Diary of a Loser Read online

  *

  New York looks leaden in the cold end-of-January twilight. Leaden pavement and the sky is the same; some houses are entirely leaden, some only in places. Yellow is especially dismal in such weather.

  It’s a frightening city, both to its observer and dweller. You hug the heater and look out the window: it’s natural for a man to be scared but also to peak at the frightening.

  And so I think: Why am I living here? Why am I not going to the woods and glades where it’s green and the space is warm and gay all year round – it’s possible to find this on earth. Why am I living here? See this vile brown smoke going up from the roof of a neighboring building? The Devil only knows. I don’t understand this today. Ugh, what an inhuman abomination it is outside!

  *

  First, my roommate shaved his beard, now he’s cut his hair. It seems like he started a new life.

  I too want something new. I’ll go to a store and will buy a new gun. Or two guns. I’ll hang them on the walls, then I’ll buy cartridges and gunpowder, and my life will change and it will flourish.

  One of the guns, I’ve decided, will be a fowling piece, and I’ve known how to use it since childhood. I’ll sow off its muzzle and if a mob bursts in here, it will be met by a dense charge of shot.

  They don’t like this, I know this since childhood. I remember my neighbor Mitka, he ran to the doorstep of his house and shot at the mob who came to kill him with picks and axes. How they screamed and ran away! And he shot just once! It was not Sicily where I lived, it was Ukraine.

  *

  I’m standing by the window, hands in my pockets, and I say to myself: «So, disgusted, are you? Feeling empty? Why the fuck did you masturbate then? You know this since your childhood, it’s bad, even your mother told you so. Besides, it’s embarrassing – there’re plenty of females around. They always call you on the phone, and you masturbate, eh?»

  «Well, the females are not my kind, there’s no flame in them. Yes, I fuck them, but there’s no great pleasure in it,» I reply to myself. «I can’t find the one aflame, and so I’ve committed a sin, have entered the fantasy about this angel, tender and vicious.»

  «Okay, what the fuck, go, take a nap, then have a good meal, drink a glass of gin, and go walk the streets, check out the faces. Who knows you may meet the angel for your loins, then you’ll get scared, dumbfounded.»

  *

  Yellow cabs. The city – lines and numbers. Eighty-third Street, Eighty-foutth, Eighty-fifth… Or if you’re going downtown, it’s Eighty-second, Eighty-first… Or if you’re counting towards the west, it’s Second Avenue, Third Avenue…

  An amazing boy with his mother – an arrogant dreamer, a model with a portfolio – emerging from a slick, polished car. «Bitch!» I hurled this spitefully at her. Couldn’t control myself. A petty vengeance, old accounts going all the way back to my ex.

  She turned around, surprised: What’s he saying?

  I smiled as rudely as I could.

  She smiled back, thinking, «He must have the right to this tone of voice. An artist? An actor? Who the fuck knows, maybe some celebrity.» She smiled just in case and left. Her fair, serene little forehead, her rude derision toward – and the knowledge of these pathetic, pestering men: «They all want me.» Ah, sweet kitten, if I’d fallen for you, you’d learn what misery is real fast – I wouldn’t burn you with a cigarette, I’d find a way to inflict real pain on you. I dove into a bar and had a Black Velvet – it’s Guinness and champagne, just like the deceased little Irish poet George Reavy taught me.

  The bitch’s legs – daring, long, brazen – glinting from under her fur coat while her daddy, holding her little hand helped her out of the car. Oh if she could hit him in his balls with her lovely leg!

  She probably has some scoundrel like me for a lover – an Italian, shorter than she.

  *

  They got up late. Had breakfast in the kitchen – cold roast beef, tea, an apple pie. Sitting at the sides of the small table, facing each other. Talked a little about everything. Including the article in the Village Voice about general asexuality. «But not us, not me,» thought the two.

  Outside, the sky, rich after the blizzard, overflowed with blue. And then he caught himself waiting for her to leave. To be alone, to plunge into the books and the newspapers, to write, to go for a walk in the winter sun – to look at women, at the store windows… But she wasn’t leaving. Out of growing hatred for her, he fucked her again. She left happy.

  *

  I’ll walk to the sea. I’ll sit and pull at the wet rope or a string. I’ll eat some fish, drink some vodka, and get lost – stupid – in thought for a half hour. And all the while I’ll stare at the sea, forgetting who I am, a fascist, a communist, or worse. I’ll remember some Vera, no, that other corrupted girl, Marina who was in love with me in the Koktebel mountains…

  I come to. I get bored of the sea and walk to the city where people are rushing about, making claims for love and attention of their close ones. I’ll go and inseminate someone during a totally needless sex act on the fucked-out sheets. Let the belly puff up, let the unwanted baby grow.

  *

  Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la!

  How I wish I could gallop somewhere from the glade into the woods amid these cute, little curly headed pages in their white stockings – to follow that little seductive princess, smiling through the rosehips.

  Gallop, go ahead! You’re thirty-four, and the princess will call the police, the ambulance will come and then you’ll have to explain that you’re a page and where the other pages have disappeared.

  This took place in Central Park where I chose and admired one little girl.

  *

  An old friend of mine called to ask if I wanted to go to a museum to see Arpa’s exhibit. But I was sick of museums, of their order and quiet. I invited my friend to go check out garbage dumpsters later in the evening, and he agreed to do that instead of the museum.

  Two hours later we walked the streets, sinking our eyes into the tempting bags (filled with pants? Shoes? Shirts? Gold?), the seductively swollen black bags, and us – examining, sniffing, involved – expectant fortune hunters. A lot more interesting than Arpa.

  *

  Sometimes I feel good about the police. They defend us from ourselves – the lonely and desperate selves. So that we don’t kill each other. But during the revolution they should step aside. Don’t interfere, you mustached fellows, it’s none of your business. It’s not for you stop. Change is taking place. And you just have to become one with the people. Otherwise you’ll be trampled down. We’ll trample over you. If you like, you can take part in it. Our revolution appeals to you too. She appeals even to the rich. It’s not people, it’s this civilization she’s against.

  *

  We’ve learned to walk like that from films and photographs. We’ve taken these faces from films and photographs. We’ve arranged our muscles exactly to their standards. We’ve named our children the brand names of cars and coal mines. One day someone – a traveling businessman or a nun – brings a book into a house and it totally overturns one’s whole life. Or even a magazine, a newspaper – not a book – where an incidental sketch lashes your eyes with an electric whip – and so goes your life to hell, to a hole, out…

  *

  I want to write a book. It’s a very nasty, bleak book where gasoline floats in the ocean, the wind rattles iron, rats run in rooms and even on the ceiling, and there are no cockroaches, only because they were eaten by the rats.

  Flocks of winged, ugly, evil-smelling half-animals, half-insects obscure the sun; the trees are black and have shed their leaves; the freeze moves slowly from North to South; the earth cracks open in places and devours houses; there are fewer and fewer people; the planet looks abandoned.

  It’ll be a pocket-size book. The font will be unusually big and legible. After all, people’s eyesight is steadily declining. Besides, if you’re traveling in the dying earth, then you’d need of a guidebook.

 
Things are pretty bad. After all, the new fresh crowds will never come from Asia – there’s no one there – mounted on the brown-eyed animals, and the last short Oiraty and their offspring thoughtfully grease their motorcycle parts in the absurdly cracked mountains.

  *

  Gogol and I, embracing each other, jolly and happy, in our dear Ukraine near Poltava. We’re eating cherries and talking. Maybe vareniki, too. We’re talking. That’s the dream I had – Gogol and I. Wearing white – maybe it wasn’t Ukraine – maybe it was Italy, Rome. Branches everywhere. It was hot, you know…

  The compatriots

  Were Leo Tolstoy alive now, I would hit him over the head with a log because of his stuffy moralism, because of his holier-than-thou tone, and because in his «great» works he didn’t mention how he fucked a great number of female serfs on his estate.

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, my double compatriot, deserves to be drowned in a prison latrine. «Why?» You ask. For his lack of brilliance, for the nagging dullness of his characters, for the army-prison-slavophile jackets with which he dressed all of his characters (and would dress the entire Russian nation, if he had his way), for the one-dimensional thoughts, for this whole preachy, provincial, stale and cheerless picture of the world – yes! For all this into the latrine he goes.

  *

  My roommate, a Jewish fellow, isn’t living with me now – lives with his mother. I came by his room and saw a magazine «Club.» I took it and looked through it.

  Nina’s pulling at her cunt with her little fingers – thrusting it. Muriel, sprawling in a chair, breathes at me with her cunt. All these tender girls, equipped with stockings, belts, king-size beds, and plush sofas – they’re either lying down – tempting – or are standing up, or even hanging, sometimes masturbating, waiting anxiously for a cock. «It’s unlikely that I’ll ever find a golden cunt like that,» thinks a man, an exhausted businessman or a bank employee, «such golden cunt.»

  Dream! Fantasy! A tender, fire-spitting cunt; white and weak shoutders, so that you want to abuse them, bend them – thin long legs… Pah, motherfucker you, bourgeois society! You can’t pass a news stand without having some fifty cunts shoot at you.

  They wound and disturb…

  Go ahead, if you can, sell your own genitals, too.

  *

  The old people warm their backs in the chairs under the setting sun – in the house across the street. I watched and watched and suddenly, «I won’t, I won’t, I won’t,» I roared. And these white covers on the chairs are like the beginning of the end, like a rehearsal for the burial shroud. Fuck you! Coffee, marijuana, hash, alcohol, cocaine, heroin – whatever, as long as I’m hoisted in a noose, crooked like a crazy. Or become limp like a piece of meat, ooze out, break down, decompose – but not be normal like this hobble-hobble toward death.

  Fuck you! I want to fuck, betray, shoot out the window, torture victims, plunder palaces – I want to walk with my blood aflame, my prick bursting with blood – fierce! And I want to rape proud women.

  Retirement Insurance Policy! Indeed! Me, fishing at some creek in Oklahoma, drinking Schlitz-lite, wiping my bald skull, sniffing the old cunt, my wife/granny?

  Oh, no! It’s better to be a lone wolf, to have a clear vision of the rubber-insulated electric chair in your future, and in spite of that, rejoin my guys and cry out in a hoarse voice: Kill ‘em! For that is life! Kill ‘em all! Those who are not with us are against us!

  *

  I’m a good hand. I put up walls, smooth and solid; I paint them beautifully, quickly. The nails, as though alive, get hammered in all the right spots; the doors are hung though by themselves.

  I’ve built a studio for a photographer, and I’ll build another room if there’s work. It’s no big deal for me to build a house – there’s magic in my hands. I’m a damn good worker, and I’m proud of that. I can bake a pie, I can cook shchi; I can put together a jacket, a coat – in my life, I’ve sewn thousands of pairs of trousers.

  Had my life taken a different turn, I’d be a solid citizen. As it is, I hang out with the unsuccessful, I root for the losers. They’re closer to my heart. This is my kind of a crowd – I tied my future to them.

  *

  I dream about a wild uprising. I cherish a Razin/Pugachyov-like uprising in my heart. That’s why I’ll never be a Nabokov. I’ll never collect – walking with the bare, old, hairy, anglophone feet – butterflies in a glade. And I’ll never be an obnoxious Norman Mailer, slapping the face of even more obnoxious Gore Vidal when the wrinkled Jacky O., would use her self-defense training, pulling us apart.

  There is a type of blood that’s pathetic and muddy, and then there’s a type of blood that’s bloody and clear – pure syrup. You won’t fucking make a Mr. Writer out of me. And if I make a million, I’ll spend it on weapons and will stage an uprising in some country.

  I won’t be buying castles or islands; I won’t be piling up antiques or exchanging one cunt for a younger one – I’m not some silly artsy puppet or a grasping, hoarse rock star, a young proletarian. No, in this world, my entertainment is of an extraordinary nature…

  *

  The Bald Diva came by. I’ve discovered that her breasts have become bigger. I’ve asked her if I’m not imagining it. She confirmed it without commenting on it – «No, you’re not imagining it, they’re bigger.»

  After I fucked her twice, she began to get ready to leave (this is unusual) by 10:00 pm. And only when she was at the door on her way out, she mentioned that she’s going to get an abortion. I stroked her cheek, it disturbed me somewhere within me. It has happened to me dozens of times – but it has and will keep disturbing me. Had she found some dark path, she could have reached my heart – but neither she nor I knew this path. That’s why, having carefully kissed each other, we said goodbye at the door. Remarkably reserved, unobtrusive, the Bald Diva awed me with her conduct. Nevertheless, she knew I was an adventurer – I told her that myself. A smart Jewish girl, she behaved accordingly. «Why impose? Thank goodness I have what I have,» she probably thought to herself.

  I’ve promised to call her the following night, but didn’t because I’m wicked. Besides – I thought – this will make her hate me: «He didn’t even call to check on me.» This bitter thought will possibly keep her from loving me in vain – if not completely, then partly.

  *

  I have a pleasant appearance but I’m malicious. I’m interesting but malicious. They should be shot, the likes of me, so they don’t go around spilling their malice. States (even though they’re usually late) are right in shooting these types – they, the destructive types, need to be shot earlier.

  What a rabid dog am I!

  *

  I remember how, a long time ago, I was riding in a cart in the Suma district. The horses gaily pulled on cart, the milk lapped in the pails. I was twelve and had a kind of crush on a twenty-year-old student Nina. I was staying at her place; because of the unheard of summer heat, we slept on the floor of a big wooden house. We slept on the floor because of the heat.

  She slept with me in a lacy gown, and I felt a strange kind of anxiety. In her sleep, she hugged me with her slippery body. And I was jealous of a young peasant with a forelock, a tractor driver I think. And I remember how mosquitoes disfigured me when I went to pick black currents, standing knee-high in a swamp. I persisted in being angry with them and ran from them to the swamp. I responded to their calls only by nighttime.

  The cows mooed, the bull threatened with his horns, the landscapes rolled up and down, a Ukrainian song blasted from beyond the reedy pond. The student Nina and her tractor driver probably hated me that summer.

  And I remember the hay-making in August. The oxen pulled us along with the monstrously huge hay stacks, and the macho guys showed off their skill by deftly tossing the last of the stacks onto the top of our cart – Nina’s and mine. Swish-swish! And the blue flies buzzing by the oxen tails, and then the palpitating, pellucid evening.

  And I remember the villages overgrown
by the cherry trees, surrounded by the fields of buckwheat. Have you ever driven across a buckwheat field? What then can we talk about if you’ve never driven in a cart across a buckwheat field?… From out of the villages’ orchards old peasants in straw hats came to welcome us into their cool clean huts; they treated us to honey and warm bread – everything that makes the gray Ukrainian nationalists here go insane with nostalgia, making them turn and turn in their beds, thinking: «Our Ukraine is still alive.» And it will stay alive as long as people like Mr. Savenko (that’s my real name) stir up trouble on this earth. Though I’m not a Ukrainian nationalist.

  The reformation

  The time when I fucked the male strangers I happened to meet in some back alleys (I did this out of loneliness), and lived on welfare – that time has passed. Now I’m a full-fledged member of an American society, a working individual, a proletarian – I even try to pay taxes. And I stopped being a fag a long time ago.

  *

  Ah, the Jewish girls, the Jewish girls…

  Energetic and curious, with luxuriant hair, tender and Romantic in the Oriental manner, they leave their parents’ houses early. They bravely go into the world armed with diaphragms, contraceptive pills, and books on good nutrition. Enthusiastic, nosey, their brown eyes aglitter, they’re first in any movement, be it women’s lib, socialism, or terrorism.

  They’re first to run and get a new book by a celebrity poet, and you’ll meet their swooning eyes if you look into a hall during a concert of any rock group or classical music performance. They study ballet and photography; they’re independent and persistent. Though often truly lecherous and very sexy, they can restrain themselves for the sake of duty and family. One can find rare and refined flowers among them – these become courtesans and patrons of arts.

  No matter how hard they try to get rid of the Jewish girls through the Auschwitzes and other powerful means, they keep running on the streets of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities; their arms up, holding on to the bus handrail, they keep staring mistily at you; they keep giving to you – the Slavic and other nations’ youth – their bodies.