Down by the Seaside, Baby

Tom Sawyer, in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, insists on applying the laws of adventure writing to real-life problems, such that when it comes time to rescue the runaway slave from “prison,” he invents an absurdly elaborate scheme––the Rube Goldberg machine of schemes––which takes weeks to put into action and puts everyone else’s safety in jeopardy. Form over function; ego over all. The same can be said for Peter the Great, who was so enamored with sea travel, so committed to transforming his country into a nation of seafarers (like Holland, in his eyes), that he excluded bridges from the city plan. He also dug many more canals than exist today. Thankfully, his successors filled in the more excessive ones and built scores of bridges (if I’m not mistaken, there are around 300 today). Neither did they take to seafaring as he hoped.

It seems as though the people are completely indifferent to the seaside where I live. There are no parks or walkways, nowhere at all for girls to go wild, should they do wish to do so. It could easily be one of the most depressing places in the city, but living in Russia, you form a zen-like peace with decay in all its forms––garbage, crumbling concrete, dead animals and people (a dead dog by my apartment, a dead man in a smashed up Volga automobile), horrible smells (a student on the program said that his house smelled as though a hundred babies were trucked in daily to deliver their aromatic cargos). I really enjoyed looking at the garbage––speculating as to what kinds of crimes and misdemeanors take place in this, the seediest of places. A used condom, some broken glass, a tube sock, a McDonalds bag (“I’m lovin’ it,” doesn’t translate, so they use, roughly “here’s what I love”). I saw a police car and a civilian car side-by-side in a grove of trees, almost hidden from view doing something illegal, I imagined. Some guy was trying to impress his girlfriend by doing high-speed 180s in the parking lot in his early 90s Lada. On the indelicate concrete slabs that form the actual water-land interface, three young anglers in black turtlenecks chugged Balticas, the local beer, and took turns casting.

But I didn’t find any syringes, which is what I was really looking for. I wanted to see syringes everywhere; I wanted them to be sticking out of the ground, clogging drainage pipes, tossing about in the surf, being swallowed by seagulls adapted to their consumption. I know I’m being flippant; heroin use, and AIDs transmitted via infected needles is a serious problem here and I don’t mean to make light of it. I’m even embarrassed by my enthusiasm. Where did it come from? The idealistic take (from the standpoint of my moral maturity), is that the syringes are not signs of another’s misery or but of a version of reality, which, as a product of a nice place in Connecticut, I’ve never seen before and so I was simply curious. But this feels incomplete and quixotic. The other possibility is that they ARE signs of another’s misery and failing, of a major pitfall that I have avoided thus far, are therefore I wanted to find them to inflate my own balloon somehow. Or perhaps I was searching for corroborating evidence––of the drug problem of course, but also of the tenacious big, bad, scary Russia myth I’ve heard for so long in so many forms.