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.