies. As Seryozh and I stood up to go to the living room, Nikolai added, “Anton and I will stay here and talk.”

How thoughtful of him, I thought, giving me a chance to cope with Seryozh by myself!

And we left Anton to cope with Nikolai alone.


Seryozh and I didn’t have sex, though we kissed deeply and passionately and talked a lot, and played with each other’s cocks until I got a boner. I even kissed his. I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was circumcised, because he is after all Jewish. It also wasn’t very big, but he said it was what we used to call “a grower, not a shower,” and actually when it got hard was as big as the one on the guy in the porn flick, which was definitely a mouthful for the beautiful teenagers trying to it down their throats.

What did we talk about? He talked about his difficult life and the constant money problems. He is 24 instead of the 18 he looks. He doesn’t much like Misha. We talked about what we liked, and we agreed we wanted to have sex, but it would have to be sometime when it was only the two of us.

“Have you ever thought of settling down with one person?” he asked. I told him that Yegor was sort of that person for me. Still it was only with some difficulty that I refrained from telling Seryozh that I loved him. It’s so American, after all!

He said he and Nikolai, whom he had known for 10 years, were former lovers, but not any more. He also said he moved in with the other Seryozh (Long Seryozh, Seryozh II) because he was in love with him, but Seryozh II wasn’t in love with him, and that’s why he was looking for another apartment. Does that mean that Seryozh II was the raison d’etre for the wrist slashing? He’s certainly tantalizing enough.

And what did Nikolai and Anton talk about? Anton said Nikolai tried relentlessly to get him in bed. “Your eyes are so beautiful. Do you have sex with Yegor? Do you have sex with Dane? Are you interested in Seryozh? He’s got a big cock. You’re beautiful.”

“I have a boyfriend. No, I don’t have sex with Yegor, we’re like brothers. I used to have sex with Dane when we were boyfriends, but I don’t anymore. No, I’m not interested in Seryozh. I don’t care if he’s got a big cock.”

Nikolai also said he had had sex with Misha several times. He said if we heard from Misha to tell him to get in touch. Nikolai knows a rich guy he could live with.

Maybe that’s how Misha is going to survive.

Nikolai told Anton that when Seryozh moves out of the other Seryozh’s apartment, he will move back in with Nikolai, and they will again be lovers.

Tilt.


Valodya’s not the only one with the flu. Anton’s got it too. When I got home from my lesson at Moskovskiy Teleport yesterday, there was a strange man in our bedroom.

But he had his clothes on! And he wasn’t cute!

“The doctor,” Anton explained after he had left.

When Anton didn’t feel like going to work yesterday, he called the “polyclinic” designated by his company’s insuror. The doctor paid a home visit an hour later, examined Anton, pronounced it flu, and gave him a doctor’s excuse for not showing up at work for the next four days. He won’t get paid for the days he misses, but at least he won’t get fired.

“Good companies pay you for sick days,” Anton explained, but his 0-a-month salary isn’t from what he considers a “good company.”

Health care is one of the few remaining vestiges of the Soviet welfare system. Even if you’re not insured, you call the designated polyclinic for your neighborhood, and the doctor pays a home visit. If you’re a proper Moscow citizen, it’s still free.

If you’re so sick you have to go to the hospital, that’s free too. Seryozh’s surgery and hospital care, for instance, were free.

It’s a great system for the ailing Muscovite, but not for the doctors, whose state salary is probably less than Anton’s. Two of the great shames of Russian society are the deplorable wages paid to educators and state health care workers. Ivan., as a teacher of English in the prestigious state pedagogical institute, gets less than 0 a month!

It also sometimes isn’t such a great deal even for the sick citizen. While the care is free, the overworked nurses and staff in the state-funded polyclinics are often rude and surly and always bureaucratic. Lines are sometimes interminably long.

And while the medicine is free, you may have to wait months for it. Four years ago when Andrei K., my gay friend and former roomate, was diagnosed at a free polyclinic with hepatitis C, he was told he must have seven liters of intravenous interferon. However, it would have been months before it would have been available for him at the clinic. He could die in the meantime. The alternative was to buy it at a pop, so I gave him 0 so he could get treated immediately. He’s still alive. Maybe that’s why. Who knows?


The Khodorkovski crack-down is quickly simmering down to a non-issue, with Putin warning the rest of Russia’s oligarchs in no uncertain terms that the same thing will happen to them if they don’t stay out of politics.

The oligarchs have promptly fallen in line and are purring gently on Putin’s lap.

About the only dissenting voice belongs to a former Kremlin journalist whose book warning that Putin has also succeeded in bringing the Russian press to heel has just been published.

“There is hardly a single publication left these days with an editor-in-chief who won’t change or simply pull an article after a call from the Kremlin – or worse still, replace an opposing journalist with a loyal (to the Kremlin) one,” reports the former journalist, Elena Tregubova

As if to prove her point, an interview with her that was scheduled to air on what’s left of NTV, the former dissident channel that was the first to be put out of business by Putin after it defied the Kremlin by continuing to report Russia’s Chechen atrocities, cancelled the scheduled airing.

The show host frankly told her: “The report was called off” by station management after a call from the Kremlin.

The fact that her book, Tales of a Kremlin Digger, is already among the top 10 best sellers in Moscow suggests that Russians are still deeply interested in what’s going on; they’re just afraid to say so.


Which is apparently more than you can say for Americans right now. A column by Moscow Times writer Matt Bivens describing the non-response of the American press to a speech by former Veep Al Gore, the poor sap who really won the last election, is nothing less than an indictment of my profession and my country!

“For the first time in our history,” Gore was reported as saying, “American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families.

“President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an ‘enemy combatant,’ Gore continued. “Those are the magic words. If the president alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the president wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment.”

But Gore’s speech was “buried inside most newspapers and newscasts,” Bivens decried. “Even among the politically literate, no one in America talks about this.”

On the other hand, “Throw a Russian oil oligarch in jail and announce he may have to wait two years for a trial and everyone gasps at the horror of it, and governments and editorial boards all start scribbling out their indignation and their concern for democracy.

But in America, “for more than two years we have imprisoned upwards of 650 people in a U.S.-controlled chunk of Cuba, where our most inalienable rights and highest principles apparently don’t apply. And we refuse to say anything about their fate…

“Can someone explain the difference between (Bush’s) ‘enemy combatant’ and Josef Stalin’s ‘enemy of the people’?” which was Stalin’s version of the same thing and his excuse to liquidate millions of loyal but dissident Russian citizens.

“I don’t think there is one!” Bivens wrote.

I don’t either. And it’s completely ignored by the American so-called press.


Almost since I landed in Russia, I’ve been worrying out loud that I am living in America’s future. At first, it sounded like an outlandish bit of exaggeration. But the longer George Bush Jr. twists the reigns of U.S. government, the less preposterous the idea becomes.

Except now, it seems, we are in real danger of living -- not in Russia’s present -- but in Russia’s unspeakable past.

I started out living here despite the difference in civil rights. But the way things are going in America, I may find myself living here because of it instead of because of Valodya and Seryozh and Yegor and Shurik and….