This passed quickly. After all, by now it was the end of summer, not March or April. I didn’t settle down into a wonderful mood, but when I went into the house the old man had finished singing “The Peddlers” and little Katenka had appeared, a small sleepy creature about two years old, or even a little younger. The Bulgarian father dressed the creature, and she began moving around among us, mostly in my vicinity, uttering sounds and smiling at me. I caught myself watching only Katenka; the conversation between John and sweet Vanya held no interest for me. They were saying something about the secondhand cars that stood along the road to the barracks. The cars were for sale, it seemed, and cheap. A white Pontiac cost only $260. At the price of the Pontiac I turned off, because I had made up my mind: I picked up this Katenka and set her on my lap.
Good Lord, what did I know about children, poor unhappy frightened creature that I was? Not a fucking thing. The little plant had to be entertained. On my head was an old straw hat of John’s; I kept taking it off and putting it on, trying to summon up a smile on the baby’s face. Although at her age the little girl was closer to nature, to leaves and grass, than to people, she understood me. She didn’t cry, she didn’t want to frighten me in any way, she put her little wee hand on my chest – my shirt was unbuttoned – and stroked me. Her hand was hot, and from it there spread into my body a sense of animal comfort such as I had not felt since I slept with my arms around Elena.
Suddenly it occurred to me that once upon a time I had greatly disliked children, and how happy I was now with this creature on my lap. She would grow up, she’d be beautiful – sweet Vanya wasn’t bad; I hadn’t seen his wife. God grant you happiness, little animal, I thought. But if He does, let it be for your whole life. God forbid you should know happiness and then live all the rest of your life in unhappiness. The most terrible torment.
The little wild animal sat on my lap, and fool that I was, I didn’t know what to do with it. All I did was carefully support its little back and make funny faces at it. I was awkward. I have never had children. How strong I would be now if I had such a Katenka, I would have an incentive to live. I wouldn’t send the child to school, the hell with your schools. I would dress her in wonderful clothes, the most expensive; I’d buy her a big wise dog…
Such were my futile dreams as I gazed on someone else’s child. Why futile, you say? Of course they were futile. I could no longer have a child by the woman I loved; I would not have loved a child by an unloved woman. I did not need an unloved child.
I shouldn’t hold her so long on my lap. They might notice, I wouldn’t want that. To John I was unprincipled, desperate Ed, a pretty good helper, for whom he intended a future as manager of his business. He’s that way, John is, he’ll have everything. Not for nothing does he live like a Spartan: doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and perhaps doesn’t sleep with women, considers them to be too ruinous a pastime for him at present. He’ll have everything he wants, John will. Only not for long, because this whole era is coming to an end.
John made a tape of sweet Vanya singing a few excerpts from some Bulgarian songs and the famous “Moscow Nights.” He sang them gently and touchingly. I let baby Katenka go, set her carefully on the floor, and thought with bitterness that I had no right to relax, I must keep a tight hold oh myself. If you don’t, you die, and I had learned from a conversation among Roseanne’s guests – they were discussing the book Life after Life – that suicide changes nothing, the suffering remains, a dead man experiences the same feelings as the living. I wouldn’t want to plunge into eternity in the state I’m in now. They had convinced me. That meant I must overcome. Therefore I took leave of my host with exaggerated distinctness, then gave Katenka, who sat in her papa’s arms, a light touch on the shoulder and said, “Good-bye, baby!” I jumped up to my seat, and we drove off in the darkness, from time to time conversing, from time to time falling silent. Traffic was heavy, it was Sunday, people were driving from vacation areas, and therefore it took us a while to get to Manhattan.
“Look at that car ahead of us,” John said as we crawled along the George Washington Bridge. “It costs eighteen thousand. My vehicle is for making money, his is for wasting money. I bet the guy driving it’s a cheat, he got rich off fraud and drugs. How are you worse than him? But here you sit in my van, and you’ve got nothing.”
John said it viciously, and I thought that he was far from being as simple as he seemed. And not very contented. He worked like a horse and got tired, his face was lined. Maybe I was wrong about the barricades. Maybe, God willing, we’d be on the same side? Something resembling class hatred had glinted in his words.
“What’s the name of that car?” I asked.
“Mercedes-Benz!” he replied. Staring at the car, he added, “Fuckin’ shit!”
My friend New York
I am a man of the street. I have to my credit very few people-friends and many friend-streets. They, the streets, see me at all hours of the day and night; I often sit on them, press my buns to their sidewalks, cast my shadow on their walls, prop my elbow or my back against their lampposts. I think they love me because I love them and pay attention to them like nobody else in New York. As a matter of fact, Manhattan ought to put up a monument to me, or a memorial plaque with the following inscription: “To Edward Limonov, New York’s number one pedestrian, with love from Manhattan!”
I once covered more than three hundred blocks in one day, on foot. Why? I was out for a walk. I generally go almost everywhere on foot. Out of my $278 a month I begrudge spending fifty cents to ride anywhere, especially since my sorties have no set destination, or the destination is indefinite. For example, a place to buy myself a notebook of a particular format. They don’t have it at Woolworth’s or at another Woolworth’s or at Alexander’s, and I march down to the sidewalk markets on Canal Street to scrounge up the right notebook. All other formats irritate me.
I am very fond of tramping around. Really, without exaggeration, I probably walk more than anybody else in New York. Unless there’s some tramp who walks more than I do, but I doubt it. So far as I can see, bums are all immobile, more apt to lie still or putter sluggishly about in their rags.
I walked a great deal in March and April, my most terrible months. In the mornings my leg muscles were locked, every step caused me hellish pain, I would have to walk in this pain for half an hour before it wore off. The pain would have been less, of course, had I worn shoes with lower heels, but I would never consent to make that concession – I have always worn nothing but high heels, and I ask to be laid in my grave, if I have one, wearing incredible shoes of some kind, high heels without fail.
I was visiting the individual neighborhoods of New York in expectation of some sort of encounter. Sometimes I clearly sensed this and walked especially purposefully to seize the opportunity, to be favored with an encounter. Most of the time I walked as if just for fun, as if it were my heart’s desire to take a stroll, yet in fact my goal was the same, to be honored with an encounter. In my faraway childhood, my nowremote past, I tramped the main street of my provincial hometown the same way, waiting to encounter someone who would take me and lead me into another life. Whom did I hope to meet? A man? A woman? A friend, or love? Oh, the image I had in mind was very nonspecific, but I waited, tremblingly waited. How many empty evenings there were, how many sad and lonely homecomings, how many terrible reflections before sleep, until I encountered Anna and from an ordinary lad, with her help, created a poet.
I walk that same way now. Again I have nothing. I have established my poetic fate, whether or not it will last is no longer the issue, it’s done, it exists, in Russia my life is already legend, and now I walk free, empty, and terrible in the Great City, amusing, saving, and distracting myself with its streets, and I seek the encounter that will begin my new fate.
From Kierkegaard, who lived in the nineteenth century, I learned that only a man who has despaired can properly appreciate life. He is at once the unhappiest and the happiest of men. Oh, I have appreciated
life, how I have appreciated it, I howl and weep over life and do not fear it. On every little street I peer attentively at the people: is it he, is it she, is it they? To hope is folly, but I hope. Again and again I go out on the streets, the streets of my great, boundless city – of course it is mine, since my life is happening here – I seek, watch, peer… and return to the hotel. Often I fall face down on the bed and weep, and only malice gives me the strength to get up every day at eight in the morning, clench my teeth, read the American newspapers. I curse and damn everything in the world, but I live, and oh, although love has betrayed me, I shall never cease to seek love. But it will not be a love for one person, who would betray me again, no, no more, I want no more betrayals, it will be a different love.
What do I seek? Either a brotherhood of stern men, revolutionaries and terrorists, in love and devotion to whom my soul could rest at last; or I seek a religious sect preaching love, people’s love for one another, love at all costs.
My darling, where will you find it, such love?
My darling, where will you find it, this sect where they will comfort and caress you, lay your head in their laps. Sleep, my weary darling, sleep. Nowhere in the world is there such a sect. Once it was in Elena’s lap. Where is there such a sect now? Why am I not surrounded by its affectionate inmates? Mimi the ballerina will playfully stand on her head, Pascalino will tousle my hair, and George will kiss my knee. “You have come to us, you are weary, here are wine and bread, and we will wash your feet. Poor weary darling, be with us as long as you like, and we won’t go off to work and leave you alone tomorrow like Papa and Mama, like a wife, or like children going to school. We’ll be with you a long, happy time, and perhaps later – once in a while this happens – you will leave, when you want to, and the glint of our old buildings will be in your eye…”
Brotherhood and people’s love – that is what I dreamed of, that is what I wanted to encounter.
None of it is easy to find. I’ve been walking for six months now, and how much longer will I walk? God knows…
I walk around New York – my great house – lightly clad, not much overburdened with clothes, and almost never carry anything with me, never encumber my hands. I know all the street people of New York. I know where they can be found, and the spot where each of them curls up to sleep, whether it’s the stone floor under the arch of the boarded-up church at Third Avenue and Thirtieth Street, or in the revolving door of the bank at Lexington and Sixtieth. Certain bums prefer to sleep on the steps of Carnegie Hall, to be closer to art. I know the dirtiest, hairiest, fattest bum in New York. I think he’s crazy because he always wears a weird smile. By day he usually makes himself comfortable on a bench in Central Park, not far from the entrance. In the evening he moves to Sixth Avenue in the Forties. Once I found him reading – guess what – Russkoe Delo, the newspaper I used to work on. Moreover, he was holding it the right way, not upside down. Could he be Russian?
I know a place where, at various times of the day, you can see a red-bearded man in the costume of a Scottish highlander, playing the bagpipes.
I am familiar with all of New York’s blind men and their dogs. The black man who sits on Fifth Avenue with his rabbit, usually across from St. Patrick’s, gives me a friendly hello and a smile.
I am acquainted with a bearded artist and his wife who sell paintings of wild animals – lions, tigers, and other lovable beasts of prey. I say hello to them and they answer me. Admittedly I can’t buy anything from them.
I know the man who sells shashlik in Central Park. I know well the Italian drummer who often pounds a drum near Carnegie Hall.
I am acquainted with a black saxophonist and a fellow who plays the violin at the doors of Broadway theaters.
I know by sight the joint-sellers in Central Park, at the Public Library, and in Washington Square.
I know a young fellow with stubby legs and an athletic torso. In the summer he is always dressed in shorts and a weirdly cut undershirt. His time is divided between the Public Library and the distribution of advertising flyers near the arch in Washington Square.
If I wanted to enumerate them all, describe their clothes and faces, I could go on and on; it would take a lot of time.
I have in my memory knowledge of another type too.
I know, for example, where you can find, any place in New York, a liquor store that stays open late at night; or which way the tiniest little street in SoHo, the Village, or Chinatown turns.
I live in a neighborhood where the world’s most expensive companies – General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, and others – have their offices, but I roam along the dirty Bowery, boring Lafayette Street, I dig up all sorts of shit in the sidewalk markets on Canal Street.
I know where you can take a leak, if need be, anywhere in New York. I know the safe places. Walking toward Chinatown along Canal Street, for example, you can go in the nearest entrance of the courthouse, and on the second floor, up the stairway to the left, you can take a wonderful leak in the stinking men’s room.
I know where you can buy two huge fresh fish for a dollar, and where you can buy the same fish at three for a dollar. I know where there’s cheap paper, and where, in the tangle of streets, there’s a store with cheap five-cent pens. Oh, what I know! It would suffice for ten normal New Yorkers.
The best display window in New York, without question, is at Henri Bendel on Fifty-seventh Street. The most exquisite, the most sophisticated. Its gaggle of lesbians, girls grouped in weird poses, excites me to sexual arousal, the basest lust. I want to climb in there, into the window, and fuck them. Sometimes I go and watch three strange men change the clothes on them. This happens at night. Bendel’s changes and rearranges its lesbians very frequently; one day it has them trampling dollars underfoot like fallen leaves, the next day whispering together, clustered in threes and fours.
I have secret relations with the mannequins. When I see them at night, slender, mystically naked or half undressed, flooded with the incredibly ghastly light of the display window, I am much more attracted to them than to live women, who have been no riddle to me for a long time now and who have but one solution. I spy on the undressed mannequins with voluptuous curiosity, much as when we placed a mirror under the school desk, as children, and tried to see the cunt of our teacher, our young little French instructor. I remember how frightened and shaken I was when I crawled under the desk in my turn and saw the dark folds and hairs (she went without underpants in summer). Now, when I feel like fucking all the time but don’t arrange it for myself, the mannequins also frighten me. With pleasure and fright I think how I could tear aside their skirts, scarves, and other frippery to get at that place, and suddenly it would turn out they had a real live peepka. But forgive me these mystical sexual daydreams. It’s because I’m not fucking much.
The most exquisite clothes in New York can be seen on Madison Avenue between Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, at Julie, which is also called the Artisans Gallery. There is something weird and fantastical about the clothes in this shop, a fairytale quality and at the same time depravity. They drive me wild with delight. Nearly all the suits, dresses, and masks in this gallery are constructed, not sewn, constructed the way a building is constructed; or carved, like sculptures. I love a holiday mood, effect, surprise. This is the only shop that surprises me, these are clothes for rare, strange natures, but unfortunately you have to be rich to buy them.
I dream of someday, somehow, getting some money and buying something from this shop for Elena, my former spouse, now my merry widow. She too is mad about clothes like these. A present from this shop would make her happy, I think. Such clothes would be becoming to no one else, only to Elena. Who else could wear a feather camisole, or the weird dresses, the wild play of fantasy.
I once got into the Diplomat Cabaret Theatre for a performance of Le Bellybutton and saw the sex star Marilyn Chambers. In one of her numbers Marilyn Chambers wore a feather bra from this shop. I recognized both the style and the execution at once. I d
on’t suppose even Marilyn Chambers can afford to dress entirely in things from here. Too expensive.
I could live in this shop and never leave it. I often come and look at its small display windows, peer in, sometimes even go inside. I’m bashful about being here too much, I don’t have any money, all I have is a taste for the unusual and strange, that’s all. At times I feel like beginning to make, to construct, something similar; I did do tailoring in Russia, and I have to my credit several crazy self-made objects, among them the 114-patch “Blazer of the National Hero,” and a jacket sewn of white filter cloth six millimeters thick. Perhaps I’ll do it someday…
Another reason for my sorties around New York, apart from my abnormal desire to encounter someone or something, is the desire to distract myself from my eternally half-erect, nagging cock and from learning English. The two together cause me to fall into a terrible half sleep, a doze with nightmarish apparitions.
So I roll my trousers up to the knee, my white trousers with patches on the seat, which I’m forever washing in Tide in my hotel room; I put on my unvarying buskin sandals, which have already survived a summer and have lost half their straps; they are wooden and look like some Oriental structure, a bullock cart or well sweep, wood and leather; I take off my one and only summer shirt, white with blue checks, and I trudge downtown along Second Avenue in August. I walk on the sunny side of the street, of course, only the sunny side, never otherwise, the sunny side in any kind of heat, that’s why I’m always so tanned. As I pass Fifty-third Street, I glance to my left. There’s a very good wine shop down there, very pleasant and nice. It has bottles standing and lying in barrels, on shelves, in carts, in the middle, on the walls, wherever you look. You can buy any wine in this store, any beverage, it has a pleasant smell, and a huge bottle of French champagne, which very likely stands as high as my waist, costs between $162 and $175. That bottle is another thing I want to buy, if I ever come into any money, and intend to present to Elena. She is capable of appreciating it – she loves champagne, and a bottle this big will delight her. She’ll be glad, and I will too. Elena is an uncommon woman, our tastes coincide, that’s why I feel so bad about her. She’s very beautiful herself and used to love the beautiful, and though she is no longer what she was, though life has broken her, in my heart she is always the same.
It's Me, Eddie Page 27
