It’s Me, Eddie
Edward Limonov
Edward Limonov
It’s Me, Eddie
© Эдуард Лимонов
© Translated from the Russian by S.L.Campbell (1983)
contents
§ The Hotel Winslow and Its Denizens
§ I Am a Busboy
§ Others and Raymond
§ Chris
§ Carol
§ Sonya
§ Where She Made Love
§ Luz, Alyoshka, Johnny, and Others
§ Roseanne
§ I Make Money
§ My Friend New York
§ The New Elena
§ Epilogue
The hotel Winslow and its denizens
If you’re walking past the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street between one and three in the afternoon, take the trouble to tip back your head and look up – at the unwashed windows of the black Hotel Winslow. There on the topmost, sixteenth floor, on the center-most of the hotel’s three balconies, I sit half naked. Usually I am eating shchi and at the same time working on my tan, I’m a great sun lover. Shchi, or sauerkraut soup, is my usual fare; I eat pot after pot of it, day after day, and eat almost nothing else. The spoon I eat the shchi with is wooden and was brought from Russia. It is decorated with flowers of scarlet, gold, and black.
The surrounding office buildings gawk at me with their smoky glass walls, with the thousand eyes of the clerks, secretaries, and managers. A nearly, sometimes entirely naked man, eating shchi from a pot. They don’t know it’s shchi, though. What they see is that every other day, on a hot plate there on the balcony, a man cooks a huge steaming pot of something barbaric. At one time I also ate chicken, but then I stopped. There are five advantages to shchi: (1) It’s very cheap, two or three dollars a pot, and a pot is enough for two days! (2) It doesn’t spoil out of the refrigerator, even in very hot weather. (3) It’s quick to make, only an hour and a half. (4) It can and should be eaten cold. (5) There’s no better food for summer, because it’s tart.
I choke and gobble, naked on the balcony. I’m not ashamed before those unknown people in the offices or their eyes. Sometimes I also have with me, hanging on a nail driven into the window frame, a small green battery transistor given to me by Alyoshka Slavkov, a poet who plans to become a Jesuit. I enliven the taking of shchi with music. My preference is a Spanish station. I’m not inhibited. I am often to be found bare-assed in my shallow little room, my member pale against the background of the rest of my body, and I do not give a damn whether they see me or don’t, the clerks, secretaries, and managers. I’d rather they did see me. They’re probably used to me by now, and perhaps they miss me on days when I don’t crawl out on my balcony. I suppose they call me “that crazy across the way.”
My little room is four paces long and three paces wide. On the walls, covering the marks left by previous occupants, there hang: a large portrait of Mao Tse-tung, an object of horror to all the people who drop by to see me; a portrait of Patricia Hearst; my own photograph against a background of icons and a brick wall, with me holding a thick volume, perhaps a dictionary or a Bible, and wearing a 114-patch blazer tailored by me, Limonov, monster out of the past; a portrait of Andre Breton, founder of the surrealist school, which portrait I have carried with me for many years, and which Andre Breton is usually unknown to those who come to see me; a call to support gay rights; other posters, among them one for Workers Party candidates; paintings by my friend the artist Khachaturian; numerous lesser papers. At the head of my bed is the poster “For Your Freedom and Ours,” left from a demonstration in front of the New York Times. Completing the wall decor are two shelves of books. Mainly poetry.
I think it’s clear to you by now what a character I am, even though I forgot to introduce myself. I started running on without announcing who I was; I forgot. Overjoyed at the opportunity to drown you in my voice at last, I got carried away and never announced whose voice it was. My fault, forgive me, we’ll straighten it out right now.
I am on welfare. I live at your expense, you pay taxes and I don’t do a fucking thing. Twice a month I go to the clean, spacious welfare office at 1515 Broadway and receive my checks. I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience, therefore my conscience doesn’t bother me and I don’t plan to look for work, I want to receive your money to the end of my days. And my name is Edichka, “Eddie-baby.”
And you, gentlemen, can figure you’re getting off cheap. Early in the morning you crawl out of your warm beds and hurry – some by car, some by subway or bus – to work. I hate work. I gobble my shchi, drink, sometimes drink myself into oblivion, seek adventure in dark city blocks; I have a magnificent, expensive white suit and an exquisite nervous system; I wince at your belly laugh in the movie theater and wrinkle my nose.
You don’t like me? You don’t want to pay? It’s precious little – $278 a month. You don’t want to pay. Then why the fuck did you invite me, entice me here from Russia, along with a horde of Jews? Present your complaints to your own propaganda, it’s too effective. That’s what’s emptying your pockets, not I.
Who was I over there? What’s the difference, what would it change? I hate the past, as I always have, in the name of the present. Well, I was a poet, if you must know, a poet was I, an unofficial, underground poet. That’s over forever, and now I am one of yours, I am scum, I’m the one to whom you feed shchi and rotten cheap California wine – $3.59 a gallon – and yet I scorn you. Not all of you, but many. Because you lead dull lives, sell yourselves into the slavery of work, because of your vulgar plaid pants, because you make money and have never seen the world. You’re shit!
I’ve gone a little too far, lost my temper, forgive me. But objectivity is not among my attributes; besides, the weather is fucking lousy today, it’s drizzling, New York is gray and boring – empty weekend days, I have nowhere to go. Perhaps this is why I switched out of my usual mode and started calling you names. I apologize. Go on living for now, and pray God to keep me from mastering correct English as long as possible.
The Hotel Winslow is a gloomy black sixteen-story building, probably the blackest on Madison Avenue. A sign running from the top to the bottom of the facade proclaims WINSL W – the letter O fell out. When? Perhaps fifty years ago. I moved into the hotel by chance, in March, after my tragedy, my wife Elena had left me. Exhausted, footsore, and bloody from wandering around New York spending each night in a new spot, sometimes on the street, I was finally picked up by a former dissident and former groom at the Moscow race track, the very first recipient of the Welfare Prize (he prides himself on having been the first Russian to master welfare), stout, slovenly, wheezing Alyoshka Shneerson, my Savior, who led me by the hand to the Welfare Center on Thirty-first Street, and inside of a day I received emergency aid, which has dropped me to the bottom of life, made me a man scorned and without rights – but fuck your rights, I don’t have to earn my own board and room, and I’m free to write my poems, which are not fucking needed, either here in your America or there in the USSR.
So then how did I end up at the Winslow?
Shneerson’s friend Edik Brutt lived at the Winslow, and that was where I came to live too, three doors down from him. The sixteenth floor consists entirely of cubicles, as do many other floors. When I meet people and mention where I live they look at me with respect. Few realize that such a neighborhood still has a dirty old hotel populated by poor old men and women and lonely Jews from Russia, where scarcely half the rooms have a shower or toilet.
Misfortune and failure hover invisibly over our hotel. During the time I have lived here two older women have thrown themselves out the window. One of them, a Frenchwoman I was told, with a face that still preserve
d traces of beauty, had always paced the corridor inconsolably; she threw herself from her fourteenth-floor window into the courtyard, the light-well. In addition to these two victims God very recently took the proprietress, or rather the mother of the proprietor, who is a huge, elephantine Jew in a yarmulke, I met him once at a party given by my American girl friend Roseanne. The proprietor’s mother, like all old women, loved to give orders at the hotel, although the proprietor of our dirty little establishment owns forty-five other buildings in New York. Why she enjoyed hanging around all day and pointing out things for the hotel employees to do I don’t know. Perhaps she was a sadist. Recently she disappeared. They found her later that day, a crumpled and mutilated corpse in the elevator shaft. The devil lives alongside us. Having seen a lot of films about exorcists, I am beginning to think it’s the devil. From my window I can see the St. Regis Sheraton. I think about that hotel with envy. And, without prospect, dream of moving there if I get rich.
We Russians are treated by the hotel the way blacks were treated before Emancipation. Our sheets are changed much less often than the Americans’, the carpet on our floor hasn’t been cleaned once the whole time I’ve lived here, it’s horrifyingly dirty and dusty. Sometimes an American from across the hall, an old hack who is always pounding his typewriter, comes out in his underpants, takes a broom, and sweeps the carpet vigorously as a form of calisthenics. I keep wanting to tell him not to do it, since he only raises the dust and the carpet stays just as dirty, but I hate to deprive him of the exercise. Sometimes when I get drunk I think the American is an FBI agent assigned to watch me.
They give us the oldest sheets and towels, I clean my own toilet. In brief, we rate at the very bottom.
The hotel staff, I think, considers us useless freeloaders who have come to America – land of honest laborers with crewcuts – to eat them out of house and home. I know all about this. Everyone bitched about parasites in the USSR too, bullshitted about how you had to be useful to society. In Russia the people who bitched were the ones who worked least. I’ve been a writer for ten years now. It’s not my fault that neither state needs my labor. I do my work – where’s my money? Both states bullshit about the justice of their systems, but where’s my money?
The hotel manager cannot stand me. A benighted lady in glasses, with the Russo-Polish name of Rogoff, she accepted me into the hotel under Edik Brutt’s sponsorship. Like shit I needed his sponsorship, when there were plenty of empty rooms in the hotel, God knows who would live in cubicles like these. Mrs. Rogoff has trouble finding fault with me, but she very much wants to. Sometimes she gets a chance. Thus, in the early months I paid for my room twice a month, but after a while she suddenly demanded that I pay a month in advance. Technically she was right, but it was much more convenient for me to pay twice a month, on the days when I got my welfare check. I told her so. “But you can buy white suits and drink champagne, you do have money for that,” she said.
I kept trying to think what champagne, what kind of champagne did she have in mind. Sometimes I drank California champagne, most often I did it with my friend Kirill, a young fellow from Leningrad, but how could she know that? We usually drank the champagne in Central Park. Only somewhat later did I recall that when planning for the birthday of my old friend, the artist Khachaturian – the one whose paintings hang in my cubicle – I really had bought a $10 bottle of Soviet champagne and put it in the refrigerator, so that I could take it to the celebration that night. Mrs. Rogoff must have personally checked my refrigerator every day, or else this was done on her instructions by the maid who cleaned (did not clean) my room. “And you’re on welfare,” Mrs. Rogoff said. “Poor America!” she exclaimed passionately. “I’m the one who’s poor, not America,” I replied.
The reasons for her hostility to me became fully clear only later. When she took me into the hotel she thought I was a Jew. Then when she got a good look at my chipped blue enamel cross, my only property and adornment, she realized I was not a Jew. A certain Marat Bagrov, formerly of Moscow television, who was still living at the Winslow then, told me Mrs. Rogoff had complained to him about Edik Brutt: He had deceived her and brought in a Russian. Thus, gentlemen, I know firsthand what discrimination is. I’m kidding – the Jews in our hotel live no better than I do. Far more than the fact that I’m not a Jew, I think, Mrs. Rogoff dislikes the fact that I don’t look unhappy. Only one thing is required of me – to look unhappy, know my place, and not go around wearing first one suit and then another in sight of astonished spectators. I think she would take great pleasure in looking at me if I were dirty, hunchbacked, and old. It would comfort her. But a welfare recipient in lace shirts and white vests! In the summer, however, I wore white slacks, wooden platform sandals, and a little close-fitting shirt – the absolute minimum. This, too, irritated Mrs. Rogoff. Encountering me once in the elevator she said to me, staring with suspicion at my sandals and bare tanned feet, “You… like… heeppy. Rahssian heeppy,” she added without a smile.
“Nyet,” I said.
“Da, da,” she said firmly.
The rest of the hotel staff treat me passably. The only good relationship I have is with a Japanese, or maybe he’s Chinese, I can’t tell, but he always smiles at me. I also say hello to an Indian in a turban, he too is attractive in my eyes. All the rest, in varying degrees, have wronged me, and I talk to them only if I am paying a bill or asking for a letter or phone message.
That is how I live. The days roll by one after another; opposite the hotel, on Madison, a whole block of buildings has been almost completely demolished, and an American skyscraper is about to go up. Some of the Jews and half Jews and fake Jews have moved out of the hotel, others have come in their stead. Like the blacks in their Harlem, they find support in communal living; in the evening they pour out on the street and sit by the hotel in the window bays, some swig from bottles in paper bags; they talk about life. If it’s cold they gather in the lobby, occupying all the benches, and then the lobby is filled with the buzz and stir of voices. The hotel administration struggles against the communal habits of Soviet emigres, their predilection for gypsy campfires, but without success. It’s impossible to force them not to gather, not to sit in front of the hotel. And although their rustic habit of sitting around must scare off potential victims who might suddenly wander into the hotel, the administration seems to have given up on them – what can you do.
I have very few dealings with them. I never stop and visit, confining myself to the words “Good evening!” or “Hi, everybody!” This doesn’t mean I think ill of them. But in my lifetime of wandering I have seen such a variety of Russians and Russian Jews – in my view they’re one and the same – that they no longer interest me. At times the “Russian” shows through more plainly in Jews than in real Russians.
So I don’t stop to visit with them in front of the hotel, I go to my room. What would we talk about – about their misfortunes, about how tired they are, working as cab drivers or whatever. Recently I gave them a “Hi, everybody!” and walked past them, out into New York. Some new fellow, a Georgian Jew by his appearance, or more likely an ethnic Georgian who had masqueraded as a Jew in order to emigrate, shouted after me, “Hey, are you Russian too?”
“By now I’ve forgotten what I really am,” I said, without stopping.
On my way back about two hours later, I passed them again, this time coming in from New York. The same mustachioed, swarthy fellow spotted me and said with an aggrieved air, “Hey, did you get rich or what, that you don’t want to stop and talk?” This struck me funny, I had to laugh, but even so I didn’t stop, to avoid getting acquainted. I have too many Russian acquaintances as it is. When you yourself are in a lousy fucking situation, you don’t much feel like having unfortunate friends and acquaintances. And almost all Russians bear the imprint of misfortune.
You can recognize them from the back, by a sort of anguished depression in their posture. Although I hardly associate with them, I always recognize them in the elevator. Depre
ssion is their distinguishing mark. Between the first and the sixteenth floors they manage to start a conversation with you, inquire whether the new emigres, one and all, will be given American citizenship in honor of the American Bicentennial; perhaps they will ask you to compose a petition to the President in this connection. What the fuck do they want with citizenship? They themselves don’t know.
Or the conversation may take the opposite tack:
“Did you hear? In October they’re going to let us in!”
“Let us in where?” I asked.
“What do you mean, where? Russia. A pilot defected from the USSR in a fighter plane, now they’re going to let us back, to compensate, understand? One defected, and they let two thousand back. Two thousand want to go back. And half the applicants begin by asking to be sent straight from the airplane to prison camp, they want to do time for their crime, for having left the Motherland. But aren’t you planning to go back? If they took anybody it would be you. Didn’t I hear that you had been published again in both Pravda and Izvestia?”
“Oh, that was a long time ago, back in June,” I said. “They translated an excerpt from the Times of London, and even that got distorted. No, I’m not planning on it, what the fuck would I do there? And besides, I’d be ashamed to go back. They’d laugh. I’m not going, I’ll never go back.”
“You’re still young,” the man said. “Give it a try, maybe you’ll make it here.
“But I’m going,” he continued quietly. “I had big ideas over there, you know, I thought much too highly of myself, but when I got here I saw there wasn’t a thing I could do. I want peace. Somewhere south of Moscow, a little cabin in the Tula region; catch a few fish, do some hunting, get myself a job teaching in the village school. This is hell,” he said. “New York is a city for madmen. I’m going back, I’ve been knocking around here long enough. They’ve got no fucking freedom here, just try and say anything bold at work. No fuss, no muss, but you’re out on your ear.”
He had worked various places, mainly washing dishes. He is getting unemployment, $47 a week. He lives on the West Side in the Eighties, and had come to the hotel to see a friend.
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