Diary of a Loser Read online

  *

  Decorating my new apartment I’ve hung, among others, an old picture of Elena sitting naked on a tray, while I’m standing behind her in a National Hero jacket. I sit down on a hot radiator and say:

  «This is it, Lenka! After two years I’m not afraid of you anymore. I’ve hung you on the wall. I’ve mastered you. I’ve overcome you, Lenka. You’ll hang here as an historic exhibit. Actually, you’ll provide an extra benefit to Eddie Limonov, your ex-husband, by encouraging the girls who visit me to become intimate with me. Since Eddie had such a beautiful wife, we have to put out for him – this is what the girls will think. So hang in there, Lenka, and help me even in that way, you bitch, whore…»

  Eddie, Eddie baby,

  You’re a nice guy.

  Beautiful and randy,

  I love you, you’re mine!

  The songs we sing together,

  The waltzes we dance -

  You are tough like leather

  The wound in your soul’s immense!

  – I sang this in conclusion.

  *

  «Girls, my dear ones!» On a cold rainy morning, lying under a blanket, just returned home in a leather coat, after taking a cab – he had uttered this aloud, addressing all the girls who have recently appeared around him, most of them twenty two years of age. I addressed those who take off their clothes with me, into whose tender and sensitive slits I insert my tender and sensitive tool and we go on rubbing against each other for a long, long time.

  «Girls, my dear ones! You’re the only ones I have in this world!» They arrive at my place by subway, wearing cheap nylon jackets in the cold, in the rain and snow, and they go to bed with me. «Please forgive me for something that I myself don’t understand!»

  *

  Looking through the window: this babe trots along in a white beret, under it a tuft of blond hair. «Aha, coming from the supermarket, you slut. You cocksucking slut!» He thought crudely, feeling happy about his virility and charm, about being in his prime, and of his triumph over the recent horrors.

  *

  One day, at dawn, in dry February, I saw a big rust-colored rat on a deserted 5th Avenue. She came out of a hole in the underground (semi-underground) basement of a fashionable store and calmly crossed the avenue. A few days earlier in that icy year, my wife had walked out on me.

  *

  I’m vicious, I’m irritable, I’m no good, I’m not interesting. I think a lot about revolution and terrorism, and I think little about reality. I’ve lived long enough to have gray in my hair but I’m naive, as one girl, Virginia, told me. I’m a dreamer, as another girl said. I’ve prepared a bad future for myself, I’ll come to a bad end, in horrible anguish, as one poet said.

  «I’ll die in anguish, in a prison or at the gallows,» as I have discovered and become frightened. I have no money, no one supports me. During the evening for the poet Voznesensky at Columbia University, the Russian literature professors stared at the poet’s throat, but looked away while shaking my hand.

  And yet I’m proud that I’m irritable, I’m proud that I’m vicious. And I’m certain that I’m good, way better than that lot – the narrow, domesticated professors and the tame, domesticated, pseudo-rebellious poets.

  Nowadays, I want to be a man who, at night, opens a fence (a car door, castle gates) and says to a shivering youth (a quivering girl): Come in, my friend! (Come in, miss!) It’s warm and pleasant in here. Take this gold and live it up.

  I used to want to be a shivering youth, getting ready to jump off a bridge, who suddenly accosts a stunningly well-dressed gray-haired man who says: Are you poor? Did your lady abandon you? Stop it! There’s no need. Don’t kill yourself. Here’s money. Take a trip somewhere. Relax. Live it up!

  *

  Once, during the usual boring merry-making at the millionaire’s house, I ran downstairs, opened the door into the black December garden and stared sadly at the bulging river and at the patterned branches of trees against the troubled sky. There was also a sacramental moon and I was thinking about this lady-girl in a white, almost gossamer dress. She was laughing nervously and dancing with me hysterically, becoming wet through the dress (the sap of desire?). She was enticingly beautiful in her bitch-like, youthful passion – directed towards me, and towards everyone else. Towards the world.

  Her hot neck, her long gloves-up to her elbow, smeared with brown grass – it was cold and shivery as we fucked under a tree, as though in a rush. It was a mixture of half-romance and half-pornography…

  «Edward!» someone called from upstairs. Edward – that’s me. The housekeeper’s girlfriend walks up to me. «What are you doing out here alone?» she asked.

  *

  It’s cold. Sometimes it rains. Today it’s cold. It’s been a year since – as I understand – I’ve been under the careful eye of the FBI. After the article carried some time ago by an Italian paper, they – one would think – focused on me even more. For now, it’s just for my words and books, not for some subversive acts.

  But the acts will follow. For some reason I’m looking out the window onto First Avenue, empty on this cold December night, and I think absentmindedly about my – Eddie’s, Edka’s, Edward’s life. It shouldn’t be too long, it seems. Neither should it be short.

  I envision a summer exploit and summer blood. I contrive for myself a comfortable death, so to speak. Most likely, it’s just that I’ve always hated the cold and adored the sun.

  «It will happen, it will happen as you wish. Calm down. For now, go to the kitchen – you always get hungry at night – get out a piece of food that the kind housekeeper brought for you and eat-this is for the time being, just for the time being… You’ve already achieved something in this life – a case with your name on the cover is filed somewhere with the FBI. Shrug your shoulders. What of it? It means that everything’s going the way it should.»

  *

  Mama mia! Life is like a dream: you can’t even remember anything properly. Just a dream – the poems, Moscow, the wives who flashed by and disappeared, friends and tender admirers, the Russian landscape, Crimea and the Caucasus, the Moscow snow and the Moscow inky dusk.

  I flew to Italy with a bow-tie – an artist and a conspirator, Asti Spumante, the Vatican museum, the attractive, red-haired woman who was divorcing her husband Arkady, leaving him for a disheveled musician – all this has passed… And there will be a lot more that will pass.

  And suddenly I find myself on yours-theirs street in a suit from Pier Cardin, with a machinegun in my right hand, and on the left, a thirteen-year-old boy, my friend, whose neck I’m squeezing as I lean on him – we’re moving towards a shelter and this is Beirut or Hong Kong, and my left shoulder is shot through but the bone is okay.

  Studying the new strange language, shooting at the moving target – you have to be brave, that’s what history wants from us, that’s what the always voracious, bloodthirsty nation wants; you have to be brave and reckless, Edka Limonov, you just have to, Brother.

  *

  If you’re young and slim…

  Oh, if you’re young and slim, and you have more hair on your head than you fucking needed – your fluffy bangs cover your forehead – than it’s no big deal that some of your hair is gray. Your hands are covered with nicks, scratches and cuts – this is because now you’re building a loft, and now renovating a doctor’s office. You’re ambitious like a pig; you’re ready at a moment’s notice to appear on television and radio and give interviews to newspapers on any day; the others, however, live at a much slower pace and the books take a long time to get printed, and for now nobody is seriously interested in you, with the exception of homely girls.

  *

  Bought myself a Christmas tree – it’s as though I’m playing a game. Though I didn’t stand in line for this as I did in Russia, still I wasted a lot of time driving around with the millionaire’s housekeeper from place to place downtown. By the end of the day, on the West Side Highway, right on Canal Street and the severe December
Hudson River we – exhausted and angry and cold – found a whole crowd of Christmas trees and its vendors who, in order to keep warm, burned oil in barrels. The oil burned with the unreal red, infernal, flame.

  We bought (the housekeeper haggled over the price) two trees. After tying them to our Jeep’s roof, we took off. We got the Jeep from the millionaire’s wife when she heard that Edward wanted to buy a Christmas tree. Three days ago, after getting drinking himself into oblivion at the millionaire’s Christmas party, Edward kissed the millionaire’s wife in front of all the three hundred guests. An idiot and a pig he is, that’s for sure.

  And the Christmas tree – that’s for the sake of New Year’s: it feels good to breathe in the aroma of childhood. I’ll go ahead and buy myself some mandarines, here they’re called «tangerines.» I’ll run the strings through the tangerines’ skin and will hang them on the tree. And, if I still have money, I’ll get the candy and will hang the candy too. And the lights. And then I’ll watch.

  And I’ll return home right before New Year’s (or right after). I’ll be drunk, and I’ll lie down to sleep right under the tree. Hell, the way it’s been going I don’t get much chance to pamper myself.

  *

  The group consisting of the staid, bearded millionaire himself, his wife, her lover in a top hat and tails, and a black velvet cape, and all the children – all are off to a theater to see «Dracula,» and stop at a Chinese restaurant before that.

  The housekeeper picked up little Michael from the Chinese restaurant at seven – he doesn’t get to go to «Dracula»,- and we went to Bloomingsdale’s to buy presents for the housekeeper’s family. Little Michael gobbled his pop-corn; they showed the most exciting episode from the «Star Wars»; the pre-Christmas crowd; the sword sale, the models of which came from the movie – I felt like buying cologne and much, much more, or nothing at all. I had no money, just 50 cents and a subway token. Suddenly I caught myself posing, affecting Michael’s father. I was in a hat and in a sheepskin coat with a wide collar, my face anguished – Michael’s father indeed. The millionaire is a modern type – leaving for theater, he was in a dinner-jacket and in a Persian shirt with a stand-up collar, resembling a Russian golden shirt – it was embroidered with gold.

  *

  What an unearthly, heavenly-hellish time it was when Elena left me in February 1976. Oh Lord, how fortunate I am that I’ve lived through that time, through that misery.

  The time of the naked heart! The time of strange air – burning like alcohol, of the growling monsters, of the whole nature’s conspiracy against me, of the fire-spitting sky, and of the gaping earth waiting, quivering, for me.

  So many unbelievable observations, nightmarish experiences! The sabretooth tigers and other ice-age beasts strolled about New York in the burning winter wind, the skies cracked splitting apart, and I – warm, wet, and small – barely escaped, jumping, the teeth, the stomachs, and the claws. I, the tiny bleeding clot.

  And all around me the frightful words of the hunched philosopher thundered and rang: «The unfortunate one is the most fortunate!…he is the most fortunate!…the most fortunate!» But I didn’t understand that then.

  I wish I could experience that now, but that’s impossible, quite impossible, unfortunately. That kind of a vision is granted only at a time of great misfortune, just once, and this experience borders only death.

  *

  Millionaire’s Housekeeper

  The Neanderthal Boy

  The Bald Diva

  Upon reflecting about all my girls, I tend to conclude that the girl-photographer (the Bald Diva) – though a pretty demented specimen – is my highest achievement in sex now. Aside from the fact that I want her most of the time, she’s more creative than all of Eddie’s other girls – her strange pictures of naked women and men who radiate light.

  The Bald Diva is superior to the asexual millionaire’s housekeeper, she’s also superior to the Neanderthal Boy as I call this short creature who’s good in all ways – nice, helpful, fucks pleasantly, but, inevitably, in varying degrees, she smells of urine and looks remarkably like that cute Neanderthal Boy whom we all know from a textbook illustration. For now, the Neanderthal Boy does modern dancing and waits at a restaurant three times a week.

  The Bald Diva is superior.

  *

  Had the millionaire’s housekeeper died, I think I would make up a story about how tenderly I loved her and how sincerely I wept for her with the Bald Diva and how, on the following day the Neanderthal Boy came by, and she also wept – all of my girlfriends today are sentimental.

  To be honest, I respect the millionaire’s housekeeper: though not in good health she has a great deal of energy; though she’s simple, she’s capable of loving the complex, even decadent. With pride and adoration befitting a mother, she says that at the last party all women asked the hostess, «Who is this sexy guy?» – more than about any other men. «It’s about you, Edward!»

  It’d be interesting to take a peak into the soul of this strapping girl with big feet, protruding soft butt, and strangely long, chubby – still child’s – hands. What’s in there, in her soul? Why does she enjoy giving food and drink, and look after – in various ways – after this villain who’s twelve years her senior, who obviously wants to be somewhere else, and in whose bathroom she finds women’s wrist watches and probably even women’s underwear. But the housekeeper doesn’t complain. She graduated from a Catholic school. Had she died, she could be canonized saint.

  But precisely because she hasn’t died, I hate her sometimes for her caring for me, and I despise her for her being asexual. «The doctor told me that soon I’ll be healthy and you’ll be able to go inside of me,» she tells me with a lisp. If only she’d known how many times I’ve done this «going inside» with the Bald Diva (who begins to bore me now), she’d die of fear and envy.

  *

  Though the millionaire’s housekeeper has a mere flu, I have an impression that she’s almost dying. I love the dying, that’s why I’m here in the New Year’s night. She’s in her bed on the fourth floor; she sighs and moans and reads the children’s poet A.Milne, while I’m downstairs in the kitchen, having my own fun. I’m eating shchi with pies – I’ve made this all earlier. I’m drinking Stolichnaya and Martini, talk on the phone occasionally, and I keep my spirits up – everything will be all right, and although the life is closer to the end than to the beginning, we’ll have time to show off our brilliance, Eduard Veniaminovich, we’ll have time to frolic and to show our teeth and the sideview of our severe face, and then, with thunder and flames, we’ll take off once and for all into the yawning abyss – death.

  And in the meantime, a swan-like beauty – and there’ll be more than one – will bend over me, you just wait.

  *

  Maybe you need to sleep, maybe you don’t – I don’t know. Maybe you need to stay up without sleep: write, seek inspiration, chew on your pen, waste paper. But for some reason I have no reason to do any of the above. I’m just sitting – vacantly – at the table, not going to bed; I’m quietly processing my thoughts, and this terribly slow process in the state of semi-consciousness is – as it turns out – a true sensation of life that is no more than the pulsating blood and this semi-delirium. It’s like a bull’s-bladder in the window of my grand-grand-grand-grand-grandfather’s. There’s a glimmer of light through the bladder.

  *

  Once – it was freezing cold – I, poorly dressed, was returning from the Bald Diva. In the subway, the RR line, there was a crazy guy – smiling, slobbering – he kept saying the names of the presidents and it was turning out that he was a relation to Roosevelt; in fact he was his son.

  On the 6 train, the Lexington line, where I later transferred, there was another crazy. This time it was a black guy in boxers holding a pair of pants under his arm – he was a lot meaner. He harassed a black girl who was deathly scared and shoved people out of his way, and at the end, he chased away everyone from the car, everyone but me. Uneasy yet ca
lm, I resolved to stab him in his belly if he touched me. He didn’t, though he hobbled nearby.

  *

  It’s snowing, and I’m thinking of how nice it would be to poison myself by drinking some bright and vile liquid, leaving a bit of it in a narrow glass. Poison myself while staring at the snow. And do this because I’m ecstatic about life, just because I’m ecstatic, yes, just out of awe and ecstasy.

  *

  I came out, straightened my jacket and said:

  «You have to understand, guys, this is our final battle. It’s unlikely that we’ll escape, don’t entertain any illusions. There’s only one thing in this world that’s higher than life: a good hero’s death. Antonio and Barbara will go with me to the left room, to the windows, the others will do as they did yesterday. Sheila, put on that insane record, it fits the mood now. What a sunny morning we have today!»

  «And what are they doing there downstairs? When are they going to start moving?» He asked Luciano who stood leaning against the hole in the wall.

  The soldiers’ black backs began to move around below on a far-off street.

  *

  The love for my revolver shows in that at night I often put the gun on a small pillow under a lamp in my study; I lovingly take it apart, lay out all the parts and admire them. He’s my devoted, tough, and loyal friend. He’s graceful, elegant, and his entire silhouette, as well as his parts, is endowed with strength, significance, and expression. When I look at my revolver, I feel good.

  Usually I examine my revolver for a long time. Then I stroke it and grease it with the best grease I can find in our town.

  Once, I had a young, white-breasted girl – I loved her a lot. We fucked many times a day, and when I got dead tired but still wanted to see how she twitches and cries from love’s pleasures, I replaced my prick with a revolver. This was greatly successful and met with acclaim by my girlfriend. I always took the cartridges out though.

  We were both mysterious crazies, she and I, that’s why she turned away when I took the cartridges out, she wanted to believe that I didn’t take all of them out and that maybe I had left one in, and she was scared.