Issue #24/49, October 10 - 22, 1998  

By Dar Zhitayev

The best essays in the world have been written with the pen. So when my wife came home tired from work and said the hum of the computer was more than she could stand and so banished me to with my stack of old party leaflets (the only paper we have at home) and pen to the toilet (the only place in our room where one can work in relative calm and isolation, and I'd promised the eXile editors to cough up some material by the following day) I felt almost relieved. It puts you on the same footing with all the great minds of mankind, from Homer to Comrade Limonov.

Nobody seems to have the right attitude to the crisis we're in the midst of, that is, thoroughly enjoying it. Let those integrated into the system-the Westernized bastards, with their astronomical dollar salaries, incomprehensible household gadgets, and an unhealthy passion for inane Internet chat groups-worry about political instability or the skyrocketing dollar... serves them right, the motherfuckers. We of the oppressed toiling masses have nothing to lose but our filtered cigarettes. We never had any dollars to our name or were represented politically by the colonial regime (or even its quasi-opponents, for that matter). And now with the Dow-Jones falling several percentage points thanks to Russia, we can take pride in the Motherland for once. Having made the necessary provisions for winter (i.e., hoarding rice, potatoes, and other durable foodstuffs lest we die of starvation), we devote ourselves to the only sensible occupations possible given the circumstances: thumb-twiddling, reading Keats or Baudelaire, having sentimental love affairs, making irrelevant observations, and cracking silly jokes.

Here's a moronic observation a physicist friend of mine recently came out with. Depressed about his inability to buy his girlfriend a glass of beer, he was contemplating a career change. For some reason, becoming a gay prostitute struck him as a particularly promising and lucrative one.

"But that's disgusting!" I said, sucking on my foul Russian cigarette butt.

"Not at all," he replied. "See, if you're a prostitute, you get fucked and receive your money. After that you're free to engage in better and nobler things. As it is now, they're fucking you all the time, in every orifice-and FOR FREE!"

As I said, now is an ideal time for sentimental reminiscences and idle meditations. So for some time now, I've been pondering the connection between... (see title). My own sad experiences seem to indicate there is a strong link between the two.

According to the fanatical Komsomol wisdom of the 1920s, "it is as unnatural for a Komsomol member to have sex with a member of the exploiting classes as to have sex with an orangutan." In my case (that of an exemplary Party and Komsomol member with a healthy hatred for the bourgeoisie) this wisdom seems to be depressingly true, even on a physiological level. My sexual relationship with my wife is stable and of a consistently high quality, but my (very rare!) extramarital excursions are marked by a pattern of vicious, politically correct reactions on my body's part. Give me a worker or peasant girl, a hippie or punk chick, a lady alcoholic or drug addict-in short, anyone belonging to the oppressed toiling masses-no problem. But when presented with a daughter of affluent parents who is upwardly mobile, self-confident, well-groomed, and smelling of good perfume, my deep-rooted class consciousness starts to play unpleasant tricks on me.

It was two years ago, when I was teaching English at a technical college in my hometown, that I got my first chance to become a rich girl's plaything. Out for a stroll one fine summer night in a Hawaiian shirt, torn jeans, and sandals-sort of a 1950s California Beatnik look-I met a fine specimen of a 16-year-old. Full breasts, dreamy eyes, no brains-the perfect raw material for one of Johnny Chen's depraved rape editorials. Without preliminaries, the subject kissed me and invited me to her mother's place, where the latter was drinking champagne with some friends.

The mother, it seems, had been a bookkeeper during Soviet times but was now a realtor, futures broker, or some such nonsense (I don't know enough English to comprehend the distinctions)-in short, a Nouvelle Russe. "You're in the lair of the class enemy, man!" I said to myself as I eyed their oak-paneled walls. The champagne-drinking friends, one of whom was an ex-cop, belonged to the same social stratum. Boy, did they look picturesque! Despite suspicious glances at my unwashed hair and beard, they tried to maintain an air of civility. "My dear, you're being crude!" the mother would exclaim when the daughter used some slang expression.

Anyway, this girl sought to enjoy my company in more intimate surroundings, so she stole some money from her mother and took me to a classy (by our provincial standards) bar. She kept the drinks coming as we talked, and whenever I said something overly intellectual she would roll her eyes and say "maybe, maybe" in English. I made no attempts to resist her. I hid my masculine pride way down deep, totally succumbing to the humble charm of the bourgeoisie. When the money ran out, she went home and swiped some more.

In the morning we found ourselves piss-drunk and naked in the stairwell of a building that turned out not to be hers (an inebriated miscalculation on my part). I also knew that one of my students lived in that very same building, possibly even on that same floor, which meant he had a decent chance of looking through the peephole this morning and espying his professor in a none-too-academic predicament. A perfect setting, it would seem, for some extramarital intercourse.

But this was not to be, of course. When, after an hour of futile exertions, my middle-class seductress realized that I was hopeless, she put on her pants (but not the rest of her clothes) and bolted in a rage. I rushed to the roof in alarm, where I found two punks gazing into the sunrise. "Have you by any chance seen a girl naked from the waist up?" I asked. "No," they answered bemusedly. I caught a taxi home, buying some fine wine with the rest of the girl's money. My wife and I drank it together as we had a good laugh over the whole story. More recently there was a systems analyst about my age whom I somehow managed to charm one starry night, despite my bare skull being covered with scabs as a result of my wife's inept shaving job. The girl went up to the apartment of a male friend of hers and, his protests notwithstanding, resolutely demanded condoms. Having obtained them, she rushed out into the street into my arms. Her roommate was out of town for several months, and she looked and smelled and felt so perfect. And despite her manifest upward mobility, she was so fucking lonely that her only joy in life was her goofy e-mail exchanges with a pen pal somewhere in the frightening backwaters of the American deep South.

I'll give you one guess what happened when we got to her room. You got it. In the morning we talked about the Internet, love, and upward mobility, but there was clearly a frustrated look in her eyes. I walked home in her roommate's T-shirt because I'd lost my coveted eXile Death Porn T-shirt under the bed somewhere. It goes without saying that I returned within a couple days to retrieve the black cotton treasure.

So what's the underlying message to all this? The proper reaction of a proletarian guy to a bourgeois slut would seem to be brutally giving it to her and then breaking her heart, like in those early Stones lyrics, Angry Young Man novels, and so on. Ultimately, however, there is absolutely no difference between fucking them too well and being physically unable to do the deed when they're begging for it. Either way, we greasers manage to frustrate the soshes, shattering their self-confidence and significantly diminishing their quality of life. This is our humble little contribution to the proletariat's exalted class struggle against the oppressors. We will fight on.