Pulp Graffiti: Volume I

By Wilbert Quick

Pulp Graffiti is a fresh and humorous combination of karma, the butterfly effect, and chaos theory that will compel you to ask, "Would the dancing virgin have jumped off the bridge if Roger hadn't farted." Better yet, what would have been the consequences of Cherry Sue Brown keeping her panties on instead of ending up wearing Cheryl Thompson's panties with the three-girl, four-boy, multipartner DNA collection on them? This comic tragedy of Cherry Sue's fall combines with the tragic comedy of Billy Gale's less-than-immaculate conception to explain why bad things happen to good people.

Billy Gale just wants to know who his father is. His innocent search and consequential visit with Michael Bell, jolts this old flame of his late mother into a sudden midlife crisis that leads to a memory lane expos of the "me" generation and an old-world quest for the missing "something more" Michael later wishes he had less of.

Whimsical indictment of the human need for hedonistic pleasure at the expense of others, is the common thread in fifteen connected vignettes of Pulp Graffiti that examine the intertwined lives of a dozen abnormally socially maladjusted young people living in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 14, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595823864

Wilbert Quick

Wilbert Quick teaches writing at Oklahoma State University. His recently published works include the novel Jacy?s Girl, a college writing textbook International Journeys in Writing, and the short stories ?The New Craziness? and ?Saving the Devstvenyetse."

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Copyright © 2006 by Wilbert Floyd Quick, Jr.

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Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements

The New Craziness

The Birthday Wish

Luck Favors Motion

The Midlife Crisis

The Fall

Safe Sex

The Immaculate Conception

Karma

The Pecan Tree

The Last Casualty

Self-induced Stupidity

Udder Madneee

Bill Trouble

Saving the Devetvenyeteee

The Homecoming

For Wyle Craig, eternally the best of my best friends: Though decades have passed since you left this world, I could not write this book without missing you.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank cover model Olga Khanukova for the energy and beauty she put into making this cover perfect. Her brilliant ideas and amazing dedication turned an otherwise stressful and frustrating project into an enjoyable experience that I shall never forget.

The New Craziness

On a bridge over the Moscow River in the eternal twilight of a Russian summer night, I found something that forever changed the way I will look back on everything that has happened to me since my birth. As I stood fidgeting with my camera under a lamp in the only lighted portion of this two-hundred-year-old span of gray stone and steel, I saw a small, pink, frilly-looking book sitting near the far edge of one of the meter-wide, square-topped, support columns of the safety rail. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was a diary or journal of some sort and that it apparently belonged to someone named Larisa who had also bothered to place a middle name and last name on the cover, either of which would have physically challenged me to pronounce.

I reached out and picked up the pretty, little book and struggled to make sense of the Russian handwriting inside. As I read, I was pleased to find that with a little effort I could understand almost every word. So proud of myself was I that I leaned back against the rail and stood there under the light, shamelessly perusing some stranger’s intimately personal thoughts. I had no way of knowing that simply reading this book would later make me a player in its final act.

I don’t know who was more shocked, me or my mother, Larisa’s journal began, but what we saw that day turned my world on its end. My head was on a swivel as Mama dragged me back to the house. We had just gone to the barn to gather eggs like we always did at the end of the day. Even in early summer, Siberian mornings made gathering eggs much more pleasurable in the evening, and as always, I had run just ahead of my mother because I always thought of it as a contest to see who could find the most eggs.

I opened the barn door and ran into the dim light that managed its way through cracks between the planks of the western wall, but just inside the door

I froze. My sister, Svetlana, was lying in the hay with a boy on top of her; her dirty bare feet dangled in the air, one on each side of his skinny, white ass which was by far the most visible object in the barn. Oh, oh, oh, my sister moaned in a monotonic rhythm that seemed both to conduct and be conducted by the movements of the ass between her legs.

Svyetlana Borisovna! Mama gasped from behind me, and without further words she began to drag me toward the house.

Life in Russia was a prudish existence during the Soviet years. Most women, like my mother, were virgins on their wedding days. Pornography was forbidden and almost unheard of; even a catalog ad with a picture of a woman in a bra would have shocked the average Russian. Public temptation by flesh was rare. Privacy for a nonpublic temptation was almost impossible.

These were the days of my mother’s youth, not mine. Gorbachov’s new openness—or new chaos, as many have called it—brought changing values and looser morals from the west. Freedom was a new experience for Russia and her people. Sex was everywhere; it literally exploded onto the scene. Instead of baseball cards, Russian chewing gum packages came with photographs of naked women; some of which had adhesive backs and could be found stuck to just about every conceivable surface such as elevator doors, bus seats, and the dashboards of taxi cabs. Store windows were garnished with life-size posters of topless models. Popular prime-time television programs depicting graphic sexual acts received the highest ratings. And, of course, the Russian mafia, which grew to monstrous proportions with the introduction of free enterprise, exploited the sexual revolution at every opportunity, eventually fostering the growth of prostitution into a socially accepted, although still morally outrageous, occupation.

As for myself, I cannot remember when it was any other way. I wasn’t born until 1987. By the time I started to school, the glory of the Soviet Union was ancient history. Now, when I look at it all with street educated eyes, I see that the only difference between the new Russia and the United States of America was that the Russian people did not know how to behave in the craziness of their new world.

My sister, Svyetlana, reached puberty during the dawn of this new sexual awareness, and my parents did not know how to deal with what was to them her shocking promiscuity.

Larisa, get yourself into the house this instant, Mama directed me with the coldest tone I had ever heard her use.

What did I do? I asked, unclear as to why my sister’s choice of recreational activities had garnished me a scolding and abruptly ended my fun. I couldn’t understand why Mama would talk to me in this tone. I wasn’t the one with my skirt around my neck and a boy between my legs.

Nothing, just get yourself into the house, Mama said.

Once in the house, I peeked through the curtains as my mother made her way back to the barn. The boy, I was pretty sure at the time, was Serge Alexan-drovich, and I saw him run from the side door, as if the barn were on fire, still trying to fasten his britches. Svyeta marched boldly out of the front door before my mother reached it and walked right past as if she weren’t there. My mother still had the shock on her face of finding her oldest daughter fornicating in the barn, but it mixed now with anger as she followed Svyeta all the way to the house without allowing her lips to utter the disgust she surely felt for what our eyes had seen taking place in the cow’s food.

Before they came in the back door of our old farmhouse, I ran to the bedroom and pulled my door so that it was open only a few centimeters. I knew if I left it fully open, Mama would close it all the way. I wanted to hear what she would say to my big sister. I was just old enough to think I knew what my sister had been doing in the barn. With any luck, the conversation that was about to take place would confirm my prepubescent suspicions.

Now you’ve spoiled yourself, Mama said. What’s done is done. Let’s not speak about it.

I was disappointed by the lack of what was said. I wanted all the juicy details, but these few words of my mother’s were all I got that day.

My mother was more right than she knew, however. Svyeta had spoiled herself to the maximum. Two months later she had an abortion. After this, she was quite a slut. Perhaps it can be argued that she was already a slut, but I never saw it that way. She just met an older boy who had his way with her until she became pregnant—nothing more.

After the abortion, Svyeta was different. We never talked about boys or sex, but I learned from other conversations that I overheard that it had indeed been Serge Alexandrovich in the barn that day as I suspected. He never came around again after he learned of Svyetlana’s unfortunate condition. There were several theories as to why Serge didn’t come around anymore, but I suspect it was because he rightly believed that my father would have allowed my mother to kill him.

Perhaps it was because Serge didn’t come to her anymore, but afterwards, Svyeta sought out other boys. She sought them with such fervor that it drove my poor parents mad. She was pregnant again in a few months. This time Papa made her keep the child. He said he hoped having a baby would slow her down a bit. If not, surely it would slow down some of the boys.

Regardless of which came first, the abortion or the slutiness, I learned from Svyetlana’s mistakes. My mother saw to that. By the time my body reached puberty, I was much wiser to the ways of men than Svyeta had ever been. There were handsome boys in my life, but I turned sixteen without so much as having allowed one of them to hold my hand at the movies. Mother had managed to press into me the importance of saving intimacy for my husband whom I somehow managed to imagine would be a handsome prince who would insist upon a chaste and virginal princess bride.

I graduated from high school before my seventeenth birthday. Papa announced that the time had come for me to select a husband, but I had taken care of Svyeta’s bastard enough to know that marriage and family were not what I wanted at this time. College, though it had always been part of my plan, was totally out of the question. This was another concessive adaptation that had to be made now that the passing of socialism had left the colleges without funding. I needed a job more than anything, but I didn’t have any luck finding one.

One day, my father handed me a letter he had picked up at the post office. He was smiling broadly like he rarely did, and at first I thought he had been drinking. It was from a school. They were offering me an affordable opportunity to learn a trade. The letter called itself a scholarship.

This is the answer to our hopes, Papa said. They are offering to extend you credit to pay for your room and board, and they promise to help you find a job when you are through.

What kind of school is it? Mama asked.

It is a modeling school, Papa said proudly. One of their agents saw our beautiful daughter’s school photographs and decided to extend to her an invitation.

And where is this school? Mama asked.

Moscow, Papa said almost in a whisper too low to be heard.

Moscow! Mama cried. But that is so ocheen far away.

It doesn’t matter, Papa said. They have offered to front her transportation expenses as part of the scholarship package.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. The letter was full of flattering words. They said my features, my complexion, and my shape were bound to make me a top model, maybe even in America where I would surely become rich beyond words or dreams. In spite of my mother’s concern for the great distance I would be from her and home, we wasted no time responding that I would accept the invitation.

My daughter is going to be famous, Papa said, and he handed me a little pink book he had bought for me in town.

What is it?

A journal, Papa said. You’ll be changing into a woman now. Write in this book everyday. Tell your story. Write so that you will never forget who you are.

Thank you, Papa.

Don’t thank me, Papa said. Just go and make us proud.

I did go, and it seemed like I went forever. It is sometimes easy to forget that, even without the Soviet Union, Russia is still a country that spans eleven time zones. China would fit twice into Siberia alone, and I still had the Ural Mountains to cross after I had gotten past that. I was on the train for eight days before reaching Moscow. Before I left home, we had decided I would come home for visits as often as possible, but after the trip, I never wanted to see another train as long as I lived. I began missing my parents the moment the train pulled away from the station, but by the end of the second day, I had decided that they would have to come visit me in Moscow. Still, I knew this was not possible for a number of reasons, including the economics of the day.

No one met me at the train station, and I had to find the school by myself. Moscow seemed so vast, especially to a small town girl like me who had come from such a different kind of vast, the vast empty wilderness lands northeast of the big lake, Baikal. There was a subway terminal nearby, but figuring out which train to take was more than I could handle. After taking the wrong tram twice, I decided to spend the last of my travel money on a cab. The driver, pleasant and courteous, didn’t have any trouble finding the address I gave.

The school was small but nice. It was in a rather seedy neighborhood, but there was an iron fence around it with a gate that blocked the drive. The cab driver leaned out the window and pushed a button on a pole with cracked white paint. As I sat in the backseat not knowing what to expect, a static crackled voice said, Yes, who is it?

Who are you? the driver asked me.

Larisa Borisovna Krochenkova, I said.

The driver repeated my names out the window, and while I was feeling all these little-girl butterflies in my stomach, being announced like this made me feel so very grown up.

The gate slid open as if by magic. I know now that it was electric, but I had never seen anything like this. To me, it was all part of an unbelievable experience. It was like a fairy-tale, and I was beginning to think that maybe I really was a princess.

A large boned woman with frizzy hair who looked like anything but a model came out of the white cinderblock building and greeted me as I got out of the cab. I am called Olga Petrovna, and I will be your teacher.

Olga Petrovna gave me a tour of the place. It seemed even smaller on the inside than it did on the outside, and I got the impression that more than one business shared the building with the modeling school. In the very back of the building there was a room with bunk beds. This will be your home during the first part of your stay. Until you actually start on-the-job training, you will live here, eat here, and sleep here. The first couple of weeks are quite intensive. You won’t have time for anything but your studies.

I followed Olga Petrovna back up front to her office. Business first, she said. I know we already have your father’s signature on the promissory notices, but we need your signature on a few documents just in case, heaven forbid, something should happen to your father. The big boned lady pretended to spit over her shoulder three times for luck after having said this about my father.

During the next thirty minutes, I signed my name many times. One of the documents listed the daily expenses of my room and board. It was all itemized: the room, the bed, the pillow, the blanket, the meals, etc.; I would even be charged a usage fee for the bathroom I was to clean thoroughly after each and every usage. Broken down into daily charges, it didn’t seem so bad. Besides, I didn’t have to pay for these things until I was finished with school, and by then I would be so rich it wouldn’t matter. Furthermore, another document I signed said that if I did not find a job on my own when I finished my training, the agency would assign me a place to work until my debt was paid in full. There was really nothing to worry about.

Two more girls arrived the next day, and another girl arrived the day after that. Training was as intense as Olga Petrovna had said it would be, but it wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting. We were taught how to put on our makeup, what clothes we looked best in, what colors to wear with what makeup, and even such valuable lessons as posture and exercise techniques to make muscles smaller and more defined. We were exhausted, but the first two weeks were fun. We were starting to look like real models right down to the American Snap-On fingernails.

During the third week, our training shifted to dancing and Olga wasn’t our teacher anymore. A man named Alex Rasonovich came to the school each day, and he said that dancing was a big part of modeling here in Russia. Sure, we would be discovered and eventually we would surely be magazine models, but first we had to pay our dues in what Alex called the real world, the real experience, of the real Russia.

At the end of the month, we were all feeling cabin fever. We were ecstatic when Alex announced he would be taking us to one of the local clubs that night. We were told how to dress