When I was Kosmonaut

Thrasher Magazine, Oct, 2005 by Michael Burnett

ON OUR FIRST FULL DAY in Moscow someone died at the skate spot. It wasn't a skater, and it may have been a homeless person, but it was still the first time I can remember someone breathing their last breath so close to where people were crooked grinding.

"I think someone just died over there," somebody said, and one by one we walked over and checked him out--terrifically twisted at the bottom of a giant set of stairs, resting in the most disturbed position, face and shoulders down, legs and feet facing skyward. The cops came but no ambulances. There were no sirens. They gathered around and looked at him, pointing down to the ground and then up to the stairs. They stroked their mustaches.

We'd seen the same police an hour earlier. It had been dumping rain and the monument security guard, weary of chasing out the pack of 20- to 30-kids who were skating flatground in the long covered hallway, had called for back-up. The police grabbed the first kid they got to, bent his arm sharply behind his back and pressed him to a pillar, His cell phone popped out and bounced on the granite floor while everyone scattered like monkeys. We ran too, and watched as they hauled the skinny boy away. Now the same cops were back and standing over the dead guy. An hour later an ambulance finally showed up. The medics got out and looked at him. Then, without loading him up or even untwisting him, they packed up and left.

"Why doesn't somebody just take him?" we wondered out loud. Eventually they did, about five hours after he fell.

THIS WAS JUST THE TYPE of story that would have scared the pants off of Lakai team manager Kelly Bird and I as we were planning for the trip. In the weeks leading up to it we had both gathered some shocking bits of anecdotal data regarding Russia, its safety, and the possible pitfalls we might run into.

"I heard the hotels will steal your passport!" I told him.

"Yeah, well I heard packs of glue-sniffing orphans will attack you and scratch you with their dirty fingernails and give you the staph infection!" Kelly reported. "Oh yeah? Well I heard the police will steal your camera equipment, use it to shoot naked and compromising photos of you after they drug you up, and then sell it back to you for more than you bought it for with half the lens caps missing!" I blasted back.

"I think you have the wrong idea about my country," the distributor wrote to Kelly when pressed on these concerns.

"Maybe," we thought. But we were still going to have our guard up.

As a child growing up in the 1980s, a lesson that was beaten into me through art, literature, and, to a greater extent, horrible movies like The Day After, was that sooner or later we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust at the hands of the Russians. The Day After wasn't even a real movie, but some sort of made-for-TV mini-series. Nevertheless, its grim portrayal of post-apocalyptic life after the Russians had blown us to kingdom come (apparently we'd all be wandering around either blind or with our eyeballs melting out of our heads and all our hair molting off), managed to spook me the most. In one scene, I believe a family even had to eat their own radioactive dog. Other '80s Cold War fare included Red Dawn, which foresaw Soviet troops storming the US by ground (starting with local high schools and teen centers), War Games, in which Mathew Broderick stars as a precocious teen who, in an effort to change his grades by "hacking" into the school's computer with his Apple IIe, pushes the nation to the brink of nuclear war, and Rocky IV, where Stallone bad to defend the title (and pretty much the free world) against a possibly chemically enhanced and definitely stern-looking Russian killing machine and his long-legged she-trainer (played by Brigitte Nielsen). Even as a small boy I knew that, should Rocky be lucky enough to somehow defeat the boxer, there was still a great chance that Brigitte Nielsen might fuck us all to death.

Though later trends skewed more towards friendlier "the Russians are people too" fare, no amount of Yakov Smirnov "What a country!" jokes or Mork from Ork in a beard and furry hat could erase those melting eyeballs or warhead-like bosoms from my mind. Needless to say, in addition to my more recently collected stories of Russian danger, I was working with a lot of built-up emotional baggage in the old psyche as well.

Moscow is a very large, very flat city punctuated by large industrial areas, grandiose Soviet-era monuments and parks, and vast blocks of shabby-looking apartment buildings. Considering there was no advertising until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow has worked double time to pack every inch of available space with as many ads as possible. Entire buildings are covered with massive signage singing the praises of Coke or Loreal or Honda, and tacky neon facades have been tacked up onto ancient doorways for the many casinos and strip clubs. Though the streets are extremely wide, traffic in Moscow is terrible. Every day the Lakai team and I would get picked up by a van driven by a stoic man named Valentine, and we'd lurch around the city trying to find spots to skate. The action crew was Marc Johnson (presently growing his hair out), JB Gillet (French wunderkind), Rick Howard (Canadian powerhouse), Mike Carroll (SOTY 1994), Cairo Foster (new daddy), Ty Evans (shirtless), and Kelly Bird (TM and inventor of Texas street-style). The distributor, Dimitry, who has been aptly described as Sluggo Van Engelen for his beefy Viking good looks, accompanied us for a few days. For all the days, however, we were in the competent hands of a 23-year-old girl named Albina and a revolving cast of characters that included her boyfriend, Ivan, and various local skaters including a video-camera-toting kid we called The Fox, and an especially inquisitive young man we called Curious.