In the years before the revolution, when the world was still young and before the glories of the atom bomb and wars that sent millions of souls into the blissful embrace of oblivion, I found myself hitchhiking across Russia, bumming rides off of buggy drivers in exchange for a salami sandwich and a sad, sad tune on my accordion. The days went by in a bleary haze as I--propelled by vodka, marijuana and more vodka--stumbled across the country side in search of something out there larger than myself. That something was named Raisia; she stood 6'4" and weighed almost 300lbs. Our love affair didn't last because her father was convinced that his third wife, Raisia's mother, had been stolen by a pack of wild gypsy polka players that roamed the countryside like feral beasts searching for their next victim and was certain that I was part of their gang. Plagued by memories of the night rabid dogs dragged away his second wife to whelp their young; he was prone to night terrors that woke the villagers every night at exactly 2:34 am. Raisia's father milked the cows on his farm twenty hours a day, long after it was comfortable for everyone involved. He took one look at my accordion and burst out in tears, crying for his dear departed wife. Raisia looked at me sadly then turned her moon-face towards her father, and then back to me with a wistful look on her face for all the might have been. I knew that, yet again, my art would bring me heartbreak.

Hat in hand and weary of heart I stuck my thumb out and waited for the next buggy to pass down the dusty road. A man by the name of Ivan Ivanoff Ivanaovich picked me up in his dilapidated buggy. The cab smelled faintly of old urine and unshed tears. He looked down at me with that look which I later came to understand meant: I am gonna need a lot of salami. My life had been nothing more than an endless series of one night stands with lonely, voluptuous peasant women who let me touch their babushkas after my gigs at dank Russian punk accordion clubs. They would hang out backstage while I wailed to mesmerized audiences and then take me back to their tarpaper shacks as their husbands were just heading out to the fields.
With a cigarette dangling from my lower lip, I picked up my accordion and began to play as I poundered my next move on the chessboard of life. As the days wore on I composed new ballads to set the young peasant women a flutter, stopping only to start a new cigarette, make love, or write a 1200 page novel.
Ivan Ivanoff Ivanaovich asked me to call him Guido because that was his mother's name. He was tall and fat (although he referred to himself as short and skinny) with a great white ankle-length beard that he called "Guido Jr". When the drive would become too tedious, he would start talking to his beard, petting it softly and asking if it wanted more vodka. Looking at me with his toothless grin, his nostrils flared to the size of bowling balls, he told me to tell Guido Jr. that I loved and needed him.
"I like Guido a lot and we've had some great times together, but I'm not ready for that kind of commitment," I said.
On day twelve of our odyssey he made Guido into a puppet and tried to make me kiss it.
"BAD TOUCH!! BAD TOUCH!!" I yelled and jumped off the buggy, flying through the frigid Russian air until I landed by the side of the road covered in bruises. Glad to have escaped certain doom I wandered across the frozen potato fields in search of a place to put down roots.
Eventually, I found myself in Moscow where I landed a job as a checkout clerk in a small pornographic postcard store. I sold pictures of Russian writers such as Pushkin and Turgenev in various states of undress to peasant women whose husbands didn't give them enough attention; illiterate peasant women who never read the great authors they longed for so passionately. Apparently, Chekov had a really hot ass but I wouldn’t know, I am not into that sort of thing. Twelve months later, the highly anticipated bootleg shots of Tolstoy and Dosteovsky's weekend of sin was finally due to arrive in stores. As I tried to keep the women from crushing themselves in a mad rush, a lazy-stock boy named Vladimir Lenin unloaded boxes in the tiny storeroom while our boss, the gigantically fat Nikolai Nikolevich Grushenka Vladimir Konstantinov, sat on a tiny stool, shouting at Lenin to get his "commie ass" moving.
Nikolai Nikolevich Grushenka Vladimir Konstantinov looks at me and says "Nice hair"
"My hair? What's wrong with my hair?"
"It's commie hair. You wear that on your head and you might as well be a queer."
Stunned, confused and a little stoned from the pot I smoked before work, I walked towards the cracked mirror over the employee's sink. For the first time I looked at my life in the context of history. In the thick curls and flowing golden strands that ran down my back, I finally understood all the crazy talk that Leon had been shoving down my throat. YES! It made sense. The hair had opened up something in my soul. I told my boss that I was quitting, stuffed a loose postcard of Chekov into my overcoat for "literary research" and walked out of the store into the swirling winds of history......