A Hamster In Stereo

editor@exile.ru

    Yes folks, I’ve been long gone in the land of sexual famine, the U.S. of A., dreaming of a time and place when sex was not only available, but even worth thinking about. Fond memories of the following incident kept me going during those long weeks of want. And so to honor that hope-giving memory, I am putting it down on the permanent record for all to share...
    I had just finished a long miserable day—my third—tourguiding my mother and her new boyfriend through St. Petersburg. It was a Saturday night. I put them to bed (they were still complaining about how inconvenient Russia was compared to suburban California when I slammed the hotel room door shut), then I bolted out the hotel lobby and stalked up and down Nevsky Prospekt. Seventy-two hours of middle-aged babysitting had me wired and hungry for an evening of sin and regret.
    It was mid-December, damp slushy air blowing in from the Baltic Sea. The sidewalk was fairly crowded with bundled up dyevs looking for an escape from their dim little apartment lives. It’s amazing how their eyes glow with mischief even in the world’s shittiest climate.
    I followed a gaggle of raver dyevs in techno parkas and platform cross-trainers to a second-tier disco just down the street from my hotel. Some sad, shitty disco pop Tsar took the stage, a forty-something Russian geek in flashy techno getup, graying ponytail, shirtless revealing withered six-pack abs, and Madonna head-set mike. Before starting his set, he babbled endlessly about all the other aging pop stars who were friends of his and with whom he’d just dined at some overpriced restaurant that none of these kids could or would ever be allowed into... and the worst of it was, the audience was impressed! Some of the supplicating serf instinct still thrives in the Russian soul.
    I sucked down three vodka tonics, trying to numb myself.
    When he segued into a lip-synching pop trash number, I was history. Exit, stage left. Talking up a teen-slut wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to get drunk and find myself a low-rent fuck, not mack up some doe-eyed teenager and pretend to be interested in her dreams of traveling to Spain and owning a Palm Pilot... I was horny and impatient. So I fell back on my old rule. When you absolutely positively jus’ gots ta fuck, accept no alternative to the Whore. To the ignorant masses, whoring is for losers who can’t get laid-even though this theory doesn’t explain why so many stars, politicians and other landed gentry are fond of slum-whoring. In fact, you pay a whore not just to guarantee yourself of a hassle-free fuck, but also for her hassle-free exit once you’re through. No matter how much of an anti-social asshole you fancy yourself to be, it’s never easy getting rid of someone you’ve just fucked. Whores, however, are out the door the minute you say “Boo!” And that’s why I love them so much. If you’re like me, once the sex is over, and regret drips from your body, you don’t want anyone around. Especially someone who is looking to you for comfort and assurance.
    Back on Nevsky Prospekt, warmer for the vodka, I saw an ad on a street lamp for a nightclub: slinky-dressed slut winking right at me, cheesy club name “Hollywood”, and the address: just a ten minute walk up. Once inside the casino-nightclub (the casino’s a giveaway), I knew right away I’d come to the right place. The girl-to-boy ratio was about 4:1; the girl-to-American-boy ratio was stacked so heavily in my favor it would be like invading Panama all over again.
    After downing three more vodka tonics in quick succession, a tall redhead named Alla approached me. It’s always nice being chatted up by young beautiful Russian girls, even if they’re only after your wallet. Their exaggerated girlish act is an irresistible strategy for someone who comes from the Bay Area, where irony, bitterness and provincial posturing form a lethal erection-killing cocktail.
    Alla showered me with insincere compliments on my Russian language skills, then introduced me to her friend Ira, a half-Jew with long dark hair, full lips and wild Asiatic eyes. After downing a half a dozen vodka-tonics, they grew impatient with my playing-dumb game and proposed themselves. Sometimes, part of the fun in whoring is pretending that you have no idea that they’re whores until they’re forced to come right out and propose you. Usually they’re too smooth to be unnerved, but on rare occasions they’re shamed into comping you.
    “You know what we do here, right? We’re not exactly proud, but you know, St. Petersburg is very poor, there’s no money here...”
    “Really? That’s terrible.”
    “We’re very poor and we like you. We want to suggest something maybe interesting for you. Have you heard of ‘Stereo’?”
    “No, what’s that?”
    As delicately as possible, in a doll-like voice, Ira explained: “That’s when two girls give you a blow job; one licks and massages your, well, your balls, while the other sucks you. And they take turns. It’s very nice for the man. ‘Stereo’ is very popular in St. Petersburg right now.”
    “I’m sure it is.”
    They wanted fifty dollars each. A bargain by any standard. (Think about dating an American girl: small chance of getting laid, guaranteed hours of hearing about her office disputes and all the guys in her life who have dumped her, then the inevitable sex talk about her cliched-decadent fantasies, all for the price of a $100 dinner, after which you don’t even WANT to fuck, even if you could...)
    The three of us piled into a Volga for a quick drive back to my hotel. And this is where things started to get a little weird.
    We entered the lobby and made our way to the elevator when the Nevskij Palace Hotel “security” stopped us. The girls were asked to register their passport numbers at the front desk. This unconstitutional rule is a holdover from the Soviet days when Russians were kept as far from foreigners as possible, and if they dared enter a Western hotel, their names were passed onto the proper authorities. Nowadays, it’s just another way to extract a bribe from a desperate john and his working woman. Alla, the tall red-head, didn’t have her passport. Which meant they wouldn’t let her through, without greasing their palms. She argued with a swarthy, mustached security thug-he demanded $100 to let her through without her passport. I balked. Somehow the math just didn’t work out: $100 bought you a “Stereo” blowjob from two babes... why pay an equal amount to some corrupt, dickless thug in a Soviet suit just to let you onto the elevator? No way. It would ruin everything.
    I caused a scene, accusing them of being fascists and Soviets. The girls whisked me away into a taxi, towards what they claimed was Alla’s apartment, just “five minutes away.” They reassured me that it wouldn’t be dangerous, that I had no reason to fear. I was too drunk to be afraid, although I’ve read countless robbery and murder stories that start off exactly this way, the drunken Western john in the filthy taxi with the Russian whore... ending on our Death Porn page...
    On the way there, Alla complained bitterly.
    “I’ve been to work at that hotel with clients hundreds of times! Hundreds of times! And they’ve never done that to me!”
    Oo, that stung. You don’t want to hear that your whore has fucked hundreds of slobbering fat tourists in your hotel “hundreds of times”. Multiply that by all the other hotels in town, as well as the rented flats, the street corners and back alleys...you might lose a little sleep. And a lot of penile blood.
    Drunk and curious, my interest had gone from sexual to professional. The drive was taking much longer than she’d promised. We’d passed out of the dim, decaying classical ruins of St. Petersburg’s central districts and moved into the utterly black, bleak suburbs, Soviet apartment blocks, broken street lights, chewed pavement. Almost thirty minutes later, we arrived.
    We picked our way through a broken apartment entrance, and knocked on the first door we saw on the ground floor. A babushka in a housedress answered. She and Alla argued in a loud and angry whisper...
    “We’ll have to wait a half hour,” Alla said to me, furious at the delay.
    “Alla, I thought this was your apartment,” I said.
    “Well, it is. I have a room here. But someone’s got it for the hour. It’s OK Mark, no problem. We’ll drink tea. Then we’ll do ‘Stereo.’”
    “I don’t think so,” I said.
    After a brief argument, Alla cursed the babushka, pointing to me, “amerikanets!”, but what could we do? Alla slammed the door in the babushka’s face, and knocked on the neighbor’s. A young boy, no older than eight, in ragged sweats and a stained Pokemon T-shirt, answered. It turns out he or his parents had already rented their spare room to another whore, and they were booked for two hours. If there was any “stereo” going on, it was the ugly howls of whores and johns fucking in lower-class ground floor apartments.
    This had become downright Dostoevskian. Alla started swearing and cursing in street criminal slang. In fact, I assumed that the fact that she didn’t have a passport (or rather, didn’t want to show her passport) meant that she had her feet far deeper in the Russian criminal world than your average whore... The babushka burst out of the door, dragging a short fat whore and a pickled flathead by the scruff. She tossed them out and yelled at Alla that “the American can come in now!”
    But I didn’t want to anymore. If I was going to fuck - and at this point that was a big “if” - it wasn’t going to be in one of these diseased dives.
    I grabbed Ira, who had a passport, and we went out into the darkness in search of a taxi. Alla followed, asking me for 50 dollars for her time, but I told her to fuck off. Well not exactly told her - I half turned around and let out a snarling laugh, not too unlike the condescending laugh of the evil yuppie in Naked. Works every time.
    Another half hour, and Ira and I were back in the warmth of the Sheraton Nevskij Palace. We emptied out my mini-bar of everything it had: gin, vodka, wine, rum, cigarettes, beer, Lay’s potato chips... She took the longest shower a whore has ever taken. I found out why: she’d shaved her snapper into a stripe all for my viewing pleasure. But she used an old disposable razor. What emerged was a nicked, bloody stripe, as if a cat had torn her groin to shreds, trying to dig a mouse out of her hole. How many turn-offs can a john endure in one evening? A lot, as it turns out, especially if you’re as drunk as I was. So drunk that I popped a 50mg Viagra just to make sure that I’d get something for all my pain. I’d make the whore pay— and fellas, lemme tell ya, the best way to make a whore pay is to pop a minimum of 50mg of Viagra and fuck them to death.
    “It’s too bad we can’t do ‘Stereo’,” Ira said. “But do you know what ‘khomyak’ is?”
    “No, what’s that?”
    “I’ll show you. You know the animal, right? It’s a little mammal that has big cheeks.”
    “Like a squirrel?”
    “Yeah, like a squirrel, but with bigger cheeks and no tail. The ‘khomyak’ blowjob is very popular in St. Petersburg right now.”
    “I’m sure it is.”
    The “hamster” technique was not unpleasant. Like deep throating, only much greedier. Even a little rougher. If she was going to store my nuts for the winter, then I was going to make sure she had enough for a very very long winter.
    After an hour of the khomyak, I let her rest her jaws.
    “Watch this,” she said. She lay on her back and pulled her left foot behind her head, and her right foot underneath her left foot. Her snapper literally popped out of her groin. Didn’t exactly bloom like a rose, but rather burst out like a gaping shrapnel wound.
    “Whoah!” I said. “That’s pretty cool.” I tried fucking her in that position but it didn’t quite work.
    Ira preferred doing the khomyak to fucking. She doesn’t like penetration much. A lot of whores are like that. Probably work-related stress. Still, you can only store your nuts in a hamster’s mouth for so many hours before it gets old. After a while, you’ve got to attack even the driest hole.
    I didn’t throw her out after I jizzed in her bag. She’d been too hard-working, and she didn’t ask for much. I listened to her story. Every whore has a story, and hers was horrible even by Russian whore standards.
    Her father had once been wealthy. He was the general director of a large Leningrad oil transport firm during the late Soviet days. When Putin came to power in St. Petersburg in the early 90’s as deputy mayor, he invited in the Tambov Mafia, real blue ribbon murderers even by Russian standards, to divide up the city with him. They tried taking control of her father’s firm once it had been privatized according to Western advice. Her father refused. They threatened him. He still refused. About six years ago, when Ira was sixteen, she came home and found her mother beaten almost to death in their kitchen, lying in a coma in a pool of blood. After a month her mother came out, but to this day she has only limited control over the left side of her face. Ira’s father still fought for his job. So they shot and killed Ira’s brother. She still cries when she talks about his murder. That was it. Ira’s father resigned. Ever since, he took to vodka. He hasn’t been sober since. They live on a meager pension - when it’s paid. Ira had to give up ballerina school (hence the limber legs) to be a prostitute and support her family. She said that her father probably knows, but since he’s always drunk, he’s hardly aware of anything. He’s too ashamed and too drunk. Ira said she’ll name her son after her brother. If she can still have children.
    I learned that Alla’s father was also a drunk, though he was a loser from the start. He’d left home when she was still a child. Her mother remarried; the stepfather was abusive; she ran away in her early teens and hasn’t been back since.
    Ira curled up in my arms and passed out. It was almost touching. I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to toss her out. In fact, it was she who left in a panic at 7:30 a.m. I asked her to stay longer but she wouldn’t. She wanted to get home before her father awoke. She didn’t want to upset him.
    She left me her phone number. I flew back to Moscow the next day, and haven’t been back since. I tried calling her a few times. Her father always answered, rude and drunk. Ira was never home.
eXile alert: Listen to the twisted voicemail saga of Mark's latest break-up at PsychoExgirlfriend.com!