Issue #20/101, October 12 - 26, 2000   

100
Looking Back...

100 issues. A lotta water under the bridge.

Do we remember the day when it all began? Of course we do. The MVD wore gray; we wore jeans.

Ahh, yes, Russia was a different place back then: optimism was running high, the nightclubs were full of ecstasy, money was everywhere...The “young reformers” Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais were just weeks away from being installed in the cabinet. USAID had yet to suffer its first Russian scandal; you could still find the Moscow Tribune around town. It was not exactly an innocent time, but it had the gleeful quality of youth. The local gangsters, for instance, had yet to shed their last crimson-colored sportcoats, while on the national stage, you almost never heard the word “oligarchy” mentioned aloud, even as the future bearers of that title were carving up the country like a Christmas turkey.

If the country at large was not exactly innocent, the eXile, in relative terms, certainly was. None of us had any idea, really, how to run a newspaper. Most of us, in fact, had little or no job experience at all. Each member of the staff, when he came to work, generally came with the expectation that he might hear that very day that the business had died, and we would all have to be sent home. We simply had no idea whether we would make enough money to last one, two, three weeks; the whole question of survival seemed a mysterious, magical business beyond the ability of any one of us to really understand. Tellingly, we were all in excellent health, none of us on drugs. At the time, it seemed critically important to stay as sober as possible, in order to put out-and we were actually known to use this expression from time to time back then-a “good product.”

Like everyone else in the press, we spent the next three and half years or so trying desperately to cover “the big picture”, which in Russia is always really very big. We watched whole governments get sacked, watched an economy collapse, watched a revolution building on the nation’s railroad tracks one spring that fizzled out almost as quickly as it began. We watched a war begin and an ideology die. And we watched as a snide little jerk named Vladimir Putin destroyed the press, turned the nation’s airwaves into a monstrous attack dog, and leveled his enemies en route to the presidency. In the midst of all this a drunken circus clown named Yeltsin quietly exited the scene, and Russia was once again presented to the world as a country whose economic prospects “never looked brighter”, a line of goods that was this time being sold without the silly optimism of the earlier period.

That was the “big picture”, and while it was unfolding, we were living out our little lives to collectively make up one of Russia’s countless smaller stories. We were a “little picture”. A little, annoying, funny picture. Nothing that happened to us will ever be much help in the way of educating future generations about the history of this country. But the story of the eXile might give someone a good laugh someday. Here’s what it was like behind the scenes, a collection of snapshots from the lives of a bunch of losers clinging to the caboose of history in a tortured, dying empire.

February 4, 1997
Issue #0

Late at night. A tiny office the size of a closet in a burned out building across the river from the Kremlin. Seated at a refuse-covered desk in front of a Power Mac is Mark Ames, 31 year-old American from California-a failed wine salesman who spent almost the entire period of his twenties masturbating in his parents’ suburban home in the Bay Area. He is desperately trying to put together the club guide section of his new newspaper, whose failure would mean the virtual end of any hope for a real career in his adult life. He is wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over his head, in order to block out any and all possible distractions.

Standing directly behind him and impatiently observing his progress is Kara Deyerin, his business manager. In this standing position, she is about the same height as the seated Ames. Kara is from Seattle and secretly hates Ames. Her dream is to open a Seattle-style bookstore cafÈ in Moscow. At least, that’s what she tells her husband her dream is; they were planning on opening that cafÈ together. In fact, she’s probably thinking of leaving the puppyish, beardless husband, considering other options. She’s got an aggressive and ambitious, if somewhat pedestrian mind-she could go somewhere in life if she put her mind to it, which she always does. Like now, for instance.

Standing right behind Kara is the balding Oxonian Owen Matthews, who would later take a job at Newsweek. He’s not looking at Ames at all, but pointing at Kara’s backside and silently, stealthily making faces at the other people in the room. He says nothing out loud, but you can see him mouthing the words.

“Look at the size of that ass!” he’s saying. “Look at the size of that ass!”

March 28, 1997
Issue #4

Matt Taibbi, the new editor, couldn’t get used to the idea that he was the boss. He was sure no one else could either. But one afternoon, as he prepared for the paper’s prank-filled April Fool’s issue, he found himself alone in the office with the eXile’s pretty young secretary, Yulia.

“Matt,” she said. “There’s something I have to ask you.”

“Shoot,” he said. Bosses said things like “shoot.”

“Can I leave a little bit early today?” she said, chewing on a pencil eraser. “Like at five-thirty?”

He frowned. It was five twenty-nine. “That’s a full half-hour,” he said dramatically, “that you’ll owe the company.”

She shrugged. “Well, then,” she said. “I suppose you’ll have to punish me.”

She smiled; he froze, unable to think of what his line was. “Um,” he said. “I’m sure we can think of something.”

She grinned, got up, and put on her coat. “I’m sure you can, too,” she said. “I just hope you won’t have to put your hands on me.”

She turned and left.

May 20, 1997
Issue #8

The party at the Beverly Hills club was going badly. Ames and Taibbi were raving drunk a full two hours before they were supposed to go on stage to emcee the proceedings. They’d initially made plans with the club management to hold turtle races on stage; Ames and Taibbi were determined to eat the losing entrants. But when the moment of truth arrived, word came up from the kitchen that the cooks were refusing, on humanitarian grounds, to boil the turtles. Drunk beyond recognition, swaying on stage while clutching huge gin and tonics that glowed in the disco’s fluorescent lights, the pair took the news badly.

“Um,” said Ames, leaning into the microphone. “We just flew in from Saransk, and boy are our arms tired!”

Film columnist Kevin McElwee, on drums, tossed off a desperate rim-shot. The sizable crowd, mostly Russian, stood motionless, staring in angry disbelief.

“Hold on just a minute, folks,” Taibbi said. “Just bear with us.”

There was silence for a moment, then somebody in the back shouted: “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Ames leaned over to Taibbi. “We’re dying up here, dude,” he said.

“Fuck you!” the voice continued. “You suck! You suck!”

June 4, 1997
Issue #9

Designer Ilya Shangin was 37 years old. A veteran of countless newspapers and publishing houses around town, he vaguely resembled Grigory Rasputin. On production nights he worked late into the morning, his food-spotted beard perpetually wet around the brown expanse of his mouth from the vodka and beer he drank incessantly from the bottle.

Shangin liked working for the eXile. While the American staffers pounded their feet to the grinding, monotonous music of the punk band Flipper, Shangin cackled incongruously every time the chords repeated themselves. He was working on a cover for an issue about the kind of men who would date an expat woman. The cover subject had to be an atrocious, penny-pinching geek of a male, a woman’s nightmare.

Shangin cackled again as he scanned in a photo he’d found, sticking the face-which fit the bill perfectly— on the cover.

“My high school math teacher,” he said. “He flunked me. I found a picture of him at home.”

June 20, 1997
Issue #11

The previous issue of the eXile had made everyone a little nervous. The cover story was about the fact that most of the people currently running the country-including most of the so-called “Group of Seven” oligarchs, and many of the most influential members of the Kremlin’s inner circle— were Jews. It was something that a lot of people were talking about, but almost no one had discussed in public. In its frantic desire to establish a reputation for discussing the unmentionable, the eXile had firmly decided to do the story, but wasn’t sure how to go about it without seeming anti-Semitic. The tactic Ames and Taibbi eventually settled on was to write about the story from the angle that the presence of so many Jews in the nation’s corrupt power structure might later trigger an anti-Semitic response. This was the framework that the piece was written in, but when the piece came out, it was fairly obvious that the main journalistic mission in the piece was to count the number of Jews in and around government.

In order to confirm who was Jewish and who wasn’t, Taibbi had called Rabbi Beryl Lazar of the Moscow Jewish Community Center. He sold the piece to Lazar very carefully on the phone in order to worm the needed quotes out of him. Then the piece came out the way it did.

Now it was two weeks later. The phone rang in the office. The secretary peeked in the door of the editors’ room.

“Rabbi Beryl Lazar calling for you,” she said.

Taibbi paused. “Um,” he said. “Tell him I’m out.”

September 15, 1997
Issue #18

At Ames’s touchingly well-kept shithole apartment at Oktyabrskaya Ploschad, the two editors were sitting watching a movie. Taibbi was flipping through the Moscow Times as he watched when he saw a classified ad which listed a washing machine and a ton of other stuff on sale cheap.

“Hey,” he said. “Isn’t that Marcus and Kara’s number?”

Two weeks later, the paper nearly collapsed from being unexpectedly left without management.

October 27, 1997
Issue #20

The cover was supposed to advertise a special report about Boris Jordan’s role in the so-called book advance scandal. The severed lower half of the eXile “X” hung into the middle of the cover bearing the words ‘Special Report.” The edge of the X nearly touched Jordan’s face in the picture.

“I designed it to look like a dick,” Shangin said.

December 17, 1997
Issue #24

The new sales manager, Nicole Mollo, was threatening to quit because of a planned cover depicting an amputee over the headline, “Is This Funny?”

“Go ahead, quit,” barked Ames.

February 13, 1998
Issue #28

The paper’s first anniversary party was at a basement squat for homeless punks called Titan. After leading out a group of people late into the party Taibbi had run into a doorman from the club Carousel, located upstairs, who’d asked him to take in a brown-haired Russian girl he was throwing out of his place. The girl had just finished a jail term in Belgium for hooking and drug-dealing and had flown in to Sheremetyevo that night. She was homeless.

Two hours later, after she had already surreptitiously blown a guy in the middle of the main room in the club, Ames invited her to dance and looked down her shirt. Her chest was covered with scars.

February 18, 1998
Issue #29

A skinhead named Sasha who would later be hired to work as the paper’s secretary dropped in on production night carrying two packets of yellow powder. It was speed. Ames was out of the office, but Taibbi, who’d never used the stuff, bought a bunch of it anyway.

Krazy Kevin was in the office. Taibbi showed him the stuff.

“How much do we take?” he asked.

Kevin shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

They tried some and didn’t feel anything. Then they did some more: still nothing. They did more and more: nothing, nothing, nothing.

Nonetheless, they worked through the night. Dawn arrived with unusual alacrity. They were still going strong by nine a.m., when they remembered they were supposed to meet Ames at Chesterfield’s. They got there and chatted for a good thirty minutes before Ames cut them off.

“You guys are pathetic,” he said. “Look at yourselves. Jesus.”

April 1, 1998
Issue #35

In their drug-addled, desperately insolent April Fool’s prank, a phony issue of the Moscow Times, the staff of the eXile used the byline of harmless AP reporter Dave Carpenter three times, once in a bogus story about an Alaskan dogsled race.

April 20, 1998
Issue #37

In the wake of the clearly illegal Moscow Times prank, the paper received a call from the city Directorate of Print Media. The official on the other end of the line demanded that the management of the company come into his office to discuss possible sanctions.

In a panic the paper consulted a high-powered American lawyer in town who sometimes did pro bono work for the paper. What should they do?

“Oh, just ignore him,” he said. “Just fucking ignore him!”

May 24, 1998
Issue #39

Our deadline in those days was at about seven p.m. on Wednesday nights. It was nine already.

Kevin had been writing his 600-word review of Hunter Thompson’s recently-released book of letters for about ten hours already. Ames and Taibbi, who between them already written about 15,000 words in the past two days, stood over him in abject exasperation. From the looks of things the review was finished; there was already more than enough text to fill the spot on the page. But Kevin, who types exclusively with his two index fingers, kept tinkering and tinkering.

“Come on, man, you’ve got to finish,” Ames said.

Kevin said nothing and kept tinkering and tinkering. His pupils were the size of marbles.

“Kevin, Jesus, just hit save and send it,” Taibbi said.

No response.

He finished long after midnight. The review was 1500 words by the time he was done.

July 10, 1998
Issue #43

The quality of job applicants to the paper had changed dramatically in the past six months. In the paper’s first half-year the only people who’d come looking for work had been dropouts from places like the Moscow Tribune and Russia Life.

But lately the paper had been getting some press attention, and a new type of writer had begun to make himself available. In general he tended to be a hip East-Coast type who knew he wouldn’t be paid any money and was mainly looking to boost his alterno-credentials. One of these types appeared in the summer of 1998. Her name was Valerie Stivers and she’d written for some classy New York fashion magazines. Her literary niche was young adult sexuality. For some reason that never became clear to us she had decided to come to Russia. For a person like her, the eXile was the only conceivable local publishing outlet. Writing news features about the elusive Russian middle class for the Moscow Times would have been a definite step down for this candidate for the pages of Details and Seventeen, but she could probably sell writing for the eXile as a bold and original career move.

Stivers was tall and shapely and vaguely attractive in a way that the men on the eXile staff, who had been removed from the American sex game for so long, had forgotten about. Nonetheless, we were vaguely afraid of her and avoided her outside the office as much as possible. We had a very poor idea of how she spent her spare time.

Less than a month into her stay in the country we began to get the sense that things weren’t working out for Valerie. There was nothing you could put your finger on: she just sounded... tired.

Then one day we heard this rumor that she’d been seen in a club with the eXile’s pudgy Indian nemesis, Vijay Maheshewari. Vijay was the editor of the Moscow Times’s revolting club section, “MT Out,” and was a regular target of eXile ridicule for his habit of tirelessly-and utltimately unsuccessfully-haranguing every girl he saw to convince her to go to bed with him. We often joked that Vijay’s presence in a bar on any given night would automatically lower the club’s intake by ten percent, simply by virtue of his ability to send every unattended female in the place clamoring for the exit.

The news that Valerie had been seen with Vijay presented the eXile management with a dilemma. In a mild panic, the editors met and decided on a conservative course of action. They drew straws and Taibbi lost, which meant that he had to make the call.

“So, Valerie,” he said. “You were out with Vijay.”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” she said apologetically.

“So what’s the deal?” he said. “Did you sleep with him?”

She paused. “Well,” she said. “Well, no, not really. I was drunk...”

Taibbi took a deep breath. “Did you, uh, suck his dick?” he asked.

She sighed. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did.”

“You know,” he began. “This is kind of a problem for us. We have to have standards of some kind or another...”

“I know,” she sighed. “I know, I know. I guess I’m fired.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry, too.”

She hung up. Three weeks later she left Russia. These days she’s back on her feet, writing for big fashion mags in New York.

October 23, 1998
Issue #50

The ruble had just devalued, expats were fleeing the city en masse, and the eXile was trying to commemorate the end of an era. Though the paper was on the verge of collapse due to financials strain from the crisis-salaries were frozen for the entire staff for several issues after the August crash-the period was, in an odd way, the paper’s proudest moment. It had called the devaluation long before it happened, even correctly predicting, at one point, the appearance of the English-derived word “defolt” in the Russian media lexicon about a week before the newspaper Segodnya actually christened it in the Russian press.

The paper joined up with departing American investment banker Buck Wiley, who wanted to throw himself a going-away bash, to organize a “Crisis Party” in late October. More than 600 people showed.

Ames and Kevin, hopelessly wired, sweating unhealthily and barely able to speak, spent a good portion of the party incompetently computing ruble prices at a booth where they were selling t-shirts. By the end of the party they were mostly alone. Buck Wiley, they thought, must have a lot of friends.

Wiley himself was in good spirits. “You know,” he said, to a girl late into the night, “all of this is for me. It’s for me.”

December 14, 1998
Issue #54

Ames had just arrived in the States to join Taibbi in negotiations over the sale of their book. One weekend they left New York to visit Taibbi’s family summer house on the southern coast of Massachusetts.

Ames had been scratching his crotch ever since he flew into JFK. By the second day in New England he couldn’t take it anymore. He drove into the nearby city of Fall River, where a doctor told him he had crabs, something he’d picked up in Moscow. When he returned to the house and made his grim announcement, Taibbi’s girlfriend stared at the couch where Ames had recently been sitting and frowned.

“This is disgusting,” she said.

“Shh, Masha, it’s not his fault,” Taibbi said.

Just then a voice came from the bathroom.

“Hey,” Ames said. “Can you guys tell me when ten minutes is up? I’ve got to wash this stuff off.”

April 20, 1998
Issue #63

A party at the Mexican restaurant Hola Mexico featured dance acts by women who frequently changed costumes. They’d come out, dressed only in wraps made of bird feathers, then go into the back room and change again.

John Dolan, our book reviewer and in-house litterateur on leave from a professorial job in cold New Zealand, watched the girls with rapt attention. In the intermissions between each act, he mopped his bald head with a napkin, alternately padding his forehead and sweeping his hand in a circular motion along the rest of his skull.

May 18, 1998
Issue #65

TV people stage a lot of their footage. There are some shots that they need to tell the story that take too much planning to catch in nature. So they ask their subjects to do re-creations of certain things.

A CNN crew had been filming the staff of the eXile for almost two weeks. They wanted to do a documentary sequence about the making of an issue of the paper. When they came up a few shots short, they asked Ames and Taibbi to recreate them. In particular, they needed footage of the two editors getting out of the elevator and walking to the door of their office.

When the cameras rolled the two editors came out of the elevator. They were walking with bent knees with their arms waving over their heads like orangutans. Screeching and hooting, they lumbered to the door, walked in, and went back to work.

The CNN people laughed politely, then asked them to do it again. At first, they said, quite seriously, that they wouldn’t. The whole thing nearly developed into a serious argument. Finally they gave in and did the shot the way CNN wanted it.

August 11, 1999
Issue #70

An enormously fat girl sat in the eXile offices next to a draft printout of an ad for her personal escort service. The ad read, “Big Breast”. Without consulting any of the English-language staff, the ad was subsequently changed somehow to the far more effective “Titanic Tits.” None of the Russian staffers ever owned up to having provided the insider knowledge. The girl left smiling.

September 8, 1999
Issue # 72

The captions from the three photos in the paper’s “Death Porn” section: “This issue really sucks!” (under a picture of an Asian man in agony from having his jaws wired shut ), “Being dead is nothing, compared to appearing in this shitty issue!” (a corpse) and “This issue was so bad, I killed myself!” (another corpse).

When the last page of this issue was finally laid out the entire staff-from the American writers to the Russian designers and sales staff-sat stunned with grief and shame. The cover was an unaltered picture of a dinosaur taken from a children’s book. The headline read “Privatized!” The picture had no thematic content other than the fact of its showing a big dinosaur being eaten by little dinosaurs. It had nothing to do with privatization.

February 1, 2000
Issue #82

For almost two years the paper had had plans to print its own matchbook covers as a promotion. The plans had always fallen through for one reason or another. Now it looked as though they were finally going to get made. The barter arrangement with the company had been set. The design of the actual matchbooks had been laid out on the paper’s computers, put on a disk and sent to the printing company. All we had to do was wait.

The matchbooks showed a picture of Boris Yeltsin on one side, while the reverse side showed the paper’s logo over the caption, “When I light my farts, I use eXile matches!”

Now the staff was in the middle of putting out a new issue commemorating the rise of scary acting President Vladimir Putin. Among other things, the issue touched on Putin’s intimidation of the press. The paper was almost in the can when we got a call from the matchbook company.

“We won’t do it,” they said. “We got a dictionary and figured out what your caption says.”

“Why not?” we cried. “Come on, please! Nothing will happen, we guarantee it!”

“We’ll all be in big trouble if we do something like this,” they said. “People are paying attention now.”

The next morning we heard from the printing press that handled the newspaper that the issue was going to be held up. The printers were refusing to publish an upside-down picture of Putin we’d laid out for page 6.

“The president has to be right-side up,” they said. But we bargained with them and finally they let us publish it as it was.

April 14, 2000
Issue #89

Ames and Taibbi were in Los Angeles for a stop on their book tour. They’d visited twenty cities, generally attracting crowds no bigger than eight or nine-mostly half-bored students and creepy academics.

In LA they met up one afternoon with the two writers-let’s call them Jack and Hank-who had been hired by the hotshot New York film studio Good Machine to write the screenplay based on the eXile book. It was a good lunch, but Ames and Taibbi, whose own proposal to write the screenplay had been rejected by the studio, were both decidedly uncomfortable by the end of it. The two professional screenwriters were so impressively witty that it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the studio had made the right choice, that these guys were really much more talented than Ames and Taibbi.

When the lunch was over Jack and Hank led the eXile guys out into the parking lot. On the way to our car, Hank pulled out a small prescription bottle from his pocket and asked the editors to hold out their hands. Ames and Taibbi, looking beaten, cupped their palms in front of them. Hank then poured out about ten Dexedrine pills.

“These are for you guys, for the road,” he said.

Ames looked at Taibbi and sighed. “This is it,” he said. “This is what it was all about. The whole thing.”

August 2, 2000
Issue # 95

An ugly quarrel between Taibbi and Ames had been brewing below the surface for some time. There were a lot of reasons-not the least of which being the collective disappointment and loathing over the direction of their lives, which had been inextricably joined for three years-but the precipitating problem in this case revolved around Ames’s girlfriend. Taibbi couldn’t stand her and did a bad job of hiding it. At times Taibbi would come home and pace back and forth in his apartment ranting to himself about the “new” Ames. When snide comments didn’t do the trick, he let himself slip into overt attempts to influence the situation, impugning Ames’s manhood when the latter chased the little teenager to London for the weekend. London! England! Was nothing sacred?

A week after Ames came back from his trip the two had to put out another paper. The paper itself was a hysterical cry for help, a theatrical declaration of surrender to an ordinary case of depression which had taken over the entire staff. The theme of the issue: “How to be happy: the eXile guide.”

Taibbi wrote the lead article. There was a section early on in the piece about how not having friends was no reason to be unhappy, because friends were, on the whole, a net minus. When he was finished with the whole piece he asked Ames to read it over. Taibbi was always bugging Ames to read his stuff, then sitting next to him and watching for his reaction. It annoyed Ames practically to death.

When the paper hit the newsstands two days later Taibbi looked in the lead article and saw that Ames had added a line in the “Friends” section.

“[Friends] rebroadcast you most intimate secrets, and plot to destroy your relationships with significant others. A stranger, on the other hand, will never bother to waste his energy praying for your downfall. A passing acquaintance, kept at the proper distance, is also much more reliable than the close friend who silently rages at the obviousness of your character flaws, and can’t keep himself from scheming no matter how hard he tries.”

Taibbi got the point and never mentioned that he’d noticed the passage. A few weeks later Ames broke up with the girl.

September 22
Issue #100

Ames was gone for the time being. He was burned out and taking a leave of absence outside the country. In his place the eXile hired a new guy named Rudnitsky, who arrived to find Kevin and Taibbi with their hair ridiculously bleached white and maniacally babbling about past glories. By way of initiation they twice took the new guy out on the town.

The second night saw all three shunned by virtually everyone they approached and found them, ultimately, sitting by themselves at a table in the Respublika nightclub, drinking round after round of White Russians like old perverts.

At four in the morning a multi-gendered group of Russians from a nearby table dropped a napkin in front of Kevin. In touching, near-grammatical English, it politely asked for two cigarettes and invited them to join their table.

Kevin scrawled a nonsensical response in Chinese, shoved two cigarettes in the napkin, and tossed it back to their table.

A few minutes later a girl brought the cigarettes back in another napkin with another polite message in English. The message was hard to decipher, but the eXile contingent was stuck on the fact of the returned cigarettes and drunkenly considered the correct response.

“Draw a stick figure of a woman,” said Taibbi, “and indicate stab marks all over it, with blood drops. And write the word ‘Die!’ all over it, like a hundred times!”

Kevin drew the picture, splattered the napkin with the word ‘Die!’, and added the inscription, “Die, you fucking cunt!” When it was almost ready Taibbi signaled for him to wait.

“Wait,” he said. “Punch some holes the stick figure with the pen...”

Kevin stabbed viciously at the napkin. Taibbi then wrapped the cigarettes back in the napkin, majestically walked over to the Russians’ table, and put down the offering.

The Russians peered quietly at the message, clearly rattled. There were three men at the table, and none of them turned around to make eye contact. The eXile contingent roared with self-satisfied laughter and ordered itself another round of drinks.

An hour later the girl who’d brought the message over to begin with pulled up a chair and bravely sat down, waving the defiled napkin at us. She was blonde, obviously well-off and well-educated, and spoke careful, nearly accent-less English. All three of the eXile staffers, despite having lived in Russia for years, spoke heavily accented Russian.

“Look at yourselves,” she said. “You’re like children. This isn’t funny at all, you know. It’s just stupid.”

None of the eXile guys could think of anything witty to say to that, and instead just looked down at their laps, or off in other directions.

“You shouldn’t do this,” she said. “It’s not civilized.”

See 100 Issues of Solitude, Comix by Roman Papsuyev

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