Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  All the young Style Queens I knew had read at least one book, Dangerous Liaisons, and they all identified with its protagonist, the Marquise de Merteuil.

  Eugenia: Darling! I’m the Madame de Merteuil!’

  Monkey: ‘No you’re not! I’m the Madame de Merteuil!’

  Later, they would start their text messages with things like Cher Vicômte… I, for one, always write my diary like that, in the form of letters to my girlfriend Paula, a.k.a. Madame de Merteuil… My handwriting is neat and sloping, with all sorts of parenthetical asides revealing my various little intrigues, most of them invented, though some really do happen, and generally embellished with this or that juicy, cynical snipe or archaism or other.

  ‘Unfortunately, the majority of Polish queens,’ Eugenia lowered her eyelashes, ‘are entirely too brand-conscious. They act all excited about something you’re wearing, but when they notice that it doesn’t have a label they stop liking it. It never occurs to them that it might not be from the high street, but made to measure.’

  While they were explaining this all to me – although it was hardly necessary, my being a Style Queen myself – I simply nodded and fantasised about sending Monkey off to Świnoujście on a long walk – ideally one-way – so that Eugenia and I could have a bit of a snog again, suck face to our heart’s content. What would Madame de Merteuil do? What would the Vicômte de Valmont do? So I continued nodding, but we weren’t really having a conversation, because they were saying the same things I was; we were on the same intellectual plane (in the Hair and Fashion department, of course); we were in unison, not dialogue. They had been sitting on the pier at Międzyzdroje the day before, people-watching at Café Paparazzi. Men were promenading past the café like on a fashion runway, but not one had anything decent on – designer knock-offs, discount items, tracksuits. One of them, the proprietor of a tanning salon in Świnoujście, was tanned coal-black and wearing all white, even her hair was white, a right mess. And there were some other young things in for the day from Świnoujście, real heifers. Two blokes had slipped away from their wives to have a few beers ‘like we did in our bachelor days’. And so on. All their factory seconds were showing!

  Think, think – I thought – think of some way to get Monkey out of here… Start some Vicômte de Valmont intrigue… Oh, I know!

  ‘Look,’ I said to them, ‘just look at this ring.’ I held out my silver-and-titanium ring, which I’d had made by a silversmith I knew in Wałbrzych. They enthused.

  ‘Super! Where did you buy that?’ Oh, she was mine! Eugenia was mine! Mine the ginger-haired, fair-skinned genie… And now my Eugenia retrieved from her bag an Alice band made of plastic, like the ones good girls wore in those old primary school textbooks, Ala Has a Cat, etc. She combed her hair back from her forehead with it and set it daintily in place on the crown of her head… Later, at the dentist’s, I came across a weekly magazine with a photograph of David Beckham wearing exactly the same sort of hairband. She must have got the idea from him…

  ‘Hurry,’ I said to Monkey, ‘hurry along to Świnoujście! They still might have some of these rings there – I saw a man selling them next to the ferry stop earlier on. He had a few left. Go and get one for your Eugenia!’

  At that, however, Genie piped up: ‘What? Buy jewellery without me? Never! He’ll choose the worst one!’

  Nothing remained for me to do but to retreat graciously and wish them a sunny – though not too sunny, given Eugenia’s delicate complexion – day. But before walking too far, Monkey suddenly turned and pointed at Eugenia and squawked the following at me:

  ‘She’s seen aliens, you know!’

  ‘You’re the one who saw it, not me!’

  Like little girls squabbling in the playground, they start screaming at each other over who saw what, each embarrassed to admit it in front of me.

  ‘Really? What did they look like?’

  Eugenia and Monkey start to get all excited and shriek. Suddenly it turns out that, in fact, they both saw them.

  ‘The one had on a Galliano waistcoat…’ But Eugenia interrupts her girlfriend:

  ‘I already told you, that was Arkadius. Galliano has different buttons, like this’ – she traces the shape of the buttons in the sand – ‘and those buttons looked like this’ – she draws the other ones.

  ‘He had on Kenzo sunglasses and the most faaabulous Prada shoes!’

  ‘I don’t know why you bother opening your mouth, ’cause you don’t know the first thing about fashion. I saw everything with my own two eyes, and I even know what he smelled like as well.’

  ‘I saw everything! I did! He didn’t smell like anything!’

  ‘He smelled like Rosi Braidotti, if you really want to know!’

  Screams, a mayhem of shrieking, they hit each other, struggle on the sand, tear each other’s hair out, and out of the chaos I hear the occasional shout:

  ‘Donna Karan!’

  ‘Galliano!’

  ‘Hair straightener!’

  ‘Diesel!’

  ‘Estée Lauder!’

  ‘Anklets!’

  ‘Nail extensions!’

  ‘Hair straightening!’

  ‘Body art!’

  ‘Permanent makeup!’

  ‘Belly-piercing!’

  ‘Galliano!’

  ‘Alexander McQueen!’

  ‘Arkadius!’

  ‘Toni & Guy!’

  ‘Vidal Sassoon!’

  And they’d be screaming like that to this day if a torrential rainstorm hadn’t blown in and flooded that whole luxury boutique of theirs. The mood took an abrupt turn, as if summer had come to a sudden end. My Style Queens and I fled the beach. From out of nowhere the Old Queens disinterred some very communist-looking plastic hoods. Plastic scarves on their heads, like old women in the countryside. The Apothecaress toddled past with her Vichy-advert umbrella: Health is Vital – Start With Your Skin. The Style Queens with their designer umbrellas – the fashion this season was for ones so transparent they couldn’t be seen: it’s like they’re not even there! The gays from Poznań were calling each other to their Puntos, their motorcycles and bargain-basement cars, because what else would a small-time businessman drive? The beach emptied, and the water’s surface, which had been as still as that of a lake, was broken by large rings of rain.

  Only one – some madwoman or other, some middle-aged queen, though obviously D-list, all totty and no knickers – stayed behind in the rain, dancing, shouting, and gulping the rain as it falls down from the sky, writhing in the wet sand, inspired. She yelled out something about innocence regained, how the rain has revived her youth, added years to her life, how her blood was flowing faster again… And then a few other old queens went back as well, at first uncertainly, gathering up the rain in their outstretched hands, then scooping up the wet sand, smearing themselves with it, lying down in the sea, loudly proclaiming their regained youth, that the rain has purified them. In the throes of inspiration, in some mystical rapture, they shouted:

  ‘Rain, o rain! I’m a virgin again! Purifying rain, sent by God to wash away the evil…’

  The Others

  And that was it for the rain! The sun started shining again, the way it does on the Baltic Sea. So I continued walking. The dunes became less sheer and above them the forest with its bunkers full of stagnant water and flies gave way to meadows. Suddenly this old thing from Stargard popped up (that’s how queens describe others, by referring to them not as ‘old person’ but as ‘that old thing’; and instead of saying ‘I was with someone’, they say ‘I did this thing’, or ‘There’s nothing around today’ or ‘Maybe we’ll find something’).

  ‘Are you a student? Do you have a job?’

  ‘Good heavens, there really is nothing interesting around today,’ I said, trying to let him know that it was pointless. But he grovelled:

  ‘I’m interesting…’

  I managed to discourage him with banal chatter, his excitement dwindled, and he went away. I passed a couple of
Germans. I can always identify naked Germans by their tiny, flat-lying ears and handsome, intelligent faces (not a single ounce of that Lech Wałęsa mix of grease, moustache, and beer belly), and by their slim, expensive wristwatches. Also by the fact that they always put their cigarette ends back into the pack so they can throw them out later in special containers made for recycling. I always say ‘Ciao!’ to them because they’re so cultured and speak English so well, and you can talk to them about literature and the environment. There’s only one thing you can’t do with them. There’s something so methodical, so calculating in their eyes, something really grunty about them… But grunt has to be more Russian, bigger, and completely unpredictable in its behaviour. Grunt throws its vodka empties into the bushes – recycling is an alien concept. And of course it doesn’t shave or pierce its balls. Real grunt doesn’t exist in the West. It starts appearing east of the Oder and continues all the way to the other side of Russia.

  I walked on, looked around, and realised that the Old Dear was right: queens always leave such a mess on these dunes. It makes you want to wring their necks.

  I carried on walking, and suddenly, from behind a mountain of condoms, empty water bottles, and old glossy magazines, emerged one of the stars of the open-air theatre and music hall, a pre-war diva of sorts. All in black, a scrap of fur across her shoulders… Later I realised that it was Madame de Pomme de Terre. Or her ghost, rather, since she’d been a regular at the Little Fairy back in the sixties. Madame de Pomme de Terre was a Queen of the ancien régime.

  It’s important to understand that in addition to the Style Queens (an innocuous and cultured sort found mainly in metropolitan areas) there is a great variety of other species of queen. The Old Queen, for example. Age will not make of a Style Queen an Old Queen, because the latter is old to begin with. Even at birth she breathes a pre-emancipatory air of railway stations and grunt, and embodies in equal amounts the twin pathologies of skinniness and obesity. Old Queens generally originate in small- and medium-sized cities and may be found at railway stations and bus depots; they’re an endangered species. There are also Demi-Queens, a particularly interesting variant. The Demi-Queen is likewise alternatively oriented, and that orientation lurks in every gesture. She does not, however, refer to herself as a lady, nor does she speak in a high-pitched voice, and she dresses in unassuming garb. But just watch how she puts her mobile phone back into her shoulder bag: she leans over a tad too attentively, opens the bag a bit too deliberately… and voilà, the bag becomes a purse! She radiates her orientation unconsciously – all would-be ostentation is concealed. Ninety-nine per cent of those emancipated upstarts from Poznań are in fact Demi-Queens. They shave their heads, but shake their arses when they walk. Muscle-bound, they rub their faces with skin cream just like any diva…

  But let us proceed to the next page of our atlas, where we shall find the Goth Queen and, farther on, the Mall Queen (a frequenter of shopping centres, her distinguishing feature is the whitewall hair-cut, shorter on top than the Style Queens wear it, and never coloured), the Show Tune Queen (and her permutations: the Ballet Queen, the Opera Queen, the Pantomime Queen), as well as the Cloakroom Attendant Queen, the Academic Queen, and the Queen of Everlasting Cosmetics Sales. On the next page of our Atlas we find a rare species: the Press Spokesperson for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Intersex, Transgender, Queer and Questioning Community Queen, or LGBITQQ Queen for short. Newspapers and TV stations contact her whenever there’s a public demonstration against homophobia or when they need a soundbite on Gay Culture. As soon as an LGBITQQ Queen shows up and outs herself, the media quickly acknowledges her for the rare and useful specimen she is. She generally speaks on behalf of all other queens, though many of them would probably disagree with every word she says. But as they rarely end up finding out what that is, nothing happens. This species naturally combines with the Activist Queen, creating a more or less stable, but erotically unappealing, hybrid.

  Mall Queens, similarly, can be found crossed with Style Queens (the ‘all for beauty’ model of consumption), and there is an Ikea variant, as well (the ‘all for home & garden’ model of consumption). In general, Style Queens will cross with all subtypes except Old Queens. For example: Art Fag + Style Queen = Gallery Queen.

  Blackie was an example of this last category. As the name implies, Blackie always dressed all in black, draping herself with new silver jewellery. She worked in an art gallery and regular went to the theatre, gallery openings, and poetry readings. She was all about pretense and snootiness, long-filtered cigarettes, silver cigarette cases… She never took off her hat in cafés, but would sit there with it on like an old woman in a beret, shovelling down her slice of cake and prattling:

  ‘We had a concert of ballads, you know, which is why I couldn’t make it any sooner. I was having drinks with Krystyna and Olgierd… We’re doing a play with Stanisław, you know.’

  But that’s nothing compared with what you get when a Style Queen is crossed with a Stylist Queen. Any hair salon of note is filled with the sort, and there’s no one who can cut or style or colour your hair better than they can. They know whole storylines, whole Nights and Days, by heart. Skinny, tall, beautiful, indolent… They smoke and have piercings all over their bodies. They know all the latest hairstyles. They know which way the wind is blowing, and what happened yesterday on the catwalk in London. Sometimes a gaggle of them will get together in someone’s fabulous flat, all equally fabulous themselves, and sit there among the old armoires and vitrines full of trinkets, wallowing in their ennui like decadents. Instead of books their antique bookshelves are stocked with an assortment of vaguely extraterrestrial hair product containers and stacks of neatly folded, black, terry-cloth towels.

  Karen, for instance. All the way through school Karen would doodle cartoons of women in various poses in the margins of her textbooks; each one she signed with the moniker ‘Lady’, a whole army of stiffly postured females. In class, while the teacher was talking about wars and kings, Karen would put her bag on her desk and set up her own little ‘corner’ behind it, her ‘cottage’, her private, miniature world. She had her mirror, her antiseptic ointment, pimples to squeeze… Outside were wars and uprisings, and there she was in her corner, her little cottage, her private retreat…

  At home she covered the canopy over her bed with hand-drawn portraits of weeping Pierrots, drawing lips and tears and flashes of light on his black turban. Her boss at the salon where she worked complained that Karen was a lazy and lousy boy. She daydreamed while shaving the customers, and as a sign of protest dyed her hair blue. It’s no fun at all having to wash hair all day, to hear how lazy and lousy you are, and to have to spritz spray on your hair during your breaks. She read all the magazines in the waiting area from cover to cover – they were her escape! The Toni & Guy catalogues, too… It was a whole other world! A black-and-white world on slippery, shiny, white paper fragrant with perfume samples. A world that appeared to Karen only in fragments, shreds of a photomural that someone had ripped apart. In this other world, the coffee was strong and came served in elegant cups, the men looked like movie stars, horses reared up on their hind legs, and cooking had nothing to do with the pierogi from the canteen. One day she realised that this world existed in its entirety somewhere far away, and she left to seek her fortune in Paris.

  ‘She upped and went to seek her fortune in Paris! Well girls, if you don’t kill me, that will! So, Karen left to go glue together that photomural of hers… No way any good will come of this.’

  PAULA

  Suddenly my mobile starts ringing. I pick up: Paula.

  ‘Guess what, Vicômte. I’m at the other end of the beach. Come on over.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the straight bit. Wait, let me cover myself up; all I have on is a black thong. I’ll be right over…’

  She’s forgotten everything again; and again I have to explain it all to her. So I tell her this:

  ‘Dearest Paula, did you really purchase those,
how shall I say it, spectacular underthings, just to go and hide in the bushes every time a spectator happens upon your charms?’ Paula had to concede that I was right, she told me I’d utterly emancipated myself (which is true), and that she wasn’t covering herself, but putting herself ‘on display’. But the problem lay entirely in the displaying. Emancipation means showing off, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re not hiding yourself, then you’re displaying yourself – but you’re not being yourself. All of this will vanish anyway in the post-emancipatory phase; there’ll be no more gay beaches, no more gay bars, or gay newspapers… And no gay ghetto either. Queerness will be so transparent that when two lads start kissing on a regular beach, no one will take any notice. But fortunately, Paula, we won’t be around then to see it.

  How Paula Took the Piss Out of a Pseudointellectual Queen

  On my way here, Vicômte, I ducked into a hollow for a lie-down and this Pseudointellectual Queen latched on to me. Tinsel Tina I think was her name. Just imagine! Oh, there she goes! Look! There, on the horizon! She’s probably walking back to Międzyzdroje!’ (Paula points to someone strolling along the water’s edge.)

  Well, I guess I really did give her what-for. She ran off with her tail between her legs. I was spreading out my blanket when she came over… But I have to describe her for you: bright-coloured scarf on her head, string of Buddhist beads around a weatherbeaten neck, and clogs, just like our Poontanga. She spread out her blanket a few metres away and started reading a book. She kept glancing over at me, wondering why I wasn’t chatting her up, seeing that she was so important and all with her book and beads. Finally she says to me: