VODKA

Chapter 1: Dad Blows a Gasket

As a boy growing up in Moscow, I got disgusted with the adults around me. Everything was tinged with vodka. When my father got home from the borscht quarry at 9 PM, he’d not even say hello to me. Instead, he’d go straight to the cupboard for his vodka. Then he’d go into the sitting room, sit down in his chair, and drink vodka while chanting Communist Party slogans. By 10 PM he’d be drunk and drooling into his beard. He would finally acknowledge my presence by slapping me on the head if I got too close while I was practicing my ballet moves.

My mother spent her whole day sipping from a five-liter jug of vodka she kept hidden next to the butter churn. When the jug was empty, she would curse Rasputin and smash the jug against the wall. Then she’d dig up a couple of rubles, take the Metro down to Red Square, and get a new supply at Crazy Vlad’s Vodka and Turnip Emporium. My older brothers, Josef, Leonid, Mikhail, and Chad, were always drunk on vodka. You can imagine the fights we had. Someone would yell at someone else, a chair would fly, the housekeeper would get stabbed, and the whole place would be a shambles in no time. They were all drunks. When we had relatives over, like on May Day, there’d be forty vodka-swilling Russians squat-dancing, fighting, yelling, breaking furniture, and very often pissing themselves.

By the time I was eleven I’d had enough. I became rebellious and decided to do something different to break the vicious cycle my family and all of Russia had fallen victim to. One evening my father got home from work and sat in his chair with his vodka. His shoulders were covered with beet peels. I went in and sat next to him. I was drunk. But I was drinking sherry, not vodka. My father saw the sherry bottle and exploded, calling me a traitor to the motherland and a prancing homosexual. Then he kicked me out of the house. I was on my own. It was forty below, and all I had on was a tutu.

Chapter 2: A Visit From the KGB