I lived invisible to everyone but Jenny. And I lived intensely; I was in a hurry. Unfortunately, nobody else was. I badly wanted to get ahead. Onward! I shouted to myself in an agonized voice. But the world held me back with a firm grip, not wishing to let me leap with such sudden ease into the next category of life, or, if you like, to climb up onto the next rung of the social ladder. Up, I'm sorry to say, from the very bottom. There weren't any rungs below me. Unless it was jail.
I wanted to get out of the hotel and move somewhere else. I sensed from everything that I needed to get the fuck out of the Diplomat, that the time had come to move. If for no other reason than just to move.
My first attempt proved a false start. After one of my arguments with Jenny, I decided to strike out on my own, and tried to find myself an apartment. The ballet writer Volodya rummaged through his vast circle of acquaintances and introduced me one day to a little twat named Mary Ellen. This dwarfish little bag of bones lived in a two-room apartment near Lincoln Center and was studying ballet for the fun of it. Mary Ellen had a rich homosexual dad who lived in Washington, D.C., and who paid for both her apartment and her two two-hour classes a day. "Mary Ellen's apartment is too expensive for her and she's looking for a roommate," Volodya told me. "Talk to her. If she likes you, she'll take you and you'll pay her something. Or you won't have to pay her anything," added the cynical Volodya, "if you start fucking her; then you can live there for nothing. In my opinion, she doesn't so much need a roommate as a prick," and he laughed in distaste.
Mary Ellen did in fact need a prick. The first time we met, she looked very intently and significantly at me, and passionately informed me of her desire to learn Russian. Her apartment was spacious, in a huge modern building with mirrors in the lobby and several doormen who used special televisions to watch what was happening on every floor. The lobby even had its own newspaper stand.
I liked the building and I liked the apartment, but I didn't much care for the circumstance that I'd have to sleep on a little couch in the living room. And write there too, for when I asked Mary Ellen where I would work, it turned out I'd have to do that in the living room too on the only table in the apartment. The upshot was that I would be renting a «corner» of her apartment, as they say in my native land, and not a room. Naturally, if I start fucking her, I thought, then I'll sleep in the bedroom with her and work wherever I see fit. But after looking at her gray, sunburned, bony little arms with their skin strangely cracked like crude leather, I had no desire whatever to fuck her. That is, I wasn't excluding the possibility of occasional copulations with her, once a month say, after I'd had something to drink or smoked a couple of joints, but to become dependent on her wasn't something I wanted to do.
After spending about an hour with her at her place and drinking several cups of instant coffee without sugar, since Mary Ellen didn't offer me anything else, I took my leave, solemnly promising to think about her offer and decide during the week. I also recommended that she think about it too and make her own decision. Riding down on the elevator with a well-dressed elderly woman and listening to the soft music emitted from somewhere in its ceiling, I talked myself into moving in with Mary Ellen, citing to myself the example of the "real opportunist." A real opportunist, Edward, I said to myself, would move in with Mary Ellen without hesitating, and fuck her with his eyes closed. And so must you!
I called Mary Ellen several days later and told her I was ready to move in if she hadn't changed her mind. "As a roommate," I emphasized diplomatically.
"Fine," she said. "You can move in anytime from tomorrow morning on, or any other day." I said tomorrow, of course; I was impatient, and immediately went back to my hotel and started getting my things together, books for the most part. I only had one suitcase, so I packed the books in shopping bags with handles.
I must have looked like a bag lady when I climbed onto the bus going down Broadway the next morning with two of my sacks, both very heavy. But what could I do — I didn't have any money for a taxi, nor anyone who could have helped me move, so I was forced to move my things piecemeal by bus.
Carrying my shopping bags, I made my way past the self-important doormen in braid with a timidly defiant expression on my face and went upstairs to Mary Ellen's floor. To my floor, I thought proudly, as I pressed the buzzer. She didn't answer for a long time, but then she finally opened the door. Her face was sleepy and, it seemed to me, a little guilty.
"Did something happen?" I asked, already aware of what it was.
"I'm terribly sorry, Edward. My father just called from Washington and said you can't stay here; he's against it. I called you at the hotel, but you'd already left…"
I stood in the doorway like an idiot with my shopping bags. I didn't even lose my temper, since I've grown quite used to fate's little tricks. I just borrowed five bucks from her, left my shopping bags, telling her I'd be back for them later, and hopped onto the elevator. She called after me that she was sorry about it and apologized and something else, but I couldn't hear anymore. Outside it was a blindingly sunny autumn day and the wind was blowing some flags, although, since I was in a hurry to find a bar, I don't remember exactly what kind they were — whether the flags of countries or just for decoration.
I had to call Jenny from the bar several hours later, since I was drunk and didn't have any money with me. Jenny arrived in a taxi with Bridget, and they took me away. "Bad boy!" Jenny said several times with a maternal smile. The bartender was pleased it had all worked out without his having to call the police, and I felt like my relatives had come for me. It really is a good thing to have relatives, and know they won't leave you in the lurch, even if you have been a "bad boy." And as we rode in the taxi back to the millionaire's house, the sun was still out, and the wind was still blowing the flags, whatever they were.
In order to compensate for my failed attempt at moving, I soon afterward resolved to get off welfare. As I say, I was anxious for evidence of my progress in life. I remember with what astonishment and delight the clerk at my welfare center on Fourteenth Street looked at me — as if I were somebody who had just come back from the dead — when I informed her of my intention to give up welfare assistance, since I had found a job and was now able to support myself. That probably didn't happen very often. The black clerk shook my hand and wished me luck in my new life, and I gazed for die last time at the immense sea of my now ex-comrades in misfortune sitting in the large hall waiting for their appointments. Goodbye, comrades! I thought cheerfully, as I strode out the door.
Okay, I thought, we're on the next level now. I was the only one who realized it of course; the people on Fourteenth Street carrying on their unruffled trade in plastic sandals, polyester dresses, and suspiciously large cans of tomato sauce certainly had no idea that I was already on the next level, that I had climbed up a little bit from the bottom where I had been. I couldn't even share my happiness with Jenny — I'd concealed the whole welfare business from her.
Is that something I should do on the next level? I wondered, passing by a porno theater. It was, and I went in and watched a porno film. Even on the new level I still had some of my old bad habits. The porno film turned out to be shitty.
It's always the way that either nothing happens, or if something does, then the first event is immediately followed by a second and then a third; obviously they come in batches. A couple of weeks later Jenny and I went to Southampton for Jennifer's and Dr. Krishna's wedding. Not only was he a crazy Indian for marrying a twenty-year-old girl, but a rich one as well, and the wedding therefore took place in a large restaurant with an ocean view.
Looking back at that momentous occasion from the present, I can see that the wedding was one of the most boring, but at the time it seemed to Limonov, with his then great yearning need for throngs of people, to be grandiose and significant. I even managed to be, if not at the center of attention, then at least on its periphery, since I was by no means the least attractive man in that crowd and could actually dance better than anyone else, which earned me the attention of the ladies and I suppose the bitter resentment of the men. I was dressed, I remember, in my white suit. The day was sunny and warm, fortunately, although I had in fact been following the weather reports for a week, afraid it would turn cold and I wouldn't be able to wear it, the only impeccable item in my wardrobe. The lively, smiling Limonov, surrounded by ugly girls and women, and as breathless from dancing as a young virgin at her first ball — you know, Natasha Rostov. "Are you a designer perchance?" asked a fifty-year-old-lady, puffing away at her cigarette and rendered even happier and more interested when I told her I was a writer. Another lady of the same venerable age took me for a ballet dancer; obviously, such ladies think that all Russians living in the United States are ballet dancers.
What can I say? I was flattered by their attention, and although it would have pleased me even more to be surrounded by a flock of young actresses and models rather than by a motley crowd of slightly crocked married women jealously watched by their paunchy and sullen better halves sitting at their tables with loosened ties, or by a crowd of Jenny's pimply friends selected as if for their complexions, a gaggle of twenty-year-old girls of various sizes, even those groups stimulated me somehow, although I realized it was all very silly. This is silly, Edward, really silly! I thought to myself, and then grabbing my next partner, I rushed onto the dance floor, desperately seizing from life whatever it was capable of giving me that day, and in fact did give me. The orchestra (certainly Krishna had hired an orchestra) was a jazz ensemble, with saxophones, drums, and a piano — what else; I couldn't expect him to invite Richard Hell and his group, could I? The orchestra liked me too, and even started to accompany me, keeping time to my movements.
I used to have a Polaroid picture taken that day by Raj, a relative of Krishna's, in which I am sitting at a restaurant table in my white suit with the sea behind me and a happily romantic expression on my face. I later gave that picture to Elena, who no doubt has lost it, which would be a pity. Behind me you can make out the head of a woman, or her hair at least; mat's Andrea, the girl I danced with the most that evening and who won me, having prevailed over all her rivals. That is, I fucked her, or more accurately, she fucked me, or even more accurately, we fucked each other a few days later. I was at the wedding with Jenny, after all, and had come in the same car with her, which she drove. Besides, I had no intention of abandoning her that evening or of hurting her; I still cared about her, and anyway it was enough that I had hardly danced with her that day. Andrea and I merely exchanged phone numbers.
Despite my expectations, the bride and groom, or rather the husband and wife, didn't look all that incongruous, didn't seem like grandfather and granddaughter. Even though Jennifer was only twenty, she was stocky, robust, and swarthy, with a coarse blunt nose, and looked older than she was; I would have said she was thirty. Krishna, on the other hand, was just the opposite: he looked much younger than his years, and was tall and well-built for his age, without any wrinkles to speak of on his tanned face, so that I would have given him fifty-five instead of his seventy-two. And so they looked quite normal together — nothing particularly shocking.
Among the guests was a whole clan of Indians: men, women in saris, and even Indian children, and not one of them got drunk, and I noticed too that the men danced, but the women didn't. It also seemed to me, as I looked at the Indian women, that Jennifer very much resembled an Indian girl — it was no accident I'd mistaken her for a Turk the first time I'd met her. Her face was of a generally Eastern type, and if you had taken off her clothes, she would have looked like one of those squat women with fat thighs you see held on the pricks of their grinning Indian rajas or non-Indian sultans, those well-built women sitting or lying in various positions, sometimes very uncomfortable ones, on the pricks of their rajas in Indian colored miniatures tinted in red and in gold. Who knows, it may have been that very resemblance that tempted Krishna into thinking they would be happy together in bed.
Andrea and I met again only a few days after the wedding, both of us waiting a bit, as if out of decency, although we both knew what we wanted. Finally, after a phone call, I went down to her place on Chambers Street in an unfinished loft which she had bought with several friends. Each of them had a separate bedroom but shared a huge kitchen and a gigantic hall, empty and uncluttered, which they planned to use for concerts and dance performances and for teaching and studying dance. Andrea was in fact a student of modern dance, and I soon had my fill of sweaty youths and girls in tights or wide pants and T-shirts portraying snakes or a Chinese theater or whatever while rolling on the floor with significant expressions on their faces — which all seemed so second-rate to me. Nevertheless, during the months I spent fucking Andrea, I posed as a passionate admirer of modern dance, and even went to some of her performances. Andrea was either the seventh or the fifth dancer in "The Silences of the Night," or maybe it was the "The Scream of Day" — I don't remember exactly what, although it had a pretentious title and reminded you of something halfway between therapeutic group gymnastics and a theater for the deaf and dumb.
I didn't burden myself with any any special efforts on Andrea's behalf; we just went to a place called the Ocean Club near her place on Chambers Street for drinks, and I told her, just as I had told Jenny, about how unhappy I was. I told her I didn't want to be a homosexual and had therefore become friends with Jenny, although I couldn't have sex with her because she was very sick. "Jenny and I are just friends. I merely play the role of being her boyfriend," I said, "only please don't tell anybody, Andrea," and Edward made a noble face. I don't use that pitiful technique anymore; it seems unworthy of a man. And I very much want to be a "real man," as indeed I am.
Andrea wasn't required to believe anything I told her — it was just the usual love song of the male; any noises would have done. She wanted my hands on her little body and my prick inside her, and I wanted just as calmly and confidently to see her naked; she probably had short legs and a hairy crack. A twenty-year-old cunt, I thought with a certain aversion.
Andrea told me in her turn how unhappy she was. She had had an affair for a year and a half with a guy who also did modern dance, who crawled on the floor, in other words, and sometimes she thought she still loved him. Pronouncing the word "love," Andrea's face assumed a tenderly bovine, dreamy expression.
Realizing that we were both unhappy, we drank some more, and she suggested going to her place for a smoke — she had some grass at home. We returned to the unfinished loft, went into her bedroom, and lit up. A few minutes later I found that I was fucking her without even taking her panties off but just pushing them a little to one side, and with my own pants in a tangle around my ankles, that I was fucking her and that it was extremely good, as if I had come home again — and doesn't it seem to you, dear reader, that a cunt is a home, warm and cozy? Her sticky cunt followed my prick wherever I wanted it to; if I went to the side, her cunt did too, and if I pressed down, her cunt inclined downward too, softly and benevolently enveloping my prick as it did so. I lifted her dress as high as possible until it covered her face, took her large breasts in my hands, large for a girl so small, and lay down on her as heavily as I could and stroked. She was submissive and only panted, and then she softly moaned. I liked the way she fucked — I don't care for women who are too vigorous — and especially that feeling of domestic tranquility she gave to me. Her cunt was a home, cozy and warm. She came with me, later admitting she had waited.
We lay still and I surveyed the field of battle. Strewn on the floor and bed were singles and ten-dollar bills belonging to her, my glasses, and various other feminine junk that had tumbled out of her purse, which also lay nearby. We both burst out laughing. On tiptoes, trying not to make any noise, we took turns going to the cold bathroom at the other end of the loft, and then we undressed completely and lay down, and I grabbed her luxuriant hair and pulled her head onto my prick…
I was awakened at dawn the next morning by a sweet odor of decay in the room, as if outside they were doing something with corpses under the window. Looking out the window, I saw the backyard of a butcher shop…
I had become a full-fledged member of American society with surprising speed. The French restaurant opened at last, and I started working there with Volodya and Kirill, a young guy from Leningrad and one of the characters in my first novel. Kirill and I were no longer friends, however. As you know, I had completely left Russians behind and set off on my own path.
I had left, but they still came. The two intellectuals, while making dough or shaping kulebiaki, pelmeni, or pirogi, the delicacies that were the basis of our menu, chattered nonstop, reciting Russian poetry together or suddenly breaking into Les fleurs du mal in French. Both of them, you see, had received Old World classical educations. Both were terribly, shamelessly cultivated, and their fastidious intellectuality at once created a distance between them and the rest of the kitchen. Otherwise they wouldn't have avoided sharp conflicts with the populace, even though the main kitchen was upstairs and we worked in the basement where the bouillon was made and the dishes were done in a special wing, and where the only other person besides us was the restaurant butcher.
I had listened to Russian poetry every day in fabulous quantities for a dozen years without a break, and the pompousness, vulgarity, and artificiality of Russian verse made me sick, and I therefore obstructed them by swearing, banging pots together, or reciting my own recent verse out loud, poetry which was frequently unbearable to them. Our little skirmishes had a rather benign, even friendly character, however, and neither they nor I took offense. But what really irritated me was their casual and misplaced disdain for our fellow workers. Neither Kirill nor Volodya called them anything but "cattle." I've never considered myself a model of altruism, but to hear insulting Russian names spoken every day right to the faces of our completely unsuspecting co-workers was for some reason offensive to me. As a result, I started swearing at them in earnest.
Taking advantage once of a convenient moment, I swiped several gallon bottles of cheap wine and a couple of bottles of whiskey from the bartenders upstairs — theft or expropriation? Expropriation without a doubt, I told myself, and just like Robin Hood I shared my booty from time to time with the people, including the puffed-up intellectuals, who of course called me a thief but who refused the wine and the whiskey neither the first time nor the last. On one occasion I also treated a black guy named Victor from the upstairs kitchen, who had come down to us to make a meat filling with the huge meat grinder located in our territory, and I'll admit he looked like a hoodlum — a broken nose and a raspy voice. I poured him a half a glass of whiskey — I knew how to make friends — and we jabbered awhile about his Antilles islands, where he was born. After Victor was gone, Volodya and Kirill started protesting:
"Don't start bringing your black friends down here, Limonov," Volodya said. "We know how much you like them, you wrote about it in your book, but we haven't got any use for them."
"Yes, Limonov," added Kirill, getting so angry he even turned red, "go upstairs if you want to hang around with them. We have a nice quiet place here, and we don't want them coming down. We don't need a crowd of blacks around here. This isn't Harlem."
"You disgusting intellectuals!" I said to them. "It's my business, and I'll make friends with anybody I want. You squeamish pansies!"
"If you don't stop bringing him down here, we'll tell the manager that he's been hanging around and that you've been drinking," the intellectual informers said maliciously.
I got my way. Victor came to visit me frequently after that, calling me «brother» and laughing very loud, and we had a good time. The intellectuals grumbled and muttered but in the end got used to Victor and even found him to be witty in his own way. Later on I heard something completely unprecedented — Kirill bragging in my presence to one of his girlfriends that he had a black friend at the restaurant named Victor!
Not unfortunately, but not fortunately either, life in the restaurant basement didn't last very long. Despite our grand beginnings — several parties organized by the owner Christine for publicity purposes during which well-dressed young whores with young men of the Playboy type toured the kitchen, and my two countrymen turned red and tried to keep their dignity though dressed in cooks' uniforms, and I imagined myself knocking one of the long-legged, sweet-smelling cunts over onto the potato sacks — despite those beginnings, the restaurant was poorly patronized. Despite all the ads in the big New York newspapers and magazines and the enthusiastic reviews in the restaurant sections of the New Yorker and Cue arranged by Madame Margarita, the restaurant declined, Christine lost money, and every night the dining room was three-quarters empty and the handsome waiters were spending more time combing their hair and bickering in the cloakroom than they were waiting on customers. There were rumors that we would soon be closed.
It wasn't so much that I liked working, no, but that with Jenny's help I had started looking for an apartment. I wanted to become a normal person, a member of their society, and then we'd see, maybe fate would toss something my way. Maybe a publisher would buy the book, since my agent, Liza, had finally received from my translator, Bill, the first chapter in English to go with the other two he had already finished and was now setting down to work with enthusiasm — and now this obstacle in my path.
Fucking unsuccessful businessmen! I needed their two hundred and ten dollars a week; I needed it badly. Believe it or not as you wish, but it was on the very same cold November day that Jenny found me an apartment on First Avenue and Eighty-third Street that the Russian section of the restaurant was closed. "We can't have such a large menu. It just isn't paying its way, unfortunately," Christine told us. I put on my leather coat bought used some time ago in Italy, picked up my old umbrella, said goodbye to Victor from the Antilles, and left behind yet another basement in my life. I went to Jenny's, of course.
She told me to take the apartment.
"Edward, how long can you go on living at the Diplomat; that's a very depressing situation. You'll feel a lot better as soon as you get out of there. I'll help you," she said. "I've already spoken to Linda about it. We're very tired of the Chinese couple, you know, the Chus, who vacuum and wax the whole house once a week. They go around the house the whole day without saying anything, and you can't communicate with them," Jenny went on. "If you want, we'll can let them go, and you can do the cleaning instead. Even though she pays the Chinese thirty dollars a week, Linda is willing to pay you forty, and that will be exactly enough for your rent — one hundred and sixty dollars a month! Do you want it?"
I said, "I want it," thereby depriving a Chinese family of rice. The struggle for existence. Neither the first mean thing I've done, nor the last.
You'll say something about how a hundred and sixty was too little, right? The fact is that Jenny found me two little rooms in a three-room apartment, the third and largest room of which was occupied by Joe Adler, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish-American boy who was trying to live independently of his mother and become a painter; he even had a beard. The apartment actually cost three hundred and twenty dollars. And so we made our decision. "If it ever happens you can't make your rent, Edward, I'll always be able to help you out," Jenny assured me encouragingly.
Jenny borrowed a car from one of her friends, and on a cold, snowless first of December, I dragged all my shopping bags, my pictures, and my suitcase out of my hole in the hotel and took my leave of the manager, who said, "Good luck, Comrade Limonov!" Dressed in an ankle-length black coat with a caracul collar that had belonged to her grandmother and, for some reason, in a black dress too, Jenny stepped on the gas and we set off for a new life. The "Destruction is Creation!" poster I had left hanging in the hotel. Looking back for the last time I saw standing in the wind next to the hotel a little crowd of our black brothers, including I think my neighbor Ken. He had a long and passionate conversation with somebody in the hallway on one of my last nights in the hotel. When out of curiosity I opened my door a crack to see who it was and what was going on, Ken was alone. Poor guy, he was evidently already suffering from delirium tremens.
"Hurrah!" I shouted when I was finally alone after Jenny had left and the boy Joe had gone to a meeting of the building association. I had succeeded in climbing out of that shit after all. Congratulations, Limonov! I said to myself seriously and triumphantly.
I started enjoying life a lot more then — it was a new period. I became exceptionally zealous about equipping «my» new apartment, as I affectionately called it. By New Year's, I had completely furnished my two rooms; I even had a large desk given to me by Jenny — who else? — and for the first time in my life had the pleasure of my own desk with a great number of drawers into which I at once put all my papers. I had a bookcase too, old and slightly rotten, more a shelf than a case, but exceptionally pleasing to me, and I started buying and stealing books in order to fill it up as quickly as possible, and when I did fill it up, the books made their way onto the windowsills and other convenient places.