We arrived at Manzhoulli late in the day.
We had travelled the last miles of China through the night.
The train crossed the border to the Russian side and was pulled into a large shed where I recall it took almost eight hours to lift each car off of the wheels that had carried us from China and place the cars on bogies that would fit the width of the rails in Russia.
The place had the feel of a frontier town.
Aside from the endless grasslands that spanned from horizon to horizon on the way in to the town itself…it had that gritty, dusty, shitty feel of someplace that existed only because of some circumstance that mandated its existence.
I got the feeling that Manzhoulli was the place that they threatened to send misbehaving Siberians to.
You’d know you pissed someone off bigtime if you got stationed here.
Tumbleweeds wouldn’t have been out of place blowing across the road in Manzhoulli.
Inside the station was a restaurant where the smugglers who I shared a cabin with treated me to the first real western meal I had eaten in so many months.
Beef stroganoff… sweet delight.
The creamy stroganoff and the wide noodles were like a beautiful angel dancing a dance of joy on my vagabond tongue.
A culinary massage to my homesick taste buds…except for the fact that the heavy metal silverware… something I had not used in many months… it really imparted a sharp metallic taste in my mouth.
I finished off the extraordinary meal with chopsticks I had retrieved from my bag…
the ones Masami gave to me in Osaka Japan.
That I missed Masami I already knew…
but eating the stroganoff there in Manzhoulli with the chopsticks she had given me…
I felt guilty that I had not been able to give her a proper goodbye.
She really deserved it.
The woman was never anything but good to me.
She always gave more than she took and it always made me want to give her back all I could.
I had planned to travel with her during my last week in Japan and talk about the future.
When I left the university and had my student visa pulled I wasn’t given very much time to get my affairs in order.
I wasn’t even given twenty four hours to leave.
The officials pretty much wanted me at the airport immediately.
But I had different plans.
I slipped away quietly and told no one.
There was no way I was going to tell my parents I had ‘left’ school and that I needed money for a plane ticket right away.
Really that I was expelled.
From school and the country.
I spent most of the next day coming up with a plan to have my roommate forward my parent’s mail to me and from me while I hung out in Australia for the rest of the semester that I was supposed to be a student in Japan.
And I didn’t feel like seeing the officials change their mind about letting me go.
That’s why I slept under the bridge in Kyoto that last night and hightailed it out of the port at Osaka on a ship to Shanghai first thing in the morning.
But that was all a thousand miles behind me now.
I had made it this far…
why look back?
The only regrets I had were that a wonderful woman and I parted ways with a phone call.
Now I stood at the doorstep of the hyphenated land of Eur-Asia… and if it didn’t have a hyphen it was at least a hybrid land.
It was a middle ground between two worlds.
If I looked behind me towards China I was looking at Asia.
In front of me stood Eur-Asia.
I felt so ready to make passage there.
Thoughts about that fight that got me kicked out of Japan entered my head right then.
It’s kind of what got me here.
I had to laugh when I recalled running into the guy’s accomplice in Beijing.
Actually I didn’t run into him at all.
I was riding the bus when I saw that motherfucker standing on the sidewalk looking like a lost dog.
I jumped off the bus at the next stop and followed him.
It was Elan.
I was sure of it.
The coincidence was unbelievable.
He never saw me and I followed him for quite awhile.
Only an idiot couldn’t tell he was being tailed by a westerner in China.
For one… I didn’t have black hair and secondly… I was about a foot taller than everyone else.
Elan was that idiot.
Before long I found out where he was staying.
There was a tiny cafe right there… I think it was called ‘The Pink House.’
I sat there and drank a beer or two and tried to figure out the best way to nail the guy.
That prick was gonna get a smackdown.
In a lot of ways it wasn’t even my battle or my anger that made me want to do it.
It was what he and his buddy did to my friend Joel.
The guy who was there for me at the Pig & The Whistle when I was pushed into the backroom with the sharp edge of a Yakuza’s knife pushing into my throat.
We took turns saving each others asses there it seemed.
Not only did Joel extricate me from a situation where a very sharp knife was pressed into my jugular…
he had the steadiness and presence of mind to grab my passport off of the table after he pushed those guys off of me.
He surprised the fuck out of them.
I didn’t know a whole lot of Japanese at the time.
Certainly not enough to beg for my life.
But that shit was serious.
When the guy with a blade pressed into your throat tells his buddy to go and find a mop…
well… I’m pretty sure that shit’s serious.
I felt bad that my mom would be getting a call from some low level State Department official asking where she wanted my body shipped to.
Because I got killed in some dive bar in Japan.
I couldn’t even move the way that guy had that knife on me.
I’ve never felt so powerless.
I knew from the way that he’d handled the situation that it wasn’t the first time he’d cut someone’s throat.
That I got out of that one with my life was just another blessing.
That Joel grabbed my passport was quite a pleasant bonus.
We ran from there out a fire exit… down the fire escape… laughing so hard we could barely keep running.
It was my closest call.
I always got on Joel’s case about not grabbing my thirty thousand yen off that table too.
Dude saved my life, grabbed my passport off the table… but he left my thirty grand in yen right there.
Whenever I brought that up Joel would double think clinking my glass in the toast we would inevitably be about to make and then give me a dumb look.
He hated when I bugged him about not picking up that thirty thoudsand yen.
But I saved his ass a time or two in repayment.
What those guys did to Joel was something so cruel and inhuman that I suppose it would be traumatic for us both if I accurately painted that moment here in words.
There aren’t many experiences in my life I’d prefer not to talk about but what they did to him that night is definitely one of them.
Suffice it to say that my plan to kill Elan was not hatched so much in anger or revenge.
It was just that I supposed… no I knew… that the world and all of humanity would be a better place without scum like him intertwining paths with us.
We’d all be better off without him.
It was only weeks ago that I fought with his buddy in that hallway… slipping in his blood all over the ceramic tile in my bare feet after I’d stabbed him with that Asahi bottle.
I’ll never forget the surprised look on his face when I plunged the jagged glass beer bottle right into his gut so hard you could hear the glass crunch off of it.
You can’t imagine how slippery blood is until you’re trying to kill someone in a puddle of it in your bare feet.
And you can’t imagine the bizarre feeling of ‘waking up’ with your hands around a masked intruder while you’re punching ‘the mask’ in the face.
To go from a deep sleep to killin’ a guy in less than a minute is a pretty disturbing experience I’d wish on no one.
It kinda felt like a bad dream.
Confused the hell out of me really.
When you wake up tryin’ to kill someone you go through this phase where you ask yourself ‘what the fuck is going on and why am I trying to kill this guy?’
But then you come to your senses when you realize that you were just woken up in your bed and the asshole in the mask is obviously up to no good and you gotta believe that whatever reason you’ve all the sudden got for killin’ the guy is a good reason.
I don’t think I slept too well for a few years after that.
And now I just happen to run into the guy’s partner on the street in China.
Obviously there was some unfinished business that had to be taken care of.
I wanted to be sure that as Elan started his walk on the path to hell that he knew… that he was absolutely certain that it was me that helped him take the first step.
I wanted to remind him to ‘say hello to Satan for me.’
I wanted that prick to see me laughing over him as he drew his last breath.
I know that the university officials and even the police quietly agreed with me tryin’ to kill his partner back in Japan.
That’s why I wasn’t sitting in jail right now in Osaka.
They saw the honor in what I did that night.
When the police arrived on the scene there was so much blood on the floor that someone said that their first question was ‘where is the body.’
There was so much blood on the floor and the walls that they didn’t think anyone could have survived that.
Man it was a bloody scene.
I remember almost laughing as we fought there in that darkened hallway in Osaka… slipping in the blood in our bare feet… slicker than oil on polished marble I’ll tell you.
It was almost funny… like jello wrestling or something.
One guy trying to kill… one guy really trying to avoid being killed.
And both of them slipping and sliding in all of that blood… it’s probably what saved us both.
That neither one of us could throw or land a good punch or jab on the slickened slip and slide of warm blood on the hallway floor there.
Now I had my eyes on Elan.
The score had to be settled… the karmic books balanced.
Each evening Elan would ride his rented bicycle past the cafe just after seven.
On the night my train was to leave for Russia at a little after eight in the evening, Elan was going to be riding straight into the biggest smackdown of his life.
The last smackdown of his life if I had my way.
I had a feeling that destiny, after all, was on my side.
The guy really deserved what was coming.
I had never planned such a thing before.
The fight in Osaka was a moment of passion… there was no planning that kind of thing.
It was different.
I never asked for it and it happened and I dealt with it.
I did what I had to do and I’d do the same thing all over again given the same situation.
Planning this was different though.
I think everyone should plan at least one really good assassination in their lives.
You learn a lot about yourself.
It’s really a giant exercise in looking within the human being that you are.
You get to see a part of yourself you pretty much never knew existed.
A part of you that under normal circumstances you would never be acquainted with…
and although it’s frightening it’s amazingly self intimate.
You’ll walk away knowing a lot more about yourself that’s for sure.
That was the plan… to kill Elan at the Pink House… finish the last sips of my beer… leave a really nice tip…
because I think it would be important to leave a really nice tip if you leave a body for someone to cleanup.
And then walk to the train station where I would in minutes be on my way to the Russian border.
No one would have even stopped me.
I imagined they’d just stare at his body while I walked away.
That night I sat at the table… I was remarkably calm for what I was about to do… I remember that most of all.
My mind was easy.
My senses were all heightened no doubt.
There was no nervousness though… not even jitters which suprised me… maybe because I had gone over it again and again in my head.
I enjoyed the sounds of the capitol city and the Tsing Tao beer I was drinking.
The sun was about to set… lighting up the polluted Beijing sky in that thick orange way…
and I watched for the first sign of Elan riding his bicycle towards me.
This time I wouldn’t fail.
Elan was about to go down… the hard way.
"Meetchermakermotherfucker!"
Unfortunately at the moment, and fortunately as the wisdom of time has crept by, that asshole never showed up to get his punishment at the Pink House Cafe.
I never got a chance to send his ass straight to hell.
But God knows I wanted to.
With the benefit of eighteen years having passed by I can honestly say that it is a blessing and a miracle that on that night, Elan never rode his bicycle by the table where I sat at the Pink House Cafe.
Whichever way he turned in life that day… it was definitely the right way.
I know that if he did ride by that cafe, two lives at least would have turned out differently.
Forever and permanently altered.
We both lucked out it seemed.
It turned into just another thing to put behind me.
That and a lot of miles.
After that meal at the Manzhoulli station…
which seemed to have been offered to me only so that the smugglers could keep their eyes on me and protect their mysterious ‘stash’…
I sat out in front of the station with Sergei and he and I shot the shit.
Sergei the ‘just bribed border official.’
Who took long draws on his harsh smelling Russian cigarette and shot meaningful questions at me about life in America and the nature of the relationship between our countries in between hits.
I couldn’t tell if he was sizing me up for something… paying a little extra special attention.
‘Givin’ me a little scrutin’" as we say in the Windy City.
Sergei and I both agreed that it was all bullshit the way our nations behaved towards each other’s and we concluded that he and I were just like each other…
that we really just wanted to live our lives and dream our dreams and not worry about one nation or the other nuking us and our families out of existence.
It’s funny how two regular guys can come together and solve the world’s problems.
Sergei never mentioned at all the bribe or inquired about what it was paid to protect.
It was a done deal.
Finished business.
It seemed to me after a while to be ‘the Russian Way.’
Almost like it really would have been rude of him to actually ask what it was he just took a bribe to allow into his country.
This building in the frontier town of Manzhoulli at the Chinese border just miles east of Mongolia was the place that welcomed me to what was then the Soviet Union…
supposedly as Ronald Reagan called it… a part of the ‘Evil Empire.’
I don’t know much about the empire… but the people I met there were some of the kindest most wonderful and warm people on the planet.
No wrong or harm was ever done to me in my travels there.
The service sucked… but that my friend is what the Russia of 1990 was all about.
A crumbling empire and a people who smelled opportunity and change on the wind.
You could see it.
You could feel it.
You could smell it.
And the stroganoff… that stroganoff was my culinary welcome back into the western world.
It was the first taste of home in so long.
That stroganoff… it was the strong and hearty embrace of a wonderful friend I had not seen in the longest time.
That stroganoff was a milestone… the stroganoff was a sign that I had made it… halfway.
Halfway around the world.
It seemed like Manzhouli was that place… the place where I went from each step taking me a step further away from home to each step taking me a step closer to home.
That stroganoff was indeed the epicurean point where I’d felt like I was just a bit closer to home too.
The place youth made me run from, a newly earned maturity made me miss… the place my stomach missed the most.
Manzhoulli’s stroganoff… that was the most memorable meal I swear I’ll have ever had the pleasure to eat.
The sweet cream settled into my stomach like a warm velveteen ball of lead.
My digestive system was no longer used to its dreamy lactose heaviness.
How many months had it been since I had even had a glass of milk?
Asians didn’t seem to have much love for the bovine delicacies… I had missed the milk… the cream in dishes like the stroganoff… and especially cheese.
I don’t think I ever saw cheese in China… I bought some once in Japan to make a cheeseburger with.
I think I dreamed of cheese a couple of times.
The Japanese told me that they had a nickname for people like me…
they called us the "butter people" or often "the big nosed butter people."
They say that to them… westerners smell like butter.
It is because of the amount of dairy that we east supposedly.
It oozes from all of our pores and it’s carried on our breath.
I know it to be true because after some months of living among "the fish people" as I thought of them… for the same reasons they called me one of the "butter people"…
I noticed that If there was a fresh westerner on a subway car… I got all hungry and reminiscent of the delicacies of dairy that were celebrated daily in my homeland.
I couldn’t wait to hit Paris and score myself a backpack full of cheese.
