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

"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 so fucking long ago that you should’ve drop it, you'll still keep doing it and doing… Like that team of zeks who felled an Oak coppice equipped with only a couple of jigsaws.

Or, let’s take, the so-called "piggy" drift; this is when you got started eating something and all of a sudden there unfolds such a gamma of taste sensations that you, without ever noticing it, could put away a whole pot of cold macaroni from the day before yesterday and scrape the bottom.

And, on the whole, you became ever so prudent, awesomely perspicuous, and when some buddy’s coming up to you, like, "Hi, how's your nothing?" you knew already at which point of his nonprofit socializing he’d start chiseling for a pinch for a joint.

Or there may get started to form all kinds of deep thoughts by you—fucking Isaac Newton!—only that they did not linger for long so as to shape them clearly and got lost because of one thing or another distracted you over to something else equally profound. All in all, a play of shadows on the swirling whiffs of fog.

Listening to music when you ride the wave is the utmost drift…)

In the musicians’ we had a record player on the bookshelf together with the one and only LP disc, "Burn" by The Deep Purple… Getting seated on the floor next to a speaker, I would hold the disc cover in my hands and consider it unswervingly till all of the side played to the end – there were their busts, like, in bronze, with a tongue of flame from each one's head, like, a lighter, sort of, the dudes were clearly understanding what's what in blasting…

A real bummer popped up when anasha suddenly ran out and, no matter whomever you rolled up, no one had it; such a period was named "the empty suction". Everyone became dog snappy, some buddies even got crashed because of the fucking khoomar was so too pressing. No kidding, they became just fragments a-jitter; some simply eyesore sight…

Once Gray heated me with pills that he brought from the city.

"Would ye?"

"What's that?"

"Nyshtyak."

"Okay".

He was passing them, one by one, for me to swallow. With half of the pack over, I said, "And what's the dose?"

"All's nyshtyak."

So I consumed the whole pack. Then a roar flooded the ears, as from a waterfall, and the night got dense and dark around.

Oh… the stoker-house… Vanya's shift… I entered.

He talked to me but I couldn't get it at all. Then I began to walk around the furnace, what for?. He told me later that at one point I stopped in the dark passage behind the boiler, and stood there for half-hour as a monument, like, in bronze. And, most importantly, I was afraid of going to bed: what if getting somehow asleep I wouldn't wake up? But eventually, I came to myself.

And Gray was just a bitchy scumbag not knowing the dose himself, kinda experimenting on people whether I'd survive or not.

"But you're some fucking moose!."

Vanya's wife came on a visit from their Crimea village… The construction battalion started to seem some club of married dolts because of whose premature marriages I again was pulling at the stoker-house one shift after another.

When she left, Vanya changed from the parade-crap into his fatigues and came to the stoker-house as gloomy as the sadness itself. I didn't want to barge in the buddy's meditations and the darkness outside the windows was as delicate as me…

And then Roodko, the Club Director, arrived in the stoker-house. He had the regular cold in his snoot and, in the medical unit, they forked him out some powder for inhalation. So, grabbing on the way a tin cup from the Dishwashers', he navigated to the stoker-house in another of his futile attempts at curbing his adenoidal condition.

The powder from the folded sheet of paper was poured into the cup, then he added boiling water from the boiler tap and covered the cup with a stray piece of cardboard, sort of a lid to keep the mixture hot and not let it cool down right away.

That way he and I sat by the round table talking our talks. And, while talking, Roodko would move that cardboard lid, sniff at the cup a time or two, cover it back and we would go on with our gossip.

Now, by that particular moment in the course of his army service, Vanya had already seen different sights in the stoker-house and, standing in the dark of the adjacent hall of it, he followed all those collateral manipulations and came to certain aberrant conclusions. In determined strides, neared he the round table and, "Roodko! Gimme too!"

"What to give?"

"Well, this!" And Vanya pointed at the Roodko's contraption.

Roodko was as naive as any other intellectual and he thought if he had a running nose then whosoever could have it also. "Welcome."

Vanya pulled the cardboard off, took a couple of sniffs, deep indeed, filling himself to the heels, and I saw how his eyes rolled under his forehead getting more and more, however strange it may sound, crosswise on the way.

So what? I, personally, would believe it. Self-hypnosis is a great power because faith moves the mountains. If Vanya believed that Roodko was consuming the fucking "blue fairy" by bucketfuls there, then any other moment he could fall into hallucinatory strawberry fields and fucking easily too, I swear. Someone had to save the buddy.

"Vanya," says I, "the other day in the Canteen I talked to a Tatar from your draft."

"And what?"

"Well, nothing special…just that I says there, 'hey buddy, what's your name?', and he says, ‘Me a-Russian no understand'…to which, 'Okay,' says I, 'a fully clear matter, but how much do you have to serve yet?'…and here he at once clutches his head from both sides, 'Vooy! Fucking too much!' says he… So, Vanya, could he was a friend of yours?"