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and was decidedly off the grid. The remains of his formerly luscious locks, now surrounded by bald patches, were sticking out every which way. Back when I was a kid, he still had a full head of hair; I remember seeing Kocha a lot back then—he was the first living thing my consciousness registered, aside from my parents, relatives, and our other neighbors. As I grew up, Kocha grew old. We lived in adjacent buildings in a new neighborhood that was constantly expanding, so I felt as though I grew up on one big construction site. Our neighbors were mostly workers at the small nearby factories (there weren’t any big industrial concerns in our city), and then a few railroad men, all kinds of white-collar dipshits (teachers, office workers), military personnel (like my father), and members of the Communist Youth League—the leaders of tomorrow, as they said. As far as I can remember, Kocha wasn’t there to begin with; he moved to our street after we did; but it still felt as though he’d lived in our neighborhood his whole life. He had joined the leaders of tomorrow, grown up without any parents, and gotten himself into some trouble with the law, gradually becoming something of a local menace. It was in the ’70s that our neighborhood really started expanding, so Kocha’s wild adolescent years coincided with intensive infrastructure growth—Kocha held up our new grocery stores, cleaned out the newly opened newspaper kiosks, and broke into the newly constructed civil registry office; simply put, he was keeping up with the times. Acknowledging their helplessness, the authorities handed Kocha over to the Communist Youth League, hoping they would straighten him out. For some reason, they didn’t consider Kocha a hopeless case, so they got right down to molding him into a model Communist. For starters, they enrolled him in the local vocational school. Kocha stole a lathe during the second week of classes, and they were forced to expel him. After a year and a halfof hanging around the neighborhood, he finally got hauled off to the army. He served in a construction battalion by Zhytomyr, but he came back home with paratrooper tattoos. These were his glory days. Kocha made his rounds in full uniform, beating up anyone he didn’t recognize. All the guys, myself included, worshipped Kocha then since he was such a bad example. This was when the Communist Youth League made one last, pathetic attempt at winning Kocha over by giving him a one-room apartment in the building next to ours. He moved in and immediately made his home a pit of debauchery. In the early ’80s, all our neighborhood’s young overachievers passed through his apartment—boys became men and girls gained valuable experience. Kocha started hitting the bottle harder and harder, so he barely noticed when the USSR collapsed. At the end of the ’80s, when a serial killer went on a rampage in our city, the authorities pointed the finger at Kocha. The neighbors too—everyone was convinced that Kocha was the one raping the girls coming home from the milk factory on starry, perfumed nights, and then stabbing them with a long jagged piece of scrap metal. Nevertheless, no one had the guts to do anything about it—they were too scared of him. In time it seemed he’d earned all the men’s respect and the women’s affection. Then, at the beginning of the ’90s, the authorities had to take matters into their own hands once again, absent the now-defunct Communist Youth League: at the end of a solid week of partying, Kocha burned down a billboard advertising a newly formed joint stock partnership, and this wound up being the final straw. The powers that be had already been at their wits’ end; but then they busted into Kocha’s own apartment and put him under arrest.A small protest had been organized by the time they led him outside. The guys and I (we were grown-up by then) all backed Kocha, but nobody