I have said that I did not hate the specific bearers of evil, the rich. I have even admitted that there might be among them victims of the world order. What I hated was the system, in which one man goes out of his fucking mind from boredom and idleness, or from the daily production of fresh hundreds of thousands, while another man barely earns a living at hard labor. I wanted to be an equal among equals.
Now try and say that I was unjust. I was not.
My last days at the Hilton were spent in terrible agitation. One day I would feel like quitting work and decide to do it, basing my decision on numerous considerations. Why the fuck am I living this way? I thought irritably. I still don't have any money, not even enough to rent a normal apartment. I'm dreadfully tired, sometimes I go to bed at eight. I haven't made any contacts at the restaurant, I've hardly made any progress with the language, so what's the point of working here? I'll leave. I'll leave, and I won't feel any pangs in front of Gaydar, why the fuck should I be ashamed in front of Gaydar? A man looks for where it's best, the best thing for me is to leave and be on welfare. We are not slaves – no slaves are we. It's either all, or if nothing, welfare.
The next day, my day off, when I had nothing to do and my devil Elena appeared to me again in all her glory, I would feel tormented by the free time; hoping again that work would kill my torment, I would decide to stay on at the Hilton. But, after working another day or two and falling asleep again at practically eight, I was exasperated. Walking from work through the seething crowds to Sixth, Fifth, and Madison avenues, I thought again, I'll leave, I'll leave tomorrow, enough of killing myself – though I really could do the work, if I wanted to be a waiter and conceived of my future as that of a waiter or porter.
In the morning, walking to work in the dark, I would make a six-minute excursus through all of world literature – that many lines came to my mind every time. Some fucking waiter! The poem I remembered most often, for some reason, nearly every day, was "Factory," by our great Russian poet Alexander Blok. "Yellow the windows next door…" Then I skipped the lines I didn't need and recited the last stanza in fulclass="underline"
They enter and straggle off,
Under heavy sacks they stoop,
And the yellow windows laugh -
Beggars are easy to dupe…
Walking to work, coming home from work, I felt myself to be one of those beggars, I had been duped. My native literature would not let me become an ordinary man and live in peace, shit no, it tweaked me for my red busboy jacket and preached at me, arrogantly and justly: "Shame on you, Edichka! You are a Russian poet, that is your caste, my dear, that is your uniform. You have discredited your uniform, you must leave this place. Better a beggar, better to live as you did at the end of February – a beggar and bum."
Oh, I didn't fully trust my Russian literature, but I hearkened to her voice, and she wore me down in the end. Her constant "The yellow windows laugh – Beggars are easy to dupe" (I took the yellow windows to mean Park Avenue, Fifth, and their denizens) forced me one day to approach Fred, the manager, and tell him, "Excuse me, sir, but after looking at this work I have come to the conclusion that it's not for me. I'm very tired and I need to learn English, I want to leave. You've seen that I'm a good worker, if you need me I'll come another day or two, but no more than that."
I wanted to tell him, but did not, that I was incapable, constitutionally incapable, of playing the servant and I found his customers disagreeable. "I do not wish to serve the bourgeoisie," I wanted to tell him, but did not – for fear of sounding too pompous, for that reason alone.
In the Hilton period, in the last days of my stay there, I accomplished several other things – wrote a letter to a "Very Attractive Lady" and sent eleven of my poems to Moscow, to the journal Novy Mir.
The "Very Attractive Lady" had placed an ad in the Village Voice. Lady, 39, desired companion for trip to "Paris, Amsterdam, Santa Fe, etc." The itinerary suited me, as I wrote the lady, 39. Now I recall this with irony; at the time it seemed to be my only chance, and I was sure she would jump at a Russian poet. Besides, in February, in a New York Review of Books article about Russian literature today, Carl Proffer had devoted several lines to me, as I also wrote the very attractive lady, without a twinge of conscience, like a salesman touting his wares. I am still waiting for her answer. Well, it would have been a chance to come up to the surface, out of the artificial life that I am living to this day, and get into the real world. No matter, I might have knifed the very attractive lady on the third day of her "favorite trip," as she called it. To her good fortune, she turned out to have little imagination. Recalling my shameless brags in that letter, I am even somewhat embarrassed.
The letter to the editors of Novy Mir was written out of mischief and my love of scandal. Although I was almost positive they would not print my poems, I did not deny myself the pleasure of having some fun at the expense of both camps. My conscience was clear. Solzhenitsyn, while living in the USSR, had published his books here in the West; his conscience hadn't bothered him, in point of fact he had thought only of his own career as a writer, not of the consequences or influence of his books. So why couldn't I, while living here, publish my poems over there in the USSR? Both governments had made good use of me, at last I could use them too. I had some chance of getting published. After all, a whole page had been devoted to me and my article "Disillusionment" (which, as I have already mentioned, got me fired from Russkoe Delo) in the Moscow weekly Nedelya for the week of February 23. By divine coincidence, those were the very days when I was out of my fucking mind. Wrapped in a filthy overcoat I had found in the trash, my arm oozing pus, I was roaming through the New York February, picking scraps out of garbage cans and drinking the last drops from wine and liquor bottles. I wandered a good deal in Chinatown during those days, spent the nights with bums. I endured six days of that life, on the seventh I returned warily to the apartment on Lexington and saw again my gruesome exhibit of Elena's things, which I had hung on the walls, with a label under each item, such as:
Elena's wee little stocking – white
Whereabouts of the other, unknown
She bought little white stockings when she had come
to know her lover, and at the same time bought
two slender belts… she and her lover wore them
to fuck… for Eddie Limonov, sorrow and
a martyr's torment.
Or:
Tampax
Elena Sergeevna's
unused,
my girl-child could insert it
in her peepka – comically
it used to stick out, hang out of
her peepka, the string.
The objects were hung on nails and coat hangers, or taped to the walls. Jolly little exhibit, wasn't it? How would you like to be invited to such an exhibit? But I had invited people, on February twenty-first. About ten people saw the exhibit, and Sashka Zhigulin came and got it down on film, so that I have it on three rolls.
I was out of my mind, I confess; the exhibit was called "Diary of Saint Elena." When I returned from being a bum, I tore all those things down from the walls, with my eyes narrowed and face averted, and began a new life, which is what led me to the Hilton and welfare and the Hotel Winslow. Fuck it – so many events rolled over me in that period, and I seem to be getting slowly stronger day by day, I can tell.