Metallistov Prospekt

The snow blanketed the dirt path between the two buildings. I turned off the path and when I turned my eyes to the front door of my apartment building on Metallistov Prospekt in St. Petersburg Russia, my eyes encountered a Russian man who had the dark skin of the Georgian Mafia and the look of electricity in his face. He led me to know that he had realised that the young man who had moved into his neighborhood in St.Petersburg Russia was a relative of Uncle Sam, an American and from that moment on he became curious about my activities. Every day, in front of our building waited a Mercedes station wagon, which a young Russian man with his hair cut short waited in the cold snow with a Russian Belamor Kanal cardboard cigarette to keep him warm. I had come to Russia for an adventure, to meet women and in the back of my brain was the fear that I was making enemies unconsciously with the local men by being such an inveterate flirt. Because I spoke Russian, I hadn't worried too much. I carried with me the conceit I had developed in the States in college, of thinking there was no situation I could not get myself out of. The only aspect of it that bothered me were the little Gypsy kids, who I had read carried stick pins, and they massed around you with their pins and stabbed you repeatedly until they could get your wallet and flee. This part alone scared me, and made me want to be careful. But tonight I couldn't sleep because of the cold wind blowing through the cracks in my Russian apartment's windows. I stuffed toilet paper that felt like rough sandpaper into the cracks and that started to dent the feeling of cold. I had only one odd-e-yalla (blanket) and I was tired of turning on my little radio that could pick up scraps of BBC from over Finland. A few days earlier, I had been reading some Hemingway and it made me need to get some rum or brandy. I circled my apartment a few times and then grabbed my wallet. I had three hundred-thousand Ruble notes, or about sixty bucks. I figured a good bottle of brandy might cost me about nineteen bucks or maybe ninety-thou rubles. I didn't want ot show myself in the store next door as having that much money, it wasn't a good idea. But I wanted a drunk badly. I had worked like an ox for three years to learn the language and for two to save up the money. I wanted to be drunk reading literature in the morning in Russia. I put on my coat and my shopka (fur hat) and my gloves. I opened the inner door and then the outer door and stepped into the hallway. The wallpaper was old and in a blue plaid pattern that reminded me of the decorations on the walls of my grandmother back in Iowa. I went down the three flights and exited out the broken-down wooden front door. I followed the snowy path to the left and after I had walked the length of the middle building, I turned right and a little farther reached the Produkte magazin (grocery store). The front of it was lit up and it sold beer most of the night. Every time I entered this store I put on my mantle of the flirty American. The store was arrayed with counters around the outer edge. Women in blue smocks stood between you and the things for sale. If I wanted to buy a bottle of brandy, I would gander over at the girl who sold the bread in loaves. She was slightly heavy in a way that made her look solid but still attractive in a farmer's-daughter sort of way. She alternately looked at me with romantic dove eyes.