Bezdelniks

I. SUMMER

…and again the Black Sea turns toward a star called Sun. And on and on for a billion years.

…So what?

“You awake?”

I look over at the lawn chair next to me. Kirill’s on his stomach, his legs up at the head of the chair, his head hung over the foot of it, lifted to another sunrise, challenging the ball of atomic radiation to burn his corneas through his shades.  

Kirill shifts and slides out a quarter-read hardcover of Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle from under him, which he’s been making his way through the past two-and-a-half years. He opens the marked page, scans a few sentences and drops it under the chair.

“Who’s that American musician –”

“Layne Staley.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

People tell Kirill he looks like Layne Staley. 

I tend to get ignored.

He don’t do shit. I don’t do shit. So I got this habit. Every morning, I blare Kino’s “Bezdelnik”, and that’s basically our theme song for the day. Every day. 

Kirill’s got places to be. I tag along. We hop a street-car and I immediately lift a paperback of Moscow-Petrushki from my back pocket. Kirill spots a girl he knows and moves past me. She wears a faded Duran Duran ‘Rio’ T-shirt. Whatever. He tries to get into her pants the whole way. I read about the Russkiy equivalent of Hunter Thompson stumbling around in a stupor trying to spot the Kremlin.

The girl gets off with us.

He shows me off to her. The stocky cue-ball-headed cousin. I’m wondering: this the chick he told me about? One he met in some basement-club off a side-alley where they only play Depeche Mode, everyone grinding against each other in the dark and strobing lights?

Someone waves me over from a shop we pass. They go on without me. I pick up a few rubles here and there for translating English text whenever someone needs it. The two kids who wave me over are relatively fluent, but this is Hawthorne. Even I have trouble with Hawthorne.

Couple guys who went to school with Kirill come in and see me leaning on the counter. They tell me some of them are going to the beach tonight to shoot fireworks. Ask Kirill if he wants to come.

I walk out and can’t see where he went off to. Call him up. Wander around. Can’t make out what he’s talking about. Give up. Go home.

I walk into his room. Rummage his CD’s. Mostly Bi-2. What a schmuck. I crack open each case, switch out every Bi-2 CD with t.A.T.u. Then I take my house key and carve “KIRILL IS GAY” into his desk.

In my own room, I lie on the floor and listen to Pulp’s Different Class. As the second track ends, I get up, call Kirill. When he answers, I ask if the girl’s with him.

“Yeah?”

Put her on.

I don’t say a word, just hold the phone up, making her listen to Common People.  

Street lamps come on. From the balcony, I hear voices. I come down and join Eastern Bloc Harry and Sally.

A car, top down, screeches to the curb. Someone whistles to Duran Duran girl. Two roid-monkeys she knows. She leans over the driver’s door. They invite her to watch the fireworks display. She glances back and jerks her thumb at us.

We drive to this sorta natural esplanade along the headlands slightly jutting into the sea and get out. 

They shoot fireworks over the sea. I squint. Far away, I see three old whinos on the boardwalk pound down green bottles. I ask on the off-chance anyone has binoculars. A roid-monkey pilfers the car, then moments later produces a small set. I look down at the boardwalk; looks like they’re singing. I motion Kirill over and stick the binoculars in his face. He can read lips. Sez they’re singin’ “your honor, lady luck”.

So now we sing it.  

II. AUTUMN

Not much happened. I watched the leaves change and rode the street-cars. Street-cars make me nervous. They’ve made me nervous since I was young and read The Master and Margarita, and got to the part where Berlioz crosses the tram tracks, slips on sunflower oil, and gets decapitated by a passing street-car.

We sit on the couch and watch Brother for the hundredth time. Kirill always gets psyched at the part where Sergei Bodrov buys a shotgun, saws down the barrel, fills the shotgun shells with nailheads, then in the next scene he enters the apartment where he blows away the goons.

We debate which is better – this or the sequel. I say the first – it’s more even and has an aesthetic like an early Guy Ritchie movie. The second one’s great for the first half, but when Bodrov goes to America, it feels like a cash-grab – but we both always mouth along to the scene where he gives his whole “tell me American, what makes you strong?” speech.

Another night, we go walking through forest park in the hills. After wandering the confusing trails, we follow the increasing trickle of human voices and stumble out on a semi-abandoned mini-amusement park. The host of the evening threw a sheet between concession stands and projects a movie onto it. An old Giallo called “Footprints on the Moon”; a screwy edit that kept alternating between dubbing and subtitles. We walked back and took a path different than the way we’d come, and stood on a creaking wooden overlook in the dark around eleven at night after we’d got lost and had to double back.

Kirill scores with every chick he sees. I scored twice that fall, once with the Duran Duran girl. Oddly, they all tell me the same thing: getting in the sack with me is like the way you’d imagine it’d be like to grind against a mannequin of Harvey Weinstein. Every time, without fail. I swear. I shed a tear and throw on “Enjoy the Silence”, and softly sing along with Dave Gahan as she dresses. Later, I wake up and see a spider crawling across the lit-up face of my digital clock. By the time I switch on the lights, it’s scurried off under the desk. 

III. WINTER

In winter what we do is, I’ll throw on my leather jacket, and if Kirill sees me in my leather jacket, he’ll wait behind the corner on some random pathway, jump out - taking me by surprise – and pretend to shiv me like Viktor Tsoi gets shivved at the end of The Needle when lighting a cig for his would-be assassin, spilling a few drops of blood before he picks himself up and walks off into the snow-covered night. Kirill uses the end of a toothbrush, only partly whidled down. There’s a statue of Tsoi holding that lighter in Almaty, on the very pathway where they shot that scene. Kirill took a photo in front of it, when he was little.  

Ice floats break on the shore. Maybe a bit dramatic, but I figure it’s close enough. Once, our uncle took us on his friend’s yacht. We’d packed a cooler full of snow, and we’d scoop out handfuls and pack them tight and flung the snowballs at passing boats. It was still coming down when we pulled in that afternoon.

Sometime between western Christmas and New Year, I’m getting back to the house after making a run to the store; I stomp the snow off my boots on the front step. Kirill’s plugged in his Fender an’s screwing around before playing a pretty good cover of Akvarium’s “Ploskost”. Everyone in the house joins in. I know my voice would be drowned out by the rest, but I don’t sing. I wait on the doorstep until they finish.

From the front hall, I move into the kitchen. I pass Kirill’s door and notice Solzhenitsyn’s novel is now marked nearly halfway through.

The garland buzzes, wrapped around a small pine in a corner in front of the glass sliding doors onto the balcony.

There’s frost on the railings where the snow’s been brushed off.

After a while, people notice me on the balcony.

I left everyone, Kirill plucking the electric guitar strings, starting on Joy Division’s “Ceremony”, shut the door and stomped through the snow drift. 

Above town, the trails of forest park wrap around and continue past abandoned playgrounds and run-down sporting complexes.

I wander through a forested garden, step off the path and stop at the edge of a shallow pond. There’s the moon out there, where the Americans left their shit. We could’ve done that, I guess, but skimming past the atmosphere was apparently enough for us.