I’m not here to expurgate or add anything, but just say what’s on my mind; know what I mean? How can I add anything if everything’s already there? Know what I mean? So I’m just going to describe, and if I explain, it’s only my view and not the ultimate explanation. Yeah, I defy anyone to give that – like they know everything, except there really are people out there who do that, throw their weight around, tell people what it’s all about, make a living from it, always having to be the number one, yeah, in their own minds, because in the big picture, their lives ain’t worth a shit, and that’s about the only thing they leave behind them when they’re done – a big stinking pile of it. And then someone’s got to clean up after them – once they see what they’d been taken in for.
I’m Manny Face. I’m an actor, so I know when they’re full of it. I make a living out of it, but at least I tell it to you straight; like I’m not pulling any stunts of the PR kind, know what I mean, pat you on the back and call you my friend, say everything’s going to be all right if you just stick with me and listen to what I have to say. And don’t forget to pay me that fee. No, if I think you’re a stinking piece of shit, I’ll tell you to your face, because I know what it means to be full of it, because I do it for a living, so if you try to pull the shit on me, I’ll tell you to your face what you’re all about and where you can get off, and if you don’t like me, well then, you just tell me and maybe we can settle it somehow. Know what I mean?
I was reading this website and it hired me to write for it, except they never said exactly what they wanted me to say or do, and I don’t even know who these people are except they contacted me somehow and were talking to me in a way that I couldn’t refuse, like out of my control, and they said the rest wasn’t my business, and then see you, bye, and we’re expecting your first piece on the website, and all subsequent pieces – in The Checkout section – soon. And that was that.
And so here it is.
And then I read that stinking barrel of molten Satanic semen, the one called The Hunched Cornish, before I even get here, is already riding my ass with some negative intimations about my character, and I’m not writing you this preamble because of what he said, to make some excuses for myself, because I would have started it out probably similar to the way I did anyway, for a lack of a notion of how I should start out, not knowing what they want me to say, so here I am saying what I think needs to be said. With the exception that I’m saying this also because of The Cornish and I wouldn’t be saying it, using up space and time, if he hadn’t opened his obese mouth about me to start.
So I was saying, I don’t know, but a little, what or who this Hunched Cornish is or how he knows me from a Jack-in-the-Box, that he immediately comes up with some cheap insults pertaining to my profession and I suppose my character, instead of just sticking to what he should be doing and minding his own business. I’m not even there yet, meaning here, and something about it already bothers him.
Me, I just want to do the work the best I can, but The Hunched Cornish throws down this gauntlet, so I figure he’s got something up his ass, like he needs an enema. Okay, so, maybe we can settle the difference somehow. Maybe I’ll stick one end of the rubber tube in his rectum and the other end in his mouth, and he can figure out which way to suck or blow.
It’s funny though, now that I think of it, not that it’s going to take on any particular significance with me, know what I mean, or that I will ever strain to figure out what the significance is, if there is any, but the only one The Hunched Cornish seems to have any tolerance for is John Smith – who also happens to be a rotating blade in my ribs. I don’t know how to explain it – there’s a bad karma between some people right from the start – no explaining it.
So here’s some of the things I did, for the record. So on Saturday last, March 2, in the evening, being hungry, I wanted a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich at The Golden Gate Pub after my Argentine Tango lesson in the Dolphin Studio just up from Independence Square. So I’m not going to tell you where this Irish-styled pub is, since that’s not my job, and if that fucking Cornish wants to take you there, that’s his problem, but I had the sandwich with fries and a good Greek salad and the only thing I’ll tell you is it belongs to the Myrovaya Karta network of restaurants, and me, Manny Face, having a discount card for the net, got a 10 percent discount, which is better than nothing. But it pissed me off that a bunch of tables were reserved and I saw why when all these assholes started pouring in to watch some fucking soccer match from Spain on the big screens. So fuck them, I wiped my mouth, said thanks, left a tip the size of the discount, and thought I’d go to the Ye bookstore – yeah, okay, okay, so all this is around the Zoloti Vorota, or translated into human language, the famous Golden Gates, a supposed remnant of which is still extant, into the original city of Kyiv before it was annihilated by the Mongol-Tatars, but I’m not giving no street names, you can find it on your own if you’re interested – there’s maps.
I don’t normally read books, except once in a while, but for some reason looking at rows of books on shelves calms me down, but I wasn’t able to do that at Ye, because when I walked in – it must have been around 6:30 pm – some French chick was going on to a seated audience of homely journalists listening intently and taking notes, saying:
Vous le mous le zhou le we por qua le jeux ma non contraire deju mon la – etc.
And some hot-looking wavy black-haired broad sitting next to her was translating it into Ukrainian, which Manny Face understands, and then they’d turn down the lights and the French woman, controlling everything from her laptop, would show against the screen behind her long scenes from French movies by great film noir and crime drama director Jean-Pierre Melville, no doubt connected with the Melville retrospective brought to Kyiv by the city’s own French Institute, showing five or six Melville films somewhere in town from February 28 through March 5.
And so I’m sitting there watching, and it’s Alain Delon, from Melville’s 1967 “Le Samourai”, in a light trench coat and fedora, secretive, evasive, incognito-like, moving quickly on foot through the megalithic labyrinths of Paris, both above and below ground, the city’s hellishly extensive subway system featuring prominently, down long urban passages – streets, rail lines, walled corridors – toward the outskirts of the leviathan megalopolis, and it was all supposed to be metaphoric of the existential aloneness of man moving ceaselessly within the cold, indifferent nightmare world he had himself created, engulfed by it on all sides, trapped, with any attempt at escape futile, and no matter how far he runs, that world pursues him, it’s out to get him, eventually closing in on him. And…
But I don’t like Alain Delon, so I left. Know what I mean?
And that’s all I got to say this time.
Manny Face, March 9, 2013