The Next “Real Man”

There was a huge construction area in front of the house where I lived: a new 9-storey house was being built. The working crane was like a sculptor, finalizing its work on it’s another “masterpiece” in our neighborhood. That day was a day-off for the workers, and the guys from my district used this moment to check which one of them was a “real man”.

The next “candidate” was Gosha, the Terminator’s brother. You will not believe what he did! He got to the top of an unfinished house, tied the “sausage” (that’s how builders call a pipe-shaped heat-insulating material, which is put in the open spaces between the blocks and is flimsy) to a piece of metal, threw the other end of the rope out of the window and started descending down from the 9th floor! Everybody was watching this frightening and exciting show of a guy, whose life depended on that rope. As he got to the 6th floor, the guys started shouting, “Come on man! There’s not much left!”

Suddenly, something happened and he started falling down! Everybody thought that it was the end of his life, but, gladly, that wasn’t the case! He flew for about two floors and, thanks to his strong hands, he managed to clutch back to the rope and successfully get down! Everybody breathed a sigh of relief that everything went fine. That’s how Gosha proved that he was deserved to be called the Terminator’s brother.

The Elevator

One day, my friends and I were hanging out in the streets. The sky was filled with grey clouds and some-time later it started raining. That’s why we got to one of the 9-storey buildings and had a “brilliant” idea.

We did not want to fall behind our seniors and we decided to prove that we were “real men”. There were ten of us and we all huddled up in the elevator on the eighth floor. We were actually packed like sardines. It was so inconvenient that we could hardly push the button of the first floor. When the elevator started moving, we started jumping actively and all together.

The elevator was designed for four people max, not for ten guys jumping crazily. So, after several seconds there was an emergency stop. The light turned off. The darkness was all around us, we heard a strange noise from the upstairs. It sounded like the metal rope which was holding us was cracking and it seemed that we could fall down the elevator shaft any second possible. Everyone stood still not knowing whether we would stay alive. Suddenly, the cabin started shaking and we thought that the lift was to become our coffin in a few seconds. The grinding sound of the elevator was the final accord of our life. But, luckily, the light turned on, the lift started working properly and we got to the first floor. When the elevator doors opened, we saw people waiting for us. We pushed each other out of the cabin. They started yelling at us, saying, “Because of people like you, we had to walk up to the ninth floor, idiots!” We were laughing, got out of the elevator and ran into the street. We were happy that we stayed alive and started enjoying every single moment of our precious lives

Friendly Sparing

As the time went on, we were growing up. In our neighborhood we had a lot of young people. The district was like a machine, creating more and more small and large criminal groups from twenty to one hundred young men. Their parents were ordinary people. The children, seeing their parents work hard for a small salary, wanted to find a better way of life. So, it was easier to steal a pager or to beat up somebody and take the money than to find a job.

There were only twenty-five people in my group. At that time, most of our senior guys were in the army and some of them started drinking and using drugs. By the way, those people who were drug addicts had always been punished to the fullest extent of the “street law” in our neighborhood.

There was a guy in the senior group, whose nickname was Bugs Bunny. He got such a nickname because of his teeth. They looked like ones of the famous American cartoon character. The guys got the information that his friend Bunny was taking drugs. The whole gang (about 10 people) caught him in the streets the very next day. The guys started beating up Bugs Banny so furiously, that they knocked out his cartoon teeth. He screamed, “I won’t do this anymore, please, forgive me!”

But they did not listen and went on kicking him. They stopped only when he lost his consciousness.

I asked Ivan (the Terminator), “Why did you beat him up so severely?” “For being hooked on heroine, he replied.”

I remember that we always tried to lead a healthy lifestyle. Quite often we took our boxing gloves and went to a place, where there were no people. We had real sparring over there. The rules were: as soon as the first blood appeared, the fight was over. Usually the fighting did not last long, because everyone was trying to hit in the nose, so that it would start bleeding. Such way we prepared ourselves for more serious fights.

The Kind Policeman

You may be asking yourself why there was so much crime in our society, but the answer is quite simple. It was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 90s. The system of law-enforcement agencies stopped working properly and corruption was all over the country. Russia was actually divided into 2 groups: the law-abiding workers and the criminals. In our dangerous district there were only 3 patrol militia cars and there were hundreds of criminals against them. So, they hardly could do anything to make the situation better. That day my friend Dima had a birthday party which I went to, but had to return back home at 22.00 p.m. Our guys continued celebrating his birthday all night long. The next day they told me what happened that night.

They all went to buy some beer, Dima stood outside the store and waited for the other guys. Suddenly, he saw three huge figures coming towards him. Dima knew that something bad was going to happen. Apparently, they liked his leather coat and they wanted to steal it. He hit the huge guy as hard as he could, but that guy only smiled thinking that Dima was alone, grabbed Dima’s arm and said, “Well, you are dead now!”

He hit Dima right in the face! Somehow, my friend managed to whistle really loud and in about 10 seconds they could see the running crowd of twenty people with bottles and sticks in their hands. As a result: the big guys were lying on the ground getting beaten by the crowd of our guys. Two minutes later the patrol car arrived, and two policemen got out of it. Having seen them, the guys immediately stopped fighting. The cops greeted the guys and one of them said, “Hey guys, could you take those three away from these apartment buildings and beat them up somewhere in place far from these buildings? The people are already sleeping and you are making a lot of noise.”

Our guys and the birthday boy followed the advice of a kind policeman. They dragged them to a deserted place, where there were no people, and continued what they were doing. They also took off their jackets as a punishment. After that they merely continued celebrating the Dima’s birthday and their glorious victory in the fight.

Our Neighbor

I would like to tell you about my apartment. It was in a usual 9-story building, it had 3 rooms ( plus a kitchen and a small bathroom). The worst thing about this place was that we had really noisy neighbors: some were listening to loud music at nights, the others had scandals quite often. People were packed like rabbits in a warren in those 9-storey buildings, there was hardly any privacy. The walls between the apartments were thin, therefore it was almost impossible for me to play the piano and get prepared for school. Sometimes, it was hard to sleep. My apartment was on the 4th floor, so I usually took the stairs, although we had an elevator. One morning, my mom asked me to buy some bread from the store outside. When I got out of my apartment to the stairs, a terrible scene appeared in front of my eyes. The walls, the ceiling, and stairs: everything was covered in blood! I suddenly saw some blood was still dripping from the ceiling.

In the middle of the day, I learnt, that last night our neighbor, who was a bartender in a restaurant, was returning home. He was said to owe someone a large amount of money. When he reached his apartment on the fifth floor, he got attacked by Afro-American men who started hitting him with their axes!

He ran down the stairs, splashing his blood all over the place and barely got outside. Some people saw him and immediately called the ambulance. The killers were afraid of getting caught and they ran away. Our neighbor was taken to the hospital. After a while he returned home feeling all right.

My parents and I knew him very well. He had a wife, a daughter and a son. After that incident he started drinking a lot and then became a drug addict. Sometimes he asked me to buy vodka for him. They could sell alcohol without any problems, although I was only 7 years old! After I brought “the treasure” to my neighbor, he gave me some money to buy some candy. Sometimes from the upper floor I heard him screaming and I knew that he needed a dose. A year later, he died after he got an overdose. His wife was alone with kids. Anyway, I was sorry for her loss.

Go Over the Swamp!

The sun was shining bight and I was hanging out with my gang in our neighborhood. There was a guy, whose name was Vadik. He was the leader of our street gang, everybody listened to what he said and treated him with respect. We were really bored at that time, we had nothing to do. Suddenly, Vadik said, “Follow me!” Our district was set on a mountain and there were basically 3 parts of the neighborhood: the top (the part where we lived in, was called Nagorno-Karabakh), the middle (The Sicily) and the bottom (The Pentagon). So, all five of us followed our leader down the hill not knowing what was going to happen next. The air started smelling awful and it only got worse. “We are almost there!” said Vadik. A few moments later we could see a huge swamp (about 300 meters (1000 feet) to the other side. It was disgusting! Dirt was all around us! We were wondering what we could possibly be doing in that horrible place. “What I want you to do is to cross this swamp,” said Vadik.

“You guys go first, I will follow you and don’t you dare stop or refuse to do that!”

There was nothing we could do but cross the swamp as our “Boss” said. Apparently, he really enjoyed yelling at us and watching us fall down right in the mud. The quarter of our dirty journey was done. I was in the middle of the line, behind me was my friend Ruslan and Vadik. Vadik was always hurrying Ruslan and suddenly Ruslan lost his balance and accidentally dove with his head first, so, as a result, he got stuck with his legs dangling in the air.

I was afraid that he would start choking, so, I immediately started pulling him out of the mud with the help of the other guys. When we succeeded in that, his face was dirty and all we could see was the fear in his eyes. We looked at him and started laughing. We decided to turn back, because it was dangerous to continue. We were glad that everything ended up fine. When we got back to our neighborhood we started telling the story about our walk through the swamp and about Ruslan, who nearly got stuck in the mud, to all our friends.

Bottles for Sale

At that time there were lots of poor people in Russia, they barely had enough money to survive in the streets of Irkutsk. The main source of money for them was collecting empty glass bottles and giving them to the recycling stalls. A bottle cost about one Russian ruble, so the more bottles there were to give, the more money they were to receive. I was ten years old when this story happened. We had a recycling stall in the basement of my house, so after the major holidays, I always took the empty bottles there and got some money to buy candy and gum in the grocery store nearby. One day, I heard something cracking really loud. I looked out of the window and saw the store being on fire!

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My friends and I immediately ran there to see what happened. We could see the shop assistants running like ants to save the goods. They simply threw all the products outside the building. Having realized what a great chance we had, we immediately started putting the candy, chocolate and gum into our pockets and ran away. Although, the chocolate was a little melted and the gum smelled like fire, we were still very pleased and ate everything we took. It was like a child’s dream come true.

Michael

I had lots of friends in my neighborhood and some were really weird. Michael was one of them. Our guys called him “the intelligent”. He was very kind to everybody, although I noticed that he behaved strangely, when he was close to animals. One day, I saw a huge stain of blood on his shirt. I couldn’t help but wonder where he had got that stain.

He said, “Oh, that’s because of the experiment that I recently conducted. You see, I was always wondering whether the organs of different breeds of cats look the same, so I merely caught a couple, cut them open with my axe and checked.”

“Isn’t that a little crazy??” I asked.

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s mere science. I have also found out how many lives a cat has!”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I caught a cat, which was lying on the corner of a street, got to the roof of a 9-storey building and dropped it on the ground. It was pretty cool! I realized that the fact that cats have 9 lives is a myth! Isn’t that awesome?”

He spoke with such excitement, that I thought that he could easily conduct such experiments on people.

Everyone from my neighborhood knew that he had mental disorders because of the constant scandals between his parents. That’s why everybody tried to be more polite and delicate with him, we tried not to annoy him. Looking at his appearance, he seemed to be a normal teenager. He wore glasses and looked like a smart person. But it was only his appearance. From the inside he was totally different. When he was eighteen years old, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison! I still don’t understand why he got to prison, but I think, definitely not because of experiments on cats, there must be something more than cats, something serious.

The Phantom

If you go inside of any house entrance in my neighborhood, you can immediately feel the strong smell of different food that comes from flats, especially, when someone cooks fish. Such smell is much stronger than other ones. In each stairwell there is a garbage chute, which is often clogged up and the stench spread all over the floors. Every single day, when I got back home, I could see dirty walls and broken windows. Barely working elevators made horrible sounds, it was impossible to use them because of the awful smell of dog’s urine. Almost all the buttons were burned and you had to use some force to push the button to the floor you needed.

The elevators in these houses got stuck quite often and I was once in a situation like that. I had to sit for three hours in the cab without any light until the lift operator came and opened the doors. If the elevator was out of order, you had to walk the stairs. Going upstairs, you immediately heard a crunchy sound of seed shells being broken under your feet. A large number of smoked cigarettes and beer bottles under the stairs didn’t surprise anyone. Occasionally, some tenants got tired of this garbage and cleaned the whole staircase. There was twice much dirt in the stairs when winter came. In many entrances there was no glass in the windows and the temperature was pretty much the same as in the street, -30 degrees Celsius or even lower. But in some of the stairwells all the windows were saved. In such staircases it was much warmer than in the others, but there was twice as much trash as in the cold ones, because when winter came, all the young people went inside of the warm buildings. We sat on the stairs between the first and the second floors, because the heating radiators were there. We drank beer and smoked there. When we were smoking, the floors got immediately covered in a fog of tobacco smoke. The tenants, entering the house and knowing that the first and the second floors were filled with young people smoking and drinking, covered their mouth with scarves and mittens and waited impatiently for the elevator, in which it was also hard to breathe.

It was always dark in the staircase of my building. When I was ten years old, I went for a walk and came home late quite often, when it was already dark. I was always scared to go into the building. It was too dark and the staircase reminded me of an ominous cave. In winter, the entrance door was always covered in snow, and clouds of steam were pouring out of the building to the street. I didn’t know what would happen to me on my way to the fourth floor where I lived.

I always waited for someone who would accompany me to my apartment. But sometimes no one appeared and I had to go there myself. With my heart beating fast, I jumped into this cloud and ran up to the fourth floor as fast as I could. I was really scared, because at the age of ten, I knew that there were people who caught children in the dark hallways and kidnapped them, then rape them or sell into slavery.

But there was one scary thing than every other: there was a drug addict, who lived directly opposite our door.

I was afraid of him, but I was always polite to him said hello, “Hi, Yasha, how are you?”

He barely moved his lips, pronouncing, “H-e-ll-o…”

His eyes were like glass and it was scary to me than ever. In 20—30 seconds my mother opened the door and I quickly ran inside, locking all the door locks.

The Funeral March

There was a tradition in our neighborhood. When someone died, the funeral began with the bringing of the coffin in the staircase, where the dead person lived. His family gathered around the coffin and mourned the loss of him. I saw this ceremony every single time when somebody died.

The invited musicians always played the funeral march. I could see all this from my window. It was hard for me to see the dead and the weeping people near the coffin. When his relatives and friends went away to the cemetery, they always left a lot of flowers lying in the yard. Those flowers lay for weeks in our neighborhood roads. They didn’t allow everyone to forget the funerals of people, who most of the tenants didn’t know. I still can’t understand why the relatives of the deceased could not start and finish the funerals in special places in the cemetery. But this tradition was accepted in our society.