Memoir of a Russian Punk

27

Eddie-baby departs the benches under the lindens along with Hollywood, who happens to be going the same way. It's already long past two in the morning, and most of the kids have wandered off home. Sanya's hairdresser came by – the vulgar Dora who possibly loves him – and took him back to her place. As a matter of fact, there wasn't anything particularly odd about their argument. Sanya and the hairdresser have been sleeping together for over a year now, but they still get into bitter arguments and even scuffles sometimes – lovers' quarrels, as the old women say.

Hollywood lives by himself in a dormitory a few buildings away from Asya's. Eddie-baby doesn't even know what Hollywood's real name is. Actually, it would never enter his head to use it, even if he did know what it was. Everybody in the district calls him Hollywood. He got that nickname from his peculiar habit of explaining everything with quotations from foreign films, especially American ones, although there aren't enough knowledgeable people in the district to check up on whether Hollywood's quotations really do come from movies or whether he makes them up himself. Kadik, for example, claims that he makes up half the things he says.

Even now as the last late November leaves rustle under their feet, Hollywood casually turns to Eddie and says with a cough,

"These leaves rustle like American dollars, don't they?"

Eddie-baby doesn't know what film this quotation comes from, and so he cautiously replies with a noncommittal, "Uh-huh."

Eddie likes movies, but he's embarrassed about having to wear glasses, and so in order to see a new one, he has to go into the city. There, where nobody knows him, he can calmly watch the movie with his glasses on, giving it his full attention. Eddie's too lazy to go to the city very often, especially since he has to go by himself, and so it happens that he misses a lot of things.

Hollywood has a movie quote for every occasion. If the kids decide to go to the store to get some biomitsin they've all chipped in on, Hollywood suddenly steps forward, assumes a heroic stance, and shouts, "Mamelukes! I shall lead you to Cairo! Who has not seen Cairo has seen nothing!" This is a scrupulously accurate quotation from the movie The Mamelukes, which has just been showing on the screens of Kharkov.

The kids like Hollywood because he always livens up the occasion. He's about five years older than Red Sanya, or perhaps, since bald spots gleam through his thin blond hair here and there, even the same age as Gorkun, although unlike Gorkun he's never been in prison. Hollywood doesn't steal; he works in the foundry at the Hammer and Sickle Factory and lives in a dormitory. The parents of this strong, long-nosed fellow live in a village near Kharkov, according to one of the kids. Both of them are sick and can't work, and Hollywood sends them money. In the summer Hollywood goes around in swimming trunks with palm trees on them… That's basically all that Eddie-baby knows about him, but in Saltovka the kids and adults associate not on the basis of what they know about each other but of how they feel. And it is Eddie-baby's feeling that Hollywood is a good guy. Even if he is a worker, he's still not one of the goat herd.

They walk for a while without speaking, and then Eddie says to Hollywood,

"Aren't you celebrating anywhere today?"

"What do you think we've been doing, Ed?" Hollywood asks in a melancholy voice. "We've been celebrating, and now we're finished and are on our way back home."

"No," Eddie insists, "I mean in the company of other people."

"I've got too much company already at the dorm," Hollywood sighs. "They'll be drunk all night long, and there's no fucking way you'll get any sleep. They'll be drinking in every room. And then they'll get into fights."

"A-a-ah!" Eddie-baby answers sympathetically. He's never lived in a dormitory, although he has visited them more than once. Both men's dormitories and women's. He didn't care for them. Even though living in a dormitory is very cheap. But Eddie-baby couldn't live in a single room with three other men who were complete strangers to him. He wouldn't even mind getting rid of his own parents if he could. The balcony he sleeps on is almost a separate room, but in the first place, they haven't had a chance to winterize it, so he sleeps there only when the weather is warm, and in the second, he still has to go through his parents' room to get there. Although his parents aren't strangers, of course, and there are only two of them, not three, as in the dormitory where Hollywood lives…

Eddie-baby and Hollywood separate at the fork in the old asphalt path built by the first residents of Saltovka so they wouldn't sink into the mud, and now worn through to the ground here and there.

"So long," Eddie says.

"When the brilliant tropical night casts its star-studded velvet black cloak over the streets of Rio…," Hollywood begins the next of his movie quotations, but then, obviously recalling the dormitory he's on his way back to, he waves his hand in annoyance and interrupts the quote with a simple, "So long, Ed!"