Category: Confessions

First Love in Leningrad, Circa 1984

The following evening found me slouched in a Leningrad discotheque, still nursing the kind of sore backside only a Soviet bus seat could deliver. I was stationed at a high-top table, reading A Clockwork Orange, trying to project an air of literary detachment while simultaneously avoiding eye contact with the throng of dancers twisting under the flickering neon lights.

Then she appeared.

Short, elfin, bespectacled—like an intellectual sprite who had wandered in from some parallel universe where bookish charm trumped disco fever. Her sandy-blonde hair framed a delicate face, and her gaze, sharp and assessing, landed squarely on me. “A very famous book,” she observed, nodding toward my well-worn copy.

She introduced herself as Tula, a Finn on vacation, and without hesitation, slid into the seat across from me. We launched into a conversation that flowed as naturally as vodka at a Russian wedding—literature, music, the intoxicating allure of Russian novelists who knew how to suffer properly. I rattled off every book I had read, every philosophical revelation I had gleaned, and, with the reckless bravado of a twenty-something, confessed my grand ambition to write a novel.

“You will be famous,” she declared with absolute certainty, as if she had peered through the murky fog of the future and spotted my name emblazoned on book covers. “I can feel it. You must visit me at Lake Saimaa. We will celebrate. Who knows. Perhaps I too will be a published novelist again. We can live together and be each other’s muse.”

Flattered, I let my guard down. For two hours, we spoke like old friends who had simply taken too long to meet. Our mutual love for Russian literature, the music of Rachmaninoff, and the strange magnetic pull of doomed genius bound us together in a bubble of conversation. Then, as if she had been waiting for just the right moment, she reached into her purse, retrieved a small scrap of paper, and wrote down a title.

“This,” she said, sliding it toward me, “is the book you must read.”

I picked it up and saw the name—The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

She looked at me with the intensity of a woman who had just handed over a sacred text.

As we conversed under the glittering gold disco ball, the Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” blared across the club. It became apparent through our self-revelations that neither of us had any romantic experience. Tula At one point, she said, “I will never marry. I have, what do you say in English? Melancholy. Yes, I have melancholy. You know this word?”

“Yes, I am no stranger to melancholy.”

“I am so much like that,” she said.

“That explains your love of Rachmaninoff.”

She clasped her hands and almost became teary-eyed. “How I love Rachmaninoff. Just utter his name, and I will break down weeping.”

I thought I was a depressive, but in the presence of Tula, I had the perkiness of Richard Simmons leading an aerobics class.

She asked me what I was doing in Russia. I explained that my grandfather was a card-carrying communist, a friend of Fidel Castro, and a supporter of the Soviet Union. He used a shortwave radio in his San Pedro house to communicate with Soviet sailors in nearby ships and submarines. He visited Cuba as often as he could to bring medical supplies that were in need there. One of his friends, a Hollywood writer, lived in exile in Nicaragua after being arrested in France by Interpol for driving a Peugeot station wagon filled with illegal weapons. My grandfather wanted me to fall in love with the Soviet Union and become a champion of its utopian vision, so he paid for me to go on a peace tour. Had I fallen in love with Russia as my grandfather had hoped? Not really. So far, I had been approached at the Moscow Zoo by a striking woman dressed in black and pearls who my tour guide Natasha warned me was a KGB agent trying to have me arrested for soliciting a prostitute. I was washing my hands at the newly built Olympic Hotel in Moscow when the bathroom sink fell out of the wall and against my torso, causing a bloody cut on my abdomen. I got a fever in Novgorod prompting a beautiful female doctor with a severe face to come into my hotel and give me a shot in the butt. I was, as my fellow traveler Jerry Gold warned me, approached by young men on the subway who wanted to know if I had any American blue jeans to sell as a way of having me arrested for illicit black-market trading. Everywhere I went in Russia–hotels, trains, restaurants–there were speakers playing grim chamber music as if the authorities were saying, “Try not to be too happy during your stay here.”

Tula listened to me talk for a couple of hours with a wide gaze while touching my shoulder. “I need to see you again,” she said.

We agreed to meet the next day at the Peterhof Royal Palace by the Samson Fountain. There is this giant garden the size of several football fields with monuments, gold statues, and fountains shooting streams of water straight into the blue sky. We sat on concrete steps around the fountains. It was close to ninety degrees as statues of gold naked bodies stood in various poses next to jets of erupting water in a spectacle called The Grand Cascade. Tula wore a short white dress and we sat on the steps. In the heat, we decided I would get us some ice cream.

While I was walking toward the ice cream bar, a gypsy tried to hand off a baby to me the way a quarterback would hand off a football to a running back. It all happened so quickly. Before the baby was cradled in my chest, a fast-acting Russian police officer grabbed the baby, returned the baby to the gypsy, and shouted at her. I thought she would be arrested, but the officer appeared content with scolding her. She withered at his remarks and slumped away with the child in her arms.

I returned with the ice cream and told Tula about the incident with the gypsy. She said things like that happen all the time here.

“But what was I supposed to do with the baby?”

“Perhaps adopt it? Buy it? Save it from a life of misery? There is so much tragedy here.”

“So I was supposed to fly back to the States with a baby? Go through customs and everything else?”

“I know. It’s crazy.”

“I don’t think I could be a parent. I don’t have the hardwiring for it.”

“Me either. I’m too sad to be a parent. Sadness is a full-time job that leaves me with little energy for much else.”

She finished her ice cream and smiled at me, then said, “You and I are like two kindred spirits meeting each other in this strange world.”

“It’s hotter than hell out here.”

“So will you marry someday?”

I shrugged, then said, “I doubt anyone will take me.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. If I were the marrying type, I would come to America and spend my life with you. We could live in California and be sad together. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

It actually sounded rather appealing. Tula and I living a life of sadness, writing novels together, marinating in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony while discussing the existential torment of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. What other kind of life was there?

She stood up and said she had to catch her plane back to Finland and gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek.

“I really hope you find happiness. You are such an outstanding person.”

“Outstanding?”

That adjective used to describe me was a bit hard to take. It was like a real estate agent trying to describe a decrepit property by the train tracks as palatial. I repeated the word outstanding with perhaps a trace of sarcasm and said goodbye to her. I never saw her again, but I still remember the vanilla ice cream–the best I’ve ever tasted.

Nine months later while back in my routine of working out, playing piano, and doing my college studies in the Bay Area, I received a letter from Tula. I was living with my mother and standing by our front yard’s loquat tree while holding the envelope and staring with fascination at the Finnish return address. Nearby some Mexican parrots were making a ruckus in a neighbor’s dogwood tree. It was a warm May. I walked under the porch light by the front door entrance and read Tula’s letter.

Dear Jeff,

So much has happened since I met you. I took your recommendation and read A Confederacy of Dunces. I laughed my ass off, but the book was so sad. I keep the book on my shelf and always think of you when I see it. Now for some big news. Brace yourself. You won’t believe this. I’m getting married! I have you to thank for this. I never thought I was the marrying type, but those two days I spent with you in Russia changed me. When I got back to Finland, I was restless, I thought about you constantly, and even at one time I had this mad idea that I should arrange to visit you, but a high school friend Oliver came into my life, and we began seeing each other, not as friends but as lovers. I have you to thank for this. Meeting you awakened a part of my soul that I had never known before. I hope that you don’t forsake love, as I had planned to do, that you too will find someone special in your life. You deserve it. You are an amazing man!

Love Always,

Tula

I stood at the entryway and listened to the shrill cackles of the nearby parrots.

So I was the guy who had helped a sweet-souled depressive fall in love. No, I wasn’t the recipient of that love. But I was the lighter fluid to get the grill going. I was the spark, the catalyst, and the kindling to get Tula on the road to Loveville. I had made a difference.

I went inside the house, walked into the living room, and played something sad at my ebony Yamaha upright. I tried to imagine Tula as my sole audience, but she was replaced by the Russian Commander and I could see him mocking me.

“You are a charlatan,” I could imagine him saying. “You are an American charlatan in Russia. You must always be put in your place. You must drink warm beer till you puke your guts out. Only then can you find redemption for your vain self.”

Over the years, I attempted to channel the absurdities of the totalitarian police state into my fiction, convinced I could capture its paranoia and bureaucratic lunacy in novel form. Herculodge depicted a dystopia where physical fitness was the highest moral virtue—where to be svelte was to be righteous, and to carry an extra pound was to invite public shaming and possible exile. Gym-Nauseam imagined a society where citizens willingly surrendered their freedom, not to a dictator, but to the tyranny of endless, punishing workouts, their lives consumed by squats, protein intake calculations, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive “goal weight.”

As short stories, they worked—a sharp jab of satire, a bitter laugh at the madness of it all. But as novels? They were so catastrophically bad, they deserved their own show trial. Any competent literary tribunal would have sentenced me to hard labor in a Siberian gulag, where I could atone for my crimes against narrative structure by stacking bricks in the permafrost and reconsidering my life choices.

March 14, 2025
The Day My Piano Playing Annoyed a Russian Commander

After breakfast inside the newly-constructed Moscow Olympic Hotel, I spotted a grand piano in the lobby, and I began to play a sad piece that I had composed myself. My fellow tourists surrounded me and when I was done with my short piece, they asked me to play another song. Being a ham with an insatiable appetite for attention, I was happy to oblige.

I could tell by my audience’s response that they were impressed, but to be honest, I am technically a subpar pianist, and worse I compensate for my lack of technical prowess by playing my compositions in a style that tends to be mawkish, self-indulgent, and lugubrious.

As my fellow tourists and other hotel guests surrounded me, there were at a distant table several Soviet military men sitting down to breakfast and room-temperature beer. They were watching me with curiosity. Most notably, the Commander, a tall husky man in his forties with thick eyebrows, dark hair, and a broad chin, was staring at me. I turned from him and continued to play my drawn-out piano ballade.

In the middle of the piece, I saw out of the corner of my eye the same woman from the Moscow zoo, and like the day before she was dressed in the same elegant black outfit. She was standing over the piano’s soundboard and smiling at me. I was thinking of cutting my piece short so I could converse with her, but before I could do so, the slack-jawed Commander, his uniform festooned with medals and epaulets, approached the woman and gave her a lurid stare. His presence seemed to spook her. She abruptly exited the hotel, and the Commander was now staring at me with an amused smile. To make sure I knew that he was mocking me for my ham performance, he puckered his lips and placed his hand next to his chest, and waved his hand up and down while wiggling his fingers in an exaggerated fashion. His military subordinates at the nearby table were laughing.

When I was finished playing my composition, he invited me to sit with him and his fellow soldiers at the distant table. Listening to his heavy black military boots squeak as he walked, I followed him to the table and scanned the faces of jeering soldiers. The commander outstretched his arm toward an empty chair, his way of ordering me to sit. He then poured me a tall glass of warm beer. I was trying to construct a polite way of telling him that I didn’t care for any type of beer, especially warm beer, but before I could get out the words, the Commander shouted, “Drink!”

Noticing my reluctance to take the warm beer, he repeated this command two more times. I could see now that I was being punished for being a piano dandy. I am convinced that the Commander knew that my piano playing was both vulgar and inferior. I say this because I know enough about musicianship to know that I am more of a piano poseur than a true musician. I also know that in Russia many children are forced to take rigorous piano and violin lessons with strict supervision so that the average Russian eight-year-old has better technical acquisition than I do. So I am convinced the officer and his fellow soldiers knew that I was a musical fraud. Also because I was deeply immersed in the novels and essays of Russian emigre Vladimir Nabokov, I knew that in Russia there was the concept of poshlost, the affectations and vulgarities of a charlatan who aspires to be grand but merely flops and reveals himself to be crass and pretentious. In other words, I was an American charlatan in Russia, and I would have to pay the penalty. The price I would pay would be to be forced to drink a pint of Russian warm beer at the behest of the Soviet military. The Commander surely knew that as an American I was accustomed to ice-cold beverages and that warm beer in the morning would not be to my liking.

I forced the entire glass of bitter hoppy beer down my throat. My grimacing sour face and my being overcome by nausea elated the soldiers who engaged in thigh-slapping laughter. Witnessing the American Charlatan reduced to size was cause for triumph and celebration.

After I was done with my beer, I thanked them for the refreshment and returned to my hotel room. I undressed, showered, then prepared to brush my teeth. When I twisted the cold-water knob, the entire sink came out of the wall and the sink’s sharp edge cut me in the chest so that I had a three-inch-long vertical cut down my torso. I was bleeding. A sink from a newly-constructed hotel in Moscow had just fallen out of the wall and cut me.

The cut wasn’t that deep, but I was angry that I had missed two opportunities with the mysterious Russian woman and that the Russian Commander and his soldiers had mocked me, so I spent the rest of the day lifting my shirt and showing my fellow travelers the “ugly cut” I had received as a way of venting my resentment at my perceived adversaries.

That wasn’t the last I saw of the Commander and his coterie of soldiers. They were in a nearby cabin on the train to Novgorod. When the Commander was putting his duffel bag above his cabin bunk bed, he saw me, gave me a familiar nod, and laughed as if still feeding off my humiliation from drinking warm beer at the Moscow Olympic Hotel. Part of me was grateful that he found me to be a source of joyful entertainment because I could imagine worse alternatives.

Inside my own cabin, which I was sharing with Jerry Gold, I told him the Commander was nearby.

“He’s probably trailing us,” Jerry said.

“Why?”

“We’re on their radar. Or it just might be the protocol for them to keep close tabs on us.”

“We’re just American tourists.”

“That’s not what they think. For all they know, we’re CIA. Not to mention they saw you with a copy of A Clockwork Orange at the airport. Thanks to you, we’re all being followed.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“We’ll see.”

By the time we got to Novgorod and Jerry and I were settled in our hotel room by Lake Ilmen, I had what felt like either a cold or the flu. Natasha came in to ask if I felt good enough to go on the tour of the museum.

“I’m not sure,” I said while lying on the bed.

“We’ll get you a doctor,” Natasha said.

“I don’t need one,” I said.

“But I insist.”

Barely a half-hour had passed when a beautiful doctor with her light brown hair in a bun and a white medical coat came into my hotel. She was accompanied by two nurses holding leather apothecary bags. My fellow travelers, all twelve of them, were so curious they inched their way into the small hotel room to watch my examination.

The unsmiling doctor had me sit in a chair and take off my shirt. She listened to my chest, looked inside my mouth, and proclaimed that I had a cold.

“Just a cold,” I announced to everyone standing in the room.

But at that very moment, the doctor ordered me to lie face down on the bed and to pull down my pants. I was going to get a shot in the ass.

“In my country, we don’t get shots for the common cold,” I protested.

“Shut up and do as you’re told,” Natasha said.

“If you insist.”

No one cleared out. Watching me get a shot in the right butt cheek was apparently something everyone felt entitled to see. A Soviet-style shot in the ass was too good of an opportunity to miss, I guess. The shot hurt like hell as if some thick viscous molasses was being injected into my flesh.

Afterward, I went to the museum, and for some reason, we were standing in a barn surrounded by overgrown grass and weeds and Natasha was giving us a lecture about farming and trade routes in Russia. It was close to a hundred degrees, we were miserable, hungry, and impatient for Natasha to end her lecture. That’s when the Commander and his subordinates approached. They stood next to Natasha and watched us. The message was clear. We were to listen attentively to our tour guide.

As Natasha walked around the barn and found a place that was in the shade, Jerry Gold found a long stalk of dried hay and positioned himself behind the Commander. Slyly, Jerry brushed the dry straw against the back of the Commander’s neck causing the officer to think he was besieged by a mosquito, and he gave his neck a mighty slap. After Jerry performed the prank three times successfully unnoticed by the Commander, about a half dozen of my fellow tourists had caught on and we were doing our best to stifle our laughter.

On one hand, I was terrified that Jerry would get caught. On the other, I was enjoying the spectacle of the Commander’s vexation.

My good spirits were gone the next day when I woke up with a bruised ass from the mysterious “cold” shot. The pain and swelling were so bad that I had to walk with a severe limp. My fellow travelers said I walked like a Soviet soldier with a war injury.

Part of our itinerary that day was to visit a toy factory, which was located on the edge of a forest. I don’t know why it was so important to walk around a factory full of cheap plastic figurines. The factory was uninhabited by employees except for the attendant, but I looked out the factory window and saw several buses full of children between the ages of ten and fourteen. Some of the children were getting out of the buses and approaching the factory. I asked Natasha if the children were about to start a work shift at the factory. She consulted with the factory attendant and he whispered something into the ear of the security guard. The guard, a silver-haired man in his fifties, rushed outside and shepherded the children back into the buses. I even saw the guard give one boy a kick in the rear. It was clear to me and some of the others that Natasha and her cohorts didn’t want to create the impression that the Soviet Union violated child labor laws.

We returned to the hotel by the lake and had dinner in an affixed dining area that was crowded with other tour groups. The staff was so busy they had to stagger us inside the restaurant based on our status. We were at the bottom. The first tier was a group of North Korean children and teenagers dressed in blue uniforms with hats. They looked happy and confident that in the Soviet Union they were special and belonged. Their meals came first, were larger, and served by the staff with more enthusiasm.

We on the other hand were looked at as a painful obligation. Our portions were smaller, our food colder, and our service more perfunctory. They were throwing scraps to dogs. I was ready to leave Novgorod and go to Leningrad.

March 14, 2025
The Mysterious Woman at the Moscow Zoo

The morning after landing in Moscow—still basking in the relief that no grim-faced customs officer had pried A Clockwork Orange from my hands—I found myself standing with a dozen other jet-lagged Americans at the Moscow Zoo, led by our perpetually chipper tour guide, Natasha. The air was thick with a mix of animal musk and cigarette smoke, and somewhere in the distance, a public speaker crooned a heart-wrenching Rachmaninoff piano piece, as if the entire city were in a state of elegant despair.

I stood transfixed before the silverback gorilla, watching as he pounded his enormous, muscle-corded chest inside his moated enclosure, the very embodiment of brute strength and existential boredom. That’s when she appeared—an elegant woman in a black dress so perfectly tailored it looked painted onto her body, a matching black hat perched at a rakish angle, and a string of pearls glistening like a final touch of old-world sophistication. She moved toward me with an effortless grace, her dark eyes alight with something between mischief and intrigue.

Not only was she stunning—she was smiling. At me. As if we were long-lost confidantes about to dive into a tête-à-tête of world-altering significance. My sleep-deprived, jet-lagged brain struggled to process this impossible scenario: a beautiful Russian woman, dressed for a rendezvous at Café Pushkin rather than a casual afternoon at the zoo, suddenly deciding that I was worth her time. I had come to Moscow expecting bureaucracy, bad food, and a surplus of dour expressions—not this. It was as if I had stumbled into the first act of a Cold War spy thriller, and I had absolutely no idea what my lines were supposed to be.

“I can tell you’re American,” she said with a sharp accent that sent chills down my spine, “but you look very Russian.”

This was true. My mother’s family was from Poland and Belarus, and I had dramatic Eastern European features. Even the other tourists on our tour said I looked Russian.

“Russian men are very strong,” she said. “And you are a weightlifter, of course.”

Indeed, I was. In fact, before I pivoted to bodybuilding in my mid-teens, I was an award-winning Olympic Weightlifter, and I was very fond of the great Soviet world record breaker Vasily Alekseyev.

“Russian women love strong men,” she said, smiling at me.

I was too flattered by her attention to be suspicious of her ulterior motives, but Natasha saw what was going on, and the goody-two-shoes tour guide with thick spectacles grabbed me by the arm with her strong grip, walked me to some nearby bushes, and warned me that the woman was probably KGB attempting to ensnare me into some kind of kompromat or other. What the trap was Natasha did not say, so it was left to my prurient imagination.

While the reality was that Natasha had probably saved me from a lot of grief, I was too enticed by this elegant woman to get her out of my mind. In college, I was too socially awkward and absorbed by my bodybuilding, piano playing, and reading of “dark literature” to date or have what people considered normal socializing, but thousands of miles away from my mundane environment in the San Francisco Bay Area and now in the forbidden Soviet Union, I found myself feeling emboldened around the opposite sex, and I was hungry for a memorable encounter of some kind. What I’m trying to say is that I found myself feeling unusually lusty. My desires compelled me to believe that I had a grand opportunity with this lovely Russian woman at the zoo, and the fact that Natasha had ruined my chances pissed me off in ways that got me in touch with my Inner Silverback. Contrary to Natasha’s warnings, there may have been an outside chance that this mysterious woman simply found me attractive and wanted to get to know me, but her opportunity, and mine, had been repelled by my no-nonsense busy-body tour guide.

March 14, 2025
Reading A Clockwork Orange in Russia

In my early twenties, I was holding a copy of A Clockwork Orange on an Aeroflot flight from New York to Moscow, and I was fairly certain I’d be arrested before I even touched Soviet soil. This was not the book I was supposed to be reading. My grandfather, a proud, card-carrying Communist, had made it clear that my in-flight reading should be Cities Without Crisis: The Soviet Union Through the Eyes of an American by Mike Davidow—a glowing, uncritical love letter to the USSR. According to Davidow, the Soviet Union was well on its way to utopia, a land where happy, apple-cheeked children played in clean, orderly cities, miraculously untouched by the crime, chaos, and moral decay of capitalist America.

I had every intention of honoring my grandfather’s wishes. He had, after all, funded my spot on this Sputnik Peace Tour, a Cold War-era cultural exchange designed to showcase the Soviet Union’s superiority and convince impressionable American university students that their homeland was little more than a dilapidated shack compared to the Soviet skyscraper. My grandfather, who spent his golden years vacationing in Russia and Cuba and had personally befriended Fidel Castro, hoped I’d return to the States ready to sing the Soviet anthem on command, with a crimson hammer-and-sickle tattoo stretched across my chest.

But try as I might, I couldn’t stomach Davidow’s propaganda. It read like an overlong infomercial scripted by a particularly humorless bureaucrat. Every page was predictable, every assertion dripping with a blind, almost devotional reverence for the Soviet system. By chapter three, my eyelids were growing heavier than a Soviet cement block. That’s when I ditched it for A Clockwork Orange, a novel that, in its satirical depiction of authoritarianism and mindless conformity, was just about the worst reading material one could bring on a goodwill trip to the USSR. My grandfather would have called it “reactionary,” but I wasn’t worried about him.

No, my real concern was the Soviet customs officers waiting for us on the tarmac. They’d be rummaging through our luggage, sniffing out any hint of anti-Soviet subversion. And there I was, gripping a book that, if noticed, might earn me an all-expenses-paid trip to the kind of re-education program I had no interest in attending.

When one of my fellow tourists, Jerry Gold, who was studying law at Brown University, saw me reading the subversive novel while sitting next to me on the plane, he warned me that the Soviet police would probably confiscate it when we got to the airport. “Not only will they take your book,” he said, “they will mark you as a troublemaker and keep tags on you throughout the entire trip. You must now constantly look over your shoulder for spies, my friend. And remember, if anyone wants to offer you good money for your jeans, it’s probably KGB. Selling Western commodities for the black market is a crime that could get you sent to a Soviet prison.”

I’ll admit, I was a little anxious about some stern-faced Soviet officer confiscating A Clockwork Orange from my hands, but that concern quickly took a backseat to a far more immediate crisis: the inedible horrors being passed off as food on the Aeroflot flight. The demure flight attendants, clad in their stiff, no-nonsense uniforms, moved through the cabin with a grim efficiency, depositing onto our trays what could only be described as Cold War rations—waxy cheese triangles entombed in foil, anemic cold cuts that looked like they had lost a war of their own, limp lettuce gasping for dignity, and carrot slices so soggy they seemed to be pre-chewed. It was a meal that could single-handedly refute Mike Davidow’s utopian vision in Cities Without Crisis. His thesis—that the Soviet Union was building thriving cities free of strife—collapsed under the weight of this culinary travesty. Because if a nation’s food is a reflection of its prosperity, then a country that serves despair on a tray is, in fact, in crisis. And a man who fails to acknowledge that crisis is a fraud.

Across the aisle, Jerry Gold, the kind of guy who exuded the unshakable self-assurance of someone who spent his summers at debate camp and his winters skiing in Vermont, curled his lip in disgust. A mop of reddish-brown hair and a constellation of freckles gave him the air of a scholarly leprechaun. He peeled back the foil on his cheese triangle with surgical precision, examined its plasticky surface like a jeweler appraising a fake diamond, and let out a slow, deliberate sigh. Then, in a display of Ivy League pragmatism, he took the industrial-grade brown napkin from his tray, folded it with the care of a man preparing for a high-stakes origami competition, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat. “You might want to do the same,” he advised me in a tone that suggested this was less a suggestion and more a survival strategy. I nodded, following suit, because when faced with Soviet airline cuisine, you learned to take advice from the man with a backup plan.

“This could be the only toilet paper you’re going to have on this trip,” he said. “You would be wise to save all your napkins. They’re worth their weight in gold around here.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Have you ever used an Eastern European toilet?”

I shook my head.

“A hole in the ground. An invitation to the deep knee bend. It’s a free Jack Lalanne workout every time you go to the shitter. Things can be rather primitive.”

“For someone so hellbent on horrifying me on every aspect of this tour, can you please tell me why you decided to go on this trip?”

“It’s college credit. It’s exotic. How many Americans can boast of having been inside the Soviet Union?” He forced down a bite of cheese and asked me why I was going on the tour.

“My grandfather is a card-carrying communist,” I said. “He’s trying to convert me.”

“So he sent you to paradise.” He laughed, then pinched a cold cut, lifted it before his face, and scrutinized it carefully.

“The food isn’t a winning argument,” I said. “Nor is the absence of toilet paper.”

“There is a saying in the Soviet Union,” he said while tossing the uneaten cold cut on his tray. “If you see people standing in line, make sure you stand in it. People are always waiting in line for something.”

His statement proved to be true. A week later when we were in a sweltering market in Kyiv, we saw forlorn citizens, mostly stoic-faced babushkas, standing in a long line to buy wrinkled room-temperature chickens with flies swarming over them. I kept thinking to myself, “Cities without crisis? Bullshit.” Little did I know, I was standing 62 miles from Chernobyl and that two years later the nuclear reactor would explode causing worldwide radioactive contamination. Cities without crisis indeed.

But in 1984 as I witnessed long lines, food shortages, nonexistent toilet paper, and primitive toilets, I found something about the Soviet Union that struck me as almost admirable: Everywhere we went, markets, train stations, parks, and museums, there were government speakers playing classical music, much of it from Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. I wanted to believe, as my grandfather would want me to, that the violin chamber pieces and piano sonatas were the Soviet Union’s idea of music for the masses based on the government cultivating sophisticated taste in its citizens. But a darker motive was that the music was part of the Soviet Union’s propaganda: Classical music from Russian composers was a way of rebuking the vulgarity and corruption of the West.

March 14, 2025
30 Years of Teaching College Writing in the Greatest City in the World

Yesterday, in my college critical thinking class, I played a clip from Liza Treyger’s Night Owls set, where she spirals into a monologue about her addiction to animal videos. The class erupted in recognition—Treyger’s bit was less comedy, more collective confession. We then compared the insidious grip of food addiction to the death grip of smartphones, two habits nearly impossible to break because, unlike more glamorous vices, they’re baked into the daily human experience. You have to eat. You have to communicate. And thanks to Pavlovian conditioning, the mere buzz of a notification or the scent of a cheeseburger can hijack your willpower before you even know what hit you.

At one point, I noticed one of my students—a professional surfer—had a can of Celsius energy drink perched on his desk like a talisman of modern endurance. I mentioned that my daughters practically mainline the stuff, to which he casually replied that he was transitioning to Accelerator, as if he were upgrading his addiction to something with a more explosive name. This led us down a delightful rabbit hole about the marketing committee responsible for naming that monstrosity, the raw aggression of Costco shoppers jostling for bulk energy drinks, and how smartphones are turning my students into exhausted zombies. They shared their chosen comfort foods, each confession tinged with equal parts nostalgia and shame.

The discussion was sharp, lively, and deeply engaging. And yet, in a moment of brutal self-awareness, I admitted to them that I felt pathetic. Here I was, sitting among the chillest students in the world, having a profound conversation about addiction—and all I could think about was ditching class to speed down to Costco and buy a case of Accelerator. They cracked up, and we carried on dissecting addiction for their essay on weight management and free will.

After thirty years of teaching in Los Angeles, I’m convinced I’ve won the academic lottery. There’s no better place to teach, no better students to challenge my tomfoolery, and no better city to fuel my own ridiculous, completely relatable compulsions.

March 14, 2025
What devotion really looks like

When I think of love in all its fullness, I dredge up a memory from 1982—a gem buried deep in my psyche from my early twenties. Back then, I was in college, slogging through a statistics course taught by a professor who looked like he’d been teleported straight out of a Dickens novel. Wild white hair defied gravity, crazed blue eyes darted around like they were searching for meaning, a nose as red as a warning light hinted at extracurricular activities with a bottle, and his overall aura was eau de whiskey. He was a kind man, though, in that shabby, endearingly tragic way.

The class itself was a masochist’s delight, and by week four—when the sadistic monster called “standard deviation” reared its head—half of us were drowning. Among my classmates was an elderly African American couple in their early seventies and always dressed for church, who were either a heartwarming sitcom subplot or walking proof that God has a delicious sense of humor. The husband, a determined relic with a cane, announced on the first day of class that this was his seventh attempt at passing statistics. His wife, the embodiment of long-suffering devotion, was there not as a student but as his support system—a Bible-toting, knitting saint.

The husband’s approach to learning was…unorthodox. While the rest of us quietly sunk in our seats, he would occasionally leap to his feet mid-lecture, his cane clattering dramatically, and hobble to the chalkboard. Pointing a finger like a preacher calling out sin, he’d declare, “That’s not the answer I got. Let me show you!” And then he’d scrawl his “solution” on the board—a series of hieroglyphics that no one could understand.

The professor, to his credit, tolerated these interruptions with the forbearance of a man who had seen worse (probably in his flask). Meanwhile, the wife would bow her head and whisper desperate prayers to “sweet Jesus” as if divine intervention might save her husband—or at least restore a shred of her dignity. Students stifled laughter behind cupped hands, and I sat there, torn between secondhand embarrassment and the sneaking suspicion that this was comedy gold worthy of Saturday Night Live.

After class, I’d drive home and pop in a cassette of “Tiny Children” by The Teardrop Explodes—a song that paired perfectly with my mood of existential dread. I’d replay the scene in my mind: the old man’s quixotic battle with the chalkboard, the wife’s quiet perseverance. And then, like clockwork, I’d start crying. Not just because I was floundering as badly as he was with standard deviation or because my social skills were nonexistent, but because that woman had shown me something profound: the power of love. Real love—the kind that sticks with you through seven attempts at statistics, through public humiliation, through everything.

I can still see that couple vividly. The husband’s determination, the wife’s quiet strength, and my own pathetic, lonely self, sitting there and learning—without realizing it—what devotion really looks like.

March 14, 2025
Father Time’s Frenemy

I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were vacationing in Maui. There, on the beach, I spotted a short, compact man in his mid-seventies parading around in dark blue Speedos with a woman at least fifty years his junior—a striking Mediterranean beauty in her twenties. The guy was trim, well-manscaped, and scampering confidently on the sand like a millionaire who spends half his life in boardrooms and the other half trying to outrun the Grim Reaper. He dove into the waves with the vigor of someone convinced that as long as he keeps moving, Father Time can’t catch him.

You could smell the wealth on him. He was probably some CEO with a portfolio big enough to buy the illusion of eternal youth. He worked hard and played hard, to quote Hugh Hefner’s mantra. Now, I’m not here to pass judgment on the guy for choosing a partner young enough to be his granddaughter—that’s his business. What fascinates me is this idea that money, discipline, and a little manscaping can somehow hold age at bay, like youth is a rare potion you can sip on to stay forever young.

But the whole scene was off. He and his youthful companion looked like mismatched puzzle pieces being forced together by sheer willpower. It was as if they were two jagged halves of a broken mirror, stubbornly pressed together despite clearly not fitting. And with each attempt to make it work, the edges chipped away a little more, until all that was left was a pile of shattered glass—a perfect metaphor for trying to cheat time.

This rich fit man is Father Time’s Frenemy–a guy who pretends he’s on good terms with aging while secretly plotting to outwit it. He may have fooled himself with the “perfect picture” he created, but the eyesore is as plain as day to the rest of us.

March 14, 2025
The day I showed up to work in a see-through pirate shirt

The breeding ground for my unreadable novels was the California desert, where my catastrophic literary judgment was rivaled only by my crimes against fashion. Allow me to paint you a picture of excess so garish that even Liberace would have staged an intervention.

There I was—a freshly minted full-time professor in a sun-scorched town, drunk on a heady cocktail of naïveté, unresolved teenage angst, and the disastrous influence of International Male and Urban Gear catalogs. To my 27-year-old mind, these catalogs weren’t mere collections of overpriced polyester; they were sacred texts, blueprints for the modern alpha male—or at least a man who looked like he managed a European nightclub and occasionally fled the country under mysterious circumstances.

But even my delusions had their breaking point. The pinnacle of my sartorial madness arrived in one final, glorious misstep—an outfit so egregious that it shattered the patience of my English Department Chair, a man whose tolerance, until that moment, had been almost biblical.

At first, my colleagues generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance” from a Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrive three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted into the campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells?

But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster—was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

Word of my fashion blunder made it to Moses Okoro, our distinguished Chair, a no-nonsense scholar in his fifties who had traded the vibrant streets of Lagos for the dull sands of this backwater town. Moses prided himself on being a man of deep thought, the kind who savored life’s complexities and relished philosophical debates like a connoisseur of fine wine. In the rarefied circles he once frequented, he had been celebrated for his intellectual rigor, a reputation largely sustained by an essay he penned two decades earlier on a celebrated Nigerian novelist. The essay, which dissected themes of post-colonial identity with surgical precision, had been lauded as groundbreaking in its time, securing Moses’s place as a respected voice in academic and literary discussions. But the years had passed, and that once-prominent essay had become a relic—he still leaned on it like a crutch, bringing it up whenever the opportunity presented itself, hoping to rekindle the admiration it had once inspired.

By the time I got the midday summons to his office, I knew I was about to get the fashion red card. I walked in, and there was Moses—feet ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

“Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering monstrosity draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.”

I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

That was the small-town way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

March 14, 2025
Where I Could Forever Be a Man-Child–Walt’s Gym

By the time I hit fourteen, my sacred sanctuary was none other than Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California—a temple of iron that had started its inglorious life as a chicken coop in the 1950s. The place was a veritable swamp of fungus and bacteria, a thriving petri dish of maladies eager to latch onto the unsuspecting. Members whispered in hushed tones about incurable athlete’s foot, the kind that made dermatologists throw up their hands in defeat. Some swore that the strains of fungus and mold festering in the corners were so exotic they had yet to be classified by the most intrepid of mycologists. Roosting among the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog that the pro wrestlers had affectionately named Charlie. I never saw Charlie myself, but I often wondered if he was a real creature or a figment of the wrestlers’ imagination, birthed by too many concussions and late-night benders.

The locker room was perpetually occupied by a rotating cast of characters who looked like they’d been plucked straight out of a grimy noir film. There was always some bankrupt divorcee draped in a velour tracksuit and a gold chain thick enough to anchor a ship, hogging the payphone for marathon sessions with his attorney. He’d discuss his sordid life choices and the staggering attorney fees required to sweep his past under a rug large enough to cover the entire state of California.

Out back, an unused swimming pool lurked, its water murky and black—a cauldron of plague, dead rats, and God knows what else. Walt, the gym’s owner and part-time crypt keeper, had a peculiar ritual. Every so often, he’d saunter outside, brandishing a pool net like a scepter, and scoop up some unfortunate deceased creature. He’d hold it aloft for all to see, like a demented priest presenting an unholy sacrament. This grim ceremony was invariably met with a thunderous round of applause from the gym-goers, who treated Walt’s rodent exorcisms like a halftime show. Walt would then toss the cadaver into a nearby dumpster with all the flourish of a Shakespearean actor delivering a monologue, bowing deeply as if he’d just conquered a dragon.

Walt’s Gym showcased a walking fossil named Wally, an octogenarian who swore he was the original model for human anatomy textbooks—perhaps ones etched on cave walls. We all loved Wally. He was a beloved gym fixture even though he could be a pain in the butt. Wally’s routine was the stuff of myth: He’d righteously correct everyone’s form whether they asked for his advice or not. He’d monopolize the gym for hours, his workout punctuated by monologues worthy of an Oscar about his deadbeat relatives who “borrowed” money, his former lovers who once graced the silver screen, and his eternal battle with arthritis. Between sets, he’d often deliver a Ted Talk on muscle inflammation and the sorry state of the national economy. He delivered these soliloquies with the gravitas of a news anchor, then spent an eternity in the sauna and shower, emerging like a phoenix from the ashes only to douse himself head-to-toe in talcum powder, turning into a spectral beacon of gym dedication. When Wally spoke, he was engulfed in such a thick talcum haze you’d swear a lighthouse was about to blare its foghorn warning.

The radio played the same hits on a relentless loop, as if the DJ had been possessed by the spirit of a broken record. Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship” echoed through the gym like a soundtrack to my personal purgatory. As a kid navigating this adult world, the gym was my barbershop, my public square, where I eavesdropped on conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the exorbitant costs of sending kids to college, and the soul-sucking burdens of caring for elderly parents.

It dawned on me then that I was at fourteen the perfect age: old enough to start building biceps like bowling balls, yet young enough to be spared the drudgery and tedium of adult life. The Road to Swoleville, I realized, was all about sidestepping the real world entirely. Why bother with mortgages and 401(k)s when I could disappear into my true paradise, the gym? As Arnold himself wrote in Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the gym was the ultimate Happy Place: “The weight lifters shone with sweat; they were powerful looking. Herculean. And there it was before me—my life, the answer I’d been seeking. It clicked. It was something I suddenly just seemed to reach out and find, as if I’d been crossing a suspended bridge and finally stepped off onto solid ground.”

My “solid ground” was the 1976 incarnation of Walt’s Gym, a germ-infested, rat-plagued wonderland where dreams of muscle-bound glory were forged—and quite possibly the greatest place I’ve ever visited on this planet.

March 14, 2025
The Man Who Loved Podcasts Too Much

Last night, I was in my kitchen, casually sharing shrimp, cocktail sauce, and champagne with public intellectuals Andrew Sullivan and Reihan Salam. As one does. We dove headfirst into the big topics: public policy, identitarianism, the collapse of critical thinking in echo chambers, and the shaky health of democracy. Between bites of shrimp and sips of champagne, we reveled in our status as lifelong learners, trading stories about childhood, lost pets, first crushes, and bouts of existential despair. The shrimp bowl magically replenished itself, and the champagne glasses never emptied. It was glorious—three intellectual heavyweights, solving the world’s problems, toasting to friendship and intellectual curiosity. For a fleeting moment, I felt like I’d reached peak existence: camaraderie, enlightenment, and a deeply inflated sense of self-worth, all in one glorious, shrimp-fueled evening.

Only it didn’t happen.

I was dreaming, my subconscious hijacked by The Dishcast. This is my nocturnal routine: When I go to bed at night, I fall asleep to a podcast and, before long, I’m the star guest. There I am, delivering profound manifestos about the human condition, my opinions urgently needed and universally admired.

When I woke up, the camaraderie still lingered, as if Andrew and Reihan had just slipped out the back door, leaving only a faint echo of laughter.

This happens all the time. In my dreams, I’m not just a listener—I’m part of the podcast universe, slapping backs, sipping champagne, and dropping truths no one dared to utter. Reality, by comparison, is disappointingly quiet.

Clearly, podcasts are taking too much bandwidth in my brain. I’m not alone. Like millions of others, I’ve practically taken up residence in the world of podcasts. My life runs on a steady soundtrack of conversations and monologues, piped directly into my ears while I swing kettlebells, pedal my exercise bike, grade uninspired writing assignments, cook, eat, and scrub the kitchen into submission. Podcasts are my companions for post-workout naps, my co-pilots on the commute, and my salvation during middle-of-the-night insomnia—the kind where you wake up at 2 a.m., stare at the ceiling, and hope a familiar voice can lull you back to sleep before dawn.

In total, I must rack up over a hundred hours of podcast listening every week. I spend more time in the podcast multiverse than in the real one, and inevitably, these voices have taken up permanent residency in my brain. Some of these parasocial relationships I welcome with open arms; others, I tolerate with the resigned grumbling of a bad roommate. And then there are the hosts who commit unforgivable sins—becoming smug, tedious, or worse, preachy—earning themselves a one-way ticket to oblivion. In this universe, the delete button is my only weapon, and I wield it without mercy.

Living in the podcast world as I do—where most of my waking and sleeping hours are dominated by disembodied voices—I’ve started asking some uncomfortable questions. Have I, like millions of others, surrendered my brain to the podcasters, letting them hijack my mental real estate to my own detriment? Am I so immersed in podcast life that I’ve lost all perspective, like a fish in water, oblivious to how wet it is?

What am I really after here? Entertainment? Wisdom? A surrogate friend? Or just noise to drown out the endless chatter in my own head? Why do some podcasts stick while others fall by the wayside? Are my favorites truly brilliant, or just slightly less irritating than their competition? Is it their buttery voices, sharp wit, or the fact that they don’t seem to realize they’ve become permanent fixtures in my inner monologue?

Could I live without podcasts? Would the silence reveal things about myself I’m not ready to confront? What do I call that blissful, cozy state when I’m wrapped in the warmth of a trusted voice? Podcastopia? Earbud Nirvana? Sonic Solace? And is it possible to “love” a podcaster too much, like when I know their pet’s name but can’t remember my sibling’s birthday?

Am I escaping something? Is this obsession a creative pursuit or an elaborate scheme to avoid existential dread? And most importantly, does this insatiable consumption mean something is deeply, hilariously wrong with me? Or does it point to something more profound—a need for a new word to describe the bottomless, soul-deep immersion of chasing episode after episode like a digital hunter-gatherer?

Yeah, I’ve got questions. But it might be too late. I may already be The Man Who Loved Podcasts Too Much.

After waking up from my dream of hanging out with Andrew Sullivan and Reihan Salam, I crept into the kitchen for breakfast–a self-inflicted atrocity of overnight oats. Not just any overnight oats, mind you, but a Trader Joe’s variety touting “ancient grains,” as if the endorsement of long-dead civilizations could somehow redeem the experience. Spoiler: it didn’t. Despite my best attempts at culinary CPR—vanilla protein powder, a smattering of berries, and a dusting of pumpkin spice—the result was still cold, gluey sludge, the breakfast equivalent of a wet handshake.

Each spoonful felt like a personal affront, a betrayal by my own hands, as though I had willingly prepared the kind of gruel Dickensian orphans would revolt over. The texture was an abominable mix of paste and gravel, and the cold temperature screamed “punishment” rather than “sustenance.” By the end, I wasn’t just eating; I was enduring. Mental note: next time, boil this nonsense into something remotely edible—or toss it and make a proper breakfast for a self-respecting adult.

March 13, 2025