I will not undertake to explain what the attraction was for me, why it took a masturbating woman in the autumn of life to arouse me to orgasm. I do not know, but I came very well. And may Johnny forgive me for having to resort to the help of this lady; he did it better than any woman, better than all of them. When he had my cock in his mouth I felt serene and happy. He alone – punk, filth of the streets, panhandler, least of the least – lovingly and tenderly kissed my cock, laughed with me, clasped me to him, kissed my poopka and shoulders.
Chris had been serious, Johnny was much more playful and funny. For the rest of the time that I spent with him in the attic, perhaps another hour, we laughed, turned somersaults, and lay on my clothes and his, acting out important personages in their boudoirs. "I am a lord!" he said, lying haughtily on his back, his dick hanging sideways, his black face shining. "It's my house!" he said, encompassing the stairwell in his gesture. I rolled with laughter.
"I am lord, too," I said in English. "My house ees all streets of New York!"
Now he laughed. Then the lord and I wrestled…
We had to leave. Voices sounded downstairs, doors slammed. The day was beginning, we might be seen naked and defenseless, and that we didn't need. We agreed to meet the next day at a coffee shop on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue. I suggested the place, I knew that coffee shop well; it was opposite a bordello and not far from where Alexander lived, my friend in the struggle, my party comrade.
I got dressed and left first. Still naked, he pulled me back at the last moment, but I kissed him and started down. At the next floor I got in the elevator and rode down. On the way the elevator filled up with gentlemen in suits, off to do business. They looked suspiciously at my soiled white jacket and odd face.
When I walked up to my hotel the electronic clock on the IBM tower showed seven-thirty. The last thing I was aware of as I fell asleep was the smell of Johnny's cock and semen. I must have grinned in my sleep.
Roseanne
She was the first American woman I fucked. It sounds fantastic, but I fucked her on July 4, 1976 – the day of America's Bicentennial. Commit this symbolic event to memory, gentlemen, and let us go on to Roseanne herself.
Kirill again, solely Kirill. He was sick of his role as interpreter for Alexander and me. We needed to go to the Village Voice, where we had decided to take our open letter to the editor of the New York Times. We had written the letter apropos of our unnoticed demonstration against the Times. Kirill said, "I can't go, go by yourselves, why can't you go by yourselves?"
"Listen, Kirill," I said, "this is a serious, delicate matter, and with our barbaric English it would be foolish to go alone. We'd just ruin everything."
"But I can't," Kirill said, "I'm busy. Take someone else." "Who?" I said.
"Well, there's Roseanne. You remember, I pointed her out to you at the exhibit at the Russian gallery. Over thirty, a bit of a weirdo."
"All right, Kirill," I said, "call her up and ask her to go to the Village Voice with us."
"No," Kirill said, "I'm afraid of her, I think she wants to fuck me. You'd better call her yourself, I'll give you the number." "All right," I said, "let's have it."
I reached her the next day, and she invited me over that same evening. She was having some friends, an out-of-work history instructor and his wife. I arrived there all charged up, I needed relationships in any shape or form, and any relationship made me glad. She lived, and still does, in a wonderful penthouse apartment. The windows of the long hallway and living room all look out on the Hudson River. On the other side of the living room there's a door out to the terrace – properly, a large fenced-off section of the roof. In addition she has a bedroom and a study. Next door there is another apartment that belongs to her, of smaller size, which she rents out. The whole apartment is as windswept as a sailing ship, and it recalls a sailing ship in its brightness and whiteness, the surge of the wind in it, and the Hudson River beyond the windows. The air is good, it's easy to breathe there. The only thing about the apartment that's a little hard to take is Roseanne herself.
A day or two later we met again and went to the Village Voice with the letter, which she had recast in her own style, cleaning up our excessively leftist political phraseology, making the letter more American. Alexander and I had consented to these revisions.
Even then I noticed her irritation at having to work, type, think, although at that time she was still controlling herself. The letter was practically nothing, less than a page; she agonized over it, while behind her back I scrutinized the piles of books in her study. But then, when she had typed the letter she was very proud of herself. Observing the smile that distorted her face, a strange smile, gentlemen, slightly degenerate, her good facial features notwithstanding, this grimace exposed a mental, psychical defectiveness – observing her face, I had a sudden clear insight. A schiz.
My associations to this word go way back, to my crazy second wife Anna, to the literary and artistic bohemia of Kharkov, the passion for abnormality and disease.
I was raised in the cult of madness. "Schiz," abbreviated from schizophrenic, was the name we gave eccentrics, and it was considered praise, the highest rating a person could have. Eccentricity was encouraged. To say that a man was normal was to insult him. We segregated ourselves sharply from the herd of "normals." How did this surrealistic cult of madness come to us, the boys and girls of the Russian provinces? Via art, of course. Anyone who had not spent time in a mental hospital was considered unworthy. A suicide attempt in my past, practically in childhood, was the kind of credential with which I, for example, had arrived in this company. The very best recommendation.
Many of my friends, both in Kharkov and later in Moscow, received "Group" pensions, as they are called in the USSR. Group 1 was considered the height of praise. A Group 1 Schiz – that was the absolute limit. Many people went too far with this game, and a very dangerous game it was. The poet Arkady Besedin brought his life to an excruciating and atrocious end, the poet Vidchenko hanged himself, we were proud of ourselves. There were but a few hundred like us in the whole city. We had nothing to do with ordinary people. Boredom, despondency, and in the last analysis a joyless death – ordinary Russian people reeked of it. Americans reek of it now.
I understood that Roseanne was one of us. But she was and she wasn't. She easily made Group 1, but there was something unusual about her. A Jew, daughter of parents who had fled Hitler's Germany, the little girl had dreamed of being a pianist and had played professionally from age eleven to thirteen. But American life, the American provinces, the high school where they occasionally beat her up for being Jewish (the last time when she was eighteen, she says) gradually turned Roseanne away from an artistic upbringing too complex for America, away from the piano and her pianist mama – her grandmother was also a pianist – and reshaped her life. She began to be ashamed of her European upbringing, she quit the piano and started down another path in life. It led her to Russian language and literature, led her to work actively against the war in Vietnam while an instructor at a college in one of the boroughs of New York. And then came the event that made her a Group 1 Schiz. She lost her job.
"I'm almost Russian," she says sometimes. But a Russian, in my observation, can go schizzy from just about anything, except from losing his job. She went schizzy. She was depressed for almost two years and still has her ups and downs. She wanted to expose the man who had fired her – unjustly, she said – but the New York Times refused to print her article about the man, and she went schizzier than ever. We are unanimous on the question of the New York Times.