I was in Europe with my grandfather
some years ago. I spent my twenty second birthday there (which I only
know because, on the advice of an Irish rugby team, I spent the night
telling people I was twenty one to solicit more free drinks. Which
would make it, 2012. Or 2011. Somewhere in there, beer in Europe is a
huge player.
Anyway, we were in the south of Poland
in a town called Muszyna. I guess kinda the bum-fuck of Poland,
though in a weird twist, the bum-fuck of the great grey industrial
east of Europe is kinda the place to be. Eight kilomeeers from the
shitty border into shitty Slovakia. In summer, as when I was there,
it looks like
My grandfather, a
Polack and a fucking weirdo, is a health nut. He goes back to the
mother country to get fifteen minutes of sun on each of his four
sides, eat mackerel and walk a lot. He expects the same of me, I
don't have the heart to tell him I want to meet our family. I want to
see Europe. He has seen Europe and suspects the family is trying to
kill him, for all his millions I guess. So we walked. Well, we
walked after a bus ride.
Krynica is the
neighbouring town, bigger and with more to do and see. We would fork
out our weird coins every day, get the bus 8 kilometres up the road
and walk around for most of the day, or until lunch time as old
people are weirdly preoccupied with lunch. To the elderly, and I
didn't know this, lunch is like Friday night beers to the working
man, Centrelink pay-day beers to the non-working man and any-time
beers to the student.
We would have
lunch in a 'home kitchen', essentially someone's house run as a a
resturant. The food was killer though it seems to be some sort of
compromise for the women not working. Then we would walk a little
more and pay more weird coins to go back to Muszyna. After doing what
he wanted to do, we did what I wanted to do; drink cheap Polish beer.
We did this for a
month. A solid daily routine. Our walks through Krynica would
inevitably start, end or go though the town square. In the town
square, most days, was a stripper handing out flyers for an upcoming
skin show.
This stripper was
something of a beauty, though her glory years had long passed. She
was oddly tanned for a Pole, buxom, a big arse (my favourite) and
cropped peroxide blonde hair. She kind of looked like a more fuckable
Jessica Rowe.
I
took one of her flyers and committed myself to seeing her nude
(seeing her show, that is). I know now this is crass and crude and
piggish and all the other bad penis shit. But at the time I was
coming off Warsaw, Krakow and Bratislava. I was coming off grey
cement cities with the most divinely sculpted things, things
inconceivable to me, a kind of astonishing human that I had never
seen.
Plus
I was very horny. I admired all these women but did jack shit about
it. I couldn't even play the rugged Australian angle with any good
faith. When my grandfather went for a shit, I would go for a wank.
Another different generational obsession.
I
got the flyer and told him I wanted to go. He said with the great
confidence of the foolish, that he would go with me. He knew full
well the non-Polski speaking where ripe for punishment in the open. I
did too. He translated to me, in Catholic old guy speak, a torrent of
vicious abuse directed at me on the bus from Krakow to Muszya. So, we
walked on. I was very keen to see the Polish Jessica Rowe's bits. I
reaffirmed with the old man every day that he would chaperone and
each day he affirmed he would.
I
was, indeed, all the more keen when one day I was drunk at the
Muszyna bakery (you can do that shit there) and the aforementioned
stripper approached me to ask if I was O.K (At the behest of the
bakeries lovely matriarch and owner). The love of my life approached
me and was talking to me. The reason was that I desperately needed a
piss and was positive the toilet was occupied. The bakeries owner
conversed with the stripper and through my shitty Polish it was
apparent the stripper spoke English, a cultured sex-pot. I told her I
needed to use the toilet, she informed me it was empty and I did my
business. Smitten again.
Then the day came. The day I put up
with all my grandfathers bullshit for, the day I stayed in Poland
for. The strip night.
'Oh I don't think I'll go to that'
Though it sounds like the words of a
snobbish Englishman, it was the words of an old Pole looking through
the fog.
He had his back to me, straightening
out one of many khaki-safari pant and vest combos that he thought
made him look taller.
'Why not, you said you would?' I
asked, given my natural connection to the lady paid to make false
connections with people, I thought this outrageous.
'Oh, I don't know. I just don't feel
upto it'
THAT MOTHERFUCKER! After he had agreed
twenty times, promised me, told me the horrors of how Australians and
English speakers were treated at these kind of things. He really
wasn't going to use his language skills to help me see naked women.
'I wouldn't mind paying them to come
here for a bit of sex with you' he said.
I wouldn't mind either.
He went to sleep, I went for a wank.
NP
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