When I forsook the Hilton, when I shag-assed out of there the last day, I laughed like a silly baby: I had shed one more burden, one more stage. I was sorry only about Wong, but I hoped to find him when I needed him. I could not be useful to him yet.
Others and Raymond
I really got over my tragedy very fast, all things considered. Granted, I'm not quite over it even yet, but all the same the pace has been startling. I've known of other such tragedies, and people have recovered slowly, if at all. It was March when I made my first attempts at intimacy with men, and by April I had my first lover.
One day in March, Kirill, the young aristocrat from Leningrad, mentioned that he was acquainted with a fellow a little over fifty, and that he was a homosexual.
For some reason this stuck in my mind. "Kirill, old buddy," I said finally, "women rouse me to disgust, my wife has made intercourse with women impossible for me, I can't deal with them. They're always having to be serviced, undressed, fucked. They're panhandlers and parasites by nature, in everything from intimate relations to the economics of the normal joint household in society. I can't live with them anymore. The main thing is, I can't service them – take the initiative, make the first move. What I need now is someone to service me – caress, kiss, want me – rather than wanting and being ingratiating myself. Only from men can I get all this. You'd never guess I'm thirty fucking years old, I'm nice and trim, my figure is faultless, more like a boy's than a man's, even. Introduce me to this fellow," I begged. "Please, Kirill, I'll be eternally grateful!"
"Limonov, are you serious?" Kirill asked.
"You think I'm joking?" I replied. "Look at me, I'm alone now, I'm at the very bottom of this society – the bottom of it, hell, I'm simply outside it, outside of life. Sexually I'm totally freaked out, women don't arouse me, my dick is faint with incomprehension, it just dangles because it doesn't know what to want and its master is sick. If things go on like this, I'll end up impotent. I need a friend. There's no question in my mind, men have always liked me, always, they've liked me since I was thirteen. I need a solicitous friend to help me return to the world, a man to love me. I'm weary, no one has worried about me for a long time, I want attention, I want to be loved and fussed over. Introduce me, and I'll take care of the rest, really, he'll like me."
I wasn't lying to Kirill; it was a fact. I had even had some long-term admirers, I had snickered at their advances, but somehow I had enjoyed their attention. Now and then I had even allowed myself to go to a restaurant with them; once in a while, for the fun of it or maybe the stimulation, I had allowed them to kiss me, but we never fucked. Among ordinary people same-sex love was considered impure, dirty. In my country pederasts are very unfortunate. At the whim of the authorities they can be entrapped and put in prison for what in the opinion of Soviet law is an unnatural love. I knew a pianist who did two years for pederasty; the film director Paradzhanov is doing time now. But that is the attitude of ordinary people, the authorities, the law. I was a poet, and I had been intoxicated by Mikhail Kuzmin's "Alexandrian Songs" and other poems, where he sings the praises of his male lover and tells about love between men.
My most persistent admirer was a red-haired singer named Avdeev from the Teatralny Restaurant. The restaurant was directly across from my apartment windows. Every evening, if I was home, I could hear his voice belting out "Mama's Poor Heart" and other semiunderworld songs. The restaurant was small and on the dirty side; every night they had almost exclusively the same crowd. Among the habitues were thieves, gypsies from the outskirts of Kharkov, and other shady characters. In summer I heard my singer's voice loudly, at its natural volume; in winter, muffled by the closed windows.
I had just moved in with Anna, a beautiful gray-haired Jewish woman. We lived together as man and wife, it was a happy time for me, my poetry went well, life was gay, I drank a lot, I had a good coffee-colored English suit (which I hadn't come by quite honestly), I spent a lot of time hanging out on the main street of our city with my dear friend Gennady, handsome Gena, son of the manager of the largest restaurant in town.
Gena was a sheer joy. An idler, he saw his calling in drinking sprees and parties, but sumptuous ones. Strange as it may seem, his attitude toward women was almost indifferent. Even though he appeared to love Nona, who came on the scene later, he could give up a date with her for an excursion with me to a little out-of-town restaurant that we called the Monte Carlo, where they made sumptuous chicken tabaka. My friendship with Gena lasted several years, until I went away to Moscow. Gena and I were rakehells, like Fellini's provincial city boys.
The relationship with Gena, I think, was one facet of my innate homosexuality. For the sake of a date with him I used to escape my wife and mother-in-law by jumping from a second-story window. I loved him very much, although we didn't even embrace. As I now see, I was all entangled in homosexual liaisons, only I didn't understand that. When I said good-bye to Gena at the corner – I lived on Sumskaya Street, our main street, where the Teatralny Restaurant also was – Avdeev would come out of the restaurant, he had dark circles under his eyes, his lightly made-up lips glistened, he would walk over and say in a hollow, languid voice, "Good evening!" Sometimes he had to cross the street to do it. I believe he even interrupted his songs for the sake of this "Good evening"; I mean, he rushed right off the stage. He had a clear view of the street through the big windows. Often I was very drunk, and my friends recall that Avdeev sometimes helped me to my house, walked me into the entrance, and started me up the stairs.
Back before Gena and the nightly scene of Avdeev's figure bowed in greeting, back when I was in school, I had a butcher friend, Sanya the Red, a huge man of German descent with a florid complexion, which was why he was nicknamed "the Red." He was six or eight years older than I. I showed up at the butcher shop first thing in the morning, I went everywhere with him, I even accompanied him on dates with girls, and besides we had a more solid tie – we worked together. We stole. I played the role of a cherubic poet, usually this was at the dance pavilion or out in the park, I recited poems to the astonished, open-mouthed girls, and meanwhile Sanya the Red, with his stubby, clumsy-looking fingers, would lightly and unnoticeably – he was a great artist at this business – remove the girls' watches and pick their purses. It was all beautifully thought out, we never once got caught. As you see, my art then went side by side with crime. Afterward we either headed for a restaurant or bought a couple of bottles of wine, drank them right from the bottle in the park or in a doorway, and went for a walk.
I very much enjoyed appearing with him on the streets and in crowded places. He dressed brightly, wore gold rings – one had a skull, I remember, that captured my fancy. He had the taste of a gangster, as they are depicted in the movies. On a summer evening, for example, he liked to wear white pants, a black shirt, and rakish white suspenders; he had a predilection for suspenders. A huge man – he even had a paunch, which got bigger and bigger with the years – he in no way resembled the ordinary, in those years rather drab inhabitants of our city, which is a provincial industrial center with the most numerous proletariat in the Ukraine.
He got sent up without me – went to prison for attempting to rape a woman with whom he had had sex many times before. In prison he worked in the kitchen and… wrote poetry. When he got out, someone gave him a good deep dig with a knife. "Even my fat didn't help!" he complained, when I visited him in the hospital.
He was kind to me, he encouraged me in writing poetry and very much enjoyed listening to poetry. Several summers in a row, at his request, I read to an astonished crowd at the city beach lines that went something like this.