Diary of a Loser

by Edward Limonov

  *

  An opera was performed. I walked in.

  *

  The electric chair – it’s unpleasant and painful, and you get butterflies in your stomach as though at school before exams but it doesn’t last. It’s too bad though they don’t show this on TV, and that the reporters don’t get to ask questions before the departure to the other world, and that it’s too clean and probably too bright from the artificial light.

  It’s easy to imagine one’s own death in that chair-my crying mother (God forbid) brought over from Moscow in 1990, one of my wives (whichever one happens to be there). They shave the back of my head, give me the stinking prison shirt (I wonder if they wash them, or maybe the rich America gives a new shirt each time?). It’s shit – death in the electric chair.

  It’s way better on the battlefield – you plop into the redolent grass and you often have time to say something graceful to your friend and sometimes you even find time to caress your girlfriend’s face.

  Recalling the school days

  1

  Eddie, that’s what Kadik called me. Edward, do you remember Kadik? Edik and Kadik, Kadik and Edik, bosom buddies. Kadik – he’s mother was a mail-carrier – learned how to play saxophone. He wasn’t a bad kid, had his talents. Lidka ruined him. The first cunt he happened on. Was older than he. He ran outside to cry because of her. This was during a drunken wedding.

  2

  Borka Khrushkov fucked girls. And you didn’t, and you didn’t. But now you fuck any girl you meet, and who does Borka Khrushkov fuck? Probably just his wife, or maybe he’s in prison, and so he doesn’t fuck anyone. Poor Borka Khrushkov.

  *

  Edward is gobbling a chicken. It’s hard as wood. He puffs and pants, trying his best. He’s scratched his throat and has smeared chicken fat all over himself.

  It serves him right – he bought it because it was so cheap. Who saw anything cheaper than this? Thirty-eight cents for a pound. It’s twice as cheap as any ordinary cheap chicken. Now Edward’s stuck. Don’t buy cheap meat, gentlemen!

  I’m not going to throw it away, I’ll eat it up anyway. I’m not some picky American who leaves half a plate of meat and then throws it into the garbage. I come from a country where the wars and misfortunes came in droves this century. I treat food with care. I’ve never thrown food away. After I’m done eating, a cat or a dog has nothing to lick from my plate. I’m a Russian peasant by nature, as I’ve mentioned before. This frugality about food comes also from my hungry years in Moscow, it’s not just genetic (both of my grandfathers were born in the country). I gnaw on the bones – be it fish or meat bones – I polish them all equally clean, and I never cut the fat out. I eat everything.

  *

  I’ve drawn a woman and put a cross in-between her legs. I was drawing unconsciously but all the arrows were directed at her. A wall of nasty arrows were menacing the naked woman with a cross between her legs while she was helplessly opening her arms. Instead of a head, the woman had a wheel, a depressing wheel.

  The sheet of paper was full of horror and terror. Thus I was drawing unconsciously in dark blue ball-point pen while having a lively – jolly even – conversation over the phone with one of my girlfriends.

  For some reason I’ve attached a lonely faucet at the bottom of the wall of arrows – two drops were falling from it. An indecent faucet with a valve.

  *

  Ah, Edka the poet. Fine job he has – toppling governments. Yes, it’s subtle, it’s exciting, it’s huge money.

  You come into the office, there sits Edka, the bespectacled poet, smiling politely. «Would you like to have a government toppled? How much will you pay?»

  And it starts… Ah, Edka the poet from 1st Avenue in New York. Will I live long enough to see this come true, will I be able to?… And the dream is vivid, active, powerful.

  *

  Without saying goodbye, like an Englishman, a nervous paleontologist, an ichthyosauruses specialist, left a big, turgid party in a Greenwich Village basement apartment. I too was leaving, and we walked together along a row of houses. This is what he was saying:

  «I love the kind of fish whose jaws you can walk right through, and keep walking in its stomach as though it were the State Department.

  So that if you were to stroll there with a lady you wouldn’t experience any discomfort and you wouldn’t need to cling to the walls. Spaciousness is my first criterion for fish.»

  With these words, the paleontologist jumped into a cab which just stopped in front of us and whirled away from me forever.

  *

  «Steal, steal, steal, take as much as you can barely carry. Heaps, piles, packs, bags, baskets can be taken from Bloomingdale’s on bicycles, carts, and trucks to your apartment.

  Cologne, a basket of perfume; let it lap there, green, all the hats, all kinds of fur coats, suits, and sweaters. Steal, take it, go ahead rob, have fun, enjoy it! And whatever you can’t carry, chuck it into the mud, into the snow. Whatever we aren’t taking, cut it up with the razor, so that nobody gets it. Here’s a razor, it slips into my hand, go ahead! Wreck everything, put it through a grinder!

  «Hit that lamp! Take the umbrella, Jean! Over the chandelier, Philip, frigging hit that mirror!» (Crash, crush!)

  «And we were breaking our backs for this, knocking ourselves out, giving up our lives – here, take it! Hey, tear the women’s underwear, cut it up both pink and blue. Cover the floor with the panties. See how big they are, Lazar! What a size! Imagine the ass they’re for?!»

  «We’ll trash this department too. Let’s dance on these pretty, white nightgowns. The nice middle-class wives fuck in these flannel rags at night and during the day, they put on these robes for their lovers – they show off their cunts when the flaps fly open, how do you like that?»

  «Hit this, Karlos! Enrico, give us a hand! Run over here, Juan! It’s what you were looking for, oro, gold!!!» (Grrrrr!)

  «Let’s get some grub in the food section! Want some chocolate? Here, put it into your pocket. Get a whole sack of it. Two sacks».

  «Crash the glass!» (Bang!)

  «Trash this shit!»

  «Pull that rod out and hit this fucking hard!» (Wham! Crash!)

  «Push that cunt with a chair – that will stop her from standing up for the bourgeois property!» «Don’t kill me, boys!»

  «Give it to this bitch. She has to be a manager, or even an owner.»

  «Boys, boys! What are you doing? Please, don’t!»

  «Fuck that made-up bitch, go ahead guys!

  It’s a long time we’ve been dirt poor, our pricks smolder from lack of good clean meat!»

  «And the pianos, Alexander, together with the outraged people we’ll fling the pianos down the steps. They’ll use it as firewood.» (Crrrush! Rrrrram!)

  «And these beds too.» (Tra-da-da-da-da-drrrrrrrr!)

  That’s how on a nasty winter’s day, I walked around Bloomingdale’s and since I couldn’t buy anything – I was completely broke and was hungry two days in a row – I heard all of the above coming to me from the outside.

  *

  I walked down Madison Avenue, the walk of a man who’s seen everything in this life – dignified, tough, night like, wearing a leather coat and a cap pulled glumly over my eyes.

  Coming towards me in a rain-coat was a blue-eyed little Jesus, pale, pretty, blond, in a watery way. He maimed his neck turning towards me, his eyes bulged toward me with awe and terror. He had finally met the animal he needed.

  But I didn’t move a hair; I pushed on knowing full well that he stopped and was staring at me, waiting, adoring me, and scared of me-leather clad, criminal, wicked.

  *

  An early morning – snow and sun. A man with a hooked nose and the eyes of a quiet killer watches how the big-ass workers demolish the bowels of a big house – they do it with the help of fire and a bulldozer’s teeth. There’s pleasure in the man’s eye and his nose. He almost purrs dreamily.

  *

  Let’s lie
on our stomachs for a while. Fucking, sometimes, is boring. Hand me that flower and I – half-bored, half-curious – will touch your pink slit with it. Jesus, these blondes – can’t even touch them…

  After a long fuck I feel like I’ve had too much porridge-Still, her ass got me interested. How do you like an ass like that?… Pushing my thumb in between her puffy buns, I twist it a little. This way I get that orifice ready, as it were, unstuck, open. And then immediately I stick my prick in.

  What a squall she lets out, how she jerks! But I don’t let her go. I press her ass tight, my cock in there feels delightful. Go ahead, scream on, I don’t care if you hurt, as long as I feel good. I even like that cry of pain, it’s better with pain and screaming. I’ll work you up so you collapse.

  «A-a-ah! A-a-ah! A-a-ah!»

  Back and forth, my cock’s sliding in her gut. It feels good that she writhes and kicks with -her feet – my cock feels good, it’s narrow in there, it’s not like a cunt. A cunt is big but here the hole is small. And with the final fury at this busty bitch I almost tear something inside her against the firm head of my cock. Take it! My sperm like a machinegun burst, shoots in, clogs her up.

  I jerk my cock out and, kissing her, fall down on her tormented, pathetically quivering ass. You, my co-animal, my female, my dear little bitch!… Come on, stop howling. There. Forgive me!

  *

  If someone loves you but you don’t love her, it’s a savage, cave-like terror. Especially if that person is nice and kind. I know what it feels like because of my experience with the millionaire’s housekeeper.

  Once at night, she cried, screamed, and in her impotence, splashed wine on me, and then, in her wheezing whisper: «I adore you!» she said. She became upset, shifted into a nightmare, though I’ve never uttered anything to the effect that I don’t love her, or that I’m leaving. She feels it in her gut that I’m just a passing visitor.

  And how can I force myself to stay? I can’t, alas. She feels to me like a best friend. You can’t push yourself into love, you can’t violate yourself. There’s no one to blame. As to respecting her, I do very, very much respect her.

  And I appreciate her. She’s talented and kind. But I can’t fuck with her, it’s like a shameful incest, it’s like fucking your own mother. It’s the same feeling.

  *

  Houses. Spring. Inky sky. I’m walking, a genius like Rimbaud. Not quite spring, it’s turning into spring. It smells of violets, though obviously there are no violets around. The vague hopes: to one day walk into a brightly-lit place and see the eyes and the entire radiant figure – brazen, smiling Her. Having never seen her before, I’ll recognize her. I’ll rush up to her: «Let’s go!» Her icy hand. Laughter. «Let’s! Mister Poet!» Her wrist bones are bruised.

  How will I be able to fuck you, loving you so?! Under the palms, on holy Monday, on holy Friday, on the Sunday – Christ’s day of resurrection, with the candles, praying, having kept the long fast, having been pricked by the thorns, barefoot, the thorns have pricked my penis and around the loins… you, thin-legged.

  *

  Sometimes I cry out of fury. Out of fury, I hit the palm of my hand with my own fist, I swear and tears burst from my eyes. And you? Do you do that? Can you?

  *

  It snowed in the morning, but by tea time the sky has cleared.

  There was anxiety in the air, as though you’re eleven and waiting either to be punished or rewarded for what you did earlier, and you’re quivering at the vastness of your life ahead. And you loiter, walking from one corner of the room to another, pulling on the breast-band of your shorts.

  A morning

  In the morning, sitting by a sheet of paper, I stare out the window. The section of the First Avenue I’m able to observe is pretty deserted. You can rarely see more than one passerby at each stare.

  This is where I get stuck and can’t come up with anything else. I’d like to say something about my insane anxieties, but the 1st Avenue in its yellow section has no connection to my anxieties. If there’s one passerby per stare, what’s to cause anxiety?

  My inner life has turned into an outward one a long time ago so that I no longer know what’s inside – it’s probably that yellow section of the 1st Avenue with one sad passerby on it, and my anxiety and the ever new morbid thoughts and sensations about Elena, about her body, about her fate and mine – all this is on the outside and perhaps is lying in the window.

  The machineguns, the parachutes, and the canons of my future appear very easily as my past, and the execution of the Chicago Anarchists at the end of the 19th century in a Chicago prison has been burning ahead of me in the black sky for twelve years – ahead, not behind. I read about it twelve years ago and, terrified, I «recognized» my own execution.

  Meanwhile, it’s already 11:00 a.m. The Bald Diva (I never fuck her in the morning) has gotten up and poked her head into my room – greeted me. Greetings, Bald Diva, you’re a good woman, you like to – and knowhow to – fuck; now you’re going to the bathroom, and you’ll occupy it for a long time. I know you, yes I do.

  *

  I have an ambivalent attitude to the millionaire’s housekeeper.

  Sometimes she seems to me nice and kind. She’s a real American heroine, a gal from the frontier. She’s that kind – she’ll get up on the wagon holding a gun and the reins, firing at the Indians and at bandits. She’s the oldest daughter in a family with nine children. And in the wagon, the younger children, frightened, huddle together, and she keeps driving the horses on, keeps firing. A tough gal.

  It’s a misfortune that sometimes I see her in a different way too – a twisted mug, idiotic pants, pimples under her nose and her chin, barefoot – and it’s not much fun, alas. I went to see her yesterday and saw her like that. Why did I go? The reason is cynical. I have to pay rent in a few days and – who wants me now?- I took from her the few dollars I was short on. She gave it to me gladly.

  I’m horrified comparing the millionaire’s housekeeper with Elena, whom I also saw yesterday. Elena is a voluptuous courtesan and of a high caliber at that. Every piece of her body is elegant and savagely, wickedly sexy. So what that Elena betrayed me, dumped me, and doesn’t give a damn about my life, and the millionaire’s housekeeper gives me food and drink, gives me presents and money and is loyal to me, body and soul? So what? Like the scraggliest and most ragged bitch in the neighborhood, Elena exudes an especially strong odor that attracts all the studs and me.

  You see, gentlemen, that’s how it works: vice is strong, beautiful, and attractive; virtue is mediocre and uninteresting even though it’s directed at you.

  Nonetheless, I think, there’s some part of Edka Limonov – he as a down-to-earth fellow, to be exact – that’s a part of the gal from the frontier. That’s why he, Edka, has a relationship with her.

  *

  Did your abdomen ever hurt with the hurt of a many-hour-long desire and hard-on?

  Did it hurt you in such a way that after you’ve said goodbye to your object of desire – your ex – and you were climbing the stairs to your apartment at night, then you couldn’t move a step and your ascent to the fourth floor took twenty minutes?

  That’s what happened to me yesterday.

  And could you, after two years of separation, fall in love – head over heels, horribly – with your ex who exudes the poison of sex, the nightmare of sex, who can be fucked into every spot of her body?

  Elena has aged a little, she’s terribly skinny, a skeleton, but viciously beautiful: her tiny sacks of breasts are wickedly indecent, her unbelievably narrow shoulders, her spiderlike dear hands, neck, face – all were aflame in my hands. A fragile marquise who can be satisfied only by a fiery stallion; sometimes she secludes herself and masturbates with a rose.

  A madman, a peasant, I raised her long, black, Parisian house dress – she was sitting on a chair, I stroked her legs, I spread her knees and looked at her shaved slit. The white juice of desire slowly appeared.

  *

 
; The Bald Diva and I went to an S M meeting. She invited me – she’s well connected in that world. For the uninitiated, I decipher: the meeting was for the sadists and masochists.

  In a huge red loft, they talked first about finances and dues. And then there was a first lecture for the novices, an intro to Sadism as it were (an intro to Masochism they promised next time). One tough fellow lowered his pants and lied down – his ass up – on the knees of a fat blonde who demonstrated all kinds of gadgets to be applied sadistically to the fellow’s ass: whips, lashes, a special tickling whip resembling a horse’s tail, a special ass-spanking racket (that is «it» had only the shape of a racket) – «it makes a particularly intimidating Sound,» she commented with satisfaction. While explaining this, the blonde smiled winningly and spanked the fellow.

  After a five-minute break, a girl with a vicious, dreamy face strung up another fellow with a moist, wispy beard and white body to a special beam up by the ceiling. She fastened his arms by chains and leather bracelets and began to whip and tickle him with the same gadgets, she also kissed him on his lips.

  The fellow was left with just his underpants on, but when she turned him over, his ass facing the audience, his underpants were taken off too. It appeared that the fellow was genuinely shaking.

  In spite of a certain air of neglect there, I liked the Sadists and the Masochists, especially the severe gray men with the wire eyeglasses who came from the «Bondage and Discipline» section. Actually, the majority of the male sadists wore glasses.

  The S M folks treated us well. The black guy of about 45, who looked like a doctor and who was in charge – he was also a photographer and the Bald Diva’s friend. From time to time he tried to talk the Bald Diva into joining his harem, two girls of which I saw that night. One was a model, slim, not bad at all, she was particularly nice to me.

  Later, at my place, I fucked the Bald Diva without applying any of the special methods. I fucked her in a good old way, deeply, with relish, coming onto her very nice breasts.