#19 | October 9 - 22, 1997  

by Mark Ames

A Young, Harvard-Trained Economist

Question: How many licks does it take to get to the center of Michael Bass's head?

Answer: One whiskey glass.

I have a hazy memory of asking that question during eXile quiz show at our party in September. It was freezing cold out that night, which Kara solved by shoving a bottle of Captain Morgan's Rum into my mouth.

Bass had made a surprise appearance to the River Strip party in his slick ZiL limo. He was incredible: scabbed zipper stitched straight up the top of his oval head, giving it an Evil Dead rugby ball effect. He was in a jumpy mood that night, distracted, nervous, yet eerily confident. He even complimented me, which made me uneasy: it meant I had fallen beneath his radar. "This is YOUR party?" Bass asked contemptuously. When I answered yes, he snickered. It was the most likeable I'd ever seen him. His chauffeur opened the back door to his leopard-skinned whores-on-wheels unit, and they were off. Damn that was impressive. You had the feeling that Bass had hit his all-time bull market high that night, but that his bubble was about to burst and his currency was ripe for a brutal devaluation.

Then came my quiz show, which featured questions about Bass. The correct answer was always "c). a young, Harvard-trained economist." I thought it was funny. But I was in the minority. The hostility against me went from muted concern to anger to mob violence. Krazy Kevin, lurking somewhere near the middle of the crowd, later told me that several people-at least half, in fact-were yelling for me to get off stage, calling me an "asshole" and wondering loudly "who's that DICK?!" but I have no recollection.

I almost got into four separate fist fights that night. All were drunken Russians who wanted to rip my throat out and piss down my neck. It's kind of comforting, being hated. Hatred is the only honest emotion. The scariest are the compliments. There's got to be some hidden agenda to a compliment: a sexual or business motive, or a set-up. Compliments are always lies, verbal pickpockets.

Recently, my brother came out to visit me from L.A. On his first night in Moscow, he sneered. Everything was "cheesy." Even I'd become cheesy. The second night I took him to a party that, if Batwing Soup was still around, would be described as "everyone who was cool was there..." Except that Cherie D. and Mahi Vijayshwari were there... although then again, there was always something quintessentially Batwing Soupish about those two... you got the feeling they were the types who jealously read and quoted Batwing Soup, then gave their own "authentic" versions of the same story.

The party was thrown by a young employee of Renaissance Capital. The apartment where it took place had to be about the swankiest spot in the CIS, a corner flat on the top floor of the Dom na Naberezhny, with a huge balcony overlooking both the Kremlin, the Moscow River and the Church of Christ the Savior. The women, excepting a few Americans, were flawless if scary, and the Corey Hart factor was moderately low. Best of all was the open bar. It offered E-Z access and friendly staff. I ordered a quadruple vodka tonic and for the first time in Moscow, got a real quadruple vodka tonic.

However, the party was drug free. That meant the best you could hope for was to collect phone numbers. No violence, no senseless vandalism, and no rapes. Just business cards and bleary-eyed slurring. Most of the women were teetotaling, but the guys, particularly the Americans, were drunk, slobbering lechers. I gathered with a few of them near the bathroom, and that's when the compliments started. They were furtive compliments for the most part, which made sense since these bankers have often been the target of our newspaper. Hearing them praise the eXile was sort of like in the movies when one of the bad guys' dying henchmen admits to the Bruce Willis hero, "I hope you get [name of badguy]... I never liked him anyway..." I felt like Ash in Army of Darkness: "Yeah-yeah, right. Get the fuck away, you primitives." After I pissed I ran straight back to the bar, downed another quadka, then went on an unsuccessful scam. The women at the party were uniformly hostile towards me. Two threatened me with my life if I mentioned their names in this column. One was Julia, and the other Sveta.

There were some low-points to an otherwise fantastic evening. Like when Cherie D. pinned my brother against the wall with her tits and shook him down with a one-hour rant about what an asshole I am. A friend of mine rescued my brother, and then that same friend, about 30 minutes later, was savagely dry humping a Russian girl while her boyfriend lurked nearby. "What should I do?" my friend asked me, panting and sweating. "I had my shlong out, and my hand in her box, and her fuckin boyfriend keeps walking by."

"Keep doing that voodoo that you do," I advised.

I shined my brother and friends and took off to Kafe with a group of degenerates that included Mahi Vijayshwari, who now sports these scary Twiggy-like sidelocks. Most of the guys were bi, as they proudly announced. Ugh, I'm so tired of this Studio 54 retro thing that I'm tired of being tired of it. I remember the 70s. They were Treblinka and Belsen with James Taylor as the camp warden. The 70s didn't even have the courage to gas you. It just made you listen to shitty music and look at people in shitty clothes.

My brother warmed up to Moscow after that party, but he still thought it was cheesy. Sunday night, we dragged him down to the Cherry Casino and tried fixing him up with a six hundred dollar whore. He didn't think it was funny. My brother's a decent person with basic hygienic standards, qualities that I lack. We left empty-handed, and I was worried that Moscow didn't leave the proper impression.

Monday was my brother's last night. I arranged to meet him at the Duck, hoping that this one last chance would finally win him over. Let's just say it was important to me.

I was exhausted when I arrived at the Duck, and was ready to grab him and head home. At first, I couldn't find him. Then I heard some yelling... and there he was, my innocent older brother, dancing on the bartop between two 19-year-old girls. "I'm never going home!" he yelled. "Fuck L.A.!" Jesus Christ, talk about cheesy... "Fuck L.A.!" my brother, a respectable lawyer, repeated. "I'm staying here!" It was a genuine compliment, that I could tell. The only one I wanted to hear.

So now I ask: How many licks does it take to get to the center of my brother's head?

If you answer right, you win a Michael Bass T-shirt.