The Ferret’s Version for Alternative Underground Website Kyiv Edited (intercepted by Smith for KU)
Plus: Plumb’s Draft Version for Alternative Underground New York City Urban Grunge Publication (intercepted by Kowalski for KU)
Waiting for Mack
By The Ferret
Jack Step: Hey, what are we waiting for?
Dirk Dickerson: You shouldn’t ask questions there are no answers to.
JS: Is he coming or not?
DD: I don’t know. Maybe. What difference does it make to you?
JS: That’s neither here nor there. I was just asking. I don’t like my time wasted. No need to be rude.
DD: I don’t know if I’m being rude or not, but I don’t see any advantage to answering stupid questions.
JS: The question wasn’t stupid. In a situation like this, it’s normal. The only thing that’s stupid here is your answer – and maybe you.
DD: It doesn’t matter what you think about my answer. You’re the one who’s stupid. What’s important is how you handle the situation, and you’re not handling it very well. Maybe you should have a drink.
JS: What’s that supposed to mean?
DD: It doesn’t matter what it means or not, but I heard you keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker in your bottom drawer.
JS: And I heard you’ve been in a loony bin.
DD: You didn’t hear it from me. At least I’m not a drunk.
JS: You shouldn’t go spreading rumors. At least a straightjacket isn’t part of my wardrobe.
DD: Yeah.
JS: That’s right.
DD: That’s right.
JS: Yeah.
Silence.
DD: He said he’d come. But you didn’t hear it from me.
JS: Then chances are equal he won’t. You shouldn’t go spreading rumors.
DD: What about obligations?
JS: To himself?
DD: To whatever he offers us. Maybe. I don’t know. This is a slippery slope, so don’t say I told you so. Don’t go spreading rumors. I can’t give you any guarantees.
JS: Then we do it. But you didn’t hear it from me.
DD: Because he tells us to. Maybe I can help you there, maybe I can’t. Don’t take me at my word – because it won’t work. It’s not like I told you so or gave you any guarantees.
JS: But dude, can’t we decide?
DD: No. Yeah. Maybe. Dude, I don’t know. I have some inside information.
JS: Until then we wait. I think I can be useful to you, but keep it between you and me.
DD: Dude, I don’t know what you are talking about. I never said that. Let’s go.
JS: Yeah, let’s.
They remain in place.
DD: Hey, instead of that pimply-faced kid coming over with a telegram, Mack could call us.
JS: Who delivers telegrams these days, anyway?
DD: Or sends them.
JS: He could write an SMS – at the least.
DD: Who?
JS: Mack.
DD: That’s right.
JS: In this day and age of lightning-fast technology.
DD: Or a short email to let us know.
JS: Let us know what?
DD: If he’s coming.
JS: If who’s coming?
DD: Mack.
JS: If he’s coming?
DD: He should let us know.
JS: Who?
DD: Mack.
JS: Let us know what?
DD: If he’s coming.
JS: If who’s coming?
DD: Mack.
JS: What about him?
DD: Heh-heh-heh-heh…
JS: Heh-heh…
***
Waiting for Mack (special to New York Re-Press, an alternative underground New York City urban grunge publication)
Continued from where the pimply-faced kid enters with the telegram:
By Andrew Plumb
The kid opens the door and the pimples on his face protrude into the office of the two psychologically twisted rubes, who are wearing fedoras, preserving some infantile fantasy of a time they never lived but insist on calling their own. The hall where the kid parked his scooter splays out behind him like a giant receding chessboard seen through the smoked wavy glass of the heavy art-deco door like a mushroom-induced hallucination. Open unto the East, the dry wind blowing from the steppe across the Dnieper into Kiev carries memories of Tartars and Turks slaughtering a half-Renaissance in its ruins, like Jews seething a calf in its mother’s milk. Unlike the dolts, the wasted minds, shriveling under the penumbra of their throwback hats, benighted by a self-deluding nostalgia for a time they never knew, the kid is aware of this as his red message delivery jacket precedes him toward the nearly tossed rubes. Nearly tossed by Mack, that is, because the assignment they’ve bungled has all but tanked.
In the morphing minutia of their slug-like thought stuff, they brace like diminishing fractals against the foundation of their growing insignificance, the realization rising anfractuous, primal and slow from a degenerating vestigial core – rotting brain stems the targeted stuff of the kid’s morphing scurrilous canards.
With knitted protruding brows, painfully bewildered, tortuously, the realization dawns that they are about to be handed a message by the kid, and their apelike forms rotate in his direction, in a sort of rudimentary pre-awareness, laboriously, heavily, ponderously. A red jacket walks toward them, a bowtie bounces between its lapels, they do not immediately make out the face, which is mocking them as it approaches, but in their dullness, they take the mockery, when they finally do make out the kid’s caustic soda smirk, for friendly intentions.
Both of the kid’s hands are armed. A small square envelope in one, a clipboard with a string-attached pen and checklist in the other.
“Telegram for Jerk Step and Dork Dickerson,” he razzes, savoring the direct hits he knows they just barely perceived without completely realizing they’d been insulted. The kid crunches his mouth to the side and watches them with small, glinting eyes.
“Uh, that’s us,” Jack Step and Dirk Dickerson finally reply in demotic moronese – their broken patois.
“Yeah, sure it is,” the kid says, shoving the small envelope into their four outstretched haymakers, which are too large and clumsy to do little else but crumple the delicate little missive between them before Jack Step fumbles it onto the wide, orange-stained calloused surface of his palm. When the kid thrusts the clipboard at them for a signature, he arches a brow in vague surprise to see Step also, with great difficulty and tremendous concentration, wrap four of his other canned ham’s outcroppings around the attached pen, with the thumb jutting up like a vertical rockface excrescence, to mark a short shaky childish curve approximately in the space on the checklist indicated by the kid, which was, the kid deduced, the start of the letter J, except backward.
“Say, thanks, you two dopes,” the kid croons, as he smirks, morphing toward the door, beyond which glossed stuff trans…
Filed by John Smith and Steve Kowalski, July 28, 2013