It's Me, Eddie

by Edward Limonov

  Epilogue

  I’m sitting on my balcony on a banged-up chair in the sleepy October sunlight, studying an already old summer magazine that I fished out of a trash can and brought back to my room to practice my English.

  Here they are, those who have behaved in exemplary fashion in this world, its A and B students. Here they are, those who have earned their own money. He has seated his overnourished ass on the edge of a swimming pool, the pool is streaked with blue. She, wearing a swimsuit, thin, her face just horsey enough to be chic, holds in her hand a glass of Campari. His glass stands beside him on the edge of the pool.

  The caption reads:

  “You’re having a long hot day around the pool and you’re ready to have your usual favorite summer drink.

  “But today you feel like a change. So you do something different. You have Campari and orange juice instead…”

  I’ve never had a long hot day around the pool. I confess to never having swum in a pool in my life. Yesterday I had a cold disgusting morning at the welfare center on Fourteenth Street. When I got there it was half-past seven. Outside the closed doors welfare recipients stood in line in both directions, hunched against the morning cold.

  They don’t take many pains with their appearance, these fellows. Some have a growth of stubble, some are dressed in shapeless overalls, hand-me-downs. Many are hung over, some already drunk. One guy, who has obviously been smoking or shooting up since early morning, keeps dropping his papers. I help him pick them up a few times, but after half an hour he starts falling down periodically himself. Fortunately he has some friends in line, they arrange him, prop him up somehow so that he won’t fall. People on their way to work try to give our line a wide berth, our people throw them grim and challenging glances. We stand, say nothing, wait. We’re cold. After more than an hour they let us in. The policeman jokes with us. Since we are assumed to be slow-witted and obtuse, we all hold slips of paper in hand, and a man standing at the door glances at them and reshuffles our line accordingly.

  “To the railing,” the policeman says, and moves us along to the railing. He has to make room for yet another line beside us. In exchange for our white slips we receive red ones with numbers. Mine is number 19. This is not a very lucky number for me. But what the hell, I think, and in the company of my fellows I cross over to the next line, leading to the elevator, to which we are also admitted in groups. Although the group is large, everyone tries to crowd into the elevator at once so as not to get left behind. Cod knows what might happen if you got left behind.

  Casual visitors going up in the elevator without any number slips huddle fearfully in our midst. We are going to the fifth floor. Jokes and oaths aimed at the chance visitors are heard. The atmosphere reminds me of being drafted into the Soviet army; the draftees too had a psychology nicely summed up in the words “I’m a goner,” and a sense of isolation from the rest of society.

  The elevator delivers us to an enormous hall with rows of desks, we put our red slips in a basket by the railing and sit down to wait. A hall like a field, except that the desks and chairs make it different from a field. The whole place is painted the unforgettable color of bureaucracy. And it has that same smell, the smell of a barracks, a prison camp, a railroad station, any place where many poor people are congregated.

  A black boy sits down beside me. Judging by the white band on his forehead, his hairstyle and distinctive clothing, he is a homosexual. We look at each other appraisingly for a while, then avert our eyes. We’re here on business, the need to listen keeps distracting us. The staff workers call out a name from time to time, and names are hard to hear in a hall like a field. For this reason an incipient excitement stirred by my neighbor’s languid eyes quickly fades. A welfare center is not the best place for generating love.

  We have to wait a long time. People get irritable. A certain Mr. Acosta, wearing a cape and a straw hat, a small man with a little Mexican mustache, gets irritable and shouts why aren’t they calling him, Acosta, when people who arrived after him are already sitting discussing their needs with the staff. He’s very funny and at the same time villainous, this Acosta. If I were a film director I’d make an actor out of him.

  A tidy black boy in glasses, from Trinidad, is telling his story to a girl with an exhausted face and a hoarse voice. The girl has evidently been through so much in this life that she’s not afraid of a fucking thing, and for that reason she’s a kind and simple person. When the boy from Trinidad is summoned and walks away, the girl starts a friendly conversation with an indignant fat man in overalls who has a Burger King bag in his hands. The girl is open to the world, I have fleeting thoughts about them all, I want her to rest, this exhausted thin little girl in her black jacket, in her slacks and her high-heeled boots.

  The little cripple with the short legs I know from somewhere, she even greets me. And here’s a hooknosed, very ugly girl, ugly to the point of exotic charm, tall and neat in her denim outfit, evidently here for the first time. Sitting in front of me, she fidgets, keeps jerking her knee and constantly glancing around at me. I try to give her a level gaze. I must not deceive her by making any overture, I’m not courageous today. Gradually, after considering the way my slacks cut into my poopka and the way I’m poured into my short little jacket, the girl begins to realize that I’m an odd duck, and she turns her attention to me less and less often.

  If I had my way, I would want to comfort them all. If, in order to do it, I had to fondle the hooknosed girl, fuck her, take her to live with me, then that’s what I’d want. And the exhausted girl, too. And the boy with the headband. And Mr. Acosta, he’s a good fellow. And this one, with the amulets and the hat. And the drug addict. We’d have a ranch with room for them all. And for Carol. And Chris. And Johnny. We should even take Roseanne – I’ve been unjust to her.

  I spent six hours at the welfare center that day.

  Swimming pool. It would be nice sometime to have the honor of a swim in a pool. Some long hot day I will. And I’ll have Campari and orange juice.

  I tear myself away from the magazine and look down. All summer they were wrecking the buildings under my window, the din was insufferable. No buildings now – a level area covered with brick dust. Autumn. Time for me to move on, the Hotel Winslow has outlived its usefulness. Time to move on.

  You think I never yearn for slavery? I too yearn sometimes. For a white house under the trees, for a large family, for a grandmother, grandfather, father, and mother, for a wife and children. For work, which would buy all of me, including my mind, but in return I would have a fabulous house with a lawn, with flowers, with a wealth of household appliances, a clean little smiling American wife, a freckled, jam-smeared son in football cleats…

  But why dream – it’s futile. Fate is fate, I’ve already gone too far. I’ll never have any of that. The family will not sit down around the evening table; nor will I, a lawyer or doctor, tell what a complex case I had today, or what a difficult but interesting operation.

  I’m a punk. I’m on welfare. I have to cook for myself now, eat shchi. I’m alone, I have to think of myself. Who else will take care of me? The wind of chaos, harsh and terrible, has destroyed my family. I also have parents, far away, halfway round the globe from here, on a green little street in the Ukraine. Papa and Mama. Mama’s always writing me about nature: when the cherries bloomed under the window, and what good jam she’s made from the apricots that she and Papa once planted under the windows, good jam, your favorite, Son, but there’s nobody to eat it. I, little Eddie, have no other relatives. My uncle and grandfathers died in the war. At the Leningrads and Pskovs. For the interests of the people. For Russia. Shit.

  From my wives and girl friends I have picked up certain habits to live with. In the morning I drink coffee and smoke a cigarette at the same time. A plebeian boy in essence, a mongrel, I picked up this bohemian habit from Elena. I live.

  Life in itself is a meaningless process. This is why I have always sought a lofty occupation in life. I wante
d to love selflessly, I was always bored alone with myself. I loved, as I now see, extraordinarily, powerfully, and terribly, but it turned out that I wanted an answering love. It’s not good when you want something in return.

  A man who has lost all but has not surrendered a fucking thing, I sit on the balcony and look down. Today is Saturday, the streets are deserted. I look at the streets and am not in a hurry. I have lots of time ahead of me.

  What, specifically, will happen to me? Tomorrow, the day after, a year from now?

  Who knows! Great is New York, long are its streets, homes and apartments has New York of every sort. Whom I shall meet, what lies ahead, none can guess. I may happen upon a group of armed extremists, renegades like myself, and perish in an airplane hijacking or a bank robbery. I may not, and I’ll go away somewhere, to the Palestinians, if they survive, or to Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, or someplace else – to lay down Eddie-baby’s life for a people, for a nation.

  I’m a man who is ready for anything, you know. I will try to give them some gift. My heroic deed. My senseless death. But why say try! I have tried for thirty years. I’ll do it.

  Tears of agitation well up in my eyes, as always when I am agitated, and I no longer see Madison Avenue below. It dissolves and runs.

  “Fuck you, cocksucking bastards,” I say, and wipe away tears with my fist. Perhaps I’m addressing these words to the buildings around me. I don’t know.

  “Fuck you, cocksucking bastards! You can all go straight to hell!” I whisper.

  About the Author

  Edward Limonov was born on February 22, 1941, in Gorky, USSR. His father was a member of the secret police. Eddie spent his childhood and adolescence in Harkov, that Detroit of contemporary Russia. He attended high school, mastering the art of the petty crook. Between 1967 and 1974 Limonov published eight volumes of samizdat poetry in the USSR. His poems have appeared in translation in Spain, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. In 1974 Eddie emigrated to the West and in 1975 he settled in New York City.

  Edward Limonov has been a construction worker, a waiter, a tailor, a painter, a steelworker, a mover and a caretaker of an elegant New York town house. Among his other works are Diary of a Loser.

  Edward Limonov currently resides in Paris, that is Paris, France.

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