Pre-Fairy tells - Gulag Ep.6
September 7, 2007
Stuck!
Not having come across any more frozen corpses on the streets since my first encounter a couple of months back, I was feeling quite chirpy. I had survived camp. The summer was over, which meant I wasn’t sweating like a pig anymore, and I had made a friend! YAY for me.
After having changed metro twice and waited fifteen minutes for a bus, I was finally on my last lap to reaching my destination: a god forsaken district in the north of Moscow, where I taught sulky fag-bashing teenagers.
By now, I excel at manoeuvring the very crowded Russian public transport system. My face, normally slammed against a window by a dozen of ‘Babushkas’, remains as motionless as possible. I know perfectly well that if I have a fainted smirk on, the babushkas will lunge at me and rip my throat off. So I listened to my MP3 and tried to sway as discreetly as possible. I have the Dreamgirls Soundtrack on a loop, its magical power being the only thing stopping me from jumping in front of a car.
Being on a bus in Moscow is much like playing with Legos. You stuck your arm under a bar, bent your leg as if you were a gymnast all the while balancing yourself to the best of your abilities and hoping not to be crushed or to lose a limb. On that sad day however the Russians had decided to rid the world of your faithful servant.
We were dangerously getting closer to my bus stop and I was completely stuck at the forefront of the bus. I knew that if I didn’t get out at the next stop, I would probably get lost and wander aimlessly through the streets of this deadly suburb until I died of starvation or worse.
People were coming from both sides of the bus, I was gasping for air. Not being claustrophobic, I still couldn’t help but feel threatened. Something was up! I absolutely had to get off but no one would let me. I tried jumping the turnstile but two fat boobs belonging to the sister of the Bibendum stood in my way. From all sides, Russians were coming at me and none of them were backing off. Pushed and crushed, I literally lost it and started screaming in English as if my life depended on it: ‘GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY! YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLES’ The F word resonated in the entire bus. No one moved. Filled with rage and a powerful survival instinct, I raised my voice once more and insulted the holy fuck out of all of them. I was hoping it would shatter all the windows of the bus and allow me to escape. It didn’t. I was out of options. The only thing left to do was to brutally push my way out. And so I did. I was a terminator, scooping people up and out of the way, slamming babushkas, and literally tearing my way out of the bus. Luckily there were no children on the bus, as I would have happily trampled them.
Safely on the sidewalk, and short of breath, I looked at the bus door closing. I felt like He-Man finally defeated Skeletor. Inside the bus, no one was even looking at me! No one had been choked at my unreasonable use of violence to get out. I’m not even sure they noticed.
In a later discussion with a fellow worker, I was astonished to find out that this was THE only way to get out of a bus. ‘By nearly killing them? By grabbing people and lifting them out of the way?’ I asked. ‘Well, yeah!’ was her response. She looked at me, a bit puzzled, probably wondering why I was finding it so hard to believe.
What the fuck am I doing here?
Seven months to go…
ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS – EVEN THOSE BASED ON REAL PEOPLE - ARE ENTIRELY TRUE
THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT NO ONE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD TRY TO LIVE IN RUSSIA
