MOSCOW, September 24, 2006 -- Okay, it’s official: I’m the biggest chump in Russia. He got me to send him another $ 200 to fly to Moscow and I never heard from him again.
A fool and his money….
But there is a silver lining. On Thursday I met Lyosha on the internet and discovered that we live very near each other. He’s a 22-year-old geography student -- not adorably cute and not an 8-incher, but handsome enough and rake-thin with no body or leg hair.
We sucked and jerked Thursday night, followed of course by a shower, and my blood pressure dropped to 109/72 -- despite having forgotten to take my Norvask that morning, and after having been as high as 167/95 a few days before!
So I’m going to patent my new therapy for high blood pressure: Fuck your ears off and take lots of showers.
But there was a down side. Before we met for the first time, Lyosha asked if it would be possible for me to help him “materially.” How much and how often, I asked. “Maybe $ 50 from time to time.” But we’ve met and had sex twice and he’s asked for $ 50 each time.
That has to change, or I have to find a new cure for high blood pressure.
For that kind of money I could buy breathtakingly beautiful little “business boys”: 19-year-old “Rush,” for instance, will go on retainer for $ 100 a week and have sex several times a week. And for $ 100, luscious 21-year-old Stass will spend the night.
So I definitely have to get this little wrinkle ironed out: Do I really want to pay for sex? If so, how much and for what?
In the meantime, there are several less exotic – and less expensive – applicants in the wings who don’t want money, just sex: 30-year-old Andrei, 26-year-old Paul, 32-year-old Alexei, and 27-year-old Alexei, who is arriving soon from St. Peterburg. Andrei and I had made arrangements to meet Tuesday, but I chickened out; and Paul is probably going to spend the night one night this week.
I looked at the want list of 32-year-old, bi-sexual Alexei. He wants Santa to bring him:
Kisses
Massage
Petting
Mutual masturbation,
Giving blow jobs,
Getting blow jobs
Cunnilingus
Rimming
Vaginal sex
Anal sex, active
Hungarian (I don’t even know what that is)
Photo and videofilming
Bondage
Domination
Sado-masochism, in the “sado-“ role
Beating
Fingering (vagina or anus)
Fisting
Sex toys
Oh, and I forgot golden showers – no, that’s Paul.
And he doesn’t charge for any of it! I’m clearly batting in the wrong league. Out of the 18, I can handle kissing, petting, and coming out of passion from jerking or sucking. On the rest, you can count me out.
So I realize what I long for is not sex for the sake of orgasm, but sex as an adjunct of a loving, supportive relationship. And that’s what I’m really looking for. That – or at least the illusion of it – is why I have been so happy up to now: with Maxim, Vanya, Misha, Anton, Yegor, Shurik, the twins, and finally Zhorik.
And I don’t think I’m going to find it on the Internet.
I’m making progress. Sexy, hunky Robert from Estonia wanted to come spend the night for $ 100. I told him, “I don’t pay for sex.” And luscious 18-year-old Sergei with an eight-inch-plus cock wanted me to be his “sponsor.” I told him no, he’s too risky. I’ve even been dodging Lyosha. I don’t want to be hit up for another 50 bucksi.
In the meantime, both targets of my native tongue -- beautiful Igor and 18-year-old Peter – flaked out last week. Peter caught a bad cold and Igor is at a typically Russian bureaucratic impasse. His Russian visa – he’s an Estonian – expires within the next two weeks, and he’s having problems with the university because he’s not properly registered in his apartment, which belongs to his mother, and he can’t register in her new one because she hasn’t gotten the proper documentation.
Got that? Me neither. This prototypical Russian Catch-22 I have never understood. But it’s a real and recurrent problem for most non-Muscovites.
Anyway, he and I were scheduled to meet Monday, and Peter on Tuesday.
So if we get things worked out with both of them, I won’t need any more sex than that.
And my Peter fantasy is still a hovering possibility. Peter has been in Pitr for a week and was to return last night, and by SMS assured me that he is “looking forward” to seeing me soon. “I’d be keen on (British English is universally taught here) meeting next weekend.”
Me too.
Serious racial battles have been taking place over the past month in a place called Konderoga north of St. Peterburg, and it’s being copy-catted in many other parts of the country, including Moscow.
It started with a barroom brawl between native, dark-skinned, black-haired Chechens and lily white, blond, body-hairless ethnic Russians whose loathing of dark-skinned Caucuses natives is as pervasive as white America’s rejection of the Afro-American 50 years ago.
When the Chechens killed two Russians in the brawl, the town’s vigilante reaction was to run all the Chechens out of town, leaving behind their homes and businesses.
In the meantime, Russian racists, led by two political organizations, the anti-Putin National Bolshevik Party, which has publicly pretended to have shed the racist program which launched it several years ago, and the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (MAII), an unabashedly racist group which would dearly like to run all the “blacks” out of their white Russia.
So the movement has spread: against Armenians in Saratov and Volsk; against all “blacks” in St. Peterburg, which has already earned its credos as a racist bastion; and now Moscow, which has a pretty good set of racist credentials of its own. The MAII organized a rally week before last to protest Caucasus natives in Russian universities, and a group of skinheads were involved in a brawl in Oktyaberskaya metro station.
A poll showed that 57% of Russians believe racist violence could break out in their community, and the larger the city, the larger the percentage, reaching 89% in Moscow and St. Pete.
The Kremlin remains silent on the issue, despite an earlier commitment to solve Russia’s severe demographic problem by encouraging immigration from former Soviet republics, which would include the republics of the Caucuses.
In fact, the Duma has introduced a new bill that would increase penalties for individuals and companies hiring unregistered immigrants, which would work directly to counter the professed aim of more immigration.
It’s a problem that won’t go away, because racism is rampant among the ethnic Russian population, and any governmental attempt to do what America did after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 – enforce equality -- could spark a popular uprising. And Putin will avoid that at all costs, because who knows what all might rise up in an uprising?
It is just such a fear that has prompted an anti-blue light move among the political and social elite in Moscow. The blue lights mounted atop the BMWs, Mercedes, and SUVs of officials and legislators which gives them immunity from police and traffic laws (Chapt. 218) has long been a source of resentment among Moscow residents.
The never-ending blast of sirens announcing the stream of flashing blue lights down New Arbat Street used to assault and infuriate me as I walked to and from my classes with Olga at Deutschebank near Arbat Metro station. How much more anger and resentment it generated in the average Muscovite I can only imagine.
In fact, this badge of elitism was the source of one of the few widespread protests in Moscow earlier this year after a Russian governor was killed when he appeared from nowhere in his blue-light Mercedes driving 200 km/hr. and tried to pass a left-turning automobile. The driver of the automobile was at first convicted of manslaughter, but a national protest soon reversed the conviction and sparked massive motorist protests in Moscow.
Putin recognized it as a potential flashpoint that could cause election problems. Since his diatribe against them a couple of weeks ago, legislators have, amid fanfare and photo-ops, removed their flashing blue lights, removing one more potential obstacle against a landslide vote in 2008.
My idea of migrating to Thailand prompted an e-mail from reader Dan Schramm last week pointing out a possibly significant change in Thai visa policy which, buttressed by last week’s military coup, could put the kabash on Thai fantasies.
He forwarded an on-line article warning that a new Thai visa policy limits visas for foreign visitors to not more than 90 days followed by an enforced 90-day wait before entering the country again. “The new law means that any westerners here, regardless of whether they are earning money from abroad or working here, will only be allowed to enter the country three times without a Visa,” said Skrufff man-in-Bangkok Bee (yeah, that’s what it said).
Ninety days with a visa and three times without? This article is too confusing! It also mentions getting a work permit. So maybe if a foreigner had a visa and a work permit to teach English, for instance, it might be a different story.
But visa violations of any kind bring detention “in one of the feared Immigration Detention Centers for a few days while your case is processed…, an experience you can well do without, as conditions inside have been described by Amnesty International as ‘cruel and degrading’ and ‘seriously overcrowded’.”
In any case, the military coup last week leaves everything up in the air. And after my more recent experience with the gay bulletin board here, I’m less discouraged and more optimistic about the future of my love life – or at least my sex life -- in Russia.
Hong Kong Harry says his Chinese doctor friend says the coup hasn’t affected the tourist and sex industry. Barring unforeseen problems we still plan to visit Thailand over New Year’s and we’ll get a chance to see for ourselves.
The second in command of the Central Bank was gunned down last week, presumably because somebody didn’t like his anti-money-laundering policies.
Officials and newspapers expressing shock that the lawless days of the ’90s, thought to have been put into the past, are still alive and well in Putin’s more stable Russia. In fact, one of them, a former prosecutor, says bluntly that “Organized crime, in association with big capital, can do whatever it wants, and the government is helpless.”
He sees this latest gangland killing as the first in a forthcoming series of contract hits on government officials. “We’re on the eve of a big brawl.”
One thing you can bet on: The killer/s won’t be found. Forbes editor Paul Klebnitz’s murderers are still at large, and gangland killings are still the quickest way to remove untidy or inconvenient obstacles to financial goals without having to deal with the messy and intractable Russian bureaucracy.
After all, you don’t have to stand in line for a permit to kill somebody.
Motorcycles, a relatively new phenomenon in Moscow, are proving a handy new tool for robbing motorists. The idea is, you ride up beside a woman driving an expensive car waiting at a stoplight, break the window glass, grab her purse, and roar away before anybody knows what’s happened.
First, you take the tag off your motorcycle.
According to the Moscow Times, a Moscow version of the Hell’s Angels has done this successfully 30 times over the last week.
One of the most successful netted about $ 7500 and a thousand-dollar cell phone from a 25-year-old company director driving a Lexus.
You don’t need a permit to do this, either.
So the only thing to do is take the law into your own hands, right? That’s what the coach of a football club in Lipetsk did when he suspected the team’s captain, goalkeeper and striker had been throwing matches when they lost two games in a row.
He accused the players at a training match last Saturday. They countered that it was the coach who was throwing the games.
Shortly thereafter, five hitmen showed up at the stadium and beat up the three players in front of the rest of the team. They were also shot at with plastic bullets.
The coach was fired.
No charges will be fired unless the players file a complaint. So far, they haven’t.
The trial of the sergeant who celebrated last New Year’s by beating a 19-year-old recruit for six hours, after which the young soldier, Andrei Sychyov, had to undergo surgery to amputate his legs and genitals (Chapt. 185), has ended.
Prosecutors have asked for six year’s imprisonment.
That’s not enough, says Sychyov.
But that’s probably a lot more than he’ll get after the extraordinary and mendacious efforts of the Army brass to paint him as the wrongful victim of wrathful prosecutors.
What beating?
Remember the army’s extraordinary efforts to get witnesses to retract testimony and the hospital’s claim that the amputations were actually made necessary by an abnormal medical condition which caused clotting and obstruction of the blood flow in Sychyov’s legs (Chapt. 210)?
And don’t forget that the defense minister is Sergey Ivanov, who stands a good chance of being a candidate for the next president of Russia.
So, any bets on a conviction?
Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov wants bigger bathrooms in his city. He has ordered architects and the city planning committee to design them bigger to accommodate washing machines and other stuff.
It’s a noble move. My own bathroom was hard pressed to find space for my new washing machine. And there’s barely standing space between the tub, the toilet, and the handy dandy appliance.
But does it take orders from the mayor to do this? I thought the days of Soviet planning were over.
It is “imperative,” he declared, that this overriding problem be addressed “immediately” in the 1.9 million square meters of housing on the drawing boards for next year. He said that 2.5 million square meters had already been built in Moscow through June of this year in a feeble attempt to meet the exploding demand for housing.
A display of toilets in an exhibition of the WTO (World Toilet Organization) here in Moscow three weeks ago featured the regal potties favored by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great (see Moscow Times photo). After all, no matter to what heights you soar, you’ve still got to squat to “throw stones,” as the Russians are fond of saying.
Note that the toilet on the left, on which Catherine the Great plopped her royal heinie, is especially throne-like. One can only wonder if there was a royal butt wiper or if she had to perform this onerous task herself.
Reflecting contemporary concerns, one company now offers a terrorist-proof version for unfortunate targets like the gunned down central banker.
Whatever you do, remember the admonition of Vladimir Moksunov, general director of the Russian Toilet Association: “You cannot call your city a world capital if your toilets are dirty.”
The U.S. will attempt over the next two years to weaken the Putin government, and will try to pave the way for bringing “pro-Western” forces to power in Russia, “experts” have warned legislators, according to the Moscow Times, citing the newspaper Nezamisaya Gazeta.
Among steps the Bush government might take, reported the newspaper, are to “encourage corruption allegations against top Russian officials and businessmen, try to freeze Russian assets in the West, refuse to recognize election results, increase support for the independent media and the opposition, and even encourage regional separation.”
A former top Soviet official and a former top intelligence official are the sources of the report, according to the newspaper, saying the U.S. hoped to encourage “a covert regrouping of forces” within the political and business elites that would “pave the way for a ‘quiet’ Orange Revolution, Russian style.”
This sounds like contrived Kremlin crap. Of course charges of corruption will be made against top Russian officials and businessmen because they’re all corrupt. If the election is as rigged as the last one, there will be calls for a new one, and independent media voices, inasmuch as they are now almost non-existent, are always encouraged.
But the Kremlin is setting the stage for being able to point to Western conspiracy when these criticisms are actually made. Not that the U.S. – and every Western nation for that matter – wouldn’t like to do all of the above, and perhaps will try, but it will hardly be a covert conspiracy.
It’s just putting another lay of protection against the charges that are likely to be made over the next two years, because they happen to be fact.
