I look again at the woman opening her cunt as she sits down on the cock. I have just made peepee and am wiping my member with a tissue. At the touch of the toilet paper my delicate member shudders, something in me begins to stir, my member slowly grows into a cock. Almost unconsciously I begin to fondle the head of my cock, knead it and stroke it, all the while thinking that they fucked here too, in the bathroom – she and I fucked in all our bathrooms, that means she and he fucked here too – and I move my palm along my member and begin masturbating urgently.
Darling Eddie!
I simply cannot get anywhere. I stand up and sit down, my erection does not go away, but I cannot come. I always have trouble the "day after," even with a woman. But I want so much to be connected to this house and what they did here, to splash out my semen where his semen too has flowed, into the tub or into the toilet. His semen flowed there out of her, of course, out of her peepka.
Darling Eddie!
Forty minutes went by; someone had phoned Kirill, some other fan of late-night gab, and he was talking with renewed strength, briskly and joyfully. Perhaps he was getting somewhere. I was getting nowhere with my cock. At length I despaired, and lowered the curtain on my cock by hiding it in my pants.
I hid the yellow hell of the bathroom by extinguishing the obsessive light, shut the door, and went out to my drinking companion.
"We may be going to a party at twelve," said the joyful young idler, "they'll call us back. But now let's go have coffee at the bar on the corner of Spring Street and West Broadway. It's a very famous spot. They've always got very nice women artists and bohemians there. We might pick someone up," Kirill said.
I wanted no one and nothing. I hadn't even managed to come. Poor Eddie. I was tired and wanted to go home. If we couldn't drink, I should take off. The party's over, don't overstay my welcome.
But the aristocrat had no wish to be alone. He needed me so that he wouldn't have to sit in the bar alone, so that he would be seen by the young or not-so-young women artists not as a lonely, horny cunt-chaser but as a respectable man who had come with a friend. The jerk, he didn't realize that together we would look like two pederasts, and he would be even less likely to achieve his goal…
He pestered the fuck out of me. I very much wanted to go home, but he grumbled and raged so much that I finally walked him the hundred meters to this establishment, and then there was no help for it, I went inside with him. A coffee-colored darkness reigned; every spot was taken, and people were standing in line waiting, too. Everyone wanted to mix, talk, and of course get acquainted and fuck. Women artists and women nonartists, pretty ones and dogs in homespun dresses and jeans, they were all there.
He had $5 and that was it. All I had was a subway token. We might have gotten a table, but what we wanted was coffee. We trudged back and began making our farewells at the door of the Frenchman's building. By dint of extravagant mutual compliments we had reached the point of parting, when I suddenly remembered the cigarettes in Jean-Pierre's drawer.
"If you were a good boy, I'd tell you where to find two marijuana cigarettes in Jean-Pierre's house," I announced brazenly.
"Edichka, what are you doing in other people's cupboards and desks?" he said.
"I have the right," I said gravely. "After all, he's my wife's ex-lover." "I'm sorry, Edichka," he said.
We began haggling over the marijuana and decided we would each get a separate cigarette, although Kirill tried to insist on smoking them both together. I threatened not to show him where the cigarettes were if he didn't give in.
"We'll each do what we want with our own cigarette," I said. "You can throw it out or shove it up your ass."
After that we went up to the studio.
I went to the office and got the cigarettes from the box, and we returned to the kitchen. I gave him the cigarette that was due him, and my own I lit up right away. It turned out to be amazingly strong – I had never had anything like it, thick and fat. By the time I had sucked it down to the end, so that I could no longer hold it with my nails, all I could do was struggle the six or seven meters to the couch and collapse in hallucinations.
I heard all that went on in the studio, and at the same time I had dreams, fantastic ones made up of what was past and what had never been. A maniacal girl was trying to open a little box in which lived a thinking being. Her hair flying, she bent over the box, gnawed at it, but could not get it open. Finally, by some sort of trick, by turning a mechanical device, the maniac opened the box, and out poured a stinking brown liquid similar to semen – the being had been killed. I was horror-stricken, but the maniac bared her teeth in a grin.
I heard all that went on in the studio, and at the same time Kirill, who had smoked only half his cigarette, was making phone calls and debating whether or not he should go to the party, his pants were dirty and unpressed. Then Slava-David arrived. He asked what was the matter with me, and they hauled me up, laughingly hoisted me from the couch, then let go of me. I floated and swayed. "Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell" – Eliot's lines surfaced and disappeared, succeeded by my Moscow friend the poet Heinrich Sapgir wearing a yellow tiger face.
It was morning before I could stand up. Although I tried to get up twice in the night, it was eight in the morning before I could do it. Slava-David made me some toast in the toaster. The toast burned and scraped my throat. I took my umbrella and left.
Luz, Alyoshka, Johnny, and others
I took my umbrella that day and left. I was still reeling from the evil weed. But, to avoid returning to my garret and the routine third-day depression, I walked out Spring Street to Sixth Avenue, got on the subway, and went to my English class. It was a gift to me from my solicitous welfare office.
I had my class at the Community Center on Columbus Avenue near 100th Street. The Community Center was not of such ancient construction, but our classroom windows looked out on what were almost ruins – broken windows, fire-blackened walls, all sorts of mold and vermin, creeping right out to the street. New York is rotting around the edges. Its clean blocks are much smaller in area than the already boundless sea of uninhabitable and semihabitable neighborhoods, terrible in their state of near-wartime destruction.
There were about a dozen such buildings where I went to school, between Columbus and Central Park. The reason I mention this is that even the little book we used – "we" being ten women from the Dominican Republic, one from Cuba, one from Colombia, and the only man in the class, namely me – well, this book was entitled Every Night There's No Hot Water. The book told about people who lived in a neighborhood roughly like this one, and how they were surrounded by misfortunes of every description. There was no hot water, they were afraid to step outdoors at night because of crime, a father of two girls felt annoyed that their home had been taken over by a certain Bob, a ne'er-do-well and dangerous character, leader of a youth gang. There was an open implication that the father of the two girls was simultaneously the father of this Bob. All the residents of the neighborhood described in the sentences and exercises of this book were linked to one another by nearly incestuous relationships, and watching over all was an old procuress and scandalmonger in a shawl (the illustrations showed her in a shawl and with a face like a fox). A jolly little book.
I was slightly late that day; they were already writing a composition based on the teacher's questions. The teacher had a surname of Slavic origin, Sirota, although she could not recall that anyone in the family had been a Slav. Women of various hues greeted me joyfully; they were sincerely disappointed when I didn't come. Luz threw me a smile. She very much liked to smile at me, arching like – forgive me this very vulgar and trite simile, but she arched like the stem of a rose. Luz was altogether white, the perfect Spaniard, though she too was from the Dominican Republic. Luz had a child, though she herself was still a child, small and thin; her earrings did not help, nor did her high heels. Her earrings were cheap little things, but she always changed them if she put on a new blouse. She and I were almost lovers, though we never once kissed, and I told her only once that I liked her very much. But we always watched each other all through the three hours of the lesson, and we smiled at each other. One time, in response to the teacher's questions, we were all pointing out on an atlas where we had been born, and I saw Luz hastily jot down in her notebook the name of my hometown, Kharkov. I am probably a modest and inhibited person at heart, and as I have said, I am a long way from total freedom. And Luz was a modest girl – woman. Therefore we simply couldn't clasp each other close, as we would have liked. I endlessly regret that we couldn't. She might have loved me. And that's the only thing I need.