the eXile - Moscow Babylon

Issue #07/88, April 13 - 27, 2000

By Mark Ames

There's a basset hound sleeping on the futon I've been assigned to here in Madison, Wisconsin. It has this grotesquely erupting stomach that sounds to me like it's got a case of giardiasis. I should know - I'm an expert in stomach parasites. Any minute now, the dog might roll over, let out a terrible high-pitched yelp, and spray the white bedroom wall behind it with a blast of yellow giardia-shit, propelling him across the futon and into the folding closet door on the other side of the room - a crash, yelps, splunge.... Maybe I'm just spooked, but it seems to me a real possibility. Every time I hear a stomach growl of that magnitude, even a basset hound's, I assume the worst. My giardia-seismic readers are very sensitive, blowing false alarms as easily as a pug breaks wind.

Just to be on the safe side, I should kick the fucking basset hound off of my futon, throw him out into the kids' room (I'm staying with a family here, free housing), but somehow I feel bad. This basset hound looks like he's had a rough day. In fact, he looks like he's had a rough day everyday. Tabasco-red eyes, creaky stump-limbs. Every morning must be a trial for the poor little bastard. Basset hounds were bred for someone else's comfort, not their own: long radar-cone snouts, manatee-like limbs bred into the genetic stamp so that it couldn't outrun its Belgian masters as they hunted down hare and pheasant, just for le fuq of it (or der fuucken auf it, depending on which part of Belgium you're hunting in). The basset was bred down from its taller, sleeker, sportier ancestor, the bloodhound, who proved to be too fast for the corpuscular Belgian outdoorsmen. Sure, bloodhounds were experts in sniffing out game - but Belgians, being kind of slow and stubby themselves, needed a slower and stubbier dog that wouldn't be able to run away with the hare. Only one animal on the hunt was going to be humiliated: either the bloodhound, or the Belgian. So they produced the basset hound, the compromise humiliaee. And there he is, on my futon, ready to explode in a geyser of giardia shit. Meaning, in the end, I'm the meta-humiliaee, the punch-line to some Belgian's joke.

Or maybe not. Maybe, nothing will happen; no, probably; no, for sure, absolutely for sure nothing will happen. That's the way it works here in America. You keep expecting something, anything at all, to happen, but eventually, because nothing really does, you have to start inventing possibilities just to make it seem like your own narrative might be worth reading. So you have to imagine yourself the punch-line to some 17th-century Belgian's dog-prank, because the flat truth - that this hound will probably fart a few times but never explode - is just... too damn flat.

Flat, bland, beige, sexless, harmless, diminished, "alternative-my-ass": these are just some of the adjectives that sizzle in your spleen after landing on U.S. soil. But by now, even the realization of flatness is itself getting flat, doesn't inspire the same kind of visceral hatred or panic or fear that it used to.

Case-in-point: we had a ten-pack of horse powder that we took into our Super 8 Motel room with us in Champaign, Illinois; we snorted up a packet of Laos's finest. To make an all-night story short, it was the worst horse ride I've ever been on. May as well have been riding a Schwinn. No glow, little warmth. Just that feeling you get when smoking dope and feeling you're wasting time, wasting time.... If you're in a place that can flatten out a smack high, then baby, you're in the wrong fucking place.

After having been spoiled in Russia, you come back to the United States with expectations. Simple expectations: like one event per day. Minimum. Clearly, that's asking too much. Even asking for a transport to the Buddha's den is asking too fucking much if you're in Champaign.

The closest thing to an "event" that I've seen since landing two weeks ago happened yesterday, when Taibbi and I stopped off at an Arby's on highway 14, just outside Chicago. We've been spanning the continent on our "Highway To Failure" book tour, scaling the vast post-industrial powerhouse that is America.... Remembering how good those melted cheese-and-mayo roast beef sandwiches looked in the film Fargo, we popped into the Arby's and dimly noted that only two tables were occupied: one by a pair of greased back vatos sporting gaudy gold chains, and the other by a teenage alternacouple. The girl, a pink-haired punkette with requisite chin-stud and heavy mascara, stared at us in nervous anticipation of something; her fat goateed Metallifriend spent most of his time sneering and sucking on his super-sized Arby's jumbo coke.

Then a group of fat guys and thin girls burst in, and the prettiest of the bunch ran up to the punkette, grabbed her, and hugged her, crying. "Katie! Katie, I'm so sorry!"

Katie kept her cool, then boasted that she'd just been thrown out of school. "The cops stopped us, lined us up against the car. But I can't believe I've been thrown out of school. I've been thrown out!" she said. "I'm going to run away. Jenny's father already beat her with a belt. There's no way I'm going home. I'm going to Puerto Rico or something. I have to run away."

It was so exciting. Something was happening, to someone at least. For about a minute, I thought of walking over and asking her if she needed help, if she wanted to join us on our way to Wisconsin, and from there, on towards the West Coast. It would at least add something. Some event.

But then reason reared its ugly head. If I asked her to join us, I'd probably be hauled off to jail. If we weren't hauled off to jail, then we'd probably be stuck with a major burden on our hands: some whiny Bloodhound Gang groupie-type with no home, no money, no parents. Only me. Fuck that. Later. You're on your own now, niggie.

So it was onto Madison, bez runaway, to an NPR interview with a scared, harmless, gray-bearded, avuncular radio host, decked out in full outdoorsy-office-wear, who couldn't wait to get us out of his studio. Too much enthusiasm, too much death porn for one interview. Then onto a bookstore event. Sub-minor celebrities in the Midwest, that's us. Oddly unrewarding. The only consolation is that it's better than being less than a sub-minor celebrity.

So I'm praying for something to happen. Something violent. I don't even think about sex out here, don't even bother jerking off. Why waste time? It would be as ridiculous as holding a bakesale in Izhevsk.

There is one last hope. That Stuart Pratt-infested anti-IMF protest rally this coming weekend. I've redeemed some Delta miles to score a free ticket to D.C., and I'm working on lining up a magazine gig to pay for expenses. The hope is to see a few of these pierced-eyebrow hairdo types getting smacked around by truncheons, the least ironic objects extant. Quip-proof, those truncheons. The cops are clearly gearing up for a fight. The protesters feel a bit emboldened after Seattle. The big question is whether the Office World's storm troopers can make the collective Pratt flinch. Or whether I'll have the chance to see chunks of gold-studded eyebrow flesh being flung from cop truncheons, landing on some anti-IMF placard, balled in a wad of blood-greased dreadlocks. This is it, the new generation's last chance to prove that they're human. But to prove that, they're going to have to pay in real scars, not in parlor tattoos.

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