Americans, generally speaking, are the greatest of pussies.
posted by jeremy on March 17, 2004
I get off of work at Lovely Hula Hands around midnight, slam a shot of Bushmills, gulp a beer, bid my coworkers adieu & ride off into my weekend. A warm night to cruise, with more warm nights ahead, an entire summer of golden warmth, goddam...
It makes my cold heart glad.
I swing into the unfailingly bleak MLK Safeway parking lot just in time to see some cute punk rock girl get chucked into the back of a police car. Bad night for somebody, I think & lock up my $600 junker... & then I nearly drown in the harsh depressing fluorescence of Safeway before I get my frozen pizza & cheap beer & get the fuck out.
I arrive home in time to chat with Nathan for nearly 5 whole minutes before he hits the sack. Lately, I've been known as the Night Creature due to my nocturnal lifestyle & it's true... The dawn never finds me asleep. I pop open a can of Olympia & retreat to the basement, our warm lair of the information age; An unceasing stream of data flowing thru buzzing hobbled hard-drives, myriad monitors. Music, movies, news, whatever you want, just a few keystrokes & a DSL connection away...
& I'm beginning to hate all of it.
I've spent the entire winter down here, killing innumerable aliens thru the glory of Halo, googling the news at least twice a day to check up on the degradation of the world, occasionally wallowing in facts with Wikipedia or surfing celebrity porn & sending said pictures to various politicians, all to a soundtrack afforded me by I-tunes.
But Spring has pounced & I tell you, fuck this digitized poo... I want dirt & grass stains. I want campfires & starlight. I want to be lost in a Cedar forest. I want to startle deer & worry about bears. I want to break in some new boots, fuck-up my sleeping bag...
Yet here I am, plopping my skinny tired body down in front of this computer once again. I check Kazaa to see if my music has downloaded, I google the tragedy in Spain, I download a book, The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, open another beer, light a cigarette, work on my cancer. Forgive me, I'm digging thru the scat of the world...
Hours later, I stumble upon the website for eXile, a moscow based weekly edited by a motley crew of American expats. After just a brief examination, I realized I've found something truly great. This paper makes the Portland Mercury look like Readers Digest, I shit you not. Some of the columns & articles in this paper would probably start a right-wing riot, or maybe a left-wing lynch mob, if published on a regular basis in America. The editors make no bones about why they are living in Russia, America is a hypocritical morass of infantile & spoiled dipshits & anyway, Russia is far more interesting... to paraphrase the general tone... & reading the eXile, with its ballsy anti-Putin politics & dangerously obscene content, well shit, I'd have to agree. Russia is a dangerous place to speak freely, in the media or anywhere. Fuck, Russia is dangerous place, period. The level of poverty to be found in that place is difficult to imagine & what people do to survive, the sheer desperation of it... Just yesterday an apartment complex in Arkhangelsk exploded because a couple of homeless men stole the copper gas line caps to sell for scrap; 26 people dead so far.
This kind of tragedy is nothing unusual for Russia or for most of the world, I suppose. The strangest thing about Russia's poverty & general fucked-ness is the backdrop of its industrialization; It is, supposedly, a developed nation.
Anyway, back to the hookers...
(Hey, what hookers? You're wondering & I say, shut up, I'm getting to it.)
The chief editor, Mark Ames, writes a column that I cannot stop reading, Whore-R Stories. (Horror stories, get it? I didn't, until Nathan explained it.) He basically goes out (or orders online or calls the ads in the back of the papers) once a week or so & hires a prostitute or two & talks with them about their lives, then more often than not, fucks the shit out of them... & spills every detail, ugly & sad, to his readers. The blend of politics, smut, social commentary & profanity is horrifying, fascinating, depressing & profound.
What an ass, you might say, what an evil misogynistic user. Hell, I thought so myself but he's beaten us to the punch on this one. He's an avowed mysogynist, but not the cold sociopathic kind, but more of the hurt scared kind.
To quote, ...my "misogyny," if that's the right word for it, comes not from ice-cold, cinematic antisocial tendencies, but rather, from fear. Fear and pain. Way too much fear and pain. I ain't like those other assholes, the axle-grease-on-the-arms misogynists.
That kind of misogyny, the cool kind, the misogyny of a crocodile, is completely alien to me. Misogyny born of sociopathic coolness may be attractive, but it isn't interesting. It's just a reaction, like gas or sweat. Misogyny born of fear and pain is what makes Eraserhead, Louder Than Hell, Death On The Installment Plan, "Pretty Girls Make Graves"... It's rich because it's true, born of experience, a truth too dangerous to be admitted into middle-class discourse.
Women are scary on all sorts of levels. They're not dumb and weak, they're scary. It's that simple. If you don't understand that but you still hate women, you have no right to be a member of my misogyny club. You're just a common jerk. I've known all kinds of jerks in my life. Real jerks aren't interesting; however, a stylized, literary sort of jerk is. Most women I've met through my writing expect that from me: stylized antisocial misogyny, cigarettes and rape with Link Ray soundtrack. Many of the male friends and writers I've known since starting the eXile have tried to ingratiate themselves by affecting their own sham misogyny. But real misogynists can sniff out the phonies: our pain-radar is flawless. The fake misogynists saw that my columns got me an audience, that it seemed cool, so they affected it, wore it like a beat-up leather jacket. They didn't pay for it, though. (Misogyny has even become a chic stance for a certain faction of urban hipsters in America, although it's mediated through some kind of anti-PC backlash that is itself rooted in a bourgeois major premise.) So the fly-by-night misogynists call women "stupid bitches," brag about fucking and dumping them, about how much they "hate women," about how they made them cry and didn't care...It's a lie. They didn't pay for that, you can tell by the ease in which they move in and out of the stance.
So he's a misogynist but after reading enough I decide he's a bighearted intelligent misogynist & whatever, get over it, he's an interesting writer.
The questions he asks the women reveal much, too much, about the current state of Russia's economy & social environment. Many of the women are fleeing the even worse economy of the rural areas for the possible 'hope' of a better future in Moscow. Same as anywhere, prostitution is the ever available job for those with few options. So they take it on or in, whatever, it's an ugly business, ugly as sin, though it isn't a sin, it's a job & it's something to hear about, something to be brought to light, to try to understand the experience of the hooker & the john...
Mark writes, So many bleeding heart Westerners talk about the evils of sex trafficking without knowing a thing about their subject. They can only see prostitution through the facile Christian prism of victim/victimizer. Gladstone, the patron saint of today's so-called anti-sex trafficking activists, used to obsessively interview whores on 10 Downing Street during the height of Victorianism, his interest purely Christian and humanitarian, of course... although he had a strange obsession for prying every last lurid detail out of each whore he'd interview. Today we can admit what drove Gladstone: pure penile lust. Free Gladstone from the oppressive Victorian morals of his time, and what you'd have is the patron saint of the eXile's Whore-R stories. If he was just a healthy nihilist like your humble john here, he'd have ended each of those tedious whore-r interviews with a right good shagging and an "Off you go, then!" which could have saved all sorts of peoples in the British Empire from extermination. But no: he couldn't fuck the whores, he could only interview them, but it was perfectly okay to exterminate natives in the great cause of Christianizing them. All I've done is drag Gladstone into the 21st Century, and rescued his legacy from the Victorian fundamentalists who control much of how we frame prostitution and all of its "evils" today, and stripped him of the imperial violence. I've reduced Gladstone's prostitution obsession to what it is for all of us who are honest: sex and labor.
I remember when I first started writing these Whore-R stories, my evil Mexican friend, Ricky Ramirez, burst out laughing over the long-distance line. But then he got serious. "You know, you're fuckin right, Ames. That's a great fuckin idea. Whores are just fuckin people who do a fuckin job. Regular people don't want to think about whores that way. But whores, they're like Mexicans or niggers, you know? Fuckin middle-class guerros don't want to look at whores as people, just like they don't want to look at Mexicans or blacks as people. But that's what they are: they're just fuckin people. White people want whores to be in a fuckin shelter somewhere, somewhere out of view. But whores are just fuckin people. With stories and lives and problems. God, it's so fuckin obvious! Good for you, man. So that's your job, huh? Ask whores questions, then bed them?"
& yeah, that's what he does, he writes about an experience few of us encounter in our day to day lives. An entire industry that lurks in the background & always has. I consider the experience of the prostitute & then I consider the experience of the Russian prostitute & sit here in my little abode, considering my smug safe little existence in America... Knowing, I'm a fucking pussy & most likely, so are you.
We have so much without knowing it. So much freedom, (though the Feds are working on that) so much space in which to maneuver... Even our homeless, as fucked as they are, have a chance to escape... Hell, it would take a lot of work to starve to death in this nation, a certain plodding stupidity, cause, babe, the dumpsters are quite full. I have friends who live off of the Trader Joes dumpster. They eat better than I do, the scruffy fucks.
But what the bloody fuck is my rambling point? I can't really say that I know. I just know that sitting here, reading the stories of these women & reading a paper that's friggin gutsy enough to print them, publish everything that they do, in a nation that will cornhole you in a heartbeat if you step too far out of line & well, suddenly I'm just filled with some kind of shame.
Here we are, living our lives in the most liberal city in the United States, puttering around in our scruffy sweaters & ironic t-shirts, fussing over our organic food, complaining about the price hikes at the Goodwill, reading our whiny little zines & semi-offensive weeklies, topping off everyday by getting drunk & arguing about the various plot points in the hundreds of movies that we've all seen... & I know suddenly that we're not trying hard enough, that I'm not trying hard enough. I stopped trying a long time ago, it was too easy to quit... At heart, I'm a fucking slodge.
& I don't want to be a fucking slodge anymore...
But what do I want to fight for? What stupid struggle do I ask? I can't say... but it's time to make some inquiries, it's almost time to take up the mystery once again & make life exciting once more. Am I being vague? I am. I don't know what's going to happen.
Just that something has to.
