It's Me, Eddie Page 3

  Edik was a cameraman in Moscow, or an assistant cameraman. He lives quietly, feeds everyone who comes to see him, lends money – he’d give you his last dollar – and he’s on welfare.

  Another of our hotel’s intellectuals, a tall, fair man of thirty-three, is the poet Zhenya Knikich. That’s a typical Leningrad surname – refined. By training he is a philologist, he defended a dissertation on the topic “Dostoevsky’s Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Denizens, from the Standpoint of Eccentricity.” He cooks kidneys and sausages in his cubicle, which looks out on a dark light-well; on his bed sits the homely American girl who teaches him English; all over the walls there are pieces of paper with expressions written in English, like “I want to work.” That statement does not fit the facts, Zhenya doesn’t much want to work; at present he is trying to get on welfare. “I am a serious scholar,” he tells me. He is, I think; why not? But he and I both understand that his profession as a serious scholar – an expert on Gogol and Dostoevsky, a teacher of aesthetics – is not fucking needed here. What’s needed here is serious dishwashers, people who will do the dirty work without any literary reflections. Literature here has its own mafia, art has its own mafia, any form of business has its own mafia.

  The Russian emigration has its own mafiosi. Fair-haired Zhenya was unprepared for this, as was I. He worked at Russkoe Delo, as did I in my time, for one of the chief mafiosi of the Russian emigration, Moses Yakovlevich Borodatykh. Mafiosi will never let anyone else get at the feed trough. Fuck no. It’s a question of bread, of meat and life, of women. We know all about this: try and break into the Soviet Writers’ Union. They’ll crush everything. Because it’s a question of bread, meat, and cunt. A struggle to the death. For the cunts of the Elenas. It’s no joke.

  Sometimes I am seized with a cold anger. I look out of my little room at the high-rise walls of the neighboring buildings, at this great and terrible city, and I understand that this is all very serious. It’s either the city or me. Either I become that pathetic old Ukrainian who visited my dishwasher friends at our feast – as humiliated and pathetic as we are, he is even more humiliated and pathetic – or else… “Or else” means “win.” How? Who the fuck knows – by destroying the city, even. Why should I pity it? It doesn’t pity me. Jointly with others, I’m not the only one like this. In any case, my corpse will never be carried out of the Hotel Winslow like a stupid board.

  The terrible seriousness, the poignancy, of my position seizes me when I first wake up in the morning. I jump up, drink coffee, wash out of my head the sleepy snatches of pathetic Russian songs and poems and other fragments of a Russian delirium, and sit down to my papers – either my English or something I’m trying to write. I keep glancing out the window. Those buildings make my gorge rise. Cocksuckers! I’ve taken to swearing a lot here. I’ll never make it in this system, I think with anguish, looking down the long and difficult road ahead. But I must give it a try.

  The cheapest food, not always enough of it; dirty little rooms, wretched poor clothes, cold, vodka, nerves – my second wife went out of her mind. Ten years of that life in Russia, and now the whole thing over again. “Where’s your motherfucking justice, world?” I feel like asking. I worked ten years there, day after day, wrote so many collections of poetry, so many poems and stories, I accomplished a lot, I was able to create in my books a well-defined image of the Russian man. And the Russian people read me, they bought the eight thousand collections that I typed and distributed all those years, they knew them, recited them by heart.

  But I saw one day that I would rise no higher there. Moscow was reading me, Leningrad was reading me, and my collections had found their way to a dozen other major cities, people accepted me, but the state did not. Try as I might with my primitive distribution methods, what I did would never reach the masses. My heart was bitter that for someone like Rozhdestvensky they ran off millions of copies, but they had not printed a single poem of mine. You can go fuck yourselves, I thought, you and your system. I haven’t worked for you since I quit peddling books in 1964. I’ll get the hell out of here with my beloved wife, I’ll go to the other world. Writers breathe freer there, they say.

  And so I came here. Now I see it makes no fucking difference, here or there. The same gangs in either sphere. But here I have something more to lose, because I am a Russian writer, I write in Russian words. And as a man, I found I had been spoiled by the praise of the underground, the attention of underground Moscow, of artistic Russia, where a poet is not what a poet is in New York. From time immemorial a poet in Russia has always been something of a spiritual leader. To make the acquaintance of a poet, for example, is a great honor there. Here a poet is shit, which is why even Joseph Brodsky is miserable here in your country. Once when he came to see me on Lexington Avenue he said, as he drank his vodka, “One has to have the hide of an elephant here in this country. I do, but you don’t.” There was anguish in these words, because Joseph Brodsky has succumbed to the system of this world, though he had not succumbed to the system of the other. I understood his misery. In Leningrad, after all, apart from his troubles, he had had tens of thousands of admirers, he would have been received with delight in any house on any evening, the beautiful Russian maidens, the Natashas and Tanyas, were all his – because he, a red-haired Jewish youth, was a Russian poet. The best place for a poet is Russia. There, even the authorities fear our kind. They have from time immemorial.

  And other friends of mine, those who went to Israel, what nationalists they were! They emigrated expecting to find in Israel an application for their minds, talents, ideas; they believed it was their state. Like hell! It is not their state. Israel does not need their ideas, their talent, their ability to think, not at all. Israel needs soldiers, just like the USSR – hup, two, and obey! You’re a Jew, you must defend your country. But we’re sick of defending your faded old banners, your values, which long ago ceased to be values; sick of defending what’s “yours.” We’re tired of “yours,” old men, we ourselves will soon be old men, we doubt that we should, that we must. You can all go fuck yourselves…

  “We.” Although I think of myself as separate, I keep returning to this concept “we.” By now there are a great many of us here. And I must confess, we have among us quite a few madmen. This is normal.

  There’s a certain Lenya Chaplin who constantly makes the rounds of the emigres. Properly he is not a Chaplin, he has a complicated Jewish surname, but back in Moscow he was in love with Chaplin’s younger daughter in absentia and took himself a pseudonym in her honor. When said daughter got married, Lenya mourned, he tried to poison himself. I knew him in Moscow and once attended a birthday party of his where, besides me, there was only one other man, the seminormal philosopher Bondarenko, the ideologue of Russian fascism, stock boy in a liquor store. I was astounded by Lenya’s narrow streetcar of a room. All its walls were papered over with the great men of our world, large and small, in several layers. There were Oswald and Kennedy, Mao and Nixon, Che Guevara and Hitler… Never have I seen a crazier room. Only the ceiling was free of great men. Some great heads were glued on top of others, the paper was layered as thick as my finger.

  Now, after spending time in various American states – and, as evil tongues say, in several state mental hospitals – Lenya lives in New York on welfare. He makes peculiar use of public assistance. He sets aside the whole sum, about $250. He plans to travel in the future, or maybe join the American army. He spends the night with friends and eats… what he takes from garbage cans on the street, first a slice of pizza, then some other filth. So doing, he invariably makes one and the same pronouncement: “Grain by grain, and the hen fills her belly.”

  This madman Lenya – who is nevertheless a cultured youth, he’s read Nietzsche, and written some Buddhist parables about three elephants – is a relative of sorts. My second wife, Anna Rubinstein, had a niece who was Lenya’s first woman. Lecherous Stella, who, in the expression of a longtime acquaintance of mine, had a cunt like Finland Station, fucked the
tall schizoid Lenya. My “relative” also lived in Israel for a while, before America.

  Lenya is always sitting at somebody else’s, chewing something. Sometimes he drops in on my neighbor Edik Brutt.

  “Motherfucker,” I say to him, “what are you doing, spreading rumors again? Always hanging around, you shitass! You ought to stay home, you big slob, write something, work,” I say.

  “How vulgar you’ve become, Limonov,” says Lenya. Bearded, baldpated, dressed in torn jeans, he is a little afraid of me. Even the shape of his head and the stoop of his tall figure testify that he has been mad since birth. I see no special sin or misfortune in this, I merely enjoy establishing the fact.

  A completely different form of madness has taken hold in little Sasha Zelensky. This mustachioed prig is notorious among us for owing a gigantic amount in debts, for an emigre. He works nowhere, receives no public assistance, and lives exclusively on credit. On the wall of his studio, which he rents on none other than Fifty-eighth Street, for $300 a month, is emblazoned the proud inscription: “World – I owe you money!”

  Zelensky graduated from the Institute of International Relations in Moscow. His papa was a big wheel at Krokodil. When he first arrived in America Sasha worked as an economist in marine transportation; this was his profession, and since he knew English, they took him in his specialty. He made quite a decent salary, but naturally his madness stirred within him and demanded sacrifices, an incarnation. Sasha decided that he was a great photographer, although he had never taken pictures in the USSR. An emaciated man who looks like a cross between two Russian writers, Belinsky and Gogol, Sasha chose photography, I think, in the belief that there was easy money in this “chic” profession. Had he decided he was a photographer and then taken pictures, labored, striven, sought, that would have been all right; it would simply have been called fanaticism. But this is serious: he takes no pictures, knows how to do nothing, and has developed a frenetic business borrowing more and more money. New loans crawl over old… It’s the only thing he knows how to do. How does he manage? I don’t know. Maybe he puts on a yarmulke and goes to the synagogue. That’s what many do…

  How much does he owe? I don’t know. Perhaps twenty thousand. He calls up people he has seen once in his life and asks for money, and is very offended when they refuse him. It has been a colossally long time since he paid for his studio, I don’t know why they haven’t thrown him out by now. He lives on bread and water, thin as a skeleton, but for some reason he doesn’t go to work. At one time he worked as a waiter at a coffee shop on Forty-third Street, but after a short time they threw him out.

  He has a thin little voice, worn-down shoes, and holey jeans. He and Zhigulin, another boy photographer who lives downstairs, used to have the lousy habit of comforting themselves by loudly cussing out famous photographers: “Hiro? Shit. Avedon? An old hack…” The names flashed by. Zelensky and Zhigulin knew how to make masterpieces, but for some reason they didn’t do it. Now they’ve piped down a bit.

  At present Sasha Zelensky is waiting for his mummy, whom he dearly loves, to arrive from Moscow. The wild mood he was in a while ago, when Zhigulin said to me, “Mark my words, he’s bound to hang himself” – he wouldn’t let anyone in and sat locked in the eternal semidarkness of his ragged studio (all there was about him of the photographer was the studio) – that mood has passed. Soon his mummy will arrive, and perhaps mustachioed Sasha with the evil eye (there is something equine about his eye, always rolled back at you with such suspicion, he’s always suspicious, Zelensky is) will force his mummy to work, while he himself devises his next project, a design for a ring, a project that he will carry around and propose to the jewelry stores. From time to time Zelensky comes to me – to a man who has done a great deal of tailoring in his life to earn his bread and butter – with the request that I make a designer shirt of his own design, which he painstakingly conceals. I tell him to buy the fabric and bring his design, I’ll make it for him immediately. This has been dragging on for two years now, and he will never buy the material or bring the design because there is but one name for all his unfinished schemes – madness. Not the kind where people rattle the bars, yell, and spatter spittle. No, the quiet, apologetic, thin-voiced madness where they try to print color photographs, they conceive designs for rings or invent solar batteries or suddenly decide to devote themselves seriously to classical music. Man has no peace in this world. He is harassed on all sides and forced to make money. Why money? So that seedy down-at-heel Zelensky can turn into handsome Zelensky in a Rolls-Royce, with a beautiful smiling fair lady beside him. All beggars dream of fair ladies. I have already had my fair lady.

  I am a busboy

  Early March found me working at the Old Bourbon Steakhouse in the Hilton Hotel. The Hilton was an easy walk from the Winslow, two blocks west and one street down.

  I came to the Hilton through the influence of a Crimean Tatar named Gaydar, who had been a porter at the Hilton for ten years, one of the family; otherwise they wouldn’t have taken me. I must confess I committed a crime: I started at the Hilton several days after going on welfare. I wanted to try it a while and then choose. Once when extremely young I had studied at a special school for waiters, but only briefly; I had no proper education in waitering. I had gone to the school purely by chance.

  I had never dreamed that necessity and chance would force me to turn again to this profession. But here I was at the Old Bourbon – a large red room with two balconies and no windows, absolutely no windows, as I presently discovered – working as a busboy. The young Armenian woman who signed me up in the Hilton personnel office said that if I’d had even a mediocre knowledge of the language they would have taken me as a waiter, not a busboy. I lost money by not knowing the language.

  The Hilton had a staff of two thousand. The huge hotel worked like a gigantic conveyor belt, never stopping for even a minute. Our restaurant worked at the same pace. The first customers would appear by seven in the morning, mainly snappy, gray-haired, middle-aged men who had arrived from the provinces for a trade convention. They hurried to eat their breakfasts and get down to business. I remember that now and then we all wore cardboard signs pinned to the lapels of our red uniform jackets, such as: WELCOME, PULP AND PAPER CONVENTION! THE HILTON STAFF GREETS YOU AND INVITES YOU TO THE TRADITIONAL BITE OF THE RED APPLE. MY NAME IS EDWARD.

  If it wasn’t pulp and paper, it was some other equally glorious convention. The gentlemen from the provinces had their way paid at the hotel; they all carried identical cards on which the waiter filled in the total for their food and drink.

  The gentlemen did not tarry long at the tables. Business was waiting, and after they had bolted down the expensive and in my view none too tasty wares of our kitchen, they lit out for their meetings. The mad rush began at seven, as I have said, and was over for me at three o’clock.

  I was subdued and broken then. I could not stop thinking about what had happened to me. Elena’s betrayal, her leaving me – the last six months had been a quick slide into tragedy. So I did not feel very good when I got up at half-past five, put a turtleneck sweater on my naked body, then a gray suit, and a scarf at my neck… walked the six minutes to the hotel, went down the steps… saw a sign that faded with every day, HAVE A NICE DAY AT THE HILTON, as the smell of garbage hit me in the face… took the elevator up to my restaurant… greeted the Cuban and Greek cooks. I greeted these people from the bottom of my heart, they appealed to me. The entire kitchen and all our busboys, waiters, dishwashers, cleaning women were aliens, not Americans, metecos. Their lives were not very settled, their faces were not stonily calm like those of our customers, who controlled the great affairs of pulp and paper in all quarters of America. Many of them – for example, those who took from me the tubs of dirty dishes that I lugged out from the dining room – got even less money than I did. Since I was still caught up in the atmosphere of my tragedy, I felt these people from the kitchen were my comrades in misfortune. And so they were, of course.

&nb
sp; Well, every morning I walked through the kitchen, took a little table on casters, covered the top with a white tablecloth and the two lower shelves with red napkins. On the napkins I placed some special long, deep little bowls for butter, sometimes a few forks and knives or a stack of cups and saucers, in case the two waiters I served should lack dishes. On top, on the white tablecloth, I usually placed four imitation-silver pitchers, having first filled them with ice cubes and water, and a big bowl of butter pats, which I took from the refrigerator and sprinkled with fresh fine ice. On a second such cart I put several empty tubs, also of imitation silver, which I would use all day to lug dirty dishes to the kitchen. Then I went to the board, which indicated the busboys’ stations for each day of the week. We changed places so that no one would have a constant advantage, since the customers, for some reason, were more eager to sit in certain spots in the restaurant, and even the manager or the headwaiter, who seated them, often could not keep them from it. Having looked to see which tables I was serving today, I rolled my carts into the dining room and stationed them in the proper place, usually in such a way that they did not strike the customer’s eye. And then, as I have said, the mad rush began…

  The customers appeared. I ran over and greeted them even before the waiter, filled their glasses with ice water, and put butter on their table. At lunch I was also supposed to dash each time to the warming oven – it was located between the kitchen and dining room, in a passageway – take out a hot loaf of bread, slice it, and bring it to the customers, covering it with a napkin to keep it from getting cold. Imagine you have fifteen tables, and you’re also supposed to remove the dirty dishes – pronto – change the tablecloths, see that your customers have coffee, butter, and water, and set the table after changing the cloth, lay out silver and napkins. The sweat never dried on my brow; not for nothing did I get my tips. Far from it.