Issue #28/83, February 10 - 17, 2000  

By Mark Ames

How do you dump a dyevushka? How do you get rid of her and make sure she never bothers you again? It’s not as easy as you’d think. You may have thought that because they’re so easy to score, they’d be just as easy to unload, no different from tossing a crumpled bag of Taco Bell wrappings out the passenger window on Interstate 5.

Wishful thinking. Here’s a simple SAT Verbal exam question. Grrls:Dyevs=Night:? You there, sir, in the back with the hand waving. Yes, "Day" is the correct answer! So, if Grrls (i.e., American women) are impossible to score on a one-night stand basis, instead requiring a daylight appearance at Starbuck’s, a follow-up dinner at an ethnic restaurant, and a whole litany of icky confessions before they’ll take their pants down and pop the libido-mangling "did you bring a condom?" question, then dyevs will come back home with you and fuck you bez preservativa even though you’re disgustingly drunk, sweaty, balding, and you forced her to pay for cab fare because you didn’t feel like reaching into your back pocket. I’m talking about opposites, folks. Inverse. Antipodes.

So here’s the flip-side to the wonderful dyev antipode. Getting rid of your American girlfriend is relatively easy; windexing your dyev may prove to be a bit more difficult. A lot more. The reason is that American girls are so well-trained in the art of showing that they don’t care or aren’t hurt that for them, it would be more painful to "have a cow" and make fools of themselves by making the breakup process loud, public and difficult. I’ve rarely had problems getting rid of my American girlfriends--often, they’d say that they were thinking the same thing, that they were fine, they didn’t mind, etc. Dyevs, on the other hand, are generally impulsive, have a low sense of self-worth; she is far more horrified by the thought of letting even the most water-rat-resembling eXhole slip through her fingers than she is worried about "looking like a freak," one of those capital crimes in American culture. Those features that make the dyev such E-Z prey in provincial discos also make her a dangerous, drug-resistant parasite when it’s time to flush her from your system.

Last Sunday, I asked Dr. Limonov what the best, most effective way is to get rid of your Russian wife or girlfriend.

"Just hit her!" he said. "Crack her head. She will go away."

"No, they’ll just love you more if you hit them," I said.

He laughed, but stuck to his guns--or rather, his fists--on the matter. Hit her enough times, and she’ll leave you, a purple-eyed martyr, wandering a world of one.

I’d like to believe it, but I really don’t. An old Russian saying goes, "He wouldn’t beat me if he didn’t love me." Another saying goes, "One person flogged is worth two who haven’t." I remember hearing a story about a Russian peasant somewhere in the provinces who used to wake his wife and daughter up early every morning and give them a good thrashing with his belt before the day began. Since they were bound to screw something up, he reasoned, he may as well punish them first, sort of preemptive strikes, in the charitable hope that they could be trained not to do things that might piss him off.

Stories like this are just too damn sexy for my tastes, and one of the major attractions that drew me to Russia. Nevertheless, I don’t think my suburban upbringing, no matter how fucked up, has prepared me for a life of wife beating. I mean I UNDERSTAND IT, but I can’t beat a woman myself, unless she asks for it. As in, "Hit me," verbalized, perv-game asks for it, and not in the bar-room humor version of "she asked for it." There’s a little V-chip they put in your head the first time you sit on Santa’s lap at the mall--and that’s that. They got you for life. No future in wife-beating for Markie.

Not only that, but I don’t believe beating works. Refer to Turner, Ike & Tina, if you want proof. I saw an interview with Ike--a hero of mine, incidentally--and he’s still baffled as to why Tina endured 14 years of his beatings--14 years of rolling with the punches, as it were. "She must be a mas--a uh, mas-kist, or sumfin like dat," he told BBC television last summer.

Domestic violence victims rarely just pick up and leave after the first fat lip. Instead, they spend years in support groups, crying to their friends, compounding the masochistic pleasure of martyrdom, but returning in the evening to the familiar smell of one’s bleeding gums. It’s a painful fact. A book that the eXile’s book-burning-editor, John Dolan, recently shipped to me, Perfect Victim, tells the true story of a girl kidnapped in Northern California, kept in a box, whipped and tortured and raped for seven years. She developed a kind of liking for it, you could say, and passed up opportunity after opportunity to escape. It was only after the sado-kidnappers got bored with beating her and started to ignore her that she walked away and turned them in.

The lousy bitch.

The reason I bring all of this up is that dyev-haunts from my recent past have been shamelessly, abjectly hounding me for just one more chance to be treated like shit. Wait… I know. If I were to read that sentence I just wrote six years ago, I’d hate, I mean really hate, me. One should be so unlucky, right? No. Otherwise that old line about starving people in Africa would really make you appreciate the overboiled Safeway rump roast that your mother used to serve you. I’m being hounded by dyevs I don’t want, and I can’t get them to go away. But if you consider the evidence, I think you’ll agree that violence would not help my cause.

Two days ago, one of my tormentors left this letter, which I quote in full:

What a wonderful letter! Especially the part, "I will serve you without waiting or expecting any kind of reward..." Ah. "I will serve you"... "reward"... excuse me while I run my fingers through those words. I also appreciate the last nod to our eXile book, which, she wisely guessed, acknowledgment thereof is a shortcut to my heart. Nevertheless, I know it’s a trap. She’s calculated that it’s either my sweaty, hairy ass, or Sergei’s scabbed, bleeding knuckles. The odds of her requiring plastic surgery would be much lower with my sick sex games than with Sergei’s all-too-authentic thrashings.

She’s not the only one. A teenager I deflowered last year has been stalking me with repeated phone calls, suicide threats and poison emails; another, one of those when-everything-else-fails fucks, calls me every time I step into the office, which is rare. My point being, when it comes to fucking and shining dyevs, it ain’t all gravy.

I want them all to go away. And I can hear Limonov, my OB-1 Kanobe, whispering from the netherworld, "Luuuuke... Use the fist, Luuuuuke.... Use the fiiiiiist."

But it won’t happen. If I were to beat any of them, I’d be stuck with them for life. My solution is the coward’s solution. I never hit them, but I never totally dump them. After all, in a few months’ time, our upcoming book could be a massively-recognized failure, the eXile shut down, and my stock would plummet. Gotta keep my options open, gotta keep a few dyevs warm just-in-case. So I don’t totally dump ‘em. I just leave ‘em hanging, and force them to come up with more and more exciting ways of trying to entice me to fall into their traps.

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