Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 284 – 2,507 words
Columns :: Apprehensions mount as reunion with Zhorik nears

MOSCOW, June 7, 2008 – Comments:   Ratings:

Zhorik is out of the army
Nizhny Novgorod Vanya surfaces - abjectly
Zhorik risks discharge, goes AWOL again,
As Sasha grows dearer – and leaves
Tabloid "eXile" threatened by authorities
Academy of Sciences again defies Kremlin
The impossible comes true: Obama is nominee



MOSCOW, June 7, 2008 – Zhorik boarded the train in Novosibirsk headed back to civilian life this morning. We had agreed that he would come to Moscow first so that we could have some time together and make our plans, but two days ago, he SMS’d me that he had some “very bad news.”

His CO (commanding officer) was not only not going to let him come to Moscow – despite the $ 250 I had sent him for train tickets (Chapt. 283, Gaining Zhorik, but losing Sasha? Igor?) -- but was going to take him to the train station and put him on the train to Stavropol himself.

The bad news was that he wouldn’t come straight to Moscow; the good news was that the army paid for the ticket, so the $ 250 for the trip to Moscow can now be spent getting him from Stavropol back to Moscow and for other necessary things.

So he will go to Stavropol, register his return with the Army induction office, and then come to Moscow and to me for a leisurely exploration of our feelings for each other and our future together: i.e., will there be one or not?

Of course, the major concern for me is whether he is willing to pick up our sexual relationship – or whatever he wants to call it (“we don’t have sex,” he repeatedly insisted; “we fool around”) -- where we left off.

I thought he would be overjoyed at finally breaking loose from the pseudo prison where he has been serving time for the last year and a half, but when I queried him this morning about how he felt, he replied, “sad.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m leaving my friends.”

That is a little surprising, because he’s never mentioned any special friends there. I once asked him after he sent some photos of his buddies, which ones were his best friends, and he replied “none of them.”

“I’m sorry you’re sad,” I wrote, but I am very glad that we will soon see each other.”

“I’ll also be glad only when we see each other, but for now I am sad.”

So has he developed some strong bonds of friendship in the meantime? Or is “friends” a euphemism for a pining girlfriend? Is that why he went AWOL -- to spend one last night fucking her?

Add that to the list of things to discuss.

In any case, he is voicing no joy at the prospect of seeing me again and of resuming our life together. How does this reconcile with his reassurance a few months ago that I was “the only person in his life” (Chapt. 273). And there’s the love poem he wrote to me (Chapt. 247), and all the reassurances of how he loved and missed me and couldn’t wait to return to me (Chapt. 270, 267, 264, 260, 259, 252, 247, 238, 236).

We will soon see if they were just words.

In the meantime, Sasha hasn’t slept here for two nights. Has he made good on his promise to move to a friend’s apartment so I can be alone with Zhorik? It seems he has.

And Igor left yesterday afternoon to go to his nymph girlfriend Ira’s apartment. He didn’t come home last night (so, with Sasha also gone, I slept alone for the first time in months) and at 8 p.m. still hasn’t returned. He called this afternoon to ask me to put $ 4 on his mobile phone.

So I, like Zhorik, am also sad. I, too, am missing my friends. I hope Zhorik can compensate for my losses and return my joy.


My mobile phone rang at 3 p.m. last Saturday. The screen announced “Vanya – Moscow.” Who the hell is Vanya Moscow, I thought to myself.

When I heard the voice, of course I recognized him at once: Vanya, the former 19-year-old lover whom I put through the university, and who split after Denis, Igor (Chapt. 222), and the twins (Chapt. 226) re-entered my life and apartment 18 months ago, and whom I loaned $ 3,000 to help get reestablished in a new job and new apartment after twin Andrei stole his laptop.

He promised to pay me back at the rate of $ 200 a month. He made one payment then disappeared, refusing to answer his mobile phone or reply to my e-mails.

I had reluctantly concluded that Vanya, whom I had loved, taken care of, and trusted absolutely, had in the end betrayed me. He had taken the $ 3,000 and run. I had been shocked and hugely disappointed. I simply couldn’t believe he would do this to me.

And here he was – after a year and a half – on the phone.

“Dane,” he said, “I’m to blame for not paying you back the money. I’ve been too ashamed to talk to you.”

“Where are you?” I asked. “Are you in Moscow? I’d like to see you and find what what’s been going on in your life.”

We agreed to meet at the “Shokolodnitsa” around the corner.

I had long ago concluded that Vanya was a “ne-udachnik,” a loser, and his experiences over the last year and a half bear that out. Everything he has touched has turned to shit. He’s had – and lost or left -- three jobs. Without a salary he also lost his apartment and has been living on the street, with friends, in a dormitory with migrant workers, surviving any way he can. He doesn’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. And through it all, he was so ashamed at his plight and his inability to repay me that he never contacted me or responded to my attempts to contact him.

I told him I was very, very sorry, but I couldn’t help him financially. “No, I don’t need your help,” he said.

Needless to say, he’s unhappy in Moscow. He even had a train ticket to Vladivostok in far Eastern Russia to try to get a new start, but the night before he was to leave he got beaten up and missed his train. Ne-udachnik! Judging from what I know about his past, he probably got drunk, picked a fight and got the shit beat out of him, and missed his train.

I told him I was also fed up with Moscow, and was just waiting for Zhorik to come back from the army to decide if I want to continue to live here or to move to Spain and start a new life there.


So it was not the best of times for Zhorik to inform me by SMS that night that he had gone AWOL the night before and had gotten caught by his CO as he was returning drunk that morning.

The sheer stupidity of pulling such a stunt less than a week before he was scheduled to get the hell out of Dodge City forever boggles my mind and makes me more seriously than ever question whether I want to invest thousands of dollars in his education and his future – money that I could use to set up my own future in Spain – if his judgment is so incredibly bad.

And this, after acknowledging that he had a booze problem and vowing not to drink any more because he does stupid things when he’s drunk (Chapt. 280) and doesn’t want to jeopardize his future.

When Sergei called him, he admitted the role of booze in his AWOL episode, but in true alcoholic fashion, when I reminded him he had promised not to get drunk, he replied, “I don’t drink anymore.”

“Sergei told me that you told him that you were drunk when you returned to the caserne this morning.”

“Well, yes,” he admitted.

“So it means you still can’t control alcohol, that it’s controlling you. This is a serious problem we have to talk about.”

“I am controlling it,” he insisted.

“Then why did the colonel threaten to put you in the brig for ten days?”

“Just for being AWOL.”

Umm-hmm. “Nevertheless we have to talk about this.”

“God grant I come home to talk about it.”

And, it seems, God has granted. He will be here in about a week.


As if to punctuate my growing doubts, Sasha announced at 11:30 the same night that he was ready to go to bed. Igor was off somewhere with his nympho, so we would have the bed to ourselves.

We hopped into bed and went into a passionate clinch.

“Do you want to play?” he asked.

Is my hearing getting bad? He asked me if I wanted to play before I even had a chance to beg him.

“I’m drunk,” he said. “I’m not sure if it will work.”

“I’ll bet it will,” I said, and bent to the task of making it do just that.

I had to suck his flaccid glans a couple of minutes before it caught fire, and from then on it was paradise – stroking his fragile, hairless body, his little-boy legs, his exquisite balls as I plunged his rapier piska down my throat again and again. It wasn’t long before I was feeling his sweet honey pouring down my throat.

A few strokes on my own bursting rod, and we were ready to tuck in for the night, with him nestled in my arms in the spoons position.

That’s when he announced that on Monday he would be moving to his new room. But he promised to come visit me often – for English lessons and whatever else we might devise.

Can Zhorik really replace this?

And now, is it too late anyway?


There’s an outrageous, bawdy, irreverent ex-pat tabloid called the “eXile” that came to Moscow about the same time I did. Although it’s fun to read, I seldom get a chance to because I don’t frequent the places where it’s distributed – ex-pat watering holes like the John Bull Pub and other venues where good ole boys sit around, drink pricey beer, talk about their current lays and complain about life in Russia.

Like the Red Queen, the eXile wallows in the misery of living in Moscow, pokes fun at the Kremlin Puppet Theater that calls itself Russian politics, and derides the hopeless red tape that binds Russians together and keeps them reminded that they’re still in their beloved country.

Unlike the Red Queen, however, its editorial pages are often in atrocious bad taste, filled as they are with four letter words beginning with the letters “fuck” and “shit,” which the Red Queen for the most part primly shuns under the time-honored Puritan rule that it’s one thing to do it, but quite another to talk about it.

All in all, I’ve been unceasingly amazed that the eXile has continued to survive in this land of pious babushkas and vindictive censors. They’ve dodged the bullet, I’ve assumed because, like its regal counterpart that you’re now reading, it’s written in English, which requires a certain level of literacy and comprehension to read, a level not reached by most god-fearing and patriotic Russians.

But it seems the Ministry of Information, or more precisely, the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage, has added some literati to its legion of snoops. It announced last week that it is investigating the eXile for possible violation of media laws.

Editor and founder Mark Ames told the Moscow Times on Wednesday he didn’t know why they were suddenly targeting his tabloid. “It could be one of the many people we’ve pissed off over the last months and years,” he said.

But when the defenders of Russian culture went to the eXile Office on Thursday, they focused on the fact that one of the columnists is Edouard Limonov, a founder of the banned National Bolshevik Party and fierce Russian critic.

But they also noted it had been brought to their attention that the eXile “mocks and humiliates” Russia, so they would explore it for extremist content. They specifically said they would check it for compliance with Article 4 of the Law on Mass Media, which prohibits media from promoting extremism, pornography, or narcotics.

“Hell no,” Ames told the MT when asked if they were going to cancel Limonov’s column under Kremlin pressure.

Ames acknowledges the outlook “is not good” for his in-your-face tabloid. “I get the general sense that they’ve decided it’s time to shut us down.”

The prospects for the eXile are indeed grim, which is particularly troubling inasmuch as yours truly prides herself on being guilty of many of the same shocking violations: mocking and humiliating Russia, graphic descriptions of (hopefully) lurid and erotic sex, and pushing -- if not crossing -- the bounds of decency.

But Limonov doesn’t write for us and if none of the censors are queer, so we may continue to squeak by undetected.

Stay tuned.


The prestigious Russian National Academy of Science, which defied the Soviet Union by refusing to oust humanitarian dissident Andrei Sakharov from its membershipa couple of decades ago, continued to defy Kremlin authority last week when it refused to grant full membership to a Putin pal whom Putin has been pushing as the next president of the scientific forum (Chapt. 242).

Putin has long been trying to bring the NAS into obedient compliance with his “vertical of power,” whose long tentacles control virtually every other Russian institution.

But the Academy has been equally adamant in refusing to bend to the Kremlin’s will, and last week pointedly refused to grant full membership to Mikhail Kovalchuk, close Putin conspirator, brother of billionaire banker Yury Kovalchuk, and head of the Kurchatov Institute, to which Putin’s government gave $ 1 billion last year to oversee the development of nanotechnology.

Failure to reach full membership also made him ineligible for election to the NAS presidency which Putin had sought.

Kovalchukk’s snub was “a great setback (for the government) and speaks well for the Academy’s Independence,” Edward Lozansky, head of the American University here, told the Moscow Times.

Despite the Academy’s rejection, Putin, now “demoted” to prime minister, promised to spend $ 25 billion on scientific institutions through 2010 and announced an increase of scientists’ salaries from $ 800 a month to the princely sum of $ 1,200 a month.

With such largesse, how could they refuse him?


Speaking of presidential elections, the impossible has come to pass in your country: Barack Obama, a half-black man with the name of a Muslim terrorist, has become the Democratic nominee for President.

Many of my Russian acquaintances and friends stated with absolute authority that it couldn’t happen, because America is a racist country. Pride in my country is beginning to stir again.

Now our task is two-fold: Get him elected president and keep him from being assassinated by the dark forces that rule our country.

Go, Barack, go!


See also related pages:
Chapt. #285 - Plans for Spain threatened in quadruple whammy
Chapt. #283 - Gaining Zhorik, but losing Sasha? Igor?
Chapt. #280 - With Sasha and Igor, life takes a satisfying turn
Chapt. #270 - Kremlin clans battle over rights to smuggle, launder bucksi
Chapt. #267 - Russian Sputnik launched 50 years ago
Chapt. #264 - Craig: Scratch a homophobe and you’ll find…
Chapt. #260 - Igor returns to play, but Zhorik keeps top spot
Chapt. #259 - Igor headed home from Moldova
Chapt. #252 - New crime: opposing Putin
Chapt. #247 - Russian bear roars again on Victory Day
Chapt. #242 - Is Peter fantasy becoming reality?
Chapt. #222 - Shtokman, Sakhalin, just part of Putin’s defense
Chapt. #238 - Moldova’s bureaucrats ruder than America’s
Chapt. #236 - Prostitution supplements Russian soldiers’ $ 10 wage!


This day years ago:
2007-6-11: Chapt. #252 - New crime: opposing Putin