Last day of winter vacation. The happy days of waking around ten and going where I want when I want are over. My class is in the morning shift this month. The weather is also shitty - the fat snow from few days ago is thawing, leaving mud everywhere (there's still no sidewalk on our side of the street; few houses made their own but we didn't, being on the corner makes it cost about four times more than normal). There's enough mud to make a mud spa in each major town. The clouds are dead heavy. I confess these three weeks have been somewhat boring, but then that's better than watching teachers' faces everyday and worse than being with the gang I know for eight years. In three and a half months we'll finish school, have a farewell party, promise each other to meet in five, ten, fifteen years... That's future. The present is a haircut. Again. Got lucky this time, this was a "wolf sated and sheep on count" job, i.e. Ivka is satisfied and I still have enough left. It's not shorter in the back, it's thinner. The bangs are shorter but their corners are lower than usual, so I don't look so soldierly. That part, on the temples, can be swept back (for school) or forward so I get wide sideburns. Short as they are, I still don't look as forcibly mowed. When I came home, dad just cut me short: "you didn't cut your hair". Never satisfied.
At times I managed to find myself even guilty of Charles Manson's massacre, having to find imaginative ways to dissociate from the likes of him. And being on the defensive wasn't a good position from which to convince anyone coming from that angle that we're actually the good guys. One of the tricks was to point out the logical fallacy. So what if he was wearing long hair like we do - you're dressed like Al Capone.
That being said, I still concluded that I couldn't possibly be a hippie, cos' they have nothing to lose. I have.
Tried to ask Cink what's the meaning of "every man in life has certain psychic moments which act antifractilly upon his vital point which passes through his soma", but he didn't even hear the whole thing out, someone else made more noise and he had to divert his attention.
On 16th, Rencika came with a short short haircut, like Ana from Bazar (a fictional character of a girl in her, say, late teens, whose father is pretty much an image of the writer, Moma Kapor), which means all short, short bangs to the side, temples somewhat covered, neck length in the back but not thinned. Don't know whether it was voluntary, or someone talked her to it. At the time I assumed any short hairdo is achieved by coercion, how else. Either way, I imagined that Moma used Rencika as a model upon which he built Ana, except there was something wrong with the timeline.
On 20th, another parents' meeting, with us in the classroom, and Ivka was beside herself. The elections for "max frajer and mis of the class" that we held the other day were somehow an unforgivable sin. Probably she got her definition of frajer from some police manual from eight or fifteen years ago, because what she included in her definition of frajerizam was full of things we haven't even heard of, far from crossing our minds. And since I have preserved one of the ballots, I see my own handwriting on them, the chances of me getting the title of firebrand organizer again are high. So she was at a loss of what to say when she heard of the word "frajer", and so were we when we heard how much of a fuss she raised. Which, all in all, didn't mean that I couldn't miss the chance to ask to organize another dance. Which then came to be.
But then it wasn't much - most of the best girls didn't come. Patak was somehow a DJ, but nobody danced. Well almost nobody - I danced with Tejka, someone else with Dragana, there was a couple from 4th division and that was all, everybody else were just sitting around. It took some time to get the party started. There was a trick to the room - it was basically two mess halls, for the daycare, connected by an almost full length accordeon door. We used the half closer to the middle of the building; the other half was dark. Then someone would just crack that accordeon door open wide enough to push you in and then close it. All of a sudden you were in the dark. When it happened to me, I found the door out into the hall by dead reckoning, came back into the lit half, and got right behind the guy who pushed me. Scared him a bit.
On 26th finally got some fancy shoes, dark wine-red, or as we call that color, rotten sour cherry. With no lace, but buckle instead. Which meant a big step in becoming an, ahem, frajer. Influenced many other of my steps too, because the front was tailored low, so I didn't lean on the tip of my big toe anymore when walking, but rather on the first knuckle. I still haven't quite shaken the habit off, fifty years later. And acquiring the habit did hurt at times, but I was just self-important with my new looks. Size, 41 (I'd grow to wear a 44). They cost 104 dinars at the time.
Same day talked with Ivka at length about "šund in the hands of youth and frajerizam as a bad streak in their behavior". She tried to keep the class informal, more of a talk, but it ended up with her talking with me. About that election, what did we mean by that. So it was just for fun, mostly mocking the various official contests like that, and the titles were taken in sheer irony. And about frajer, we don't understand why is the word taken so seriously, what's wrong there? She tried something about form being important for form's sake... I don't think we came to the point where the misunderstanding began.
On 28th there was another dance. I bet with Rencika a slap on the face that there will be one - she said won't. I developed the roll with my cartoon experiments (which I thought would be an addition to "Four bad luck guys"). Bought the "Trla baba lan" single.
At the dance talked with Tejka about the future. With a not-excelent mark for conduct, we may have trouble getting into a better high school, so perhaps a vocational thing was due... become a locksmith or whatever. Or go be a hippie. How can Ivka be such a pest. She was slurping blood to the previous generation too, stories circulate. In the end she said "what a fat shit you talk". Then she went to dance with some left guy, looking wistful and romantic, and I got into a mood. Danced a lot with I. from fourth division, then tried to animate the crowd (which was huge this time), then found Miljka and danced with her in silence. Body to body, slowly. And I fell in love for the evening. Did I hear her calling me "my sunshine"? Perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe she was just trying the words for size. I spent the next few days under influence.