Issue #09/64, May 6 - 20, 1999  

by Mark Ames

The night before leaving for a 5-day trip to California to visit someone close to me who is courageously battling stomach cancer, Yulia called me up.

"While you're out there," she said, "can you buy me a Palm Pilot?"

"What?!" I asked.

"Yeah, just pick me up a Palm Pilot," Yulia casually and confidently suggested. "I'd really like one."

My first thought was, "How would you like a Back-Of-My-Palm Pilot? Or a Fist Pilot?"

It's not easy to pin which of us was more evil: the selfish, materialistic dyevushka who showed no sympathy at all for me and whatever pain or grief I might be going through, focused only on her desire to tap me for a pricey object as a means of measuring my feelings for her; or me, seriously entertaining thoughts of taking a chunk of granite and smashing her pubescent little skull in. Luckily for both of us, she made this suggestion over the phone. It could have been ugly.

Now before you get all Secular-Humanist on me, let me make something clear. I don't support domestic violence. But in cases like this, as the late Sam Kinison said, "I UNDERSTAND IT! I mean I know what turns Mr. Hand into Mr. Fist!" Or in this case, into Mr. Fist Pilot...

Consider the facts. A Palm Pilot costs $449 dollars. Without getting into embarrassing details about my niggardly wages, let's just say that I'd have to forego all food for a month and spend about four days on the street if I'd have agreed to buy her that fucking Palm Pilot. That's a sacrifice I might have considered if I hadn't already slept with her. But I had. Which meant that there was no way I'd forego eating for a month and shelter for a few days just to do something that I'd already done. It sounds bad, but it's a lot more common than you'd think. Any honest man will tell you that the things you value in a woman change radically after you've ejaculated. It's biochemical, burned into the operating system, part of Nature's mold ... Andrea Dworkin's perfectly right, the only feminist who makes any sense at all. So if you're a woman who is aware of this horrible truth, you either become a crazed dyke like her, or try to work within God's system, as it were. Women wisely try to hold off the day of reckoning as long as possible for good reason: once a guy has jizzed in her bag, the air around her ceases to glow, the party banners are torn from the walls, song birds drop from the skies, rainbows turn to wax, and you judge her in all of her flat, two-dimensional self. Which, despite all of the revolting propaganda put out by Chekhov and his minions, is all humans really are: two-dimensional beings inhabiting three-dimensional bodies. If the body is beautiful, the being acquires dimension; if it is ugly, body and being are seen for what they are.

And what the fuck does Yulia, a sixteen-year-old vixen, need a Palm Pilot for anyway?

I can tell you why I have one. My Palm Pilot was given to me in an atrocious trade deal executed between me and my close friend Andy, who coveted a lousy pair of Italian rabbit fur gloves once given to me as a gift by an ex-girlfriend. I played Red Auerbach to Andy's Al Davis--it was like stealing candy from a baby. What I did to Andy, whom I've known since I was seventeen, was wrong. I knew he was getting the short end of the stick, if that--but hey, in every trade, there's a winner and a sucker. The gloves, as Andy subsequently found out, are useless: the fur lining in the fingers isn't sewn into the suede shell, meaning that they pull out every time you take them off, curl inside-out, get stuck in the wrong finger-slot, and therefore, serve no function except to allow your fingers to freeze in Eurotrash style. That isn't a surprise, if you knew the ex-girlfriend who bought them for me. Her family was worth close to $10 million, which meant, like most rich people, she was hyper-aware of her account balance with me, always making sure she was deep in the black. We dated for years. The last birthday gift I bought her was a $250 silver necklace and pendant from Tiffany's, a heart with an arrow through it. I was only making $800 a month at the time as editor of Living Here, surviving mostly on my dwindling savings from a previous job. She almost never wore it. Five months later, for my birthday, she bought me a clearance sale ultra-thin powder blue V-neck sweater that was two sizes too small. The perfect winter gift for someone living in Moscow. I dumped her a week later, ending our five year relationship.

...Wait a minute, this is fucking up my argument. I started off by making a case that Yulia deserved some kind of Biblical execution for demanding a Palm Pilot from me, and ended off telling you how I slyly burned one of my own best friends out of his Palm Pilot, and dumped my girlfriend of five years for buying me a cheap sweater. Of course, that assumes I'm trying to make a point here, which, clearly, I'm not. I'm actually trying to work out, right here, on paper, the mathematics of getting into a relationship with Yulia, and it really comes down to this: is Yulia worth $449 dollars?

Yulia is intelligent, remarkably well-read, tall, girlishly attractive with a perfect Viking nose, even occasionally sensitive. But she is a product of one of the most warped generations on earth: children of the Gaidar Era. She once told me that her father had drilled into her the importance of money and objects. "He always told me that money is everything," she said. "With money, you could buy happiness."

It sounds funny and foolish, but it's not. When I first met her, she bragged about how she'd just windexed one of her boyfriends.

"For Women's Day, he bought me a dozen carnations," she sneered. "I couldn't believe it! I told him specifically to buy me roses, exactly which ones, but instead he brings me these carnations. And then for dinner--he could barely even pay for the food at some stupid restaurant. He wasn't a REAL man."

When she first told me this, it scared me, but I was focused more on the body than the being.

Now I've had the body, and I have to make a judgement on the being. This column should help straighten things out real soon-like. Yulia will read this. And probably cry. But if she sticks with me, I'll have to give her credit.

What really chaps my hide about Yulia is not so much that for her, love is quantifiable. What's worse is that Yulia has tried telling me that I'm actually a nice guy who, like her, dreams of abandoning the savage chaos of Mother Russia in favor of the Volvo Life in some Social-Democratic country in the West, where state-funded daycare, maternal leave and six-week-vacation rights are queen. She's convinced that what I'm doing at the eXile is a put-on, that I'm playing hard to get, holding out like some inverse-princess. That's because on the surface, my manners are typical middle-class suburban. I don't try to hide my roots like the other liars, piercing and tattooing my body and affecting that Tom Waits homeless chic 'tude. I come from the exact same town and went to exact same high school as the Trench Coat Kids from Littleton, Colorado, only my suburb was in California. I know exactly what made them what they are, and I'm not in the least surprised at what happened. In fact, in some complex way, I admire their courage in carrying out the ultimate Revenge of the Nerds, excepting the killing of the black kid, which besmirched their crime with a banal pickup-truck plot-twist and offered Americans an all-too-easy Escape From Meaning Free card.

Growing up in the suburbs, in that cold, selfish, hypocritical world, made them what they are, and made me what I am. That, and I guess a few crossed wires, a software glitch, a small fuck-up in the operating system.

Yulia will never get it, because her view of Americans is warped by her own experience here, and by Hollywood films. She's told me how much she loves Americans because they always smile; even I, out of trained reflex, smile too often. But underneath that smile, there's a lot of petty evil.

Just in case Yulia doesn't get it, here it is. On paper. My loving, caring, Volvo-sponsored Ode To Yulia. Distributed to 25,000 readers locally, and reprinted on our web site, which now clocks roughly 1,000,000 hits per month.

It may be wrong, but it's better than hitting her. If I'd have hit her, I'd have had to buy her the Palm Pilot as recompense--and probably a $149 modem to boot--and I'd spend the next three years apologizing, three long wasted years of guilt and resentment that I can't afford to lose. That's why I didn't track her down and crush her skull.

She wanted a Palm Pilot, so I gave her nothing. I returned from California late Tuesday night with nothing at all for Yulia. Not even a lighter, nary a stick 'o gum. I could afford it--I forgot to mention that I've made some money selling our book and a few free-lance articles. But I was pissed off that she expected something from me. So this is my little gift. My Fist Pilot. Cost me nuthin'.

Turn it on, this Fist Pilot. Read the instructions. Play with it all you want. That way, we both get to see what ugly, two-dimensional souls we have, souls that our devious bodies do their best to hide. Now that you've seen my soul, Yulia, do you still want me?