In keeping with the proprieties, they gave me a separate bedroom. After all, I was Jenny's boyfriend and not her husband. They had set aside a place for me in a huge room downstairs, a sort of second living room whose door opened directly onto the garden. Before going to sleep, and after their parents had gone off to their own room, we all went up to Debby's room and smoked a joint. The grass belonged to Debby and Robert — the brother and sister were good friends — and turned out to be very strong. We lazily sat or lay in various corners of the room among the dolls, the pictures of rock stars, and the photographs of Debby's former boyfriends. There were a surprising number of the latter, despite her seventeen years.

The next morning I woke up before almost everybody else in the house and went out into the yard, where I made a careful reconnaissance of the whole territory. I carefully examined the vegetables in the garden, tested the hammock, though I was soon driven away from there by the mosquitoes, and then returned to the house, where I noticed a tangle of bicycles in the room where I'd been sleeping. I got on one of them and rode off, but after circling the house, I came back, since I had no idea where to go. At that moment, Debby came out of the house yawning. For some reason, I was especially glad to see her and no one else, and I went over to her and like a curious tourist started asking her all about the garden. It turned out that she was raising the tomatoes, whereas the pumpkins belonged to her thirteen-year-old brother, Ronald. After properly manifesting my delight in regard to her tomato plants, I remembered the bicycles again and suggested we go for a ride. "Okay!" she said. She was very easy to please.

We went into the house and had a cup of coffee. Her parents hadn't yet made their appearance, and I didn't even know where their room was, there were so many doors. We had already taken our seats on our bicycles, when at the last moment we were joined by Robert, who, as it turned out, had just taken his car to a garage. We set off: Robert first, then me, and then Debby on a little bicycle that obviously belonged to the youngest of the children, the eleven-year-old Kevin. After we had climbed to the top of the asphalt road high above the house and were already resting on our pedals, I heard an anxious voice call, "Edward!" Looking in the direction of the voice, I saw Jenny standing in her nightgown at the front door. She was standing on one leg and scratching it with the other. The mad Edward merely smiled at her and waved.

Our jaunt was not without its minor incidents. From a house with a cement swimming pool painted a dark blue and hidden deep in a gully among the trees some shaggy dogs rushed out at us, barking furiously. Robert and Debby put their legs up on the handlebars and I put mine on the frame, and we quickly coasted downhill to a green bridge crossing a little brook, and left the disappointed dogs behind. Eventually we reached the place where all the Jackson children had gone to school. Robert and Debby laughingly showed me, as if it were one of the sights, the special building where the defective children studied. I laughed at the defective children too, and regretted that it was Saturday, since they had probably all been taken back home to their families and it would therefore be impossible to see their defects.

It was very hot, and so we decided not to ride any farther but to remain in the school yard and spend some time there. Each of us taking quiet pleasure in the fact that he wasn't defective, we rode on the swings, and then when he saw somebody he knew throwing a ball in the basketball hoop all by himself, Robert asked me if I wanted to play. We played with the other guy for a little while, and then switched from basketball to soccer, which I'm a lot more partial to. Debby played soccer no worse than Robert did. After we had exhausted ourselves and the ball, we rode back home. I was already getting tired of the American hinterland, even though I was also making an effort to «study» it. Since you're here, Limonov, ask about everything; stick your nose in all the details…

And stick my nose in all the details I did. On a shelf in the living room I found The People's Almanac, went out into the garden, sat down in the sunshine, and began to study it. It contained more than a thousand pages of different kinds of information from every domain of human endeavor. I of course was most interested in the lists of criminals "most wanted" by the FBI, lists going back many years. After 1969 the "most wanted" were political criminals, especially those belonging to certain organizations — the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and still earlier, the Students for a Democratic Society. Obviously, the two giants, America and the Soviet Union, had undergone a process that was still not quite clear to me but that was the same in both countries, since at the end of the sixties in the Soviet Union too the most important criminals for the KGB had been the dissidents. The mosquitoes were biting me, and the sun was roasting me unmercifully, but I read on and on, reading until lunchtime, unable to tear myself away. Papa Henry even came out and said he would give me the The People's Almanac, and I could read it in New York. Papa Henry was obviously hinting that I was being "unsociable."

After lunch I decided to be more sociable for Jenny's sake. And so, when they invited me to go to a baseball game between two school teams, one of which the eleven-year-old Kevin played for, I said it had always been my dream to see a real baseball game and I was dying to go.

We piled into two cars, the big car belonging to Jenny's father and a small blue one belonging to Robert, and set off. On the front seat next to his father sat the grave little Kevin, chewing gum. He was nervous, but he chewed his gum like a grown-up, pretending he was a tough guy.

There were already quite a few cars parked at the site of the upcoming event, and many of the seats on the wooden benches had already been taken. All of us — the more than ten members of the entire Virginia-based Jackson clan and I — took our seats higher up where it was more comfortable, in the center, so to speak, of the bleachers that partly surrounded the main part of the baseball field and that were separated from it by a high fence, and got ready to cheer Kevin on. And then it started…

I thought it would be insufferably boring and had already begun to steel myself for the ordeal. How wrong I was! There was nothing boring about it. In just a few minutes, the solitary figure Limonov found himself caught up in a vortex of local hysteria. "Our team" — that is, Kevin's — was called the Yellow Socks and was playing the Tigers, and, gentlemen, it was the championship! And so all the relatives of the Yellow Socks and all the relatives of the Tigers were there, plus all their friends and acquaintances, and everybody else who cared about the reputation of the town and the school, as well as all those who were merely curious, and all those locals who had come simply because there was nothing else to do in town, and all the local hooligans and local intellectuals, and… All of them had clambered up onto the benches with cans of beer and Coca-Cola and other soft drinks and with cigarettes between their lips, and were waiting for the action to begin. Underneath the bleachers wandered very young children ready to pick up balls coming over the fence, if there were any.

Children of eleven, twelve, and thirteen are exceptionally different in size and form. On the same team were giants and dwarves, men and babies. All of them took their turn at bat and struck at the ball thrown by the opposing team's best pitcher, and when they swung and missed, the crowd roared and whistled indignantly, but when a lucky batter swung and hit it and threw down his bat and took off round the bases, the crowd roared and whistled in delight. I was afraid for the catcher the whole time, since I was sure one of the kids would hit him between the eyes with the bat or knock his brains out — the bat was a serious weapon — and spoil the whole game, but the kids were up to it and didn't hurt him.