Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (8 page)

I smiled back graciously, thanking him profusely, as he sat with us and stared at me. The whole time I thought two things: (1) who is driving the train?; and (2) these Machine stories might have gotten out of control.

We killed the only bottle of vodka we had before the train was even out of St. Petersburg. Everyone who worked on the train had said hello and either been introduced to The Machine or had already heard stories about The Machine. Things were falling into place. John and I laughed big laughs as we shared jokes with whoever was in our cabin. This was exactly how I had envisioned it. I was Frank Sinatra, holding court with my gangsters. The entertainer that could turn thugs into puppies. My name had made the rounds with the Russian mob, and I was
the
guy to party with. While John and I were getting buzzed, Igor and Igor seemed to have hollow legs. With no vodka, they started in on a bottle of peach schnapps, offering us swigs straight out of the bottle. When I declined, they smiled. “Then we go to the bar.”

I’m an extravagant man. I enjoy the finer things that come with whatever celebrity I have. This, however, was a type of respect and attention I, to this day, have never seen. As the four of us walked to the bar car, we walked as
mobsters,
just like in the movies, and everyone knew it. Doves flew beside us, a breeze blew back our coats to show our holstered guns, we flicked cigarettes behind our back, to set big explosions. And I was the guy out front. It’s like when you see a hot chick with an old guy or a fat black dude and you think, “Who
is
he?” We walked into the bar car, and people stared. I strutted like a peacock with a big dick.

In a voice that was loud enough to quiet the room, the bigger of the two Igors said in Russian, “Machine, get bread.”

He started to rattle off his list of party rations in Russian as I walked behind the bar to find them, and it dawned on me: I understood what he’d said. I was learning, for the first time in my life. Before I could congratulate myself, the next order came. “Machine, grab cheese.”

I turned to John excitedly. “I know what they are saying!
I can speak Russian!
” A visibly buzzed John smiled back at me and said in Russian, “Congratulations.”

Now, behind the bar, with a loaf of bread in my arm and looking for cheese, I waited for Big Igor’s next order. “Machine, grab more vodka.”

I was giddy as a two-year-old. “I know what you are saying!”

“Good.” He wasn’t as impressed as I was. While everyone else had been learning the language through flash cards and textbooks, here I was picking it up my way, by joining the mafia.

“What else?” I said proudly. “Give me another one.”

“Grab the money.”

“What?” I said, smiling.

“Grab the money!”

And suddenly time stood still.

I remember being hunched over, still looking for cheese. When I looked up, I saw the bartender standing against the wall, not making eye contact. He was scared. As I looked around the room, I saw that
everyone
had that same look. Everyone was scared. Even John.

Before I could argue, John spoke up.

“He said grab the money.”

“I don’t want to grab the money.”

“I think you should just do it.”

Standing half erect, I uttered my last word as an innocent man:

“Huh?”

Big Igor was busy going through the pockets of the people in the bar, as he shouted the same command over his shoulder, this time slightly annoyed.

I looked at John. I looked at the bartender. I took the money.

I grabbed a couple bottles of vodka, gave up on the cheese, and we left. As we made our way out of the bar car, I made eye contact with a couple of kids in our class who had seen it all. For a split second I felt cool—cool like the first time you smoked pot, or drank beers in high school. Outlaw cool. As we walked past the coach cabins to our cabin, the cool feeling that comes with committing a felony quickly faded to panic. I was the man behind the bar. I was the one with the bread and the vodka. I was the one who had displayed the spoils of our treachery for all to see.

When we got back to our first-class cabin, things were a little more solemn and the drinking escalated. My teacher came after hearing of our escapades, more to check in than to reprimand us.

I was silently hoping the two Igors would pass out and that I could return to my classmates in coach, but my dreams were dashed by the entrance of a teacher I will simply call SHE. SHE was a substitute chaperone who did not much like me, even before I robbed the train. SHE was in her fifties and fancied me a stupid frat boy, which SHE was mostly right about. SHE opened the door to our cabin and began berating me in front of the two Igors.

“You are done! It’s over! You, mister, have a huge lesson to learn in how to be an ambassador for your university and for your country. Stand up right now, the both of you and let’s go! Because I—”

Before SHE could finish, Big Igor took a sip of vodka, spit it in her eyes, and said, “No one talks to The Machine like that.”

John and I were terrified of what would happen. But SHE was as scared as we were. It was like witnessing a tidal wave firsthand and realizing you are not in as much control as you think you are. SHE said nothing, looked at neither of us, frozen.

Igor shut the door in her face and smiled at both of us. “Fuck that bitch. This is Russia,” he nonchalantly said. “When it gets dark, we’ll have good time.”

To our dismay, the debauchery hadn’t even started. Igor and Igor had keys to the entire train and we were about to play Butch Cassidy to those other Sundance Kids. John looked at me in horror as he listened in on their conversation.

“We’re robbing everyone,” he said with a forced smile.

“Huh?” I said, smiling back.

“I think we are robbing the entire train.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

And sure enough, as the sun set and conversations subsided to snores, the four of us were off like the Newton Boys.

As we walked out of their cabin, John pulled me aside. “We can’t rob the train, but we can’t leave them either, or really bad shit might happen to our classmates.”

So we accompanied them, forcing vodka down their throats at every opportunity, while the Igors, with our help, robbed our classmates.

I have to say as terrified as I was of the situation, the Igors proved to be the two least insightful thieves I’d ever seen work. Big Igor would unlock the door, not so quietly I might add, while little Igor would crawl on his stomach into the room and go through whatever bags were on the floor. Big Igor would go through their above-floor shit, and if anyone woke up, Big Igor would spit vodka in their faces (now his signature move). Luckily for our class, Igor and Igor were too drunk to do it well. We half-robbed roughly everyone before the rest of our class woke up and we darted off.

The rest of the evening is blurry. I remember John and I decided to continue our attempt to get the Igors as drunk as possible so they’d pass out, which meant getting
ourselves
as drunk as humanly possible in the process. The train was moving fast. I know this because I have a vivid memory of taking turns holding each other by the thighs, hanging halfway out the windows, feeling the cold air punch our faces. We smoked a ton of cigarettes, we took pictures of me taking a shit, and at one point, Igor and Igor left, telling John they had to make their rounds. Not sure what there “rounds” entailed, we rejoiced in our few free minutes of unfiltered conversation. We even went back to our class to make sure no one was hurt, then caught back up with the two Igors to continue our partying in first class.

We approached Moscow as the sun started to come up, and my teacher opened our cabin door. Igor and Igor were semiconscious so she quickly broke the news. The class had been robbed, SHE had been assaulted, and the police had been notified. She explained that they would be waiting for John and me on the platform when we arrived.

After she left, we tried our best to tell Igor and Igor the bad news, only to have them laugh it off. “Deece is fahking Russia!” they said in English. “Fahk police!”

Their reassurance didn’t quite have the calming effect it was meant to.

“We
fahk
police in mouth!” All I could do was wonder what kind of trouble they had gotten in while they had been making their rounds—whether we would be held responsible for those crimes, too, or just the felonies we had committed. I prayed that “
Fahk
police in mouth” was a euphemism we weren’t familiar with, like “He got his ass handed to him.”

My mind spiraled as I imagined my life with John in the gulag. We’d start by being bitches, living in the mud like animals, being owned by older gangsters who had been there since Stalin. We’d get tattoos from tire rubber on our cocks, like good Russian gangster bitches. We would probably date each other on the DL for nostalgia and conversation, while maybe dating stronger men for protection? And that would be just the first year. This was not how I planned on spending my third junior year.

When the train came to a full stop, I opened my eyes hoping to find a passed-out Igor and Igor whom John and I could sneak past, but as fate would have it they were just starting that day’s drinking, smoking fresh cigarettes, and laughing loudly. I opened our door and looked out the window onto the train platform where I saw my destiny awaiting. Two cops stood dutifully taking a report from my classmates, most of whom were in their pajamas, some of whom were crying, others somehow still covered in vodka.

I looked back at John, who had his head in his hands, then at our Russians, whose fate I’d be tied to for the rest of my life. They realized what I was looking at and came to the window only to laugh. Big Igor lit a fresh cigarette, and with a bottle of vodka in hand, headed out of the train onto the platform to offer a counterstatement, one I got the feeling he had
not
been working on.

My class backed away at his arrival. Again, life slowed down. Little Igor walked out of the train and took position next to Big Igor as John and I watched them present their defense, which had more finger-pointing and shouting than I’d have liked.

John looked at me with fright and said, “I think Igor just called his mom a goat. Let’s hope that’s a compliment in Russia.”

Then the finger-pointing took aim at us. It was followed by head shakes, which was followed by shouting, which was followed by more arguing than I was comfortable with, all of it vaguely steered in our direction. The shouting escalated and the cops motioned for John and me to come to them as they barked out some inaudible command in Russian, which, to two kids who grew up watching movies like
Rocky IV
and
Red Dawn,
sounded ominous. As we slowly made our way, the cops began walking to meet us. Their stares never faltered.

I looked at John and said, “I won’t say a word, you speak Russian, explain to them clearly what happened, and please get us out of this.”

I took a deep breath as we met them. John, in his best I-fucked-up body language, tried to take pole position, only to be shoved off to the side. It was clear: I was to be the patsy. I was Keyser Söze.

I tensed as one of the two cops grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the side. It was a moment of clarity—one when you know your life is about to change forever, when your asshole gets ice cold and you realize just how much you fucked up a great life. It’s the moment they find the pound of coke in your suitcase, or the hash taped to your body, or the tumor in your brain. Life as you knew it will always be a depressing memory. That was then, this is now.

They waited for what seemed like an eternity, then all of a sudden the smaller of the two cops cleared his throat and leaned in toward me.

He whispered, “So I understand you are The Machine?”

I said nothing. I nodded gently. I looked over to Igor and Igor, who were too busy making fun of my class to notice us. I looked at John, who looked back for a hint of what was going on, when the taller of the two cops started laughing.

“Tonight,” he said, “you party with us.”

I leaned in and gently whispered, “We are not in trouble?”

He looked over his shoulder, then back to me, and whispered back, “No, fuck that bitch, this is Russia!”

Things happen on trains, he told me, and he mentioned also that he had my hotel information and would call us later that night. John and I got on a bus with a class full of people who hated us and spent the rest of the day touring the Kremlin, as hungover as Yeltsin must have been the day after his inauguration.

I would like to say that I got into some hijinks that night with the two cops, just like I had on the train. That I have an awesome story about driving their cop car around after going to a strip club with their friend who was a plastic surgeon, and shooting machine guns in a forest, contemplating the possibilities of doing the same only while getting a blow job. To be honest with you, if I had known that night I would still be telling this story at forty years old, I might have killed a man.

But it didn’t happen that way. That night John and I lay in our beds in a room we were sharing and simply listened to the phone ring, over and over and over.

5.

Givin’ Out Spankin’s

No matter how successful I may get, I’ll always be a failed musician, sitting at a concert double fisting overpriced twenty-ounce beers, wishing it was me on stage brooding soulfully to my fans. I had my shot once, but I let it slip through my fingers like cocaine on a roller coaster. I’m sure that ultimately I would never have been taken seriously as a musician. The low-rise leather pants never fit, and they still don’t. (Turns outs a size 40 in leathers is a bit pricey—lots of cows.) But to know that rock stardom was within reach, and I let it go, will always loom over my head.

I learned to play guitar a couple months after losing my virginity in eleventh grade. My dad bought me a Martin acoustic and my childhood friend John Noonan, who was now king of the alt scene at our high school, taught me how to play “She Talks to Angels.” I was hooked. Every day we’d hang out at lunch in the yearbook room, and he and his friends would show me the basics of the guitar and debate who was better, Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure, all while subtly inspiring me to grow my hair out. My repertoire started to grow from there. “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (a panty-dropper at the time), “Brown-Eyed Girl,” “Wish You Were Here”—Base Camp for every high-school kid who at one point planned on summiting the peaks of college pussy. I was always funny, but the soft sensitive musician was a new hat for me and I liked the shade it gave my face. I graduated high school, and my guitar and I moved to Tallahassee. I was still a hack, even then, but like Dirk Diggler’s dick, I’d whip it out at parties, bonfires, any chance I had to impress girls.