Diary of a Loser

by Edward Limonov

  *

  to E.

  And in the mountains there blossomed gigantic flowers visible from the valley. And she and I were both very ill, all covered in bandages, both after surgeries, and we were taken in wheelchairs to see each other, in accordance with the unexpected instructions of the president who had read my books. We were left in the sun, and she moved her lips smiling at me.

  And though the guards were always around, we were finally happy that we wouldn’t be able to run away from each other, and we kept staring at each other, getting our fill of each other. And after the hospital an inevitable court – along with the wide-open death – awaited us. And in the mountains gigantic flowers blossomed, and the yellow coastal sun smelled strangely.

  *

  «Should I rob a bank?» I say that in desperation, from being hungry and broke and dependent on the millionaire’s housekeeper. But no, I’ll get caught, I don’t have the knowhow, I won’t succeed being in a strange country. My conscience wouldn’t bother me – come on, what conscience? It’s just that it’s impractical to get into prison – I’ll get a lot of years.

  To plot against a state, that’s another business, and the bigger the state the better, something like the USSR or the USA or China. It takes, of course, a long time to prepare a revolution-explosion, but if it succeeds there’s no limit on the returns! Everything! Rapture and ecstasy! Shoulder straps embroidered with gold, decorated uniform, adoration of all women. Hundreds of thousands of young men yelling «Hooray!» standing at attention.

  It’s a profitable venture, revolution is, if you think about it. Yes, there’s the risk of losing your life, but so you risk that when you cross the street.

  And staying in prison for robbing a bank – they can give you twenty years for it. It’s stupid, it’s incredibly stupid.

  «I know you, Limonov. You want to be standing in your Astrakhan hat on top of the mausoleum.» One shrewd guy from Simferopol told me. Yes, I do, oh yes, on top of the mausoleum and precisely wearing an Astrakhan hat, or even better – I’d get a Georgian papakha, that would be even more barbaric.

  *

  The woman – she’s the cause of it all. Yes, they’re a wicked lot… Now she wants me to use my smarts and conquer some country for her, even a small one, preferably an island state. To this I replied thusly (affecting a woman’s voice):

  «Please, Lee, sweetie, kill the president,» said Prusakova, raising her skirt and showing to Oswald «it» – her cunt. «No kill, no cunt.» «I will, I will, Marinka,» whispered Oswald. And he went to practice at the shooting gallery.

  That’s what I’ve told her. After all, telling the truth is the most perverted kind of pleasure.

  And in 1978, women still say the things they said before B.C. and at the time of the Crusades. They say those things only to certain kinds of men, naturally, not to any man, only to the mad dogs like me. It makes me proud.

  *

  Boys and girls, adolescents – in the photographs they stand behind their crooked and coarse mothers and fathers. They give me hope.

  Their eyes mistily and ecstatically directed towards the future. It’s worth living for their sake.

  *

  A sunny, windy day. A certain palpitation in the air. Spring has arrived again in New York from the green-and gray-Atlantic, and the soul of every earthling gets thin, it contracts, and on the far-away cafe doors, or on the yellow wall of a wind-beaten house, there appear harsh, spring, emaciated, sophisticated profiles…

  At this time of year, my dear mother, happiness is when you tear a harsh love letter into small elegant squares and watch them stream into the air, and you twitch in a thin coat or in cold leather.

  Yes, we’ll all die, and everything’s taking place for a billionth time. Still it’s fresh and for the first time you notice the little face of your vicious lady-love, your ex and you think, terrified: «My love.»

  And this love has slim legs, a mad, reckless slit under the Yves Sant Lorant skirt, and a fur coat, a gift in return for certain favors from her most recent husband…

  Mother dear, there’s an incredible agitation in this spring of cold and metal, it’s as though a whole culture – the Black German oaks and the Roman statues have crowded around Edka Limonov…

  *

  My fate has always been decided by some fellows, fuckers in the mysterious, unknown offices. That’s why I’m still a loser because they – the mysterious bitches I’ve never met, the deciders of my fate – have never accepted me into the tribe of winners. It’s been that way in Russia-a country at one end of the world, and now it’s that way in America-a country at the opposite end.

  Now, in the recesses of the massive Macmillan press, certain American misters and mistresses are deciding the fate of my novel It’s Me, Eddie. They rub their foreheads, or they laugh. They put on or take off their neckties. They scratch their feet or their asses. They adjust their glasses. They doodle in their pads. They smoke and drink coffee. What will be the result of their secret meeting that I know nothing about?

  And what does their future fucking decision has in common with my present talent, my value in the world? One female among them, Katie, is rooting for me – she has been to this day, as far as I know. She wants to accept me into the tribe of winners. It’s a boring tribe, to be honest.

  I have made an awesome oath to myself though: even if they accept me, I’ll always remain a secret loser, and secretly I’ll observe our customs and rituals. I’ll share in our thrills and terrors.

  Parents

  All the same, having parents is disgusting, isn’t it?

  Mother’s letter is all sheer nonsense, useless in life; there’s a stifling atmosphere, nagging, pathetic information about maladies and depressions; miserably boring emotions, dissatisfaction and the sense of life wasted – these stare at you from every line, naked, like a face without skin. There’s fear, the old age that came too soon (they’ve thought themselves old since their thirties!), the absence of one’s own occupation in life – I don’t mean something general, like father’s military service – I mean one’s own work which absorbs you entirely, and you belong to it from head to toe. And so now I’ve become the focus of it all – they think that had I stayed there, in that country with them, their life would be different.

  No, it wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t have saved them.

  Who’s to blame? Father was terribly weak – he loved music but stayed in the military, he didn’t have enough guts to take that step and leave. He was also gifted in mechanics – but he never developed that talent. He ended up being what his fate pushed him into.

  Mother spent her entire life staying home when she loved being with people, loved theater.

  This is how day by day their boring lives have wound down and left them, one on one, on some rocky island as it were, and the wind is blowing, and it’s cold, and they nestle up to one another to get warm, and they cry out to me – who’s far, far away – to save them.

  But I don’t feel sorry for them. And I’m happy that God took me away from them, from their old age (which I wouldn’t comfort anyway), from their desperation, which can’t be helped.

  A bad son? No. Intelligent and therefore ruthless, strong and sad, I look at them from afar and I make a helpless gesture in dismay. What can I do when every one in this life has to fight the almighty Fate alone. And woe unto him who is weak.

  Having written all this, I happened to look at the last letter they sent me, and oh horror and confirmation of my thoughts and feelings about them – the stamp on the envelope turned out to be a reproduction of Fedotov’s painting, a hunchback kneeling down before his bride. Precisely. The letter arrived from the hunchbacked life.

  *

  Pumpkin. Vegetable. Wow, such yellow! Oh, so big and spekled. A mandarin (tangerine) is no worse – it’s smooth, small, and smells wonderful. Especially when you peel its skin, which becomes wooden and stringy from the inside. I love these natural creations, and so yesterday a woman came over to my place. S
he had huge breasts and small red nipples. The woman was Mexican. She probably had a lot of Indian and Aztec blood too. I caressed the woman, and she admired my hands and allowed to penetrate her c. with my finger only, so I don’t know much about her c, what it’s like in a Mexican woman.

  I wasn’t upset, though – this was our first date. I’ll have time to find out.

  She had one other characteristic-very narrow fingernails, tiny, especially on her pinkies. This is very strange, you have to agree, when you consider her height (she’s two inches taller than I), chest and wide hips. And strangely similar to her tiny nails was her narrow Aztec nose. That’s how I keep myself entertained with nature. Otherwise, my life would be lonely and unprofitable.

  *

  When you’re completely broke and hungry, your fury at the world increases; when you have a little money, the fury decreases. Out of pride and stubbornness (I didn’t feel like begging the millionaire’s housekeeper for money and food), I sustained myself for a week by alternating between the disgusting chicken soup and onions with potatoes. I slept a lot that week; I was chilled in the March air when taking walks, though before going out I gulped some gin from a bottle that I had stowed away for a rainy day.

  In such a state of mind, the burning night lights and the male slaves behind the glass-windows of the small restaurants along First and Second Avenues where I went walking (free of charge, thanks goodness) spent their hard-earned dollars on the young female slaves – all this caused sharp pangs of envy in me.

  Once running into a company of friends who just poured out squealing from a restaurant, I, animal-like, twisted and tensed my face and headed directly toward them, at their best girl and forced between them like a knife in my leather coat, squeezing my knife in my pocket, being ready for a bloody fight if the mustached ones start protesting. Nothing happened, though once I passed them, they hurled curses at me.

  During one of these evenings – Saturday – it was pretty warm by that time, I, unconsciously, a new torture devised for myself – I found two clean but old armchairs by the Martel restaurant and decided to bring them to my place. For me, sustained by a watery broth that I kept diluting, the chairs turned out to be damn heavy. Carrying each one to my 1st Avenue apartment was a job from hell – I understood this when I carried the first chair. Some tipsy couples and companies were in my way, they were just spilling out onto the streets from the restaurants and discotheques – I looked absurd, lugging these torn chairs; girls, dressed-up for Saturday night, laughed at me; yellow dust kept pouring down on me from the chairs; everybody I saw on the street was taller than I. I was drenched in sweat. This is probably how a small, dark-eyed Jewish slave felt lugging some heavy load behind his master on a Saturnalia celebration in Rome; I, however, clenched my teeth and brought my chair to the stairwell where I hid, relieved. It wasn’t much work to get the chair to the fifth floor – no one was looking at me there. Being stubborn, I went through the torture for a second time. I survived.

  I gave up by the end of the week and took some money from the millionaire’s housekeeper – I bought a piece of meat and some other food. Having eaten, I immediately became nicer.

  *

  I keep pacing – back and forth, back and forth – from one corner of the room to another. No work for two months. Now I look out the window, now I nap for a half or a full hour, now I light up a cigarette, now I sip some tea or some cheap broth, now I skim through a book – and the book is vulgar, stupid, and I push it away with a grimace, now I skim through another book, now I go down the stairs to check my mail box – no letters; now I look expectedly at my telephone – it’s silent; now I go to the bathroom and stick my face in the mirror, I stroke my mug, I smooth the hair that stick out or curl up, I take a leak, now on a whim I draw a bathtub, I crawl in, I sit in the warm water, I get out, get dry and the window pulls me back again.

  Out the window, it’s humid and overcast. From the window in a house across mine, an old woman looks out from behind her plants. As always she’s curious about life, like me – she wants change. I look at the old woman and I start pacing the room again. Now I sit down on one of the newly-acquired chairs, the ones I picked off the street and covered with some colored cloth – I sit there for a while. So goes by hour after hour: time goes to waste. I probe myself: does it bother me that hours go to waste? No, it doesn’t, and, anyway, it can’t be changed Life is rubbish, just rubbish.

  Still, I have so much energy within – I could have really shown myself. There’s no fucking chance to show yourself in this society – they’ve built up such barricades to block a person’s way. That’s why the society has become my main and primary enemy. And if you try to oppose it, getting a machinegun is not an easy task. So I keep pacing – back and forth, back and forth – from one corner to another. Days go by. What’s there to do – there’s no work. And it’s still muddy and cold outside.

  A policeman

  Having reluctantly fucked one of my girlfriends – for some reason I got excited over her ample body – dozing off, I suddenly recalled how a policeman tried to seduce me, and I laughed outloud. It took place in the summer. I was invited, I think, by the Neanderthal Boy (maybe it was the housekeeper, I don’t want to be exact) to go to the country, even to the ocean, to be with some big and far-flung family in a garden, where, having hung the arrows and lanterns, we/they were ready to picnic, to eat and drink. The host was a policeman, already graying, and his children of various ages ran around. His wife, a sizable woman with a red face, was busy preparing food.

  Tying a ribbon with balloons and flags to some strange species of shrub, I noticed a great swarm of bees sitting and hovering over a shrub. «That’s nothing!» said the gentle and nice policeman in shorts. «I want to show you this shrub from our house, from our window, and you’ll see that over on the other side they have their nest.»

  We went into the house. I looked at the bee’s nest and politely expressed my awe. The policeman, looking at my bare arms (I was in a T-shirt), suddenly said, «You have a great tan. Your skin is practically brown! I’ve got a pretty good tan too,» he added, «though my skin isn’t too fair to start with.» And he suddenly pulled his shorts down, appearing naked, his impressive penis hanging down severely. With this, the policeman looked at me half-inquisitively. I got embarrassed and mumbling, «yes-yes, nice tan…» I rushed out of the room.

  I forgot about this episode half-an-hour later and would half probably forgotten about it entirely, thinking that «this» – he and his penis – appeared in my mind only, had we not needed a barbecue grill which the policeman, another guy, and I went looking for in the basement. The guy took the grill and went upstairs, I lingered to have a look at the policeman’s weights. I didn’t look for long though: the policeman mentioned his tan again, and again, in an instant, he bared his inquisitive penis. I turned away and ran out, and since then I made sure not to be left with him alone.

  Policemen

  Down below, across from my window, by the store’s display glass there often stand two or three police officers where they either catch the rays of the March sun or wait for somebody. One of them keeps looking onto the street from behind the corner. I have a desire – which I have no way of explaining – to throw, to drop a grenade or a bomb on them. I’m thinking this without any malice, as of something clearly self-evident, something like «here’re the policemen, they have to be eliminated.»

  I have neither a bomb, nor a grenade, nor a sniper gun which in my mind I exclude from my arsenal for eliminating policemen: «The trajectory will give me away,» I reflect. Besides, I want to get the operation over with quickly, I don’t want an exchange of fire. That’s why I’m leaning towards a bomb.

  I even had a dream today that I’ve had thrown a bomb at them, not out of my window, but from the roof of the house where they stand. Perhaps it’s their uniform that’s the cause of my desire?

  Recently a crowd of drunk young men kept me up – they hung around and yelled at the same spot where the
policemen hung out earlier in the day. It was in the small hours of the night. I hated them. «You, disgusting pimples,» thought I, having turned the lights off, watching them from my dark window above. «It’d be great to slash your heads and throats with a burst of a machinegun lead.» Besides, they harass passers-by, even the elderly. The police officers are angels by comparison. Perhaps it’s a case of atavism: like a duke or a prehistoric man, I consider the space below my window inviolable. Or like a cat, a lion, or a dog – is this my hunting ground? And these shit-heads – probably some students, or workers, or clerks – they got drunk and now think they’re God’s gift to the world. Fucking fish heads! They hung around and swore.

  *

  And I – without batting an eye – firmly sided with evil: with witches, vampires, sinners, Nazis, with Ravillac who murdered Henry IV, with Oswald who murdered Kennedy, with Che Guevara and the losers who haven’t murdered anyone, those doormen who spend their entire lives stand at the entrances of rich houses, wearing uniforms, bowing their heads in deference, welcoming and seeing off rich old ladies, rich old men, and rich children. A doormen like that – within himself – stands all these years, teeth clenched, and something is growing within him, it sticks out, and at times he can hardly keep himself from raping a young, long-legged Kristie – daughter of the famous oil baron, she’s sixteen, having fun living with her girlfriend in a huge apartment which takes the space of an entire story; boys and bleary-eyed men often drop by to visit her.

  Yes, I’ve sided with evil – with the small newspapers, with the Xeroxed leaflets, with the movements and parties that have no chance. None whatsoever. I love political meetings with only a few people attending, I love cacophonous music performed by untrained musicians who have «Chronic losers» written on their faces. Go ahead, play on, my dear ones… And I hate symphony orchestras, ballet – I’d cut down all the cellists and violinists if I ever came to power.

  *

  Our city is quite imperial. Today I had a dream that a president’s wife fell in love with me. Carter’s? I don’t think it was she – this one was young and I liked her, a blonde, and I kissed her and stroked her hand and made a date. She promised one but not tomorrow, she said, because she has to go with her husband on a pre-election campaign. And in my dream, the cars sent dust into the air. In one of the cars, somebody was standing in a white suit giving a speech about jam/marmalade. And the road was pretty shitty: pot-holes; the passengers were bobbing up and down like puppets.