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A drunk named Sergei said that St. Petersburg is a museum of sex and suffering, which at the time I thought profound, but we were all drunk on cheap beer and Sergei spoke poor English, so there’s a good chance I said this and attributed it to Sergei, who, come to think of it, never could have uttered such a phrase, being passed out in the street.  Back to sex.  Dear Mom, I am tingling in Russia.  I am starring in a commercial for my penis.  It features me dancing on bars in a suit made of thousand dollar bills, an explosion in the background, and then my penis rising, which, luckily, is attached to me.  In all seriousness, when I was fourteen and a prisoner of puberty, I would lay awake like a old-time flying machine unable to lift from the ground, throbbing in my body, writing in the secret journal of the night.  Dear journal, I wrote, let there be a place where women walk like tigers, where their eyes are steel and ice, where their spiked heels wound the ground they walk on.

The Jellyfish

We stood dripping in our underwear at the edge of the Neva.

Slava the philosopher rested one hand on his pot belly and brought a shot of Vodka to his lips with the other.  Crosses and stars tattooed in blue on his fingers.  Hundreds of scars sliced into the white loaves of his arms.

If New York is a big apple, he said, tossing back the shot.  Then St. Petersburg is a jellyfish.  He brought the shot glass to his eye like a monacle and looked at me.  Don’t ask what that means, he said.  I can’t tell you.

By Ryan Griffith