Steve Kowalski heads to a sleazy strip bar on Kyiv’s left bank
War or no war, a sexually frustrated Steve Kowalski can no longer restrain himself from heading to the tastelessly named Strip Shelter, easily the sleaziest among the short row of strip joints that have cropped up in the last year or so on Kyiv’s flat-faced left bank.
The reason Steve has chosen The Strip Shelter is because he has no other choice, as The Strip Shelter is the only “gentlemen’s club” that will allow him past its “velvet rope”, as it is the willing repository of the more desperate losers who are rejected from the other three. The other three – Skin Game, Birthday Suit, and The Flesh Dive – have already face-controlled Steve to the curb; the last, quite literally with a jackboot kick to his bony Billy the Kid jeanswear ass.
Well, he shouldn’t have spontaneously and unselfconsciously touched that mostly naked girl, who was touching him, after The Flesh Dive had actually taken its chances and let him in. In all fairness to The Flesh Dive, the bouncer was only doing his job according to established industry-wide rules. In all fairness to Steve, he genuinely didn’t know the rules. But, as they say, not knowing the law is never an excuse for breaking it.
“Yes, it is! It is an excuse, it is too an excuse…” Steve did not catch himself muttering half-aloud on the metro ride all the way back home that night, to the bafflement and mockery of everyone around him.
Be that as it may…
The strip bars are a convenient short walk from the Left-Bank Metro Station.
And, yes, the nighttime metro ride on the city’s Red Line across the broad-shouldered Dnipro to the city’s left bank is still well worth it to Steve, notwithstanding the above-documented misadventure, poor guy, who’d only ever gotten a blowjob in the capital city all those years ago not long after his arrival to pursue his dream and fortune as a poet; a fascinating moment that can best, and perhaps only, be referred to as a sort of beginner’s, or newcomer’s luck, a thing that most certainly does exist. But then, once you’ve used it up, it goes away, after which, you make your own luck… or not…
With Steve, it’s been exclusively ‘not’ – with one exception.
The other full-on sexcapade, with Steve experiencing vaginal penetration by his own surprisingly hardened cock, was with a homely coworker from the Angry Curmudgeon, the ridiculous, almost satirical, English-language tabloid of seamy-sided repute that has still managed to somehow remain in print in Kyiv.
You see, Zenia had kept coming on to Steve in a way that communicated, ‘Hey, you’re never going do any better than me in this town, so you’d better take what you’re being offered’, and he did, initially disgusted, and disappointed, by the whole ordeal though he was.
It was only her room’s nihilistic darkness and Steve’s fervent imagination, together with recalling to mind his own small-town-USA rape-fantasy poem, which helped Steve replace what he had under him with what he actually wanted under him. This, in turn, allowed him, eyes tight shut – and amazingly managing to mentally block out the cat that had purposely begun jumping up on and off of the window ledge directly behind them – to not only rise to the occasion, but even enjoy his own climax.
But the worst part about the experience hadn’t been his initial repulsion by it, but rather, crawling up to Zenia at work about a week later, wanting some of the same and taking his presumed guaranteed entry for granted, only for the girl to reject him… laughing…
For it turned out that she’d just used Steve, as jealousy bait, to hook the boy at work she’d really wanted, Timofey, a dark and brooding web engineer, second in command on the Curmudgeon’s IT team, which everyone else, who was not IT, was afraid of, and referred to in hushed and deferential tones as – guess what? – The Geek Squad, because everyone in Ukraine is just so fucking original.
And so, Steve Kowalski, it had become painfully clear even to Steve Kowalski, wouldn’t be improving on his abysmal sex record any time soon. And what with Internet porn having begun to wear him out, forcing his brain to rewire against it and lose interest (due to both overstimulation and overuse) the third best option (other than reading his own rape-fantasy poem) seemed to Steve to be The Strip Shelter, especially as he knew his admission into it was a certainty – and that fact alone excited him. Later on, he could think about it and, you know…
Steve Kowalski sees Jack Step inside the strip bar
This, I’m ashamed to admit, has been a long way of stating a short fact – that now, Steve Kowalski sits within the smelly, depraved depths of The Strip Shelter, nursing a tumbler of whisky, taking wobbly stock of his own increasing degeneracy, as just above him, the typically small tits of a high-cheeked Ukrainian chicky bounce up and down and around a pole on a sandy stage.
And there, across the room and through the smoke, under dismal lighting, the middle table up against the opposite wall, he sees American Detective First Class Jack Step. No doubt about it. That’s Jack Step, all right. Steve himself had run Step’s mugshot through the Curmudgeon’s yellowy pages many-a-time.
And Steve’s not impressed. That Kyiv-based American detective agency should really send the Curmudgeon another photo of the guy, because this guy is old. Not that old, but still, no longer the taught-faced hard-jowl of the only stock image the paper has of him.
And then, there on the table, just ahead of his hands, Step’s own tumbler of whisky – Johnnie Walker Red, no doubt. Ha! So much for all those rumors that he’d stopped drinking.
With that, Steve rises with his things from his table and burrows across the room until he’s standing next to Step, who, though he is aware of Kowalski’s presence, continues poring over a jagged swath of nervy text he has just scribbled into a blue-lined yellow legal notepad with a No. 2 pencil. He stops writing mid-stream as soon as he senses Kowalski actually trying to read what he’s written.
“Well, then…”
Naturally, and, much as we would expect, Step does not raise his head and turn to look at Kowalski to acknowledge his physical presence.
“Oh, uh, nothing… nothing… So, I know who –”
“I know who you are, too, Kowalski. Although I don’t think we’ve ever met; but that doesn’t matter, I guess. And what would you have of me… Steve?”
Kowalski does not know or remember wherefrom or how he’d gotten the gumption to actually pull out the spare seat at Step’s table and sit in it, without first being invited to do so. Under that seat he stows his bag of things and places his drink down before him.
He marvels at the medium-book-sized metal case that lays closed on the table with the words “WRITING KIT” impressed on its cover, followed by “Bona Fide Detective Groups of America – U.S. Kyiv HQ” in smaller scoring underneath.
‘And that case is filled with what?’ Kowalski wonders – ‘more No. 2 pencils; erasers; a pencil sharpener; perhaps a couple of pens; white-out correction fluid; a stapler; a staple remover; a few smaller-sized notepads: for those quick jottings, or sudden ideas that pop into your head that you don’t want to risk forgetting later, so you’d better write them down right away; a few sticky-note pads, for those mere, but hard-to-remember reminders; some kind of abbreviated style guide?
‘And whoever heard of someone writing physically in a notepad anymore? In longhand? These days, who does that kind of thing? Well, if you’re going to take the trouble of playing the “writer” who slouches his trade into a sleazy strip bar on left-bank Kyiv, then you might as well make a dramatic self-pitying show of it – right, Step?’
Filed by Mr. Logic, September 18, 2025