A corner of the otherwise dark bar is illuminated and serves as a sort of makeshift stage with a microphone and stand
Sweaty Tank Top is standing under the light and sweating profusely. He’s dressed in a wrinkled beige sports jacket worn over a pastel pink tank top, and his mouth is round and gaping as if something hurts…
NON PERSONAE GRATAE:
A pathetic jumble of Kyiv’s expatriate losers, both identified and not
Sweaty Tank Top: I came to this town alone, on my own, without a woman to love…
Heckler in back: And you still don’t have one, ha, ha…
Hidshit: (over his shoulder) Shh!
Sweaty Tank Top: A writer with nothing to write…
Diminutive bearded figure: (to himself) Probably just as well – hee, hee…
Sweaty Tank Top: But then I met YOU, that’s right, YOU, and we didn’t make two.
Supportive (heavily intoxicated) voice from audience: Tell it like it is, Sweaty! Tell it like it is!
Sweaty Tank Top: You were a beauty, like most Ukrainian girls, and I knew I didn’t have a chance. Not a chance for a dance, much less love as I knew it at the time – Miss Kyiv – I shall call you. Yeah, you were cruel, baby, absolutely uninhibited in your biting remarks about what makes for proper men’s attire. What’s in a shirt, with all the meaningless buttons leading up to a stiff, imposing collar that cuts off a fella’s breath before it can even exit his lungs? You taught me, didn’t you?
Supportive drunken voice: Tell it like it isss…
Hidshit: (over his shoulder and scowling) Hey, keep it down!
Sweaty Tank Top: So I suffered… like a thin piece of sleeveless cloth flung over a shapeless and foul-smelling torso did I feel. The rejection was real… an ordeal… (dramatic pause). And everyone knew it in the expatriate community… and with impunity… did they scorn… me… for all to see.
Diminutive bearded figure: (dark eyes pointed up to guy sitting next to him) Psst. Can you lend me five hryvnias for a shot of vodka?
Guy: Huh… er, why don’t you ask someone else?
Sweaty Tank Top: Someone else? Yeah, that’s who it will always be, not me, can’t you see? O, city of beautiful women whom I can only leer at from the confines of the 3×5 photo that accompanies my weekly editorials. That’s right, the guy with the pasty face, no chin and greasy blond hair – Barney Rubble-cum-Yogi Bear, in need of a shower, or at least a few nights off from the basement bars that so attract a foreign soul, a foreign soul who writes shit that nobody reads because I either don’t write it at all, or am too embarrassed to show it to anyone, much less get it printed.
Hidshit: (to girlfriend half his size) Do you have my “For whom the night bird hoots” poem with you?
Girlfriend: (suddenly distraught) No, you didn’t ask me to take it. Should I have taken it…?
Hidshit: (irritated) All right, never mind, I can improvise with some other stuff… but you should have remembered to take it…
Heckler: Shhhhhhhh!
Hidshit: (looks back) Huh?
Heckler: What are you looking at, Owl Face? – ha, ha, ha…
Sweaty Tank Top: But what’s in a face? Can you face it, if I tell you, anew, you chosen few? I’ve faced a trio of so-called editors who rejected me for a position at the city’s leading English-language newspaper; I’ve faced a face, if you want to call it that, which crept into my confidence at What’s Off magazine only to try and later take full control of that vital source of entertainment for expatriates by hiring his cronies right under my nose, so it goes.
Diminutive bearded figure: (who, thanks to a shifting spotlight, now appears to be of South Asian descent and at least 60 years of age; pensively, to guy sitting next to him) Methinks Sweaty Tank Top doth protest too much…
Guy: Listen, I gave you that five hryvnias, now can you leave me alone?
Girlfriend: He’s going on awfully long, Jim. Are you even going to get a chance to read your stuff?
Hidshit: I don’t know, but we may have more serious problems…
Girlfriend: What, what is it? Is there someone in the audience whom you owe money to again? Tell me, I need to know these things…
Sweaty Tank Top: (eyes raised to light) But don’t cry for me, ancient Kyiv – you ungrateful whore! Not for me, your foreign-born bard; not for me, your gadfly of public morality always there to tell you how to behave on escalators in the metro or in restaurants frequented by foreigners like me who only speak English…
Hidshit: (grabs girlfriend) Let’s go, now. I see an exit just to the right there.
Girlfriend: Huh… but I’ve found your owl poem…?!
Diminutive bearded South Asian pensioner: (to same guy) Is five hryvnias such a large amount of money for you, eh?
Sweaty Tank Top: I don’t need your love. I can go on forever writing those same 400 words…
Drunken Supporter: Tell it like it is, Sweaty!
Out on the street, just in advance of the rest of the audience…
Jack Step: Well, at least he thinks he had one supporter in the crowd.
Dirk Dickerson: Yeah, if I didn’t know you quit drinking, I would have sworn that you were drunk in there.
Jack Step: Are you gonna go chasing after Hidshit and his half-sized girlfriend?
Dirk Dickerson: Naw, I’m gonna call it a night. I wanted to put up another piece on the Commix section before hitting the sack.
Grecian Formula 44, aka Rico Soiree: (looking over his shoulder at Dickerson as he hurriedly leads away a hippy chick by the arm) Shit, that lunatic seems to be everywhere…
Diminutive bearded South Asian pensioner: (calling after Grecian Formula 44) Hey, what about taxi fare? How am I supposed to get home?!
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, March 24, 2013