So, while I was in Boston at college, I was also a hostess at a fancy restaurant: white table cloths, coat room, reservations for stars like Ben Affleck and Hilary Swank (okay, once). The South American line cooks snorted lines off butter knives and smoked American Spirits in the bricked back alley. The manager, Brenden, liked to wear sky blue ties with different little patterns and had studied hospitality at Cornell. Anastasiya was another hostess, a full-bodied Bela-Russian girl with auburn hair who smoked at least two packs a day--also Spirits, but menthol.
Her and I became connected, let´s say it that way. Together, we smoked on breaks and were able to laugh quite a lot through the buzzing dissatisfaction we both seemed to feel. I guess we were typical - young, attractive women in big-city America who had chosen to just not know what the fuck we really wanted or where we were headed.
She was an immigrant from Belarus on her own though except for her first cousin, Ilya. Of course, I had no idea what all that might mean for a person at that time. Not really.
One night she invited me to meet Ilya, who was also a grad student at Harvard dental school. To Anastasiya, he was just brilliant.
´´Ok,´´ I agreed. We took the T from South Boston to lower Allston (LA). LA was generally an icky place with lots of students and unvacuumed coffee shops. I found out that night that lower Allston was also where Ilya the dental student ran an underground poker room from his duplex apartment.
Anastasiya helped her cousin with the game there and she´d brought me along to offer me the opportunity to waitress there. She´d landed a second job in customer service that didn´t let her keep poker hours anymore (I would later appreciate just how well she had done at learning the patience and gloss required to work in American customer service, which Belarus had given her absolutely no preparation for). There was one other waitress, a beautiful, thin Colombian with glossy-black, tight curls, whose name I now forget.
Beyond the living room where the players sat at a massive lob of a poker table, Ilya asked me to lay down on the sofa in the tiny kitchen and open my mouth, because he liked to see people´s teeth. I did so. He was very friendly and a handful of MIT geniuses were sitting in his living room so I thought all of this must be safe enough. Also, my father and his side of my family back home in Washington state had all been card sharks and hobby-gamblers: poker, black jack, pinochle, gin-rummy, speed, bullshit, go-fish—my family played ´em all. For example, my mother´s first trip with my father´s family had been an all-inclusive, dirt-cheap trip to Reno where the only catch had been that you weren´t allowed to leave the casino´s gambling floor for a minimum of seven hours a day, save for bathroom breaks and the free lunch. My mother often recounted how she´d been scolded by the floor manager for taking too long in the bathroom. My point here is that my past also helped me see Ilya as card-loving kinfolk at bottom, which made his dental fetish and glaring criminality irrelevant at that point, on that little pleather sofa while he looked into my mouth.
Sure enough, and to my delight, after the examination, Ilya told me I had fine teeth and, what´s more, he was very impressed I hadn´t had my wisdom teeth out like so many other idiotic Americans. And I was hired. Starting immediately.
My first task was to go out with the Colombian to get gummy worms and more tortilla chips for the players. And this we did. The Colombian was very motherly, and would offer me cocaine at red lights from her long French-tipped finger nail as if she were giving water to a sick stranger on her way through the desert: gentle but insistent with her expectations. She was, I guessed, a real Hispanic woman. I suppose we must have talked about things during our times together, but I recall none of our conversations now--just my own warm, appreciative, slightly frightened feeling for her.
So, for a few months I was just studying, working as a hostess, then working at the poker game and hanging a lot with Anastasiya in her world. Some might say I was an upper middle-class girl trolling harder immigrant lives to replace the empty feeling I´d failed to shake off from an expectable adolescence of tailgates and seriously dating a shiny-toothed football-star boyfriend called Kyle.
Anyway, I slept over a lot at Anastasiya´s. She wasn´t a student like me, she just worked. We would go out at night, I´d often pass out in her bed in all my clothes then wake up to find Anastasiya had changed my clothes for me as I slept. She´d get me up before she left for work to have coffee and cigarettes on her back balcony in Brighton. Her roommate was an older black woman who owned the apartment and wore beautiful long cotton house gowns like I´d only seen in old films. She kept her dead husband in an urn next to the television in the living room. I suspected the grief she often expressed for him was at least partly an act while she sat with us in her gowns before herself getting ready for work. After they´d leave, I´d often slip back to Anastasiya´s bed for a nap before my lectures started at college.
After a while of all this though, I started feeling an organic, internal drift from Anastasiya, her world, and the game. And well, there was one particular night that finally pushed the drift very fast, I´d say.
First though, and generally speaking, the game had been the ideal gig for a college student and I am very grateful—I just had to give minimal effort taking care of the players, occasionally crushing up their Adderall, cleaning ash trays, filling the snack bowls and making mostly non-alcoholic drinks like tea and coffee. My largely unseen, undistracting background presence was highly valued and the atmosphere was basically calm so I could study and sleep on the sofa in the kitchen.
But one late Saturday morning, towards the end of a particularly grueling game, Ilya came into the kitchen with Anastasiya with a weird energy—weirder than their usual Bela-Russian weirdness. Both their behavior was normal but the energy was of a new charge to me and I didn´t like it. The two seemed to crackle off each other, saying usual things in a higher, thicker way to each other.
So, Ilya did the books in the downstairs bedroom, cashed players out, the players shuffled home exhausted - some broke losers at that point - and I went about cleaning up in the kitchen, planning to go home by myself because I was reaching the point of needing to be alone again. Spending so much time with people whose truths would for me always be very nebulous and therefore unsettling was becoming less exciting and much more wearisome.
I was packing up my over-sized school purse as loud house music came on out in the poker room, where Anastasiya and Ilya were cleaning up. I felt tense about walking through there to the front door, having to tell both I´d not be doing a little after-work chill-out with them. I was learning that getting into new worlds was easy enough, but that leaving them gracefully was my biggest challenge. Looking back, I guess the universe had really heard me on that and thrown me a bone.
I heard a little moan as I pulled on my winter beanie and jacket. I fucking hate this music, is what I thought. In the living room, I saw Anastasiya fucking Ilya on a poker chair, both looking as demented as the incest they were, I have to say, quite casually committing. He motioned with his hand for me to come over but I kept it moving, walked out into the sunny Boston freeze and never went back.
Thankfully, Anastasiya had already quit the other restaurant as a hostess, so no contact between us was necessary. All I heard from her two weeks later was a woeful, lengthy text about the FBI raiding the duplex for prostitution, then arresting Ilya when they learned it´d actually been part of a larger illicit poker ring in the Boston metropolitan region. The vents had been filtering all the cigarette smoke to the third-floor neighbor, who´d tipped off the local police, and so on… I´d much later learn that the Bela-Russian mafia´s specialty had been illicit gambling in America for quite some time by that point.
I never responded to her last text. I find that speculating about why she´d reached out to me about it all after I´d ghosted her for two weeks is very unpleasant to me now. I think she hoped I would turn out to be a solid friend, the kind that ultimately accepts their friends no matter what, then gives them support in their biggest times of need. What I choose to focus on now though, is that my discomfort with incest/orgies back then meant I´d dodged getting nabbed in an FBI raid.
A couple years later, when I myself was at a desperate juncture after the death of my father, the warmth I´d felt during my time with Anastasiya and her world would prompt me to get a job working in Zelenograd, Russia, where I met one of my best and enduring friends, Nikita, who is also uncomfortable with incest/orgies.