“Ok everyone, take your seats and let’s begin. And remember: nothing said during the meeting can be repeated beyond the walls of this room.”
“I don’t know why I let you drag me here. It looks like nothing but a bunch of losers,” says Step, sitting in the back row with his hat on his lap.
“Take it easy, Jack. That’s just the point. You can learn from them.”
“My name’s Bill and I’m a Kyiv-based expatriate loser,” says a rotund, tinsel-haired man in the front row, with the crack of his ass clearly visible to the anyone sitting behind him.
“And what’s your problem, Bill?”
“Food disorder… uh, and a couple of other things.”
“Welcome Bill,” the audience rumbles in chorus.
“And you, sir?”
“Boner, Bret Boner. I’m a tough uncompromising journalist with Hollywood good looks who was recently fired from Kyiv’s leading English-language weekly. Freedom of speech is my problem and not only mine, as long as the Soviet cogs in power in this town continue to get away with murder, intimidation and…”
“He’s a sex-pat,” shouts someone from the back, followed by a few snorts and smirks from others seated in the small crowded room.
“My wife got a dirty email from him one time,” whispers another man, but not so quietly.
“Ok, and the gentleman in the back…”
“My name’s Zippy, and I’m here for anger management, after having pulverized The Ferret with a meat tenderizer not so long ago. The terms of my release call for me to attend these sessions, otherwise I wouldn’t be here at all.”
Several “boos” and at least one “hiss” emerge from the dense seating area.
“Who do you think you are?”
“You’re no better than the rest of us… fat ass!”
Zippy sits back down and tightens the brown, alpine huntsman looking fedora onto his head, not disdaining to return any of the stares now directed at him.
“Oh, brother! Is this some kind of a joke, Dickerson? I mean, do you really attend these things regularly? And if so, why? I’m getting out of here.”
Step begins lifting himself up from the chair and soon spots a side entrance out of the meeting room just a few rows from where’s he’s sitting.
“And you?” asks the moderator, now looking right at Step.
“Huh? Uh, I was just leaving…”
“Well, tell oos yore bludey problem before ya go, then, Ay,” shouts a puppet-headed figure in a moist pastel-colored summer undergarment from the other side of the room.
“All right. I’m a drunk – at least I used to be until just a couple of years back, when I quit drinking as well as smoking, and turned to ice cream and uzvar instead.”
Dickerson slumps in his seat and pulls his hat over his eyes, as if he were trying to take a nap.
“No kidding, uzvar?” someone else says in a genuinely surprised voice from among the close seating.
“Yeah, I had never even wanted to quit boozing before then. ‘It is too near and dear to me’ I used to say. But that wasn’t really the truth.”
“So, let’s hear it.”
“Tell it like it is.”
“Ok. You see I’m a member of the Ukrainian Diaspora, where everyone is expected to be successful, even though few of us ever are. But that didn’t matter, because I hated them all, anyway. All those ‘Bobos’ and ‘Mirons’ who filled the club houses at some upstate New York lodge, where we were all expected to wear these same stupid peasant shirts and sing silly folk songs. Do you know what I mean?”
“We understand ya.”
“Please, go on!”
“So, anyway, I quit being a lawyer before I’d ever really become one in the first place,” Step continues. “And then, I got a job at Kyiv’s leading English-language weekly, where there was already working a bunch of battleaxes, backstabbers and assorted freaks, who all made my life a living hell… Oh, and I wasn’t getting laid very much either…”
“We hear you.”
“Keep going.”
“Well, to cut a long story short, I ended up at a dive called the Hairy Lime, where I quickly became a stalactified version of myself after work. Somehow I got made chief editor upstairs though – at least for a while, until an overweight and recklessly arrogant product of that same Ukrainian Diaspora caught up with me to promptly manipulate my firing from the paper in the most unmanly and sneaky-assed of ways.”
A general applause takes hold, and Dickerson emerges from under his hat, smiling and shaking the hand of his partner who humbly acknowledges the spontaneous recognition and warmth being admitted from the gathering of the Kyiv chapter of Losers Anonymous.
The still fedora-wearing Zippy lifts his rhino-like rump into an arch, his small eyes blind with intensity and his upper lip quivering ever so faintly.
“YOU’RE a LIAR!!!” he shouts and then charges through the row occupied by Step, knocking sundry expatriate losers back into their seats along the way.
Sweaty Tank Top can then be seen menacing the crowd with a beer bottle, and the large tinsel-haired man for no clear or definable reason seizes Boner over a row of chairs by the suspenders, snapping him back and forth into his not insignificantly sized stomach while shouting unintelligible commands into the wordsmith’s face.
Out on the street, Step and Dickerson are still dusting off their light gray suits as they make their way back to the agency.
“None of this gets back to Mack, ok?” says Step, still a little shaken after Zamazda’s vicious rhino charge.
“None of what?” says Dickerson, winking coolly.
“You know, I just don’t get it. They all seemed so normal in there for a while.”
“Normal… What’s that?”
“You know what I mean, wise guy. Everyone was seated and listening to each other… and to me, too.”
“They’re sick sons of bitches, Jack. That’s all. Sick to the last of ‘em – just like you and me.”
The partners continue on their way, neither of them noticing the contents of a nearby light box, featuring Welsh Losser and his new book: “Ice Cream Smiles: Learn to Be Happy Being Someone Else.”
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, August 9, 2013