Vlad’s dad drove like all Russians do; Rasputin on steroids, with absolutely no regard for the traffic laws of whichever land they happen to find themselves in, riding tight to the bumpers of old ladies and gang members alike Lenny’s road bullying was totally indiscriminate.
Unfortunately, Lenny had some pretty specific parking plans, so I had to ride close to , doubling down on his cut-ups and cut-offs. If it was anyone other than Lenny I’d have been pissed, especially as the F had insisted on riding with Vlad in Lenny’s truck.
But, I forgive Lenny a lot, he would’ve been totally unaware of any offence his atrocious driving may have caused, nor had it been inspired by anything as pathetic as machismo, no, this guy was genuinely fucked up.
Lenny had spent 4 years fighting in Afghanistan back in the early 80s, you know, back when it was really horrible over there. During that first foray by a superpower into that mountainous land of goats and poppy fields, he’d been drafted into the Red Army. Man, I’ve heard some pretty miserable stories about the poor sods conscripted to serve there, but one of the worst had nothing to do with guns and bombs, but a famed soviet army cocktail.
Due to a near constant, woeful lack of provisions and driven by a desperate need to escape the horrors inflicted on them by the CIA funded Mujahideen, pretty much everyone from freshly arrived conscripts to seasoned colonels downed a nasty cocktail of diesel (yup that stuff truckers poor into their tanks) and aftershave for some temporary drunken release. I know from experience that soviet era aftershave/perfume was not at all nice and that was just to smell let alone drink the fucking stuff!
Anyway, pretty soon and I guess not so surprisingly they discovered that regular consumption of the cocktail resulted in blindness. Sometimes the blindness was temporary, lasting just a couple of weeks!!! But for the less fortunate it became permanent. Still, due to these very same side-effects, the popularity of the perfumed pick-me-up boomed, blindness was considered a reasonable risk for a guaranteed one way ticket home. The Red Army was an equal opportunity employer but they drew the line at blindness.
It wasn’t long before the Red Army in central Asia found themselves incapacitated and blindness a problem of pandemic proportions, these mysterious cases of blindness ultimately came to the attention of the politburo and their comrades in the KGB, soon after the low octane cocktail was discovered as being the cause of their troubles.
Red Army generals were far less accommodating when dealing with any subsequent outbreaks, temporary sufferers were forced to sit out their blindness the Kabul equivalent of the black hole of Calcutta, though I doubt guests would’ve known too much about the black hole part, but permanent sufferers got it really bad, they got their one-way ticket except it wasn’t home, but to the salt mines of Yakutsk.
Lenny had suffered from the temporary version and it seemed his 20 days in the black hole of Kabul was enough to prompt him to attempt a little sobriety.
Blindness from swigging gasoline wasn’t the only blight to the otherwise formidable and heroic Red Army, Afghani smack had become all the rage too. Kids from country towns had never heard of the stuff, but the cities of central asia the opium poppy grew everywhere, these guys returned and started harvesting their own versions. By the early 80s smack was everywhere in the USSR.
And I know this how, well once upon a time my reprobate mate, Sean and I attempted cleaning up in Moscow circa ‘86, bang in the middle of the cold war and at the height of the Afghan offensive. Gorby had just taken power and that wall in Berlin was still graffiti free at least on the Eastern side it was. We mistakenly surmised that Moscow had to be one of the cleanest cities on earth, after all Gorby had just banned vodka, so we figured it was safe to assume there wouldn’t be too many temptations to lure us from our chosen route, but we were wrong very wrong.
From the steps of Ivan the Terrible’s Cathedral, through Red Square and to the Kremlin, dealers plied their trade, it was probably one of the worse placs to go and one of the easiest in which to score smack.
I digress, I was able to forgive Lenny the odd driving faux pas, what was interesting about our jolly jaunt to the beach was that we parked up next to a weird looking truck house (pic to the side) it looked similar to the kinda pikey caravan I’d seen when I was growing up in the English countryside in the 60s. There was nothing much to note other than the weird wooden siding, but when we returned the owner was in a deck chair on the grass next to her truck house, F and Vladin had already taken over her peaceful peace of the world so I went to retrieve and politely introduced myself, she asked if I was visiting and I explained that I kind of was but only from downtown as I’d moved here a number of years ago. Anyway, we got talking she was expectedly nuts, but interesting. She was all about what I did and I told her that I worked in the music industry, that’s when she dropped the bombshell, she claimed she was Suzanne, you know the Suzanne, Leonard Cohen’s ’Suzanne’.
Look, the woman was living in a parking lot, what would you’ve thought…right! Me too, I took it all with a pinch of salt, but I wasn’t a dick about it, I stayed polite, still it kinda put me out a bit so I gathered the kids and skipped off to the ocean for a dip.
Anyway, a long tedious story short, I got back later that night looked the song up and fuck me sideways with a fish fork, if it wasn’t written about a woman called Suzanne Verdal. There was a picture of her and the clincher, she’s known to be homeless in Venice, there was even a picture of the weird truck house she lives in.
F and Vlad have no idea, they'd spent part of their afternoon with perhaps the most famous beatnik muse, ex-wife of Armand Vaillancourt, the Suzanne.
You can read a BBC interview with Suzanne here. The picture above and the interview courtesy of http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/indez.html
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