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

I know, gentlemen, that you will immediately start vying with each other to tell me all about spiritual beauty and to explain to me that that very Jenny, the one driving the Toyota, possessed a beauty of the spirit, which I, miserably ambitious person that I am, as you'll say, don't understand. I do understand, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do about it. Before physical beauty I was and am ready to fall down in the dirt and let it walk over me — its little feet won't soil me. Beauty makes the tears well up in my eyes. It's awful! I place beauty higher even than talent, for talent is given for the world's benefit, is it not? Talent is a sort of applied thing, whereas beauty is endowed at birth both for the world to admire and to be adorned by.

Then the last act began. In Los Angeles, a place I had no desire to go (but who pays the piper calls the tune, and Jenny was paying), we stayed with a certain Mark, who was a childhood friend of Jenny's older brother Donald. Mark was a large, slightly heavyset guy who always went around dressed in checked shirts and jeans. He had, in my opinion, not so much a California look as that of somebody from deep in the American hinterland, from the middle states, conservative and landlocked. Mark was the owner of a printing shop. He had, in other words, a certain affiliation with culture, and dreamed of opening his own publishing house someday. May God grant that he does.

Martha was at that time obsessed with the idea of moving to Los Angeles and was looking for a job, something I was required to take part in too. From morning on, Martha, Jenny, and I would set out on a tour of the city's hotels, trying to find Martha something at one of them. We went on like that for three days during a tremendous heat wave, and those drives around the hot, sweltering city among the crowds of people tremendously irritated me, as did the fact that we were staying with Mark and sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags. By the fourth day I couldn't take it any longer and in spite of my desire to remain on good terms with Jenny, I suggested returning to die redwoods. If, however, they wanted to stay on in Los Angeles instead, I would go back to New York, since I was tired of sleeping on Mark's floor and couldn't see any reason for it and was uncomfortable and bored.

To my amazement, Jenny agreed to go back to the redwoods again, but in order to thank Mark for his hospitality, the girls decided to have a party. The girls were so lackadaisical and tedious that even the sight of them plunged me into a deep depression, but it was in a California supermarket where we had gone to buy food and alcohol for the party that it finally dawned on me for the last time, so that I was left without the slightest doubt, just how great the distance separating us was. It's only in California that you find such vast supermarkets, so large that your friend at the other end of the hall looks like a tiny point. It was there in the supermarket that I suddenly saw myself in a huge mirror and was astonished to discover just how alienated and strangely isolated from them I looked.

Fat-assed with big calves and both dressed in skirts with ruffles that I myself had made (Jenny had lent Martha one of her skirts to wear), the two girls laughed and gesticulated crudely while waddling like geese down the aisle and loading the cart up with chickens and whole sections of greasy lamb ribs. Butchers' or bakers' wives? I thought to myself. I, on the other hand, dressed in a checked summer jacket, a cap (the same one from Paris with the label "The Enchanted Hunter"), white pants, fine boots, and glasses, and with an astonished look on my face, didn't fit with them at all, but looked like a creature from another movie perhaps, if you imagine that huge supermarket mirror as a motion picture screen. Precisely as if an editor in that same Hollywood, say, had in his haste mistakenly spliced into a sedate, realistic family movie about the American Midwest a few frames from a European existentialist film about an outsider. An editor who was drunk.

The party took place that evening, the guests arriving gradually. The first to appear was Jenny's older brother Donald. He obviously couldn't wait; a romance was apparently developing between him and Martha. The second person to arrive was another relative, Mark's brother, his younger brother John. It was clear that the exclusive source of their parents' imagination was the Bible, since they had given their children the names of the famous evangelists. I didn't ask them where Matthew and Luke were, but I wanted to. The last to arrive was a certain Peter, an aging failure whose life was brightened only by his recollections of the 1969 student disturbances at Berkeley. Whatever he was talking about, he would sooner or later make his usual leap into the past: "…whereas when I was at Berkeley…" or, "in Berkeley we had…" Peter reminded me of our own Solzhenitsyn with his eternal camps. Fuck you and your Berkeley, I thought angrily. You can't live on memories all the time. Do I start bullshitting every five minutes about "Russia… Now when I lived in Russia…"?

They all had their Berkeleys. Jenny's brother Donald, who was already about thirty, was trying to become a rock star — the world of the music business, the unjust, treacherous, sinister Berkeley of music. Brother John, short and stocky with a dark beard, was stuck on reincarnation. After we had smoked some grass, of which brother Michael had more than enough — he was as the owner of a printing shop the most successful among us — younger brother John sat down next to me and started methodically ramming reincarnation up my ass. If he wants his soul to transmigrate so he can once again waste his life in arguments about trashy ideas that two million Americans have lifted from glossy mass-market paperbacks, then he needs no better reincarnation than he has now, I appealed both to Nature and to God. I trust they heard me.

Later on there was dancing in the living room. I stuck my head out of the kitchen to take a look. Martha was lovingly intertwined with the lanky Donald. My Jenny was dancing with Mark of the invariable checked shirt, and both had taken off their shoes and were in their stockinged feet. I glanced out of the kitchen for just a moment, and although I'm sure that Jenny didn't see me, I did notice that the two of diem, Jenny and her brother's friend, were very well-suited to each other. Her face even had an entirely different expression than it did in my presence — completely calm and self-assured and cheerful. They stamped their feet in unison whenever that was called for, and no less harmoniously they stepped to the side or forward, whenever the music required them to do that. For some reason they reminded me of a painting by Brueghel — dancing peasants, I thought. And although Mark looked like a complete hick to me, his printing shop notwithstanding, I was still a little envious of the way they fitted together.

I went back into the kitchen, where Peter and John at once fell on me again with their Berkeley-reincarnation jumble, and since I haven't known for a long time what to do at parties, and was altogether lost at that one, the only recourse available to me was to get drunk, which is what I did, and with the addition of a goodly quantity of grass managed to get through the evening.

The next morning, suffering from a terrible hangover and the slowness of the girls — who weren't in any hurry to pack their stuff, whereas I, in proper soldierly fashion, had already quickly gotten mine together — I sat dully in the living room and examined Mark's books, the only thing there that interested me even remotely, and quietly bickered with Jenny and Martha. With equal bitterness on both sides, we climbed into the Toyota around noon and set off.

Once on the road, they chattered for hours on end about Mark, John, and Donald, and even about Peter, of whom in my opinion there was nothing to say except that he was an old loser. "And then Donald, Donald goes… Ha-ha-ha… And John, John comes over to me and he goes… Ha-ha-ha…" came to me in the back seat.