the eXile - Moscow Babylon

Issue #03/84, February 29 - March 10, 2000

By Mark Ames

I probably caught it from the half-stale khachapuri I’d bought in Kursky Vokzal. I was trying to score a ticket to Tula to chase a story that we wanted to cover. Three dirthead siblings, ages nine to fourteen, had been charged with gang-murdering three men over a six-week spree. The nine-year-old girl was the marksman of the group--she’d launch the first brick to the head, sounding the trumpet as it were. And whatever else you say, the little cretin was a damn good shot, woulda had a future in softball if she could make the adjustment from bricks to balls. After she’d down her victim, the kids, armed with loose bricks, would pounce and bash his head in (all were drunken/elderly men) until there was nothing but kasha and marmalade. The first victim’s face was so thoroughly destroyed that his wife could identify him for two whole weeks-- she finally recognized a marking on his back. These kids weren’t just suffering from black light poster nihilism, like the River’s Edge murderers--that shallow nihilism that makes dumbshits out of every suburban American teenager; no, the Tula gang’s nihilism was totally innocent, unconditioned, terrifying. After grinding their victim’s head into paste, they’d strip his clothes off and take his possessions, then bring them to their parents’ apartment, keeping the change for themselves to score the odd Wagon Wheels snack. The parents never noticed a thing--because they spent nearly every waking hour dead drunk, barely even able to hit each other or the kids, a notorious power-vodka couple even by local standards. When the bodies started piling up in the apartment block dvor, the town’s residents at first feared that a serial murderer had arrived; after the second murder, they got suspicious, but no one could imagine that a group of kids–-the only potential suspects in the area of the crime-- were capable of such brutality. After the third murder, the cops decided it couldn’t hurt to ask. The kids fessed up right away.

I went to Kursky Vokzal two Mondays ago to check on times for the Tula elektrichka. On my way out, I stopped at a dirthead kiosk and picked up a copy of "Seks S Zhivotnymi-5"--a porn flick featuring the usual ponies and horses, as well as an S&M dyke-duo with a bucket of eels, and one extremely horny Great Dane molesting a Russian whore streaked with red scratches. You’ve got to wonder what options remain to a Russian porn star whose career has hit such a low that the only gig she can line up is sucking Scooby Doo’s dick. I mean it’s not like she could leverage her experience into landing an interview as the office manager for Akin Gump. Although then again, this is Moscow... As heart-gnawing as it is to imagine her fate, what about the poor animals? The eels especially tugged the inner animal rights activist in me. They struggled in vain to slither out of the masochist-dyke’s gaping snapper, wriggling violently, only to be stuffed back in by the dominatrix. If eels could scream, we’d know what horror sounds like. The Great Dane was, on the other hand, a different story--the title of it’s clip was "Raped By A Dog", and it’s not too far from the truth. He was a pretty confident dog. I bet he stopped returning the whore’s phone calls once filming wrapped.

Anyway, the khachapuri. The giardia protozoa thrive in your intestinal tract, but they can survive outside of a host as cysts, protected by a kind of hardened shell. I wolfed the khachapuri down, crunching on the little cyst shells. By the evening, my stomach started to bloat. The following morning, I was hit by a wall of fatigue and swirling nausea. I missed the train to Tula, and dragged my sorry ass down to the office, convinced that I’d been poisoned by unnamed enemies.

It’s no fun vomiting at your office, into that filthy toilet. You can imagine every employee having sat on that toilet that day. That’s all you need to launch all the mulch from your stomach. I puked for 4 hours into the eXile toilet, then took a taxi home, crawled into my apartment, and puked for another 10 hours before passing out. For the next week, I barely got out of bed, had an appetite like Karen Carpenter’s... I didn’t even consider that I might have a parasite gnawing away at me--I’d just assumed it was all my fault.

Then last week the culprit unmasked itself during an explosion in my toilet: yellow diarrhea. The smoking gun.

As a highly decorated veteran of countless non-life-threatening Russian illnesses (and perhaps a couple of as-yet undetected lethal ones), I knew exactly what that yellow diarrhea meant. "Alex, I can name that yellow-diarrhea-inducing microbe in two squirts!" Giardia. G-I-A-R-D-I-A. Once inside your stomach, it sheds its cyst shell, and takes on the more sperm-like form of a trophozoite whose specialty is grazing human intestinal walls. And multiplying. Nice little nuclear giardia families quickly double and triple, trading the family SUV for a Ford van... the litters become herds, and herds become settlements, the settlements colonies: great colonies of giardia microorganisms ranging the rugged, fertile plains of my intestinal wall.

You usually get giardia from drinking tap water, or else by coming into contact with infected feces, which is why gays are a little more at risk than the rest. (Wait, that must mean that the khachapuri vendor scratched her ass just before she reached her hand into the heated display to hand me my bun--which has me thinking: khachapuri vending in Kursky Vokzal could be the kind of work that washed-up doggie-porn actresses could really succeed in--I mean it beats blowing Scooby every time you need a head of cabbage, right? Although then again, she’d probably have to blow Sergei Sergeievich the Kursky militiaman if she wanted to keep peddling her giardia-infested khachapuri in such a choice spot as Kursky, and if she’s doing him, she’s probably got to swallow Ivan Nikolaevich the administrator, as well as Mikhail Nauminovich the public relations director, and so on--heck, they might even force her to blow one of the Vokzal’s stray dogs just for laughs, and then where would our uppity little starlet be, huh?! Sorry, bad idea.)

This is the second time I’ve caught giardia within the space of a year, and I can honestly say that I’m damn proud. As proud as if my own son was gay. It’s not as bad the second time around. The antibiotic, tinidazole, is butt cheap in Moscow. I take so many antibiotics these days, I’ve got to be creating new drug-resistant creatures, a master race of intestine-gnawing protozoa.

Since coming to Moscow, I’ve had salmonella twice, giardia twice, and countless one and two-day stomach eruptions in which I was sure I’d been poisoned. I’d never seen blood in my toilet bowl until the time in my kommunalka, when I barricaded myself in the roach-filled bathroom as my neighbors huffily paced and knocked. On top of giardia, I’ve had your salmonella and various other stomach ailments... you’ve also got your chlamydias, you’ve got your scabies, your crabs, your flukes, your briefly psychotic paranoia bouts. My body is a tourist spot for every microbe and parasite in Eurasia. I hope the fuckers enjoyed themselves.

Ironically enough, I still get sick less in Russia than I did when I lived in the U.S. This is a huge improvement for me health-wise. And speaking of irony, can we say that it’s ironic that Russia’s top figure ice skater’s last name is Slutskaya? I think we can.

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