From: The Lost Interviews, Part 87
It means you’re just a filthy, rotten, stinking, no-good, good-for-nothing, lowdown, lazy, lying –
I’ll sue you for defamation! I’ll sue, I swear I will!
– freak-eyed, fathead, full of shit, ass-kissing, lying piece of shit, a goddamn clown, an aberration, a boil on the ass of culture, a –
That’s insubordi… subterfuge… I resent that, resent it! I’m an author – the only expat one in Kyiv – a writer and an artist, and I –
Get the hell out of here, you’re fucking disgusting, I don’t even want to see you in this interview anymore, you fucking one-eyed mutant.
You’re pushing (voice like a lizard flailing in a vat of chemical abrasives) a fine line there, you’re really asking for it, you’re –
Yeah, and as a prime sample of your writing, we secretly dug up this secret letter you secretly wrote direct to the secret CEO – that’s who, we’re assuming, Boss Lard is, as referenced in your letter – of The World Window Through Ukraine.
How do you know that’s my letter?
It’s got your smell on it.
You have no right to that – you have… I’m going to sue, I’ll sue, I’ll sue!!! Underhanded, behind-my-back, backstabbing –
Yeah, you should talk. So here it is:
I demand coverage by my own English-language news media – The World Window Through Ukraine – the only one of its kind in town! What a rancid insult, Boss Lard, that I should have to bear this scourge, these flinging arrows of misfortune! How dare you ignore me? Everything I ever did for you, running your PR firm, and this is how you treat me? That’s not running a paper! Things had better change over there and they had better change – starting right now. Or else. If you don’t have enough money to print something complimentary about me putting me in a good light and showing me as the only expat writer and artist in town, then fire someone else and then slowly turn the paper into some kind of glossy, paid-for news-lite, advertising insert PR magazine leaf trussed up and lightly sprinkled over with slightly rewritten news wire shoving Editor Boy out in front as the legitimate face on it – he’ll do anything you say just to keep the job – and be done with it. After all, what’s more important here than ultimate justice to the truth of what’s going on? Where are those principles of truth and honor and freedom of speech and press and decency and democracy and human rights you’re always claiming to stand up for? Me, who’d always worked so hard for you, giving you my all, dedicated, in addition to turning myself into a top fiction writer as I did it – practically feats of superhuman magnitude – and you don’t even have the decency to tell the newsroom to write about me. What’s the matter – not enough space in the paper? Or are you afraid one small story about me and I’ll suddenly overshadow you? Well, Lard, I think I just hit the head on the nail here – you and your oversized ego – an ego that’d finally met its match. Yes, I knew it’d take some time, but I made it. If that weren’t the case, then there wouldn’t be this resistance. But like I said, that’s not such a big thing, because all I have to do is go public with all this and I’ll get what I want anyway – with the ever-so-small difference that it will be at your expense – and that’s some expense, ain’t it, Boss Lard? Probably the first one in your life you’ll have ever paid. The first, I reckon, and that’ll probably be the last. So, Lard, what’ll it be? You get me in that paper and we stay friends, or I unfold Plan B?
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Filed by Jack Step, February 4, 2013