Lovetown

by Michal Witkowski

  ‘Nipple play! Heavens…! All-over body contact! I told her to go find someone else, picked my arse up off that bench, and got the hell out of there.

  ‘I rang Anna to tell her all about it, and she says to me:

  ‘“This happens because they have no one to teach them… All the old queens have either been murdered or don’t go out any more. Who is that little puppy supposed to take as her mentor? How is she supposed to learn? Where are the textbooks? Girls like Baker’s Roma and me, why, we had to learn from the ground up; we trained with Uterina, with Poontanga, Culinaria, Zither, all the old mistresses of the art. But young queens now, they don’t realise that if that lad really had been grunt, not only would she have never had a chance with him, but he’d have landed his fist right in her face! They don’t understand that you just can’t say things like that to grunts! Grunt couldn’t care a rat’s arse about our Brabant laces! You walk up and immediately train your eyes on ground zero, then without a word you open up the grunt’s flies, and Bob’s your uncle! But this one, with her ‘body contact’ and all her requirements, ‘only reciprocal though’! I’m telling you, Uterina must be spinning in her grave!”

  ‘Anyway, I rang up Zither with the Broken Nose, ancient, emaciated Zither with the Wall Eye. She’s poor; she has thyroid cancer; she sits at home all day, taking care of her memories. She goes about like a duchess in a little periwig, the hair all combed upwards. She once performed in Florence at the operetta. With her crooked, broken nose. She spent her whole life dancing, singing, and ambling through Warsaw on her way to Café Amatorska (that must have been during the Stalinist years). She danced with Mazowsze under Madame Sygietyńska. A very cultured girl that one. The younger generation could learn a thing or two from someone like her…’

  Paula extinguishes her cigarette with a look of distaste and puts the end in the packet. She purses her lips. Then I begin to tell her about Giselle, so I can contribute something from my own youth as well – except my youth happened in an entirely gay milieu: hardly the place to search for hidden desires, like that taking-by-the-hand of hers. Just flagrantly open ones.

  Giselle

  ‘No–ohhh!’ says Giselle, emphasising the second ‘o’ like a little girl. ‘No–oh! This can’t go on! We have to do something about it. We should find some kind of sponsor!’

  Her hair was blonde, German: long in back, short in front, permed, peroxide. In addition, she had a remarkably pretty face, the face of a sixteen-year-old. She loved Papa Dance and Modern Talking, and dreamed of being famous. She would hang out with me on a bench in the park, smoking extra strong cigarettes and prattling on for hours about the band she was going to start, Magic Talking… And suddenly she ‘changed faces’ and started singing in a high voice; she sounded like the background singers, echoes of Modern Talking. In English. And then it was Dieter Bohlen this, Dieter Bohlen that. But the truth was an entirely different matter. And she was running away, hiding from that different truth in Dieter Bohlen.

  Giselle was destitute and scrawny, and lived in that part of town called the Bermuda Triangle. Her boyfriend, a bricklaying lout named Lech (with a moustache), used to beat her. One day we were sitting by the pond in the botanical gardens, and she had her prized possession on her lap: a large, brightly coloured, battery-powered cassette player. We were listening to her Modern Talking, and she was singing, because at the end of every cassette they had the so-called ‘reprises’, the instrumental versions of the songs. Hey! Let’s all be stars! She was more interested in being Thomas Anders; I had to sing Dieter’s part. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and other hits. She was always retreating into her dreams, into unreality. How she’d rake it in at the market, or one day just happen on a fat wad of cash. Or how we should go over to the Hotel Wrocław, where we might meet a German or a millionaire. The pinnacle of her dreams was a stereo tower, large as a wardrobe, with the turntable on top; this was back in the eighties.

  ‘And I’d have all my records alphabetised, too, the whole lot of them. Dieter Bohlen, Modern Talking. There, behind glass doors.’ All of a sudden Giselle starts making sounds like a train, which is what one of the songs starts off with. She could reproduce a whole disco with her mouth! Boom boom boom, eeh eeh eeh, ooh ooh. Fuh fuh fuh. Ooh – ooh – ooh. Her face changed completely when she started playing her mouth, its drum and bass.

  Then all of a sudden that awful Lech turned up, the lout, and he really let her have it, right across her face. He ripped the cassette player out of her hands.

  ‘What fucking time were you supposed to be home, you fucking slag? What time? What fucking time where you supposed to be home, you slag? What fucking…’

  He slammed her down on the ground, then threw her into the pond, which was blanketed with water lilies; we’d been sitting the whole time in the botanical garden. But she wouldn’t leave him; she loved him. And you couldn’t tell her a thing.

  A million times I must have said to her:

  ‘Giselle, come to your senses, dump him. He hits you, he beats you up…’ And she’d always say:

  ‘But he can be really gentle, too. When he’s sober.’

  There’s a queen for you.

  Eventually she said to me:

  ‘We have to scrape some money together somehow; I can’t do this any more!’ We walked through the night. Back then, it was always night; we only ever hung out at night, wandering around Wrocław, straying into unknown neighbourhoods, ducking into courtyards. She came from a bad family, and I was from a good one, but I was sick of school, of family dinners, of reading. Of having to hear how I fraternised with the dregs of society and was sullying myself in the gutter. She lived in Traugutt Street; I was in Baciarelli. Another world entirely. I spent the day in school, she in her broken home. Nights we spent together. I’d tell my parents I was off to the discotheque. And with Giselle it really was non-stop disco; she couldn’t help but sing, make noises. And in my memories of that time it was always and forever night. The night of my youth, of my fifteen years of age. So we needed to scrape some money together. But where? At a hotel, of course; where else could you do that in 1989, when communism was already finished and capitalism had yet to begin? At the Hotel Panorama, which has since been demolished to make way for the Dominican Shopping Centre; at the Hotel Wrocław. The get-up she had on, all second-hand! A green jacket and a sweatband made of brightly coloured rags on her head. Pink leggings. Blue eyes. Scars on her arms and her angelic little voice and blonde eyelashes. We would sit in the lobby. We’d sit there, smoking Extra Strongs, and maybe Carmens, too, which we’d buy just for the occasion… Elderly German lady pensioners would walk by with their leather bags, grey-haired, no makeup on, a far cry from the world of the disco. A far cry from ‘Strangers in the Night’. We pressed our little noses against the glass wall of the drinks bar; we must have made a fine sight. But there was nobody inside – the German lady pensioners weren’t interested in partying. Defeat across the board.

  At least we knew a queen who worked at the Panorama. She was a toilet lady, so you could always have a slash for free, fix yourself up. This fashion designer was supposed to come by. Hey, Giselle, let’s tell him we want to do an article on him for the school newspaper… He was gay. He started buying us drinks at the bar… He’d say things like:

  ‘One more shot for Babycakes here!’

  Giselle clambered on to the bar stool, which was much too high for her. But nothing came of it. The designer had to catch a train that night to get to a show in another city. Giselle let herself go, went about unwashed, drunk. And she had such an innocent little face, I still remember it clearly; such blue eyes. And she could make such amazing noises. And all those times she played Alexis…

  One night we met this bloke who told us he was going to start up a wholesale company in Legnica; back then everyone was starting up something or other. He told us we could work there, we’d earn three million a month, it was a sure thing. Three million – that was a leather jacket every month! Something none of us could ev
en dream of. I saw one at the market once, leather patches stitched together, a patchwork jacket. That’s twelve jackets a year!

  ‘You’re a lost cause, Giselle. Are you stupid or something? If each of us buys a jacket the first month, you won’t need to buy a new one the next – get something else, cowboy boots or something!’ And we looked at each other, grasped each other’s hands and squealed in delight: only now did we realise what we had to look forward to!

  ‘Right! Cowboy boots! And later on we can have gold bracelets!’

  ‘Swear to me,’ Giselle said one night, in the park, ‘swear to me, you silly goose, that we’ll always be together and that life and everything will always be really amazing! Swear on your mother’s life!’

  We went with this bloke to his flat, an old, ugly flat crammed with dusty antiques and rubbish. In an old building, in a shabby part of town, not far from where Giselle lived… In the morning, he sent us out for vodka with coins he’d shaken out of a little vase, to which we had to contribute our share. I still have this image in my head: Giselle that morning in his bath. In the bubbles. She was calling me, covering herself with the bubbles, and which shampoo would you use, if you were me, to wash my hair, this one or that one or that one. Oh, go and listen at the door, silly, and see if he’s standing on the other side. No. Then she went all gasps and giggles, spraying herself with whatever she could find, rummaging through everything.

  And then for a long, long time, nothing. The bloke never called. But he’d given us the address for the wholesaler.

  ‘He fucked us over.’

  Giselle was eating candy floss under the stars.

  We were sitting on the back of a bench. We kept fiddling with a sunflower, nibbling on this and that. Giselle scratched a scab off her knee and licked the blood, I spat tobacco and poked at it with a stick. When she gouged under her long fingernails with a match to get the crud out, I chewed mine. When she bit and tore the skin off her lips, I didn’t even notice because I was busy sticking a wad of gum under the bench, then scratching. Then she pulled out a little bottle of counterfeit perfume called Made in France and sprinkled herself with it. Then I started to scratch my thigh.

  ‘Maybe everything really will be different. Think about it: cowboy boots, leather, gold necklaces, L’Oréal shampoo!’

  We took the train to Legnica, or was it Trzebnica. To the address he’d given us. We wandered about in the sweltering heat. We sat on a low wall and drank mineral water; we blundered between the garages…

  At last we found it! An old villa, stairs. A woman in a tracksuit opened the door.

  ‘Does Mr So-and-So live here? We were expecting to find a wholesale company.’

  ‘Yes, he lives here, but he’s not here at the moment; and it didn’t work out with the wholesaler’s. Maybe next year. Would you like to leave a message?’

  ‘Umm… Umm, maybe you could tell him… that Grzesiek and Michał were… ’cause of the wholesale company…’

  We hitchhiked back. It was raining, pouring. Giselle laid her head on my shoulder and fell asleep, rocked by the swaying lorry. I never saw her again; I stopped hanging out with her. Not just her – with all of them.

  The German Old Dears: The Revenge

  What? Like I’m going to bother! I’ll be fucked if an old whore like me has to hunt for a chemist, one that hasn’t any customers or tourists or queues, or that’s out of the way; I’ll go to the biggest one in the very centre of town, right next to Neptune Square. Hello, excuse me, I desperately need something for my pubic lice, something strong, to nuke every last one of those little bitches off my fanny! Chuck together a bit of this and a bit of that, and make me a mix of pine tar and spices, medicinal lovage, pharmaceutical rue!

  No sooner do I reach the promenade than some Old Dears from Germany sink their claws into me. Vicious. Every last one of them wearing cream-coloured orthopaedic clogs, cream-coloured anoraks, brown trousers… All individualism scrubbed out of them with soap and water. Hair cropped short, grey. No makeup at all, just daubed with affectation. Naturally they came from the former GDR. Jolly, elderly ladies. They’d had it drilled into them over the years never to stand out, always to obey power and do what the bosses at work told them to do: no talking back, no thinking for themselves – just perform! After work, it was off to the allotment graciously provided by the Party. It would be hard to expect any individualism now in their clothing, in their behaviour. All they care about is whether they’re normal. Are those pearl earrings she put on too large? Maybe she should take them off in the toilet? Maybe they’re inappropriate? It’s especially hard to expect them to change now, in their old age. Which – because of the high standard of living in Germany today – has been prolonged. But it’s even more hideous and conspicuous as a result.

  It was just such an agitated group that waylaid me on the promenade and asked, in German, about a Hotel Grunwald.

  ‘Have you heard of it?’ They’d been searching since morning, had already reserved the room and paid the deposit over the phone before they left. They repeat it, loudly and clearly to make sure I’ll understand: ‘Hotel Grrrrunvald!’ – boiling the ‘r’ in the back of their throats.

  I knew there couldn’t be a hotel by that name in Międzyzdroje because most of those types of conveniences were actually meant for Germans. Someone was taking the piss out of them, and was having a little joke with the name, too. Not the first time Grunwald had spelled bad luck for the Germans…

  Lindane, Please!

  But they couldn’t get it into their grey heads that somebody could do something like that. When I turned away, they immediately started grilling the next passers-by. Who merely shrugged their shoulders. And I was off to the chemist’s. A queue of holiday-makers; it was clear at once that the straights had sent their birds off to stand in a queue while they watched the football. A few of them had screaming brats in their arms; others, it was clear, were childless, and had only come for some tanning oil. ‘I’m here for tanning oil, I’m here for tanning oil, too!’ I shouted to myself, but repeated, so I wouldn’t forget: Lindane! Lindane! Lindane! Unfortunately – I said to myself – you already have more than enough tanning oil… A sizeable queue had formed behind me, a potential audience in case I blew it. A young, bleached-blonde thing behind the counter. I was seized by dreadful anxieties: how to make sure no one else overheard me; whether for her the word ‘Lindane’ meant only one thing: you have crabs, you’re infected! And her all pure and hygienic like that, like an Apothecaress. But I concocted something, and when I arrived at the front of the queue, I said in a relaxed voice:

  ‘Lindane, please. It’s for my child…’

  She wouldn’t give it to me. She insisted that for head lice in children another remedy was needed, a kind of shampoo. I bought it without arguing and left. I walked to the next chemist’s.

  ‘Lindane, please!’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For lice.’

  ‘Head lice?’

  ‘Y… yes…’

  She gave me a bottle of shampoo, the same kind as before. I bought it. I went to a third (and last) chemist’s shop. A queen I knew from the beach, one of the Poznanites, came in and stood in the queue behind me. I was like:

  ‘A bottle of suntan lotion, please.’

  I bought it, and walked away from the queue. Then the queen behind me goes up to the counter and says:

  ‘Can you please give me something for pubic lice?’

  ‘Lindane?’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Here you go. Sixteen zlotys, eighty-five.’

  Oleśnicka

  Just as boredom was setting in, when my Old Dears were starting to repeat themselves, I glanced over and: Oh, I hope that’s who I think it is! A little dog in the distance was waddling towards us, all dressed up, a Pekinese, and farther on, a limping little roly-poly. I’m thinking: I hope to God that’s Oleśnicka, I’m not asking for much, just please let that be Oleśnicka’s Pekinese!

  Please let that be Ole�
�nicka! Please let that be her – fat, crippled, short, simultaneously bald and bleached blonde – and her dog, a dog who’d broken the record for pissing on trees, having spent his whole life in parks, on picket lines. That dog had urinated on every single picket line in Poland, on each and every tree, and here he was pissing on all the plants on his way towards us! Please let that be Oleśnicka’s little dog, who had done his time in the cruising grounds of Bydgoszcz, Toruń, Kalisz, Suwałki, Zgierze, Wrocław, Warsaw, Poznań, Olsztyn and Kraków, everywhere peeing, pissing, passing water, piddling, relieving himself, urinating, micturating on the trees; because if it is him (or rather: her, since she was all dressed up in a bow tie and rhinestones – a little queen-dog), then that roly-poly human companion would have to be Oleśnicka, and that would spell hope, a light at the end of the tunnel, an end to this boredom, to this ennui, because then our story would get a shot of new energy!

  And indeed, it was no other: Oleśnicka in the flesh.

  ‘Hey girls, having fun? I flew in on my broomstick when I heard Kangaroo was in town, that bitch! Have you seen her yet? You know, they call her Kangaroo because she used to live in Australia, and still gets an Australian pension…’

  My Old Dears blanched; they’d realised they were talking to none other than the infamous Oleśnicka, whose name was known throughout Poland from the graffiti in trains and railway station toilets. Who was gossiped about in the cells of prisons. Trash-talked about all night in the wards of hospitals, where the chanteuses did their national service. Throughout the years of communism she’d been second in line, right after Lucia La Douche. But now, ever since that grunt killed Lucia with a curling iron, she’s the No. 1 Queen for life in all of Poland. The Old Dears fell at her feet. I, too, fell. With a majestic gesture Oleśnicka bade us rise and asked us if we hadn’t seen that tart Kangaroo, because she’d nicked (an uglier phrase was used) twenty zlotys from her.