Edward Limonov - Its me, Eddie: A fictional memoir

Translated from the Russian by S.L.Campbell (1983)

contents

The Hotel Winslow and Its Denizens

I Am a Busboy

Others and Raymond

Chris

Carol

Sonya

Where She Made Love

Luz, Alyoshka, Johnny, and Others

Roseanne

I Make Money

My Friend New York

The New Elena

Epilogue

If you're walking past the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street between one and three in the afternoon, take the trouble to tip back your head and look up at the unwashed windows of the black Hotel Winslow. There on the topmost, sixteenth floor, on the center-most of the hotel's three balconies, I sit half naked. Usually I am eating shchi and at the same time working on my tan, I'm a great sun lover. Shchi, or sauerkraut soup, is my usual fare; I eat pot after pot of it, day after day, and eat almost nothing else. The spoon I eat the shchi with is wooden and was brought from Russia. It is decorated with flowers of scarlet, gold, and black.

The surrounding office buildings gawk at me with their smoky glass walls, with the thousand eyes of the clerks, secretaries, and managers. A nearly, sometimes entirely naked man, eating shchi from a pot. They don't know it's shchi, though. What they see is that every other day, on a hot plate there on the balcony, a man cooks a huge steaming pot of something barbaric. At one time I also ate chicken, but then I stopped. There are five advantages to shchi: (1) It's very cheap, two or three dollars a pot, and a pot is enough for two days! (2) It doesn't spoil out of the refrigerator, even in very hot weather. (3) It's quick to make, only an hour and a half. (4) It can and should be eaten cold. (5) There's no better food for summer, because it's tart.

I choke and gobble, naked on the balcony. I'm not ashamed before those unknown people in the offices or their eyes. Sometimes I also have with me, hanging on a nail driven into the window frame, a small green battery transistor given to me by Alyoshka Slavkov, a poet who plans to become a Jesuit. I enliven the taking of shchi with music. My preference is a Spanish station. I'm not inhibited. I am often to be found bare-assed in my shallow little room, my member pale against the background of the rest of my body, and I do not give a damn whether they see me or don't, the clerks, secretaries, and managers. I'd rather they did see me. They're probably used to me by now, and perhaps they miss me on days when I don't crawl out on my balcony. I suppose they call me "that crazy across the way."

My little room is four paces long and three paces wide. On the walls, covering the marks left by previous occupants, there hang: a large portrait of Mao Tse-tung, an object of horror to all the people who drop by to see me; a portrait of Patricia Hearst; my own photograph against a background of icons and a brick wall, with me holding a thick volume, perhaps a dictionary or a Bible, and wearing a 114-patch blazer tailored by me, Limonov, monster out of the past; a portrait of Andre Breton, founder of the surrealist school, which portrait I have carried with me for many years, and which Andre Breton is usually unknown to those who come to see me; a call to support gay rights; other posters, among them one for Workers Party candidates; paintings by my friend the artist Khachaturian; numerous lesser papers. At the head of my bed is the poster "For Your Freedom and Ours," left from a demonstration in front of the New York Times. Completing the wall decor are two shelves of books. Mainly poetry.

I think it's clear to you by now what a character I am, even though I forgot to introduce myself. I started running on without announcing who I was; I forgot. Overjoyed at the opportunity to drown you in my voice at last, I got carried away and never announced whose voice it was. My fault, forgive me, we'll straighten it out right now.

I am on welfare. I live at your expense, you pay taxes and I don't do a fucking thing. Twice a month I go to the clean, spacious welfare office at 1515 Broadway and receive my checks. I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience, therefore my conscience doesn't bother me and I don't plan to look for work, I want to receive your money to the end of my days. And my name is Edichka, "Eddie-baby."

And you, gentlemen, can figure you're getting off cheap. Early in the morning you crawl out of your warm beds and hurry some by car, some by subway or bus to work. I hate work. I gobble my shchi, drink, sometimes drink myself into oblivion, seek adventure in dark city blocks; I have a magnificent, expensive white suit and an exquisite nervous system; I wince at your belly laugh in the movie theater and wrinkle my nose.

You don't like me? You don't want to pay? It's precious little $278 a month. You don't want to pay. Then why the fuck did you invite me, entice me here from Russia, along with a horde of Jews? Present your complaints to your own propaganda, it's too effective. That's what's emptying your pockets, not I.

Who was I over there? What's the difference, what would it change? I hate the past, as I always have, in the name of the present. Well, I was a poet, if you must know, a poet was I, an unofficial, underground poet. That's over forever, and now I am one of yours, I am scum, I'm the one to whom you feed shchi and rotten cheap California wine $3.59 a gallon and yet I scorn you. Not all of you, but many. Because you lead dull lives, sell yourselves into the slavery of work, because of your vulgar plaid pants, because you make money and have never seen the world. You're shit!

I've gone a little too far, lost my temper, forgive me. But objectivity is not among my attributes; besides, the weather is fucking lousy today, it's drizzling, New York is gray and boring empty weekend days, I have nowhere to go. Perhaps this is why I switched out of my usual mode and started calling you names. I apologize. Go on living for now, and pray God to keep me from mastering correct English as long as possible.

The Hotel Winslow is a gloomy black sixteen-story building, probably the blackest on Madison Avenue. A sign running from the top to the bottom of the facade proclaims WINSL W the letter O fell out. When? Perhaps fifty years ago. I moved into the hotel by chance, in March, after my tragedy, my wife Elena had left me. Exhausted, footsore, and bloody from wandering around New York spending each night in a new spot, sometimes on the street, I was finally picked up by a former dissident and former groom at the Moscow race track, the very first recipient of the Welfare Prize (he prides himself on having been the first Russian to master welfare), stout, slovenly, wheezing Alyoshka Shneerson, my Savior, who led me by the hand to the Welfare Center on Thirty-first Street, and inside of a day I received emergency aid, which has dropped me to the bottom of life, made me a man scorned and without rights but fuck your rights, I don't have to earn my own board and room, and I'm free to write my poems, which are not fucking needed, either here in your America or there in the USSR.

So then how did I end up at the Winslow?

Shneerson's friend Edik Brutt lived at the Winslow, and that was where I came to live too, three doors down from him. The sixteenth floor consists entirely of cubicles, as do many other floors. When I meet people and mention where I live they look at me with respect. Few realize that such a neighborhood still has a dirty old hotel populated by poor old men and women and lonely Jews from Russia, where scarcely half the rooms have a shower or toilet.

Misfortune and failure hover invisibly over our hotel. During the time I have lived here two older women have thrown themselves out the window. One of them, a Frenchwoman I was told, with a face that still preserved traces of beauty, had always paced the corridor inconsolably; she threw herself from her fourteenth-floor window into the courtyard, the light-well. In addition to these two victims God very recently took the proprietress, or rather the mother of the proprietor, who is a huge, elephantine Jew in a yarmulke, I met him once at a party given by my American girl friend Roseanne. The proprietor's mother, like all old women, loved to give orders at the hotel, although the proprietor of our dirty little establishment owns forty-five other buildings in New York. Why she enjoyed hanging around all day and pointing out things for the hotel employees to do I don't know. Perhaps she was a sadist. Recently she disappeared. They found her later that day, a crumpled and mutilated corpse in the elevator shaft. The devil lives alongside us. Having seen a lot of films about exorcists, I am beginning to think it's the devil. From my window I can see the St. Regis Sheraton. I think about that hotel with envy. And, without prospect, dream of moving there if I get rich.