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 shagassed over here, and having seen what the life is like, many if not all would shagass 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 t
ook 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?”
It's Me, Eddie Page 19
