1993-1996

June 30, 1993

Toronto
Dreams: Mother is pregnant again. I try to reassure her that it's all right, even though she's old.
Mila, the bitch landlady at Vishniakovskaya, tried to push her way into my apt to try to get money out of me. I forced her out and locked the doors and windows, though I was leaving soon. Meaning: Starting anew provokes anxiety. Money refers to my feeling of self-worth. I'm fighting off the castrating bitches inside me and moving on.

When homosexuality was legalized in Russia recently, the thrill of being a pariah was gone, at least legally. When I read that a gay 'spouse' gets rights at his mate's workplace increasingly in the West, I react negatively. Gay as status quo lacks the mystery and romance of the outsider. Just like Russia renouncing its anti-status quo social experiment has left it with no romance or mystery. A bit masochistic, that. I suspect I'm reacting immaturely. These are false impressions on my part - seeking romance and mystery outside in the material, sensual world. Mystery and romance is in your head or not at all.

I get quite animated talking to PaulB, Sara Sutcliffe, SuzannaB, EricM about how sordid life has become in Moscow, the pathetic aping of everything Western, the cynical viciousness of public, commercial life, the choking pollution of street life, the crass American billboards and oil wheeler-dealers. Thank God for memories of spiritual quest - Orekhovka and Staraya Ladoga.

The culture shock of returning after almost 5 years:
1/ women of my generation have made a quantum shift towards equality, which contrasts sharply with the unreformed status of women in Russia. Still I immediately think of independent women I met in Russia - Liuba in Orekhovka, Elena in Volgograd (I'm sure lesbian), Galia the filmmaker, who were all attractive, intelligent and still women. The impression of wasp women here is a slightly pathetic aping of men.
2/ The incredible personal wealth which seems to be pervasive, and public neatness combined with a wealth of commodities. How can such a mass commodity fetishism be possible? How can Nature survive? The worry of massive budget deficits and global warming adds up to one thing: a quantum shift in social organization is necessary or there will be an acceleration of violence and ultimately a police state.

Does Russia have the store of human resilience to make the transition successfully to a capitalist system? Perhaps. I hope so, for the sake of the common people. Maybe it can still lead the way out of the present world scenario of post-apocalyptic apocalypse.

July 3, 1993

Dream: Biking back to Toronto from somewhere near Ottawa (Paul's farm?), having taken the bike there by bus. Take the turn-off through beautiful woods, and find an old cathedral in ruins. I ask ladies there if I can bike through. They say it's just as easy as going back. Later I ask a workman at a building site. He says I must rent a rope ($12) as there is a mudslide there, and the road goes to Montreal. I don't buy the rope, and risk it. I can take the night bus back to Toronto.
Meaning: Journey to find self. Bike is my desire for independence and balance, though I'm dependent on society (bus). I experience spirituality on the way. I risk (I'm too cheap or I like danger?) being swamped by my u(nconscious), leading to (sexy) Montreal, but the (sexy) night bus goes to Toronto (home or c(onscious)).

July 6, 1993

Dream: I'm to rehearse Hamlet with a Russian group but rush off to look for a toilet. Go to gym but showers in the way. Walk through area full of trucks of Russian recruits and think of peeing in corner, but a man is lying in mud and there are graves. Someone throws a pillow in the spot I want to pee in. I finally pee in a corner but worry it's draining on my pants. I half finish and then Anne appears.
Meaning: Sex distracts me from my cultural/ spiritual pursuits. My u and accumulated, deadening inhibitions interfere.

***

My diary takes a long break. In Toronto, I read, finally made a dope contact, started a halting relationship with an attractive 25 year-old I met at The Baths (I'm pretty well passive now - looking for a cock to suck) who explained that to get dope I had to go to the roof of The Stable, the leather bar downtown. I later visited him in the hospital after he jumped/ fell off a roof and broke his arm and leg.

With great difficulty I sold articles on the followers of Porfiri Ivanov to the Ottawa Citizen and Common Ground in the autumn. There is no interest in a critical view of the new Russia. Then I settled into working 4 months as a production assistant for John McGreevy Productions' Sir Peter Ustinov at the Vatican and looking after Sara's Alzheimered mother, Erma, and dog Kelly in their cavernous gothic house on Warren Road. Finally I packed it all in to return to Moscow to see what fate has in store.

January 2, 1994

My going-away party in Toronto was a festive gathering of emigres and friends at Sonya's and Harold's, including Natasha, Kostya’s mother, for whom I had arranged a ‘tourist’ visa, which promptly turned into a drawn-out scheme to remain in Canada as a refugee via my bachelor friend's bed and some vile Jewish emigres. Meanwhile, Kostya had finally crossed the Yugoslav border, claimed refugee status in Vienna, and skipped across Europe, finally settling in London. Where there are wills, there are ways. The party was followed by an intense few hours with PaulB at his nightwatchman's job. What a contrast with my send-off in January 1989, zapped on mescaline, dope, booze, with a huge cake from my crazy wonderful SEE students… But the same all-night packing.

In 1989, I took an Aeroflot flight from Mirabelle, outside of Montreal, walking out to the plane with a crowd of noisy, crass, mostly fat, pseudo-bourgeois Soviets, befriending the one handsome young fellow, Valentin, a Jew from Lvov, who saw my tears of despair, and cheered me through the long, ominous flight into outerspace, i.e., the Soviet Union.

This time it was a cheap 18-hour Alitalia flight to Moscow via Montreal, Rome, and Milan (!), dragging what felt like hundred of lbs of luggage on and off cramped planes and transit buses, jostled by equally obnoxious Italian and Russian tourist/ 'businessmen'. What the Casa Nostra lacks in taste, the Nouveau Russians make up for.

I met Svetlana Liubanova, a RETURN emigre, a Jewish dentist. "Better a madhouse, but my madhouse, than a glossy lifeless life in the West... I hated it from the first day: no language, no friends, no profession, no family."

But I fear life amidst this new madhouse is proving too much for her. Svetlana refuses to use the expensive family gadgets (mixmaster, toaster, microwave, washing machine...) the sine qua non of the modern Russian nouveau riche, and is screaming and railing at a brow-beaten husband, spoiled son, and his faggot friend/ lover, as I smile politely as if nothing is happening.

February 3, 1994

After a 7-month absence, it's easier to see clearly what possessed me both to come here in the first place, and then to leave.
-The simple sweet old sales clerk near Novoslobodskaya: "You don't have a bag. Liuba, bring one for our guest (referring to me). Of course we're all the same, East and West, but we Russians know how to suffer, so it's not fair to make you do without," versus the klutzy one on Starokoniushenni: "Maraseika is a SWEET flavoured vodka, Anise is BITTER. It's all the same really, just have a pickled cuke." In fact she has it all backwards about the vodkas, but insists she's right.
-The swarthy toughs on Petrovka, whose aggressive sexuality is bursting through their pants, and could turn to a smile or to violence at any moment. Sexy, callow youths in crazy or tattered clothes, hiding their graceful shapely bodies in the full flush of youth, walking down any street, giggling on the metro, naive and innocent versus ugly drunks stinking of vomit on the subway, the danger of even walking on the street in the evening, the murder of a young friend of Yegor's that I had a crush on once-upon-a-time by a Chechen for some minor debt unpaid (he was thrown out a 12th floor window).
-Scheming Raisa Fedorovna chattering on about her senseless trip to Brooklyn to see Russian emigres on welfare and to hear Russian emigre folk singers (especially Tokarev) in smokey pubs; the filth; the fact that nothing works; that men's life expectancy has dropped to 59 (vs 72 in the US).

Like many writers, I find it more stimulating living abroad - to see more clearly reality, beauty, contradictions in my and others’ lives; to feel truth (when the idea merges with the reality; to know myself, reflected in Lyonia, Denis, Patricia, Elvis (he died at 43); to discover and affirm what's really important in my life - belonging, loving, being loved.

I feel full of sex back here, unlike in Toronto, where I felt impotent, dead, asexual. Life here is earthy, lived on the edge. The plus side of the 59 year life expectancy for Russian men is they must live every minute; they can't count on living to a ripe old age.

May 12, 1994

I have been boarding with a very bitter widow whose parents were old Bolsheviks and purged as Trotskyists in ’37 along with Bukharin. She and her mother were exiled to Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s. She has a huge scar on her face to show were a camp guard had beaten her. Needless to say, it is most awkward in a cramped apt, with me insisting on the sole use of the balcony in order to toke in peace. I’m paying a royal $90 a month, though she was referred to me by some Ivanovites.

After a 3 week trip to Astrakhan and Mhachkala in Dagestan, where I looked up my Dagestani banya prince, Marat (unsuccessfully), I returned to find she had invited her relatives to move in, intentionally making life so unpleasant for me that I would be forced to move out! Despite her own tragic early life, her sharp intelligence and excellent education as a scientist, she was scheming and deceitful, and full of prejudices, referring to the Kyrgyz as animals, and bemoaning the many Jews who were repressed and the genocide of WWII, not so much as a human tragedy as “the loss of the genetic fund.” Her only son was in jail and wrote while I was there that he had caught TB. This woman has BAD karma.

Fortunately, she had pleasant neighbours, who saw what she was up to and offered to let me have temporary lodgings in a friend’s empty apt. I remember some wonderful, intimate lazy afternoons with Lyonia there, and lusting after an Azerbaijani in the nearby market. I then moved into a Canadian Embassy flat across from the Kremlin to cat-sit for Danielle Walker, an old fellow alumnus from Sonya’s Russian teaching. It was a heady whirlwind of dinner parties and visits by Minsk Sergei and Vilnius Valera.

From there, I made the wild jump to Tashkent to teach at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, and bought a platzkart [3rd class] one-way ticket in the heat of mid-August to Tashkent. Lyonia and Denis saw me off. As the train pulled out, a band of robbers climbed through our open window (they were later kicked off trying to rob someone further down the car).

In Tashkent, I eventually stumbled onto the beautiful old Chorsu Turkish banya which I immediately realized was largely gay, and between dope, anonymous sex and reading, survived the grind of teaching Economics and English. As a result of my trip to Astrakhan, I starting writing articles for the Moscow Tribune (Russian sails around the world from Caspian Sea, animal rights, cold bathes, the MMM pyramid scandal and the banking system in Russia, the Russian coal sector...). I reinvented myself as a journalist in Tashkent, wrote the Privatization Newsletter for UNIDO and prepared an English language paper Good Morning for People's Word. I made many trips to the mountains, where I met Nuf, the wiry, horny old Kazakh mountain rescuer, and did some paragliding, skiing, and trekking.

A year passes, and my diary now comes back to life on my primitive laptop computer.

June 1, 1995

Letting myself get fucked tonight at the banya, sans condom, was a risk, but his penetrating and pumping was like life itself entering me. Why all the hardness on the surface though? After pulling out, he stood, staring down at his still-hard cock, waiting expectantly...
"Wipe it off, damn it."
It was then I noticed the beefy self-appointed guard, arms crossed like an ancient slave on guard at the sheik's palace, shielding us from possible discovery in delecto. A latterday version of Forster's Indian guard in the trial scene in Passage to India. The rushed, improvised act was like a ritual, religious or rather spiritual, a homage to Eros, to the glorification of maleness, the phallus connecting, becoming, transforming the Other. Not something to do lightly or often. The dangers surrounding it make sure of that. Maybe that’s their collective unconscious purpose. The trio - master, slave, guard - makes us a kind of father, son and holy ghost.

A young Uzbek I mistook for another in the unlit sauna scared me by asking "What?" in Uzbek, when I thought I was just picking up where I left off about 5 minutes before with that other. I leaned forward to sit as if nothing had happened and he stroked my back. I switched sides over to the corner and I sucked him, his moans of pleasure a real turn-on. Too bad I can't be sure who he is. I'll have to be more scientific about chatting someone up henceforth.

The male culture here includes the habit of spitting, much to the disgust of Westerners. But it can be sexy, and is an important extension of body language, especially in the baths, expressing either disgust or sexual arousal, which I'm learning to read. God forbid that you misread the signal. The fundamental bisexuality of the human race has been confirmed to me over and over here, but these macho guys can mix up disgust and arousal, feeling the excitement and the guilt together, with sometimes dire results. Two close calls taught me to read the various signals more closely.

After the first fat lip and hurried escape into the night, I was concerned about reputation. After the second, and the swollen jaw, I was concerned about something much more vital. Thank God my reactions to my faux pas were more intelligent than my reactions to the invitations that preceded them.

The first case required beating a hasty retreat. I feel sorry for Vladik (There! I've NAMED him.). I must have been really horny or lonely. It was New Year's Eve. I usually don't get turned on by drunks, but his instincts certainly were working, if not his reason. He kissed and hugged me, insisting I come home to sleep with him. I hope his mindless state obliterated his memories of what followed.

The second was a case of ‘don’t provoke.’ To outwait the beast, a cop it turned out, like a treed cat, and to call his bluff. Thank God that there's still simple goodness quietly lurking in unexpected places. I was beaten up and very nearly arrested by Robocop; however, seeing as we had had sex before he flipped out, the banya attendant was able to convince him that arresting me was a lousy idea, that entrapment excluded having sex with your victim.
"You've got to watch out for these bastards,” he told me later. “We get bad apples here unfortunately. I told him I would deal with you. Here, I'll accompany you out to check the way's clear."

The thing that's hard to comprehend is I could have been murdered in either instance if circumstances had been a bit different, with no fear of retribution. I poo-poo Denis's obsession with death and mutilation in movies. Meanwhile...

“What kind of hell-hole is this?” you may ask. But then there's lots of random muggings and killings every hour in the Uzbek heaven, i.e., the good ol' U S of A. So maybe we should measure civilization by the relative paucity of firearms as opposed to GNP per capita and number of poisonous machines on the road. Fewer firearms = fewer murders.

No question about it. Robocop will take some getting over. Should I block out the terror, pretend it didn't happen? Or relive it uncontrolled? Or try to rationalize it? [My theory is that he flipped out because he couldn’t come and felt humiliated.] Is it nemesis for taking advantage of a pathetic drunk a few days earlier? Is it a warning, a sign that it's time to change tracks? What do I get from the (truly) mindless ecstasy of the moment? Is there no other way to bridge the human gap for me? I've come to the conclusion after all these years that there's no perfect other, and if there were, it’s unlikely he would be pining just for me. But there's Denis, and Lyonia, and, though the banya is to be torn down in the near future, Tashkent.

My stages are many but seem to lead me back to zero. I don't have any strong fetish anymore, and have done just about everything. I need a balance of yin and yang, which I can't see coming from one sexual relationship. You just can't square the circle. Let’s hope I grow out of the whole nonsense (because is really is NONsense) before I end up a physical (not to mention psychological) casualty.

Back to D. He represents my attempt to break out of the loveless, hopeless prison I built (with some help, of course) in Canada. The impotent momma's boy, full of hypocrisy and lies. And it was (and still is) wonderful to know he's there and to know how we loved then and enjoyed each moment. Carpe diem is no idle phrase. So is life now `before and after D'? Was I writing before? Yes. And fucking? Yes, though less and less. Was I happy? Yes, though rarely, and mostly with PB. Is the only difference that I liberated myself if only a little bit with D, and could actually be dominant in a relationship?

The graphic memory of Jim masturbating behind the couch when I was 12, the mixture of arousal and disgust and the inherent danger still define my own sex life. But I have to find those fleeting moments of love as they come, and keep trying to incorporate them into my life. I think if I can maintain a positive image of myself and ‘learn the language’, I can pursue my search for self here and not get mugged in the process. But can a real relationship develop out of my fleeting glimpses of love and my fantasy world?

June 5, 1995

One thing Sekine, my mad Japanese Marxist supervisor at York University, did was to instill a fascination for the dialectic in me. My love affair with the East no doubt began as his captive graduate student, a flaming (closet) Commie-fag, fresh from Cambridge, full of defiance.

So it's thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But there's more in the Asian variant. The fourth - summing-up or reflection. Denis - fresh, young tabula rasa, or so I thought. Lyonia - the antithesis. Dumb, yes, but so close to the natural state he's always ready to fuck. And no hang-ups. Then a kind of annihilation here in Tashkent. Definitely the negative, dark side of all this. My two ‘close encounters’ are rather unpleasant examples of those Ten Thousand Things Lao Tzu warns about, manifestations resulting from desire, but which somehow are no different than the Nameless. Of the same origin. And they make me move on, write, try to redeem myself for not being the dull, programmed adult I should be. Or the responsible, loving adult, as you like.

[I went to Canada via Moscow that summer and managed to procure a tourist visa for Denis to come to visit and check out colleges to study at while I was there in August. On the way back, passing through Moscow to catch the midnight plane to Tashkent, I was robbed by the train police.]

August 26, 1995 (Tashkent)

Dear Denis,
I'm listening to a beautiful country song "Love Can Build a bridge" on short wave from India. Too bad we never made it to Little India in Toronto. So little time. Well... love CAN build a bridge.
I only realise now how wonderful it was to have you in Toronto, meeting all my closest friends. What do you think of Mills, Paul, Sonya&Harold, Erma and Kelly? Please do some caricatures and send me. I'm so sad to be back alone here in Tashkent. There are nice people - Voitek, Rashid, Anvar at UNIDOA ... but no Denis. When we go back to TO, we'll find a place. It's hard to live all the time at others’ homes.
I have so many crazy impression of our week together - how nervous and nasty I had to get at the bank, how we rushed back to Manning to get your license, our day shopping on Yonge St., our long walk home from Sonya's via Casa Loma, our great evening with Dave Orsini drinking and smoking (remember Lenin Hills?).
I began to remember why I love you so much - how we laugh, eat cake, watch Elvis. How I wanted to go to the country with you. Now we have to wait for next year. Oh well, life is hard and ...
Please forgive me for being too nervous sometimes. Once we solve the day-to-day problems, it'll be all right.
What will I do now? I brought my Moscow diaries and lots of notes about dreams, so I better get to work on WRITING. When I come back to TO, you will be studying and working; I'll have to write, though that's not going to earn me very much.
Already the nightmare at Domodedovo seems far away and just plain stupid. Lyonia was with me but went to change a $10 bill so I could leave him some cash. The militia took me to their room while he was gone. It's better he wasn't there or they might have done him some harm. When I got out, he had gone. Did I ever tell you how we met? When you went to the army, he spoke to me at the Sandunovsky Baths. I was so bored without you and he was cheerful. He was wild then - no father. He thinks of ME as a father!
Man, life is crazy! It's still only 8:00 am Sat. I wake up at 4:30 am but it's the best time to send electronic mail here, so I stay up. Then I meditate - there really is too much junk in my head.
Last week, when you went to the country and I was lonely, I went to Paul's and cried. He said "It's painful, but isn't it great to feel so strongly for someone?" I feel lucky to have such good friends as you and Paul.
It was hard for me to open up my TO life to you at first. At first I resented that I had to do so much work for you - phoning, researching colleges in libraries, trying to find a place for you to stay, teaching you about the metro, buses, directions, keys, shopping, cleaning, being on time, paying for this and that...
Now I remember how happy I am for opening up a new world for you, MY world. Remember how negative I am about Canada all the time? Now that you're a part of Canada and my life there, it's becoming wonderful again. Before you came, reading, windsurfing or movies (and or course "books") were what was important to me. After spending the week with you, they don't seem so important.
I'm worried that you won't need me once you are on your own in Canada, but at the same time I want you to feel independent and self-reliant. I dreamed about an old school friend, Bill, that I loved but who rejected me. [My mother gossiped about his mother needing psychiatric help. I didn’t know the real story and defended my mother and he turned against me.] Probably it is a deep wound and you are as important to me as he was then. [Now I see the dream as a portent that I would lose D as my closest friend, just as I lost Bill.]
I can imagine a life with you in TO now, crazy as that may seem to everyone else (Harold: “Denis is awfully young.”) and it seems too good to be true. Before you came there, I couldn't imagine life in Canada again. All I could see were these unappealing scheming Russian emigres. But I saw how different you are from them.
Remember how we joke that YOU want to go to Canada and I don’t. It would be very ironic (and sad) if you DON'T try to stay in Canada, now that I want you to! Maybe you see the empty, cheap side of Canada now. I DON'T KNOW because we had so little time, damn it. I'm slowly (or not so slowly) coming to your dad's conclusion that Russia is fucked. A German businessman on the plane to Tashkent told me how he's lost hope for Russia. He's investing in Uzbekistan (!) and China instead. He was also robbed by Moscow militia, right on Tverskoi at night - $100 - in the winter. Maybe I'll try to think up some way of working with him. He is a jolly fellow, like Father Frost, and still has an office in Moscow.
I have this strong feeling of loss, like when you went to the army, or when my father died. I'm such a fucking romantic. It's frightening, but it must have its good side. I'll see it through.
You know, maybe that feeling is because you made me make contact with my feelings of Canada as my home (which I 'killed' by moving to Russia). What do you think?
I'm losing my illusions that I can escape my past by living abroad (in exile?). Last night I dreamed that my mother was cooking lamb, and I was trying to turn a lamp on. I didn't want to be the "good son who works for the UN" but I was still returning to Uzbekistan. I think it means I have to reintegrate my old life and be independent. Easier said than done!

September 9, 1995

From "The Back of Beyond" by Somerset Maugham:
Planter: “God knows I only want to do the right thing."
Moon: "The right thing is the kind thing... And I wouldn't make too much of a song and dance about it. She'll have a lot to forgive too. One needs a devil of a lot of tact to get people to forgive one one's generosity. Fortunately women are frivolous and they very quickly forget the benefits conferred upon them. Otherwise, of course, there'd be no living with them."
The planter accuses Moon of being a cynic.
Moon: "I haven't deeply considered the matter, but if to look truth in the face and not resent it when it's unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it's absurd and grieving without exaggeration when it's pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I'm a cynic. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to weep."

In another Maugham story, “P & O,” a jilted wife going back to England intending to get a divorce, reflects on a passenger who died alone and unloved, and writes her husband: I think we should allow those we care for to be happy in their own way, and we should care for them enough not to let it make us unhappy.

I realise I'm a fool to keep running away, and that when it comes down to it, I need intimacy and companionship more than adventure and intellectual games. I suspect I have to learn to forgive those I love when they hurt me. Emotional "hurt" is all in one's head anyway. I'll just have to hope that people I love, like PB and Denis will do the same. How about myself? Do I have to learn to forgive myself too? I think so.

And to ride the emotional waves. Just like when I get too drunk, and have my emotional down the next day. This is more long term. I wish I knew if all my farting around is helping me get closer to an even keel. I'm not Maugham, able to channel the alienation and hurt into inspiring stories, nor am I Butros Ghali, able to save the world.

Strange dreams. A porno magazine shows a vagina casually. One painted in flowers, another as a face with lips. It's not frightening. It's a cheap UK edition, with an ad against IUDs, recommending a cream. Also a mousetrap [just when it might start making sense, it throws you for a loop!].
Meaning: My anima talking sex. But the mousetrap is like a threatening vagina. Wanting to give birth (create).

Some amateur Jung, so bear with me. I'm overly intellectual (the animus side), repressed sexually (the anima side). I can't stand female sexuality (i.e., sensuality). I'm attracted to male sexuality, i.e., the sensuality has to be wrapped up (hidden) in nonfemale garb. Somehow, that makes sex more acceptable to me. It can be pushed aside most of the time, with the occasional release when the instinctual urges can't be kept under wraps any longer. Using Jung's Perception (sensation-intuition) vs Apprehension (feeling-thinking) schema, I'm dominated by f-t.

I think the bottom line with Jung is 'gay is sick'. From a Jungian perspective, my fear of women is unnatural and rooted in my relationship with an overbearing mother and older sisters. Thus my relations with men end up being neurotic TOO. I can't relate easily, I have obsessions, I expect to be humiliated, I lack self-respect, I accept passivity. I crave that which I feel has been cut off within, i.e., the aggressive, sensual male. But then there's PB, Denis, Lyonia. Long term relations despite everything, and even some minimal, ongoing sex with Lyonia. So there's something I have salvaged out of my sex life, at least for the present. And gay vs straight ultimately boils down to (leaving aside neurotic screwups and conditioning) some complex balance in each individual between yin and yang. It's hard to picture a perfectly equal sexual relation for either 'choice' - there's always role-playing and preferences that each person fits into.

Jungian idealism: I try to live on a spiritual plain, but still seek physical and emotional sustenance in the material world. I seek the spiritual high of another's orgasm, to participate in his high, and to raise him up to experience a moment of spiritual transcendence. A kind of quasi-altruistic proselytizing. I get the same high from helping society (i.e., lifting it however momentarily or slightly from its path of destruction and cruelty). I even lose the desperate urge for sex when I have some success in work (material/spiritual), in a social cause (anonymous participation in a spiritual struggle), or self-defense (raising myself spiritually by overcoming self-denial and neurosis). A kind of post-Marxian social science cum praxis.

Being natural (especially in sex) means innocence or brutishness. Being SELF-conscious means rising to a higher consciousness (neurotically or spiritually higher). Maybe I'm doing good (giving ecstasy, working in the peace movement) unconsciously by living my life the way I do (a kind of social synergy). According to Buddhism, it is better to be conscious/ do consciously, but this is less exciting (especially in sex). However, it leads to a higher consciousness (where happiness/ecstasy are not so important), free of neurotic desire.

Re Dr Zhivago. The novel is anti-Soviet "if by Soviet one means seeing life not as it is in actual fact. We are made to rejoice in what brings us unhappiness, to declare our love for things we do not love, and to behave contrary to our instinct for the truth. So we stifle this instinct like slaves, and idealise our own bondage."
"The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Your nervous system isn't a fiction, it's part of your physical body, and your soul exists in space and is inside you, like the teeth in your head. You can't keep violating it with impunity."

"I describe characters, situations, details with a single higher purpose - namely, to undermine the idea of iron causality, and to depict reality as a manifestation of inner impulses embodied in individuals, as a spectacle whose motive force is choice and freedom, and which exists as one of a number of possibilities, taking place not just because it simply so happens, but because it is so willed."

I'm u/c striving for unity, both
inner - worker/intellect, m/f, rich/poor, friend/enemy, love/hate, East/West, self/not-self (i.e., vicarious pleasure is still MY pleasure)
(Felicia's Journey by William Trevor - mystery of altruism ("act not out of self interest, but from an impulse of grace") greater than the mystery of evil)
outer - work for peace, world unity, East/West, here/not-here (i.e., in exile from Canada)
Auden's creativity derives from his "troubled sexuality". He sought to stand out from the collective.

Addiction derives from the need to deaden loneliness and childhood hurt. Perspective vanishes in a comforting ersatz landscape. Booze and drugs murder sleep just as Macbeth's actions did.
Overcoming addiction requires learning an awed respect for the body. Emotions of childhood emerge unaccompanied by the optimism and resilience with which they were originally endured. The accompanying depression has a disheartening flatness. After depression there are no tragedies. We have the illusion that we share the fate of Shakespeare's characters and partake of their poetry (catharsis). You must realise there is no free will in this. You must utterly rely on grace. When health returns, it feels like coming home, with everything just as you left it. Back in harmony with the universe.

November 1995

Sans dope for a week, I've become obsessed with getting laid.
Friday: Saw a dark mustachioed young handsome Uzbek slowly lathering near showers. Exchanged glances. It took more than an hour till we connected in ‘the room,’ him sitting with a beautiful black hard-on, me tentatively approaching, sucking. He gasped and withdrew, lay down, and we continued. He stood and it was clear what he wanted. I let caution to the winds and after some difficulty, he had penetrated and was pumping hard, alternately massaging my back and tenderly embracing me. He wouldn't let me jack off. He pushed me against the platform and half lay on me, then after a few minutes (it was getting sore) he came and left. I remember watching his legs between mine and feeling his energy. Later I used his soap and waited for him to leave, but missed him. That made me wild, and I returned the next day, restless.

Saturday: A Russian catalyst got me involved in a threesome against my will, but I noticed a young tough-looking guy peering in excitedly. Later he stood with a hard-on, but was resistant till the Russian encouraged him. His pubic hair was red, his hard had a huge head and narrow shaft, his legs were knock-kneed. He broke off and we didn't connect again. I felt he was fighting disgust.
Sunday: That quiet, good-looking guy for the 3rd Sunday in a row. Though I come looking for Rakhimjan, I sucked this guy in the darkened sauna back in July. I think he's just shy. I jack off while he looks on in the sauna, standing at the door, another guy sitting beside me, casually pretending he’s not looking.

Much to my surprise, another attractive Uzbek teenager, Nazyr as he later told me, comes and sits in the room with his feet soaking in a basin of water, facing me. I muster courage and offer a massage. He declines, then enquires "You know how to do it?" as if he was interested after all. I massage. He turns over. I take the plunge and am rewarded with his cock in my mouth. He watches the door but wraps first one and then the other leg around my head. Beautiful face and body. Ecstasy. But he breaks off when someone enters. Later we connect briefly. I ask in the sauna to come back to my place. He doesn’t strike me as dangerous. "Hop," he said, the usual Uzbek reply to everything, but he later declines. I get us cigarettes and he offers to get me dope. "Come at 10:00am tomorrow." I say I must work. "Then 1:00" I'm not hopeful. I want to connect after baths, but he disappeared. I come dutifully at 1:00pm the next day, but no Nazyr. Bakhtior, a teacher ask for a massage and my number and insists he'll phone but I'm not sure I want to try to create the magic here in my apt, and he's a bit too much like me.

Wednesday: Obsessed with sex and depressed at work at UNIDO, I come here again at lunch - 12:30. A rather plump but still attractive guy wants to give me a quick fuck in the shower which I decline. Later he lets me suck him in the room. Comes in seconds. The taste drives me wild.
Thursday: Cruise a can in the park. Great graffiti.
Friday: Back to the park, then Chorsu. The red-haired teenager from last Saturday with the cock with the huge head is there. Still feigns disgust, but sure enough, comes into the room when I'm there, and walks around and offers me his cock. It quickly gets hard. A guy walks in and he withdraws, but the guy motions to continue. He takes my hand away and drives his cock deep in my mouth and comes quickly. Then to a reception at the studio theatre Ilkhom, where I ponder acting vs living. Who wants to drink champagne with ugly businessmen?
Saturday: A bit exhausted but still driven. Can I find a way beyond the confines of the banya?

December 1,1995

Strange how my fantasies can become poisoned. How many times have I recalled Rakhimjan's visits with excitement. How disappointing the reality of another turned out to be, even how nightmarish. It is very difficult to bargain with the devil (or should I say one's own devil). Besides, what is going through his mind has nothing to do with what is going through mine. God knows what is going through his: 'If I'm nice to this guy, he'll give me money for a tapedeck,’ but with an underlying contempt?

Is this just another version of me rejecting my own sexuality? Funny how Lyonia is the only survivor, and how comforting it is to think of him now, crazy, simple-minded, but with an underlying respect for me in spite of what he sees as an unfortunate (or rather fortunate for him) weakness. I recall how he jokingly threatened to blackmail me back on Stroitelei, how I refused to let him visit me for over 2 yrs at Vykhino, but how I've kept coming back to him, and how he is forgiving and forgetful of hurts, how he can comfort me in despair. For all my galavanting around, L and Denis have proved impossible to replace. But can I construct any kind of real life around either of them?

December 9, 1995

Everything seemed to burst after Rakhimjan's visit a week and a half ago. Lack of work, lack of companionship, lack of security at home, lack of dope.... I had been looking for him for months, and yet that day at the baths, I wasn't, though I still was glad to see him and invited him back. His fantasy is totally divorce from mine though. He was hustling another guy at the baths, came with him and announced it was time to go to my place. Immediately the talk of money - to top up his stereo fund. An unwilling premature ejaculation followed by a request for money (I had given him his present from Canada - a windbreaker) which I declined, and a promise to visit again soon. I smoked and jacked off and then the paranoia set in. [Never overdo your ecstasy!] The Sunday before, the landlady had arrived unannounced and hostilely demanded more rent and complained that the apt was dirty. These two malevolent extremes both knocking at my door, upsetting my peace, reinforcing my insecurity and loneliness. And then my UNIDO contract was cancelled.

What have I built here in Tashkent? A quasi-worship of the male orgasm, unrequited and passive. Was this selfishness, selflessness, or merely self-loathing? Or all three? As one acquaintance from Chorsu said: "We're getting older every day". At times I am overcome by how sordid it seems. It's either black or white, nauseating or transcendental. Maybe me trying to scheme to have this transcendence for a (reasonable) price was sacrilegious, and this paranoia is my nemesis.

That Saturday pm I spent brooding alone, fearing even the telephone. I answered to hear Nimat, my swarthy, sweet Tadjik ex-flame. How nice. We would meet next week. Then a half hour before Rakhimjan was to come, as I sat nervously planning to exit with him and try to fend off his claims (threats?), a knock. Fortunately, I braved opened the inside door and peered out to see it was not the tall R. It turned out to be Ruzibai, one of my first acquaintances at the banya, soft, polite, and in the end a possessive bore. Still how happy I was to see him. We ate and I watched the minutes tick by. No Rakhimjan. Ruzibai had to leave, so I decided to go with him. What luck that he dragged me away. My decision to go is gelling, something to build on. I feel stronger for it. I'll work things out and struggle with making relationships work. It's either meaningful relations with people I love, or none at all (unless one-time stands can be counted as relationships). The one-time stands are not enough; they don't seem to lead anywhere. This makes them unique and special, or meaningless. Take your pick.

The underlying problem is I'm surrounded by people who don't understand, certainly don't accept, who I am. Who relate to me only for the money or because I’m exotic. But that’s at least partly why I’m here.

At the Business Club meeting on the roof of the Jewel Bldg last night, how uncomfortable and naked I felt. At first I wanted only to escape. How useful a bit of drink is. I finally met an artist, a former dancer, a Dutch publisher, a Tadjik/Russian journalist/mountaineer, and seemed to lose my paranoia. Pavel, the classic tall, dark and handsome youth, took an interest in me, raising my self-esteem to the point where the paranoia disappeared altogether. Is that all I'm seeking in returning to Moscow - relief from paranoia?

Chorsu has become like a bad acid trip. It hit me with the arrival of the new 'cup' of grass (grass is sold in matchboxes or cups (1 cup = 10 matchboxes)) and after Rakhimjan's visit, like acid flashbacks. The Chorsu experience perhaps should be frowned upon, illegal, illicit, fleeting, secret. It's like the unnamable Yaweh. Such ecstasy leads to a down just like alcohol, acid, or good times, but more so.

Being obsessed is dangerous. I kept searching for Rakhimjan, making myself too obvious, and then found the fantasy shattered when we finally met up. I guess I'm jealous too. Is it my fault I couldn't make it work? Was I intent on rejecting him anyway?

After desperately tossing options in my head, I decided I would return to Moscow and try to live with Lyonia, to be with L and D, for better or worse, the people I love. Work as a freelance journalist.

June 1996

A month of strep throat and the flu at Lyonia’s over New Years and then back to Tashkent. I couldn’t face the cruel Moscow winter, the horrendous cost of living, the hugeness of Moscow. I stumbled onto a project to start up a Tashkent English-language newspaper and joined up in hopes of landing accreditation and a proper visa, but still no go. Does the Foreign Ministry have spies that have sussed me out? Just as I’m getting back in stride on the sex front.

Bakhtyor is a young, tall and lanky fellow I fellated as an older dumpy but not unattractive man kissed him wildy. B came over to my corner as his pursuer got hotter and hotter, and his straight, long cock was his invitation card, which I finally read correctly. The pursuer wanted to fuck him, but our plot succeeded, as B came ecstatically. He managed to extricate himself, but the pursuer wanted only to fuck, and his attempt to subdue me deflated quickly when I said I had piles. Ha, ha. He later changed his mind in the sauna, but the unwanted entry of another hopeful ended our mutual fantasy of B. B disappeared and I went out for a smoke. The pursuer came back in from the locker room for a light and went back out. "Has the boy gone? What a great guy," he said, almost reverently. 'He's right' I thought, and decided to cash in my stakes. I went out and changed, leaving just before B, with my address scrawled on a piece of the People's Word. As he came out, I screwed up my courage and asked: "Would you like to meet again?" "Sure," he said hastily, whereupon I pulled out the People's Word. "Right across from Victory Park, where the trams turn," I tried not to sound too anxious. "Thursday, 7:00 pm," he said casually. No doubt he won't show up. But it all happened without rejection.

An hour later I was anxiously waiting word about my visa application at the Foreign Ministry. When I got the bad news that they would not accredit me as a journalist, the sense of empowerment was still enough to keep me going. Don't lose it! That's the key. Try to nurse it through till the next hit. And what if there is no next hit? No more dope and no more Turkish baths?

Oh, Canada! I'll miss the cocky teens smoking their cigarettes and strutting around, flashing their dazzling smiles from their dark Asian faces. The wrinkle, wizened, battered Russian, blue-eyed and dead poor, stumbling down the street, much like Russian slaves here not much more than a century ago. The waifish ladies sitting patiently with their sacks of sunflower seeds and pitiful displays of cheap cigarettes, a child looking on hopefully. Not much better off than the Russian. Both - full of humanity. I won't miss the official side of life here: the overblown pomp, the flabby, sly, snotty pretenders in their Mercedes.

It struck me that I may have 'flipped out', like the person who wears glasses which invert the outside world, but who unconsciously reprograms himself and within a few days sees things twice inverted. I've overlived my '7 year itch' and see life everywhere as a foreigner. How can I reverse the image? Or should I? Will I always be the foreigner now, even in Canada?

August 1996

As I'm finally about to leave Tashkent, I let it happen, again without a safe, just like when I first came here 17 years ago, back in 1979. I went for a late night stroll then, after Borodin’s Prince Igor at the opera theater, and was picked up by a local Russian. We went back to his hovel, where his handsome, brooding Uzbek lover was lounging in jockey briefs. They both fucked me, much to my horror and ecstasy, and left me with hepatitis, but also mulling over this intensely secret nocturnal adventure, like a gauntlet thrown, for me to pick up at my peril or salvation. I hope this last fuck does not have the negative effect of the one (OK, three - the Russian insisted on a repeat performance) from the previous trip.

A 4 month stay back in Toronto from September to December made me realize that I was indeed the foreigner there now. I crammed as much gay reading and writing as possible, and spent most of the time in bed with a series of complaints - the flu, lumbago, a sprained finger and sciatica, and nonetheless came back to Tashkent to translate and to keep looking for love.

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