Diary of a Loser

A morning

In the morning, sitting by a sheet of paper, I stare out the window. The section of the First Avenue I'm able to observe is pretty deserted. You can rarely see more than one passer-by at each stare.

This is where I get stuck and can't come up with anything else. I'd like to say something about my insane anxieties, but the 1^st Avenue in its yellow section has no connection to my anxieties. If there's one passerby per stare, what's to cause anxiety?

My inner life has turned into an outward one a long time ago so that I no longer know what's inside – it's probably that yellow section of the 1^st Avenue with one sad passer-by on it, and my anxiety and the ever new morbid thoughts and sensations about Elena, about her body, about her fate and mine – all this is on the outside and perhaps is lying in the window.

The machine-guns, the parachutes, and the canons of my future appear very easily as my past, and the execution of the Chicago Anarchists at the end of the 19^th century in a Chicago prison has been burning ahead of me in the black sky for twelve years – ahead, not behind. I read about it twelve years ago and, terrified, I «recognized» my own execution.

Meanwhile, it's already 11:00 a.m. The Bald Diva (I never fuck her in the morning) has gotten up and poked her head into my room – greeted me. Greetings, Bald Diva, you're a good woman, you like to – and knowhow to – fuck; now you're going to the bathroom, and you'll occupy it for a long time. I know you, yes I do.

I have an ambivalent attitude to the millionaire's housekeeper.

Sometimes she seems to me nice and kind. She's a real American heroine, a gal from the frontier. She's that kind – she'll get up on the wagon holding a gun and the reins, firing at the Indians and at bandits. She's the oldest daughter in a family with nine children. And in the wagon, the younger children, frightened, huddle together, and she keeps driving the horses on, keeps firing. A tough gal.

It's a misfortune that sometimes I see her in a different way too – a twisted mug, idiotic pants, pimples under her nose and her chin, barefoot – and it's not much fun, alas. I went to see her yesterday and saw her like that. Why did I go? The reason is cynical. I have to pay rent in a few days and – who wants me now?- I took from her the few dollars I was short on. She gave it to me gladly.

I'm horrified comparing the millionaire's housekeeper with Elena, whom I also saw yesterday. Elena is a voluptuous courtesan and of a high caliber at that. Every piece of her body is elegant and savagely, wickedly sexy. So what that Elena betrayed me, dumped me, and doesn't give a damn about my life, and the millionaire's housekeeper gives me food and drink, gives me presents and money and is loyal to me, body and soul? So what? Like the scraggliest and most ragged bitch in the neighborhood, Elena exudes an especially strong odor that attracts all the studs and me.

You see, gentlemen, that's how it works: vice is strong, beautiful, and attractive; virtue is mediocre and uninteresting even though it's directed at you.

Nonetheless, I think, there's some part of Edka Limonov – he as a down-to-earth fellow, to be exact – that's a part of the gal from the frontier. That's why he, Edka, has a relationship with her.

Did your abdomen ever hurt with the hurt of a many-hour-long desire and hard-on?

Did it hurt you in such a way that after you've said goodbye to your object of desire – your ex – and you were climbing the stairs to your apartment at night, then you couldn't move a step and your ascent to the fourth floor took twenty minutes?

That's what happened to me yesterday.

And could you, after two years of separation, fall in love – head over heels, horribly – with your ex who exudes the poison of sex, the nightmare of sex, who can be fucked into every spot of her body?

Elena has aged a little, she's terribly skinny, a skeleton, but viciously beautiful: her tiny sacks of breasts are wickedly indecent, her unbelievably narrow shoulders, her spiderlike dear hands, neck, face – all were aflame in my hands. A fragile marquise who can be satisfied only by a fiery stallion; sometimes she secludes herself and masturbates with a rose.

A madman, a peasant, I raised her long, black, Parisian house dress – she was sitting on a chair, I stroked her legs, I spread her knees and looked at her shaved slit. The white juice of desire slowly appeared.

The Bald Diva and I went to an S M meeting. She invited me – she's well connected in that world. For the uninitiated, I decipher: the meeting was for the sadists and masochists.

In a huge red loft, they talked first about finances and dues. And then there was a first lecture for the novices, an intro to Sadism as it were (an intro to Masochism they promised next time). One tough fellow lowered his pants and lied down – his ass up – on the knees of a fat blonde who demonstrated all kinds of gadgets to be applied sadistically to the fellow's ass: whips, lashes, a special tickling whip resembling a horse's tail, a special ass-spanking racket (that is «it» had only the shape of a racket) – «it makes a particularly intimidating Sound,» she commented with satisfaction. While explaining this, the blonde smiled winningly and spanked the fellow.

After a five-minute break, a girl with a vicious, dreamy face strung up another fellow with a moist, wispy beard and white body to a special beam up by the ceiling. She fastened his arms by chains and leather bracelets and began to whip and tickle him with the same gadgets, she also kissed him on his lips.

The fellow was left with just his underpants on, but when she turned him over, his ass facing the audience, his underpants were taken off too. It appeared that the fellow was genuinely shaking.

In spite of a certain air of neglect there, I liked the Sadists and the Masochists, especially the severe gray men with the wire eyeglasses who came from the «Bondage and Discipline» section. Actually, the majority of the male sadists wore glasses.

The S M folks treated us well. The black guy of about 45, who looked like a doctor and who was in charge – he was also a photographer and the Bald Diva's friend. From time to time he tried to talk the Bald Diva into joining his harem, two girls of which I saw that night. One was a model, slim, not bad at all, she was particularly nice to me.

Later, at my place, I fucked the Bald Diva without applying any of the special methods. I fucked her in a good old way, deeply, with relish, coming onto her very nice breasts.

to E.

And in the mountains there blossomed gigantic flowers visible from the valley. And she and I were both very ill, all covered in bandages, both after surgeries, and we were taken in wheelchairs to see each other, in accordance with the unexpected instructions of the president who had read my books. We were left in the sun, and she moved her lips smiling at me.

And though the guards were always around, we were finally happy that we wouldn't be able to run away from each other, and we kept staring at each other, getting our fill of each other. And after the hospital an inevitable court – along with the wide-open death – awaited us. And in the mountains gigantic flowers blossomed, and the yellow coastal sun smelled strangely.

«Should I rob a bank?» I say that in desperation, from being hungry and broke and dependent on the millionaire's housekeeper. But no, I'll get caught, I don't have the know-how, I won't succeed being in a strange country. My conscience wouldn't bother me – come on, what conscience? It's just that it's impractical to get into prison – I'll get a lot of years.

To plot against a state, that's another business, and the bigger the state the better, something like the USSR or the USA or China. It takes, of course, a long time to prepare a revolution-explosion, but if it succeeds there's no limit on the returns! Everything! Rapture and ecstasy! Shoulder straps embroidered with gold, decorated uniform, adoration of all women. Hundreds of thousands of young men yelling «Hooray!» standing at attention.

It's a profitable venture, revolution is, if you think about it. Yes, there's the risk of losing your life, but so you risk that when you cross the street.

And staying in prison for robbing a bank – they can give you twenty years for it. It's stupid, it's incredibly stupid.

«I know you, Limonov. You want to be standing in your Astrakhan hat on top of the mausoleum.» One shrewd guy from Simferopol told me. Yes, I do, oh yes, on top of the mausoleum and precisely wearing an Astrakhan hat, or even better – I'd get a Georgian papakha, that would be even more barbaric.

The woman – she's the cause of it all. Yes, they're a wicked lot… Now she wants me to use my smarts and conquer some country for her, even a small one, preferably an island state. To this I replied thusly (affecting a woman's voice):

«Please, Lee, sweetie, kill the president,» said Prusakova, raising her skirt and showing to Oswald «it» – her cunt. «No kill, no cunt.» «I will, I will, Marinka,» whispered Oswald. And he went to practice at the shooting gallery.

That's what I've told her. After all, telling the truth is the most perverted kind of pleasure.

And in 1978, women still say the things they said before B.C. and at the time of the Crusades. They say those things only to certain kinds of men, naturally, not to any man, only to the mad dogs like me. It makes me proud.

Boys and girls, adolescents – in the photographs they stand behind their crooked and coarse mothers and fathers. They give me hope.

Their eyes mistily and ecstatically directed towards the future. It's worth living for their sake.

A sunny, windy day. A certain palpitation in the air. Spring has arrived again in New York from the green-and gray-Atlantic, and the soul of every earthling gets thin, it contracts, and on the far-away cafe doors, or on the yellow wall of a wind-beaten house, there appear harsh, spring, emaciated, sophisticated profiles…

At this time of year, my dear mother, happiness is when you tear a harsh love letter into small elegant squares and watch them stream into the air, and you twitch in a thin coat or in cold leather.

Yes, we'll all die, and everything's taking place for a billionth time. Still it's fresh and for the first time you notice the little face of your vicious lady-love, your ex and you think, terrified: «My love.»

And this love has slim legs, a mad, reckless slit under the Yves Sant Lorant skirt, and a fur coat, a gift in return for certain favors from her most recent husband…

Mother dear, there's an incredible agitation in this spring of cold and metal, it's as though a whole culture – the Black German oaks and the Roman statues have crowded around Edka Limonov…

My fate has always been decided by some fellows, fuckers in the mysterious, unknown offices. That's why I'm still a loser because they – the mysterious bitches I've never met, the deciders of my fate – have never accepted me into the tribe of winners. It's been that way in Russia-a country at one end of the world, and now it's that way in America-a country at the opposite end.

Now, in the recesses of the massive Macmillan press, certain American misters and mistresses are deciding the fate of my novel It's Me, Eddie. They rub their foreheads, or they laugh. They put on or take off their neckties. They scratch their feet or their asses. They adjust their glasses. They doodle in their pads. They smoke and drink coffee. What will be the result of their secret meeting that I know nothing about?

And what does their future fucking decision has in common with my present talent, my value in the world? One female among them, Katie, is rooting for me – she has been to this day, as far as I know. She wants to accept me into the tribe of winners. It's a boring tribe, to be honest.

I have made an awesome oath to myself though: even if they accept me, I'll always remain a secret loser, and secretly I'll observe our customs and rituals. I'll share in our thrills and terrors.