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

A sequence of hilarious sexual misadventures transplants Edward Limonov's fictional hero — like himself a Russian émigré poet named Edward Limonov — from a roach-infested welfare hotel to the servant's quarter's of a New York tycoon's townhouse. From there he hopes to launch himself to fame and fortune with the help of his as-yet-unpublished novel. So begins this ribald, wildly funny memoir of a Soviet poet turned butler in the glitzy world of Manhattan's superrich. A literary high-wire act of outrageous audacity, His Butler's Story takes on the American dream's underside with boisterous wit as it parodies the world of émigré cultural superstars and their cronies.

In Steven Grey's East Side mansion, Limonov finds himself in the role of a servant to a multimillionaire whose jet-set friends range from the Shah of Iran to a celebrated Soviet writer whom Limonov knew in his Moscow days. Grey becomes not just Limonov's master but a rival the poet wants to emulate as much as destroy. Limonov dreams of spraying his employer's dinner table with an AK-47 rifle, but sex is the only revenge left to the servant, and he seduces the girlfriend of his boss's teenage son and lusts after a neighborhood nymphet. An outcast as much in his new country as he was in his Soviet homeland, Limonov holds up a mirror to an America rarely seen with such an uncompromising yet ecstatic vision.

I had been completely captivated, completely enthralled by him for two months. Then on the twenty-eighth of February, 1979 — I remember that day of my humiliation well — his limousine came to take him to the airport, since he was going to California, and in the last minutes before he left, he treated me to a nasty little show of hysterics. He stamped his feet and stormed up and down the stairs, screaming the same thing over and over again: "God damn you! God damn you!" His face turned red, his beard bristled, and his eyes seemed about to pop out of their sockets. There were times before that when I had heard him from the kitchen shouting at our secretary, Linda, but I had never actually seen him in that state. I had only heard him.

I stood with my back against the doorway and tried to figure out what I had done wrong. I had sent to the cleaners a pair of gray pants that he himself had put on the chest by the front door. The pants had spots on them and were lying on the chest with the other dirty things that were supposed to go to the cleaners, the chest being our special place for that. But it turned out he actually wanted to take the gray pants with him, since they were the ones he always wore on the plane. He didn't have anything else to wear, poor guy, except for a hundred or so suits in his closet.

So I stood there in the dining room doorway, while he ran up and down the stairs, hurling aside whatever got in his way and ripping open the doors and screaming the same thing over and over: "God damn you! God damn you!" and "Ask! Just ask!" He had shouted the first "God damn you!" while leaning over me, since he, my employer, was much bigger and taller than me, his servant — in fact, next to me he was a gorilla. He barked the rest of his imprecations from a distance. Perhaps he moved away from me because he was afraid he would lose control and hit me? I don't know.

It was during those few minutes that I first began to hate him. I was even a bit scared, but not that he would hit me. I would have killed him if he had. I would have gotten the better of him somehow, even rushing out of the kitchen after him with a butcher knife if it had come to that. No, what scared me was the obviously unhealthy nature of his hysteria and the insignificance of the pretext that had provoked it. Well, go fuck yourself then! I thought. Go scream at yourself! I know I haven't done anything wrong, and if you don't like it, fire me! Who cares! And already gathering my things together in my mind, I walked through the living room into the kitchen and went downstairs to the basement, took a bottle of soda water from the box, and proceeding to the farthest room, one heaped with broken furniture and the discarded or worn-out toys of his children, I sat down on a broken chair, opened the bottle of fizzing soda water, and started drinking it.

It was only then that I noticed my hands were shaking. That observation infuriated me. Why the hell should I have to get mixed up in somebody else's goddamn hysterics and inability to control himself! Why should I? Visions of myself moving off, suitcase in hand, into a yawning vastness of freedom both calmed me down and cheered me up.

Upstairs I could hear loud stamping. Perhaps he was looking for me? So let him, the asshole, I thought. I'll be damned if I'll go back up there until he leaves. I've seen enough of his bloated face and bug-eyes. What's he stomping around for, anyway? I thought. Has he got flat feet? I put special rubber soles on his shoes so his feet won't blister, even if they are flat. Actually, I don't put them on; the Greek shoe repairman does. I just take the shoes to the Greek. And sometimes I shine them too. He keeps thirty or forty pairs in the house. Shining his shoes is one of my duties. I'm his servant, and that's what I'm paid for. When he's here in New York, I make breakfast and lunch for him too. For him and for his fucking businessmen. They frequently go over their papers at lunch.

The stomping and crashing continued. The house is probably fifty or sixty years old, so there was really nothing very odd about my being able to hear the hysterical Gatsby stomping around upstairs from the basement. The Great Gatsby. My employer. My boss. My oppressor.

Obviously I don't call him Gatsby to his face. Steven Grey, Multimillionaire, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Principal Stockholder, and President of Corporations, has no idea I call him that. But if he did, he'd probably be proud of the name; he's well-read and graduated from Harvard, and he has a grandmother who used to be a writer and a great-grandfather who was a friend of Walt Whitman's, and every room in our house has booklined shelves covering almost an entire wall. Mr. Grey knows who Gatsby is and would be pleased.

Actually, while hiding out in the basement from Steven's hysterics, I gave a completely different meaning to the image of the Great Gatsby. I suspected that Steven's Gatsby was merely an attractive façade he turned toward his women and his friends. It would have been interesting to be the other Gatsby's housekeeper too, to observe him from the kitchen, where I could have seen what he was really like.

Steven Grey, stomping over my head for the last time, slammed the front door and was gone. The throb of his limousine soon followed. After sitting another five minutes or so just to make sure, I went back up to the kitchen, drinking the soda water and trying to suppress the passionately indignant and condemnatory speeches I was reciting to myself. It was 8:15. The whole episode had taken only fifteen minutes. I walked through the dining room to the hallway of our house, or rather his house, stepped into the elevator, went up to my fourth floor, or rather his fourth floor, entered my bedroom, which of course was really his, and started gathering my things together. The indignant speeches had stimulated my brain. I made them both to myself and out loud, appealing to an imaginary jury of arbitrators, whom I alternately called «guys» and "gentlemen," pointing out to them the correctness of my own behavior in contrast to Gatsby's hysteria, rudeness, and lack of self-control. Along with those thoughts, another, quite unexpected one suddenly occurred to me — that Soviet lads in faded battle tunics would soon be here, that my brothers would soon come to take revenge on everybody here, including my employer Gatsby, for all the insults I endured. Oh, what revenge they'd take…