Issue #12/93, June 22 - July 6, 2000   

By Mark Ames

The Hideous American

I knew things were going to get ugly when we checked into the hotel in Saransk last Saturday.

“You can only stay here for one night,” the woman at the reception desk told us. “Since you’re foreigners, you need an official letter from a local [Mordovian] organization to stay any longer.”

That was it: the trigger. I looked over to my friend Andy, a frequent traveling partner to the Russian provinces. A maniac masquerading as an investment banker. Red anger patches formed on his neck. As he stared menacingly at the reception desk clerk, I could see him calculating, Terminator-like. He’d moved to Defcon-2; he’d scrambled his jets and called up the reserves.

“You know, that’s a violation of the Russian Constitution,” I said, trying to let out a little steam. “Now that Kiriyenko is the super-governor of this region, you’d better be careful. He doesn’t joke around.”

“Sorry, but it’s hotel rules,” the young Mordovian woman said, smiling nervously. “We can’t just have any foreigner show up here.”

“You mean you need to limit the amount of Americans trying to squeeze into your wonderful hotel?”

The place was woefully empty, excepting two red-head whores who sat in the lobby with some sleazy middle-aged Mordovan in tinted glasses.

“Sergei Vladilenovich Israetel is going to crush you for this,” I said.

We took our bags and headed up, but before we could do so, they stopped Andy’s girlfriend, a local Saransk dyev.

“She needs to have a passport to go in!” the woman barked. Seeing that Andy had turned red and was about to pounce on her, she corrected herself: “She can go up now, but later, any guests need to show a passport.”

Andy laughed, dismissed her as a “fucking monkey” in English, and we headed up to our rooms.

It was only a matter of time before open hostilities would break out. I’ve seen it a dozen times with Andy. Usually the battles take place in hotel lobbies. They’re brief but bloody, lopsided battles; like an A-10 warthog opening up with rapid-fire cannon on a line of Kosovar refugees. Once the smoke clears, those hotel lobbies are littered with the bodies of humiliated sovki. It’s no joke. Someday it’s going to get us strung up on a lamppost.

One of the more famous of these lobby bloodlettings took place in Lvov. Everything was going fine until checkout time. The matronly hotel receptionist had even fixed us up with some whores the night we arrived. It was service at its best.

“Did you come to Lvov looking for brides?” she’d asked us when we first checked in.

“Maybe,” we said. “Sure, yeah!”

“Well, let me help you handsome young men find nice Lvovian brides,” the middle-aged woman responded.

“We were going to go out. Maybe you know of a club where we can find some nice brides?”

“Why go out?” she said, seizing our hands and pulling us close to the counter. “You never know what’ll happen to you out there. Better to stay in here, and we’ll bring some brides to you.”

She wasn’t lying. An hour later, a gaggle of whores walked into our hotel room, formed a line, and posed while we inspected them. We fingered their chins, their breasts, elicited giggles... We selected a lucky few and sent the disappointed remainder on their way, probably to a nasty beating at the hands of their madam (one would hope, lord knows they deserved it).

A few hours later, we trawled the clubs, but found the lvovchonki to have a chip on their shoulder. Second-tier mud people, like Czechs. So we drank ourselves silly.

We were late for our plane the following morning when we found out that we had to pay in hrivny, the Ukrainian currency, “play money” as Andy called it.

Andy wanted to use his credit card. But the rule at the hotel was that you had to walk to an in-house bank in the lobby, pay a 5% fee to pull out the monkey money, then pay in cash.

“Fuck you, I’m not paying five percent to you fucking bandits!” Andy yelled at the middle-aged staff.

“But it’s our policy—”

“It’s theft!” Andy yelled, drunken eyes turning every shade of red. “Theft! You fucking Ukrainians should be ashamed of yourselves! You’re not even white people! You think you’re European, but you’re just a bunch of fucking monkeys!”

I looked around for jackbooted Ukrainian nationalists, but instead, the khokhliye lowered their heads in shame. Their shoulders slumped, their heads bowed.

“Yeah, hide from me you fucking monkeys!” Andy screamed. “Even in Africa they don’t treat you like this! Trying to steal in this sneaky way. You’re pathetic! You’re like a bunch of fucking children! I wish my country and NATO never bothered to free you from the Soviet yoke! You fucking monkeys don’t deserve our help! You’re just a bunch of low-life thieves! You only deserve to be Russian subjects!”

Middlebrows reading this will probably shudder to themselves and label Andy an “Ugly American”, but he’s nothing of the kind. In fact, he’s far, far worse, and far less hypocritical and bleating. An Ugly American possesses a kind of destructive naivete; he doesn’t really see the damage he causes, because he’s too much of a blundering, ham-fisted, pious idiot. Andy, on the other hand, knows exactly what he’s saying and why: he hates people who don’t follow basic rules of civilized behavior, and wants to make them pay for it. Knowing how racist Eastern Europeans are towards Africans, Andy usually tells them that they’re in fact lower than Africans the first chance he gets, provided that, in his mind, they broke basic rules of civilized conduct.

His tirade went on for ten of the longest minutes of my life. An entire division of Rukh paramilitary units could have surrounded the hotel by this time, but that wasn’t how they played it. From the khokhliye point of view, scamming a 5% fee and taking abuse from an American were equally delectable.

He got the cash, screaming at them the whole time, literally threw wads of hrivny on the floor for them to pick up, mocked them as they scrambled to pick up the cash, then left. And the amazing thing is... THEY APOLOGIZED AND BLUSHED IN SHAME! When they should have strung both of us up Mussolini-style!

Andy’s not always this lucky. At least twice since I’ve known him here in Moscow, he’s shown up with black eyes, which he’s had to explain away at his investment bank as having been “jumped”, when in fact some young Muscovites didn’t take kindly to being called “monkeys” and “lower than Africans” by some barking drunk American banker. A few times, he’s confessed that he’s amazed he’s still alive.

But that hasn’t stopped him.

In Saransk, Andy and I joined a group of his girlfriend’s friends for a night out on the town, which ended up at the “Dzhentelmens Klab” in the hotel lobby.

The “klab” featured a small group of whores dancing, some seedy Mordovians eyeing them like shashlik, and then us. It was too much for Andy to take. “I’m getting the fuck out of here!” he yelled, and grabbed his girlfriend.

They tore through the lobby, and were in the elevator, when the flathead guard at the door stuck his hand in and opened up the elevator door.

“Passport!”

But Andy’s girlfriend didn’t have her passport. Meaning, she had to leave.

As you might expect, Andy exploded.

“You fucking people are animals!” he yelled. “You’re a bunch of fascists! You’re not even human!”

The reception clerk tried to explain that this was how they protected their clientele from undesirables.

“What is my girlfriend going to do here? There’s nothing in your shit hotel worth stealing!” Andy yelled. Then he got into the flathead’s face and called him a “fascist” and a “monkey”. “You can’t even call this hut a hotel! If you were to see a real hotel, The Four Seasons in New York, you would literally weep in shame! Because this place isn’t fit for Africa! And you know what? At that hotel, no one checks your documents!”

“Well, perhaps because there’s not so much crime in New York as there is here,” the woman pleaded.

“No, it’s because we don’t have fascists running around in every corner of our hotels. You people will always stay a hundred years behind because you can’t act like human fucking beings. You’re all a bunch of fucking apes!”

The flathead was in stupor, even with Andy screaming in his face. And the amazing thing is... IT WORKED! His girlfriend was let through. Anything to appease the beet-red psychopath American.

Not that I’m not grateful to him. When the rest of us, Russian friends included, went to join them in the hotel for more partying, the flatheads and the reception clerk all hid, fearing another humiliating battle. The Warthog had leveled the lobby. There was nothing but smoke and humiliated sovki.

The moral of course is this: it pays to be a hideously rude American. Forget your fake attempts at cultural sensitivity and noodle-necked fairness. Don’t bother being merely an Ugly American. Just scream the worst things you can think of when things aren’t going your way. As they say here, the worse, the better

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