My Many Loves: The Singing Pickpocketess

Not many are aware in my current coterie, but I can sing like a oil-slick canary. Always could. My pipes, I’ve been told, are smooth and virile, with a sultry cadence. I’m a tenor, mostly, but capable of adventurous deviations when the song calls for it.

Some years ago, in my traipsing years, I insinuated myself into an underground karaoke circuit in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Dissolution. Dressed in Western finery — blue jeans, tucked-in sleeveless tee, Minnesota North Stars ball cap — I aimed to give the air of an American rube, ready to be swindled out of my beer money. I’d remove the mic from its stand with shaky hands, and intentionally miss my cue when the opening cue came scrolling.

But the chuckles and conversation would come to a halt by the time I got to the chorus of “Sweet Love” by Anita Baker, or “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” by Gloria Estefan, “All Night Long (All Night)” by Lionel Richie. My eyes would bat, my hips would sway, and a few hours later I’d go waltzing back out into the Moldovan night, my fanny pack stuffed with crumpled rubles. But it wasn’t money I was after. I craved connection.

I thought I’d found it one night in Pirjota. After charming the judges with “Just Because” — Anita really was my sweet spot — I swagger up to the bar and caught the dewy eyes of a world-weary pick-pocketess thirty years my senior.

“Before the smoke cleared, I would have sworn it was Queen Anita herself on that stage,” she said, sawing at her gums with the sharp shard of a pecan shell. “Buy you a drink?”

“I’ll have an amaretto sour,” I said, cozying up.

That night we dueted on “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” I became so intrigued, and then smitten. Lastly I became engorged, and was forced to expose my privates to the frigid night air as we walked hand-in-hand back to her boarding house. There we practiced harmonies of the coital kind.

Her name was Olgata, and she too was singing her way across the bloc, and sending money back to the two husbands and seven kids she’d left behind when she set out to make it in the karaoke game, or so she told me. Her voice was not classically beautiful, and her perpetual hiccups brought to mind a pair of copulating crickets. Most of her loot came from picking pockets, socks and thigh sacks, I soon realized.

For the next three weeks we worked our way south to Goruni, Chicerea and Biserica Baptista. Ours was a tumultuous relationship. I bought and she stole, and we made just enough to keep ourselves pickled. But this hardly kept the peace. In Stanca she stabbed me with a cocktail skewer. In Ostoi she sold me to a petroleum company where I was forced to sing for lunch room crowds of six or seven hundred. They tried to get me to wear greasepaint and sing Whitney, but I refused.

I eventually caught up with her at a cigarette lounge in Cioburciu, just as some moskal was trying to goon arm her into the back of a mail truck. I gave the guy a knuckle tartine and sent him dropping into the canal. We promptly fled to Cimslia where the karaoke scene was dead, and most of the townsfolk made a living lifting each other’s wallets. Olgata taught me a few tricks (the clutching goose, the diving pinkie, the billfold nurple) and I got pretty good at it. And I was in love.

As it turned out, Olgata was not.

One morning she shoved a flier under my bloodshot eyes and told me we needed to make our way to Foscani for the high stakes karaoke tournament being held in an amphitheater there.

I said okay, and we blue-thumbed it out there in search of the big bucks. Olgata and earned the last two spots on the bracket, but when I got up on stage to sing “Giving You The Best That I Got” I instead saw the scrolling lyrics to “Jam On It” by Newcleus. Not my type of song at all. I knew immediately I’d been set up. I sobbed my way through every “wikki-wikki-wikki” and left the stage to grumbling indifference.

From the bar I watched Olgata and her two apparently not estranged husbands absolutely bring the house down with a triumphant version of “All For Love (non-film version)” that sent me wailing into the night. I went to sleep on a pile of iron shavings behind an old mill and woke up four nights later suffering from a there-to-fore un-catalogued strain of tetanus that left me in lockjawed agony for days.

I never saw Olgata again, but for the next several nights I stumbled my way to every karaoke establishment in town and sang only my half of “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” through clenched teeth and spasming facial muscles. Each time I imagined she’d emerge from the shadows to join me: 

Let them say we're crazy, what do they know?
Put your arms around me, baby, don't ever let go.

But she never did. The song always ended in yelps of agony and grief.

Eventually my jaw loosed and the seizures subsided and I smuggled myself aboard an ice truck to Odesa where I arrived shivering, starving, heartbusted, and done with karaoke forever.

Or so I thought.