Issue #29/54, December 17 - 29, 1998  

by Mark Ames

I recently saw a turtle on a nature show that lures fish into its mouth by dangling what looks like a meaty worm undulating on the tip of a stem. That worm and stem are actually part of the turtle's tongue. The turtle buries its belly into the ocean floor, thus camouflaging itself from the sight of unsuspecting prey. It turns its head back so that the top of its skull is nearly parallel to the floor, and holds its mouth open as widely as possible. Its eyes greedily track stray fish that take a detour from the school to check out what appears to be a meal on a silver platter. The fish warily dances around the worm, while the turtle, keeping its eye on the fish, lurches the "stuck" worm towards it, tempting it. Inevitably, the bait is too much: the fish swims too close, into the range of the turtles jaws, which instantly snap shut. And that's the last you see of the fish.

When you think about it--the gastric juices stripping layers of flesh from the trapped fish, as it gets sucked deeper down the turtle's ulcer- and bacteria-walled gullet--you kinda-sorta start to get angry-like about it all... We live in a 4 billion year old death camp, run by sadists whose grand design is so gratuitously cruel that it makes Attila the Hun look like Nora Ephron... and yet somehow, like hostages who grow to sympathize with their captors, we're all too deeply fooled by dopamine to realize the shit we're in until the turtle's jaws snap shut and the agony of being digested becomes too great to ignore.

This became painfully clear to me, yet again, when I caught a nasty case of the crabs just after the last issue. For those of you who've never had crabs before, I'd like to welcome you into the mysterious, enchanting world of the grayish, freckle-sized arthropod, whose flat shape and front pincers distinguish it from its close relative, the head louse. Crabs are called crabs because they actually look like and are related to your average beach or restaurant crabs, except they're a lot smaller. You can actually feel the bastards chewing into your skin and crawling around--it's an itch you'll never forget. They gnaw on human flesh, lap up the little puddles of blood, and shit in microscopic streaks that sometimes, if the infestation lasts long enough, show up on your underwear.

"Mommy! Someone's been shitting in my underwear!"

"Oh no, don't worry about it, Markie. Those are just crabs! It's not as if the neighbors sneaked into your undies and took a shit there, for Pete's sake!"

Of course, it couldn't have been my neighbors. One, the old pensioner in apartment 63, reeks so badly of urine that the entire floor carries the stench of Kievsky Vokzal. He smells worse than death itself. It's a natural repellent to all living matter, including his children and grandchildren, who have seen him a total of five times since I moved in nearly 2 years ago. One time, he shuffled over to my apartment, Tim Conway-like, and asked to use my phone to call himself. He looked so pale that I thought he'd crawled out of the morgue. I let him call his own apartment. We heard the phone ring across the hall. He seemed startled, and just like that, he shuffled out. Another neighbor is a single middle-aged woman, while the guy across the way is a half-French oil worker with one of those coke-scooping pinkie-nails.

Darwin or god or whoever didn't select my neighbors to burrow into my pelvic flesh--chewing and swallowing the entire way--and then shit it out the other end, so that it could show up in my boxers. Humans aren't cut out for that kind of work. Instead, barely-visible arthropods were selected. Humans are merely the transport ships, the Mayflowers that take the lice from one bountiful island to the next. They are transmitted almost exclusively through sexual contact, pube to pube, their favorite campground. This is because they cling to the body by clasping onto your hair--their pincers were specially designed for grasping thick hair. Like little eight-legged Tarzans, they swing from curly vine to curly vine, frequently venturing down to the jungle floor for food. When you fuck, it's as if the ferry's landed to take them to another island. That's how they colonize people and keep the whole ugly cycle going, the lice-comedy, as it were.

I'm sure it was Alla who gave it to me. First of all, she's a regular at the Duck. That's proof enough right there. A good 80% of the patrons at the Duck have crabs or scabies or fungal infections. The rest have chlamydia or genital warts, and the rest are merely too drunk to notice.

The night before I met with Alla, she'd been at the Duck on its Wednesday night all-you-can-drink beer night. As Wade Gustafson would say, "She wasn't drinking milkshakes there, I assure you." Nope, not unless there was a helping of sperm, some bacteria, and a nest of pubic lice floating in that milkshake. She didn't get home until 10 a.m. Thursday, and she still stank like a Bavarian tavern when I met her at six in the evening at Polezhayevskaya Metro station.

Sometime that night, while we were fucking, one of the crabs from the bustling lice village in her pubic hairs got an idea in his exoskeletal little head. "This place is getting too crowded. I think I'll swing on over to that giant, unexplored jungle that keeps pounding against our village, and see what's up."

He kissed his fellow crabs goodbye, a tearful farewell with bunting and plenty of flesh salads for all, and then, like some kind of George of the Jungle, clasped a pubic vine, and started swinging from one hair to the next. Instead of wearing a tiger pelt, he wore the pelt of some tiny chunk of flesh from Alla's groin. Screaming, "Ah-ahahaha-ahahaha!" he took off. And somehow, he made it to my body--he and his wife. Soon, they were depositing egg pods on the stems of my pubes. If you've never seen lice eggs, or nits, they're really a sight to behold. Oval-shaped, translucent, with what looks like a brownish eye at the base, what must be the larva. You can actually pull the egg out, but it's not easy. I plucked a few off myself and popped them between my two thumbnails. They made a little snapping sound, like pop rocks.

I gassed the bastards with some 1% Lindane shampoo last Sunday. The Lindane is basically mustard gas; once the crabs ingest it, their lungs collapse and they suffocate to death. The same goes for the larvae in the eggs. You can't help but feel some satisfaction as you poison them.

Thankfully, they didn't infest my eyelashes, which is said to be a favorite vacationing spot for crabs. Since you can't get poison that close, one way to kill them off there is to rub copious amounts of Vaseline on your eyelids and lashes. Over time, it eventually drives them out or kills them off.

At this point, some readers might be tempted to draw a moral conclusion from this tale: don't sleep around, or at the very least, don't order takeout from the Duck. Balls, as Nkem would say. You're merely playing into the death camp officer's hands when you buy into that line. There's no moral to this lesson whatsoever. Take the example of the koala, which is actually a marsupial and not a bear. When it gives birth, the barely developed fetus, still blind and hardly larger than a grain of rice, has to crawl from the vagina to the pouch. Many never make it. Instead, they wind up on the dinner menus for a species of louse that's a close cousin of the pubic crab. Since the koala baby is so small at this stage, the louse doesn't simply bite off a bit of flesh and cause it some itch; rather, it rips the koala baby to shreds, devouring the whole fucking thing. To give you an idea of scale, the louse-to-koala-baby ratio would be the equivalent of a Maine lobster setting upon a newly born human baby--then tearing it apart and eating it. Where's the moral in that tale?

I guess that's why I'm not too pissed at Alla. It's not her fault. We're all ships at sea, well-stocked with fleshy provisions, carriers for a higher species--the pubic louse. So Alla was just being used as bait by these crabs. If you skew the scale of things, it's not all that different from the turtle with the worm-tongue. Look at it from the crab's point of view. It has to keep moving from human-food-cow to human-food-cow; otherwise the species will die off. How to gain access though? That's easy. Use bait. So the crab was the turtle, cloaking itself on the ocean floor; Alla, an attractive young dyev with sleepy eyes, a lazy smile and a perfect body, was the fake worm dangled from the tip of the crab's tongue; and I was the gullible, horny fish, eyeing that quivering worm, Alla, held out to me on a platter one night at the Hungry Duck... I couldn't resist. I got too close, close enough for a couple of crab-Tarzans to swing over and set up another settlement.

Still, the whole experience makes me want to swear off sexual contact for the next decade or so. And out here in New York, where I'm writing this from, this seems not only possible, but preferable. I've never seen more angry, zit-chinned, fat-ankled women in my life than in New York. When you start to see all women as little more than crab cruise liners (and not very attractive ones at that), it's hard to care. But when I return home to Russia in a few weeks, I'm sure all of that will change. I'm sure I'll go right back to getting suckered by the worm-tongue, over and over, as often as possible. The only way you can wreak revenge on the crabs, and the death camp operators, is to deny them new victims. That's why I'll never have children. Every abortion-notch I carve into my belt is another food cow that the mites and lice will never get to feast on. Every abortion is a victory for us humans.