Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  ‘“Bitches are back!” They saw through us immediately. There are people I’ve known for years, people who’ve had years to figure it out, and they still say to me things like, “One day when you get married and have kids…” But one of those convicts – only later did we find out that the prison in Oleśnica was for the mentally ill – one of those psychiatric prisoners starts right off talking our talk, like he was a big whore just like us, whore to whore… the same fucking language…

  ‘That’s when you squeezed my hand even harder. “Pansies” is what they were shouting at us. One of them stood in the window, taking up the whole window, behind the bars, rubbing his crotch like he was going to fuck the bars… We just stood there. Like we were made of stone, something out of the Bible. Volcanoes seething inside. Over to the main square again, back round again. We’d already given up on the train. It being night and all, we figured we should see what we could make of it; those lads no doubt had but one thing on their minds. There was only that one in the window, but after he saw us he disappeared for a moment, then reappeared with a few others, then they all started beating themselves off on the sill and grunting. Soon they were in all the windows, lighting up the place like a Christmas tree. And we were up there, in there, with them! Above them, someone began signalling something to us with hand gestures; I instantly regretted never having learned their sign language. Then they shouted at us:

  ‘“Heh! Whore! Answer him!” But it was hard to make out their words; after each barrage of shouts we convened a meeting of two, a convocation, combining all our resources to figure out exactly what they were saying. “Heh! Whore! Answer him!” is what we came up with.

  ‘Anyway, as I didn’t understand their sign language, to reply I just stuck my finger in my mouth and slid it back out, addressing him in the universal prison jargon of sex. But it was all too much; I could no longer contain myself, so I went and hid myself around the corner and had a wank. But you stayed put – why don’t you tell me and the gentleman here what happened next?’

  ‘Well, umm, you’d pissed off, and before me there commenced the great Balcony Scene of my life… One of them started whistling at me, and it was like the whistling of a skylark, that herald of the dawn… It was like the most beautiful concert ever played, the most wonderful music imaginable. As if he was whistling to the faithful bitch at his heels. And all in tune. Towhee-towhee-towhee. And I approached his window – not right up to the wall, but a couple of metres away, as I wanted to be able to see him – and it was as if I was hypnotised, like a cat following a call, like a performer on the stage of instinct, lit solely by the latticed scum of light. And I went to those brutes with my heart aflame. And then he raised his hand, shook it, and drew it across his neck as if he were threatening to kill me, as if he were vowing revenge. That I’d be found with a knife in my back on some dark street – Book of the Street indeed! – like Mańka from the song… Shivers went up and down my spine. But I was still on my feet. And then he started quietly whistling to me again, and so softly, as if he were silently stroking my heart:

  ‘“Come here, little one, come over here… Come here, come here…” and he whistled: “Towhee – towhee – towhee…” Like he was a young boy again, calling to newborn kittens before roasting them alive in a dustbin… Gently, gently they would call the baby kittens – because they were gentle. They’d say, “Here, little one,” and the next minute they’d be tossing the carcass into the bin. And in the ferment of that heterosexual prison all their heterosexual traits were fortified, exacerbated. A rage of tenderness and hatred, they wanted to rape us and kill us at the same time. They hated us and they desired us. And we just stood there as if we’d taken root in the ice. Our passivity, their explosive mayhem: like a bumblebee caught in a bottle. Young lads, all of them. Until finally we couldn’t help but break out in song: “And the walls will fall, fall, fall!”

  ‘Dawn was upon us, the last train had already departed, and we just stood there like we were waiting for Judgement Day… We were already thinking Judgement Day had to be on its way, and God would come down and say: “Lordy, Lordy! What are you girls standing there for? Why on earth are fruitcakes like you standing there?’

  ‘Later we went over to the young offenders’ home. But that can be really dangerous, because there they can go in and out. We called up this one queen from Gdynia, and she said:

  ‘“Ooh, the clink… I’d keep my distance from the clink, girls! The queens here used to wait in front of the clink until they released a prisoner. Then they’d cook for him, give him a place to stay, do his laundry – and not one of them remains alive today. Ooh, girls, I’m not carting my arse over there to sing ‘Asleep in Jesus’ for you, not even if you pay me…”

  ‘Go on, Lucretia, move along now and say your prayers. I’ll stay here and chit-chat with our guest…”

  ***

  Once upon a time, and this was long before there was ever any talk of barracks, I was still living in Bydgoszcz. I even had a boyfriend there, you know. Matthew-Mary they called him. What a nutter that boy was. She worked as an orderly in the hospital – did her national service there, then stayed on to empty the bedpans. We never went out together because we both had the same taste: masculine lads, straight if possible. And the railway station was going through a dry patch then, and it’s not like we could go without. Just like a junkie needs his fix. The one time, though, we picked up a soldier together. We got him drunk on vodka, and he did a striptease for us; but he wouldn’t take off his boots, because they never take off their boots; their feet get so manky in them, and they’re ashamed of it. And it was so funny, him dancing with his trousers down, but with his boots and footcloths still on. He couldn’t take those trousers off completely… Another time we did a young lad, another straight boy, heavens above… And once I got beaten up. It happened really quickly. I was walking through the park one night, see, not afraid at all, and I noticed this group on their way back home. Twelve o’clock at night. By the time I saw them they must have been about ten metres away, so I just looked away, acted normal. But they appeared from behind a building, from around the corner. So I started walking faster, acting like I was coming back from somewhere, like I was in a hurry. And I’m listening and already thinking that it must’ve worked – and then there they were, coming up about five metres behind me, saying something. Not a second later, one of them rushes up, kicks me, pushes me to the ground. With my face stuck in the tarmac like that, I couldn’t get up. Another one pinned my neck with his boot, probably one of those heavy ones that skinheads wear, but when I pulled myself free, he just stepped on my neck again like it was nothing! Until something cracked. The others took my belt off me, and started to whip me with it. My mouth was all gritty with sand and blood. But I didn’t feel the pain; I didn’t feel it even though they were whipping me. And I heard them say: You gonna die, poofter. And I said, please, stop it, please, and that’s all the words I could cough up. They ripped me off, too. I took my watch off myself, and started to give them everything I had, because I thought that with each thing I gave them they might ease the pressure on my neck. The fact that I’m still alive today I owe entirely to a passing car; it passed by on the street, and I heard them say: let’s get out of here! And though I wasn’t in any pain at all while it was happening, because I was so upset, the minute they left I started vomiting blood. They later told me in hospital that I had internal haemorrhaging. Matthew-Mary came running to me. We flagged down a car and took off for the hospital. And that’s where I found out I had that haemorrhaging, and a deep cut to my head, and a concussion, and a broken hand, too. I didn’t have any papers – they took everything; they left me there with nothing but my underwear on. Pepper spray? Who ever heard of pepper spray back then? I’m telling you, nobody would’ve dared to use it in such a situation, because if those lads had got any angrier they would’ve killed me; it would have been enough for them just to step a little harder on my neck. And them standing there on my neck was the worst thi
ng ever! I was shaking so badly, I could’ve taken an oath never to go to the park ever again. So later on we usually just went to the barracks, though that was in Wrocław. And the barracks were a godsend, a real luxury, not just because they were all straight there, but it was pretty safe, too. And it was like they even kinda liked us. But those skinheads – brrr. Though we finally got our revenge on those straights for that!

  ***

  The elderly concierge smiled when he gave me the keys. Keys and towels at the sauna, handed out by none other than Wrocław’s most famous queen – Lucia La Douche! Lucia was famous for her stormy dalliance with a criminal who got her drunk and robbed her. After that, she announced, ‘I’m never touching vodka again if it’s the last thing I do, not even if it’s made of solid gold!’ At the reception desk at the State Bathing Works, she watched me out of the corner of her eye, the hair around her bald spot dyed and permed so tightly it looked like sheep’s wool. Her face ruddy and robust, her bloodshot eyes glowering. You could see she came from the country; you could tell, even if it was just her typical country penchant for talking about metaphoric gold that gave it away. And it wasn’t just that she’d sworn off drinking ‘solid gold vodka’, but all her friends had ‘hearts of gold’, too, and everyone she met she nicknamed ‘Goldie’. Like the madam in a house of ill repute, Lucia retrieved an enormous key from a narrow drawer; but it was only the key to a locker. She handed you a folded sheet that would, by night’s end, be transformed into a Roman toga, sheathing a body damp with sweat; she handed you a towel. She took a sip of her coffee. She was utterly relaxed, she never hurried; other people could do the hurrying. Nothing had changed for her in over a decade. So Lucia would draw out her vowels, speak slowly, slovenly, lost in thought:

  ‘Ooh, Goldie Girl, go on, hurry now… A real hunk just walked in there. A golden hunk of a man! I gave him the key with that little heart-shaped charm on it, a little gold fish. Let me tell you something, just between you and me, love: get a move on, shake a leg, he’s waiting for you in there… I gave him number sixty-two…’

  If Lucia were around today, I’d ask her to decipher the stains and blotches on all those sheets that were tossed into the dirty linen basket, to reconstruct their history, to write her own book of the streets – a book of solid gold. She’d pick them out under the dim fluorescent lights – it’s always night at the sauna. She’d squint and gripe under her breath about the trouble she was having with her eyes.

  Half the people who frequented the sauna back in the eighties are no longer alive. Those old queens would warm their bones up in pairs, ambling majestically, cloaked in sheets; they would come for the whole day, bringing their lunches with them in canisters, and eat in the locker room. The beautiful, marble hall of the State Baths was much too grand for them. They weren’t worthy of those Greek columns. Clouds of steam would float low over the giant tiles. Back in those days buggery was still a sin. Everyone was naked, or had towels wrapped around them like togas, one arm uncovered, gowns made of sheets. Gaunt clavicles, sunken chests, freckles and liver spots. Sitting in the marble pool filled with lukewarm water, I would look at those old queens: Comely Cecily, Catherine the Purse-Seller, Jehanneton de Millières, Catherine la Bouchière, and any number of Villon’s other women. They came around the corner, baring their corrupted flesh, licking themselves lasciviously, pinching each other’s nipples as they walked past the pool. They went off to the steam room in hopes that I’d join them. The decay of time had magnified the decay of AIDS unfurling within them. Special offer! All ten Egyptian plagues for the price of one! It started with the red spots that appeared on their bodies. That’s when they realised that something was about to end, that the time for farewells had come… So they forgot their inhibitions and rushed headlong after the fugitive remnant of life… The less time they had, the more wild they grew. They had no shame; they were like unnaturally libidinous lepers. They reckoned that because everyone was sick already there was no reason to worry about safety. They pissed on each other, tore out what was left of their hair, and gave every perversion, even death, a whirl. The Roman baths began to look like a scene from the Marquis de Sade, from a film by Pasolini. With what tenacity those deteriorating, paunchy, fifty-year-old bodies would cling to one another! There was no secretion that couldn’t be licked, no motion that couldn’t be interpreted as an invitation to… sex? Was that still sex? It was more like a dance of death. It defied words, but maybe whimpers and wheezes would do. Rats started showing up, or maybe that’s just how it seemed to them. After the first deaths, the municipality ordered that the steam room, the pool next to it, and the locker room all be disinfected. Clouds of smoke wafted between the majestic columns in the Roman hall; Lucia La Douche was burning the towels and sheets, setting the dried sperm ablaze. The smoke refused to rise to heaven, but coiled downward, underground.

  I’ll never forget the stench!

  ***

  Thoughout the communist era, Lucia La Douche had lived above the butcher’s on the high street, where the Green Cockerel tavern is now. She used to bring grunts from the picket line back home with her. One time, they robbed her – never mind; another time they beat her up – no matter. Once, out cottaging, she met three guys and brought them back up to her place above the butcher’s for a drink. They tied her up, beat her, and started rummaging through her high-gloss wall unit and the drinks cabinet, where she kept all her valuables. But she didn’t care, because what she valued was something else. They found her old Party identity card:

  ‘Eat it!’

  Nothing, just ‘eat it’. Lucia refused; she hadn’t, after all, brought them home so she could eat her own ID card, in its hard protective wallet no less – I can’t remember now if it was plastic, but it was certainly hard, and certainly not edible. Lucia always did her hair up in a woolly perm with a curling iron, and they took that Russian curling iron, and they heated it up, and they branded her with it. Until she ate the whole thing, until she was no longer a member of the Party. Then they finally fucked her. With the red-hot curling iron. And that was the final straw. She died in hospital, and may she rest in peace. And now in her stead, Oleśnicka, who used to be her assistant, is the most famous queen in Poland.

  Under communism, Lucia La Douche used to sell vodka under the counter at the bathhouse. And she kind of had a thing going with Zdzicha Anaconda. Zdzicha was called that because she worked in the snake house at the zoo. She used to feed them; she’d walk in there in her dirty overalls, without an ounce of fear. Oh Zdzicha, Zdzicha! The serpent lady! Our serpenty, snaky Zdzisława Anaconda! Her hair was blonde and she had blue eyes and wore a denim jacket… And she looked so pretty in her rubber apron, walking from the monkey house over to the sea turtles, which were as big as small cars, and then from the turtles over to the snakes. She smelled like jungle, like apples and fish food.

  Once, back on the Scorched Picket, the queens said to her:

  ‘Zdzicha, you could make a fortune off smuggling those snakes into West Germany.’

  ‘Just a couple of those snakes, Zdzicha. You’d make a mint!’

  ‘Hide them in your drawers, act stupid, and fuck off over there! You can say they died…’

  ‘Oh, Zdzicha, Zdzicha… don’t be stupid, smuggle them into the Reich!’

  ‘What are you waiting for? It won’t be the first time you’ve had a pair of snakes in your drawers! Ha, ha, ha!’

  So one Friday Zdzicha Anaconda stayed late at work. She chatted with the lady in the ticket office for a while, then with the nightwatchman, and at last she announced that she had two sick snakes on her hands and she had to go and take care of them, because snakes like that need looking after, you know, they’re not cheap… Her hands trembled and her legs shook as she walked through the pitch-black monkey house, and in the silence the keys to the cages rattled in her pocket, and those monsters howled inhumanly. She turned on her torch and saw some behemoth hulking behind the glass. Planet of the apes, planet of the dogs, a preserve for wild beasts. Someh
ow she made her way to the snake house, but she wasn’t really sure which ones to take. The little snakes wouldn’t fetch enough, but boa constrictors? In the end she compromised; she stole two little ones that would grow into big ones in the future: one that the veterinarian had recently treated because it had swallowed an egg that broke inside it, and another, pretty, opalescent one. And thus Zdzicha became a smuggler. She put the snakes in a burlap bag and threw it over the fence, on to the Odra embankment. Bawling her head off, she went to the porter:

  ‘They’ve died! And they were so cute, such lively little fuckers, and now they’ve gone and died just as I’ve put them back in their cases…!’ Then she sauntered out and circled back around the zoo, down by the fence to retrieve the writhing bag printed with the slogan Chemistry. Feeds us. Heals us. Clothes us. Houses us.

  But Zdzicha failed in smuggling the snakes out of the country; she was caught at the East German border. She lost her job, and after that she really went to the dogs. That’s when she started robbing people! She stole all the time, did Zdzicha, and sometimes they paid Lucia La Douche a visit and complained: ‘Your Zdzicha robbed me again.’ And Lucia would clench her teeth proudly and say:

  ‘Excuse me, mister, but leave me out of it. I’m a grown woman and I really don’t care to waste my time with frivolous matters. I have problems of my own!’

  ***

  So how did you get your revenge on the straights?

  ‘Well, it was like this. The two of us were having a terrible case of fellatio withdrawal, and everywhere we went the cure was unavailable. The park was empty; it was cold; the railway station was nothing but beggars. And we were like a pair of beggars ourselves, begging for the blessed nob, the holy balls, the sacred arse. We’d made a kind of religion of it, after all. And then it was like… Oh, I don’t know… I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t record this…’ – I oblige and turn off the tape recorder – ‘So, there used to be this one discotheque, see, that was popular with grunts from all over Bydgoszcz. Primavera was its name. It’s not around anymore, like everything from back then. So… there we were, and we’d been trying all night to score some drunken grunt. The dark, the cold: it was a nightmare. They were playing this music, too: disco polo. And we were starving, literally on our last legs. And behind that disco there was this river. Bydgoszcz, as I’m sure you know, has water all over the place. And the river had embankments on both sides, and again and again a grunt would go back there in the dark by himself, or there’d be a whole row of them all taking a slash. And they were tempting us, like this, see?’ – Lucretia demonstrates – ‘They’d stand there with their legs spread like this, feet wide apart. And then, oh… How can I explain? We got ourselves a knife, see, and we waited, in hiding.’ Here, Lucretia’s voice cracks again. ‘Because they didn’t… they didn’t want to do it as a matter of choice. So we had to choose for them. There they were, pissing with their legs spread apart like that, all cocky and provocative… They were getting us all hot and bothered, and then they would walk away, and a lad like that, you know, not over his dead body… So, anyway, there we were watching, and this hunk comes by in these jeans. Jeans, you know… Back in those days, that really meant something. And they were so tight, and he had this bubble butt, and his crotch was bulging out, a real symbol of everything that’s masculine. And he was totally bald too. And then he started going down one of those dark paths, and there was no one around, and we… How should I know if he’s still alive? But we got him with that knife, in his legs, so he blacked out… He must have survived; really, I think he just blacked out… Because, well, it was like this: the minute we went after him with that knife, he screamed and started thrashing something awful. But we weren’t scared at all, we were so determined! He just shrieked and thrashed about and kicked. Did he ever! But then I remembered that what you needed to do was poke him in the eyes, poke his eyeball into its socket with your thumb so that he would go unconscious from the pain. And while Matthew-Mary was twisting his arm back, I used my thumb to poke that eyeball in as hard as I could. And he blacked out. And then I unbuttoned his fly and pulled out a glorious cock, glistening all over like it was coated with saliva. Then, right there in the bushes, we undressed him like he was some kind of mannekin… Well, that’s why I had to get out of Bydgoszcz. I was afraid he might’ve survived and that he’d recognise me. There was so much blood, but I think he only blacked out, because in the end he got a hard-on, and corpses don’t get hard-ons, right? But you know, as soon as we were able to have our way with him, we lost all interest; groping him just felt like going through the motions. If only that stupid slapper hadn’t thrown him into the river. In fact she just left him there near the bank, but his head was in the water. And that kinda worries me.’