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

Jenny's brother Robert was the only one living at the saloon when we got there; I had met him, you'll recall, at their parents' house in Virginia. This young man lived an easygoing and carefree life, accumulating an immense quantity of trash in black plastic bags. The only reason he didn't have problems with rats is that the raccoons would probably have gobbled them up if they had come. The raccoons had chewed through the bags which were heaped in a pile under a tree next to the kitchen, and the whole area around the saloon looked like a dump.

Robert's morning began at six. At least whenever I would get up very early myself, I would find the young man sitting in the kitchen next to the already lit iron stove, his morning joint gaily glowing between his lips. As the day progressed, he smoked more and more, and when evening came, he would cook himself up on the same stove a stinking paste of hallucinogenic Mexican mushrooms. Sometimes his friends would come to visit him from the nearby college campus in old cars, and they would all sit out on the veranda and take turns scraping out mushrooms from the pot with an aluminum spoon. What Robert was trying to do remains a mystery to me. The only food he ever ate in front of me was carrots. He was a vegetarian, and there was always an inexhaustible supply of carrots in the refrigerator, which Robert and his friends and Jenny and Martha made juice with, and then drank. They must, I think, have consumed dozens of pounds of carrots. Jenny claimed that Robert ate our vegetables too, our vegetables and our bread, since he didn't have any money of his own — or so she said. But it's also possible she was exaggerating.

The skinny, likable Robert, with his utterly vacant, ethereal gaze, was the mildest of creatures. True, the only time he was capable of grasping anything, in my opinion, was in the morning. Whenever I opened the refrigerator to get my morning can of beer — which is how I started my own day, since Alyoshka and I were drinking heavily — Robert would always ask in amazement, "Beer at eight o'clock in the morning, Edward?" and grin and shake his head. And I, motioning at his invariable joint, would say, "A joint at eight o'clock in the morning, Robert?" and shake my own head. He was a very "cool dude," this Robert, and later on, when Jenny and I started having our arguments and disagreements, he couldn't understand at all why we weren't getting along with each other.

"What are you arguing about?" he said to me one morning. "Jenny and you, Edward, are getting upset over nothing. You should take it easy; after all, you don't have anything to argue about. I eat my mushrooms, and then everything's fine with me. The world's really beautiful, you know… Do you want some mushrooms, Edward? They're cheap — five dollars a bag. You can even order them by mail…"

For us Robert was something like God's own representative in the redwood forest. He had a calming effect on us, but of course not even he could keep us from dividing into two camps.

Sometimes it seems to me that if it hadn't been for Alyoshka, I might not have lost Jenny then, but it's possible it only seems that way. I realized even in Los Angeles that with the four of us in one car the trip wasn't going to be an easy one. We could never agree about anything. If Alyoshka and I wanted to spend the day at the beach, the girls wanted to go to a restaurant and then to a movie, and so on. If you also add to our continual disagreements the fact that Martha was a complete stranger to Alyoshka and that during the whole trip he never had, as far as I could tell, the slightest desire to fuck her, as well as the fact that Jenny's and my sexual relations weren't giving us any pleasure, then you can imagine how we, a group of strangers irritated with each other, felt in that tin can of a car. Jenny, moreover, did all the driving. Alyoshka still didn't know how to drive then, I wouldn't have trusted myself with the car, and Martha didn't drive either for some reason, and so Alyoshka and I found ourselves completely at the mercy of their coalition.

Once enclosed in that small space, we discovered that we were all very different. And not just because Alyoshka and I were Russians and the girls were Americans — no. After all, Alyoshka's English was excellent and he was moreover already enrolled in a graduate program, while I myself had in fact forgotten more of Russia than I remembered. But the girls had their own interests, and we had ours.

Health food, for example. Alyoshka and I laughed heartily at their passionate faith in health food and made fun of it every chance we got. Whenever we stopped at a health food store, and there are a great many of them in California, I tried to find out from Jenny how she knew that the food — shitty tomatoes, the famous carrots, and rotten onions — had in fact been grown without the use of chemical fertilizers. And what if they had? Jenny got mad when I laughingly maintained that the owners of all the health food stores were crooks, and that they bought spoiled produce from the supermarkets around the corner and sold it to her as wholesome food. I would have kept quiet if the shitty health food hadn't cost twice as much as the much more wholesome-looking «normal» food.

The girls also had huge jars full of various kinds of vitamins with them, which they would constantly bring out during the trip and share with each other. "Do you want to try some B-2, Jenny?" or, "Why don't you give me some C with A-6, Martha!" So went their little conversations.

I might have put up with the girls better by myself, much better — I wouldn't have paid any attention to them, but Alyoshka and I continually egged each other on, and since we were speaking Russian, we unfortunately had the fatal ability to say whatever we wanted about our opponents in their presence. If we had had only one common language, we would necessarily have restrained ourselves and spoken less, instead of spinning a web of hysteria together.

The girls' conversation was little more than gossip. They chattered incessantly about Steven and his lovers, about Nancy and her love affairs, and about their own mutual acquaintances and their love affairs, but never about books or politics.

Alyoshka and I discussed Russian and English and world literature for three days or so until we got tired of it. I'm not saying our conversations were more interesting than theirs — you can chatter boringly about literature, too, and I in fact talk less and less about it now than I used to — but only that our conversations were of no interest to them, whereas to Alyoshka and me theirs were merely the primitive babbling of servant girls. Yet the fact remained that we were divided into two hostile factions, and that I was in the worst position of anybody, since both Jenny and Alyoshka came to me whenever they were unhappy about anything at all, and Alyoshka moreover told me whatever was on his mind in a language the girls didn't understand, thereby implicating me in his hysteria too.

He said that they were stupid country girls, but I already knew that they were simple and dumb and boring. But I couldn't tell Alyoshka in so many words that those girls were in fact just what we deserved then — if we had deserved any better, we would in fact have been traveling with them. That was something I had always understood very clearly; it was an objective reality. Just as the fact that I was traveling at Jenny's expense was an objective reality.

In short, I had several fallings out with Jenny because of Alyoshka, during which she screamed that it was her first vacation in almost four years and that she had the right to rest in whatever way she liked, even if it only meant not being criticized every minute. "I don't care about your literature! Fuck your literature and politics!" she screamed. And for the first time in my life I heard her say, "I'm paying!"