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

The enterprise repaired not just helicopters, but military machines and instead of Directors or Managers they had high-rank officers and Zampolit’s post was that of Deputy Commander at the RepBase. Now, that Commander simply ordered Father to stop his son from being a frightful sight in the city.

True, I did have a yan for sporting long hair like that by The Beatles. And even though the length of theirs was beyond my reach, my hair had already grown enough to touch the top of the shoulder blades when I threw my head back as far as I could to marvel my profile reflected by the mirror in the wardrobe door. At a recent CJR match, I performed the Dean Reed's hit "Jerico" hopping on the stage with a muted mike and whipping my face with my hair.

One good whipping deserved another. How would the RepBase Zampolit know that I was a son of their worker? As if few other Beatles fans were hanging out around the city. I had been told on, and no doubt about it.

However, I couldn't have words with Father for too long because I was sitting on his neck, and Zampolit threatened him with firing if I kept my hair any more…

A vigorous infection swept over our school in spring. The acutest cases of grave epidemic forms were registered in our grade which definitely turned its main locale and spiller…

Vladya and I were seated on stools at the last desk. Quite ordinary stools whose black-painted seats had oblong holes in their center to insert your hand for conveniently moving it to some different place if needed. Their commonness became a challenge… When we wiped off our foreheads the sweat from selfless toil, the black seats of our stools bore deep white scars crying out, ‘THE BEATLES! THE ROLLING STONES!”, and we looked around – what else could supply us a sufficient pastime?

Some unlimited naivety indeed – what could be out there to busy yourself with in a graduating class? Actually, nothing… Still and all, we gave the boredom a slip – we started writing poetry.

It was a prolific poetic eruption turned out in various forms and genres. At the break, we presented our creations to the classmates. We laughed and they were laughing too, unaware that the virus of poeticizing had already started the invisible undoing of their immune systems. Many of them began trying their hand at the production of rhymed lines. Even Chuba turned out some trifle of an epigram. But the indisputable crest-riders in that wave were sitting, sure enough, on the maimed stools at the last desk… Fortunately, the epidemic eventually died down without fatalities.

(…if those scattered pieces of ruled paper torn off from various notebooks were put together, it could become a collection of aspirant poets. And, stashed away in bookstores stacks, it would accumulate the dust there submerged into its drowsy dreams of eager readers' hands and rising to the fame…

It is highly improbable that any of my classmates would recollect that overweening epidemic. None of them would recognize even their own lines, betcha. But, after all, who cares? The final goal is nothing. The main buzz is in doing. Although, I'm still not ashamed of the lengthy elegy crafted at a lesson in Organic Chemistry:

“The day will come for me to join the robbers
To earn my honest daily bread
I'll sleep all day and chew on dried grasshoppers
At night, stray walkers will I intercept…”

Then, of course, I would get killed because elegy is a traditionally sad genre and, lying in the tall grass by the highway:

“I won't grasp it with my head
by nearing Death already chilled
If so urgent was indeed
For you to have me killed?
Of wood was made my pistol, it wouldn't harm a lamb,
With gentle "Hello!" I fleeced the clients
Yet left them kopecks for a tram,
“Take ‘t easy, folks! So’s my job.”
Then soft "Adieu!" and – parting bob…”

A lot of water has flowed in the river of Varanda since then and, quoting the classic poet, handled Monkey, who worshiped banks of the Neva river:

" Some aren't there anymore, and I am far away…”

Okay. That's enough for flashing up my speckles of erudition… It's time to confess that I wasn't a stranger to swindling too. There are things you'd prefer not to remember before starting to recount them…

However, showing oneself off entirely good and irreproachable is foolish and dishonest. It's not a righteous thing, I mean. Anyway, I am not a good guy, I’m way too unsteady for that…)

So, as it was said already, that year we lost the CJR final to the prestigious School 11. In the Contest of Greetings, we schlepped on stage a dummy ship of cardboard, exactly the same as two months before us they dragged out at the Central Television CJR. And they also joked our jokes there, two months before. Both the ship and jokes were still fresh in the memory of the jury members and we were accused of blatant plagiarism in the end.

The team of School 11 came out in top hats made of blackened Whatman paper and finishing their Greeting they presented the hats to our team. I did not get my share, because their Captain left his one on the jury desk to bribe them into the right choice when taking the right decision.

After the defeat, going home without shields yet in top hats, our team members were doffing the paper head-gears at the Settlement crossroads to bye-bye each other and I felt hurt that only I didn't have the thing.

By the moment when the streetcar stop at School 13 was reached, there remained just 2 of all the team – Valya Pisanko and me. And then I insidiously asked Valya for her top hat, like, just to try it on. She credulously gave it and, clapping the paper thing onto my head, I ran away along Nezhyn Street.

I knew she wouldn't follow, she lived in Podlipnoye and had to turn in the opposite direction. Indeed, she didn't chase and only screamed behind, "Sehrguey! Give it back! It's not fair!" I knew it was not fair, but I did not return and did not give it back. Why should I?

The next morning in the lean-to which served my summer bedroom already, I was nauseated by the sight of that piece of Whatman paper blackened with gouache, some disgusting loot.

(…so, I'm assembled of divers parts and meanness enters in the aggregation…)

~ ~ ~

And so the decade was over. But it was not for me to decide whether that term was long or short, because 10 years later I became a different I from that I who 10 years before was handed to the educational system for them to format me into one more usable member in the current society. It’s only fair to admit that the goals set before my didactic cultivators were, in general, achieved. I grew up from a snotty Octoberist to the Head of School Komsomol Committee. I realized that, with the universal gravitation in place, spitting into the sky was meaningless.

Even though I did not have enough of Komsomol zeal to sing "The Internationale" at All-School Komsomol Meetings along with the backup gramophone record by the Bolshoi Academic Choir, I still had no doubt that the USSR was the bulwark of peace throughout the world. (When in doubt, it’s enough to recollect those small-sized red flags with the yellow prints of a dove which Soviet people used to wave at celebration demonstrations.)

Generally, we were the best in everything, and the only area in which we lagged was music. In any song by The Beatles, there were more interesting chord sequences than in the entire Soviet song production. The reason for such a dishonorable state of affairs was that all songs by us started from A-minor… If only The Beatles would not mess around with the politics. By what right did John Lennon announced that the Soviet Union was a fascist regime? It was our country who lost 20 million people killed in the war against fascism, so why couldn't The Beatles mind just music?

However, Furtseva, Minister of Culture of the USSR, was really a nasty bitch not letting them have a tour of the Union. She personally did not miss enjoying their performance behind the closed doors and then announced, "Sorry, guys, but our listener will not understand your music." Yeah, some accomplished bitch of a Minister, because they were getting ready and had already written their hit "Back to the USSR".

As for the school curriculum, I did not comprehend chemistry at all, as well as algebra with trigonometry, and several other subjects for which I did not have time enough. Yet, I was trained to distinguish landlord Famusov from its creator, poet Griboyedov. Wasn't that a sufficient base of knowledge for entering the broad road to bright brave life?

Anyway, it was too late to supplement. The time was up. The final exams were close at hand and then Graduation Party traditionally followed by the night of collective roaming of graduates who were not classmates anymore but still had to meet the dawn of their new life together.

However, all of that was just a background to the more important matter. We were preparing for the contest organized by the City Komsomol Committee. Competition in the nomination The Best Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble, aka VIA. You want a VIA? You'll get it!

All the previous winter, long before and even never suspecting they would announce the competition of VIA's, we were busy producing electric guitars as advised by instructions and blueprints in The Radio and The Young Technician magazines. For a start, we experimented in mounting piezo elements on a common acoustic guitar. As a result, the sound got amplified the way it would with a mike shoved in thru the soundhole, yet it sounded nothing like an electric guitar. Besides, the guitars for 7 rubles and 50 kopecks did not look like those in black and white pictures of different rock-groups with their hair reaching below the shoulders.

Wanna have a guitar with stylish horns? Cut its body out of three-centimeter-thick plywood. Be ready for a long hassle with the neck. The guitars which we manufactured after the drawings in the magazines for advanced technicians could not keep to key.

What is "keeping to key"? Well, if you pluck a string at the twelfth fret and then pluck the same string released, you get the same note, only over one octave. And with the necks we produced, there sounded different notes, the guitars did not keep to key; that's what it meant.

The upshot was we had to fall back on using the necks of common guitars which kept to key alright. Yet, the headstock of a common guitar with its slots for strings looked ridiculous on an electric guitar, like a saddle atop a cow. To replace the headstock in the neck, you have to saw it out and substitute with a homemade one having no slots and with all six or four tuning pegs in one row.

Father soldered the electrical rigging of guitars following the schemes printed in the magazines. Besides, he brought from the RepBase shielded cable enclosed by braided metal strands for the connection of a guitar to the amplifier. Without such a cable, electric guitars issued a godawful wail miles away from any music.

All the testing was carried out in our khutta, with the product in progress connected to the ancient radio receiver because Father said if it worked on that junk then with a normal amplifier would make it sound topnotch.

The pickups became a major headache. A pickup is a tiny box installed under the strings with an individual coil for each of them. One coil comprised six hundred spirals of hair-breadth copper wire wound by hand, now it remains only to multiply them by the number of strings to equip the guitar with a pickup…

Eventually, everything got assembled. The radio receiver shakes its case bursting from steely thundering cords and popular guitar riffs, drowning Mother's yells of protestation from the kitchen. Wow! We're delighted. The bomb! Father looks pleased too…

Now you can take everything apart, level the plywood of guitar body with sandpaper, putty it and tenaciously polish again, this time with finer sandpaper before spraying the body with paint (you’ll choose red, betcha), then re-assemble your shiny new electric guitar. Enjoy!.

Thus we got all the right, as well as equipment, to apply for participation in the contest organized by the City Komsomol Committee who kept pace with the contemporary life demands. All in all, there were exactly 2 competitors vying for the laurels of the Konotop’s best:

1) VIA "The Kristall" by the House of Culture named after Lunacharsky (aka Loony);

2) VIA "The Orpheuses" by the Club of the Konotop Engine and Car Repairing Plant (aka the KahPehVehRrZeh Club).