1. After our show in Moscow, we racked up an 800 euro vodka bill. So we felt pretty nice, you might say. After our show we drank and drank and reveled and we racked up this monumental tab. Delicious ice-cold vodka was brought to our table: whole crystal vases of precious sloshing vodka, sloshed into our joyous mouths, and plates of whole baked Rus fish with onions, and rinds of lemon, and the silver skin of the fish drizzled with olive oil, and perogies with dill.
In Russia the word Vodka is a slight diminutive of Voda, or water, and the drinking all felt very pure--as if the vodka had melted from a glacier and into some purified crystal decanter. I thought of water, and what water means to people, and I thought of water’s little brother, and what that means to people.
I wanted to go to a Georgian restaurant after this racking-up of Euros and drink yellow weirdness and eat li'l lamb off an ancient skewer. Our cosmopolitan Muscovite hosts disagreed. They surely did not want to go to a Georgian hole-in-the-wall and drink yellow liquid that slows your limbs and makes you fly around in a psychic-amber-dawn golden light. They turned their handsome Muscovite noses up at such a proposition--Muscovites, as a general over-simplification (meaning: cultural observation), have a kind of "U.S.S.R.-is-still-in-effect" snobbery towards the old satellites, and I think they possess a particular fear of the representatives of those post-glasnost countries that bolt for the West. I do have two incidences that corroborate this small claim, and I will get to them in due time.
Our hosts wanted to go to a western-style nightclub and drink tequila. I could see this desire expressed in their aura.
We bought dried fish in little yellow bags, and wine and beer and vodka, and we went back to our hotel rooms. We convinced our German booking agent to have a party in his room, but actually we convinced his girlfriend to host the party. He looked pretty sad about the whole affair. Astrid, his girlfriend, is a Bavarian and a Russian translator. She lives in Berlin but she used to live in Moscow.
Astrid is the only Bavarian I know, but I have been told that Bavarians often have this Manichean love of seriousness, made Manichean by a Bakhtin-Carnival style love of guzzing. Or guzzling. She was dressed in black, and smoked every second, and she blew the smoke out of her mouth like the smoke was an impudent child that she loved and owned. She also loved Kharms' Incidences and the lesser Bulgakov works and Bely's Petersburg, and knew lots of places in Moscow and she pissed off the brides of Mayakovsky but she didn’t care (I was of course mortified, but still so giddy to meet a bride of Mayakovsky).
Our hotel was large. It was opulent, and we were breathless virgins to that word and world of opulence. Each floor of the hotel had its own massive central gathering space, protected by sound-proof glass, with beautiful carpets and fireplaces and marble and red and gold and Hockney shit all over. I have no reference or analogy, so I can only think of these spaces like lobbies, but without a portal to the outside world. I thought: ‘We will just have a party in there’.
I love being in an elevator because it’s the only time I get to mosh. I have a personal pledge, to myself, to skank the shit out of all elevators, mostly because of this idea: the cables break from the moshing, and the post-tragedy examiners soberly pop in the security tape, and they expect to see a bunch of chicken-shit business men panicking, flailing in fear at the camera, but the footage only shows some stone-cold moshers skanking the shit out of that elevator. That security tape is, to me, the very logos of punk.
The elevator doors opened, and I stopped moshing into everyone, and I stopped singing "Holiday in Cambodia", and we looked into our pre-ordained party space. We saw that another party was already occurring. We saw a muscular man wearing jet black leather pants, smiling and singing dramatically and drinking juice out of a carton. When he drank, we saw his torso muscles ripple. He only had bald-dreads, every other hair was burned off his body. His dreads streamed in coils down his back, cascading dreadlocks that fell from the crest of his head. He wore a ketchup and mustard hot dog cable-knit undershirt, and it hung loosely off of his raw, rare bulging muscles. This shirt, coupled with the tight leather pants, produced an effect that was not unlike an exploding hydro plant falling into a panic-void. He looked like Conan on the catwalk. These were clearly theater people. We are still children, and these kinds of signifiers scare us off.
2. So we skipped the party place and moved to the room, kind of sad because everyone has partied in hotel rooms before and it usually ends poorly.
But luckily, on our way to Astrid's room, happy just to smoke cigs on the bed, and clog the sink with prawns, and chicken bones, and puke, we saw a beautiful sight--Latvian Helen Mirren, weaving towards us, slamming into the walls, swearing, laughing at her own comedies. Latvian Helen Mirren, drunk off her own beauty, her essence, drunk off her performance that night as Star Opera Singer at Moscow’s Biggest Opera House, drunk and weaving and laughing and singing Opera in the hallway, and with every swagger she was utterly bewitching us.
Mike Rak, our Bass player, dropped his beer and ran up to her, and he immediately and wisely adopted her sway and swagger. He was like "Allll Righhhhhtttt! Where are you going? That's right, I know where you are at! Come party with us, 'cuz that's where the party is really at!"
I thought, 'Wow, what a brazen move!'
Later, after touring with another Bass Player, I will recognize that all bass players are secretly sex-crazed, as a result of playing the bass. And when they have their liquor, this brazen-ness burns a forge of fire in their bellies and takes control of their actions, and they are able to speak sexily, they are able to verbalize the sexy language of the bass.
She might have slapped Mike, or scratched his eyes out, because she was shockingly beautiful. Her hair was like this field of wheat that a noble soldier sees after two months of traveling on a train, a field of wheat that he had once tilled when he was a boy, and now the sight of the wheat drains him of all of the horrors of the trench, a field of wheat swaying under a spring’s breath, a field of wheat that has grown even more handsome since his departure.
I looked into her sloshed eyes and I mouthed "Star". She truly was a star. She was 55 years old, and her laugh, if you can permit this metaphor, was a Bosendorfer twinkle. She held a beer in her noble hand, and she appraised Mike.
She “considered” Mike, though with her beauty she might have smote him a blow with her clarion voice, she might have smote him with only her eyes and struck him down as insignificant.
Her beauty was such that she could have drawn into her bed-chamber any one of Moscow's many chestnut-haired or coal-haired princes with only a glance or a lilt. There might be moats of anonymous Audis circling her hotel room, a whirling dervish of Putins crying out her name, crying for her love.
She laughed and shook her head and mouthed “no” with happy eyes, and she deaked around Mike, like Ariel on her way to a spirit party, and the sorcery of the sea poured into the hallway and we felt like we should have put wax in our ears but someone had their eyes closed or something and managed to drag us fireman style into the hotel room and away from the option of following the star immediately to her party.
The hotel room was pretty wild. Ryan was drinking lots of stuff, like beers from cans and raw warm vodka from a bottle with Prince Myshkin on the label. People were just guzzling wildly and talking about the brides of Mayakovsky and having other conversations. No one noticed Mike disappear. We noticed him come back though. He’d gone to the party. He’d followed the star.
Astrid was pissed—it could have been dangerous! But Mike swore that they were theater people, but were singing, or, in other words: “opera people.” Astrid was a bit protective, and our other host Inna, a true Muscovite, was begging us not to go to the party. She feared something nameless. But we had seen the star.
3. When we walked into the party space the excited chatter of the Latvian National Opera troupe hung up, and all eyes went right to the star. After a minute of squinting, she remembered Mike from the hallway--that is, she remembered meeting him twenty minutes prior to this show down, and she greeted us and hugged Mike and squeezed him. We sat down on some leather couches, all huddled together of course, but Mike was led into the Star’s inner circle. This circle of power was quite discernable—and those on the outside of the circle snarled and stink-eyed us, and this group of emigrants and exiles from the circle were definitely led by the 2nd Star, a young woman who was dressed like Snoop Doggy Dogg.
She really was dressed exactly like how I see Snoop whenever I close my eyes and think of Snoop: those long, skinny cornrows, a big loose blue jersey, some tear-away pants and brilliant white sneakers, cool cat slouched shoulders and the knowing of one’s own infinite coolness. She sullenly smoked and eyed us with utter contempt. Utter contempt.
Her troops assembled around her—I thought of just after World War 2, when the Russians and the Americans were viewing each other with a suspicious hatred, and then some hapless British officer shows up with a gin gimlet thinking that it’s time the allies just get along. Hapless fools, we were, and we had stepped into the darkness outside of the circle, where the 2nd star’s burning hatred for the 1st star choked the air. She just smoked, and scowled, but in her eyes smoked all of the fury of a 2nd star.
Inside the circle, everything was light and happiness: I saw the Star, holding court and laughing and drinking fine champagne, I saw the man with the leather pants and the cable-knit sweater, and a rosy-cheeked stage manager who smelled like Mel’s mom, and by that I mean she smelled nice, and there was, in this circle, another half-dozen hangers on and bit players.
Our host Inna was the most disturbed—the Latvians sensed immediately that one of the hated Muscovites had crashed their party, and though they had just played three wildly acclaimed sold-out shows at the Moscow Opera-house, the old rivalries and hatreds of Moscow were such that not even an infinite string of adored performances in their Rome could have softened this hatred. They were all burning a wicked hatred towards her.
4. I hate strife, unless I am trying to create that strife. I hate other people’s strife, and I always want to mitigate this strife. If I have to, I will create a situation that unites all of the warring parties for a short time, by acting in such a way to unite these parties.
So I stood up, and I explained to both circles of the Latvian National Opera that we too are musicians, and that it is a kind of holy coincidence that in all of Moscow two visiting troupes should happen upon each other, and what greatness lies in this coincidence, and so on and so forth. And then I planned to give a tribute. But I had forgotten, while I was planning this diversion, to decide who to tribute: Turgenev and Farley Mowat? Should I make a toast to Glenn Gould and Rachmaninoff? I just couldn’t think of anyone who we would all know and respect.
I was saying things like “It’s truly a blessing that two artistic troupes [I actually used that word] are here, unified by that most invisible art”, every fucking terrible word damning me more in their eyes, uniting them in outright disdain for this overweight, red-faced Scottish British guy with shark eyes holding his vodka glass in the air, as if he was delivering his acceptance speech for the Scotiabank poetry award (this is how crappy Canada is—it lets Scotiabank give out awards for poetry), as if I was speaking to a crowd of friendly but bored Torontonians and not hostile Opera singers who hated me and hated Inna and hated Moscow and hated each other.
I sensed that my plan was working! Star was looking at me like I was a pile of puke, and so was corn-rowed 2nd star! I became emboldened to sow these two disparate forces together:
“I’d like to make a toast, a tribute to the great musicians of our traditions! So here’s to Metallica and Shostakovich!” and to seal the deal of unified hatred, I guzzed my entire drink like a frat-house pig, great rivers of Vodka pouring down my ruddy dimples and down my neck. No one toasted with me, but I think one of the stage-hands started air-guitaring “Master of Puppets.”
After that the world started growing dim and fractured and contentious. Star looked up at Mike and asked what nationality he was. He proudly proclaimed that he was 100 percent Ukrainian, and for the xenophobic Star his hands, hands that were brazenly rubbing her shoulders and slowly moving down her chest, morphed into rotten fishes. She looked positively disgusted that this Ukrainian was giving her a sensual massage in front of her whole company. She seemed on the verge of slapping him, but then Mike really poured his magic into his bass fingers, and she floated back into the whirlpool of goodness and she started singing. This was nice, very nice, incredibly nice, shockingly beautiful, she was singing about The Volga, that steaming, boiling, rolling Volga that Paustovsky wrote about, that white frothing Volga of my dreams, she was singing and I was dancing and she was up on the table singing to her Ukrainian liege and I was spilling my new drink and dancing and then the last thing I remember was being back in the hotel room, and Astrid was talking about Faust, and I was trying to remember one thing about Faust, the book, and the one thing I could remember at the time was a cottage’s light and the word “peace”.
Then our booking agent said something about Faust, and Astrid turned to him and snarled the following words at him:
“Christian, you have only read the first six hundred pages of Faust. Until you finish Faust, I not only order you not only to never ever speak again about Faust, but you are not even allowed to ever speak again about other books, and furthermore, you are not allowed to speak again for the rest of the night, so pull the covers over your head, and go to fucking sleep!”
Then I crawled down the hallway and into bed. Mel was moaning, poisoned from Vodka, and she was muttering in her haze “She smelled like my mom…”
When I closed my eyes I saw the peace of a cottage’s light.
