Context
Nine-and-a-Half Americas
Max Frai
1.
My first America is an imaginary one. It does not exist at all, and
never did. As a child, it seemed that grown-ups had invented America.
But what for? They knew what they were doing. They had invented
bogeymen to keep children from climbing into the attic. They had
invented Young Pioneer heroes who died horribly to coerce children into
following the rules and studying hard. They had even invented vitamins
to force children into eating tasteless, slimy boiled onions, spectral
petals that swim mindlessly in every bowl of soup. So they had invented
America in order to inspire fear. As I grew older, the formula became
more precise: they had invented it for propaganda. To keep the Soviet
people from relaxing in the absence of an external enemy. But I was
happily oblivious to words like these as a child. And then from time to time we saw pictures of American life
on television—the way you can see aliens from outer space in the
movies—they seemed pretty much the same thing to me then. But Vovka
down the block said that there were no aliens in outer space, just our
own cosmonauts. Vovka was big, in the sixth grade, he probably knew
what he was talking about. Still later, I was childishly confident that America had been
invented by mean-spirited grown-ups as the setting for innumerable
jokes and shaggy-dog stories that were wildly popular in my circle of
acquaintances and friends. They provided various funny explanations:
where American things came from, and where people really go when they
say they’ve gone to America on business or as tourists: whether they’ve
been hypnotized into thinking they’ve been on a marvelous journey, or
simply cowed by blackmail or violence into corroborating the existence
of an imagined country beyond the ocean. We enjoyed ourselves
immensely. But in February 1994, when a rented microbus conducted us
from Kennedy Airport, and the black silhouettes of the Manhattan
skyline reared up ahead against the fiery background and lily-white
smudge of an early winter dawn, my heart nearly stopped in terror. We
were about to penetrate the two-dimensional space of a glossy postcard,
to pass into an imagined, illusory reality. The obvious question then
was, and even now I sometimes ask myself, where the hell were we? 2. My second America is related to the first, in the sense
that it really is imaginary. This America derives from popular movies,
the basis of a beautiful life in all its manifestations: from the
heroic confrontations of cowboys and Indians to Audrey Hepburn, who has
to have breakfast at Tiffany’s, of course, and supper who knows where.
The America of Coppola and Tarantino, of gangsters and cops, of
clandestine parties of bootleggers and the happy, orange-headed
pumpkiny horror of Halloween. Philip Marlow shoots back at scoundrels
without letting go of his glass of straight whiskey, Jack London’s
Smoke and Shorty swim on golden sand, Mickey Mouse wolfs down a
hamburger with a cold Coca-Cola, and Marilyn Monroe sings like a
nightingale, twirling her appetizing backside to the joy of all the
other human children. Beyond our wildest dreams, ah. 3. My third America might as well be the Land of the Dead,
the place where my acquaintances and friends, in their own good time,
went off to forever. To the West, to the sunset, to the dying sun, in
full correspondence with ancient myths. In earlier times it was
reckoned that from there, from America, there was no return. As for
those of us who stayed behind, we never expected to go there. Therefore
we said goodbye forever, saw living people off as if they had died,
kissed their brows, and froze to the spot with grief. Fortunately, this version of my America has long since grown old. 4. And there it is, my fourth America, the America of
literature, the patrimony of the people of the Word, which, as we all
know, precedes the act (and I am not fully certain that there ever has
been a succeeding act). No need to list my favorite writers: the list
is too long, a good hundred names well known to the world. I’ll just
note that a book by Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day, fell into
my hands in a library in the Ural village Tavatui during the winter of
1984, and if it didn’t exactly save my life, it certainly saved my mind. In particular, the structure of this very essay, the account
of nine-and-a-half Americas instead of a single integral picture, is in
its own way a tribute to the memory of the celebrated Theophilus North,
who explained to me, along with everything else, that each city is Nine
Cities, “some superimposed, some having very little relation with the
others—variously beautiful, impressive, absurd, commonplace . . .” 5. I’d consider my fourth America the crown of creation if not for the fifth—the America of mysteries and miracles. It’s clear that my fourth and fifth Americas are not simply
woven together, but bound up into several sailors’ knots—it’s
impossible to unravel them. And there’s nothing to unravel. The map of my fifth America is a map of deserts, forests, and
putrid swamps, dappled with ancient Indian curses, tattered by the
thorns of hallucinatory cacti and fouled with the excrement of rabid
lizards. In the skies of my fifth America kites are swooping, and down
on its earth unwashed shamans walk, and the sound track to this idyll
is provided, of course, by Jim Morrison, who else? 6. And so we get to Jim Morrison. My sixth America, if not
the motherland of current art, is still The Promised Land. Andy
Warhol’s Factory works nonstop, the boss has locked himself up in his
bedroom with his “wifetape-recorder,” he treats himself to
chocolatecovered cherries, for three hours he flutters around the
telephone with his best girlfriend. Other things, people and events
revolve around this eternal child like planets around the sun. This is
an extremely harmonious and self-sustaining world. I like it very much. 7. The seventh America is deeply repulsive to me. This is the
America of informers, hypocrites, bureaucrats, and lawyers. The America
of legal wrangling and civil suits, in the course of which
irresponsible idiots are awarded huge amounts of money from companies
that don’t provide special, useful instructions about their products
for irresponsible idiots. An America of spurious, deceitfully
interpreted political correctness, offensive to all participants in the
process of human society. This is the America where passersby will not
even think of offering help to a person who is dying in the street
because they are afraid of being sued. I won’t go on: it’s boring and
obnoxious to go through it all. 8. The eighth America is one I happen to have visited. Strictly speaking, this is not even America, but a single city, New York. I flew into New York with a friend in February of 1994 and
stayed there until about March 10th. We had an exhibition at the Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts gallery; we thought this was really, really terrific.
We lived in a vast loft on Green Street in SoHo; the resident parrot
took care of us, and we fed it in return. The elevator opened right
into the apartment, and this detail drove us crazy, made us feel like
heroes of a fantasy film, more utopian than anti-. . . . Every morning we went to the gallery on Mercer Street and set
up this damned exhibit. We labored for twelve hours running, returned
home, ordered takeout from a Chinese restaurant, then wandered around
SoHo, stopped by bars, tried unfamiliar cocktails, listened to
unfamiliar music, looked at unfamiliar faces, tried to get our fill of
a completely different, incomprehensible, but entrancing life: just in
case. Bar 88, which took its name from the number of keys on a
piano and is located somewhere in Greenwich Village, is the only one
whose name I will never forget. I’ll definitely look for the entrance
again when I get the chance, but I have to confess it will be more by
instinct than by memory. A pianist played there in the evenings, most of the clientele
were of indeterminate sex, a lady with the appearance of a professor
took my coat in the coatroom—in the deepest part of my understanding I
knew this had to be the ideal bar! A lady dressed in a dark leather man’s suit behind the bar
sang stupendous blues, successfully mixing cocktails and dumping
cigarette stubs out of identical white ashtrays at the same time. I
especially liked the cocktail she made called the Breeze: how many
gallons of that liquid—pale pink, deceitfully sweetish, but in essence
fiery enough to blow my head off—did I consume during those amazing
evenings—God only knows. The Feldmans—Frayda and Ronald—treated us gently, as if we
were country cousins. They filled our pockets with money and good
advice, took us to eat in an Italian restaurant, urged us to drink only
decaffeinated coffee (advice we hardly ever follow, better to cut out
coffee completely). Ron entertained us with stories about his own
childhood; Frayda tactfully took care of all the details. Her colleague
in the gallery, marvelous Peggy Kaplan, invited us to visit and for
several hours nonstop photographed us for some album of hers. We have
never been so inhumanly handsome as we were in Peggy’s photographs,
and, it must be understood, we hardly expect to be again. Chuck, the
chief installer at the gallery, waved an English-Russian phrasebook in
front of our noses and painstakingly pronounced his favorite sentence:
“I have a back ack.” He did not bother to learn any other
Russian sentence. Obviously, he had decided that you couldn’t ask
anything of someone with a “back ack.” In New York we were very young (you always become a few years
younger in a foreign country than you are at home, a strange effect)
and, apparently, inexcusably happy. So passersby smiled at us, sidewalk
vendors waved at us and threw us compliments. This became clear, by the
way, only much later: it took us at least a week to understand the
English you hear on the streets of New York. And I still keep in my closet a pair of dark glasses with
multicolored frames, which I bought for eight dollars from one of the
involuntary witnesses of that happiness. It’s impossible for me to wear
them anymore, but my hand refuses to throw them out, although I usually
discard old things with pleasure. 9. The ninth America is that one through which I will travel
someday. I want to cross it in a rented car, from the northwest to the
southeast, and then, along the other diagonal, from northeast to
southwest. I usually enjoy the roads I ride on—I see no reason why
American roads should not be a real pleasure for me. It would be good to go everywhere in America, look into every
godforsaken corner, flirt with the winds, get lost on the streets of a
big city—let’s say, L.A.—and then discover myself in a highway motel,
somewhere on the far side of this imaginary land. To fall asleep in a
field, sprout like dejected grass, wake up in the morning and, as if
nothing had ever happened, keep going farther on. To eat tasteless
cherry pie in a roadside diner, close my eyes, swallow bitter ocean
water, come to the surface again and lie for a long time on the sand,
wiggle my fingers and my toes: I’m alive! One day all this, of course, will happen to me. Sooner or later, one way or another, it will happen, for sure. I know. 9 1/2. And then there is America in the subjunctive mood,
that America which never was and never will be real for me. The America
where I might have been born into an American family, lived an American
life, eaten American food, drunk American drinks, slept with American
boys and girls, raised new American children, and with difficulty
imagined that some people get born in foreign countries. —From the anthology Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States ___________________________ Translated from the Russian by J. Kates.
