Jeb Dickeys is trying to say how he’s been a writer and publisher for a long time but everyone just calls him a fucking old man and tells him to shut the fuck up, labeling him an editor, at best, to which Dickeys takes great offense. He has so many detractors attacking him that he cannot avail himself of his annoying penchant for long-drawn smartass comebacks, and sits off to the side against the wall in a folding chair, head slumped between his shoulders, visibly shaken.
Jim Kickshitz is saying how he’s been writing this play, to which some of the members who have been listening say, ‘Ooooo…’ and ask him what it’s about, to which he begins, as though modestly and reluctantly, although really filled with great self-confidence, to explain that it’s about an unemployed philosopher trying to make his way in a strange and hostile environment, when he meets this woman, who starts painting a picture of his free will, and…
But, as could be expected, Walsh Losting doesn’t allow Kickshitz to continue but interrupts with an annoying joking comment he suddenly believes is indispensable to make, especially with him right there (thinking he’s just so damn funny and how everyone finds him to be just so great) by saying something like, ‘Painting – nyug-ug-ho. Hey, just like Chief Bollard. You know, with the (self-) publication of my new book, I think I’m catching up to him; yeah, I’ve even started doing a little drawing, a doodle here, a doodle there – nya-ha-ha-aaara…
But Chief Bollard hears this and says to Losting, with what sounds like barely concealed contempt, something like, ‘Boy, when you get up to 400 canvasses, give me a call, because by that time, I’ll be hanging in the Louvre,’ and Losting, well, he’s just not sure if Bollard is joking or not, so he takes his chance and starts slowly yucking it up, looking at the others around him, with that one wall eye of his, for moral support, betting that Bollard, and the others who have been listening to them, will hook into the levity and the moment’s largely jest-like essence will be harmlessly exposed while any percolating anger is dissipated…
But that’s not going to happen, because now Chief Bollard, who has been nominally moderating the meeting, starts getting all worked up, as never before feeling insulted by Losting’s presumptuousness in even daring to compare himself to Bollard, and so he takes aim at Losting, in an increasingly affronted and embittered way, which appears to build toward rage, saying something like: ‘Boy, I’ve written so many books, I can’t even count ‘em anymore! I’ve shared salty snacks and soda pop with some of the most powerful men in Washington, molding their hearts and tempering their minds – with media consulting and PR advice so advanced for its time, even today it’s beyond your comprehension! Today, those great men are dead! But that takes nothing away from the largely undocumented legacy I’ve left in helping them make some of the most momentous decisions ever taken in the course of human history. And so where do you get off –
But Losting is spared Bollard’s wrath because one member of the group arbitrarily blurts out, ‘Hey, what about Andrzej Malinka? – a question as rhetorically meaningless as it is unanswerable.
A silent veneration filled with a combination of fear, awe, respect, and a profound sadness descends upon the entire group.
Bollard, now moved by a self-preserving jealousy of a different kind, says, ‘Hell, every time someone mentions that boy, I don’t know whether to shut this group down or to turn him into its patron saint. For he, Andrzej Malinka, the David Foster Wallace of Kyiv, the terrible infant of the English language in Ukraine, is the ultimate tragic example, for all of us here, of a cruel and indifferent world shattering the hopes and chances of one literary phenom and prodigy at writing greatness,’ and with these words, everyone sort of lowers their heads in mourning, even Walsh Losting – although obviously for the sake of form and propriety in front of the other writers – who, when Malinka had been around and just about to make his great breakthrough onto the world’s literary stage before fate cut him down, instinctively knew Malinka to be his greatest mortal writing enemy.
All other English-language rivals in the Kyiv writing world, Losting knew, he’d be able to handle; even Chief Bollard, whose higher rank and status he had been ceremoniously and disingenuously (cleverly disguised as sincerely) deferring to, playing for time, looking for his opening. But this mention of the terrifying nemesis, it sends shudders through Losting, and him bounding for the bar on the eighth floor of the Hyatt, where he secludes himself, hands shaking around a bracing tonic, thinking where, indeed, was Andrzej Malinka.
Losting didn’t know what the name meant in Slavic, being conversant only in one dialect of Northwest American English, but he knew it held the root of ‘bad’, sounding like ‘malicious’, ‘malignant’, ‘malevolent’, ‘malediction’, ‘malefactor’, ‘malfunction’, and ‘malformed’, and he spitefully concluded that for him the name meant “Little Malice” – an ironic understatement in the case of Malinka. Nyu-u-u-uuug-a-a-aaa…
Meanwhile, back at the writers’ support group, talk had degenerated to complaints over the local English-language newspaper, the Kyiv Poster, supposedly the leading paper of its kind in Ukraine.
Chief Bollard is trying to calm down some of the members, and to reassure them, he tells a runner to go get the paper’s chief editor, Ken Cockburn, who’s relaxing down the hall in the lounge.
A minute later, Cockburn jumps into the room, saying, ‘Here I am!’ The only reason the attendees stifle their laughter is out of respect to Bollard, who says, ‘Son, I wish to hell you’d stop wearing that Media Man costume,’ to which Cockburn replies, ‘But I was only –’, but Bollard says, ‘That’s all right, son. You just run along now, and I’ll talk to you later,’ and humiliated, Cockburn slouches out the room to bemused and derisive looks, cape trailing sadly behind.
Filed by Jack Step, March 28, 2013