Issue #28/53, December 3 - 16, 1998  

by Mark Ames

Somebody better kill me soon. Otherwise, it'll be too late for all of us. That's because there's an all-too-realistic possibility that, a year from now, Kodak Kinomir will be showing a subtitled version of the eXile: the moVie.

I've been getting felt up and down by Hollywood producers over the past few weeks, ever since the Rolling Stone article came out--molested like some lost, half-naked little Laotian boy who accidentally stumbles across a rural retreat of Log Cabin Republicans. Whatever's happening, it's spinning way out of control. And the ultimate losers in all this will be YOU, the common folk, who've been enduring us for two years now like some chronic infection that you were sure would heal once you returned home. Wrong. The eXile is going Hollywood, and there's a distinct possibility that whether you like it or not, you will not be able to escape our presence on any medium available to man. As far as I know, there might even be eXile blimps and skywriters preparing to take off at this very second, to ensure that every corner of the globe is covered in eXileness, spreading frustration and ill will. The machine is running on its own fuel, in a way I don't get at all. What I do know is that Taibbi and I are merely figureheads, fronts for a game so weird that we have no idea where the tide will sweep us out to. It is, as they say, out of our hands.

If you see me somewhere--and I'm mighty visible these success-filled salad days--I'll tell you the whole story about how the eXile found a big literary agent, publishers, and movie producers. My brain, unaccustomed to success, is producing a cocaine-like substance which is making me friendlier to people, complete strangers even. I notice people actually trying to get away from ME, instead of the reverse, as was the case from day one. I won't let them leave until I've told the whole story about the Rolling Stone article, the Hollywood producers, the book we're selling, the magazine we're setting up... Even though I've got absolutely zilch to show for all this--even though I still sleep on the same cruel sofabed that has aged my back by 50 years, live in a small Soviet apartment, in a building featuring the most shit-and-tuberculosis-infested podyezd this side of Bombay owing to our status as a popular destination for the homeless, an odor so intense that I've literally lost dates the minute they got a whiff of my stairwell. Imagine human shit and urine, bums' clothing, and a dog population that seems to multiply by the day, and you've got the idea.

Now all that's about to change. Even if the money never gets that good, the fame dividends are already pouring in. People whom I hadn't heard from in years have tracked me down. Thank god Joe, my Sicilian friend from 6th grade, found me; others, I'm not so sure. And in the meantime, almost every day at least one of the producers calls me to keep us warm, feel us out, try to get us to panic... I'm eating it all up and then some, if only so that when they pull the carpet out from under my feet and tell me they've lost interest in the movie, and the book dies and I start to acquire that odor of failure and has-been-ness, I'll fall that much harder on my face. If you fall, you may as well fall from the Golden Gate Bridge. SLAM! That's the part I'm really looking forward to--the crash, when I'll try returning to the friend I'd once turned away in my moment of near-fame, or the once-trusting girlfriend whom I'd shined for something dumber and more attractive in my flash of fame.

After the collapse of all this Hollywood shit, and after the broken relationships fail to repair, the really great part is that I'll have another 50 years of lonely, troubled life to bear out, knowing that fate will never pass me the plate again. Fifty years of bodily decay. I look forward to it all--the Valium prescription, the domestic violence, the unwanted child, the alcohol abuse... The spiteful older wife who mocks me for "almost having made it"... who reminds me that Taibbi had way more talent than me, that she never should have married me. I can't fucking wait. It's a life most people I know have, a very real life that even another me is living in another parallel universe. I believe in that universe more than this one. Training, I guess.

Everything changed about 10 days ago when some Hollywood producer--I'll call him "Norbert"--was the first one to start pimping me. He spent 90 minutes working his mojo and trying to send my head spinning with dreams of Hollywood fame. The problem was, I could barely understand a word he was saying. Norbert was so fucking coked up that you could hear his gums smacking and the gluey coke spittle stretching from his tongue to the roof of his mouth. That chewy tongue of his was working the stairmaster on high speed, trying to convince me that Taibbi and I could be stars, if only we signed with him.

"I read the article about you in Rolling Stone... <smack!>..." he said. "And I saw there, I saw... <smack!>... the elements of a really great story. I mean, what is it we're talking about here, Mark? <smack!> It's truth. Truth is what it's about. <smack! smack!> And what we have here are the elements for a really great movie, a movie about truth. <smack!> When I read about you and Matt ... <smack! smack!>... I see a pair of American guys, full of ideals, fighting for the truth... <smack!> <glurp!> <smack!>"

He didn't let me get a word in. Not even a courteous, acknowledging "yeah, I know." If I so much as made a peep, some evil Incan god would suddenly burst out of Norbert's neck, and he'd unleash an avalanche of promises, praise, hyperbole--names were dropped left and right, everyone from studio moguls to "A"-list actors... I could have put the receiver down, fixed a pot of chili, read The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 3, come back, picked up the receiver, and he wouldn't have noticed, he was so hypnotized by his own mojo. About 45 minutes later, he eased into a slow landing. He claimed that he'd let me get off the phone, that I must be tired. I agreed, which was apparently the wrong thing to say. Like a worried husband who scrambles to make sure his wife is reaching orgasm, Norbert panicked and turned his mojo meter up to eleven.

"What we're talking about <smack!> Mark... is ... <smack!> is... buying the rights to yours and Matt's lives. For the period... <smack!>... I just want <sniff!> to sign the deal now and move along, because... <smack-smack!> this is a long process, a long process <smack!>, and if we don't move now, it's going to be even longer <snort!>."

I had to reprocess that for a minute in my mind. He wants to "buy my life"? Buy my experiences? Even when you know your life is far more Homeric than what you've left behind, you still can't imagine it would be worth anything. And why would people from one context be interested in buying the experiences of someone from another context. The two universes--Russian and middle-America--are so far apart that these producers may as well by the rights to the experiences of gas rings around Saturn.

Of course, I'm all for selling my life, which I view as a purely material commodity. What good will these experiences do me stuck inside my brain cells, like every other idiot's? Might as well stripmine the brain cells, put them to work for me.That's all memories are, anyway: messages, telegraphic imprints on the brain's neurochemistry, codes. The best thing is to export them for hard currency earnings, and not leave them stuck in the ground.

The very concept of selling a piece of your life is so disgusting that I want to do it just out of principal. You can actually privatize your experiences and sell them for, say, 100 grams of glass, or about the same amount of Mexican tar. This was something Gogol hadn't thought of: Living Souls, with producers as Chichikovs, money for a memory, trading one's superior context for another's superior currency. Americans' lives are so dull and Protestant-grim and lacking in surprises that, like in some Philip K. Dick novel, they're willing to trade in their credits in order to live vicariously through someone else's memories. All coordinated by some greazy, rollerblading producer, a modern-day Chichikov in a convertible Audi.

A movie. What kind of movie, I asked?

"I see in this a political thriller... <smack!>... two Americans, young American guys, <smack-smack!> who come to Russia, two guys that everyone can identify with... <sniiiiiff!>... caught up in political and mafia intrigue... especially the political, KGB and stuff... <smack!> <smack! smack!>... and <smack!> I... <smack!>... of course, there is the bit about you in the article, the drugs and stuff... <smack!> We can have it, you know, morally ambi-<smack!>... ambiguous. But the American audience ... <smack!> <sniiiiff! smack!> they'll need to identify with you, so you've got to be good. <sniff! smack!> I mean you essentially are good anyway, right? <sniff!> <kwwap!> With a little edge, of course, that's good, you want that. But basically... <smack!> It's about truth here, Mark. Truth. <smack!>"

"The only thing I care about is that the actress who plays Jean MacKenzie has an ass the size of a KamAZ truck, and a face that looks like it's nearly drained of blood from lack of use."

"<Snort!> We can do that. Sure, we can."

"Ideally she should have suffered a stroke, or at least looked like she did. With one side of the face pulled down."

"Talk to me. <smack!> I like this Jean character already."

"No, she's the bad guy, the devil."

"Yeah, that's what I mean. <sniiiff!> <smack!>"

"You know, sort of a cross between Kathy Bates and the woman who played Pat Nixon in Nixon."

"You got it! <smack!> <smack!> We're gelling here, Mark, I can feel it."

"Maybe it could be Meryl Streep, but she'd have to do the De Niro thing and really put on a lot of weight. I mean a lot. But just so long as the face looks bloodless, like--"

"--Pat Nixon's! <sniff!> Like Pat Nixon. I know her, beautiful woman. And Merlie Streep, we've developed a few projects together that... <smack!> No problem, we've got people. We're connected <smack!>."

"The Pat Nixon thing was Matt's idea."

"Uh-huh. <sniff!> <smack-smack!> I'll send the contract on out to you. It sounds like we're all agreed, like we're on the same wavelength here, right?"

The next 20 minutes I spent convincing him that I hadn't agreed to anything, and that I needed to talk to Matt, blah-blah-blah. Norbert, as if out of habit, worked his mojo about how we'd "connected."

"I feel we had a good <smack!> conversation, I feel good about it <smack!>. And, uh, I hope you do too. <sniiiifff!>"

Maybe I would have if I had a pile of piss-yellow chop on my kitchen table--or access to the mirror in his front desk drawer. Not that I like blow. I'll tolerate it--after all, the eXile's motto to its readers is "It's Hard To Say No"...

As fun/funny/disgusting as all this is, (and it must be far more disgusting to read about it), Taibbi and I, with the help of film expert Krazy Kevin, have been starting to actually think about how you transpose this context to an audience over there that cannot possibly fathom a life here. Over there, everything is ironic, nothing really matters, and the smartest thing to do is lead a stern, spartan life, saving and saving, so that when you're 70 or so, you can retire to some giant golf course like Scottsdale and piss into a bag for the next thirty years while chugging along some hilly lawn.

PK Dick, when he wrote about life in middle-America, said that it was so totally grim, uneventful, and bizarrely bland that one could not possibly fathom such a civilization existing, and that's why he decided to write sci-fi. "No alien culture would believe me if I told them how people live on my block," he wrote. Interestingly, to this day he's the only writer I've ever read who captured what it felt like to grow up in the California suburbs, even if his stories took place on moon colonies gone sour.

Let me give an example of how far I am from my counterpart back home.

My long Thanksgiving weekend. Here's the brief on it. Wednesday night, Krazy Kevin and I went to the Duck, where later we met up with Johnny Chen. I saw my little 41 kilogram girlfriend Natasha there, the "midget girl" as Kevin calls her. I've been courting her for months, and she calls me telling me she loves me, but won't go anywhere alone with me. She doesn't really love me, just as I don't love her; we're both trying to get something from the other, and I haven't got anything yet, so I was ready to kill it with vengeance. After a few drinks, I decided both to seek revenge and conduct an experiment. The night before, Ksyusha, my friend's girlfriend, had said that "there is no such thing as friendship among women." So as my Natasha's best friend, Anya, walked by me, I grabbed her and began kissing her. And she let me.

"Mark, be careful, Natasha will see us," she said. No resistance at all. I persisted, just to see. But still no resistance. Ksyusha was right. Natasha saw it all, called me later to tell me that she hates me and she'd never met a bigger asshole in her life.

The next day, Thanksgiving, I went to a concert put on by ex-eXile employee DJ Gizmo at the DK MII near Novoslobodskaya. Almost a dozen hardcore, thrash, and punk bands played, including an eXile headbanging fave, Zuby. A skinhead posse that includes an eXile comrade, "Toothless Andrei," acted as security. Near the end of the concert, I met Masha, a red-haired 20-year-old from Zhukovsky. She was making a video for local access cable, and she asked to interview me. Twenty minutes later, we were in the downstairs hallway. She wants to travel to where it's warm, like Egypt. She gave me her home phone number; five minutes later, I saw her go up the stairs, then return with her boyfriend, a drunken dirthead stumbling.

As the concert ended, I saw Andrei and two other skins rush up the stairs, warning that a fight had broken out. Some half-mongoloid orphan, Tanya, whom I knew from Titan, lit up excitedly and ran up the stairs to watch the fight, and I followed her. There's something sexy about Tanya, but as DJ Gizmo told me, fucking her would be like fucking the entire Moscow underground, and worse. She must have chlyamidia microbes that could chew through condoms. Up top, I witnessed about the bloodiest all-out fight I've seen in Moscow, which is saying a lot. One dirthead had been thrashed so badly that even 10 minutes later, his friends couldn't wake him. Fights between stray drunken dirtheads and very tightly organized skins invariably ended in some GoodFellas massacre. One kid I saw was literally getting the Robert De Niro heel-kick in the jaw. I counted at least three broken noses. The chick who started the fight ended up splayed on the ground with a cracked skull and bloodied neck. And then, like all battles, the mo' died down, and that was that. I returned home, ate a can of Turkey chili for Thanksgiving, and passed out.

Friday night began at midnight when a good friend of mine came by, laid out some railway tracks on my hamper, and got me all amped up. And then crashed. So it was over to Krazy Kevin's at 4am for a blast to the East, the far East, the very, very farthest East, where Buddha sleeps numbly and warmly.

By 9am, I realized I needed to be with someone, so I called my girlfriend Olya, who is 16, and thus fully legal. She immediately dressed and made the one hour trek back to my apartment, where we lay around until mid-afternoon. From there, I met Krazy Kevin, and we headed off to the recording studio to see if the Bandit-Aid song was really viable. That evening was the 4th anniversary jubilee for Edward Limonov's avant-garde newspaper Limonka, which has much in common with our own eXile. I was still pretty warm and hazy when we arrived, not quite in the right mood to meet with hundreds of skinheads, Gestapo Youths, artists, egomaniacs, and assholes. It was a Who's Who of the Dark Side, but I was too fucked up to participate. Kevin and Olya and I spent most of the time passed out in the auditorium chairs.

The next day, we spent 12 hours recording our "Let Them Know It's Christmas Time (Send Them Crack)" song, shuttling back and forth between artists, freaks, and eccentrics ranging from Delphin to Alina Vitukhnovskaya to Michael Bass and eXhole Nigerian Nkem.

Now the song is taking on a life of its own. I'll be appearing on Serebryany Dozhd radio Friday morning to play the song. Trust me, it's the worst, most offensive Christmas song, or any song, at least since "Belsen Was A Gas."

In my alternative universe, the universe in which I didn't move to Russia but stayed at home I became a frustrated, wannabe serial killer, causing no one harm, but making big plans for everyone. The farthest I'd gone in my alternative universe was to stare menacingly at a yuppie woman in the canned goods section at Price Club, before hopping into my beat-up van and heading back to my book-littered Sunnyvale apartment.

That alternative universe still seems more real than the one I slipped into here, by virtue of some wormhole of fate, a timewarp of courage. I would guess that anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of under-50 white American males people the universe I escaped. They are there now, my brothers, stalking themselves every waking hour, thinking of plans, wallowing in self-loathing, helpless and furious at all the disappointment. Jerking off into their pillows. Trying hard to fit in by playing fantasy football, while dreaming about playing fantasy torture-the-yuppie-woman. And never courageous enough to even look a woman in the eye passing down the sidewalk.

Fuck it. At the very least, I'm scoring a free ticket to LA, where my old friend L-- will, as always, make all necessary arrangements. They've got a 3-story house in the Hollywood Hills, a police scanner, and a high-powered telescope to track heli-cops. We'll probably chase a few crimes down with his girlfriend's nightvision vidcam. We'll make a movie of our own.