Red Ticket: The Interview
You're not going to believe what freelancers got paid in Moscow in 1992
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. Today, I interview her for a job after our last writer ran off with the band Madness, and Robin goes on her first date in Moscow. If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, and 8-9.
Chapter 10. The Interview
by Robin Whetstone
You had to shake.
It was the strangest doorknob I’d ever seen: a brass hand sticking straight out of the main door to the building. To get into the lobby, you had to shake. I grasped the hand and stood there for a minute, seeing what it was like. It felt like I’d struck some kind of deal with this building.
The lobby was decorated in Rio-era Duran Duran. Everything was black and gold and mauve, with lines swooping everywhere. I sat there, waiting for the Moscow Guardian's managing editor to come down and meet me. I was wearing my “nice sweater,” the dark-green wool one, and a pair of jeans that had a conspicuous yellow stain on the left thigh.
On my feet were the only shoes I’d brought with me, a giant pair of blue and tan rubber hunting boots. Around my left wrist, over the burn, I’d loosely tied a white bandana. Jason Stanford would see me and think I was a lumberjack, or a Flashdance fan. Not a writer. My notebook-paper resume would confirm this. One of the three items on it was “camp,” as in, “This one time, I went to camp.” This was never going to work.
“Are you Robin?” A man my age was standing halfway down the staircase. He probably looked professional and confident, but all I saw was that he had an enormous black eye. It was a real shiner, all blue and gray and lividly swollen. I’d never seen a black eye that bad before in real life, definitely never at a job interview. I felt a little better. Maybe this would work out after all.
We walked down the purple and mauve hallway into the Guardian’s offices. A man in his mid-twenties was crouched on the floor, his hand curled around the handle of a filing cabinet drawer. “Hey!” he whispered at us, waving us over. He pulled open the bottom drawer, which was labelled “S-Z.” Inside the drawer were a cat and her five kittens. The cat lay there, nursing and purring. “They should have filed this under C,” said the man.
Jason and I sat down at his desk. “We need a new writer because our last one ran off,” he said.
“Ran off? Where?”
"With Madness.” Jason shook his head like it was a shame.
“Madness? The ska band?” This was precisely the trajectory I hoped my own career would take. I wanted this job so badly I felt nauseated, and dizzy. I felt like I might start crying. I pulled my story out of my coat pocket and held it out to Jason. “Here’s the story I wrote,” I said. “It’s about Russian home remedies.”
I sat there and watched Jason read through his one good eye. Was it okay? Was it bad? Did he like it? I shifted around in my seat, and noticed something. My left thigh was wet. Again. I’d had my arm resting on it the whole time, and the wound had wept through the bandanna completely, stiffening my pants leg with pus. I was mortified. I scooted my chair closer to Jason’s desk, so my thigh was underneath its top. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
“This is a good story,” said Jason. “But you really have no experience at all as a writer.”
“Yes,” I said forcefully, hoping I’d follow with a big, convincing “but.” But I couldn’t think of anything to say. Jason was right, I had no experience.
Jason stared at me for a second and then unlocked a drawer. He put a $100 bill and a copy of The Elements of Style on the desk. “You can be freelance for now,” he said. “We’ll call you.”
I don’t remember what happened after Jason said “We’ll call you.” All I knew was that I had tried, finally, and somehow my heart had not been broken after all. I paced on the sidewalk in the falling snow outside the handshake building, trying to stay calm. I felt psychotically exuberant over this turn of events. It would not do to be alone in my room. I decided to go to the Irish House Bar and Supermarket. I could pay dollars for a beer there without having to bribe anyone.
The Irish House was packed with oil executives, lawyers, and managers of construction companies. They were from all over Europe, Africa, and North America, a bunch of ambitious, rootless men. I wound up at the bar next to one of the few Russians in the place, a slim blonde man with interesting bone structure. We stood there, waiting for our Bitburgers. He was wearing an elegant gray coat and was bobbing his head in time to the yellow Walkman he was wearing.
This was one of those New Russians I kept hearing about. Young people who’d graduated from high school into the collapse of their society and were making the best of the opportunity. I should talk to him, probably. Maybe take some notes.
“Excuse me,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “I’m working on an article and wondered if I could ask you what you’re listening to.”
He took the headphones off his head and smiled at me.
“Howling Wolf,” is what he said.
Chapter 11. Pizza Sluts
I was riding the escalator up from the Kievskoe Metro, on the way to my first date with Lyosha, the Russian I’d met the night before. (That’s him on the right.) I was nervous. Lyosha last night had been meticulously dressed, like a 1950s ad man. Mine was more an “off my medication” kind of look.
After three days of a dirty bandana being wrapped around my wrist, my hand had swollen so much I could not get my arm in the sleeve of my black trench coat. Instead, I wore it half-cape style: right arm in the coat sleeve, left arm hidden underneath the coat, as though concealing a dagger. With only one working hand, I’d been unable to tie my boots or button my trench coat by myself, so I’d shuffled down to the perpetual line of old ladies and bought a metal clip, which I used to hold my coat closed. Its rusty spine stuck straight out in front of me like a battery pack, and the silver handles of the clip rested on either side of the coat flaps. This was an office supply, no doubt about it; a big one meant to clip together a stack of invoices. Lyosha would wonder whether I meant to wear it as an accessory, why I was only wearing half a coat. Is this what Americans do?
Even worse was my hair. Right before I left for Moscow, I’d been so nervous that my mom insisted I go somewhere and get a perm. “Go,” she said. “It’ll take three hours.”
I’d gotten a “spiral perm” immediately before 24 hours of international travel, and now my nearly waist-length hair was angry; angry at me for what I’d done to it, angry at the conditions it had to live in. There were no spirals anymore, just a light red static that bristled around my shoulders. The coat-cape and the scarecrow hair and my untied blue rubber hunting boats and my pus-stained jeans were in no way an evening look, unless the plans for the evening were evacuating from a house fire with only the things we could grab.
Also, speaking of plans, what were Lyosha’s? “What if he takes me to Pizza Hut?” I thought. The idea filled me with dread.
I’d been to the Moscow Pizza Hut two years ago, a week before the coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The coup plotters wanted to lock everybody down again, to get rid of the relative freedom Russians had under perestroika. But Russians weren’t about to be locked down. They’d had enough battleship gray. Pizza Hut, with its engorged breadsticks and lashes of red sauce, was a window to everything they’d missed in the last 75 years. The paper menu liners from Pizza Hut trays became status items. People — educated, serious people — added the framed liners to the décor displayed in their living room hutches, so the guests would see. Muscovites stood in line for seven hours, eight hours to get a seat at this table. But some of them did more than stand in line.
My classmates and I called these girls the Pizza Sluts. We knew this was unkind, but we were young, and it rhymed. On our trip to Russia in 1991, we were sitting at a table next to the big blue plate glass windows that wrapped around the restaurant. Outside the window, five feet away, the line snaked back and forth around poles that had been set up and then disappeared way off down the block. The Russians outside had been standing there, staring at our peperoni pizza as it disappeared into our mouths, for 20 minutes. It didn’t seem right to talk.
Eight girls pushed their way through the line and stood right up next to the window, spread out so all the diners could see. They hiked up their acid-washed miniskirts, fixing their stockings. Leaning forward from their hips, they applied lipstick, puckering their lips at their reflections. A few of them stepped forward, spread open the collars of their blouses, and pressed their cleavage to the window. They jiggled and wobbled, smashed up against the glass like that. My classmates and I sat staring, slices drooping in our hands.
At the table next to us sat four large men in suits. Two of the men stood up and went outside. They returned with two girls from the line. The girls plopped down and, without a word to anyone, began eating slice after slice of pizza while the men, also silent, sat there and waited. When the pizza was gone, the whole party got up and left together. As for the girls who weren’t selected, they scooted further down the window and resumed their preening. Under no circumstances did I want to have my first date with Lyosha at Pizza Hut.
Lyosha did not take me to Pizza Hut. He took me to the top floor of an abandoned Peter-the-Great-era building. The building was derelict, peeling light blue paint and rubbled corners, but on the top floor, there was a special room. Inside this room were chandeliers, and glossy parquet floors. Mirrors in gilded frames and plush mahogany furniture. A receptionist in formal business attire sat by the door at a Louis XIV desk. She found Lyosha’s name in a thin black book and led us to a table. This room, hidden in the middle of a collapsing city, was the tackiest, shiniest restaurant I’d ever seen. It was aggressively fancy, stunning you with explosions of crystal and gold. There was no sign of it at all from the street, just a burly man standing in a courtyard.
The only other patrons were two men who were sitting across the room from us. They were methodically, silently drinking vodka. The bottle they’d already finished sat on the table beside them, next to their guns. They were machine guns, and I could not stop staring at them. I had never seen people bring guns to fancy restaurants before. Who were these men? What were they doing here? This was so much better than Pizza Hut. One of the men looked up and caught me staring at him. He held my gaze, his face expressionless.
“Stop looking at those men and look at me,” said Lyosha, his voice a warning. Then, in a friendly tone, “Do you like your sushi?”
I looked down at the octopus tentacle that lay there on a rectangle of rice. I had never eaten sushi before, never even seen it. In North Florida, where I came from, fish was fried and served with ketchup, period. I’d heard that sushi was raw fish, so I was intrigued. Now that it was really here, though, I was having some trouble. I had no problem picking up the tentacle with the chopsticks, but it was so chewy. There was no way to bite through it. I had already tried, twice, gnawing at it like a river otter before giving up and setting it back on the plate. Was I supposed to put the whole thing in my mouth at one time? I was willing to try, but it would take two hands. And that was the problem.
I’d had my left wrist in my lap the entire time and was not about to move it. I could feel it, moistening my jeans as we drank shot after shot of strawberry-leaf-infused vodka. If I could just keep my arm down, maybe he wouldn’t see. But then, how was I going to eat this octopus tentacle?
I sat there not answering Lyosha’s question about how I liked my sushi, staring at my plate. I’d had this burn for three days, and not only was it not healing, it was getting worse. It was soaking through the bandana every few hours, and the skin on the edges of the burn was a frightening grayish-green color. Also, and it was very hard to think about this but there was no denying it, my arm was starting to smell in a way that reminded me of my perm. I had to do something about this and I had to do it now.
“Lyosha,” I said, “I need some advice.”
***
As soon as we got back in the car, which had waited for us during our meal, Lyosha asked to see it. I unwrapped the bandana and he made a sharp sound of disgust. During dinner he’d been talkative, and funny, but now, on the ride back to my dorm, he just stared out the window in silence, a stern look on his face.
When we got to my dorm building, I gathered up the roses Lyosha had greeted me with five hours before, when it looked like the evening might go well, and struggled to open the car door. “Well,” I said, looking back over my shoulder into the car’s interior. It was empty. Lyosha had gotten out and now stood on my side of the car, pulling the door open for me. He took my arm and helped me out.
“I have to walk you to your room,” he said in a wooden voice. “These dorms are not safe.” He seemed distracted, like his mind was somewhere else. We waited for the elevators in silence, Lyosha staring at the ground. I was not scared of Lyosha, but I didn’t want an escort to my room. I knew my oozing injury was disgusting. Why drag it out? I was already thinking about tomorrow, and where to find a doctor, when the elevator finally came.
When we got to my door, Lyosha put his hand on my good arm and squeezed it in a friendly way. He looked relaxed and cheerful again, like he had at the start of the night. He looked like he had decided something.
“You must meet me at Prospekt Mira metro tomorrow morning at 11. If you do not come, I will come here myself and get you.” He kissed my cheek, then turned and walked down the hall into the darkness. It looked like Lyosha would help me. I unlocked my door, trying not to drop the roses.
If you’re enjoying Robin’s Moscow memoir, share it. Part of the reason I’m serializing it is to help her build the audience she deserves. (The other part of the reason is that I want you to have something fun to look forward to every weekend.)
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RIP
I would like to pay respect to those we lose along the way. If there is someone you would like to be remembered in future newsletters, please post links to their obituaries in the comments section or email me. Thank you.
How we’re getting through this
Reducing our risk of PTSD
Leading a virtual second line
Not watching WWE, apparently
Making New Orleans barbecued shrimp (so easy)
What I’m reading
Business Insider: “Roughly half of the Twitter accounts pushing to 'reopen America' are bots, researchers found”
NYT: “What Elvis, Michael Jackson and Trump Have in Common”
Texas Tribune: “For some, forgoing masks in public during the coronavirus pandemic has become a political statement”
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What I’m watching
Every COVID-19 briefing. Hilarious.
Did you know you can edit memories?
Comedians dragging Gal Gadot with this parody of her “We’re all in this together” video
Holy hell. Steve Martin was on the Dating Game in 1968?
Got suggestions? Post them in the comments section, and I might include them in the next newsletter.
What I’m listening to
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down has been getting cooler and more interesting for more than a decade, and their latest album, Temple, is really damn good. But anyone interested in how culture is adapting to isolation will enjoy this video for “Phenom.” I wish you could have seen my face when I realized what they were doing. I wish I could see you face when you see it!
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