A former teenager’s story. Ch. 5-8

CHAPTER 5

My days at school weren’t very good to me either. For it could be said that I had no friends there. Well, actually I did have one, Volkova – but she was in a different class known as “special” for smarter kids. Our public school divided its students by classes from A to D. Class A was for the A-students, Class B for the B ones and so on. I was in Class D – among slow pupils. I don’t know how I’d managed to get in there, but I suspect there was a reason. I remember they were actually going to hold me back.

I struggled to follow the school program. My great efforts to concentrate on the teachers’ explanations were futile; all the new information I got would come in one ear and go out the other. Later on I realized it was not me being thick; I just have a different mindset. I need to find out and digest information on my own, learn it by trial and error, even if it takes a lot of time. But our educational system wouldn’t let me spend a lot of time on searching and analyzing things on my own, so my school performance left much to be desired.

I also hated the labs (laboratory assignments) which were supposed to be done collectively. Even back in my school days I knew for sure that teamwork was not my thing. So, by hook or by crook, I tried my utmost to dodge all kinds of labs, team projects, school clean-ups and other collective chores.

Although, speaking of school clean-up chores, I can not refrain from bringing up one curious event. It occurred when I was in the eighth or nineth grade; that week our class was charged with a cleaning duty. Some girls and I were assigned the task of cleaning up the kitchen and running the dishwasher.

Having done with the dishes we sat down on the windowseat to wait for further orders about setting the lunch tables. We’d got an hour and a half of free time left; so we decided to spend it playing cards.

It was one of those rare days I was included in the game instead of standing off alone in a corner. I was in a great mood; it was a bright April day, the sun was shining through the window, and on the radio the newly released song by Chaif – Argentina-Jamaica was playing.

And, as ill luck would have it, at exactly that moment we got interrupted by the appearance of the boys who were on duty, too. And of course, they started bullying me as usual.

“Hey, Philipok, what are you doin’ here? Go clean the loo!”

I had long been used to such attacks and I’d learned that the best way to cope with the situation was to ignore my offenders, mentally building an invisible wall between them and myself. Bullies taunt their victim because they expect some funny reaction – for example, crying, waving their fists around or something. When there’s no reaction, the taunters get bored and bug off.

Just so I’d liked to tease one rooster in the country when I was small. The rooster was scrappy and when he was angered he would chase me trying to peck me in the butt. As I drove the rooster mad I would run from him with laughter, and it was funny. But later that rooster had either got cooked or dead – I’m not sure – but I confused him with another, a calm one, and when I started teasing him, no reaction followed. Having realized that the game was over I lost interest in visiting the henhouse and doing such a nasty thing.

Perhaps, Buddhists are right and karma is real. Apparently, as a punishment for making fun of that poor rooster when I was six, I ultimately had to pay for my karma.

However, as they made a comment or two about me, the guys focused on someone else. It was evident that they had come not for my sake. They were keen on the girls, among which there was Elya, a very interesting character, I must say. Many guys in our school had a crush on her, even though she looked rather plain – short and redheaded; besides, she couldn’t pronounce the letter “r” properly. But how confident she was! She was reasonable and pretty smart; she had a perfect sense of beauty. But the main thing in her that attracted both guys and girls was the total absence of insecurities. She was aware of her shortcomings but she could also accept them which is unthinkable for a regular teenager. When someone not very wise tried to mock her improper “r”, her reaction was surprisingly calm:

“I got a tight lingual frenulum. It needs to be cut; then I’d be able to speak properly.”

It was disarming: her opponent didn’t know what to say next. I envied her secretly; I struggled to understand why she was taking it so easy. Only years later I’d got the clue: she was truly loved by her family, and the energy of that love could reach any point of her localization. The love of her family had boosted her aura and helped her stay immune to any toxic environment including our school.

It was quite understandable that the guys had come to see her. So we were sitting there and talking (I mean, they were – I was sitting silently in my corner). And then the curious event happened, when one of the girls asked the guys about their footsizes.

I have no idea where that silly legend popular among teenage girls back those days came from, that the footsize of a guy is relevant to the size of his dick. Practice showed me afterwards that those parameters do not correlate with each other in any way. But the trick question was asked, and the giggling girls waited for a trick answer.

“Wanna know my size? Here!”

It happened in a blink of an eye. One of the guys, Marchenko, unzipped his fly and pulled out something red and slimy, and incredibly disgusting. I uttered a cry and turned away as I covered my eyes with my hand.

Everybody burst out laughing.

“Ha-ha-ha, look at Philipok! Why did you turn away? Are you a virgin?”

“Why do you care?” I said frowning.

“Hey, really, why are you so weird?” a guy nicknamed Chechel asked me, “You always look as if you’re about to be beaten up.”

“Aren’t I?” I thought to myself.

“Just keep it simple, you know?” said Chechel, “If you go on with the way you are, you’re screwed.”

“He’s right” said Elya, “You don’t even watch your posture, let alone your style.”

“Exactly, you keep slouching around and it makes you look like an underdog. Everybody can see it.”

And just like that I was “put on trial” once again. Another meeting was declared open.

How many times have I been put on trial like that? At home, at school, at work, on the Internet… Meaning well and truly believing in their good intentions people have never spared criticism with me – they would lecture and critisice me right to my face. Maybe they were just aware of my inner softiness and spinelessness which are probably still there.

CHAPTER 6

When my school year was over dads usually took me to one of two places for summer vacation: my paternal grandmother’s villa in the suburbs or the hometown of my mother in the country. I had never in my life been taken to beach resorts: only after finishing school I first saw the sea. With palm trees and other exotic pieces of southern nature I got acquainted even later. Who knows, maybe that’s why I have never been able to truly love the South or make it a piece of my world even though I’d longed for it in my childhood. I used to draw the sea and palm trees according to my imagination, that is, different from reality. The sea in my drawings looked like many little sine waves (kids usually add to them a ship with a triangle sale), and the palm leaves like daisy petals. After hearing out my classmates’ boastful stories about spending their vacation at the beach I whimpered and pestered my parents to take me to the beach, too. And every time I was fobbed off – they just didn’t seem to give a toss.

As the saying goes, the only thing worse than a dream unfulfilled is a dream fulfilled in the wrong time. So it happened to me. My beach dream had finally been fulfilled too late when I didn’t want it anymore.

Meanwhile, in my teenagehood, I didn’t have much choice for my holiday. There were only two options: the suburbs and the country. Of two evils choose the lesser; and I would have chosen the suburbs if I had had the right to choose. I was never asked where I’d prefer to spend my vacation; I was just told to go to the suburbs and stay there until July; then in July when my parents had their time off from work, they picked me up and took to the country with them for four weeks. Then, in August, when their leave was over, they brought me back to my grandma’s villa. I hated to waste a whole July – the best summer month away in the boondocks, and I had my reasons for it. So, every time I was taken there against my will, with yelling and fighting. I tried in vain to break free, kicking and screaming at the top of my lungs: “Let go, you idiot mother****s! I’m not going to your ****ty country!!!” In vain I balked and clutched at shrubs and bushes when being dragged to the car; I have always been too frail, especially as a kid, so I was pretty easy to be twisted and forced into a car.

In the country I languished terribly; the place was a real dump in the middle of nowhere. The town was named Vyshvirka which translates as “Dumpsville”. One couldn’t think of a better name for that godforsaken hellhole. The very sight of its shabby unpainted wooden huts in the middle of a swamp depressed me and drenched me deep in sadness. There was absolutely nothing to do there; I tried not to interact much with the locals. Depraved, vulgar and extremely rude, the country teenagers repulsed me to my core.

The girls, Irinka and Irinka (the most popular female name over there was Irinka) were a year younger than myself. Their thirteen-year-old age notwithstanding, they spoke foul language; cursed in their husky voices, and you can bet your sweet patootie they knew firsthand all about sex. They would dress and paint provocatively, like real ****s. The more vulgar looked their louboutins caked in manure, bright polish on their dirty fingernails and tons of concealer they’d been trying to cover just as dirty abrasions on their faces with. I still clearly remember the strong smell of their patchouli mixed with manure, moonshine and Prima cigarettes – that distinctive aroma of ”Vyshvirka gals”.

The main entertainment in town was the nightclub gathering all the cream of Vyshvirka’s society. Young folks used to hang around the club house inside which there was low dubstep blasting from the stereos and an absolutely empty dance floor. The drunk country guys groped the screeching gals’ boobs – they would call it the English buzzword “flirt”. Wherein they all smoked like chimneys cheap cigarettes, drank cloudy moonshine. Some unexperienced youngsters would get overdrunk and puke on the nightclub walls; then, with their pants pissed, they would conk out right on the ground.

I really disliked those filthy hangouts; their lewd way of speaking rife with most disgusting expletives would make my ears bleed. But I couldn’t escape it anyway; to refuse to go out with them put me at risk of a big trouble. Conflicting with the locals was just hazardous to my life.

The locals, though, didn’t like me either. The guys in Vyshvirka had also given me a moniker – Chinese. Probably they’d picked it because of my narrow eyes, very conspicuous in their European-like background.

“Hey, are ya’ll city folks jus’ as dumb?” they would ask me straightforwardly.

Such “positive” communication would leave me with a really bad taste in my mouth. Yet it wasn’t the worst thing. One night some of them put burdocks in my hair – they had to be cut out with scissors. As a result my hair was a mess making me look like something the cat dragged in.

To make it short, I had my reasons to hate the country just as badly as I hated my home city.

 

CHAPTER 7

The villa of my grandmother Zoya was probably one of the few places I felt rather good at. I had many friends all over the neighborhood so I was hanging out with them from morning till night. We would have a lot of fun together, riding bicycles, swimming in the lake until we got blue in the face, gathering in the upstairs of Nastya’s house, playing all sort of games: cards, hide-and-seek, blind man’s bluff…

We would also entertain ourselves with random phone calling. Back those days mobile phones weren’t just as widely spread among simple folks; so people in our neighborhood would use the old phone booth in the main street – it was the only spot in the whole village to make calls from.

The calls were free, and from early morning there had always been a crowd lining up to the phone booth. It never dispersed as the day went on, but became even bigger. The calls were unlimited, so the callers were not in a hurry to get off the phone. In our days of mobile technologies people, indeed, have learned to keep it short and to the point in order to save their time and money. But back then people lacked this skill for it was quite useless. So, the ones waiting in the queue were compelled to hear out the incessant prattling of some old Aunt Anna:

“Hey, Nadya! Hello-o-o! I say hello!!! How are ya?… Great! I say, great!.. Yeah… What’s the weather like? Been raining a lot? What?.. Oh yeah, yeah, it’s been raining cats and dogs over here, too… What did you say? Come again?… Lovely weather for ducks, yeah…” – etc, etc.

Only forty minutes after, when Aunt Anna had got her fill of talk and finally started saying goodbye, everybody knew that her farewell would at least take another twenty minutes.

Now, looking back from the vantage point of a different time things like a two-hour-long idle conversation and half-an-hour-long goodbye on the phone seem implausible. Now the phone in my terms is something like an emergency button used only in cases of absolute necessity. So, my usual phone conversation now will never go over this limit:

“Hi, where are you? How long will you be? Ok.”

That’s enough! Idle words such as “hello, how are you, ok then, I gotta go now, it was nice talking to you, see you later, bye-bye” are unneeded and expected to fall into disuse soon, because they waste your time which is limited as it is.

But back those days we were young and had all the time in the world. So, late in the afternoon, when the bored villagers had already finished flapping their jaws on the phone and left the phone booth, we rushed into there to have fun. We would dial random numbers and crack jokes depending on who had picked up. If there was a pleasant young male voice at the end of the line – we giggled foolishly, trying to flirt. If the voice was old, female or childish – we had a couple of hackneyed tricks for such cases:

“Hello, is this the home of Hares?

“No.”

“Then why are your ears sticking out the phone?”

Or we would pose as “poll managers” and ask tricky questions:

“How many times a week do you have sex? In what positions? Do you use a condom?”

Sometimes we were told to stop goofing around and go do the homework. One pleasant male voice, as we had tried to flirt with him, said kindly:

“Someone missing a good fuck, huh?”

I bet any of us would have rather died of embarrassment if such things had been said to her in private. But, as we were all united together, under the illusion of safety in the crowd – all the insults rolled off us like water off a duck’s back. We just didn’t give a flying fuck, as we used to say.

It is not without reason that even crimes are easier done in the crowd than single-handedly. At no time do people feel the need to flock together so pressing as in their teens, when they are most vulnerable to external influence. A lone reed is easy to break, a bunch is not.

So we held on to one another – not because we were soul mates sharing the same common ground and other kinds of bullshit usually mentioned by grown-ups teaching us how to pick up good friends. Even then any of us vaguely realized that we were different and when the time came our paths would diverge forever. But meanwhile we were huddling together to feel safer and more confident – and we sincerely believed that our friendship would never end.

CHAPTER 8

There was another friend of mine in the village. I mean, she was not just a friend of mine, she was my bestie – my closest friend ever. Her name was Susannah, in Russian it sounded as “Sashka”. Having her in my life made me what I am now. Anyway, she played a very important role in the following story.

I met her as follows. I was riding my old “clunker” as I called my jacked-up bicycle when at the gate of our village I got stopped by a neighbour boy in the company of a tall teenage girl of twelve with curly hair down to her shoulder and thick bangs over her forehead.

“You must pay a fine for violating the traffic regulations!” she said in one breath.

“What the hell traffic regulations?”

“In the name of Victory, the Queen of Great Britain! I am Inspector Susan Starfield.” the girl introduced herself with an important air.

“Oh ok. I’m Margaret Thatcher, then.” I tried to laugh it off.

“But, really, my name is Susan. You can call me Sue, though.” she said.

“Sasha! Have you torn your skirt again?” came the harsh voice of an old woman leaning out of the nearest house’s window – evidently, she was Sue’s grandmother.

Sue made a face and sighed.

“Oh, that’s just so you, dear granny!”

Deep down I was amazed at the odd relationship between the grandmother and granddaughter. There she went yelling and scolding Sue, yet the last didn’t look one bit ashamed. Things were different in my own family. I was afraid of my grandads even though I could show them my teeth sometimes. It was not so much fear as some kind of alienation. I didn’t know how I was supposed to address them – formally or familiarly, so I tried not to address them at all. Grandmother would notice it and rebuke me for it.

“Why do you never call us anything? Can’t you move your tongue to say “Granny”, “Grandpa”?

I frowned silently. I couldn’t indeed move my tongue to call them so – I fancied that the word “grandma” or “grandpa” coming out of my mouth would sound strange and out of place.

Not only did I have difficulty in pronounsiation the words “granny” and “grandpa”. I couldn’t call by name my aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers. I have no idea where that odd barrier had come from, but even now I avoid addressing people by their names as well as looking them in the eye during a conversation.

I made friends with Sue immediately and forever. It’s truly said that the older you grow the harder it is to gain new friends. Now I can’t even fancy coming up to some nice-looking lady of my age somewhere in the street or a supermarket, starting a conversation and inviting her over to a cup of tea – such things seem incredible in the age of thirty. Back in childhood they were way easier and occurred as a matter of course.

“Let us be the best friends, the best of the best of the best!” Sue suggested rapturously and, grasping my hand, skipped down the road as she sang:

“Hey, Captain, smile!..”

“No, that’s childish,” I said with a grimace, “We learned that song at a singing class in primary school. We should make a special new song that nobody else knows!”

“Oh yeah, we should! So it’s very special for us only, and nobody else!” exclaimed my new buddy.

And we started composing stuff. But, as the imagination of silly teenagers we were is very limited and always boils down to the same one thing, the first words that occurred to me were:

“A cunt and a cock…”

“Pissed on a rock!” Sue carried on.

And just so we skipped down hand in hand and sang at the top of our lungs like two freaks:

“A cunt and a cock

Pissed on a rock!”

An old lady neighbor cast disapproving glances in our direction from behind her fence.

“The foul-mouthed little oiks!”

But it couldn’t stop us. The “gymn” to our friendship created by us was no limit. We would twist the lyrics of popular songs such as, for instance, “the silken heart, the silken heart can never ache when torn apart”:

“The silken cock, the silken cock

Can never raise, looks like a sock…”

No wonder that both our families – mine and Sue’s – weren’t too thrilled with our friendship. Her grandads believed I had a bad influence on their lass, mine thought exactly the opposite.

“Stop messing with that yer Sashka,”grumbled my grandad, “She’s a quirky one.”

I chuckled. “Quirkies” was the brand name of cookies advertised widely on TV back those days. And as I imagined Sue “quirky” with those quirkies all over her face and body, I couldn’t help laughing. And anyway, I wasn’t going to quit messing with her over that reason.