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We are here to collect stories. At some point they'll be the most valuable possessions we have, those stories that we're manufacturing now. As Limonov would write, quoting Catallus: "We are all just corpses on vacation." I was sitting in an Italian restaurant two weeks ago winging to a Russian lawyer who has been an invaluable friend to the eXile this year. I won't go into my problems here, but I will say this about me: I looked like shit when I met him. Wearing the same clothes for two days, stinking of various sweat odors: beer sweat, vodka sweat, speed sweat, and good ol' Moroccan sweat, the pheromone that comes racing out of my pores on camelback, scimitars raised, heading straight for the olfactory regions of anyone within a 10 yard radius, committing unspeakable atrocities on their nasal passages. (My temporary living situation required me to sneak down to the Manezh, buy some shirts and socks at Timberland and two pairs of Tommy Hilfiger underwear, all of which I have since burned in a pentagram-shaped pit behind our house.) My lawyer friend wasn't buying my winging. He figured all I needed was a shower and a good night's sleep, and everything would be fine. And maybe he was right. But sometimes if you go down a path, you have to see it through to its doomed end. To set me at ease and put my problems into perspective, he told me one such story, the kind of immortal story that I'll stash in my memory for a bad day. A few weeks ago, a perfectly respectable Russian businessman, I believe he worked for one of the Big Four (is that all that's left?) accounting firms, decided to let loose. His in-laws had split for the long weekend to the dacha. Before they left, he got their keys to their now-empty Leninsky Prospekt apartment from his wife, saying he wanted to rest there alone, work, relax. We'll call our hero "Slava." Slava did what all respectable Russian men do while staying at their in-laws' empty apartment on the opposite side of town from his wife: he got shitfaced drunk, bought a whore from the closest Leninsky Prospekt open-air whore market, dragged her back to the apartment, fucked her, beat her, tied her to a chair and shaved her head until it was raw and bald, then threw her out. And continued drinking, alone.
A half an hour later, the girl's pimp came knocking on the door. Slava answered. The pimp explained that it was wrong to have beaten his whore and to have shaven her head. It was bad for business: who would want a shaven-headed whore?! With bruises, no less! The pimp said he'd let the whole thing go if Slava paid him $300 dollars. Slava told the pimp to fuck off, and slammed the door on his face. A half an hour later, a cop working that beat came to Slava's door. He explained calmly that the pimp was unhappy, that Slava had wrongly beaten a young woman and shaven her head after tying her to a chair, all of which could be crimes, but if Slava paid him $500 dollars, the matter could be settled. "Fuck off." Slam! About fifteen minutes after that, three cops come to the door. They complain about what Slava had done to the whore. "You shaved her head. What the fuck is wrong with you?!" Yelling ensues. The cops are clearly angry. They threaten: they say the matter could be serious, but they'd drop it all if Slava paid them $3000. "Go fuck your mothers!" Slam! The cops stuck by the door and called in backup. They told Slava they were going to ram his in-laws' apartment door down unless he relented. "Didn't you hear me? I told you all to go fuck your mothers! Goddamn musor!" Slava slurred. The cops took axes from their cars and tried batting down the iron door, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Slava, cursing them, called "02" and told the city police that some armed gang posing as cops was trying to batter down his door, pleading for them to come and rescue him as quickly as possible. At the same time, the unsuccessful cops had called the MChS, or Emergency Ministry, to bring the proper ramrod equipment to his in-laws' apartment in order to ram down his door.
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