Memoir of a Russian Punk

17

The wine of love burns

Like a fire in the blood!

Vovka ends his song and puts the guitar down on his automated bed.

"Great fucking job, Vovets! Really terrific!" Grishka says, coaxing a cigarette from his box of White Sea Canals with yellow fingers. Even a meter away you can smell the cheap tobacco; Grishka's as permeated with tobacco smoke as an old grandfather.

Vovka pours some more vodka with a bored look. If you didn't know him, you might think he's really sick of his guests and wants them to leave. In fact, however, he can't go more than half an hour without company. He gets bored by himself.

"Cheers!" Vovka says, but then he puts his glass back down on the table. He forgot about music. He goes to the tape deck and turns it on. It's Glenn Miller. No, he's taking Miller off – Miller doesn't suit him this time. He rewinds the tape – you can hear the reels spinning – and puts on another one. It's Bobby Darin. The song about Mack the Knife. Eddie-baby likes that one, maybe because Mack the Knife is a punk too. That's probably the reason. "Mack the Knife is an unforgiving person," Eddie thinks as he listens to the music. "The kind of person a man should be. Tough." Which is exactly the reason why Eddie-baby carries a straight razor around with him.

"Cheers!" Vovka exclaims again. They clink glasses and drink up. Eddie-baby nudges Grishka under the table with his foot. It's nice being at Vovka's, but Eddie came for money. The little hand of Vovka's clock, which as in all self-respecting model 1958 Saltovka homes is on top of the television set, is pointing uneasily toward the southeast – it's three-thirty.

Grishka clears his throat and begins: "Vovets! We have a small problem here. Have you got any money you could lend for…" He looks at Eddie-baby.

"For a week," Eddie says. Either Sanya will sell the watch, or Eddie will reborrow the money from somebody else, maybe from Borka Churilov, but he'll pay Vovka back in a week.

"How much?" Vovka asks. The terribly laconic Vovka. The Spartan.

"Two hundred," Eddie answers. He's laconic too.

"No, I haven't got that kind of money," Vovka says, shaking his head. "After all, I don't print money here. All I have is my advance, and I'll be lucky if it gets me through the holidays. But when I get my salary – be my guest," Vovka adds.

The kids say nothing.

"Ri-ight!" Grishka finally sighs in disappointment. "That's too bad."

"You know I'm not cheap, Grigory," Vovka says in a dignified voice. "If I had the money, I'd lend it to you."

Eddie doesn't think Vovka is cheap either. He always treats the kids to vodka and doesn't scrimp on the snacks, and if they decide to go somewhere together for whatever reason, Vovka buys both the champagne and the chocolate, knowing that unless they steal, schoolboys don't have that much money. Where would they get it?

Reality begins to seem rather dark to Eddie, like eternal night. He has absolutely no idea what to do. Ask his mother again? Tell her that their fucking system for training their son to be sparing about his needs (Eddie-baby doesn't even have a wristwatch) is pushing him into crime and in point of fact not training him to be sparing at all?

There was once another episode like the present one that grew out of Eddie's resentment of his parents' stinginess. He successfully counterfeited several dozen cash receipts for the grocery store on Stalin Avenue and two days later turned them in with the kids from his class for liqueur, cake, cognac, and chocolate.

Using a knife, the talented Eddie-baby cut out a stamp for the receipts from a rubber sole. In just a couple of days. The cash value and serial number of the receipt were filled in later. The receipt paper itself was given to him in a roll by Yashka Slavutsky, a Jew in their class whose mother works as a cashier in a store in town.

The mechanics of that little swindle were simple enough and were based on the fact that the customer first has to pay at the cashier's booth for whatever it is he wants. If, say, he wants five bottles of vodka at 28 rubles 70 kopecks apiece, then he goes to the cashier and pays 143 rubles and 50 kopecks, in exchange obtaining a receipt with the sum R143.50 printed on it. He then takes the receipt to the wine department and says, "Five bottles of vodka, please," and turns over the receipt in exchange for the vodka. The grocery store Eddie had picked out was a large one, where there was always a crowd of people and always a line in the wine department.

Usually one of the kids went to the cashier and got a small receipt for about a hundred grams of cheap candy – 1 ruble 2 kopecks, say. Then he quickly brought the receipt outside to the yard behind the grocery store, where Eddie-baby, dipping his rubber numbers into a special ink and using several of his own receipts with the amounts already calculated and filled in (always more than a 150 rubles, since he wasn't fooling around), would add the necessary serial numbers, beginning with the next one after the candy receipt number and proceeding from there, depending on how many kids had come to the grocery store with him to turn in receipts for goods.

The last time they tried it, it was cold outside, and Eddie-baby was in a hurry. His hands were freezing, and he probably (if not certainly) stamped the numbers upside down on one of the receipts, something that a cash register wouldn't do, the typeface being so firmly fixed in it that there's no goddamn way you could turn it upside down…

The clerk, a fat old woman in glasses, had already stuck the receipt on a special steel spindle behind the counter when – Eddie-baby sensed this more than saw it – her gaze suddenly fell on the receipt and she said in an unusually tender voice,

"Oops, I'm all out of liqueur. Sorry, lad. I'll get some more from the storeroom." She then set off in the direction of the cash register, which was about twenty-five meters away. As she left, she removed the receipt from the spindle with an almost imperceptible gesture, but Eddie, whose nerves were naturally already tense, noticed the light, almost flylike motion of her hand, and after waiting several seconds until the clerk was momentarily concealed behind a column (the store resembled a many-columned palace), he dashed for the door, knocking people and boxes over along the way. The other kids ran out with him.

They all got away and joined up in a square located half a kilometer from the scene of the crime. It turned out that all of them had kept the bottles they had acquired, and everybody except Eddie-baby had acquired something, so that everything ended happily. They even had two large cakes, although the cakes had gotten a bit squashed during their flight.

It was clear, however, that they had to put an end to the swindle with the receipts. And Eddie-baby didn't try it at other stores as he had been planning to do. In the first place, the counterfeiting of receipts didn't bring in any money – just groceries and drinks – and in the second, the kids had told him that the now alerted trashes would probably start keeping track of cash receipt transactions, so that it would be dangerous to go on with it…

"Even if it wasn't dangerous, an operation like that would still take several days," Eddie thinks bitterly. In any event, Plotnikov and his crowd had asked for money, so it would be silly to turn up there in a bow tie with Svetka decked out in her crinolines on one arm and string bags loaded down with bottles on the other. "There isn't even any point in considering it;" Eddie thinks, "since it's impossible to get the bottles anyway."