Sex and the Cyrillic

A drunk named Sergei said that St. Petersburg is a museum of sex and suffering, which at the time I thought profound, but we were all drunk on cheap beer and Sergei spoke poor English, so there’s a good chance I said this and attributed it to Sergei, who, come to think of it, never could have uttered such a phrase, being passed out in the street. Back to sex. Dear Mom, I am tingling in Russia. I am starring in a commercial for my penis. It features me dancing on bars in a suit made of thousand dollar bills, an explosion in the background, and then my penis rising, which, luckily, is attached to me. In all seriousness, when I was fourteen and a prisoner of puberty, I would lie awake like an old-time flying machine unable to lift from the ground, throbbing in my body, writing in the secret journal of the night. Dear Night, I wrote, let there be a place where women walk like tigers, where their eyes are steel and ice, where their spiked heels wound the ground they walk on.