I am a man of the street. I have to my credit very few people-friends and many friend-streets. They, the streets, see me at all hours of the day and night; I often sit on them, press my buns to their sidewalks, cast my shadow on their walls, prop my elbow or my back against their lampposts. I think they love me because I love them and pay attention to them like nobody else in New York. As a matter of fact, Manhattan ought to put up a monument to me, or a memorial plaque with the following inscription: "To Edward Limonov, New York's number one pedestrian, with love from Manhattan!"
I once covered more than three hundred blocks in one day, on foot. Why? I was out for a walk. I generally go almost everywhere on foot. Out of my $278 a month I begrudge spending fifty cents to ride anywhere, especially since my sorties have no set destination, or the destination is indefinite. For example, a place to buy myself a notebook of a particular format. They don't have it at Woolworth's or at another Woolworth's or at Alexander's, and I march down to the sidewalk markets on Canal Street to scrounge up the right notebook. All other formats irritate me.
I am very fond of tramping around. Really, without exaggeration, I probably walk more than anybody else in New York. Unless there's some tramp who walks more than I do, but I doubt it. So far as I can see, bums are all immobile, more apt to lie still or putter sluggishly about in their rags.
I walked a great deal in March and April, my most terrible months. In the mornings my leg muscles were locked, every step caused me hellish pain, I would have to walk in this pain for half an hour before it wore off. The pain would have been less, of course, had I worn shoes with lower heels, but I would never consent to make that concession – I have always worn nothing but high heels, and I ask to be laid in my grave, if I have one, wearing incredible shoes of some kind, high heels without fail.
I was visiting the individual neighborhoods of New York in expectation of some sort of encounter. Sometimes I clearly sensed this and walked especially purposefully to seize the opportunity, to be favored with an encounter. Most of the time I walked as if just for fun, as if it were my heart's desire to take a stroll, yet in fact my goal was the same, to be honored with an encounter. In my faraway childhood, my nowremote past, I tramped the main street of my provincial hometown the same way, waiting to encounter someone who would take me and lead me into another life. Whom did I hope to meet? A man? A woman? A friend, or love? Oh, the image I had in mind was very nonspecific, but I waited, tremblingly waited. How many empty evenings there were, how many sad and lonely homecomings, how many terrible reflections before sleep, until I encountered Anna and from an ordinary lad, with her help, created a poet.
I walk that same way now. Again I have nothing. I have established my poetic fate, whether or not it will last is no longer the issue, it's done, it exists, in Russia my life is already legend, and now I walk free, empty, and terrible in the Great City, amusing, saving, and distracting myself with its streets, and I seek the encounter that will begin my new fate.
From Kierkegaard, who lived in the nineteenth century, I learned that only a man who has despaired can properly appreciate life. He is at once the unhappiest and the happiest of men. Oh, I have appreciated life, how I have appreciated it, I howl and weep over life and do not fear it. On every little street I peer attentively at the people: is it he, is it she, is it they? To hope is folly, but I hope. Again and again I go out on the streets, the streets of my great, boundless city – of course it is mine, since my life is happening here – I seek, watch, peer… and return to the hotel. Often I fall face down on the bed and weep, and only malice gives me the strength to get up every day at eight in the morning, clench my teeth, read the American newspapers. I curse and damn everything in the world, but I live, and oh, although love has betrayed me, I shall never cease to seek love. But it will not be a love for one person, who would betray me again, no, no more, I want no more betrayals, it will be a different love.
What do I seek? Either a brotherhood of stern men, revolutionaries and terrorists, in love and devotion to whom my soul could rest at last; or I seek a religious sect preaching love, people's love for one another, love at all costs.
My darling, where will you find it, such love?
My darling, where will you find it, this sect where they will comfort and caress you, lay your head in their laps. Sleep, my weary darling, sleep. Nowhere in the world is there such a sect. Once it was in Elena's lap. Where is there such a sect now? Why am I not surrounded by its affectionate inmates? Mimi the ballerina will playfully stand on her head, Pascalino will tousle my hair, and George will kiss my knee. "You have come to us, you are weary, here are wine and bread, and we will wash your feet. Poor weary darling, be with us as long as you like, and we won't go off to work and leave you alone tomorrow like Papa and Mama, like a wife, or like children going to school. We'll be with you a long, happy time, and perhaps later – once in a while this happens – you will leave, when you want to, and the glint of our old buildings will be in your eye…"
Brotherhood and people's love – that is what I dreamed of, that is what I wanted to encounter.
None of it is easy to find. I've been walking for six months now, and how much longer will I walk? God knows…
I walk around New York – my great house – lightly clad, not much overburdened with clothes, and almost never carry anything with me, never encumber my hands. I know all the street people of New York. I know where they can be found, and the spot where each of them curls up to sleep, whether it's the stone floor under the arch of the boarded-up church at Third Avenue and Thirtieth Street, or in the revolving door of the bank at Lexington and Sixtieth. Certain bums prefer to sleep on the steps of Carnegie Hall, to be closer to art. I know the dirtiest, hairiest, fattest bum in New York. I think he's crazy because he always wears a weird smile. By day he usually makes himself comfortable on a bench in Central Park, not far from the entrance. In the evening he moves to Sixth Avenue in the Forties. Once I found him reading – guess what – Russkoe Delo, the newspaper I used to work on. Moreover, he was holding it the right way, not upside down. Could he be Russian?
I know a place where, at various times of the day, you can see a red-bearded man in the costume of a Scottish highlander, playing the bagpipes.
I am familiar with all of New York's blind men and their dogs. The black man who sits on Fifth Avenue with his rabbit, usually across from St. Patrick's, gives me a friendly hello and a smile.
I am acquainted with a bearded artist and his wife who sell paintings of wild animals – lions, tigers, and other lovable beasts of prey. I say hello to them and they answer me. Admittedly I can't buy anything from them.
I know the man who sells shashlik in Central Park. I know well the Italian drummer who often pounds a drum near Carnegie Hall.
I am acquainted with a black saxophonist and a fellow who plays the violin at the doors of Broadway theaters.
I know by sight the joint-sellers in Central Park, at the Public Library, and in Washington Square.
I know a young fellow with stubby legs and an athletic torso. In the summer he is always dressed in shorts and a weirdly cut undershirt. His time is divided between the Public Library and the distribution of advertising flyers near the arch in Washington Square.
If I wanted to enumerate them all, describe their clothes and faces, I could go on and on; it would take a lot of time.
I have in my memory knowledge of another type too.
I know, for example, where you can find, any place in New York, a liquor store that stays open late at night; or which way the tiniest little street in SoHo, the Village, or Chinatown turns.
I live in a neighborhood where the world's most expensive companies – General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, and others – have their offices, but I roam along the dirty Bowery, boring Lafayette Street, I dig up all sorts of shit in the sidewalk markets on Canal Street.
I know where you can take a leak, if need be, anywhere in New York. I know the safe places. Walking toward Chinatown along Canal Street, for example, you can go in the nearest entrance of the courthouse, and on the second floor, up the stairway to the left, you can take a wonderful leak in the stinking men's room.
I know where you can buy two huge fresh fish for a dollar, and where you can buy the same fish at three for a dollar. I know where there's cheap paper, and where, in the tangle of streets, there's a store with cheap five-cent pens. Oh, what I know! It would suffice for ten normal New Yorkers.
The best display window in New York, without question, is at Henri Bendel on Fifty-seventh Street. The most exquisite, the most sophisticated. Its gaggle of lesbians, girls grouped in weird poses, excites me to sexual arousal, the basest lust. I want to climb in there, into the window, and fuck them. Sometimes I go and watch three strange men change the clothes on them. This happens at night. Bendel's changes and rearranges its lesbians very frequently; one day it has them trampling dollars underfoot like fallen leaves, the next day whispering together, clustered in threes and fours.
I have secret relations with the mannequins. When I see them at night, slender, mystically naked or half undressed, flooded with the incredibly ghastly light of the display window, I am much more attracted to them than to live women, who have been no riddle to me for a long time now and who have but one solution. I spy on the undressed mannequins with voluptuous curiosity, much as when we placed a mirror under the school desk, as children, and tried to see the cunt of our teacher, our young little French instructor. I remember how frightened and shaken I was when I crawled under the desk in my turn and saw the dark folds and hairs (she went without underpants in summer). Now, when I feel like fucking all the time but don't arrange it for myself, the mannequins also frighten me. With pleasure and fright I think how I could tear aside their skirts, scarves, and other frippery to get at that place, and suddenly it would turn out they had a real live peepka. But forgive me these mystical sexual daydreams. It's because I'm not fucking much.
The most exquisite clothes in New York can be seen on Madison Avenue between Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, at Julie, which is also called the Artisans Gallery. There is something weird and fantastical about the clothes in this shop, a fairytale quality and at the same time depravity. They drive me wild with delight. Nearly all the suits, dresses, and masks in this gallery are constructed, not sewn, constructed the way a building is constructed; or carved, like sculptures. I love a holiday mood, effect, surprise. This is the only shop that surprises me, these are clothes for rare, strange natures, but unfortunately you have to be rich to buy them.
I dream of someday, somehow, getting some money and buying something from this shop for Elena, my former spouse, now my merry widow. She too is mad about clothes like these. A present from this shop would make her happy, I think. Such clothes would be becoming to no one else, only to Elena. Who else could wear a feather camisole, or the weird dresses, the wild play of fantasy.
I once got into the Diplomat Cabaret Theatre for a performance of Le Bellybutton and saw the sex star Marilyn Chambers. In one of her numbers Marilyn Chambers wore a feather bra from this shop. I recognized both the style and the execution at once. I don't suppose even Marilyn Chambers can afford to dress entirely in things from here. Too expensive.
I could live in this shop and never leave it. I often come and look at its small display windows, peer in, sometimes even go inside. I'm bashful about being here too much, I don't have any money, all I have is a taste for the unusual and strange, that's all. At times I feel like beginning to make, to construct, something similar; I did do tailoring in Russia, and I have to my credit several crazy self-made objects, among them the 114-patch "Blazer of the National Hero," and a jacket sewn of white filter cloth six millimeters thick. Perhaps I'll do it someday…
Another reason for my sorties around New York, apart from my abnormal desire to encounter someone or something, is the desire to distract myself from my eternally half-erect, nagging cock and from learning English. The two together cause me to fall into a terrible half sleep, a doze with nightmarish apparitions.
So I roll my trousers up to the knee, my white trousers with patches on the seat, which I'm forever washing in Tide in my hotel room; I put on my unvarying buskin sandals, which have already survived a summer and have lost half their straps; they are wooden and look like some Oriental structure, a bullock cart or well sweep, wood and leather; I take off my one and only summer shirt, white with blue checks, and I trudge downtown along Second Avenue in August. I walk on the sunny side of the street, of course, only the sunny side, never otherwise, the sunny side in any kind of heat, that's why I'm always so tanned. As I pass Fifty-third Street, I glance to my left. There's a very good wine shop down there, very pleasant and nice. It has bottles standing and lying in barrels, on shelves, in carts, in the middle, on the walls, wherever you look. You can buy any wine in this store, any beverage, it has a pleasant smell, and a huge bottle of French champagne, which very likely stands as high as my waist, costs between $162 and $175. That bottle is another thing I want to buy, if I ever come into any money, and intend to present to Elena. She is capable of appreciating it – she loves champagne, and a bottle this big will delight her. She'll be glad, and I will too. Elena is an uncommon woman, our tastes coincide, that's why I feel so bad about her. She's very beautiful herself and used to love the beautiful, and though she is no longer what she was, though life has broken her, in my heart she is always the same.
I trudge on, thinking pleasant thoughts about this shop. It would be nice to go there, browse awhile, and finally buy a bottle of Jamaican rum and drink it from a small wineglass – which I don't have, but will – in the heat of the day. I know where I'll buy the glass: at the comer of Perry Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the Village. They always have a variety of good crystal for sale, and if I spend a little time, look around, I'll find a wineglass that satisfies me.
So I march on downtown, and some people smile at me because when I'm walking I try to look as though I'm reciting a prayer that I recently composed for myself, thought up in a difficult moment when I noticed that I was excessively angry at people. Here is the prayer:
No anger has my soul
No anger has my soul
Though dead my hopes and cold
No anger has my soul
Do you suppose the people around you don't know whether you have anger in your soul or not? They know perfectly well. That's why, on seeing that I have no anger in me, many people smile at me and many ask me the way. First a cheerful Latin-American behind the wheel of an old jalopy asks how to get to Avenue C. "Turn left, my friend, turn left," I tell him. "You'll come to First Avenue, then Avenue A, then B, and the next is C." "Thanks! Have a nice day!" he calls to me, and smiles. Then a gray grandpa with a mustache, sitting in the open door of a truck, stares in fascination at the blue-enameled Orthodox cross that sticks to my chest. Grandpa may be a Ukrainian, this is their neighborhood. I stop at the fire hydrants, which are open, the water is flowing from them; I wash to the waist and walk on, without drying myself. This is natural, I get hot and I perform my ablutions.
Sometimes when I'm walking along Broadway, usually late at night – I used to walk this way from Roseanne's – someone will approach me, beg for money. I don't give it, I really can't. The man who is begging can certainly obtain money in New York more easily than I can. I am always willing to stop and explain that I don't have money, I'm on welfare, which means I'm on the same level as those who beg, if not lower. By this assertion I'm declaring that I'm a scorned individual. Everyone is satisfied. The only people I do not stop for are the ones who are very drunk or dulled out on drugs. Stopping for them is futile, it's hard to understand what they're mumbling. They're not actually seeing the world around them at that moment; to them, I, Eddie-baby, am a blob in the shape of a man. They are offended, but what can you do… I do give money to people who in my view are really unfortunate.
Often I go downtown for the whole day. I usually begin with Washington Square, where I lie in the fountain, if it's working. I put my feet in, my buns repose on the last step before water level, I lie back philosophically and contemplate my environment, or even more often I close my eyes and am merely aware, opening them infrequently. The sun, the water, the hum, and the shouts – to me it all makes up the melody of life. Often the fountain is spurting upward in a hard jet, the children throw various objects into it, beer cans, Coca-Cola cans, handkerchiefs. When thrown right, these things go flying up high, and the naked wet children squeal with delight. Other children try to sit their poopkas down on the jet so that the jet will lift them up. But either the children are very heavy, or they don't sit down right – it never happens, the jet doesn't lift them. One boy of about ten became very adept at aiming the fountain jet wherever he wanted by pressing his foot on the opening it spurted from. He hounded everyone else out of the fountain circle; a fat black woman and I proved to be the most stubborn. The black woman lay there and held out a long time, but the bad little boy overcame her in the end after squirting her with an ocean of water. She left. Things were more complex with me. It's hard with guys like me. He kept squirting water on me, but I had schooled myself from childhood, like a yogi, to endure both cold and hunger serenely. He squirted and squirted, and I just lay there. But the kid turned out to be every bit as stubborn. He adapted. When he squirted my face, in particular my nose and mouth, with a whole barrage of water, I couldn't take it, there was nothing to breathe, I had to crawl out and change places. The spectators – idlers, students, guitarists, and drug addicts – applauded wildly for both him and me.
The dogs also join in the general joy by playing in the water. They run after sticks, cans, and balk and devotedly drag them to their masters. One dog will be swifter; one will be fatter and won't get to the thing thrown by his master in time, it is snapped up by the other, swifter person of the dog species, and then the one who has committed the offense looks guiltily at his master.
One fool of a boxer dragged his mistress into the fountain and spent half an hour in there, choking and probably taking a great many blows on the muzzle as he tried to bite the jet of water. Poor thing, he deemed it a most evil enemy. His eyes were bloodshot, his muzzle was flayed, he wheezed and choked, the jet kept lifting him up by the chest, beat him on the muzzle again and again. The mistress, a perfectly proper-looking woman – God knows what had brought her here, it was certainly her first time – was thoroughly soaked, and a preposterous bra and underpants of an almost Russian cut showed through the wet fabric of her dress. The philistines of the two countries are alike.
Washington Square is pointed out in guidebooks to New York as a place of note, and sometimes real Americans pass through, countrymen and country ladies, glancing over their shoulders. To us natives they look very funny; observing them, the guitarists, students, idlers, and joint-smokers laugh, and so do I. These people dressed in their bulky American country finery look especially funny in Washington Square. They have a great deal in common with Soviet philistines, dressed in their ample dusty suits in the terrible continental heat.
I have a whole complex of diversions in Washington Square. Sometimes, along with everyone else, I listen to the Poet. His name is unknown to me, I call him the Poet. I could easily find out his name, but for some reason I don't. A short little man with a beard and a balding head, wearing a black shirt over loose sateen pants, also black, and sandals on his bare feet, he clambers up on one of the elevated bumps in the fountain's low round wall and reads his poetry. Usually he stands on the exact same bump where I sat while Irina and Khachaturian – my friends, they consider themselves my friends – dressed the veins in my arm, stuck a plaster on them. That was at the very beginning of March, the slashed veins were still barely closed; unattended, they were oozing pus. Irina and Khachaturian put iodine on my arm, then stuck an American plaster on it. The whole of Washington Square observed this operation.
The poet always heads for the exact same pedestal. That is why I haven't made the poet's acquaintance, he and I are linked by this pedestal as it is. The poet lays by his feet a shopping bag similar to the ones that elderly Soviet ladies used in the fifties – black, crude, made of oilcloth. He rummages unhurriedly in his bag, takes out a single page, and begins to read: He reads with expression, with gesticulation. His voice is hoarse, he has lots of enthusiasm, but he's a long way from Lyonka Cubanov's shrill, sobbing, lamenting delivery, a Moscow style that originated perhaps in the laments of northern Russia. Doesn't make the grade, I think with superiority.
The poet reads, some people even turn down their radios a little. Alternately rummaging in his bag and reading, the poet does ten or fifteen poems and then sits down. He swigs from a bottle of wine and talks with any listeners who wish to talk, occasionally letting them too have a swallow of wine. He's a nice guy, that's obvious, he's about forty-five, and to me Washington Square would be empty without him.
After lying here for three or four hours, listening to all the conversations around me, now and then being captivated by the girls who fall for my wonderful tanned figure (which girls, as you know, attract and repel me simultaneously; that is why I fear them and have failed in two or three intimate relationships. I was scared shitless, alas, though I had promised myself to take advantage of all opportunities, to enter into all contacts) – after lying here awhile, I get up and move to another spot, somewhere on the grass, under a bush, but again, nearly always in the sun, only occasionally in the shade. If the Ramakrishna chariot comes, I watch the members of that sect dancing to the tambourine. I know them all by sight, know which is better or worse at dancing and playing the drum or the tambourine. Their little boy, also robed in orange gauze, touches my heart. At one time I thought about going to live in their commune, I still think about it even now. Probably I am prevented by my ambition from carrying out this plan. It could still happen, however.
To me, even though they are inauthentic, the Ramakrishnas are redolent of my native East. I lie on the grass in a relaxed position, my head pillowed only on my arm, often with my eyes closed, and then all that sounds in my ears is one of their rotating prayers:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna!
Krishna, Krishna, Hare Hare!
Hare Rama, Hare Rama!
Rama Rama, Hare Hare!
After spending perhaps an hour listening to the rhythmical din of the tambourines, I decide to change position and sit for a while on a bench. A fair-haired young mama, dressed in God knows what, clothes from Botticelli's time, asks me to guard a fair-haired and just as whimsically dressed child lying in a carriage. If only she wouldn't come back, I think, glancing at the baby with interest. I would sit and wait a while, then take the child for myself. I'd have someone to care for, someone to love, and someone to work for. Even though the child would grow up and abandon me – that's inevitable. The ones you love always leave you. But surely it would be fifteen years before he left, I would hear his ringing laughter, I'd cook for him, walk with him till I dropped, raise him myself, not send him to school, I'd play with him and run along the seashore, I think dreamily.
Despite all his ironic mockery and malice, Eddie-baby, like a lonely dog that has lost its master, dreams of dogging someone's footsteps, devoting himself to someone. The dreams are interrupted, as always in such cases, by harsh reality. The little mama comes back with papa.
He is a Christlike man in a ragged suit jacket, his feet bare in his shoes. I know him, he's always here, he paces up and down in the crowd with his hand thrust into the pocket of this very jacket, and offers joints to the strolling crowd. The really serious smokers have their own, however; purchased joints are skimpier and weaker. The family, evidently happy to be reunited, thanks me. I bow and scrape. It was nothing… Any time… What the hell…
The family wheels off with the carriage, and I wonder why I didn't think to make a baby with Elena. She would have left anyway, but the baby would have stayed, women like her do not take the children with them when they leave. I would have had a little baby, and it might have been beautiful like Elena – I'm not bad-looking, either – I would have had a little piece of Elena, a girl or a boy, and I would have devoted, myself to the baby. Asshole, I think. But what if…
Instantly a plan springs to mind. Not now, of course. I'm not in a position to engineer it now. But later, maybe a year from now, when I have good connections and friends here, I can find some remote dacha, equip it appropriately to care for a kidnapped person, and then steal Elena. I'll find a doctor, perhaps I can persuade Oleg Chikovani, my friend who lives in Davis, California – after all, he was my friend back in Moscow; he might not be afraid to risk his medical license, being a friend – and he'll pull out the coil that allows Elena to fuck and not get pregnant. Oleg is a neurosurgeon, a specialist in operations on the brain. An operation like this would be nothing to him. And I'll fuck my girl-child and keep her locked up till she delivers, nine months.
Among people who know her I can spread the rumor that she's gone to visit her sister, who has moved from the fucking ruins of Beirut to either Rome or Paris – I can always tell some lie. And for those nine months, not all of them, but the first six, I can still fuck Elena, what can she do? Nothing. She'll be furious, yell a bit, and calm down. I'll fuck her every day, many times; in point of fact we won't have anything else to do. At the thought of such happiness my head spins, and as at any thought of Elena my cock stands up.
It will be someplace in Connecticut. Mentally I transfer the scene of the action in my fictitious kidnapping to Alex and Tatyana Glickerman's dacha. I liked their dacha; Elena and I visited there a couple of times when we were still husband and wife. Nowadays it seems she occasionally visits them alone. The Glickermans have paintings by Dali hanging even in the bathroom there. Alex is a friend of his, he's the director of a very fashionable fashion magazine, after all. As for Tatyana, the poet Mayakovsky was once in love with her, and if you recall, I have mentioned somewhere that in Moscow I was friends with Mayakovsky's mistress Lily Brik. It's odd how fate persistently links little Eddie with the sexual legends of another great poet.
Oh, my wife, even now we are not separated. How I love you, I think, horrified to discover once more the awful depth of the abyss of my love. I will, I'll do this, I tell myself with conviction. And though they will try me if they find me out, love is always in the right, always, and I'll do this. Shit if I'll submit to fate, to the fate that took Elena away from me. I have merely been temporarily in hiding, I am waiting…
The falling leaves at that dacha have slowly disappeared, but my cock is still standing; I feel a certain inner contentment, as if I had just now fucked Elena and this mysterious process had begun within her. Mmh!…
I wake from my thoughts, store the idea away in my memory. I start toward a group of people, from whose midst I hear the rumble of a guitar, the rhythm of a percussion instrument, and hoarse voices.
Some fat-faced boys, grouped under a tree, their foreheads nearly touching, are singing a song, a rhythmic one. I can hardly understand their song, but they themselves, with their tattoos and their false teeth, are familiar to me. Their type emerged in Russia at the same time as here in America. There at home we didn't know that the whole world lived by the same laws. A vision of the Kharkov beach rises before me…
Vitka Kosoy, just as fat-pussed as these fat-pusses, a hefty boy with legs like tree trunks, is plucking the guitar. His face is turned toward my even more fat-pussed friend Sanya the Red, the butcher; their foreheads are nearly touching. Staring him in the eye, Vitka plucks the guitar and sings Russian rock:
Ziganshin rock!
Ziganshin roll!
Ziganshin forty days in the snow!
The melody of this song came to us via the radio, maybe from here, from America, but the words – which tell the story of four Soviet frontier guards who got caught in a blizzard and were picked up by the Americans – were composed by the Russian people.
Kosoy is just back from Moscow, where he served three years in the army, and has brought back this song and two or three dozen others like it
They sing. People cluster around them. Here is a man in swimming trunks with palm trees. Everyone calls him Hollywood. He acquired this nickname because he speaks in quotes from foreign films. For example, we're walking in the park in the fall. Hollywood is bound to say: "These leaves rustle like American dollars."
The people in Washington Square are absolutely the same. There are small, purely American differences, the colored tattoos on their skin, for example, and the fact that some of the people, the singers and those standing around them, are black. Nevertheless, I recognize in many of them my own faraway Kharkov friends, who by now have long since taken to drink. With the smile of a sage I also notice, sitting in an embrace on the parapet, two vulgar zonked blondes. In their puffy faces, their painted, smudged mouths and eyes, I recognize our unchanging girlfriends, girls from Tyura's dacha, Masya and Kokha, except that they're talking between themselves in English. Other spectators are also familiar. This man here with the black teeth is Yurka Bembel, who was shot in 1962 for raping a minor… And this is the exemplary technology student Fima…
Contenting myself with the song – having concluded it, the whole company of singers is sharing a marijuana cigarette – I march on. I go out of the park toward the Catholic student center and walk down Thompson Street, where, after passing a little Mexican restaurant, I briefly study the diverse and unusual chessmen, which never cease to astonish me, in the window of a chess shop. Occasionally I walk more to the left, down LaCuardia, where I drop into a clothing store. The proprietress, a large fair-haired Polish woman, talks with some of the customers in Polish. I invariably reject her help and look at the hats: The Pole does not get angry, though I've never bought anything from her, I always just look. I have a special predilection for white things. After leaving the Pole's, I cross Houston – a boring street, provincial as a street out of Gogol's Mirgorod, but with two-way traffic – and go down to SoHo.
The contents of the SoHo galleries have long since palled on me. I have frequented SoHo since the day I arrived in America. Bicycles of wood, typewriters of wood, shopping bags also of wood, or a wooden plant with slender leaves that sway in the wind, as well as the skeleton of a huge fish. I survey it all with indifference. The artist, a little Japanese, also looks to be made of wood, his cheekbones, his face, his gristly ears. I got used to contemporary art back in Moscow. A good hundred artists were friends of mine. I am not astonished at a photographic cycle depicting a hole being punched in a house. Cross-sections of the rooms, views from the right and left, from above and below, and to top it all off, a chunk of wall exhibited complete with plaster – these do not astonish me. Silky tulle bags at the Castelli gallery: Rauschenberg has entered his salon period. I much prefer his work in the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-third Street – cloth, iron, a used automobile tire, all crude and harsh – there is protest visible in the painting. Now Rauschenberg is a master, a luminary, rich people have bought him, his works cost big money, and naturally, though I doubt he realizes it himself, these tulle bags are his salon period, Puvis de Chavanne stuff; he has become a society painter, a decorator, "beautiful" I miss the canvas cloth, the crude execution that has disappeared from his works. America gets even with its artists by other means than Russia does. Russia is also wising up, however. An exhibit at the board of the Soviet Artists' Union by some friends of mine, artists of the extreme left, is a case in point: Russian administrators are learning from their American colleagues the more modern, humane means of killing art, namely, if you want to kill an artist, buy him.
Having visited all the galleries that are in the same building as Castelli, I usually go down to West Broadway. People are roaming around. I can always pick out the artists. Their faces are familiar to me, like the fat faces of the boys in Washington Square. These are the faces of my Moscow artist friends. Bearded, inspired-looking, or on the contrary unremarkable, whether worn out from work or fresh and impudent, they're familiar down to the last little wrinkle. So are the faces of their girl friends – faithful women who have been with them through many years, or cheerful casual traveling companions to share a bed, a drink, and a smoke, who have not touched their hearts, who are here today and gone tomorrow. In April and March I wanted to live in SoHo, I was bursting to go there, I wanted to live in a small building, know all my artist neighbors, sit on the steps of the building at night, drink beer, gab with the neighbors, acquire solid connections. I wanted it so much, but lofts are extremely expensive and I did not realize my dream. Now that I have grown calmer, I no longer want to live in SoHo. I realize that I have changed greatly, that art alone no longer satisfies me, nor the people of art. That which once made me happy, the bohemian, light-hearted way of life, is already irretrievable, and if I succeeded in imitating it, it would soon turn out to be an unnecessary, irritating, and infuriating repetition of what I have already seen. They are selfish, I think as I trudge down the street looking at the denizens of SoHo. They seek success in this society, they are cynical and locked into their own circle of friends, they are hard to organize, and in the final analysis they are merely part of this civilization. In youth they protest, seek, are indignant in their art, but later they become pillars of the system.
What has become of Salvador Dali? Once a talented artist he is now an old buffoon, capable only of adorning wealthy salons with his own mummy. It was in one such salon that I became acquainted with him. Elena and I had been taken there, as usual, by the Clickermans, Alex and Tatyana.
Dali was sitting in the place of honor, along with his male secretary and some girl. He turned out to be a short, bald old man with bad skin, who said to me in Russian: "Ladybug, ladybug, fly to the sky, Your babies are up there, eating meat pie…" This is what many generations of Russian children have said when the ladybug, with her little spotted winglets, lights on their hands. My Elena was in raptures over Dali, and he over her, it seemed; he called her Justine. Though her head was crammed with superficial knowledge picked up here, there, and everywhere, she was essentially an uneducated girl from the Frunze Embankment and did not get the point. Well, of course, I, big clever Eddie, told her that Justine was the heroine of one of the Marquis de Sade's novels. Dali called her "the little skeleton." "Thanks for the little skeleton," he told the Clickermans. His secretary, who spoke English worse than I do, wrote down our phone number and promised to call on a certain day.
Elena waited eagerly for the call. Although she unfortunately got sick, she constantly sniffed something to make her get well and said she would go to Dali's even if she were dying. But he didn't call. I felt sorry for the disappointed little girl, the old dotard had disappointed the child, and because of her despair and her cold and illness she and I fucked long and well that night, though it was already the era of the panties blotted with semen.
Everything is perverted by this civilization, the gentlemen in suits have fouled and besmirched everything. Lithographs and etchings by old dotards like Picasso, Miro, Dali, and others, which are sold in all the stores, have turned art into a huge unclean bazaar. The money they have is not enough, they want more and more. Paintings in oil, in tempera, are not enough; drawings, watercolors, and gouaches are not enough; to make even more money they do their hackwork on stone and put it on sale in hundreds and thousands of copies. They've devalued everything, the bastards. Many of them are burdened with wives and several families, with relatives and friends; they need lots of money. Money, money and the greed for money, guides these wretched old men. Once rebels, they have turned into dirty operators. The same fate awaits the young men of today. This is why I have ceased to love art.
The only thing I fear in SoHo is Prince Street, where he lives, my wife's first lover. When I even glance at the signpost with the name prince street it torments me, spots of light play before my eyes and I come close to vomiting. As I draw near Prince Street I try to avoid the signpost with the name, it exasperates me, it's such a substantive corroboration of my pain and torments, my defeat. But occasionally I fail to close my eyes in time, and then I am stabbed in the eye by this name. And more important, my heart: I am stabbed in the heart. The same thing happens when I'm riding the subway and all of a sudden the name of this station steps out of the darkness, bright and prominent, repeated perhaps fifteen times. It comes running after the train, running, running… Elena has apparently already left her Jean, but the terrible name will probably make me turn over even in my grave; before it I had known no defeats in life, or they had been immaterial.
Idle Washington Square and retiring, taciturn SoHo weary me at times, and I take to visiting Central Park, since it's right under my nose. Walk four streets up, turn off Madison onto Fifth Avenue, and there I am in Central Park. Usually I walk as far as Sixty-seventh or Sixty-eighth Street alongside the park and enter it near the playground. I climb uphill by a winding little path, go to the far end of it, take off my clothes, and lie down on the hot stones to tan. In my own geographical atlas this spot is called Children's Mountain. I lie there contemplating the sky and the posh penthouses on Fifth Avenue with plants sticking up from them, and I hypothesize about the kind of life that goes on there. The children run around near me. Usually these are good children. Bad ones turn up too – there was one savagely malicious boy, for example, who spent more than two hours breaking and tearing my favorite bush on Children's Mountain. There was nothing I could do but suffer in silence, for the cretin's father was sitting nearby smiling encouragingly. The father was also a cretin. When they left I got up and went to straighten the bush.
Back in Moscow the poet Sapgir told me that plants also suffer greatly, that special indicating devices had registered horror in a certain plant when a man came into the room who the day before, in the presence of this plant, had killed another plant related to it. Plants do not fear me, but I had little success in putting things right after this fiendish boy.
Children's Mountain is where I am usually to be found in Central Park. I write poetry there, and while I do that my back, the rear half of me, is slowly turning black.
When I get tired of lying there I pull on my white trousers and set off to roam the park. Usually I go to the Alice in Wonderland sculpture and walk in her vicinity, or sit on a bench observing the children romping on the sculpture. She's never empty, this Alice, someone is forever romping on her. Usually I sit there until about four o'clock, and sometimes, looking at certain children, I am visited by strange desires, but sometimes I am totally normal and take pleasure in watching the shaggy-haired, freckly American boys boldly jump their skateboards down the five or six long steps near Alice. Some of them are remarkably adroit at this. There's one little kid I especially like, he's such a brat. He looks like a girl, even has curls, but his brashness and courage make him stand out among his other friends. They're too virile, he's a delicate boy.
I too was delicate as a child, for which my dogheaded friends always teased me. How could they understand that I was of a different breed? The boy by Alice is also of a different breed. Through his brashness, of course, he is trying to atone for his guilt before these little lowbrows. I too was desperately bold. On a bet I once went up to a woman hawking pastries at an outdoor festival and took one of her trays. Calmly bearing it over my head, I carried it off into the crowd and then into the bushes in the park. I was atoning for my girlish exterior. I was thirteen.
I smile. There's one good thing about my life. Measuring it against my childhood, I see that I haven't fucking betrayed it, my dear and fabulously distant childhood. All children are extremists. I have remained an extremist, have not become a grown-up. To this day I am a pilgrim, I have not sold myself, have not betrayed my soul, that's why I suffer such torments. These thoughts hearten me. And the princess I dreamed of encountering in life and always sought – I did encounter her, and it all came to pass, and now, thank God, I am behaving worthily, I have not betrayed my love. "Once, only once," I sigh…
I forsake Alice, and the smile of the Cheshire Cat melts in the air. Semipederast Red brat Eddie marches uphill in step to a gallant song from the Russian Civil War:
Army White and Baron Black,
They're fixing to bring the old Czar back,
But from the taiga to the British seas
The Red Army scatters its enemies…
So be it the Red, with bayonet
In calloused hand gripped fast.
None can halt us! Into the battle!
March and fight to the last!
And all I want, gentlemen, at this moment, is a bullet in the head because I'm tired of holding on, to tell the truth, and scared I will not die a hero.
Beyond the park fence, New York picks me up in its arms. I sink into its warmth and summer – a summer coming to an end, gentlemen – and my New York carries me past the doors of its shops, past the subway stations, past the buses and the liquor store windows. "None can halt us! Into the battle! March and fight to the last!" resounds within me.