At first, however, I was glad for all that running around. In the beginning it distracted me from thoughts of Elena. Especially at first, when I knew nothing, when I was learning, our restaurant seemed interesting to me. Only occasionally, as I ran frantically with the dirty dishes, almost skidding on the turns, would I recall with anguish that my wife had left for a world much more beautiful than mine, that she was smoking, drinking, and fucking, going to parties well-dressed and fragrant every night, that those making love with her were our customers, their world had stolen Elena away from me. It wasn’t all that simple, of course, but they, our slicked-down, smoothed-out American customers, our gentlemen – America forgive me, but they had swiped, ripped off, forcibly taken from me my dearest possession, my little Russian maiden.
I would be carrying out the dirty dishes, walking down the aisle between the tables with a tray of soiled plates held out in front of me, and these visions of Elena betraying me would appear. I would break out in hot and cold sweat, cast glances full of hatred at our customers. I was not a waiter, I did not spit in their food, I was a poet pretending to be a waiter: I would have blasted them all to hell, but I could not play dirty little tricks on them, was not capable of it.
I’ll blow up your world! I thought. I clear away your leavings while my wife fucks and you amuse yourselves with her, for the sole reason that there’s an inequality: she has a cunt, for which there are buyers – you – and I don’t have a cunt. I’ll blow up your world, and these lads will do it with me – the underlings of this world! I thought passionately, my glance resting on one of my fellow busboys – the Chinaman Wong, or the dark-browed, criminal Patricio, or the Argentinian Carlos.
What else was I supposed to feel for this world, for those men? I was no idiot, comparisons with the USSR held no comfort for me. I did not live in the world of statistics and living standards and purchasing power. My pain forced me to hate our customers and to love the kitchen staff and my friends in misfortune. A normal position, you must agree. Strictly normal, unobjective but strictly normal. To my credit it should be said that I was consistent: I had likewise hated the masters of life in the USSR, the party apparatus and the numerous ruling elite. In my hatred for the strong of this world I did not want to be reasonable, did not want to consider assorted explanatory causes, or responses such as these:
“But you’ve just arrived in America -”
“You have to understand, poetry-writing isn’t a profession here -”
And so on.
Fuck your world where there’s no place for me, I thought in despair. If I can’t destroy it, at least I’ll die a fine death in the attempt, along with others like me. I had no concrete image of how this would come about, but from past experience I knew that he who seeks fate is always provided an opportunity; I would not remain without one.
Wong, a young Chinese who came from Hong Kong, had a special appeal for me. He always smiled at me, and although I had trouble understanding him, we managed to communicate somehow. He was my first teacher in the sphere of my uncomplicated profession – he spent a lot of time with me the first week, since I didn’t know anything: I didn’t know where to get the butter, I didn’t know where I was supposed to go for linen. He helped me patiently. On our short break we would go down to the basement cafeteria for the hotel workers and eat lunch together, I would ask him about his life. He was a typical Chinese – lived in Chinatown, of course, and was mad about karate, took a class from a master twice a week.
Once we had some time left after eating, and went up to the coat-room. He laughingly showed me a pornographic magazine with Chinese girls in it, although he claimed they were Japanese: Chinese women were decent and wouldn’t have their pictures in such magazines. I made some coarse jokes about the magazine and Chinese women; Wong had a good laugh. I liked this magazine better than similar ones with Western women, this one did not cause me the pain that I felt when I happened to see magazines with obscenely sprawling blondes. Blondes were associated with Elena, and I would shake with agitation over the inside-out peepkas, the show of internal organs and labial epidermis. The Chinese magazine was comforting. It held no pain for me.
The waiters were dressed differently from us busboys, much more impressively, I envied their uniform. The short red coat with epaulettes and the high-waisted black trousers made them look like toreadors. Tall, handsome Nicholas the Greek, with, his broad shoulders; thick-lipped, wisecracking Johnny, almost as tall as Nicholas, but big and heavy; Luciano the Italian, who looked like a pimp, with his narrow forehead and agile narrow frame – I worked with them all, received my 15 percent of the tips from them at the end of breakfast and lunch. Every day I took home $10 to $20 in tips.
The waiters were all different. Al, for example, a tall, jolly black guy who was always late – he arrived after all the other waiters, and I often helped him set the tables – gave me more tips than anyone else. A certain Tommy, a guy in glasses and tight short pants, gave me less than anyone.
Two old Chinese waiters – they always worked together, I don’t remember their names – were stingy and not at all like Wong, who was a Chinaman of another generation. The gloomy Spaniard Luis did his job with a totally estranged expression, but the Chinese worried a lot about their work and kept trying to teach me things, although it was ten days before I happened to work with them, and by that time I had fully mastered my simple-minded profession. I liked working with Al and Nicholas best; they were jolly and talked to me more than anyone else. Nicholas often encouraged me with exclamations like “Good boy! Good boy!” I was in love with Nicholas. He was a hot-tempered man, though, and was capable of shouting at me sometimes. What with the rush and the everlasting flying from kitchen to dining room and back, I had lapses like everyone else, and I never took offense at him. Once I saw Nicholas crossly hurl away a heap of pennies that had been given him as a tip; as I say, he was a hot-tempered fellow. In my ignorance of the language I missed a lot in his conversation, but once, sitting in the cafeteria with Nicholas, Johnny, and Tommy, I heard him say hotly, “Public opinion holds that people who become waiters are looking for easy money and therefore shove their dollar…” I didn’t understand the rest, but it was clear that Nicholas was offended by public opinion. Our work, both theirs and mine, was really very tense, tedious, and nerve-racking.
I am not a slave by nature, waiting on people is hard for me. This came out when our manager, Fred, and headwaiters Bob and Ricardo had lunch on the side balcony, as they liked to do. I got very irritated whenever I happened to be serving the side tables nearest the balcony – they never failed to send me on some errand, although this was not part of my duties. When I served a glass of milk to plump young Bob, my insides would get all knotted up: I did not like to be, could not be, a servant. Sometimes a woman or a girl would lunch with our bosses. Who would ever notice me – a servant is just a servant – yet it would seem to me that she was looking at me and scorning me. And I could not tell her that only a year ago I had been friends with the ambassadors of several countries, I had had good times with them at private parties. I remember one party where there were twelve ambassadors, not secretaries but genuine ambassadors, among them the ambassadors of Sweden and Mexico, Iran and Laos, and the host himself was my friend the Venezuelan ambassador Burelli, a poet and a very fine man. His embassy on Yermolova Street was like home to Elena and me. Nor could I explain to her that in my country I had been one of the best poets. Everyone would have laughed had I said so. When I came to work at the hotel I put down all sorts of foolishness about my past on the application, said I had always worked as a waiter in Kharkov and Moscow restaurants. That was bullshit.
Actually I was leading a double life. The manager was pleased with me, the waiters too. Sometimes Bob the headwaiter taught me something; I would summon up all my acting talent and listen, assiduously wide-eyed, as he advised me to fill the glasses as well as the pitchers with water and ice before work, so that I could serve the water right in the glasses without dela
y when there was a great influx of customers. I would look Bob in the eye and say “Yes, sir!” every couple of minutes. He did not know what was in my heart and mind. “Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” Bob was pleased. But I was leading a double life. And hating the customers more and more. Not merely because of Elena, but mainly because of her. When we happened to have a few minutes’ respite I would fold and stack napkins – to have them ready at hand – and I would recall involuntarily, with pain, I could not help recalling, the events of the last months…
She informed me that she had a lover on the nineteenth of December, in the terrible cold and the dim evening light of our tragic Lexington Avenue apartment. Shaken and humiliated, I told her, “Sleep with whomever you wish, I love you madly, I want only to live with you and care for you,” and I kissed the knee uncovered by her robe. And that was how we lived.
Even this decision she attributed to my weakness, not to love. At the beginning, after the nineteenth of December, she was still forcing herself not to refuse me in love, trying to make love with me. From some quirk of my constitution I wanted her every day then, I had a constant hard-on. In my diary, if I summon the courage to look in it, I discover joyful short notes: I had made love with her four times, or twice, or once. But she grew more and more insolent, and gradually our coitions – no other word will do, so solemn were they for me – became very infrequent.
At last she completely stopped making love with me and said openly aloud that she wanted to leave me. I wandered in the twilight of my unconscious, masturbated at night in the bathroom after donning Elena’s – she had just come home and was already asleep – still-warm pantyhose and panties; often both the one and the other were spotted with semen, someone else’s of course, and I wanted but one happiness, to fuck my very own wife. Thus a delirious idea gradually took hold in me – to rape Elena.
One sunny, very sunny, frosty day, from a cultured salesman with a little beard, in a store on Broadway, I bought a pair of handcuffs. They were… well, everyone knows what kind of handcuffs you buy on Broadway for seven dollars. By the time I got home I was in complete hysterics over this purchase. After testing and closely examining the handcuffs, I had discovered with horror that there was a button to open them without the aid of a key, that is, they were steel and apparently strong, but for play, for children. There was even a notice that children over three could play with the handcuffs. A pitiful story, very pitiful.
I burst into sobs of pity for myself and my body, which was forced to resort to such nightmarish methods to get a caress. Even my attempt at rape was a failure. I howled, I wept a very long time, and then, gasping and weeping, found a remedy after all. I took a serrated kitchen knife and in half an hour, never ceasing to weep, sawed the release buttons off the handcuffs and made them real, they would open now only with the aid of a key. As I did this I saw myself from outside and decided, as a writer, that this gruesome scene was fit for Hollywood: Limonov weeping with grief over a pair of handcuffs for his beloved and filing off the safety button with a kitchen knife.
I never did put the handcuffs to use, or the rope either. The dream of raping Elena went hand in hand with the dream of killing her. Already insane, two weeks before buying the handcuffs, I had taken up the rug, the preposterous pink rug in our bedroom, and installed a rope snare under it. I fastened one end of the rope to a pipe in the corner of the room; from the other end I made a slip noose, so that as a last resort, when it became more than I could bear, I could strangle her easily and noiselessly. Then I thought of killing myself by means of… the means of killing myself kept changing in my imagination. The rope lay there quite a long time, sometimes I think it was what saved Elena and me from death. Lying there beside Elena at night, strangers, neighbors, she under her blanket and I under mine, breathing the smell of alcohol and smoke that emanated from her – she had taken a liking to marijuana, cocaine, and other delights – lying there, she snored faintly in her sleep, exhausted from orgasms with hateful American men (this is why I can never love you again, America!), despite all, I was comforted to remember the rope. Despite all, I knew that if I reached under my pillow the end of the rope would be in my hands; it would be nothing to throw the noose over the head of the little tormentress lying beside me. The possibility, the ease, of ending it all comforted me, and perhaps that is why I escaped the outbursts that could have led to murder: I was sure I could always kill her, I could do it at any time. Thanks to the rope, some part of the malice and madness gradually left me…
All these horrors came to mind while I folded napkins. Nicholas returned me to reality – he thrust an empty coffeepot into my hands and I flew to the kitchen, noticing along the way that the young woman and the corpulent man who looked like a gangster had finished their breakfast and left, and that Fred, the manager himself, was clearing the table and spreading a clean tablecloth, when I was the one who was supposed to do that. My blunder sobered me up completely; I ran to the kitchen so fast that on the turns I had to grab at the wall to keep from falling. I wonder what she is to him, I thought as I ran. Certainly not his daughter – either his wife or his mistress. He doesn’t look like someone from a pulp and paper convention, but then why the fuck is he up so early? With such a beautiful woman I personally could not be dragged out of bed before dinner…
As you see, our restaurant was also frequented by women. They were many fewer than the men, I stared at them with caution, disbelief, and forgive me… with delight. Alas. I stared at them in a peculiar way – I scorned them, hated them, simultaneously realizing that their pastimes would never be open to me. They had an advantage over me, the advantage of birth. I had everlastingly served them in this life, invited them places, undressed them, fucked them, and they had lain silent, or cried out, or lied and pretended.
Even in the past I had sometimes suffered acute attacks of hostility to women, genuine malicious hostility. Then came Elena, and the hostility subsided, hid. Now, after everything, I was suffering acute envy toward Elena, and since she embodied for me the whole female sex, envy toward women in general. The biological injustice roused my indignation. Why must I love, seek, fuck, preserve – so many more verbs could be piled on – while she must only use. I think my hatred proceeded from envy that I had no cunt. For some reason it seemed to me that a cunt was more perfect than a prick.
Bitches, I thought, staring at the well-cared-for girls and women arriving in our restaurant. Once my fellow busboys caught one of those stares. The busboy Patricio, a dark-browed criminal type with false teeth, pointed to the woman I had stared at and asked sarcastically, “Do you like ladies?” I said yes, I had been married three times. Patricio and Carlos looked at me in disbelief. “Maybe you like men?” Patricio asked with interest, breathing alcohol at me. He used to finish off the liquor the customers left in their glasses. Later I began doing it too, usually going behind a sort of screen. Now and then I also finished off the food the customers hadn’t eaten. Being an Oriental, I’m very fond of fatty meat, for example. The customers left the fat, but I wasn’t so picky.
The conversation about women and men ended with a retort that delighted Carlos and Patricio: that in general I liked women, but I might also change the object of my love and in the future love men. Then Ricardo the headwaiter appeared and dispersed us; one of us ran for butter, one for napkins, one to clear empty dirty plates from under the customers’ noses.
When I started at the restaurant, I am ashamed to say I had the fleeting thought that I would be in society here and could make some contacts. Oh, how stupid I was! The waiter – never mind the waiter, even the headwaiter himself – is separated from the customers as if by an iron wall. No intimacy occurred. The first few days I tried to use my face and figure to attract the attention of the customers, of all the beautiful women and the men I found appealing. I thought they would have to notice me. Only later did I realize that they had no fucking need of me. The notion of intimacy, contacts, was sheer nonsense, gentlemen, and it had occurred to me only because I
was not yet quite well from my tragedy.
My fellow workers didn’t treat me badly. The Latin-Americans called me “Russia.” Why they conferred on me the name of the country I had fled I don’t know. Perhaps they found that name more pleasing than my own, which I had brought from Russia but which was quite common in America – Edvard, or Edward. My Chinese friend Wong generally doted on me, especially after I helped him with the linen. Each of the busboys had linen duty every third day. we would bring up from the basement, from the laundry, a huge box of clean linen and unload it in the storeroom, where we kept all sorts of things in addition to linen – candles, sugar, pepper, and other necessaries. I loved the storeroom, loved its smell of clean linen and spices. Sometimes I ran in there in the middle of work, to change a towel or quickly finish chewing a piece of meat left on the plate of some surfeited customer, and then ran on. Well, so once I helped Wong unload the linen after work and put it away on the storeroom shelves – this goes much faster with two people, but for some reason they didn’t do it that way there. Wong thanked me so profusely that I felt uncomfortable.
Another day he took my little Collins dictionary and looked up the word “good,” then showed it to me and said with a broad smile, “That’s you.” I am much prouder of this lad’s praise than of all the compliments paid to me and my poetry at various times in my life. “I’m good!” Wong had acknowledged it, probably I really wasn’t too bad. I would have liked to be friends with Wong, but unfortunately it didn’t work out, gentlemen, I had to forsake the Old Bourbon.
It's Me, Eddie Page 4
