#27 | January 29 - February 11, 1998  

by Mark Ames

This year is starting off stranger and scarier than any in recent memory. Year of the Tiger my ass-this is the Year of the Scabies Mite, and we're all going to be itching real bad-like. Not since the Carter/Abba years has the general karma felt so negative. Last week, Taibbi and I were shamefully shuffling around our office with bruises, sore jaws, and ugly bite marks. Actually, Taibbi had the black eye, and I had the bite marks. My chin looked as though I had those two long Confucius whiskers yanked out with brute force, and all that was left were two pus-oozing raspberries.

It's embarrassing. We're newspaper editors, after all: we're supposed to be respectable, ascetic egghead types defending the community from lies and filth. Instead, WE are the filth that the community is trying to defend ITSELF from. There we were last Tuesday night, acting as guest bartenders for the Duck's "Ladies' Night." It was as if Chikatilo and Manson were doubling the role of Tom Cruise in an NC-17 musical version of Cocktail. There was a lot of blood, vomit and semen, which I guess is what Ladies' Nights should be all about (the most recent Ladies' Night featured a toilet miscarriage, smeared fetus on the walls, and accompanying geysers of vomit). Wednesday morning, I was as wiped out as Martin Sheen in the opening scene to Apocalypse Now. When I got in the shower, I literally screamed, Sheen-like, from the sting of all those bleeding bites: "EeeeerrggghhAAAAAGGGHHHH!!!"

Violence seems to be "in" in 1998. The scary thing is that the days of eXpat immunity from the routine violence that locals endure may have ended for good: just in the last week, knuckle-whipping eXpats has overtaken Virtual Pets, breakbeat techno, and popping ecstasy as the leading fad.

Marc, the lead singer of Detsky Panadol, told me last weekend about how he got popped in the jaw recently at 16 Tons by some surly flathead while he was taking a post-gig leak.

"I'm scared, man, aren't you?!" he said, wearing an expression of desperate fear. "What the fuck's going on?"

Another American got jumped at his own store, which is under construction, last week. One thug grabbed the eXpat from behind and held a tin bucket over his head, while a 2-meter-tall flathead beat him in the ribs. In some ways, He's lucky: those bruised ribs don't show, except in the spooked, half-paranoid look in his eyes.

It could be worse, though. He could have had a blackened ear-that's right, a BLACKENED EAR-like a certain local American reporter, who made the mistake of arm-wrestling some drunken Russian jarheads on a train ride into Moscow last week. I don't know if the reporter won or lost the arm-wrestling match, but he definitely lost the second round between his ear and the jarhead's fist. In general, an ear will lose to a fist: a thin flap of cartilage just doesn't stand a chance against a balled-up mass of knobby bones accelerating at great speed like some medieval maceÉ Getting popped in the ear sucks. I remember in 5th grade when Jim LeMack punched me in the ear. I tried to stop the fight because, suddenly, I couldn't hear a thing. I stared at him in deaf-mute horror, thinking: Hey, can he DO that? While my brain's lawyers conferred, LeMack unleashed an uppercut to my jaw and the fight ended. My lawyers conceded defeat, and left me with two pieces of valuable advice: always protect your ears, and only pick on people smaller than you-preferably bespectacled girls in scoliosis braces...

Then, over the weekend, Stanley Williams, the subject of our lead story, was cracked over the head with a bottle by some skinhead jerks outside Chesterfield's. Jesus, as if Stanley hasn't gone through enough shit already! "Hey Stanley, you just survived two years in a GULAG. What ya gonna do now?" "Get cracked in the head by a beer bottle!"

eXpat-bashing is only a street-level symptom of the overall global bad karma. The big story is the world financial collapse, and how that's affecting Russia. At least, you'd think it's the biggest story. For some weird reason, the Moscow Times, which serves the local business community, buried the fact that the market collapsed further last week in a tiny four-square box story, no bigger than the Kallback advertisement. Can you imagine if the Dow Jones slumped 27 percent in the first three weeks of January? That would mean a 2,000-point drop. People would be throwing themselves out of windows. They'd be running down the streets screaming bloody murder. A huge portion of eXpat employment is directly or indirectly tied to the fortunes of the Russian stock market, so you'd think people might want to be filled in a little, and not treated like Soviet patients, who were never told whether their disease was terminal or not.

Moscow's stock brokers are gloomier than ever. Talk about bad karma-spend three minutes with any of these guys, and you'll want to offer them a Lifesaver. There's absolutely no one buying Russian stocks, and no bottom in sight. This is worse than even the slump in late '95 and early '96, because at least then, everyone knew that a turnaround was only a matter of time. Then, few people were in the game, but this time, big players are stuck with bad positions. As the world financial crisis gathers steam, it seems as though Russia's 50% stock market drop since October is only a precursor, the hot flash before the real shock wave hits and radiation defoliates the financial community.

An acquaintance of mine in Jakarta, who works as a lawyer, tells of how everyone he knows-literally EVERYONE-in the financial community has been laid off. Tanks guard his upscale neighborhood, but he's not sure when the turrets are going to turn on him.

Is it possible that Moscow will become the next Jakarta, or Bangkok, or Seoul? From the looks in the eyes of eXpat stock brokers, and those in the finance community in general, the cataclysm has already begun.

All these things-eXpat bashing, the stock market collapse, the taming of the young reformers, the Broncos Superbowl victory, my bite marks-seem to point to a rough year ahead for eXholes.

The most shocking news personally came to me the other day in the form of a letter snuck out of Women's Prison #6. It was from Alina Vitukhnovskaya, the poet who was tossed into jail twice for the same charge, and was recently moved to a psychiatric ward when the state's evidence against her collapsed. Responding to my proposal to marry her in order to help free her, the persecuted poet opted for the single life in the Serbsky Psychiatric Institute. "I can imagine myself in all sorts of extreme situations (in jail, at war), but I can't imagine myself married, even fictitiously," she wrote. "Because I consider myself a child. And to marry is not for children."

That is, she can imagine herself in all kinds of extreme situations except for one: married to me. I thought I had it in the bag-after all, the choice was between serving time in a mad house packed with serial killers, or marrying meÉ Which meansÉ fuck it, it's probably better this way. I'll still do my best to help her.

If 1998 turns out to be as horrible as 1979 or 1974, then at least I hope it sucks in a cataclysmic, apocalyptic way. Let all the markets crash, let the Asians hang their leaders and the IMF reps from freeway overpasses, let the whole thing go up in flames. Just don't let me go down in flames alone.