Too quiet.

Almost like a trap.

I arrived in Vodkaberg, as I will continue to call it, about the first week of September, 2000.  It was scorching hot.

By the second week, you needed a jacket to go out in the evening.

By the beginning of October it was below freezing.

By the middle of October it was WELL below freezing.

An unusually cold winter, as it turned out.

Anyway.

Before I started work, I had to leave the country and get a proper working visa, as the one my former employers in Desolationgrad had gotten me was about to expire.  This meant I had to go to Estonia on a Visa Run.

Wow!  An Eastern European visa run!

The school translator took me to buy a train ticket to Moscow and then a plane ticket from Mosocw to Tallinn, Estonia.

With the usual alcoholic friendliness endemic to Russians on trains, the middle-aged engineer in the compartment with me insisted on sharing his vodka and sausage and bread. 

I guess it was the sausage.

Shortly after we all got into our beds for the evening, I began to feel nauseous.

I barely made it to the toilet in time to puke.  I soiled my best combed-cotton Banana Republic trousers. 

I spent the rest of the evening racing to the toilet to puke.  I couldn't even hold water down. 

The heaves subsided sometime around dawn, and I was met at the train station, week and shaky, by a young Kazak man who worked for the language school chain I was employed by.  I was taken to an apartment to hang out, rest and shower.  The Kazak man scolded me for the bombing of Kosovo.  I apologized and went to the toilet and puked up my breakfast.

They got me on the plane in the afternoon, and I arrived in Tallin, Estonia about 4:00 in the afternoon. There was free Internet in the airport.  That impressed me.  I made it to a cheap hostel in the Medievally cool center and after chowing down at McDonalds (the best food to eat when you've had diarrhea -- lots of salt and starch) collapsed into my bed and slipped in and out of sleep while listening to the Canadian and American backpackers talk about how great everything was.

The next morning I was feeling better, and I got my visa application put in with surprisingly little fuss, then went and did some sightseeing.  Tallinn is kind of like a smaller, cleaner, less-touristed, slightly Nordic version of Prague.  It was a bright sunny fall day there and I enjoyed my walk around.  In the evening I went to a nightclub near the hostel called the Club Hollywood (there's a Club Hollywood in most of cities of the world, except Hollywood).  I was surprised and pleased when I picked up an only slightly pudgy blonde and made out with her in the alley outside my hostel (coudln't take her inside, damn it). 

The next evening I was off again, and when I landed in Mosocw the next day at nine at night, I was again installed in an apartment, this one minus the Kazak man.  There was nothing to eat there but one package of orange-flavoured cookies.  I ate them and shivered underneath a thin blanket all night. 

I made it back to Vodkaberg on the train the next day, and a few days later started my new job.

The staff was nice to me.  I had one colleague, a middle-aged woman.  The students were nice to me.  I found a small kitten on the street and took it in.  I was feeling very emotional during this period. This was my fifth city in my third country in less than two years.  I was burned out.  I was trying to be nice to everybody, and worked hard at my job.

And the landlady's daughter was after me.

She made no secret of this fact.  She was barely eighteen, I'd recently passed my 31st birthday.  She was studying English in my Level Six class, and lived not far from where I did.

October got colder and colder, darker and darker.  The landlady's daughter was at my beck and call, asking to help me with my shopping, with my laundry, anything and everything.  She would invite me out for dinner on Friday evenings, show up uninvited on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Having had plenty of trouble with women of all nationalities and ages, I thought that getting involved with the landlady's daughter would be a good way to absolutely fuck up my new home and my new job.  I vowed not to do it.  I could scarecely afford to move suddenly again.

But the problem was, I liked her.

She was funny, intelligent.  Cute.  Nice.

One Saturday afternoon she came over to say hello.  I was watching a film on the old video player she'd given me.  X MEN, as I recall.

She was lying next to me giving me cow eyes.  The first kiss was iminent.

Then the phone started ringing. 

I decided not to answer it.  Probably a certain annoying male student, who always wanted me to check essays he had written.

 But it kept ringing.  Eight.  Ten.  Twelve.  Fifteen times.

"Oh shit.  That's your mother isn't it?"

"Yes, probably.  Don't answer it."

"And she told you not to come here."

"It doesn't matter."

"No, she could just throw me out on the street, that's all.  And she lives five minutes away.  Get your bag, you're going home now."

She didn't need much prompting.

Near as I can figure, we must have been going down in the elevator the time her mother was coming up.

I walked the landlady's daughter home and came back.  The landlady was in the corridor talking to the neighbors.  She greeted me curtly.

Sigh.  I seem fated to be blamed for doing wrong even when I don't do it.

So I decided to do it, eventually.

I kissed the landlady's daughter on October 31, 2001.   We never got horizontal, as it were, because we couldn't be alone in the apartment for more than a short time.  The landlady had instructed the neighbors to keep a close watch on us and tell her about our comings and goings. 

Towards the beginning of December she stopped calling me and returning my calls, and started saying she was too busy to see me.

She'd satisfied her curiosity, I suppose. 

So the heart of winter came, me and the cat alone.  My lack of Russian prevented me from becoming good friends with most of my students, who were mostly level one and two. 

In December the snows came, piles and piles of it.  It came and didn't go until the following April.  One foot, two feet, three feet, four feet. 

 I met another American about my age working at another school in the city and we had some fun at nightclubs.  He went to Moscow for the Christmas holidays though so I spent New Year's Eve alone playing DUKE NUKE 'EM on the Playstation.  Then he moved to St. Petersberg in January, so that was pretty much me in solitude again.  

I played Playstation with a vengeance while the snow piled up and temperatures in January plummeted to -30 Celsius.  I'd bought a Playstation in Thailand in 1999, and managed to cart it with me to Desolationgrad, Prague, and here. Games only cost a dollar at the Pirate Market, a big parking lot on the edge of town where teenagers sold pirated videos, games, and software.  At one point I was playing so much TOMB RAIDER that my students complained that I didn't seem prepared for class anymore.

I'd wanted some peace and quiet after a couple of chaotic years, but it was getting too fucking peaceful and quiet.  I was beginning to feel like Jack Torrance in THE SHINING.  Perhaps some screams would dispel the deafening silence.   

I think it was about this time I got penis cancer.

I've had a small bump the size of a pinhead on my penis for as long as I can remember. 

Once a week I shlepped out to an Internet cafe a twenty-minute tram ride from my house to send email to my friends in America.  One of them reported that his brother-in-law had recently discovered that he had cancer in two places on his dick.  The only symptoms were small purple bumps.

That got me thinking about penis cancer.  I researched it on the Internet.

Naturally I was not comforted.

I spent a long time looking at the thing on my penis.  You look closely, there's all sorts of things you wonder about.  Shit, were those lines suppose to be there?  Man. . . the little bump.  It had a dark spot on it.  Isn't that what they usually warned you about, moles that were two colors?  I'd never had it looked at.  Dear God.  I probably had penis cancer.

I'd been having unusual stiffenings and pains in my knees and ankles lately too.

Oh god, maybe it was metastasizing.

I approached a student who was a former gynecologist and asked him if he could make me an appointment with a reliable skin doctor.  I had a big mole in my armpit I wanted to have removed, too.

The Russian hospital reminded me of the ancient crumbling middle school I'd attended, the last year of classes before it was condemned.  It was not hectic or scary or anything.  Just a lot of old people with bandages sitting around in hallways waiting and paint peeling off the walls.

I had a contact though, and didn't have to wait.  My student took me in to see the short, fat, middle aged woman, who burned off the mole on my armpit and then checked out my dick tumor through a magnifying glass.

My student translated for her.  "She says it's probably genital warts."

"I've had it since before I had sex."

She considered.  "Maybe a genetic wart then."  She recommended some medicine to burn it off.

My student went to say hello to his old boss, the Head of the Department.

When he came back, he told me that the Head of the Department had asked that I come back to see him next week.  He said that his colleague's diagnosis was probably not very sound, and warts on the genitals should be considered carefully before being burned off.

Oh dear God.  I still had penis cancer.

It was a tense week.  Okay, being fatally ill was one thing.  But dying by inches, from the penis outwards?  A nightmare.

I recall it being a bright sunny day when we went to see the Head of the Gynecology Department.  His office was musty, sunny, full of books.  He was a huge burly man, balding on top but with luxurious hair spilling out of his sleeves and the neck of his sweater.  My student translated as he asked me some questions about how long I'd had the bump, had it gotten bigger, did it hurt or bleed, etc. 

He asked to see my penis.  It was contracted to about the size of a walnut.

He grabbed it and pulled it, squeezed it, pressed it, scraped the bump with his fingernails.

The sunlight shining off his bald head will always live in my memory.  He consulted with another man in rapid-fire Russian, and with my student.

Dear God.  They were discussing amputation options.

Then they all began laughing.

"He says it is in inverted follicle.  Totally harmless.  However, he says he can tell you have. . . .well, the Russian idiom is that you have 'cockroaches in your head' on this issue.  He can remove it, but it would be an even greater potential source of disease in that case."

It was a new world I walked out into.  The student and I went and drank vodka, and it tasted damn good.

So that's how I survived my first Russian girl, my first Russian winter, and penis cancer.

Things got better.  The snow melted.  I got a young incredibly hot blonde girlfriend, and other women were suddenly pouring out of the woodwork on me.  Even the landlady's daughter came back for Round Two.

And my penis was fine.

Just fine.

RETuRN To RAmBLinGZ MeNU