An unfortunate modern-day allegory of Steve Kowalski, starring Clint Eastwood, David Lynch, His Dwarf (wait till Part 5), and Goldstein. Co-starring Commix Girl and Littman
Place: Commix Café
Not long off the plane from L.A. via Munich or Frankfurt, he doesn’t remember which, Goldstein, jetlagged and rocking on his heels, manages to find the Commix Café in the bohemian yet quickly gentrifying district of Podil in Kyiv, and walks in.
Why he came, what he’s doing here, reading this, you’ll never really know.
As these things sometimes happen, sitting in a booth under one of the café’s large street-front windows, with a bird’s eye view of the Hasidic Strip Bar across the street, are Clint Eastwood and David Lynch, facing each other. By now they are acclimated and know the city well. They feel as worldly here as they would be feeling in their native Hollywood, if they were there, instead of here, and very much at their ease, except the people here don’t quite react to them the way they’re used to.
The Hasidic Strip Bar is surrounded today by a fairly large gathering, by Kyiv standards, of protesting Jews – some Conservative, others Orthodox, and yet others atheist but pissed off. Disturbingly, there are no Reform Jews.
Anti-Semites, including some Jews (Anti-Semitic Jews, Self-Hating Jews, Self-Denying Jews, Closet Jews, Jews for Jesus (who, these particular Jews claim, was a Jew), and Gentile Jews), are holding counter-protests in the exact same spot.
Pro-Semitic non-Jews on the scene have it the worst, as they have to protest the Hasidic Strip Bar and the Anti-Semites (Jewish or not) at the same time.
But none of this is important for our purposes at this point, if at all. It is background and local coloring that goes well with good hard-hitting factual reporting – the type, for example, the Kyiv Poster used to glory in before it’d been blown up in a fake terrorist coup by its frustrated (but subsequently happy (and relieved)) owner.
Moving along with our story.
Kitty corner in another booth, with that window framing Andrew’s Pub across the perpendicular cross street*, are Commix Girl, talking intensely and in low annoyingly immature whispers over coffee, tea and bottled water with her Kyiv Commix Internet chat room friend, Littman, who, though several years older, and an aspiring grad student to the New York School of Writing, has a crush on Girl. A crumbly forkful has been taken out of a piece of Commix Cookie Cake on a plate between them and we don’t know, cannot tell, from the way the cake is placed, which of them took it or whom the piece belongs to; the fork now rests tines down against the plate.
Meanwhile, Goldstein is overjoyed to find Lynch and Eastwood here. He presumptuously works himself into the bench next to Lynch, forcing Lynch to sigh and repost himself closer to the window. ‘This is great,’ Goldstein thinks: he’d always wanted to get a closer look at Eastwood, at those lines, at those age-worn crevices… ‘Who’d ever thought I’d get that chance here, in Kyiv, Ukraine, of all places – ha-ha!!! And all those years – decades – working so close in Hollywood, being so close… so close, I could almost touch him from my offices on Los Loseros Boulevard, and yet… never the twain did meet…
‘But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
‘And, damn it, we’re both full-blooded Americans…’
Even though he hadn’t ordered it, Commix Girl brings Goldstein a Double Com Coffee Mix (not to be confused with the Double Commix Coffee) and a bottled local sparkling water and quickly replaces herself in the other booth across from Littman, who looks desperate and worried.
Paying almost no mind to Goldstein, whom they vaguely recognize, a has-been, a washed-up and forgotten irrelevancy from the distant past, which, as it turns out, is in fact the case, Lynch and Eastwood continue their conversation. Goldstein opens his mouth and leans in intensely, as though he’d been part of the conversation all along and is waiting for his turn to speak.
“Dave,” says Clint, his old man’s voice low and gravelly, but still commanding awe and respect, “I want that David Lynch Transcontinental Meditation Center in this town as much as you do, and I seriously think the Hasidic Strip Bar across the street there is the space you’re looking for. You’re my good friend and I’m willing to stay here as long as it takes and do everything in my power to get you there and to make sure that happens.”
“But, Clint, that place is totally corrupt. It’s completely entrenched in sordid off-the-book practices and steeped in unnamed crimes. It is a raw, churning cesspool of deadly gangland enterprise, filled with the rape of dancing girls, and murder, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
“That’s just what they want you to believe, Dave. That’s what they want all of us to think. The damn place is crumbling under the weight of its own perversity even as we speak. Just look at it. It’s on its last legs. We just have to go in there and roust those rowdies out. When I blow the roof off the joint, my friend, you and me are gonna find a couple of cowering punks trembling in the corner, and one of them will probably be this so-called Ferret. It’ll be my collar. I’ll apprehend him and deliver him to the authorities. I’ve done it plenty of times before. You know that; you’ve seen me in action. For me it’s second nature. I ram my fist in his fucking face a few times and he’ll be lucky if he wakes up with the same, uh, face. It’ll be an improvement, from what I hear. I understand that’s not your thing, Dave, but just leave it to me. I know how to use a gun and I can still ride a horse.”
“No, now look, Clint, I appreciate it and all that, and, yes, I’m still determined as… uh… as anything to get my meditation center up and running here – just imagine all the thousands of troubled people we’ll be able to help – and I’m delaying the production of ‘The All-New Twin Peaks of the Early 21st Century’ indefinitely sine die until I do, but… I mean… but, but… well, just forget about the strip bar. I’m telling you, it’s not the place we need.”
“No, no, Dave, it’s gotta be the strip bar – it’s just gotta be! Don’t you understand?! I want to be as close to Commix Girl as possible. Help her out with the café, maybe serve the customers, help her budget her money, come up with some new ideas, wash the cups and saucers in the back. I want to be next to her, Dave! I want to be with her! I can still do it, Dave! Deep, deep in my longings and my heart – although I really don’t know how to explain it – I’ve always wanted to father a Ukrainian child, and this is my chance! Out of all the things I have, and everything I’ve achieved, this is the one thing I’m still missing. Once I get that, I can die easy – my life will truly be complete.”
“But you’ve already got five wives and seven kids.”
“Well, those numbers aren’t exactly right, but nevertheless… and I can still ride a horse. I know how to use a gun.”
“Eh, I don’t know who Commix Girl is, Clint – is that what you called her; some kind of super heroine, or something, or are you just making it up for some kind of movie idea you’re developing with, eeehh, with Dave, here? Because if you are, that’s great, though it threw me for a loop there for a second, Clint, seeing as how that’s never been your thing, but hell, I know you never stop looking for new ideas and creative growth, regardless of how old… eh-eh-eh, I mean, I mean, Commix Girl, is it, I mean, that’s really great, we can use a fresh new super heroine, instead of all those one-dimensional 120-year-old Marvel and DC Comics stick figures they’re still throwing around back our way in the ol’ Wood, you know, heh-heh, trying to squeeze that last billion out of formulas very old-eeehh… very tired, heh, and, well, I can help you get it there, I can help you make it, but, but, we can talk about that later, sure, sure, later, yeah, but, aaahh, but, but, what I first wanted to say was, ah, actually, ask you, what are you referring to – that place across the street over there? The, the… oh, how foul, how loathsome, how vile – the Hasidic Strip Bar!”
Looking down at the table with their hands clasped in white-knuckled endurance until the moment mercifully passes, the two old friends clam up and wait for Goldstein to exasperate himself out of their lives.
“Uh… ah… because, ah, because, you know, as a Jew, I’m highly offended.”
“Well, you should be highly offended even if you’re not a Jew, jackass, so just keep your big mouth shut…” Eastwood replies.
‘We’re both strong men,’ Goldstein thinks. ‘But Eastwood’s a lot older, so I’ll defer the point to him.’
Goldstein licks his bottom lip and then shuts his mouth, awaiting the next exchange between the two legends. To help give himself the air of nonchalance in the awkward situation he’d himself created, Goldstein takes a sip of the Double Com Coffee Mix before him. He nods his head in what is clearly an exaggerated and badly acted gesture of feigned approval, made worse by the fact that under the feigned approval is an approval that is genuine, as Goldstein finds the still-hot beverage truly to his liking. But it is now too late to switch his reaction from a fake one to a real one, as, under the circumstances he himself is responsible for, that would simply be too much.
Is there anyone more tormented than Goldstein? The answer is –
Meanwhile, back in his dilapidated Kyiv hovel, Steve Kowalski starts writing another poem – this one about his deep regret for his behavior toward Commix Girl and his remorse.
Night passes into night, and into day again…
‘No, no, that’s not it…’
He starts again.
I feel it hanging over me, like a storm cloud,
Like immoveable darkness,
Like earth fatigued, strained and aching
From bearing fruit.
Remorse.
I’ve read your thousand pages, Ann**
And I close the book,
I close it for a while.
I could not pray you into life again,
Into flesh,
Into susceptibility.
I can’t beseech gods to dream you into being,
To burden you with living weight again
If all they have to do is dream.
I could not sing you into hearing.
I could not sing to you, nor can I tell you,
I resolve myself, I –
But as he writes, for some reason, it finally dawns on him that he doesn’t need this – he doesn’t need to hand her a poem. All he has to do is find her and then simply tell her – “I’m sorry…”
He crumples the papers on which he’d scribbled the preliminary notes. On his laptop, he deletes the page of the completed lines he’d just written.
Whatever this poem was meant to be, whatever it was meant to say, it will now never exist.
He gets up and heads out – into the heart of Podil…
Filed by Saint Stephan, July 6, 2016
* For you see, the Commix Café is located at one of the corners of an intersection, with the Hasidic Strip Bar and Andrew’s Pub occupying two of the other corners, and we don’t quite know yet what the fourth corner consists of – Secret Ed. Bd.
** Note on ‘Ann’ – this could be a stand-in for Commix Girl, but we have reason to believe, that if Kowalski was writing this for Commix Girl herself, the likelihood that Ann is her real first name is very high. Further note, elsewhere in his poems (not here brought to light), Kowalski had written of “Ann of a Thousand Pages” and had launched the writing of a book of poetry, a collection he had wanted to call “The Book of Ann” – Secret Ed. Bd.