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

"Twenty-two," Sarah said.

"Aha, twenty-two, but I'm fifty-four. I'd like to see what you'll be like at my age."

"At least I'll never be so cynical," Sarah said.

"Russian, what's your name?" Raphael asked me, once again not giving Sarah the satisfaction of an answer.

"Edward," I said.

"Listen, Edward, hold on to this Jewish princess. She's a very talented photographer, even though she's still a young little cunt. In a few years she'll make a lot of money at photography once she gets this crap about photography being an art out of her head, and she'll be able to support you very well. All you'll have to do in return is give her a good fuck from time to time; nothing more is required. Based on what I hear about Russians, that shouldn't be too hard for you."

"I refuse to make money doing fashion photography. I want to do what I like," Sarah angrily protested.

"Oh please!" he said, waving her away. "Don't talk such rubbish." And then he stood up. "If you want coffee or something to drink, help yourselves; if not, I am unfortunately going to have to kick you out. Fucking business!"

We turned down the coffee and rolled back out onto the street.

"Don't worry, he's not as bad as he seems. He gives me work and helps me make a living," Sarah said, starting to talk very fast. "I'm a good printer, and he often asks me to do printing for him and pays me pretty well. The first time we met, he invited me to join his harem — he has a harem of several girls, models — but I refused to." Sarah ran ahead again and looked back at me anxiously. "I've never slept with him," she added uncertainly.

"Sarah, you don't have to justify yourself to me," I said. "Raphael's fine as far as I'm concerned. I like crazy people. And I even enjoy the fact that he talks out loud about things that ordinary people don't. I can't stand polite conversations about the weather. Raphael's all right; he's a good fellow."

"Yes," Sarah said, relieved. "I'm glad you liked him. He's very kind, even though he pretends to be mean."

We went to her place in Brooklyn. Ordinarily I wouldn't go to Brooklyn for any reason, but now I was following a cunt there, was being led there by a cunt hidden beneath a brown wool skirt.

Back at her apartment, we immediately lay down on her huge metal bed with brass knobs and several tiers of lattice work of various kinds, and started fucking… By the middle of the night I was trembling all over from just the touch of her fingers on my skin, and we were completely covered with sweat and semen. When I looked at my prick while we were taking a shower together, it was torn and bloody, or more accurately, worn out.

You think she took her wig off in the shower? Shit no; she just tried to keep her head dry.

"What's wrong with your hair, Sarah?" I asked, trying to put the question in an indifferent tone, as if by the way. How did I know, maybe she had a complex about it; maybe the wig was her Achilles' heel.

"I'm crazy," she said, a little embarrassed and turning her head a little to the side with a lightly apologetic smile. "I tear out my hair sometimes when I get depressed. It's growing back now."

Jesus, I thought, is it really necessary to tear your hair out, and how much do you have to tear out before it becomes necessary to wear a wig? You really are crazy, Sarah. I used to know a girl who had the nervous habit of pulling out her eyelashes and who sometimes went around without them, but to pull your hair out… All of it?

Maybe Sarah lost her hair as a result of illness, say a thyroid disorder; I've heard of things like that. Actually, the absence of hair on Sarah's head didn't bother me; I had always rubbed shoulders with freaks and crazies, and anyway I didn't consider myself exactly a paragon of mental health. If she didn't have any hair, then she didn't…

All the same, I spent New Year's Eve by Jenny's side instead of going out. I was fair and not without a sense of gratitude, although I took the addresses and phone numbers where I could reach either Sarah or Andrea — just in case. I say I spent it "by Jenny's side" because the poor girl was sick in bed with a bad cold or the flu. However much I wanted to be out in the noise and the crowds, I stayed with her; she deserved a Happy New Year.

At exactly twelve midnight I drank some champagne with the patient, bought obviously with her money, and we toasted with Gatsby's very best champagne goblets, made of German crystal. "What do you wish?" Jenny sniffled, and I told her: "I want to be famous and I want the whole world!"

I don't know what she wanted, maybe ten children and me, a husband in pajamas. After our toast we chatted a little more, and then she let me go into the TV room to watch a New Year's program. "You're probably bored, Edward," said the noble Jenny, letting me go.

I went downstairs to the TV room with my goblet, watched Yellow Submarine, had several martinis, and then around three, I went back up to the bedroom, feeling very calm and majestic. Jenny was asleep and breathing heavily in the midst of clouds of water vapor from two round electric humidifiers. They were her latest fad. She had heard somewhere that there wasn't enough moisture in the air in wintertime and that it was therefore a good idea to sleep with humidifiers on. Grinning like a hoodlum, I unplugged them and went to bed.

The time flew by, January and then February — it was already 1978. I worked every day with the photographer Seva, remodeling his loft, and then rushed off to see my girls.

In the spring, my roommate, Joe Adler, gave up his dreams of a free and independent life as an artist after all. His mama had won. She found Joe a well-paying position in Yonkers, and he decided to give up his part of the apartment, and I, mad fool that I am, was suddenly overcome with a desire to take the whole place for myself.

At first Jenny didn't approve. "How are you going to pay for it, Edward?" she reasonably observed when I first told her of my intention. "You don't have a regular job."

Jenny didn't realize that she was in fact going to pay the one hundred and sixty dollars for the other half of the apartment. For I was sure I could easily hook her, so to speak, on the idea of our sharing the apartment together, the apartment serving as a kind of prologue to our shared family life, a place where our children could perhaps play someday. "Our own apartment."

Ours or not, I still had no intention of giving Jenny a key to it. Hell no!

Mama Jenny's maternal heart was of course unable to resist the temptation of having her own nest. Within a few days I had, in addition to my study and bedroom, my own living room with four windows.

My relations with Sarah developed, unfortunately, along the same lines they had with my other girls; that is, she gradually started to irritate me. I was tired of her. When we fucked, I sensed even through my marijuana or alcoholic stupor that she was giving herself to me and was moved by me, which is something I can't stand, in fact. I hate it when other people love me but I don't love them. Looking at her with as unprejudiced and sober an eye as possible, I suddenly realized that she wasn't pretty enough for me. Maybe I understood that earlier too, but the feverish state of mind I was in whenever I grabbed whatever cunt happened to be available just to keep from being alone and masturbating, and suffering the anguish of not having anybody to stick my prick into or take at least a modicum of animal warmth from — that state of mind had passed.

Sarah now seemed to me to be just a crude little slut from Brooklyn — crude and uncultivated, fussy and loud.

She would flop down in my apartment and throw on the floor her trashy boots, underpants, stockings, and other awful things which I turned away from in embarrassment and distaste, just as I had from my mother and her feminine secrets when we lived together in the same room.