I used to return from a woman to my room at the hotel, having drunk and fucked through the night, feeling gifted like a flower, healthy, excited.
The elevator is out of order, there's a stench at the door of my room, shit from somebody's dog or a human being. I enter, angry, smart, and the cockroaches scatter from the table drawers in all directions. «Jesus! Motherfucker!» I think to myself and suddenly burst out laughing as though I've just discovered myself for the first time… «The worse it gets, the better it gets. Fuck New York!»
There's a sound of bottles falling from the windows. Seagulls fly around the yard for some reason.
Young people are often lazy, they don't want to work. And they're right. Later they'll have no choice, they'll have to. But they were right. What's so wonderful about work, what's to be proud of? «I work, I pay taxes.» This way one's whole life passes in submission.
Personally, I only like to write and not always. But generally I prefer to do nothing. To cogitate. To recall someone's poems. To lie in the sun. To eat meat. To drink wine. To make love and organize a revolution. And to write sometimes.
I don't believe that there's really someone who for eight hours a day, five days a week, likes to type, or sew men's shirts, or pick up garbage from the streets. Once in a while it's fun to sew a shirt. It's exciting to type out a few pages – I can do it! See how well it comes out! But to do this throughout one's life!? I don't believe it, and many facts confirm this. One woman won a lottery – she'll be paid one thousand dollars a week until the day she dies. So what do you think she said she'd do first? «Stop working,» of course. So, the young people are right without realizing it. I'm for them. I support them.
You're walking in the morning again through New York, going «home» – cogitating – and you run into your ex. She's tall and thin, wearing pants and a belt with a huge buckle. Her fashionable rags are hanging down. Toothy. She has had her teeth redone, not because they were bad but because they were not photogenic.
Her upper lip is trimmed; her nose is powdered over; her neck is tense. She looks insolent but there's shame in her eyes.
We talk and go our separate ways. Walking, you think to yourself: Ah, Elena, Elena you too did not escape the common lot of females. It's a damned pity, real pity. You did something wrong. You can dump Eddie Limonov, why not? But there's something wrong. There's definitely something wrong…
Most of all I hate the rich old ladies. Each one conceals some vileness. Lucky traders of their cunts. They lucked out. I hate them either with or without their puny dogs. And I hate them in the stores too. And when they eat.
Even young women are disgusting when they eat. Usually they're voracious and greedy, especially after a few weeks of having sex with you, when they're certain that you are theirs and they can relax. This is when you see them the way they are. Poor boy, you imagined she was a princess, an angel. She gobbles the pieces of meat like a python, grunts over the brown sauce, wraps her lips in thick red wine, hisses voluptuously with the mixture of pineapple and coconut – she copulates with the food.
Hotels, hotels – the entire 59th Street of Central Park South is a gilded street. Once here, at night, a drunken couple started hugging me. I was dumbstruck. My usual reaction: hand in the pocket, going for the knife…
«But, I thought then, they're not hurting me. Still, they're touching my body.»
I left, steering clear of this temptation.
They were drunk, could they've guessed? He or she? That a well-built man in a cap who looked like an artist could stab them easily. You, the bourgeoisie, have your fun, but don't get carried away. And don't hug me. Because I'm angry you see.
A Japanese restaurant is good in dank weather: hot napkins and warm sake, while the North-Wester is blowing. It's especially good before assassinating a Prime Minister, while you're spending the last of your money in a squalling November.
Central Park. July. Two young pale-faced freaks in glasses – one has a long, attentive nose – hand sheets of printed text to each other. I glance over – it's a script. Okay, okay, long noses, you'll get there. With your old necks, with your wide-open jabot shirts and gold chains on your freckled wiener-like arms, you'll make it to Hollywood. And you'll get to screw the young dumb models and aspiring actresses. Next to them a full-blooded Mexican family had claimed a spot. They had blankets, children, thermoses and three transistor radios. They won't make it to Hollywood.
And passing by was I – red scum – long, curly hair, dark skin and black thoughts. E.Limonov, a man from Russia. And what is amazing – a talented non-Jew.
Mom, listen Mom. I despise you.
And Dad too.
It's as if you're of a different race, never mind a tribe.
Once, I was painting a studio for Frank, a jeweler – he has a long Italian last name. His little girl, Ellen – three years old – was hanging around near me.
«My Dad Frank is my Mom's husband,» she announces. «Do you have a wife?»
«My wife has left me,» I tell her while I keep painting, squatting down. «That's very mean,» the child says seriously. And then obviously to cheer me up she declares: «Here, watch how I jump.» She gets up from the floor and jumps, throwing her little hands and feet to the side. «That's because I'm light. I'm still a kid, you know. I won't be able to jump like that when I'm a grown-up,» she explains.
I get up, put the brush away and try to jump like Ellen. Apparently I don't do too well because she laughs. «You're heavy,» she says. When I ask her how old she is (a corny, idiotic, and ingratiating question of a grown-up who's trying to make conversation with a child – her father had already told me she was three), she answers that she has already had three birthdays. «And how old are you?» she asks. «Thirty-one,» I lie. (In fact, I'm thirty-five.)
«You are old,» she says.
«Maybe not very old?» I ask hopefully.
«No, you're old,» the truth-loving child says, lowering her eyes.
After that she teaches me English words. «Repeat after me,» the little Italian girl tells me in a severe tone of voice. I repeat after her.
All things considered, we're doing great. We're getting along famously and are happy with each other.
Pastoral
to M.N.Izergina
From Brandenburg runs a beautiful summer road, lined along both sides luxurious beeches and plane trees. The road leads to Oranienburg, which is only a stone's throw from sleepy Winnenburg.
Beyond the big sleepy lakes on the outskirts of Winnenburg, there's a valley with remarkable grapes unique to the area, grapes like the Blue Velvet and Rosaly. Nearby the southwestern exit from the valley – the only one accessible by an automobile – there's a hotel, «Eccentrics' Shelter,» whose owner, Frau Maria, remarkably resembles Madam Recamier. «Our entire life is a joke,» she likes to say in rainy weather, and then she inevitably performs with great gusto a well-known old love song «Burn Bright My Star.»
Who would have expected this? Nonetheless, last Friday, a student, Savitsky, and a Jewish miss, Klinestock, committed suicide simultaneously. Singing, they crossed the valley and drowned in the ponds, I mean those by the lake.
To be a passer-by on every beach. To be a foreigner, a fly-by-night from another country. To manage without books or apartments. To throw a dozen finished volumes into a hotel's dumpster and then – in accordance with the secret instructions of the Extraordinary Annihilation League conveyed through an agent – a girl in a purple hat, named Madeleine. Moving on and on, setting up conspiracies and at times unloading your own gun into the pink faces and stomachs of men sentenced by the League – usually they're between forty and sixty years-old.