mrgodden: переводы

→“At least my degeneracy is all-natural,” she says. I remove the bag of weed from my pocket and hand it to her.

→“Well then close the damn door,” she says. By the time I step inside and close the door behind me, Nate is greeting her with a kiss.

→“Is that you?” comes a voice from an attached bedroom. I turn toward it in time to see a perfect female silhouette framed in the doorway against the sunlight, a trucker’s mud flap come to life. Then she steps into the room, and there’s nothing left to remind me of a trucker. Her eyelids seem to open a fraction of an inch higher than they should, leaving extra space for her eyes—radioactive blue, lively and intelligent. High cheekbones softened by pillowy lips and auburn hair that cascades in waves down to the small of her back.

→A Eurotrash dude with a clove cigarette and a brown jacket that might be sewn from the skins of baby deer cheers on two brunettes in stretchy miniskirts, asses so sculpted they should be in a museum, as they face off in a dance that makes the Lambada look like the Virginia Reel. The part of my brain that isn’t gaping like a tourist wonders why I can’t see any panty lines.

→7

→I enter a small room whose only light comes from an hon-estto-goodness lava lamp, bathing everything in shades of red. A lair, I think, hearing the door close behind me. My eyes slowly adjust, revealing walls and ceilings lined with the kind of batik tapestries that were so popular at college among veterans of prep school and fans of the Grateful Dead. The room’s sole inhabitant turns out to be a Caucasian male in his fifties who would have looked out of place anywhere but at a Dead show. There’s a small soul patch on his chin and dread-locks, either bleached or naturally orange, extending halfway down his back. He’s dressed like a South American farmer, but everything else about him suggests royalty, from the plush velvet armchair he occupies like a throne to the way he tilts his head, almost imperceptibly, toward the throw pillows that line the room’s floor. I recognize the gesture as an order to sit down. Which I do.

→“Ah,” she says with a sigh. “The album.”

→“I’m an idiot,” I suggest.

→“The party ended hours ago.” Herman looks down when she says this, apparently deeply saddened by the news.

→“When I was here earlier. This morning. Nate told me to stop by the party later.”

→“Hi,” she replies, politely concealing her inability to place me. Her radioactive blues are stony red.

→Then he opens the door, sucking all of the fear and disappointment out of the air.

→“This was Janis’s suite.”

→We used to talk about staying at the Chelsea for what I assumed would be a night of mind-blowing sex. Before she tried to kill me. Still, I kind of owe it to myself to see the place.

→At which point she would stop singing and reenact the scene—the TV was conveniently located in the bedroom. Thankfully, unlike the song or the movie, Daphne’s version always had a happy ending.

→But then Daphne would sing Leonard Cohen: “I remember— you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed …”

→But that’s not the reason I’ve seen it fourteen times. I’ve seen it fourteen times because it was the only movie Daphne owned, and we were usually too lazy, wasted, or horny to make it to the video store.

→Despite what you probably think, I’m not some crazyass obsessive fan. I mean, it’s a great movie, even if they got Johnny Rotten all wrong. A love story that isn’t full of shit, that recognizes the stupidity of it all—true love, impossible in the real world, only leads to pain.

→The next morning, I rise early and dress in the dark, slipping out of the house before my parents can wake up and ask questions. A fifteen-minute walk later I’m aboard the Long Island Rail Road, just another head in the morning cattle drive to New York City. I find a seat next to an asshole in a suit reading the Journal. The car bounces gently as the train rumbles past row after row of working-class houses. I’m trying to decide if “working class” is an oxymoron when a frosted blonde in a work skirt sashays past me. While my time with Daphne taught me, among other things, that I wasn’t the biggest fetishist when it came to sex, there’s something about the combination of stockings and running shoes that does it for me. I spend the next thirty minutes wondering if there’s a railway equivalent of the Mile High Club. On reaching the station, the cattle rise to their feet, driven toward the exits by instinct and caffeine. I drift along for the ride, floating on a wave of group dynamics toward Seventh Avenue.

→Conversations with Uncle Marvin tend to be short, given his natural aversion toward anything polite, but I’m not in a hurry to get back inside and more than willing to pick up the slack. “I hear you. I’m thinking about moving to the city.”