MEC-S C E N E (XXX)

S C E N E (XXX)

TEL AVIV, STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001 ce

***

A small place like this takes on fierce intensity. A pressure cooker of ethnic strife baked in varying religious modes. I have not seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach, and then go back to Mughrabi to sleep. I’d walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled until I got to Mike’s Blues Bar. I’d shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager told me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turned out he and Maya, whom he also called Emma, were old lovers or something for a fleeting time. I really liked the guy. Once he took me to the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours to get the most bang for your exposure. He told me that sniping is like ancient times when you must remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I told him I wanted to be a sniper in the army, and he just figured the army I meant was the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but they only happened two more times.

I co-write a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav and they turn it into Hebrew and Arabic. I didn’t trust any of my Russians to look at it and did not know any Arabs to trust either. We set up a timetable for me to set up cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and Jerusalem. I was to spend about three days in each city recruiting. I was to attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya would set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav would be the money and logistics man.

The Organization, as we soon took to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line went. The initial objective of our group was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded was that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized’ another line from our playbook. The Organization was to serve as a network through which quite different people could unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals were to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel and Palestine.

I was taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I was mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We didn’t say proletariat. We just said we fought for the rights of the working class. I was getting my training on the fly. So were Maya and Avinadav. The Maya revealed no ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She seemed left without needing to declare it. She was Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’d been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she had half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She took the role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urged me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tried to recruit anyone she knew.

Andrew Manasseh Butler, aka “Andrew the Hustler”, whom no one seemed to call Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me one night over dinner that Maya and I could be the activists, but he had ‘keep the focus on the mission.’

Avinadav and I would talk all night. He lived in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azrieli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It was really near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot, so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma called it. There were always people crashing on the couches, on the floors and anywhere they could. There was a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who had been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucked it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. One night he and I picked up these two Ashkenaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed the stand and the four of us walked our asses north to the Sheraton and beyond, only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.

I talked big too, but I prided myself on delivering what I promised with broads and bullets both. This guy was living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declared ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium, was the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looked Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time, there could be between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d gotten exiled from Demona for this or that and were living with Avinadav until something came along, or they got forgiven.

“We are all in ‘back against the sea or a head to the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of Southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?”

“How many of you are there?”

“A couple thousand now. Not one is a citizen here. Ethiopians, they at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We do not even get offered real citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you got some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkenaz, everybody is shut out of something.”

“Just like in the States.”

“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.”

“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.”

“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.”

“Ah. Answers about what?”

“To judge if we can trust you, a near total stranger, with our lives.”

“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?”

“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?”

“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.”

“Which would take a miracle.”

“You’re not saying…”

“Who’s Mike Washington?”

“How did you….?”

“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.”

“It’s not like that.”

“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.”

“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.”

“Gets um all doesn’t he? Shoots straight, never misses, reliable? Brotherly maybe?”

“Something like that.”

“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?”

“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.”

“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.”

“Who? Mike Washington?”

“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘G-d Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being an accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young and so early.”

“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.”

“Be as careful as you want. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.”

“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. I think I’m in love with Maya by the way.”

“With Maya or Emma?”

“Same person.”

“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?”

“Emma told you my real name?”

“Yeah, but I learned it again going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We must ensure everybody is who they say they are. Got me?”

“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.”

“Complicated. Sounds like programming. Being that you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. You are in love with Emma. What is it to you to hold that girl?”

“It is to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise, she would not want me near her.”

“That’s part of it. What else you feel?”

“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.”

“Whatcha gonna do about it?”

“Why so you can tell her?”

“Information only flows one way around here.”

“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.”

“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love, she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. You want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time-honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.”

“Yeah. Go on.”

“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.”

“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?”

“And stop being promiscuous.”

“You and Emma are gonna do that?”

“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.”

“Why the fuck is that?”

“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message, get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.”

“You keep alluding to me on some God tip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?”

“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.”

“Eleven more years?”

“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends.”

“The world doesn’t ever end.”

“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians, we probably wouldn’t have left the gardens to begin with.”

“Why 2012?”

“It’s a Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.”

“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?”

“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.”

“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.”

“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah; and your soul is eons older than your years of life. Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.”

***

So, we built the thing, cobbled it together based on the various books we’d read and life experiences we’d had. The Organization, whom the Israelis called Ha Irgun, was structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It was the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal was for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proved logistically expedient to our ends. We had all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya was appointed Defense Minister. I was elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that would command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program, under the leadership of the Cabinet. Maya and I authored the first statement that we would print on glossy club flyers with a grey fist.

We selected the color grey as our standard because it was no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We called our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It began simply:

“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.”

We argue about the name for a whole night then figured “what’s in a name?” We all had a couple of names, so why not the group? “We were organizing. It was an organization.” The word for that in Hebrew was Ha Irgun, which sounded officious enough to me and had been the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups. So, we ran off stacks of these little grey cards with a black fist and a little call to arms.

________________________________________________

June 19, 2025 0

LFME-S-3

SCENE (III) — JERUSALEM / YERUSHALAIIM / AL QUDS — STATE OF ISRAEL, 2001 CE

In a land soaked in history and under the unblinking eye of total surveillance, rebellion cannot scream. It must whisper. Ha Irgun, an underground movement born in the urban sprawl of Be’er Sheva, grows like cracks in the wall—impossible to see until the whole foundation trembles. Phones are tapped. Emails read. But handwritten notes, strange symbols painted on walls, quiet meetings in basements—these leave no fingerprints.

Led by youth too tired to wait for freedom, the movement spreads fast. Judah Command in the desert, where punk kids and street fighters train with M1 rifles. Manasseh Command in Tel Aviv, filled with Black Israelites and expats, base of operations in a crumbling loft and a converted nightclub. Asher Command in Haifa, built by Arab Christian youth and disillusioned art students.

In Jerusalem, there is only silence.

Emma, a revolutionary hardened by loss, walks alongside Zachariah Artstein, her mentor, a burnt-out dreamer haunted by ideology and love. Together, they attempt the impossible: spark a cell in the holiest, most militarized city in the region.

Their journey is built on quiet acts. A food basket on a doorstep. A stranger with a whisper. A child trained in Krav Maga in a park once ruled by junkies. The Bedouin School House—once overrun with addicts—now serves as their headquarters, swept clean by the young and the forgotten. Girls with tattoos. Thirteen-year-old orphans. Soldiers of the shadows.

On August 9th, Zach and Emma return to Jerusalem. Third attempt. They stop at Mike’s Place for lunch. They talk about organizing. About art. About exhaustion.

Then—boom.

Just up the street, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonates inside a pizza shop—Sbarro—a place that still served pepperoni. Dust, blood, fire. Screams. Panic. Then a second explosion—first responders taken with it. Seven children die. Over 130 wounded. Hamas and Islamic Jihad take credit within the hour.

Zach and Emma sit frozen. Bones vibrating from the blast. Emma wants to help, but they’re not medics. They’re insurgents. And the rules are different now.

In the cab ride back to Tel Aviv, Zach finally mutters:
“I ain’t gonna be caught dead in that city again.”

But they both know the truth. They’ll return. They have to. No one else will bring the fight to Jerusalem.

Because revolutions aren’t born in speeches. They are born in smoke. In whispers. In terrible silence after the blast.

April 19, 2025 0

LFME-s.1

S C E N E (I) — BEIRUT, 2024ce

The Jew of Beirut arrives like a ghost falling through layers of time, dragging with him war names and worn-out dreams. They call him Sebastian Adonaev—“Abu Yazan” to some, “Kawa Zivistan” to others, but no one agrees on where he belongs. He claims no tribe, yet tries to belong to all. He walks into Beirut not as a savior, not even a tourist, but as something older, something broken and raw. They say he’s kind, but also that he has that look—the madness that lingers in the eyes of those who’ve been too close to war, and came back wanting to be poets.

He bleeds sincerity, cracks jokes in Arabic, and pours his wallet into chai and cab fare. Some call him righteous, others just confused. He shows up talking about confederations and shared struggles, about love as revolution and borders as lies. But this city doesn’t care about poetry. Beirut eats kindness for breakfast. One minute he’s a guest; the next, he’s on the ground in Chiya with a gun in his ribs and cuffs on his wrists. He didn’t even see it coming. He was knocking on doors. Looking for something—an old address, a lost friend, the edge of the map.

They drag him down the cracked pavement, crowd gathering. His mind fractures. Voices in his head scream orders. Yaelle—his Vice President, his conscience—berates him. Another voice, deeper, ancient, urges violence. He listens. “Kujichagulia!” he roars, slams into the cop, runs like a wild dog through unlit streets. In his mind, Karessa falls from a plane. Blood on Martyr Square. Reality bends. Beirut opens its mouth wide, and he dives in—into the dark between worlds—where memory, myth, and madness blur. And maybe, just maybe, he sees the eye of God staring back.

April 19, 2025 0

MEC-A-I-S-XXIV

S C E N E (XXVI)

תל אביב-יפו

TEL AVIV, State of Israel, 2001 ce

***

I stay in several questionable places while I make myself a weekend warrior, moving about the country. Which us only eight hours tall and 2 hours travel wide. I sleep in the kind of hotel rooms that you pay for by the hour and where small roaches creep up the bathroom walls out cracks in the ceiling and floor. Grunts through paper-thin walls, and bed boards banging like a carnal metronome. Sometimes I’d sleep on Jerusalem Beach under one of the many wooden pergolas built on the sands. Occasionally I’d get offered a couch in a female or gay man’s never-seemed-to-be-air-conditioned apartment. I’d always wake up in my own sweat feeling hungover stinking of cheap vodka when I was lucky with a broad whose name ended with an ‘A.’ Later on, in memories, I just associate Tel Aviv with being out all night. The place I’m at tonight is swinging. This happens when my morals are loose.

The weekend warrior tale had alternative endings. The first was called the missionary. I’d split a bottle of vodka with a client or two and sit on the beach recounting my yarn of exile. We’d palaver on the boardwalk over a twenty-shekel bottle of still water chased with cola or cherry juice about how I came to this place and what was across the sea in that city they all seemed so eager to run toward. That was missionary work. I had worked this tale so many times that it came out like a sermon. My congregants always spent more to purchase a picture after the homily was delivered than they would have before. They’d often give me a number to get fed or get fucked or have a placed to sleep for the night that was not sand or pavement.

Far more often than the missionary came the genie in the bottle. The small peace I had seen through observing Shabbos with the Golder’s Green Jews was drowned in the even greater peace of drinking, fucking, smoking and fighting. I was back to the lifestyle I led prior to my internment in the series of hospitals and the Family School. The rapes and the robberies were gone, but in all other ways it was come-on-in-and-sin. I smoked opium and hash. I drank vodka alone and with my congregation.

My Russian compatriots yearned for New York Americana, and I delivered it. I was a symbol of the city they hoped every night that they might still get to grow up in. So, their girls swallowed my cock and fucked me even when I could not speak a word of their language. Anya spoke a sort of broken half-English. Everything was in the future tense and every sentence included a couple of Russian words, a couple of Hebrew ones and the curse word blat, which means bitch-fuck-shit-cunt. These street Russians use it like a comma.

Anya does not live in Tel Aviv. She lives in Pardes Hanna on the road to Haifa. She is down here on the tiyeled more than I am for her work. She never says what kind of work. One of the many Dimitri’s tells me she is a ‘medical agent.’ These Russians roll deep, like twenty people whose names I’m not expected to keep track of. Mostly they sit on the boardwalk getting drunk all weekend. The Russians post up where I sell across from the Opera Towers so now, I’m part of the gang.

The only time I recall paying for a hotel by the hour was when I banged out Anya in a roach motel with no sheets. We’d drunk so much still water that it was hard to stand. We fucked frantically. I clenched her burgundy, blonde hair as I sucked on her C-plus tits thrust after thrust. The night she attempted to tell me about how Ariel Sharon started the second Intifada, I realized it would be nice to take her to dinner. Or at least have a picnic with a scenic view. Some figs and cheap white wine. Some crackers and some cheese. I don’t really want these girls to think I’m some dark fuck that has no romance in him.

Everyone likes an artist, and I know I am playing a part in all these young girls’ escapist fantasies. I’m that hero in the night who’s gonna whisper it’s all gonna get better one day after I tell them a good story. Never mind my art, it’s all in the epic sincerity of my various yarns. I give these girls something to believe in. I give them some hope that life is like a mission and not just a journey in the darkness. I mean some girls fuck me just because I’m from New York, but I’d like to think that Anya could understand every fourteenth word I say. Then I can be a kid again and do the cute courtship type stuff, write her a poem or something. It washes over me and recedes just as fast. My emotions would be wasted on her. It would add a sense of development to a relationship that has been taken as far as it can or should be.

***

I found a free place to live after three days in Tel Aviv. I was selling art, as I do when money and options run out. A lanky and dark- complexioned Ashkenazi and a jacked-up Russian with spiked hair approached me. Their names were Gilead and the Greek respectively. The Russian kid called the Greek understood more than he could communicate so he let Gilead do the talking. Gilead seemed something of a slimy ass to me. They were both aimless street kids. Gilead told me there was place called Bet Ashanti where I could get three meals and a bed for free just by being homeless and underage. They said it was clean and relatively safe. I was sold.

I accompanied them all the way down past the Dolphinarium and the drummers of the Tiki Beach beyond the Dan Hotel to the crossroads of Tel Aviv and Yaffo into a neighborhood named Florentine. At least the Bet Ashanti was clean. It looked like an urban kibbutz behind the Dan Hotel across from a rundown parking lot. There were twin wooden bunkhouses, and a huge wooden porch cluttered with twenty boys and girls about my age on wooden tables and chairs. The rec room had computers and couches and a pregnant 15-year-old Yemeni. There was something about it that was very Mary Poppins, but it was more like Lord of the Flies. The older battle-axe of a woman who was on duty looked like she had punched a few of these kids out. My new housemates were sizing up what I had to steal even before I put my bag down. Most of them introduced themselves, but I can’t ever catch names when I meet more than ten new people at a time.

It just so happened to be sundown on Friday. We gathered around a huge table in the rec room to eat a Shabbos dinner, light some candles and sing the prayers. There were forty kids in all. The girls had their own apartment up the street. They gave me a locker without a lock and bottom bunk in a large room full of kids that stayed in and out of juvey. Greek told me to hold down anything I had of value. I was one of only two or three Ashkenazim in the lot. They told me not to do any drugs and to come home by midnight. They say I can stay here until I get on my feet.

February 19, 2025 0

MEC-A1-S-XVIII

S C E N E (XVIII)

نيويوركغراد

NEWYORKGRAD, USA, 2017ce

***

As told by Heval Goldy.

A begrudging Russian sympathizer to our cause now held in a small, electrified cage in Midtown West. A gated community for the ultra-rich. A place called the Hudson Yard. They call her “Goldy the very expensive goldfish.” Of course that is not her real name at all. Her name at the agency is Sussudio. Her real name in Russian, it means “rich soon”.

“All of the buildings appear to be very, shall we say, forever. Permanent. Almost invulnerable, blyat. These elegant high towers of blue and black, glass and steel, towers built in defiance of gravity and common sense. Like mega sculpture, like a love song to the invisible hero called American Capitalism. You look down at all the city, even all Downtown and Midtown and imagine all the utter debauchery other people are having at your expense. Well anyway I have my name on my own little cage here. So, I too can say “I have made it in New York City.” “So maybe I’ve made it here in America!” In the background a saxophone cacophony erupts! There are more brothels than bars and coffee shops in all Newyorkgrad, but the quality and the pricing vary markedly. Sex work is hard work. It may not be the world’s oldest profession as they say blyat, but it is the oldest trusted way to get information from one’s enemies.

And she states in letter:

“I live in a tall residential tower complex in Western Midtown in a costly new development named the Hudson Yards. Right in the very heart of success. A tower complex built in recent years above the train yards of west 34^th street. I work my sweet ass off to keep that apartment rent free. The game I am playing with this chubby Indian Brahman venture capitalist roommate, is eating off his plate without him imagining he’s becoming my patron. Drain the clock, not his cock as they say. But really, he annoyingly proposes marriage as often as my Sergei had. And the others. And the other. I am waiting for a Russian Jewish doctor. He will love me again. I know it. The stars say as much. As for Sebastian. I think he’s calling himself Kawa now.” We all have all kinds of names.

“He mostly writes to me. I mostly do not write back to him very often,” I would later tell the FBI, or the CIA, or the Police Dept. and the Department of Homeland Security or whoever else I was being forced to talk to. But I, of course blyat, I do write him back, I’m his muse. He creates well, though most of it is chaos. Much of it very much misses the mark, as it were.

I once remarked to Oleg the Bear, a common friend;

“A relationship with Comrade Adonaev is like a roller coaster. Extremes of up and down, drama and thrills. But like all such thrill machines. You can tolerate it only in increments, you must step off and stay off. Sometimes for many years.”

My blonde hair is convincingly dyed from light brown. I told Sebastian that once and he said I was beautiful either way but should try brown hair like him. I don’t actually hate him, though he has cost me time. I just prefer not to have him around, thinking he can save me, heal me, change my life. No working woman ever needs that shit. Get me to higher ground on his terms. I told him go to law school and stop fucking helping the Kurds. I just don’t like giving him hope that we have a future of any kind. I’ve always been adamant about that. Sometimes against my better judgment, I’ve kissed him, and those kisses gave him way too much hope. He in fact wrote me over 100 poems of Russian theme and a door stopping nearly 800-page novel. Which is kind of about me, but also about terrorism being justified. Or so my friend Alana interpreted. That he can save money up, get it together in the brain, and “save me”, he just can’t. I’m a kept woman now. That comes with a price tag and comes with responsibilities. Like sex on demand. I’ve told him that, but I’ve told him many also not so true things so maybe he can’t put it all together. He thinks it’s love. It’s maybe some kind of fucking weird 18^th-19^th century muse lust love, blyat, but it’s really a product of his mental illness, not my encouragement. His writing is prolific. To be fair. Some of his paintings are very unique. Overall, he is impressive as an American, just not the horse I need to bet on right now. He’s not patron or paperwork marriage material, as he is always nearly broken, or often fully broke.

But like it or not an artist gets only one truly great muse, and I am his. Russians, we are known for our loyalty and being indomitable. Putin says we also make the best whores. Well anyway, I know what I came for when I arrived in Newyorkgrad lost lonely and lethal at age 19, and I am a full-grown asset, a woman with expensive tastes. Not that into long board walk walks and art making and picnics with stupid couscous and over spiced chicken blyat with no value. The long long book and paintings he has made for me do not help my mom immigrate to the U.S.A. Or get me a euro passport, for that matter, now that it is looking like my special marriage hasn’t resulted in anything useful for papers.

“Let me roll up my sleeves and my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multilingual. What a catch to catch if you can. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a graceful fighter of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”

“Zdrastvistia! The purpose of my sponsor is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also, a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also, to warn you about Chechens and to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is so little time for singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not Vodka. To us it’s like water for wound care.”

“Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out of the corner of the newspaper or on the telescreen. And of course, we both supplied the arsenals and the airstrikes to our proxies. But ultimately it was a faraway spectacle happening far from both empires. At least until Ukraine.”

“The papers called them “the New Chechens” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in G-d-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into their fun little Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechens” aren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Peshmerga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”

My latest “patron” is in his mind a Brahman, which is something pretty fucking fancy in India. He’s a tech guy but looks and acts more like a Wall Street guy. He’s just too fucking rough on me. It has a lot in common with rape in my own home. He goes deep up my ass too often. He is pulling my hair and slamming me against the bar. He punches me in the head as hard as he can. He gets what he pays for. He slams me for about five minutes until he cums. Like a Quisling, snorting pig. I am the star of a very private show! Recently, I fell down some stairs. He paid for surgery. I don’t remember things like I used to.

Sebastian wrote to me the other night to go down memory lane and formally tell me he is off for Syria soon. Well, this is the end of him finally. I do not feel that bad, or much of anything. He wants to end it like this anyway. He is living up to his expectation to die a martyr, that is up to him. In my mind, somewhere, is the understanding that if I had given him more rope, he could have hung himself here, but who doesn’t like a motherfucking show. Am I right.

My patron climbs off me eventually. Eventually, they all must.

A lot of meat to him, I will need to stretch it out. Jon isn’t just a Jon; he’s unfortunately often my roommate too. He’s the one paying me to live somewhere nice with him. A Brahmin. They do what they want. Including fuck my asshole on a Tuesday afternoon. Am I fucking to not pay my rent? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I wish I had something better, someone better to do but I don’t. The Russian doctor, well he said I was “a little too high maintenance.” Sergei flipped his shit when he found a pile of Sebastian’s letters. Poor form on my part, perhaps, too sentimental. No, I will just say lazy.

I have not seen Comrade Sebastian Adonaev since the end of the summer. The time when we gave it another sad go, the poetry making for some kissing. The hopeless romanticism in him. Well anyway he’s the exact same man and I’m the same old gal. He’s still broke and still just a shiftless adventurer, romanticizing the Chornay. He once wrote an 800-page book for me, yet I’ve only read the first couple chapters. He wrote me over 100 poems, but they all sound about the same. Words rhyming about love, hate sex and devastation in Angliski. He painted and framed a painting in Brighton and bought a gold frame for it. It’s still up. I was dating a doctor, but he left me, as I said. I was dating a corporate lawyer, but it was never so serious. My original patron cut me off over my first Adonaev affair. Now I’m fucking the so-called roommate to cut down on my business here expenses. Well anyway “my roommate” has a big Indian style Xanny Kama sutra cock. He manages some tech finance derivatives schemes in L.A., which could be anything. I must disassociate a lot. What was I saying, that’s right, something about my mother getting her paper. Something about the mark.

Later, in around a year when I am arrested by the secret police and they demand that I tell them about what Sebastian was actually doing in Syria, honestly, I didn’t even know that much. I wasn’t that interested or directly invested. He is climbing a moutnain, to prove himself to himself to win me, that sounds like a good take.

He periodically would send me all these highly miserable looking, often bloody war photos, but I didn’t want to see any of them. He would beg to be allowed to see me. But in reality, I wanted very little nothing to do with him. I live my own life. It’s mostly mine. I chose it and made all the bad decisions! Later on I’d sometimes message his WhatsApp and tell him to ‘Come home now please’. But I didn’t, mean, to me. He would probably survive the war. He has strong luck. He is tough in his own way. Incredibly lucky. The roommate, comrade Brahmin patron, he likes to choke me. I need a new living situation. Or should I just pay cash, every hole is too many holes. I’m working on a possible new patron with a place by the beach in Miami.

I wasn’t raised stupid, or lacking morales. So how have I gotten stuck here in this loop? I should move to Miami, where it’s warmer. I remember thinking only a little bit about his strange Syria objective.

What I failed to see, through Sasho, our old boss and roof explained it to me, was that he was actually going to Syria to impress me. How ludicrous, nothing could be further from impressive to me. He was going to live, I was fairly sure. But to do what? Live to be a mentally broken person that I could never imagine how to heal. From Miami, it will all take the form of more of brightly colored dream.

We had some fun but also some very messy history Sebastian Adonaev and I, blyat, but I think going to this evil little war was the stupidest thing he ever did, far worse than the exploits in Haiti, worse than loving me. It was hard on me anyway. I will certainly not be meeting him at the airport, should he survive the war. I am tougher than he, but it’s still not nice to make a person watch unwillingly your attempt at self-murder. Functionally speaking that man is dead to me. I have to insulate myself from mad men seeking high publicized means for suicide. The man just wants to die in a meaningful way, but that doesn’t help my situation at all! Yet, I still have all his letters, I still have the two published books about me. I still have the gold framed multi-color pornograph on the wall.

When the secret police dragged me in to find out where Sebastian went, I told them:

“He is probably still in Havana…”

“He’s definitely not in Havana, toots.”

“Don’t call me toots, blyat.”

They then did pretty nasty stuff to me just to punish him. Or maybe just because I don’t have any actual papers? Or maybe because degrading a Russian blonde is as American now as apple pie. They eventually bent me over and just took turns fucking me on the interrogation table. Good times. It’s really not that free a country. Once the surface gets scratched enough. Eventually, my Brahman patron bails me out, somehow. He lectures me about “pussy footing around with terrorists that don’t have my best interests at heart.”

“Well where is that fuck? Where is your useless Jew Chechen now?” my patron asks me.

“He is climbing up a Holy Mountain, blyat. In his mind anyway. Thinking of me the whole entire time.”

“But here you are. Locked in a fishbowl with no passport. With one to help you besides me and your Serge,” the patron replies, “And like a goldfish, I can do whatever I want, and you will not remember it 8 seconds later. He punches me in the face and rapes me on the table.

“Dumb bitches always thinking things are free,” he says.

But nothing in Russia or America is free. Old Russian saying, “The only free cheese is in a mouse trap.”

December 18, 2024 0