The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

(I froze in mortification, could it be she's going to announce she had her time of the month?)

Well, in general, if I wanted it… well, I knew what… to come to pass, then I had to agree to one condition…

"What?! Speak out!"

Now, before going out to the city she would make up my eyes.

What the fuck?!. Though, if you come to think about it, that was better than her being on the rag… Hercules would understand me. After the victorious fights against the Nemean Lion, the Lernean Hydra, the Cretan Bull, and other monsters, he was made (by a chick named Omphal) wear a female dress and spin the yarn in a gynoecium, with her high heel crushing his male’s dignity's throat. At least in some way, I'd equal that inhumanly hunky demigod… And I agreed…

Blueish eye shadows tinted my eyelids, black eyeliner accentuated the lashes… And out we went to the city…

(…at present, in the aftermath of all those "blue" and "pink" revolutions, after Elton John was knighted, after the charming cutie pirate Jack Sparrow, etc., etc., people became more intelligently aware.

In those pre-enlightment days folks needed more than a glance to get it what the heck was there with my visage. Then some shrugged, others giggled…)

Borya Sakoon, who came out of his five-story block in Zelenchuk Area greeted me cheerfully but, after a more focused look, suddenly changed in his face. Genuine fright distorted the worn-out facial features of Overseer, the unfinished "hairy yob…" stuck in his throat and he fled back to the block of his residence.

(…and that was the man who survived the rampant banditry and all kinds of "black cat" gangs in the post-war Konotop!

Or maybe because of that? To grab the old Walther gun from the down-most drawer in his chiffonier?..)

"You are nuts on the run from their having your head checked," concluded my younger sister Natasha flatly, when she met us on the sidewalk of Peace Avenue.

In the Central Park of Recreation, Olga took out her cosmetic bag and washed out my War Paint, so much for faking a Hercules. Then Skully's girlfriend Nina with her girlfriend Ira came up to us, and the 3 girls walked off looking for a place to have a smoke.

A pack of Settlement bros approached me, they were celebrating it in full swing already. They felt elated, they wanted that an Orpheus from the Settlement was also nyshtyak. They tore off the lid from an intact bottle and handed it to me… Everything in this life is to be paid for, even your popularity. I raised the bottle up, threw back my head, cast the parting look at the sun, and started drinking from the bottle’s neck.

Then the bottle went from hands to hands around the circle warm and emotional.

Then we went to a deli for more wine.

Then I felt sick and reeled off home…

I woke up in the lean-to on the iron bed which inherited the space from the "Jawa" bike when the Arkhipenkos moved to their apartment. My "dacha" season had already been over, but the bed still tarried in the lean-to and, as it happened, that was the rightest place for it.

I woke up with my raincoat and shoes on, but the bare spring mesh of the bed didn't mind. The main thing was that I hadn't overslept the farewell dances that we were playing in Park that night. Only I still had to trudge all the way there being so stiff and with that oily smack in my dried up mouth and—ouch!—with that pain in the nape…

I finally came there when everyone was already schlepping the equipment to the dance-floor stage. Lyokha fussed that I was shirking, and Olga too began to lay into, "Where did you get lost?"

I hardly could explain that I was very so very much sick, and Lyokha said all that I needed was a hearty swig to get back to life. I shuddered at the very thought of it, but Lyokha and Olga started to laugh at me.

Yurko, the young guy whom Olga used as her errand-boy, ran to a nearby deli and brought wine. I forced myself to take a few gulps and—lo!—the remedy brought me back to life…

After the dances were over and the equipment dragged back to the ticket office, Olga and I left the Plant Park and in 2 minutes of suspensive walking reached her back-alley.

The first khutta, then the Sveta's one, the third was for us. I assuredly walked Olga to the wicket, opened it and… all of a sudden, she recoiled!.

By age, I was two years older than Olga, yet always felt, like, it was another way around. She knew more than I learned from all the stuff in all the books I read.

Besides, she enjoyed respect and authority. Whenever any of the girlfriend in our bohemian milieu had problems with outsiders, she turned to Olga for help. Olga walked out with the brazen and put the stupid cow in her proper place…

It was a rare evening when the dances went off without a fight… A multi-voiced discordant squeal broke suddenly from the dance-floor, yet not at all in time with the number played at the moment. In the dense mass of the youth gathered for collective recreation, a circle of vacant space formed in no time, filled with the blur of rapid gusts of fists milling the air. The vortex swept, tornado-like, across the dance-floor, thru piercing shrieks of girls giving way.

Abruptly yet asynchronously, we cut playing and encouraged dear friends to keep order, please. The defeated side, alone or in a ring of his bros, was pushing thru the crowd to the exit. To remove the low depressing hum, Skully set the tempo with dry snaps of sticks against each other and we started the next number…

Girls though did not make a show of their dissent and for their cat-fights invited each other to go out.