The Roof

The Roof is a club built eponymously on top of an old beer factory just across the Moscow river from where I live. Everything in Moscow is something on top of an old something. There's a metal frame staircase leading to a platform against an aging plaster wall. Barbed wire coils across the top. Makes sense. Don't want the partying to escape and run free through the wide ulitsya of Moscow. No. Don't want that at all.


Inside is a warren of rooms, some of them dance floors, some just quiet, moody, modernist salons with white bean bags and fuschia neon. That's where Marius, Yuri, Olga and myself ended up.


It's no wonder bean bag chairs seem emblematic of the mod 70s. Groovy rap sessions seem to naturally flow from these malformed ovoids of dubious support. I don't know how groovy our rap session was. Seemed lacking in some essential groove. In other words, I'm not sure it was a real happening.


The salons were all watched over by The Man's big electric eye, man.


Sucking down helium and doing the funny voice thing sounds just as funny in Russian as it does in English. I've never actually done it. I get scared my vocal chords would get stuck that way and I'd have go through life sounding like Truman Capote.

Oh, and this is interesting. Olga was telling me that the sound of English being spoken by a native English speaker is a very pretty, almost romantic sound. Clearly she's never been to Mesquite, Texas.


We finally adjourned our quorum and headed into the frigid night along the frozen banks of the Moscow. Sheets of ice reflected the violet lights sparkling on the bridges over the river... That was when Yuri decided to go topless.


See, I get a lot of flack over my coat. But I promise you, I'm the only warm man in Russia. Last night's walk to the main road was especially bitter. Marius, Olga and Yuri -- Russians all of them -- were in sub-zero distress. I, however, bundled into my Canada Goose Expedition Arctic-rated parka was as toasty as a New England clam simmering in a pot. Yuri decided that an appropriate protest was in order so walked the remaining distance to the boulevard al fresco. Them crazy Ruskies.