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 c
heck. 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.
Roseanne
She was the first American woman I fucked. It sounds fantastic, but I fucked her on July 4, 1976 – the day of America’s Bicentennial. Commit this symbolic event to memory, gentlemen, and let us go on to Roseanne herself.
Kirill again, solely Kirill. He was sick of his role as interpreter for Alexander and me. We needed to go to the Village Voice, where we had decided to take our open letter to the editor of the New York Times. We had written the letter apropos of our unnoticed demonstration against the Times. Kirill said, “I can’t go, go by yourselves, why can’t you go by yourselves?”
“Listen, Kirill,” I said, “this is a serious, delicate matter, and with our barbaric English it would be foolish to go alone. We’d just ruin everything.”
“But I can’t,” Kirill said, “I’m busy. Take someone else.” “Who?” I said.
“Well, there’s Roseanne. You remember, I pointed her out to you at the exhibit at the R
ussian gallery. Over thirty, a bit of a weirdo.”
“All right, Kirill,” I said, “call her up and ask her to go to the Village Voice with us.”
“No,” Kirill said, “I’m afraid of her, I think she wants to fuck me. You’d better call her yourself, I’ll give you the number.” “All right,” I said, “let’s have it.”
I reached her the next day, and she invited me over that same evening. She was having some friends, an out-of-work history instructor and his wife. I arrived there all charged up, I needed relationships in any shape or form, and any relationship made me glad. She lived, and still does, in a wonderful penthouse apartment. The windows of the long hallway and living room all look out on the Hudson River. On the other side of the living room there’s a door out to the terrace – properly, a large fenced-off section of the roof. In addition she has a bedroom and a study. Next door there is another apartment that belongs to her, of smaller size, which she rents out. The whole apartment is as windswept as a sailing ship, and it recalls a sailing ship in its brightness and whiteness, the surge of the wind in it, and the Hudson River beyond the windows. The air is good, it’s easy to breathe there. The only thing about the apartment that’s a little hard to take is Roseanne herself.
A day or two later we met again and went to the Village Voice with the letter, which she had recast in her own style, cleaning up our excessively leftist political phraseology, making the letter more American. Alexander and I had consented to these revisions.
Even then I noticed her irritation at having to work, type, think, although at that time she was still controlling herself. The letter was practically nothing, less than a page; she agonized over it, while behind her back I scrutinized the piles of books in her study. But then, when she had typed the letter she was very proud of herself. Observing the smile that distorted her face, a strange smile, gentlemen, slightly degenerate, her good facial features notwithstanding, this grimace exposed a mental, psychical defectiveness – observing her face, I had a sudden clear insight. A schiz.
It's Me, Eddie Page 21
