​Act I. Seventeen: Port and Snobbery

​We used to sit in the smoke-choked kitchen of a rented concrete flat, drinking warm, cheap wine
from plastic cups, arguing about Palahniuk, Cortázar, and the future of underground rock.
Outside the window lay the bleak, dead-end autumn of a classic sleeper district. If you leaned
out of the window, you could see them on the dark playground below – shadows in heavy
jackets, squatting around an overturned wooden crate. The gopniks. The miscarriages of the
nineties.
​We would shut the window to drown out their curses, smiling with self-satisfied arrogance.
​" Thank God we’re not like them," someone would say, brushing a stray bang out of their eyes.
" We actually have brains. We’ll go to university, get the hell out of here, and build real careers.
Those guys will just rot on their benches."
​We genuinely believed that intellect was a golden ticket to a better world, while they were just
baggage – an evolutionary dead end. We drew up grand plans, memorized English verbs, and
looked down our noses at the people whose only real skill was hitting first.

​Act II. The Great Divide: Natural Selection

​Then life did what life always does – it threw us into the meat grinder of reality, but it chose a
different setting for each of us.
​We, the "smart boys," followed a perfectly predictable trajectory: grad school, our first
suffocating office jobs, overtime, resumes on job boards, iPhones bought on payment plans,
and finally, the coveted status of "white-collar professionals." We purged the neighborhood from
our systems. We learned to say "colleagues," "I hear you," and discussed burnout over
corporate coffee stations.
​Meanwhile, the boys from the courtyard played Russian roulette with no rules.
​The weak went first: Seryoga from the third entrance was found in a bathtub – he miscalculated
the dose, going out quietly and routinely.
​The hotheaded burned out: Valera was stabbed in a drunken brawl behind the garages over a
misplaced glance or a pack of cigarettes. A pure, stupid death of a neighborhood-scale rock
star.
​But the survivors... The survivors turned out to be apex predators. Those who made it through
that hell, through the jail time, the turf wars, and scraping for pennies, developed a feral,
unerring instinct.
​Last summer, I saw Kolyan – the very same guy who used to shake people down for their
phones by the subway station when he was seventeen. He was stepping out of a matte-black
SUV. There were no tracksuits this time. He was wearing a Loro Piana cashmere sweater that
cost about three of my monthly salaries. But his look remained exactly the same – heavy,
scanning, completely devoid of doubt. He never went to business school, but he owns half the
commercial real estate in the district. Because while we were learning how to write reports, he
was learning how to survive.

​

​Act III. Thirty-Five: Where Is My Fixer?

​And now, we are thirty-five. We have flawless credit scores, ergonomic chairs in open-plan
offices, and premium app subscriptions. Our lives are as safe as a padded playroom. The
biggest stressor we face is if a courier messes up the oat milk in our latte.
​But sometimes, in the evening, when I close my work laptop and stare at the city skyline through
the glass of a high-tech business center, a strange, suffocating longing hits me.
​I realize that if a real crisis hits tomorrow – if the system jams, if hard men from the real world
show up to take what’s mine – all my KPIs, my diplomas, and my polite " as per my previous
email" notes will turn to dust.
​At thirty-five, surrounded by gadgets and insurance policies, you suddenly feel a desperate
deficit of raw, primal strength. You look at your circle of friends and realize they are all team
leads, marketers, and designers. There isn’t a single "fixer" among them.
​There is no one you can call at two in the morning to say, "Kolya, I’m in trouble," and hear that
heavy, gravelly voice reply: "Give me the address. I'm on my way."
​We ran so hard from that brutal, dangerous world that we ended up locking ourselves in a
golden cage. We became predictable, proper, and... boring. Those boys lived like rock stars – at
maximum volume, on the edge, dying young or taking it all. And we just perform our duties
efficiently.
​We won. We left the ghetto. But why does it feel like in this war for safety, we lost the only thing
that mattered?