Issue #24/79, December 12 - 26, 1999  

by Mark Ames

"Is this what it's all about, mang? Eating, drinking... fucking, sucking, snorting... Is this it?"
--Scarface

Every man dreams not so much of fame and riches, but rather, the cinematic epiphany that comes after too much fame and too much pleasure--you're sitting at a classy restaurant table, your $10,000 tuxedo stained with $5,000 splotches of century-old wines and champagne, your heroin-chic wife with the coke-poisoned womb sitting across the table from you... now's the moment when you get to deliver your "is this what it's all about?" speech. And that, to me, is what it's all about: reaching the point when you've had everything, and then you get to complain that it's not enough. That you feel so empty inside. An emotional emptiness that can only be healed by the sympathy and tears of the common people, those sad saps, who feel that your pain is both tragic, and a vindication of their own diminished lives.

None of us will ever reach that point--not even close. And yet, that plateau, that Platonic Form of satiation, does exist.

So, Jim, what's a po' nigga like us to do? Is there some lesser, accessible prize?

Well, yeah, there is. I wanna tell you all about it. At least you guyz. Girls, you should probably leave the room for a few minutes. Ready? The girls have all gone? Good. Okay, here goes. Here's what you do, guyz. Give up. Don't waste your energy. Instead, find yourself a vulnerable woman whom you can attach yourself to like a remora fish, and pimp her for as much as she's worth. It happens all the time--it's happening all around you as you read this! And nowhere is such a parasitic relationship more easily-accessible to you guyz out there than right here in troubled Moscow.

Take the case of the last whore I was with, Tanya. She was an attractive blond, young, and still a few months shy of developing squishy whore flesh: you know, those diet-thin whores whose flesh feels like its been boiling on the bone for hours, and could fall off the back of the arms and the thighs if you're not careful when touching it. I guess that comes from getting fucked by lumpy middle-aged perverts on a hourly basis, night after night. The flesh has jiggled so much that it's detached from the muscle.

Anyway, when Tanya and I opened negotiations, my relative (to the other johns) poverty tugged her whore heartstrings, and so she offered me her cut-rate, wholesale discount: half-off skidka, special for you! In return, she begged me to take her out dancing at a club--so I took her somewhere where I could get us in free, and gave her one of the drinks that the manager comped me, before we headed back to my place. Where I learned why she was partial to me. See, Tanya has a boyfriend. Not just any type of boyfriend either. Nuh-uh. Her boyfriend is what they call an archetype-ical boyfriend. A boyfriend who has lived on her money for the past two years. She'd paid for everything: the apartment, the food, the alcohol, the trip to Malta in September. She even paid for his weed, some kind of shitty Kazakh shake, which, she whined, he baked out on daily. He was, to use a Russian expression, an "Alfons"--a male loser who lived off his girl and gave her nothing in return but some kind of psychological comfort. Not an uncommon phenomenon in Russia, so not-uncommon that, as I said, they even have a cute name for it. (The word "Alfons" apparently comes from an archetype sponger from some 18th century Spanish opera popular here--I haven't bothered to find out which one, although I'm sure that some pasty culture-pedant will soon let me know.) About three weeks ago, her Alfons had detached himself from his host, and moved back into his family's house. He'd grown tired of sucking her blood.

Tanya was flabbergasted. How could he leave her, after all she did for him? All night she wouldn't shuttup whining to me. "Should I call him? What do you think, Mark? If I call him, will he think, 'She cares too much, leave me alone!' Or wait, if I don't call him, maybe he'll think I've forgotten about him, and I don't want to hurt him."

Poor Tanya. She didn't understand that even a tick can grow to resent the mangy dog whose blood it's been sucking. The fur stinks, the blood tastes the same... Think about it: the Alfons's ability to procure another korabl' of shake depended on Tanya's ability to swallow middle-aged semen. Every time he put his lips onto the bong, he knew that the only reason he was able to suck smoke was because Tanya was sucking Hans's rim in exchange for a week's rent money. Alfons would suck and suck and suck (while Tanya flicked her tongue on the split-screen), and finally get stoned, then more stoned, then too stoned (while Tanya gagged)... and then-- paranoia. Tanya comes home at 6am after a hard night at work with a cheery, "Hi honey, I'm home!" But Alfons, stoned and scared, is sitting in the dark with Gregor Samsa stalks growing out of his eyes, terrified. She gives Alfons a fat kiss on the lips--it stinks of chlorine, the smell of Swiss-German sperm... Now, imagine going through that night after night, your only reward being that you live in a box with a whore instead of living in a box with your parents, and that you get to go to Malta for one week out of every year with the very same whore, instead of going to the Crimea, where you once boned dozens of chlymadia-infested local dyevs.

But I digress. I'm making it seem as if he had it bad, the way Tony Montana allegedly had it bad. No, that's not true. The point of our lesson is that for two solid years, Tanya's boyfriend lived high on the hog--very high. While you were stuffing your fat neck into a starched button-down dress shirt and adjusting your tie for another stressful day of getting screamed at by your boss, Alfons was packing his bong, pimping Tanya for the latest version of Playstation, and basically taking it easy for all of us non-sinners.

So, as I said, her story got me a-thinking. See, as Alfonses go, I've been a failure. Not like I haven't tried. When I was twenty-five, I had a shitty job working for an insufferable hippie at his used bookstore in the Mission District of San Francisco. The pay barely covered the rent for my room. Then I met Sarka, a Czech emigre who lived in a gated condo complex in the Embarcadero. Within a week after our first date, I moved in with her. I had access to a swimming pool, her credit card, her Berreta car... Sarka had whined to me about how her previous boyfriend, David, a balding 40-year-old failed photographer, had lived on her coin for over a year. That was music to my ears: I was sure I'd won the lottery, that I'd bought myself a skip-year-free card. But then--and god only knows how--I suddenly found myself living with her, her mother, and two care home patients in Foster City, a miserable suburb in the peninsula. And stayed there, meals and rent free, for a year.

By some standards that was a fairly successful Alfons on my part. After all, I probably pimped her for $10,000, maybe more. In return, I lost a year of life, but then again, how good would my life have been slaving away on behalf of some leftie creep in his failing bookstore at 20th and Guerrero?

My next girlfriend was like trading in a Hyundai Excel for a Lexus. Or so I thought. Her family's net worth was in the double-digit millions, via real estate riches. My initial reaction was Daffy Duck-like: my bill fell to the ground, my tongue slowly ran across my lips, soaking the spittle, and I said to myself, "I can learn to be a nithe boyfriend! Oh yeah, real nithe and thwell!" But as it turned out, the new improved rich girlfriend not only didn't give me a goddamn thing, but she pimped me of most of my net worth before splitting town in her golden coach.

LESSON ONE: STAY AWAY FROM RICH GIRLS.
Guyz, the thing about rich girls is that they'll never, ever part with a single dime on your behalf. For some reason, rich girls are more jealous and proprietary about money than anyone. They believe, rightly perhaps, that the world is theirs for the taking. Experience and observation have taught me that your best chances of leeching off a chick is to go for lower-class women. They're more ashamed of their money, less responsible. And fellas, if Russia is one thing, it's a giant lower-middle-class nation in the throes of a recession (which gives you the perfect excuse for not working), teeming with plenty of self-made women with that ol' nurturing instinct.

How to land your lower-middle-class host? Spot her at a bar or club, and hit her up to buy you a drink because you're out of money. See, nearly all men are too ashamed to actually hit a woman up for a drink, so just for that reason alone, if you do have the guts, the host-prey will find you interesting and very likely oblige you by offering a sample of her blood--or in this case, her money. You must discard all of your cheap bourgeois notions of "pride" if you want to succeed as an Alfons--as Marcellus Wallace would say, when you first hit her up for that drink, you'll feel a little pain. That's jus' pride fuckin' wichoo. Fuck pride. Cuz pride ain't gonna get you a free bed, free meals, and a free trip to Malta.

Next, you have to spend time charming her, while making her pity you. I can't impart too much wisdom here on how to charm a woman. My limited observation of this phenomenon tells me that charming a woman means convincing her that you're interested in what she has to say and it usually involves telling lots of dull jokes and barely-interesting stories about things for about eight hours, maybe dancing with her as well... you're on your own with this part.

Where I can help you though is in how you keep her.

LESSON TWO: GET HER HOOKED ON HARD DRUGS
If you can get your host-prey hooked on highly addictive hard drugs such as coke or heroin, you will become identified both with the euphoria of those drugs and with the jones associated with it. This should buy you at least a year's worth of successful parasiting. Make sure though that the drugs don't get in the way of her ability to earn money, however; drop subtle warnings that you will have to leave her if she slacks off in her work, and/or periodically force her to quit drugs long enough to get back on her feet at the job, before pulling the carpet out again and plunging her into the profitable (for you) cycle of addiction. Remember, addiction to drugs that you introduced her to means, in essence, addiction 2 U. Sure, it will kill her in the long run, but hey, we're trying to be Alfonsy here, not Christians! After all, ticks don't say to themselves, after attaching to a host, "Gee, I may give them lime disease." Nope, they just detach, drop into the underbrush, and wait for the next bare leg to expose itself--and you should too.

So now you have her hooked and paying for you. In order to keep her psychologically on-edge, you'll have to pursue a dual strategy: convincing her that you're helpless without her, while simultaneously destroying her self confidence.

LESSON THREE: STOP FUCKING HER
If you keep your host sexually dissatisfied, she'll feel inadequate and lack the confidence she would need to dump you. It's odd, but the less you satisfy her sexually, the more she'll need you, in the hopeless hope that she'll somehow turn you around. Furthermore, she'll inevitably have affairs with other men, which will only make her feel more guilty. Don't worry about losing her to her lover: she'll despise the man that sleeps with her for liking her, and love you more for not satisfying her. Keep alert to signs that she's having affairs--a change in body language, coming home late with strange excuses, a bleeding ass--and make sure that on those very nights, you prepare for her a French or Italian dinner and buy her a cheap wine, then complain that you've been feeling sick all day. Her guilt will further weaken her and with each affair, she'll feel the need to support you even more.

Which is a good thing. Now you've got her where you want her. Her purse strings are wide open. Time to go for the kill:

LESSON FOUR: STEAL AS MUCH FROM HER AS YOU CAN Take money from her purse, pawn her bracelet while she's out working... clear her out as quickly and thoroughly as possible. She'll notice that you're stealing her money--you should make sure she notices by leaving her purse in tatters, makeup scattered on the floor. Oddly enough, she'll feel even worse, as if it's HER fault, as if she's not doing enough or giving enough to you. And you will have more money to spend on yourself, or, better yet, money to spend on girls whom you want to fuck but who aren't the type who are susceptible to Alfonsy. In other words, rich girls. To recap: steal money from the purse of your hard-working lower-middle-class host, and blow it on trying to impress some ice-cold rich bitch.

If you're really good at this, then in all likelihood, after fleecing a perfectly decent woman for a year or two, you're likely to say to yourself that you feel horrible, that you'd expected more out of life, and that you feel so empty. But on the other hand, you'll have lived as close to a baron's life as possible. You'll have lived for free, bought yourself some time, and postponed indentured servofficetude just that much longer.

Of course, if you're a real Alfons, you don't need to be told this. And my experience shows that if you're not a real Alfons, you can't learn to be one this late in the game. Look at me: I have a low-paying, very public job, and I'm seeing a rich girl. I've got it all fucked up.

LESSON FIVE: YOU CAN'T FAKE ALFONSTVO