Issue #01/56, January 14 - 27, 1999  

by Mark Ames

Maria, you asked me when we met if I'd write about our night together. I laughed disingenuously and said that I wouldn't. I lied.

At this point, Maria, you've got two choices. Either click out of the eXile web site and return to your miserable Dostoevskian life in uptown Manhattan, or else... draw a warm bath, call your parents to say a tearful farewell, and take a very sharp, clean blade to the tub with you.

I first met Maria at a New Year's Eve party in a Manhattan condo in Clinton--which used to be known as "Hell's Kitchen," the neighborhood west of Times Square. Hell's Kitchen was once a rough, seedy, dangerous area. Now, like everything else in late '90s America that used to be threatening, that part of town is clean, safe, packed with ethnic restaurants and called "Clinton." As they say in the entertainment business, it has gone "mainstream alternative."

The New Year's party that we crashed was no less mainstream-alternative. About three or four quirky thirty-something yuppie men and their Reality Bites liberal arts girlfriends all sat on the floor in the dark, wearing only pajamas. They listened to some kind of Goa-trance soundtrack and dropped ecstasy. The host, a rich young doctor with a hippie hairdo, welcomed us in his boxer shorts. He was what you might call a New Eccentric.

My radar zeroed in on Maria because it detected something vaguely dyevilish about her. The large cheeks, the amorphous, herbivore-mammalian body tone... Or maybe it was the obvious desperation. She talked to me. The others gathered around the hippie-doctor as he showed off a day-glo cardboard-cutout aquarium, in which hung cute dayglo cardboard fish under a black light.

Maria was born in Russia. I knew it! Her mother is a Jew, and her father half-Russian, half-Armenian. They emigrated to America when she was two, and eventually wound up in Indianapolis, where her father joined the conservatory. Right away, Maria confessed to me that she was shy, hated people, and that she wanted to come visit me in Russia. She was one of those twentysomethings looking for an out. My radar crew was decorated and promoted for sniffing this one out.

After she postponed our first date, I finally went out with Maria. My first date with an American woman in about eight years--and it was worth every harrowing, hair-raising, penis-contracting minute.

Ten minutes after we took our seats in some pretentious Lower East Side yuppie restaurant, she was complaining about the shit luck she had in life that she'd finally found someone interesting--presumably me--and here he was, taking off for Russia the next day. She grilled me hard about whether or not I had a girlfriend back in Moscow. She brought the subject up no less than four times, attacking it from various angles, like an interrogator trying to catch me in a lie. I was just afraid that I'd let the story about my crabs slip, and I even caught myself furiously itching my crotch a few times, as a sort of knee-jerk reaction to it all.

Maria was a classically trained violinist and pianist, but life in her miserable uptown kamorka was making her desperate. She was poor and terrified, and ready to sell out to any bidder. I learned that she'd never had a boyfriend in her life. That was a shock! Maria was pretty, intelligent, reasonably interesting... but lonely and desperate, kind that feeds on itself in a cruel circle--a not uncommon kind in America. She confessed to being a lesbian, at least in theory, while she was a student at Columbia. She was frustrated and unable to meet any man, excepting one, who wound up being married. Of course, she gave me the obligatory grrrl line about how she used him for his dick and didn't care about anything else, but the way she tried asserting her fem-power was so practiced and sad that I pretended I didn't hear it. She also complained about a mutual friend of ours, a Russian-American, who dresses and makes herself up like a fashion model.

"I just can't wear makeup," Maria told me. "I can't see myself in it."

And yet, this poor creature was so wretched that she was throwing herself at my filthy feet!

At the time, I really felt pity for her. It struck me what a strange country I come from, how it disfigures so many millions. I mean really disfigures them. If Maria had stayed in Russia, she would most likely have an active sex life, would have boasted of several failed love affairs, would have no hangups with such ridiculously over-politicized mate-attracting rituals as wearing make-up or showing off her legs. But as I said, America is a very, very strange place.

When people say that America is "boring" while Russia is "exciting," I'm always baffled. America is the farthest thing in the world from "boring." There's more to do there, more pressure, more work, more fear, more disappointment, more distractions, and more expectation than anywhere in the world. Nope. What America is is hugely scary. That's S-C-A-R-Y scary. Even scarier than shit.

The scariest thing about America is that it is the opposite of everything it markets itself to be--and no one there seems capable of recognizing it. It is not fun; its people don't enjoy themselves; it is the land of incredibly limited opportunity; people are not free to express themselves; they are not individualistic in the least. After college, each person becomes a hyper-cautious, nervous wreck, terrified of fucking up. He watches everything he does and says, and lives with the constant fear over his head of getting downsized--which, if it happens, is worse than death. Why do you think there are 5,000 bottles of Prozac and Valium in every home? Why do Americans search for lovers on internet chat groups or the back pages of mainstream-alternative newspapers? Why do Americans never take vacations? Why do they smile so much? It's because they're scared shitless--and if you haven't understood that, you're probably one of those righteous idiots who calls Americans "fake" and "boring" and "uncultured."

Revulsion of American women is not misogyny. The fact that they are unwitting conduits of banal ideology, bitter, wretched, carrying with them entire libraries of life's disappointments by age 23, and above all, as sexually enticing as sewer grates--is not their fault at all; they are victims. But nevertheless, they are metaphors and carriers of the frightening, middlemania disease that modern America is spreading around the globe. So when people--particularly those who have been abroad--express their violent disgust towards American women, they are revolting not against them as females or as humans, but rather, as metaphors.

That's why I refused to fuck Maria that night. I refused to fuck that metaphor. She brought me back to her apartment, a room on the first floor of a seedy residential hotel on 101st Street, and nearly jumped me. I've never been date-raped like that before--it was frightening, the desperation oozing out of her. She begged me to do anything to her--literally anything. Normally that would excite me, but I figured, gee, if I fuck her, she'll win. And if she wins, America wins. I couldn't let America fuck me like that. (Also, the fact that she had an unkempt muff the size of Dr. J's 'fro didn't help matters.)

I turned her over on her stomach and pulled her clothes off--actually, she pulled them off herself--then I passed out. It was the only way I could get my revenge. Not that I hated her personally. Poor Maria was merely a victim of something so large and inexpressible that she's not even aware of it.

She certainly didn't behave like a victim. I've never had my belt ripped out of my pants with such greed and swiftness. When I rolled over to fake that I was sleepy, she tried sticking her large tongue into my mouth. I told her to leave me alone. She jerked off a few times, rubbing her slime on my leg, but I feigned sleep. And that was that. The next morning, she acted as though everything was fine, asked for my Moscow phone number, and we parted ways around 42nd street, near "Clinton." A friend of hers later told me how sorry she felt for Maria. "She's always had the worst of luck. Nothing goes right in her life."

That day, I packed and returned to Moscow. It was my longest stay in America since I went into eXile--and the scariest.