The Old Nightstick in the Balls Trick

Ukraine's most disturbing problem is its laughable collection of Beagle Boys impersonators and hapless beer-seeking criminals known by the peculiar Russian word of "politseiskiy." Go out to a cafe with your dark-skinned Arab friends and faster than you can say hick Shoney's in the middle of Florida, they'll be outside of that cafe, with their demands for dokumentiy and pivo ready. Well, yeah, sure that's a valid visa, but well, um, everybody knows that that one chick guard, what's her name, bro, like Alexandra Sergeyevna, she totally stuffs passports down her pants, and well, I don't smell her. Yeah, brat', that distinct flavor of rhubarb and allergy medicine does not reek from this passport. You must have snuck in illegally.

I walk around. Pace about. Lollygag, even. Don't ever do this in Ukraine. Earlier this same day, I had been bounced from a bookstore. By a seventy-year-old woman. I was browsing, just looking. They didn't understand the concept, and saw that my Russian was faltering. I knew the two or three able-bodied menfolk in the city were being at that moment called to remove me to the leper's colony or local Pale of Settlement; "you don't know Russian, how can you read?"

Um, you have, like, some books in English? I walk around, and the babushka Cheka is on me. For ten minutes our game of walking speedily through aisles continue as I hope one of them passes out and I can actually leisurely browse the book shop. But, alas, they win. Really, you get paid to do this? You bounce people at a goldurn bookstore? Or is this just a pregame for a highly competitive night of the Soviet equivalent of bingo?

At the bus station in N(M)ikolae(yi)v, I buy a ticket for a bus departing soon. I want a soda, but nothing's open. So I am committing the aforementioned crime of walking without committing to a destination. A guy who could partake in a furry convention as Hooch from Turner and Hooch without even getting into costume comes up to me. He's "oxrana," or security, which means he holds a job which doesn't even have a Paul Blart figure to rally around. He yells at me loudly, convinced that I speak awesome Russian. I don't. He gets more mad. What am I doing out of the Pale of Non-Russian Speakers? Did the Tsarevich give me a permit? Oh, let's go in my beat up Lada to settle this.

This fifty-something man has a rape-crazy face. He's so pissed, anything could go. Could he in some sort of messianic way turn the local (Southern) Bug River into urine and drown me in it. At 11:30 PM in a surreal outremonde, I'm not ruling it out. Stranger danger. Oh, you want to go behind that bus, do you, sir? I've committed a crime, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure not going to fall for various invitations to date rape. I'm being pretty uppity, I guess. This is why within five seconds this dude's night stick whacks the heck out of my testicles. Shit's getting serious. For a few seconds, I stand there stunned at what has happened, before losing any sense of speaking Russian and going on a long cursing spree brought to a climax by me putting two middle fingers within inches of his eyeballs. The nightstick made a dramatic return, this time positioned to club my head. The people who are with my bus company with whom I purchased tickets are like "Get on the bus, get on the bus." I agree and do so. I spent the night alert, paranoid about the possibility that this guy had radioed ahead. At 1:00 AM, we stop as a policeman pulls our driver off the bus. Oh shit, I think. I look at the unmarked over-the-counter sleep medication I have in my bag, it's as good as opium here. After this false alarm, I took some of the sleep medication, and dispensed the rest in an outhouse in a place called Yuzhno-Ukrains'k.

I am a victim of awkward pacing-related bus cop brutality. Tizkorni, b'vakasha.