They shaved my head in March.
I'm starting here because this is, according to them, the rite of passage that makes you one of them. The white suit came free soon after, but it was the shaved head that identified me amongst their ranks, really. And my passport, I suppose.
But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's rewind.
It's 1985 and I'm without family or friends, unemployed, an illegal alien trapped in America. Just to clarify, America in the aftermath of the Russo-American war in the Pacific made Cold War America look like a fucking kid's show. On the day the war ended, protesters and patriots firebombed the block of flats me and some other Russians were squatting in. I lost a lot of friends – not even to the fire. The bastards were waiting outside, knowing we'd be flushed out like plague rats. They had bats, chains, bars or metal. We had nothing. I escaped, alone. I was 19, then.
I changed my name to something more local, combed through the works of Arthur Miller for something rife with Americana, settled on Eddie Loman. I buried my accent under an exaggerated East Coast surfer's voice I picked up day by day hanging out on beaches and in bars. I died my hair dark, hid everything Russian about me, dissolved into America like an incubating germ. And I survived. And I waited.
Just to make it clear, everything I did in the four years after that I did out of fear and hatred. Terror drove me into hiding and spite forced me to go on. I thought if I could survive under the radar in the USA I'd be winning somehow, even as I scraped together a minimum-wage living eating beans out of the can in a dingy shithole apartment in a tenement building. I thought I was winning. I thought my continued existence as a Russian national was the biggest 'fuck you' I could give the country in which I was trapped. How did I come to be here, you might wonder, me – a Russian national who, so far as you're aware, despises America and always has?
Rewind again. Let's go further back.
I'm 12 years old. Bright blonde hair, bright blue eyes, high-pitched voice extolling the virtues of everything I saw. I was an optimist. But pre-war Russia was not a good place to be such a thing. My parents berated and penalised me for my outlook. They hated Russia, you see, and I adored it. Eventually, they realised the stick wasn't going to work on me – my youthful patriotism
ran too deep – and turned to the carrot. They told me about America, a paradise with beautiful, sparkling seas and beautiful, sparkling people. They told me it was the greatest country in all the world, far greater than Russia. They told me we were moving there. I was impressionable, and trusting; I was filled with rapture at the prospect of somewhere that was somehow even better than Russia.
The boat ride was long, but it was the only option; illegal immigrants and air travel simply did not go hand in hand. We must have been on the boat for weeks but to me it felt like a whole year of my life was spent in shipping containers and below decks, hiding from who-knew-what. I was curious as to why such a perfect country would require us to sneak in, but I didn't ask any questions. I was simply happy that we were going.
My father got a job as cheap labour in a construction yard; my mother as a maid in some California housewife's domestic palace. They worked mornings through to nights whilst I occupied myself in our tiny apartment. I had strict instructions not to leave, but I did anyway. I was utterly enchanted by the strange language spoken by these tall, incredible people. We lived not far from a beach, so I would walk down and marvel at the surfers with their tanned, sculpted bodies and the women in their two-piece swimsuits, with golden hair and perfect smiles. I was bewitched by the world of America, which to me was as far removed from Russia as the Earth from the Moon. And it went this way for a while.
Fast forward four years. It's 1982, and the day the war begins my mother is fired and my father is beaten to death by his own colleagues with bricks and hammers. They deliver his body to our doorstep, and since my mother is despondent at her sudden unemployment I'm the one who receives it. He was as mangled and broken as much as those patriots could achieve with their limited resources. It's not hard for me to imagine them encircling him, rage in their hearts and a perfect target for it in their midst, as he stammers pleas for mercy and appeals to their friendship. He knew these men. He'd met some of their families. Held their kids. Kissed their wives' cheeks.
His face was caved in after they broke his limbs and ribs.
My mother was catatonic with grief for weeks, and I quickly realised I'd need to find money or we'd starve to death. And what's more, we were known in the neighbourhood. Russians. The word was spat at me every time I left the flat, followed by threats of violence. One morning, I left the house to go beg for change. My neighbour, an obese man who'd said nothing to us the four years we'd been there, told me he'd rape my mother to death if she ever left the apartment. He told me he was listening for the door all the time, just waiting. I swore at him as he laughed all the way down the stairs.
I turned desperado, after begging failed to produce enough for us to keep going. Naturally. I lifted food from houses with open windows, smashed in store fronts and took what I could whilst the alarms blared all around me. By now I'd learned English well enough to threaten people into giving me money. I had a knife, and there were alleys and sidewalks I could stalk by night, picking out lone figures and hiding in the shadows from groups and gangs. And it worked, for a while. We didn't live in glamour, but we lived.
For a year, I kept my mother and myself fed and sheltered. The landlord was a decent man, understanding of our plight. He never kicked us out, even as the war turned in the Russians' favour. He knew it was nothing to do with us. He never told anyone he was housing Russians, nor would he tolerate violence in his building. And he never asked where the wads of money I would hand him each month came from. But he wasn't divine, and he couldn't save us from everything.
I returned one night from a smash-and-grab a few blocks away, stolen goods and the meagre contents of a cash register in my pockets, a knife stuffed in my boot. A discordant, broken wailing came from somewhere upstairs, but I thought nothing of it; this neighbourhood was no stranger to prostitutes, nor domestic abuse, and both were heard in abundance and duly ignored. But when I mounted the last step to our floor, I saw the open door to my apartment and knew immediately what had happened.
I stormed in. It was pitch black, but I navigated by noise until I found the bedroom where the door, normally locked, was half-shattered and wide open. There he was, the vile, corpulent form of our neighbour pinning my mother face-down to the bed with his arms and his sheer bulk. His trousers were at his knees, his legs glistening with sweat in the streetlight glow that came through the window. He grunted rhythmically. He called her a Russian whore as he fucked her. She cried. I cried, too, and I realised my teeth were clenched so hard they were in danger of cracking. I drew my knife from my boot.
"Get the fuck off her and look at me you fat piece of shit!" I shouted, grabbing him by the back of his shirt. He stumbled as I dragged him backwards, fell over, cracked his head on the wall. His cock was out, and I aimed a heavy kick between his open legs; he groaned, yelped.
"You fucking Russian, you fucking alien, I'll kill you, I'll fucking kill both of you!"
"Get the fuck up," I screeched.
"I'll gut you, I'll fucking gut you, I swear to God."
"Get the fuck up and look at me," I repeated. In Russian. I didn't mean to, but I'm glad I did. He rose to his feet, unsteady, winded from my kick. My mother's cries had subsided to muted weeping, her face buried in pillows. I looked at the man before me. He grinned.
I stabbed him in the gut, once, twice, so many times I lost count. He screamed and fought like a dying pig as I wrestled him to the ground, blood covering his shirt and my hands. When he was down, I pinned his arms below my knees and dropped the knife. I set my thumbs over his eyes. He was still screaming.
"Fuck America," I panted in English as I squeezed my thumbs into his eyesockets. "Fuck you, and fuck your whole piece of shit country."
He died crying blood.
My mother killed herself not long after that. I think my father's death and the trauma of that night were more than she could take. Mostly, though, I think she knew that with the war still going it would only happen again. Someone else would find us, hate us, try to hurt us. Someone else would come for her, and she couldn't stand the thought of that. She hung herself from the window of her bedroom – there was nothing else to hang from – and I understood. I grieved, and cried, and was alone. But I understood.
No police came for our neighbour, incidentally. I don't think anyone cared – possibly no-one even knew him. And no-one came for my mother, even as she bounced in the wind off the tenements walls. I pulled her in, closed her eyes, left her in bed. And then I was gone.
I found a place that a load of immigrants were living together, and for a couple of years I got by much as I had before, only now I had friends to help me. I met some guys from Russia, and they too had become handy at getting money by illicit means. We waited out the war like this – mugging, looting, extorting. All I wanted then was to go home, and I thought if I saved up money this way then I could buy passage back to Russia and have a little left to set myself up there.
I've told you what happens here, so I'll skip the details of those two years. Molotov cocktails rained in through the windows, followed by shouts and jeering, and we streamed out onto the street chased by fire and met by bludgeoning. I was pretty handy in a fight by now from more than a few muggings gone wrong, and I fought my way through the crowd, though not without injury. I lost everyone else.
I was homeless for a few months. All things considered, it wasn't as bad as it could have been: there were subways and sewers to sleep in, and with nowhere to be tracked down to I could be more reckless than ever with my crimes. People harassed me, but I didn't give a shit. I worked on my accent. Built an American identity. And, like I said, I waited.
And finally, after what felt like years, it all paid off.