“Good morning, everyone. Kate Mustard here, reporting from 31A Pushkinska Street, the brain center of the city’s window to the world, The Kyiv Poster, now under siege by topless shock troops of the radical protest group Fem Girls.”
As the scene unfolds before a live television audience, dozens of tiny-titted young women can be seen scaling the walls of the paper’s editorial offices, using rope ladders fashioned from Soviet-era, industrial-strength bras, or simply pulling each other up by the hair.
“Open the door or we’ll break it down,” shouts one angry young activist with a distorted lip line and bull-dyke hairdo, as she hurls chunks of cement wrapped in sex ads from the Poster at the windows of the building.
In one of those windows stands Vlad Lemurov, the paper’s top investigative reporter, waving a white flag or possibly an oversized handkerchief in characteristically limp-wristed fashion.
“Please stop, pleeeeze… before someone gets hurt!” the word sleuth seems to plead. But within seconds he’s knocked senseless by a dark beer bottle launched from a rooftop across the street.
“Ya fookin fascists,” shouts Sweaty Tank Top from that very same rooftop, clearly pleased that he’s hit his mark. His puff-rice face beams pink in the early morning sun, and a puddle of perspiration creates a shadow across the flimsy article of beach wear stretched over his flabby chest.
But no sooner has Lemurov lurched away from the window, holding his head in affected pain, than Hound Dog Face, that faithful servant of free speech with a knack for administrative expedience, takes up position in his place.
Steely-eyed and firm-jawed, her head encased in a World War One infantry helmet, she begins flapping the top panel of the office photo copier, thus momentarily blinding the assailants on the street below.
Unexpectedly, however, and at cross purposes to her tactical intent, the overworked office machine commences to cough out countless copies of past Poster cover pages, primarily composed by the paper’s recently dismissed chief editor, Bret Boner. Within seconds, question-marked colored photos with headlines like “Sell Out?” “Cover Up” and “Why I Got Fired” fly out the window and into the air like pigeons released from their coops.
“Kill ‘em all!” shouts one particularly fanatical Fem Girl activist, now holding a past cover story penned by Boner himself on the country’s flourishing sex trade.
From one of the Poster’s corner offices, Pony Boy mans the phone lines.
“Hullo. Yeah, this is the Kyiv Poster,” he responds dully into the receiver… Nah, I don’t know nothing about any opinion pieces being sent in… A photo with a fedora, yeah? … Hmm, I think we threw that one out… Hello, what was that? Hello, hello?”
Another call soon follows. “Heh, heh. You don’t know me, but I could prove useful to you. Heh, heh,” says the voice on the other line. “I know who’s behind the attack on your office, but you didn’t hear it from me. Heh. Heh.”
“Huh, who is this, anyway?”
“None of your business, cowboy. Just a friend, but not yours, not for long, anyway, Heh, heh.”
“Now you listen to me, son,” says a third caller. “You are to all intents and purposes in a state of war – one that you cannot and will not win. I want you to raise the white flag, lift up those arms and proceed to give yourselves up to anyone willing to take you… do I make myself clear?”
At this point, a peace delegation led by none other than Moe Zaire and two trusted South Asian delegates has exited the building at 31A Pushkinska Street in line formation, bearing a bouquet of fresh flowers and cheesy smiles that under normal circumstances would evoke at least a temporary inclination to cease hostilities if not hear the men out.
“Please accept these flowers as a symbol of our blossoming relations,” says Zaire, kind of batting his eyes and looking up with a silly simper on his face. But no sooner has he uttered these gentle words of friendship and conciliation then the trio is set upon by the mob.
The fatter one, wearing a turban, soon finds himself supporting a stringy-haired little wench on his shoulders, seemingly intent on unwrapping the hapless Muslim’s head gear. The harder she tugs at it, the faster he turns, creating the impression of a mock street rodeo.
Ali, the little one, manages to dash a short distance in the direction of safety, only to be tackled by a lanky bitch in pigtails who promptly takes him down and into what would normally appear to be a painful leg lock, if it weren’t for the brief squeals of delight periodically emitted by the tiny Asian in between feeble calls for help.
Zaire himself immediately goes into a crouching – some might say praying – position while several young women take turns plucking flowers from the bouquets he now holds over his head, dancing defiantly around him and rushing in close to try to shove the stems in various parts of his clothing.
Amid the chaos and violence, a carnival-like atmosphere has taken hold.
A saggy-assed old man has set up what can only be called a makeshift weapons facility, where he is diligently wrapping rocks, bottles and anything else at hand in pages of the Kyiv Poster and handing them out to passing protesters or anyone else.
“Step right up and help yourselves, ladies. That’s it, take two or more if you can carry them,” he shouts.
A stiff-haired figure in a loincloth has climbed onto the roof of a car where he attempts to whip up his own protest. “Morph ‘em, that’s what I say! That’s it, draw a circle on the sidewalk there, and we’ll pretend like this is New York.”
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, July 22, 2013