#12 | July 17 - 30, 1997  

by Mark Ames

I told our secretary, Julia, hundreds of times to screen my calls. This time she forgot.

"Mark Ames please," the familiar, oily voice spoke into my phone.
"Yeah, that's me."
"Hi Mark, this is Michael Bass."

Julia wasn't just fired on the spot-her picture can be viewed on the bottom of the Death Porn page. It was horrible, but it had to be done.

The very name "Michael Bass," has so many unpleasant associations that I can't eat or drink for hours after hearing it. It's like a witch's curse, a voodoo incantation. I just suck in air as quickly as possible until the queasy feeling fades. Somehow the name fits him so well, the perfect union of signifier and signified. I wouldn't be surprised to see it become a part of our everyday lexicon. "Ee-yew, god! That chopped chicken liver is so michaelbass." "I could never vote for Newt Gingrich. His policies towards the needy are so michaelbass." See how natural it sounds?

Maybe that's why, underneath it all, there's something I can appreciate about the guy. I don't hate Michael Bass, not by any stretch. In a town teeming with some of the most egregious hypocrites ever to slither across our planet, Michael Bass wouldn't dare claim to being a "Pillar of the Community." As Robert De Niro might say, "It is what it is." Yeah, but "it" can only be appreciated from a very long distance, in the third person removed a few times over. Not in the first person, over the telephone-no, that changes everything. It takes weeks to recover from a conversation with the guy. You feel that you've been slimed. Your cherry hasn't just been popped-it's been brutally disfigured and smeared on your chest... Finally, you can't help but to think, "If only he'd just die." You don't mean it maliciously. You just want him to disappear, quietly, painlessly, and after going through the options, you realize that only death-his or yours-will end it. Since you're not the dying type, you figure, well, it's gotta be him. You feel bad, but not as bad as you feel each time his living presence is reaffirmed.

Bass had some terrible news for me. While he wasn't too amused by the Munchle Basse spoof we ran, he told me he was "laughed out loud" when he read what I'd written about one of the Temptations dying on his behalf.

"I'm glad you liked it," I told him.
"The nice thing about working for an independent paper is that I get to write what I want," Bass continued. He was trying to be menacing by way of showing that he was not trying to be menacing. "Anthony [Louis, editor/owner of the Moscow Tribune, whose family also has an interesting history] told me that I can write whatever I want in response to you."

"That's great, Michael."
Then he dropped his bomb. "So, guess what? Vijay Maheshwari told me he has a pair of your underwear."

Oh shit, this was getting uglier than I thought, and not in an ineteresting way.

"Vijay has your underwear, Mark. Do you know what that means?" he pressed me.

I knew exactly what it meant: Vijay's sweaty balls were staining MY pair of expensive, high-quality, American-made underwear. My very best pair has fallen into his godforsaken hands. I paid good coin for them. I must've dropped fifteen bucks on that one pair of Calvin Kleins, in the desperate hope that someone would get between me and my Calvins. As it turns out, that someone is Vijay Maheshwari.

"I'm gonna run a picture of you, some kind of funny picture," Bass added, turning up the heat.
"That's great, Michael. What picture?"
"Oh you know, a funny picture," he said in the same threatening-by-way-of-not-being-threatening tone.

Welp, what can you do, I thought. I guess this is my punishment. The Axis Powers have regrouped, in the form of Vijay Maheshwari and Michael Bass. They're calling up the reserves, and mobilizing for the big counter-offensive. This is it: Tannenberg; Stalingrad; Kursk... my underwear!

"I've got to go, Michael. I've uh... I've got this thing I'm doing. But thanks for calling."
"So I'll just go ahead and run that funny picture of you," he added menacingly.

It's only now I realize that Bass meant to blackmail me. To publish kompromat, to Kovolyov me, in order to cut a deal with me so that the eXile would leave him alone. Frankly, I'm offended, and I want to kill the bastard if that's what he meant. But the joke is on him, because at the time I didn't get his threats, so I must have come across as some Humphry Bogart under pressure. Even now, I could care less. What could his "funny photos" show? Me in a sauna with a pair of aging whores? I'd be proud. Maybe he could doctor some photos to show me rubbing Crisco on some gay prostitute's ass. What do I care? People would leave me alone, which suits me fine.

All in all, it could be worse. I could be Michael Bass. His punishment is life imprisonment in the body of Michael Bass, low-rent villainy, physical deformity, and the back page of the Moscow Tribune. Vijay, on the other hand, by stealing my favorite pair of underwear, clearly made off like a bandit in this whole deal. I'm sure Vijay's psyched. He's practicing in front of the mirror right now, sucking in his stomach and pretending he's me. He'll have to suck in real hard, though. Hell, he can keep my underwear. I don't want them now. I won't ever let them touch my ass and balls again, that's for sure. That's getting way too close to the real thing, and even I have my limits.