[dt]MOSCOW, February 12, 2004 – [/dt][ch]I put on another layer this morning.[/ch] It got down to about 4 below zero (F), and it’s supposed to get down to –30 tomorrow night, Friday the 13th!
So to my usual wardrobe of pants, T-shirt, shirt, warm synthetic vest and all-purpose lined rain jacket I bought at Costco in Seattle, was added a pair of sweatpants and a sweater. I also turned down the flaps of my wool-lined leather cap to cover my ears. If it gets any colder I’ll supplement my walking wardrobe with a turtle neck shirt.
I was quite comfortable on the quarter-mile walk from Dynamo Metro Station up Leningradskiy Prospect to the Aerostar hotel for my 8 a.m. class with a group of buyers for the “Real” hypermarket retail company.
Walking back an hour and a half later was like strolling through a Disney fantasy. The morning sun – the first I’ve seen in weeks -- was edging up the sky directly in front of me and the millions of microsopic ice crystals were sparkling through the brittle air like fairy diamonds.
My heart sparkled with them.
Seryozh dropped in unexpectedly last night and again slept with me. How I love holding him and caressing his exquisite little porcelain body. He’s so affectionate and as eager to make his partner happy as I am. It’s a lovely, warming experience.
Before he left this afternoon we found the time and privacy to have another roll in the hay. He plans to return Saturday night.
Yesterday in my Moskovskiy Teleport class near Novoslobodskaya Station we talked about age. “What do you think is the best age to be?” I asked. One said his teens; another said 27, the age he was; 60-year-old Yuri recalled his 30s as the best years. How I wanted to tell them that they were all wrong, that 70 was far and away the best time of your life. I wanted to tell them how I am surrounded by beautiful young people whom I love and who love me, how I am having ongoing sex with four of them at present. I wanted to tell them about the dozens of beautiful young Russians I’ve made love to in the six years I’ve been here.
But they wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
Who would?
[ch]Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday – and my father’s.[/ch] He would have been 110 years old. Not much I can say about him. He abandoned my mother and his seven children when I was seven years old. He tried to re-establish the father-son thing after I got out of the army at age 27 – and pretty much succeeded. My ex-wife Elaine and I used to play bridge in a foursome with him and my step-mother, the former teenager for whom he had dumped the rest of us.
He turned out to be an affable old carmudgeon, and entertaining to be with. But when he would make his own bridge rules as he went, then berate my step-mother for not following them, I would flinch as the memory returned of the stern, unbending tyrant I had known 20 years earlier..
So when he died at age 72, I was surprised to find myself sobbing uncontrollably. Why? We were never that close, and he was not a person I would miss in my life. Maybe it was while I was in psychotherapy some months later that I realized that I had been crying, not for the father I lost at age 34, but the father I had lost at age 7. It’s the first time I had come to grips with the grief I had felt but never let myself express.
[ch]Vanya, my “Ann Landers” from Nizhniy Novgorod[/ch], came this morning to get the money for his last semester at the university there. So I gave him his $ 500 tuition fee and advanced him $ 250 for March living expenses so he won’t have to return till late March. Sending him through school has been a financial drain, of course. When I first met him in the summer of 1999, I fell passionately in love with him. But my lover of the moment was 18-year-old Maxim, his best friend and the guy who had introduced us.
Max was insanely jealous, and they even came to blows a couple of times – over me! But Vanya and I managed to develop a relationship anyway on the side. On one of our trysts in a classroom in Mendeleev University, which English Exchange was renting for classes, I commented on his brooding unhappiness.
“What would make you happy?” I asked.
“I want to go to school and get an education. Without an education I have no future. But I have no money for school.”
“How much would it cost?” I asked.
“Tuition is $ 250 a semester, and I would have to have money to live on.”
I did some quick calculating and figured I could afford to invest $ 200 a month in Vanya’s future.
“How many years will it take you to get your degree?” I asked.
“Five.”
“Well, seeing you through the university will give me an incentive to stay here.”
We talked about how we might spend more time together, but before we really were able to put anything into operation, I had met [Misha]. I dumped [Max], but maintained my passionate relationship with [Vanya], who continued to visit periodically.
Vanya’s tuition has doubled over the years and his monthly living expenses have edged up to $ 250. So I’ve probably spent $ 15,000 putting him through school. While we are not life partners, I love him and he loves me. We’re “family,” even if incestuous – or at least committed friends and lovers who enjoy sex every time he comes to Moscow. His parents have essentially abandoned him. When he was 14, his mother told him it was time to get out and make it on his own.
He has more than once told me that I’m the only one in the world who cares whether he lives or dies. And it’s probably true. If it hadn’t been for me, he says, he doesn’t know what he would have done, and with no future to look forward to, might have committed suicide by now.
So my $ 15,000 has not been a bad investment.
[ch][Yegor] and I had a long talk tonight.[/ch] I wanted to reassure him that despite the joyful and rewarding sex I am having with Vanya, with [Sasha], and with Seryozh, it is he whom I consider my partner and with whom I want to spend the rest of my life. We got very serious, and he said that if he hadn’t met me when he did, he would probably have committed suicide himself. At that moment, he said, he had no money, no place to live, no real friends, and no hope.
“I think I would be dead now.”
Have I really saved the lives of two vibrant, intelligent, beautiful young men on the threshold of life? It would be nice to think I have. In any case, great joy has in turn come to my life through them and we are friends for life. Lifetime friendships are rare. I’m a very lucky man!
Will this have a dramatic story-book ending? Will these two lives that I have perhaps been instrumental in saving become great forces in the development of a more just and democratic Russia? A more just and democratic world?
No, of course not. No ordinary person has ever been able to influence the course of events in Russia – or the world for that matter -- except by assassination.
No, they won’t change Russia. But they will make the place where they are a nicer, more just and more peaceful place to be. And that’s worth a lot.
[ch]A “surprise surge” in global oil demand[/ch] was reported in the Moscow Times today in an article that analyzed growing oil needs at the same time that OPEC has announced plans to cut production by 10%. There was not a word about the impending and inevitable crisis that looms with the coming oil-peak and subsequent downward spiral of production.
I recently put my 50 + year-old nephew Dennis in touch with an EnergyResources Internet group whose members – many of them experts of one kind or another on energy – regularly discuss the nearing oil crisis. I recently asked him if he was finding the information there useful.
He had read some of it, he said, but there was simply more information than he could process.
“Of course I’m concerned about the continued reliance on fossil fuels and the apparent blind eye that this administration and most Americans turn toward what is a building crisis.
“I’m also concerned that with China only beginning to emerge as an industrial and ultimately a consumer nation we can only look forward to a worsening of the condition in a geometric manner.
“But,” he added, “a more immediate concern that I have is with the Social Security System. I am not relying on Social Security to provide me with any income. It would be nice if there was some money, but I’m relatively sure there won’t be any. That is extremely frightening, because we are already deficit spending with no provision to ever get us out, hence the loss of money that should be available for social security; but in addition, we are going to increase social security payees at a rate of something like 75% over the next 25 years with people entering the workforce at less than 1% per year.
“In the past we have always had enough new and current workers to carry the load of the past workers. Less than 50% of people expecting to retire in the next 25 years have sufficient plans in place to retire without Social Security as their primary source of income.
“When 50% of the people over the age of 65 have no or very little income, I expect the economy to shut down. If it does, all my investments will be valueless as well. The stock market needs a viable economy to keep going. Anyway, the thoughts are frightening and as much as I hate pessimistic attitudes, I have one as it relates to the survival of this economy and society as we know it.”
“So I continue to plan for escape to the hills and independent living.”
The hills Dennis is referring to is 50 acres of rich farmland a top a mini-mountain in Southern West Virginia which my ex-lover Jim and I used to own. Dennis bought it and is planning a solar house and self-sustaining life style.
It is not a bright future we face, and I have to start asking myself the question: When do I bail out of Russia? And when I do, what will I be going back to? To the hills and independent living with Dennis and his wife seems to me the most appealing option.
Or will the grim reaper solve that problem for me?
See also related pages:
Chapt. #45 - Celebrating the Red Army and Maslanitsa
Chapt. #43 - Racist stabbing follows terrorist bomb
