Diary of a Loser

by Edward Limonov

  And little Celestina cried for a long time, shaking her naked breasts while her father, the honorable President, was entering the capital with a tank division. The loyal western outskirts were shaken up, and our comrades were being shot in the courtyards.

  *

  I’m so fucking horny today! Shove my prick in deep, deep into that slit the color of beat-up strawberries and then let you, the whole world, go to hell. But then what an abyss after the orgasm, how it gapes! How metallic, how cold the world is afterwards! It takes no effort then to sentence anyone to death; and if one is sentencing an angel, it will be even more exciting.

  *

  Yesterday, around 1 a.m. I ran into a fellow – white suit with a dark, nonchalantly half-undone bow tie. He had just rolled out of a restaurant, quite drunk (swaying), artsy. Seeing me, he came to, turned, and fixed his gaze on my bangs… But I had to pee real bad. I was in a hurry and didn’t stop.

  Later, having peed in an all-night accessible spot – known to me only – in the hall of a building on 58th street, I regretted it. What a blockhead! I should have gone with him and taken $54 and tomorrow morning I would have bought those white glossy boots on Broadway, I could put them on right in the store.

  *

  If it’s May and you’re sitting in a garden and crying, it’s incredibly good. Someone close to you has died, and you’re sorry.

  An untanned, plump relative in a dark dress arrives, her eyes swollen from tears. And you take her by her white hand, you get closer, you embrace her and say: «Sally, dearest, how awful, what a loss!» You embrace you are overflowing with tears. And as you mourn and make body contact, you feel a terrible desire. It’s embarrassing, illicit, and inappropriate.

  And she feels it too, especially if she’s the spouse of the deceased. And with closed eyes we both plunge headlong into that abyss…

  And the casket with the deceased goes spiraling up into the heavens. It speeds away.

  *

  I love being an adventurist. It often saves me. Suddenly it rains and I am depressed, and poor, and want to cry. And then I think, «Hey, you’re an adventurist. There are all sorts of things that happen. Don’t give up, boy, you’ve chosen that road yourself, you didn’t want a normal life, now you have to stick with what you have.»

  That’s when I re-adjust myself and start calling this one and that one, pretending that I’m a lamb, lying through my teeth and then, voila, in a couple of hours I’m strutting around in high society talking to famous people, grabbing beautiful women by the hand, talking rubbish in a penetrating voice. One word leads to another-the next thing, you greet the morning in a luxurious bed, the first rays tickle your face through the curtains, and they bring you coffee in bed. «I want vodka,» you say. It’s unbelievable but they bring vodka too. You make a face but you drink it nevertheless – you did ask for it.

  I love being an adventurist.

  *

  I’m a bitch. And it’s sad that I’m a bitch and that I don’t love anyone anymore. And it’s no excuse either that I used to love. I keep smoking and thinking stubbornly, «Bitch, bitch, that’s just it, you’re a bitch.» And I look sadly out the window at the clouds a la Italia under the skyscrapers. They’re called cumulus, I think.

  *

  A luxurious summer morning over the East River. It’s me, sitting on a bench in the millionaire’s garden. A young Italian, an itinerant laborer, envies me. He looks through the fence at the inaccessible garden. «There,» he thinks «this rich guy is sitting and drinking coffee. Why did this scum,» thinks the laborer, «get up so early, at eight in the morning, to look at the water?»

  In fact, I don’t have any right to be sitting in the millionaire’s garden. I have no right to be drinking this coffee I didn’t work for, or put my bare feet on someone’s grass while touching, from time to time, the body of a twenty-one-year-old girl sitting next to me. A prodigal writer, a good-for-nothing foreigner, an FBI client, a poet with dangerous ideas. A millionaire’s housekeeper’s lover.

  *

  That water cruise in a small cabin with her will stay with me forever. In the morning I lugged the suitcase across that entire Southern town, the suitcase full of her pretty rags, her beloved fragrant essences. We barely found a car to take us to another town and careened along the mountain roads with a driver in a leather jacket. Wild flowers burst along the sides of the road, and a low sea flashed in our eyes during the turns, and life was like gunfire from a revolver, like random, terrifying gunfire from a revolver.

  *

  TV shows that no one remembers even half an hour later. Dumb actresses, familiar and boorish actors. Moronic movies, they’re for slaves and for people with the brains of a cat. They respond to the five senses, forty work hours a week, air conditioners, conversations with pregnant women, strikes, commercials…

  And the only time there’s something dear and close and normal is when they show the rapist of an eleven-year-old girl. It turns out that only this kind of person still values freshness, beauty and authenticity.

  *

  Just break the window and jump into the store.

  Take anything you want: the suits, these magnificent walking sticks, the compelling soft hats, the varnished boots and the affectionate scarves. Negotiate your way between flowers (your shoulders touching the palm tree leaves), and find a strong light and elegant suitcase and pile everything into it. Finally, don a cynic’s dark glasses, cover your locks with a hat, and strut out of the display window. And let that obnoxious siren whine. It’s quite possible that you’ll have enough time to escape. Just don’t fuss.

  In the morning, in the Cairo airport, drink Turkish coffee, breathe in its aroma with the fresh cigarette smoke, and stare brazenly at the ladies. And their daughters discreetly wet their underpants from your forty-year-old stare.

  *

  Bare my chest and – sweet mother! Lenka! Parents!… «Go ahead, shoot, you bastards, my sweet ones!» On a fierce earth with the soft hips. What a blessed and important business Death is! He extends his hand, «Let’s be off, Eddie!» – breathless. And you recall the slanting rain at the corner of Petrovka street and the boulevard. And sweet mother, Lenka, parents, Anna!… at my strange La tin-American land. With bare chest.

  *

  I used to return from a woman to my room at the hotel, having drunk and fucked through the night, feeling gifted like a flower, healthy, excited.

  The elevator is out of order, there’s a stench at the door of my room, shit from somebody’s dog or a human being. I enter, angry, smart, and the cockroaches scatter from the table drawers in all directions. «Jesus! Motherfucker!» I think to myself and suddenly burst out laughing as though I’ve just discovered myself for the first time… «The worse it gets, the better it gets. Fuck New York!»

  There’s a sound of bottles falling from the windows. Seagulls fly around the yard for some reason.

  *

  Young people are often lazy, they don’t want to work. And they’re right. Later they’ll have no choice, they’ll have to. But they were right. What’s so wonderful about work, what’s to be proud of? «I work, I pay taxes.» This way one’s whole life passes in submission.

  Personally, I only like to write and not always. But generally I prefer to do nothing. To cogitate. To recall someone’s poems. To lie in the sun. To eat meat. To drink wine. To make love and organize a revolution. And to write sometimes.

  I don’t believe that there’s really someone who for eight hours a day, five days a week, likes to type, or sew men’s shirts, or pick up garbage from the streets. Once in a while it’s fun to sew a shirt. It’s exciting to type out a few pages – I can do it! See how well it comes out! But to do this throughout one’s life!? I don’t believe it, and many facts confirm this. One woman won a lottery – she’ll be paid one thousand dollars a week until the day she dies. So what do you think she said she’d do first? «Stop working,» of course. So, the young people are right without realizing it. I’m for them. I support them.


  *

  You’re walking in the morning again through New York, going «home» – cogitating – and you run into your ex. She’s tall and thin, wearing pants and a belt with a huge buckle. Her fashionable rags are hanging down. Toothy. She has had her teeth redone, not because they were bad but because they were not photogenic.

  Her upper lip is trimmed; her nose is powdered over; her neck is tense. She looks insolent but there’s shame in her eyes.

  We talk and go our separate ways. Walking, you think to yourself: Ah, Elena, Elena you too did not escape the common lot of females. It’s a damned pity, real pity. You did something wrong. You can dump Eddie Limonov, why not? But there’s something wrong. There’s definitely something wrong…

  *

  Most of all I hate the rich old ladies. Each one conceals some vileness. Lucky traders of their cunts. They lucked out. I hate them either with or without their puny dogs. And I hate them in the stores too. And when they eat.

  Even young women are disgusting when they eat. Usually they’re voracious and greedy, especially after a few weeks of having sex with you, when they’re certain that you are theirs and they can relax. This is when you see them the way they are. Poor boy, you imagined she was a princess, an angel. She gobbles the pieces of meat like a python, grunts over the brown sauce, wraps her lips in thick red wine, hisses voluptuously with the mixture of pineapple and coconut – she copulates with the food.

  *

  Hotels, hotels – the entire 59th Street of Central Park South is a gilded street. Once here, at night, a drunken couple started hugging me. I was dumbstruck. My usual reaction: hand in the pocket, going for the knife…

  «But, I thought then, they’re not hurting me. Still, they’re touching my body.»

  I left, steering clear of this temptation.

  They were drunk, could they’ve guessed? He or she? That a well-built man in a cap who looked like an artist could stab them easily. You, the bourgeoisie, have your fun, but don’t get carried away. And don’t hug me. Because I’m angry you see.

  *

  A Japanese restaurant is good in dank weather: hot napkins and warm sake, while the North-Wester is blowing. It’s especially good before assassinating a Prime Minister, while you’re spending the last of your money in a squalling November.

  *

  Central Park. July. Two young pale-faced freaks in glasses – one has a long, attentive nose – hand sheets of printed text to each other. I glance over – it’s a script. Okay, okay, long noses, you’ll get there. With your old necks, with your wide-open jabot shirts and gold chains on your freckled wiener-like arms, you’ll make it to Hollywood. And you’ll get to screw the young dumb models and aspiring actresses. Next to them a full-blooded Mexican family had claimed a spot. They had blankets, children, thermoses and three transistor radios. They won’t make it to Hollywood.

  And passing by was I – red scum – long, curly hair, dark skin and black thoughts. E.Limonov, a man from Russia. And what is amazing – a talented non-Jew.

  *

  Mom, listen Mom. I despise you.

  And Dad too.

  It’s as if you’re of a different race, never mind a tribe.

  *

  Once, I was painting a studio for Frank, a jeweler – he has a long Italian last name. His little girl, Ellen – three years old – was hanging around near me.

  «My Dad Frank is my Mom’s husband,» she announces. «Do you have a wife?»

  «My wife has left me,» I tell her while I keep painting, squatting down. «That’s very mean,» the child says seriously. And then obviously to cheer me up she declares: «Here, watch how I jump.» She gets up from the floor and jumps, throwing her little hands and feet to the side. «That’s because I’m light. I’m still a kid, you know. I won’t be able to jump like that when I’m a grown-up,» she explains.

  I get up, put the brush away and try to jump like Ellen. Apparently I don’t do too well because she laughs. «You’re heavy,» she says. When I ask her how old she is (a corny, idiotic, and ingratiating question of a grown-up who’s trying to make conversation with a child – her father had already told me she was three), she answers that she has already had three birthdays. «And how old are you?» she asks. «Thirty-one,» I lie. (In fact, I’m thirty-five.)

  «You are old,» she says.

  «Maybe not very old?» I ask hopefully.

  «No, you’re old,» the truth-loving child says, lowering her eyes.

  After that she teaches me English words. «Repeat after me,» the little Italian girl tells me in a severe tone of voice. I repeat after her.

  All things considered, we’re doing great. We’re getting along famously and are happy with each other.

  Pastoral

  to M.N.Izergina

  From Brandenburg runs a beautiful summer road, lined along both sides luxurious beeches and plane trees. The road leads to Oranienburg, which is only a stone’s throw from sleepy Winnenburg.

  Beyond the big sleepy lakes on the outskirts of Winnenburg, there’s a valley with remarkable grapes unique to the area, grapes like the Blue Velvet and Rosaly. Nearby the southwestern exit from the valley – the only one accessible by an automobile – there’s a hotel, «Eccentrics’ Shelter,» whose owner, Frau Maria, remarkably resembles Madam Recamier. «Our entire life is a joke,» she likes to say in rainy weather, and then she inevitably performs with great gusto a well-known old love song «Burn Bright My Star.»

  Who would have expected this? Nonetheless, last Friday, a student, Savitsky, and a Jewish miss, Klinestock, committed suicide simultaneously. Singing, they crossed the valley and drowned in the ponds, I mean those by the lake.

  *

  To be a passerby on every beach. To be a foreigner, a fly-by-night from another country. To manage without books or apartments. To throw a dozen finished volumes into a hotel’s dumpster and then – in accordance with the secret instructions of the Extraordinary Annihilation League conveyed through an agent – a girl in a purple hat, named Madeleine. Moving on and on, setting up conspiracies and at times unloading your own gun into the pink faces and stomachs of men sentenced by the League – usually they’re between forty and sixty years-old.

  *

  Early morning. A tempting thirteen-year-old babysitter arrives. Sunburned nose, blonde, long legs. I want to get up from the table, get rid of these tiresome adults and their conversations, take the girl by the hand and go with her into the new morning. She still believes in something. She still loves for no particular reason – for shaggy hair, for unconventional ideas, for her first sex.

  *

  «Cocksucker!» you say bitterly into nowhere, being one on one with yourself. You smoke another cigarette, and yet another. Or you walk from corner to corner. Or you stare out the window. «Cocksucker!» And this exclamation has more meaning than most books, including the famous old Bible.

  *

  It doesn’t interest me anymore. Okay, a woman: a head, hair, two arms, two legs, that opening in between her legs covered with furry growth. So what? I did use to love women, loved to get to know them, loved to study them, loved their orgasms, loved to watch their faces distorted at that moment. But now I’ve left that to ordinary folk, and I only find pleasure in the struggle against this society and societies in general. Nonetheless, yesterday I was disturbed by a five-year-old girl. An unashamed little creature was rolling on a low toy bicycle – her legs wide apart, showing off her pubis. And there it was, a pink opening like a hole from a bullet. A bullet hole.

  I’m not an impotent, dirty old man. Women on the streets look at me with definite interest, but that bullet hole was so indecent that I turned my head in terror. It was much more indecent than the fat prostitute who showed a mangled cunt which I once saw early in my youth.

  An evil child.

  An old man and a virgin

  And old man sticks his prick into a virgin and sways voluptuously over her. A virgin has a certain burning sensation and receives great pleasure from his
gray hair and creased skin. She feels like a child, a little girl, and it’s very bad that an old man is fucking her. And because it’s bad, the virgin enjoys it. She claws the old man’s chest.

  A youth weeping stupidly is outside the frames of the picture. God forbid, he may even kill himself. «Chili out, buddy. The virgin is just a senseless, twenty-one-year-old flower.» Sometimes the guy calms down, sometimes he doesn’t.

  *

  Who’s that knocking at the door? Oh, it’s nobody, it’s that good-for-nothing writer, Eddie Limonov, a thirty-four-year-old fucker, God’s creation, a creature.

  «Oh, it’s yet another Russian!» said a great lover of cherries Misha Baryshnikov when someone asked him, «Who’s this?»

  I liked that. That’s just who I am: yet another Russian.

  *

  Suddenly, it turns out that for the past two months he’s been having sex with a girl who has hereditary syphilis – can you imagine? It’s that millionaire’s housekeeper. She announced it to him. «And if I’m already infected with it?» thought he – a question worth pondering. But being a reckless adventurer in the extreme, it occurred to him, not without some consternation, that even this is interesting to him; he perceives it as a fascinating fact in his biography. Isn’t that something!

  Later it turned out that it’s not syphilis but some kind of benign plague.

  *

  Well, yes, I would want some kind of terrifically exciting relationships amid a group of people, and women of course, all on a moving ship. It’s just a pleasure trip with no particular destination.

  A ship is convenient – no chance to escape. Besides, a crowded space breeds perverse relationships.

  And the quickly changing backdrop of shores, landscapes, and ports is necessary for an impatient person. It is a very tense situation which is resolved only with a murder. Blood makes everyone huddle together as though they were a family.

  Intimacy

  A girl I love but don’t fuck often comes to visit me. Our only intimacy is my toilet. When her visit is long, she uses my toilet. She says in English, «May I use your toilet?» And she uses it.