If you thought there would be more about David Lynch, well, sorry, but this is about Commix Girl, The Ferret, Steve Kowalski, Litman to some degree, and Chang just a little bit
Because if you want a place in The Kyiv Commix, you have to work hard for it and earn it, Lynch
Drunk and really happy in his power after his vicious assault and battery of American poet Steve Kowalski, with nobody stopping him and without paying his tab The Ferret pops his turtle-backed form out of The Whiskey Cellar in Podil.
The Ferret’s small beady eyes gleam maliciously with characteristic alcoholic vomit-green-and-red iridescence into the city’s darkness.
Unbeknownst to The Ferret, on the roof above him crouches-in-wait a young shapely female form in a ruby-colored bodysuit and eye mask, serrated black cape and running boots.
“Heh-heh-heh…” says an overconfident Ferret, even in his present condition.
The Ferret sets his blurring sights on a trek back down the way he’d come but hours earlier to make his drunken yet victorious route home, his flat-hoofed side-to-side hobble made more complex by a fitful forward lurching he finds hard to control.
“It’s nobody’s business, but my not walking straight really doesn’t matter” says The Ferret, “because I’m truly happy… heh…”
But this soon changes.
With his dulled senses The Ferret is nonetheless able to discern what seem to be rapidly pursuing footsteps across the rooftops of the buildings he’s passing.
“Heh, this is maybe neither here nor there,” The Ferret says, “but if it’s either one, I didn’t say so, but, my point is – although you didn’t hear it from me, unless you’re really immature and need serious help – I think I’m being followed – heh-heh-heh…”
“Heh, whoever it is, they can’t catch me,” The Ferret adds. “I’m too fast for them!”
The Ferret goes into a short tadpole-legged sprint, concentrating hard to control his careening, but hears the footsteps above speeding up behind him.
“Oh, yeah?! HEH!!! So now I’m going to fly – see if you can catch me then!!!”
He tries unfolding his batty monkey wings, but like little malfunctioning umbrellas sticking out of his back they only open up halfway… not enough for liftoff by half, and that’s under occasionally sober conditions.
“Heh, come on… heh… heh… come on-come-on-come-on!!!”
With his short flabby arms out, The Ferret takes running jumps into the air – “Heh, you’ll never get me to admit that my efforts are futile – heh-heh-heh…”
It’s the end of the block [Ed. Note – read ‘end of the road’]. The Ferret’s at the corner where, an episode earlier, he broke a new café’s large street-front window. He grins. He sees the other side of the street. That’s all he needs and he’s safe. Just a few more steps, heh-heh, just another little rubbery tadpole burst, and… and…
There’s a final exertion of boots against the final roof – the one above her café. The timing and the measurement of the eye must be perfect so that the left foot pushes squarely off the corner…
There’s a leap.
The cape unfurls as the shapely ruby plummets down, down… arms out like a diver’s to the sides…
[Ed. Note – we believe the language here is somewhat exaggerated, for effect, no doubt, since the buildings in this part of Podil are altogether two stories high, and no more. In other words, we have been possibly led to believe that the height from which the ruby shape has flung herself at The Ferret was precipitous and her fall through the night toward the street a nightmarish plunge of Miltonic proportions, but physically, that simply cannot be the case.]
The Ferret, heh, turns his knot-shaped head up for one of those too-late-final-looks of horror at a blackness that grows larger and larger, speeding at him from above.
The Ferret’s corpus absorbs a crash. The cloaked blackness thunders through him, a blast of light explodes inside his eyes as his forehead cracks against the curb.
As The Ferret comes to, he begins to realize he is lying face down, partly on a sidewalk and partly in the street. There is a dripping and flowing from his nose and mouth into the gutter that he comes to understand is his blood. Above him he surmises that someone or something is beating him silently, savagely, mercilessly, waylaying his head with punches, and doing many other things to him he can no longer feel, and that who, or what-ever it is, is enjoying every cruelty it is inflicting. He can tell… After all, it’s not like he doesn’t know about such things – heh-heh-heh…
Weary of further soiling her hands with bloody Ferret, she now puts the boot to his head instead.
She’d tried breaking the tadpole legs but found them too rubbery for wasting time and so went for the arms, which proved far more amenable to breakage, wrenching them behind the turtle back until they broke with delicious snaps.
As Commix Girl stomps and crushes the wings down into The Ferret’s back with a heel, turning them into vestigial pulps of worthless dangling tissue, she hears a hollow screeching wail and suddenly a dark force wraps The Ferret pityingly in its raging embrace and sweeps him away, sending Commix Girl flying back through the broken window of her own Commix Café, where she lies semi-senseless on the floor.
Commix Girl staggers back to The Whiskey Cellar and goes downstairs. There, she finds Steve Kowalski sitting back, his swollen eyes closed, holding an icepack over most of his face. Commix Girl’s heart twists into a knot. She sees the scratches and the bruises, and some of the worse wounds that will become visible scars, recently cleaned but not yet dressed, covered in bright fat lines of freshly clotted blood.
She takes Kowalski by the hand. He opens an eye – though it still looks closed when he does – to look at her. Who is she? What’s with the superhero costume? What does she want?
“I… I took care of him for you.”
“Took care of whom? Who are you? What are you talking about?”
“The Ferret. The one who did this to you. I… I beat him up. I crippled him. I broke his arms. I destroyed his monkey wings. I –”
“Yeah? Well, that’s just great. But tell you what. I don’t need some girl to fight my battles for me.”
“Oh… Well, maybe next time you’ll just get killed.”
“Well, maybe next time that’ll be my business – how about it… chicky?”
Kowalski closes his eye and turns his head back against the chair. He turns his hand so that Commix Girl understands to let it go.
She straightens up and walks out The Whiskey Cellar.
After eating, I’m again filled with courage to work against the awe I feel in Commix Girl’s presence – although she’s no longer here. I’m determined to show her not only my feelings, but to couch them, that tenderness I know I’m capable of, inside the toughness of a man… when I see her once again.
In my mind’s eye, I look at her sidewise to gauge her feelings at this very moment.
She is smiling – almost imperceptibly. What’s she thinking of… or of whom? Kowalski?
Chang is contemptuously waving a bill under my nose. I look at it. It’s double. Apparently, he decided not to be kidding about us paying twice – once for the food and once for Commix Girl’s big mouth. Fuck Chang. There’s no way I’m paying this. Besides, Commix Girl isn’t here to go dutch, which, if I recall not incorrectly, had been the plan.
As we ate in the midst of my argument that Steve Kowalski doesn’t exist, Commix Girl calmly informed me – in a way by which she apparently meant to convey, conclusively, thereby closing the subject once and for all, because the so-called facts speak for themselves – that one night recently she saw an older woman giving a mostly naked Kowalski a blowjob on a couch as she looked down at them through the skylight of the Doll’s House Café in Podil right next to her place.
“The moon lit up the action pretty well,” she’d said.
Was she playing… or not?!? Hey (the thought suddenly occurs to me just now) – what did she mean by ‘her place’???
I call her up. She’s on the phone to me.
“What did you mean by YOUR place?”
“Precisely that, Litman – my place,” she says. “Commix Café,” she says. “Right next door to The Doll’s House in the quickly gentrifying yet bohemian district of Podil. The Ferret broke my storefront window – just like it said in the story I read to you from The Commix right before I bolted out of Chin & Chang’s.”
Astounding. Instead of going to college, Commix Girl has decided to use (or squander) her savings to open up some joint in tribute to an Internet cosmos made up by God-knows-whom that has absolutely no objective correlative out here in real life! So THAT’S it?! She wants to doom herself to a life of thankless drudgery running some penny-ante café?! In Kyiv, of all places?!?
“I can’t talk right now, Litman.”
Commix Girl sounds upset.
“Why – what’s the matter. I can come over and help, maybe fix the place up or –”
“No, no, Litman, I can’t… I really can’t talk right now.”
“But, but I –”
“Gotta go, Litman, gotta go.”
“Commix G –”
“Goodbye.”
Commix Girl is back at the broken window of her café.
Filed by O. Boy, with help from John Doe and AWOL, March 8, 2016