It’s just a fucking drycleaning ticket, a lousy sales receipt… So why does Step keep bringing it up? What did he expect the Heavy Hebe to answer about it when he was wrecking all his shit?
On the other hand, why was the Hebe so frightened at the mention of the ticket; why was he so taken aback?
Or was Step just fucking with the Hebe, you know, having some fun at the Hebe’s expense, and it didn’t really matter what he asked, or said to him? The Hebe was all shocked and distraught, so his reaction to almost anything, especially coming from that maniac, Step, was likely to be more or less the same…
This is something for my journal…
Except for Dirk Dickerson, the office is empty just now, affording Dickerson some highly coveted moments of peace and reflection.
And no drone attacks – unreal. The peace, the quiet, as they say, are deafening.
And, paradoxically, somewhat unnerving. Dickerson bangs his coffee cup on his desk to break the unsettling silence, but breaks the cup, instead.
Yeah, I knew that would happen. Good thing I drank most of it. It’s almost as if I’ve done all this before…
Dickerson just leaves the pieces and coffee mess as are – even as the cold, brown liquid seeps into some yellow notepad paper containing some of Dickerson’s recent notes, all of which he’s already crossed out as dead ends and untenable – figuring Ira, the nurse who changes his bandages, will come in soon enough to clean things up, having no doubt heard the loud noise.
I know she’ll be annoyed, and that it’s not in her job description, but why would I care?
He reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out his journal, which is also a sort of diary, for a few seconds banging it this way and that against the drawer’s inside panels merely for the brief satisfaction of adding to and completing, with a loud and hollow drumming, the commotion he’d begun with the cup’s sharp and crisp shattering.
Get up, snaps Ira. Go, you, away from the desk. Do so now!
Dickerson is more than happy to oblige. He pops up out of his chair and, holding his journal, walks to the other side of the room, where he stands, just outside the door into the adjacent gym. Somewhat anxiously, he begins rifling through the oft-mad record of his own years.
Here it is… the first reference to that damn laundry ticket I could find in The Commix…
Dickerson finds a hard copy of the story referenced in his journal in a filing cabinet. At the bottom of the final page, the archivist’s notation: “From a series of largely unauthored stories, undated, best guess filed between the beginning of April and the end of May, 2017.”
Right. It’s probably the Half Guinea, judging by the title…
He pulls the story file copy out of the folder and reads, in part:
Quote:
“So then what happened?” [allegedly The Half Guinea to John Smith – Ed.]
“I head over to the Podil-area drycleaners.”
“You didn’t get started on the paperwork?”
“No.”
“You decided to get your suit pressed instead?”
“That’s right. My wife’s dead, so I have to take care of these things on my own, now. And while I was there, I picked up this…”
Smith removes from the lower front pocket of his light-gray suit jacket a small piece of paper, on which is printed a sales receipt for the dry-cleaning of several “perforated performance sheets,” including a ten percent discount for “value-added customers”.
The Guinea examines the receipt as best he can, as Smith holds it between two fingers, twisting it upright to-and-fro. But the writing is large and legible enough for The Guinea to certify its contents.
“So what?”
“So, the Heavy Hebe, who had his arm wrenched behind his back by Step, who then tossed him face-first into a pool of muck – the same guy who then showed up at the flat in Podil, where he was viciously assailed again by someone completely different and yet still managed to get a lucky punch in on Step, knocking him cold to the floor – this same amazingly large Hasidic Jew runs a drycleaners in Podil, not far from where all this and other earlier unbelievable action took place.”
“And?”
“And… he handles the dry-cleaning for that strip bar where the girls all dance in ‘holey’ bed linen!”
End quote.
And further down in the same number, alleged John Smith continues to be grilled, by allegedly The Half Guinea:
Quote:
“You… still haven’t explained how you came across the receipt for the ‘perforated performance sheets,’ or do they just leave those things lying around at the order desk of that drycleaners?”
End quote.
[Note from KUSEB: So, whoever’s writing this thing has got to be a major non-writer/loser, if they need to republish large swaths of an earlier work published to this outfit – and, we will add, a work that is vastly superior in writerly qualities than the dreck being served up with this present number – to make up something like half of the text of their own work. Just saying…]
In the same report that introduces the laundry ticket, we have the giant Hasid knocking Step down, and out; so clearly, there’s an established history between the two; thus, the Hebe’s cowering act in the synagogue subbasement the other day when Step was smashing up all his spooking tools was just that… an act… possibly… I mean, the story does say that the punch he got in on Step was lucky (in other words, kind of a fluke) – and with all that weight behind it, it’s no wonder Step got KO’d…
It’s not that I’m making Step out to be some kind of hero of mine in all of this; but I simply find all this… well, this entire business, that’s what… not so much suspicious, I would say, as highly… questionable; Yeah, that’s it: questionable and contentious…
And somehow, one way or another, I seem to be mixed up in all this filth as well… shooting this guy, killing that guy. After a while, it gets to be a bit much, even if I do say so myself.
I mean, are these things really true? Could they possibly be? Someone, it seems to me, keeps putting in these details that I not only find completely alien to my person, but absolutely abhorrent beyond all description. That I would even think of… no… no… it’s utterly preposterous, outright and downright diabolical. No wonder every now and then, when I walk down the hall, or simply limp into the messroom for a quick cup o’ joe, you know, to keep myself going, I sense like I’m being eyed by some of my own colleagues around here with a palpable degree of suspicion… and distrust… as though I were in some way sneaky, and my whole insanity thing has all been just some kind of act… a ruse…
But they could never know my pain…
Anyway…
Suspicion… Yes… suspicion… Here, suspicion, there suspicion, and everywhere a guess-guess… Aye, matey – suspicion, caw! That’s the ticket…
Ticket?! Oh, no…
And here… an undated Saint Stephan piece, archived with an estimated filing date of March 1, 2019, called “#1 – his spot is gone” ; one of four, summarizing the final fateful moments of the Ferret, when he decided to call Steve Kowalski out for a fight, just for fun – having earlier beat the unsuspecting lad to a hospitalizing pulp in a Podil whisky bar, when Kowalski had merely been sitting off in a corner nursing his tumbler, minding his own business, as they say, and reading poetry – believing it would be yet another easy victory, but instead culminating in the Ferret’s somewhat preternatural death of crashing head-first into the pavement and disintegrating into dust, in front of the city’s main synagogue, and without Kowalski’s laying a hand on him. And then he got washed away…
In this first report, we see the Heavy Hebe thrusting “a piece of paper into The Ferret’s left jacket pocket,” as he runs by him outside the synagogue, that paper clearly being the drycleaning ticket, as evidenced by the very next piece, “#2 – he is perceptibly and strangely influenced” , in which the Ferret for some reason vehemently renounces and denounces the bill, after the Hebe asks him by phone why he didn’t even bother to look at it:
Quote:
“‘So what?!’, The Ferret finally thinks in anger… ‘… heh… heh… heh… Why should I look at it? I saw it already! It was that dry-cleaning ticket, a sales receipt, heh – I wasn’t going to pay that thing! That was Smith’s debt, not mine!… heh… heh… Or… heh… or maybe it’s that note I wrote for Za – Say! What is this, anyway?! Heh. I don’t care WHAT it is! Heh… heh… I’m not gonna look at it, ‘cause I got NOTHIN’ TO DO WITH IT!!! Heeehh… heeeeehh… HEEEEEEEHH…!!!’”
End quote.
This is how I see it: The Ferret tried to palm the bill off on Smith while still reaping the benefits of the 10 percent discount for value-added customers by sending new goyim business to the drycleaner’s generated from Smith’s activities at the Hasidic Strip Bar. He also wanted to hold it as a form of blackmail over the compromised Smith’s head.
But that was back then. Things are completely different now. Who knows just how far-gone Smith is by now… so far steeped in evil, it makes no sense for him to turn around… The crow makes wing to the rooky wood, and those rooks had better watch it…
Rooks? I… no… what I meant to say… And what… did I mean… to say? Oh, probably just that he’s nice and comfortable in those woods – crowing all about it, ha-ha – and isn’t planning to leave them any time soon; probably never… No… no… that’s not it, at all… And those damn rooks had better watch it, is all. Do you hear me? They just better watch it, ‘cause, even though their number’s great, they’re outclassed by the… crow… the one and only, solitary all alone and lonely… crow…
Hey… HEY! Do you… HEAR ME???!!!
And with that, what, exactly, have I achieved? Where, precisely, has it gotten me? Forget about it… Just put it in your journal, Dirk (the rook says), and then try to let it go… you repulsive troglodyte ape… Maybe take the couch, close the door, and get some sleep…
Filed by – We’ll Just Keep the Author out of It This Time, Shall We…, November 6, 2025
To be Continued in Part II