A brief interlude ahead of Part 3
Peering through the blur of mayhem accelerating its rings around and around the inside of Sweaty’s Place, Andrew Plumb now notices a figure deep in the shadows against yet another wall. It is Steve Kowalski.
Sweaty Tank Top knows Kowalski’s there, but he doesn’t dare throw him out for not buying any drinks. Business is business. Kowalski humiliated Sweaty in a poetry contest, and now this is business of another kind. It may not have so much to do with sportsmanship, but there are certainly motives; motives we will never fully comprehend, only doing our best, perhaps, to guess. But there is a shrewdness about Sweaty that belies the ruined stupidity of his face and a gut feeling tells him he’s right.
And what can Plumb do, for he had also been recently beaten by Kowalski? And because it was Plumb rather than Sweaty, his humiliation was all the greater. Nothing. That’s what he can do – not a thing.
To underline this fact, I send a message I scribbled on a blank invitation card in a square cream-colored envelope by courier across the bar over to Plumb. Instead of walking, the messenger, a skinny pimply-faced kid, wearing his red company service jacket, one of those postman-like hats, except stylized, and a bowtie, takes his scooter. That wacky kid.
Pimply-faced Kid (at Plumb’s table, revving his scooter): Message for Mr. Lump.
Plumb: That’s Plumb.
Pimply-faced Kid: What’s that, Swifty?
Plumb: It’s Plumb, I said. Not Lump, but Plumb.
Pimply-faced Kid: Ah, yeah, sure, whatever you say, Mr. Mulp. Here, take it.
Plumb: Who’s it from?
Pimply-faced Kid: I don’t read them, Swifty, I just deliver them.
The kid shoves a clipboard with a string-attached pen and checklist into Plumb’s face.
Pimply-faced Kid: Here, sign it.
Plumb: I’m not signing anything.
Pimply-faced Kid: Suit yourself, Lumpy, it’s no skin off my teeth. I’ll just put a checkmark in the Kaka Box next to your name.
Plumb: Oh, well you just go ahead and do that.
Pimply-faced Kid: Say, Lumpy, you’re pretty fast with those devastating rapier-wit-like answers. You must have an IQ. Oh (referring to Lard’s Ego), and you’d better tell your girlfriend here to get a new slime outfit. The one she’s got on stinks. See you dopes in Jersey. The slow boat’s picking up suckers next week.
The kid scoots off, revving exhaust in their faces.
Lard’s Ego: What’s it say, Plumb, what’s it say?
Plumb: It says, ‘Keep your fucking hole shut and make way for the Prince of Poetry. Signed, Jack Step.’ Who the fuck is Jack Step?
He screws up his eyes like he’s genuinely confused and with his mouth crooked open to one side shakes his head to show true annoyance and indignation. Yeah, sure, Plumb. Go ahead and pretend like you don’t know me. He knows I’m out here watching him. He knows.
There he goes, demonstratively (and predictably) tearing the card in half and then in half again – oh, and in half again – and tossing the scraps on Sweaty’s floor.
Because he’d keep his mouth shut and make way for the Prince of Poetry anyway – with or without my taunt. He has to make way and he has to keep his mouth shut. He has no choice. And at least now he knows his failure to become a writer is no personal, private matter; it’s no secret. Now he’s aware that others aside from him are aware of his failure and have taken note of it. And they are in his face about it the same way he was in their face about being such a writer.
That’s no writer.
There are perhaps a few disgruntled sycophants who fawned on Plumb and hung on his every word when he first came to town and pronounced himself a writer. Some of them may even be sitting in this bar, silent, sullenly hunched over their beer. They had greeted Plumb with such fanfare and were ready to believe they could form Kyiv’s own Lost Generation of expat writers around him paralleling the post-World War 1 Paris of Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Pound.
They hate Steve Kowalski – for showing up, for existing, for with his natural talent and grace destroying their silly notions centered around Plumb. They try to ignore Kowalski out of existence. They drink their beer and try not to listen, but Kowalski recites his poetry and does not go away.
A few others deny Kowalski’s greatness because they cannot reconcile their own preconceived notions of Kowalski as a loser with his magnificent gifts – they think it’s simply not conceivable that such a loser could possibly possess them. They do not acknowledge him, thinking in this way he will never know success and will simply fade away.
Instead, they hanker for the days when Welsh Losser and The Ferret would come to their table, and with their arms around each other, regale the rapt listeners with tales of their victories over all of Kyiv.
But those days have gone, and Kowalski remains, reciting poetry.
Hell – what is it about Plumb types? Why is it so easy to say that one’s a writer? What is it about the state of being a writer that makes people insist on the delusion? Plumb, Lard, Losser, Fishburger, Davies, Kickshitz, Publowsky, Zamazda, Sweaty, Boner, but in fairness, not The Ferret. And yet, so many of them – in one place at one time – so many… so many…
This is what Kyiv has to offer. In comparative terms, just a tad different from post-First World War Paris – wouldn’t you say?
Of them, Plumb is by far the best, and yet, he’s no writer.
It is a great deal easier for readers. They get something that is closer to pure enjoyment when they let the well-wrought language in, even if they don’t get it.
But these others, these self-proclaimed writers, these Plumbs, they are on their guard, belligerent, ready to attack. They get their backs up at good metaphor that describes whatever it is the writer wants to describe exactly so, as if it can’t be any other way. How do they do it? the Plumb wonders. The way they use language, put it together, they possess the uncanny ability to create the illusion of omniscience. Not only with their sentence or turn of phrase or particular word linkage have they precisely described the thing, but they’ve done it in a way that eliminates the need for all other attempts at description – or so we are made to believe.
This is what a Plumb wants – to be able to say it all. And for us to understand and believe that he knows it all. He wants to be omniscient. And so he goes at the thing – the thing that’s in his way – from every aspect and angle, trying to say it all. Trying to convince us that we are incapable of thinking beyond him, because he’s already said it all – beyond us. He’s so much smarter.
But instead of measuring it out, to create the illusion, to produce the effect, as would seem more natural, he panics.
He might have stopped somewhere, taken his work up to that moment, however unsatisfactory it may seem to him, as sufficient, and moved on, learning from mistakes and experience, applying true knowledge, and wisdom, and skill gained with the passage of time. But instead of these, he applies his arrogance, and ignorance, and pretension much like a bad artist might apply the brush to details that don’t need it – ultimately, to everything – making it ridiculous and grotesque, and the painting, like the story for the bad writer, suffers and fails. The picture he paints is not convincing.
What come out are the lies, the forced exaggerations, the writing that is not true, the absence of humility arrived at through deprivation, hardship and suffering. As Graham Greene wrote in “The Quiet American”, “Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from pride…”
In the end, we perceive only such a writer’s desperation. It is recognized for what it is: a paranoid uncertainty, a vengeful lack of confidence, a spoiled immaturity. Huffing and puffing and plenty of hot air.
This is not a real writer. This is no writer at all. He doesn’t have what it takes – that’s what it comes down to; that’s the bottom line. He is good for a laugh at his delusion. But he could never come up with The Commix – only be in them.
Kowalski waits. It is not yet time for him to step forward.
The Highlander Slob hacks a 15-man CHORUS to pieces.
The man-dog known as Milk Bone sits at the bar and laughs – “Khe-khe-khe-khe.”
Filed by Jack Step, reporting live for The Unraveling Yarn – Secret Binder of Rare and Erratic Encyclicals, January 15, 2014