Chapter 5 - I Fall in Love

June 17, 1989

Falling in love is great. Letting the hours go by with Denis - no unease, feeding off each other's energy, giggling at nothing, laughing at the craziness of life here, occasionally touching without thinking, enjoying the way he gesticulates describing the crude meaning behind a prison song, or twists his legs, drinking in the magic of his sparkling blue eyes and the slight twitch in his face punctuating some comment like an exclamation mark. He filled the apt. at once with his bright cheerfulness and neither of us want to break the spell of each visit, resulting in worried phone calls from his mother. She even broke a stick on his back when he returned past midnight last Sunday. Ostensibly, I'm teaching him English, but he's a goldmine of blatnye songs, an Elvis fanatic, and makes the most vacuous joke into pure poetry (-Krupskaya, Dzerzhinsky and Lenin in the market, D telling K that Baldy is selling carrots at a certain price; -Ivan being told his premiu pokrylos pizdoi by the cleaner lady/ dream analyst).

D is a courier at MN. He bummed a cigarette once in the hall, and later we were in line for lunch, providing ample time to make introductions. Our opening conversation: D "Gee, an English-speaker. Can I practise my English with you?" E "I hope that won't be the only basis for our acquaintance." He likes my bachelor regime - the uncluttered messiness, the freedom from female disapproval. When he told me he's never going to marry, that he hates women and prefers the companionship of his friends, my heart melted. I wonder if he'll find life less rocky than me, following this route? He's handsome and seems quite straight, so his light-hearted zeitgeist probably will carry him closer to the mainstream. His anger and hate at the Soviet system is deep - he can't believe that if you're robbed in North America, they don't do it to steal your clothes. "They sometimes don't bother stealing your money here. It's not worth anything - better take your running shoes or jeans." His greatest wish is to be transported back to the 1960s to see Elvis in person.

We were to spend another glorious day together, but he phoned at 7:30 am to say that their daschund was sick and he would phone on returning from the vets. No call. Finally at 2:00 pm, my call was answered by (guess who) his mother, who wept about the rapidly expiring dog, the enema which had little hope, etc. So I can't even commiserate with Denis in his moment of anguish. So I sit and feel sorry for my own loneliness, hoping he'll call. I'll settle into his book about the Vietnam War, a Soviet reporter writing in 1972 - vintage stuff. Another call answered by the mother put me through to Denis. I went to a party that night and D came over the next day for scrum tennis with Sergei. I met Marat afterwards working out in the park, a Karakalpak boxer Rabfak student, fresh from the army, with a flashing smile, and much to Sergei's dismay arranged to meet another time. Sergei's days are numbered, I fear. A handsome, but consequently narcissistic str8 parasite. He has already asked if he can bring his girlfriend over to fuck. I clearly don't fit into his logical world, though I'm sure I'm not the first gay guy to be charmed by him.

June 30, 1989

D and I have had a passionate 1 1/2 weeks, seeing each other almost every day, and talking on the phone till 1 am. One night he played accordion and sang to me for 4 hours. His mother is quite suspicious, and we met unexpectedly one day when I came over to his apt., she on her way to the metro as I walked towards the apt. I had a premonition that this would happen, and even took a different path than the one D had indicated, but so did she. Yesterday my anxiety returned in spite of being with D (or maybe because of it). The feeling of life passing me by, of playing at being a ridiculous, aging teenager. He has no interest in theater or opera, but is fascinated by Hitler and Fascism, often drawing Hitler's portrait. He enjoys looking at concentration camp pictures while listening to peaceful music and is fascinated by genocide. We spent a boring hour at the Museum of Armed Forces yesterday.

This infatuation is no doubt part of his adolescent rebellion and repressed sexuality; I am a bit of exotica for him. He was increasingly boxed in by suffocating parents, almost without friends before we met. He would like to be me, i.e., a traveling single Western male. My ambivalence is growing towards him as our intimacy grows - the same old story. Let's see if we last. I worry that our love confirms my alienation from this society, just as my loves at home were asocial. Is this a challenge to live my life without social crutches, finding my meaning and goals, and pursuing them in self-confidence? Or is it another step in my isolation and my neurosis?

July 24, 1989

My writing is suffering from love sickness. I feel drugged these last few weeks. Denis's smile and hurried self-possessed walk, his teasing distance and seductive embraces, have driven me mad. I'm alternately his father, mother, husband, boy-friend, brother,... oh yes plain old friend. We exchange clothes and go to church to light a candle and pray for success in his entrance exam, which he seems quite resigned to failing.

He considers himself of middling intelligence and not particularly attractive. He'll grant only that he has the ability to charm and manipulate people. Full of reckless childish prejudices - "Hitler's genocide was fully justified against Jews and gypsies" until I point out one of his closest childhood friend is Jewish, that he's never actually met a gypsy (as opposed to panhandlers in public places), and Hitler wanted to kill all 'non-Aryans', including blacks, whom Denis likes for their musicality, tragic history and friendliness.

He's started asking all the typical Russian questions: "How much does a VCR cost?" "Wow" etc., which I love from him, watching the changes of expression which his face goes through and coaxing a laugh out of him. Laughter. We're always laughing - it's like water flowing in a brook - gently, bubbling, sparkling. Anxiety melts. When I wait long hours for him to come - he invariably gets up at 2:00 pm - it starts to return.

Love is a drug! It's 'worse' than grass. Grass you can control till it puts you to sleep or makes you hungry, although it creates long-term anxiety -i.e., what are you doing with your life? I keep thinking how glad I am to have been off grass (my dear ol' friend) for 6 months. A kind of death of my old self. In a way, my whole existence is a constant re-experiencing Dad's death - I dreamt of him on an MGU kayak trip to Lake Onega a few weeks ago that I managed to join. I am not a kayaker - rather a canoer - and cavalierly took a kayak out alone at one point. It capsized and I found myself stuck upside down. I panicked but managed to scrape my way out. I dreamt of Dad's death that night, and of a friend of mother's assuring me his memory will live on in those who love him.

Suzanna at MN tells me her uncle cut himself off from her family in Hull in England because he was homosexual. She met him only once in London and found him quite pleasant, and recently heard he was mugged and died at age 45. I'm terribly sensitive to my own mortality, and sometimes feel my 'fling' here is like a last desperate attempt to make something of my life. Whether or not I'm 'trapped' by Denis (or vice versa - he told me I'm a spider or octopus), I feel alive and whole when we're together. Going to the theatre tonight was like making love - I felt like we were glowing among people only half-alive. We were larger than life, and out love was almost palpable. It's as if some unknown part of me or 6th sense has been discovered and awakened. I've been through it before - Peter, the lanky Australian Vietnam vet at UofT, shy and graceful though slightly buck-toothed Ian at Cambridge, then 'the Party' and the SU, which provided a channel for my sexual energy till now.

Ironically, D sees himself as my corrupter - turning me into a political cynic, but it's really more me realizing human love is the true essence, or rather goal of life, what makes life worth living. And when you don't make a family and create your long-term human circle to make sure you have love till you die, you must recreate love in your surroundings. I've only come alive here since I fell in love with him, and I don't feel guilty for telling him, holding and even kissing him (on the cheek and neck). OK, I've worried that he might react, but he lay in my arms yesterday and said "I want to go away." I felt as if we traveled through half the universe.

July 25, 1989

Robertson Davies' novel Bred in the Bone centers around the relation of Francis and Ross. F loved R as his spiritual other self. Youthful and gay and defiant of conventions. Exactly why I love D. Even for his wild, crazy longing for the glittering dream world of the West and the lost years of Brezhnev, stinking of hypocritical corruption. How but perfectly it apes the stuffy false world of my family, with its skeletons carefully hidden away, its perversions only just held out of sight. Glasnost is ugly and depressing, cold and unsettling, now that the veil has been ripped off its face. Society looks vicious and impenetrable for a light-hearted, sweet 17-yr old with nothing but his dazzling smile and exploding libido to offer the world. When he lets go with me, it's pure magic. We create gold out of base metals. And yet when he's going on about clothes or Elvis, I sometimes have to squeeze myself to keep awake.

July 29, 1989

A week of wild obsession. We fuse together everywhere. Our hands slip unconsciously into each others, his head snuggles against my neck on the metro or a park bench, I bite his ear and we laugh like children, we talk on the phone till 2:00 am. We're definitely being outrageous, oblivious, but people seem to politely ignore us, though I had the evil eye from one very middle class tree stump.

We go out for lunch in Pushkin Square at MN. D insists on holding my hand and even bit my ear one day on the street. Our boss, Pichugin, just happened to be watching, and he later called D into his office and gently lectured him about the dangers of decadent foreigners.

We found Elvis on compact discs in the Rossia Beriozka and D insisted on returning the next day for another look, though there isn't a CD player within miles. So much for the Tretiakov Gallery. We saw a play Peaceful Cemetery at the Sovremmenik Theatre on Marat's bidding. A contemporary version of Gorky's The Depths. But it was more dressing up and going there, walking down the Clear Ponds Boulevard, smoking on the boulevard during intermission, than the play, that made the evening. Marat, the Uzbek, has no trouble with our love.

Am I thumbing my nose at Soviet society, caught in a bigoted Stalinist time warp, as our crazy love blossoms, or am I connecting with my real feelings? Is it all narcissism? D told me "You really just love yourself and your white pants" as a joke but...? Or do we bring each other to life? D asked me "You couldn't find a boy like me in Canada?" innocently. I said "No." But why? Because assimilated, mundane gayness makes it all OK, takes the personal risk and danger out of what is most precious in life, blends it into the faceless consumer ethic? Or is there something missing in me in Canada that keeps me from making real contact, or which turns people off? Am I a rare animal here, a big fish in a little pond, or does the chemistry of the place (or fate) bring me alive and make me desirable? I've not felt desirable very often at home - a mouth or asshole for a cock at the bathes, a good mark for students, a good mind for ... PB. No, PB, Paul Sinclair and Richard Holt, Eric Mills, Maureen Kenny, Mario, Brian, Matt and Phil - these few friends and students all love me in their way.

D terrifies me sometimes. "My mother says I'm a prostitute. I'm partly schizophrenic." He used to talk to himself, stare at himself in the mirror, he adapts himself to please others, used to jilt girls as a game till some boys beat him up, is a total cynic about Soviet society and (he claims) love, though he tells me all this while holding me and kissing me.

He asks me "Why do you love me?" Each time, I give him 10 different reasons. His beauty, smile, presences. His laughter, the way he responds to me physically. Even his aggressiveness, rudeness (asserting himself on the metro, leaving the socks he borrowed on my pillow), his perverse love of Hitler and Fascism. He and a friend, Volodya, celebrate Hitler's birthday and the June 22 dawn attack on the SU. It's crazy - it made me angry when he first quite calmly told me, but it's part of him. What can I do? The empty bankrupt ideology here, he fights with admiration for black evil and brute force. They're honest straight-forward reactions to nonsense. Will making love change this frustrated repression of his feelings?

He likes the West because it is honest about its base concerns (greed). I correct him: "more honest but still worthy of cynicism." Meanwhile he loves me, at least partly, for my cynicism about my own society. Would D be a cynic in the West? I think of my love for students Matt and Brian (they're not such cynics) and Phil (a beautiful spiritual being with a deep cynicism about the material world). And then there's Genet and Fassbinder, whose erotic cynicism is starting to feel dated, it's so serious and intense. There's no laughter in Genet and Fassbinder. That's what kind of art I must create - cynical, with tender laughter. It doesn't even have to be gay. [I find women attractive when I walk with D beside me. They're not so threatening.] But I mustn't forget the dark spiritual side. This is the flip side of our laughter, rather than Genet's gloomy, humiliating eroticism.

August 4, 1989

We really raked ourselves over the coals tonight - hypocrisy and egoism. D gave me an ultimatum and I him - I have to stop my cruel teasing and he has to control his wild disdain for all social boundaries.

He said he couldn't live the foreigner's life of constant deception of self and others. He feels good about being Russian - open and straight-forward with those he loves. My own habit of being 2-faced makes him suffer.

My own attraction to the Russian character is perhaps why I'm here - still fighting the battles of childhood.

How mercurial he is - one day longing desperately to free himself of his hated life of sloth (like me) and to live the dazzling life of western order, with its material correctness, its civilized repression (what I am trying to escape). The next day, tearing it up and licking his wounds.

Can we work it out - make our attempt at love flower? Or will our wild flailing do us in. Pichugin's warning to him hangs over me like the sword of Damocles. Have I burned my bridge to real intimacy? I have to face the music at work - it's still a society of spies and old-fashioned morality, something I should have been more careful to observe, rather than throwing caution to the wind. My (hypocritical?) naivety is not my strong point. I have to provide the social framework - I can't expect it from him. I still have a lot of growing up to do.

August 12, 1989

My dark brown hair and beard, egged on by D, raised a few eyebrows, but Pichugin seemed to be no gruffer than usual, in fact he even gave me a conspiratorial smile. I told the office "I did it on a dare." To hell with grey hair. Good ol' East German hair dye.

D and I spend every evening together. I keep feeling terror when we haven't spoken for a few hours, but our crazy affair has reached the point of long sessions with more and more intimacy. We go right to his metro station, reveling in our hilarious warmth. An evening at his parents' apt. - we almost got caught in flagrante several times. Playing in front of the bathroom mirror with his mother around the corner on the phone, lying in bed supposedly watching TV while his parents were out for a few minutes, listening to old 33 1/3 records on a junky turntable which only plays 45s or 78s in his parents' bedroom. I wanted to go home, but D had his way. I was forced to sleep on a tattered short couch in the living room, and at 4:00 am I woke up dreaming I was touching his cock, which I realized was mine. I went to him and lay my head on his chest without waking him. The next day, he told me he felt it all in his sleep - magic.

He has the outrageous habit of asking me for, say, clean white socks on the metro escalator and then sticking his tongue in my mouth. When I really got going and almost came against his ass, he howled with laughter and continues to remind me of my groans of ecstasy and threats to come all over his ass. We're...[D arrives]

August 21, 1989

Last Saturday I came on his ass for the first time (fully dressed), without admitting it. Sunday, once on his ass, and once like I was a woman with him on top. He gets hard too.

Five boring days in the Latvian resort Palanga with Achiko and his Georgian friends trying to chat up local girls. A completely flat hard sandy beach, not a breath of wind. Lots of pine trees. One surreal day on the beach with Canadian/US peaceniks holding a 'meeting' while I got to know Valera, Remis, Natsha and Lena from Vilnius. They were play volleyball, and blond, blue-eyed Valera, bronzed and muscular, with a bright engaging smile captured my libido. I thought - it's now or never, and asked to join their game. Later I went to visit them in their hotel and play scrum tennis in the parking lot. Valera and I exchanged phone numbers, but I still longed for D.

I missed D terribly the first few days and it was a thrill to see him waiting for me at Sheremetevo when I returned. It took him 1 1/2 hours and considerable resourcefulness to get there. Someone needs me! We picked up where we left off on my return. I came Friday pm and Saturday afternoon on his ass, having convinced him to take off the sacred white pants which he had convinced me to give him. But he was most careful that I cover his black underwear with a cloth even though I was in my own underwear. An aborted attempt at getting us into Cosmos Hotel led us to Pasha and Volodya's apt. that was not entirely a success. They are weird-gay vs weird-foreigner. Sunday we slept in till the afternoon and had strange dreams - D dreaming of a neighbour's conversation about emigrating and of kicking an offensive babushka out of the apt. I dreamt of unloading a truck of mineral water at the embassy. I invite D and only have one slipper, so put on black Soviet shoes.[the water of life from my move, lack of profession in the West, adoption of Soviet lifestyle…]
D finally shows me his cock (I showed him a glimpse 'by mistake' earlier). He finally admits to masturbating. He admitted sneaking a condom from me and jerking off in it. Being caught at 2 am with porno by his mother, stealing his father's condoms, coming on his mother's panties and pillow, making a woman out of stockings and cotton batten, fucking a calendar pin-up... Revelations coming thick and fast. He regularly comes 5-7 times a day! Often at work in the tiny can on the second floor.

August 26, 1989

Just came. D draws some porn for his own inspiration. How does he do it? 5 times yesterday. I thought of the gay lib philosophy of indiscriminate sex - "get sex out of the way" of a relationship. It's a puritan reaction to puritanism - debase sex - objectify it, make it a plaything.

D does it virtually every time he gets a hard on, and draws porno when he wants some extra inspiration. But he's still a virgin. He wants to stay a boy but it's hard to imagine. He goes crazy over women's legs and even came in his pants unaided watching some porn on video at a friend's. Ah, his sweet breath when we kiss. That will go with age and smoking.

Skvorecky's homophobia is really irritating, but consistent with his egocentric anti-communism. I found his last novel, The Engineer of Human Souls, at the Embassy library, for which he won the Governor General's award. His comparison of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness to Stalin/ Lenin ("Destroy them"/ "the horror") is right on, and occasionally, his detached anarchistic cynicism works (encouraging Chinese students to buy term papers to avoid such oriental mysteries as "this novel is a novel", his accounts of workers' conversions in the can during the German occupation - fucking German women for ration coupons).

His love/ hate for his communist student Hakim is interesting - there's a grudging admiration for someone at least interested in the metaphysical issues of politics, even if from opposite sides of the barrier. Was I inadvertently an inspiration for this H? In the late 70s, before my studies in Moscow in 79-80, I was president of the UofT grad student union, and as my contribution to radical activism, put on an East European film festival. I approached the various consulates through the Canada-USSR Friendship Society (so they wouldn't be suspicious), and got several films from the Bugarian and Czech Consulates. (I also showed Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain. Out of the blue, I was phoned by Skvorecky one day, and he invited me to his office. He began a 3rd degree interrogation, heaping scorn on my pathetic efforts at detente - apparently the Czech Consulate refused to lend the films to him. Of course they refused to lend them to him; he made his career out of trashing the Czech government and denouncing the SU. I held my ground, refusing to let him use the films. I told him to come to the Grad Student Union to the film festival if he and his students were so keen to see the films. Of course, he refused to come. A bizarre episode that left me feeling confused and bitter. The 'film festival' was a bit of a disaster. Apparently not many people had any curiosity about culture behind the 'Iron Curtain'. So is Hakim my 'ten minutes of fame'? Will grad students in some god-forsaken seminar room one day debate this possibility? Better they go and indulge in some idealism themselves.

Anyway, Skv's obsession with booze and women gets to be a bit of a bore. He portrays a sell-out homosexual who writes melodramatic trash for the post-1968 Czech government, and a writer who's good and normal and loves democracy and suffers there. I presume this is him; at least he is alienated as an emigre, and takes an ironic view of himself, though his politics suck and he has all the clean boring prejudices of his suffering compatriots.

I don't know, maybe my attitude to this place, Skv, life in general is just sour grapes on my part, being the hated fag and not having the fallback of a literary career. God knows, this place is fucked - I don't hate it as much as I feel pity for all the honest misguided, even betrayed, people who must keep trying to hold it together. It's so hard to believe in it and still have any self-respect. Maybe it's healthier to build up your self-respect independently of your (meaningless) role in society - through friends and your own being - not relying on pretty baubles, the money in your pocket, or a supposedly meaningful role in society.

As for Skvorecky, he can't shake off his attachment to himself as an Important Writer, which makes him an insufferable macho prig (nice oxymoron, that) and bore in spite of his talent and ability to recognise the meaninglessness of life. He quotes a remark of Graham Greene--"The situation of a writer is incomparably better under communism than under capitalism"--and explained that "it's a ready-made drama if you live under the Nazis or the Stalinists." Henry Miller recommended that writers live abroad, because their native language suddenly becomes precious to them. Am I just possibly a mirror image of this man, distorted by the prism of 20th c Cold War politics? But then that would make me a prig and a bore. Or maybe just an (oxy)moron. But then again, I'm not an Important Writer.

September 2, 1989

Last Sunday we dropped some acid. I was a bit leery, wondering what the dosage was and how D would react. After a bout an hour, he got jumpy and started to pace up and down the living room like a caged animal. He wanted to enjoy it, which is half the formula for a good trip. I convinced him to go walking, and we headed for the steep Moscow River bank park, affectionately called Lenin Hills. The weather was unsettled, and the result was a spectacular sun shower, which caught us in a clearing in the woods, with the sun flashing magically off the rain-soaked leaves. Paradise. D tugged at my heart when he mistook the Orlyonok Hotel (my first stop in the SU way back in '76) for the Pushkin Institute. "Yah, they're a bit the same. That's the trouble with everything here, Eric, everything's almost the same as everything else. It's so boring," he sighed. We came back and lay together in bed for several hours.

We both felt like zombies for a few days, but still managed to get it up all week. I rage at D sometimes for demanding that I be in a good mood, but denying me the tenderness and intimacy I crave. But then he comes through, like Wednesday - 3 hours in bed - heaven. Friday he made me take him to the Cosmos rouble restaurant, blustering our way past the guards, speaking English loudly.

All the hard-luck stories suffocate me at times. And a 17-yr old has a lot of rough edges - helpless and demanding, childish and selfish. It demands a lot - to be resourceful and giving. He pushes me to stop denying myself (and others) and being selfish in a masochistic way. Our relationship could be (is?) very healing. I've never fucked so much, if in a rather half-assed way, nor felt so sensual or happy. D's like tap water for me now, I only notice his absence (and it's lethal), but too much can be uncomfortable. I dreamt I was going to make peace with mother on a clay tennis court/ father's grave. She's proud of my silence. [tennis = sex?, making peace with the feminine/ anima?, dignity in silence?]

It's time for a film script about an uptight Canadian throwing away everything, coming to the land of garbage and shit, and finding: love and himself, pity/ compassion, the complete senselessness of life and work, that women are sexy and bitchy...

September 4, 1989

Little Sandra, the frail pug-nosed librarian from Robarts with her list of presents-to-buy for nieces, nephews, and retired spinsters, left today for her conference of archivists in Cambridge after visiting Mary of the Embassy. A breath of comfortable suffocating Toronto - all I wanted to escape. Trying to fill the emptiness of that mindless existence, however, is not so easy. D will soon go to the army and leave a bigger emptiness. He swears his love for me, even imitates my gangling walk, chortling over my halting Russian, alternately coldly ignoring me or seductively manipulating me, all without a trace of self-conscious guilt. Exasperating and thrilling.

Our evening at his old girlfriend's was an exercise in frustration. I listened to her mother Vera recount her Bored frustration with life as a technician at Mosfilm, while Annia and D listened to his dubbed renditions of Elvis and petted in her room. D sucked her breasts and told her about our relationship until I tired of the second-rate Georgian film on TV about a pre-revolutionary circus wrestler and we caught a taxi home.

Sunday, we came twice and slept away the afternoon blissfully, after which I trimmed the slap-dash Elvis haircut Vera had created the night before and we made our customary promenade through Gorky Park, enjoying the fountain show to the music of Strauss. My melancholy today no doubt is a result of our crazy orgiastic intimacy. Riding the crest of a 17-yr old's sex drive is a dizzying adventure. D cuts through any attempt at routine. He makes life before or after orgasm seem rather flat.

What is our relationship? Am I a father, mother, brother, husband or wife? All of them, but I can't help feeling that I'm responding to his macho sexuality, be it with my own quasi-macho sex (excluding of course my licking up his cum after he leaves). I invite him into my womb-home; we come when he decides (though my response is part of the timing). He keeps asking if I'm in a good mood (like PB) which irritates me, as if my mood is independent of his, and is solely responsible for his mood. He constantly is on guard against me hiding behind a hypocritical smile, which of course is my major fault. The thought of losing him indefinitely is frightening - will I have to start from scratch again, or do I have something now to build on?

September 16, 1989

D brought his 50s nostalgia friend Volodya Shtukun over to do some taping. V's birthday today (17) and D's tomorrow (18). He's tall and gangly with a long straight nose, big feet, and a rye smile. Not handsome, but with a bubbling, masculine sense of fun that in a 17 year old is delightful. We're to go to a sleazy nightclub and milk bar to listen to Elvis and watch the locals fight in the suburbs on Wednesday. We picked up an Elvis documentary video in German which we'll watch after D's birthday party tomorrow.

I finally coaxed D into bed minus clothes - wow! But he insisted I put a safe on just as I was getting hot so I wouldn't get him wet. What a drag. Then I couldn't come fast enough. ("Hurry up... Come on..."). Finally he went to the other room to jack off with some porn, then settled into a frustrating (for me) hour of taping and retaping Elvis. A less than perfect evening. Patience!

Strange dreams this week - one jacking off with PB, another searching for egg formula shampoo, which turned out to be rotten [my attempts at cleaning out my mental cobwebs perverse?]. Angry anxious search to buy anything - couldn't find 'it' in women's dept, ended up in Canadian Tire [looking for male solace] Lying on a cot under circus ride - people falling around me - angry that I might be hurt. [left out, alone, passive, cowardly]

Mindless style-editing. I feel like I'm going nowhere. Only my crazy love for D to keep anxiety down. A frantic worried letter from my student Ken who had a mental breakdown but finally finished his high school diploma. He wants to teach English in Bangkok in a slum. Lots of good but hurt lost souls drifting around. Schubert was a 'chicken hawk' too. How to clear the garbage away and create art?

September 23, 1989

Saturday pm listening to the soundtrack of a German documentary film about Elvis that D taped on my JVC. Makes me realize how most culture is 'blackmarket', just as much of the economy is here. And yet everyone puts in their time in official jobs, the army, etc. The residual belief in the official system is fading fast (collapsing even) and the vacuum is being filled by consumerism and adulation of the West. Gorbachev represents an attempt to fill this in with a return to a liberal approach, but the forces of nationalism and religion are swamping that. Fromm's prediction that the SU would be doomed if it gave in to consumerism (vs a social asceticism) is coming true before our eyes.

Where does D's desperate nostalgia for Elvis and 50s America come from? Innocence, individualism, personal rebellion in a cynical, collective society, where rebellion has been turned into a hollow, cold icon.

The attempts to demythologize society and inject liberal humanism back into it seem rather pathetic, but there's no desire for more revolution. Trying to evolve into a liberal society is a tall order. State control of almost all cultural hardware in film, the press, and music must somehow be dismantled, and the second rate quality of much of the existing state-sponsored culture exposed. Hardly sounds like evolution.

September 24, 1989

Ghosts of troubled genius - Prokofieff's 3rd Piano Concerto on the radio. Finished a novel about a gay crypto-Fascist novelist Mauberley by Timothy Findlay, Famous Last Words, where Schubert's last piano sonata is constantly played, Elvis's music meanwhile saturating the apt.

Life seems empty - politics is meaningless, pursuit of material wealth crass, family relations poisonous, journalism pompous navel-gazing. Novels at least fill hours with comforting distraction. Friendship, love, orgasm (drugs?) are all that are real for me, and they are all fleeting. I should be making contacts, feigning experience, preparing for some bright future. However, coming here really was more like a final cutting myself adrift. Life here for me is more reactive, passive... Waiting for D, correcting or translating others' thoughts. My only activity is seducing D which is more a question of him allowing, with the vague hope that I'll deliver him from the idiocy of developed socialism (into the rich idiocy of developed capitalism).