English / 26.03.2020 / 6827

Dentist's Spartakiade. Or the life of Spartacus

Nikolay Mokhov, author from the Dark Side of Business

— I used to run like a wolf! I looked at everything in a skirt. And now?.. — says Sparta-cus — a strong man in his 60s.

— The computer is frozen — I can't do an X-ray. Let's go for a smoke, — Spartacus is the dentist of dreams. Even in the middle of treatment, he can offer a smoke break on his balcony, the way to which is through the hallway with a shelving unit. On the shelves are Soviet books on dentistry with new-fashioned magazines...

The balcony is small, hardly accommodates an armchair and a table with an ashtray. The view is on the dusty supermarket parking lot...

— ...That's what I tell her: when a man has an affair, it's a situation! And when a woman has it — it's whoring. So why do you confuse whoring with the situation?... Oh, men, women — are such a thing. As they say, the hair from the pussy will sink any barge (fem-inists are asked not to read any further, and it was not worth reading before)…

If my parents called me Igor, I'd sit at home. But they named Spartacus. All life is an ad-venture…

While Spartacus is telling the stories, I remember the plastic clinics in Moscow that are obsessed with service but have forgotten about humanity. The weary doctors there didn't know the names of the patients. They were only interested in speed — to serve as quickly as possible. And in a receipt from the cash register. Spartacus treats patients as human beings, not as units in the business plan...

— I couldn't sleep for shit, — says the doctor.

— Why is that?

— At two o'clock in the morning, the patient woke up... The pain, he said, is wild. Yelling. Well, what should I do? I had to go and prepare my tools.

— Have you cured?

— Yes. But then I couldn't sleep…

Muscovites, having visited Cyprus, often complain about the lack of service. Well, let them try to wake up their dentist at two in the morning... And have him do the surgery af-ter that. No. That's only possible in our Cypriot village...

— The cops put me and my friend in jail, — says Spartacus, another story from his time as a jeweler. — And my friend had long hair, he hid a pencil behind his ear — during the search, the cops did not notice. They put them in jail on Friday. Two days off ahead — nothing to do.

Oleg, a friend of Spartacus, took up painting Jesus on the wall. Then there was the virgin Mary. Spartacus helped. The paintings came out all over the wall.

Then comes a Monday. The cops are coming:

— Who did this?

— God from above... Who-who? Who was sitting here?

The guard left to consult with his superiors. Eventually they gathered a council and called the metropolitan. The church representative silently examined the artists' work... An hour later, a comrade in uniform commands:

— Gather your things and go!

They let the artists out, giving them a farewell parting:

— Get the fuck out of here. And take the metropolitan's card.

The metropolitan wanted a silver prayer scroll...

From the heading

Where does the price come from?

The Marxists took offense at me. We have an article called "Don Juan's Wall". In the article, I wrote about the unexpected consequences of quarantine. But I made an ideological mistake. I refused to consider the overproduction crisis as the cause of the Great Depression. And then it hit me.

The story of the clubber-programmer, kinesiologist-cyberneticist, and writer-investment banker

— I need to self-determine myself! — our interlocutor started with a banality. Ilya and I experienced a toothache. From the depths of memory rose the shadows of businessmen who had lost their lives in attempts to determine themselves, or rather to put a label on themselves. In the meantime, our vis-a-vis was throwing the names of the great ones on the table:

— Nassim Taleb — this is the second writer after Nikolai Mokhov (Nikolai Mokhov's ego is growing like the bitcoin exchange rate during a hype), John (well, of course, Grinder, co-founder of NLP), Castaneda (no wonder our interlocutor practiced tensegrity)...

And then he told his story. And his story refuted the theories of many respected authors, including those mentioned. I would write this story down with a pen, roll up the paper, and put it in a bottle, go out to sea on a yacht, and throw it into deep waters. But I don't have a yacht, and I don't have a pen, so read the letters electronically...