Read Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child Online

Authors: Bert Kreischer

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Essays, #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (7 page)

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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“You weren’t kidding, he really can’t speak a word of Russian.”

“I told you so,” said my teacher.

The man, who I would later learn was the head of the Russian Department, leaned across the table and made me a blunt offer. “You can go, but you have to promise to
never
take another Russian class ever again.”

I considered his offer, looked at my teacher, smiled, and said, “Deal.”

*   *   *

A few months later, we were on a plane headed to the motherland. I was in the back with an open seat next to me, drinking heavily and fantasizing, as most men do, about all the sex and possibilities that lay ahead of me the second we touched down. The girl in the sundress on a bike that I’d meet on the street, the small village she would live in on the outskirts of the city, our nights in her family’s onion field, sitting on top of a Yugo watching the stars, falling in love. How her family’s neighbors would beg me to stay and become their mayor, how I would end up living there, telling the villagers stories of my exploits as the starting pitcher for the New York Yankees. How I had invented the car wash, explaining what a car wash was, then opening a line of very successful car washes all over the country called Bert’s Squirts. We would marry, have children, and spend our summers in the small village where I met her and our winters on the Caspian Sea listening to The Smiths.

I had always assumed my teacher understood me, so when she sat in the seat next to me, in the midst my daydream, in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Atlantic, and asked if she could show me something, my heart started racing. The sex was starting now, I realized as she started unbuttoning her jeans. I almost began drooling, when she did something very unexpected: she pulled out a fanny pack filled with money.

“I’m freaking out about this,” she said. “The department gave me ten grand in cash and told me I need to sneak it into Russia.”

“For what?”

“The mob.”

The mob,
I thought.
Why would we have to pay off the Italians to visit Russia?

As it turns out, the Russian mob had risen up after the fall and had taken over Russia and made it a business to routinely shake down foreigners. A group of our size, from a state school, was as tantalizing as a brand-new pair of Jordache jeans must have sounded ten years earlier. So the head of our Russian Department (the guy with the fat cock) saw to it that we’d hire two younger mafiosos to chaperone us around St. Petersburg. We offered a good price, and they were going to accommodate by sending two dudes to shadow our every move and make sure that no one laid more than a casual eye on us.

“And that,” she said, “is how you do business in Russia.”

She had learned about this arrangement at the airport, and she was as nervous about the prospect of having gangsters live with us as she was about having to smuggle their payoff into the country.

My teacher by now was a sort of friend, and I felt empathetic for her plight. I, on the other hand, was bubbling. I had always envied guys like Frank Sinatra, Tupac, Snoop, and Dre. They were artists who were just as comfortable hanging out with entertainers as they were with gangsters. In some parallel universe I fancied myself like them, and now I was going to get a chance to meet actual real-life gangsters. She told me not to tell anyone, went back to her seat, and left me spinning wildly with ideas of what was to come. As I drank myself over the Atlantic, through Prague and into St. Petersburg, I made a resolution: Fuck the dumb chick in the village of morons, I was about to get in real tight with the Russian mafia!

*   *   *

I was too drunk to notice Igor when we deplaned in St. Petersburg. It was only when we checked into our hotel that I realized who he was. The head of the Russian department was there, not only to welcome us to Russia, but to introduce us to our “tour guides,” who would be following us around the city. He said they spoke little English and asked us not to engage with, bother, or talk to them. I, on the other hand, had already decided they were going to be my best friends.

I spent the rest of the orientation sizing up Igor. He actually seemed pretty normal, and he smiled more than I thought a gangster should. Igor looked like he might have been beat up a lot as a kid. He was maybe a bit rougher than an American of his age, rocking greasy jet-black hair and a constant cigarette in his mouth. But he definitely wasn’t what I expected. He said next to nothing in our meeting, leading me to believe he didn’t speak English, and excused himself to his room in the middle of the orientation.

I worried that my opportunity to introduce myself to our “chaperone” was lost, but by the grace of god, his room turned out to be directly next door to mine, across the hall from my hot teacher’s.

After orientation, I walked the streets of St. Petersburg, pretending to sightsee, but actually looking for a bottle of nice vodka and a case of beer. Extremely difficult, you can imagine, when your linguistic abilities are equal to that of the average stray canine. My four semesters of Russian were no help, except I was very used to not panicking when people talked directly to me in a foreign language. But eventually I found and overpaid for a cheap bottle of vodka, a six-pack of a beer called Baltika, and stole a lemon.

As the sun set, I grabbed my pocketknife, threw on my fanny pack, and with the nerve of a soldier fighting in a war he believes in, I knocked on Igor’s door.

When the door opened, I immediately noticed two things. First, there was a small party happening. This I hadn’t expected. I had hoped for a one-on-one with the man, where Igor would be impressed by my gregariousness, generous party favors, and friendly face. Second, there was his “casual” look—cigarette still in mouth, but wearing a wifebeater, track pants, and a most uninviting expression.

He met me with a gruff voice and I knew enough Russian to understand the gist of his muttering.

“What do you want?”

I’m sure he was expecting me to ask them to keep it down. I felt as welcomed as a lump in his nut sack. In a panic, and not really sure how I was supposed to respond, I said the first and only words that came to me in Russian, words that would define me for years to come.

I said, in Russian: “I am the machine.”

It was one of the only things I knew how to say after my four years in the department—that and “I work with cats,” which I believed loosely translated to “I work pussy.” These were things I would accrue in a moment of attention in class and drop at a party back at school. I was told later that I must have been thinking I was saying, “I am a man,” which I’m sure he could have deduced by himself, and sounds now like an extremely direct gay proposition. But regardless of why or how I said it, I said it.

I tried to read Igor’s facial expressions, hoping that through them, I could figure out what my words meant. My heart raced and I started to panic until something unexpected happened. Igor cracked a smile. In broken English he asked, “What did you just say?”

Not sure what I had said, but confident that it had made him smile the first time, I repeated it in Russian.

“I am the machine!”

His smile widened. He put his arm around my neck and in even better English than before, said, “Come in and tell my friends what you just say.”

Smiling back, I walked in with him to find a smoke-filled room of Russians. He said something to them that I couldn’t understand and looked at me, arm still around my neck. “Tell them what you say.”

Not sure if I had told him to fuck his mother, or that they could kill me and fuck me like a mother, I put all my confidence in the moment and proudly said in Russian again, “I am the machine.”

The room broke out in laughter, and Igor broke into English almost as good as mine. “So you are The Machine. Well, Machine, sit and do a toast for us.” I cracked the bottle and pulled out my knife and lemon, thinking I would introduce them to lemon drops. I got an even bigger laugh. “The Machine runs on lemons,” someone said laughingly, and the room fell apart. This, much like the rest of the conversation that night, was in Russian. I struggled to follow, but I was certain of one thing:
I was killing.
They took the lemon from me and taught me how to shoot vodka like a Russian. All I said the entire night to them in their language was, “I am the machine.”

And so began the legend of The Machine.

I don’t remember much from that night—only that Igor spoke English, played the guitar, laughed easily, and that I was The Machine. The Machine lived out of the box, and never said no. Also, The Machine was the funniest guy they had ever met mostly due to the fact that they had never seen any of the movies that I had grown up on, which inherently played to my advantage. Every night that week, under the radar, we smoked, drank, played guitar, and laughed hysterically as I dropped one-liners from
Caddyshack, Fletch,
and
Uncle Buck,
claiming them as my own.

One day, visibly hungover, my hot teacher asked where I had spent the night drinking. I told her. She was as shocked as she was intrigued. When I told her I was doing it again the next night, she asked me to take her, so I obliged. That night, I introduced her to Igor—and to The Machine—and by the end of the next week,
everyone
was partying in Igor’s room.

The interesting thing to know about Igor was that he wasn’t a hard-core gangbanger. He was a guy misplaced by Russia’s failing government. He had been brought up not to dream of becoming famous or a millionaire, but with simple goals like finding a wife, having babies, and living a carefree life, taken care of by the government. Then things went caca. Now, with a new government in place, he and men like him suddenly had to fend for themselves, stand out from the crowd, and make a name for themselves in order to achieve the life that had been guaranteed to them at birth. So Igor did what many men with few options and less hope do: he got involved in illegal activity. Igor was a good guy—a guy who knew how to read the streets of Russia, who could tell two minutes in advance when a problem was going to happen. One time at a flea market, Igor grabbed me and my buddy John by the arm and told us in Russian, “Let’s go.” As we walked away, three men jumped out of the car and ruthlessly beat another man into submission in front of a bookstore, then put a gun in his mouth and began shouting. Igor saw it coming, and he wanted no part of it. I, on the other hand, in typical gawker-American fashion, was pissed I hadn’t gotten a picture. I told him next time he saw something like that to let us stay. But that was not Igor—his path clearly was the path of least resistance.

*   *   *

I may have been wrong initially about how hard-core a gangster Igor was, but one thing was for certain: The Machine was making a name for himself. I’d meet Igor’s friends and he would rejoice in telling them about the outlandish things The Machine had said or done the night before, like the time The Machine had won four straight games of billiards against the house pool shark and begun singing and dancing with his pool cue, swinging it wildly like a ninja-samurai. It didn’t matter that I had taken it directly from Tom Cruise’s performance in
The Color of Money,
because they had never seen that movie. All they knew was The Machine was spontaneous and improvisational, a wild card who was fun to be around.

Midway through our stay, I was informed that we were taking a trip to Moscow. Great: see the countryside, maybe I’d bump into that girl in the sundress on the bike; she’d love The Machine. But to my chagrin I found out that Igor would not be accompanying us. When I asked Igor why, he said very simply, “One group runs the trains, and a different group runs Moscow. You’ll have different escorts for both, but not me.” The next day as he walked us to the train, he told me that he had talked to our new escorts and that they were excited to meet me. Before I knew it, I was eye to chest with our two new Russian bandits, Igor and Igor. (I’m assuming when boys were born in communist Russia it was probably best to keep their names in the state-approved comfort zone. All I’m saying is I didn’t exactly meet a lot of Millhouses.) In Russian he told them, “Guys this is The Machine, this is the guy I was telling you about. If you give The Machine vodka, you’ll have a great time. Take care of him. You’ll laugh all the way to Moscow.”

They had smiles on their faces, and while they spoke English better than I did Russian, I asked another classmate, a guy we’ll call Big John, to hang with us so we could communicate. Despite his size, John was shy and not a big drinker. He was funny, nice, an all-around sweet guy who loved quoting comedians. But even more importantly, his Russian was impeccable and he looked like a defensive lineman.

He looked at me as they told us to follow them. “They said something about wanting us to sit with them on the train, and the bigger of the two keeps looking at you and saying he can’t wait to play with The Machine.”

We left our friendly Igor and said good-bye to my class as John and I headed to first class, in the front car of the train with our two new Igors. This was like a horrible Richard Grieco movie, I said to John, only in real life.

Their cabin was much nicer than the ones we passed. The ones our classmates were in had two sets of bunk beds with a three-foot-by-seven-foot breezeway between them, while ours was palatial. When we walked in, the first thing we saw was a spread of cheese, meats, bread, and lots of booze. I felt like royalty—and acted the part. There were two couches, a table, a bathroom, and a bed. The best part was that as the train took off, the people who worked on the train, in the know, came back to pay their respects. When the conductor came back to our cabin to introduce himself, John translated.

“He said it would be an honor to have a drink of vodka with The Machine.” And then under his breath, “What have you told these people?”

We took our shots, and then the conductor ripped the stripes off the shoulder of his conductor’s uniform and handed them to me, “A present for The Machine.”

My jaw dropped as the man who was supposed to be driving this moving train—the same man who I just drank vodka with, the man who had defiled his uniform—anticipated my reaction.

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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