CornFed Invades Moscow by CornFed (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

and raising their hats. Well, all of that except there was no honkey tonk, it was a dude or two who had gotten on the bar and started dancing, and all the hollering was from the women. As the vomit cleared and the beer bottles quit flying across the room, I looked around and noticed the men were outnumbered by, oh say, 25 to 1. Talk about a serious case of role reversal. I felt so much like a woman would feel in America.

But, alas, the Hungry Duck didn’t live up to its expectations for various reasons, the most obvious being the lack of English conversation. There were a few business characters in there who could speaka-da-English but most people simply knew that you spoke English and it was hopeless to listen to you jabber anymore. Another reason my departure was sooner than expected was the simple fact that the Hungry Duck was sort of “infamous” for rowdy and obscene behavior. The “least obscene” of which was the “circle the bar and kiss someone”. According to social customs at Camp Hungry Duck, as people get drunk, they just sort of make their way around the bar and started kissing whomever was facing them. The “most obscene” falls in between a kiss and being thrown off the balcony onto the street below. Knifes, broken chairs, impromptu fornication, and death threats sort of filled in the middle spaces.

All myself and Masked Wrestler Number 2 witnessed was a woman (I think) the size of an army caravan standing on my table and dancing to some foreign rap song. We both decided we needed to get away before she, or someone else for that matter, filled in the gaps mentioned above.

I thought the night was over as I was dropped off at the hotel. It was only like 9 or 10 and I was feeling a little tired so I decided to wander over to the Red Square and see what was so special about this place. The first special thing, and I think this is the most special thing ever, was a beer kiosk…much akin to the hotdog or bagel kiosks you would find in New York City. March on up there, pay some change, get a beer, wander around the Red Square with no worry of any kind of Puritan silly “open container you go to jail now” laws.

The cast of characters in the drama of Moscow was all in the Red Square. 18 to 80, blind, crippled, and crazy, if they couldn’t walk, they’d crawl. There were the token military officers out there with the guns showing from their belts. Occasionally, you’d see a bench or two filled with “women of the night” and their “commander in chief” sort of standing there with what looked like a little pig whip. On a side note, a pig whip is something you use to guide a hog while you’re showing him to the judges. Imagine that you cut a golf club in half, kep the top half, covered it in leather, and then put a little leather flap on the end the size of a dog’s ears. That’s a pig whip. And this lady had one. And I just had to watch.

Mama was right about Moscow in many regards. While the women are all sitting there on the bench, a bunch of night crawlers ventured up and said something to the woman standing there with the pig whip. She says something loud, sort of like the German lady in Austin Powers.

“ATTEENNNUUHUUUUTTT!!!!”

The women stand up, the man walks over to whom he likes, they talk and giggle, have a very endearing dialogue, and then disappear off into the night. Now, I remember my Sunday School lessons very clearly and I do believe this falls right in line with what King Solomon would call “improper wife selection” and what my Sunday School teacher would call “sin and degradation.” My mama refers to it as “fornication”. I think my daddy would say it’s a “most unusual act of foreplay, don’t you think son?”

I guess in Russia, they call it “dating”.

I wandered back over to the hotel after watching a few more people walking, err, stumbling around the Red Square and polished off the remnants of any American made beer in the mini-bar before going to bed.

“Why is it daylight at 5 AM?”

was my first thought the next day.

My second thought was in some silly Russian accent, which means I am definitely becoming one with Mother Russia after only a day.

The most difficult part about waking up on the second day at 5 AM is the case of the and-now-whats? So, now what am I going to do? I tried breakfast and it was a short lived masterpiece of eggs something with toast something and ham something. None of it tasted like it sounded. I tried wandering downstairs to see what was happening but it looked like your typical fancy hotel breakfast guest list. Businessmen and couples, sitting down all elegantly dressed for the day, and eating things off the menu that don’t taste like what they sound like. I checked the bar, just out of sheer ignorance and boredom, and was met with sheer ignorance and boredom.

What is a country boy from the bowels of South Georgia going to do at, now 7 AM, in Moscow Russia with 9 more days remaining? Being a firm believer in “bloom where you are planted” and “your diamond doesn’t need to be sought”, I did what any good ole boy would do.

I got back in the room, opened the mini-bar, and started enjoying myself. The interesting thing about drinking in the morning, aside from waving off the number 1 indicator of alcoholism thoughts in your ind, visa vis drinking in the morning, was how to prevent oneself from getting too carried away before lunch time. It didn’t work. By 11 AM, I called my friend, Masked Wrestler Number 2. By noon I was reeling from the effects of vodka and orange juice. By 1 PM, I was packed into a shoebox with wheels and grabbing some local fare. Bland local fare that is.

The rest of the day, we drove around looking at the Cathedrals and some of the rustic alleyway settings We talked about how little the police make and how they rely on bribes and scaring foreigners for money. We talked about how people in Moscow love life even though, from the outside looking in, life here seems anything but happy, joyous, and free. We talked about how most people are taught English in college but just don’t know how to say it back. We talked about his days a fighter pilot, some of battles he fought, the guns he fired, the men he wished he had killed but didn’t. We talked about his wife, his 2 kids, and his contempt for expensive vodka. The one thing we didn’t talk about was him leaving Moscow. He seemed content to stay there.

Back at the hotel, I attempted to sample Moscow in the daytime. I have to admit that the daytime life was boring to me. People walk here. People eat there. People rush to a cab. A cab rushes to the people. Blah blah blah. I got enough daytime fun sitting in a deer stand, communing with the Universe and all it’s peacefulness, back on the farm. I wanted to see the life of the locals when everyone forgot their job position and “role” in life. All of a sudden, I wish I had spent more time at the Hungry Duck the night before. No telling what I could have seen.

It was under this mad rush of life not lived, that I went back to the hotel and phoned my friend from Chicago.

“Where does a bored person go in Moscow?”

“NightFlight”

he says.

And so, at 6 PM, I grabbed myself one non-English speaking cab who understood the word “NightFlight” like a baby understands the word “Mama” and away we go. The best way I can describe the 6:15 PM entrance into NightFlight would be to say that it was like walking into a restaurant with a floor dedicated to bar/cheesy dance floor. Except, normally, that’s upstairs. At NightFlight, the food was upstairs and the bar/aforementioned cheesy dance floor was downstairs. There was a single, lone “bouncer” at the door letting people in. I began to question my friends’ choice of non-boring places to visit. Everyone knows the more bouncers, the better when looking for excitement.

The owners of NightFlight were supposedly Norweigan or some other Scandinavian kind of country. The surroundings were very nice, quaint, and a peaceful ambience. And in a country that has no catfish, the only thing left that is safe is the salmon. And let me tell you, a very beautiful salmon it was. I could almost hear it talking to me, telling me about it’s venture down the streams of Alaska, how it fertilized a million eggs and danced a million dances before it was caught by one of the owners of NightFlight on some silly looking lure that resembled a fly with a very large hook extending out it’s fanny. Poor salmon. Good salmon. It was a fantastic meal.

I am not sure how long I spent upstairs, talking to the salmon, eating the salmon, and polishing off several rounds of differing kinds of drinks, but the NightFlight I saw walking in was not the one I saw walking out. There were “all of a sudden” 25 or so patrons downstairs and somehow 2 more bouncers had morphed into existence outside the doorway. This might be a fun place after all.

Sitting at the bar, a very common theme kept occurring. I was outnumbered again in the gender category. Looking around, there was 5 guys and 20 women, not counting the bartenders. However, I was not outnumbered in the money category as the man from England, sitting next to me, had more than his share of Big Ben’s floating out of his pocket. I drank to his exchange rate, on him.

As the hours went on, the dance floor filled up with the most hideous of dances. Take a man in his 60’s, in a suit, give him a gallon or so of forbidden beverages, put on something from the 80’s in the music maker, and you have yourself a man wallowing over the floor, dreaming of his peak. My Exchange-Rate-Rich English friend and I got a real kick out of this.

“Look, he’s doing the Michael Jackson.”

There goes a moonwalk or three across the floor.

The hours felt like days, time stopped, eternity melted into my soul, as I honestly and earnestly watched the crowd pour in. The mix of people was astounding. In comes a suit from India, in comes a 70’s styled man from New Jersey, in comes 10 women dressed like Vogue magazine, followed by some goober with khaki’s and a Southern accent, the latter reminding me more of myself than anyone else.

The dance floor was a cornucopia of wishes and dreams. When it would clear out between songs, someone older than myself, be they man or woman, would venture out onto the floor with arms extended and dance the next 10 minutes away with something imaginary. Depending on the gender, another man or woman of the same demeanor, would join him or her. Me, personally, was drinking for free and laughing my fanny off with Mr Exchange Rate.

Until they started talking to me.

I don’t know quite what I did to invite these conversations. At this point in my life, one could call me