Having visited all the galleries that are in the same building as Castelli, I usually go down to West Broadway. People are roaming around. I can always pick out the artists. Their faces are familiar to me, like the fat faces of the boys in Washington Square. These are the faces of my Moscow artist friends. Bearded, inspired-looking, or on the contrary unremarkable, whether worn out from work or fresh and impudent, they're familiar down to the last little wrinkle. So are the faces of their girl friends – faithful women who have been with them through many years, or cheerful casual traveling companions to share a bed, a drink, and a smoke, who have not touched their hearts, who are here today and gone tomorrow. In April and March I wanted to live in SoHo, I was bursting to go there, I wanted to live in a small building, know all my artist neighbors, sit on the steps of the building at night, drink beer, gab with the neighbors, acquire solid connections. I wanted it so much, but lofts are extremely expensive and I did not realize my dream. Now that I have grown calmer, I no longer want to live in SoHo. I realize that I have changed greatly, that art alone no longer satisfies me, nor the people of art. That which once made me happy, the bohemian, light-hearted way of life, is already irretrievable, and if I succeeded in imitating it, it would soon turn out to be an unnecessary, irritating, and infuriating repetition of what I have already seen. They are selfish, I think as I trudge down the street looking at the denizens of SoHo. They seek success in this society, they are cynical and locked into their own circle of friends, they are hard to organize, and in the final analysis they are merely part of this civilization. In youth they protest, seek, are indignant in their art, but later they become pillars of the system.
What has become of Salvador Dali? Once a talented artist he is now an old buffoon, capable only of adorning wealthy salons with his own mummy. It was in one such salon that I became acquainted with him. Elena and I had been taken there, as usual, by the Clickermans, Alex and Tatyana.
Dali was sitting in the place of honor, along with his male secretary and some girl. He turned out to be a short, bald old man with bad skin, who said to me in Russian: "Ladybug, ladybug, fly to the sky, Your babies are up there, eating meat pie…" This is what many generations of Russian children have said when the ladybug, with her little spotted winglets, lights on their hands. My Elena was in raptures over Dali, and he over her, it seemed; he called her Justine. Though her head was crammed with superficial knowledge picked up here, there, and everywhere, she was essentially an uneducated girl from the Frunze Embankment and did not get the point. Well, of course, I, big clever Eddie, told her that Justine was the heroine of one of the Marquis de Sade's novels. Dali called her "the little skeleton." "Thanks for the little skeleton," he told the Clickermans. His secretary, who spoke English worse than I do, wrote down our phone number and promised to call on a certain day.
Elena waited eagerly for the call. Although she unfortunately got sick, she constantly sniffed something to make her get well and said she would go to Dali's even if she were dying. But he didn't call. I felt sorry for the disappointed little girl, the old dotard had disappointed the child, and because of her despair and her cold and illness she and I fucked long and well that night, though it was already the era of the panties blotted with semen.
Everything is perverted by this civilization, the gentlemen in suits have fouled and besmirched everything. Lithographs and etchings by old dotards like Picasso, Miro, Dali, and others, which are sold in all the stores, have turned art into a huge unclean bazaar. The money they have is not enough, they want more and more. Paintings in oil, in tempera, are not enough; drawings, watercolors, and gouaches are not enough; to make even more money they do their hackwork on stone and put it on sale in hundreds and thousands of copies. They've devalued everything, the bastards. Many of them are burdened with wives and several families, with relatives and friends; they need lots of money. Money, money and the greed for money, guides these wretched old men. Once rebels, they have turned into dirty operators. The same fate awaits the young men of today. This is why I have ceased to love art.
The only thing I fear in SoHo is Prince Street, where he lives, my wife's first lover. When I even glance at the signpost with the name prince street it torments me, spots of light play before my eyes and I come close to vomiting. As I draw near Prince Street I try to avoid the signpost with the name, it exasperates me, it's such a substantive corroboration of my pain and torments, my defeat. But occasionally I fail to close my eyes in time, and then I am stabbed in the eye by this name. And more important, my heart: I am stabbed in the heart. The same thing happens when I'm riding the subway and all of a sudden the name of this station steps out of the darkness, bright and prominent, repeated perhaps fifteen times. It comes running after the train, running, running… Elena has apparently already left her Jean, but the terrible name will probably make me turn over even in my grave; before it I had known no defeats in life, or they had been immaterial.
Idle Washington Square and retiring, taciturn SoHo weary me at times, and I take to visiting Central Park, since it's right under my nose. Walk four streets up, turn off Madison onto Fifth Avenue, and there I am in Central Park. Usually I walk as far as Sixty-seventh or Sixty-eighth Street alongside the park and enter it near the playground. I climb uphill by a winding little path, go to the far end of it, take off my clothes, and lie down on the hot stones to tan. In my own geographical atlas this spot is called Children's Mountain. I lie there contemplating the sky and the posh penthouses on Fifth Avenue with plants sticking up from them, and I hypothesize about the kind of life that goes on there. The children run around near me. Usually these are good children. Bad ones turn up too – there was one savagely malicious boy, for example, who spent more than two hours breaking and tearing my favorite bush on Children's Mountain. There was nothing I could do but suffer in silence, for the cretin's father was sitting nearby smiling encouragingly. The father was also a cretin. When they left I got up and went to straighten the bush.
Back in Moscow the poet Sapgir told me that plants also suffer greatly, that special indicating devices had registered horror in a certain plant when a man came into the room who the day before, in the presence of this plant, had killed another plant related to it. Plants do not fear me, but I had little success in putting things right after this fiendish boy.
Children's Mountain is where I am usually to be found in Central Park. I write poetry there, and while I do that my back, the rear half of me, is slowly turning black.
When I get tired of lying there I pull on my white trousers and set off to roam the park. Usually I go to the Alice in Wonderland sculpture and walk in her vicinity, or sit on a bench observing the children romping on the sculpture. She's never empty, this Alice, someone is forever romping on her. Usually I sit there until about four o'clock, and sometimes, looking at certain children, I am visited by strange desires, but sometimes I am totally normal and take pleasure in watching the shaggy-haired, freckly American boys boldly jump their skateboards down the five or six long steps near Alice. Some of them are remarkably adroit at this. There's one little kid I especially like, he's such a brat. He looks like a girl, even has curls, but his brashness and courage make him stand out among his other friends. They're too virile, he's a delicate boy.