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It’s always about Boris Yeltsin isn’t it? In the myriad beginnings your story can have, you always start about the time you met Boris Yeltsin.
It was the beginning of perestroika and there I was in Moscow. If I had been killed, a place back in the states would have put up a star in memory of someone who they would not identify as an employee of the company. And so there I was, a CIA agent hanging out with Gorbachev, talking about a free market economy.
The joke was something about how Charity brought Hope, her cute friend. In a free market everything is fun and games.
Underground snuff film distribution comes with the territory in this atmosphere. The money is in the fact that some things are underground…that way they fetch a better price. The free market is why Nazi gangs import Mexican girls to be their prostitutes. It’s all about if you can sell it. It isn’t that free in the States but you get the idea. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Under the right circumstances, one of these Mexican girls would be as procreative as a blow up doll and if you kept her clean she would last far longer. Some justify this action by saying that she would have a much better life here than she would have had if she stayed in Mexico. Is living the U.S. that much better?
But here I am in Moscow, and they do something similar with Afghan girls. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan they called raping the native girls “planting flowers.” It seems that the Russian mob does the same as the Yanks. Imported pussy, USDA approved.
And so here I am, getting head from an Afghan whore in a Russian hotel when Boris Yeltsin walks into the room. There are bagpipes lying on the floor and Boris begins to play them.
I have to concede that at this time I am tripping on acid in a home in the suburbs of L.A.
That is why the story starts the way it does. The house is smoky from a hookah filled with pot as I come back to the U.S. on a cloud. My hands tingle, falling asleep from gripping the mouthpiece of the hookah. I grip it the way I grip my cock getting head from Charity in the room. Though it is all in my head, it is real to me.
The mouthpiece of a hookah is very reminiscent of the mouthpiece of the bagpipes and so I play my bagpipes. I get high and I sit low on the couch in the smoky living room. If I were outside I could smell the sea air but this is a smoky living room. I am only three blocks from the beach but I am locked up in a dungeon with my hookah. As I blow out smoke I see the figure of Yeltsin and a dancing bear with a unicycle clenched in its jaws wearing a fez.
And then I drift off to stare at the television no matter what was on the stupid thing. It wouldn’t matter what was on or if it was off it was just something to watch. Atomic bombs went off in the background as I munched on Doritos. The atomic wind blew my hair back. But maybe that was only the patio window open. Outside it looked as though it would rain at any moment. The sky was grey and the wind blew. A grey cat walked along the top of the fence in the backyard its fur blended into the grey sky.
It is the way her eyes sparkle in the sun and the way her hair gets caught in her eye lashes in the wind. She is napping in the bedroom while she allows me to smoke a little. There was fog earlier but it is a clear day I might walk down to the beach after I put out the coal and set the hookah on the patio.
And I love the way she looks when she is asleep. Her chest is rising and falling. I watch for a moment and then close the door and walk outside. I walk a block or so and notice an Elks Club. It is filled with men cheering eighty-eight…eh-dee-eh-tee…that is how they cheer for The Man. They are chanting in reverence to the winner of the race war while wearing furry animal costumes as they gather in a ceremonial circle inside the club. As I pass they begin to burn an American flag and salute a German Nazi flag. I think that Germans are just fine but when it comes to white supremacy the Elks Club is tip-tops. And I just keep walking toward the beach.
I am still thinking about world politics and Boris Yeltsin’s place in my mind and the world. Why am I so worried about Russia? Why? When men had been blowing up their own countries trying to protect the people they were killing from foreign invaders carrying holy books attributed to an illiterate prophet? I walk into the seven-eleven to purchase a Rockstar and a three pack of Budweiser. It is a hot day and I want to be hydrated and drunk–and what about the man in Norway? What if the Nazis had lawyers like these men? Would they all be unfit to stand trial on the basis of their insanity? The sheer gruesomeness of the Final Solution would be proof enough. Can we learn anything about human evolution by studying populations affected by genocide? Do the genetic markers of that population diffuse among a new population or is there a bottleneck?
These are smart things for an idiot like myself to think while I am coming down off an acid trip. Just an hour ago I was peaking, thinking I was a CIA agent in Glasnost-era Russia. Now here I am outside of the 7-11 drinking my Bud with the Rockstar in my pocket.
Clara is turning tricks three blocks east, giving the money to her boy Hector. Hector sells weed and other soft drugs if we could call them that. He sold me the acid on blotter paper. The trip was good and smoking out is a great way to end the trip. With all the things going on along my trek I can see the true beauty of the mid-afternoon on a mild California day. I finish the beer before I get to the pier and I crack open the Rockstar. I sit at the end of the pier watching the men with their fishing poles catch mackerel and perch.
Sometimes the trips in my mind are the farthest trip I have gone…believing I am someone else, somewhere else.
