Jag-off

Thursday night, I stopped by the CVS in downtown Bethesda to pick up a box of Nice & Easy 114, the current (non-freaky red) cheap hair color of choice. I snagged a parking space next to the two handicapped spots and went in. As I scanned small boxes for the right color, I overheard snippets of a loud conversation between a couple perusing the Easter candy aisle.

"But do you think he's really handicapped?"

"It's just wrong."

"Yeah, no shit! Nice car, though..."

I assumed someone with no handicapped plates had pulled into one of the few designated spots at the pharmacy. Wouldn't be the first time that had happened here in the land of entitlement. I thought nothing of it and paid for my box of chemicals.

When I got to my car, I saw there was a very spiffy Jaguar parked next to me, occupying a handicapped spot. Indeed, there was a handicapped tag hanging from the rear view mirror. An older gentleman sat behind the wheel, the driver's door open. He had one leg stretched out the door, and, though I tried not to look, I could not help but see he had a serious palsy in one arm.

Or so I thought.

As I did the "healing spine sideways shimmy" to get into the Crapmobile Mark II, I got a better look.

Nope. No palsy.

The guy was going to town, whacking his willy in his fancy-schmantzy car. Polishing the wood. Beating his well-aged meat. Wanking with abandon.

I could not help it. I just stared, my jaw scraping the ground.

The onanistic Jag-ster finally noticed he had an audience and tried to stuff his member back in his trousers and get his leg back in his car. People, this parking space is directly under a big light right on a busy section of Wisconsin - there is no way you can masturbate in your luxury car a few feet from the entrance of this CVS and NOT be seen.

For once, I didn't say anything. I was just astounded and drove off, shaking my head. I know being affluent is no guarantee of having common sense, but there clearly had to be something wrong with this dude. At least I understood the conversation of the candy aisle couple.

What the hell is the problem with this CVS? Is it a second Pike Hellmouth, like the 7-11 by White Flint? I'm starting to think so. And I think I'll start using Purell after touching any products in this particular CVS location...

One weekend in Paris, Part III

So, there I was, trapped in a Parisian apartment while my "host" was off doing... well, whatever he was doing. I had no keys to the place, and I didn't even know where the closest Metro station was. By 8 that night, I was scrounging through his mostly empty refrigerator, looking for something edible. I found a couple of unopened yogurt containers and had a modest dinner in front of his tiny black and white TV. Parisian TV? Not so great. I found something that appeared to be the French equivalent of "Saved By the Bell" and pretty much gave up. I turned on the radio and listened to bad Europop punctuated with English-language oddities like Stan Ridgway singing some weird ballad of a dead Marine named "Camouflage." I looked out the window on a silent street, knowing that just a short distance away, the City of Lights was, well, lit up.

I found some paper and wrote up a list of the places I wanted to see and made the most of a very quiet night. I figured my best bet would be to find a hotel the next morning and just write off P. and his insanity. It was my first week off work after ending my contract in Moscow, and I suddenly was very, very tired. I crashed out and overslept horribly. I woke up when I heard a key in the door, and P. came in, dressed in yesterday's clothes, stinking of smoke. He was laughing and singing and manic beyond belief.

I, on the other hand, was angry. I let him have it both barrels. But I did it very coldly.

"So, where's the pizza?" I asked.

He laughed and fell onto me on the futon, trying to wrap me in some creepy hug.

"Oh!" He giggled. "Well, I had some pizza last night, hahahahahaha!"

I pushed him off me and got up, grabbing my things. "I'm hungry, I'm furious, and I want you to just drop me off at a decent hotel. I'm done with you treating me like shit. You're just as insane as you were in Moscow. Worse, actually. I'm done."

P. just lay there on the futon, watching me aggressively repack. Slowly, the truth hit him, and the smile vanished from his face. He reminded me of one of those dinosaurs with the brain in the tail, the impulses slowly reaching that primitive mind. "You just don't treat people this way, P. You just don't. I don't know what's really wrong with you, but you are sick and pathetic. Why the hell did you invite me here and beg me to come if you didn't want me to come? Kак вам стыдно!" How shameful of you! It's one of those things that is worse -and means worse - in Russian. And sick or not, P. needed to feel shame over how he had just treated me - like garbage.

P. looked down and said nothing. I locked myself into the tiny bathroom and threw on fresh clothes. When I came out, P. was on the phone, this time speaking in Russian. This I understood. He was making arrangements to return to his office in Moscow the next day. When he hung up, he said to me, "I am so sorry. I don't know why I did it. I just don't. I just do these things, okay? I have this life here, you know?" Honestly, I didn't know what life this was. Just clubbing and staying out all night, doing God knows what or God knows who. I sometimes wonder if he's ever picked up HIV or AIDS in his careless (I'm sure he'd think of it as "carefree") lifestyle.

He dug through a small dish on the windowsill and came up with a key. "Look, here is the spare key. You can just stay here. Stay for a week, if you want. I will not be here. The apartment is yours." He looked down again. "Je suis désolé." The same empty words he'd offered in Moscow after locking me out of my apartment all night. "Je suis désolé."

It meant nothing, really.

P. actually spent the rest of that day with me, mostly silent, very sober. He took me on the Metro to a Moroccan restaurant by the Stalingrad station. The restaurant was run by a couple he knew, friendly, but wary. When P. excused himself briefly, they asked me if he was being a horrible host. When I said yes, they apologized. Clearly, they had seen this before. After lunch, we picked up P.'s car and he drove me along the Champs d'Elysee and we stopped for an astoundingly overpriced coffee somewhere en route. I let him pay for everything. I really didn't care if I abused his hospitality for this one day. I made him stop at a bank and a little shop for me to get French currency, some food for the fridge, and a map of the city. As we went along, we barely spoke.

When we reached his place, P. quickly gathered some things and left. There was no real goodbye. He simply told me to leave the key in his mailbox when I departed. Where he planned to spend the night before his Moscow flight, I didn't know, and frankly, I didn't care. I felt nothing for him. No pity, no sympathy, not even any anger by then. He tried to do a little double-cheek kiss with me, but I pulled away. I just said, "Appreciate the use of the apartment."And P. left. As I heard the sound of his shoes echoing down the hall, I finally felt something.

Relief.

I laundered the futon sheets in his tiny washer. I put on some rubber gloves I found under the sink and scrubbed down the kitchenette and the bath. I took a long, hot shower, put on jammies, ate some ham and a croissant with a big glass of milk, and then slept like a baby.

For the next few days, I was a free woman in Paris. I walked for miles and miles. I took the Metro everywhere, drank coffee at little outdoor cafes. Went to Versailles on a bus with a group of Brits who thought I didn't understand English and made snide comments about me until I told them to fuck off. (That was fun.) Enjoyed the pleasant gloom of Notre Dame and the breathtaking view from the Tour Eiffel. Saw Mona Lisa's smile and the limbless glory of Winged Victory and the Venus de Milo (and got hopelessly lost in the galleries of the Louvre). Drank more coffee. Ate more fresh pastry than any human should. Bought cheerful yellow cafe au lait bowls from the clearance rack in the basement of Galeries Lafayette.

It was lovely.

I just broke the last of those cafe au lait bowls this week. Maybe that's why I finally decided to write about P. and the trip to Paris. Exorcising old demons.

I've heard from P. twice since then. Once, when he showed up in DC with this guy named Brian, an African-American clothing designer living in Paris. He'd grown up in DC and wanted to show P. the city. Brian could have been a character on "Absolutely Fabulous." He was flamboyant and silly, and when I asked him what he designed as we sat in some overpriced raw bar on the edge of Georgetown, he responded "viscose men's shirts - it's the only fabric worth working with, dahling." Really, I'd just expected him to say "menswear, ladies, eveningwear..." To this day, I smirk when I read the word "viscose." P. wouldn't cop to Brian being his lover or partner. He was still working on some pointless illusion, and I let it go.

They'd invited me out for dinner as apology for the fiasco in Paris. I'd never eaten at a raw bar, and, with apologies to my sushi-loving friends, I prefer my food cooked. I nursed a glass or two of champagne while they packed away a couple hundred dollars worth of oysters and caviar. Brian was unimpressed with my plain lumpiness, and P. wanted to party in Dupont. I left, emotionless, not expecting to ever hear from him again.

But I did. It must have been 1999 or 2000. I was in Tbilisi, Georgia, managing logistics for a conference. I was staying in a very posh hotel in the middle of a people's strike -- Georgia had been without electricity after dark for ages by then, and the citizenry, finally fed up with the situation, had started to protest in the streets, burning tires. Black smoke crept into every opening of every building in the heart of the city, and I developed pneumonia after a couple of days of breathing cold, acrid air in the autumn chill of the Caucasus Mountains. The phones didn't work for the most part, but, for some reason, the Internet still functioned in the business center. Unable to sleep one night (and sick as a dog), I went to check my Hotmail in the middle of the night. And there in my in-box was a message from P. He had friends opening a restaurant in New York. They wanted him to manage it, but he couldn't get a work visa. Would I be interested in a marriage of convenience? He and his friends would pay me for my trouble.

I remember starting to laugh - I laughed so hard, I had a coughing fit, waking up the old guy snoozing at the front desk. I wrote several responses:

"You've got to be fucking joking."

"Go to hell."

"Good luck with that, asshole."

But, in the end, I didn't send any of them. I just deleted his e-mail, and I've never heard from him since.

I don't know where P. is these days. I have no idea if he's alive or dead. I'm still irritated with myself, years after the fact, that I was taken for a fool by him.

I feel sadness for him now, just because he was sick and pathetic and surely deeply wounded and twisted by abuse at the hands of his own family. And I hope, if he is still alive, that he's gotten the help he needed so badly. It would be nice if he could be out and stable.

And I also hope I never hear from him again.

Like that last broken cafe au lait bowl, I've swept P. away into the past.

But, really, Paris was nice.

One weekend in Paris, Part II

So... where were we?

Ah yes, my last few days in Moscow...

My apartment was empty and my belongings en route to a warehouse in Germany (where they would be rifled through by thieves and vandals) for eventual dumping at my mom's house. I was wrapping things up at work and ready to spend a few days with my brother in Frankfurt before heading back to the United States.

P. was back in Moscow right before I left. He had returned from Paris and called, asking if he could deliver me to the airport for my last flight out of Russia. Having encountered a messed up, addictive personality or two in my past, I didn't want to discount his efforts at rehabilitation, and I agreed to accept his ride.

I also agreed to visit Paris for a long weekend. Just a quick trip to see the city before I headed home to the 'States. Man, that was a stupid, stupid decision.

Très, très stupide.

Travel Hint: if you agree to be the houseguest of someone with serious issues - especially in a country where you don't speak the language - make sure you arrive with local currency already in hand, the contact information for your country's embassy, and the phone number & address of a decent hotel. You'll thank me for this, trust me.

I flew to Paris from the safety and comfort of my brother's apartment in Frankfurt via Lufthansa, my brother's then-employer. Because I was flying on a heavily discounted family member ticket and could end up in first or business class, I had to dress the part. However, this was 1993, and I'd been in Moscow since the 80s. Let's just say that the dress-up fashion of the 80s really didn't age well. Picture, if you will, a rotund woman in a hot pink and black power suit (top - hot pink with a big black button at the top of the shoulder-padded jacket, bottom - a black, knee length skirt) with, God help me, hot pink slingback pumps. Yeah, hot pink pumps. Jeezus Christmas, what an awful thing!

Despite horrifying my fellow passengers with my own form of fashion terrorism, I made it to France in one piece. But, upon arrival at Charles de Gaulle, my host was nowhere in sight. This was well before we all had cell phones genetically attached to us, mind you, so I was left wandering around a really awful, confusing - and frankly, dirty - terminal for more than an hour. I wasn't even out of the airport yet, and I had a bad feeling about this trip.

Finally, P. appeared and when I asked him what had happened, he just laughed - very nervously - and blew off my query. We got into an elevator to take us up to the parking garage, and one of my pink slingback heels lodged itself into the overly wide space between the elevator and the closing doors.

The elevator won. My pink heel was ripped off my shoe, leaving me hopping around in an already ridiculous-for-the-90s ensemble in Paris, of all places. No worries, P. told me. We'd go to his flat, I could change, and then, we'd see the city.

But we never got to P.'s apartment that morning. Twice, he stopped to make phone calls, leaving me in the car and never explaining what was going on. I saw the edge of the city come into view, and then fade away as we turned into the suburbs. "We're going to see my parents," P. announced. This, I had not planned on.

I had met P.'s mother once before in Moscow. A Jew from Algeria, Mama P. did not speak any English, and my French was limited to a few phrases, although I could understand a good bit of what was spoken to me. P. had dumped his mother with me one day in Moscow, and I had to take her souvenir shopping on the Arbat, a quaint street lined with gift shops and cafes. We had trudged the length of the street in near silence, except for me using Sesame Street-level French to answer her queries of "combien?" whenever she found a trinket she wanted. We finally bonded - as much as we could, under the circumstances - when Lady Marmelade started to pour out a speaker on the street. At least we could sing the chorus together! Me, the Algerian Jew, and Patti Labelle, belting it out a few blocks from the Kremlin:

Voulez vous coucher avec moi, se soir?
Voulez vous coucher avec moi?

(Moscow, was, kids, one really weird place.)

At least I knew I would have a warm welcome from P.'s maman. As for P.'s papa? I couldn't guess. I'd heard a lot of strange things about him. P.'s father, I understood, constantly had flashbacks to Vietnam. He had been a paratrooper with the French military back in the 50s, dropping in twice on Dien Bien Phu, where some bad shit had happened to him, and he was, I had been told, never quite the same.

We arrived at the parents' place unannounced. I had guessed - incorrectly - that one of P.'s many calls along the way had been to his 'rents to let them know we were coming. No such luck. Mom P. was dressed in a slip, had curlers in her hair and toilet paper stuffed between her freshly painted toes. Dad P. was just in his jockey shorts and socks. Both had cigarettes burning away in their nicotine-stained hands. But, to their credit, they welcomed me warmly.

And, as soon as we arrived, me in my hot pink mess and broken shoe, P. vanished with the car - and my luggage. He was gone for two hours, during which Mom P. railed at one of her older children over the phone and Dad P. sat silently with me in front of the TV, where we watched The Simpsons and a Jacques Cousteau special. Our entire interaction was:

Dad P.: Jacques Cousteau? (grunt)
Me: Jacques Cousteau! Oui! (offering a big thumbs up)
Dad P.: Oui, Jacques Cousteau.

Let's hear it for international understanding!

Eventually, P. showed up again with no explanation of his disappearance. He immediately insisted that his parents get dressed and we all go for lunch. We packed ourselves into P.'s tiny car (mind you, I'm still in the shitty suit and broken shoe) and went to a Vietnamese restaurant. A Vietnamese restaurant in an Arab suburb of Paris with a guy who has Vietnam flashbacks.

P.'s father immediately got into a heated half-French, half-Vietnamese argument with one of the women working at the joint, P.'s mother went out to the payphone in the lobby to continue screaming at one of her kids, and P. himself quickly ordered our food and then vanished again, leaving me at the table alone.

I'll say this, the food was good. The company was... sitcom-like.

P. resurfaced after a while, paid the bill, and whisked me away, without a moment to say goodbye to his parents, whom he simply left at the restaurant.

I wasn't sure what was up, but P. was acting more bizarrely than I'd ever seen him in Moscow. Drugs? Turning tricks? I pondered all the unsavory possibilities and, quietly, calmly, I asked him what the hell was going on. He just laughed everything off and said all was well. It wasn't even a good lie. I realized this was a trip where I would have to try to make the most of a challenging situation. I asked to stop at a bank to change money, but he told me not to worry about it yet. He'd pay for everything this trip! Being an awfully independent sort, that didn't make me very happy.

He drove me through the heart of the city, at last, and it was, I have to admit, very lovely. P. wanted to stop for coffee, but I'd had enough of limping around in the broken shoe, and I insisted we go to his flat so I could change.

He lived in a tiny efficiency in a quiet neighborhood. I couldn't tell you where it was to save my life now, but it was pleasant and tidy, and I felt safe. P.'s actual apartment was a sea of chaos with laundry and bedding tossed every which way. There were no chairs. You either sat on the edge of his futon or you stood. Living like that would have made me crazy in fairly short order. I determined I wouldn't spent much time in the apartment. I only had four full days in town, anyway.

In short order, P. made a few phone calls in rapid fire Arabic. Raised a Catholic by an Armenian father and a Jewish mother from North Africa, P. walked a fine cultural line in France. He fit in many places without really fitting in anywhere. He spoke French, Arabic, Russian, English, and Armenian - he was an intelligent man, but a troubled, and sometimes downright stupid man. And he also knew I didn't understand a word of Arabic. Once off the phone, P. told me he was running out to grab pizza for our dinner. That was at 6 p.m.

He didn't come back until 11 the next morning...

One weekend in Paris, Part I

Well, I've decided to tell stories about all the place I mentioned in an earlier post, and I've determined Paris would be a place to good start. It's not one of my favorite memories, but it's good for the telling.

I've been to France twice - once for an hour or so stop in Nancy on a car trip with my brother, mother, and brother's spouse, and again to Paris for a long weekend. A very, very, very long weekend.

I should explain a little about the circumstances that led up to my long weekend in Paris. It came at the end of my time in Russia. I'd been in Moscow almost four years, and, despite the possibility of private sector jobs to keep me there, I wanted to return home. Moscow had changed rather dramatically during my years there. When the Soviet Union fell, there were quiet waves of violence that ushered in the Wild West gold rush days of ugly oligarchy that still govern Russia's capital city. I use the term "quiet waves of violence" because I don't think much was heard about it in the West. But there was a dramatic increase in murders, abductions of foreigners, mafia hits, sexual assaults, and weird attempts at bribery by underpaid police through threats of beatings or bogus blood tests with rusty old needles carried in sweaty wool uniform pockets.

The little kiosks by my apartment building had started stocking and selling handguns along with their usual fare of Snickers bars, champagne, and condoms. I heard gunfire at night on the street, and I was - although too cool to admit it - terrified of walking down the ill-lit hallway of my apartment building because getting to my door meant walking past the garbage chute alcove, which had open access to the dark emergency stairs. I sometimes heard people scuttling around those stairs late at night, and I had visions of being mugged or worse (much, much worse) leaving or coming home. I actually developed a bit of an OCD during those last months there, returning to my door to make sure it was really locked almost every morning. To this day, at times of great stress, I will do the same. It's my Moscow OCD that I keep sublimated, for the most part.

During that last year, a friend of mine - a French-Armenian businessman - asked if he could stay in my apartment while his was under renovation. This was to be just for two or three weeks. I could handle that. I had known him for years at that point and enjoyed his fun company. Two or three weeks was no big deal.

It became a matter of months, though. The "two or three weeks" I would find out was just another one of his constant stream of unstoppable lies. His apartment wasn't being renovated. He had lost the lease.

I used to be a fairly naive person, but exposure to people like P., the businessman from Paris, turned me into a much more wary - and much more savvy - person. But it wasn't a pleasant process. Over time, I would find that he had some serious problems - clinical depression, bulimia, a sex addiction that was probably a result of childhood trauma from his older brothers peddling him to pedophilic men in the rough Paris Arab suburb where they lived, and an addiction to prescription sleep and pain pills. Back in Paris, he ran with a fast, rich, and pretty set of people - movie directors, models, trendy restauranteurs - but in Moscow, he clung to me, probably for safety. I didn't learn about his problems - and his rampant lying - until the last week he was under my roof. He was making my life hellish at home, and when he left his journal sitting on my coffee table, almost begging me to read it, I did. I know it was wrong, but his increasingly bizarre behavior was just killing me.

I don't speak French, but after four years of being around French speakers in Moscow (and having some modest ability with languages) I could read it with a fair degree of understanding. In the handful of pages I read, he spilled out how he just couldn't help lying to me. When he was back in Paris, he would sneak away from his Chanel-clad friends out to the suburbs to turn tricks like he had been forced to do as a child. He told his family he was straight, but was, in fact, gay. Usually my gaydar is pretty good, but sometimes, there is a fine line between gay and a Parisian fashion hound who carries a man bag. Go figure. Why he felt he could not tell me he was gay, I don't know. I'm pretty comfortable around people, gay, straight, whatever. I assumed he knew I had no issues with anyone's orientation. But I think he was so caught up in his own game of lies and subterfuge, he couldn't even be honest on that point.

When I was away on trips outside of Moscow with friends, he was bringing strangers home to my apartment for anonymous sex. I suddenly realized why my bedroom was often strewn with roses when I'd come home. What might have been seen as a lovely sentiment was really just to cover the smell from person or persons unknown he was banging in my bed while I was away. My disgust was beyond belief.

When he came home that night, I fessed up. I had read his journal. He gave this sarcastic laugh - he'd left it out on purpose, hoping I would read it. "I knew you were smart enough to read French," he hissed. He wanted someone to know what a dark person he really was. I told him he needed help, and he needed to move the hell out of my apartment immediately.

That night was the birthday of a mutual friend - the friend who had, in fact, introduced me to P. She had no idea he was messed up. She also didn't know he was gay. Nor did her family. She had a conservative Armenian upbringing in France, and, in truth, her parents thought he might be a good candidate to marry their lovely daughter. P. had been engaged once, but his fiancee broke it off. He would not ever say why. After reading his journal, I can only imagine she came home to find him bonking some guy in their bed. Maybe even for money. Who could say? All I know is that his ex and my friend both dodged a bullet coated in toxic waste.

So, on that birthday evening, P. declined to go out with us, knowing that I knew his unpleasant secrets - and that I wanted him gone by the morning. My friend and I returned to my place after a nice dinner out only to discover that P. had put the chain on the door inside and then taken a sleeping pill. Pounding on the door, throwing rocks at the window, phone calls... nothing woke him. My agile friend even climbed over to my kitchen balcony (a dizzying feat fifteen stories in the air) and screamed at him in her most aggressive Armenian. That still did not wake him. She and I spent a cold night huddled at my door, smoking cheap cigarettes to stay warm. Keep in mind, I don't smoke. At all. But this was what all the old Soviet cops did to stay warm as they stood post outside our building. It worked, although it was one of the worst nights of my life. Moscow was not a place where you could just run off and find a hotel room. (Still isn't -- Moscow is now the world's most expensive city. A mediocre hotel room will run you in the high hundreds.) And I simply could not go knock on a friend's door and tell them what had happened. It was too embarrassing. "Hi, I've been duped into housing a troubled lying part-time male hooker who's locked me out of my apartment. Can I come in?"

I felt bad for P. that he had such tremendous problems with addictions, an eating disorder, and abuse at the hands of his family. But that he had used my home as his personal brothel and constantly lied to me? I didn't feel bad for him on that count. I was just pissed off, beyond belief.

The next morning, all P. had to say when he finally opened the door was "Je suis désolé" and, I swear to god, he tried to stuff fifty bucks in my hand. What an ass. I told him to get out of my home, and he promised he would be gone by the time I got home from work. For once, he kept his promise. There was no sign of him left (except for the hair he constantly shed on my bathroom floor - shudder, shudder) in my home. I breathed a sigh of relief, and he left Moscow for an extended stay in Paris. He sent letters and made phone calls saying he was seeing a therapist and he was getting his life back on track. He would make it up to me some day. I should come to Paris and he would show me his city and apologize.

This episode with P. had stuck the big fork in me. I was done, kids. I realized it was time to leave town. My contract was ending, and I wanted to shake the shadows trailing me. P. called one last time, sounding very sober and calm for the first time in ages, saying he was sincerely sorry for all the grief and the lies. Would I consider coming to Paris for a weekend on my way out of Russia? He would be my tour guide to all the City of Lights had to offer. He even laughed that he would see his therapist twice on the day that I arrived and would make sure to be on his very best behavior for me.

But that, my friends, was just another lie. And I would have to kick myself all over again for my continued naivete...