absolutely still or lie down rigid and ready for attack and you
listen to the night m oving over the earth and you understand
that you are buried alive in it and by the grace o f random luck
you will be alive in the morning— or w on’t be— you will die or
you w on ’t and you wait to find out, you wait for the light and
when it comes you know you made it. Y ou hear things break
outside— windows, you can hear sheets o f glass collapsing, or
windows being broke on a smaller scale, or bottles dashed on
cement, thrown hard, or trash cans emptied out and hurled
against a cement wall, or you hear yelling, a man’s voice,
threat, a wom an’s voice, pain, or you hear screams, and you
hear sirens, there are explosions, maybe they are gun shots,
maybe not— and you hope it’s not coming after you or too
near you but you don’t know and so you wait, you just wait,
through every second o f the night, you wait for the night to
end. I spend the change I can find on cigarettes and orange
juice. I think as long as I am drinking orange juice I am
healthy. I think orange juice is the key to life. I drink a quart at
a time. It has all these millions o f vitamins. I like vodka in my
orange juice but I can’t get it; only a drink at a time from a man
here and there, but then I leave out the orange juice because I
can do that myself, I just get the vodka straight up, nothing
else in the glass taking up room but it’s greed because I like
rocks. I never had enough money at one time to buy a bottle. I
love looking at vodka bottles, especially the foreign ones— I
feel excited and distinguished and sophisticated and part o f a
real big world when I have the bottle near me. I think the
bottles are really beautiful, and the liquid is so clear, so
transparent, to me it’s like liquid diamonds, I think it’s
beautiful. I feel it connects me with Russia and all the Russians
and there is a dark melancholy as well as absolute jo y when I
drink it. It brings me near Chekhov and D ostoevsky. I like
how it burns the first drink and after that it’s just this splendid
warmth, as i f hot coals were silk sliding down inside me and I
get warm, m y throat, m y chest, m y lungs, the skin inside my
skin, whatever the inside o f m y skin is; it clings inside me. M y
grandparents came from Russia, m y daddy’s parents, and I try
to think they drank it but I’m pretty sure they w ouldn’t have,
they were just ghetto Jew s, it was probably the drink o f the
ones who persecuted them and drove them into running
away, but I don’t mind that anyw ay, because now I’m in
Am erika and I can drink the drink o f Cossacks and peasants if I
want; it soothes me, I feel triumphant and warm , happy too. I
have this idea about vodka, that it is perfect. I think it is
perfect. I think it is beautiful and pure and filled with absolute
power— the power o f something absolutely pure. It’s com pletely rare, this perfection. It’s more than that the pain dies or
it makes you magic; yeah, you soar on it and you get wise and
