Zaza Burchuladze
adibas
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adibas – 1. fake adidas; 2. surrogate or imitation in general; 3. any fake or falsified thing, situation or fact, etc.
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01. MORNING MULTIMEDIA Bobo can do anything. She cooks pasta fabulously, has seen all the seasons of Lost, and drives me crazy the way she sucks; she does it elaborately, with great care. Bobo. At the bare mention of the name her firm nipples, cream-rubbed body, slender waistline and dexterous tongue loom before my eyes. I lay in bed alone. The cell phone shows half past nine. I slept two hours longer beyond usual time. All I remember from my dream is that my brain was shining like a light bulb and colored sparks were racing through its convolutions the way signals flash through a fiberoptic cable. A glass of pasteurized milk is on the nightstand at my bed, a plate with a pill of Centrum and a croissant are next to the glass. The way I figure it out is that this will become my morning diet in the near future. Did I really sleep so tight that I couldn’t hear Bobo get up, get dressed and run down for the croissant? As soon as I reach for the croissant, Aphex jumps up on the bed, wags the tail fast: right and left–the picture is blurred. He licks my face, too, trying to stick his dry warm tongue through into my lips, sort of long time no see. I know the way he counterfeits joy. All he wants to get from me is just the croissant. He lies down on my chest, fawningly looking into my eyes. ‘Fuck off’, I say. ‘And now!’ He sneaks away dismally, head down, tail between legs, sits on Bobo’s pillow, looking fixedly at the croissant. He’s got really big watery eyes, just like Amélie from the movie Amélie. He wants to snatch the croissant from my hand, dares not do it though. I feel for him. This croissant is the best in Tbilisi, baked in the newly opened bakery on the ground floor of the building I live in. Inside they put cherry jam, raisins, marzipan, chocolate, farmer cheese … and they are more than just croissants, they are Goldberg Variations performed by Gould. Aphex looks hard into my eyes, trying to soften me up. To no avail though. His Lacrimosa doesn’t work today. We both figure out that he can’t goof me, so he wouldn’t get a crumb of it. The airy-soft bakery dough melts in my mouth, then slides down and warms up the inside of my belly. I take off the blanket and look at my blood-shot cock; it lies over my stomach and swells up in a sort of funny way. I feel it throbbing, can’t take my eyes off it. My funny Valentine–that’s just the way Bobo named it. There is something hypnotic about beholding a hard-on. Are stomach and cock all that really matters? Sure thing. Even Aphex gets it: he shifts his eyes between the two. I hold the croissant in one hand, my funny Valentine in the other. I swallow the Centrum pill, drink it down with the milk. Then I run to the bathroom. Aphex, sore as hell that he didn’t get the croissant, goes at me barking, sort of trying to bite my heel. The plasma screen is on in the living-room. TV1000 shows Pan’s Labyrinth.1 Can’t show, that is. The frame gets stuck. The white monster puts its palms with an eye on each of them to its face. The half of the frame is lost in pixels. No signal to display–pops up on the screen. This cable TV has been really goofing up things recently. I flip the channel to Imedi. A tank column rattles along some highway. A rapid speech of a voice-over: ‘… general Kulakhmetov calls 3
it misinformation and strongly denies that Russian tanks entered Tbilisi. Nevertheless, high-intensity shooting has been heard for as long as one hour in Didi Digomi2 …’ First thing I get under a hot shower, thoroughly foam myself with a scrub up to my neck, wax granules and coconut flakes enjoyably massaging my body. I cool the water down to icy cold and brush my teeth in my own way. The two things I’ll never give up are having a cold morning shower and brushing my teeth until the gums start bleeding. The hard is still on, anyway. With the sweetish odor of the scrub Bobo comes to me again. I don’t give a damn that she wouldn’t swallow cum; even now I would gladly cum in her mouth. I separate women into two categories: the ones who swallow and the others who keep cum in their mouths. I can tell from experience that the latter blow better than the former. Sure enough it isn’t a law of nature in any way. I just know it by experience. Take Bobo. She doesn’t swallow but her blowjob is heavenly though. As I shoot in, her mouth gets filled with cum while her heart prays. That is what I call a true blowjob, a discipline of saints: cum in mouth, prayer in heart and a cock in hand. I picked up Bobo the day before yesterday at a party in Tsavkisi.3 That was at a summer house of a mutual acquaintance with plenty of black candles, boozy delirium, love chiromancy, rave and lousy ecstasy. Since that day I learned that she was a determined character, preferred black clothes and plain talk, her Skype nick was alien_style, had a pierce ring in her navel–a tiny platinum embryo, and loved electronic music. She’s got a firm body, upstanding tits and tight ass. However, there is something vamp-like about her; she is sexier rather than pretty. She was standing alone by the loudspeaker sipping Red Bull through a straw. I pushed through the ecstasy hung up dancers to get to the speakers … and accidentally bumped into her. ‘Sorry’, shouted I. The way she smiled I figured out she hadn’t heard me. No wonder though; I didn’t hear myself through the basses bursting from the speaker. ‘Borena’, she shouted back. I thought she was just kidding. ‘Borena?’ She nodded: ‘Just Bobo’. … After we tried and failed to dance into the beat of the music, we happened as if by magic to be in the next room where, jaws askew, we zealously necked for a long time. As though in a trance, I figured ourselves fucking right there on the sofa. Then we exchanged all the tunes from our cell phones through Bluetooth, laughed a lot over plenty of bullshit, bitching about everything and everybody. At long last we cuddled up and fell asleep right there, just like in TV series; the camera moves back, romantic music is on, titles appear on the screen. I figure that everything is settling down on its own. Bobo’s going to enter my life once and for all. Just as complete renovation wraps around a shabby, shared apartment. I, for one, am willing to accept all that she’s going to bring into my life: 4
Johnny Depp movies, Centrum, Darth Vader poster and gentle hysterics before her period. I put on a bathrobe. Aphex lifts his rear leg for me to see, defiantly pees on the fridge and runs away far enough to be on the safe side. That’s the shitty way he pays me back. Happy for what he has done, he can hardly wait to see my reaction. Well, he’ll be waiting till cows come home. The bastard is strained and stiff all over just like Antonio Gades4 before performance and waits for me to shout an order to dance flamenco. I pretend that nothing is up and coolly wipe his pee off with napkins. I just wonder if all Chihuahuas terrorize their masters like this, or rather I have Aphex spoilt head over heel. Out of the corner of my eye I see him watching me with amazement; he realizes that the game is up. I open the fridge. As soon as the inner light bulb is on, it dawns on me that in my dream my head was lit just with the same bulb. Not like cocaine when you take it through the nose and it blows up your brain like hell. It was a quite bulb, just like a good old lampshade in sweet grandma’s bedroom. The TV is heard from the living-room: ‘… the motorized rifle battalion of the nd 42 division is headed downtown along the right embankment of Mtkvari5 River. The battalion includes 80 units of heavy machinery and 30 tanks …’ A paperback book and the open laptop of Bobo are on the kitchen table by the window. A light vibration of the laptop is carried through to the table. I see the book for the first time ever, a shadow-figure on the cover:
Gone with the balloon. Seems like some modern novel, anything from horror to postmodern. First thing I do I visit YouTube, search it for any crap whatever. I download Cannibal Corpse6 hoping George Fisher’s raucous would soften the hardon. I sit down on a chair, lift the hems of my bathrobe, stare at my stiff cock and think about Bobo. It’s hard to have a hard on and not to think of Bobo, or, in contrast, to think of Bobo and not to have a hard-on. The Cannibals fail to soften it down. Fisher wheezes: Draining the snot, I rip out the eyeees … rotates his head propellerlike, his long loose hair waving about. I give Bobo a buzz, all to no avail though. The mobile phone is blocked or out of coverage. Where could she have gone? I look outside through the open window. A herd of bicyclists rides along the highway. The bicyclists, bent forward from their seats, look tired, heavily pressing the pedals down. Due to their aerodynamic suits, stuck to their bodies, the egg-shaped helmets and mirror glasses, they look like aliens. A gray Ford Sierra drives behind the herd. I snuggle up in my chair and shoot a photo of my cock with my cell phone. Then I check the quality of the photo on the cell screen and one more time become certain that three mega pixels can’t even get close to the real-life picture. I still send the multimedia to Bobo. A winged envelope flies away on the screen: message sent to Bobo. 5
02. TOY TRIANGLES ‘Two Mojitos’ I address the bartender. His name is Paata. Everybody calls him Bob though. Just a Bob Marley thing. I never call him this way, by the way. His faked reggae style gets on my nerves. A marihuana-colored shirt on, Jamaican pigtails, leather beads and loose shorts get him out of the big picture. Bob nods quickly and smiles at me. I hate to be flirted in a so untalented way. While he slices a lime and breaks up ice, I walk over to a plastic chair under a sun-shade and seat myself. The Vake Swim Pool is bustling with silicon-breasted widows of mobsters, businessmen’s wives with cellulite-heavy waists, cum-eating Barbie Girls with huge sun-glasses, rave party gays with their navels pierced, mama’s boys with all their dreams come true, young firm bodies just ready to be sent to the Eurovision Song Contest. Smells of water, cosmetics, fresh chlorine and disinfectants mix with each other. The water in the pool dazzles and blinds. The speakers pour out neutral house music. You can’t love the music like that. It can’t get at you, either, though. You two, you exist separately. I should think, the music like this is specifically composed to be played in spas and lifts of luxury hotels. One never knows when it starts or ends. It is not 10.00 a.m. yet and the sun nastily sizzles. Nobody is swimming though. Heatrelaxed and white as a sheet Tbilisians lounge in their beach chairs under sun-shades. All one is supposed to do here is just baking in the open swim pool; swimming is not looked with favor here. Just Tako stands out against the background with her chocolate-colored skin. She stands bare-footed at the edge of the pool with her eyes closed and her back turned to me. Her bathing suit can hardly be made out among the Y-shaped panties and thread-tied tiny triangles that cover almost nothing on her. These geometric figures are so merged with her suntan that one can hardly see them on her body. Even her tattoo is hidden behind the suntan. By the way, she had tattooed a small target just two weeks earlier in the middle of her nape. She had painted that tattoo in this unfashionable spot for the simple reason that next to her clitoris her nape is one of her most erogenous zones, sort of an external GSpot. She seems to have gone too far for that matter just like a teenaged girl for whom remonstrating with the world, declaring her own parents the bitterest enemies, frequent masturbation and making hasty decisions are a common thing. How can I tell her all this stuff, anyway? By the way, a couple of weeks ago I almost showed off hillbilly style, too. I mean, I came very close to having a tattoo painted on some spot of my body. You know, I’d always felt like having a big Avatar-like arrow painted on my shaved head: right from the nape all the way over the head and down to the place where my brows meet. I’d have had my body tattooed all over long ago, just like some yakuza. However, the thing is, all that lasts for ever, annoys the hell out of me. While the tattoo master was working Tako’s nape, I was sitting in a leather armchair in a tattoo salon looking through some tattoo catalogue. The range seemed to include almost everything from Incan-Aztec images and bar codes to SS-men’s symbols and pictures of Che. There were mottled ones like computer tomography and uniform ones just 6
like naïve stencils. You could see some funny ones as well. Like, a Dao monad, an industrial symbol-logo yin and yang and der grüne punkt intertwined just in one tattoo.
I liked God of war–Huitzilopochtli who, as a matter of fact, happened to be a humming bird, armed to the teeth and dressed in knight’s armor. Looked like Bumblebee that is transformable into the Chevrolet Camaro Iron Giant. Then I checked on it in Wikipedia and learned that in olden times even people were offered up as sacrifices to this tiny little bird. Well, if I were sure that I’d have got myself understood right, I’d have gladly sacrificed one half of Tbilisi to some bird. Even a chicken would be just as good. I find that I am not alone near the bar. Some couple sits at a plastic table with glasses half-filled with some juice. The box of Vogue is just around, with a lighter inside. The woman is sitting the way that all I can see is her fragile shoulders, a thin arm relying on the table and her foot heel under the chair. The heel exposes a piece of yellowed, warped and scaly skin of her feet. She is whispering something into the man’s ear, her body bent slightly forward. The man nods now and again, typing a message on his phone. I have no idea why I recollect in detail the dream I had that morning. In that dream I was in Krtsanisi Residence of Shevardnadze7 having an interview with him. He was wearing conventional clothes as usual: a blue suit and a sky-blue shirt. Just on his feet he had rosy plush slippers with rabbit ears. We were sitting in chairs at a low table with a bottle of Borjomi8 and two glasses. I was holding a voice recorder in my hand for some reason. The leather of the chair and the skin of Shevardnadze were the same color. I couldn’t tell where Shevardnadze finished and where the chair started. He reminded me of Big Lebowski from the movie The Big Lebowski. He wouldn’t move his lips. Just as a clock-work puppet, sounds would ooze out of his mouth. Sedately he would recollect: ‘… once being a secretary general I visited Parajanov9 in his small half-wooden house in Mtatsminda10. He was very happy to see me and a little worried at the same time, as based on his own words he had nothing to treat me to. He excused himself and said he would drop in at his neighbor’s for a minute just to get some food. I stopped him saying that if I needed food, I would have brought some along myself. He kept plenty of strange things in that apartment of him, just like a whole museum. Later I moved to Moscow. The Armenians, however, moved the museum to Yerevan in secrecy. Everything that belonged to Parajanov’s house, they managed to move away piece by piece and eventually opened a wonderful museum in Yerevan. Some time later I put them to shame which they defied saying that Parajanov was Armenian just like them, so they were not ashamed a bit.’ The flashback vanishes. Tako has a small set of earphones stuck into her ear. She is holding an iPod, its white jack looking even whiter on the background of her 7
suntan than it really is. Just like a milky stripe along a bar of chocolate. She looks as if she cares about nobody, as if alone with herself, in herself. As a cobra ready to strike, she lightly sways to and fro to the beat of her music. She is aware though that she brings some slight, correct disharmony into the sluggish reality of the pool and everybody watches her closely but surreptitiously, with some artificial carelessness. Watching straightforward is unacceptable in this show. However, peeping in secrecy keeps in more eroticism than any porno does. And this is more than just a show. This is a magic show. A Sawing illusion. That’s just what she wants for herself. She wants them to peep her and get a hard-on. She wants to be like that woman who is about to lie inside a box to be sawed in half next minute in front of the public. Why not? I love everything she does. I like myself when I see the way Tako gives them a hardon. I myself get a hard-on watching her firm boobs, an updrawn tight ass, a slightly wide, boy-like shoulders … ‘Two Mojitos,’ Bob puts glasses on the counter. The water twinkles in the pool the way one may think it a result of some special effects. And it vibrates as if it is being drizzled. A growing drone all of a sudden reaches its peak and dies away as fast as it appeared. A jet fighter flies so low that the wind and shadow attached to its board pass over the pool. The sun-shades near the bar wave heavily, the water in the pool wobbles. Relaxed Tbilisians lounge around in their beach chairs. Everyone pretends nothing is up. Just one skinny woman bends sideward and looks up at the sky. As soon as I start sipping Mojito I wish I had got just flat water. It’s mixed with vodka rather than Bacardi. Even spearmint can’t kill the sickening taste of alcohol. Feeling a little woozy from the heat I creep up on Tako, kiss her sun-heated nape. It right away gives her the creeps. I feel a bitter-sweet taste of tanning cream on my lips. My brain sends a signal down to my cock. Right away I feel my sphincter contracting, a light electric shock going through my balls. In cases like this, it’s my sphincter that contracts first. Then my balls twitch. Have no hard-on, anyway: some familiar jazz music vaguely cuts through my earphones. My thoughts don’t make any sense–what’s got Tako to do with jazz? I kiss her nape again. Then I wait in vain for the jazz excerpt to turn into its electronic remix. Tako turns to me. Smiling she opens slightly her eyes. The twinkle of the water dazzles her eyes. I hand her a Mojito and ask with a motion of the hand what she is listening to. In reply she points to the screen of the iPod. I can’t see anything though. The screen reflects the sunshine. Tako sways again like a dancing cobra. Before she takes away her hand I catch sight of her index finger. The varnish on it is off in one place.
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03. DIPLOMAT IN ATACHE CASE I lounge on the bench at an empty bus stop across from the City Concert Hall, a newsstand beside me. Alia11 headline in large type catches my eye: ‘DIPLOMAT IN DIPLOMAT’S ATTACHE CASE.’ The newsman’s shadow is seen through the open door. A Jiguli12 taxi is parked at the curb, the driver’s door is open. The driver leans back in his chair, a wet handkerchief on his forehead. Just a tiny guy, keeps his knees together girl-like. A voice of newscaster is heard from the speakers: ‘… Russian army units are heading along the right embankment of the Mtkvari River. Roadblocks are laid out on Beijing Street, at the Sports Palace and Public Broadcaster …’ The Jiguli reminds me of the taxi drivers from Telavi13, nice, considerate guys. Not a chance they would utter a word until spoken to. Most of them have perfectly round bellies as if they have just gulped down a great big water-melon, and they sit at the wheels of their silver-colored Opel Vectras in a sort of so dignified and Kakhetian way that you would even feel shy to get in. By the way, one can’t find in Telavi any other taxi model. I’d really like to paint a logo of Opel up in the corner of the Kakheti emblem, for all I care. This provincial town is alive with wine, watermelons, potted cactus (available all over the place, for some unknown reason) and silvery Opel Vectras. Hardly you can hold your tears back when looking inside those cars you find neatly arranged boxes that ring the old bell out loud to you: TDK, AGFA, BASF, MAXELL, DENON … Those cassettes make you sort of missing and sorry at the same time. Cassettes and cockroaches vanished into thin air at some stage of my life. At the entrance to Vera Park I catch sight of a street sweeper. He has a black bush of thick hair and a big mustache. In some sort of funny way he bears resemblance to Benicio Del Toro as Dr. Gonzo. The LSD I took yesterday reminds me of itself. Some object circles over the Chess Palace just in the same geometric way as a fly does under a ceiling lamp. I just can’t make out whether the object is a surveillance drone or just a seagull. Despite being annoyed by the voice of the newscaster, I still stand in between the newsstand and the Jiguli. The object is best seen from there. At some moment it sort of spots me, raises itself, takes a sharp nosedive and disappears through the tress. ‘… a short time ago Russian military boats started patrolling the Mtkvari River from Mtskheta14 to Gardabani15 …’ is heard from the taxi. After a little time the surveillance drone appears from behind the Chess Palace, watches me for a while, then slowly starts to fly towards me. The identified flying object. Eventually it gets so close to me that I can make out my own reflection through the objective lens built in its nose. It reads (РФ)-08 under a curve bent like a seagull’s wing. I stand petrified. It seems to sense that we two are sort of soul mates, starts circling around me changing its direction now and then as unexpectedly as a 3D clock on a computer screen saver. It utters almost no sound. All I can see is its lenses sliding back and forth along the objective when it starts zooming. All of a sudden (РФ)-08 stops in the air, its lenses dilating to the limit just like an apple of an eye. 9
‘You motherfucker!’ a voice from behind my back. I turn back so sharply that a poignant smell of antiperspirant from my own armpit hits my nose. The street sweeper runs towards me waving his broom menacingly. Instinctively I stagger aside, burying my face in my hands. Even a plain broom may turn into a strong weapon in proper hands. I realize too late that the street sweeper doesn’t care about me, he strikes at (РФ)-08 with his broom but only fans the air. The craft moves aside at lightning speed. The street sweeper waves his broom as if it were the genuine Jedi’s lightsaber. (РФ)-08 craft is faster, though, it turns away and flies back towards the Chess Palace. The sweeper dangerously swishes the broom. ‘Fuck your ass, anyway,’ spits he between his teeth. Then turns and runs to me. ‘How are ya, brother?’ asks compassionately, breathing heavily, his eyes glowing with more indignation. He looks even more furious than those true orthodox Christians who last year, armed with their crosses, raided vampires at the fancy Halloween dress party at Number 1. He seems uncontrollable, with his eyes angry, incredulous and piercing at the same time, just like those of Clint Eastwood. He comes so close that I can see the hair that sticks out of his nostrils. His legs are set far from each other, sort of П-like; wouldn’t even shit on his legs if he crapped his pants. He looks into my eyes intently, as if trying to read something out of my eyes. ‘I’m ok,’ I comfort him. ‘I’m really ok.’ ‘Are you sure, man?’ he surveys me from head to foot. ‘Yea, I’m sure.’ Then I repeat it as he looks at me suspiciously. ‘Yea, I’m sure.’ ‘You’ve got to get yourself checked,’ he breathes deeply. Here I can’t guess what he means. ‘Sure this motherfucker got you irradiated,’ he puts his broom over his shoulder. Got me irradiated? His assumption sounds as a threat, like Borne Ultimatum from the movie The Borne Ultimatum. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Had no time at all to do that.’ Only now I catch sight of a small You Tube window-size screen built in his stomach, just the way Teletubbies have them on. The message in one of the corners of the screen reads: press here to enter full screen mode. I press the message. All of a sudden everything moves back somehow: the street, the Jiguli, the street sweeper … as if the molecular system of the air changes and the picture going into perspective takes on a sepia effect, becoming grainy like a photograph surface. I look at the screen. The picture gets lost now and then in thick pixels. First appears a hood of a black Mercedes. One fender of it has the Polish flag fixed to it, the other has the Georgian flag. As I guess, the Mercedes heads towards Tbilisi along the airport highway. A police escort that drives ahead of the car is seen through the windscreen. A cameraman shakes the objective lens. For a second the shot shows president of Poland Lech Kaczynski and a couple of sturdy bodyguards. The camera returns to the hood. Just as the Mercedes pulls level with the BP building, the foremost cars of the escort get riddled with shoots simultaneously from different sides. The first car runs down slowly, then bumps into the highway guard rail. The 10
honeycombed wind screen of the second car gets red-splashed with fresh blood. The third one explodes right on the spot, its passenger compartment and wheels blazing up. The cameraman works miracles with his camera. Sekula and Kaminski16 are no match for him. The shot jolts, gets trapped for a couple of seconds. White vapor swishes out of the Mercedes hood. The car where the cameraman sits suddenly pulls up. The cameraman turns around the camera sharply. From the BP side several militants, their faces covered with black masks, run towards the car, some of them pointing their guns at the camera, others shoot up in the air. The focus is no good any longer. One of the militants walks with a slight limp, seems to be used to his artificial lamb. A green bandage, wrapped around his head, has a white lettering twisted the Al-Jazeera logo way, a black attaché case in his hand. The militants throw the passengers out of the Mercedes. The picture disappears for a short while. The next shot shows Kaczynski on his knees in the middle of the highway, the hands clasped behind the head, two of his security beside him on their knees. The militants point their guns at them. The cameraman zooms up Kaczynski’s face to the limit. The limping militant ties up the hands of the president behind his back with synthetic rope, sticks adhesive bandage onto his mouth. Shortly afterwards he opens the attaché case and gives Kaczynski a sign with a nod of his head. The former gets up, an actor who knows his part well, and obediently lamblike sits into the attaché case. The militant shuts it as a military 4wd off-road vehicle pulls up beside him. He hops in, puts the attaché case on the floor between his legs. The rest of the militants hit the bodyguards in their faces with the barrels of their guns. They do that hard and brutally. It seems the cameraman gets hit, too. The shot focuses on the worn-out boot of one of the militants. The picture closes up, fades out. The phantom vanishes. The street sweeper still cleans at the park entrance, the Jiguli driver leans back in his seat the same way. My hands go numb, my ears ring. A bus №21 stops before me. A 10-12 year old girl squeezes up her nose against the window glass, the glass is steamy around her nostrils. She looks straight into my eyes through a pair of silly-looking spectacles. Nobody gets off. The bus door closes with a whiz. ‘NEXT STOP–NATO’ is written in capital letters all along the bus side. At both ends of the message the five-star Georgian flag and the navy blue NATO flag with four beams meet edge-to-edge. The Slogan is absolutely posthyper realistic. The simulation of something which has never really happened. The bus jolts away. The girl doesn’t take her eyes off me.
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04. I CAN JUMP DOWN I stand outside on Miho’s balcony, a cigarette in one hand, a glass in the other: just a gulp of shake remains inside. Vodka Martini, sort of popular classic drink. I look down on the street. The balcony is on the second floor, I just can jump down into the street. The balcony door is open. Soft minimal techno sounds from speakers–some musician bores through the music so laboriously that I can hardly keep from imagining myself in a dentist’s office. Inside Miho and Nina fuck, asking me to shoot them screwing with a video camera. ‘Get in here,’ calls Miho. ‘Be a buddy, be a buddyroo.’ ‘All right,’ I say. I hate to be in on this stuff, the last thing I want. The bottom line is that my exgirlfriend screws my friend. We broke up just a week ago. It happened fast, with no showdown, no argument. One doesn’t always need words to break up. So we didn’t make a big deal out of it … I didn’t even think that things like that happened in real life, or I would get through it. The quotations I picked up from movies would be popping out of my mouth just like toasts out of a toaster. Emotionless like robots, we limited ourselves just to the bottom-line phrases: … I’m not worth of you … I’m not worth you either … I will still love you … I will love you, too … And now pretending that the last four months we didn’t spend together, she lays Miho. She may have laid him before, too. One can hardly dig the truth out of Nina. I wonder if Miho has already discovered the ins and outs of her vagina and whether the love-making with her reminds him of dancing on a volcano. Personally I was always careful with Nina, especially in bed. Her vagina has always reminded me of the Bermuda Triangle. I mean one can’t see anything on the surface, though it holds a lot of surprises. The neck of her womb is so sensitive and spongy that she can easily contract it down to the size of needle’s eye and stretch it from California to New-York island, let alone her lips–she can use them as garden clippers just in case. ‘You’re not jealous, are you?’ asks me Nina. I put the glass on the handrail and turn around. She is on all fours, her tits slightly shaking. From where I stand, one can’t see the cellulite that just starts to develop along her waistline. She looks in my face, her thick brows joining Frida Kahlo-like at the bridge of her nose. Super strong and super naked Miho, black-colored sunglasses on his nose, slowly screws Nina from behind to the beat of the music. Pumped-muscled, with clear-cut abdominals, strong jaw and fair crew cut, he looks like the universal soldier from the movie Universal Soldier. Ledger’s Joker smiles from the poster on the wall. Scriabin’s Donuts crumpled paper bag and an open pizza box with a bit of sausage, scrap of pizza and a butt of a cigarette lie on the table by the mirror. I have no idea what a French bakery’s got to do with Scriabin’s Donuts. Maybe the baker’s name is Scriabin? I know where the video camera is, but I still ask Miho: ‘Where is the video camera?’ ‘Over there, next to the CDs,’ Miho points to the shelf. ‘See?’ 12
‘I can jump down,’ I tell him. ‘What’s that?’ Miho adjusts the glasses on his nose. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Coming.’ I look outside again. Through the window of the house opposite I see legs of a man lying on the sofa and a shadow of a woman sitting at a table in front of the mirror, her long hair tied with a white rope. She smokes a cigarette, massaging her face with cucumber’s skin. Two armored vehicles with the Georgian flags on are disposed at the corner of the street, one of them blocking St. Petersburg Street, the other Kamo Street. Some officers smoke, Kalashnikov guns strapped on their shoulders. Several privates drag sandbags from the street corner, put them into an impromptu trench so as to leave some space for a weapon port. Is this the way the army is going to defend the city or is this just a simulation of defense? I don’t know. The garbage can under the balcony stinks hard. Bibi Sartania stands just nearby, watching the soldiers messing around. In one hand he holds a bottle of beer, another is in his pocket–I wonder if he is stroking his cellulite-stricken cock. I haven’t seen Bibi for six month. I didn’t even know he was alive. He wears shabby sneakers, dirty jeans and an oversized black T-shirt. He has a lousy hat on, too, with abbreviation of NYPD. Around his arm he has an O-shaped tattoo just like an arm strap. He had it tattooed 10 years before in Goa. He is one of those terrific losers who thronged Tbilisi back in late 90-s. Now they have died out like the dinosaurs. Had Bibi not got hung up on vint,17 he might even have become a father of Georgian ambient; he had all it takes to make it happen: a cool laptop supplied with sound programs, camouflage uniform with side-pockets and military boots with phosphorous shoe strings. He was even popular within certain limits; once he even hit the cover of Reflection magazine, if nothing else, and would play in some night bars from time to time. All of a sudden our last meeting comes to my mind as my brain prints out a snapshot like a Polaroid. Typical Tbilisi winter, warm and with no snow as usual. However, Bibi still wears his stupid ugly anorak with an artificial fur-lined hood. He sits alone on the terrace of McDonalds on Marjanishvili Street, drinking vanilla shake through a straw sipper. Reminds me at the same time of the guy from the well-known video18 of UNKLE19 and some crack dealer from any B-movie. Stinks as a glamorous hobo, too. Sour cabbage would smell about the same way if you scent it with some exotic perfume. Hands me the vanilla shake as I approach. ‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘I’ll buy myself one.’ ‘Have it,’ says he. ‘Have it.’ I sip it. The shake tastes awful though. Shake is just 30%, vodka 70%. Some unpleasant heat starts in my stomach. He smiles: ‘The recipe is mine.’ ‘I never doubted that.’ Soon the things start to develop in a regular way. We leave McDonalds for his one-room apartment on Klara Tsetkin Street. The kitchen looks painfully familiar: 13
decorative wallpaper, a fridge ‘Orsk’ with a broken handle (that’s why a chair is always leaned against it), an aged greasy gas cooker and a bright green roundshaped ceiling lamp hanging on the spiral-like wire, the one old-fashioned telephones had once. I have no idea how long we’ve been talking; that is, Bibi has been talking, talking my head off. He is surprised that Franz Ferdinand20 is best-selling in Tbilisi, and says he’ll form a band and call it Gavrilo Princip.21 We, like two idiots, laugh our heads off at this poster-type joke. An untouched hamburger wrapped in McDonalds creaky paper with grease spots on it and an open plastic can of peach yoghourt. I get glassy-eyed with drink, the state when one still keeps on boozing but feels so juiced that 2 times 2 is 31972541. What’s more, you enter any problem like a knife enters butter and your own yeasted dough-like body appears before your eyes. Neither sleep nor booze takes you. We don’t turn music on. My ears still ring and sing though, just like being at a disco nightclub. Shortly afterwards everything before my eyes gets flat like a blackand-white photograph and starts to beat intermittently and hurriedly as a heart troubled with tachycardia. Just Bibi remains colored and 3D, standing out as pantone on bleak laminate. Then two men come in. That’s exactly like Bibi; one never knows who’ll come or leave next. One of the two is Koka Margiani, aka Margo, next-door neighbor, thrill-seeker, photographer and glue-sniffer. A very slow shot. He moves like an astronaut in the open space, his eyes not quite friendly. Looks like he must have been abused being a kid. Like a field doctor he always wears a khaki bag slung over his shoulder where he keeps four tubes of ‘Moment’ glue, neatly folded down plastic bags, and a cockroach-repellent spray for an extreme case. Once sat on the chair, he looks at me with suspicion. One-eared Goggia follows him in. The story goes that once he got himself into a jam and some malicious people cut his ear off. The old wino, his hands trembling with overdrinking, wears Dr. Marten’s workman’s boots, those that Bibi once wore, and a shabby, khaki pilot jacket with the American flag on the shoulder. Stinking, unshaven and unwashed, he resembles at the same time a personage of some Kusturica film and Eduard Shevardnadze. Speaking of Shevardnadze, a great many of people wrongly consider him absolutely good-for-nothing. Rather, he is wonderfully recyclable. A perfect set of sado-maso would have come out of his skin: a latex mask with zipper for mouth, muzzle, whip and set of handcuffs. The skin of him is tight and resilient at the same time. Talking of presidents, I think it’s about time we made more valuable things out of ex-presidents. One would do without their memoirs and charity. Bibi hands Goggia a full glass. Before taking it, the latter produces a CD out of the pocket of his pilot jacket and puts it on the table next to the hamburger. No words are needed whatsoever to understand that he means to say he has not come empty-handed either. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I thought Goggia and a CD completely incompatible, just as Bigfoot and a Smartphone. It’s got to be some old rock, Yes22 or ELP23 or something of the kind. Best of Ryoji Ikeda,24 say letters written in a blue 14
marker. Well, this borders on fantasy. My brain, overtaken with drink, tries in vain to figure out what Goggia’s got to do with Ikeda CD … and who the fuck Ikeda is for that matter. ‘There now … good morning, girls,’ says Goggia in an infernal voice, gulps down the vodka and eagerly snuffs the yoghurt, a pink nipple and a tattooed profile of Stalin are shown on his hairless chest. At some moment the chest gets so crumpled that the chief resembles young Omar Sharif. Margo seems restless. Perhaps his brain wants some glue. He shuffles zombie style away to the next room, sits on the armchair and produces the plastic bag. He carefully opens one tube of ‘Moment’, and neatly empties the content into the plastic bag. Finally he puts the bag over on the head, the bag immediately gets steamy. Next minute his petrified eyes are seen through the bag. His swollen face soon settles down though. He sits in the armchair just as in a space vehicle, and looks down on his own feet the way an astronaut oversees the earth through the viewing port. We are just around, as satellites of a big planet. Even the plastic bag on his head looks like an astronaut’s Spacesuit. Bibi passes me a glass. The Kitchen starts to twinkle before my eyes, just the way a low-cost TV screen does. Then the kitchen upsets, gets highlighted. Something snaps and it gets pitch dark all at once … I look down on the street again. Bibi sips beer, then throws the empty bottle into the garbage can. The woman is no more seen through the open window, all I see is the cucumber skin on the table with the mirror, and the feet of the man lying on the sofa. The soldiers finish setting up the trench. Just now a provocative plate on the front of the house opposite catches my eye: The Department of Health warns: Regular sex is for the benefit of your health
Good Sex, Good Family
Does the message mean that somebody remonstrates about lack of sex in Tbilisi? That looks promising. Tbilisi is indeed short of sex, and that causes plenty of severe physical and moral perversions. Sure thing, just a single promotion is insufficient to handle the issue, that is, get Tbilisians fucking. However, half sex is better than no sex at all. In southern countries a revolution should start with slum dwellers rather than white collars. ‘You don’t give a fuck, dontcha?’ asks me Miho, still screwing Nina from behind. She looks in my face again. I wonder what her orgasm is going to look like. As ever first her nostrils extend, then her knees tremble, and finally she starts to moo rolling up her eyes. ‘Ok, ok, I’m coming,’ I say. 15
I grind out the cigarette in the glass and enter the room. Smells of sweat, antiperspirant, sex and pizza mix. Joker looks towards me, a bit higher and away. From the loudspeakers come the sounds of minimal techno, so smooth that one can’t tell where one composition breaks up and another starts. Miho, tied up to Nina, doesn’t stop, rhythmically sways to and fro, then adjusts the slipped off glasses. Nina’s small tits wobble from side to side.
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