The Day After

The next morning, I had only the mildest of hangovers. I slept peacefully and the grey skies out the window gently roused me. I hadn’t set my alarm and had no idea of the time nor had I any concern that I was probably late for work; I was content to have Yulia right next to me. So many thoughts running through my head – how I had been so worried the day before about going to her birthday and that the question of whether I was straight now or a bisexual seemed stupid and simple compared with the feeling that I had made some great discovery, though the realization that perhaps now, I didn’t have to lie about my sexuality anymore seemed to potentially be a nice perk.

I slipped out of the bedroom to see that it was only 9AM and phoned to my office to tell Dildora that I would be coming in after lunch as I wasn’t feeling well. It was the first time I would ever be late to work. I started boiling water for tea and from the kitchen, watched Yulia in the bed; she seemed to be smiling with her eyes closed and when I turned away to pour tea, she had disappeared from the bed, later emerging from the bathroom looking fresh, wearing only my shirt which covered her up – something I’d probably seen in the movies. She lit up a cigarette and I popped in an Aerosmith CD and turned it up, it seemed appropriate. The moment needed rock and roll. I took her cigarette and kissed her on the lips, then taking a drag off the cigarette, then running my hand down her leg. “It’s so smooth,” I said and stupidly added, “girls here usually have such hairy legs.”

“I don’t know what kinds of girls you’ve been around,” she said smiling condescendingly, knowingly, perhaps, sipping the tea that I put out in front of her. I didn’t have much experience with women here at all or with women period and I had a strong feeling that she knew that…She disappeared into the bedroom and got dressed in her clothes which were lying on the floor, evidence, I suppose of last night’s drunken and reckless night. I couldn’t believe that it was over.

“When will I see you again,” I asked.

“Whenever you want,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

I wondered if this was a one-night-stand. Even if it was, I didn’t care. I felt so good about it, so good that I felt like I wanted to shout it around the city as I walked to the office, arriving there hardly late at all, but because I never showed up late – the heads of my colleagues turned and eyebrows rose as I walked in. Was I being paranoid, or did they suspect what I had been up to? I didn’t even care. When I sat down to work and when I’d look at the computer screen, I would just think of her. Every time my pants pressed against my crotch, I’d feel myself grow hard and aroused just by the thought of Yulia and the night before and I’d think about how much I wanted to see her again and how that night, when I got home, I would immediately call her to see me the following night.  ¶ 12:17 AM 0 Comments

  The Birthday

The following day at work, I found myself a bit nervous about Yulia’s birthday. Who would be there, I wondered. Her dark-haired friend Lena was there. Lena was harsh and I had a distinct sense that she did not like me. Most likely, there would be people who I’d seen before at Lucky strikes. During my lunch break, I went over to the flower market and bought a dozen long-stemmed roses, which, of course, my entire staff looked at not without curiosity.

I worked a little later than usual that evening, and arrived a little after the time Yulia had said to be at the restaurant where she was celebrating. In the center of the restaurant, there was a long banquet table filled with plates and salads and breads and fruits and bottles of vodka and wine. Yulia sat at the center of the table among her friends – some of whom were familiar faces, like her friend Lena. When I arrived, I handed her the flowers, which she smelled and then kissed me on the cheek thanking me. The entire party shuffled around, in an almost conspiratorial way to accommodate me so that I would sit at the chair right next to her. I was a little mystified by that, as I believed that of all the people in the room, I probably knew her the shortest amount of time. But I sensed that this conspiracy was determined that by the end of the night I would fuck her.

The company consisted of several Serbians. Lena’s boyfriend was a silent and glum, but very handsome Serb. And with him, some of his Serbian compatriots, including an elder and very jolly bearded one, who led the toasts of vodka. And according to the Serbian tradition, we were to look deeply into each others eyes before we downed our shot glasses. He explained, that we weren’t simply to look into each others’ eyes, but into the souls, that amongst the group of friends around this table there were to be no secrets. Of course, everyone laughed at this, I myself felt even more self conscious, and in parody, we would open our eyes very wide, looking around at everyone at the table, before we drank, saying, “eyes, don’t forget, the eyes.”

And despite the laughter, the lively conversation in the language which suddenly seemed so alien to me, the eye contact and the festive table, I felt like an outsider, imagining that I felt how an astronaut in his space suit must feel like when he’s floating around in space. Voices sounded muted, as though outside my glass encased helmet, sealing inside a silence that makes you feel close with your own thoughts and looking out at a strange universe around you. It was a feeling of alienation of disjointedness of dissociation. And I decided not to sip my vodka from my shot glass, but to aggressively down them, which always impressed locals, when a foreigner was able to drink like a Russian. And I felt much more comfortable and even touchy, putting my arm around Yulia in the seat beside me, and even talkative, proposing a toast to Yulia’s beauty on her 23rd birthday.

Yulia, beside me and much less drunk than I was looked over at me, and I could look deeply her beautiful eyes, they had a harsh edge to them, though they had a melancholy aspect too. It was hard to look back at her, but her gaze did not allow me to look elsewhere.

More guests arrived. A group of actors from the theater joined, including the actor who played the lead in the play that I liked so much and had seen so many times. He greeted me as though he knew me, though we had never spoken before, though he must have seen me so many times in the audience of the play. I had fallen in love with him so many times, had hoped so many times to meet him, but next to Yulia, I didn’t really notice him; it felt almost like Yulia and I were alone in the room.

She asked me in her edgy way, “what is it that you want?”
“What do you mean?” I asked fearing what she meant.
“Do you want a boy?” She asked and then continued almost neurotically ,reminding me of so many women I had known in New York. “Because if you want a boy, we’ll find you a boy, there are hundreds of boys in Tashkent for you, they’re all over the Internet.”
“Shhhh,” I murmured to her. “I’m not interested in boys on the internet. I want you.” And at that moment, it was the truth. The room had grown foggy with heavy cigarette smoke and my head was beginning to spin. I told Yulia that I would go outside for a moment for some air. Once outside, I thought I could disappear, run away, catch a cab, and vanish. But Yulia followed behind me and once we were out in the empty parking lot, I turned around to her and she pressed me against the wall and we began to kiss and hungrily, curiously our hands reached under each others’ clothes, passionately, a bit drunkenly, and suddenly any fears or doubts I may have had, disappeared. The female body was not something that I feared, but something I wanted to explore, running my hands up her sweater, stroking her breasts, her arms. She reached under my shirt and into my pants, even murmuring, “it’s big.”

For a moment, I was in some shock, unable to believe how good it felt. I thought, had I realized this earlier, my life could have been so much simpler. I amazed myself. I was overcome by a desire that had astounded me. I felt a feeling of dissociation astounded by the situation – I was making out with a beautiful woman in a parking lot, an image I had never imagined – as though I was living someone else’s life, not mine. Often I’d find myself either drunk or even sober in the exotic Tashkent surroundings, wondering if this was really my life. But this time, it was more intense than ever before, as though I had done the craziest, most subversive thing ever.

She pulled away. “Stop,” she said. “I have guests inside.” The pause gave me the moment to worry about where this was going and what were the consequences of this kiss. I followed Yulia, who held my hand as I stumbled back into the restaurant. And the time seemed to fly past and before I knew it we were leaving the restaurant again, and Yulia and I were piling into a taxi alone to an apartment – Lena’s apartment, and Lena was there as well as some of the other people from the banquet table and Yulia and I went right to the bedroom, not turning out the lights, undressing each other and pulling one another down onto the bed, with her lying on top of me, kissing me, my lips moving between her mouth and her breasts and she moaned loudly in Russian and bringing herself close to me, so that I entered her.

It felt like some other person had possessed my body and was making me do what I was doing. It felt so good, but I knew that I had to pull out before I came. I was inside her without a condom. And I barely noticed that occasionally people would walk through the room, saying excuse me, to pass through to use the bathroom, the only bathroom in the apartment. Yulia came loudly on top of me, and I pulled out of her and ejaculated all over myself. We got up and quickly dressed and agreed to go to my house. I had forgotten about the time, and knew that tomorrow was a work day, but I didn't care. We forgot about the party guests in the other room and in the bathroom, and ran down to the street, barely saying goodbye to Lena and the others, catching a taxi beside the man selling bananas on the street late at night. It took only minutes to get to my house, we hadn’t even finished sucking up the cigarettes that we’d lit up in the taxi and went straight to the bedroom to fuck some more, always, her on top of me, her head thrown back, her breasts beckoning my mouth, me pulling out before I could come inside of her, her body so soft to my touch, her loud moans and me wondering how I was so happy to have this amazing woman next to me. And we fucked and fucked until we fell asleep.  ¶ 1:46 AM 0 Comments

  Time for a Reality Check

I began to realize that I really needed to take the home leave that I had been postponing all these weeks. Emails from friends at home expressed their concern. I had been away for a long time, almost two years, and I didn’t write much, never called. Some friends flat out said that they were concerned that maybe I had gone crazy or had gone native or both.

Meanwhile, I had hesitations about going back. I had parents back home who’d gone through a bitter divorce some seven years earlier. My mother’s one-sided conversations still essentially consisted of her litany of what a bastard my father was. My father essentially was carrying on with his life as though waking up from life with my mother as though it were just a bad dream. I had a sister who was a hysteric, another one who was normal, but who infuriated my mother by marrying a non-Jewish man, and a poor younger brother who was likely traumatized by the rest of the family into immersing himself Orthodox Judaism.

Being away from it all, I always marveled over the calm, stress-free environment that I lived in. It may have been a bit boring, but nothing compared to the peace of mind that Tashkent offered. The flip side of that loneliness was the priceless peace of mind.

The end of my days culminated in the pure, sweet silence of cigarette smoke and the fizz of beer foam. My problems and responsibilities were few. I needed to wake up in the morning, feed myself and go to my job. Otherwise, I felt as though I didn’t really have any cares in the world. I would sit in my kitchen by the window and look at the sky and the stars and the moon. I hung a map of the stars and constellations next to the window and I would try to recognize them when I looked out the window. I would turn the phone ringer off most nights just to avoid phone calls from the US. But I forgot to turn it off that night. It was Yulia, who I had nearly forgotten about, nearly forgotten about that night I had held her close and danced with her that was almost a week or two earlier. I suddenly remembered that tomorrow was her birthday.

“You haven’t forgotten about my birthday, have you?” She asked. And I wished at that moment that she had forgotten about inviting me.

“Of course not,” I said, realizing that it was my destiny to go and I had no choice in the matter.  ¶ 12:09 AM 0 Comments

  Yulia

Whenever I walked through the door to the Lucky Strikes bar, my heart always skipped a beat; who knows whom or what awaited inside. But this time, it was a disappointingly slow night. The place was quiet, with no one sitting at the bar in the front, and in the back, you could pretty much see small groups of people at tables or at the bar around the dark dance floor. I bought myself a 100 gram shot of vodka which I quickly shot down and washed away with a Baltika #9 and stood at the entry to the dance floor, scanning the room, looking for a familiar face in the darkness and finding none.

Then Oleg appeared. Oleg was Kirill’s cousin who I had met in the park that very first time I met Kirill. He was a quiet type without much to say and he sort of just loomed there after greeting me, looking at me, expecting me to speak. I had nothing to say to him and I began to wonder if it was perhaps better if I had just stayed home and gone to bed early. But I still hoped that maybe the evening would pick up. And then my eyes fell upon this very attractive blonde girl standing at the bar.

I didn’t know her, didn’t know her name, though I’d seen her so many times before around Tashkent, I felt as though I knew her. I’d seen her at the theater, in the club, and probably some other places I couldn’t exactly recall, but she always stood out to me among the very lovely women that you could see all over Tashkent. She wasn’t as tall as the others, or rail thin, or ever dressed in anything more extravagant than blue jeans, but there was something in those big blue eyes that I saw across rooms or streets when our paths had crossed, that always seemed to draw me in.

She stood at the bar smoking with her dark haired friend, who she seemed to be talking with or maybe she had been talking with, but at this point it seemed like they were just smoking and looking out, perhaps with that same sense of boredom as I had, the way she puffed on her ciggarette and lew out a perfect smoke ring that she poked at with her finger. How many times did I do that, out of boredom, late into the evening by the kitchen window.

Then I got the sense that she was staring right at me. I looked right back at her, rolled my eyes and gestured as if to say, “I’m bored too,” and “how do I get rid of this guy standing next to me?”

Emboldened by the alcohol, and wishing to extricate myself from Oleg’s lackluster presence, I walked right up to her and said in a rather impolite Russian way, “what are you staring at?”

“Is that your boyfriend?” She asked with a brazen glance.

“Are you kidding?” I said taken aback and actually a bit amazed that she had the audacity to call my number like that. “Can I join you?”

She softened immediately after and put out her small and delicate hand which I shook. “I’m Yulia.”

“I’ve seen you around before,” I said

“I know,” she said.

“I mean, I’ve really noticed you,” I said drunkenly.

“Who is that guy you were talking to,” she asked.

“I don’t know him really. I met his cousin once. Does it matter?”

I turned to the bar to get another Baltika. “Can I get you anything?” She nodded no, and we stood there a little while and chatted, mostly about how bored we were and what a boring evening it was and that it was sad that there was no one there that evening, that there was hardly anyone even dancing.

Then the music changed to the slow Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song “Californiacation.” Couples came from the woodwork to slow dance to this oddly inappropriate song, I listened to the lyrics “It’s the edge of the world/And all of western civilization/The sun may rise in the East/At least it settles in the final location.” I asked Yulia to dance with me and I held her close.

No longer did she have that tough-talking chain smoking attitude; everything about her softened, from her soft arms and ample breasts pressing against me, the soft cashmere of her sweater, her small delicate chin resting on my shoulder. She smelled fresh. I wondered how she managed to smell so nice when she seemed to chain smoke and drink beer. I thought of the amazing contrast to be dancing with this very beautiful woman when earlier in the evening, I’d been in a seedy bathhouse with seedy guys.

All that now seemed light years earlier, so distant and forgotten. And yet, with Yulia so close to me, it frightened me to be so close to someone, even today, when all day I had felt so alone. My mind started to run like a video player on fast-forward into the future, in which I saw myself getting closer and closer to Yulia, and I would have to pull away. Maybe I would tell her I was gay, though it seemed that she already knew or suspected, though I had brushed off her brash question when I first approached her and continued to flirt with her. I didn’t want to tell her I was gay for so many reasons, among them that it was uncomfortable and that I just didn’t want to. She fascinated me and I wanted her, even though I was frightened a bit by this want.

At the end of the dance, Yulia looked up at me with bedroom eyes and the club seemed to be clearing out. At the bar, there was her dark haired friend, Lena, and several Turkish men who she introduced me to, all very warm and welcoming. I told Yulia that I was tired and was going to go home. I’d had too much to drink. I had been drinking almost the entire day. We exchanged phone numbers. She would be having a birthday party for herself on the 24th and she asked me if I would come. I told her that, of course, I would come…but inside, I thought that I probably would not. And as I walked out of the club and this time, with money to hail a taxi, I decided that I needed to run home through the quiet streets.  ¶ 6:57 PM 0 Comments

  Muzhiki or Men

Alijon hailed a taxi and spoke to the driver in Uzbek. Inside, I kept silent and tried to figure out where were going. It was not far from the Pionerskaya baths, deep into a tree-lined residential area with nice, large homes, one of which I recognized as the embassy’s deputy country manager’s residence.

The sauna was an ordinary Soviet one, a bit nicer than the Pionerskaya one in that whereas it had that decrepit look, it did not look like it would collapse at any moment. At the door, Alijon was greeted by a young lean guy who wore glasses. They embraced and spoke in Uzbek in tones that seemed to me like they were speaking business. Though I didn’t understand them, I recognized Alijon say the word “mekhmon” several times, which means “guest.” Obviously he was referring to me, and in this country, where hospitality was of such importance, he was clearly using my being a guest as leverage for a deal that was in the making.

The guy with the glasses called out another guy, who was called Ilhom; he was also young and short, but dark, with longish curly hair came. The three of them spoke in Uzbek and eyed me between their exchanges. The guy with the glasses and the guy with the longish curly hair disappeared into the building, where bathers, young and old were exiting.

Alijon told me that we’d need to come back in an hour’s time, when the baths close to the public. At that time, the guy with the glasses, Farhod, who was the attendant, would open the building for us privately. “What do you think of them?” Alijon asked me.

“What do you mean? Are those the guys?” I asked trying not to sound too disappointed. They were so young and small.

“Yes.” He said. “I think the dark one is very nice,” Alijon said.

“The one with the glasses is OK.” I said, recalling the saying that beggars can’t be choosers.

“We should go and get some beers.” Alijon and I walked down the street to a kiosk that had beers and next to it a grill with a man making shish-kebabs.

“How much money do you have with you?”

I had about 7000 soums with me. “Is that enough?” I asked.

“Yes, but you should give the 5000 to Farhod.” That was essentially five dollars, not a lot of money, but I suppose I felt a little bit uncomfortable by the fact that I was paying for sex. I wasn’t really ready to accept that I was so desperate that I had to start paying for sex. And for these guys who I didn’t even want that badly. It made me feel like I was old and unattractive.

But, again, I had to remember that in this part of the world, there was always an economic aspect to relationships, an aspect that I suppose back home we never really calculated, though perhaps it existed as well – that everything came at some kind of a price and that principles of economics guided so much of our behaviors, perhaps more than we were wiling to acknowledge.


But with paying for sex, I felt as though I’d crossed a line. The amount of money was so small, I decided I could probably pretend that I never spent it; I barely even spent this little money on my lunch. But I just didn’t want to be a part of this economy. I didn’t even know how it was supposed to work. Was I supposed to have paid Alijon for sucking my dick earlier? He did say thank you to me, so perhaps he was supposed to have paid me for sucking my dick? “Are you always supposed to pay for sex?” I asked.

“There are some guys who you have to pay for sex,” he explained. “I mean, most guys will have sex with a man if you give them something for it. It doesn’t have to be much. Just something symbolic.”

“Even straight guys?”

“Sure,” he said. “What man would turn down the opportunity to have his dick taken care of?”

I gave Alijon all of my money to buy beers and to handle whatever payments that might to be made instead doing it myself and constantly reminding myself of the money. I’m a sugar daddy, I thought, and that is that, I have crossed that line.

We walked in silence eating our shish-kebabs off the skewers. A chill appeared in the air and it seemed that perhaps today would be one of those false starts of spring; tomorrow it would be winter again for a few more days or weeks until the real spring started at the end of March.

We returned to the bathhouse as the last of the bathers were leaving. Alijon and I waited on the street until Farhod came and beckoned us inside, took us into a small, cozy room with worn out divans and a coffee table in the middle. Alijon spread out the beers on the table and opened them.

Alijon and the guys spoke in Uzbek. They didn’t speak much Russian, Alijon explained, as they were from the provinces. Occasionally Alijon would translate something for me into English, but essentially, I wasn’t much of a participant in the conversation. I got bored, perhaps visibly so, at which point Alijon suggested that Farhod and I go to the sauna together. He and the dark guy would stay behind and talk and drink.

I stripped down out of my clothes, which I left in a pile. It seemed so awkward for me to take off my jeans, undo my sneakers and socks as Farhod, a few steps away seemed to slip out of his drawstring pants, his loose shirt, his sandals. Beside him, I felt my body to be big and powerful and hairy next to his small, lean, and tight body; I felt that I could crush him with my body. Nonetheless, I felt awkward, like I wanted to hide it, that even when we got into the hot sauna, I wanted to cover myself up.

We had not said a word to each other the entire evening and sat next to each other on the wooden benches in the sauna. Where the wood was nailed down, the metal of the nails stung where they touched my legs or butt. Farhod barely looked at me and I tried to speak to him in Russian, asking some very basic questions, which he answered. He was 23. He was from Andijan. He was not yet married.

I wondered if he was gay or straight, if he just did this for money, if he found me attractive or repulsive or if when one did these things for money, you didn’t think of it that way, but that a job is a job. Before I could ask, he told me that I looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme. I thought that was funny, I laughed. I wanted to reach over to touch him and initiate sex, but I didn’t know what to do. I felt shy, like a kid about to have sex for the first time and afraid to make the first move.

He then asked me, “what do you like?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“For example, I’m a muzhik,” he said. Muzhik is Russian for a man or a guy. I thought about it for a moment and understood what he meant. It meant that he was a top.

“I’m also a muzhik,” I said.

“Hmmm. We’re both muzhiki,” he said and shrugged his shoulders as if this was an unsolvable situation.

I said, “well, I don’t know if this will work out.” And I thought that maybe this was my way to excuse myself from the situation and salvage what I felt was my innocence.

“What can we do?” I said and didn’t know what else to say and wondered if I could not be a muzhik for once. Or perhaps, I should just start being a muzhik with him, and force my way with him. “It’s a pity,” I said. “Maybe I should go.”

I quickly walked out and went to the changing area, where Alijon and the dark guy sat. I put on my clothes over my sweaty body, reaching into my pocket and realizing that I had absolutely no cash left in my pockets.

Alijon rushed over to me. “That was fast. What’s the matter? He asked.

“It didn’t quite work out. That’s all. But it’s ok.” I tried to sound unemotional, though I resented Alijon for getting me into this situation in the first place. “Everything’s OK.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?”

“No,” I said. “I forgot that I have something to do at home.”

Since I had no cash left, I was reduced to walking home. I rarely walked in Tashkent because there was hardly ever anyone on the street and there weren’t really sidewalks. There were, but most of them were dusty pavements. This was the desert after all and they left a film of dust on your shoes, which could never keep a shine. And I walked thinking that in retrospect, I would have liked to have fucked that boy at the sauna and probably I could have had my way with him, if I wanted. But, I had to let the money get in the way.

So, I ran, just to make the walk go faster. Ran from the shadows under the streetlights on the deadly quiet and empty streets, ran from something, though there seemed to be nothing around that could be chasing me, and only when I got home, behind the locked door, I felt safe. It was only 10:30 and I thought that I could not end this Saturday night on such a desperate note. I wanted to write off what had just happened. I stripped down and washed myself off under the shower, feeling clean from the sweat from my run, from the sweat from the sauna. I felt like a new person and I would do this evening over, put on fresh clothes, walk out the door and forget about the day and start it over. I would go to Lucky’s and I’d drink and forget the whole thing and start the evening anew.  ¶ 6:33 AM 0 Comments

  Loneliness


My life slowed down. The journalists had all left Tashkent. Henrietta went home to the US for a few weeks. Sherzod had gone missing and he didn’t return…and I couldn’t find him. I didn’t have his last name – in fact, I had never known it. And he didn’t have a telephone. I imagined that only perhaps, in the time of the bible, did things like this happen.

Work was slow and there wasn’t enough of it to bury myself in it. It was just plain dull in Uzbekistan, much like the way I remembered it when I first arrived, when I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t understand the language, and I felt very much like an outsider, so far removed from the rest of the world. I couldn’t call my friends in the US. Morning here was probably dead of night in New York and I didn’t even think to wake someone up from their slumber simply because I needed someone to talk to. Besides, what was there to say? It was impossible to explain what I was doing here, what my life was like, how I felt. I could not explain how I’d literally lost my boyfriend or how it had happened. I was sure that most of my friends had already written me off as mad as it was and that anything I might say would seem like ravings.

And it wasn’t that kind of day that should have inspired this melancholy. It was a day that could have been the first day of spring – winter seemed like it was over, you could go outside without a coat. The sun was shining. The frost had thawed. But the streets were empty. No people. Sometimes a car would pass. I looked out the window to the park below, sitting on the windowsill, blowing smoke rings against the pane, like looking out onto a ghost town.

I would go out, I decided. I would sit on one of the many empty park benches. I would bring a book and I did. I went outside feeling comfortable in just a T-shirt and jeans and brought out the book I was trying to read, but somehow couldn’t get into and I sat and read the words over and over and looked around the park for signs of life. It was a grim park, actually, a little wild with its swaths of gray grasses and the cracked stonework on the ground and the trail of litter by the walkways. In the spring and summer, with the growth and green and the people walking around, you didn’t notice as much the wear and tear and how the park had most likely seen better days, when it was new and taken care of. Probably at that time children ran around this park and played, lovers sat on the benches – they still sometimes did at night in the dark, the lawns were lusher and greener and cleaner and manicured and the stones weren’t cracked and didn’t have bits of garbage in the cracks between them.

Two men showed up and of all the empty park benches in the whole park that they chose to sit at, they came to mine, sitting at the other end. I couldn’t help but glance at them occasionally from my book, from which I registered nothing. The men were two youngish Uzbeks, speaking Uzbek between themselves animatedly. I listened to the coarse sounds and didn’t understand a word. One of them then left, leaving me alone on the park bench with the other, and a plastic bag in front of him that had some bottles in them. I looked over at him and smiled politely. He was not unpleasant looking, dressed neatly, probably in his mid-20’s.

He asked me in Russian for the time. Everyone did. It was the way people determined if I was local or not, Russian speaking or not; or it was the way they tried to see what kind of watch I wore, or to open a conversation, or pick me up randomly off the street. It was already five, I told him and surely, he could detect the American accented Russian.

“You’re not from here” he said. I nodded. “So you speak English?” I nodded and looked back down at my book a little nervous, realizing that I would be engaging with a complete stranger.


“May I ask you a personal question?” he interjected, and I thought how strange it is to ask a perfect stranger off the street if you could ask a personal question. In fact, it seemed vaguely familiar, as though I knew what the question would be. In fact, when Alijon – that was his name, I later learned, asked me his personal question, I was struck by déjà vu. I had heard this question before and it was a common conversation starter in this park with the blue domes. “Do you prefer men or women,” he asked. And I looked at him askew and he struck me as someone with a clear agenda, an agenda that at the moment quite nearly coincided with my own. He wanted sex.

“Was that your boyfriend who you were talking to?” I asked changing the topic.

“No,” he said. I looked at his hand, which had a wedding band.

“You’re married, aren’t you?” Do you have children?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have a daughter. She’s three.”

“That’s nice.” I said and there was a silence. We didn’t directly answer any of each others’ questions, but we knew the answers. “Does your wife know about you?” I asked, always wanting to ask this of the men in their wedding bands who I’d seen at the pionerskaya banya.

“No, of course not. Besides, she lives in Andijan in the provinces.”

“And where do you go to find you men? Here? In the park? There’s no one here.” I was curious to know where people went besides this park, this large swatch of the city with only two people sitting in it. I knew there had to be more – this was a city of three million people and from my window, I saw not a soul out on the street. Where was everyone hiding? “Do you go to piyonerskaya banya?”

“No way,” he said. “There’s never anyone nice there. That’s for old men. Old men who have been going there since the Soviet Union. They go out of habit.”

“So where to go?”

“There’s another banya, off Rustavelli, near Piyonerskaya. Now there, you can find nice men. You can even get a nice private cabin with some young soldiers. And it’s clean there and nice.”
It sounded good to me. I wanted to go there. I wanted to find all these hidden places in the city. I wanted to know how people could possibly live a fulfilling life here, surely there was something happening behind the cold and proper exteriors, the empty streets and parks. Often I’d walk past a store or a street and even though it was quiet and dead seeming, I could smell the sweet smoke of marijuana, which I saw growing wild everywhere. But I felt completely left out of it.

“Maybe you can take me there sometime.”

“Sure,” he said, producing beers from his plastic bag and offering me one, opening the caps off with his teeth. It was a Baltika #9. “We could even go today.”

And with the powerful brew and my boredom powerful and my deep seated desire for some adventure, something new in this city which I had suddenly soured, I refrained from any serious judgement. After all, I didn’t know this guy. Perhaps this was the legendary set-up – an undercover security agent out to bait me. But I didn’t even care. I said, “let’s go today. I just need to stop at my apartment right here, to get some money.”

And he followed me up to my apartment, into the doorway of the building, up the elevator and into my apartment. And he said, “you never answered my question.”

“Which question was that?” I asked.

“If you preferred men or women.”

“Why does it matter?” I asked.

“Because I’d like to suck your cock.”

And I undid my belt and unzipped my pants right there, and he got on his knees and closed his eyes and began to suck my dick which was already hard and it felt pretty good. I wished for a moment that it were Sherzod. But I enjoyed it nonetheless, in fact I probably enjoyed more watching him enjoying sucking than the actual sucking itself. And finally, without much fanfare or effort, I came in his mouth and he seemed to have swallowed and from below, on his knees, he looked up at me and said “thank you.” I suppose I was a little confused by that, I thought as I stuffed my hard on back into my jeans, as I probably should have been the one thanking him.  ¶ 8:17 AM 0 Comments