Republican Party Reptile Part 6

Sunday I was drunk.

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE.

SOVIET CAPITAL AND HEARTLAND.

AS WE JOINED THE NATION THIS.

SUMMER ON AN EXCITING AND.

AFFORDABLE SOVIET EXCURSION?.

I know I'll never understand what the Americans thought they were doing in Russia, but I'm almost as confused about what the Russians thought they were letting them do.

Obviously the Volga Peace Cruise was approved. Unapproved things unhappen in the USSR. But though the Soviets had approved it, they didn't seem very interested. In one of the cities where we docked, a local reporter came aboard and talked to Nick Smarm. When Nick finished excoriating the U.S. and began pointing out that the Soviet Union was also engaged in the arms race, the reporter simply stopped writing. This was the total media attention given us.

I suppose we were under surveillance. I noticed that Sonya took complete notes during the conferences, but it seemed to me she was paying most attention to what her countrymen said. Some peaceniks suspected their rooms had been searched. One woman had found her bags a little too neatly closed and zipped. Another woman had her copy of Peter the Great disappear.

"Do not bother to look for it," said one of the Intourist guides, when the woman made a stink. "It has doubtless slipped behind the folding bunk when the steward lady has been making the bed. It is most difficult to look under there so steward lady will do it for you during dinner." This sounded suspicious. But the book did not mysteriously reappear after dinner, not even with certain pages torn out, so maybe it was just lost.

Neither I nor the outspokenly pro-American New Mexicans were bothered. One day Nikolai and Sonya took me on a nice but pointless speedboat ride up the Volga, and I a.s.sumed this was when my cabin was to be searched. But I'd used the old Ian Fleming trick of fastening a human hair with spit across my locker door and it was still there when I got back.

If anything was happening to the leftists, they weren't talking. But one of them, the woman who was embarra.s.sed to have left the Soviet Union as a child, had relatives in Moscow, whom I know she visited. When we went through customs at the end of the tour, she was searched completely and questioned so long that the plane had to be held for her. Our tour leader claimed it was because she'd lost one of her currency exchange receipts.

Whatever the official Soviet att.i.tude toward us may have been, the private Russian att.i.tude was manifestly clear. The Russians, when they'd had a few drinks, would repeatedly make declarations starting, "I am not an anti-Semite, but. . ." And, at least to judge by last names, many of our tour members were Jewish.

One of the crew, in the most confidence-imparting stage of drunkenness, told me, "You know Brezhnev is married to a Jew. Many members of the Presidium are married to Jews. This is why we cannot be so firm with the Israelis."

But the peaceniks and the leftists were blind to this, or pa.s.sed it off as anti-Zionism only. Their only serious concern was with the CIA. They were convinced there must be a CIA agent aboard. I suggested the fat man, surely an agent provocateur. But they'd decided he was okay, since he'd apologized to Nick. Someone said the leftists suspected me-that coat and tie. I asked Nikolai who he thought it was. "All of them," he laughed.

MONDAY, JULY 26.

I think the Russians had decided both privately and officially that these Volga peace cruisers were inconsequential people, unable to influence American policy in any important way.

When we docked in Togliatti, the leftists were very eager to see the Lada automobile plant there, one of the most modern factories in the Soviet Union. They were swooning to meet genuine "workers." But it wasn't on the schedule. Our Intourist guides made a halfhearted attempt to convince the local Intourist office to allow a tour, but it was too big a group, too many officials would have to be contacted, it would take too long to arrange, and so on. The leftists were pretty sore, and went so far as to make no excuses for the Soviet system this time.

But meanwhile Nikolai had somehow got in touch with the Lada plant management and informed them that I worked for Car and Driver magazine. I'm only a contributing editor there, and even if I were editor in chief I wouldn't have much sway over the FTC, DOT, and Reagan administration executive orders that keep the Russians from exporting cars to us. But I was a representative of the real world nonetheless. And that afternoon there was a big chauffeured car waiting at dockside to take me, the only admitted Republican on board, for a personal tour of the Lada plant.

ALL THE REST OF THE DAYS ON.

THE TRIP.

By Tuesday the 27th I'd come to the end of the tour, at least as a sentient being. There were still two days left to the cruise and six days left in Russia, but I was gone.

The place just wears you out after a while. There is not a square angle or a plumb line in all the country. Every bit of concrete is crumbling from too much aggregate in the mix, and everything is made of concrete. I saw buildings with the facades falling off that were still under construction. And everything that's well built turns out to be built by somebody else. Moscow Airport was built by West Germans, the Grand Hyatt knockoff by the French, the Lada plant by Italians, the very boat was made in Austria.

The air pollution in the cities is grotesque. No machine seems to run well. And the whole of commerce visible on the Volga consisted of carting sand and phone poles from one port to the next.

The New Mexicans had a contest: a bottle of champagne to be won by the first person who saw a crane with an operator in it. No one won. Every building site we saw was three-fourths deserted. I asked Orlonsky where the workers were, but he turned sly on me. "Perhaps they are at lunch." It was 10:30 in the morning.

What little of the old and charming architecture is left is rotting, sitting neglected, waiting to be torn down for its lack of modernism. Russia stinks of dirty bodies and evil Balkan tobacco and a disinfectant they must distribute by the tank car daily, some chemical with a moldy turned-earth stench as though vandals had been at it in the graveyard or mice had gotten into the mushroom cellar.

In the end, every little detail starts to get to you-the overwhelming oppressiveness of the place, the plain G.o.dawfulness of it.

We put in at Ulyanovsk, birthplace of Lenin. Not an easy city to find your way around in. Take Lenin Avenue to Lenin Street; go straight to Lenin Square, then left along Lenin Boulevard to Lenin Place and Lenin Lane. Don't miss the monument to Lenin's sister's dog.

And there's no reason to find your way around. There's nothing there, anyway. We were s.h.i.tfaced drunk in the bar by noon. The New Mexicans and I were crazed now with the desire for a cheeseburger, mad for the sound of a pedal steel guitar, would have killed for a six-pack of Budweiser and a ride down the interstate at 100 miles an hour in a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. But there was nothing to be done, nothing to do but drink. So we drank and told jokes: old jokes, bad jokes, dirty jokes.

We were interrupting the progressives' dinner now. The leftists and the peaceniks were mad. But only Mrs. Pigeon had the courage to approach. What were we laughing about?

"s.e.x," said Sue Ann.

"Now, what's so funny about s.e.x?" said Mrs. Pigeon.

"Well, if you don't remember, honey . . ." And Mrs. Pigeon retreated. We began to sing. We sang "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" and "Danny Boy" and: My mother sells rubbers to sailors,

My dad pokes the heads with a pin,

My sister performs the abortions,

My G.o.d how the money rolls in.

The progressives could not get the Russians to stop us. Instead, the Russians came back from the fantail and began to sing too, loud Russian songs with stamping and pounding of gla.s.ses. Then some of the peaceniks came up and then a few more, and they began to sing along. They sang "America the Beautiful" and "G.o.d Bless America" and every verse to "The Star Spangled Banner," a most cacophonous sound. We danced, and the ship's band tried to play jitterbug. And the Russians gave toasts, and we gave toasts: To the American Eagle,

The higher she goes, the louder she screams,

And who f.u.c.ks with the eagle best learn how to fly!

And the Russians said: To Mother Russia,

Who comes here with the sword

Dies by the sword!

And someone said, "From one bunch of sons of a b.i.t.c.hes to another." And we drank everything that came to hand, the doctor's neutral grain spirits included, and sang and danced and drank some more until we pa.s.sed out on top of the tables in a triumph of peace and Soviet-American relations.

There's nothing at all to the rest of the trip except a huge gray-and-green hangover with a glimpse of the White Kremlin making my head ache in Kazan and the band piping us ash.o.r.e in the morning with, most appropriately to my mind, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Then a flight to Moscow, rough weather all the way, and back to that Grand Hyatt hotel.

There was a Russian dis...o...b..nd in the lounge, balalaika music played on electric guitars and set to a Donna Summer beat. The New Mexicans went on to Leningrad, and I was left sitting alone in the bar waiting for my plane home a day and a half hence. An English tourist sat down next to me. "Been here long, have you?" he said. "Been all around the country?"

"I've been to the f.u.c.king back of the moon!" I said. "Scotch," I said to the bartender. He gave me vodka.

Goons, Guns, and

Gold

On the day before the 1986 Philippine presidential election, a Manila bartender tells me this one: President Marcos and General Ver find themselves in h.e.l.l. General Ver is up to his neck in boiling tar. President Marcos is up to his knees. General Ver says: "Look, I've been your right-hand man for twenty years, and I've done some terrible stuff, but it's nothing compared to what you've done. How come you're only up to your knees?"

President Marcos says, "I'm standing on Imelda's shoulders."

A taxi driver tells me this one: Imelda and her kids, Irene, Imee, and Bongbong (this is, no kidding, what Marcos's twenty-seven-year-old son, Ferdinand Jr., is called), are flying over the Philippines in their jet. Irene says: "Mommy, the Philippine people really hate us. Isn't there something we can do?"

"I've got an idea," says Bongbong. "We'll drop ten thousand packages out of the airplane. Each package will have fifty pesos in it. The people can buy rice and fish, and they'll love us."