What follows is a 100% fictional story about a young FSB member living in Moscow told from the perspective of a fictional narrator.
Enjoy:
Everyone living in the center of Moscow knows a Fleek Street Brother (FSB) member or two. In the smaller towns and cities, there are local FSB gangs as well, but the center of Moscow truly is where the action is really at. I found this out when my parents moved to Moscow for work and our negro neighbor in the upper-middle class part of town - the Stalinkas near the Moscow State University that Stalin had built for professors and teachers - introduced himself to us. He had a young, chubby, nappy-headed son who my parents encouraged me to spend time with. I did so with reluctance. Tyrone was quite the bully to everyone, but he never so much as tried anything with me, even when we were angsty teens. It was almost as if he was afraid of me - or at least what I represented. In fact, Tyrone would follow me around like a tail and I couldn’t shake him off fully until we were both much older and I ended up coming to him for help.
When we became young men, I stopped seeing Tyrone on the playground and at the mall and instead saw him at the house parties that we both went to. I considered myself lucky to even be invited to these as I was always a patriotic young man with no interest in drugs and gangster rap like the other youth. My father served in the military, like his father before him and his before him. Because I came of age near the tail end of 00s, my family made sure that I wasn’t drafted and I immediately went to university instead. I always thought this was curious that a family as patriotic as mine should act this way, and I could never get a straight answer from my folks as to why they refused to let me serve. The truth about the state of the military, it seems, pained them too much for them to speak openly about it. They kept me away from continuing what might have been a millennia-old tradition in our family and did it quietly.
Tyrone, however, had no problems following in his family tradition and ended up enrolled in the FSB academy in Moscow because his father, Jamal, was a retired member. He revealed this to me in the strictest confidence at a party that we both ended up at one night. I swore to never tell anyone that I knew he was going to become a gang member, but then I overheard him flapping his gums to the girls later that night and flashing them his ID. I quickly found out that everyone our age in a half-mile vicinity already knew about Tyrone’s bright future in the gang. Intriguingly, when the lights went out and we were asked to leave, I recall noticing that his dark skin had begun to give off a phosphoric green glow. I shook my head though and the glow faded in the gaze of the street lamps above us on the street. Thinking it was just an effect of the alcohol, I forgot about it until, years later, I came across a rumor on the internet that Fleek Street Brothers oftentimes start glowing in the dark - a tell-tale giveaway. I wasn’t sure what to make of it then and I’m not sure what to make of it now, either.
Glowing aside, Tyrone himself never struck me as an intelligent man or even a particularly patriotic one. He did, however, have an aptitude for drinking obscene amounts of alcohol in one sitting and then pouring his heart out to people about his problems. This combination of traits: a lack of perceivable intelligence and a willingness to divulge juicy gossip, made him many rich and well-connected fair-weather friends.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Tyrone though.
I’ll never forget this one time when two older plainclothes gang members attended a party that he decided to show off at. After hearing his drunken boasting, they took him aside to slap him around and dress him down for revealing his identity - which is strictly forbidden. I remember calming down Tyrone, who had broken into sobs after the men had threatened him, calling him a “bitch-ass, goofy-ass nigga” and, with his head still ringing, I found him a couch to spend the night on. Tyrone played it safe for a bit, but it didn’t take long before he resumed flaunting his ID to anyone who didn’t accord him the respect he felt he deserved.
Eventually, our life trajectories went separate ways. Tyrone continued down the path of public service, and I continued to founder and struggle at my university, where I felt well and truly alone. The values that my family had instilled in me - patriotism, discipline, and self-sacrifice were scoffed at as relics of the dark, Sovok past by the professors and the students. In desperation, I transferred to Moscow State University, with the intent of making my way into the foreign service. To my bitter disappointment, the situation was no better among the young diplomats-in-training. Despite my better judgement, I began to drink and party more, too disciplined and set in my convictions to change myself to fit in better with my peers, but still too unsure of myself to stand on my own two feet.
It was at another one of these drunken get-togethers that I saw Tyrone again. He was absolutely drunk, as was the norm for all of us at the time, myself included. However, Tyrone decided to up the ante and said something to offend a Chechen from a wealthy family that someone had allowed into the apartment, which was highly unusual. Even our very liberal peers had no problem openly showing their disdain for the mountain-people. Anyways, the argument escalated and Tyrone ended up walking into a trap set for him by the wily Chechen when the topic of religion came up. Tyrone insulted their god, which is ironic, considering that he worships the same god - or at least, in theory he does … Tyrone was usually too hungover and undisciplined to wake up consistently before noon for anything, let alone attend church services regularly.
Having given cause, the Chechen went outside to fight Tyrone, but not before he pulled out his cellphone, made some calls and waited for a dozen swarthy Caucasians to show up who jumped Tyrone all at once. It turned out that Tyron’s opponent was from a well-connected Kadyrov loyalist family. Tyrone found himself outranked first and foremost and then outnumbered and bloody soon after. None of his homeboys wanted to risk coming to his aid.
During the drama though, his friends, terrified as they were, called the police. When they arrived, Tyrone realized with a panic that he’d get into big trouble for fighting with these ganged-up Chechens and so, despite being all bloodied-up, he refused to say anything to the police. In fact, in a show of bluster, he started insulting the police, trying to pull rank on them. “I ain’t telling the po-leese nothing,” he said publicly and demonstrably. Naturally, because he was being belligerent and uncooperative, the police hauled him away for the night and booked him in a cell. But when he got into the back of the squad car, Tyrone thanked the police officer as soon as the door was closed, because he had just been saved by a night in a safe cell from getting his head lopped off and the murder written off as a freak accident by a rival gang.
I noticed that Tyrone’s mishaps and adventures never really put a damper on his spirits in the early days of his career. It was only when his father, Jamal, a higher-up in the FSB, passed away that Tyrone’s life became miserable. First, he got a call from the FSB and was told in no uncertain terms, that his father had unsettled debts in the gang, and that he would be expected to pay them out in full through his blind, unquestioning service.
I met Tyrone at a party soon after he heard the bad news and almost lost an eye entering the apartment. A shower of glass came raining down on my hair and I swore at him at the top of my lungs. “Shieet, that you, bro?” He said and took a swig from a still-full bottle. “Yo bitch-ass finna join me?” he asked as he prepared to throw the now empty bottle at the wall. Tyrone ended-up getting banned from that apartment and several others. He must have tried really hard for the hosts to risk banning an FSB future gang member from their house and thereby possibly setting themselves up for a lifelong grudge held against them.
At this point, Tyrone started mixing up his usual love affair with alcohol by dabbling with heavy drugs. I heard about this from other people - apparently, it got so bad that he eventually to have cosmetic surgery from overuse of cocaine which destroyed one of his nasal canals. He had a ruined half-nose for a while and looked like he was slowly transforming into a Michael Jackson clone. But it was unsurprising that he’d end up hooked to drugs - Moscow was suddenly absolutely inundated with drugs in the years leading up to and around the return of Crimea. It was only comparable to the heroin epidemic of the 90s that I had heard so much about and Tyrone had redeemed his reputation among his Moscow brat friends by providing them with the best stuff. I couldn’t help but notice that wherever the FSB guys were, there were also plenty of drugs around them. De’andre, a friend of Tyrone’s who had already become a fully blooded FSB member at that point, always had designer drugs on him for friends in need. “Imma hook all y’all sober ass niggas up,” he would often say.
Funny enough, I ended up sitting down with Tyrone for a heart-to-heart on the couch of one rich lady’s salon on the famous “Flower Boulevard” of Moscow’s inner ring one night closer to graduation. The alcohol opened me up and I shared with him that I didn’t know where to go or what to do next. My degree, I suspected, was going to be useless and I didn’t have any connections anywhere except the military, which my family didn’t want me to join. Also, I had gotten disenchanted with the prospects of serving in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where everyone seemed more concerned with promoting “Human Right Freedom Democracy” than advancing Russia’s sovereign interests in the international arena. I was also let down by Minsk I and II and felt that the diplomats had slid a knife into the back of the Donbass resistance fighters. Tyrone faded in and out as he listened, but eventually came up with a novel solution: “shit nigga, why you ain’t tried to link up with mah FSB homeboys?” He slurred.
I shrugged and shook my head. “I don’t know, I’m not sure,” I said. In reality, I distinctly remembered the reactions of aversion that members of my family had exhibited when talking about the gang. Sure, there were some good glowing negroes in the ranks, but for the most part, my racist family had warned me to never get entangled with these people if I wanted to be able to sleep at night.
“Yo straight-edge ass all worried ‘bout dem drug tests?” Tyrone pressed. “Ain’t no thang - niggas got it all figured out.” He explained in his usual erudite, but laconic way.
It turns out that following several scandals involving drug-using and drug-dealing within the FSB, monthly and even weekly spot checks were instituted by the organization. To combat this, many members simply switched to amphetamines, which weren’t being tested for.
“Do many of you guys use … drugs?” I asked him, afraid of the answer that I was expecting to hear.
Tyrone shrugged his shoulders. “Niggas wil’in,” he simply said and nodded his head sagely. “Dey do be wil’in,” he repeated softly.
Tyrone continued to socialize and grow in the ranks among the Moscovite circle of mazhors (the indolent children of the political and financial nomenklatura), but he’d often break into sobs as the party entered the early morning hours. Between the sniffles, he’d complain that he never had a choice, that he was now effectively a slave for life and that he wanted to kill himself to be free of the chains that had been put around his neck. Yes, Tyrone often talked about suicide, but eventually settled into his new condition. “They always be tryna hold a nigga down,” he would often whisper.
Tyrone graduated the academy despite his best efforts to flunk out and got his first official posting soon after.
The first and most visible change was his weight. Tyrone was always a bit chubby, although he claimed that it had nothing to do with all of the fried chicken he ate and that it was all on account of his big bones. But then he began to grow an entire size every couple of months. His FSB homies started calling him “Phat Nigga” and making fun of him.
But the joke, in the end, was on them. When the special military operation began in Ukraine, President Putin refused to send the regular military into the Donbass and decided to lean on the various gangs inside Russia instead. He gave a speech in which he said and, I’m paraphrasing a bit: “These drug-addled negroes need to shape up and start pulling their weight around here,” for which the UN condemned him, of course. On account of Tyrone’s excessive weight though, he got to stay home while his buddies De’Shawn, De’Andre and Reekus were sent to the frontlines.
But the war took its toll on Tyrone as well.
He was given more duties and he became less volatile true, but he became far more somber as well. Bags appeared under his muddy eyes and his usual blabbermouth tendencies came to an abrupt end. He could no longer be counted on to regularly spill gang secrets to his Liberal friends in Moscow who were by that point no doubt already in regular contact with Western secret agents and journalists. As a result, he got invited to parties less and less and he focused on his new job, which seemed to be related to internet snooping. On account of his young age, he was assigned to monitor Russian-language comments sections and forums to collect dirt on Millennials.
One day, Tyrone sent me a message asking to meet with me urgently. “Were yo ass posted up?” the message read. We met the following day and he told me that he was aware of what I had been up to online. Despite myself, I began to sweat and shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I had started frequenting hard-right forums and consuming far-right talking points as I had become increasingly alienated from my university and polite society. It turns out that Tyrone’s friend, Reekus, had traced my IP and had tipped off the other FSB homeboys.
I should point out that Tyrone, despite all of his flaws, was often quite loyal to his friends.
For example, when the Gorilla Flu hoax started in Moscow, he had gotten his friends fake vaccination passes. These were the real deal - no different from the fake passes that the other FSB homeboys had gotten for themselves. Tyrone even warned his friends to stay clear of the government-mandated “AIDS juice” as he called it. Now, he was providing me with yet another favor by tipping me off beforehand.
“It’s impossible to understand what exactly I’m supposed to believe in,” I whined. “What is the correct narrative that you guys want us to repeat and what is the narrative that you want us to avoid?”
Tyrone rolled his eyes, waved his hands and sucked on his teeth before replying. “Don’t be saying nothing, you feel me?” He said. “Shut yo bitch-ass up, fo’ real. We rollin’ up on niggas now..”
I nodded my head sadly as the wisdom of his words sank in. I thanked him for the warning and decided then and there to leave Moscow for good and return to my provincial backwater hometown to live with my grandparents for awhile. The insanity of the last couple of years - the drug craze, the Gorilla flu, the war that wasn’t a war and now the tightening of the screws by the FSB “rollin’ up on niggas” had worn me out.
I still felt worried for Tyrone who wasn’t a bad person, really. A simpleton, maybe. A flap-gummed gossip too. Someone who loved to bully others and pull rank on them, admittedly. Never contributed anything positive to society and yet looked down on the unwashed masses … sorry, I lost my train of thought there. The point is that Tyrone was a good person, I think.
“Any chance that you might be able to get out?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “I’m in for life. Furthermore, no gang, once established, cedes territory on its own volition,” he explained with a sigh. “We’re a part of the security structure of the country now, whether people like it or not. That means that only a rival gang can replace us. But, because we are so useful, no one would want to replace us when we can just as easily be bought over and used by any faction that harbors ambitions of one day taking over. Until a new political order is established, perhaps on the foundation of an aristocracy or even a middle-calls yeoman caste, that is. The current political order is a relic of an older one which was established by a group of terrorists that needed to use the terror tactics of the secret police to reign over a population that largely despised them. We are now, as a society, between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand are the oligarchs. On the other are the security agencies that serve as a counter-balance to them in the current political order. But, we too are mistrusted and generally despised by the population. A new order, based on the power of a new caste needs to emerge to do away with the current one. Perhaps a new order based on the populist model - where order is built on a more direct system of politicians currying favor with the capricious masses. Or, better yet, a political order built on the power of the military class - which will always be far more transparent, democratic and popular (in the good sense of the word) to rule by the oligarchs, the secret police or the mob. Much is changing now. The power of the Oligarchic faction has been dramatically curtailed and a vacuum exists that either the secret police, the masses, the military or some other dark horse organization may step up to fill in. Time will tell what is in store for our country next. Fare well,” he concluded and waved me off as I hopped on the train with my bags and the conductor slammed the door shut behind me.
Tyrone's verbal IQ suddenly increased by leaps and bounds in the last paragraph. Perhaps he grew mature with the surging load of his responsibilities.
Terry Davis needs a shrine built to him for just how much he improved the anti-glow banter.
This is clearly a fake,fictitous,purely made up story of events that no one ever alive or dead went through.But if someone were to theoretically go through such events they'd have my sympathy.Purely hypothetically ofcourse.