Divided into two Part 2’s, as 1 whole would have been almost 3 times the recommended dosage – so read on, beloved readers, to understand how, and to see why
Invidious, these insinuations from Mack. Now he’s saying I’m purposefully undermining John Smith in the Hasidic Strip Bar case.
Mack is saying that Smith is saying that The Ferret has nothing to do with it, and I’m saying The Ferret is at the very heart of the entire matter. I connect with Commix Girl. She gives me the skinny on Rico Soiree, seeing as how she took a temp job with his depraved household as a gofer, maid, and servant. Says he made a grab for her but she managed to push him off playfully without upsetting his sense of masculine strength and pride. Later, she says, it took her hours to wash off the grease. But she can still smell the thick oily musk. I’m the one who tipped off the authorities, and they’re the ones who picked the scumbag up outside the joint on suspicion of rape and murder. For once, Kyiv law and order worked. The young woman’s body was dumped on the outskirts of town by operatives of the bar, controlled, I have no doubt, by The Ferret – but Soiree was the one. One of the ones. One of the increasingly many ones. All this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s Bodkin MacFlatus, the triple-chinned floppy-haired Highlander Slob, loudmouthed PR and marketing ExIm flunky (second only in professional failure to Welsh Losser, suspended in midair off the Pulaski Skyway in or close to Newark, New Jersey, or dead), who enjoys flipping his freckled orange pecker at girls from under his kilt, and his teary-eyed Scotsman compatriot Sweaty Tank Top, loser publisher nonpareil and major boozer. MacFlatus is also the cold-blooded murderer of seven fellow Scotsmen and a Jew at Sweaty’s Place before it was shut down, mainly because Sweaty’s a filthy loser, but has gotten off, shall we say, scot-free. And there’s even maybe Piper Nadine, but I don’t quite have all the nuts and bolts on him yet. He’s a Protestant mick and that’s a different game. Chic Dickie? Erstwhile limey publisher who looks like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and a gout-stricken Henry VIII and completely insane, held in punitive sado-sexual bondage by countrymen, one Outrage Reggie and a tiny insecure clown, Reggie’s reverential and obsequious servant, Binky – in a high Stalinist tower smack in the center of Kyiv. So maybe he’s clean, Piper Nadine. Maybe he’s out of it. Happily married to Lava Encole but nevertheless after some marvel-breasted Jenny girl he followed obsessively off a plane, who’s bedding down with a cocky spatula-headed Turk, apparently just to spite Nadine, here in Kyiv. Also has a thing for a big-breasted underage niece back in the States – or what soon may be the former States, thanks to the mind control of Jeb Davies, whose relation to the beheaded Josh Davies is still being established – and wants to get her over here at any cost and screw her in a pair of kiddy jammies under his wife’s nose. Smith had nothing to do with it. Smith doesn’t belong here. Smith has to go. He’s done. He has no idea what’s going on or what he’s gotten himself into. It’s beyond him. It’s way over his head. Whatever Smith had, he lost it.
Real life isn’t like this. What is this if not a freak show?
For example, when Smith staked out the Hasidic Strip Bar, he reported back to the agency that The Ferret went in with someone and was kicked out two hours later. Smith was unable to make the connection that they kicked The Ferret out because, knowing they were being watched, they wanted to make it look like The Ferret had nothing to do with the strip joint, whereas he in fact lurks at the very heart of the operation. They’d pulled the biggest, simplest and oldest ruse in the book on Smith. I mean, the facts he reported are accurate, sure. But they’re completely meaningless without the right interpretation.
How do I know? I just do. You come to know a few things in this business after a while, things that make sense without you having to explain them, because explanations in things like this, which this racket is full of, always float in the improbable, and usually there lies your answer. In this racket, trying to think in logic and rational terms, apply deductive reasoning, or whatever you want to call it, always leads to muddled questions, and the more you do it, they just get worse. In this racket, if you start with a hunch, and that’s a pretty good thing to start with, if you are one of the ones who can do it – and you should be, you should know this thing about yourself if you want to work in this business – you throw yourself into the improbable, and more often than not you come out with something a lot more solid and far better than the hunch you started with – and there’s no explaining it. No need to. You just know.
A Brief Interlude
Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Goldstein sits in the bar and licks his bottom lip.
“So you’re not Andre Olyvka, Anti Olifko, or Andrew Plumb.”
“No.”
“And you’re not Animal Boy, either, even though you’re dressed exactly like –”
“Nah – I’m the guy they’re based on. The original. I’m –”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. So, what’ve you got?”
“The stuff I wrote is totally morphed.”
“Is it better than Saint Stephan’s?”
“Saint Stephan’s version tanked. He was tossed, by me, ‘cause he wouldn’t wear out the shoe leather and couldn’t get the nut bar. All he’d do was drink – spent twelve hours a day in the Hairless Melon under the newsroom. Just ain’t worth it. A rube, a bumpkin country cousin of second-rate hacks writing for other hack rubes, polishing the brass on The Titanic before it sank. So let’s just leave it at that. Now, the stuff I wrote, I –”
“Yeah, yeah – what’s it called?”
“‘Kyiv Gravity’s Rainbow’, or ‘Kyiv Pastoral’ – don’t know which yet. But I’m gonna totally curb stomp that Kyiv motif fresh into a complex multidimensional rising order of progressing tropes. I’ll give you the real deal, the way it happened, the way it went down, the whole story arc, and not all this broken-up Kyiv Commix shit. It’s my metier!”
“So, you haven’t written it yet?”
“In progress. Working on it. Almost, you know, like morphed into done and stuff. And then it’s just a question of drawing a circle around disturbed adolescents from wealthy families going to an elite boarding school in Upstate New York only to grow up into spoiled adults wearing long chino shorts over their flabby legs on Thanksgiving selling drugs in log cabins in the Catskills being arrested in New Jersey and escaping to Canada…”
Goldstein remains silent. He is deeply concentrated. He stares pensively into his glass. His focus is so deep and intense he sees the water trickling from the tops of the ice cubes melting in his drink. Maybe he’s melting the ice himself with his gaze.
“And then there’s Welsh Losser,” says this brief interlude’s unnamed vicious-faced stiff-haired old-adolescent-looking man in nothing but a loincloth made from Kyiv Poster paper sitting on the barstool next to Goldstein. “And I mean,” he adds through his malicious saliva-spraying lisp, “who gets gout these days, anyway – Henry VIII?! Give me a fucking break!!!” A leer of tremendous satisfaction tears open his face.
Goldstein licks both his lips.
End of interlude, and now back to our story, starring Jack Step (if I do say so myself)
Well… that’s going to have to be in the next part – namely, The Second Part 2 of this very story
Oh, and by the way, Bret Boner, former dead chief editor of the recently fake terrorist bombed Kyiv Poster (and by now expert smooth operating cunning sex harasser of nubile young girly flesh ostensibly brought into the newsroom for high-standard tough uncompromising Western-style democratic freedom of speech journalism training only looking out for their best interests (yeah, right, I can only imagine)) – SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
Filed by Jack Step, June 21, 2016 – Summer Solstice following a Full Moon
Read on, intrepid reader, liker of tangy and enjoyer of saucy REAL COMMIX LITERATURE, which is exactly precisely what this is, the next step in the evolution of the writing arts, better than the short story, superior to the novel, and be not indifferent or shy, for the Second Part 2 of Meanwhile Back in Kyiv Continued awaits just beyond the next Commix link’s port of call (or is that protocol – well, it doesn’t matter) and horizon