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

I've long lived in the world as if in furnished rooms — I don't arrange it to my liking; I just use whatever happens to be available, women too. I've moved way beyond the passionate and crazy Edichka I was four years ago, whom I left to the world.

Tatiana was surprised to find I wasn't like Edichka at all. She said my book had made her cry, whereas I had, as you see, sold her to Ghupta for a jacket.

"You're an evil person, Limonov!" she sadly told me on the phone recently after I lost my temper with her over her paranoid delusions and told her that there wasn't anything between us except fucking and that she was a petite bourgeoise with neither money nor brains. Tatiana doesn't care about me either. She sees a writer in me, an author of books that make her cry. I interest her, but it's the interest of a consumer. She uses me to decorate her life. The same way that spices improve the taste of food, I make her life more interesting, a life that would otherwise be insipid. I, however, see Tatiana because I like fucking her, so that we in fact make very good use of each other, only I don't whine about it; I make jokes and smile and enjoy myself, while she whines and insists that I'm not "like Edichka." I already know I'm not.

I went to pee. I wasn't in the bathroom very long, but when I came out, Tatiana wasn't in the bedroom — one of her little jokes, her style. I called to her, looked for her, walked around the whole house, and then not finding her, I said the hell with it, and went out for a walk. I had almost been in the mood to fuck that unhappy, freshly impregnated woman, pulling up her black dress. She likes to go around in black. It didn't matter, I'd fuck her next time, or I'd fuck somebody else.

I always take the same route on my walks, going west on Fifty-seventh Street to Madison Avenue and then up Madison. I like rich Madison, particularly since you can always find beautiful women there. I walk without hurrying, gazing at the faces of pedestrians and examining the windows of the expensive stores, so familiar now that I've almost memorized them. I look at the faces of the men for the sake of comparison — to see if they're more interesting than mine. You'll say that it's difficult to be objective when comparing anything to yourself, but I try to be — the truth is important to me, and I want to find out if I have many rivals in my struggle. There aren't many. I see men who are much better looking than I am, but they lack that self-assured hardness, that peremptory decisiveness that appeared on my face around the time that I started working as housekeeper in the millionaire's house. It's strange, but the millionaire's house has given me a sense of assurance. Maybe I've been infected by Steven's nervous self-assurance and have acquired his confident habits — Steven who feels at home anywhere. That one time I went to a restaurant with him, I remember how he was the first to sit down, taking a seat in the most comfortable corner, the bastard, and putting his elbows on the table, comfortably and firmly in place and not giving a damn about anybody else. Maybe I did get it from Steven? I think, looking at the reflection of my face in a window. Before I was too embarrassed to stop on the street and look at my own face in the window; I was afraid of what other people might say. But now I don't care what they say, the pitiful failures, the suckers, the whole insecure and timid lot. "Don't trust anybody," I remember Linda saying. Don't worry, Linda, I never will. Why should I?

As you see, the buds of a new man, a new Edward, are urgently forcing their way out of me, pushing aside and supplanting the old one, just as green sprouts force their way into freedom from a potato, consuming it as they grow. Though flesh of my own flesh, a new Edward now walks along Madison Avenue.

The men, my rivals, understand something of this, I'm sure — there's probably a biological language that hasn't been forgotten even though it's been replaced in a way by words and speech. But a language of the body, of the eyes and facial muscles, still exists, doesn't it? In any case, before people used to ask me things on the street. You know, there's a special category of people who always want something from the rest of humanity — a quarter, a dollar, how to get to Lincoln Center, or just somebody to latch on to. But now nobody asks me anything; it's clear to them. My face obviously eloquently expresses everything for me: fuck all of you!

Behind Steven's confident appearance stand his millions. Behind mine is my newly discovered self. I don't need anybody; that's what I've discovered — not a mama, not Elena, not Jenny, not anybody. I'm strong enough to live proudly by myself. And there's no bitterness in my solitude, only joy.

I still look for the girl in chinchilla. If I should meet her on Madison, I won't recognize her of course, unless she's dressed the same way, but that doesn't matter. I'm looking for a type — that youthful charm, mystery, and inaccessibility, that alluring mixture of expensive prostitute and young girl, our civilization's highest achievement. When I write "prostitute," it's not at all judgmental; on the contrary. How many speeches have our kitchen mothers in aprons and slippers recited to us all with their hands on their hips, drumming into our heads over and over again the great value of gray, decent, virtuous women like themselves, of the kitchen slave, whom we at a certain time would have to, indeed were obligated to, bring into our lives. But I, thank God, have never believed in virtue and have never understood the value of those gray creatures. I have from childhood always been fond of holidays and have continually found myself in conflict with humdrum everyday life. As a child I would ask my mother, "Mama, why isn't it Christmas all the time?" So why don't you all go stick it, mama and papa, and neighbors in Kharkov and Moscow, and friends and companions, and residents of New York and London and Paris, and all of you who strain yourselves to the limits of your strength to support that heavy, gray, shapeless moral clod. Fuck all of you! I want to love whatever is beautiful, brilliant, sweet-smelling, and young. I don't want the decent, modest, and noble goose Jenny and those like her; I want the girl in chinchilla!

When I'm in a very bad mood, instead of Madison, I walk along Central Park South, where our city's most expensive hotels are drawn up in a line. In the spring or fall when it's raining, especially when it's raining, the entrances of the expensive hotels and restaurants present an unusual spectacle. Huge elegant automobiles drive up one after the other out of the mist, their chauffeurs obsequiously leaping out with big umbrellas, while absent-minded and imposing gentlemen assist their ladies from the dark warmth of the cars and fastidiously open their wallets to give the doormen a tip. Friends meet friends — they all know each other, these wealthy people — and at once kiss the little hands of their ladies there on the street, while a sudden breeze lifts the white scarf of one of die participants in that scene and carries to me, a modest passerby, the smoke of an expensive cigar and with it, the faint fragrance of warm feminine perfume.

I have in the millionaire's house the most expensive cigars and wines, wines that couldn't even be found, perhaps, in the cellars of the restaurants they frequent, and if I wish, I can open a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1964 and drink it. But I'm a servant, and not one of their race. I know that sooner or later they'll accept me under the name of writer — it's inevitable. They won't be able to withstand my strength, and I'll descend on them and fuck their women, and their women will be wild about me and my masculinity and wickedness. That's right, my masculinity, for a wave of masculinity has for the first time in my life emerged on my face with its prominent cheekbones and taken it over. But how to survive the day and its humiliations; that's the hardest thing. I will endure it all, I think stubbornly, while examining the decked-out crowd around the Plaza — no, you won't have that pleasure, I won't go crazy and buy a Beretta from a pimp I know on Times Square, a little black instrument of death just like his, and bump off a congressman out of bitterness and hatred — a disgusting swine-faced congressman for all my sufferings, for all the sufferings of the pitiful failure Edward. No, I won't give you that pleasure. I will survive, survive and endure a great many more rejections from publishers, and many more years of empty evenings like this, and thousands of walks like today's. I will survive them and join you on the pinnacle as the most intelligent and malevolent. And not for your company, which I'm sure will be only a bit more amusing than that of Jenny and her friends, and not even for your women, but for myself. I want to prove to myself that I can. The main thing is that I respect myself.