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

No one listens to him, they sheepishly plod on towards the summer cinema ticket office. Be like everyone else…

If for a couple of decades you keep folks without even a brass band around, they would readily put down 50 kopecks for a slip of blank movie-ticket with the "price 35 kop.” printed black on blue.

After the dances, when we brought the equipment back to the narrow ticket office, the cashier shared that she had sold 500 tickets that night. The following day Pavel Mitrofanovich ordered to remove all the benches from the dance-floor to cram more people inside. The merchant genes in his DNA surpassed all my guesses.

What did we play? Basically, instrumental pieces like in that LP disc by The Singing Guitars plus the songs we had prepared for the contest, however, without my third already.

At times, at the insistent request of the public, Quak would come up to the microphone to break all hell loose by "Shyzgara". He looked great with that long blonde hair of his and small mustache of albino color. It’s only that he made people wheedle him for so long, but then: "Shyzgara!"

And the bursting, eager response, the wild wail from several hundred throats:

"Vaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!"

(…you should have heard this song. Yes, you had, and more than once for sure, only without the lyrics. The TV folks like to use it as background soundtrack when advertising all kinds of female lingerie and stuff.

And at that time a rock-group from Holland, The Shocking Blue, toured the globe with practically just that one song of theirs – "Venus" which made them “the group of the year”, surprising all the music critics as well as the band themselves.

And their vocalist, of course, sang:

" She's a goddess!”

Yet, Quak's "oidclothy" interpretation did not prevent anybody from being carried away and shrieking at the top of their lungs:

"Vaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!"

I mean to say that true, sublime, work of art finds its way to the masses and ignites sincere response in spite of any accent.

Shyzgara!!!..)

And the masses grew more and more dense. When in the middle of the dances we announced a short break, it took a while to push thru the crowd and get out to a side alley towards the long booth of whitewashed planks, marked with "M" and "F" at its ends.

There was no time to idle because back on the stage Chuba was already dubbing random riffs by his bass guitar to set a-quaking the front of the huge loudspeaker borrowed from the summer cinema. Skully's current girlfriends with the girlfriends of theirs used the nook behind that loudspeaker for stacking their shoulder bags.

Yes, it was Skully who had the most frantic success among the girls in The Orpheuses bohemian milieu. (It's inappropriate to use 'groupies' when talking of VIA’s, right?)

What do girls find in all those drummers, eh? I, for example, had only one time seen home a certain blonde Irina. It's hard to say who of us cooled down quicker – she, having to wait after the dances while The Orpheuses were hauling all the equipment to the summer cinema ticket office, or I because of the alarming fact that she lived in the dangerous neighborhood of Zagrebelya.

Later on, she was picked up by Anatoly Melai who was smart enough to escort her by a taxi. Getting out of a car pulled up by her gate, Anatoly would ask the driver, "Chief, when the meter ticks up to one ruble, gimme a honk, eh?"

I know not if the driver, after the stipulated honk, got amused watching the Melai’s trot while fumbling with his fly or Anatoly accurately set his temporal limits. Anyway, Zagrebelya still remained dire straits for those in love.

In another development, I was approached by Kolya Pevriy. When at school, he kept bully-ragging me so that I even started to figure out for how long I still had to suffer before he'd leave after the eighth grade and enroll the Seminary. And now he came up with full respect and asked to step out from the dance-floor to his classmate Valya, who also was a year older than me. She was going somewhere to be operated from an inborn heart defect and wanted to talk to me.

I went out at the half-time break, stopped by her side in the dark alley. We both were silent, she kept sighing, and then the break was over. Some romantic date…

How did we play? That question I can answer with just one word:

LOUD!

Oh, hapless tenants of the two-story apartment block right over the Plant Park fence!.

(…in the beginning of the third millennium, the King of Spain asked Jews to forgive that 500 years ago the great-grandpas of their great-grandpas of their great-grandpas were deported from the land of Spain. Better late than never…

Forgive us, O, woeful-tenants, for making you deaf three times a week!

Never again we’ll be so inhumanely beastly!.)

~ ~ ~

However, the Club life didn’t get fixed to the dance-floor alone. The Head of Variety Ensemble, fair-haired saxophonist Aksyonov, popped up again and integrated us into his band to accompany their vocalist Zhanna Parasyuk at concerts by the Plant Amateur Activities.

One of the rehearsals was held on the stage of open-air cinema in the Park with the white screen pulled aside because the season of summertime cinema was at its end. We worked before the empty benches in the auditorium enclosure performing another number in the inescapable A-minor:

"Icy ceiling, creaky door –
In the Winter-Mommy's hut…"

The dusk was thickening outside and in the auditorium, when thru the tunnel of entrance under the projectionists' booth there appeared a couple of girls escorted by a guy, too young though to be a boyfriend.

I thought that, seeing empty benches all around, they’d turn about and leave at once but, no, they slowly proceeded and got seated somewhere in the fifth row. Well, the audience of 3 is also an audience. One of the girls had long dark hair, but she was fat. The other was what you’d need for a girlfriend in her mini-skirt and checkered waistcoat. Her hair, even though short, was wavy and yellow, so you at a glance could see it's dyed.

And then, quite so composedly, without a slightest attempt at concealing, she took a cigarette pack from out her waistcoat and lit one up. Skully's girlfriends, before smoking, always looked back and all around to check that no one would sight them smoking.

Anyway, they were sitting down there and we starting another take, when the girl with the cigarette turned to her fat girlfriend and spoke up. Of course, I couldn't hear that it was me she pointed out to her chum, "This one will be mine. Wanna bet?"

With the rehearsal over, the youngster approached me on the stage, "That girl over there wanna have a word with you."

In a minute I was by their side in the fifth row. Olga, Sveta – oh, how mighty nice! And in a half-hour, I was escorting both girls home. Not far at all, some two hundred meters from the Plant Park, the third back-alley in Budyonny Street when going towards the Swamp.

In fact, I wasn’t the only escort because Skully and Quak also plodded along, which was not quite fitting into the picture – she got only one girlfriend about her which those 2 obviously outnumbered. Who's escorting whom?

After the turn into the back-alley, Sveta giggled her parting "bye!" and slipped away into her khutta's yard. Olga and I went on to the wicket of the next one, where she said she lived. But Skully and Quak stuck fast and tagged on along, inserting their silly cues in our conversation. And only when I and Olga started kissing, they realized there was no making-hay for them at all. So, they crossed to the opposite fence in the alley, urinated on it under the lamppost (some bohemian milieu, dammit!) and left with a flea in their ear. As if they couldn't keep in check their nature call until back on Budyonny Street. How come Quak was at the rehearsal? Very simple, the vocalist Zhanna Parasyuk was his one and only sister…

The Amateur Activity concerts were staged not only in Club. Sometimes, they were taken to different villages in the Konotop District traveling there by a small bus of PAZ make. It was for one of such concerts that we rehearsed that icy ceiling with the creaking door in A-minor.

Since the PAZ bus was not of rubber, you couldn't take along any amplifying equipment, neither was there any room for the young snowflakes in their tutus bred by the Ballet Studio. Just one Ukrainian Hopuck and one Moldovan Jock danced to the button-accordion of Ayeeda were quite enough for such a touring concert. Then she handed the instrument over to Chuba for playing his part in the Variety Ensemble band.

My role in the Ensemble was that of a rhythm guitarist with a common acoustic guitar. Vladya remained outside Variety Ensemble because Aksyonov, with his saxophone, felt no need for assimilating a solo-guitar. As for Skully, he was irreplaceable, only his "kitchen" got minimized to the skeleton composition of the snare-and-hat to pat his sticks upon.

The universally recognized cream of the concert program was, certainly, Murashkovsky singing songs and telling humoreskas. Those rhymed stories about "me and my koom", were his specialty. About how “I”, together with the koom, aka a sister-in-law's husband, smashed the football goal clean away with koom's head or, riding a motorcycle, collided with a kolkhoz bull who threw us over an Oak-tree just for free… Simple rhyme, solid wit. The audience liked it – they laughed and clapped.

And then on the stage again appeared Zhanna the Singer and we – her band. Skully sat the tempo, we started and I suddenly felt that the guitar strings under my fingers were loosened to the utmost. Aksyonov had tempered with them, no doubt, during a humoreska or, maybe, while they danced Hopuck, to have a hearty laugh. Some stupid thick-cheeked joker.

Well, so Chuba and Skully were making up for chords and rhythm and I, like scenery alive, was striking chords careful not to let them sound – as if I was playing an odd klepka…

In the end of the concert, Murashkovsky traditionally burst out his main "bomb" – the humoreska about Adoptee and his Mother-in-Law.

(…in those days the word "mother-in-law", aka "teshcha", was the most magical incantation among stand-up comedians. It was enough for a man on the stage to pronounce "teshcha!" and the audience laughed and laughed.