David Lynch is unceremoniously jettisoned by Commix Girl at the top Chinese restaurant in downtown Kyiv
The dwarf David Lynch sees us. He throws over the stand with the piano synthesizer on it and begins to wobble over to our table.
A coterie of his hangers-on follows him, but he orders them off with a pointed stumpy finger and a sharp “No!”
He ambles up into a chair at our table, turns back to the stage and points at the man, who looks like the David Lynch we know from Wikipedia, Google, and Charlie Rose, and says to him, “You – over here!”
The David Lynch-looking man appears confused at first and seems not to know what to do with the microphone. In his nervousness, he finally throws it at the stage and walks over to our table.
“Sit down! Over there!” The dwarf points the man into a chair.
Commix Girl and I look at the man and he just raises his shoulders and shakes his head, as if to say that the dwarf is out of control and he can’t do a thing with him.
So, is this David Lynch, or not? Or is it – and has it always been – the dwarf? Who, we finally want to know, is in charge?!?
“What’s your name, sir,” I ask the man, oblivious, as Commix Girl is, to the dwarf. “Because, if you don’t mind my saying, you look just like… I mean, you are – if you aren’t the man himself – an exact copy of –”
“Oh, I’m, ah, I’m –”
“Shut the hell up!” fairly screams the dwarf at the man. “I’M DAVID LYNCH!!!”
And then, as if the dwarf hadn’t screamed at all, he says:
“You’re those Kyiv Commix people, aren’t you? The ones we’re supposed to meet?”
His tone is nevertheless insinuating, rude…
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Commix Girl. “We’re big Kyiv Commix fans, but other than that, we’re not associated with them at all.”
“Yeah, right! Who’s The Ferret – I want to meet The Ferret. Now! And Bret Boner. Where’s the Kyiv Poster? I want to go there now! I want to open up a Transcontinental Meditation Center! Now! Now! NOW!!! Saaaaay, you’re a pretty hot one, aren’t you?”
The dwarf climbs down from the chair and steps toward Commix Girl. He forcefully pries her legs apart and begins to wedge himself between them, pressing into her body and squeezing her breasts.
As if it isn’t enough that this Lynch dwarf has mentioned two living entities and an institution nauseatingly odious to Commix Girl, real though they aren’t…
She gathers the dwarf by his jacket lapels, pulling them together with one hand under his neck, choking him hard and forcing his tongue out.
Thus choking him with one hand, with the other Commix Girl liberally slaps his face – also hard – back and forth, back and forth – like that.
After this, her both hands grab him by the lapels and she forces him under the table, wherefrom she then proceeds to shake him up and down, thereby banging his head repeatedly against the table’s underside – like that and like that.
She then drags the wilted and possibly unconscious dwarf out, lifts him above her head and throws him across the room into and on top of a neighboring table.
Chang doesn’t come running out. The Lynch-like man fades from our table, seemingly submerging back into the shadows from which he had equally as seemingly emerged. The people whose table was affected by the thrown dwarf keep their mouths shut.
Commix Girl and I even look over at the large long table that’d started it all, and while it seems filled with a thinning bevy of diners, it looks oddly bereft of the Lynchian hotshots and goons, which had earlier in the evening aggressively invaded Chin & Chang’s serene isle of Chinese delights in the haywire world that is downtown Kyiv, taking it by storm.
Commix Girl leans over toward me, but only to pull my notebook toward herself. No doubt, she just can’t keep her eyes off Kyiv Unedited and out of The Kyiv Commix.
“Oh, no…”
“What’s that, Commix Girl?”
“Oh… oh, no, I can’t believe this… I just can’t – no fucking way!!!”
“What… what?!”
“Here, Litman, check this out – No! I’ll read it to you:
“‘Following problems with hiding his identity at the Kyiv Poster, The Ferret tonight is drinking hard down inside The Whiskey Cellar located, for those of you who are strangers to Kyiv, in this ancient Rus capital’s quickly gentrifying yet bohemian district of Podil.
“‘Moments earlier, before entering said establishment and as nighttime fell over the city, The Ferret was sort of hopping malevolently on his bowed tadpole legs from side to side down the street, going “heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh…”, when he saw a new establishment with the name Commix Café – not yet opened – emblazoned on its large street-front window.
“‘Taking a loose brick lying at the foot of the café’s still unfinished façade, The Ferret throws it through the window, saying as he does so, “That’s better – heh…” before hobbling the rest of his way down to the end of the block to his chosen port of call that night – The Whiskey Cellar.
“‘The Ferret, who is sitting at the bar, clutching a tumbler between both paws, now glares across a table-cluttered rustic expanse of sawdust-covered floor to espy, sitting alone in a corner, minding his own business and writing poetry, Steve Kowalski.
“‘The Ferret, noticing that Kowalski, whom he immediately hates instinctively, is alone and just oozing with simplistic gullible faith in humankind, a sort of foolish accepting trusting stupidity and a childish naivety that is annoying in the extreme – so much so, that one need not be The Ferret to have it irk one – and so that The Ferret unilaterally decides that he doesn’t want any artistic types giving the joint character.
“‘The Ferret swoops down and Steve Kowalski does not know what hits him. The Ferret throws punches wildly at Steve Kowalski’s head. He’s ripping up his literature books and tearing up the poetry Steve’s been working on quietly all night at the table, sipping Johnnie Walker Red over the hours to free the verses from his mind.
“‘But it looks to be all over now for Kowalski, folks! The Ferret’s going “heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh…” and the pummeling, the bludgeoning just doesn’t stop. It’s a massacre, ladies and gentlemen, a slaughter – The Ferret’s absolutely just murdering Kowalski! Ladies and gentlemen, in all my years, I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like this! Oh, the carnage, ladies and gentlemen… the humanity… the humanity!!!’”
Commix Girl stops reading and looks up, all but reeling and stunned. She’s looking at me, to speak, to say something, and yet not looking at me at all, but somewhere through me, somewhere beyond.
“No, no,” she finally says. “This has gone way too far – and now it’s going to stop!!!”
I mean, here we go again with The Kyiv Commix.
Does Commix Girl know her effect on me, or is she just playing, as if there’s nothing better to do, other than eat the food here at this very moment while insisting non-stop in either an implied or direct manner that Kyiv Commix is real? As if its mastery over us is beyond our control and we’re being sucked into it ourselves?
Was this entire two-and-a-half-frame David Lynch episode in Chin & Chang’s East Eats, up until this very moment, which is now somehow posted on the Kyiv Unedited website under unknown authors’ names, and over which even the Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board is embarrassed to admit it has no control, much less able to delete, and which I suspect you are reading right now, and which has me, Litman, as the narrator telling the story in first person – which, in fact, I have been doing on my laptop simultaneously as all of the events here have unfolded, although my actions were of an entirely private nature and were never supposed to be the business of Kyiv Unedited – supposed to prove that Kyiv Commix and everything inside it is without a doubt real: now including us, that is, Commix Girl and me?
As if – and now I will get to my point, which is perhaps for me a somewhat painful one, but nevertheless – as if other than to do such things, she, that is, Commix Girl, doesn’t take me seriously? Well, whom DOES she take seriously? Steve Kowalski?
But Kowalski, as everything in Kyiv Commix, doesn’t exist. He’s just a made-up fiction of whoever’s behind Kyiv Unedited.
And as far as writing credentials go, this Kowalski purports to be a poet, but what’s he doing here in Kyiv? He’s just a freelance English teacher, for godsakes. ANYONE can do that!
Me – I told her: I’m seriously contemplating pursuing a graduate degree at the New York School of Writing – specializing in The Novel. But that doesn’t seem to impress her. I say it, but it’s like she never hears it. Instead, she keeps mentioning this Kowalski, Kowalski, Kowalski – WHO, I tell her, doesn’t even exist!
I mean – I’M THE REAL WRITER around here, not some fictitious KOWALSKI!
She’s so exasperating!
“Oh, Commix Girl!”
“I’ve had enough of this, Litman!”
Commix Girl leaves.
The dwarf David Lynch is clattering and battering around on his own makeshift stage, apparently intending to sing another number. No one previously in his attendance, including the David Lynch-looking man who sat at our table but was prevented from talking by the dwarf, is here, or so it appears. I see Chang running out again – this time, toward the dwarf. From the looks of it, I think Chang will now exert his powers to prevent the dwarf from performing, and maybe kick him the hell out.
Filed by Missing in Action, with contributions from Author Author and Nobody No One, March 5, 2016