Diary of a Loser Read online

  After she leaves I sit on that same spot and reflect that it was here that she bared her little bum, and that everything else was displayed here as well.

  And I get aroused.

  *

  The world of dirty pictures, cheap sex, seedy magazines, the world of sperm and cream, of dank cotton balls scattered everywhere, of a prostitute’s tiny underwear, of shaved pubis and sweaty wrinkled necks. An aging model in the morning is horrible: the crumpled ears, the smell of all those make-up cleansers, lackluster eyes, lashless and browless. And the body – it’s been bathed over and over again and then fucked again, the fucking poor body is getting soft, the way aged bodies do – you touch it and it moves in ripples. And only the big, sad, child-like brown eyes from under the bangs – bewildered: why?

  «Shall I come outside alone? Sit on an empty beach?

  In a thick knitted cardigan, keeping warm my cunt, which has a period. (An inane stare at the ocean.)

  Shall I wait for the silly, bearded actor, my lover with an incipient belly?

  Shall I watch a drifting stick?

  There was I time I was a girl.

  I believed in the white dress and a wedding.

  And I destroyed everything, and now I feel like crying.

  Everything… everything…»

  *

  Morning. I looked at my shit in the toilet bowl. Cucumber seeds stick out. They don’t get digested, it turns out. Made a discovery at thirty-four. The cucumbers were old, the seeds hard. It’s fall.

  *

  The invitation to a reception at this prominent lady’s garden has reached me (the lonely one) too. Through a newspaper. There were all those illegitimate haves:

  Beautiful women who at the right time married impotent freaks, thanks to whom they now show off their titles and money.

  Old men from the art world who have outlived their much more gifted contemporaries and are thus considered geniuses today. Their only achievement is their longevity.

  Economists and businessmen who, had they not inherited a couple million from their fathers, would have started out life in a seedy hotel and died of hunger and weakness…

  All in all, there were all those I despise.

  *

  You desire a woman. A girl. And one you haven’t met. Yes, there’s salt and pepper in my blood. «All the same, I’m sure I’ll meet her, and I will, I will be happy! Again – I will be happy – in a different way.

  And I’ll perish in a revolutionary war. I don’t wish to be an old shit in the service of this society. I don’t want to fuck just anybody, I want to fuck my beloved!

  Yes, it’s my beloved I want to fuck!

  How sweet it is to fuck your beloved!»

  The image becomes blurry. Have patience, sir. And she’ll come to you, and she’ll tilt her plumed hat… that’s not it, sorry – she’ll be wearing an infantry khaki jacket. How sweet it is to fuck your beloved!

  *

  A small young woman ringing the bell at a German banker’s villa. The old pensive Rhine flows on amidst the green landscape. Life is neat and boring.

  And nothing but a bullet will rip the air.

  And it’s beautiful – the banker falling down by the door – nodding – at the feet of his young bitch of a wife.

  *

  Whatever you say, August is drawing to a close, and the leaves of ivy on «our» cottage begin to fall. Dry and gray, they lie on the metal chairs out on the terrace.

  I can’t think about it for long – it’s obvious that it’s just a sign sent to me by the leaves, a sign of change, the sign of a question: «And what about you?» Well, me too – it’s not a tank top anymore but a shirt; it’s not the two-year-old sandals but boots. There’s gray in my shaggy hair, and the angry face of a savage rat is combined whimsically with the remaining poetic gentleness and charm. What can you do? This is me.

  *

  Being human is very stupid.

  I saw something stirring in the bushes of Central Park. A little black creature, either a bird or a rat. I looked, I got curious, I began to sift through the bushes, fussing and running around, peeking from this side and that – I wasted a good five minutes and then thought: «What the fuck! I’m supposed to be on my fucking way to my hotel, this is not my fucking business!»

  And I left.

  *

  A visit with a crazy cost me a lot of blood. He turned out to be fat – belly and thighs. Semiparalized, he rode around in his well-lit studio in his chair.

  His crumbling consciousness was a characteristic feature of his insanity. He had me pulling out (and then putting back) layers of yellow, dusty letters and sketches, all the while spying lest I disturb the order (the chaos) in which they were arranged. Once, under his instructions, I had to rifle through some twenty-six pieces of paper before he was satisfied with a pink scrap. But then he ordered that I return the scrap to its place. His other feats: he put on my glasses and tried to give me his phone book for a present.

  The crazy was quite sentimental – he kept reminiscing about his numerous wives. It was as though all the women he or I mentioned used to be his wives.

  Many of the crazy’s sketches were chaotic, mere daubs, but some – particularly a yellow and green portrait with a double face, and the birth of Venus from the foam of a wave – were striking in their nervous power.

  I barely survived the two hours with this crazy. Precisely because it was this particular crazy. It seemed that there was some resemblance to me. The others sickos I could take with no sweat. The purpose of my visit was to bring him Russian cabbage soup – the crazy had Russian parents.

  *

  For my hotel depression, for being completely lonely, for dog shit by my door, for watching TV all night alone, for the inaccessible redolent beauties seen at the expensive stores, for life without smiles, and for all the other delights I want to get even with this world.

  And it won’t do getting on top of a roof with a shotgun to shoot at the passers-by. They’re not to blame, they’re victims themselves. Instead, this whole system must be brought crashing down, so that there’s no stone left unturned. I want to raze all the institutions.- I want this so bad my stomach hurts. It’s like wanting to go for a walk barefoot on the fresh spring grass.

  And have it so that no one is privileged materially over others. And so that neither the actors, nor the singers, nor the presidents have more than the other folk. And get rid of that disgusting money altogether. And burn the banks to the ground. And leave this Babylon, let it be overgrown with grass, let it crumble and fall, let the ocean eat it away.

  *

  When you see all the stuff that remains after one dies, you realize how stupid it is to collect it in the first place. Knick knacks, brick-a-brack, journals and magazines, everything that’s left, goes out to the street and into a dumpster.

  The heirs took all the valuables but these letters. The letters with blurried words. From an inamorata. And only a curious, sad fellow like me stands by an open trash bag and rummages through someone’s cinders.

  It happens too that they bring me pants and jackets – for free – from an auction, left by the dead. I reflect on them for a long time. Then, of course, I do go ahead and alter them.

  *

  Out of all the memories I have of picking flowers, there’s one that’s especially vivid – out in the Koktebel mountains in Crimea.

  I went to pick wild tulips early in the morning, right after it had stopped raining. I reached the right spot up the clouds and there – only in the shafts of light-I managed to fish out flowers from the dark and wet grass. I wasn’t satisfied until I had a fresh, taut bunch in my hands. I was happy. There was no one in the mountains. And the trail is barely visible even five steps away. «Devil’s Finger,» a cliff, was covered by fog – as though it was never there.

  When I returned, my beloved was still asleep. I put the tulips in water in many vases and lay down with my beloved. It began to rain again… And all of this, alas, has passed…
/>   Happiness is a state when you’re able to love the present. Not the past, not the future, but the present.

  *

  There are things that are impossible to recall or to describe so that others can understand. For example, hunger, that epiphany of hunger that you reach when you’re hard up for months and don’t have enough to eat.

  A flaming bowl of soup is transfigured into a solar disk – you remember it for years.

  What wonderful and bloody horrors occur to you when you’re hungry! What executions and tortures you invent for the rich and well-fed when you bump into them in the streets, as they come out of the brightly lit restaurant doors in fur coats and tatters! And what pleasure – indescribable for an ordinary man, a man with hungry eyes – if you manage to fuck a rich girl. You meet her somewhere accidentally, and then you fuck her. «I, a plebeian, lumpen, still I’m fucking you, that’s right, I’m fucking you.»

  It’s a supreme kind of sex if you have a woman who’s higher than you, who’s clean and belongs to another. Now that I’ve come of age I often feel like fucking a wellgroomed, high-society lady, on her way to becoming a plump, respectable mother, a wife to some gray-haired idiot.

  I want to fuck her in a rude, inconsiderate way, peasantlike, and no foreplay or petting either. Freud, Freid, however you pronounce it, Old Sigmund, whenever this heavy ass appears from under her redolent rags, I forget everything you’ve taught me and there’s only vengeance, vengeance, and vengeance: «I’m fucking their woman without any right, their woman!» They say black men feel this when they have a white woman. I’m not black but I feel it.

  Training

  I’m hiding, waiting in secret. I’m learning. I’m sitting in the kitchen of the millionaire’s house (I’m the maid’s friend and lover) – who can notice me? I’m biding my time until my personal 1917 will thunder in. But until then I scrub the rooms, or I touch up a door, or I screw in a bolt, or sew a skirt, or alter pants – I earn my keep. The wife of a lord – a visitor from London – paid me a compliment yesterday, «Such beautiful boots you have!» I wanted to reply by telling her, «What a nondescript mug you have. You and your queen too. But I kept quiet. I’m not going to insult her, I thought. What does she know about me, anyway?

  A friend or lover of the same lady – a famous architect, passing through the kitchen to get his yet another drink, glanced at my hands and became ecstatic. «You have the hands of a creative person,» he proclaimed. This time I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure and said – carefully and with malice that only I could appreciate: «Perhaps of a destructive person, who knows?»

  That’s how I walk in the midst of enemies. I learn, I sit quietly in a corner. I don’t open my mouth much, I do more listening. I’m waiting, gathering my strength. Then we’ll talk. At the moment, I’m in training.

  And that lady from London – she even has her own elephant. I saw the picture: she’s sitting on her elephant. In London.

  *

  Autumn. It’s gotten cold. And at the hotel, when I get to my floor, it’s dirty, warm and smells of cunt. It’s even cozy. Many prostitutes live here, that’s the reason.

  *

  You walk down the street, your cap on, your velvet jacket fits nicely. Well-built, you encounter the frequent glances of women. You know the reason – you look European, your face is delicate and somehow tormented. Women like that. Still, you can’t use your fortune of good looks to your advantage – your accommodations are horrid: the dirty hotel. It’s unlikely that a woman would go to such a place. Besides, you have no money. You can’t even treat a woman to a drink – not one glass. So you trudge on.

  Again, I have to wait. If I sell the book, there’ll at least be some money. But until then, it’s just sitting and waiting and being thankful for whatever comes your way – broads, ugly or handicapped. And sometimes, with luck, something rare happens.

  Go on, talk after that about a just social structure. It will be just when sex won’t depend on money:

  «Hello, Madam. Do you like me?»

  «I do.»

  «And I like you. How much money do you have?»

  «$3.30.»

  «And I have $2.60. Let’s get some wine and then go to my dirty hotel.»

  And so they did.

  *

  An unidentified body in the Long Island waters. Damp autumn fog hovers over the unidentified body, it licks the heels of the unidentified body.

  Who was she? With an ordinary expression on her face did she sit at a restaurant, speaking in a ringing voice? Did she spread like a shadow under her man’s wiry abdomen? My God, why do you whip our poor bodies? Why do you freeze them, pierce them through and beat them?… Sometimes there’s no blood, but often it is sticky and coagulates…

  Autumn ground, the roots of plants cut by a shovel, a young dead hand in a sandy puddle. The sleeve of a cotton sweater. The body laps together with coins in a pocket of her denim skirt. They did not fall out. I’m staring – forgive me – the way a lover would stare at his beloved. The weather is nasty, swampy, and the body laps in the water, its head and its hair swaying, its left hand swinging. And there’s also the ocean, the grimy ocean.

  *

  I’m a terribly curious person. I remember that I kept shoving my prick towards the dog so he could lick it. I was 24 then. It was winter, and I was sitting on a red couch.

  But the dog wasn’t too interested. He licked it a few times and that was it.

  All my life, my prick keeps bothering me.

  And in that same house there was, aside from the dog, another temptation: a landlady’s thirteen-year-old daughter. I remember how – my fingers trembling – I measured the distance between her breasts. I was sewing a white blouse for her. Her mother was there, and so was my then wife. They stared.

  The blouse was intended for some kind of Young Pioneer celebration.

  *

  My sweet mother! Such rejoicing in the window!

  The Revolution, mother, has come – festive and triumphant!

  With flowers and branches. Such joy, mother!

  Such happiness!

  Hey, guys, let’s run outside! The Revolution, like Christ, has come to our town. Over there they take from the rich and give to the poor. And over there they prepare the tables, and people of all types embrace one another. It’s good over there, the lanes are sprinkled with sand…

  *

  The ruddy cheeks of a woman at the beginning of her decline, her wrinkled neck-these are wildly sexy.

  She wears her cap askew like a hooligan. Still beautiful, wearing tough rain-and-wind gear, she’s on her way somewhere on the bus. She looks at me through the mist, sitting so that her head is level with my waist, as I stand next to her. From time to time she raises her head, takes a look and gives me a crooked smile from under her cap.

  I know what she sees. I always wear pants so tight they almost burst at the seams and when I have a hard-on it’s terribly conspicuous. And due to her ruddy cheeks and the wrinkles on her neck my prick is up and it stays that way.

  Neither she nor I are embarrassed. There even appears to be a kind of a warm intimacy. Unfortunately, the bus turns from 57th Street onto Fifth Avenue. I have to get off here. We smile at each other for the last time. Farewell, little cap…

  *

  Leaving a woman I’ve never loved – on the corner, in the wind, in tears she ran after me without even putting on her shoes – I almost cried. (It’s that millionaire’s housekeeper.) Still, rudely, maliciously, I left with tender and pitiful thoughts of her within myself.

  Walking up to 2nd Avenue, suddenly I couldn’t bear it, and started sobbing under the horrible lights of the cars turning right. I pulled my cap down over my eyebrows. The abandoned woman – her wounded pose and her wretchedness – reminded me of my mother at the Kharkov Airport timidly waving goodbye to her only son, who was leaving forever, whom she would never see again. God, I’m cruel!

  What drives us on, why can’t we stay with those who love us, where we fi
nd warmth and care and happiness? Housekeeper, forgive me for Christ’s sake, will you?

  *

  The left side of Lincoln Center reminds me a lot of a cemetery. The black stone benches, the straight rows of trees between and above them. Amazingly dark foliage intensifies the resemblance, though there are no tombstones.

  Sometimes I come by and take a seat by myself in the October sun; I think about people; I sigh. More often than not my thoughts are sad and pensive. I’m thirty-four, and I’m beginning to get tired of human interaction.

  Today there’s one cherry lying on the slab at the foot of a bench. I glance around, stretch my hand, grab it and eat it. The cherry turns out to be a tiny apple, you know that kind, they call it crabapple. At that time the disappearing sun reappears. And what sort of cherries could there be in October!?

  *

  Boys are better than girls at surviving summers. Girls feel summers with their stomachs and their insides. For girls, summer is sticky, it’s very hard for them to resist their own flesh in the summer. They’re anxious, timid, and their nerves go in knots around them and outside their clothes. They keep thinking that they’re being pelted to death with apples, or that they’re being bathed in hot jelly made of inseets. There’s always the danger of being tickled or of something crawling where it’s not supposed to. (Generally, a woman’s perennial state is the sensation of an impending sneeze every minute of her life.)

  It’s frightful to be a girl in the summer. Since I feel this, I question which I am more of – a boy or a girl? Yet all along I’m positively certain that I’m a queer man of thirty-four years of age, somewhat refined in the French manner, having a disorganized sex life.

  *

  We came over to my place, to my stinking hotel, we undressed and suddenly I embraced her so, embraced her – so tender.

  The poor, already bedraggled twenty-six-year-old girl: how exhausted we are in our endless search for love!

  I stroked and caressed her all night long, imagining that she was my daughter. My poor little daughter. She also was quite thin and short. And so today, like normal people I have a kind of family. We keep each other warm in October under a coarse army blanket with the letters US printed on it.