‘He Ain't Heavy, He's My Neighbor’, Part I

I have a drinking problem.  That is, I have a problem with drinking in Georgia.

At least five times a week I am awoken at various early morning hours by the so-called street boys.  It is usually a youngish crowd in their twenties barking in the street outside my flat.

Some, admittedly, come home with an honest boozy glow about them: though their wits are dulled, they seem good-natured and maintain a modicum of respect for their sober sleeping neighbors.

Others lack this restraint.  They yell at their friends’ windows ten storeys up.  Hanging all over one another, they cry out their friends’ names in drunken exuberance at the top of their formidable lungs: “Avto-o-o!” and “Lu-u-uka-a-a!”  They finish the lively conversations they must have been having earlier indoors, and they turn up their car stereos to the point where the bass grabs my window and throttles it like a can of paint in a mixer.

Surely, all must be stolen away from dreamland at these times, no?  (I sleep with earplugs in and my windows are double-glazed — neither saves me from losing shut-eye.)  But no one, including myself, says anything back.  No one sticks his head out the window to say Shut the hell up.  None wants such responsibility, I suppose. 

And so the revelers carry on nightly with gleeful impunity while I seethe into my pillow with thoughts inexpressibly violent.

This morning it's five thirty, and the guilty party hanging out in front of the twenty-four-hour supermarket en face my flat is a crew of three very merry pranksters.  They alternate between speaking fairly softly, conspiratorially, and ejecting loud, harsh syllables from their mouths, seemingly in anger, so that I can’t tell whether they are laughing it up or about to smash one another’s heads in.

The rhythms of this repartee were especially cruel on me.  They tricked me into thinking that, just maybe, during the softer speech I could drift off to sleep . . . yes . . . almost . . . there . . . only to be jolted back into consciousness by another shout.  I abandoned all attempts to sleep and went to the window in order to put faces to the voices.

As for the crew: Number One, I notice, is a real rhapsodizer, speaking with hands flying up, down, out, shoulders shrugging, brow arcing upward — you name it.  He’s also by far the loudest speaker of the bunch.  His throat would be the first I would go for in a sleep-deprived rage.  He shall hereinafter be known as “Rhappy”.

Number Two is a behemoth — easily the fattest and largest man I’ve seen in nearly two years in Georgia.  This young man’s physique easily pushes six foot five (~198 cm) and is filled out.  Where did it all go wrong, I wonder.  Dude should be running point for CSKA Moscow or the like. Instead he has grown so rotund that he resembles a bulb-shaped Christmas ornament on legs, his noggin the head of a pin.  He ambles with his arms swinging comically wide to avoid being obstructed by his core.  Let’s call him the Village Epicure, “V. E.”.*

Number Three doesn’t factor in for now; he’s passed out on a set of cardboard boxes from which fruit and vegetables are sold during the blessed daylight.  He is sitting with his upper body bent over so that his face is buried in his crossed arms which themselves rest on his knees.  I can’t be entirely sure that he’s still breathing. 

V. E. and Rhappy seem to vacillate between anger and affection, now grabbing each other playfully, now smacking each other upside the head with considerable force.  Rhappy even begins to recoil from V. E., perhaps a little frightened of the mass of drunken power.  But then they start walking out into the street arm in arm, maybe ready at last to call it a morning, when V. E. suddenly seizes Rhappy and tries to chuck him into an open dumpster.

An epic struggle ensues: V. E. has his arms locked around Rhappy from behind and is heaving his body as high as he can into the air, and then letting it drop again when he can’t manage to get it high enough to clear the rim.  Rhappy can only protest loudly and grab on to the side of the bin and cling for dear life, or dear cleanliness.  The wheels of the dumpster grate against the asphalt with a rusty screeching.

TO BE CONTINUED. . .

---
*Now, I can hear you saying, “Serves you right for choosing to live near a 24-hr joint.”  And you would be right except that many shops in Tbilisi have adopted a curious practice.  They advertise proudly that they are open twenty-four hours, “non-stop”, “24/7”, etc.; but when you’re jonesing for a Snickers at 3.30 a.m. you will surely find their doors shut tight.  My shop, however, does the opposite: it doesn’t display its hours of business but it never closes – ever, including Christmas, New Year’s, Easter . . . .

  

*  *  *

Select Enlightenment:

D. M. Lang, The Georgians (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966)