Santa Barbara Forevah!

CAHTA GAPGAPA ΦOPEBA!—SANTA BARBARA FOREVAH!—was stenciled boldly in tall purple-chalk lettering on the side of my parents’ apartment building in the southwestern part of St. Petersburg, Russia, when I returned to the re-renamed city of my childhood and youth—Leningrad, USSR—in 1993. It was the first time I’d been back since immigrating to the United States seven years earlier. There were other signs of Santa Barbara’s presence in the city—improvised tributes to the American soap opera in the historic downtown area: a hole-in-the-wall café called Santa Barbara here, a Santa Barbara strip joint there. On several occasions I was asked, typically by women, whether I’d been to Santa Barbara myself and, if so, what it was like. I hadn’t, unfortunately. “You should go. That’d be the first place I would go if I could ever make it to America,” a middle-aged salesclerk at the grocery store said to me with mild reproach.

Santa Barbara certainly sounded nice.

In Santa Barbara, people had manners. They had their self-respect about them. The men didn’t urinate in hallways or write obscene words on the walls of elevator cabins. They didn’t smash lightbulbs in entryways or drink cheap eau de Cologne first thing in the morning. They didn’t occupy the only toilet in the communal apartment for a good half-hour or keep their dirty combat boots and homemade barrels of pickled mushrooms in the communal bathroom. And they certainly did not, out of pure malice, slip slivers of tar soap in other people’s pans with soup boiling on communal kitchen stoves. Nor did they come home dead drunk past midnight and plop down on the couch face first with their shoes on and immediately start snoring. In Santa Barbara, men were men, real men, handsome and gallant, even if they were not necessarily very good people in all other respects. They didn’t go through their entire lives without saying “I love you” once to their women, especially to their wives—on whom, admittedly, they cheated mercilessly nonstop, but