Memoir of a Russian Punk

8

"Yes," Eddie thinks, "there isn't that much in common between Captain Zilberman and the moocher Slavka the Gypsy, but they say the same thing, word for word." It seems to Eddie-baby too that he's a little different from the other Saltovka kids, or rather it seems to him that until his fight with Yurka Obeyuk he was very unlike, very different from the other kids. He's still different, but not so much now.

Of course, Eddie reasons, the fact that he sees the madwoman Tonka naked in his dreams is substantial proof in favor of his being crazy. Very, very substantial proof. And you wouldn't call the fact that he masturbates all the time a normal phenomenon either. Eddie-baby is ashamed to recall his private secrets, to recall the stuck-together yellowed sheets of calendar paper. But besides that, there's another thing that inclines Eddie in favor of the conclusion that he's abnormal and a freak. And that is that Eddie-baby has never in his life gotten laid. He's not a man but a boy.

Naturally, none of the kids know that he's never been laid, or else they'd laugh at him. To hear them talk, all the Saltovka kids have been laid, but sometimes it seems to Eddie-baby that Vitka Golovashov, for example, has never been laid either and is just too embarrassed to admit it. The one in their class who has been laid the most is Borka Khrushkov, but then he's two years older than the other kids and has been shaving for some time. Borka is a swimmer and a regional champion – if he weren't, he would have been kicked out of school a long time ago, since he's such a lousy student. The girls, however, like Borka because he's famous: his picture is in the regional newspapers year-round, and once it was even published in Kiev in Ukrainian Pravda.

Having eaten the salad, Eddie returns to the balcony for his shoes and his yellow jacket. As he gets dressed, he sadly ponders the fact that all the kids think that he and Svetka are fucking each other, whereas in fact they aren't. All they do is kiss and feel each other up. Eddie has tried several times to take Svetka's panties off, but she won't let him – she's scared. Svetka tells Eddie-baby that she's never been laid, and Eddie hides from Svetka the fact that he's still not a man. Actually, fat Adam from Svetka's building maintains that Svetka has been getting laid for a long time now, and that the fool Eddie just doesn't realize it. But Eddie doesn't believe Adam, since Adam used to go with Svetka until she broke up with him because he was so boring.

Once Eddie got Svetka drunk on purpose in order to "hump" her, as the kids say. The very drunk Svetka almost threw up all over the bed at Sashka Tishchenko's parents' house, where they had gone for a party. Eddie-baby just managed to push her head off the bed in the direction of the floor so she wouldn't vomit all over Sashka's parents' bed. When Svetka finished throwing up, Eddie-baby had to bring a basin of water into the bedroom to clean up the floor, since Svetka had vomited all over it. She couldn't even get up to help him and only moaned whenever Eddie-baby started swearing at her.

After cleaning up the floor, Eddie turned out the light again and tried to hump Svetka. Maybe he would have humped her if it hadn't been for her panties. Svetka had on black panties that fit her doll-like ass very tightly – everything about Svetka is doll-like, her little mug and her cheeks and her long doll's eyelashes. Sometimes even she makes fun of the fact that she looks like a doll, and falling over backward, automatically closes her eyes and says in a mechanical voice, "Ma-ma!" or "Na-na!"

Eddie was trying with all his strength to pull Svetka's panties off, but they wouldn't come off, and when Eddie finally tried to rip them off, he couldn't do that either, since they were made out of thick black cloth that shone like silk in the light coming through the window from the Tyurenka streetlamp outside. Only after fooling around with the panties for half an hour did Eddie finally figure out how to take them off. All you had to do was unbutton two buttons on the side. The nearsighted Eddie hadn't noticed that the panties had buttons.

It's terrible that Eddie is nearsighted, although there are many things in life that he would prefer not to see. For example, until the fourth year, when his parents were finally forced to buy him glasses, he thought his mother was very beautiful. But after he put on his glasses, he not only looked through the window into their snowy yard and saw a group of kids hitting the humpbacked Tolik Perevorachaev, a friend of his at the time, but he also noted with horror that there were wrinkles on his mother's face and large pores in her skin, a fact that made him very, very sad, and he took off his glasses and decided to use them only to read and write, and then only at home, not at school.

Eddie-baby did, however, finally manage to get Svetka's panties off. Svetka drunkenly tried to resist, but there wasn't much she could do since she didn't have any strength. She only said, "No! No! Oh, no!" several times in a drowsy drunken voice, and then lay still after her panties were off. Eddie pulled Svetka's taffeta dress up, but all she did was mechanically put her hand over the place where she had the orifice into which Eddie-baby was supposed to insert his penis.

Eddie-baby pushed Svetka's hand away and touched that place with his hand. The place was hot and lightly covered with dark red hair. Taking his hand away, Eddie-baby touched his penis. His penis was cold.