‘Why, she can nick any pair of shoes she wants, ha, even a coat, walks right out of the shop with them! Long as they don’t have those security tags, and I suppose there are still quite a few shops that don’t tag the expensive stuff, right? Of course that tart knows to cut the tags off with scissors, but she’s of a different generation (unlike Poontanga, you know), and she’s no good with those electronic tags, doesn’t really understand how they work. Well, Radwanicka isn’t exactly rolling in it, but when she goes shoplifting she always ends up with the most expensive things… But when she goes to social services for the free lunch (she can’t steal that), and her benefit cheque, do you think she wears those stolen, high-heeled, shiny crocodile-leather shoes of hers? Heavens, no! That whore dresses up like a beggar, in a little beret with a pompom, and rags… An actress if ever I saw one!’
Valentina came round the picket line the other day and says to me:
‘Radwanicka’s gone off her rocker. Radwanicka’s delusional, she keeps thinking someone’s calling her name, keeps saying Fuck off! to everyone. She’s been tearing leaves off the trees in the park and eating them, hanging up little pictures of saints on all the tree trunks. What a nutter!’
‘That’s right, it’s because she wants to get her pension increased.’
‘Oh, right… her pension…’
‘Because she has benefits for the mentally ill, and they’re about to run out.’
Then there’s Jackie, who sells kebabs under the viaduct. Sometimes Radwanicka will go round at lunch time, and you know those gloopy bits that drop off kebabs and fall on the floor? She scoops them up, makes a sandwich out of them, and eats it. Then she chats with Jackie for a bit, camping it up, because Jackie gets bored selling those kebabs all day by herself. Radwanicka says to her:
‘You think this is normal, the way we live? This constant drifting and running around?’
‘How should I know why I’m like this? You think I’ve never thought about it? Maybe because I’m the youngest, and the seed had already lost its vigour, I have no idea… No idea why I turned out this way…’ – entertaining a primitive form of genetics. Because Radwanicka was bourgeois at heart, even if she was a queen among criminals. You just had to listen to the crap she was saying under her breath, about how guilty she felt for being a poofter, how she dreamed of having a family, a normal life…
She’d bring back cheap, knock-off perfumes from the Reich and sell them at market here for ten zlotys a pop, but she always wore the most expensive perfumes herself. She was an old floozy; once she even got caught. Of course, she found a way to work it to her advantage – and how! The police treated queens like shit, and the feeling was mutual. The police, back in the day, would make the queens get up on a table and harass them, talk to them as if they were women, saying if only the normal citizens had all made complaints long ago, and so on, and those queens would simply laugh through their tears and might even go down on one of the pigs. Because the queens would be imagining themselves describing it all in the park later on, thinking about the added aura this would give to their bios.
Years later, when they let the whore out, she was skinny and poor, utterly poverty-stricken, as if she wasn’t Radwanicka at all any more. As if she was sick. Until the queens passed around the hat so she’d have something to eat. And that’s when Virgin showed up with those free lunches of hers. Then she pulled some strings and got Radwanicka a job as a case worker. I once even got to go along with her to see some deaf, blind and bedridden old lady. I suppose I don’t have to tell you that those old tarts would take their grunts along and drink wine (always unbranded, from a bottle just labelled ‘Wine’) in the kitchen with them, without the old bag in the next room knowing a thing about it? No doubt she cleaned the whole flat out, too, because it was ages before anyone saw her in the park again, until all of a sudden she hit the big time with ‘Tabor’ or one of those other Gypsy ensembles. One time, when the compere got too drunk, she just walked out holding a rose and started talking! And could she ever talk, that Radwanicka!
The orchestra struck up! The high-hat warbled! And out walked that harlot in tails and says:
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present: Tabor! What woman doesn’t dream of meeting a handsome Gypsy! What man’s eyes don’t light up when a Gypsy girl enters the room! But what is it really worth to love a Gypsy? Because in the end…’ (and so the old tart blathered on, but when she said ‘to love’ what she really meant was ‘to service’).
The Gypsies in the group said:
‘Fuck me! This old slag’s better than the compere!’ But of course she diddled their books and got banged up again. People would come for the show, look around for their seats, and it’d turn out there was more than one person with a ticket for the same seat! And the whore would be standing in the wings, sniggering.
Then there was the time when the whore nicked a huge jar of preserves from the Supersam (this was back in the deepest days of communism), put it in her net bag and kept walking. And this one bit of grunt there, no doubt an old trick, shouts after her:
‘Ya poof, ya fuckin’ poof!’
And what does she do but swing her arm round with all her might and smash him on his head. The grunt was covered in blood, glass in his face, walking round that shop half-conscious, and the old ladies with their shopping backing away from him like the plague. And she says:
‘That’ll teach you to get cheeky with a queer!’
What happened later on? Well, later we had the eighties, and the police came up with their ‘Operation Hyacinth’, which they merely copied from the East German Stasi and the Romanian Securitate. The queers all started grassing on each other like mad to the vice squad, though they always got the shit knocked out of them, too. They had a need, which they usually satisfied by gossiping, to tell stories, to make things up, and now they’d found even more attentive listeners. More and more queens had files; Grasser Grażyna was bursting with reports. And they put Radwanicka away for good. When they started making up things to add to her biography, the police could hardly believe who they had in their hands. And that’s how Radwanicka, who was always the first to gossip, was felled by her own weapon.
For instance, at night, in the park, police vans cruising around… Radwanicka was still on the wanted list, ever since her Warsaw days. So she’d take some grunt into the night and go down on him, and of course his trousers would be down around his ankles while he was getting sucked off, and she’d be emptying his pockets and he’d never notice. The grunt would shoot his load, go. Soon after, he’d notice that his wallet was missing, keys, everything; the bitch had cleaned him out. Since the park at night was practically blue with policemen, he quickly found a patrol car and said:
‘It’s like this, see, I’m a homosexual, I admit it. And this bloke [Radwanicka] was giving me a blowjob in the bushes, and he pulled my trousers down and took everything out of my pockets.’ Uff. You couldn’t get me to say that to the police. But he did. So they asked him:
‘Which one?’
They looked, and there was that whore, sitting pretty on a bench along the path, in the dark. They put her in handcuffs and into the patrol car. Your papers, they say, and she hands them over, and the police say:
‘Fucking hell, man, you’re wanted over the length and breadth of the country!’
Flashing lights twinkling violet in the darkness of the park, siren wailing, cops, Radwanicka in handcuffs. And so the whore was taken away, but first she stopped, threw back her head, and belted out her valedictory aria to all the queens in the park. She paused theatrically at the door of the police van, in handcuffs, on the running board, as if it were a stage, and shouted to all the queens her grand communiqué. Enunciating every word. Slowly, her voice, small at first, accumulated volume and so much expressiveness that she almost had to whisper so as not to shatter into tiny pieces. In a single exhalation. Her voice low, gravelly. Seeming to speak only to me, but in fact addressing a whole world she was about to leave at the siren’
s wail:
‘Huh? What? You stupid slag, you, who in cunt’s name do you think you are? You think that just because you get to stay out there, free, that you’re less fucked up than I am?’ Here Radwanicka broke off, like she had so much to say she didn’t know where to start, like she was bursting at the seams with it. The cops weren’t forcing her to get in either, they were just keeping an eye on her, waiting apprehensively for what she would say next. They were giving her permission, like granting a condemned man a last cigarette – this was Radwanicka’s last cigarette!
‘We’re all of us fucking pervs, you know… Look how people live their lives; they have families, they have each other over for coffee or dinner, buy furniture, watch the telly. And us? Neither snow nor rain nor heat can keep us from chasing after a bit of rough cock. Like the hard-up, accursed slags that lurk around here – and you call that normal? That’s what you call normal?! This flitting and flying about we do?’
I don’t say a thing. No one says a thing. But eventually, I open my mouth:
‘Yes, that’s what I call normal!’ I say. She bridles:
‘You! You always had a screw loose! Here you have it, the life of a queen: once a year you get to grope something drunk on a bench, in secret, illegally; to suck an anonymous cock in the bushes, in the wind, in the snow. That’s the life we lead – the life of a pervert! Admit it! You poofs are all mental, you are! Really, who do you think you are?!’ At that she proudly raised her already handcuffed wrists as if she were only now expecting them to cuff her. Enormously impressed with her speech, she turned and said to the officers:
‘Gentlemen, do what you must.’
And so Radwanicka was escorted away. The stern officers, the romantic stage, Radwanicka the heroine. The trollop was beaten, packed into the police van, and taken away at the siren’s wail to be arrested.
Fredka
… sits on a bench in the park in the morning and sleeps. She sleeps because she’s old, cradled and lulled by the golden autumn of her life. Beside her is her net shopping bag, and in it is an old vinegar bottle full of tea. The next bench along is empty. The bench after that is empty, too. And somewhat further along, Radwanicka is sitting with a bit of young runaway grunt and some queens. As soon as Fredka’s old, tired head begins to droop and then drop, Radwanicka winks at us, points at her, and quietly creeps up behind her. WHAM! She frightens Fredka, whose vacant and terrified eyes fly open. The queens burst out laughing.
And every spring, when they give the benches a fresh coat of green paint, Fredka inevitably sits down on one of them, falls asleep, and gets stuck. Then the queens have to unstick her.
She comes to the park every day from one of the villages outside Wrocław. From Oleśnica or Oława, Milicz, Dzierżoniów, even Środa Śląska – it doesn’t matter which one. What matters is that she comes in on the morning train for three zlotys, and by ten she’s on a bench, tanning herself in the autumn sun. It’s not as if she’d be doing anything different in her Milicz or Środa, she’d just be doing the same in a regular park, imagining it was the picket line.
Once a month, though, the postman brings her her pension, and Fredka freshens herself up, puts on her brown jacket, and catches the train in her customary way, but now with a degree of ceremony. Because she never usually brings money with her, but she remembers them. And she has a grand total of sixty zlotys in her wallet. Three twenty-zloty bills in three envelopes. And with three different teenage grunts, runaways who need the cash, she’ll head into the ruins. Three blowjobs at twenty zlotys a pop. This month at least she can afford a little Indian summer.
But Fredka in the old days – what a star! She and Golda would party all night at the Hotel Monopol. They’d slip under the table where the moneychangers sat and take their pick. Then Golda would take out her dentures and give him a blowjob. The thing was, the moneychanger couldn’t let on that he’d been chosen. Stony-faced, silent, the lads would play cards, watching each other’s faces for the least sign of bliss. When the chosen one broke down, they’d all start laughing, and Golda and Fredka would ask from under the table: ‘Keep going?’
There’s an addendum to Fredka’s story: it turns out she wasn’t from one of those villages after all, but from the outskirts of Wrocław. Radwanicka the whore was exaggerating as usual. That one never spoke a word of truth in her entire life.
A Room With a View to the Promenade of Stars
Straight people have their quirks, too. I’m sitting, after dark, at my window. Before me the promenade courses past, a river of boys, each one lovelier than the last. Under the corrugated roof of Club Neptune, some ringmaster is announcing the next song, sung by so-and-so from who-knows-where, and a disco-polo hit starts up. ‘O, o baby, did I ever cheat on you?’ And then ‘White Roses’ comes on, which moves me to tears. Outside my window a group of about eight boys walks by. Actually they’re somewhere between being boys and being men, about twenty-four years old. Coming at a clip towards them is a group of women around the same age, though they’re definitely already more women than girls. Everyone’s dressed up, perfumed, cologned, peroxided, all in white, as people are on the promenade. A woman with a pram, a man with a shaved head. The woman with the pram lunges at the bald guy:
‘What are you doing here?’
And she kisses him. The bald guy submits, but he’s clearly bewildered. It turns out she’s mistaken him for some other bald man, her own man. Everyone has a laugh about it. But they’ve all had a few beers already, too, so it’s no big deal; if it had happened on the street in a big city, there would have been a riot – but here at the seaside, it’s a window of opportunity! The woman with the pram says to her friend:
‘Hey, who’d you think he looks like?’
Her friend nods her head. Whispers the name into her ear. Laughter. The gentlemen try to get to know the ladies better:
The gentlemen: ‘Join us for a drink?’
The ladies: ‘OK, maybe tomorrow, if we run into each other again.’
The gentlemen: ‘Why don’t you girls give us your numbers now?’
The ladies: ‘Uhh. Dunno. If we run into each other, then definitely. But not like this.’ It’s mainly the bald one who’s pushing the point, the other guys standing on the edges of this conversation. But all of them are drooling. They’ll have to make do with slobber tonight. As for my role in all of this, I’m suspended above them, invisible; though all they’d have to do is look up, and what do you know: why, that’s a camped-up, cynical, pubeless poofter up there. Quaffing their saliva and watching them, as if we were in a public toilet.
Suddenly all hell is breaking loose outside my door. And it shows no sign of stopping. I slip on my knickers and fling open the door. It’s the Deaf Hag, my landlady, sitting there with Dynasty on the telly at full volume, so she can hear.
Now I’ll Never Straighten Out!
‘Oh! There’ve been some changes round here!’ one of the Poznań lads says, staring at my crotch; fortunately it’s not the skinhead. ‘Things are looking up. Why, whoever saw someone with thatch like that, it’s like you had a beard down there!’ These lads even shave their armpits. I always felt that it made me more physical, that being shaved gave an armpit a sudden materiality, a life of its own. That when one of those Rambos laser-depilated himself, his whole body began to clamour, to be. With physical lads like these, sex meant nothing more than bodies fucking, no soul, nothing metaphysical, just thrust in and slide out – body sex, necrophilia! Two unpeopled bodies rubbing against each other. All head, no emotion. First a little snogging, then a blowjob, then sixty-nine – everything in its own compartment, discrete. They have sex with their heads, but they’re corpses – what is a human being without a soul after all? And they slather themselves all over with lotions, so their bodies don’t even taste like bodies any more, just chemicals and antiperspirants. Fucking plastic. From a distance it’s enticing, promising, but when you start doing anything with it, it’s like eating a gigantic chemical strawberry coated with cotton woo
l. And they’re surprised at the falling fertility rates in the West, in Poznań.
As for us – us old, hunchbacked intellectuals, reading newspapers in cafés, in our grey jackets and glasses, smoking our pipes, us unshaven literati – our bodies are practically see-through, inconspicuous. We forget about them. I have one inside myself, too, of course! You just need to dig a little. But when someone gets butch with me, I ebb to femme, and when they’re too femme, then it’s the other way round. It’s all in motion, and even as I write my queer magnum opus here – seriously! – I have my shirt tugged down around my shoulders in a kind of decolletage, and I ring up my queeny friends, giggle giggle, and talk about how my sentences have grown so camp I’m a lost cause: it’s curtains for me, Lucretia, help! I’ll probably never straighten out now, never go back to being the unshaven intellectual… People have even started giving me looks on the street when I go out on my daily cigarettes-and-pizza run.
I ring them and say:
‘Talk to me, Patricia. Talk to me, Lucretia! Tell me something, anything.’
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