His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  The last time I got sick of it all happened quite recently, after the business with Natashka and the blood in the bathroom. And I got myself to a brothel. The reason didn’t have anything to do with Natashka, and in fact there wasn’t any particular reason for my mental upset, or at least no explicit reason. I obviously just needed to escape from my routine and from my struggle, which wasn’t giving me any satisfaction. Maybe it was a full moon. My flight ended in a brothel.

  Yes, I licked the cunt of a prostitute. But does that make me any less of a man? No. The cunt, when spread wide, turned out to be pink, and before giving it to me, she washed it while standing in front of a sink and raking water into it with her palm. Actually, «cunt» sounds crude. Paula didn’t have a cunt, she had an Italian… what? I don’t know; there don’t seem to be very many affectionate or deferential terms for the female sex organ. In Paula, that place resembled an almost scarlet butterfly with its wings spread open. The scarlet area extended high and wide between her legs. It was probably irritation caused by her work, a sort of industrial trauma.

  I hadn’t been looking for Paula in the beginning. What I needed was a skinny blonde. But it isn’t that easy to find skinny blondes on Eighth Avenue. Paula, who had herself stopped me, did not upon learning that I needed a skinny blonde betray the slightest astonishment, but only went to the edge of the sidewalk, put her hands to her mouth and, in her attempt to be heard over the rumble and roar of the cars, shouted, “Elsa!” And from the other side of the street came Elsa, maneuvering against the traffic. Her name clearly didn’t suit her, and she didn’t suit me either. She was small and skinny, and yes, she was a blonde, but not even a vulgar one, which would have been just right, but of die simple country-girl type. Her thin curly hair irritated me, a head of hair like a permanent, and so I said I’d look for another girl, and walked away. Apparently offended by my lack of interest, Elsa hurled after me, “He wants a skinny blonde! I weigh eighty-seven pounds! What are you planning to do, throw your skinny blonde up in the air and catch her on your prick or what?!”

  After wandering around for another half hour and still not finding a skinny blonde, I returned to Paula on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue and settled with her. We went around the corner to a hotel. I had in fact invited her to the millionaire’s house, but she turned me down, as they almost always do. There are a good many creeps wandering around Eighth Avenue.

  Paula was a brunette of Italian descent. She was pretty, but in comparison with the rest of her body, her ass was a little bit plump.

  On the gray but clean sheets in the room lay the little circle of a condom. On the ceiling a thin fluorescent circle glowed with a meager and foolish light. We got undressed, I lay down on my back, and Paula began licking and sucking my cock, after giving it a careful preliminary examination. That alone cost me thirty dollars, in addition to the ten dollars I had already paid to get into the room. I don’t know how to haggle with them.

  Though poor the room was clean, and as usual reminded me more of doctor’s office in a poor Soviet village than a room in a hotel-brothel. Yes, it was both a hotel and a brothel. Coming in Paula and I had met a black mother and child in the hallway. I didn’t feel sorry for that child living in a brothel; rather, I envied him — an interesting experience. Besides, when he grows up he won’t have all those pitiful superstitions that have cost me so much effort to get rid of. The best thing is to be abandoned in this world, knowing neither your mother nor your father, so that you can then make of yourself whatever you want — vicious, without any looking over your shoulder… In a word, it’s a fine, liberating thing. And what a complex he’ll have, I thought enviously. A person without a complex is like a new car they forgot to put the motor in. You can push it through life, of course, but it’s incapable of propelling itself.

  I stayed with Paula a long time, not having any place I needed to rush off to, and I paid her some more and we talked. I really laughed when Paula, obviously wishing to be amiable, suddenly picked up my Italian boots and said, “What beautiful boots you have, Edward!” — naturally, I’d introduced myself to her, how else? I recalled that the Marchioness Houston had once given me the same compliment. The Marchioness will, I hope, be pleased to learn that she and a prostitute have the same, the same… how shall I put it? The same grasp of the external world, or the same taste in men’s footwear.

  I told Paula I envied her profession. And I really did envy it. In addition to the fact that the work was interesting, and with people, Paula probably earned as much in an evening as I earned at the millionaire’s house in two weeks, and maybe a lot more. I alone had given her a hundred dollars in all. Not everybody’s as crazy as I am, and goes to a prostitute to soothe his mind, but even those who go to appease their flesh pay too, and so with her everything was just fine. She looked like a serious girl, neither an alcoholic nor an addict, and she was probably saving her money. I was neither a priest nor an intellectual jerk, and so I naturally didn’t preach to her that her profession was sinful or even tell her that to live the way she was living was unhygienic, and I didn’t try to persuade her to change her profession and stop selling her body. We simply smoked and chatted while sitting naked on the bed. Decent women also trade in their bodies; they also sell their cunts, although theirs usually go for a great deal more than a prostitute’s does, especially in the first days and weeks of your acquaintance. You go to a nice restaurant, taking a taxi, and before that there are tickets for a show or you have to take the girl to a disco afterwards, and only then can you go to bed. And if you buy the girl cocaine, as Ghupta suggests, a gram alone costs one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars, people! What’s a prostitute next to a decent woman! When it comes to the art of robbery, decent women are much more professional and much better qualified than prostitutes are… I’m not judging anybody, since my own is hardly the most virtuous of lives; I’m merely looking at life and turning it in my hands, and taking an interest in it and comparing it and analyzing it. I’m not satisfied with the verities of old books that call prostitutes fallen creatures. What’s so fallen about this Paula, I thought, why she’s more stable than I am.

  I wrote down my phone number for Paula and then went back outside with her. I had gotten little sexual satisfaction from her, and in fact I don’t really understand what sort of idiot you have to be to go to a prostitute for sexual satisfaction. You can get the same kind of satisfaction going to a urologist; he’ll touch your prick for you too. But I did get spiritual satisfaction, as we may conventionally call it, from my visit to Paula, in the same way that a little hoodlum, suffering all day from idleness and boredom, is soothed only by doing mischief, by hanging a cat in the garden, say, or swiping his father’s revolver from his desk and shooting his sister in the leg… I was pretty sure Paula wouldn’t call me — those girls are very cautious — even though I temptingly told her I was very rich and lived in my own house in Manhattan.

  I walked back to my house, crossing Broadway and several other streets until I reached Fifth Avenue, where I went up as far as Fifty-seventh Street. Thickly inscribed with a black felt-tip pen on the wall of a bank on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street was the proud invitation, “Rob me!” This is our special form of New York patriotism. Our New York robbers had been going to banks in record numbers those days. They’d robbed more banks than anybody else in the country, and so far that month they’d robbed more banks than they had all last year.

  Go to it, guys! I thought. Let’s make a real effort! We’ll double the number of bank robberies! We’ll double and triple it! I wasn’t the only fan. Everybody in New York was keeping track; everybody was excited. The press was keeping a count, and we New York patriots were keeping one too. Thirteen bank robberies today, and more tomorrow, God willing, even if it’s only fourteen. What excitement! Our bank robbers are the best and the boldest. Some of them are even women.

  I walked calmly past the bank. No, I wasn’t going to rob it; I’ve learned to keep
my passions under control. Being a writer is much more profitable than being a bandit. I only have to be patient, to wait, and I’ll get my piece and do my great deed. I’ll be patient, although there’s no doubt that inside I’m a bandit — what else? I’m no housekeeper or writer; I’m a bandit! That’s my true profession, I thought wickedly.

  Chapter Ten

  The boss was home. Five people from Kuwait were sitting in the living room. They had been sitting there for three hours.

  The five Kuwaitis arrived in a limousine dressed in suits of Western cut and not at all in the Bedouin burnooses I had expected. “The four of them,” said the boss’s stepbrother and business associate, Mr. Richardson, as he skipped into the kitchen rubbing his hands together, “the four Kuwaitis are worth more than two billion, Edward!” Two billion dollars! That was a figure more appropriate to astronomy. A million I could still comprehend after a fashion, but two billion and even more? Only four of them were worth that, since the fifth, even though he was a Kuwaiti too, was a pauper and wasn’t worth anything — he was only an interpreter. The interpreter, as I saw it, was a servant too, and so he didn’t particularly interest me, but I was all eyes for the possessors of the two billion, and I tried to go into the living room as often as possible, pretending to be attentive.

  When I’m attentive, I frequently overdo it. And I overdid it with the Kuwaitis and blew it. I put out alcohol in the living room, although not on the main table that Steven and his guests were sitting at, the mirrored one with the birds that Gatsby had cut out of a wall in Iran, but on a little table in the corner — some whiskey and rum and a few glasses. Even though I knew theoretically that people from Arab countries don’t drink alcoholic beverages since it’s forbidden by Muslim law, and that offering them something to drink is a great insult to them, or at least tactless. It was only by accident that I didn’t shove the alcohol right under their noses on the mirrored table. There fortunately wasn’t any room to do so, since I’d just put out coffee and tea for them. Luckily for me I’d only been able to squeeze in our ridiculous leather ice bucket and in the process had seen Gatsby’s face fall right before my eyes. He probably would have lashed out at me at once in the most obnoxious terms, if it hadn’t been for the Arabs sitting around the table and for Efimenkov, my guardian angel, whom I think he kept constantly in mind, although only Gatsby himself knows that for certain. I left off what I was doing, naturally, although I didn’t immediately realize what the problem was until Mr. Richardson came running in to me from the living room and worriedly informed me of my error. As soon as I got a chance, I took my bottles of alcohol away, and it’s possible that not even all the Kuwaitis saw them, since most of them were sitting facing the other way. It occurred to me in the hallway that if I had made a mistake like that two or three hundred years ago, it would have cost me my housekeeper’s and butler’s life. Three hundred years ago a barbarian lord would have hanged me from the large tree in the garden next to the swings, although afterward he would perhaps have pitied his loyal butler, the victim of his wrath.

  The Kuwaitis had been sitting all that time working on a deal with the boss and Mr. Richardson and two other businessmen of lesser rank. True, they took a break, during which they went down to the first floor to the solarium to examine and try out… well, what do you think? A machine for instantly determining the composition of gold alloys. The machine had been brought to the house two days before in a large case carefully packed in quilts, since it was one of only two or three such machines in existence, and our businessmen were very concerned about it. Externally, the machine looked like a small lathe with an electronic control panel from which various wires stuck out and a black box containing a screen and numerous indicators with needles.

  After their break was over, and the Arab-American mob had returned to the living room with its Persian carpets and cushions to chat some more and rustle papers, I stole down to the solarium to get a closer look at the machine. Lying on it were about a dozen oblong objects that looked like crudely made pastries. I picked up one of the pastries, and it felt abnormally heavy. Gold. It’s gold, real gold! I said to myself while tossing the ingot into the air.

  For some reason I was very happy. The weight of the gold was attractively pleasant. I thought for a moment how nice it would be to rake all the ingots into a bag, and I had just the one, and take off for distant lands. But how much gold could there actually be, how much was it worth? I weighed the pile of ingots with a glance. Not enough for me. Too little for me to give up my unpublished books and my agent, Liza, and abandon my struggle halfway. I often go to the bank to get cash for Gatsby, that being one of my duties, sometimes even several thousand dollars at a time, and occasionally the thought flashes through my mind to take off for Hong Kong or Las Vegas. But the difference between the big crook and the petty thief is precisely the fact that you can trust the former with even a hundred thousand. But don’t trust him with just a million, Gatsby!

  After returning the ingot to its place, I remained standing over the machine for a while shaking my head in amazement. That machine and the Kuwaitis and the house and my boss and the situation that day all reminded me of an episode from the adventures of Agent 007. The Kuwaiti-Gatsbian group looked like something taken from the silver screen, something right out of Goldfinger, and the only thing lacking was James himself. Actually, I could quite easily have played the role of James. Even mama Jenny had found it amusing to imagine I really was a Russian spy, and had suggested I open a Russian restaurant in New York and call it The Spy.

  The Kuwaitis sat a little while longer and then at last went downstairs, shaking our already wobbly banister like masters of the house, and took their places in their limousine. I was grateful they had come between lunch and dinner, at a neutral time, so that I didn’t have to make lunch for ten. Otherwise, I’d have been panting with exhaustion.

  And then their asses were gone. After taking the fastest shower of his life, the boss at once disappeared after them; obviously he was running over to see Polly, his permanent New York woman. Does he have girlfriends in other cities in the world too, just like a deep-sea sailor? I wondered. Actually, I’m not so sure he did tear off to Polly’s. That morning a van with the name “Tudor’s Flowers” on it brought seven vases of flowers and plants, including a rubber plant. I almost sent them all back, since neither Linda nor I had ordered them. Fortunately Gatsby appeared in the doorway at that moment and with a sly smile suggested that they were a gift and that he had an idea from whom. Maybe he ran off to the woman who had sent the plants? To see the rubber plant lady, as I instantly named her? Most likely that was it.

  All Gatsby did was smile and leave, whereas I wasted over an hour trying to find places in the house to put the flowers and plants and then taking them to different rooms. The full-grown rubber plant was particularly heavy; it was in fact a tree! I installed it in the living room, and the negotiations with the Kuwaitis had in fact been conducted underneath the rubber tree. Complain or not, it was my job.

  Linda took off as soon as Gatsby went up to the bathroom; it was already after eight. I remained in the house alone, although I didn’t feel free. I never do as long as Gatsby’s in New York. I fixed myself a Scotch on the rocks and sat down in the kitchen and looked out the window.

  Instead of the holiday life once promised me, I’m sitting in the kitchen, I thought bitterly. A man by a window. Outside, the Mystery of the Evening Dog Walk was in progress. I was interested in the women and the girls, not the dogs. My old girlfriend Jenny used to call dogs shit-producing machines. I share her point of view; it is, you’ll agree, a practical one for a housekeeper or caretaker. Is it nice to have shit outside your window even if the dog’s owner cleans it up? Bowing his legs outside my window, a big dog strained to push a large, dark turd out of himself.

  At that moment my favorite appeared, although I of course had no idea who she was: a large yellow-haired woman with a ginger-colored dog on a leash. She was dressed in a slightly old-fashione
d suit — a jacket and long skirt — and for some reason it was indecently charming.

  That’s what I need, a maiden wife with a yellow head, a big healthy girl like that, I thought. Then I’d be happy. And what’s so good about my life anyway? All I do is sit in the kitchen by the window all the time or serve, while my employer goes off to restaurants.

  I’m a human being too. I’d like to be happy too. You think my casual affairs satisfy me? I too would like to have coffee and a sweet roll in my own kitchen. Or lie in bed with a warm wife whose large pink bottom sticks out from under the blanket. I’m human too. (Turn on the music here.) I too would like to have a wife who is beautiful, who fills me with joy to look at. Don’t I deserve that? But even now, after all the distance I’ve come from the Hotel Diplomat, I still don’t have enough money to get married, or at least enough money to marry the kind of woman I want.

  Who really needs me? Nobody. My boss is going to take part in a car race in California again, pulling a helmet down over his head and taking the steering wheel in his hands. He thinks he’s a goddamn Paul Newman. During his absence I will of course be free to play and fill up the house with girls, but they still won’t be the right ones. I want the expensive kind, like the girl-stranger who fucked me in the basement. Please forgive me my obsession with rich girls, gentlemen, but how could it be otherwise, since I measure life by women? They’re the only ones who light up this world. There’s nobody else. And they give the world its purpose, its excitement, and its movement.