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

two-thirds of the tobacco pours into his palm. A sharp blow into the Belomor’s thick-paper mouthpiece scatters the rest of the tobacco away. He bites the edge of the paper tube and pulls the cigarette tissue halfway off the mouthpiece. The stuff and tobacco in the palm mixed with care, the lengthened cigarette tube starts to consume the mixture in gentle tiny jerks.

Though watching the process for the first time ever, I still knew he was stuffing a joint.

"Spark it," and he brought up a burning match. "Keep the smoke in you.”

We smoked the joint passing it to each other, I diligently copied his way of inhaling and keeping the smoke in the lungs.

"Well, so what?"

"What what?"

"You asking? Wasn't you fucking touched? Well, you're some moose!"

"I'm sorry."

Disappointed, he left for the evening roll-call…

~ ~ ~

One week later, on my day shift, 2 soldiers of a Central Asian appearance modestly entered the stoker-house filled with the duet wailing by the furnace and the pump. Probably, from Separate Company, or else ours from the Crimean draft.

"We a-need sieve it," one of them said timidly.

"What?"

"Da ganja. You knows yoursel."

I did not really understand what all that was about, yet it's not proper to look ignorant before the youngs. "Okay."

They came out and returned 4 already, carrying a couple of some gunnysack bags. I led them to the workshop room and returned to watch the howlers.

A couple of times, I checked into the workshop with the grass bunches spread out on the workbench. They greeted me with their mute united smiles of gratitude and I went back – why to interfere with busy people knowing their job? In two hours, when it was already quiet in the stoker-house, their caravan moved to the exit. "We there a-left," said the last in their file with a joyful smile.

In a shallow plywood box that had since long been kicking back around on the workbench, there was a handful of brownish sticky dust. I put it away into the iron box next to the never used hammer-and-chisel and just forgot about it…

Of course, I remembered the dust in the box when on the payday instead of the usual "Prima" I bought a pack of "Belomor-Canal". Repeating the procedure demonstrated by Gray, I stuffed a blunt and sparked.

Vo-ohoo! What the tha-a-at?

And I swam up to the mirror peeping from the wall and looked into to make sure there really was no one behind because there was a clear feeling as if my head was like a balloon that was not filled too tight so you could jab it from opposite sides but not as deep as to burst up but just to spin your fingers inside where they do not reach each other as I was now feeling jabbed thru my temples and they twirled inside the brain convolutions but in the mirror there was just only me alone without anyone behind me the balloon floating gentle and slow because I was kinda zeppelin but then yes it was only very necessary to fly over and check the manometer glass or else we all will fly away and very high… you are the moose yoursel, Gray…

(…that was how I became a nashavan, aka grass doper, one of the enlightened initiates who get kef from cannabis, aka marijuana, aka grass, aka anasha, aka ganja, aka kif…etc…)

The first one to register my acquisition of the new dimension was Gueerok, a descendant of German colonists, one of the Ensigns at Fourth Company. He saw me stunned still, in a stoned reading from the scraps of The Red Star, the army daily glued, a decade before, on the tin stand in the grass drying up by the drill grounds.

The sun kept pouring its scorching heat on my piss-cutter. So what? Like to the political studies, like, I'm preparing… Hmm… Americans once again defeated in Vietnam, from our correspondent in Saigon… He approached me from the right but seeing that the "Belomor-Canal" cigarette in my fingers was smoked up to its paper mouthpiece and there was no hope even for the “heel”-stub, he smiled a weary smile, licked his dry lips, and weakly melted away in the heat…

The veil of ignorance slipped off from my enlightened eyes and there came the revelation that everyone in The Orion was on the drag, though each one in his own way… Karpesha and Pickle in a businesslike manner. Jafarov – very softly. Roodko was following the homeopathic shebang of moderate buoys at regular intervals. Robert – when they treated him, yet not always… It looked like I almost got late for a departing train.

But the coolest weed was by Sasha Lopatko, the Club painter. In his room, I had half-weightlessness fits, moving gracefully as some underwater vegetation or, when in full, like on a visit to the orbital space station Salyut, only not often, because of his meanness. Roodko also agreed that he had never seen such a greedy egoist in his life. And strange it seemed indeed when taking into account such a good father – a minister of the cult, who should infuse his son with love towards your neighbor…

(…when on high, your drift can be sort of different to another time of being under. In kef, generally, you’re getting filled with all-forgiving calm, you feel mellow and nappy, and you want any other mother’s son feel good too and you get so discreet and unobtrusive, you don't want to disturb anyone's fluff.

Or you could suddenly notice some funny wrinkle in the surrounding reality and – you're done, you just cannot stop, you'll laugh until completely exhausted, then you'll catch your breath and start laughing again. That kind of drift is called "to catch the arrival". That’s the most dangerous drift if you’re a TV announcer.

Still another time, you could get concentrated on doing something and went on doing it, and doing it, and doing in the mode of utter circumspection and methodicality with the utmost, ofttimes unnecessary, finesse and over-perseverance, and though it’s