Diary of a Loser

The Daughter of Madam Ango

Ah, that daughter of that Madam. The Madam, judging from the name, was a woman of very easy virtue, and so the daughter, obviously, is also quite dubious, because, as they say, like mother like daughter. Her whole personality is contained by her name. Just imagine for a moment if you will: since Madam Ango has breached all the norms of decency and even her name sounds dubious, then what sort of a little thing would the daughter of Madam Ango be? It's just pure debauchery. She wears her fur coat – all naked underneath – and then she's off to a restaurant, a rose or some other flower in her hair; and at the restaurant she causes a brawl, and the men fight for the she-devil. The blood is spilled, the mirrors are crushed, the tuxedoes and tails are torn. And she just exudes the scent of her cool skin from under her fur coat; she bares a breast with her nipple indecently cracked – she's happy.

She's lives alone. Rents an apartment. Now a man moves in with her, now a whole dozen keep visiting her. There's no system to it. She dresses so that everything is obvious to all: her hat, to one side, so you can't see half of her face. She'll wear any kind of white pants, or a dress that's like a flag trailing behind her for half a block. She's long past sixteen, yet there is no sign of maturity. She smokes, drinks, and sniffs like a horse. Secretly from all, she suffers from poor health. Loves to fuck, even puffs and pants. She'll come to a bad end.

She twiddles a long cigarette holder with her fingers. She'll come to a bad end. Will die in the gutter. Still, she's fun.

Her value system is founded on champagne and caviar. In the novels, the daughter of Madam Ango marries a general or a senator or dies from some fateful, vicious disease (tuberculosis, cancer) – not so in real life, not always.

Loves her c. Affectionately refers to it by diminutive names using various suffixes and endings.

I've never met a person before whom I could kneel down, kiss his feet, and prostrate myself. I would do that, I would follow and serve him. But there's no such person. Everyone is serving. No one is leading. There's no one leading on a new path.

There's no one on the path.

I see a clean yard. I see young people, men and women. They sit in the Oriental manner – they sing touching each other and swaying in synch. «Are you afraid of water?» I ask myself, awake now. «It's been a long time since I've seen it,» I reply to myself.

Enter into that clean yard, to those people, regardless of what they wear, regardless of how much or little they eat – just be with them – just feel their hands and be, without any malice, together.

Buy me white clothes! Give me fire in my hands! Cut my collar off. Send me to the guillotine. I want to die young. Put a violent end to my life, bleed me, kill me, torture and hack me to pieces! There cannot be an old Limonov! Do this within the next few years. Best time – April or May!

During the misty spring days, our New York is remarkably beautiful for a lonely person.

In that mist, it feels good to look for tulips on the tops of skyscrapers, flying gently, solo, from one roof to the other on homespun silk wings.

to E.R.

Black fabrics absorb the sun well. It feels good to sweat in them in the spring. Once, maybe, I had a coat like this. I can't remember now. It feels good to: Let the coat drop into the puddles, step over it, enter through the door – it'll bang behind my back – buy some fried food, drink some alcohol, wipe my face with the napkin, get off a chair, say: ha-ha-ha! Exit through the door, turn left at the corner, get the knife out, hide it in my right sleeve, dive into the entrance of Your house, stab the doorman, jump into the elevator, and find myself on the nineteenth floor, kiss You on Your silly lips, take your fucking clothes off, fuck you – panting – into the tight, child's-like orifice, into your weak and silly hole, and start toward the door while receiving a hot piece of metal lodged in my stomach, then die on the parquet floor. It was only You that I ever loved, I think. And at the very last moment, a glimpse of the policeman's shoes.

«Gabriel, my friend, do you happen to enjoy torture? Actually, it's pleasant, isn't it, to observe some twisted features.»

«I like torture mixed with sex. The pure pain is not pleasant for the observer, Edward.»

«That's right, Gabriel. But I'm an Asian, and in these matters the oriental sophistication is well known. We Asians like to have our experiments.»

A sad career of a major from some Southern country proceeded under the cypresses and palm trees.

I love: the tree of death, bloody around the trunk, and somebody's fate, shortnened in order to use it as an example.

A knife that pierced a map.

An officer in a beret – that's my aide.

Blood in the bandages of a soldier who fell into the grass.

The scent of eau-du-cologne and cognac.

I love my future.

And the black Southern shadows.

And a twenty-three-year-old woman, who sneaked in to shoot me.

Yesterday, a black man walks along Broadway and repeats melancholically: «I love King-Kong… I love King-Kong… I love King-Kong…»

I smiled at him. And he smiled. We exchanged glances like conspirators.

We're in the know. And the big ape has nothing to do with it either.

Yesterday, again, I saw one of ours. Bending, making an artistic gesture, he offered a car the right of way. It was he who smiled at me in that way. My own father never smiled at me like that. It's clear, this guy too is one of ours.

Two in one day – not bad.

Jule, the hairdresser, Serge, the collector of stamps, and I somehow gut to be good friends and formed a group. A passion for flying together at sunset united us. On a clear day you can often see us gliding over the hills and lakes near the town of St. Paul. Three of us are suspended – reclining – over the big pine grove to the south-east of Peoria: we breathe in the aromas.

At times we get tired. The hairdresser suffers the most. He's fat. And to keep pace with the others, he energetically flaps his arms and legs, rowing – his strokes wide and awkward. Poor guy sweats – after all, he's married.

At my age – always observing – I know everything about people. They're very funny. Some dance, others sing. Many get drunk or blow smoke. A man, staid and quiet throughout the evening, suddenly leaps up and performs a savage, unconscious dance.

I know it all. It's boring. This guy is old, this one's getting old. That one's getting ready to get old.

It's as though the purpose of life is for A to land a good job, for В to publish a book, for C to find a good husband, for D to buy a brownstone in New York.

I'm a Mongol. My mother is from Kazan. We Mongols are cunning and wise. I walk among the crowd with my long bangs; I smile politely and I hide my primitive Mongol boredom – it was born in the blackened steppes, in the towns' ruins when all the men were hacked to pieces, all the meet eaten, and all the captive women fucked – what else is there on the earth? Fullness of life. O brother, what a bore!

And there's no one my heart is reaching out to – observing…

Coming out of a store (and it's warm out), crossing the street with a bag of groceries, waiting for the light to turn green (and on the other side facing me are school kids, the youngest, with their teacher-this is Second Avenue), I see HER.

She's about six, her princess-like hair is down, her sheepskin coat (trimmed with fur and embroidered) is open. Shamelessly, she pulls up with her little hand her checked skirt and scratches her slit. Bare legs (just socks) loom all the way up to where they join in the slit.

And it's horribly exciting, these bare, plump legs, this enchanting, serious little face with full lips. God, I ached all over, and she just calmly scratched her slit. The light turned and they proceeded along. I turned: galloping, her backpack on her shoulders, she leaned on the arms of two boys…

A TV Ad:

Before boarding a plane, people walk through customs – the automatic doors keep hissing – everyone has a Specialist calculator in their pocket or a purse. Young women, men, the old, blacks, whites – everyone has it.

«Fuck your calculator – ain't nothin' I'm gonna count! Fuck your calculator – aint nothin' I'm gonna count!» I suddenly sang loud and pretty and jumped in response to this ad. Though I wasn't the audience they counted on.

«Hey, boatman, take me across to the other bank of Broadway. I'm going to buy a little salt for my family. There are twenty-eight of us, three don't eat sait,» and he steps onto the ferry's wet, rough boards. The families from the left and the right banks somehow managed to get the ferry going. «Matches, Sait» – you can already see it; it's hidden in the rocks and ruins. The sun shines on it.

«On your way here bring me a bouquet, Rosalie.

I'll pay you back right away. Buy me the blue Irisis because my right lung hurts me something terrible today».

«In the wind, freezing, icy,

A Chinese beauty's yellow, shaved slit is cold.

«Corne, crawl onto my blue cock, you maggoty meat…»

How lovely you were by the three pine trees,

When the wind starts.

I'm sad. You already died.

And took away with you your cannon ball breasts.

Calmly across the yellow land. Our wind rolls on.

You're not on my cock. My cock is empty. And only an outburst of a landscape. And a piece of an eye.»

I wrote this looking at a Chinese painting.

It's great in May, in the wonderful wet May, to be a head of All Russian Emergency Committee, to be in Odessa, and, wearing a leather jacket, to stand on a balcony facing the sea, to adjust the pince-nez and breathe in the intoxicating aromas.

And then to return to the interior of the room and, coughing, lighting up a cigarette, begin the interrogation of a princess N who is deeply implicated m the counterrevolutionary plot and who is famous for her remarkable beauty – the twenty-two-year-old princess.

I used to get on the bike and cry. Gloomy sky, an April noon. It's sad too when in March-April there's no money and it's snowing.

Like now. In the window are Broadway's chipped buildings, and you've moved – this is the fourth day in a dirty hotel, alone, and already a second year without love. And a quarter for a phone call. It's even sadder when the subtle scent of hot iron starts wafting in from the radiator. How I start sobbing then…

The iron is clicking, it's snowing for a long time. What poison these spring days are! And you can't even press your cheek against your submachine gun. Yes, it'd help.

I'll take a big fish, I'll put it on a rock, and having wiped the rock with my sleeve, I'll eat the fish, sinking my hands in it. It's good – the smoked fish. And a jug of white wine is next to me. And the sun is busy beating down on my head. And the birds are singing. And my heart is rejoicing at something, though why should it rejoice? Yes, even this pittance is enough – the wine, the fish, the birds singing. It's a good thing I'm not a viscount or a marquis, otherwise it would be too much to bear.

Let's go for a swim. The water is warm. We'll dip our bodies into a lake. In a lake, there's no anxiety as there is in a sea and in an ocean. We'll stretch out in this thin water, though it'll be harder to swim. We'll lie on our backs, we'll see a copper sunset and heavy clouds. We'll remember the past and we'll start crying in the water. And along the shore, a man carrying a bag will walk by, or maybe he'll be carrying a sack.

Let's go for a swim but not together and on different days. After all, it's been a long time since we were man and wife. It's just that we were young together.

My poor baby, sweetheart, my dear sleepyhead. Recall how we stormed the botanical garden when the bullets knocked the branches off the fan palms. The greasy aloe dripped its sap right onto the faces of the wounded, the blue pines cast shadow on the perished, and in the midst of this blazing hell the demented countess Eva Gonzales kept appearing in her white hat and in her white dress, all in tatters. Recall how we chased her away and how a peacock farm squalled when it was accidentally riddled with a burst of machine-gun fire. And the wind smelled of soot and flowers. And we knew that we'd all be slaughtered for sure, and that the new 1933^rd year will grow old without us. And they'll again rebuild the border patrol house…

Like I said, the wind in the botanical garden smelled of flowers, of tropical flowers and tombs. And some of our guys peeled away their mustaches, running for their lives, hiding – in vain – deep in the trees, or in the bony bamboo.

And I recall a certain Carlos Akun: his lips in blue lipstick, he kept laughing hysterically at his torn-away arm. Oh, the smells of the botanical garden!

Our wounds were rotting like the fruits. Like the fruits were rotting our wounds.

The mug our Limonov has – it's pretty big. He's well built, like a soldier. But on the old pictures he looks pathetic like Jesus. A weakling, you know. An intellectual, a poet. «A poet with glass wings,» as one old asshole characterized him, contemptuously.

Nowadays Eduardo guffaws at these pictures.

If on a warm humid evening you carefully put on some make-up by the mirror, pull a purple hat down over your eyes, put on long black stockings, a see-through black garter belt, lace panties, and a dress fluttering and hanging strangely on you and then go for a walk, swinging your purse – this will evoke in your body and soul feminine sensations. And even more if you meet a sad, red-necked sailor from a lonely ship. Oh, how blue his eyes are!

The hounds bark, the horses neigh, the deer snort…

And what a forehead she has – round, depraved, her purse is murky, she's wearing jeans, and a shirt of a girl-tramp. There are many like her on the two shores of our great empire, both here and in California. She lies down here, she sits down there, takes a bite, lights up a cigarette…

During the absence of her king (he was hunting), the queen says that she misses him – no one believes her. The courtiers politely clear their throats, the king laughs – everyone knows that the queen is an out-and-out slut. That is everyone with the exception of a court jester huddling in a corner of a picture. He's a secret admirer and the author of the romantic hymns. Though the entire palace and its inhabitants know about the jester's passion – the queen is an out-and-out slut, and her forehead is round.

Shit! Imagine me lounging at a cute little restaurant – I cross my legs and call on the servants. And the girls – lovely and hungry – I bring them along. «You cocksuckers,» I address the servants poetically, «bring in the girls! Feed the girls, give them Russian caviar, vodka, bring 'em all kinds of juices and whiskey. I'll take 'em dancing afterwards. Come-on, move and make sure everything is high-quality; for the girls, I want everything the best, the most expensive. If I find something amiss, I'll shoot every (how many are you here?) fifth one».

That's what I call pleasure. And we arrived not in any old car but in an armored carrier, it puffs outside by the door, its machine guns stick out rudely in all directions. The driver, by the way, is a Brazilian.

I always keep my knife in my pocket. I walk along a street and the knife is open in my pocket – I can stroke the blade. I get home, sit at the table – there, I have two knives. When I write something, I play with them automatically. When I go to sleep, I have yet another knife, the main one, the biggest-it's kept under my pillow. Thus my entire life is surrounded by knives.

And safety is not really the reason why – what can you do against this world with just a knife? I keep it for the pleasure of seeing and feeling a knife. A revolver is a different matter altogether – it only requires a decision; a knife is braver.

And to tell you the truth, I've always been and remained to this day a criminal from the working-class suburbs: I see trouble – I go for the knife. Whenever I look at my picture where I'm nineteen – the crooked grin, the cruel eyes and lips, the shape of the nose – it's plenty clear, it explains the knives. And you were saying how I've changed.

But have I really? I just put on the glasses and let my hair grow long.

I have nobody to fuck now, guys! That is, yes I do, I have two objects, but I don't love them. I'm ashamed to fuck them, though I do sometimes when I'm drunk and smoked out, though I berate myself afterwards. No, honest, I have nobody to fuck now. You see I'm not lying, I'm not striking a pose.

«My prick, you're my baby, unemployed, an integral part of me. Poor baby. If you could only live by yourself, separately, just using the smarts of the dashing fellow Eddie Limonov, then you'd be really happy.»

My ancestors, I bet, loved the earth. As soon as spring comes I'm tormented by a longing to plough and sow, to feel soil with my hand, to run to the earth. I'm sure I'd make a good, thrifty peasant. The females would love and fear me, and so would my sons and neighbors: The neighborhood. I'd probably be rich and would get drunk just twice a year to maintain the order. So why did my destiny bring me here, to this hotel on Broadway?

Let's go into the temple. We'll steal in quietly. We'll light the candles and we'll commit a sin. It's not like I'm going lie on top of you or anything like that-we'll do this in a cheep, depraved way, the way they have it in the porno-magazine. Standing, you'll rest your arms, face, and shoulders on the pulpit. I'll fold up your black coat: your white behind bare-I'll roll my eyes from this vision of the aging, white dampness. You'll squat a little and, not without some effort, settle my prick into your well-we'll go for a ride. We'll be accompanied by the soft winds and gazes of our Lord and by this whole interior of stone, wooden, and redolent beauty… And the ohs, and the sighs, and the candles' shimmer, and in some nooks there's the sensation: it's a Christmas tree, it's the New Year's celebration, it's the childhood and mama baked some sweet pies. You eat them and it's warm in the stomach. And you eat them for the last time.

We shot the sisters as we were supposed to – at the sunrise. There were my three Croatian friends, an Austrian from the Sixth International and a deputy from the Italian ultra Castelli, a Japanese Ioshimura, and me – the Emissary Extraordinaire of the Annihilation League. We've designed the execution in the style of the beginning of the 20^th century. We've chosen the mustached Bozhimir to announce the sentence. The mountain bushes were already broken in by the sun's edge, when these women fell into the dewy grass. We stood opposite them as it's depicted in all the classical paintings. We've divided our targets: one sister per three shooters.

At this point, I'm not sure the death sentence was necessary, but perhaps it was made necessary by this severe, mountainous country. Perhaps, had this taken place in some coastal town where the wine screams and sparkles, where there's dancing to the vinyl in a cafe, then there would not be an execution but simply a rape, and even then I don't mean a gangrape. I as the Annihilation League representative was their chief.

Nonetheless, before the execution the youngest Jewess was brought to me and lying in her white tatters, she was quite lovely. And as I was shooting, I aimed at that spot. As it is, I'm known for my eccentricities but I couldn't hold myself.

to M.S.

If I lie down to sleep, I'll envelope myself into pork's fat or lamb's fat. And I won't be cold, just as long as it doesn't start growing into me. Before sitting yourself down, spread onto the seat a thin layer of meat. Girdle yourself with meat to cover your naked parts. When it will wear off, throw it away, find another meat.

Put a fat, chubby piece of meat under your head.

Frame and hang meat on your wall.

Piss blood.

(And never part with your knife.)

A nurse was sitting in a corner.

Paul was standing by the window, he was smiling.

Jean was standing by the door, he was smiling.

Pierre was standing by the wall, he was smiling.

The nurse became frightened by their smiles.

In the town of Arle, the reception desk at twelfth municipal hospital opens at 6 a.m. The sick entertain bizarre fantasies-the General Council of the Sick, their trade union has voted unanimously and now the hospital opens with the burst of the fountain in the yard-and this even in the winter, at 6 a.m. Through the doors, in walk the new arrivals – words fail to describe them. One has to see these faces, the expression of these faces.

A Russian newspaper smells of graves and an old man's urine. Everything is paltry and pathetic – outdated – from the ads to the articles to the poems. Even Aunt Mary's recipe is there. And what do you think it is? Why of course it's a «Low-Fat Barley Soup.» What can be more disgusting and mediocre? It's not a goose, not a duck, not even simply a huge steak, no – it's a low-fat barley soup. It's as if to say-Look how mediocre, how drab, how defeated by life we are.

A certain K.Mondrianov asks M.Polshtoff to send his address. Why the fuck – I'd like to ask – why the fuck do you need his address? To get dead bored together. It'd be better for them not to be together, or to befriend Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones-these are healthy, jolly fellows. Instead they want to exchange the addresses, pathetic nobodies.

There are late lieutenants and eternal cornets. «By the grace of God, lieutenant B. quietly passed away in a nursing home.» This is followed by a long list of relatives and uncle Misha (why was he marked off?) who mourn. In reality, they're probably delighted, got drunk celebrating the departure of the eighty-nine-year-old (!) vegetable who had tormented all these relatives and who emptied their savings.

«At the age of 80, an untimely death of Kolchak's accountant.» Admiral Kolchak-the shaving of his cheeks is even mentioned in Mandelshtam's poetry sixty years ago. «Untimely,» at the age of 80?! When would it be «timely» then? At 120, maybe?!

An ad: «I make small electrical installations.» My friend, why make them small? Make them as big as the whole world makes them, as Americans, French, and other people. Someone asks «a lady in a fur coat to return an envelope with stamps which she mistakenly took on March 11.» Madam, don't return these stamps. Instead, buy envelopes, as many as you can-be generous-put a sheet of paper with my cry only: ah-a-a-ah-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! And send this to all the countries in the world – as many as you have stamps for.

It's good to kill a strong, tanned man-your enemy. And it's good to kill him on a hot summer day, near the sea water, on warm rocks, so that the blood streaks the shallow waters by the shore. And in the act you also get stabbed in the hip, and limping you disappear into the coastal mountains. And you walk on, breathing the wind, smelling of the fight's sweat, blood, and gun powder, then you scramble deep into the wormwood thicket and fall asleep. You wake up – it's night, the stars, the black sky, and below are the town lights where you descend and find both wine and meat and couples dancing to an accordion… You descend slowly. «Adios, adios, San-Juan,» a hoarse voice reaches you.

«We're alive, Eduardo,» you think as you stumble over the rocks. «Alive,» you tell yourself ecstatically, «yes, alive!»

Evening. Prostitutes lick their lips. I lick mine looking at them on the sly, pretending that I'm not interested. All I have is 60 cents in my pocket – and that's it. And, for some reason, I fancy that I'm an ancient Egyptian. And I'm drawn by the blue night's abyss, mesmerized, my inflamed eyes glued to the prostitutes – I feel them over with my eyes, feel their legs, follow their blue tongues. It follows then that I love rot and decay. Yes, that's what follows.

Back home, I'm excited. I'm going to get rid of my old pants, the ones I brought with me from Russia – fuck 'em. At least I'm busy with something.

Incredible! The city of Muchachu was captured by pigmies!

«Four feet tall,» the radio says laconically.

I was overjoyed. It's delightful when the city of Muchachu is captured by pigmies.

Did it occur to them to rape all the big women there and set the city on fire?

Our writer frequently goes out with the clear intention of selling himself to somebody, or simply to sleep with a first passer-by, be it a woman or a man. From under his French cap, his curious eyes stick out. He's elegant, his face is dark, he's dressed in purple.

«Go ahead, feel me up, touch me. I'll go with you wherever you wish. When you touch me, I'm all languor, I want to die.

I have no morals, no nothing. I want some affection. Fuck me, or I will fuck you. You, the gray-haired one, take me with you. I'm good. I'm just like a boy. I'm a Russian writer. Or you, lady. My eyes are green – I'll give a lot of pleasure».

An unbelievable thunderstorm. He turned off the light. Tanned, naked, he lay down on the bed, crawled all the way into a corner and lay there, happy. The windows were open, the smell of fresh greenery and rain wafted in from New York. And for the first time, he felt acute pleasure at the fact that he's lonely, that the hotel where he lives is cheap and dirty and that its inhabited by alcoholics, drug-addicts, and prostitutes, and that he's unemployed and lives off a beggarly and embarrassing dole, which, in any event, allows him to walk about for days on end.

The thunderstorm was compelling proof that even in this state he's happy. And he lay smiling in the darkness, listening to the rain and getting up from time to time and looking out onto the storm.

I've always been poor. I like being poor, there's something artistic and creative about it, it's pretty. You know that I'm an aesthete. And there's more than enough aestheticism in being poor.

Sometimes I fancy that I'm eating a Dutch still-life painting.

Not all of them, of course, but those that are modest I eat. A boiled, unpeeled, cold potato is languishing alone on a pale oval platter in the neighborhood of a piece of gray bread and-suddenly, outrageously, a bright green onion and glistening salt. A non-poet would gobble this up from the paper, in a hurry, using his grubby fingers.

And a non-aesthete would do the same.

I, using a fork and a knife, take my time – that's why my meal appears like a remarkably beautiful surgical incision. It's pretty and precise – the only difference is that surgery is executed in other hues. Mine are softer and more misty.

I really love being poor. Spend half a day deciding whether to go to the Playboy Cinema – two movies for a dollar – or whether the movies are worth that much money. Or should I walk hungry around the Village, where I get hit by a peculiar aroma coming from behind every door?

I really love being poor, being an exacting, clean, neat, poor thirty-four-year-old man – in truth, completely lonely. And I love my quiet sadness on account of this. And I love my white handkerchief in my pocket.

I want to write about velvet and its hues.

About the marijuana smoke, and about the other smoke. About the purple morning grass, it was noticed by the driver who brought the corpse to the «Medical Purposes» building.

I want to feel what Elena felt after she became unfaithful to her husband, Eduard Limonov, and was walking home through New York, when the sun was setting.

I want to break in on a premiere of a new ballet at the Met and mow down the diamond-clad audience with a pretty new army machine-gun And what can be done about it, if that is what I want?

I do try to suppress these desires but it doesn't work too well.

to be whispered with an orchestral accompaniment

I kiss my Russian Revolution

On her sweaty boyish fair locks

Sticking out from under her navy or army cap.

I kiss her scratched Russian white hands,

I cry and I say:

White, you're my white one! Red, you're my red one!

Gay and beautiful, forgive me!

I mistook you for the general's hat of a Georgian,

And of all these military and civilian types

Who grew up on your grave -

All these disgusting fat grave worms.

Those whom I oppose, and who oppose me and my poems.

I cry about you in New York, in the city of damp Atlantic winds, where pestilence flourishes endlessly, where people-slaves serve people-masters who in turn are also slaves.

And at nights. In my filthy hotel. Lonely, Russian, dumb, I dream, dream, dream about you – who perished innocently, still a youth, beautiful, smiling, still alive. With scarlet lips – white-necked, tender. Scratched hands on a rifle strap, speaking Russian – Revolution, my love!

And it's a summer civil war

In a city hot as a dream.

And the head of the uprising, half-Latino, half-Russian Victor, and Rita, a woman with straight hair, and blue-haired, gay Kendall – all of them came to my room in the morning and stood by the door. Victor is threatening me with the muzzle of his gun because I've betrayed the cause of the World Revolution for the sake of the spider-thin arms of the fifteen-year-old daughter of President Alberti, for the sake of Celestina, her pink dresses, her smiles from the sea, her small child s peepee, and her always pinched ear lobes; for the sake of the porcupines in her papa's garden and the snails on the fence.

All this has lead me to this morning: my best comrade in arms and former lover Victor tells me, whispering, terrible words; the hysterical Kendall in a thin jacket doesn't look away; and there is Rita's precipitous face…

And little Celestina cried for a long time, shaking her naked breasts while her father, the honorable President, was entering the capital with a tank division. The loyal western outskirts were shaken up, and our comrades were being shot in the courtyards.

I'm so fucking horny today! Shove my prick in deep, deep into that slit the color of beat-up strawberries and then let you, the whole world, go to hell. But then what an abyss after the orgasm, how it gapes! How metallic, how cold the world is afterwards! It takes no effort then to sentence anyone to death; and if one is sentencing an angel, it will be even more exciting.

Yesterday, around 1 a.m. I ran into a fellow – white suit with a dark, nonchalantly half-undone bow tie. He had just rolled out of a restaurant, quite drunk (swaying), artsy. Seeing me, he came to, turned, and fixed his gaze on my bangs… But I had to pee real bad. I was in a hurry and didn't stop.

Later, having peed in an all-night accessible spot – known to me only – in the hall of a building on 58^th street, I regretted it. What a blockhead! I should have gone with him and taken $54 and tomorrow morning I would have bought those white glossy boots on Broadway, I could put them on right in the store.

If it's May and you're sitting in a garden and crying, it's incredibly good. Someone close to you has died, and you're sorry.

An untanned, plump relative in a dark dress arrives, her eyes swollen from tears. And you take her by her white hand, you get closer, you embrace her and say: «Sally, dearest, how awful, what a loss!» You embrace you are overflowing with tears. And as you mourn and make body contact, you feel a terrible desire. It's embarrassing, illicit, and inappropriate.

And she feels it too, especially if she's the spouse of the deceased. And with closed eyes we both plunge headlong into that abyss…

And the casket with the deceased goes spiraling up into the heavens. It speeds away.

I love being an adventurist. It often saves me. Suddenly it rains and I am depressed, and poor, and want to cry. And then I think, «Hey, you're an adventurist. There are all sorts of things that happen. Don't give up, boy, you've chosen that road yourself, you didn't want a normal life, now you have to stick with what you have.»

That's when I re-adjust myself and start calling this one and that one, pretending that I'm a lamb, lying through my teeth and then, voila, in a couple of hours I'm strutting around in high society talking to famous people, grabbing beautiful women by the hand, talking rubbish in a penetrating voice. One word leads to another-the next thing, you greet the morning in a luxurious bed, the first rays tickle your face through the curtains, and they bring you coffee in bed. «I want vodka,» you say. It's unbelievable but they bring vodka too. You make a face but you drink it nevertheless – you did ask for it.

I love being an adventurist.

I'm a bitch. And it's sad that I'm a bitch and that I don't love anyone anymore. And it's no excuse either that I used to love. I keep smoking and thinking stubbornly, «Bitch, bitch, that's just it, you're a bitch.» And I look sadly out the window at the clouds a la Italia under the skyscrapers. They're called cumulus, I think.

A luxurious summer morning over the East River. It's me, sitting on a bench in the millionaire's garden. A young Italian, an itinerant laborer, envies me. He looks through the fence at the inaccessible garden. «There,» he thinks «this rich guy is sitting and drinking coffee. Why did this scum,» thinks the laborer, «get up so early, at eight in the morning, to look at the water?»

In fact, I don't have any right to be sitting in the millionaire's garden. I have no right to be drinking this coffee I didn't work for, or put my bare feet on someone's grass while touching, from time to time, the body of a twenty-one-year-old girl sitting next to me. A prodigal writer, a good-for-nothing foreigner, an FBI client, a poet with dangerous ideas. A millionaire's housekeeper's lover.

That water cruise in a small cabin with her will stay with me forever. In the morning I lugged the suitcase across that entire Southern town, the suitcase full of her pretty rags, her beloved fragrant essences. We barely found a car to take us to another town and careened along the mountain roads with a driver in a leather jacket. Wild flowers burst along the sides of the road, and a low sea flashed in our eyes during the turns, and life was like gunfire from a revolver, like random, terrifying gunfire from a revolver.

TV shows that no one remembers even half an hour later. Dumb actresses, familiar and boorish actors. Moronic movies, they're for slaves and for people with the brains of a cat. They respond to the five senses, forty work hours a week, air conditioners, conversations with pregnant women, strikes, commercials…

And the only time there's something dear and close and normal is when they show the rapist of an eleven-year-old girl. It turns out that only this kind of person still values freshness, beauty and authenticity.

Just break the window and jump into the store.

Take anything you want: the suits, these magnificent walking sticks, the compelling soft hats, the varnished boots and the affectionate scarves. Negotiate your way between flowers (your shoulders touching the palm tree leaves), and find a strong light and elegant suitcase and pile everything into it. Finally, don a cynic's dark glasses, cover your locks with a hat, and strut out of the display window. And let that obnoxious siren whine. It's quite possible that you'll have enough time to escape. Just don't fuss.

In the morning, in the Cairo airport, drink Turkish coffee, breathe in its aroma with the fresh cigarette smoke, and stare brazenly at the ladies. And their daughters discreetly wet their underpants from your forty-year-old stare.

Bare my chest and – sweet mother! Lenka! Parents!… «Go ahead, shoot, you bastards, my sweet ones!» On a fierce earth with the soft hips. What a blessed and important business Death is! He extends his hand, «Let's be off, Eddie!» – breathless. And you recall the slanting rain at the corner of Petrovka street and the boulevard. And sweet mother, Lenka, parents, Anna!… at my strange La tin-American land. With bare chest.

I used to return from a woman to my room at the hotel, having drunk and fucked through the night, feeling gifted like a flower, healthy, excited.

The elevator is out of order, there's a stench at the door of my room, shit from somebody's dog or a human being. I enter, angry, smart, and the cockroaches scatter from the table drawers in all directions. «Jesus! Motherfucker!» I think to myself and suddenly burst out laughing as though I've just discovered myself for the first time… «The worse it gets, the better it gets. Fuck New York!»

There's a sound of bottles falling from the windows. Seagulls fly around the yard for some reason.

Young people are often lazy, they don't want to work. And they're right. Later they'll have no choice, they'll have to. But they were right. What's so wonderful about work, what's to be proud of? «I work, I pay taxes.» This way one's whole life passes in submission.

Personally, I only like to write and not always. But generally I prefer to do nothing. To cogitate. To recall someone's poems. To lie in the sun. To eat meat. To drink wine. To make love and organize a revolution. And to write sometimes.

I don't believe that there's really someone who for eight hours a day, five days a week, likes to type, or sew men's shirts, or pick up garbage from the streets. Once in a while it's fun to sew a shirt. It's exciting to type out a few pages – I can do it! See how well it comes out! But to do this throughout one's life!? I don't believe it, and many facts confirm this. One woman won a lottery – she'll be paid one thousand dollars a week until the day she dies. So what do you think she said she'd do first? «Stop working,» of course. So, the young people are right without realizing it. I'm for them. I support them.

You're walking in the morning again through New York, going «home» – cogitating – and you run into your ex. She's tall and thin, wearing pants and a belt with a huge buckle. Her fashionable rags are hanging down. Toothy. She has had her teeth redone, not because they were bad but because they were not photogenic.

Her upper lip is trimmed; her nose is powdered over; her neck is tense. She looks insolent but there's shame in her eyes.

We talk and go our separate ways. Walking, you think to yourself: Ah, Elena, Elena you too did not escape the common lot of females. It's a damned pity, real pity. You did something wrong. You can dump Eddie Limonov, why not? But there's something wrong. There's definitely something wrong…

Most of all I hate the rich old ladies. Each one conceals some vileness. Lucky traders of their cunts. They lucked out. I hate them either with or without their puny dogs. And I hate them in the stores too. And when they eat.

Even young women are disgusting when they eat. Usually they're voracious and greedy, especially after a few weeks of having sex with you, when they're certain that you are theirs and they can relax. This is when you see them the way they are. Poor boy, you imagined she was a princess, an angel. She gobbles the pieces of meat like a python, grunts over the brown sauce, wraps her lips in thick red wine, hisses voluptuously with the mixture of pineapple and coconut – she copulates with the food.

Hotels, hotels – the entire 59^th Street of Central Park South is a gilded street. Once here, at night, a drunken couple started hugging me. I was dumbstruck. My usual reaction: hand in the pocket, going for the knife…

«But, I thought then, they're not hurting me. Still, they're touching my body.»

I left, steering clear of this temptation.

They were drunk, could they've guessed? He or she? That a well-built man in a cap who looked like an artist could stab them easily. You, the bourgeoisie, have your fun, but don't get carried away. And don't hug me. Because I'm angry you see.

A Japanese restaurant is good in dank weather: hot napkins and warm sake, while the North-Wester is blowing. It's especially good before assassinating a Prime Minister, while you're spending the last of your money in a squalling November.

Central Park. July. Two young pale-faced freaks in glasses – one has a long, attentive nose – hand sheets of printed text to each other. I glance over – it's a script. Okay, okay, long noses, you'll get there. With your old necks, with your wide-open jabot shirts and gold chains on your freckled wiener-like arms, you'll make it to Hollywood. And you'll get to screw the young dumb models and aspiring actresses. Next to them a full-blooded Mexican family had claimed a spot. They had blankets, children, thermoses and three transistor radios. They won't make it to Hollywood.

And passing by was I – red scum – long, curly hair, dark skin and black thoughts. E.Limonov, a man from Russia. And what is amazing – a talented non-Jew.

Mom, listen Mom. I despise you.

And Dad too.

It's as if you're of a different race, never mind a tribe.

Once, I was painting a studio for Frank, a jeweler – he has a long Italian last name. His little girl, Ellen – three years old – was hanging around near me.

«My Dad Frank is my Mom's husband,» she announces. «Do you have a wife?»

«My wife has left me,» I tell her while I keep painting, squatting down. «That's very mean,» the child says seriously. And then obviously to cheer me up she declares: «Here, watch how I jump.» She gets up from the floor and jumps, throwing her little hands and feet to the side. «That's because I'm light. I'm still a kid, you know. I won't be able to jump like that when I'm a grown-up,» she explains.

I get up, put the brush away and try to jump like Ellen. Apparently I don't do too well because she laughs. «You're heavy,» she says. When I ask her how old she is (a corny, idiotic, and ingratiating question of a grown-up who's trying to make conversation with a child – her father had already told me she was three), she answers that she has already had three birthdays. «And how old are you?» she asks. «Thirty-one,» I lie. (In fact, I'm thirty-five.)

«You are old,» she says.

«Maybe not very old?» I ask hopefully.

«No, you're old,» the truth-loving child says, lowering her eyes.

After that she teaches me English words. «Repeat after me,» the little Italian girl tells me in a severe tone of voice. I repeat after her.

All things considered, we're doing great. We're getting along famously and are happy with each other.