It's Me, Eddie Read online

  On my way home from work I sometimes dropped in to see the other Russians who worked at the Hilton. After going out through a passageway and punching my time card, I could come up from the basement, turn left, and see the guard, Mr. Andrianov, a former Soviet navy captain. Tall and solid, he writes down the numbers of the trucks that arrive at the loading ramp to load and unload, and keeps order. He’s easy to talk to, an enthusiastic conversationalist. Sometimes Andrianov stands in the vestibule by the main entrance to the hotel, and he’s so solid and impressive, gray temples under his cap, that rich women passing by sometimes start conversations with him.

  An interesting thing happened to Andrianov, which I took a malicious delight in because it confirmed some theories of mine. Andrianov lives in a suburb in a pretty good neighborhood, the people are quite well-to-do. One time he received a letter from the local police department, which said: “Knowing that you have great experience in police work [in the USSR Andrianov had served as a paratroop officer, then a navy captain, and so on], we invite you to take part in our voluntary neighborhood security program.” They made no distinction between the USSR and the U.S.A., these gentlemen from the police. Theirs is the most sober world view I have ever encountered. To them, a KGB agent arriving in America would be a much more desirable gentleman than people like me. Someone who has service experience is naturally preferable to someone who does not have such experience and moreover does not wish to serve. Andrianov refused to take part in their program. A pity.

  In addition to Andrianov, I used to stop and chat with Gaydar, if there was no urgent call for him to lug someone’s suitcases upstairs. I would gawk at the lanky red-coated doorman, who was well known to the whole hotel as Fidel Castro’s schoolmate; he opened the doors of the automobiles that drove up to the hotel. Because of Fidel he had lost his lands and family wealth and now served the Hilton. His wages were small, but he made a lot in tips. “A lot,” said Gaydar, who also made quite a bit in tips. It’s very hard to land the profitable job of doorman.

  Deep in the hotel, near its linens, food, garbage, furniture, electricity, water, and all that, there are quite a few other Russians to be found. Lenya Kosogor, a tall, stooped man, over fifty, who was mentioned in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, works here as an electrician – they go around in baggy light green work clothes – sometimes I dropped by to see Lenya, too. So far, this flight to an alien land has done me no good: if in the USSR I associated with poets, artists, academicians, ambassadors, and the enchanting Russian women, then here, as you see, my friends are porters, busboys, electricians, guards, and dishwashers. My fucking past no longer bugs me, though. I’m trying so hard to forget it that I think I eventually will. You have to forget, otherwise you’ll always be warped.

  Sometimes I brought something home from the hotel. Some little trifle. I stole. What the hell. My bare prison cell at the Winslow became just a shade more cheerful when I brought home a red-and-white checked cloth and put it on the table. Several days later a second tablecloth appeared, then a red napkin. That was all I needed to set up housekeeping. I stole a few knives, forks, and spoons from the restaurant as well, and that was it, I needed no more things. You must agree this was reasonable. The Hilton shared a tiny bit with the Winslow.

  When I returned from work I studied English, at least that was my schedule. Or I went to a movie theater, most often the Playboy, which was cheap and close, on Fifty-seventh Street, and saw two films for a dollar. Coming home through the New York night, I raged and dreamed, I thought about the world, about sex, about women and men, about rich and poor, why one child is born into a rich family and has everything he desires from childhood on, while others… Those others in my imagination were people like me, those to whom the world was unjust.

  When I came home, I lay down on the bed and, I confess, gentlemen (after all, the living debauched Elena still roamed within me), I confess I lay there sighing and sighing, pitying my body that no one needed though it was young and beautiful (I had already been out getting a tan, shivering with cold on the splendid roof of the unsplendid Winslow), truly young and beautiful, boys, and the fact that Elena did not need me hurt so much, it was so terrifying, that instead of running away from my fears, memories, and imaginings I tried to gain pleasure from them. I used them, the memories and fears, as I languorously kneaded my member. Not on purpose, it happened automatically, as in wild animals; when I lay down on the bed I invariably thought of Elena, felt agitated because she was not beside me, after all she had lain with me for years, why wasn’t she here now? In short, I ended by copulating with her shade. Ordinarily these were group copulations, that is, she fucked someone while I watched, and then I fucked her. I imagined all this with my eyes shut, and at times constructed very elaborate scenes. During these seances my eyes were full of tears, I sobbed, but what else could I do, I sobbed and I came, and semen spilled on my already tan belly. Ah, what a nice belly I have, you should see it – lovely. Eddie-baby’s poor little body, what has it been driven to by that lousy Russian tart? “My sister, little sister!” My little fool!

  Long before, she had forced me out into the world of masturbation to her themes – back in the fall, when she took a lover and began to do it less often with me. I sensed something wrong and asked, “Elena, confess, you have a lover, don’t you?” She didn’t really deny it, but she didn’t say yes or no, languidly she whispered something passionate and exciting, and I wanted her endlessly. The recollection of that passionate whisper makes me want her to this day, gives me a shameful hard-on.

  She forced me out. I had a live, beautiful, twenty-five-year-old wife with a sweet peepka, yet I was obliged to hide like a thief, dressed up in her things – for some reason that gave me special pleasure – and spill my semen in her sweet-smelling panties. She had bought herself a pungently fragrant raspberry-colored oil and was smearing it on her peepka, so that all her panties smelled of the oil.

  My friends, if you ask why I didn’t find myself another woman, the truth is, Elena was too splendid, and anything else would have seemed squalid to me in comparison with her little peepka. I’d rather fuck a fantasy than a vulgar woman. Besides, I had no women handy at that time. When some turned up, I tried to fuck them, as you will see, I did fuck them, but then retired into my world of fantasy. They were uninteresting to me and therefore unneeded. My solitary intellectual diversions with Elena’s shade had a criminal aura and were much more enjoyable. Elena’s voice rings in my ears to this day, I can thank this sentence, this thin little voice, for a good fifty orgasms: “I put my fingee there, I press down and lightly stroke my peepka and look in the mirror, and gradually I see a white juice ooze out of me, a white drop appear in my rosy peepka.” This little tale was the accompaniment to one of my last coitions with her. Besides everything else, you see – that is, besides me, Jean, Susanna, and company, she also masturbated. All of us together, you see, were not enough for her. The pig.

  I remember a row, it was the day she first met Susanna the lesbian, she had spent the whole evening hugging and kissing her. I hauled her home almost by force, she hissed and dragged her heels. At home the row flared up worse than ever. Elena had already undressed for bed. She was screaming at me, shrilly and drunkenly, slurring her sibilants as she usually did when drunk. And now I felt descending upon me a certain masochistic ecstasy. I loved her, this pale, gaunt, small-breasted creature in her whorish scrap of panties, who had donned my socks to sleep in. I was ready to cut off my own head, my own unhappy refined noggin, and throw myself face down before her. For what? She was a sleaze, a pig, an egoist, a stinker, an animal, but I loved her, and this love was higher than my consciousness. She humiliated me in everything, she had humiliated my flesh, killed, crippled my mind, my nerves, everything I clung to in this world, but I loved her with those panties round on her neat little poopka, loved her pale, with her froggy thighs, sweet thighs, loved her standing with her feet on our foul bed. I loved her! It was horrible, I loved her worse and worse.

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nbsp; Such were the memories that saw me off to sleep with semen smeared on my belly. At five-thirty I woke up from nightmares that were more of the same. Shaking them off, I turned on the light and started my coffee, shaved (to this day I have nothing to shave on my Mongol puss), tied a funereal black kerchief around my neck, and dragged my ass over to the Hilton. The street was deserted, I headed west on Fifty-fifth, hunching against the cold. Had I ever thought such experiences would fall to my share in life? To be perfectly honest, I had never expected any of this. A Russian lad brought up in a bohemian milieu. “Poetry, art, these are the highest occupations one can have on this earth. The poet is the most important person in the world.” These truths had been impressed upon me from childhood. And now, while still a Russian poet, I was a most unimportant person. Life had smashed me in the face…

  The days passed, and the Hilton Hotel with all its stinking dungeons was no longer a mystery to me. Half a hundred professional terms tripped lightly from my tongue, I had no time to converse, I was supposed to work, that was what I was being paid for, not to converse. The whole kitchen spoke Spanish, the Italians spoke Italian among themselves, all languages were heard in the “servants’ hall” (as it was called in olden times) except correct English. Even our manager, Fred, was Austrian. Some time ago the manager had suddenly taken to calling me Alexander. Perhaps in his conception all Russians were Alexanders. That was no surprise; the Thracian slaves in Rome were all addressed simply as “Thracian,” why the fuck stand on ceremony with them, they were slaves. Having had an eyeful of the Hilton’s multinational slaves, I already knew what supported America. I cautiously told Fred that I was Edward, not Alexander; he corrected himself, but the next day I became Alexander again. I did not correct Fred anymore, I reconciled myself. What difference does it make what your name is?

  The restaurant began to get on my nerves. The only thing it had brought me was a little money. With that money I had been able to realize some of my trivial desires; for example, I had bought a black lace shirt at the Arcadia shop on Broadway, and made the acquaintance of the owner while I was at it. As a souvenir of the Hilton and the Old Bourbon I have a white suit hanging in my closet, bought at Cromwell on Lexington Avenue. But the restaurant itself got on my nerves, I was tired. Thoughts of Elena were not disappearing. Sometimes they suddenly surfaced in the midst of work and covered me with a cold sweat; on several occasions, although I’m a robust fellow, I nearly collapsed in a faint. But the worst of it was that I constantly saw my enemies, those who had stolen Elena away from me – our customers, men who had money. I realized that I was being unjust, but could not help myself. Is the world just to me?

  I was penetrated ever more deeply by a feeling that I arbitrarily defined to myself as class hatred. I didn’t so much hate our customers as individuals; no, essentially I hated all gentlemen of this type, gray and sleek. I knew that it was not we, the tattered, shaggy, and fucked-up, who had introduced the plague into this world, it was they. The plague of money, the disease of money, is their handiwork. The plague of buying and selling is their handiwork. The murder of love, the fact that love is something to be scorned – this too is their handiwork.

  And most of all I hate this system, I realized when I tried to make sense of my feelings, the system that corrupts people from birth. I made no distinction between the USSR and America. Nor did I feel ashamed of myself because my hatred sprang from what was essentially such an understandable and personal cause, my wife’s betrayal. I hated this world, which turned touching, poetry-writing Russian girl-children into creatures fucked up by drink and narcotics, to serve as bedding for millionaires who would wear out but not marry the silly Russian girls, who were also trying to do their business. Country gentlemen have always had a weakness for Frenchwomen, have sent for them in their Klondikes, but have kept them as whores and married pure farmers’ daughters. I could no longer look at our customers.

  At about this time I was supposed to go to Bennington, get acquainted with its women’s college and its Professor Horowitz. I had sent them a letter about myself, and they evidently wanted to hire me. I don’t know what the job title was, something trivial, but connected with the Russian language. At the time I wrote the letter I was so fucking crazy I just wanted to hide somewhere, but when Professor Horowitz, after several phone calls, finally caught me at the Winslow, I realized that no Bennington or its American girls from good families could save me, I would flee from Bennington to New York inside of a week. I knew myself all too well. I did not want to play their game. I wanted, as in Russia, to be outside the game, or if possible, if I could, to play against them. “If I could” implied a temporary condition: I meant that for the time being I knew very little about the world I had come to. They had robbed me, fucked me, and damn near killed me, but I did not yet know how to get my revenge. That I would get it I had no doubt. I did not want to be calm and just. Fuck justice – you can have it; I’ll take injustice…

  Sitting with Wong in the cafeteria, I explained to him why I didn’t like rich people. Wong didn’t like rich people either, I did not have to persuade him on this point; in this world the poor are all revolutionaries and criminals, only not everyone finds the way, not everyone has the resolve. The laws were devised by the rich. But, as one of the proudest slogans of our unsuccessful Russian Revolution proclaims, “The right to life is higher than the right to private property!”

  I have said that I did not hate the specific bearers of evil, the rich. I have even admitted that there might be among them victims of the world order. What I hated was the system, in which one man goes out of his fucking mind from boredom and idleness, or from the daily production of fresh hundreds of thousands, while another man barely earns a living at hard labor. I wanted to be an equal among equals.

  Now try and say that I was unjust. I was not.

  My last days at the Hilton were spent in terrible agitation. One day I would feel like quitting work and decide to do it, basing my decision on numerous considerations. Why the fuck am I living this way? I thought irritably. I still don’t have any money, not even enough to rent a normal apartment. I’m dreadfully tired, sometimes I go to bed at eight. I haven’t made any contacts at the restaurant, I’ve hardly made any progress with the language, so what’s the point of working here? I’ll leave. I’ll leave, and I won’t feel any pangs in front of Gaydar, why the fuck should I be ashamed in front of Gaydar? A man looks for where it’s best, the best thing for me is to leave and be on welfare. We are not slaves – no slaves are we. It’s either all, or if nothing, welfare.

  The next day, my day off, when I had nothing to do and my devil Elena appeared to me again in all her glory, I would feel tormented by the free time; hoping again that work would kill my torment, I would decide to stay on at the Hilton. But, after working another day or two and falling asleep again at practically eight, I was exasperated. Walking from work through the seething crowds to Sixth, Fifth, and Madison avenues, I thought again, I’ll leave, I’ll leave tomorrow, enough of killing myself – though I really could do the work, if I wanted to be a waiter and conceived of my future as that of a waiter or porter.

  In the morning, walking to work in the dark, I would make a six-minute excursus through all of world literature – that many lines came to my mind every time. Some fucking waiter! The poem I remembered most often, for some reason, nearly every day, was “Factory,” by our great Russian poet Alexander Blok. “Yellow the windows next door…” Then I skipped the lines I didn’t need and recited the last stanza in full:

  They enter and straggle off,

  Under heavy sacks they stoop,

  And the yellow windows laugh -

  Beggars are easy to dupe…

  Walking to work, coming home from work, I felt myself to be one of those beggars, I had been duped. My native literature would not let me become an ordinary man and live in peace, shit no, it tweaked me for my red busboy jacket and preached at me, arrogantly and justly: “Shame on you, Edichka! You are a Russian
poet, that is your caste, my dear, that is your uniform. You have discredited your uniform, you must leave this place. Better a beggar, better to live as you did at the end of February – a beggar and bum.”

  Oh, I didn’t fully trust my Russian literature, but I hearkened to her voice, and she wore me down in the end. Her constant “The yellow windows laugh – Beggars are easy to dupe” (I took the yellow windows to mean Park Avenue, Fifth, and their denizens) forced me one day to approach Fred, the manager, and tell him, “Excuse me, sir, but after looking at this work I have come to the conclusion that it’s not for me. I’m very tired and I need to learn English, I want to leave. You’ve seen that I’m a good worker, if you need me I’ll come another day or two, but no more than that.”

  I wanted to tell him, but did not, that I was incapable, constitutionally incapable, of playing the servant and I found his customers disagreeable. “I do not wish to serve the bourgeoisie,” I wanted to tell him, but did not – for fear of sounding too pompous, for that reason alone.

  In the Hilton period, in the last days of my stay there, I accomplished several other things – wrote a letter to a “Very Attractive Lady” and sent eleven of my poems to Moscow, to the journal Novy Mir.

  The “Very Attractive Lady” had placed an ad in the Village Voice. Lady, 39, desired companion for trip to “Paris, Amsterdam, Santa Fe, etc.” The itinerary suited me, as I wrote the lady, 39. Now I recall this with irony; at the time it seemed to be my only chance, and I was sure she would jump at a Russian poet. Besides, in February, in a New York Review of Books article about Russian literature today, Carl Proffer had devoted several lines to me, as I also wrote the very attractive lady, without a twinge of conscience, like a salesman touting his wares. I am still waiting for her answer. Well, it would have been a chance to come up to the surface, out of the artificial life that I am living to this day, and get into the real world. No matter, I might have knifed the very attractive lady on the third day of her “favorite trip,” as she called it. To her good fortune, she turned out to have little imagination. Recalling my shameless brags in that letter, I am even somewhat embarrassed.