It's Me, Eddie

Luz, Alyoshka, Johnny, and others

I took my umbrella that day and left. I was still reeling from the evil weed. But, to avoid returning to my garret and the routine third-day depression, I walked out Spring Street to Sixth Avenue, got on the subway, and went to my English class. It was a gift to me from my solicitous welfare office.

I had my class at the Community Center on Columbus Avenue near 100th Street. The Community Center was not of such ancient construction, but our classroom windows looked out on what were almost ruins – broken windows, fire-blackened walls, all sorts of mold and vermin, creeping right out to the street. New York is rotting around the edges. Its clean blocks are much smaller in area than the already boundless sea of uninhabitable and semihabitable neighborhoods, terrible in their state of near-wartime destruction.

There were about a dozen such buildings where I went to school, between Columbus and Central Park. The reason I mention this is that even the little book we used – "we" being ten women from the Dominican Republic, one from Cuba, one from Colombia, and the only man in the class, namely me – well, this book was entitled Every Night There's No Hot Water. The book told about people who lived in a neighborhood roughly like this one, and how they were surrounded by misfortunes of every description. There was no hot water, they were afraid to step outdoors at night because of crime, a father of two girls felt annoyed that their home had been taken over by a certain Bob, a ne'er-do-well and dangerous character, leader of a youth gang. There was an open implication that the father of the two girls was simultaneously the father of this Bob. All the residents of the neighborhood described in the sentences and exercises of this book were linked to one another by nearly incestuous relationships, and watching over all was an old procuress and scandalmonger in a shawl (the illustrations showed her in a shawl and with a face like a fox). A jolly little book.

I was slightly late that day; they were already writing a composition based on the teacher's questions. The teacher had a surname of Slavic origin, Sirota, although she could not recall that anyone in the family had been a Slav. Women of various hues greeted me joyfully; they were sincerely disappointed when I didn't come. Luz threw me a smile. She very much liked to smile at me, arching like – forgive me this very vulgar and trite simile, but she arched like the stem of a rose. Luz was altogether white, the perfect Spaniard, though she too was from the Dominican Republic. Luz had a child, though she herself was still a child, small and thin; her earrings did not help, nor did her high heels. Her earrings were cheap little things, but she always changed them if she put on a new blouse. She and I were almost lovers, though we never once kissed, and I told her only once that I liked her very much. But we always watched each other all through the three hours of the lesson, and we smiled at each other. One time, in response to the teacher's questions, we were all pointing out on an atlas where we had been born, and I saw Luz hastily jot down in her notebook the name of my hometown, Kharkov. I am probably a modest and inhibited person at heart, and as I have said, I am a long way from total freedom. And Luz was a modest girl – woman. Therefore we simply couldn't clasp each other close, as we would have liked. I endlessly regret that we couldn't. She might have loved me. And that's the only thing I need.

They all had children, some as many as four. Candida's girls were lovely. So whimsical, so mannered, so unnaturally vivacious and elegant were the faces and figures of Candida's girls that when they came to class with their mother I thought of them as works of art. A blend of different bloods had produced this unexpected effect. An exquisite effect, ancient Egyptian I should say; they resembled Ikhnaton's daughters, although Candida herself was a shortish woman with ordinary light brown skin and a kind, simple face. The faces of her little girls, their hair, the shape of their eyes, held a sort of poesy… morning, daybreak, a fragrance of delicacy. I shall allow myself a flourish: they were like coffee beans, like spices, her children were.

Anyway, when I came in they were writing a composition. They had never seen me so handsome and elegant. Usually I came to school in sandals and jeans – wooden platform sandals, my only ones, and blue or white jeans. But here the Russian fellow had arrived in colorful boots and denim suit, with neckerchief and umbrella. They discussed my appearance animatedly in Spanish. To judge by their tone I pleased them, they approved.

I told the teacher that I had had a job interview that morning, and then got busy on the composition. We were supposed to write about the neighborhood we lived in. I wrote that I lived in a neighborhood where there were mainly office buildings; the world's most expensive companies, perhaps, had their offices in my neighborhood. Next came the question of whether I was afraid to walk in my neighborhood at night. I wrote that I was afraid of nothing and walked all over the city. There was nothing to fear – I had nothing. As she read my composition and corrected the mistakes, the teacher laughed.

Many in my class wrote that they were not afraid to go out in the evening or late at night. They too had little, I think, and that was why they were unafraid.

The oldest person in our class was the gray-haired Lydia. She was gray-haired and black, but her face, her figure, her gait, her habits, reminded me of a neighbor we had in Kharkov, when I was still a little boy living with my papa and mama. English came harder to her and the two Candidas than to the rest of us. The two Candidas also reminded me of some of my neighbors in the Kharkov apartment house, only their skin was a little darker. I should mention that from walking one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty blocks a day in the scorching sun with my shirt unceremoniously removed I had become so dark that I differed little from my classmates. Luz, in fact, was much lighter than I.

Luz always sat next to Rosa, an utterly black girl, tall and svelte. She had a stern and independent air, but I always felt she was unhappy for some reason. After having several conversations with her in our common pidgin English, or not even having conversations, simply consulting her and receiving answers, I saw that she was a benevolent and likable girl, she merely took a cautious attitude toward our world. Every recess Rosa twisted the head off another little bottle that had something black in it. She did this very adeptly with the hem of one leg of her very wide-bottomed slacks. It was some special Latin-American drink. Rosa and I were considered the class alcoholics. When the teacher asked the class who liked what, I said jokingly that I liked vodka, and someone else, I think it was Luz, spoke up for Rosa: "Rosa likes drink!" I found Rosa agreeable, and her independence too. Sometimes she chewed gum and became totally unapproachable.

I sat next to yet another utterly black woman, Zobeida. As a well-read Russian, of course, I knew that one of Voltaire's heroines had borne this name. It is hardly likely that Zobeida herself knew this, but she was one of the best pupils in our class. She and I were often assigned to read a dialogue, usually between a husband and wife who constantly spilled things on themselves and on each other and then advised each other what cleaner to go to. These married couples in the book were complete idiots. Everything fell from their hands, they could not convey a morsel to their mouths; God knows how they managed to stay alive; their coffee spilled, the cups broke, greasy sandwiches fell butter-side-down on their new clothes. Things were grim.

When Zobeida and I went up to the teacher's desk and read this dialogue of two idiots, we gave it our best and were evidently funny. In any case, blond short-cropped Mrs. Sirota rolled with laughter as she listened to my menacing "Vot?" and the wife's no less stupid answer, which Zobeida read. "You're like a TV couple," she told us.

Zobeida was tail, and her rear end, as is sometimes true of black women, was very large and seemed to exist independently of the rest of her. She had a beautiful face, and like most blacks, delicate hands. I talked to her more than to anyone else. She too had a child. Her husband had been born here in America; she had tried to take him back to the Dominican Republic, but then they had returned; they found it hard to live there after the United States.

Once our conversation turned to education. Ana, a dried-up, bespectacled, sarcastic little creature of indeterminate age, from Colombia, began to talk about her brothers and sisters. She wrote their names on the blackboard, and then wrote how many children they each had. Ana herself had no children. But all in all her three brothers and two sisters had forty-four children. I asked Ana when they would all come from Colombia. Ana said that they might not all come, but that most of them, as they grew up, wanted to have a higher education, and things were tight for her brothers and sisters – they had to work very hard so that the children could have more education.

"Is that the fashion in Colombia, to have a higher education?" I asked Ana.

She replied gravely that if you wanted to be somebody you needed a good education, and it cost a lot of money. Then she reported how much a higher education cost in Colombia and how much it cost in the Dominican Republic. Then I chimed in and said that in the USSR, where I came from, higher education was free, and all other education too. The effect was greater than I expected. They were staggered. Free! It was a good thing they didn't ask why I had left such a wonderful country.

Mrs. Sirota smiled in embarrassment. Maybe she felt uncomfortable for her fat, rich country, where the level of education you can get depends on how much money you have. A lot of money – graduate from Princeton. Some – go study in Canada, it's cheaper there. None – go uneducated; sometimes you might manage to get a scholarship. I took considerable malicious pleasure in listening to their lively discussion in Spanish, exulted maliciously over Mrs. Sirota and all the learned gentlemen who alleged that socialism was practically allied with the devil. To add fuel to the fire I told them that medical treatment was also free. That really started something. I exulted maliciously and was satisfied.

I liked my class. Margarita – a stout, dark-eyed woman with a lovely face, who had three boys from eleven on down and a little girl – smiled at me, showed me photographs of her children. Painstakingly-made color photographs, specially posed, they bore witness that the children had been photographed not by chance but in order to fix their image, reflect and preserve it. As in the Russian provinces. The little girl, the youngest, was all in laces and frills and stood in a self-important pose, like a celebrity. I said, "You have beautiful children, Margarita." She was very pleased.

Sometimes it seemed to me that Margarita liked me. She smiled at me just as often as Luz did, and furthermore she gave me homemade treats now and then. But they all treated me frequently to their Dominican dishes: roast yams and roast bananas, and meatballs something like our golubtsy. Margarita treated all of the students, not just me, but I doubt I'm mistaken, she obviously liked me, it was plain to see. In that period of my life I did not understand how anyone could like me. I held a very low opinion, an utterly scornful opinion, of myself as a man. She may have liked my green eyes or dark skin or abundantly scarred wrists – God only knows what a woman will like.

I was Russian; they liked that too. I doubt they knew there was such a thing as the Jewish emigration from Russia; it was pointless to explain that I was Russian by nationality but had come here on a visa fictitiously sent to me from Israel and with the consent of the Soviet authorities. Superfluous information. I was Russian, and that was that. As Mrs. Sirota explained to them and to me, Russia was located in Europe. Thus I became a man from Europe. They were from Central and Latin America. And we were all from the world.

I, a man who had fled here from the USSR in search of artistic freedom, that is, the opportunity to publish my works here – it was a rather frivolous act, my works being unneeded here, needed only there, in Russia – I was compelled against my will to be a representative of my country, the only representative of Russia, the USSR, that they had ever had in their lives.

As God is my witness, I tried to represent my country decently. I did not fuck around showing off to them or, first and foremost, to myself; I did not view the world from imaginary standpoints, I tried to view it honestly. It was no concern of these women whether I had been published or not; after all, there are hardly thousands like me.

What they did understand was something else. A land in which higher education was free, medical care was free, where rent amounted to an insignificant fraction of one's pay, where the difference between a worker's 150-ruble paycheck and the 500-ruble paycheck of an academician or even a KGB colonel was only 350 rubles – these, gentlemen, are not the astronomical sums at which the fortunes of America's wealthiest families are estimated, alongside the pitiful $110 to $120 a week that Eddie earned as a busboy at the Hilton – such a land could not be a bad one.

Unlike the Western intelligentsia, they had not been through the long journey of enchantment with the Russian Revolution and Russia, and disenchantment with it. They had been through none of this. Vague rumors circulated among them about a land where people like themselves led a good life. Always the rumors.

I did not go into details, and could not have explained to them the last sixty years of Russian history – Stalinism, the victims, the prison camps – they would have turned a deaf ear to all that. Their own history, too, was rich in victims and atrocities. They were not proud and ambitious, they and their husbands did not write poetry and books, did not paint pictures; they had no rabid desire to squeeze their names, at all costs, into their country's history, or better yet the world's; therefore they wouldn't even have recognized the prohibitions and obstacles in this path, which they had no use for at all. They lived and were kind and treated a Russian to roast yams and loved their Joses and bore children and photographed them in their best clothes, and this was their life.

Much more natural than mine, I confess. I drifted around the world, because of ambition lost my love, and having lost it, realized that love was far dearer to me than ambition or life itself and began to seek love anew; and that is the state I am in now, searching for love. As regards love in this world, there is more of it in Russia, of course, than here. That is plain to the naked eye. Forgive me, but though they may say that Eddie-baby knows little of America, there is less love here, gentlemen, far less…

I gave myself over to all these thoughts as I returned from my class. I walked down Columbus. I always walked without hurrying, I read all the signs; if it was very hot I took off my shirt. That day, however, I was wearing a suit; when the sun came out it was scorching, and I took off my jacket. The Dominican women always hurried home when they got out of school, their children were waiting for them. Sometimes I walked with Luz, Colombian Ana, Margarita, or someone else – perhaps dark-eyed Maria with the face of a saint – to the subway, half a block from our Community Center, and elicited Spanish words from them on the way. I know perhaps two dozen words now and take pleasure in pronouncing them. I would much rather study Spanish, on the whole. It is richer and more congenial to me, just as all Spanish-speaking people are more congenial to me than buttoned-up clerks in neckties, or disciplined, Skinny secretaries. I make an exception only for Carol, only for her.

When I lost my unhappy Russian maiden, who was driven out of her fucking mind by this country, I also lost interest in cultured white women. In my morbid view, many liberated ladies, or ladies in the process of liberation, are liberating themselves from the love of another person, not from love of the self. Monsters of indifference. "My bread, my meat, my cunt, my apartment," the monsters say. I hate the civilization that has generated monsters of indifference, the civilization on whose banner I would write the most murderous expression since the origin of mankind: "That's your problem." Horror and evil are contained in this short formula, which unites all the Jean-Pierres, Susannas, and Elenas of the world. And I, little Eddie, am terrified: What if my soul finds no one here to devote itself to? Then it is doomed to eternal loneliness even beyond the grave. And that is hell.

Among the Spanish-speaking population of my great city I see much less indifference. Why? Only because they came later to this civilization, it hasn't yet corroded them so much. But it threatens even them. Admittedly, I don't think it will have time to destroy them. The civilization itself will die, strangled by the rebellion of human nature, which demands love.

"What about Russia?" you ask. But Russia and her social structure are also a product of this civilization, and although certain changes have been made there, they don't help much. Love is on the way out in Russia too. But the world needs love, cries out for love. I see that what the world needs is not national self-determination; not governments made up of one group or another; not a change from one bureaucracy to another, capitalistic or socialistic; not capitalists or Communists in power, the both of them in suits and ties. The world needs the collapse of the foundations of this man-hating civilization, new norms for behavior and social relations, the world needs real equality of property; equality at last, and not the lie that the French, in their time, wrote on the banners of their revolution. We need people to love one another so that we may all live loved by others and with peace and happiness in our hearts. And love will come to the world if the causes of unlove are annihilated. There will be no terrible Elenas then, because the Eddies will not expect anything from the Elenas, the nature of the Eddies will be different and that of the Elenas different, and no one will be able to buy any Elena, because there will be nothing to buy with, no one will have a material advantage over other people…

So I came away from my school with a happy smile. I walked along dirty Broadway. At every corner, bordello flyers were thrust on me: Take it, Eddie-baby, come and be comforted, get fifteen minutes of love. I turned on Forty-sixth Street, I knocked at a black door, and Alyoshka Slavkov, poet, opened it to me. He stood in a cloud of steam. Hot water was flowing in the kitchen, and no one had been able to stop the water for a month. I walked into Alyoshka's, as usual saw the clown's black bowler hats and the musician's instrument – Alyoshka shared his black hole with a clown and a musician, also emigres from Russia – saw the three mattresses and all sorts of rags and dirt, and demanded of Alyoshka something to eat.

Alyoshka was not yet a Catholic then, but he no longer wore a beard. He had just been laid off as a guard, he had surrendered his nightstick and uniform and become once more the mustachioed and dark-eyed Alyoshka Slavkov, cheerful despite a bad limp, lover of booze. Alyoshka fed me sauerkraut and sausages, his unvarying diet, and sat down to translate a document I had brought. Entitled "Memorandum," the document expressed the hopes and dreams of what we called "the creative intelligentsia" – of Alyoshka and myself and a great number of other artists, writers, filmmakers, and sculptors who had emigrated from the USSR and whom no one here needed one fucking bit.

Alyoshka translated, and I sat in an old chair, its upholstery worn shiny, and thought about our document and our intrigues. "A drowning man's effort not to drown," I thought. Two pages. To be sent to Jackson, Carey, and Beame. As if they would help us with our art. Those demagogues had needed us, however, while we were over there. Here they shoved us on welfare so we wouldn't bitch. Okay, Ivan, have a spree, enjoy your freedom.

Cold-blooded Americans, they're so fucking smart, they advise the likes of us to switch professions. Just one thing – why don't they switch professions themselves? When a businessman loses half his fortune he throws himself off the forty-fifth floor of his office building, he does not go to work as a guard. I could have conformed in the USSR, why the fuck come here to do it? That was all the Soviet regime wanted of me, to change my profession.

A fine emigration we are, I went on in my thoughts, the most frivolous one yet. Usually only the fear of starvation or death can force people to leave a place, abandon their homeland, knowing that they may not be able to return, ever. A Yugoslavian who leaves for a temporary job in America can return home to his country, we can not. Never again shall I see my father and mother; I, little Eddie, am firm and calm in this knowledge.

It all started with Messrs. Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and company, who turned us against the Soviet world without ever having laid eyes on the Western world. They were prompted not only by specific purposes – the intelligentsia were demanding a part in governing the country, demanding their share – but also by pride, the desire to advertise themselves. As always in Russia, moderation was not observed. They may have been honestly deceived, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, but they deceived us too. Whatever the case, they were "dominant influences." So powerful was the intelligentsia's movement against their country and its system that even the strong could not resist and were swept along. So we all shagassed over to the Western world as soon as the opportunity presented itself. We shag-assed over here, and having seen what the life is like, many if not all would shag-ass right back, but it's impossible. The Soviet government is not nice.

Fucking smart Americans, they advise men like Alyoshka and me to change professions. Where am I to hide all my thoughts, feelings, ten years of living, books of poetry? And me myself, where am I to hide refined little Eddie? Lock him up in the shell of a busboy. Bullshit. I tried it. I can no longer be an ordinary man. I am spoiled forever. Only the grave will reform me.

Eventually American security forces are going to have trouble with us. After all, not everyone conforms. In a couple of years look for Russians among the terrorists in liberation fronts of every description. That is my forecast.

Change our professions! Can the soul be changed? Knowing definitely what he is capable of, is it everyone who can suppress himself here and live the life of an ordinary man, laying no claim to anything, when he sees around him money, success, and fame, all of it largely undeserved, when he knows from experience both here and in the Soviet Union – and in this case the experience is identical – that he who is obedient and patient receives all from society, that he who sits on his butt all day and curries favor gets it all.

The brilliant inventors of vegetarian sandwiches for Wall Street secretaries can be counted on the fingers of one hand. For the most part, people arrive at success here just as they do in the USSR, by obedience, by wearing out the seat of their pants in their own or a government office, in boring daily labor. That is to say, civilization is constructed in such a way that the most restless, passionate, impatient – as a rule the most talented, who seek new paths – break their necks. This civilization is paradise for the mediocre. We thought the USSR was a paradise for the mediocre, we thought it would be different here if you were talented. Fuck no!

Ideology there, business reasons here. That is roughly true. But what difference does it make to me exactly why the world doesn't want to give me what is mine by right of my birth and talent? The world calmly gives it – a place, I mean, a place in life, recognition – to the businessman here, to the party worker over there. But it has no place for me.

Fucking shit! I'm being patient, world, very patient, but some day I'll get fed up. If there's no place for me, and for many others, then who the fuck needs a civilization like this?

That last thought I expressed aloud to Alyoshka Slavkov, who is far from agreeing with me in everything. He is drawn to religion, inclined to seek salvation in religious tradition; on the whole he is calmer than Eddie, although he too has storms raging within him, I think. He dreams of becoming a Jesuit, and I mock his Jesuitism and predict that he will participate in the world revolution along with me, a revolution whose goal will be to destroy civilization.

"And what would you build in its place, you and your friends in the Workers Party?" Alyoshka said. For some reason he lumps me in with the Workers Party, to which I have never belonged. I have merely been interested in it, as in any other leftist movement. I did become more intimate with Carol and her friends than with members of the other parties, but that was pure chance.

"The hardest thing of all," I told Alyoshka, "is to overthrow this civilization, tear it out by the root so that it cannot revive as it did in the USSR. To overthrow it once and for all is to build something new."

"And what will you do about culture?" Alyoshka asked.

"This feudal culture," I said, "which inculcates wrong interpersonal relationships that originated in the distant past under a different social order – what will we do about it? We'll fucking annihilate it. It's unhealthy, it's dangerous with all its little tales of good millionaires, wonderful police who defend citizens from bestial criminals, magnanimous politicians who love flowers and children. Why is it that not one of these stinking authors – notice, Alyoshka, not one – will write that crimes, the majority of them, are generated by civilization itself? If a man kills another and takes his money, it's certainly not because he likes the color and crunch of those scraps of paper enough to murder another. He knows from his society that among his fellow countrymen those scraps of paper are God, they'll bring him any woman he wants, and bring him his grub, and deliver him from exhausting physical labor. Or a man kills his wife for betraying him. But if there were other customs, a different ethic, and interpersonal relationships were measured only by love, then why would he kill for unlove? Unlove is a misfortune, it's to be regretted. Television always shows families, and gentlemen in suits. But that's already on the way out. The gentlemen in suits are on the way out, and the wild wind of new relationships, ignoring all police measures, all religious barriers, howls over America and the whole world. The gentleman in a suit, the gray-haired head of the family, is suffering defeat after defeat, and soon, very soon, he will no longer be able to govern the world. The husband and wife who joined together in order to have a more peaceful, economically more advantageous life – not for love, but at the decree of custom – theirs was always an artificial arrangement and engendered a host of tragedies. Why the fuck preserve an obsolete custom?"

I tried to persuade him, he raised objections, and then I went ahead with the sauerkraut, and he with the "Memorandum." His English is good, he translated the two pages quickly, but all the same we had to have the paper looked over and the mistakes corrected, so we gave it to Bant, the American who was a friend of Edik Brutt, my neighbor at the hotel. There weren't too many mistakes; he had mainly left out articles, the poet and Gatholic Alyoshka. After that was accomplished, after his hard work, he wanted to rest. His idea of a rest is a few drinks.

I took him to my favorite store, on Fifty-third Street between First and Second avenues, and there we bought Jamaican rum – something I had been wanting for about a week. He too wanted rum, we both wanted to experience the taste sensation. We were not alcoholics – hell, no – although, as you will see, we did get drunk in the end. He also bought himself some soda, and we jointly acquired two lemons, then headed for my hotel.

We arrived. Sat down by the window. It was evening, the low five-o'clock sun illumined my garret. The rum was shot with yellow, it lay silvery and thick in the tawdry crude glasses, Eddie's glasses; God knows who had brought them or when. From time to time we dispatched it down our gullets. Alyoshka lit up a cigar, stretched out his stiff leg; he was enjoying himself. In the process, he moved the chair, the chair brushed a plug, an extension cord that powered the refrigerator, and the result was invisible sabotage. A puddle of water was revealed a half hour later; we had to wipe it up when we had already grabbed the remains of the rum and were preparing to disappear, set out on our way. Alyoshka was insisting on it, he had a bug up his ass, all he wanted to do was go to the Public Library and buy some joints.

We left. On the way I discovered that Alyoshka, despite being an insolent Russian poet, did not know how to use a joint properly. It seems he bought joints that had been rolled into nice slim cigarettes, unrolled them, mixed them with ordinary cigar tobacco, and then smoked them. I laughed long and patronizingly at Alyoshka. Now it was clear, of course, why marijuana didn't affect him; he was always complaining about it.

"That's like buckshot to an elephant. You're supposed to smoke that nice slim ready-made cigarette without mixing it with anything. Asshole," I told him, "Ivan the Moscow provincial."

When we left we even took the soda with us. We bought joints at the Public Library on Forty-second Street, two from one guy and two from another, just in case – if one pair proved weak, the other might be better – and began trying to decide where to go. He wanted to drag me to the Latham Hotel. But I had shitty memories of that hotel, Elena and I had lived there when we arrived in America, in room 532, before the little apartment on Lexington, before the tragedy or in the very beginning of the tragedy, and I did not want to see my past.

I wanted to live as if I had acquired consciousness on March 4, 1976, the day I moved into the Hotel Winslow, as if there had been nothing before then – a dark hole and that was all, nothing else, nothing. But Alyoshka was dragging me over there, to show me. I had no desire to see his friend, a long-haired saxophonist named Andrey who had just arrived, I did not want to revive my past, but he was dragging me. Well, what could I do, he's a stubborn bastard.

I told him I had been happy there in the Latham Hotel, I had loved and fucked my Elena, we used to turn the whole bed inside out, and I remember we fucked during Solzhenitsyn's speech, with the TV turned on and his puss on the screen, we fucked and I wanted to come right then but couldn't, contemplating him in his military-style jacket, even my girl-child's sweet peepka could not make me come. We fucked during Solzhenitsyn, of course, out of sheer mischief.

Whenever she got tired of fucking (this had already begun) and wanted to watch television I turned her around on our vast hotel bed – we had never had such a bed in our lives – I turned her around, put pillows under her, and she knelt on all fours, watched a TV program, usually some sort of horror show, she loves them, and I fucked her from behind. Even this, her incipient disregard for me, could not cool me. I wanted her very much, although she and I had been making love for four years now, and possibly it was time for me to stop and look around. I was a fool not to do it. I should have changed our lifestyle myself, without waiting for her to force the change. I could have brought somebody else, a man perhaps, or a woman, into our sex life, but I didn't think to do it. My inaction… What could I do, I had many cares: I was working at the newspaper for $150 a week, I wrote articles in the evenings, hoped to do something more in the emigre field, and clung to my family in its traditional form. Little Eddie did not understand, yet she had already made it cautiously clear, asking, "What would you say if…" Then would come a proposition, a giggling proposition about a boy fucking her while I in turn fucked him in the poopka, and all sorts of other mind-boggling acrobatics. What a shithead I was, and I'm the one for whom there existed, to all intents and purposes, no prohibitions in sex. In return for whatever I might have allowed her she would have loved me more and more, but as it was I lost her, forever and irrevocably. Then again, I sometimes think there may be a form of life in which I could get her back; but not as a wife in the old sense of the word, that's impossible by now. A paradox. I myself, who want the new more than anyone, proved to be the victim of these new relationships between man and woman. "What we fought for has been our undoing."

Alyoshka wanted me to go, to see the site of my former happiness and compare it with my current insignificant status. What could I do? He insisted. And there was no way I wanted to be alone, when I had already been hit with almost half a liter of rum and something close to anguish. I had to go.

The saxophonist lived in the same wing we had lived in, of course, and even on the same floor; I had to walk right by the door of 532. He had this long, long hair, jeans, a beard – shit, you'd never say he came from the USSR. Shit, you'd never say it about me either. We finished off the rum, one more guy arrived, a burly blond from Leningrad, a poet, the quiet type, writes poems about the KGB and boots, formalistic stuff. Who the fuck knows why he came to America. Those two preferred alcohol, and Alyoshka and I smoked the joints; they only took one drag apiece. Alyoshka tried to claim that the fucking marijuana wasn't affecting him, but his tongue began to get thick.

Then, like a lord on a spree, Alyoshka decided that his friends didn't have enough to drink, and we decided to go buy a bottle of vodka. The four of us set out, and after some delay on account of the lateness of the hour, found a store that had vodka. We bought a bottle, and in another little shop bought some sauerkraut and a can of an American meat product with a suspicious list of sodium and other salts on the label. We returned to the hotel. On the way up, there was the torture of the elevator doors: my mark, two little letters, "E E," which I had scratched with a key, once when I was drunk. More torture. "Unhappy fetishist!" I whispered to myself, biting my lips. I had to stifle my feelings.

We disposed of the vodka rather quickly. Andrey had with him, in addition to his saxophone, a guitar, we sang some songs, and then he rather quickly got drunk and wanted to sleep. The fuzz-faced poet went off to his room, and Alyoshka and I, dissatisfied and insufficiently drunk, tumbled out of the hotel. Unhappy fetishist, I tried to do it with my eyes shut.

"Why in hell buy a bottle of vodka for a gang like that!" Alyoshka said dejectedly.

He had been paying all evening, though he didn't give a shit whether he paid or got his drinks paid for by someone else. To his credit, he had a weakly developed notion of private property.

"Let's go have another drink," he said.

"Let's," I said. "But you'll drink up your last kopeck if we go to a bar." The liquor stores were all closed by now on account of the lateness of the hour.

"I don't give a shit," Alyoshka said. "Who ever has money?"

"Listen," I told him, "let's go buy some beer, let's buy a six-pack. We've already had rum and vodka, we're high on grass. The beer will hit us just right, I think, it has to. And at most it will cost two-fifty."

He consented. We went looking for beer. Found the beer. He was tired of walking, though he didn't let on. Proud Alyoshka. Say what you like, a stiff leg is not conducive to the practice of long and rapid walks. I suggested that we sit down somewhere on the street and have a drink.

We located a very dark yard in the wasteland behind a parking lot – business there was slow – and sat down on some railway ties or logs to drink the beer.

It really was pretty good. Not far off was Broadway, and somewhere nearby was Alyoshka's house; I was going to try and get my bearings, but then I ceased to care. We talked about the parking lot and its cars, I think. I don't remember now, and perhaps did not remember even then. The half-inebriated conversation of two poets, what could be more incoherent. I remember only that my mood was tranquil. The shuffle of feet from Broadway, the relative freshness of the night, the cold beer – a blessing of American civilization – all this created an atmosphere of belonging. Even we belonged to this world.

We sat there shooting the bull. I sprawled out and felt quite at home, such being my nature. Alyoshka was happy, or at any rate seemed so.

And now a man appeared, coming toward us from the parking lot. He walked up. A black, in scuzzy clothes, something baggy. Pale green trash-can trousers in a beam of light. He asked for a cigarette.

"We don't have any," Alyoshka said, "we ran out. If you want I'll give you the money, go buy some." And he gave him a dollar. Alyoshka loves to fart around showing off. He didn't begrudge the money, he'd give away his last dollar just to show off.

The black man took the dollar. "I'll be right back with the cigarettes," he said, and went off into the black gap of Broadway.

"Shithead," I said to Alyoshka, "why'd you give him the dollar? That's not even interesting, you should've given it to me instead."

"What the hell," Alyoshka laughed. "A psychological test."

"I've got nothing to eat tomorrow, my welfare check doesn't come for four days, but you're doing tests, you bastard! You're a shitty scholar, Sigmund Freud."

"If you come see me you'll eat," Alyoshka said.

We were still quarreling ten minutes later when the black reappeared.

"I'll be damned," I said, "an honest man in the neighborhood of Forty-sixth Street and Broadway. Something bad will happen soon. An omen."

"I told you so," Alyoshka laughed.

The black sat down, lighted a cigarette. Alyoshka thrust a can of beer at him. He and Alyoshka talked about serious subjects.

But by now I wasn't understanding a fucking thing. The beer had done its work. I glanced sideways at the black. A thick beard, a bum's rags. I don't know why, but what came back to me was the feeling of Chris. And it wasn't even the sexual feeling. What I wanted was to be in a relationship, to go somewhere, even do something shady, anything at all, but to latch on to this guy and crawl into the world behind him. "You left Chris, shithead, now correct your mistake!" I told myself.

Fucking was no problem for me at that time. Though it was dull and lousy, I was fucking Sonya. In anticipation of this dull act my pale prick just barely got up. Sonya was the Jewish girl, the Russian one, I knew her type: I needed to be tortured, but she didn't know how to do that, poor girl. I wanted a new world, I was sick of living an indeterminate life, being neither Russian nor anything else…

"What's your name?" I said, moving over to sit by the black.

"He introduced himself to you when he came up, you don't hear a fucking thing," Alyoshka said. "He said his name was Johnny."

Johnny smiled broadly. "You're a nice boy, Johnny," I said, and stroked his cheek. These were my whorish tricks. Alyoshka was not surprised. I had told him about Chris. He was merely curious, Alyoshka, he was not surprised.

We sat, talked. Alyoshka translated what I had forgotten in my drunken state or didn't know.

"He may be a bum or he may not, how the fuck should I know," Alyoshka said. "A shady character. Well, it's none of our business, we don't have to be buddies with him, let's shoot the bull in English, it's all practice. You should talk more yourself, Limonov, by the way. Why the hell use me as an interpreter? How long can you keep on asking your nanny?"

"It's fine for you," I told Alyoshka, "you studied ten years in the institutes, you didn't get wise but at least you learned the language. I just had high-school French."

"You don't even know French," Alyoshka said.

"I've forgotten it, you motherfucker, but in my time I did read French books, whole pages almost without a dictionary."

"Don't lie, don't lie, Limonov," Alyoshka said.

"I'm very sorry, Johnny," I said in English.

"It's okay, it's okay," Johnny nodded, smiling.

An infinite number of smiles. Alyoshka smiled, and Johnny, everyone was smiling in the dark and I could see it. Then something happened. It seems I laid my head on Johnny's shoulder. Why? God knows.

His clothes even smelled of something rotten. Theoretically I shouldn't have liked him. But there he was, sitting beside me, not planning to go away; that meant I had to do something with him. I had surprised him by touching him, or to put it plainly, feeling him up. But he had been educated, I don't know where or by whom. Maybe he thought this was done among Russians, they might all be like this. Had he seen many Russians in his life as a Broadway bum? Or whatever the fuck he was, maybe the lowliest little beast on Broadway, a flunky who ran to get ginger ale or hot dogs for the prostitutes – oh, I don't know if they eat hot dogs or if anyone runs to buy their hot dogs for them, I'm just guessing.

"Alyoshka, I want to fuck him," I said.

"You dirty homosexual, Limonov, I didn't think you were serious about all that, but you're turning out to be a real dirty pederast," Alyoshka said derisively.

This wasn't insulting, it was humor. I laughed and said, "Uh-huh, I'm a dirty pederast, and I joined the Chinese Communist Party. I did away with myself, hanged myself. I have two black prostitutes supporting me; they're standing here in the vicinity, on Broadway. Nice girls. And also, I'm a KGB agent with the rank of colonel."

These were all pernicious rumors about me that I was enumerating to Alyoshka. Some of the rumors came from Moscow, my friends had written to me; some were being spread here. In Russian books you often find it said of some poet or writer that he has been "run to earth" – a hunting term, you know, it's used to signify a long chase and the slaying of some wild animal. That trick won't work with me. I think very little of the Russian emigration, I consider them the lowest of the low, pathetic, absurd, worse than this Johnny. Therefore I find the rumors funny; what's more, I take a childish delight in them, following the dictum of contemporary Russia's crudest poet, Igor Kholin, a scoundrel and a villain, but magnificent. "Let them talk as they will, so long as they talk."

"I'm a dirty pederast, Alyoshka," I said. "Listen, take us to your place, you mentioned something about both your performing artists going to Philadelphia tonight."

"Not quite," Alyoshka said. "What are you planning to do, fuck him at my house?"

"House! You call that dirty, stinking, steamy hole a house? Yes, I want to fuck this guy on your fiddler's bed, and then switch over to the clown's bed."

"Okay, let's go," Alyoshka said. "Only don't fuck me afterward."

"We won't," I said. "You don't turn me on at all. I have little interest in fucking Russian poets."

"Or maybe he's not a pederast at all?" Alyoshka said, glancing doubtfully at Johnny.

"We'll check it out right now," I said. Hitching myself up from Johnny's shoulder, I put my arms around him, whispered in his ear, "I vont you, Johnny!" and kissed him on the lips. His lips were big, and he responded to me, not the least bit embarrassed. He knew how to kiss, he did it much better than I did. True, that meant nothing, but if he'd gone this far, to the kiss, he was agreeable to going all the way.

"He'll do," I said to Alyoshka. "Let's go."

I told Johnny that he would come with us. He expressed not the slightest unwillingness, and I put my arm around him and walked on ahead with him. I was drawn into more and more kisses, especially since I was feeling the effects of what I had smoked and drunk more and more clearly. The incubation period was over and the disease had begun a rapid development. We walked and kissed, and Alyoshka limped behind. I got drunk and silly, switched from game-playing and humor into a state of genuine drugged relaxation. I just wanted somebody, not specifically Johnny, but he was nearby. From time to time Alyoshka commented on the pair of us, Johnny and me, with remarks like, "What a pederast you are, Limonov!"

Or, "If the guys in Moscow could only see you!"

"But Gubanov's a pederast himself!" I said exultantly. "I once spent a whole evening smooching with him."

Finally we arrived. It must have been one in the morning. We walked into those clouds of steam, and the first thing I saw was two pairs of eyes, frightened and puzzled as hell. The performing artists were lying on their beds, facing the door, and were stunned by the arrival of Limonov and his black lover. I decided to finish them off. I put my arms around Johnny and entered into a long, agonizing kiss. The performing artists were petrified. They were both over forty, they were not prepared for this, neither the clown nor the musician.

I told Alyoshka, "This is a bummer, the sleep-in will not take place. If you'll just give us some beer, Johnny and I will go." Johnny and I sat down on a chair, or rather he did, and I settled on his lap within sight of the astonished spectators. Alyoshka gave us some beer.

The beer belonged to the musician, he always had a couple dozen beers in reserve, and Alyoshka asked him for the loan of a beer. He gave it, he would have given the world not to see Limonov endlessly kiss a black man. A terrible spectacle for a Russian musician or clown.

Then Johnny and I left. Alyoshka stayed, went to bed. I invited him to come with us, but he said, "You'll be fucking, and what will I do?" He was right, and we left alone.

Then began my long night of walking with Johnny along Broadway, Eighth Avenue, and neighboring streets, from the Thirties to the Fifties. I do not know, it remains a mystery to me even now, why he didn't get around to fucking me right away. Nor do I know what he was doing, sometimes stopping with people, talking with them, approaching prostitutes and people who worked in all sorts of night establishments. He was doing some sort of petty business of his own, he was busy with it right up to daybreak, people handed him something, maybe it was coins, I don't know. I could see that the faces of the people he talked to were scornful and squeamish. One time a young and handsome black man, brightly dressed, evidently a pimp, even pushed him. He was the lowest man in this world, my Johnny, and I was his buddy.

I understood at once that he was the lowest of the low. Another man in my place would have left, wouldn't have given a damn, especially since the excitement was gone, the sex drive had vanished, there was only a drugged, alcoholic state; but that was what another would have done. Not I. I felt I must walk with him everywhere in his strange dealings, wait for him, and be a friend to him, to this lowest man, this punk dressed in dirty rags. Once he even deserted me, and a huge, fat black guy, from a whorehouse on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-third Street I think, tried to beat me up for something. I don't remember – and besides I didn't understand – what the problem was or how I had irritated him. But I patiently heard out his seething speech, indistinct and vicious, and when he came after me with his fists I realized there was no point fighting, and simply tried to push the big guy away without running afoul of his fists. I succeeded in this, but not quite. Repulsed by his bulk, I bounced back against the wall. I wasn't hurt, didn't fall; a shout went up around me. Only then did Johnny come over to me and furtively tell me I'd better leave. I don't give a shit about these amusements. I left calmly, but as I say, I didn't have a fucking thing to lose; as I say, why should I fear tight spots – I was even seeking death. Not very consciously, but I was.

Johnny deserted me for long periods that night, and more than once I developed a suspicion that he wanted to shake me off. Somewhere around four in the morning he squeezed himself into a group of black youths on Forty-second Street, between Broadway and Eighth, and tried to get something out of them. Someone chased him away.

I sat on my heels by the wall and observed the young people and Johnny. I felt sad. Even they did not accept me into their game. I would have given the world, at that moment, to have black skin and stand among them as one of their own.

I recalled my own provincial Kharkov, my hoodlum friends, our flashy dolled-up girls – not this dolled-up, of course; they didn't have the resources – but also provocative, young, and vulgar, like these nice little black girls. There in my own city I was in my right place. Everyone knew Ed. They knew what he could do. They knew I hawked stolen countermarks, which was what we called the free passes to the outdoor dance pavilion where the orchestra played. I sold them cheap and divided the profits with the cashier, a middle-aged German woman. It was a pretty good business. In one evening I would earn a third to a half of a good worker's monthly pay – it was a big dance pavilion. Everyone knew that I wasn't averse to stealing anything left lying around loose, and it was I who robbed the store near the entrance to the Hammer and Sickle Factory.

The people knew my girl Svetka; they would inform me at once, that very night, if they saw her at another dance pavilion with another guy. Then I would leave someone to hawk countermarks in my place, and go to the grocery store; a friend and I would each buy a bottle of strong red, drink it right on the street. On occasion we carried out this operation two or three times, and afterward, when I had sold all the countermarks, I would go to Svetka's apartment house and wait for her. I would sit in the courtyard, talk with some Tatar boxers, the brothers Epkin, and wait for Svetka. When she appeared I would beat her and beat the guy who was with her. The brothers Epkin, who loved both Svetka and me, would butt in, and a hue and cry would go up. Then we would make peace and go to Svetka's. Her mother was a prostitute and a lover of literature. She valued highly the diary I kept as a seventeen-year-old, which at Svetka's request I had given her to read. She encouraged our romance and predicted for me a future as a man of letters. Unfortunately, she proved right.

Svetka was a very sweet girl, beautiful but sneaky. She loved the starched petticoats and fluffy dresses stylish at the time. She lived in apartment 14 and was fourteen years old. She had lived with men since the age of twelve; a friend of her late alcoholic father's had once raped her. Strange as it may seem, Svetka was proud of this circumstance; she was a romantic soul. In addition to her tallness, little doll face, long legs, and almost complete absence of breasts, Svetka possessed an amazing ability to drive me mad. My romance with her was rife with incidents – she ran to drown herself in the pond, I slashed her with a knife, fled from her to the Caucasus, wept in the entrance to her house, and so on… It was like a rehearsal of Elena.

Anyway, I felt wonderful out by our dance pavilion, in the crush of young people – mainly delinquent young people, our neighborhood being what it was. In our neighborhood there were buildings where the entire male population was in prison. The fathers went, then the older brothers, then the younger brothers, my agemates. I might be able to recall the names of about a dozen guys sentenced in their time to execution, the firing squad. And the number sentenced to ten and fifteen years was absolutely drastic.

The young blacks and nonblacks on Forty-second Street reminded me of my neighborhood, my dance pavilion, my friends, hoodlums, gangsters, and thieves. I use these words with no nuance of condemnation, none. Besides, most of that Kharkov crowd by the dance pavilion and most of this Forty-second Street crowd consisted not of hoodlums and gangsters, of course, but of normal teenagers, boys and girls at a transitional age who wanted to fuck around showing off. In Russia they were called blatnye, toughs. They were not real criminals, but their manners, behavior, habits, and dress aped the manners, behavior, habits, and dress of real criminals. It was the same here.

A sadness, as I say, came over me. I could not be one of this crowd of busily scurrying, whispering boys and girls. Oh, this business of theirs! Whom to fuck tonight, and if there isn't anyone, then where to get a drink if you haven't a cent in your pocket, though you're wearing patent leather shoes and a wide black hat. You might hit Sam for a couple of bucks – he deals in marijuana. "Hi, Bob!" "Hi, Bill!" "Hello, Lizzy!"

Such, I think, were the thoughts and expressions that floated over this crowd. The kids perhaps found Johnny disgusting; filthy thirty-five-year-old punk Johnny, my friend, for whom I was waiting. Possibly they held their noses on his account. But I, my foolish brain, was thinking about everyone and for everyone, while they were merely making gestures and uttering words. I sat on my heels at the base of the wall, in my very wide trousers and the short white – no, not dead white, the off-white jacket that Alexander had given me, with pockets; I had tailored it to my figure, it fitted me as if I had been poured into it, at the moment it was completely unbuttoned, my chest was bare, with my cross exposed. That was all I had. I waited for Johnny.

Within me was the stubbornness of an all-forgiving love. I thought, "Of course he's a punk, a flunky. There's no one worse or less than he, even here. Everyone chases him away, and he's obviously begging for coins, but even he is ashamed of me, pretends that he doesn't know me, that I'm an outsider and he, Johnny, is on his own. Nevertheless, I must be here and wait for him, the lowest filth off New York's sidewalks, I must be with him."

No one asked this of me, of course. God did not ask, "Be with Johnny," no one asked it, but I was not waiting to be asked. Maybe it was nonsense, but something made me sit and wait for this bum and not go home to bed in the hotel. Something very powerful. I absolutely clung to him. Maybe I wanted to pity him, to give myself to him, this man chased away by all. Maybe this lofty idea had taken hold of me; it was in obedience to this idea, perhaps, that I waited for him by the wall, gazing sadly upon the garrulous elegant young people.

"You've found a shitass even worse off than you, and you're trying to build yourself up at his expense. Displaying your virtue," a voice said to me.

"He's not lower at all, he holds a more advantageous position in this world than you do. His ties with this world are much stronger and he doesn't look unhappy," said another voice.

"You just want to fuck, that's why you're sitting here," said a third.

"Why no, he's here to gather impressions – he's a writer, you know!" a fourth pronounced maliciously.

"He wants to glom onto Johnny and get to know the other punks," said a fifth.

"To practice his English!" a sixth voice shouted in utter idiocy.

"Fucking all-forgiver, he's playing the saint, he's come to save Johnny, bring him love!" a seventh voice screamed obscenely.

God knows what was happening within me, but my eyes were probably sad and almost weeping. No one wanted to take me into the game, into life. They were living, but I sat by the wall.

"Come on!" Johnny said, walking over. Perhaps he had been moved by my devotion and the fact that I'd been walking with him half the night, perhaps he had reached some decision about me. I followed him submissively. We started down Eighth Avenue. Forty-first, Fortieth, Thirty-ninth, Thirty-eighth.

At Thirty-eighth someone put a knife to my back. The sensation of a knife at my back was something I knew. They surrounded us and ordered us – me, and Johnny, too – to march. Forward.

I marched, and the knife and its owner marched with me as if glued to me. "Why is he trying so hard, the shithead, he's young," I thought with a giggle. I didn't have a fucking thing, not a fucking thing, just some change in my pocket. Pack of fools – they'd found the right guy to rob. They were young kids, beginners, three blacks and a light one. Four of them…

Oh, Lord, more memories. There had been four of the others, too, four of us counting me. We went at night to the outskirts of Kharkov to rob with homemade pistols. We were more afraid than our victims. In addition to one pistol that really fired, we had two wooden models that I had fashioned after my father's TT pistol, exactly like it, millimeter for millimeter, and painted a shiny black.

Our first victim was a fair-haired woman of about thirty. At the time she seemed like an old woman to us. We were seventeen and eighteen; one of us, Grishka, was only fifteen. We were so agonizingly clumsy about robbing her, so stupid, so ashamed, that I think even she realized it, despite her fright. She told us rather calmly, "Maybe you shouldn't, boys!" At which the youngest and meanest of us, Grishka, shaking with cowardice, shouted, "Shut up, bitch!" Had she only known, she could have quietly walked away from us and we wouldn't have done a thing.

Later we boasted to each other, sitting under the bridge. After taking 26 rubles and some kopecks from her purse, we threw the purse in the river and divided the money. We were very glad for the money, and probably even gladder that all this torture was over, thank God, and we could now go home, leaving the models and the homemade pistol hidden under the bridge. "We should have fucked her!" Grishka said. Indeed, we could have raped her, but for some reason we hadn't done it. In theory we could have. In practice, because of the fear we were suffering, we might not have been able to get our young pricks up. I at least couldn't have gotten mine up, I was too subtle a creature, and still am…

The kids took Johnny and me to a dark parking lot. "Holdup!" the eldest one said. I calmly folded my hands behind my head. The eldest, a rather sensible youth, pointed to my hands and said, "What's this?" "A professional habit," I lied, for some reason. "I was in prison in my homeland." My locked hands surprised him. This really is the way that old criminals who have been through the camps hold their hands when being frisked, so as not to get tired. It was a borrowed habit, I hadn't been in prison, fate had spared me. "Where's your homeland?" the eldest boy asked. He may not have been older than the others, but he gave the orders. "I'm from Russia," I replied.

Suddenly he burst out laughing. "And I've been in prison here!"

He patted my pockets, but the tension had already abated. Both they and I had relaxed. Aside from my notebook and a hotel key – without a name tag, however; our hotel had no such luxury – I had nothing in my pockets. Even the change had disappeared, I don't know where, maybe it had fallen out when I was sitting on my heels on Forty-second Street.

All of a sudden the eldest one reached for my cross. My eyes went dim. I could not hand this over. And God had nothing to do with it. To me, this rather large silver cross with chips here and there in its blue enamel was a keepsake of my homeland. "Only veeth my life!" I said quickly and softly in English. And covered the cross with my hand. "This is a symbol of my religion and my homeland," I added. The boy took his hand away.

They let us go. They did frisk Johnny, as an afterthought, but I think it was his doing, this robbery. It was no accident. Shit, to look at him you'd never say he was worth robbing. A real bum. I think he had set it up. He had approached his acquaintances and asked them just to go through the motions of robbing him too. To see what I had.

They didn't touch the cross, didn't hit me or take the notebook. But they weren't noble robbers, by any means. They took an interest in what hotel the key was from. Even though I was all in a fog – the narcotics and alcohol had not dissipated – I caught on and told them some brazen lie. They realized I was lying, but what could they do.

No, they were a bit more experienced than the four in Kharkov, the four including me. Otherwise they wouldn't have thought of the key. This was not their first time at the business, absolutely not their first, although, had I been a plainclothesman, I would have handcuffed them easily and simply; their behavior was painfully amateurish. I know those tricks. My experience as a thief covered six years, from the age of sixteen to twenty-one. After twenty-one I became a poet and an intellectual.

Johnny and I left. I was infuriated with him. He had obviously set this up, the sneaky bastard! Apart from everything else, I was hungry, and I told him so. He continued to drag me down all sorts of dark alleys, where he held discussions with other equally shady characters, received something in his palm, and walked on. My requests for food were ignored.

"Stingy bum, loathsome zhlobby character!" Trudging along behind him, I cursed him in Russian and in English. He knew perfectly well that I was hungry. My barbaric English was understood everywhere, and almost nowhere was I asked to repeat myself. But he didn't want to buy me any food. I was really infuriated with him, fed up. It was beginning to grow light.

At last it appeared that he had finished his shady panhandling and could occupy himself with me now, or else he hadn't wanted me earlier but wanted me now, but anyway he suddenly began kissing me again, his lips seemed to want to swallow my lips and me myself. I didn't want him at all.

"Loathsome zhlob!" I said to him, shoving him away. "Loathsome zhlob, get away from me, go fuck yourself, get lost. I'm going home, skinflint, American zhlob!"

I said it in Russian and said it in English, what I knew of it in English. He laughed and would not let go of me. Near the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Broadway we began to wrestle; a joke is a joke, but he was strong and would not let go of me. We wrestled and wrestled, and crashed down on the pavement. This was right at 1515 Broadway, on the side of the building that faces Forty-fifth Street. It's the building where I always get my welfare check. We went crashing down, he brought me down on top of him and began to kiss me.

"Blockhead," I screamed, "let go, fuck off, get lost!"

But he kept after me all the same with his beard and his lips. Already people were walking to work – admittedly, not many – and they gave us a wide berth. On seeing the people I came alive like an actor, but not only that, Johnny had loosened me up, excited me, I wanted to fuck, and at the same time I wanted to scare these people walking to work. I went for his cock.

He was a bit frightened. "What are you, crazy?" he asked me. "Do people do it in the street?"

I don't know whether they do or not, I couldn't care less. I wanted to get at his cock, right here on the filthy Broadway pavement. I tried again to unzip his pants. The women walking to work scuttled away from us in fright. He jumped up and grabbed my hand.

"Come with me!" He jerked me viciously, then smiled and added, "Russian crazy!"

I went, I forgave him for being a zhlob and a sneak; I can't stay angry very long.

I don't remember the building we went to. I remember only that the inside was very respectable and there was a doorman. Johnny tiptoed me past the doorman, who was sitting with his back to us, and we made a dash for the stairway and cautiously started up.

"If he's taking me to rip someone off, that suits me fine," I thought coolly. "Even if we land in jail, I'll learn both English and Spanish, I'll make contacts, and I'll come out dangerous and mean."

I wanted to know which apartment. We were panting but kept going up and up. There were not only apartments but also organizations of some sort, judging by the substantial signs. Suddenly the doors stopped. Ahead was the empty stairwell and a dead end. Johnny threw off his baggy dirty jacket and flung it on the floor. With the gesture of a cordial host, he pointed me to the floor and sat down himself, began to take off his T-shirt.

"Let's make love, you wanted to make love. It's okay here, not in the street," he said.

I was exasperated. I had already set up plans, and he…

"Afterward," I told him. "I want to do a robbery, I thought we were coming here to rip off an apartment. Why did you trick me?" I said.

"I didn't trick you," he said. "You wanted to make love."

Again he pulled me by the hand. Well, gentlemen, what else could I do? It may have been six in the morning. I went to him…

Under the baggy, dusty street-bum clothes he turned out to have a beautiful figure with a round, neat poopka. In his pants he had seemed fat-assed and awkward, but he was well-proportioned and had nothing to spare This place in the stairwell was hot, we were both naked, and although I was very tanned except for the stripe from my panties, he was so black that my tan made no difference; I was practically white in comparison with him. Although he was much shorter than Chris, this bum and punk had a huge cock. One glance at his cock and all my disappointment and dissatisfaction vanished. Evidently I was, in fact, a pederast. I grabbed his cock, and it would be no exaggeration to say that I hastily rammed it down my throat. He was very ardent, this stingy Johnny, I didn't have to cajole his huge cock for long. He shortly flooded me, and to some extent himself, with a whole load of spurting semen. Such a huge cock! Look what nature hath wrought, I thought, slapping his cock against his belly, laughing and playing. He lay there, content.

Then he set me on his chest and began to kiss my member. He had fine large lips; their area, the area of the viscid surface with which he touched my delicate plaything, was large. He did his job very ably. Little by little he drove me out of my fucking mind, although it took him a great deal of time. He worked honestly and above the norm, more than making up for his stinginess with money:

He loved this work, he sucked my pale cock into him, and then my cock floated back out of him on waves sweet, soft, and warm, so warm – he had lips like waves in the southern seas, large and warm. I was so swept away that for the first time in many months I forgot convention, ceased to feel like an actor on stage, in brief, relaxed and luxuriated. And he didn't tire of it. He went on and on…

Fearing that I would nevertheless drop out of the game, lose my hard-on – I was still sick – I decided to concentrate and come. I summoned to my aid an Elena whom someone was fucking. I imagined her in all three dimensions, being fucked by someone repulsive, but despite my best efforts it didn't help worth a damn. Then I returned to reality, began to enter into what Johnny and I were doing, but this didn't advance me on the path to orgasm either, for some reason it seemed natural and normal to me. And then I remembered a painting or photograph that showed a lonely masturbating woman of about thirty years old. May Johnny forgive me, but at the awareness of her inside-out cunt – when I saw, as if with my own eyes, the ill-polished red nail on her little finger, with which she was chafing the upper part of her genital slit, saw the small yellow stain in the crotch of the panties pulled down on her high laced boots, the pathetic little rag-scrap panties of a lonely aging woman, saw the wrinkle or two on her little breasts – I came.

I will not undertake to explain what the attraction was for me, why it took a masturbating woman in the autumn of life to arouse me to orgasm. I do not know, but I came very well. And may Johnny forgive me for having to resort to the help of this lady; he did it better than any woman, better than all of them. When he had my cock in his mouth I felt serene and happy. He alone – punk, filth of the streets, panhandler, least of the least – lovingly and tenderly kissed my cock, laughed with me, clasped me to him, kissed my poopka and shoulders.

Chris had been serious, Johnny was much more playful and funny. For the rest of the time that I spent with him in the attic, perhaps another hour, we laughed, turned somersaults, and lay on my clothes and his, acting out important personages in their boudoirs. "I am a lord!" he said, lying haughtily on his back, his dick hanging sideways, his black face shining. "It's my house!" he said, encompassing the stairwell in his gesture. I rolled with laughter.

"I am lord, too," I said in English. "My house ees all streets of New York!"

Now he laughed. Then the lord and I wrestled…

We had to leave. Voices sounded downstairs, doors slammed. The day was beginning, we might be seen naked and defenseless, and that we didn't need. We agreed to meet the next day at a coffee shop on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue. I suggested the place, I knew that coffee shop well; it was opposite a bordello and not far from where Alexander lived, my friend in the struggle, my party comrade.

I got dressed and left first. Still naked, he pulled me back at the last moment, but I kissed him and started down. At the next floor I got in the elevator and rode down. On the way the elevator filled up with gentlemen in suits, off to do business. They looked suspiciously at my soiled white jacket and odd face.

When I walked up to my hotel the electronic clock on the IBM tower showed seven-thirty. The last thing I was aware of as I fell asleep was the smell of Johnny's cock and semen. I must have grinned in my sleep.