Soviet Bitch

Received a rambling email - complete with photography - from the Hell's Kitchen Agent just the other night. It was a picture of him with a low-level employee of some magazine or another - complete with empty implied promises of shilling my promising work to another publication. Good thing I have his ass on commission or I'd be broke from paying for all the empty promises.

I now truly believe he goes to these things solely for the booze and toast points.

The email concluded with the threat of a drunk dial before 10 p.m. I hastened to the answering machine to turn it off and instead recorded this:

"This machine has been installed with an alcohol detection device. You are over the legal limit. Please call back after a cup of coffee."

True to his threat, the phone rang minutes later and the message sounded like Portuguese, which sounds like Spanish with marbles in your mouth - only mixed with copious amounts of very dry martinis. The only part I thought I picked up was the name-calling. I could swear he'd called me a "Soviet Bitch". I replayed it twice because I have one very bad ear and thought it must surely have been "Sonofabitch". But I clearly heard an extra "t".

It was "Soviet Bitch". I couldn't fathom such a thing. Did this make me the kind of bitch who would stand in line for toilet paper? I admit that in a crisis I could do such a thing. Or did it make me the kind of bitch who would crush small Balkan states in the interest of world domination? That, too, sounded in character for me. I concluded that some truth does, in fact, come through the haze of alcohol and horrendous taste in men. I am a Soviet Bitch.

I rushed down to the t-shirt shop to have one made in my new size. I bought a custom bumper sticker and had 2 dozen generic Christmas balls stamped "Soviet Bitch" for the tree. Who needs a New Year's resolution when you have a new name? And one NOBODY else can claim at that!!

So from our bitchy Soviet house to yours.... Happy Holidays and power to the proletariat.