the eXile - [sic]

Issue #09/90, May 11 - 25, 2000

The following letter was sent to us by the brother-in-law of the late Paul Tatum.

FURM-A-THREAT!

Hey, I was just handed a copy of your feature article in issue 79, entitled,

"Furmanek Depression". After reading it, I must say that I am most earnestly looking forward to our face to face meeting in the very near future.

Have a good day,

Rick Furmanek

Dear Mr. Furmanek,

Considering the fact that you were used by the Berezovsky-controlled media to destroy the Primakov-Luzhkov threat to the Yeltsin Family last fall, we take your death threat seriously, and have forwarded it to the FBI. They should be visiting you and your wife at your trailer park any day now. We’d offer you a [sic] T-shirt for sending us the dumbest death threat ever, but we’re not sure if you’d be able to read the label (it took you six months to read issue 79, after all!). Then we thought of offering one to your wife, but, as you might have guessed, we just don’t have T-shirts that large.

GOOD AS GOULD

Get off your hairy ass and update the site, bitch! Or I subject you to the recording of Jennifer Gould at http://www.broadcast.com/events/swc/jgould/

Love,

Bradd

Dear Bradd,

Our hairy asses are stuck to the chairs, so we can’t get up. By the way, what the hell are you doing surfing the net for Jennifer Gould links? What are you, some kind of sick fucking maniac?

HOT SHITE PIZZA

Yah, sure, your book is funny. Yah, sure, your paper is funny too. I’ll even give you guys credit for being the best english language hacks in the city — hell — maybe the entire Eurasian landmass.

That doesn’t change the fact that you suck. Your review for HotSmile pizza said they served a pizza "with authentically spicy toppings." So I spent like 10% of my monthly disposable income awhile back and got the pizza. You know what — it was a total dud. I’ve had spicer stuff when my grandma made me take her to Chilji’s for lunch.

Where the hell is journalistic integrity? I mean, jeez, Ames is even supposed to be from California — he should have tried some decent wetback cuisine at some point. I think you hacks just wanted to try out the phrase "authentically spicy," or you wanted to test drive the dyevka they had answering the phone and were buttering her up. Now — I’ll grant that the dyevka sounded eminently fuckable — but you guys have a duty as journalists not only to shoot from the hip, but to tell it like it is. Stydno.

I’ve been carrying this grudge for awhile now. Your book is out now so I figure "hey, go for the deep pockets."

You guy’s owe me a pizza. If you don’t make good, I’m gonna go find some orca-fat Albright wanna-bees, give them photos of you two, and pay them to make you the center of their ritualistic onanistic lumberings till your testicles fully retract into your bodys and your dicks shrivel up like dried peppers.

Ya vash otvet ozhidau,

James Acres

Dear Mr. Acres,

Look, it’s not easy being us, the low-budget alternative. If IKEA had placed full-page ads with us, we’d have blown them. But we’re not the Big Boys. Our editorial bribery is on a much smaller scale. As in slices. With us, a couple of free pizzas from the folks at Hot Smile, and you betcha we’re gonna label them the greatest threat to Naples cuisine since... well, since whoever else comped us a free pizza before them. This isn’t to say that we didn’t like our Hot Smile pizzas when we ate them—we did. But we’re also willing to sell them out for a good laugh, since we don’t expect them to comp us again. It’s called integrity, Mr. Acres. With extra cheese.

PERVERT

Dear Sir,

Always enjoy your paper, but what is the best way to get a hard copy regularly ?!

Thanking in advance,

Reader.

Dear Reader,

You said "hard"... huh-huh.

YO QUIERO TACO SLAPPER

Just bought your book.... question: "if I bring it to Moscow in June, can we meet and can you sign it?" No, I am not some lesbian, taco slapper for the Northwest....

Yancey Harrington

Dear Ms. Harrington,

We have a question for you: "If you come to Moscow in June, can we sign your taco?"

SHEEPLE ARE PEOPLE TOO

In response to our call to readers to invite us to terrorize their hometown on our eXile book tour, we received several kind letters.

Dear Editors,

My hometown’s big brother adulation terrorizes the hell out of me, soooooo, would you guys come to Topeka and terrorize? It might wake up the sopophoric fools who think that the feds breaking into that Cuban kid’s house at gunpoint and pepperspraying the crowd as they kidnapped the kid was "OK", they did work for BIG BRO. didn’t they?

Come on over guys terrorize the sheeple, it might jolt them away from daytime TV. nah, probably not.

Dennis Hawver

Dear Mr. Hawver,

No.

ALASKA CALLING

Editors,

Yes I would like you to terrorize my sleepy hometown Anchorage, AK:-). I hope it is not too far away for you!

Anya

Dear Anya,

No. :-)

DESPERATE.COM

Hi, have to thank you for the fastest bit of education that I got from your site before my first trip to Russia. How else could I have recognised a flat head. As your team seem to have the best knowledge of what’s happening in the Russian culture it would be good to meet. I’m setting up an internet venture in Moscow and would be please to tell you more and suggest ways in which you could get involved.

Please let me know. I’m in Moscow w/c 15th, probably Friday/Sat/Sun best for me.

Lesley

ps will buy you a drink anyway

Dear Lesley,

We’re planning on introducing a "net-head" factor for our [sic] page. You’ve just earned a three star net-head rating, which means "wouldn’t be caught dead spending two minutes with this boor, even if he offers a free drink".

THE GOLDEN TURD

Mr. Ames,

Great site you guys have! Anything even approaching your genius nightlife guides for St. Petersburg that you know about?

Genghis Cohen

Dear Mr. Cohen,

First of all, don’t steal our fucking pseudonyms. We work backbreaking hours thinking up stuff like that. As for St. Petersburg, all we know about the place is that none of us has gotten laid or beaten up there in at least five years.

JANET REAM-O

Mark,

Aren’t you going to write something about that recent Janet Reno-cuban boy episode? I was looking at her weird humanoid face the other day on TV, listening to that screeching voice - and somehow started thinking: what would it be like if that elephantine body actually experienced an orgasm? Some sort of an alien, disgusting, revolting, unspeakable orgasm!!!

And then she will be transformed! No more of that dispatching of heavily armed men to storm various compounds; instead, a life of bliss and quiet contemplation in the Alaskan wilderness...

Boris Tsikanovsky

Dear Mr. Tsikanovsky,

Maybe if you had experienced an orgasm sometime in the last six months, you wouldn’t have bothered sending us this lame letter.

MAHESHITTY

One last thing of great importance.

If that Disco guy uses the word priapic one more time, which incidentally does not appear in my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, I will do the honors without the negro Janitor contingency.

Thank you

Harvey

Dear Harvey,

Vijay Maheshwari replies, "Look man, my use of a rare and colorful word like ‘priapic’ is what we writers call style. I’ve had loads of compliments on my writing style from editors of top magazines in New York and London, and right now I’m working on a piece for Granta which should be in an upcoming issue. So I don’t give a damn what you think, man."

A TRUE STORY

The following, which is 100% true, is as much a homage to my ex-girlfriend as a cautionary tale for all expats with too much time on their hands in Moscow - I request that my name/ e-mail be withheld.

I was midway through cooking my culinary specialty of boiled Russian ravioli with fried frozen vegetables when suddenly the phone rang. It was my ex-girlfriend - and it had been exactly a week since I’d split up with her.

"Hello, I was wondering if you wanted those photos of yourself as a child,"

"Uh...um...look I’m in the middle of something at the moment, could you ring back in about an hour?"

"What are you doing?"

"Just cooking. I’ll call you back in an hour."

I braced myself before making the phone call. She had sounded hurt, bitter, and confrontational.

"Hello, I’m sorry I couldn’t speak with you earlier, I was..."

"Yes, it’s about those photos, but I also want to tell you that I want to make love very, very much. My friend is staying here at the moment so you can’t come tonight, but tomorrow I can send her far, far away and you come and get it."

She put the phone down - Russian women, eh? After composing myself I suddenly realized that a granite hard hard-on had developed in my boxer shorts. I drew the curtains across the window, and went to stand in front of the bookshelf. I moved naturally and without thinking, like a soldier going over to his post. After approximately ten minutes of the most intense and enjoyable coaxing about a dozen milky droplets were spattered across the floor and hanging from the wallpaper. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to clean them up, I vaguely remembered thinking that they may serve to keep the dust down or something.

I went back to my desk and, while waiting for my enraged member to wilt and die in the torpor of anti-climax something highly odd began to happen. From various cracks in the wall and from beneath the cheap linoleum on the floor an army of cockroaches appeared and started marching, as though mesmerized, towards the area of what I’d left behind on the floor. I was shocked at this for two reasons. Firstly, I had never seen such vermin in my room before, and had smugly believed and even proudly boasted to friends that I was living in a cockroach-free zone. Secondly, the sheer suddenness of their manifestation, and the instinctual way in which they orientated themselves towards the spermicide - hypnotized yet determined - was utterly unnerving.

I kept on watching them, completely transfixed, and within two or three minutes there were perhaps as many as twenty or so cockroaches gorging on my sperm. I was unable to get this horrible and grotesque image out of my mind for the rest of the evening, and it was still with me during the night, except that in my febrile dreams the sperm had acted as a kind of elixir vitae on the bugs, and they had been transformed into huge all powerful perfect species of the kind you need to call Sigourney Weaver in to sort out. Does my story have a moral? Perhaps there are two:

1) Never believe that there isn’t somewhere in your flat a lurking hoard of revolting insects;

2) Always wank in the toilet.

Request Withheld By Name

Dear Name,

You forgot moral number three: if a dyev wants to screw, then instead of jacking off on your desk, the best thing would be to invite her over, bang her, and ejaculate inside of her. Some nasty vermin might grow in her womb, but hey, that’s her problem, not yours.

WEB-TASTIC

What happened?

Your site is actually loading pretty fast, your pics are showing up, it is up to date, well sort of... Did you finally come out of your depression?

Miro

Dear Miro,

Sorry about the mistake. The web site is back to its old out-of-date self by now, and the pictures should be slow-loading and cumbersome again. Thanks for pointing that out.

CON

Please Guys!

I am an avid reader of your website newspaper and really enjoy your assesments of Western Foreign news reporters. I came across the attached article from MSNBC’s Moscow Correspondent Dana Lewis and felt that it URGENTLY needed to be brought to your attention! (it’s also at www.msnbc.com/news/384291.asp?0m=L2AK if you have trouble downloading) Please, JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED HERE! YOU must WARN your readers and the Western media about this Dana Lewis!!

Yours truly,

Steve Kelley

Media Consultant

New York, NY

Dear Mr. Kelley,

Sorry, we were too lazy to read that article. We’ll just take your word for it. After all, you’re a media consultant. You should know.

CACA DE TORONTOS

Dear eXile,

Please let me know where I can buy a copy of eXile in Toronto, Canada. If not available here, can you please mail me a sample copy along with subscription information (include details of mailing cost to Canada.)

Thank you!

Shaun Fields

Dear Mr. Fields,

Where is Canada? We’ve never heard of it.

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