From Russia with Lunch (5 page)

The second reason I'm not into lapdances is that, simply put, I'm tighter than a trout's rectum. Once you've paid the hefty admission fee – plus been stung what must be cost plus 300 per cent for a beer – the thought of handing out banknotes as if they were how-to-vote cards on election day sticks in my craw. Mark and co had no such reservations. Each had a fat wad of litas stacked neatly beside their drinks and, funnily enough, the dancers responded better to this pecuniary incentive than to my warm smile.

Which brings me to my third problem with strip clubs. I cannot suspend myself from the truth of the situation, which is that these gorgeous women wouldn't normally look twice at the men in whose laps they writhe like epileptic jackhammers. Perky of flesh and nature, the dancers that night looked no more than eighteen and could have been one lucky break away from strutting international catwalks. How do you buy into the fantasy that these women are turned on to the point of delirium by sales reps from Derby who are buying every smile?

My final difficulty with such establishments is the reason the platform was elevated to the slight degree it was. Everything is at crotch height, and far from alluring, I find it all rather gynaecological. A phenomenon heightened by the fact that the dancers showed a blatant disregard for my personal space. Well, at first anyway. It soon became apparent to all concerned that I had no interest in being more than a frankly awkward spectator and they moved on to the more moneyed punters. Which was fine with me.

With several of my companions disappearing for private shows and God knows what else, those who remained became briefly consumed with the idea of buying me a lapdance. For the abovementioned reasons, I declined, not once, not twice, but thrice. The auburn-haired nymph whom I had to halt in mid-straddle was as perplexed as the lad who countered with, ‘But your wife will never know.' Thanks, dingbat, but I will. We settled on a compromise of hard liquor which they bought for me with the verve usually reserved for coked-up millionaires. Lest you think I'm getting a little saddlesore from all this time on my high horse, it's not like I didn't sneak a peek. And let me tell you this: all the breasts were their own, resulting in the women looking like women rather than Tupperware amalgams, someone was making a killing in Lithuania's Brazilian waxing market, and these dancers were undeniably skilful. For a start, by twisting one limb around the pole, they could defy gravity, holding the pose for upwards of a minute, or rotate around it furiously in a dizzying whirl of lycra and eight-inch heels (clear perspex seems to be a favourite).

Their athleticism and muscle control were overshadowed only by their histrionics. Granted, the audience was intoxicated by vodka and flesh but these performers had mastered a range of nonverbal communication techniques that had Mark and the lads reeling. Sure, there was a fair whack of bump and grind involved, but the real money came from making the punters believe they had some sort of special connection with the girl involved. From the neck up, things are much more subtle than you might think. Smiles were initially tentative and timid before diffusing into the lightly bitten bottom lips. Brief eye contact was made from a chin-down position to foster the illusion of shyness but gradually progressed into a sustained smoulder with an almost imperceptible nasal flare when the audience member – as it were – waved a banknote in her direction. It was Method in a g-string. The combined effect is devastatingly effective.

One clean-cut young chap who had wandered in alone after our arrival was so besotted with a dancer that he requested a printed catalogue of ‘favours' with which to shower her. Grabbing hold of one such bill of fare, I later added up his tally of titillation. The bottle of champagne he shared with the blonde cost $150, the piece of glittery costume jewellery he took off her as a souvenir of the evening set him back another $200 and the – I kid you not – bouquet of flowers he bought her had a $200 price tag. The fact that she disappeared backstage with them to put them in water for the next rube probably didn't occur to the bloke. I almost felt sorry for him.

Then there was the ‘crazy' menu which featured prominently in the club's flyers. An altogether separate compilation of options, this leather folder embossed with cursive script invited guests to engage in activities such as nicknaming a dancer with an appellation to which she would have to respond all night, a pole-dancing lesson, an opportunity to role-play firing said performer, and having her cuddle you nanny style while you relieved yourself into an adult diaper. For a further price, you could entertain yourself by making the club manager eat a whole lemon or have one of the pole slitherers launch a vicious verbal attack on you. It was all most peculiar.

As I stumbled back out onto a square off Pilies Street, the fresh air slapped me in the face like Basil Rathbone trying to calm a hysterical leading lady. Woozy, unstable and with nausea sending me a gastric SMS, I began to wonder how to extricate myself from the buck's night. Fortunately, I was given ample opportunity to do so while my new chums debated which strip club to visit next. The choice was staggering – or maybe that was just me.

Either way, when leafing through a guide to the city's attractions provided by Lithuanian Airlines, I had noticed a rather odd symbol drizzled around the Old Town map. In addition to the little houses signifying hotels, the first-aid crosses denoting hospitals and the Ms which proclaimed museums, a pair of dangling cherries symbolised strip clubs, and Vilnius was a veritable orchard. Another guide to the city – one of those bog standard pamphlets you receive with your room key – listed a dozen, one of which was the lads' next destination. It featured a central watertank in which mermaid nymphs removed their clothing. Presumably between gulps of air. The club's flyer also screamed ‘confidence quarantined!' With my own confidence quarantined by a blood-alcohol count that had removed any ability to vocalise consonants, I slunk away to the hotel dreading the hangover that was to come.

I won't go into horrific detail of said morning-after except to say that I once got whipped by a dominatrix. In the course of profiling this leather wielder for a women's magazine, I confessed to her that being a confirmed sybarite – there was a ceremony where I was dipped in Beluga and Krug – I just didn't get the whole pleasure and pain thing. ‘Have you ever tried it?' she asked coolly. She had me there, and within seconds she also had her arm poised over my back with a lash at the ready.

The lightest stroke she was capable of delivering felt like a sleeve flapping in a breeze. I should have left it at that but in the name of research asked to experience a moderate blow. Her arm moved through no more than 90 degrees and the ensuing crack verged on the chiropractic. My body felt the momentum before my brain had a chance to process the message my back was screaming. I figured that this was going to hurt plenty. Only to discover that when the pain did kick in, I had vastly underestimated its tenure and ferocity. The Vilnius hangover – as it shall evermore be known – felt much the same. Albeit without the razor-thin contusion on either side of my spine.

I needed quiet. I needed fresh air. I needed coffee and I knew where to get all three.

Time was running out as I only had a day to go before I was due to pick up a hire car and leave Vilnius. The plan was to traverse the country in a clockwise direction with Naishtot – where my father's family originated – sitting at around seven o'clock, before finishing at Moses' home town of Birzai, which was located in Lithuania's north at around twelve. Along the way, I was determined to experience as much of the nation as I could, drop in to its major cities (including Kaunas, through which Moses travelled on his way to London), dally at its fledgling tourist attractions and get lost in its backblocks. No one else in my family was remotely interested in making this journey and there was a certain modest pleasure in knowing it would be undertaken by the grandchild to whom he was a mystery. And vice versa.

While waiting for the taxi that would take me to the Europas Parkas sculpture sanctuary, Mark – tutu asunder and possibly vomit-flecked – stumbled into the foyer with the remains of his posse. A few had been lost along the way and their flight left in an hour. Within twenty minutes, the obliging Robert Stackiokas had deposited me at the gates of an artistic wonderland. I have the softest of spots for projects that the timid write off as ludicrously ambitious but an individual sees through to fruition. Gintaras Karosas is that soldier. In 1987, the 19-year-old sculpture student read that Lithuania was in fact the geographical centre of Europe and summarily decided that as such it should be home to a permanent exhibition of pieces by the continent's best and brightest installation artists. Although the cartographic hotspot that motivated this undertaking is some 14 kilometres to the north of where the park stands, Gintaras got the green light to begin clearing 55 hectares of neglected woodland on which his vision would be fulfilled.

Between 1991 and 2006, more than one hundred artists from over fifty countries took part in projects organised by the park with the current exhibition being a bit of a greatest hits affair. While a lake of lawn forms the central axis of Europas Parkas, it's in the myriad paths snaking into the sun-speckled pine forest that the real magic lies. Arcing along a spongy trail of needles and cones is arguably Karosas' masterpiece. His labyrinth of Russian television sets – stacked four high on either side of the path – covers 3135 square metres and culminates in a fallen statue of Lenin, one hand outstretched in whatever emotion the viewer chooses to see in the gesture. According to the park's booklet, ‘The sculpture symbolises the absurdity of Soviet propaganda that for over half a century had been implanted in people's minds with the help of senseless TV'. Amid the silence of the woodland, the statement is cogent and stinging. It struck such a chord in the general public that 617 Lithuanians felt the urge to schlep their own disused Soviet sets from home to the relative isolation of the park and add them to the pile. Staff would routinely arrive at work to see a couple of monitors lying by the entrance gates and only when the piece took out a Guinness Record for most television sets used in a sculpture – a category that actually existed beforehand – did a cease and desist plea by Karosas put a stop to the donations.

With only dragonflies and opalescent black beetles for company, I padded through the undergrowth and was captivated time and again as sculptures announced themselves without warning. Several were fluid and organic while others were a study of geometrics whose harsh edges stood in stark contrast to their natural backdrops. ‘Writing about art', goes the old saying, ‘is like dancing about architecture', so I'll simply share a few favourites without the embarrassment of interpretation.

I was inexplicably moved by the aquamarine steel ring that appeared to hover around an oak tree trunk. I loved Marius Zavadskis' take on the hamster exercise wheel into which you could climb and sprint without going anywhere. Then there was Dennis Oppenheim's three-metre-high lounge chair made of 300 metres of rolled steel and 100 square metres of iron mesh; it featured a pond into which the sitter's bottom might splash down amid two tonnes of water topped by floating flowers which were changed every day by park staff. Top prize was a two-way tie. Evaldaus Pauza's marvellously earnest and bespectacled young girl holding a giant balloon to which her ponytail was vertically attached by static electricity was charm in ore. Ditto Mara Adamitz Scrupe's overblown glass vegetables – turnips, beetroot, pumpkins – which harnessed solar power by day and glowed softly from within come dusk.

Perhaps the one drawback of the park is that you begin to invest almost every object that crosses your line of sight with artistic purpose – a phenomenon which I doubt Karo-sas would have a problem with. This was brought home to me as I encountered a tightly bound package of stainless-steel girders each of which bore welded struts in a lattice formation. A meditation on bonds perhaps? A homage to the majesty of cooperation which can lead to a sum greater than its constituent parts? How about part of a stage that was being erected for a concert nearby and which a smoking roadie hoisted onto his shoulder while affording me a view of almost more bum crack than I'd seen the night before?

Robert picked me up at the gates and decided that we should have a poke around the Verekai Estate on the way back to Vilnius. Although he had lived in the city all his life, he had never visited this compound of thirty neoclassical buildings which had been erected as a summer getaway for bishops. Perched high on the banks of the Neris River, it afforded a view of the city as lush as a first romance. Which Robert savoured while dragging heavily on the Marlboro that seemed as much a part of his face as his eyebrows.

A commercial pilot with 6000 flying hours to his credit, Robert had switched to surface transport after a takeover bid for his company had suspended trading. That was six months earlier. He smiled the smile of a man who has accepted the powerlessness of his predicament and looked for the income-generating silver lining that came with car ownership. A little over two decades ago, there was only one type of auto available to Lithuanians. The Soviet-made Lada was a tinny box that crumpled like cellophane and had all the charisma of a stamp collector in his forties. In many societies, the first car – albeit a cross between a citrus fruit and an explosive device – is a late teen rite of passage. Robert got his at twenty-seven.

‘It was a dream for people under the Soviets,' he smiles. ‘The only people who were eligible for a car had to have worked for the same company for ten years. Their boss also had to like them enough to offer authorities a letter in which their good character was set out. One argument, late arrival or sick day was enough to make sure you never got this letter. Then there was the cost: 5000 rubles. The average monthly salary was 200 rubles. Even if half of your salary went on repayments it would take over four years to pay off the Lada. Which usually only lasted six. Now everyone in Lithuania has cars.'