Boner wins again! But this time, in a different way, getting all the love he’d ever wanted but was too afraid to ask
Boom-boom-boom – a fist knocks on the toilet door. And now it knocks harder – BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!!
“Bryet, Bryet – vat you do der zo long… Bryeeeeet!!!”
“DUUUUUUUHHH!!!”
Leaning over with his hands either side of the sink, Brent Boner looks up and sees a bum in the cracked wall mirror.
It’s the funniest thing. He’s looking straight at the mirror, and not at some odd angle, but he can’t find his own reflection. Instead, what he’s seeing is this bum.
He turns around to see where the bum is standing, but there is no one there. And how would that be possible, anyway? – the amount of room in there is meant for one person, and if there was someone else there, behind him, Boner would feel him, as he’d be pretty much pressed up against him.
As he turns his body and his gaze back to the mirror, and sees the reflection of the movement of his own motions, he suddenly understands that the bum looking back at him from the mirror is… him…
Boom-boom-boom…
‘But it can’t be’, Boner thinks, ‘no, no, it just can’t be…’ And yet, it is.
A filthy wool cap is pulled down over a balding head with wisps of long gray hair sticking out of it over the ears. The cheeks are bloated. The eyes are sunken into bags that are crimson, purple, and black, and the jowls sag with folds of loose skin covered by days of greasy gray beard growth. At the neck, the beard looks like a net suffocating a blowfish. An old filthy hooded parka from another era – from some ‘70s horror flick – finishes the picture.
“Bryet!” Boom-boom-boom… “Bryet!” BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!!
“Uuurg-aaarr – okay, okay, I’m coming, I’m coming…”
Boner finally stumbles back out into the bar.
He looks around. The place is dark, grimy, and dilapidated, and so Soviet – stuck in the ‘90s, as it were, with its cheap, laughable so-called ‘Euro-remont’.
Boner thought such places in Kyiv had gone extinct, but no, for here he was, right inside one.
The place stinks – of sweat, and piss, and puke, and drunken vapors – so thick, they are visible – rising out of everyone’s pores. There is also the heavy, provoking smell of blood, a whole bucket of which has been swabbed up after a knife had carved open some guy’s face and neck. But that was hours ago, and yet, the smell lingered thickly on, strong in the stinking air and stale.
The music is Russian prison chanson – so tinny and cheesy and cheap and shrill and so incredibly fucking off key and bad – a gravelly, torn-up voice making its futile point, screaming about something. The volume is up, and Boner looks around at the random table, here, there, and sees drunks – other drunks – their eyes closed tight, heads shining with sweat and alcohol grease, nodding deeply and intensely into the music, hypnotized, entranced, and it is utterly frightening. The place is aggressive, filled with anger, hatred, gnarled mouths, and ill will.
*
Stas is huge. With one arm, he takes Boner around the shoulders and squeezes him into his own body.
“Kho-kho-kho,” Stas laughs, moving Boner, who is clearly intimidated and scared, back to his stool at the end of the bar, where Stas has taken up the stool next to him.
“Drrink, kho-kho, arr vee no good friend, Bryet, are we no de brraders, kho-kho-kho…”
Boner had just wanted to sit at the bar and have his drink and be left alone. Exchanging a word once in a while with the bartender, Max, was all right, but other than that, he just wanted to be alone. But in a place like this, you’ll never be left alone.
Stas wraps his giant fingers around the back of Boner’s neck and pulls his head toward his own, so that their foreheads hit.
“Arr vee no friend, Bryet, kha? Arr vee no good de best? No? Me man, you man, Max man, vee friend, good, yes, de brraders – kho-kho-kho… Drrink, drrink… khooo…”
Stas stinks. He kisses Boner sloppily on the cheek. Boner wants to pull away, but he is scared. He gets up the courage and manages to do this somehow, but is still nevertheless too scared to wipe Stas’s slobber from his cheek, which he feels remaining there, drying there.
Instead, he grunts like a tough guy and turns in his seat to reach for his drink, using the motion to quickly swipe the side of his face with a parka sleeve. But there’s no drink there, because he’d already drank it.
“Max, kho-kho, geeve good friend Bryet to drrink!”
“No-no, that’s all for me, I go home, I –”
“Khome? Vhy khome?! You no man? Vee no friend, Bryet, good-good American, me you brrader – no? Yes, Max, more now geeve please, I pay…”
“No, I… I… have work tomorrow… I… I…”
“Vork? Zo vat, vork? Me too go vork. But now, you me man, vee drrink, yes, yes, mine brrader!”
Around here, the ‘work’ ruse never works. No one works, and it is therefore never true. Moreover, neither of these two had anywhere in particular to go tomorrow, or anything in particular to do, especially Boner.
Stas makes Boner drink. He is happy. “Akh, Bryet, Bryet…” he is saying.
Boner’s angry, but he’s too intimidated by Stas not to drink, and so he drinks. Trying to sound like a tough guy, he rolls his shoulders and says “Urg, it’s Brent… not Bret… or Bryet… but Brent. That’s Brent… Brent…”
“Akh, yes, Bryet, Bryet, kho-kho-kho, good friend mine, Bryet… I Stas you feex tomorrow, make starrt strrong. Strrong man, you, Bryet, be, like rreal Ruski man. Like Stas! Bryet, I you exerr-size, geev to you sporrt, Bryet, mine friend, I, Stas, meisterr sporrt – I meisterr sporrt… beeg experrt me… yes…”
Boner is determined to finish the drink, get off the barstool and go home to the one-room dump he rents from an old hag on the 11th floor of a 16-story building, somewhere far, far out against a desolate tree line in Kyiv’s left bank’s district of Mars.
But the cheap alcohol has really started getting to his head. He takes it easier and easier, and suddenly he feels much more confident with Stas, like he’s suddenly able to handle him.
Stas takes in Boner’s gotten-up courage and begins to play with the new looked-for looseness.
“Now I test you strrong. Khere, see, hands, poosh, poosh…”
Boner takes up the challenge and pushes against Stas’s outstretched hands with his own. Boner grits his teeth and puts so much force into it, his head shakes.
Stas laughs and praises Boner’s strength. He says, “Okay, now veet legs…”
The idea now is that Boner puts his legs together between the inside of Stas’s legs and pushes out to either side, trying to pry Stas’s leg-grip open. Again he grits his teeth… Again he shakes. Stas laughs and laughs, allowing Boner some success with which he can then praise him. Now Boner really feels like a tough guy and is completely relaxed and comfortable around Stas, which is exactly what Stas wants.
*
Now, they are going home together. Stas has convinced Boner that they live in the same 16-story building, with Stas living just one street door over and on the 12th floor.
But while Boner sees they are in his massive Brezhnev-era high-rise sleeping complex, Stas is leading them to a completely different building.
“But, urg, uh… I… I…”
“Oh, no, mine friend, Bryet… vee just go von minute to good friend… I need mine, aaakh, hov you say, eeehh… wrenchit!”
“Your, uuuhh, wrench?”
“Yeees, my friend, my wrenchit, you knov, for de, for radiator to feex, the wrenchit I need, for feex… radiator… radiator…”
As this makes perfect sense to Boner, he’s willing to take this brief diversion before finally getting home.
They are in through the street door of this other building, quite a stretch, actually, from Boner’s own, and Stas presses the button. The elevator door yawns open with the noise of vibrating cables and steel. The space is small and tight. The rise all the way up to 16, as Boner notes the button pushed by Stas’s massive finger, begins.
But now Stas warns Boner not to touch him. Boner grunts, but the tough guy thing doesn’t work. He is thrown for a loop and his fear is renewed. What does he mean? Boner asks him with a shaky voice, but gets no reply. Instead, Stas looks down at Boner as if he’s crazy.
A few seconds later, Stas says it again. He is visibly riled, although Boner could swear he’d come nowhere near Stas, that he’d made a special effort after Stas’s first warning to make sure no part of him touches any part of Stas, even though he’s drunk and the elevator is small, allowing little room between them.
But now it doesn’t matter. A huge fist rapidly smashes down into Boner’s face… over and over.
*
The day shrieks in through Boner’s skull. Someone somewhere has turned up a Russian pop radio station. Two men’s voices – one older, the other younger – argue just short of screaming, cursing each other with vehemence and hatred, both voices raspy and hoarse from the exertion.
Now, there’s an even louder screaming, but farther off, coming from the landing outside, through the apartment door. It’s a woman’s voice, and the older man’s voice keeps telling her to go fuck herself. But she continues her screaming, and adds door pounding and kicking and ringing of the bell – incessantly – pounding and kicking and screaming and ringing the bell. And now someone in the other room starts up a power tool of some kind – a drill – and begins boring with it into the walls.
Through the crust and his head’s splintering pain, Boner unglues his eyes but feels he cannot do so well with his left one. He makes out that he is prostrate stomach-down on a mattress and his head is turned to the wall.
The wall features a long narrow mounted mirror, in which Boner sees his head is wrapped in a woman’s scarf. His eyes focus more and he sees a blue and purple blood-dried mound of flesh swollen over his left eye, which is just a crimson slit in his forehead. The left side of his mouth is also swollen and discolored, dried blood caked thickly from the corner of his lips down to his jaw.
He cannot move. That is, he can move, but there is no way he can get up off the mattress, which he sees is not in a bed frame but directly on the floor, because he’s tied to it with ropes that go all around.
He sees he’s also in a woman’s nightgown, and that one end of it has been bunched up above his butt. He sees his naked legs and ass, the hair on them thick and black-turning-gray.
But worst of all – even worse than his splitting head – his asshole is sore. And not just his asshole, but the throbbing ache goes far up into the canal. He thinks he even sees flower petals of dried blood between his butt cheeks. Yes, that is indeed dried blood, for while Boner was in La-la Land, that sacred passage had been rent asunder.
The carpet, so near his nose, wreaks rancid food, beer, and piss. It is burned through with numerous holes, and littered with cigarette butts, ash, empty cigarette packs, food labels, wrappers, and crumpled bits of paper. There are empty tin cans, plastic bottles, and tubes of various kinds squeezed dry. There are nails, tools, and paint chips. In the corner, he sees a needle, and vials are scattered around. There are tears and rents in the walls and stains of many kinds.
Boner needs to use the bathroom – he needs to do both. With number two, he can hold it no more than he can hold number one, since it is a diarrheatic gruel about to explode out his torn-open ass – thanks, it is needless to say, to his gastronomic behavior the night before.
He decides he will scream – with all his heart and all his might, the shit blowing out his ass and the piss pouring into the mattress, he will scream.
Ha-ha! Scream, Boner, scream, as much as you want and as loud as you can. But you are up on the 16th floor and no one can hear you! No one!!! They can only hear you in the next room, and only barely, and they don’t care, Boner. They don’t give a fucking shit!!!
But Stas is about to go out and you’re annoying him. He didn’t want to bother with this, but now, before he goes out, he will stuff your shredded shit-fudged underwear in your mouth and tape it shut.
Well, it’s over.
On the building’s roof, a fat lady sings.
Filed by Mr. Izzy “Freight Train” Goldstein, December 28, 2015