Issue #10/65, May 20 - June 3, 1999  

by Matt Taibbi

Lebed had just finished wiping one of his cowering subordinates off the badminton court when I decided to step in. I'd been convinced that the General's opponent had been losing on purpose, and, emboldened, I'd come up with a plan to step in and see if I could upstage him in front of his staff with a surprise dose of earnest and malevolent competition.

The whole scene had looked staged from the minute we'd arrived at the gubernatorial dacha. After we parked the car, Lebed's bodyguards had allowed us to wander the compound of our own accord until at last we "discovered" the shady badminton court where the General and his entourage were "relaxing". The game itself looked like a scene from a nature show about insect predators. On one side of the court there was the huge, slow-moving, menacing hulk of the General, noiselessly displacing the air in a gleaming red-white-and-blue sweatsuit (marked on the back with the word "Russia" in huge Latin letters), while on the other side, Nikolai Azimov, the sloppily-dressed (jeans; faded black t-shirt; old canvas sneakers) twentysomething head of the "Lebed Youth League" bounded spastically from sideline to sideline in unsuccessful pursuit of Lebed's cunningly-directed shuttlecocks.

In three games against this kid, Lebed neither suffered a hair out of place nor ever gave up more than nine points out of fifteen. He appeared to be concentrating not at all on having a good time, and only half-focused on the game... although, to be fair, what attention he did give was efficiently directed: he called the lines meticulously, for instance, quickly claiming his points with a curt growl the instant any of young Kolya's strokes landed so much as a millimeter out of bounds. It was the playing style, I thought, of a man sunk so deeply in the subtle mechanics of master-slave gamesmanship that a strategy of wild smashes aimed directly at his head or trunk might prove unsettling enough to make a quick victory against him possible.

Lebed was on his way off the court when I stopped him to ask for a game. He was clearly surprised--I was a complete stranger to him and was, besides, a bundle of nerves, and probably looked it--but in disarmingly calm instinctual observance of the precepts of masculine honor, he accepted the challenge and immediately turned around and headed back to the court.

I had hoped to burst out of the gates and take a quick lead, but instead I immediately fell behind 3-1, shamefully whiffing on a pair of Lebed lobs and dropping a third point on an awkward lunge for a Lebed crosscourt shot. The General could see that I was nervous and was clearly taking advantage of it; while I was still taking inventory of all the various psychosomatic emergencies which had arisen with the realization that I was in live competition with the butcher of Transdniester, Lebed was quickening the pace of the game, pacing back and forth from odd court to even court, croaking out the rapidly-worsening score with that famous growl of his: "Odin-nol! Dva-nol! Tri...!"

In the first few minutes of the game I could hear my own frenzied breathing with such terrible clarity that it felt like I had ears all over my body. Thoughts were coursing through my head which were so upsetting that they were literally jerking my racquet hand into ugly convulsions every time I went to strike the birdie... I remember that it occurred to me at one point that if I thought I'd shown admirable gall by forcing my way onto the General's badminton court, I wasn't even in the same league with my opponent, who'd once had the balls to go on live national television and lay that "Ya ne levee, ya kruche" line on all of Russia in utter seriousness. Glancing across the net at my opponent's stony poker-face-- which in Lebed's case was more like an artillery-shelling-face-- I understood suddenly that even at my own game, i.e. being a professional ham, I wasn't even in Lebed's league. Meanwhile the whole badminton thing was beginning to seem a lot more complicated than it had looked on the sideline... After blowing a few points, I remembered that I had a tendency to romanticize my own ex-jockhood, a line of thought I soon found myself following all the way down to the depths of my college free-throw percentages, grim numbers in the thirties and forties.

I recovered my senses briefly to tie the score at three-- noting the General had problems moving laterally, I managed to drop in a few low serves just out of his reach. But the great offensive coordinator in the sky must have radioed down the necessary adjustments to the Lebed side, because soon he was returning my serves with ease again and moving me all over the court. The score slid farther and farther against me until finally the game was a full-blown avalanche of dully triumphant Lebed growls: "Pyat-tri. Shest-tri. Syem-tri. Vosyem-tri." Then, an octave lower, he went on: "Devyat-tri. Odinadsyat-tri. Dvenadsyat-tri..."

Lebed throughout this time didn't speak, except to keep score and make his infuratingly meticulous calls around the lines. The silence was only broken when the game situation became so desperate that I was forced to take the extreme step of blabbering out inane trash talk in order to try to distract him. In retrospect, I can't see how it was that I came to think that this might work... At 8-3, Lebed lost his serve and tossed the shuttlecock my way under the net. "Okay, Alexander Ivanovich, that was your last chance," I said, picking up the birdie. "I'm serious now. You're all done. Get ready." No reaction. Not even a hint of a smile. Lebed stared straight ahead at me, frowning violently in an impatient half-crouch, his entire organism imploring me to serve already and get it over with. I blinked and it was his serve again, prompting a CNN camerawoman who was there to call out from the sidelines: "God," she said, in a bored but serious voice, "you're really terrible."

"I know," I shouted. Then I looked at Lebed, grinned, and shouted: "He's bitch-slapping me!"

I looked at the General and broke into a broad smile, thinking excitedly, "I just said the words 'bitch-slap' in front of Alexander Lebed!" But while I was gloating, another birdie fell in and I was suddenly a point from defeat; then, after a courageous two-point last-minute charge, Lebed whizzed another shot past my head to finish me off by the score of 15-6.

I shook Lebed's hand and congratulated him. "Well-played, Alexander Ivanovich," I said. Then I added: "Tough game, badminton. You know, I don't think I've played since I was a little kid. But you probably play a lot, since you have this court here..."

"I've only played three times," he said, then walked away.

The General was gracious in victory. He led Mark and me to a picturesque balcony overlooking the Yenisei, submitted to a preposterously dorky photo op (fading sunlight; three gorilloid males standing in a row; steely-eyed stares; heavy flow of cold, deep Siberian river, etc.) and then had us all repair to the billiard room. Mark by then was already grimacing once a minute or so, apparently desperate to squeeze a turd through his intestines in time to leave it in Lebed's bathroom. On the heels of my own failure, I began worrying for him... We sat there around the gubernatorial billiard table (next to which rested a table with two buttons on it, one marked "Doctor" and one marked "Adjutant") for about fifteen minutes while the General mechanically dispatched Kolya the Lebed Youth leader in two quick games.

Now it was my turn to do the samurai-code thing and challenge Lebed to a game of billiards, even though, after being humiliated once already, I really didn't want to. But not doing so would have meant announcing a willingness to live with the shame and failure of the badminton loss, which I think even Lebed understood would have impermissibly weenie. So he racked it up and we went at it on the billiard table.

To make a long story short, I ended up winning the game, but not without the help of Lebed, who had to teach me how to play as we went along. One thing I will say about the game is that Lebed during the course of it revealed himself to be an excellent sport; he advised me on half the balls I pocketed, and even once used his executive prerogative to chide the rest of the guests for laughing at a failed combination attempt I'd made. "You're all wrong to laugh," he said. "That was a good shot. He didn't make it, but it was a good shot. A classic combination attempt."

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I spied Azimov writing in his notebook: "Classic combination attempt..."

In order to actually win the game I had to hit a lengthy cross-table shot. It was one of those nightmarish billiard situations where the balls are lined up perfectly, meaning that you and your opponent and anyone else within twenty feet of the table all know that all you have to do is hit the cue ball perfectly straight to knock the target ball in--a set of expectations so conspicuously heavy that it inevitably becomes next to impossible to hit the ball perfectly straight. The badminton loss and the suddenly very real fear that I would be forced to report to friends and family back home having lost at two faggy British parlor games to Alexander Lebed created a not insignificant additional mental burden as I lined up the shot.

I fired the shot, and to my amazement, it dropped in with an authoritative "plunk", a sound that would soon by almost exactly repeated in a nearby bathroom...Even Lebed looked relieved when the ball dropped in. He applauded politely and then quickly vanished from the room in search of a dinner of tongue sandwiches. The rest of his entourage followed, leaving Mark and me alone in the room. We celebrated the eXile win with an Riley-era Knicks Oakley-Ewing high-ten/chest-slam-- you know, the thing where you slap a high ten, then follow through by banging chests. Then, in the time it took for me to put on my sportcoat, I lost track of Mark. Around the corner, I heard a door closing and locking...