Trowel Dissection, Part Deux: Kevin Dujan Loves A Good Character

Ya want lies with that, honey?

Oh, Brother! All right, she might exist. A snappy, red-haired, hash-slinging waitress named Shirley, who works in a Chicago diner, orders the customers to finish their vegetables, reads twinks for filth on their unflattering club kid outfits, and still is naively exuberant enough to wave at the television because Kevin Dujan is on it could possibly exist somewhere outside of Mr. Dujan's febrile imagination.

But she bears more than a passing resemblence to every Central Casting stock waitress ever to have slapped an order of Adam and Eve on a raft in front of a hard-boiled dick (tective! Pipe down, back there!) in a film noir since Philip Marlowe first pulled up the collar of his trenchcoat. Only in this case the hard-boiled dick (it's what they're called! All right?) is Kevin Dujan, survivor of nefarious left-wing plots, mercilessly bullied by the Forces of Evyll (the "bullying" coming mostly in the form of snickering. But hey, snickering hurts like fire!)

So far, Harvey Bilk's most enchanting characters have failed to materialize. The most glaring absence was the botched Glenn Beck rally meet-up, where all of Kevin's Brideshead ReRan characters were somehow somewhere else, despite Dujan's customers having paid for each of their rooms and travel: where was Panda? Where Robby? Sebastian Grey?

Eventually, Dujan simply stops talking about Sebastian Grey, whose clever little graphic looks suspiciously like...Kevin Dujan. Who is a "lifelong Democrat" of exactly the same stripe as Kevin Dujan. And, who most tellingly, writes exactly, lengthily, like Kevin Dujan. And who wrote just a couple of posts before disappearing, presumably back to his dashing life as a second-string Evelyn Waugh personage, fretfully plucking at the pills on his acrylic cricket sweater in the back of Dujan's overpopulated imagination, waiting for his next call on the bench next to Ann-Louise Melton in her Eve Arden-smart hopsacking suit, adorable Panda, dear little Niblet, and other characters named after whatever other previously inanimate foodstuffs Dujan found he could turn into Lewis Carroll-like figures (Alice? Pudding! Pudding? Alice! Take away the Pudding!) because his eye fell upon them while in the midst of a creative seizure, whether on his plate, in the pantry, or perhaps waving from the late-night television screen. Anyone for a Patty Melt? Writes exactly like Sebastian Gray, which is to say exactly like our own fabulist Kevin Dujan!

So here we are back at Shirley the snappy waitress, who slings hash with pride, but has a secret sorrow: no, not being a lesbian--this is Boystown! No no, worse: she is a Conservative! A Conservative Lesbian waitress, and just one of a circle of Conservative Lesbians, so thrilled to see Dujan bravely representing the Gay Conservative underclass on the Tube that Shirley stands up and waves at him on the TV like a tweeny-bopper at a Justin Beiber concert.

It seems that Shirley is grateful, because she, as a Republican, is part of an oppressed minority for whose rights Kevin is now bravely fighting: members of the service industry whose employers monitor their right-wing reading matter.

Introducing Eye-Candy Dan, a 23-year-old who walks around Boystown with a copy of George W Bush's biography under his arm, causing the owner of the bar where he works to erupt in fury and, according to Dujan, fire him:

“You aren’t a Republican, are you?”, the owner asked him. “Because you can’t work here if you are a Republican. Your ass is gone if you are Republican”.

(Charming patchwork effect thanks to Googlecache.)

Add Eye-Candy Dan to Scaredy-Cat Craig, the bartender who's afraid to be seen talking to Kevin Dujan, the both of them victimized, like Shirley the Waving Waitress, by relentless persecution from the Lefty Haters of Boystown.

Here I have a personal detail to reveal. A couple of decades ago, I, Mrs. Polly, worked for a gay bar. It was a drag bar in the middle of North Carolina, and after I did Art Deco-esque murals behind the upstairs bar, the owner hired me to be a kind of bouncer for the drag queens' dressing room. I was really sort of like the nanny goat in a stable of thoroughbreds.

I had a simply wonderful time with the DQs, who treated me as a combination living Barbie Head (my unprocessed hair was always good for a few hot-roller experiments), and drag-guardian (their sparkly articles were referred to thusly: "thanks for watching over my drag, honey").

It would of course be wrong to extrapolate the behavior of all bar owners from my couple of years of experience, but I still feel safe in saying that all a bar owner is interested in is employees who will show up reliably and keep their fingers out of the till. My North Carolingian drag-bar employer hired drag queen rednecks (yes!), and would have hired Jesse Helms himself if his physique had been better and he'd been willing to dance in a go-go cage.

So Dujan's fantastic and typically unsupported tale of persecution is even more ludicrous than the usual, though "I will reveal the details if ever "Dan" finds another job" can be added to the list of promises which Harvey Bilk's cult members are not likely to see fulfilled (Pictures of the Glenn Beck Rally, anybody?). A bartender's job is to sell drinks. If he looks hot, he'll sell more drinks (and make better tips), and the bar owner doesn't give a flying fig who the bartender talks to as long as his money's good. Period, Finis.

Surely, some of Harvey Bilk's characters must exist, musn't they? Perhaps so. The trouble is telling which, since we know Harvey's, to be kind, a creative writer. Putting himself at two different Thanksgiving tables to construct the same sad craft-paper turkey is just one example of what multitudes he contains. Or, to be succinct: he's a liar.

We do know, however, that some of Harvey Bilk's, or Kevin Dujan's, characters absolutely exist. Who are they? His victims. His victims, his victims. If he attacks someone, he usually does it by full name and location if he can get hold of it, over and over. His fabrications, tellingly, are always the same: that his supposed antagonists wish him to die of AIDS, even the gay ones, whether live or by email. It's an ugly, ugly, accusation, an ugly, ugly thought, and, after twenty-five years of the world's living with AIDS, curiously behind-the-times. Though bigots may still resort to wishing AIDS upon homosexuals, there is a wealth, sad to say, of (don't bother if you don't have to with this depressing link; it's just for verification) other slurs frequently employed by homophobes in 2010. Teenagers on Facebook, for example?

That every hateful person in contact with Kevin Dujan uses the exact same expression once again points to the fabricated nature of his complaints. It's the work of a lazy fiction writer. It also points to Kevin Dujan's sad, repellent, interior.

Brought to you as always by Mrs. Polly of Snarkopolitan, the undead blog, part of an ever-growing network of post-Dujan blogs left and right. Cheers, kids! What a long strange trip, etc!