They will all come: Hooligans and those who are timid (timid ones are good in combat), drug-pushers, and those who hand out bordello ads. They will come – masturbators and lovers of porno magazines. They will come – those who wander alone in the museum halls, and those who leaf through books alone in the halls of free Christian libraries. They will come – those who, with no money to buy anything, loiter away their time at Macy's and Alexander's. They will come-those who drink just coffee for two hours straight at McDonald's and stare sadly out the window. They will come – those have lost in love, money, and work, and those who were unfortunate to be born in poor families.
They will come – those who are sick of everything, who already wasted part of their lives on the absurd, endless work in a bank or in some department store. They will come – the coal-miners who are sick of the mines, factory workers who hate their factory. They will come – the hobos and some staid family people who are sick of their families. They will come – soldiers from the army, students from their campuses. They will come-the brave and the strong from all fields of life, they'll come to distinguish themselves and to find glory.
They will come – the homosexuals, walking in pairs, hugging each other; young men and women in love will come, and so will the lesbians in flamboyant clothes. They will come – the actors, and so will the artists, and musicians, and writers whose work doesn't sell.
Everyone will call in. They'll take the arms, and they'll put an end to this order once and for all.
And city by city is conquered by the revolutionary forces of losers. Giving heed to the blood which flowed through the veins of many generations of losers, the soldiers of the imperial army tear off their imperial insignia and with ecstatic eyes and flowers on their hats, they return to their own tribe, they embrace their kin.
City by city, starting with the explosion in the Great New York, America is becoming free, and I, E.L., march in the lead column and everyone knows and loves me. And my hair is faded from the revolutionary summer.
And everything anti-human is crumbling down – the banks, the offices, the courts, the factories, all the chemicals, metals and other shit like that.
I don't want to fuck her (the Bald Diva) anymore. She's not my piece.
Doesn't excite me. Barely fucked her twice. All the same, I look at her as something crude, like a thickset wench with big ass and thighs. It doesn't excite me. I'm an unhappy man, right? And it turns out that I don't need females. And why is that that I choose the busty ones, why? The busty and crude ones?
My ideal, my secret, has finally formed within me now – a tender girl or boy with un-swollen limbs, slim, fragile, who lives in the world as though it's an enchanted garden. I stared – enraptured (not sexually) – at a rich lady's son sitting at his mother's birthday party, wearing a gray little jacket, the same color vest, a bright tie, and black velvet trousers. He had long dark hair – an eleven-year-old prince.
The females, they're just good buddies to me, that's all. I now understand all my torments. And the Bald Diva left with my craziness stuck all over her. Now, that you understand yourself so well, Edward, stop dragging the females to your place, picking them up at parties or elsewhere.
If, when awake on a rainy spring morning, and after you've stayed in your bed a little – thinking, listening to music – you are suddenly able to say to yourself honestly: «After all, I'm nobody in this life-I'm shit and dust,» then it's too early to give up on yourself. But it has to be honest – a confession to yourself, not for others.
Arithmetic
Spring. I'm hungry.
The millionaire's housekeeper has lots of food and a variety of it, too. But I want my own food. That's why having stolen 950 from her piggy bank, I leave.
My remaining money is $1.50.
I buy a chicken at the store. It weighs 2.66 pounds, priced at 690 per pound, I pay $1.84. I have 610 left.
For 600, I get a pack of Kents at a cigarette booth, and I go home happy.
I have one penny in my pocket.
In the bathroom at night, I smile in the mirror at myself – the comedy of life.
«That's right, buddy, isn't it a comedy?» It is, for sure. Yes, a comedy. Honest to God, it's funny to find yourself suddenly in America, in the bathroom at night, living alone, and you smile. You even laugh, in fact.
And the light? I didn't turn it on – it comes through the kitchen.
I'm waiting for a decision from this Macmillan place, I'm waiting… and before that, I was waiting to hear from other places.
«Be patient, be patient and see what you'll get. Once on a beautiful day, you'll wake up old as a rag, hurting all over, and by then your hand couldn't hold a gun.»
Ah, how often I've dreamt and still am dreaming about beautiful, terribly beautiful girls. But I don't have them, and when I finally get them, when I have money to buy them and mount them to fuck them, I think my only desire will be to kill them and nothing else.
To kill them because they didn't come to me, they neglected me when I was young and gifted like a flower, when I believed in the blinding love – the sun. But come they will – when I become a vile old rat.
Yesterday they brought in old and elegant furniture – proper chairs upholstered with cherry-colored velvet, a huge table on carved legs, a stained-glass dresser, and a bar.
For a month now, the entire three-room apartment has belonged to me. My room-mate, the Jewish kid, left. Now the millionaire's housekeeper pays a third of the rent and still lives at her place of work. It's possible that with the help of this furniture and money she wants to capture me gradually. She has her objectives. My job is not to give in.
Meanwhile, life is gradually returning to normal. And though I have no money to get bread, and I totally depend on the millionaire's housekeeper, I feel bourgeois.
And what of it, that's the way it ought to be – think I – admiring the twenty bottles of alcohol that I've already put in the bar. It's impossible for life to stand still, it must go somewhere. Let it be going according to my efforts and under my supervision – after all, it's me trying to rebuild my own harmony destroyed by Elena. It's true to be sure – this harmony will also collapse. Such is man's lot. And I drink a tumbler of sweet alcohol, a full tumbler, like a child: «To good fortune!»
In order to raise his spirits, he went on early-morning walks. Today, he set an objective – to cover thirty blocks to Macmillan Press, to check «how are things,» and then walk back.
The wind blew, the press was where it was supposed to be; he tried to penetrate its recesses with his inner eye, he strained himself but very quickly understood that it was useless, and he turned to go.
Exactly at that moment, two postal workers exerting themselves – rolled out past him a huge tub of mail. There were no letters, just parcels, thick, same-size parcels. «Manuscripts,» he understood, horrified. A tub of manuscripts! Two or more – three cubic meters of manuscripts have vanished in the recesses of the press. The vastness of human activity made him noxious.
He pulled on his cap and took off. With the press at his back, he was still searching in the bowels of this building for the captive of two months – his nervous book.