You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  “Alinachka,” Lyudmila muttered. “Come. Take off your pants. Drink with us.”

  But Lyudmila had turned her bloodshot eyes to address the ashtray as she said this, so I didn’t think to respond. Instead I lay down on my bed and considered how very odd it was that I did not feel scared, or uncomfortable, or even annoyed, trapped here in this room with two random Siberian woman, half nude and wholly wasted. I began to drift off, my mind making random associations. Sveta’s sheet had slipped below her waist and I could see her thong riding up into Siberia. And then I was reminded of the Skoptsy, who had nothing inside their thongs, and their long years of Siberian exile. I thought about how, ultimately, the story of Siberia wasn’t one of imprisonment, but one of survival. And how one man’s exile was another man’s freedom. I thought about the wallpaper, which in all Soviet-era hotels was strange and sad and faded and made me feel as though I were trapped inside a Sputnik that had been launched into outer space in 1971. And I thought about Nizhnevartovsk, its clouds of bloodthirsty midges hovering over shopping centers and sports arenas built with oil money. I thought about Josh. And then I took off my pants. And went to sleep.

  GROWING INTO THE UNIVERSAL

  “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Konst said, lighting a cigarette. We were walking back home from dinner at Nine-D, our favorite Thai place in Carroll Gardens. It had just begun to snow. “For me it was a Lufthansa pilot.”

  “A pilot?” I wouldn’t have expected Konst to be intimidated by a pilot, but I was curious enough to linger on the doorstep instead of leaving him there alone, to smoke in the cold and contemplate his hard, black lungs, like I usually did.

  “I had to pick up a friend whose flight was scheduled to arrive at Tolmachevo at five a.m., and you know how that sucks.”

  I did know. Five a.m. was when the Moscow red-eye arrived in Novosibirsk, where Konst had lived and where my job occasionally sent me.

  “Right. So that meant I had to get up at three in the morning and leave Akademgorodok by four. When I finally got to the airport, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and Christ, did I look like shit. My eyes were bloodshot and what little hair I had left was sticking out like an insane clown’s. But the most important thing was this: I just didn’t give a flying fuck. It was late at night, so I looked at myself and figured … well, whatever.” Konst flicked his butt in the general direction of the Sunday trash pickup and we went upstairs. I turned on the electric teapot and Konst hung up his bowler hat and peacoat before sinking heavily onto a wooden folding chair. Though uncomfortable, the chair was goose down compared to the cheap foamcore couch from Target that shot an iron rod straight up your ass.

  “So then the Lufthansa flight landed,” Konst went on, “and the passengers came out, all these funksters just totally looking like shit. You know how when you’re on an airplane all night, you come out covered in this kind of … film? And it just keeps absorbing the fluorescent light in the airport until you look like some kind of ghoul? That’s what these people looked like. Then there’s the fact that nobody is happy to be in Novosibirsk. Do you remember how the airport was back then? Like a shack in the field. So everyone is miserable.”

  “Okay, they are miserable and you look like shit …” I set down a couple of mugs and a box of Tropical Grapefruit Green Tea.

  Konst examined the inside of his mug and, like mine, found a coffee stain at the bottom. He considered it for a moment, then tossed a teabag inside.

  “Then suddenly the room temperature changes. Out comes the flight crew. The hostesses are first, and they’re all very, very pretty. Very comfortable and worldly. But, you know, they were just a motorcade for what was to follow, for the arrival of the Übermensch.” Konst paused a beat and gave me a meaningful look. “Finally, out comes the man himself, like something out of Der Ring des Nibelungen—”

  “What’s Der Ring des Nibelungen?” I interrupted. Konst always assumed a base level of competency in at least three foreign languages.

  “It’s an opera cycle by Wagner based on Norse mythology, and I’d say this pilot was straight out of the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung—Twilight of the Gods. First of all, he was taller than everyone else and he looked very fresh, very suntanned and well-coifed. And his teeth were like pearls. Okay, I sound like a girl now, but it’s true. He was wearing a beautifully tailored uniform without a single wrinkle. But the most noticeable thing was that he projected this air of absolute authority, yet he wore it so easily.” Konst broke off suddenly. “He needs a name. I think we should call him Helmut.”

  “Helmut.” I nodded and poured the hot water.

  “The thing is, somehow Helmut was not at all arrogant. Here he was at five in the morning, having flown a plane all night and just touched down in Siberia, and he was absolutely comfortable in both his environment and his own skin. I just looked at him and thought to myself, God, now this is intimidating. Here’s a real pro. He gets up and he flies a fucking plane and people trust him with their lives. Helmut is a real person.”

  “And what about you?” I asked, hoping eagerly for the worst.

  Konst blew on his tea, watching snow fall on the dark tangle of telephone wires outside the window.

  “Me?” Konst asked, turning back to me, suddenly serious. “If he’d reached out to touch me, his hand would have gone straight through to the other side. Compared to Helmut, I am a nonperson. A beetle. A sad artifact.”

  To illustrate his point, Konst reached forward with one hand and pushed it straight through the chest of the imaginary Konst. We both stared at his hand, holding the heart of the apparition, the sad artifact who’d just pulled up a third chair to join us. There was a long minute when neither of us said anything.

  “Okay,” Konst said, knocking back the rest of his tea, “I’ve got the logline.”

  “What’s a logline?” It was a night for new words.

  “You know, the main idea—the summary of the script. Here it is: ‘Quietly competent people in a real-world profession who are not flashy about it.’”

  “I can see that,” I said. “Nice.” But I wasn’t referring so much to the logline as to the fact that Konst had milked his neurosis enough to give Helmut a name and a logline. It felt good to know I wasn’t alone in my insecurities. Only my Übermensch was not the female equivalent of Helmut, the woman I always saw breezing down an automated walkway at the airport, looking very Whole Foods, carrying nothing but a tasteful handbag, as I huffed along, jacket bunching up beneath the guitar on my back, struggling with a wheelie bag whose handle had just come off. I pictured her. She wakes up at some head-squeezing hour, eats half a grapefruit, and then heads off to a job where she does things that are interesting and useful while exhibiting unusually good posture. If I had to describe her in twelve words, I would say this: she has no pores and played field hockey in high school.

  And yet, it wasn’t the poreless, straight-backed female Helmut who stirred my deepest insecurities. My Übermensch was the opposite of Helmut.

  My Übermensch was Britney, bitch.

  It wasn’t always that way. At first I hated Britney, as did everyone else I knew. Actually, before I hated her, I was just surprised at how she had managed to become such a big deal. I mean, was there anything more disingenuous than a teenage Britney Spears, falling out of a Catholic schoolgirl uniform while proclaiming, with pig-tailed innocence, that her loneliness was killing her? To my mind, a hot blond teenager seldom left unaccompanied by her synchronized dancing posse of also-hot teenagers would sooner be killed by a penny tossed from the top of the Willis Tower than die of loneliness. But these observations are all in retrospect for me. From my perch on the edge of things, it took a relatively long time to notice that Britney Spears had arrived. “ … Baby One More Time” came and went and I was none the wiser. It was only in the spring of 2000, when “Oops! … I Did It Again” flattened the airways, that I woke up and smelled the Teen Spirit.

  At the time, I was living in Texas, just out of art s
chool, working for a small nonprofit organization. My hobby on the weekends was to drive out to remote towns with an old Hasselblad to photograph historically themed debutante balls, senior citizen beauty pageants, gatherings of the Texas secessionist movement, and things of that nature. I was a regular at the weekend turkey shoots out in Thrall and at a monthly African American rodeo in the rural hamlet of Plum, a place I couldn’t find on any map. After work I liked to hang out at a trannie bar off the access road to Highway 290, which was famous for its drag competitions. I had heard the name Britney Spears but didn’t know any of her songs, and if someone had asked me why I hadn’t bothered to check out what looked to be the decade’s biggest pop sensation, I would have proudly explained it was because Britney Spears was normal—she made corporate music for undiscriminating people—and I was weird. Then I would have excused myself to go shoot a cow-patty bingo contest out in Elgin.

  I forget where I was when it happened. I could have been picking up some kitty litter at HEB, or raking leaves in our front yard, or having a Pap smear, or doing one of any number of commonplace things that inexorably lead to an encounter with a Britney Spears song, when I heard “Oops! … I Did It Again.”

  “This is the crappiest song ever,” I complained to Josh back at home. And he agreed—it sucked. The video for “Oops!” features an eighteen-year-old Spears dancing in a suit so tight it looks as though she’d just been dipped in a piping-hot vat of melted red condoms. Its record-breaking sales made her the first female artist to have an album go platinum within one week of its release. But I knew zero of the 1.3 million people who bought “Oops! … I Did It Again” during that week in May of 2000, because I had surrounded myself with people who cared only about dark, obscure, and purposely difficult indie music. My friends and I listened to really small bands. The singers barely sang. Their voices wafted over to you through a galaxy of gauze run through a million effects pedals in reverse. The tempos were slow, sleepinducing washes that cast you adrift in a pale sea of Mylanta, filling your mouth with a million, billion cotton balls. It was music that made you think, and even though the thoughts you thought were sad thoughts, you felt good thinking them, because this music was deep. And no one had ever heard it except you.

  Before you are old enough to drive, the Massachusetts suburbs are typically a beautiful, lonely, and cold place to grow up. And as a lonely, cold, introverted child, the thing I most liked to do was sing at the top of my lungs, alone in the house while my parents were at work. The bathroom, of course, had the best acoustics, but warbling in the kitchen, which faced the street, offered at least some semblance of an audience—the mailman, a neighbor walking the dog, an airplane passing overhead on its way to Hanscom Air Force Base. My favorite venue, though, was the living room, where the windows overlooked a pond tucked into a droplet of forest. The view offered just the right dose of romantic inspiration for belting out pop ballads. I would serenade the pond, the indifferent box turtle sleeping on a log, the Canada geese serenely destroying the lawn, the ice hockey goalpost half sunk in the mire. I would treat them to Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need a Hero” or John Waite’s “Missing You” or Erasure’s “A Little Respect,” taking Whitney Houston down an octave, bringing Billy Idol up a notch, skipping the hard parts. This was the music I loved, that made me feel alive. I wasn’t in Massachusetts anymore. I was onstage, buffeted by the white noise of an arena filled to capacity, flashbulbs illuminating the pitch like falling stars. Bringing the microphone to my lips, heart catching, I felt the weight of a million eyes. Somewhere behind me the canned music kicked on, the sound of a synthesizer desperately trying to be a violin. I was a superhero, a fruit roll-up made of equal parts Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Pat Benatar. When I tilted my head back and began to sing, it was with the power of a thousand microwaves exploding.

  But over time I began to notice that eighties pop had strange physiological properties. After listening to it for a while you would start to feel … not so good. Hazy, restless, in need of fresh air. That’s not to say that the music wasn’t fun; it was. And a good single could still hit me like a speedball straight to the jugular. It’s just that nothing could hide its fakeness. Eighties pop songs sounded like money—yet as cultural currency, they rarely lasted long. “That song is, like, so old,” my friends and I would moan about some Duran Duran single released three weeks ago and still hovering at number seven on the Billboard charts. Like sunshine and sakitinis and Harry Potter books, eighties pop always left you wanting more. Another new song, another new voice, another perfect fix for a summer that always seemed to end too soon.

  By the time I reached college, pop music made me want to eat a strychnine-and-tomato sandwich. It wasn’t just a matter of taste anymore; I’d grown morally opposed to it. Not only to its big, tacky, and too often soulless sound, but also to the way it followed you everywhere all the time: the same ten songs hammering away on high rotation with Big Brother–like tenacity. And to the pop stars themselves, with their half inch of makeup and aggressive fashions, who didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met. Even the normal-seeming ones, like John Cougar Mellencamp or Bruce Springsteen, loomed so much larger than life, with their perfectly round butts and carefully positioned bandanas, their jeans bluer than the bluest eye.

  My horizons first started expanding in high school, when I started dating the kinds of geeky guys who knew everything about seventies punk or early American gospel, who clued me in to a whole world beyond the Billboard Hot 100. Then one day, on the way to my grandmother’s apartment in Central Square, I bought an album, on cassette tape, from a busker who was playing on the subway platform. Her name was Mary Lou Lord, and a couple of times a week she would set up her Maxi Mouse battery powered amp at Park Street station during the evening rush and sing sweet songs to tough guys from Southie waiting for the Braintree-bound Red Line. They would wait for her to finish and then yell down the platform, “Hey, Blondie, sing it again!” I remember sitting on the platform for more than an hour, missing train after train, before mustering up the courage to shuffle up to her guitar case and whisper, “How much?”

  “Whatever you think it’s worth,” Mary Lou said. And I emptied my wallet and gave her everything I had—exactly ten dollars of babysitting money. The album was called Real and it was put out by a tiny independent record label in Santa Monica called Deep Music. I played it until the tape broke and then got a copy from another fan, my high school English teacher Molly. I played that copy until it broke too. Like Britney, Mary Lou mostly sang songs written by other people, but she found a way to make them her own. In her hushed, silvery voice, every word sounded so intimate, so real. Her music made me realize that you can synthesize a lot of things, you can Auto-Tune and add enough reverb to kill a horse, but you can’t synthesize the feel of something homemade and handmade. With a fair amount of righteousness, I decided I didn’t want to be the girl sitting at the end of the giant consumer conveyer belt with her mouth open anymore. I stopped listening to Top 40 radio. I stopped watching television. I finished high school, left the suburbs, and enrolled in art school.

  It was only years later, during a long stint working in Siberia, a five-month stretch when my loneliness, so to speak, was killing me, that my resolve to ignore the mainstream finally began to melt—all because of Britney Spears. At the time, my work kept me traveling constantly. I spent many of my nights on the Trans-Siberian Express, going to sleep in one province and waking up the next morning hundreds of miles away. When I wasn’t working, I would still go out exploring with my old Hasselblad, photographing midget circus performers, male strippers, a man in Tomsk who shared a one-bedroom apartment with eleven cats and a dead tree. It was as though, having run out of U.S. territory to be weird on, I had upped the ante by committing myself to documenting some of the most obscure denizens of one of the most obscure territories on Earth. But being weird full-time was hard work. It required eating lots of bad food. It necessitated the frequent use of squat toilets. Worst of all: it left me prone to un
healthy bouts of nostalgia. I was weird, but I was weak. The sight of a dusty Snickers bar in the window of a candy kiosk was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I missed America in all its mass-produced, culture-annihilating glory.

  Throughout my epic tour of the world’s least-heard-of places, there was only one constant, one never-varying soundtrack to even the most unlikely expedition, and that was Britney Spears’s new hit, “Toxic.” Or, to put it more accurately, the Swedish production duo Bloodshy & Avant’s new hit, “Toxic.” Actually, if you listen to the way the backup vocals swell suspiciously whenever any real singing is required, you start to wonder how much Britney really had to do with this song. But let’s not quibble! The first time I heard it was in the overheated restaurant of the Hotel Krasnoyarsk. There I was, having just returned to my table from the breakfast buffet with a bowl of cereal soaked in kefir and a mug of instant coffee, when I noticed the video blaring out of the television bolted to the wall in front of me.

  The video begins with Britney on an airplane, playing the role of slutty stewardess. After serving some passengers their food using primarily her butt muscles, she lures an unsuspecting fat guy into the toilet for a make-out session, only to pull his face off and discover he is secretly a totally hot guy(!). Then Britney disappears—perhaps sucked through the airplane’s waste disposal system—only to emerge as a red-haired, leather-clad dominatrix, clutching Tyson Beckford’s back as they zoom through Paris on a motorcycle. From there it’s on to a spaceship designed by Ikea to pick up a green elixir and dance amid red laser beams in a tunnel. After some random footage from what appears to be somebody else’s shampoo commercial, Britney transforms into a black-haired vixen and cleverly suction cups her way up the side of a building to break into the hot-guy-from-the-airplane’s hotel room. Once inside, she is torn between the desire to make out with him and the desire to beat him up but eventually settles for just pouring the green elixir down his throat. That done, Britney runs away, jumping off the balcony, and lands right back in the airplane just in time to alert her passengers to stow their tray tables, using mainly her breasts. Intercut throughout the entire video is footage of Britney writhing around seductively wearing nothing but some glitter artfully applied with a Q-tip. The song won Spears her first and only Grammy. The video cost one million dollars.