Sweating to the Oldies

I’m not sure where I got it. Perhaps in a chilly and damp St. Petersburg earlier in the week, perhaps in the onset of autumn of Moscow – but I got sick this week. By Friday, I was extremely run down, sneezy, achy, and on and on.

That evening, on my way home from work, I stopped by the drugstore to load up on remedies of a slightly more scientific nature than the advice I had been getting – drink hot tea with honey and lemon being the most common. Not that I have anything against taking that type of advice. It’s just that by Friday, it was clear that a warm, tasty beverage was doing little to stop the onslaught of a virus bent on my total destruction. At the drugstore, I threw myself on the mercy of the pharmacist. She seemed really concerned about my health, and gave me a rapid fire tour of all the medicines that they offer in this, and related, realms of healthcare. I’ll admit that I was a bit dizzy and had a hard time concentrating, but this woman seemed to speak the fastest version of Russian I’ve ever heard. She had stopped talking for several moments, and I was still processing the first part of what she had said to me. The blank stare I gave her as my foggy brain struggled to keep up was signal enough – she took two boxes off the shelf, stuffed them in my hands, and then pointed me to the cashier.

Saturday wasn’t too pleasant a day. I slept until about 5 pm, waking only twice to drink the hot concoction that the pharmacist had recommended. It tasted suspiciously like tea with honey and lemon. Close enough, actually, to inspire fears of falling back asleep and waking up in an intensive care ward in the US, having been evacuated after several weeks of fever-induced torpor. Finally, I motivated out of bed and got out of the house. Which, in retrospect, I shouldn’t really have attempted.

My single goal for the weekend was to buy a guitar. I’ll get into reasons for purchasing one in another post, perhaps. But in the fog of my current state, the desire to buy a guitar attained a level of purpose akin to a life and death matter. Something approaching how a wounded soldier is still able to crawl forward and take out the machine gun nest tormenting his comrades. I simply had to have a guitar, and I had to have it right then.

The first store I went to was closed on Saturdays and Sundays. Seems odd for a music store, yes, but it was closed. I headed off to the other music store in my neighborhood. I thought I was feeling a bit better, walking around in the fresh air. I got to the store and started perusing the guitars – mostly by price level since I don’t really know anything about them. By the time the clerk came over to help me (who, of course this being a Russian store, I had to summon) I had started to feel pretty sickly again. Dizzy, mainly. Fatigued. Nose running, and necessary to gasp through my mouth every few breaths.

I tried to get him to describe the attributes of the guitar I was interested in, but he wasn’t biting. All he would say was that it was a “normal” guitar. Now, “normal” in Russian is used sort of the way we would say “fine”, but with even less enthusiasm. I told him that I didn’t know anything about what I was doing, and that this would be my first. As effusive as he would get about this guitar was to say only that it was “completely normal”.

At some point during this teeth-pulling conversation, I started to really get sick. And then perspire. I mean really perspire – all the pent up fever coming loose at once. I was standing there sweating, reeling, dizzy, and trying like hell to decide on a guitar pick from a box of 8 styles the clerk had presented to me. Finally, he broke my impasse by asking “By the way, do you feel alright?”

Oh man, you don’t know the half of it. “No, actually. I don’t feel well at all.”

I bought the guitar and a case, and left. The security clerk seemed glad to see me go – he had been giving me the evil eye almost from the moment I walked in the door. I can only just imagine what he was thinking: Here’s a large, unshaven, glassy-eyed man in my store, sweating profusely, and speaking broken Russian to boot. Clearly, he’s a Chechen suicide bomber all strung out on whatever they take that makes them want to commit suicide. Here with the sole purpose of destroying this shop on my shift.

I dragged myself back home – mercifully only a couple of blocks. I set the guitar in the corner carefully, prepared another hot medicine concoction, and crawled into bed.