Edward Limonov - His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

Probably that was what she was thinking, and I could understand her. I didn't hate her there in that American town; she suited me much better there where there weren't any Marchioness Houstons or sweet-smelling and fancily dressed and painted whores to compare her to. There Jenny had the advantage of being on her own ground, where the electric lights they had turned on at the baseball field worked to her benefit, as did the fragrance of the nearby grass and trees and even the smell of the pipe of the portly gentleman sitting next to me and of Debby's and Robert's cigarettes.

And it was then, on that field, that I suddenly realized that I didn't hate Jenny, but rather something much bigger, maybe the very arrangement of the world, or maybe nature itself for what it had given me at birth, for that enormous and eternally dissatisfied ambition that was in my blood and that wouldn't let me stop and catch my breath — wouldn't let me stop and live with Jenny on a farm and be happy and perhaps mow hay and maybe even write books, but different books, books full of tranquility and happiness rather than anxiety and the need to escape. Jenny was someone I could have been happy with, and maybe it was just that which made me hate her?

I had looked for love for so long, had wandered in chaos trying to find it, to find Jenny. And now that I had found her, and with all that was genuine and false in me had made her fall in love with me and had won her, I was going to reject her and turn away and tell her I didn't want her or need her. Or even more monstrously, that I hated her. And hated her because she was an ideal, the girl I had in fact dreamed of for two years while lying alone in my filthy hotels and choking on my own hysterical sobbing or fucking with prostitutes or other men… It was she I had been seeking in all those bodies, thinking that this is the one, that here she is, or even that here he is. And now I had found her.

The Yellow Socks lost to the Tigers that evening six to eight, but what difference did that make? Jenny had lost to me on her own ground, but then I was somebody who didn't play by the rules.

They still hadn't caught Son of Sam then, and sometime around the beginning of August at three o'clock in the morning he again wounded two victims, the girl later dying in the hospital, the guy surviving. The city was overcome with terror, not so much in Manhattan as in the Bronx or Queens, where the Son of Sam "worked," but the streets of Manhattan too emptied earlier than usual, and it would happen that coming from or going to Jenny's at night, I would suddenly find myself completely alone. Even the number of ordinary crimes diminished, die thieves and robbers probably afraid that the insane murderer might shoot them down too "by mistake," after silently appearing out of the darkness as he always did, so that you wouldn't even have time to defend yourself or shout that you were a robber, although it was unknown whether he had a sense of solidarity.

I walked in those legendary times through the sticky, spectral city, at first a little frightened myself, but then seeing that nothing had happened to me, I got bolder and even took my usual route through Central Park. The air was fresh there, not as hot and much nicer for walking than the foul West Side, but the main thing is that it was more direct. I didn't even walk into the park, but jumped over a fence into its green darkness and strode through the trees toward the East Side. I came out of the park in the neighborhood of the Metropolitan Museum, and I often brought Jenny fragrant branches or flowers as evidence of my bravery. True, I still took off my glasses, so I wouldn't look like an intellectual in case I encountered some lowlife, and I also carried a knife with me, and sometimes even two — one in my boot and the other in my pocket.

We lived quietly then. Jenny sucked my cock and tried to cure her vagina. The story of the curing of her vagina (it really is an awful word, isn't it?) is interesting and instructive, and I shall therefore permit myself to dwell on it.

You have to pay for everything, gentlemen, one way or another you have to pay. It's an undeniable truth. I didn't want to be merely an idle boyfriend for Jenny, and so the honorable and hard-working Limonov himself volunteered to sew her some rags and alter a few things from her vast wardrobe of skirts, blouses, dresses, and pants.

Once when I was in the house alone, with neither Steven nor his guests around, thank God, and had been rooting in Jenny's things for several hours at least, humming something to myself as I did the alterations, Jenny and Jennifer arrived. They had just come from the quack Krishna, with whom they were both studying homeopathic medicine. Even more pimply than usual, Jennifer disappeared to make a phone call, and Jenny, after sitting down on the bed in the room where I was seated at the sewing machine with her skirts strewn about me, suddenly announced, "You're going to get very mad, Edward, but both you and I have gonorrhea. Dr. Krishna finished his examination of me this morning."

I have of late become a very even-tempered man — very cool. I therefore continued to press on the pedal of the electric sewing machine, and its speed didn't even waver. I kept on sewing; what could I say to such an idiotic statement?

"Why don't you say anything?" Jenny asked irritably.

Making a wry face and pulling her skirt out of the clutches of the machine, I said, "I'll kill you at five."

"Why at five?" she asked in puzzlement.

I didn't say anything, but thought to myself, Well, gonorrhea then. It's even fair — I have to pay the price, don't I, for living here and fucking Jenny and having the pleasure of seeing the children's room and not having to suffer the heat thanks to the air conditioner… and for the expensive French wine she brings me from the cellar, and for the garden and the other pleasures? Obviously I have to pay the price…

"You'll have to see a doctor," Jenny said.

"Uh huh," I answered, and pressed down on the pedal again, stitching the next seam.

"You're not being serious, Edward," she said.

"What am I supposed to do?" I said, turning toward her for the first time in the whole conversation. And really, what did she want from me? Gonorrhea is just gonorrhea; nobody dies of it, and if they do, so what?

And I left her to go to the bathroom — there was a bathroom in every bedroom in the millionaire's house. I pissed, and afterwards washed my cock in the wash basin while standing on tiptoe and stretching, and then wiped it with satisfaction on a face towel. "You get it too!"

Jenny didn't say anything to me after I came back to the room, and we went downstairs to the kitchen to get something to eat. Another friend of Jenny's had come over too — Martha, a stocky blonde just as pimply as the others. I knew from Jenny that she was pregnant and was planning to have an abortion soon. I sat down with them and ate some shchi I had made a couple of days before, and they had some too. I sat there and fumed. The shchi was very hot; even the potatoes in it were overcooked and falling apart.

If you're going to infect me with gonorrhea, at least don't overcook the shchi. Why the fuck was it left on so long! She forgot about it, the cunt! I thought to myself.

I was sitting at the table with three defective sluts and dreaming about how I'd like to chase them all out, the pimple-faces. Jennifer was particularly disgusting — pug-nosed, with a rose in her hair. She had on a yellow skirt that day too. She had her feet up on the air conditioner; they all went around in their bare feet. They were drinking beer. Fat. And then they complain in The Hite Report about what a poor job men do of fucking them, I thought resentfully. What kind of man would you have to be to get it up for a fat, pimply creature like that?