“Power is being able to ruin people, to ruin their careers and their reputations and their personal relationships”
– Robert Caro, from “The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”
It’s a freezing cold snowy winter night in Kyiv – it doesn’t matter which one – and Sweaty’s Place is packed solid with local denizens and losers.
The place is so packed it brims over into the street like a riffraff stew boiling over the outside of a kettle from under a nervous rattling lid. The street, like all streets in this cruddy town, are covered in ice, and since the ancient Ukrainian capital, on the right side of the running water, is built upon hills, anyone’s ass forced out the door of Sweaty’s by the sheer force of the hot wreaking fleshy mass pressing from within is doomed to slide endlessly down, down, shocked, mouth agape and eyes bulging, clawing futilely at the grip-less pavement, into dank nightmarish glacial oblivion.
Inside, on the raised platform stage, Sonny Boner sings:
Oh, ho, ho
It’s magic, you kno-o-ow
Never believe it’s not sooooo
It’s magic, you kno-o-ow
Never believe it’s not sooooo…
Catcalls from the patrons:
“Go fuck yourself!”
“Yeah, ya fucking idiot, get lost!”
Having got used to it, Boner suffers them lightly. He sings on:
Never been awake
Never seen a day break
Leaning on my pillow in the mooorning…
“Fuck you!”
“You stupid motherless freak!”
Lazy day in bed
Music in my head
Crazy music playing in the mooorning… light…
“Shut up – face!”
At the end of the long bar nearest the stage, oblivious to Boner, a giant rat is perched on a stool drinking a tall glass of straight vodka with no chaser, the way some child might drink a glass of milk under motherly pressure. It’s wearing knee-high candy-striped socks, long shorts on suspenders, and one of those kid beanies with a propeller on it. It is clearly sunken in the hell of its own thoughts, that poetic torment of voice speaking in endless high-flown meter that the rat cannot control or ever get away from, often sounding ghoulishly like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”:
…
And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love’s dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke
The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro’ wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
His living soul was flashed on mine…
The Rat, who has lost the curse of speech, can only manage a rasping silent shrieking to itself: “Eeeekh, iiikh, ayeee – kh-kh-kh…”
For no reason it can fathom, The Rat jerks a sharp look from its hunched shoulders to its left, where he sees on the stool next to it a man with a dog’s face, or perhaps a dog with the shape and demeanor of a man, wrapped in a trench coat and wearing a fedora reading a review of Sweaty’s Place double-bylined Bret Boner and one Sondra Lowbladt – “Never heard of her,” the dog-man grumbles – in the Entertainment section of the Kyiv Poster.
With his red eyes bulging demonic green pupils, something inside The Rat that it cannot help makes him leer mockingly at the dog-man, who rumbles a low warning growl through his jowls which The Rat does not heed. Instead, some dim vicious memories from its past stir and for a split second The Rat manages an ill-wishing “Heh, heh, heh-heh-heh.”
With that, the man-dog tears his muzzle through the paper and baring his large sharp yellow teeth, lips flapping spittle, unleashes a ferocious barrage of barking at The Rat, knocking it terrified off its seat and sending it crashing with its tall glass of vodka to the floor.
The man-dog, who had been drinking an Irish stout, laughs – “Khe-khe-khe-khe” – and goes back to reading his mangled paper.
“Hey, Sweaty, I say, Sweaty, Sweaty” – it’s Sonny Boner, bugging Sweaty’s Place’s owner, Sweaty Tank Top, who is ensconced at the extreme other end of his bar, drinking a variety of beers and a variety of whiskies with his good friend, The Highlander Slob.
“Wha’ i’ fookin’ he’ da ye want, ye fookin’ no guid song-grindin’ wad?”
Boner is dressed in a white one-piece jumpsuit covered in sequins, rhinestones and studs.
“I need you to move some of these assholes back from the stage and out of the way for my special ‘Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”’ set. Otherwise, I can’t do those disco moves that go with the number.”
“Why dunna ye move ‘em yar fookin’ self, ye fookin’ tard. Eet isna enoof far ye gang on me stage, nor grateful inna most ye arna after ich gang givin’ ye yar damn joob screechin’ ‘n’ scratchin’, roonin’ ay me beest coostoomers, afore ich wipe ye oop ‘n’ down the Kyiv Administration building like ich done i’ time o’ yore past.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about… Sweaty. The only thing that you’ve wiped, if you’ve been lucky and not too stupid, is your ass, although it’s hard to tell from your smell, and maybe your nose.”
Turning sharply on his heels, Sonny Boner struts cockily away from Sweaty Tank Top and The Highlander Slob, leaving both drop-jawed, toward the stage.
Filed by Jack Step, reporting live from location for The Periodical Joint Periodical, January 13, 2014