«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.»