When Reality Hits You in The Face
An episode from the life of my youth
On the night of the 13th of January of 1991, the Soviet Army occupied the TV tower. I watched tanks driving over cars, tracer bullets flying all over the place. A few of my friends lied their heads at the tower.
By the end of the same year, Lithuania was a recognised, independent state. The hopes for a bright future were high in the air. The country was moving back where it once belonged.
“No Future” by Sex Pistols and “Peremen” (Перемен-Change in Russian) by the Russian band Kino played on a cassette player.
Few years passed and the hopes and dreams about the future were fading away. Alcohol was the escape route to the abyss. Gangsters were in charge. Idealism was dead. Money did the talking. Wild capitalism was in a full swing.
The greedy individualism took over. I stood strong against it by partying even stronger.
Alcohol infused fights, casual sex, dreams of leaving this land. Some of us managed to escape the dark days of post-independence. Some went and came back. Those who came back painted a bleak picture. “ The West is rotten,” they said. What did I do? I partied even more.
There was a party, someone’s birthday in a private room, ten or fifteen of us. By the time I arrived most of my friends were drunk. Downstairs, there were other people partying. It’s never a good sign when there are two separate parties in the same bar. We didn’t have to wait too long until someone came back with a bloody nose.
Someone shouted “ let’s go” and I knew that it was the end of the party. We went down, met the others and fists started to fly. Fights don’t last long but as a rule, there is at least one who doesn’t get up. It was mayhem, blood, broken bones, police and ambulance. That night I realised that my careless youth is gone. It was time to move on and leave this land of broken dreams behind me.
One dear friend of mine said to me once, “ We were lucky, you know. No one ended up in prison. We walked on a thin line between good and evil ”.
I wrote a piece about the games we played when we were kids, please take a look.
And here I wrote about the people I care about a lot:
