PRAISE FOR KRAKOW MELT:
“Strange, provocative, and daring: all adjectives that fit Daniel Allen Cox’s work. In Krakow Melt, the writer gets stranger, more provocative, and more daring. Best of all, he’s given us a novel that’s both thrilling and fun to read.”
—Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear
“I’ve been a fan of Daniel Allen Cox’s writing for some time, and in Krakow Melt the wit, punch, and sexual heat of Shuck return, revved up even more. As we read, we slip into a free zone of writing, almost as if the boundaries of the page had themselves slipped away and we were free to wander through Eastern Europe like natives, with the haunted and nomadic gaze of those on whom history has given up. Cox brings us a story of struggle, defeat, liberation, and love that I will never forget.”
—Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle and Impossible Princess
“Krakow Melt is Syd Barrett crossed with the Polish queer nation, a rollicking and heart-pounding urban jump through some grim realities and fine prose stylings.”
—Zoe Whittall, author of Bottle Rocket Hearts and Holding Still For As Long As Possible
KRAKOW
MELT
Daniel Allen Cox
KRAKOW MELT
Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Allen Cox
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
#101-211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 1Z6
arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Editing by Susan Safyan
Cover design by Farah Khan, house9design.ca
Author photograph by Dallas Curow, dallascurow.com
Printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cox, Daniel Allen
Krakow melt [electronic document] / Daniel Allen Cox.
Type of computer file: Electronic document in PDF format.
Also available in print format.
ISBN 978-1-55152-390-3
I. Title.
PS8605.O934K73 2010a C813’.6 C2010-903591-7
For Mark
and for those who can still smell the fire
Contnets
NOWA HUTA
ÊTRE ET DURER
CHICAGO
THE LORD’S WORK
DANISH BLUE
YOUTUBE
CMENTARZ
VERMICULITE
CHOCOLATE MILK
GEMELLI HOSPITAL
SEA SALT
YOUTUBE
DEAR MAGPIE
KRYPTOZOOLOGY
PLATINUM
MINGUS DYNGUS
MUSTH
ZOOMIE AWARD FINALIST
CAPTAIN JACK BONAVITA
TINNITUS
YOUTUBE
FOOTBALL
SAN FRANCISCO
DEAR BOYFRIEND
CONCH
GAUZE
EKSTRA
THE SMOK WAWELSKI
NOWA HUTA
Kraków is crows. Big, floppy ones. I don’t live in the city centre but in Nowa Huta, a suburb a few kilometres east. We can still hear them squawking from so far away, yammering on about the histories. I do a bit of that myself.
Nowa Huta was originally designed without a church. I love it for other reasons, too.
The Central Square explodes into a grid of side streets and tributaries lined with giant cement apartment blocks. It looks better than it sounds; this is the best of Soviet and Renaissance design, melded together. There used to be a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the Plac Centralny, but it was vandalized to hell. The Soviets should have remodelled it to make the fellow a smidge more popular. Perhaps a pose for the ages: entwined naked with Leonardo da Vinci, giving each other looks that say, “Four hundred years couldn’t keep us apart. Can you believe it? Give me a kiss.”
Didn’t anyone think to tell the Soviets that if they wanted to engineer the human soul, they should start with the body?
In the Osiedle Sportowe housing complex on Ignacego Mocickiego Street, where I live, there are industrial smoke detectors on every floor. Smart. The Stalinists didn’t want fires in the workers’ paradise— fire, historically, has led to even greater trouble—so they planted them everywhere, like landmines. These hidden screamers catch Pani Laszkiewicz every time she goes for a smoke in the stairwell. The building fire alarm rings and a whole eastern bloc of cranky neighbours file past her. Some of these reluctant evacuees spit at her vinyl maid’s shoes, others snap her cigarette in two, usually in mid-puff.
The building has a fire warden on every floor, entrusted with the task of saving lives. On each of their doors, there’s a hulking brass knocker in case we have to wake them during the night. You can guess what the kids do for kicks, right? The smaller tots can’t reach the knocker alone, so they build teetering human pyramids and clamber over each other to knock their floor-warden into a pissy mood.
Nowa Huta, a bottle’s throw from Kraków, was designed as a planned community, but the plan makes no sense. We once had the biggest steel mill in the country, though Nowa Huta is hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest iron ore deposit. To build this town—a model for future sustainable living—workers bricked over the most fertile, nutrient-soaked land in the nation.
Sustaining ourselves here has sometimes meant tearing concrete slabs out of the earth to plant vegetable gardens.
This proves a point of mine: you have to destroy in order to create. I will not gum up progress. I would be the last one, I swear to you, to knock the fire warden awake. I believe that all fires have a purpose, and I’ll tell you more about that later.
I forgot to remove my black nail polish before going to the ’s office to pay my rent yesterday, and on the way, I ran into Pan Laskiewicz, the husband of secret smoker Pani Laskiewicz. As always, he went to shake my hand (but never in a doorway, of course, because that would be inviting bad luck), and he saw my nails. Pan Laskiewicz is like a saltwater sky: sunny one minute, and a spitting, Baltic hurricane the next. He snarls at the Poczta Polska when they fold his letters to fit them into the letterbox. He pretends to have good manners, but he’s more like a wild boar in a human skin. A real son-of-an-asshole.
A funny look came over his face when he saw my black nails.
“That’s my wife’s,” he said. “She’s the only one who wears black on the end of her fingers.” Even though it’s his first language, Pan Laskiewicz’s Polish wasn’t very good. You could almost see, as one facial twitch ignited another, that he was piecing together a conspiracy in his head. “She adores young men like you, young bucks.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“It doesn’t take a pig brain to realize what you two are doing together,” he said, reaching to fix the suspenders on my glue-spattered overalls. I couldn’t tell if he was casing the best way to bowl me down the main hallway or if he had developed a new respect for me. His generation, it was rumoured, had a love-hate relationship with the young.
“Sorry to tell y
ou,” I replied, “but I don’t find your wife attractive.”
I felt lightning behind my eyelids, my face racing towards the sun. My mind caught up with reality, and I saw Pan Laskiewicz unclench his fist. He had boxed me squarely in the jaw. A corner of my lip exploded. I jumped him and we fell to the floor, the young and the old grappling for power, just like it had always been in Poland. I saw the opportunity to bite his ear off, but I whispered into it instead, caressing it with my lips.
“I am a homosexual,” I said.
That was true, at least according to the broad-brush definition on Polish Wikipedia.
His grip on my balls relaxed and his hand fell away, almost thoughtfully. I started to breathe normally again.
“A cocksucker,” I reiterated. “An expert in shopping for nail polish. And clearly, I am more physical with you than with your wife.”
He rolled away and smiled at me. A slice of a smile. There were grumes of my blood on his fingertips.
“No. I still believe you two have been fucking, but that’s okay.” He flicked my ear affectionately, a macho zing. “I wouldn’t be friends with a homosexual, so you’re obviously making it up. Tell me, though, does she ... arrive at full expression with you?”
The janitor suddenly appeared and nonchalantly started to sweep the trash around us, brushing an ice cream sandwich wrapper noisily past our heads. Ants were making love to it.
I realized that I had lost. For I was fighting not a man who disliked homos but a whole country that refused to acknowledge we existed. Is there a point in standing up for yourself if you’re invisible, if people will simply look right through you?
Now let’s do a safety check.
Nowa Huta is full of smoke detectors, though they’re blanketed with dust; even the newest ones would melt by the time smoke triggered the mechanism. Sure, the administracja appointed a fire warden for every floor, except they managed to pick all the vodka-hounds. Too sauced, I’m guessing, to tell an inferno from a good stiff one that pushes you over the edge.
There are other violations.
The evacuation plan isn’t shared with new tenants, escape routes are mapped to interfere with rescue personnel—whose stairway is it, anyway?—and the dry chemical fire extinguishers are only charged to 170 psi.
In answer to my own question, there’s always a point in standing up for yourself.
Don’t make me light a match, because I will win this war of visibility. You can see fires and the queers who start them for kilometres, especially at night.
ÊTRE ET DURER
Kraków is crows, but it is also parkour, the fine art of moving from point k to point z as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Imagine walking into a cukiernia in deepest summer and ordering a paczek z marmolada. Your order, it would seem, has disturbed a cluster of wasps who were feasting on the pastry, and through jelly-covered eyes they scowl at you, the enemy. You suddenly need to gain the most ground possible in the shortest period of time. You flap your arms, willing your shoulder blades to transform into wings and break through the skin of your back.
These are the things of fairy tales. Parkour is not.
You zoom out of the cukiernia and past the milk bar on Grodzka Street, and you perform a Cat Pass over an old woman selling cloves of garlic from a basket. Strive for the speed of sound. You have no time to waste, not with angry stingers coming to get you. The fence surrounding the Franciscan Church is no match for you and your Dash Vault. You tread lightly over the old bones in the cemetery.
The specialized parkour terminology doesn’t matter, nor would a face full of wasp venom, in the end. What matters is that you’re a free spirit, that you conquer the landscape of your city. This discipline— not sport, not sport—that has slowly leaked out of France and into the streets of Kraków will teach you to turn any physical or mental obstacle to ash.
Mind your language. Parkour is not “freerunning,” the same way that Nintendo is not Sega and zupa ziemniaczana is not toilet water.
Race north along Bracka. Flip not, for this is no performance and there are no spectators. You’re only trying to better yourself. Left on Gołbia at full tilt and prepare for your Jagielloski University Dyno. Sneakers rap against the classroom windows before you drop, thud, and roll. A young woman stares through the glass, her startle melting to a smile. This passe muraille will not splinter your kneecaps because you have learned to absorb, transfer, give in. You have learned to turn on a grosz, and the soles of your feet have memorized the warp and woof of the cobblestone.
You are one with the city.
Run fast enough, and you can jump over a herd of crows before they fly away.
Someone told me it’s called a “murder” of crows, but that sounds like an urban legend.
If parkour were an Olympic sport, Kraków bagel carts would be standard equipment. You turn right on Szczepaska Street, and you spot, a hundred metres ahead, one of those steaming metal contraptions with fogged-up glass. Burnt sesame seeds roast in the open air. There is always a bit of smoke in Kraków.
But the vendor sees you coming and opens his retractable umbrella, giving your hurdle another two metres of height. At the very last second, you switch targets to a parked Polonez with a rusty roof.
There’s only one move that can get you over safely, the Kash Vault: Kong Vault + Dash Vault. Don’t get tripped up in semantics. Just make sure you push off with your hands at the beginning and at the end, and then keep-the-fuck running.
You’re amazed at all the szopka lying around. Who creates these random nativity scenes, in front yards and tree hollows and windowsills, ornate little dioramas on street corners and littering the Rynek Główny? It can be very confusing to traceurs—parkour fanatics like you and I—to run past Bethlehem so many times in one day. If time has stopped in Kraków, then parkour has frozen it.
Interesting. Every time you jump a wall, you feel the crumble of plaster or the chipping of wood. There’s not enough cement in old cities to protect them from an all-out fire. At least you know how to run.
You have long since lost the wasps, and you did it thirteen seconds quicker than your previous record. To a traceur, this can represent a lifetime of improvement. Gratulacje.
But you never did get that donut.
You’ve done well if you’re back on Grodzka Street. Ground rule: responsible traceurs can always get back to where they started.
And remember, you’re not Wonder Woman, you’re just repeating equations:
The flying squirrel can’t fly but can glide up to twenty-five metres by controlling its patagium, a furry skin parachute stretched from wrist to ankle. Its tail is an airfoil that stops it from smashing into treetops.
In the deserts of the southwestern United States, the Crotalus cerastes sidewinds over the dunes, leaving a trail of perfect letter Js in the sand. Snakes are wigged-out locomotives.
The mother-of-pearl moth caterpillar is a self-propelled wheel, touching its head to its tail and spinning downhill at 300 revolutions per minute, forty times its normal speed. Backward. Catch this pupa if you can.
Parkour, you see, has stolen from the best.
Now, sprint south to the greatest challenge of all, the Zamek Wawelski. You are approaching a medieval fantasy, a royal castle on a slice of land jutting into the lazily flowing strip of crystal known as the Wisła River. The Zamek is the centrepiece of Kraków. A reminder that this is one of the only large Polish cities that wasn’t demolished in World War II.
But you can’t see the Wisła. Between you and the water is a stone wall almost 700 years old, covered in pillowy, slippery ivy leaves, only a few metres tall in places. An evacuation slide, if you dare to use it. You’ll land on grass, and your kneecaps will be fine.
But you never know. I’m a dabbler, not a professional—I just do it to impress the guys. In general, I avoid obstacles taller than three feet because I have a bum knee and I’m as graceful as a rhino.
Besides, I have no idea how to apply parkour ph
ilosophies in my life, the sign of a true practitioner. Être et durer: to be and to last. Most days, this seems like an impossible task.
CHICAGO
This miniature construction project seemed easy at first, but the tiny details are ballooning out of proportion.
There’s no way I can replicate the 17,500 buildings that burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. My popsicle stick supply isn’t the problem—it’s the restrictive 1.5 by 1.5-metre plywood foundation that’s forcing me to pick and choose between apothecary, blacksmith, and barber shops. Vegetable market or opera house: how does one decide?
Pink Floyd is the perfect soundtrack for resurrecting a ruined city. My LP copy of Atom Heart Mother doesn’t have a single scratch on it.
I’m lucky to be paid for my work, but there is a downside: the glue fumes. The ventilation in this gallery isn’t very good, but I can’t crack open a window because the wind could upset my whole operation. Besides, I don’t want my fans peeking in before I’m finished—they can wait for the vernissage. If I had decided to build Chicago at home, I would’ve had even less privacy because Nowa Hutans are the nosiest bunch I know.
The plywood is now a grid of pencil marks, blueprints for a highly flammable city. I’ve seen Old Chicago from above, upside-down, and clean through its transparent middle. Someone has to build it, to stoke the old embers.
A few days ago, I realized how I fit into the geometry of the universe.
The fire tetrahedron is a pyramid, the union of four equilateral triangles glued together at the vertices. It’s how all fires start. I rarely believe in universal absolutes—in fact, I usually detest them—but I can’t question this one, especially since I’m such an integral part of it.
Triangle 1: Heat. Transferred by conduction, convection, or radiation. Dancing molecules, swirling liquid or gas, or the toasty vacuum of space.
Triangle 2: Fuel. The combustible greats, none of which I need to name. Anyhow, I’m more interested in rogue materials not supposed to burn.
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