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 machine-gun 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.