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

era's fault if good ideas pop up in the mind of a certain dolt when it's too late already… So I had no other choice but to buy a dog of the biggest available size with the price answering the proportions. The brute was no less than a meter tall, rigged out in trousers and a shirt. The same, practically, doll, only with a canine head…

Lenochka grew a healthy child, and she attended the big kindergarten "Sunny" not too far from home, in the apple orchard alongside May Day Street. All September, I was taking her to "Sunny" and coming after her at the end of the day, because those who worked at the student construction platoon were exempt from the patronage assistance to collective farms.

My beard was shaved off but I kept the hair long. Once I and my brother went to dances together. Sasha Basha had already replaced The Spitzes at the Loony dance-floor.

My brother had served his two-year hitch at the Baikonur cosmodrome and because of that he lost any chance of going out of the country for 20 years. Even visiting the resorts of socialist Bulgaria was out of the question to make sure he wouldn't blurb out to a chance CIA spy sunbathing on a beach that at the Baikonur, besides the astronauts, all kinds of test ballistic missiles were launched every week unnoticeable to all those spy satellites orbiting above us in 3 layers already…

Starting off to the Loony, I put my "Mona-Lisa" sunglasses on. You’d hardly need to wear sunglasses in the evening, but the "Mona-Lisa" in its thin golden rim was commonly viewed as the swanky symbol of a dandy dude of fashion as well as the jeans losing their blue dye with wear. Such jeans were pushed over for 120-150 rubles, which was more than an average workman salary. The mainstream trafficking of jeans to Konotop was operated by well-tanned Algerians who studied at the Engineering Technical School on Peace Avenue.

By the by, those Algerians were so naive. "He said-a come-a go out and talk-a. I come-a out, he kick-a me a kick. Why-a?" But for all their naivety, they never scaled the jeans price down.

And my jeans were bought for just 30 rubles and that what they looked, some Brazilian crap never fading with washing, nothing like Lyalka's "Levi's". Therefore, although it's hard to see thru sunglasses in the evening, they justified themselves on the dance-floor, veiling the misery in jeans…

To the dance-floor, my brother and I arrived after the break when the crowd crammed the place to the utmost. Sasha went around looking for his girlfriend, and I pulled up nigh the stage and remained there listening; Basha's guitarist, Marik, was good at solo riffs.

Then some salabon buster came up and gazed at me. Well, quite understandable too, got impressed with such a hippy-long hair, the "Mona-Lisa", and my metropolitan air in general. So, he stared for a while and got lost in the crowd.

I stood where I was and in a couple of minutes—good evening to your khutta!—the same buster popped up but already with his buddy. They approached me and, synchronously so, swayed back and—whoosh!—two fists were flying at me. I parried them with my shoulder but the collective impact of the double blow slammed me off and I, like, flew into some parallel space.

I mean it – it was a completely different dimension, as if under the sea. The sound of the dances instantly turned off and I was gliding or, rather, spinning along the concrete floor. From all the sides in that mute space around, lots of legs rushed towards me, each one all too eager to kick. And those legs were somehow not complete but, sort of, cutouts, from feet and up to knees, no higher. So they whooshed by from here and there, only soundlessly, missing to inflict bodily harm.

I yanked me up and jumped onto the bench by the circular grating and pressed my back to its pipes. That’s when the sound came back, the shrieks of girls and Basha's preaching on the microphone, "Friends, please, observe…" And round the bench, a pack of guys stood facing me and one of them, such a hefty slob, yelled, "Who're you? Who're you? Take off your glasses!."

I pulled the "Mona-Lisa" off and someone shouted, "From The Orpheuses!" They obviously were Settlement guys although I did not even know them.

So, they yanked me off the bench into their tight circle and warped out of the dance-floor, and they at once went back to the general sorting out in progress. On that day the blades from Depot Street attempted at staking off the Loony as their sovereign turf.

At the park exit, I met my brother with his brow broken. We had to go to the Station for him to wash the blood off under the tap in the men's room…

To mark the most obvious things is the hardest of tricks. I had been raiding weed plantations as far as the Kandeebynno itself, while in the neighbor's garden, right over the fence splitting our plots, there grew a dense coppice of cannabis. That's what a limited outlook means. I was looking into the distance and couldn't see under my very nose. The situation called for the restoration of historical justice which I did at night and, to cover the tracks, heaved the weed looted from the neighbor's garden over his fence to the next lane, and from there back, round the corner, to our wicket and up to the attic in the shed… The quality of tested samples was simply excellent. I shared some part of the booty with Lyalka for him to get on high, and feel that not for nothing he was warming me up in those two years…

You strike a lode and there comes another. In Nezhyn, in the plot by an inconspicuous khutta in the Count's Park, right across the road from the Leninist Komsomol cinema, there stood 5 ample bushes of weed