Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 51 – 1789 words
Columns :: Memories: Mom and Shurik

MOSCOW, April 5, 2004 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Mom’s birthday
Vanya – blurred limits of kindness, stupidity
A call from Shurik
Cold snaps and macho Russians



MOSCOW, April 5, 2004 – Today would have been my mother’s 101st birthday. I’d like to do something to commemorate it, but she’s been dead now for 10 years or more, so I can’t celebrate with her; and I’m half way around the world from the rest of her offspring, so I can’t celebrate with them.

So I suppose the only way I could properly observe it would be to commit myself once again to trying to be more like her: the kindest, most compassionate, and forgiving person I have ever known.

I suppose if I were a more sophisticated wit, I would make some blasé crack, like “Maybe mothers are to be worshiped, but it’s fathers who are to be emulated.”

We must, after all, be manly.

But I’m just a simple Iowa farm boy, so I’ll merely observe the obvious: The world would be a hell of a lot better place if more of us were a lot more like our mothers and a lot less like our fathers. A lot less manly.

In fact, as a kid, I took a look around me at all the stern, authoritarian, pig-headed, tyrannical adult males that surrounded me – including my father -- and concluded: If that’s what being a man is, I don’t want to be one.

Is that why I’m gay? I think role models may have been a factor, though there were lots of other genetic and environmental contributors. But who’s to say? In any case, my mother was a much more admirable role model than my old man, and if I have a goal in life, it’s to be as kind and compassionate as she was. I hope I’ve succeeded, at least partially; and if being as kind and compassionate as I know how to be makes me a pansy, then I’ll be a pansy and a damned proud one! I do not yearn to be a manly man.


“Sometimes it’s hard to tell where your kindness ends and your stupidity begins,” Yegor said -- kindly, of course -- this evening.

Unfortunately, I have no defense.

I had just showed him the e-mail from Vanya.

“Hello, Dane,” it began. I am in grief.

I’m not trading on the Foreign Exchange any longer. Today I lost the last of my money. All my dreams about trading on the exchange are shattered. Although I didn’t lose that much. I lost $ 150; the rest I managed to take from my account, and I have already spent it.

I don’t know what to do now. I have a total of 300 rubles ($ 10) left. To go on is futile. How can I live? In three days I have to pay the rent for the apartment. I have to find some real work. But I need time for that. I’m sitting and crying. I don’t see any solution. I have just one way out: To hang myself.


I was pissed. I had given him the $ 750 so he could launch his career less than a month ago. And now it’s gone. He lost only $ 150 of it on the market. What did he do with the other $ 500? The word he used for “spend” also means “waste.” Which was it?

“What are you going to do?” Yegor asked.

“I don’t know. What can I do? I can’t let him starve.

“Are you going to give him more money?”

“No, I’m not going to give him any more money. I may lend him some.”

And that’s when Igor injected his laconic obsrvation about the lack of discernible boundary between my benignity and my lack of discerning judgment.

“What do you want me to do, let him starve?” I countered.

“No, of course not.” You have to send him some money.

So he is, as I thought, no less kind and stupid than I am!

I replied: “I feel just like you did when your alcoholic uncle bashed the car in and you had to buy the fender, take it to Sandova, and pay somebody to put it back on. He maneuvered you into taking care of him. And that’s just what Vanya has done. He’s screwed up and now he’s helpless and I have to take care of him.”

I can empathize with Vanya about the market. It’s treacherous, and the only mistake he made was thinking he could beat it. But squandering the rest of the money really pisses me off.

So I wrote back:

Dear Vanya,

Now you understand the commodities and For-Ex. It's a casino. So now you'velost all your money in the casino and have to face reality:

I too don't know what to do. I can't afford to keep giving you money. I
have already given you the money I promised you through your graduation --some $ 16,000 if I'm not mistaken. You have to start being responsible for yourself. When your mother told you that, you were 14 years old. But now you're 24. It’s time.

The most I can do is LOAN you $ 100 a month until June. Then you're
absolutely on your own. You may have to give up your apartment and move back into the dormitory. You might have to sell your computer. You might have to eat porridge and potatoes. You can't afford to drink. You have to begin being responsible for yourself. There are millions of Russians who manage to survive on a lot less than $ 100 a month.

How am I going to get the $ 100 to you? You must understand that this is a loan and you must agree to pay me back when you get a job. And you'd better startlooking for a job now. When I asked you about it earlier, you said "itwon't be any problem." Well, I think you need to prove that now.

P.S. Don’t hang yourself. Otherwise I won’t lend you any more money.

Dane



Shurik, my 19-year-old heartthrob who played me for a fool and whom I tossed out back in January, called the other evening – for the second time. This time he said he was coming to Moscow about the 15th of April to see his old prostitute buddy Andrei, and he’d like to meet and maybe have coffee.

I still think wistfully of the fantastic sex we had together and often wish he had been for real.

“Good,” I said. “I’d like to see you.”

“But don’t tell Yegor or Anton,” he cautioned.

Since then I hadn’t told anyone about his call.

But last night before The Vanya episode, Yegor told me about a dream he had seen two or three nights ago. Russians don’t “have” dreams, they “see” them, like movies. Yegor said he didn’t often “see” dreams, but this one was very vivid. Laughing at the unlikelihood of it, he told me about it: He dreamed Shurik came to Moscow with his girlfriend from Zheleznovodsk (I think that’s the real name of the place) and wanted to meet with me. So he and I met and he asked me to rent an apartment for him in Moscow. I agreed, and I would stay with him every other night and with Yegor every other night. The last thing Yegor remembered from the dream was that his girlfriend came to this apartment while I was in Shurik’s apartment. The only thing Yegor remembered about her was that she was smiling.

It was so uncanny. So I told him about Shurik’s phone call.

He was a bit taken aback. “Are you going to meet with him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t hate Shurik. I actually rather like him.”

“You know that he wants to see you for just one reason.”

“He wants to get some money from me.”

“He wants to tell you how much he loves you and what a terrible mistake he made, and how sorry he is, and ‘maybe we should start all over’.”

This was painful, because it’s very likely exactly what will happen.

“And what will you say?” Yegor asked.

I swallowed. “I will remember his words, ‘I didn’t know what a good actor I really am.”

“If you rent an apartment for him…”

I interrupted, laughing. “Honey, do you really think I’d rent an apartment for him?”

“What I was going to say is, if you rent an apartment for him, if you rekindle your relationship, I won’t tolerate it.”

Whoops!

When I met Yegor I had been so struck by his childlike innocence and his goodness and kindness that – as is my wont – I wrote him a poem, that concluded:

We look into each other’s eyes
And know.
For it is written
In the stars
And on our hearts.

It simply had to be, and will.
For I will not let him go.



“I’m glad you told me how you feel, Sweetheart. I’ve told you: ‘I will not let you go.’ I won’t rekindle my relationship with Shurik.”

And I am glad he told me. If I’m tempted, I will just remember Yegor’s warning. And I will not let him go. He’s my tresor da vie – with or without sex. I don’t want to lose him. Even a lifetime of exotic sex with Shurik wouldn’t be worth it.


Moscow punctuated its spring with a bitter cold snap last week. The temperature dropped to about 12 above (F), but with the wind chill factor, must have been about 10 below. We dragged our winter coats back out of the closet and tried to be nonchalant as we shivered to work.

My wool-lined leather cap with the snug ear flaps also came out.

But the Russian men are manly. And though their ears were brittle with the cold, you didn’t see any hats on them. It was, after all, spring! And real men don’t wear hats in the spring.

In an e-mail from Vanya before he met his Waterloo, he noted that “It’s very cold here: -10 (C). I don’t know what to wear outside, and I don’t want to be seen in a hat, because it’s already spring!” Russian men -- even gay ones -- do have their standards.

My student Andrei didn’t wear his Russkiy fur hat for the same reason. It would have been so unmanly. So he froze his ears instead.

Even though it was bitterly cold and the ground was again covered with snow, the practiced eye could recognize that it was spring: The ubiquitous gingerbread fences in Moscow’s countless courtyards were all being painted. Our knee-high metal trellises are black, but others are light green, brown, dark green, even yellow. It’s a ritual that apparently emerged during the Soviet years and today, a Russian man would sooner let spring find him in a fur hat than find his courtyard fences unpainted!

Today it’s beautiful spring again – sunny and in the mid-30s (F). The newly painted fences are gleaming. Leaf buds and baby buggies are springing out everywhere. And I have switched back to my Seattle Mariner’s baseball cap. Now I’m as manly as the next guy.


See also related pages:
Chapt. #52 - Easter in Russia – sans bunny
Chapt. #50 - People living with stones shouldn’t break glasses