...I can’t afford to have a book in my car on the back seat with the title “The Combat Sergeant Attacks” or “Special Forces Make Contact.” I don’t watch “Brigade,” I don’t like Russian rock, and I don’t have Seryoga’s CD with “Black ‘Boomer’.” I read Houellebecq and Ellis, I watch old films with Marlene Dietrich. And my first money went not to a four-year-old “Beemer,” like the guys’, but to a trip to Paris.
And it’s so full of tenderness and romance for me, it feels as good as in childhood, when Mom covered me—sleeping—with a blanket. And it seems like the scales have tipped. And that bowl of theirs, filled with pieces of something good, with fragments of peace lying somewhere deep inside me, has gone down—outweighing all my nastiness that, until tonight, had seemed like the dominant force in me. Or maybe it’s all just an illusion?