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“How I Divorced Lady Spyderco As First Step in Seeking a Traditional Tbilisi Wife”

Fiction by Bryan Adrian, written in 2007

First, let me introduce myself, I am Barak Bernini, not a famous film star, just an occasional adviser to community rights neighborhood organizations in Tbilisi, Georgia. The local urban village residents are extremely worried about the high volume of American Mormon missionaries here, and do not trust them. But that is another story, which I will get to in just a short while. 

Emphatically, I'd like to thank all of you in the Spyderco manufacturer’s home office for your Spyderco credit-card-encased kommando knife. It is ideal for concealment within a side pant's pocket, and it is exactly the size and nearly the thickness of a normal credit card or ATM card, as you state in your catalogues. The attractive silvery stainless steel frame is elegant and does not attract attention from security guards, pedestrians, nor tourists, when by accident one pulls it out of their pocket, rather than just the usual keys or coins, as intended. Any unexpected witnesses to what you are holding in your hand think simply that you are merely the lucky possessor of a thin and becoming high quality credit card case, to protect your coveted bank cards, and nothing more. 

But to the assailant or perpetrator who crosses your path with ill intent, it is another matter. I had to sleep overnight in parks on a few occasions lately, traveling on a shoestring budget between Washington DC and Philadelphia, seeking stringer reporter or even temp editing assignments as an out-of-luck progressive muckraking writer. Many times a job interview for a fresh-in-town jobseeker, such as myself, would be post-scheduled for a piece of work I desired, on the very last day of my paid-in-advance SRO hotel residence. I often could not afford to pay the hotel rate for this last day of my stay, which of course would be the day the interview had finally been set up for me by the customary young and petite and air-headed female human resources manager, which has become a commonplace affair in our newly globalized corporate reality. Thus, once again, the parks called out my name as a familiar friend, including not only the embraces of dewy green grass, but also the kiss of plenty of dog shit. 

As a result, I found myself one sultry, hot, steamy summer night in the crime ridden Northeast sector of Washington DC, far away from Union Station and near the notorious Northeast sector outermost homeless shelter dubbed 'Chocolate City' by some people, and nowhere close to the ritzy Capitol Hill townhouses close to Congress. 

My train did not leave from Union Station till 8am the next morning, so I had lots of time to kill. I found a place to hide and sleep under a children's slide of a fairly nice mini-park adjacent to an African-American ghetto. This would have to be the bedding I had haphazardly selected for myself, the night before my distant Philadelphia job interview the next day. 

The mosquitoes were biting like i had dreamed of prospective employers seeking me out. These skeeters did not need to see my resume in order to exploit my assets. They made their quick appointments without asking me in any formal manner. 

Around 3:30 in the morning, three ebony skinned men crawled towards my toddler playground hiding space to smoke a joint and gossip with each other about women being bitches and hos, and for some reason they did not see me for quite some time, lying there on my back as quietly and motionlessly as I could, under the slide. I had, however, very slowly positioned my right hand to firmly grip around my Spyderco knife, ready for action. Otherwise, I was playing possum and assuming a dead man's posture flat on my back like a fatally stricken soldier after a fierce battle, legs sprawled. 

Suddenly, one of the lads shouted out to his mates, "For Christ's sake man, look at that --- that ---- right over there, a dead white dude, don't you see him?!" 

They all made short snortles and exclamations of dread at seeing a dead white man in an all black neighborhood. 

Then one of them said, "hey look man, he's barely breathing, he must be dead drunk!" 

I remained motionless and reduced my breathing to a few milliliters of air per second. 

I was overwhelmed with fear, but replayed in my mind all the many hours of training videos I had studied on the art of using a Spyderco knife in tight and deadly situations. 

My three months of daily training sessions, sparring with a retired government NSA contractor of the U.S. Federal government, came back to me in a flash, and I was grateful for my older friend's patience in showing me defensive and slashing moves over and over and over again. He not only trained me, but he had given me my first honorary Spyderco knife ever in my possession, the one under the weight of my hand in my pocket now. 

This same knife in my hand had kept burglars and drug addicts away from my throat in dirtbag hotel rooms in New York City also, during several other efforts to find work in that big daddy of a town, too. When a thief enters your hotel room and thinks nobody is at home, and you are lying in bed naked and hungry but very ready to brandish such a weapon in their face, or near their crotch, the intruder inevitably makes some lame excuse and makes a very speedy disappearance. 

If only I had such a hand-held effective tool to help my poor mother who lost her house and garden and all assets recently to a nursing home conglomerate, working hand in hand with State Elderly Care operators, all of them raking in billions in tax monies quicker than FEMA in New Orleans, I would be the happiest man alive! More on that later. In some tight spots, especially against shifty lawyers and legislators, your splendid Spyderco knives can do no favors, I am sorry to confess. 

After hearing jibes against my race for a quarter of an hour from these three bloods, and their insulting anti-homeless-persons jokes too, they made no movements closer to me nor any kind of physical threats towards me whatsoever. The playful young men finally moved on and I took a deep breath afterwards, and went back to sleep. 

About an hour later, for no known reason I have yet entertained to account for it, my inner and ancient reptilian brain stem became aroused into a state of red alert! I opened my eyes just in time to see the same two Guyanese illegals -- who many times before while in DC I had seen stealing people's unattended bags near Union Station. Now in the pitch black darkness they were like jackals on the prowl, with the morals of a starving leech. 

The first incident with the harmless three black lads who had parked themselves quite nearby me to smoke a joint earlier and who debated among themselves which of them had made off with the most sexual conquests during the preceding week, had left me feeling somewhat defensive, and for that reason I had fallen asleep with my Spyderco knife, my Lady Knife, loosely held in my right hand while sleeping flat on my back. 

My eyes did not focus on the approaching forms in the darkness nearly as quickly as my fears demanded, and when my pupils did adjust somewhat, I could only see vague shapes in the blackness, and to my discomfort, I suddenly saw the whites of four eyes, and then made out the scruffy mustaches and rodent-like movements of the two attackers crawling commando style towards me in the tall grass of the children's park. 

The two bodies were only about 12 feet from me and seemed very confident of their surprise element in their forthcoming assault on me, and they were hungry indeed for my travel bag, which i was using as an oversized pillow. 

I gripped my knife with intent to kill, sprang like an army recruit doing a military sit-up going fast-forward, and sprang into an upright sitting position. I opened the knife with a swift and final sidewise slicing motion, swinging my right arm to lock in place the razor sharp jagged-edged knife blade, ready for immediate action. I was suddenly aware of any and all deadly blows that would be necessary to be delivered by me, without hesitation, should the need arise. 

This model of your Spyderco knives collection makes a lovely loud snapping CLICK noise, when it springs all the way forward into lock-and-battle mode, especially after having been sidewise whipped properly, as taught in training. 

The snap-and-click 'KLACK' of my Spyderco boomed like a sonic blast in the quiet of the night, and directly into the ears of my would be killers. When they saw the rage in my face and the glint of the open blade in the dim moonlight, their eyes bugged out of their heads like large golf balls. They showed me a kind of epileptic seizure condition resulting from their momentary shock, and then they fled in haste. My travel bag was still at my side. 

This enabled me to lay down my sleepy bedeviled head back onto my gear and to catch a little more shut eye before taking the train to Philly in a few hours to look for a reporter's gig. 

But this was not the coup-de-grace of my Spyderco's very high status as the most practical nemesis of my enemies! About that, I will try to tell you now. 

On November 7th, 2007, I entered the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, about dawn, after an all night drive from the Black Sea town of Batumi, a gritty oil export seaport for other foreign countries' profits, and their multinational operations. Batumi was less than I had expected. Lots of old and new oil storage terminals in a seaside resort for old leering uncles and the types of people that go to Coney Island. Maybe in the late 1800s when Baron Alphonse Rothschild built up the port and the railroad for his oil flow from Baku to Batumi, it was a much more fetching place. It did not hold me, and as I said, I headed straight for Tbilisi. 

There were soldiers everywhere in Tbilisi in the early morning sun near the imposing Parliamentary Building, bunched up in the streets together like steaming horse dung heaps. Running at a gallop were Speznas commandos, wearing Darth Vader looking helmets with plastic face shields and trendy European gas masks. A woman in her 60s was lying on the pavement with her teeth bashed out. 

She was what the media, after the Presidential military crackdown that ensued, labeled, a violent anti-government agitator. A pool of blood was circling her kindly but unconscious grey-haired head. 

I couldn't believe my eyes. Water canons were spraying people in near-freezing weather. A female New York Times journalist was laying on the ground with her knees and elbows bloodied and scraped. It looked like her camera and eyeglasses had been broken into many pieces. 

I had to ask many people in English, Spanish, and in German, what was going on, but nobody spoke any of these languages with me for quite some time. I was listening to this new to my younger ears, to an extremely complex ancient Georgian multiple consonant-challenging language, for the first time ever. I could only say two or three phrases in Russian, a language well understood here, so I had to judge events solely with my American eyes. 

A truncheon swung down near my head so I bobbed away from it and grabbed hold of my Spyderco in my pocket. I did not know if the man in the black ski mask and black sweater was a cop or a soldier or a secret commando for the ruling government, perhaps funded by USAID, as was frequently rumored on the internet. 

Suddenly I heard English being spoken! There was a large group of State Department looking Americans running for the Parliament doors! I overheard two of them, who were running, from their nametags I could read NED on the man's and Fannie Mae on the woman's, discussing a secret upper floor of the Parliament where they had completely concealed their operations within the Georgian Parliament, a floor within the heart of the government which was open only to them and their special guests, with an electronic key security card. I could not make out the floor number in Parliament they were talking about, for just then a man hurling a smoking tear gas canister back at the police shouted out loudly near my head, Shen, Kleo! 

Some more truncheons batted around my head and body and I ducked and swerved out of the way, but a down-at-the-heels semi-gray-haired American expat journalist, of some sort, was grasped from behind and held by many pairs of hairy arms wrapped around him like chains. They next started to pummel him mercilessly with their fists. His face was taking it badly, and then they worked on his skull and abdomen until they were so utterly tired, that they simply walked away from his almost comatose body and lit up cigarettes, like after sex. 

I met this same guy a few days later, swathed in bandages. He was an anti-corruption USAID agitator who had published many news features on malfeasance all over the world, investigations on lost funds and misspent finances within several USAID satellite projects. He said he was married to an Armenian. I told him I was married only to my Spyderco knife, and I highly recommended that he buy one soon, and have a honeymoon with it. From the look on his face, as bruised as it was and as bumpy were the lumps crowning his head, I figured he needed some kind of kick-ass hormonal catharsis. 

We both looked up at a window high in the Parliament building where the sunshine was reflecting off of it like a mirror, every so often, in the glass. An American flag was proudly displayed in this window. An eager young Georgian reporter from a local Tbilisi economic rights advocacy newspaper was trying to capture by camera the frenzy of fighting in the streets between hundreds of thousands of Georgians -- opposing their uncaring government -- and the heavily armed government security forces. But the poor man could not get his photos snapped. He was blocked by the statuesque figure of a Georgian woman. She told me she worked for GEORGIA TODAY when I asked her. She was evidently a Muskie Fellowship graduate, guessing by the large IREX badge she had roped around her neck, and she continued standing there after I moved away, like a compressed giant block of phosphate fertilizer, saluting the American flag clearly seen in the Parliamentary window. She was obstructing both the camera angle, and view, of the local reporter. She seemed in a kind of Rapture, like they speak of in the Second Coming of the post-Millenialists or among Mormons. 

Georgia Today is a pro-American Chamber of Commerce policy English-language newspaper published in Tbilisi with a U.S. manager who is a major investment hedge fund player in the old Russian Federation, in addition to being a former gold mining director in Georgia, along with attractive Cayman Islands interests. The newspaper prides itself on its unbiased coverage of news events, even though, many weekly editions contain a full color insert on the glories of the Georgian military build-up that has been using up tremendous amounts of American monies. The struggling poor villagers and farmers and pensioners and teachers here get virtually zip from it. The woman continued to remain standing there and standing there, saluting the flag, and her unflinching patriotism nearly brought crocodile tears to the eyes of the thousands of opposition combatants around her. They were crying out to try to warn her that her skirt had been ripped off in the chaos of the street activity around Parliament, and she hadn't a clue that she was standing in her panties only, from her waist down. Poor Georgian 'gogo,' blinded by her free education abroad. 

My bandaged new reporter friend quickly accepted my Spyderco. Unfortunately, he rushed at a policeman just afterwards and swung the knife down at his gun belt. The gun in its belt and holster dropped to the ground like shit sodden trousers, down to his riot police boots. Everybody who had been dancing the Kartuli Tango with the military crackdown government personnel had a good laugh over this! The riot policeman who had lost his revolver spluttered out a machine gun like battery of very dirty and ugly Georgian cuss words. My eardrums nearly burst from the force of so many ancient Colchi consonants strung together and spit out by such a powerhouse of a compressor. 

Another policeman ran over to my friend, still holding his new Spyderco knife with glee radiating out from his face, and the riot cop kicked the Spyderco knife out of his hand. A third riot policeman scooped up the knife from the ground with his fingers and the three policemen then all climbed up quickly into a water canon vehicle and drove away with the booty. 

Luckily, the greying conspiracy-theory journalist had not been arrested, the soldiers overlooked him in their rush to get into the water canon vehicle. 

"Hey, did I tell you yet about the can of worms I opened up in Pakistan, where the USAID folks got busted in foreign courts and smeared in the world press, for siphoning off the greater share of their own financial aid?? …….I wrote the feature!" Ho, that was me man!” the gray haired 50-something rabble rouser boasted.

”Sorry pal, no time I answered, I have to telephone my mother, its her birthday!” I answered this mysterious journalist.

As I was leaving my always going full-throttle newly acquired reporter friend, I turned back to wave goodbye one last time, and just then from a distance I saw a Board member of the local AmCham spitting in his face. I recognized the face from their monthly oil pipeline-driven magazine photo opportunity spreads. 

I looked for a phone booth but all I could find were vintage 1950s-looking old Soviet aluminum box phones that would not accept any coins correctly. So I went into a little post office, one of only three or four in all of Tbilisi, and placed a call to the States. 

My mom's phone had been disconnected. The recording warned me permanently disconnected. I found that very strange and disturbing. Even though I seldom visit her I called her frequently, and I would never miss calling her on her birthday. Something was wrong. Very wrong. 

I got lost and was in the hills behind Parliament, in Old Tbilisi. I walked down a few hills with poor street signage and broken sidewalks, and then saw the Central Elections Committee (CEC) building. A lot of thugs were standing around in front of the door, like it was a Racing Bets outlet in New York City. They looked similar to many of the unemployed men of Tbilisi, although dressed a bit better and quite a bit smugger in attitude. 

A huge dog that was homeless, broke from his pack of 7 or 8 other homeless dogs who had hungrily joined in the opposition, and lunged at me. Perhaps he could smell Ned and Fannie Mae on me. I reached for my Spyderco, but of no help to me now, it was gone. The three riot police had confiscated it from my bandaged anti-USAID agency pal. I tried to kick the dog in the snout but he was damned fast and mean, and he tackled me to the ground and chewed into the back of my knee, into the tender flesh. 

A lovely Georgian female doctor who was shouting loudly along with the opposition forces, protesting for better public health care systems, and fundings for village clinics, and for some free medicines here, she helped me up. She had some rubbing alcohol in her purse and pulled it out promptly and nearly completely cleaned my pretty deep dog bite wound, in a jiffy. 

She warned me that I should get anti-rabies injections as soon as possible. She gave me her mobile phone number in case I needed help later, and I also learned that she was unmarried, as we were saying goodbye.

As I was trying to find a cab driver who spoke some English, I turned around and looked inside the window of the CEC elections office, once again.

Inside there was a man who resembled the president and he was shredding many voters’ names lists with my Spyderco knife! I cannot be certain it was truly the president of Georgia, for I had only been in Georgia for a day or two, but the hawkish eyes and a hunger for military adventures were scrawled identically all over this man's face also, mirroring exactly what I had detected in the face of an unfamiliar to my eyes, president ranting on television while I had recently been in Batumi, the night before. Maybe all men in the Georgian Parliament have that same demonic look in their eyes, and the face I was staring at now from this angle was perhaps only one of the lesser MPs! One thing is certain, it was not “Tootsie”, local nickname for the current de facto female president until the new president shall be elected in transparent border-to-border 2008 nationwide elections! 

Whoever this man was, he was most certainly shredding documents that looked very official. Stacks of them, and all papers crucial to the upcoming election, on January 5th, when most people are saddled with bad hangovers just after New Year's celebrations, and, just before the January 7th Orthodox Christmas family tradition-bound holidays here. This strategic timing puts all voters in between a rock and a hard place. I crept up as close as I could to the window without being observed, and on some of the documents being made into early election-victory confetti, I could make out vaguely the imprimatur of OSCE on the publishings and correspondences being violated before my very unbelieving eyes. 

I next went to the Infectious Diseases hospital and after a long wait received my anti-rabies injection, the first of several awaiting me. The wound was not further cleaned nor dressed at the hospital, that would be my own personal duty later, I had been told. For a poor country, I was greatly pleased, however. Why? The French Verorab anti-rabies treatment I had received was free, so something on a governmental level was working quite well here, after all. 

In the next few days military law was imposed, and all the television media were shut down or raided, except for one pro-government television station that played hours and hours of speech-making by the president, wearing his expensive Dutch suits and colorful European ties. 

Between the president's hours-long speeches, this station, the only one allowed to air news during the State of Emergency, also showed long clips of happy faced Georgian men wearing what looked like snappy American Army uniforms, changed a wee bit, with sexy Georgian ladies swooning over these well equipped men. For the Glory of the Country was the subliminal message, buried somewhere in all the glittering heavy weapons featured in the propaganda pieces, disseminating the subliminal message, "This is the only job --young men of Georgia--you will ever find.”

I could not find even a single minute of cable news from the West during this State of Emergency. CNN, BBC, and Euronews were flat out. Gone from the cable channels and air waves broadcasts. Government censorship in what is championed by the local American embassy as “a beacon of Democracy” in the Levant region bordering on Central Asia. 

Perhaps you are interested in the outcome of what happened between me and the pretty Georgian female doctor, and if i found her again, and ask yourself did any romance spring up from our encounter during the hostile protest? Yes, I did telephone her, and we did meet at the university cafeteria a few times later, but no, nothing significant further happened, and despite the rumours that many Georgian women are seeking a foreign husband, I never married her, and she never asked me. I, myself however, am interested my Dear Sirs at Spyderco, in a good fishing knife from your coming 2008 collection. But even more pressing a goal than a new fishing knife, is to meet the ideal Georgian woman to replace my Lady Spyderco knife, as my companion! 

So, yes, I will stay here for a time in Tbilisi, where imported goods never seem to reach anybody without going through an iron fingered family monopoly with a tight grip on the traffic of consumer goods.

Could you please, Spyderco, start as soon as possible with discounted and online Fedex delivery to Georgia? That would help your wonderful under 3-inch blade products to legally get across the borders and into the lucrative market of teenage boys here. These boys and their parents are getting worked up over despotic national governance and pushy Mormon missionaries, and I think they would greatly appreciate your Spyderco 2008 collection during their Christmas and New Year shopping, if for nothing else, just to hold in their hands some of your superb craftsmanship! Thank you Spyderco! 

Myself? You ask? How am I doing now?

I am still seeking my perfect Georgian wife! 

Sincerely, 

Barak Bernini