Then goes to Sweaty’s Place to get drunk
“So we issue these bonds, see?!”
“Bonds???”
Sitting in his chief editor’s chair, Bret Boner has been staring ahead, ostensibly at his computer screen with the empty Google page on it, although he is not aware that this is what he has been doing for a long time.
As he hears the voice, which he cannot exactly place, and which sounds like it’s coming at him from somewhere far away, he slowly turns his head toward wherever he thinks it is. Right in front of his face he sees a deep-complexioned South-East Asian man and thinks where he’s seen him before. He strains hard to remember.
The man brings his mouth close to Boner’s ear. “Yeah, Boner, bonds – bonds, bonds, bonds – don’t you get it?! Bonds!!!”
Boner now realizes this is Moe Zaire, billionaire and Kyiv Poster owner. If that is the case, then it looks as though Zaire has come straight down to the newsroom to talk to Boner. Boner licks his lips and wonders why he would do that.
“What’s all this about some kind of bonds,” Boner says, raising himself up with difficulty in his chair and trying to invest his voice with authority. But the louder he speaks, the shakier his voice gets. And his words are slurred and unclear. His mouth has gone dry. He licks his lips several times and prepares to try again. But he has forgotten what he’s said, or why Zaire is there.
Zaire now turns away from Boner because a fat stomach in suspenders has just walked into the newsroom waving his arms around dramatically and saying something to Zaire in a loud voice, although Boner can’t quite make out what it is.
When the man with the stomach and suspenders has finished, an excited Zaire gets up from his chair next to Boner and bounds over to him, clasping his hand and shaking it hard, saying, “Well, if it isn’t my fast-aging, tall-talking, harmonica-playing shed-visiting porch-crouching good-ol’ Southern-boy buddy, Lard!”
‘Lard,’ Boner thinks. And then he remembers. But how is that possible. Boss Lard’s no longer CEO at the Kyiv Poster. The last Boner’d heard, he was dead.
But now Lard does some more talking. He says, “Moe, no matter how hard I’ve turned these wheels inside this exceptional noggin of mine, I’ve always found it rather inexplicable how a foreigner could become so phenomenally wealthy on the Ukrainian market, and particularly how someone so brown could make it so big in this strange and fiercely uninviting all-White world of homegrown oligarchs.”
They both laugh raucously and embrace like the best of friends. ‘But how could this be,’ Boner thinks, ‘how could this be?’
Slowly, Boner loses the thread of events or any understanding of what’s happening. He turns his head back to his computer screen. Then, remembering the other side of the room, he turns it to look out the window. The talking and commotion behind him is fading in his ears. His mouth opens, forming an expression that is not quite a smile. He licks his lips. He narrows his eyes through his thick glasses to make sure he understands what he’s seeing. He begins to shiver and looks around for a sweater, or a blanket. He crosses his arms in front of himself to warm himself the best he can, but the tips of his fingers have started going numb from the cold.
“Is it winter already,” he asks himself, half aloud, his voice cracking.
There is the story of how Steve Kowalski beat Andrew Plumb in a poetry contest.
Although I hate poetry, I know good poetry when I hear it, and I’m certain I will have the chance to chronicle Kowalski at his greatest, but you’ll have to believe me when I say it didn’t take much for him to beat Plumb. That said, it’s not worth the space to recount Plumb’s doggerel, which was absolute crap – even worse than his hip New York fiction.
Yes, I know where the contest happened, and when, but I prefer not to tell you. Why Plumb even bothered – well, that seems easy enough to answer: Ego.
Somehow, Jim Kickshitz’s wife comes to the office looking for her husband, who has been disposed of as a stuffed owl by Andrew Plumb.
As she for some reason begins to passionately recount her bound and gagged theater balcony rape by Josh Davies during intermission, she ecstatically cries out that she is pregnant with Davies’s child (knowing it could not be her lost husband Jim’s) and that she means to have it.
Unbeknownst to her, tears run from the eyes of the stuffed owl up on the shelf behind her.
Oh, and look, there’s Harry Christian. He is both chasing and trying to get away from his double in the streets of central Kyiv. For the double, who is an alcoholic on the same magnitude as Christian, is doing him much damage.
See how they just miss each other at the intersection, with one going north-south, and the other going east-west along the cross street. This kind of thing happens all day.
Or, for example, the double will sneak out of a bar after getting soused and then when Harry comes in, say the next day, he gets hit with the bill and has no way of explaining that it isn’t he who owes it, but his double. This not only confirms to others that he’s a drunk, but one who’s gone kind of loony.
Or say Harry Christian has gotten a job somewhere temporarily, as he is incapable of holding one down for longer. The double manages a certain chaos over Christian’s life that induces him to get especially drunk the night before payday, incapacitating him from coming in to work. The double will then come by and collect Harry’s salary.
When Harry comes in, say the following day, to ask for his pay, he is told that he’d already been paid. This also makes him sound like the lunatic drunk he actually is.
Ah, that double.
Breaking a heavy sweat and laughing maniacally, with the big knife Rico Soiree gleefully carves away the horns at the base of Zippy Zamazda’s cow’s head.
Zamazda goes completely mad from the pain. He runs around Kyiv bellowing and lowing like a wounded beast, bleeding from the head and frothing at the mouth. He crashes his head against the Kyiv Administration building, breaking his glasses, which are trapped under the cow’s head with the rest of his face, forcing shards of glass into his eyes and causing him to go blind. He screams and he raves. He is no longer human.
I’m going for a drink.
Filed by Jack Step, for Drinkers’ Digest, January 2, 2014