The Great Trans-Siberian Pillowcase Robbery

Like Billy the Kid, various rivals of Deputy Dog, and others, I am great thief of the frontier. My frontier is the Russian Far East. In 2005, I undertook to achieve the single greatest linens heist in Russian train history. Story below.

Former Soviet chairman Leonid Brezhnev was a pioneer in AIDS and STD’s prevention. Before Jacob Zuma and Yahya Jammeh had ever heard of thoroughly attacking those pores with a loofah and green goop, Brezhnev knew how to stop venereal diseases. The obscure Georgian scientist Nikoloz Bradzinashvili had convinced Chairman Brezhnev that STD’s really existed in the polluted minds of the female species. Relying on knowledge that the great Kazan cooties scare of 1957 had come purely from the imagination, according to Soviet psychologists, he realized that other plagues involving touching girls also came from this mind, which he had heard was located in the head. Brezhnev, a hypochondriac of epic proportions who had been hospitalized six months for NBA Fever forty years before the first reported American case, used Bradzinashvili’s cure-all: the head-condom.

Or, a pillow case.

Brezhnev being the powerful man that he was, that pillow case got put on the heads of numerous personages of note in the 70’s. Charo, Ryan O’Neal, The Bear from BJ and the Bear or maybe even both. A classic TV fan, he had had the car from My Mother the Car imported from the States to cross off number 2 on his MILF’s list. Brezhnev, who had received immortality several times thanks to his various Dungeons and Dragons avatars, eventually retired from public life to ride the rails. At a spry 75, his application for employment was conspicuous, since it would have made him the oldest man in the Soviet Union by 22 years. So, with a couple of A’s the provodnitsa or cabin attendant Leonida Stalineva Brezhneva was invented. A dress was all that was necessary to pull off the switcheroo, as Brezhnev’s 1973 General Order on the Appearance of Babushkas helped him out. Using a technology later used by Steve Urkel on Family Matters, Brezhnev made all women of forty or older enter a machine that changed their appearance to Brezhnev’s second favorite noctural companion, himself.

Given freedom of movement, Brezhnev rode the Trans-Siberian allowing him to pursue lifelong pastimes. Extorting money from drunken vomiting Belgians for breakfast, orgies with Mongolian smugglers for lunch, and twittering about his Virgin Lands Program for dinner. With him as always was his trusty pillowcase to keep the carnal scurvies away.

I met provodnitsa Brezhneva on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in July 2005. Not speaking a word of English and gifted with that melodic yell of all Russian senior femizens, she hated my Yankee tuckus from the start. At first, I didn’t see much of her. Reports were she was in the midst of a .135 10-game slump and wasn’t seeing many passengers off to Nizhny Novgorod. A luddite, she didn’t know my extensive online reputation, and that I desired her pillowcase.

Getting it was a trick. I knew performing a sex act on a former Soviet leader would not look good vis-à-vis my groundroots alternate historical campaign to represent the state of West Cuba in the Confederate Congress. Remembering Brezhnev’s hypochondriac past, I went to the provodnitsa’s room and told her that I had a medikalnyy diseasovich. I didn’t speak Russian. Stunned and sympathetic, Brezhnev knew that loss of limbs would soon follow this queer case of leprosy. He left the cabin to get me the only thing which could revive my health: spaghetti with mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together with a dash of smetana (sour cream). Taking the pillowcase while I could and surviving my trial of error, I emitted a faint do svidanya as I left Brezhnev’s company.

The Russian-Mongolian border is at a town called Naushki. Some highlights of my trip were a great mural in Krasnoyarsk’s train station, not seeing Lake Baikal because of incliment weather, and just being in Ulaan-Ude. Naushki was a dump. Brezhnev entered my cabin to begin the border proceedings and the game of strip Hungry Hungry Hippos which would see which passengers would make it to Mongolia. My team, Dynamo Long Beach beat Lokomotiv Johannesburg by a pair of underwood to some botched boob jobs. But Brezhnev knew what I had done. I had stolen the pillowcase, that one. The Russian border guards were altered, “Thief! American! American!” I was on the precipice. Nervously fingering through my dictionary for words like extortion, blackmail, and bribery, and probably saying some ethnic slurs against Tajiks instead, I defended myself. Brezhnev presented an ultimatum. I was going to Naushki Prison.

Brezhnev had an advantage. He knew that the Virgin Lands Program and Soviet Russia’s great power had so crippled the economy that money did not exist. He knew this from his American Internet friends, a group of twelve-year old boys from Enid, OK, who told him of their various currency switches from pogs to Pokemon cards to Yugi-O cards. He gave me an out. I could pay money for the pillowcase. He set his price. Three hundred rubles. $10 for an old, ratty Soviet pillowcase in a world where status was determined by card games would be too much for an American traveler. I could see Brezhnev not recognizing me as a human being, just a head-condom and a torso. He waited for me to ask how many Jigglypuffs were there to the long-dead ruble these-a-days.

I saw the most beautiful sunset in my life in Mongolia that night. Imagine this story dramatically ending by government soldiers carelessly putting away that precious pillowcase in a storage cabinet in an Orange County retirement community.

Somebody, please, buy Leonid Brezhnev an I-Phone with Internet access. I don’t want to see him sell his silicon implants for $2 because, as is the case, he believes that money went obsolete in 1988 in the same year as went obsolete the vagina. Help a tovarish out, yo.