Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  Anyway, it’s interesting how most people see being struck dead by lightning while sitting on a throne as entirely different from when it happens in a cottage. Or, for that matter – to pick somewhere even closer in location and dramatis personae to the park lavatory – in that rococo folly in the English Garden, the Gazebo of Revery. It had other names – the Kiosk, the Wet Goods Shop – and without a doubt kindly, rococo matrons had read their share of romance novels in it. This sentimental outhouse had another name, too: Cupid’s Grotto. Often it had plaster putti installed over its doors, their arrows aimed at whoever walked in. The romance novels that were read in the ‘Kiosk’ were just as likely to tempt the reader to sin, and I’m quite sure that this secluded spot was the rendezvous of various infidelities as well. Yet something tells me that there are very real differences between these two park conveniences – even if people do the same thing in both (and if they’re not doing it then at least they are fantasising about it). And that’s just fine.

  Did they have cottages before the war? There’s a photo of German Breslau that shows Plac Polski with an elegant privy made of carved wood in the place of today’s rotunda. A number of top-hatted gentlemen with canes are strolling down the gravel-strewn boulevard among flowerbeds and fountains. Does the Rainy Lover’s prewar countenance count as evidence? Maybe he was simply the ghost of some prewar German, murdered, say, by unidentified perpetrators? The history of homosexual life here has yet to be written, unless you count streams of urine on a tin wall as writing. Were there as many ‘inverts’ before the war? Where did they meet? Where did they have sex?

  The only place I knew of was the ‘Scorched Picket’.

  Someone was always setting fire to it. It wasn’t actually a cottage at all, but an elegant stone pavilion, solid German masonry, with little columns and statues, rendered in typical nineteenth-century lavatory classicism.

  It was the ‘alternative’ cruising ground, for those who didn’t want to take any chances, since it was always quiet – not many people even knew about it – and there were never any skinhead attacks. The Scorched Picket. A gloomy corner of the park overgrown with bushes, where hardly anyone ever walked, a long way from the boulevard. Left to grow wild, like an English garden. Long ago, before the war, this was where German homosexuals would meet. If you want proof, just go to the University Library or the Ossolineum and ask to see the crime reports on homicides and scandals. The really ancient divas will tell you how, in the fifties and sixties, the German queens who had stayed and, for whatever reason, had not been expelled, still frequented the Scorched Picket. Even though it had been torched hundreds of times! They went there again and again to celebrate their ritual of disbelief about what had happened. The place had not caught on with the Poles yet, having been badly burned during the war. But that didn’t bother the Germans. They would circuit round, say hello to everyone, and camp it up among themselves. They’d pretend their cruising ground hadn’t been scorched at all, that nothing had changed. They’d shake hands, wish each other a pleasant evening.

  Not until the eighties did the Poles start to go there, and then it was almost grudgingly. Sometimes there would only be one or two. Zdzicha Anaconda, some bloke passing through town who’d read about the place in an out-of-date guidebook… No one knows who kept setting fire to it. Did it have something to do with the war and the Germans? Was it some rite for purifying the place, a cleansing by fire? Or maybe the tin windcock on the roof really did attract lightning? A sturdy fence was recently erected around the Scorched Picket, and workmen were seen clearing the rubble, the fluorescent colours of their garb contrasting oddly with the age-blackened brick.

  Sometimes grunt would show up in the tin at Cruising Central, looking like a hundred-zloty note – and a crisp, newly minted one at that. Some chanteuse would immediately duck in after him, he’d unbutton his fly, then pull out his badge and declare:

  ‘Police. Give me your papers.’

  The Communist Queens, the ‘System Queens’, the ones in with the Party and authorities, quickly wangled their way out, but others would be stuck in the nick for a long time. I didn’t know a single Solidarity Queen, the ones involved in the resistance. Nor any Militant Queens. But it’s interesting to consider what role they might have played in that men’s game, when the women in the shipyards were slicing bread and helping out. They had no place in the theatre of the sexes. Somehow, too, that feminine submissiveness typical of both homos and older (pre-emancipated) women kept them from taking part in the resistance. They wanted the system to take them from behind; they enjoyed being passive, submissive, obedient… Or else they simply lived in their own imaginary universe, so reality meant nothing and nothing meant anything to them.

  ***

  It’s hard to say if anyone ever felt pity for them. They would have had to feel pitiable first! Jessica had a job as an orderly at the hospital. She was mean and stupid. Her life was dominated by television shows. First it was Dallas, then Return to Eden, then North and South, and at the end, before she died, Dynasty, which she watched in the emergency ward. Jessica would wash the dirty windows in the hospital corridors and see herself reflected in the glass as Alexis. Perhaps it was due to the distance, or the dim light, or something else entirely, but in the glass Jessica’s grubby apron, plastered with ID tags and purple stamps, looked just like the white dress worn by Alexis in the last episode. Jessica’s sweaty locks were transformed into a new perm. She was speechless with delight, bursting with pride. Slowly, keeping her eyes on the windowpane, she climbed down the ladder and set her bucket on the floor. On the other side of the window, in the courtyard, cats were yowling and screeching like monsters, tearing each other apart. They were all black and bad-tempered. Jessie knew full well what they were fighting over! Only members of staff knew about the corner of the courtyard where, surrounded by a wire fence, there was a rubbish bin marked Biological Waste. Jessie once had to take an amputated leg there. It was surprisingly heavy. She was ordered to leave it at the courtyard for a special unit to collect the next day. For a long time afterwards, Jessie could not accept certain facts: how could she, as Alexis, have carted someone’s leg around? How did this relate to her? But she learned to live with it, and that’s when she started telling everyone what an extremely tough and noble job she had, how she was ‘saving lives’ and came into contact with death every day. Meanwhile, the unit usually waited for biological waste to accumulate before picking it up, and the fence and the red No Entry signs were no deterrents for the cats.

  At least Jessica realised, to some degree, that it was all a fantasy, that those dirty gloves from the flea market weren’t the lambskin finery she pretended they were, and that the vodka she drank at night down at the tram depot wasn’t champagne. It was just a bit of make-believe, something to make it easier to knock back the goblet of her life, which tasted nothing like champagne. ‘Fine. On closer inspection, it isn’t entirely true,’ she’d say to herself while cleaning a clogged urinal or emptying a bed pan. ‘I’m still a far cry from Alexis, but maybe we can just pretend, like children do.’And she winked at the mirror as if she were lobbing a sardonic joke at Blake Carrington or, better yet, his wife Krystle. So just for today let’s pretend I’m her. Jessica was filled with joy; she gushed; she was the very picture of a respectable lady! She put on airs and let the patients light her cigarettes and refused to thank them. She held her head high, put her hair in curling papers, smeared lip balm on her lips and pretended it was lipstick. Often she would go over to the other orderlies and cleaning ladies, take a seat in their cubicles, and fall into the role of the star.

  ‘Zdzisio [Jessica had been given the unfortunate name Zdzisław] just sits there like an empress with his legs crossed, and refuses to eat bread and butter left over from lunch! He uses a glass cigarette holder to smoke his cigarettes! Oh, how he smokes!’ The orderlies couldn’t understand why Empress Zdzisio never harassed them. One of the nurses, an ignorant woman with cheap curls who went around singing chart h
its from San Remo all day, once stumbled across Jessica in the boiler room in an obvious clinch with the boilerman. She was so shocked she dropped her syringe, which henceforth was useless as the needle had come into contact with the floor, which was filthy, covered with coal. ‘Maria, Maria, Maria’ — the nurse hummed her favourite song under her breath with malicious satisfaction and decided she’d shadow Jessica. Thereafter, whenever anyone said something nice about Jessica at the nurses’ station, she would mutter under her breath: ‘The princess… Princess Diana! But there’s nobody else to empty the bedpans…

  As if in a dream, Jessica picked up shreds of the nurses’ everyday conversations.

  ‘Turn the telly on, the broadcast from San Remo’s on tonight. Good job I’m on the night shift so I can watch it.’

  ‘Stay down in Emergency, they’ve got colour TV down there. I always go down to Emergency when the figure skating’s on. You can hardly watch the telly in TB for all the ghost images.’

  ‘They say TB is haunted.’

  ‘It’s true, haunted by the health service.’

  Jessica loved to tour the old hospital at night, and that nurse would follow her every step. It was an enormous edifice on which each era had left its alterations and annexes. Only the Church of the Infant Jesus in Warsaw is as architecturally bizarre. At every turn Jessica came across long-forgotten store rooms full of chairs, broken lamps, and operating tables. At night the deserted hallways, long and low-ceilinged like corridors in a bunker, were filled with pallid flourescent light. It was hard not to get lost in such a labyrinth. You could, of course, follow the white arrows on the green emergency exit signs, but then you’d get lost even more quickly, because the arrows were all mixed up and pointed the wrong way. Jessica would come across one pointing directly back the way she had come. The innumerable glass doors between the wards and the stairwells were locked shut with chains that rattled menacingly. On the ground floor the kiosk, when open, offered patients an array of stunningly dreary wares, telephone cards, fruit juice, and issues of Detective magazine, so that they wouldn’t be bored and could curtail their own anticipation of death by reading about other people dying. Down another level was the cellar, and who knew if they stored corpses there? For – as Jessica was fully aware – an average of five patients died every day. But down there, with the generators humming, in the sad, cold light, she never ran into a single ghost. Modern death ruled this hospital: empty as a blown eggshell, clinical, it hummed with electricity and smelled of Lysol.

  During her nocturnal sojourns, Jessie would lock herself in one of the spacious, empty, unheated lavatories. She would inhale the smell of disinfectant. Once she opened a window and peered into the well of the courtyard. Her face grew frosty, and something seemed to be moving about down below. On another of her night walks, she discovered a lavatory she’d never noticed before in Cardiology. The heavy doors creaked loudly, the echo repeating itself over and over through the sleeping ICU. The lavatory was freezing cold; it had clearly not been heated since the budget cuts were implemented. It was used now as a store room: IV-drip stands, wheelchairs for patients too weak to walk, ancient fire extinguishers, cracked and shattered vitrines – all piled up in the dust and petrified by the cold. She also came across a mirror marked with white streaks of evidence, dirty and unclear, but all the more beautifully deceitful for that. At such moments Jessie would pull her lipstick out of her pocket, along with her cheap, white plastic hairslides (nicked from a bedside table in the women’s ward), and then, and only then, could she be Alexis! She opened the window and noticed that across the way a patient – a healthy patient who was clearly only being held for observation – was looking back at her and smoking a (strictly prohibited) cigarette. Jessica approached the situation, or the window at least, head-on. She lifted her smock and without a thought for the darkness or the cold began pinching her nipples. She couldn’t tell whether the patient knew she was a man, or if he was taken in by her plastic hairslides, scarlet lips, and purple eyelids. But he stared and stared at her, all the while making a kind of monotonous motion with his hand. Or maybe that’s just what it looked like to Jessica; darkness plays tricks on the imagination, after all. The next day she saw the man being wheeled into Surgery and figured she must have made a ‘killer’ impression on him.

  Jessica unlocked the lavatory doors with keys hanging from an enormous ring, like the keys to the old chambers. The doors had been painted over at least a dozen times, and peeling off any one of the oily layers would take you back to a completely different era. Jessica would sit on the commode and imagine she was having her period. This turned her on immediately, especially since she always left the door ajar and at any moment one of the patients could walk in on her. It never crossed her mind that this patient would probably be a tubercular grandfather dragging a catheter around. She was happy simply to be living in a palace, an enormous, ancient palace – the hospital’s foundations dated from the Middle Ages after all. She had vodka to drink, cigarettes to smoke, and an endless supply of cock to suck. She wouldn’t have traded it for anything. Not even Alexis had it so good…

  The other queens found Jessie, sweet-and-sour Jessie, unpleasant. Alexis had provided her with a long and effective apprenticeship in the tricky art of intrigue. She’d stand freezing at pay phones and waste her small change ringing up girlfriends, dishing out dirt, dialling wrong numbers, making crank calls, masking her voice with a handkerchief. In a word, she was a right bitch, and that’s exactly what she wanted to be! Eventually the queens were all afraid to have anything to do with her, because it always ended in some elaborate plot, not to mention the rumours she would spread. Jessie was skinny and had a long, pock-marked face. Her sunken chest was wrapped in a snug, pink sweater, and around her neck she wore a scarf run through with silver threads. Knee-high white boots bearing the word Relax. ‘Jessica Masoni is my name – sit up straight when you’re talking tome, lad! Come here, puppy dog, I have something to tell you.’ And after he gave his straight ear: ‘Say “blow me”, and queenie will give you a blowjob. Just look how fleshy my nipples are, some day the girls will show you what nipples are good for. But you’ll have to wait till you’re grown-up, pup!’

  One day Jessie was riding the tram, without a ticket of course. The conductor approached her: ‘Ticket, sir?’

  Not even for an instant did Jessie lose her nerve: ‘Don’t you know who I am? You’re speaking with none other than Jessica Masoni! You don’t believe me? Why, call and ask them on your radio! I’ve even been written up in the Russian papers…’

  In fact, Jessie only ever sororised with Angelica the social worker. They would turn up together in the park and at the sauna, known back in those ancient times as the State Bathing Works. At the picket line they would stand on either side of the road by the Racławicka Panorama and chat up motorists, so that afterwards they could make up unlikely stories about them. ‘I shagged a German; he wants to take me to Germany.’ ‘I shagged a millionaire.’ But the biggest sensation was always the one set off by the simple confession: ‘I shagged a grunt.’ No millionaire could inspire that kind of envy. Double-breasted suits and attaché cases with combination locks were nothing compared to broken teeth or a ruddy face, muscle-bound thighs or beery belches.

  ***

  A bottle of homemade liqueur lands on the table. It tastes of herbs; it’s cloudy, strong, and a little too minty. We drink and smoke. They start to loosen up. They explain how life just isn’t what it used to be. No soldiers, no park; and now the queens entertain themselves in modern, elegant bars that anyone can go to, bars crammed with journalists and wannabe movers-and-shakers. But they’re not queens anymore, they’re gays. Tanning salons, techno music, frou-frou. And no one has any sense of filth or wrongdoing – it’s all about having fun.

  But in the old days… In the old days they would stand in the street by the public toilets and no one could fail to see that something filthy was going on. During the whole of communism there was a little Orbis-run bar a
cross from the opera house that everyone called the Little Fairy, or the Orbs, or the Nellie Bar, or – as those just passing through would call it – Fairy Bar. All of five metres square! In the café on the corner there’s a concert every night. Two fat ladies stood behind the counter serving mostly coffee and cognac. You only had to walk by on the street to smell the coffee, the odour of sweet decay emanating, no doubt, from the jam tarts in the refrigerated case, the cheap perfume. Where did that smell come from? How could someone in a blindfold using only his nose straightaway detect that out of twenty café bars, this was the one infused with the stink of decay?

  Patricia, Lucretia von Schretke, the Countess, Cora, Joanna the Priest’s Girl, Giselle, Jessica, Madame d’Aubergine, and Golda, aka La Belle Hélène, spent all their free days there. Now and then a lonely traveller would wander in, take a seat on one of the high bar stools, and, immersing himself in the stench, watch the men walking by outside the window. Out of boredom he would ponder the word ORBIS painted across the glass, which from inside was inverted: SIBRO. Sibro, the most beautiful word in the world! More often than not it would be raining, more often than not he would light up a Carmen, and more often than not he would not leave alone. But before he left, all of them – Patricia, Lucretia, the Countess, Cora, Giselle, and Jessica, who was the first to get AIDS – would begin winking at him, buying him cognac, and glancing impatiently at the toilet door.

  They were all hoping for a stroke, or more, of good fortune, for something that happened maybe once a year, at most: that the door would open and in through the heavy, plush, crimson curtain would come a soldier, or fireman, or teenage boy who was thinking of trying it for the first time. No one ended up there by accident, even though the place was utterly nondescript: no neon sign, no suggestive name. Whenever a newcomer finally did show up, he was usually nervous; his hands would tremble as he stirred the grounds of his Turkish coffee in its plain glass cup, and he would keep getting up from the stool, which was awkward to sit on. Those infamous bar stools, always either too high or too low… For the novices, the bi-curious, after chancing upon the place where the pederasts congregated, the bar stools were always the first hurdle.