Diary of a Loser

The discotheque

You, Eddie, good-for-nothing, spoiled fellow that you are. And the city where you live, the one you've chosen, resembles Sodom. It does take after it. What a perverse town! It's true, there's no denying it, you felt great at the discotheque yesterday, it was fun. But if you look at it with another pair of eyes something quite different turns up, doesn't it?

It's as though all the characters came out of Fellini's «Satiricon.» The in-your-face hairdos of different kinds, the whoreish little faces, brazen, made-up; everyone, of either sex, is elevated by high heels. One black fellow has taken off his pants and is dancing with just a white T-shirt covering his ass – it's not clear whether he has any underpants on. The right-hand section of the hall is gay: some are wearing lipstick; boys and men dance embracing each other – they gaze at each other lovingly and smooch. One guy has a wide, especially-designed suit, a black shirt, and a white silk scarf; another, with a sweaty, damp-haired chest, is in briefs; a third one…

The music is deafening, the air – hot and savage – is filled with marijuana. Everyone smokes openly. And everyone drinks. It's badly over-crowded.

The females – indecent, alluring – wear wanton attire, representing every epoch and nation. Many have only stockings on. And you, Eddie, are here as well. And you too frisk around convulsively, morbidly, and have already smoked some grass, and don't feel tired at all. And the woman with you, though she's seven years younger, she's too old for you: it's obvious – she's tired. And so, instead of going home at 6:00, when they close, you go at 4:20. For this kind of place people must be real young. No older than twenty, with stamina.

Oh dear, there's no avoiding it – our Rome will fall. It's not for nothing that these lesbian cuties, these delicate girls rub against each other's bellies and do not look at the boys. In this multi-colored, pulsating light, the faces appear odd and savage. The only thing lacking here is a good bloody fight.

Even if you're a philosopher, go ahead, visit a discotheque, and don't be standing there as if you're rooted to the ground – dance, then you'll learn something.

I saw my ex there that night. Smoking from a long black cigarette-holder, surrounded by a retinue of black guys (one was wearing a scintillating trench coat), she was in a white hat.

And you love it, Eddie, admit it.

I do confess that I wanted to stop the music and make an announcent: Guys, the machine guns will be distributed at the door in ten minutes. Our target is Fifth Avenue. I'll be in charge!

And out they run…

A car speeds up a parkway. This is the state of New Jersey. I'm drinking an expensive Italian wine straight from the bottle. The housekeeper is at the helm. We've made up. What can you do? I need her, and she needs me.

The bright patches of autumnal plants strike the eye. The car stops at my request. I take a few steps into the woods and having unbuttoned my white trousers, I let out a jet and notice an abnormal multitude of huge toadstools in the woods.

Done with the jet, my prick back in the pants, I tear away one huge mushroom and carry it as an ironic gift to the millionaire's housekeeper. She's irritated and I laugh under the setting sun over the spacious state of New Jersey. Our relationship is almost that of a loved but naughty son with a loving long-suffering mother, though I'm older than she by twelve years.

And we're going to some hospital where her eighty-eight-year-old grandfather is recuperating from his heart attack. She turns the ignition, and I take the bottle again. The car speeds off on the parkway.

My last wife, Lenka, she was a whore by nature, I think. Yet there was something in her – elusive – that made me happy. Maybe that's what it was – her being a whore. After all, I too am a whore by nature.

She was exceptionally beautiful, it was flattering. I was enormously ambitious but that wasn't the most important thing. She, as it turns out, was right for my love.

My image of love – I admit it now – was and is vulgar in a folksy kind of a way. You know the kind: blonde, slender, seductive girl-lady wearing a hat. And indeed Lenka wore a hat; she also was a poet.

So, what do you expect from a provincial junior poet? Eddie fell head over hills for Lenka. And to be honest, even now my heart skips a beat whenever I glimpse in a crowd a tall, shapely figure wearing a hat.

Life is given to you, go ahead, live!

Oh mother, I'm afraid!

Live! Don't be afraid!

I'm afraid, afraid of yellow drawings, of dusty beams of light, of headaches, of the old people, of pills, of children crying in the morning, of puppies' shit, of a dead bird, and of a broken blue family vase. I'm also afraid of my real surname, of my past's scum, of the letter «p,» of rolled-up blueprints, and of white bread, when it's very, very white.

This is what saves me: hearing; lemons and oranges; a new sunny morning; dad's revolver; fine, well-knit clothes; speeding in a car.

Germany once again devours her own children. Her best, the flower of the nation, its hope. There's blood on Germany's lips; her fingers are bloody. The three were murdered in the jail. Friends, my dear ones, farewell, comrades! We'll lower our black flags. We'll take vengeance on the executioners.

On a horrible gray German morning, they entered the cell, shot them twice, and hanged them. «Don't kill, don't kill, don't kill the unarmed souls in the cell!»

I'm sitting in the window overgrown with wild grapes. I'm sitting and looking at the river some twenty meters away from me.

Sun. These are the last days of October. The millionaire's garden.

The big tree at the center of the garden has hardly shed any leaves. The birds and wasps keep circling around me, relishing the wild grapes. Now and then the tugboats cross the East River. It's a weekend. The river shimmers serenely, and the leaves hardly quiver – the air is serene; serene too is the flowing of the rock music out of speakers covered with household cloth; the music alternates with fulsome commercials and news.

It's as though everything's all right. It's even surprising and great. Nobody's bothering me and I don't even need any alcohol, of which there's plenty – the best stuff – in the cellar of the millionaire's house. But I don't want to dim this autumnal radiance.

The world, life – everything – has stopped. The sun on my face, reconciliation in my heart.

It's all a lie, though. Tomorrow or the day after, the world will explode again… The clean hair will get dirty again, the wind will soil it, the rain will soak it, a woman will betray, and I will kiss the red leaf which fell on this page. Hello, nature!

People, kill me beautifully, please!

I've fucked a girl. 21. A good American Jewish girl with fair skin and luxuriant hair. The breasts are big and soft. The orifice overflows with mucous.

It happened in Soho, at a loft under construction – metal, cement, wood, plaster, bricks and plywood were scattered everywhere. A ruffled floor and a shattered ceiling. Her room – more or less clear of all the debris – yellow with all five (!) doors opening onto the construction chaos, and a huge window shining terribly with the lights of the World Trade Center – two sinister boxes bled their light into the window.

Even in the darkness, just by touch, I knew that I was dealing with a Jewish body. There was something special that can't be defined by words. We fucked, having smoked pot. The time passed. And her socks had been knitted and were of different colors – in the rush, we didn't even take them off (neither did we my clothes). We fucked sweet, so sweet.

Her Jewish grandfather and grandmother came over here some time in the past from Russia. The great migration took place so that the granddaughter would meet a Russian guy here and so that they would fuck.

In the morning, I'm in a supermarket, standing in an «8 Items or Less» line where there are usually old men and women. They get up before others – they can't sleep – their wasted lives keep them awake, tormenting them. Some buy three potatoes, others drop their plastic and paper bags, then try with their gnarled hands to pick them up, while I notice that a hunched monster has the hands of a young damsel – the same fresh, bright fingernails, fingers and palms almost untouched by time.

This discovery, for some reason, fills me with disgust and makes me sick.

And though on the way out of the supermarket I hold the door and help to bring out the old lady's shopping cart, I'm not looking at her. I feel like annihilating her without having to touch her: I would douse her with some solution, zip her with a machine-gun and let the ambulance immediately rush her off the street. Her presence defiles the air; the old woman is monstrously indecent and pathological. Lord, how can you bear this?

Eddie is boisterous; Eddie is quiet. Like a boy, sad, he sits at one corner of his bed. He's tired. Two hours later he frolics like a child. He's naughty. He drinks wine and recites poetry. He shows off his wit over the telephone.

But suddenly the weather changes, it rains, and it's boring and gray… And now Eddie starts sobbing. Falling face dawn on his bed, he even remembers his mom and dad. He laments too about his wife: «Lenka, my beloved!» he whispers. «My silly one, weak, tender, my traitress, my girl. The last time we met I wanted to kiss your hands and feet! Lenka, my weakling, the world is so empty and small!»

Then Eddie calms down and takes a book, he reads Che Guevara's letters. He reached Che's last letter to his parents, the line about «the small soldier of the 20^th century's fortune» – suddenly he felt a burst of tears simultaneously with the pricking at the roots of the hair all over his body.

«My proud, magnificent, and modest – Spanish – Che…»

This other time a guest at the millionaire's house – rich, either a Hindu or an Iranian – pops in with a stunningly beautiful, tall and pretentious girl. The housekeeper's girlfriend made a pretentious drink as ordered by the Iranian, while in the millionaire's leather study, the beauty enunciated some words over the phone in agitated tones.

As they were leaving, our eyes met, and we found something in one another, discovered it suddenly because we lowered our gazes and smiled. She's funny and so am I. I knew this kind of smile, just as I knew what it led to. But I also knew that this could never be. I'm a servant's friend, and so there's a class wall between us. She left with this visiting businessman. Forever.

The gleam of her violet eyes, the surge of her skirt, the curve of her youthful, slender figure – naturally, nobody introduced us – whoever introduces servant's friends? «This is Edward, he's from Russia, just a month ago he was on welfare as an impoverished and incapable member of society, and now he's waiting for opening as a cook.» This fucking life!

She stepped into the night, the young beauty sped away in a car. And you get nothing, Edward, nothing! Edward, the fucking treasure. Only nobody wants this Edward-treasure.

And I bet they set off to the Hotel Regina, yes, to Regina…

I slept poorly because at 1 a.m. a bitch next door started to howl and cry. The dog stopped-whipped by her drunken owner – only at 3:00 a.m.

The wretched dwellers of skid row for some reason bring in animals who are just as wretched. There's an unbearable stench and puddles of dog piss in the elevator. Perhaps this is because our residents want to resemble the rich, or maybe they're not as lonely with dogs…

Generally, the interior of the Embassy Hotel resembles the ruins of war. Two rooms and part of a hallway burned down back in April. So they stay boarded up, and nobody bothers to fix either the sooty hall or the ill-fated rooms. A whole fifth floor burned down a week ago.

In the elevator and in the hall you're offered all kinds of drugs, and if you're riding with a pimp, he'll offer you women: «Corne on over, buddy, whenever you have an extra $20 to spend.»

The dog's piss – diluted by rain at the hotel's entrance – has a sad smell. In the lobby, a young, well-dressed crazy black woman reasons monstrously aloud about the difference between the words «God» and «dog.»

The rain beats the shit out of this November day. Now I have a new social face – no more a welfare recipient but a cafe cook. I got up late and am sitting at the same residence – the hotel – looking through the window at the rain and waiting until I have to leave for work.

Pelmeni, borsht, Russian turnovers, pies and other delicacies are awaiting me at work. Boredom and nonsense are awaiting me at work: young A., a totally vacuous man who unfortunately speaks Russian. Waiting there are two middle-aged Latino dishwashers, who unfortunately speak no Russian, not even English, who nonetheless are a lot more likable than the inane and dim-sighted A., and another colleague of mine, G., an overeducated snob and a homosexual in high boots.

Arab guys and two black fellows from the West Indies await me. The refrigerator, the passageways, the corners and cupboards, the short vicious quarrels on political topics await me. The dullness of life awaits me, while I love a different outlook on life.

A very different outlook on life.

«We'll get over this too,» I think listlessly.

I also think that the last time I cut the beets into pieces that were too big – it doesn't look good in a spoon…

Once – all covered by flour – I stayed alone in the kitchen making pelmeni until midnight. The two Latinos, the dishwashers, washed the pans right after I used them. Not a word in English.

«Here, Eduardo, are your future friends, the soldiers. Talk to them,» I told myself. «You're standing face to face with them.» They treated me to their strong coffee. And I poured them some wine that I had stolen. And I let them go early. I left late. Comrade Limonov, the commander.

He's moved, yes, he's moved! Got rid of Hotel Embassy and skid row. Now he's living in an apartment on the East Side, sharing it with a twenty-three-year-old Jewish kid. Our Eduardo has two small rooms. One is his bedroom, the other his study. And though he earns money with occasional dirty work, he has still made a step up the social ladder. He couldn't care a shit for this step, still he made it. It's accomplished.

Though the millionaire's housekeeper helps him, and though his income hardly exceeds $200 a month, still he became a full member of the capitalist society. He acquired a hat, put installed a mirror, spread the housekeeper's rug on the floor, and took her sheets and towels. Some folks gave him a bed, a table; pictures hang on the wall, a lamp shines on the desk. Life stirs again for the umpteenth time.

And on the wall there's an article about Eduardo in an Italian paper, with his picture. «This is just the beginning,» thinks the stubborn fellow, sitting under the article. And he stares out the window onto the cold December.

I met a girl at a party. She never took off her wig and kept adjusting it even when we made love and later when we showered together. Apparently, there was something serious about her hair, or maybe there was no hair at all under the wig. A Bald Diva, so to speak.

She didn't realize that this kind of nonsense hasn't bothered me for a long a time. The important thing is that her body pulled and tugged me towards her. I fucked her for two nights and one day in a row; I even scratched my prick against her until it bled. She had sheafs of pricks dancing in her eyes – she did, this Jewish girl.

During the short intermissions between our love-making we had only enough time to visit her friend at 25^th Street – a black photographer, a tired fellow of about forty, a specialist in sado-masochism.

The girl was also a photographer. In her pictures, the nude models are clustered in fuzzy groups, their breasts and pubes bursting with sparks or radiating light.

Decorating my new apartment I've hung, among others, an old picture of Elena sitting naked on a tray, while I'm standing behind her in a National Hero jacket. I sit down on a hot radiator and say:

«This is it, Lenka! After two years I'm not afraid of you anymore. I've hung you on the wall. I've mastered you. I've overcome you, Lenka. You'll hang here as an historic exhibit. Actually, you'll provide an extra benefit to Eddie Limonov, your ex-husband, by encouraging the girls who visit me to become intimate with me. Since Eddie had such a beautiful wife, we have to put out for him – this is what the girls will think. So hang in there, Lenka, and help me even in that way, you bitch, whore…»

Eddie, Eddie baby,

You're a nice guy.

Beautiful and randy,

I love you, you're mine!

The songs we sing together,

The waltzes we dance -

You are tough like leather

The wound in your soul's immense!

– I sang this in conclusion.

«Girls, my dear ones!» On a cold rainy morning, lying under a blanket, just returned home in a leather coat, after taking a cab – he had uttered this aloud, addressing all the girls who have recently appeared around him, most of them twenty two years of age. I addressed those who take off their clothes with me, into whose tender and sensitive slits I insert my tender and sensitive tool and we go on rubbing against each other for a long, long time.

«Girls, my dear ones! You're the only ones I have in this world!» They arrive at my place by subway, wearing cheap nylon jackets in the cold, in the rain and snow, and they go to bed with me. «Please forgive me for something that I myself don't understand!»

Looking through the window: this babe trots along in a white beret, under it a tuft of blond hair. «Aha, coming from the supermarket, you slut. You cocksucking slut!» He thought crudely, feeling happy about his virility and charm, about being in his prime, and of his triumph over the recent horrors.

One day, at dawn, in dry February, I saw a big rust-colored rat on a deserted 5^th Avenue. She came out of a hole in the underground (semi-underground) basement of a fashionable store and calmly crossed the avenue. A few days earlier in that icy year, my wife had walked out on me.

I'm vicious, I'm irritable, I'm no good, I'm not interesting. I think a lot about revolution and terrorism, and I think little about reality. I've lived long enough to have gray in my hair but I'm naive, as one girl, Virginia, told me. I'm a dreamer, as another girl said. I've prepared a bad future for myself, I'll come to a bad end, in horrible anguish, as one poet said.

«I'll die in anguish, in a prison or at the gallows,» as I have discovered and become frightened. I have no money, no one supports me. During the evening for the poet Voznesensky at Columbia University, the Russian literature professors stared at the poet's throat, but looked away while shaking my hand.

And yet I'm proud that I'm irritable, I'm proud that I'm vicious. And I'm certain that I'm good, way better than that lot – the narrow, domesticated professors and the tame, domesticated, pseudo-rebellious poets.

Nowadays, I want to be a man who, at night, opens a fence (a car door, castle gates) and says to a shivering youth (a quivering girl): Come in, my friend! (Come in, miss!) It's warm and pleasant in here. Take this gold and live it up.

I used to want to be a shivering youth, getting ready to jump off a bridge, who suddenly accosts a stunningly well-dressed gray-haired man who says: Are you poor? Did your lady abandon you? Stop it! There's no need. Don't kill yourself. Here's money. Take a trip somewhere. Relax. Live it up!

Once, during the usual boring merry-making at the millionaire's house, I ran downstairs, opened the door into the black December garden and stared sadly at the bulging river and at the patterned branches of trees against the troubled sky. There was also a sacramental moon and I was thinking about this lady-girl in a white, almost gossamer dress. She was laughing nervously and dancing with me hysterically, becoming wet through the dress (the sap of desire?). She was enticingly beautiful in her bitch-like, youthful passion – directed towards me, and towards everyone else. Towards the world.

Her hot neck, her long gloves-up to her elbow, smeared with brown grass – it was cold and shivery as we fucked under a tree, as though in a rush. It was a mixture of half-romance and half-pornography…

«Edward!» someone called from upstairs. Edward – that's me. The housekeeper's girlfriend walks up to me. «What are you doing out here alone?» she asked.

It's cold. Sometimes it rains. Today it's cold. It's been a year since – as I understand – I've been under the careful eye of the FBI. After the article carried some time ago by an Italian paper, they – one would think – focused on me even more. For now, it's just for my words and books, not for some subversive acts.

But the acts will follow. For some reason I'm looking out the window onto First Avenue, empty on this cold December night, and I think absentmindedly about my – Eddie's, Edka's, Edward's life. It shouldn't be too long, it seems. Neither should it be short.

I envision a summer exploit and summer blood. I contrive for myself a comfortable death, so to speak. Most likely, it's just that I've always hated the cold and adored the sun.

«It will happen, it will happen as you wish. Calm down. For now, go to the kitchen – you always get hungry at night – get out a piece of food that the kind housekeeper brought for you and eat-this is for the time being, just for the time being… You've already achieved something in this life – a case with your name on the cover is filed somewhere with the FBI. Shrug your shoulders. What of it? It means that everything's going the way it should.»

Mama mia! Life is like a dream: you can't even remember anything properly. Just a dream – the poems, Moscow, the wives who flashed by and disappeared, friends and tender admirers, the Russian landscape, Crimea and the Caucasus, the Moscow snow and the Moscow inky dusk.

I flew to Italy with a bow-tie – an artist and a conspirator, Asti Spumante, the Vatican museum, the attractive, red-haired woman who was divorcing her husband Arkady, leaving him for a disheveled musician – all this has passed… And there will be a lot more that will pass.

And suddenly I find myself on yours-theirs street in a suit from Pier Cardin, with a machine-gun in my right hand, and on the left, a thirteen-year-old boy, my friend, whose neck I'm squeezing as I lean on him – we're moving towards a shelter and this is Beirut or Hong Kong, and my left shoulder is shot through but the bone is okay.

Studying the new strange language, shooting at the moving target – you have to be brave, that's what history wants from us, that's what the always voracious, bloodthirsty nation wants; you have to be brave and reckless, Edka Limonov, you just have to, Brother.

If you're young and slim…

Oh, if you're young and slim, and you have more hair on your head than you fucking needed – your fluffy bangs cover your forehead – than it's no big deal that some of your hair is gray. Your hands are covered with nicks, scratches and cuts – this is because now you're building a loft, and now renovating a doctor's office. You're ambitious like a pig; you're ready at a moment's notice to appear on television and radio and give interviews to newspapers on any day; the others, however, live at a much slower pace and the books take a long time to get printed, and for now nobody is seriously interested in you, with the exception of homely girls.

Bought myself a Christmas tree – it's as though I'm playing a game. Though I didn't stand in line for this as I did in Russia, still I wasted a lot of time driving around with the millionaire's housekeeper from place to place downtown. By the end of the day, on the West Side Highway, right on Canal Street and the severe December Hudson River we – exhausted and angry and cold – found a whole crowd of Christmas trees and its vendors who, in order to keep warm, burned oil in barrels. The oil burned with the unreal red, infernal, flame.

We bought (the housekeeper haggled over the price) two trees. After tying them to our Jeep's roof, we took off. We got the Jeep from the millionaire's wife when she heard that Edward wanted to buy a Christmas tree. Three days ago, after getting drinking himself into oblivion at the millionaire's Christmas party, Edward kissed the millionaire's wife in front of all the three hundred guests. An idiot and a pig he is, that's for sure.

And the Christmas tree – that's for the sake of New Year's: it feels good to breathe in the aroma of childhood. I'll go ahead and buy myself some mandarines, here they're called «tangerines.» I'll run the strings through the tangerines' skin and will hang them on the tree. And, if I still have money, I'll get the candy and will hang the candy too. And the lights. And then I'll watch.

And I'll return home right before New Year's (or right after). I'll be drunk, and I'll lie down to sleep right under the tree. Hell, the way it's been going I don't get much chance to pamper myself.

The group consisting of the staid, bearded millionaire himself, his wife, her lover in a top hat and tails, and a black velvet cape, and all the children – all are off to a theater to see «Dracula,» and stop at a Chinese restaurant before that.

The housekeeper picked up little Michael from the Chinese restaurant at seven – he doesn't get to go to «Dracula»,- and we went to Bloomingsdale's to buy presents for the housekeeper's family. Little Michael gobbled his pop-corn; they showed the most exciting episode from the «Star Wars»; the pre-Christmas crowd; the sword sale, the models of which came from the movie – I felt like buying cologne and much, much more, or nothing at all. I had no money, just 50 cents and a subway token. Suddenly I caught myself posing, affecting Michael's father. I was in a hat and in a sheepskin coat with a wide collar, my face anguished – Michael's father indeed. The millionaire is a modern type – leaving for theater, he was in a dinner-jacket and in a Persian shirt with a stand-up collar, resembling a Russian golden shirt – it was embroidered with gold.

What an unearthly, heavenly-hellish time it was when Elena left me in February 1976. Oh Lord, how fortunate I am that I've lived through that time, through that misery.

The time of the naked heart! The time of strange air – burning like alcohol, of the growling monsters, of the whole nature's conspiracy against me, of the fire-spitting sky, and of the gaping earth waiting, quivering, for me.

So many unbelievable observations, nightmarish experiences! The sabretooth tigers and other ice-age beasts strolled about New York in the burning winter wind, the skies cracked splitting apart, and I – warm, wet, and small – barely escaped, jumping, the teeth, the stomachs, and the claws. I, the tiny bleeding clot.

And all around me the frightful words of the hunched philosopher thundered and rang: «The unfortunate one is the most fortunate!…he is the most fortunate!…the most fortunate!» But I didn't understand that then.

I wish I could experience that now, but that's impossible, quite impossible, unfortunately. That kind of a vision is granted only at a time of great misfortune, just once, and this experience borders only death.

Millionaire's Housekeeper

The Neanderthal Boy

The Bald Diva

Upon reflecting about all my girls, I tend to conclude that the girl-photographer (the Bald Diva) – though a pretty demented specimen – is my highest achievement in sex now. Aside from the fact that I want her most of the time, she's more creative than all of Eddie's other girls – her strange pictures of naked women and men who radiate light.

The Bald Diva is superior to the asexual millionaire's housekeeper, she's also superior to the Neanderthal Boy as I call this short creature who's good in all ways – nice, helpful, fucks pleasantly, but, inevitably, in varying degrees, she smells of urine and looks remarkably like that cute Neanderthal Boy whom we all know from a textbook illustration. For now, the Neanderthal Boy does modern dancing and waits at a restaurant three times a week.

The Bald Diva is superior.

Had the millionaire's housekeeper died, I think I would make up a story about how tenderly I loved her and how sincerely I wept for her with the Bald Diva and how, on the following day the Neanderthal Boy came by, and she also wept – all of my girlfriends today are sentimental.

To be honest, I respect the millionaire's housekeeper: though not in good health she has a great deal of energy; though she's simple, she's capable of loving the complex, even decadent. With pride and adoration befitting a mother, she says that at the last party all women asked the hostess, «Who is this sexy guy?» – more than about any other men. «It's about you, Edward!»

It'd be interesting to take a peak into the soul of this strapping girl with big feet, protruding soft butt, and strangely long, chubby – still child's – hands. What's in there, in her soul? Why does she enjoy giving food and drink, and look after – in various ways – after this villain who's twelve years her senior, who obviously wants to be somewhere else, and in whose bathroom she finds women's wrist watches and probably even women's underwear. But the housekeeper doesn't complain. She graduated from a Catholic school. Had she died, she could be canonized saint.

But precisely because she hasn't died, I hate her sometimes for her caring for me, and I despise her for her being asexual. «The doctor told me that soon I'll be healthy and you'll be able to go inside of me,» she tells me with a lisp. If only she'd known how many times I've done this «going inside» with the Bald Diva (who begins to bore me now), she'd die of fear and envy.

Though the millionaire's housekeeper has a mere flu, I have an impression that she's almost dying. I love the dying, that's why I'm here in the New Year's night. She's in her bed on the fourth floor; she sighs and moans and reads the children's poet A.Milne, while I'm downstairs in the kitchen, having my own fun. I'm eating shchi with pies – I've made this all earlier. I'm drinking Stolichnaya and Martini, talk on the phone occasionally, and I keep my spirits up – everything will be all right, and although the life is closer to the end than to the beginning, we'll have time to show off our brilliance, Eduard Veniaminovich, we'll have time to frolic and to show our teeth and the sideview of our severe face, and then, with thunder and flames, we'll take off once and for all into the yawning abyss – death.

And in the meantime, a swan-like beauty – and there'll be more than one – will bend over me, you just wait.

Maybe you need to sleep, maybe you don't – I don't know. Maybe you need to stay up without sleep: write, seek inspiration, chew on your pen, waste paper. But for some reason I have no reason to do any of the above. I'm just sitting – vacantly – at the table, not going to bed; I'm quietly processing my thoughts, and this terribly slow process in the state of semi-consciousness is – as it turns out – a true sensation of life that is no more than the pulsating blood and this semi-delirium. It's like a bull's-bladder in the window of my grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-father's. There's a glimmer of light through the bladder.

Once – it was freezing cold – I, poorly dressed, was returning from the Bald Diva. In the subway, the RR line, there was a crazy guy – smiling, slobbering – he kept saying the names of the presidents and it was turning out that he was a relation to Roosevelt; in fact he was his son.

On the 6 train, the Lexington line, where I later transferred, there was another crazy. This time it was a black guy in boxers holding a pair of pants under his arm – he was a lot meaner. He harassed a black girl who was deathly scared and shoved people out of his way, and at the end, he chased away everyone from the car, everyone but me. Uneasy yet calm, I resolved to stab him in his belly if he touched me. He didn't, though he hobbled nearby.

It's snowing, and I'm thinking of how nice it would be to poison myself by drinking some bright and vile liquid, leaving a bit of it in a narrow glass. Poison myself while staring at the snow. And do this because I'm ecstatic about life, just because I'm ecstatic, yes, just out of awe and ecstasy.

I came out, straightened my jacket and said:

«You have to understand, guys, this is our final battle. It's unlikely that we'll escape, don't entertain any illusions. There's only one thing in this world that's higher than life: a good hero's death. Antonio and Barbara will go with me to the left room, to the windows, the others will do as they did yesterday. Sheila, put on that insane record, it fits the mood now. What a sunny morning we have today!»

«And what are they doing there downstairs? When are they going to start moving?» He asked Luciano who stood leaning against the hole in the wall.

The soldiers' black backs began to move around below on a far-off street.

The love for my revolver shows in that at night I often put the gun on a small pillow under a lamp in my study; I lovingly take it apart, lay out all the parts and admire them. He's my devoted, tough, and loyal friend. He's graceful, elegant, and his entire silhouette, as well as his parts, is endowed with strength, significance, and expression. When I look at my revolver, I feel good.

Usually I examine my revolver for a long time. Then I stroke it and grease it with the best grease I can find in our town.

Once, I had a young, white-breasted girl – I loved her a lot. We fucked many times a day, and when I got dead tired but still wanted to see how she twitches and cries from love's pleasures, I replaced my prick with a revolver. This was greatly successful and met with acclaim by my girlfriend. I always took the cartridges out though.

We were both mysterious crazies, she and I, that's why she turned away when I took the cartridges out, she wanted to believe that I didn't take all of them out and that maybe I had left one in, and she was scared.

New York looks leaden in the cold end-of-January twilight. Leaden pavement and the sky is the same; some houses are entirely leaden, some only in places. Yellow is especially dismal in such weather.

It's a frightening city, both to its observer and dweller. You hug the heater and look out the window: it's natural for a man to be scared but also to peak at the frightening.

And so I think: Why am I living here? Why am I not going to the woods and glades where it's green and the space is warm and gay all year round – it's possible to find this on earth. Why am I living here? See this vile brown smoke going up from the roof of a neighboring building? The Devil only knows. I don't understand this today. Ugh, what an inhuman abomination it is outside!

First, my roommate shaved his beard, now he's cut his hair. It seems like he started a new life.

I too want something new. I'll go to a store and will buy a new gun. Or two guns. I'll hang them on the walls, then I'll buy cartridges and gunpowder, and my life will change and it will flourish.

One of the guns, I've decided, will be a fowling piece, and I've known how to use it since childhood. I'll sow off its muzzle and if a mob bursts in here, it will be met by a dense charge of shot.

They don't like this, I know this since childhood. I remember my neighbor Mitka, he ran to the doorstep of his house and shot at the mob who came to kill him with picks and axes. How they screamed and ran away! And he shot just once! It was not Sicily where I lived, it was Ukraine.

I'm standing by the window, hands in my pockets, and I say to myself: «So, disgusted, are you? Feeling empty? Why the fuck did you masturbate then? You know this since your childhood, it's bad, even your mother told you so. Besides, it's embarrassing – there're plenty of females around. They always call you on the phone, and you masturbate, eh?»

«Well, the females are not my kind, there's no flame in them. Yes, I fuck them, but there's no great pleasure in it,» I reply to myself. «I can't find the one aflame, and so I've committed a sin, have entered the fantasy about this angel, tender and vicious.»

«Okay, what the fuck, go, take a nap, then have a good meal, drink a glass of gin, and go walk the streets, check out the faces. Who knows you may meet the angel for your loins, then you'll get scared, dumbfounded.»

Yellow cabs. The city – lines and numbers. Eighty-third Street, Eighty-foutth, Eighty-fifth… Or if you're going downtown, it's Eighty-second, Eighty-first… Or if you're counting towards the west, it's Second Avenue, Third Avenue…

An amazing boy with his mother – an arrogant dreamer, a model with a portfolio – emerging from a slick, polished car. «Bitch!» I hurled this spitefully at her. Couldn't control myself. A petty vengeance, old accounts going all the way back to my ex.

She turned around, surprised: What's he saying?

I smiled as rudely as I could.

She smiled back, thinking, «He must have the right to this tone of voice. An artist? An actor? Who the fuck knows, maybe some celebrity.» She smiled just in case and left. Her fair, serene little forehead, her rude derision toward – and the knowledge of these pathetic, pestering men: «They all want me.» Ah, sweet kitten, if I'd fallen for you, you'd learn what misery is real fast – I wouldn't burn you with a cigarette, I'd find a way to inflict real pain on you. I dove into a bar and had a Black Velvet – it's Guinness and champagne, just like the deceased little Irish poet George Reavy taught me.

The bitch's legs – daring, long, brazen – glinting from under her fur coat while her daddy, holding her little hand helped her out of the car. Oh if she could hit him in his balls with her lovely leg!

She probably has some scoundrel like me for a lover – an Italian, shorter than she.

They got up late. Had breakfast in the kitchen – cold roast beef, tea, an apple pie. Sitting at the sides of the small table, facing each other. Talked a little about everything. Including the article in the Village Voice about general asexuality. «But not us, not me,» thought the two.

Outside, the sky, rich after the blizzard, overflowed with blue. And then he caught himself waiting for her to leave. To be alone, to plunge into the books and the newspapers, to write, to go for a walk in the winter sun – to look at women, at the store windows… But she wasn't leaving. Out of growing hatred for her, he fucked her again. She left happy.

I'll walk to the sea. I'll sit and pull at the wet rope or a string. I'll eat some fish, drink some vodka, and get lost – stupid – in thought for a half hour. And all the while I'll stare at the sea, forgetting who I am, a fascist, a communist, or worse. I'll remember some Vera, no, that other corrupted girl, Marina who was in love with me in the Koktebel mountains…

I come to. I get bored of the sea and walk to the city where people are rushing about, making claims for love and attention of their close ones. I'll go and inseminate someone during a totally needless sex act on the fucked-out sheets. Let the belly puff up, let the unwanted baby grow.

Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la!

How I wish I could gallop somewhere from the glade into the woods amid these cute, little curly headed pages in their white stockings – to follow that little seductive princess, smiling through the rosehips.

Gallop, go ahead! You're thirty-four, and the princess will call the police, the ambulance will come and then you'll have to explain that you're a page and where the other pages have disappeared.

This took place in Central Park where I chose and admired one little girl.

An old friend of mine called to ask if I wanted to go to a museum to see Arpa's exhibit. But I was sick of museums, of their order and quiet. I invited my friend to go check out garbage dumpsters later in the evening, and he agreed to do that instead of the museum.

Two hours later we walked the streets, sinking our eyes into the tempting bags (filled with pants? Shoes? Shirts? Gold?), the seductively swollen black bags, and us – examining, sniffing, involved – expectant fortune hunters. A lot more interesting than Arpa.

Sometimes I feel good about the police. They defend us from ourselves – the lonely and desperate selves. So that we don't kill each other. But during the revolution they should step aside. Don't interfere, you mustached fellows, it's none of your business. It's not for you stop. Change is taking place. And you just have to become one with the people. Otherwise you'll be trampled down. We'll trample over you. If you like, you can take part in it. Our revolution appeals to you too. She appeals even to the rich. It's not people, it's this civilization she's against.

We've learned to walk like that from films and photographs. We've taken these faces from films and photographs. We've arranged our muscles exactly to their standards. We've named our children the brand names of cars and coal mines. One day someone – a traveling businessman or a nun – brings a book into a house and it totally overturns one's whole life. Or even a magazine, a newspaper – not a book – where an incidental sketch lashes your eyes with an electric whip – and so goes your life to hell, to a hole, out…

I want to write a book. It's a very nasty, bleak book where gasoline floats in the ocean, the wind rattles iron, rats run in rooms and even on the ceiling, and there are no cockroaches, only because they were eaten by the rats.

Flocks of winged, ugly, evil-smelling half-animals, half-insects obscure the sun; the trees are black and have shed their leaves; the freeze moves slowly from North to South; the earth cracks open in places and devours houses; there are fewer and fewer people; the planet looks abandoned.

It'll be a pocket-size book. The font will be unusually big and legible. After all, people's eyesight is steadily declining. Besides, if you're traveling in the dying earth, then you'd need of a guidebook.

Things are pretty bad. After all, the new fresh crowds will never come from Asia – there's no one there – mounted on the brown-eyed animals, and the last short Oiraty and their offspring thoughtfully grease their motorcycle parts in the absurdly cracked mountains.

Gogol and I, embracing each other, jolly and happy, in our dear Ukraine near Poltava. We're eating cherries and talking. Maybe vareniki, too. We're talking. That's the dream I had – Gogol and I. Wearing white – maybe it wasn't Ukraine – maybe it was Italy, Rome. Branches everywhere. It was hot, you know…