There's nothing like a near-death-experience to get you over the mid-week hump.Staring glassily at the swimmers doing laps 50 meters below, you step to the place where the bungee jumping platform ends. Then you step off. The air rushes up and you think about screaming. Three meters above the water, you are caught in a terrific bounce and fly up. The swimmers recede. You zoom down again and hear yourself laugh.Hanging suspended by your ankles over the Chaika swimming pool, most of your problems seem beside the point. Your level of adrenaline has climbed steadily for 20 minutes and then dropped off in the course of five seconds. Chemically, things couldn't be much better.Bungee jumping is an expensive cocktail, but Muscovites are already proving to be binge drinkers, according to employees of Tarzan's Jungle Bungy Jump. (There are still several schools of thought on how to spell the name.)Only two weeks after the company opened for business, more than 1,000 customers have already shelled out $75 each to fall -- secured by an elastic cord to a crane above -- from a height equivalent to a 16-story building.And according to "jump-masters" shipped in from abroad, the Moscow clientele is a gold mine, combining a high tolerance for high-risk behavior and an insatiable hunger for the latest thing."They are absolute lunatics," said Dave Cooper, who accompanies customers 50 meters into the air in a small cage and encourages them to step off. "They seem to want to do anything available as quickly as possible."In Thailand, where he worked at a Tarzan franchise before coming here, "you try hard to make them feel at ease." In Moscow, so far, "it's not been like that. Here, it's a job just to keep them in the cage."According to industry lore, bungee jumping originated as a rite of passage for young Polynesian men, and was only recently parlayed into an international entertainment craze. Now, a handful of franchises -- with different levels of legal accountability -- operate all over the world.Waldis Pelsch, a Latvian businessman, brought bungee jumping to Russia this spring by arranging a deal with the Thailand-based Tarzan corporation, which supplied the equipment and four trained instructors -- two of whom must be present whenever anybody jumps.Pelsch, 27, said he knew from the start that Russia would be a good market -- "Russians aren't," he pointed out, "very worried about their own safety" -- but business has been going so well that he already has plans to open three or four more jumps in cities all over Russia next summer.For reasons that should be obvious, safety is a big concern. Swedish jump-master Tor Jonsson said Tarzan had suffered no fatalities in nearly 40,000 jumps. "The safety record is as close to 100 percent as it could possibly be," he said.Still, when I tried it, I was suspended upside-down for several minutes after my jump when the electricity went off and they were unable to lower me to the landing platform. Handing me a pole, the staff hauled me in and made polite conversation while my feet hovered more than a meter above my head."I've never seen this happen," they kept saying, while I encouraged them not to let me go.According to company rules, the bungee cords are constructed of 2,000 separate elastic bands, and they must be replaced after every 300 uses. The most seasoned jumpers admitted that nerves are part of the package."It's an unnatural thing you're doing," said Cooper. "I still get that feeling in my stomach when I look down. If you lose that feeling, there's something wrong."