T A B L E_T A L K Do you go nutso for wild mushrooms? Discuss your journeys in search of fungus perfection in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Coming down By Dwight Garner For the first time, Jon Krakauer talks about the bitter controversy swirling around "Into Thin Air." (08/03/98) Mondo Weirdo The deep A chance encounter with a seven-foot shark (07/31/98) Tallest Tree epiphany By Simon Firth A father and son make a rainy redwood pilgrimage (07/30/98) England's decadent delights By Douglas Cruickshank Staying at a country castle (07/29/98) Lions and tigers are PC, oh my! By Sally Eckhoff Disney goes PC at its new theme park (07/28/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S BACCHANAL IN MOSCOW | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - We entered: heat and a press of flesh and red and green lights. From the runway, a baby-oiled and black-masked Darth Vader sporting a G-string reached down for the brunet on the barstool ahead of me. He hoisted her up onto the stage. Two other streepteezyory, or male strippers, a blond Zorro and a Slavic edition of the Cisco Kid, also in G-strings and masks, stalked the edge of the counter, slipping through the snatching tiny hands of the teens. We struggled to remain afoot in the surging throng, amid currents of hot dripping flesh and wet shocks of hair. The woman onstage, swaying to the ebbs and flows of booze coursing through her arteries, suddenly cast herself onto Darth. Within a minute, she was on her back, her shirt was off, her bra was sailing a sopping wet lace boomerang into the crowd, and Darth's mouth was traveling north and south all over her. The bartender turned a spritzer of Heineken on the masses; tongues lapped the brew from the air. "Could these women be paid performers?" I asked, sponging beer out of my left eye. "No," said Serge, "just look at them. These are the kind of girls you see in the metro." He was right. Here were gathered the daughters of the coarse-and-once-hallowed but now just-plain-coarse proletariat, the proud wearers of Farrah Fawcett curls and Made-in-Bucharest polyester-frill blouses, the diligent appliers of smear-rouge lipstick and Bulgarian eye shadow, girls who drank borax-flavored Soviet beer and dated junior thugs from the mafia clans of Moscow's outer suburbs. They were the maidens of the masses whose lot in Russia, for the past 800 years, has differed in form but remained the same in essence -- enslavement to Mongol invaders, serfdom on gentry manors, bondage to blighted kolkhoz and factory and, most recently, exploitation by oligarchs and a corrupt, rudderless state. Despite the current reforms, for these masses, programmed by history, freedom still means less a delicate flowering of liberty and more the anarchy, abandon and scythe-swinging blood lust of the Pugachev serf rebellion. One would never see such young women in the city's upscale night clubs. But finding them here was invigorating; they were earthy types, real people, sisters with soul, and they contrasted with the marble-skinned Venuses of the elite who glided remote and vacant-eyed along downtown avenues, stopping only to examine their reflections in the windows of designer boutiques. Shouts and yowls. Onstage, a topless woman drunkenly pawed the shirt off her girlfriend, who then tumbled onto her back, her own eyes swimming in booze, and lost her panties as well. Her pelvis was suddenly level with the face of her disrober, her head was lolling side to side, her bare feet were sliding slowly up and down the slick perspiring back beneath her. A Sapphic exploit followed, and the air around us flooded with vicarious moans. The women behind us were waving their arms to the music, their untethered breasts slapping the backs of our heads. More Heineken spritzed into the crowd from the bartender's nozzle; the heat and sweat and beer clung to our faces like gauze soaked in warm urine. A stocky peasant girl was now heading for Darth, her flat feet unsteadily plodding the steel counter, her fingers popping open the buttons of her blouse. Adjusting his mask, he assumed a ninja stance; she peeled the blouse from her shoulders and lumbered into him. She was long-breasted and Darth grabbed an udder; she flung him around shouting, "Ne nado!" ("Don't!") when he tried to touch her. She kneaded his shoulders and chest like putty and forced him to his knees. We slipped through the fleshy surround and reached the bar in the side room. We ordered draft beer; it was cold but it had a benzene aftertaste. Away from the mayhem we waxed philosophic. In Soviet times public bacchanalia of this sort was unthinkable, of course, but Slavic folklore is rife with summer solstice fertility rites: naked dances around midnight fires; (no doubt prickly) copulations in stubbly fields of wheat; alfresco marathons of boozing, sex and feverish swatting on mosquito-infested riverbanks. Even in 1985, when I first visited the Soviet Union, men and women were said to gather in countryside saunas for gruppovukhi (group sex) by the fragrantly steaming stones, and I myself, during a number of lingering June dusks, saw red arm-banded grannies patrolling city parks and blowing their government-issue whistles at shaking bushes. To grasp what excesses the light and heat prompt Russians to crave in midsummer, one must first suffer through the Russian fall, winter and spring -- months of snow and dark, legions of cabbage-pale faces under rabbit-fur hats marching into the blowing slush, eyes down, brows furrowed, dreams on hold. Now, across from us, a Kazakh woman sitting on the bar was stroking the hair of her Russian girlfriend, whose head lay in her lap; another pair of girls necked vigorously under a redwood table until the bottle atop it wobbled and overturned and poured beer all over them. Lesbian currents gushed through the debauch -- a slap in the face to the Soviet Man-cum-mafiozo who still beats his wife, steals at work and boozes his way into fisticuffs on weekends, collapsing flaccid at evening's end. Serge and I finished our beer and headed back into the main room, which now felt like a red-lit steam bath. Zorro was thrusting at Natasha, a Nigerian dancer had joined Cisco and teenyboppers were lining up to heave themselves seal-like onto the bar and undress and get down. But at least half of these women ended up gratifying themselves by stripping for the crowd, pushing away Darth and Zorro when they approached, ignoring the frisky advances of Cisco, leaving the snubbed streepteezyory to slink off and assume stark Nureyevesque poses on their own, as if performing some sort of slow-motion mime in high school drama class. This all began to seem routine, and my attention lagged. I turned to Serge. "You see, there's only so much shows like this can offer, only so many variations on the old carnal theme." But at that moment the clock struck 10. The men left the stage and the disc jockey spun the volume knob on his sound system. We were nearly blasted into the wall by the music, then almost trampled in the rush of women leaping barward and jumping onto the runway. This was, it turned out, the grandest of Hungry Duck rituals: amateur tabletop striptease and an elevated fornicatory free-for-all. But I focused on one woman in particular: a brunet of about 22 who was dancing barefoot in a silk bra and blue sarong tied loosely beneath her creamy washboard stomach. Her eyes, slits of icy green, were empty-looking at first, but as I stared closer, they turned into pools of passion and suffering and desire and despair. She had surrendered herself to the music, the heat, the thumping rhythms of the place. I imagined what in her life would prompt her to embrace escape at the Hungry Duck: an alcoholic husband who beat her, a lonely existence at home with an embittered grandmother, or maybe the stress of having a favorite little brother join the mafia -- common domestic troubles in Russia. Her eyes, I fancied, spoke for women across the land, yearning for tenderness and, yes, for carnal knowledge -- but without vodka-drubbings or sausage-belching. That was a lot to see in a pair of pupils, I admit, but I gazed into them, mesmerized -- until drops of yellow liquid stung my own eyes. I looked up: A groggy girl swaying over me was wringing the sweat out of her sweater onto my head. "I'VE GOT THE POWA!" Down the Duck's darkling aisles, atop its redwood bars and wobbly tables, women were thrusting their hips to the beat, like pistons, rapid-fire, boom-boom-boom, as if pumping out the primal juice that fuels the world, the juice that, despite centuries of puritanical damming and civilized dabbing, has pushed one generation after another into this life. I'VE GOT THE POWA! The very walls sweated from the labor of these women. The heat surged. The propeller on a beanie-capped teenybopper twirled madly with the torrid drafts rising from the bodies. Something was about to happen, a Christian was about to be thrown to the lions, a sword of Damocles was about to slice through beanie-fanned air ... It was then that the beet farmers and accountants and halfway-housers and borsht-brewers were loosed into the crowd, hot to boogie, their arms hanging apelike and half-flexed. "YOU GOTTA LICK IT!" The men bounced among the female bodies like bumper cars at a carnival, their faces mugs of lust. "BOOM-DA-DA-DA." The accountant, I saw, had clipped polarized shades to his horn-rims; he was now anonymous, a roving predator with a leatherette briefcase, thrusting his way through the women, grabbing at knobs of flesh, heading spermlike toward an egg of his choosing. I envisioned him, suddenly, as a mobile blob of genetic material, a Ray-Banned clot of DNA. On the bar two topless women sandwiched a youth into a three-hipped tandem, their figures melded into a many-breasted, multi-legged peroxided godhead, three pairs of arms rising and falling. But there was a scream: The godhead was tumbling from on high, beer-heavy, into the crowd; there were bloody lips and peals of drunken laughter; there followed a tussling and screaming and lashing of breasts, a crunching of Styrofoam beer cups, a snapping of beanie propellers ... Serge and I finally made it to a spot up next to the balcony window. Our new location afforded us a divine overview: Below, from wall to wall, we witnessed a panorama of chaos and coagulation, a fantasticated fusion of piston-thrusting hips and borsht-brewer visages and flopping breasts and beet-farming louts, a cross-section of modern Russia's variegated population and bargain-basement apparel, lingerie-a-specialty. Indeed, in this heated slosh of blood, sweat, tears, saliva and shawerma (a shawerma food stand occupied one corner) were any of the primal proteins lacking that were necessary for the spontaneous generation of life? The sight served not to convince me of the baseness of humanity but rather to prompt me to concede the unassailable superiority of Homo sapiens over all the other animals of God's grand kingdom: Could a randy orangutan or hotted-up hippo throw such a bash? No! This spectacle represented nothing less than the acme of civilization, the melding of ritual and instinct and, no less importantly, shawerma (I was starving after all this ruckus). I thought I'd step over and buy myself a sandwich, in fact, when a girl dropped her cigarette next to me. I picked it up and handed it to her; she thrust her vodka'd tongue down my throat. But I pulled away, half-remembering my earlier visit to the Duck, when I had ended up pursued by a drunken schoolgirl who grunted and waved a piece of paper in my face with the words I AM DEAF -- SEX $100. The late evening sun persisted, pouring in through the open windows, galvanizing the assembly as lightning might have sparked a puddle of primal muck to life eons ago. It permitted no thought of rest, no inkling of escape into a soothing nighttime Lethe; the relentless effulgence and assault of energy from the heavens began short-circuiting the revelers' already-addled synapses. Fights were breaking out among the men, the accountant was brandishing his briefcase, the borsht-brewer his ladle. The table-top proletariettes were now squabbling with each over dancing space like Volga fishwives around a bushel of salted herring; the spell of the place, for Serge and me, at least, was breaking. And I was -- most unpleasantly -- deliquescing, slowly, surely, dissolving in the heat. Even Serge looked soaked and haggard, his hair matted to his skull. Shortly afterwards we stepped away from the window and let the hurly-burly ejaculate us onto the street. It was 11 o'clock and the sun, having just sunk behind the slate rooftops of Old Moscow, had left the sky a scrim of luminous purpling azure that, in its soaring spread and boundless arch, bespoke a timelessness, an infinite number of midsummers past, of midsummers to come, of estival passions acted upon during the few precious days of the year when the hand of Hades, deity of the dark, would barely touch the Motherland. SALON | Aug. 4, 1998 Jeffrey Tayler is a journalist based in Moscow. He has previously written for Salon Wanderlust about Marrakech, the Congo, the Sahara and Nigeria. Do you have bawdy tales to tell from your own adventures in the "New Russia"? Share them in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk.