It has not been recorded — how Toyta found her way to Grozny (lit. terrible), capital of the Chechen Republic, following the First Chechen War. Perhaps she was there visiting a relative close or distant, the aunt of her aunt she called aunt too, the wife of a father’s friend from hydroelectric engineering school she called Peacock — because of the woman’s plumage, the feather she tied to her braid — but privately. Supposed to meet her at the bus terminal. Never knew which three o’clock train. Nor is it known how Toyta was supposed to have supported herself. Whether she cooked for monks or did laundry for a nearby madrassa, whether she cleaned floors for whatever government offices were left or washed windows in what official residences in the diplomatic quarter hadn’t been razed. What retails as fact is that one night in an impromptu Grozny discotheque (formerly a dairy) she met a Russian soldier — cleancut, tightbodied, tightclothed in uniform plus mufti sneakers — who managed through bribing a general it must have been to bring her back to the site of his patriarchate: 180 kilometers outside Moscow and then, for a weekend, to Moscow Herself, neighborhood Ostankino, where a comrade soldier also discharged had an uncle who commanded a balcony over Zvyozdny (but the uncle spent whole months what was characterized as consulting in Crimea).
We will pause here to allow you to recite your PIN numbers to yourself.
By Saturday Night 1996, she’d escaped a Ciscaucasian death. Toyta would become, if the girls who’d tell this story were aware of the concept, Immortal—which Slavic languages too tend to render in the negative, as if it were regrettable: “never-dying,” “never-ending.” At a bar in Moscow she left her solider for a visiting American, a roving producer of pornographic movies.
This reporter was told that though the bar’s ambiance blarneyed Irish, its name was very much of its place and time, ambitious, nearly excessively utopian: The Brothel Under the Sign of the Dice with Three Faces, Where Lesbians Drink Free on Sundays, Male Homosexuals Eat Free Every Second Monday, Where Behind One of the Toilet Tanks Is Said to be Hidden a Jew’s Treasure, and the Rook’s Nest in the Garderobe Has Been Formed from the World’s Longest Lime Twig That if Ever Unraveled into Its Original Curvature Would Spell Out the Word Typewriter … (but I think here I might’ve been toyed with).
You ask, you might, how could an American who respects women and gives them jobs with equal wages and higher ed degrees and diligently keeps his paws off them — how could he ever expect with his solicitousness and always asking and nerves to take a woman away from a Russian soldier? from an officer — we’ve just promoted him — an officer with holstered sidearm, this major in Czarish bluegreens the color of a Romanov’s blood? To answer that, however, you’d have to think bigger than masculinity, bigger than the sexpower of violence, of war. It should be understood that the American in the sideways porkpie hat still dangling its pricetag was no mere gap year visitor or sex tourist but an approximate Russian himself (such is the nature of the American problem: who are you? whose are you?), an émigré who’d come to the United States in 1984 or thereabouts via Israel and was here returned to Moscow — though he was born in St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, and had never been to Moscow before — recruiting talent or the eligibly cheap.
After Toyta had filmed a luxuriously uxorious — read: unremunerated — scene in his room in the starriest hotel in Moscow (don’t believe it but this is what he almost certainly had her believe: with marble baths, marble sinks, marble floors, with beds as rare and expensive as arabescato and just as uncomfortable to stay the night in), this hyphenated-American, this Russian-Israeli-Floridian — Iosif, Yossele, let’s call him Joe, regular Joe — procured for her a legitimate work visa #H1B and flew her to Los Angeles, whose airport bears the acronym LAX.
Los Angeles, despite belonging to dreams, also belongs to America. This means that Toyta’s life was set, her survival assured by Marines. Here she could become someone named Tanya and this Tanya Someone could become a success. The rest, the dénouement as it’s said in film, the finale, is scarcely as important.
In LA, Toyta/Tanya became Tina Toy, then, because she was once mercilessly lashed with the word “tiny” by a wheelchaired dominatrix in a Thai noodlerie’s ladies’ room, “your waist is soooo tiny!”—Tanya/Tina at the mirror slurping up the word in an endlessly looping waist of tiny tiny tiny—she became Tiny Toy, until a reputable casting agent she met at an audition for a low budget, character driven thriller told her she’d had her typed from name alone as black, not white and foreign — and so she became Mary Moor, who became Mary Mor (both at the suggestion of a Brit cameraman with bum knees who’d tried to date her), because in porn, which genre it seemed she’d be condemned to forever, there was already an established Mary More, another tanned to public transport upholstery texture girl with platinized tresses once notorious for the development of her kegels but now on her way out who, due to unspecified viruses — definitely herpes, allegedly hepatitides — could perform by industry decree only when protected, with the man maintaining on his erection a condom.
Toyta, for her part, was never infected with the worst of the diseases you could contract in America — doubt — she was positively immune to fear and doubt and so was incapable of being anything but fun, firm, and objectively reckless (not even that monthly test could scare her: the butch boss nurse, the kit’s prick, a fink of blood to clog the vial — while waiting, she counted, the results always arriving punctually, by thirty).
It was on the set of a pornographic movie whose title has not survived and whose content has since like a failed family been broken up into short few minute clips all over the internet and there, meaning everywhere, aggregated under myriad descriptors and tags (the disparate keywords: Teen — Interracial, Anal, Trib, POV, Mary Mor), that she met a porno actor who — due to his 12 fame, the presumed prowess that went along with it, along with a concomitant legend regarding the size of the loads he routinely “unloaded”—was asked to play weekly poker with legitimate Hollywood television and film actors who only minced and otherwise faked the act of sex for much more money than was paid the people, just as attractive, who had sex really.
One Sunday during a game of Texas hold ’em, he (“Neo” of the prickly cactus muscles and tribal tatts, his head to toe entirely depilated) raved to his host’s brother inlaw — this producer/director Edison — about his costar Mary — superhott—recommending her as a miscellaneous Eastern girl/stripper/prostitutka who might even be able to negotiate small speaking roles, ten words or less, tiny.