#34 | March 26 - 31, 1998  

by Mark Ames

I barely leave my apartment these days. Mandarin peels and coffee grinds fill my kitchen sink. For the last two weeks, I've lived mostly on a diet of mandarins and coffee.

Since we went weekly, I've dropped almost ten pounds. Don't sleep much anymore either. All those bodily functions... They're such a waste of time. I could pump out two free-lance articles in the time it takes to shit out a Mama Zoya's dinner-and they'd look roughly the same, too. But there's no way around it, you've got to tend to the body's basic needs. Unless you want to wind up like Karen Carpenter: a shriveled skeleton, blackened at the edges. Which is where I'm headed if this weekly thing doesn't give.

Sometimes you have to wonder if you're taking things too far. I consider myself to be pretty modest in that area, especially compared to some people I know. Like my friend Layton, who has whiffed so much glass over the last three years that his teeth are falling out, his dick has shriveled into a walnut, and he can't take a shit without consuming three bars of Ex-Lax chocolate. I don't think he's left his Hollywood apartment since I last saw him over a year ago. Another close friend here in Moscow contracted hepatitis from carelessly maining. There's been a fresh hepatitis epidemic among junkies this year. Half of Moscow's krutoi youth has yellow faces and yellow eyes. I recently got my hep-A and hep-B vaccines because you never know who's popping with dirty needles and who isn't. You'd be surprised how many young Russians I've met jam drugs like it's nothing: Special-K and poppy straw... even LSD juice. It seems that almost everyone I meet has popped at least once in the last month. Not just grungy hair-dye types with nose rings, but seemingly normal people. Your girlfriend/boyfriend or receptionist or research analyst might be one of them. Unlike in the West, here, maining drugs doesn't set you apart from the pack and place you in a special, dangerous category. It's just seen for what it is: a better, faster means to a high.

You can buy needles at just about any apteka in town. The quality varies: you can get anything from Danish needles to Turkish or Indian ones. Those can be painful, leaving big greenish bruises for days. But Russian needles are the worst: thick, dull... Popping one of those into your veins is like trying to cut a tractor tire with a butter knife.

Just last Saturday night I was at an underground club, talking to some grungy teenage girl, out of school and out of work. She told me that she regularly jams Special-K and LSD, but she avoids heroin because too many of her friends have become junkies. You'd never know by looking at her that she bangs, which is why I'm just going to assume, in the future, that anyone I meet is a regular dirty-needle junkie. Which is as good a reason as any to get your hep vaccinations and-gulp!-wear condoms. You just know that Russians, with their blase attitude towards the Dying-Thing, aren't dipping their friends' needles into Clorox bleach solutions before sticking them into their arms. There's only one thing on their mind when their yellow-hued, scabbed-faced friend passes the needle, dripping with infected blood: "Davai!"

Another mutual acquaintance OD'd on a monster speedball a few months earlier. He was a FOREX trader for a top local Russian bank who couldn't get enough stimulation. You've got to wonder that feels like, ODing on a speedball: is there a thirty-second flash of Pure Bliss before the aorta explodes? Like one of those blinding white lights that makes your jaw drop, and say, "Oh... my God! It's... beautiful..." before slumping over in a pool of vomit. Or does a little voice in your head screech, "Danger, Will Robinson! Dan-..." as the battery pack in your back falls to the floor and you keel over dead.

About a month back, I was heading into my podyezd with Taibbi, when we nearly tripped on a pair of teenage corpses that had fallen out of my elevator. One was lying on his back, his shirt and sweater drawn up almost to his shoulders. His face was whitish-blue, and his lips had lost color, while his friend was curled into a ball. It was clear that they'd OD'd on some bad junk (the purity of heroin has gone from less than 50% to over 90% in the last few months, according my old housemate Lena). Right then, some babushka from my building comes storming in, yelling at the two corpses, kicking the blue-faced kid's legs and making a scene. Then she turned and asked Taibbi and me to help her drag the dead kids out into the snow. Jesus, and I thought I was a nihilist: but this old bitch made me look like Sally Struthers!...

Since I've been spending a lot of sleepless nights lately in my apartment, I've been thinking more and more about the Death-Thing. The way I look at it, it's important to avoid the Death-Thing. Seems straightforward enough. Russians, as I said, are far less paranoid about death than your average Californian-that's why they make far better infantry than surfers. Their attitude has always impressed me. But...still... not wanting to die is a pretty good strategy. And for my money, the best way of avoiding death is by staying locked up in my apartment. I fixed my doorbell recently, but I don't answer it when it rings. And I stopped answering the phone after I got a bitter, tear-drenched call from an ex-girlfriend whose abortion story I wrote up last time. "Don't you know that people I know read your newspaper?!" She's probably boiling a rabbit right now in her kitchen, a rabbit named Mark. Before her, I was getting regular calls from some OMON thug who was having an affair with Lena when she lived with me. Who knows to what lengths he'll go to find her. And speaking of Lena... she disappeared three weeks ago, her bag is still in my apartment, and I haven't got so much as a message. I wonder if she's even alive.

I try to limit my outer-world excursions to the eXile offices. But I'm beginning to think that this is where it will all end. There's a kind of eerie, foreboding vibe going around the eXile offices these days, as if something BAD is going to happen. The weekly schedule has put an unsustainable stress on us all. Also, the unannounced-weird-assed-visitor-Index has soared to an all-time high at our offices. Crypto-Nazis hanging out in the corridors; skinheads popping in and out; and just the other day, some strange middle-aged Russian man who claimed to work for a state information agency innocently dropped in, refused to look at Taibbi or me, and proceeded to quietly gather up as many copies of the eXile as he could fit into his briefcase. Then he disappeared... We even had a former Burger Kveen burger-flipper drop off a manuscript two weeks back, and pester us with twice-daily calls. His piece was a fairly interesting account of what it meant to be a Russian "eXile" living in squats in Moscow, and the difference between these suffering, harassed Russian eXiles and the pampered, hedonistic eXpat heroes of our newspaper... when we told him that we were interested in running his piece if he rewrote it, he played the hurt, misunderstood artist, grabbed his manuscript, and split.

That got me thinking: one of these days, someone's gonna Mark David Chapman us all. The question is when, and by who.

The Kathy Lally letter to the Johnson List [see page 13] is proof positive that our days in this world are numbered. Now we've got a correspondent from the Baltimore Sun who not only wants us censored and banned, but who's willing to play the NKVD informant and help lock us up in a Russian prison because she doesn't like the way we write. That's not just a lapse of journalistic ethics-that's a sign that the lynch mob is reaching critical mass...

My solution to the Death-Thing is to try to stay at home as much as possible. I'm beginning to like my apartment, in spite of the awful smells that waft in from the bums who sleep and crap in the corridors. I've got my "South Park" tapes and a porno film starring a Great Dane, a water buffalo, a pony, and some Pacific Islanders to keep me company. After this issue's done, I'm going to settle down for a quiet laugh watching eight year old cartoon kid Kenny get impaled on a flag pole, and his slow, blood-greased slide down to the ground. Even if it's not funny the tenth time watching it, at least it's soothing, under the age-old theory of "Better him than me."