“[P]lenty of successful people are far from mental giants”
– Raymond Chandler, from “The Long Goodbye”… and vice versa…
So now Bo Lard, formerly Boss Lard, Board Director of The Lard Group PR Agency, which until now had loomed ominously over Kyiv’s frail media and promotion scape like a giant man-eating clown, as well as the CEO of the Kyiv Poster, the only leading English-language newspaper in town, is cautiously sidling against the corridor walls of another hospital after a nurse in the one he had been in kicked him out into the nippy autumn cold.
Lard’s light-blue polka-dotted hospital gown is stuffed into a pair of brown suit pants with the suspenders hanging off his hips. He is wearing brown wingtips with no shoelaces over feet with no socks, causing abrasion that has rubbed the skin off his heels down to the blood. The reception nurse noted his entrance but figured it was an idiot patient coming back in after going out for a smoke – and she wasn’t going to do a thing about it. There was only so much a hospital could do to help. If they wanted to kill themselves despite such efforts, well, that was their problem… as they are so fond of saying around here, o, idle readers – for whom everything is made so excessively clear.
And what thanks do I, Jack Step, get for the effort, running this story to you almost as soon as it breaks, despite being booted by Mack out of the agency? And for what – a couple of lousy drinks? Me – and that crazy Dickerson – ripping some fat slob apart like that. Talk about lack of control. Damn it! Ah, hell! I was doing okay; I was on the wagon; so I had a few – so what?; it wasn’t going to get out of hand. I’ve got the control; damn it, I’ve got it, I know I do – but Mack, well, he didn’t think so. Okay, okay. Good old Mack. It was his prerogative. Maybe he was right. Maybe I needed a few more knucks to the gut and jaw.
And what thanks more do I, Jack Step, get for stringing the story into any number of frayed rags around the world just for doing so?
No thanks, that’s what thanks. And Jack Step prefers it that way.
Then why ask, you may ask, about the thanks, if you say – that is, you, Jack Step – you may be saying to me directly in your mind – you don’t need them, those thanks, that is? you, out there in Internetland, might at this very moment be asking me in just the way I’m describing, guessing your thoughts, irritated – actually one annoying step ahead of you – you, the reader, that is, out there in Internetland – pissed off, curling that upper lip in disdain and dismissive disgust, perhaps a dab of spit spraying out between the slightly open space between your teeth, before ricocheting off your rubbery lower lip or flaccid inner cheek, as you press your tongue against your pallet very close to the central cutters and go ‘tssth’, kind of momentarily exasperated, shaking your head indignantly and clicking on another web link.
The answer is: I don’t know.
And what does it matter? Since it’s no longer in Kyiv Unedited, you’re not even really reading this.
Because Lard has entered the hospital room of a sleeping Welsh Losser. He remains frozen in place until Losser, perhaps sensing the presence, awakens, smacking his pasty mouth – mnya-mnaaa – the one that had until now earned him so much desired notoriety and fame in ancient Kyiv, the little East European backwater he thought he’d take by sheer mediocre gumption and third-rate chutzpah after a lifetime’s failure and humiliation in the American Northwest – and a little help from The Infernal One – and rubbing the crust out of his wall eyes with squarish stubby forefingers, an expensive-looking watch jangling against his wrist.
“Boooss Laaard,” he asks uncertainly through the phlegmy gravel churning in his throat, bewildered. He fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand next to his bed.
“It IS you,” Losser cries, as Lard comes into improved focus. “But I thought you were laid up in another hospital!”
“I was, Welsh, but the nurse kicked me out.”
And with no ado whatsoever, further or otherwise, Lard climbs into Losser’s bed (Editor’s note to readers: your own sexual preferences aside, it is important to note that Lard does not do this with any kind of homosexual intentions in mind – not that there’s anything wrong with it – but Dear God in His Heaven; does absolutely everything have to revolve around SEX these days?)
“Boss Lard, BOSS LARD!!! What, ooo-a-owaa, what IS this?! What are you doing?! Naguyashchekul – harraaa!!!”
“The bird has his nest, the fox has his lair, but the Son of Man hath no place to rest his head.”
“BOSS LARD!!! Get out, get out now!!!”
“Are those your toes, Losser – dear G., do they feel grimy. I am Man of the Earth, I seek comfort, compassion, understanding… Clip those nails, or if you can’t, have the medical staff do it for you; after what you’ve been through (and I saw it all on the TV – woo-hee, boy!), and your newly probable incapacity to do so, they should understand – they feel disgusting – I WANT TO RETCH ON YOU!!!”
“No, no – get out, get out!!!”
“The babushkas and their lined faces, dogs that talk into newspapers, someone took it all away, Welsh – all, all aaa-waaaaayyy… bu-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!”
But as Welsh Losser strains against the big-boy weight of Lard, pushing from weak and newly crooked shoulders, which no amount of photo fixing will ever deceive into congruity again, Lard unintentionally rips a big smelly fart – “Oh, ah, sorry about that,” he says, a little embarrassed – which was actually the exit blare of his ego, who had found his way back inside Lard after all.
Slimed, and smelling of Lard’s intestinal tract – partly digested Ukrainian hospital microwave Pasta Bolognese – the ego, marvelously resplendent in a shiny putrid-green coating of animus and rage, hops up on Losser’s stomach.
“Remember me, Welsh?”
“Boss Lard’s ego! Nugi-nyek-ya. Nkhhr, nuykhhr, n –”
“That’s right, Welsh. Tried feeding me to a big fish with that boyfriend of yours – The Ferret; maybe beloved furry Ferret no more, but just a big fucking rat, crawling on his slimy belly, thinking like a tormented human being but unable to make any but beast grunt and squeal sounds to express that torment, driving him to insanity… and murderous r-a-a-a-a-age… ha, ha, ha, haaaaa!!!”
“No, no, oh, please, no…”
“Oh, that’s quite all right, Welsh – all in good time. All in its sweet good time.”
“Are you really my ego,” Lard asks. “How did you get out? For that matter, how did you get back in?!”
“Don’t sweat it, Lard. I go in an out as I please. After I plunged into you in Volume 1 of Kyiv Unedited the first time, it got a hell of a lot easier – you don’t even know when. For me you’re like a tight little virgin turned into a vast shapeless whore.”
Crouching atop Losser like a demented gargoyle, Lard’s ego swipes Losser’s glasses off his head and crushes them into his mouth, crunching on them with delectation, allowing bits of glass to crumble onto Losser’s chin and mouth. With a froglike digit, the ego presses against one of the shards and pulls downward, forming a deep bleeding gash in the terrified Losser’s quivering jaw. And then the ego leaps off Losser’s stomach and onto his eyes, bounding on them with his heels, ramming them deep into the sockets with each bounce.
“Whoa, Welsh, those eyeballs got some spring in them – like there’s a lot of hydraulic pressure built up behind those walls – and resilient as all get out – eh? No bursting membranes here – no matter how hard I jump! Woo-hoo! What would you say in a situation like this, Welsh? Hmmm… now… don’t tell me… oh, I got it – nyug-nyag-nyaaaooo!!!”
“AAAAAAAHHH!!!”
The nurse strides in.
“What’s going on here, what’s –”
“Say,” Lard notes, “aren’t you the same nurse who –”
“None of your damn business. Now out! Both of you!”
“Not so fast, sister!”
Lard’s ego, which had attached itself to the ceiling when the nurse came in, swoops down and gags her with medical tape and gauze. He is holding her, somewhat lovingly and with hateful lust, around her waist on the floor. From where she’s held, blood begins to run across the floor.
“Why don’t you two take off, like the nurse said,” commands Lard’s ego, taking a bite out of the nurse’s cheek.”
“What the hell are you doing,” screams Lard.
“What you used to do – eating people alive. And for the same reason: not because I need to, but because I can.” He rips another mouthful out of her head.
To be continued
Filed by Jack Step, stringing for The Lecturing Calcutta Nuglet, Fried Edition, October 13, 2013
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In the next episode – maybe – Losser and Lard start a PR agency under a bridge, but soon, a crippled Losser again breaks free and begins his inexorable re-rise to the top. Well, that’s just one of the possibilities… Or maybe Lard is murdered and stuffed in the attic at the Kyiv Poster by a confused Moe Zaire and his rehired henchman, Bret Boner, or… And is Losser somehow trapped in some other world by The Half Guinea and Milk Bone; a world in which he can consider himself normal; or are things irredeemably more sinister, and he has somehow, even unbeknownst to himself, gotten some kind of control over the psychologically troubled rage-aholic, Dirk Dickerson? And what happened when the now rat-like Ferret was finally captured by the big-hearted Publowski in the theater? – all harking back to Volume 1 of this venerable publication. Or did whoever just write this tripe get everything completely wrong?