Super! by Margot Berwin "There he was, the executive creative director, married, two kids, making a few million a year at least, sitting in front of a video monitor, looking up a supermodel's dress." /fiction/
Love and Hate by Peter Smith Comics legend Peter Bagge on comedy, gender and his forgiving family. *comics issue*
The ocean, along the Belt Parkway, glitters in the cold sun. The open, maritime landscape, so unexpected after leaving Manhattan's thick forest of buildings, always comes as a shock to me, as though it were inconceivable that nature could exist in such close proximity to concrete. Even with the sunglasses my eyes adjust with difficulty to the blinding light. At first, the ocean evokes a field of snow, then, briefly, the Mediterranean Coast along Autoroute du Soleil going east from Cannes. Then it turns into the Black Sea, and at each exit I pass — Coney Island, Kings Highway and finally Brighton Beach — I substitute the names of port cities in Crimea — Sebastopol, Kerch, Yalta.
promotion
Yuri is waiting for me at the door of his building, dressed in a pair of brown slacks and lace-up shoes, and a long-sleeved tan polo shirt. We take the elevator to the fifth floor, to an apartment he shares with a computer programmer from Minsk who's never there. A narrow bed covered with a sleeping bag, a table stacked with cardboard boxes up to the ceiling, from which hangs a length of blue felt, a Sony TV perched high on a dresser, a metal-frame couch caving in on one side, a glass coffee table cluttered with paper, shelves crammed with Russian dolls. With its big picture window overlooking the ocean, his room gives me an exciting feeling of displacement. I drop my bag on the floor and lean out the window. The deserted beach looks like it has floated across several oceans and clamped itself to this bit of the Eastern Seaboard.
"You bring bathing suit?"
"What?" I turn to face him. "The ocean is too cold!"
He looks disappointed. But I've brought my gym clothes, and I go to the bathroom to change. When I come out, he's got sweatpants on, a T-shirt and a windbreaker. We jog side by side like two comrades into the sun, already angling west, passing the jetties made of cement blocks and rocks. The brisk ocean air fills my lungs in great, exhilarating waves. But after a while I start slowing down. He turns back to me and yells, "Come on, come on, you're in good shape." I raise my arm to signal that he should run ahead of me. When I catch up with him he's standing on a rock, dark silhouette against the sun, moving his arms and legs erratically to make fun of my running style.
"So, ready for swim?"
"No way! It's March. I hate cold water, I told you."
"Is nothing. In Russia, we used to break ice in frozen sea, and when we came out we drank vodka to warm up."
Still whirling his arms around, he looks like a Norse god, surveying his land and ocean. "Come on!"
Afraid to pass for a sissy, I untie my sneakers, roll my pants up and jump in and out of the icy waves. Yuri squeals with a little boy's delight when he notices my lavender toenails. Then he strips down to his bathing suit, a tight Speedo like men used to wear in France before boxers and swimming trunks came back in style, and carefully folds his clothes on the rock. He's got the body of a swimmer, long thighs and almost grotesquely overdeveloped shoulders that look more at ease naked than ensconced in street clothes. I watch him dive in and swiftly move to the open sea in fast, powerful strokes, then I walk back to the rock where he's left his jacket, slip it on to keep warm and watch his head bob up and down, way out, like a buoy. We are alone on the beach, as far as the eye can see.
When he emerges out of the ocean, slapping his sides to stay warm, and complaining that his towel has sand on it, I imagine him as a husband, berating me for having neglected to keep an eye on the towel and letting it drop off the rock. But he is no husband, and I watch him with an anthropologist's avid curiosity. He shakes the towel, frowns, makes sure all traces of sand have been abolished, then rubs his back and thighs.
I offer him his jacket, but he refuses and throws the towel over his shoulder. "I've spent two years in Russian army. Is little rougher than this. I'd like to see those wimpy Americans, see if they could survive if there's war on U.S. territory." As he walks tall and proud by my side in his thin T-shirt, his white skin not even mottled
He strips down to his bathing suit, a tight Speedo like men used to wear in France before boxers and swimming trunks came back into style.
with goose bumps, I wonder if the only way to withstand the unavoidable humiliations of immigration is to convince yourself that you are more of a man than the Americans, spoiled, like Alexander's soldiers on Capri, by their easy life.
On the coffee table he's laid out a tin of gleaming black caviar, a jar of butter, black bread and a chilled bottle of vodka. He splashes black-currant juice in my glass of vodka and shows me how to drink it, bottoms up, head tilted back. The vodka shoots like molten lava down my stomach. He nods with approval, then lathers a thick coat of butter on a piece of bread, and an even thicker coat of caviar and hands it to me, waiting for my reaction, while I sink my teeth into it.
"You like?"
The briny taste of the fish eggs, softened by the butter, dissolves into my mouth, chased by a new shot of vodka. Yuri the Norse God is the hospitable stranger who picked me up while I was traveling on a foreign road, along the Baltic Sea. Behind us, background shot of the ocean rolling pewter and copper in the sunset, and on the soundtrack, the raucous voice — mournful, but powerfully moving, of a singer whose name I don't catch, and whose black-and-white poster hangs on the wall, "My hero."
"Yes. It's delicious."
He leans against the back of the couch, stretching his long legs under the table.
"In Moscow," he says, "it was crazy, in the '80s, when everything was falling apart." He sighs, nostalgic over the memories. The pyramid schemes he got involved in to survive, the vodka lines in the snow, the motorcycle he had rigged and his accident, the engine exploding, burning the inside of his thighs, his knee cap busted — he rolls up his pants and shows me the scar, a thick flap of skin curling around the knee — and at the army, scabies, little parasites under skin, laying eggs, you know? The bullying, beat up by five guys the night he arrived. "I'm strong, but I couldn't defend myself against five." Each detail punctuated by a new shot of vodka bottoms up.
