Boris Lvovich works as a blacksmith. He can't, not a kuy. But when he smokes, he can do anything, especially drink and smoke, so he rarely smokes, only if his corkscrew breaks. When the corkscrew breaks, he opens everything he needs with it, drinks, goes home and again he can't, he can't forge. And there's nothing left to forge, and how can the police have a forge? For some reason he always ends up in the police after he's forged a corkscrew. His wife has already taken him to psychiatrists, and to psychics and shamans - no one helped, not even Dr. Malakhov with his needle-necks.
The forge, the corkscrew, the police, that's the traffic. And after the police he would come home, sad, hungover, lie down on the couch and watch sports. He likes to watch sports a lot. Volleyball, chess, field hockey... But hockey separately, grass separately. And when field hockey and grass hockey are over, Boris Lvovich starts to remember his life. How he ate ice cream as a child. How he entered some kind of institute. How he dreamed of becoming a blacksmith, but first he became a father. And how he once bought a car for nine thousand rubles, but for some reason it didn't go anywhere. And he bought a more expensive refrigerator for ten thousand rubles, so he left after a field hockey game. And never came back until now. His wife Lena was very angry at the time, Boris even wanted to leave her, but he couldn't get up from the sofa. But if he could, he would have thrown it away. Although, on the other hand, a wife is a good thing, it's a pity to throw away. And she loves Boris Lvovich, realizing that he's talented in everything. Especially, of course, in vodka, for which he suffers.
Well, they don't like talented people in Russia, it's been that way for a long time. They put them in some ridiculous hospital, they put them on drips, and sometimes - the worst part! - they start hiding drinks. They didn't even know that Boris Lvovich grows pickles under his bathtub. He's not very good at it, but, as they say, Zhitomir wasn't built at once either. Something has already ripened there, but not very salty and not very cucumbers. A week later, it turned out that it was the people's discontent from below. Boris Lvovich overdid a little with watering and all the future cucumbers on the floor downstairs and there have already sprouted, probably. Because the neighbors had definitely sprouted and rang the doorbell for a long time, but Boris Lvovich and Lena hid for two days and did not even pick up the phone. Though Lena whispered loudly all these days. She said that if Boris Lvovich couldn't do it, let him go to his smithy and smith there, and not grow pickled cucumbers, especially under the bathtub. And that he should be taken to a famous clinic with yellow walls, where they will make a human being out of him. Boris Lvovich replied that his mother and father had made him a man about fifty years ago. They, of course, wanted what was best, but Boris Lvovich turned out to be a man. His parents admitted later that they had dreamed of a kitten, so they named him Boris.
But he won't grow pickles anymore if he didn't succeed the first time. He won't grow anything else, because he's an intelligent man. He can't even call the streetcar boor to order, he only quotes the Kama Sutra. The boor swears at him, and Boris Lvovich responds with a jade rod. And if the boor has not read the "Kama Sutra" and does not know where this rod is, Boris Lvovich can show him, he has nothing to be ashamed of, given his beauty.
Such an interesting person is my former friend Boris Lvovich. Why former? As soon as he read this story, he sent me to the jade rod. But I wasn't offended. In Russia, writers were always sent somewhere, and they often died because of it. Tolstoy has already died, Chekhov, Gorky... And Boris Lvovich will forgive me, I hope, and then bind me a fence. Or a knife to cut fish. He can't, he can't...
Ilya Krishtul