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

and melting on my face and my chest in the wide-open pea-jacket. The passers-by flow was adding which signaled the end of the working day for non-manual employees. They hurried home, they had nothing to do with a lonely soldier peacefully taking his rest on the bench.

"Hey!" Someone still shook my knee.

"Fuck you fucking fucker!"

"How dare you? I'm a KGB worker!"

"Fuck your fucking KGB!"

"Just you wait! I'll call the patrol!"

Then I boarded a bus crammed up to its utmost. I was shaking after the long exposure to frost on that bench and suddenly in the dense mass of passengers there opened a cleft straight to a vacant seat. Yes, our people always loved and respected the defenders of Homeland…

We played at the New Year party at the Culinary College. To be more precise, they played it and I was simply an astral body inertially following The Orion.

The autumn draft from Pyatigorsk brought to our battalion a certain Volodya, handled Long. He was not only long but also skinny, with dark circles under his haggard sunken eyes as fit for a perma-fried junkie. But he played guitar like the guitarist from Led Zeppelin in the album "Stairway to Heaven". Alexander Roodko worshiped him, and I also admired his technique but as a person, he was just a piece of crap. "Why are you the way you are, Long?"

"I always push all my shit up so that all of you piss off and leave me alone."

He had a pleasant laugh but laughed too rarely. All in all, he was just a kid who turned a god when having a guitar in his hands… It goes without saying, the construction battalion ensemble did not perform the numbers from "Stairway to Heaven" but Long at times inserted in The Orion repertoire so mighty guitar riffs which Jimmy Page himself wouldn't be ashamed of.

Some Long's buddy from Pyatigorsk brought him his own guitar from home and for that New Year season, he also became The Orion’s drummer because he and Long were in the same rock group which disintegrated after they drafted the guitarist. And when the New Year season was over, he took Long's guitar back to Pyatigorsk, you couldn't keep such things at the battalion's Club…

Yura Nikolayev, the star of Crimean taverns, and Alexander Roodko, a virtuoso from the Dnepropetrovsk Philharmonics, were the vocalists at the New Year parties. They sang, each one in his intrinsic and inimitable style, accompanied by the improvised riffs in the spirit of Jimmy Page and at times of Hendrix, for a change, who also was Jimmy, by the by. However, for a normal music lover from the hinterland expanses nourished on the undying examples of the Soviet variety pop, such variations sounded unacceptably cacophonous, since they were not Kobzon-like in any way. So one of the future cooks had all the right to approach Yura Nikolayev and ask, "Sogwe, can you play Gussian folk music?" That's how she was screwing the words up with her burr.

And Yura knew that Roodko had got completely fallen under the influence of Long whose word became the last and decisive as to what to play and how to play it. Therefore, he directed the girl straight to Long so that she wouldn't lose time in vain.

As for Long, sprawling on a chair with his legs so far away and wide apart, his parade-crap jacket hung on the chair back, but the khaki tie in its obligatory place, only thrown over his shoulder, he at that moment was absolutely lost in Dryland inside his mouth. And there he sat staring fixedly at some or another thing among the distant hazy dunes, licking his scorched lips with his raspy, dry, tongue.

"I am sogwe, do you have Gussian songs in yohg gwepetwahg?"

With a superhuman effort, the warrior on the chair collected all his will and might, concentrated, and focused his optic organs in the direction of the remote sounds to discern that there was a girl speaking to him.

"Gussian? Gwepetwahg? Go stgaight to Comgade Goodko!" and he pointed his index finger at Alexander, who stood by the loudspeaker box pensively twirling the volume knob of his bass guitar amp.

The girl was baffled, naturally, being so ping-ponged from one musician to another, but she was a sturdy backcountry strain and went all the way to The Orion nominal leader.

"I am vegwe sogwe," replied Roodko, and presented her that misty blue gaze of his, "but we genegally don't play Gussian songs." And he sorrowfully sniffed up his everlasting rhinitis.

He would be happy to say it some other way but he couldn't because of his own burr. But she did not know about it!. Now, go and talk about congenial complexes but everything—EVERY THING!—is acquired thru the exposure…

At that party, I had a kissing session with Valya Papayani, a Stavropol Greek woman. Nothing more than kisses. She told me she was a teacher at that Culinary College, and that she was twenty-seven years old. So the next morning Battalion Commander announced at the Morning Dispensing, "Yesterday, one of our fucking musicians spread out a sixty-seven-old slut at the bottom of a staircase!" That slushy brained fucker couldn't even see 27 from 67!. Of course, it was that piece of shit, the Ensign-supervisor who ratted out…

Two days later there was another New Year party somewhere else, but I did not dance there at all. Because of so superior grass quality, the kif was the weed of weed. We blasted on the stairs and then went into the hall, the guys took their instruments, all so tenderly and gently, and they started to play. And the music was strangely distant as if from over a horizon and—which was characteristic—somehow deadened. When leaning your head to the loudspeaker you could see how its front was quaking with the sound, but all the same, it kept muffled.

Then I went to wander around the hall, for a change. And the people there, all of them, were, like, some plywood cut-outs, that is