Issue #06/61, March 25 - April 7, 1999  

Our own Stuart Pratt and Johnny Chen offer up their musings about the Hungry Duck.

by Stuart Pratt

Back in high school, when every boy was suffering from a hormone overdose, kids dreamed of partying hard with drunken, easy "chicks". Most boys got over this little fantasy of theirs after their freshman year of college, as their education prepared them to tackle issues facing the world, such as rain forest depletion, human rights violations, and creating a properly-functioning global economy based on humanistic free market principles and fair rules of the game. We focused both on the individual and the world: building a career for ourselves, and making this planet a greener, better place to live in.

And then there was the Hungry Duck.

I'll be honest, as a matter of principle, my girlfriend Amy and I avoided the Hungry Duck from the minute we arrived early last year. As Amy so often pointed out, young Russian women have been raised in an environment that has retarded their consciousness and sense of Self. The lack of empowerment has led them to swing wildly the other way, trying to use their bodies instead of their minds to empower themselves. Nowhere was this more evident than at the Hungry Duck.

Even worse, I know of many expatriate women, including many of Amy's friends, who felt victimized by the very existence of the Hungry Duck. Educated, working women who could not and would not humiliate themselves the way their Russian counterparts did found themselves lonely and depressed and unable to forge intimate relations with their expatriate male counterparts. It's no secret that the Hungry Duck was the oven in which this deplorable tragedy was cooked, and its closure means that perhaps now, such shameless sexism will recede into the hole it came from.

Sure, the Hungry Duck may have served its purpose. In a free market economy, everyone has the right to open up whatever kind of bar they want to. But at the same time, the community has a right to ensure that generally-shared standards of morality are not grossly violated. In this case, I think (and so does Amy) that the communist deputy who denounced the Duck, and the legendary ballerina who wanted to stop the degredation of women who were legally under her power, were right on the money. With the Duck closed down, perhaps the expatriate community will get back to what it does best: helping Russia enter the 21st century, while learning that being sensitive to local cultures is a good thing.

by Johnny Chen

So, it's all over. Not the Hungry Duck, but rather, the world. That's right, the world is ending. It's 1999, war is erupting in the Balkans, Latin America is imploding, God is dead, Frank Murkowski is set to win another 6-year Senate term unopposed, and, scariest of all, the Hungry Duck is closed.

This isn't funny. The news hurt, real bad-like, even from out here in Ontario, California. That's where I live now. I showed up at work at the usual boss's-dick-sucking punch-in time, 8:30 a.m., downloaded my emails, and nearly died of a thrombo: the Duck is dead! The Era is over!

As readers know, the crisis forced me to abandon Russia a couple of months ago and return to America, to my horrible, flat, smoggy birthplace in Orange County, California. It wasn't like I had a choice. My Big Five firm in Moscow, which used to treat me like a senior British commissar in The Raj, was slashing staff like Pacific Lumber sawing through the giant Sequoia forests, leaving prim, Gillette Sensor-groomed accountants reeling in their cubicles. My firm slashed once, then twice, then called in a big meeting in the beginning of this year and told us that the real bloodletting was about to begin.

As I said, I expected it, and didn't wait around to see the collateral damage. When my uncle Tommy Chen called me from home and told me that he had an opening for me at his SoCal plastic utensils wholesale distribution firm, I took the job. It was time to leave. Everything had crashed and burned, including me. Two years of careless drug abuse, sleeplessness, and unprotected sex with multiple partners in a consequence-free environment had taken its toll on this 32-year-old computer geek. I was seeing weird growths on my glans genitalia that still cause me to jump out of bed at night. Weird skin lesions and fevers were telling me, "The Chenster must go home."

Now that the Duck is dead, it's as if the final bridge to that almost-unreal past has been dynamited for good. I can never return. The Duck was everything the West claims to be, but never will be: raw, natural, fun.

It was at the Duck that I bagged my first dyev. Her name was Tanya, and she claimed to be eighteen. I was still a squeamish geek, which meant that she had to do all the work. I was shocked when, after being literally forced to ask her to come home with me, she agreed. You've got to understand, I can count on one chapped hand how many chicks I'd bagged back in Orange County and Olympia, WA. Within a month, I'd doubled my win column record. And that was just the beginning. I'd grab literally anything female, squeezing mammary glands and scratching labial flaps like it weren't no thang. I bagged every type of dyev in the two years that I made the Duck my home away from home, ranging from the nesovershennoletnaya, to the skymie, twice-divorced shlyukha. I figure, you gotta try everything at least once. Or rather, I probably didn't figure anything; I can't piece together more than the first 20 minutes of any given evening at the Duck. There's an impression of something primal, not to mention illegal... and then, the morning hangover.

The Duck hangover was always a very special hangover. It's a hangover caused by consuming too much poorly-distilled flesh, contraband vodka, and Penza draft. Few things in life have been as utterly horrifying as waking up next to a girl you've dragged home from the Duck. There's an old joke about gnawing your arm off rather than waking up the skank in bed with you, but in my case, I was always more inclined to take a chainsaw to their asses and make dog food out of them. And I might have done it, if I wasn't so goddamn drunk every morning.

Eventually, I learned to be rude to any 'ho who let herself be dragged into my pad. If I wanted them out, they were out. More than a few times, their heels got smashed in my slamming front door. If a dyev tried teasing me after consenting to come to my pad, I'd "sill" them, forcing them to sleep on the window sill in the podezd corridor, where they'd curl up and wait until the metro was running again, while I slept peacefully in the comfort of my own bed. I learned, in short, to be what every woman alive loves to hate and hates to love: the guy they call "a jerk."

Yeah, yeah, I know: it's horrible, ain't it? All this nasty sexist talk. Well, fuck you, context Nazis. This is all true, and you people only value the truth when it doesn't offend you. Back home, I'd never be able to put these truths to print, especially not in one of those McAlternative weeklies. Not only can I not write like this back home, but I can't even talk like this--in fact, I'm not even allowed to THINK like this. Only in Russia, in the Duck, was I ever allowed to roam free in my natural state.

No more. I've returned to my old ways. I've had to, if only to keep out of jail. I avoid eye contact with women, and they do with me. Only in Internet chat rooms do Americans feel secure enough to talk openly to the opposite sex, to grope freely. It's sad, but true: our closest equivalent to the Duck is done without any physical contact whatsoever, or even the threat of such. I know, walking these flat, corner-mall-infested streets, that I lived a life these people could only dream of. Or can they even dream of a Hungry Duck really existing? I'd doubt it.

I abandoned America a few years ago an Internet chat room freak, whacking off to cybersex sluts who were probably just flabby, middle-aged homos posing as girls... and now I'm back. But thanks to the Duck, and to Russia, at least I had my furlough from this dull, sexless world we call Modern Society. So to Doug, Vas, Johnny, Craig, and everyone at the Duck who gave me the glass slippers and briefly made my life a Penthouse Forum fairytale, all I can say is, Spasibo, rebyata. You gave me, and thousands like me, the greatest gift of all: a life to recall fondly as I slowly die in America. Russians and expats alike will forever utter your names with religious reverence. You the one!

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