‘Wouldn’t you like to come and play with us?’ He introduced himself with a firm, manly handshake:
‘My name’s Błażej,’ he said, bald and with an impressive package.
The two Old Dears were immediately overcome by their masculinity; they felt exposed and quickly slipped on shorts under their towels in order to hide themselves. Then they ran off to go berging, abandoning me: ‘You stay and play the man with them. We’re off to pick posies on the dunes. Pocketfuls of posies to adorn our bodies with! Ooh!’
Traitoresses! Leaving me behind like that! I pushed my sunglasses up on to my forehead and lay there, observing the pair of powerful thighs looming like columns over me. I parted my lips ever so slightly and was just about to start something, when the thighs began shifting restlessly, something about adoption, equal rights, the right to marry, the Green Party, civil partners, monogamy, safe (monogamous) sex, and condoms. We’re civilised people, you know. We want to do this right, with a sense of morality, with the sanction of society, wearing white gloves (so as not to soil ourselves by association with you). Then he began telling me how it’s people like me who give gays such a bad name; and that while we (i.e., me, the Old Dears, the Blond, and other frequenters of the dunes) were going at it like dogs in the bushes, they’d come here with their volleyballs, athletics, and fitness regimens to drag us out of our pre-emancipatory, post-picketatory gutter – in short, they wanted to give us something useful to do. No fats, no fems. No more opening my jaw the moment a bloke drops his drawers. It’s love, mutual understanding, reciprocal respect that’s needed now. Sometimes other things are more important. Like what? Friendship, intimacy.
I rubbed my eyes and thought, Lucreeetia! Help! Hmmm, I could see those turncoats out of the corner of my eye, having it off in the dunes, totally oblivious to the fate they’d abandoned me to. So I continued lending my ear to that beefed up, body-waxed, plastic boy toy until I lost all interest in doing him – with all that friendship and intimacy erupting between us it started to feel like I was talking with my therapist. Too intimate, too emotional – like talking with family, except with my family I wouldn’t talk about it anyway… It’s not as if I even want friendship and intimacy. Makes me think of my mum. What I want is a completely anonymous hookup, someone who’ll thrash me like a bitch getting what she deserves, who’ll rough me up, rush in like a tornado, and leave me too weak to stand up and shut the door behind him, a damp spot on the bed, drawn and quartered… And if he were a hammersmith, raging with his hammer, hammering away in his factory, what would you say? Would you make him go? Oh I’d shake! I’d shake and shudder, I’d shake, and shake and shudder! My hair a mess, he’d leave me there like the whore I am, spit on me, toss a paper towel at me, and go without shutting the door. He’ll leave the door wide open. And with my face buried in the sopping pillow, I’ll fall asleep – I’ll sleep, without any friendship, free of intimacy!
He says, Us gays. Us. Us gays should do this, us gays should do that, together. A bird flies past, a seagull; the sun disappears behind a cloud. Not just sex, but sports, too, and protecting the environment, an alternative perspective on European culture, and whether I wouldn’t like to subscribe to his discussion board, some website or something. What? An old codger like me and the internet? With my reverence for the past, for all those state-subsidised caravan holidays, it’s as if I were moving back in time! And not one of them smokes; all they do is toss that ball that’s got NIVEA written on it back and forth, and lie there in pairs, snuggling. I drag my arse up off my blanket and walk over to them. Aha! Those monogamous couples there, all cuddly in each other’s arms – I’ve been doing at least one of each of them every day in the dunes… Now they all act as if they’ve never seen me before. There’s monogamy for you! That peroxided chicken there lying in his daddy’s arms in the setting sun on a Marlboro beach towel – I had him just this morning, right after I got here… And how many times have I been stalked by that lopsided nag over there! Now here she is, the picture of monogamy.
New troubles arise meanwhile. The rest of them, not having heard my conversation with Thighs, and seeing what a muscular young lass I am and what fashionable sunglasses I’m wearing, come up to me as if I were one of them, and start talking like I was just another emancipated queen. So what’s going on down in Wrocław? What’s it like at Scene these days? What about H2O? They’re off to Berlin for the Love Parade – am I going, too? Is that why I’ve coloured and gelled my hair like that? I’m forced to speak in the masculine, but I mumble quietly:
‘So how did all you ladie— lads first get together?’
They reply, Oh, through the ads. On gay dot pee el. Hi, I’m looking for a life partner, no pnp, d/d free. Hi, I’m a cute, laid-back twentysomething. I have a dog named Filip. Or else it’s: I’m a student, just want to meet a hotty for a pint and get freaky! I’m at email this on AIM, number that on Gadu-Gadu, text me later at blah blah blah blah. They play games where one of them lies down on the sand at the water’s edge and the other one buries him, moulding him into a mummy, adding an enormous cock out of moist sand with a pebble on top instead of a hole. An eruption of jism shaped like a sandcastle collapsing into the sea. Click, a digital pic, smiles for the camera, and a flourish: their postcard from sunny Lubiewo, addressed to: The Old Brewery, Kulczyk Street, Poznań, wish you were here.
Write About Us!
I know those ads, I know them well. I’ve met loads of men through them in my time. The team ask if I’m going to play volleyball with them; they’ve stretched a net along a row of sticks all the way from the water to the dunes. One of them has peroxide dreds, another a tattoo, all of them are jumping, leaping up and down; they couldn’t be more butch. It’s all too much for me. I say:
What, me? Playing ball? Perhaps I could just take a seat on your blanket there, and, if you like, regale you with a story? Because that’s what I do. You a writer? Why yes, I am an authoress of the highest calibre. Michalina La Belletriste they call me; formerly I was known as Snowflake. Wow, you should write pro-gay rights articles for glossy, high-distribution magazines! Are you active in the rights movement, have you appeared in the gay media? Hmm, why yes I have, I once wrote something for Aktivist. Jarek L. called in the middle of the night to ask me, because Violet V. failed to deliver her article. What about Nowy Men? No, I’ve no interest in publishing in Nowy Men, nor in Inaczej either. But I am writing a book about you. Is it political? Not in the least. Oh, please do write a book about us, says bald, bespectacled Błażej.
Write a novel about us. Us Gays… It should be a narrative about two middle-class, educated gay men, doctoral students in management and finance, who wear glasses and woolly jumpers… Mornings they lounge around in the same bed watching the same telly together, and for breakfast they eat toast with sliced tomatoes off the same plate… They’ve established a stable, long-term relationship, and now they want to adopt a child. But they’ve run into some trouble, see. Society, you see, doesn’t accept them, even though they’re well bred and well behaved, as the reader can tell. You can make the contradiction even more apparent by giving them neighbours who have a wretched marriage, who drink all the time and beat their children, but whom the state would never dream of keeping from adopting. But our couple, who were hoping to adopt a little boy (a boy!) and couldn’t have been more perfect homemakers – their application is rejected. Readers should be able to figure out on their own what an injustice it all is… In the end the couple decide to adopt a cat… I mean, really! Like, OK, you can’t have a kid, so just adopt a cat! And they decide to give him the same name they’d planned on giving their child…
Oh, what a wonderful idea for a book! The perfect gift for Valentine’s Day! All the gay couples can go buy it for each other at the galeria. I’ll just pop along and write it. I’d better clear off now. I might even make some money!
Then they invite me to some gender-something queer-something conference at the university in Poznań, where all the gender-gays will be. Germ
an Ritz will be there – he’s the keynote speaker – and there’ll be a feminist talk about the body by Professor Borkowska… all of it informed by Judith Butler ’n’ stuff…
The Date
I had the following mishap on the internet:
This fellow answered my advert. Luckily he wasn’t ‘nice’ and didn’t ‘like to chat and have fun,’ so he got five bonus points right away. He wasn’t into kayaking either, and he didn’t go to the gym five times a week, and he hadn’t given up drinking, which was truly odd. In any case, my ads were always written in such a way that only people like that ever answered them. But this one was a scientist and quite serious. To cut a long story short, I fell in love with him after about five emails. I know, I know what you’re thinking, Vicômte, and you’re right… But it was as if we were made for each other. Only he never told me what he looked like, and I never asked. Eventually he wrote that ‘looks weren’t important’ for him. I wrote right back and said the same, said they weren’t important for me either, because we agreed on everything. I printed out his emails, kissed them, framed them. Sometimes there were ten mails a day and expensive mobile phone calls, too, since we used competing services (he: Idea, me: Era). Still, we’d sometimes spend practically an hour on the phone; his voice was so young, so beautiful. He was… a scientist, solar something or other, world-renowned, an astrophysicist. And since the only physicist I’d ever known was a skinny boy with long hair who had a pretty voice like his, too, I simply pasted that image on to him in my imagination. Love can’t survive on words alone after all. It just doesn’t work. Abstraction is unbearable. After a few months of emailing I couldn’t stand it any longer. Let’s meet today, at the zoo, I said, now, right now. No, we should chat some more first. I don’t care what you look like, I said. You could be in a wheelchair for all I care, you could be HIV-positive, I just want to be with you… And he was so smart, emailing in all those languages about that sun of his. That’s why he never used Polish characters in his messages. Because, he said, he was used to writing in ten different languages, even some really uncommon ones. Finally he agreed to meet. After a whole day in the bathroom there I was, standing outside the zoo… and he didn’t show up. A quarter past five already. Just some old guy in a wheelchair. A beggar, I figured, because half his face was mangled. It looked as if he was born that way, like he had that Elephant Man disease. So there I was, standing, waiting, checking my watch. And slowly it dawned on me: that homeless man’s waiting for someone too… Elephantitis, bald, shabby clothes… He smiled at me and wheeled up in his wheelchair. Me: my face was a wall. The wind. Oh why, on this of all afternoons, did nature have to provide such a perfect backdrop for the protagonists’ emotions? A sudden gust blew hair into my eyes. There was a storm in my head, too: what to do, how to hold back the tears? I was hardly going to run away! But the tears kept welling up inside me. Right before my eyes the boy of my imagination was disintegrating. That slender, long-haired, happy youth, who had spoken to me so cheerfully, so joyfully, and for so many hours over the internet, was dying. The way he talked suggested he was younger, too; he’d say things like ‘People’ll get pissed off’ or ‘What’re your digits?’ My boy was dying, his dimples ebbing like foam, his freckles dissipating like sand… But – he had never been! No matter that I’d been snogging him in my thoughts for months! I’d been kissing a corpse all along!
I’d been kissing the man now sitting before me in a wheelchair. The wind was blowing, and he turned his eyes to me, azure, naïve… He had to be naïve if he believed what I’d said about looks not being important. I even believed it myself for a moment. Oh what does it matter, I thought. Love him now, love this man before you. I broke the silence:
‘Waiting for someone?’ My throat was so thick I couldn’t make out my own words.
His eyes lit up. ‘Michał?’
I croaked something through my clenched windpipe, something like Uh-huh, pleased to meet you. But I wasn’t able to fake it well enough for him not to notice the plummeting of my heart. Shall we go for a stroll, I mean, a roll, I said, through Szczytnicki Park? He started trundling his wheelchair towards the pedestrian entrance. We continued in silence. And only a few hours before…! When he got home, an email would be waiting for him. Judging from the conversation, he hadn’t got it by the time he left. How completely idiotic that email was now, in the context of our silent, funereal procession – my boy’s funeral. I had written to him that the moment we opened our lips we would never again be able to close them, how we would rush back at once to my place and embrace for hours, and lick and kiss and make love for hours and hours until the end of our life together. Fat chance now, I thought. At that very moment he gave me such a look… I could see he found me attractive, and that this was fueling a hope in him. Maybe he even sensed that something wasn’t right, but merely chalked it up to the wind, the bad weather… Suddenly he said:
‘You have such beautiful eyes.’
Beautiful eyes! Fucking hell! I started to cry. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I said: Don’t say things like that to me! Can’t you see what’s happening? Can’t you see the tears flowing from these beautiful eyes on to my possibly more beautiful cheeks? Don’t say another word. I’m attending a funeral here, this is a funeral procession I’m trudging in! One sepulchral step after the other in real, physical space! You’re the physicist: you of all people should understand that!
I thought to myself: just talk to him, ask him things about the sun. At least you won’t have to deal with the silence. At least you should be able to communicate on an intellectual level. But whatever it was in his voice that in the emails (from the boy) had sounded so brilliant, that intelligence of his was dull now. I started up a conversation anyway about university funding, research grants… It was as if I were talking with one of my countless academic uncles. In the end, an operatic element, which I had been hoping to avoid, came into play. He stopped suddenly, brought the wheelchair to a halt, and said ‘I love you’ right there in the park, under some sort of mannerist sculpture, a faun on a fountain, some rococo genitalia. I was forced to resort to a convention – I don’t know if it was from The Csardas Princess or The Hunchback of Notre Dame – and said: ‘Umm, I really hope we can be friends.’
Friends! Vicômte! The carriage pulled up and love’s thunderbolt failed to set this heart ablaze, but perhaps we could remain ‘good friends’, just as those lads from Poznań wanted to be, bosom buddies… Our relationship would be about other, more lasting values.
Which is to say: Keep your arse out of my bed and shut up already about the beautiful eyes! When I got home I looked at the wall where I’d hung the printouts of my emails from my ‘bespectacled boy’, and I reread them. For a moment the boy in the emails returned to life, gasped one last breath before twitching a little, jerking his leg, then expiring for all eternity. And there I was on the sofa, my face buried in the pillow, braying like a horse. I was sick, feverish, like someone in a novel. Nature, the body – everything colluded to ensure my survival. And there was my poor mother saying, ‘So your date didn’t go too well, then…’
The Leather Lad from Poznań
Right, I think, I’m getting the fuck out of here, and run away. I run back to my blanket, to the sixties, the seventies, to the flask, the tinned tomato soup that Old Dear No. 2 brought back from the Społem cafeteria. I escape with them. With us – a flock of queeny trollops from the picket line, occupying the margins of post-1989 Polish society like a chancre on its arse. I run off to write. But hardly have I left when I’m accosted (that’s all I need) by that lad with the all-over tattoos and piercings and body shave, the bald one with the barbell dangling from his cock and the studded leather strap around his bicep. A bloke like that could have pinned me down and defiled me any day! Until he came up and started speaking to me like this:
I understand that you’re a Polish writer… one who’s spent some time in the West. Oh, ha ha, didn’t we meet each other on… michal witkowski free art dot pee el,
right? You don’t fool us. (You have pics of you wearing black leather and you go to Berlin regularly… But that’s exactly what I was getting at: Berlin for him meant whoring around.) Listen, we’re a tight little batch of lads who enjoy practising safe sex in a certain clearly articulated style. If you’re interested… We’re straight-acting, we’re all pretty good pals, we’ve known each other for a while now, and we respect each other, too(!). If you like, drop by and see us in Poznań, at the ‘Lech’ Housing Complex, and do keep in mind that we have all the right gear. We have gynecological forceps, black latex gloves, lube, poppers, leather and rubber masks, and gasmasks, too. Whips, collars, cockrings, harnesses, flails, and – the Leather Lad whispers seductively – Bunsen burners… We’re not perverts or anything like that; we have barristers, and artists – you’d fit in perfectly…
And so it went, on and on, for exactly forty-five minutes. Not one cigarette, not a single beer, and the best part of the sun came and went. Finally I just nodded and said, Sure, I’d love to stop by some day, but right now I really need to get back to my blanket, because I’ve got two… two gentlemen there looking after my gubbins. Maybe I’ll stop by and see you lads sometime…
Michał, I presume?
‘I for one am an old, intolerant, out of shape, bad-tempered, camp queen, and the minute the lot of you start talking, I can’t help but shut down like a communist-era butcher at six in the evening!’ I mutter to myself, to the bushes, the sand… I’ve always had problems being assertive, I could never talk like that to someone’s face, and instead just smile and nod like an idiot. This sometimes leads to complications, like this:
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