Nowa Huta, with its concrete monoliths buffered by patches of soggy grass and swollen bushes, with its metal railings sidling around corners and out of eyeshot, was made for parkour.
Built for a discipline that would come five decades later.
I remember when I first heard about this martial art creeping into Poland. It was a ghost element of our gradual entry into the European Union, gliding in on passports that became increasingly useless until, one day last year, they didn’t need to be stamped anymore. I learned about parkour through a neighbour; more precisely, through the screams when his elbow shattered and bone fragments stuck into the grass, pinning his arm to the ground. I later learned that he had bent parkour’s non-competition rules and had paid the price.
Quel dommage, as the French say.
The doctor who treated him wasn’t very understanding of this new phenomenon because he forbade further practice. Even worse, the administracja installed barbed wire along the walls, railings, and concrete surfaces of Osiedle Sportowe, as if we were too stupid to injure ourselves elsewhere.
As if people don’t eventually get what they want.
A bunch of us guys from Sportowe shrugged off danger and followed the lead of our friend without an elbow, although we obeyed the rules of parkour more rigidly than he did. As we conquered the physical world and bettered ourselves as human beings, we often pointed out each other’s flaws: a flubbed lâché, a missed demitour, a downright embarrassing Underbar.
Self-improvement should be fun, but it rarely is.
The Underbar can go horrifyingly
wrong. You start to pull yourself through a gap in the railing, but
you get distracted. Perhaps it’s a Lot Polish Airlines jet tearing
the sky a new set of buttocks, but more likely it’s the 
storming
toward you with a rent cheque you remember signing, but don’t
remember depositing enough money in the bank to cover.
Either way, you’re screwed.
You misjudge your descent by a centimetre or two, and the steel bar wallops your chin. Your incisors punch holes in your tongue and you can’t even pronounce the best cuss word in the language: kurrrrrrrva.
In the end, I got what I wanted and acquired a few scrapes of my own. Parkour, like many other forces in Poland, cannot be stopped.
But when the came running after
me, all red-faced and zagniewane and about to stuff a
bounced cheque down my throat, I would run to the boiler room and
lock myself in there, waiting for her to go away. Childish, yes,
but parkour makes you a kid again.
It can make you horny, too. I used to fuck in that boiler room.
Karol, a hunk from my building, spent whole summers tempting me, walking around in a cut-off T-shirt that showed off his glorious armpit hair. Those puffs of pheromone candy beckoning me to sniff.
We would do it in the dark. He would be sitting with his back against the wall, his long, hairy legs splayed out in front of him. I would be sitting on his knees, slobbering over him, tasting the stinging sweat on his shoulders and hurting my lips on his stubble, jerking him off with one hand and swirling his spaghetti hair with the other. Somewhere in my sexual history, I had conceived the idea of giving my lovers a multimedia experience. They had to feel like they were in an MTV music video or in a car commercial, or it simply wasn’t good sex. I still believe that.
Inevitably, the smell of his crotch would get to me, and I’d root out his testicles like a rutting pig. They hung several inches away from him like loosely attached eggs, as if on display. I smelled, licked, and sucked them. A kind of gender worship, I guess. I imagined piercing through the skin when he was least expecting it, siphoning out his testosterone with illicit sips, and then waiting for his pubic hair to sprout magically through my cheeks so I could smell him all day. Me, the lusty and deluded Chia Pet.
I am a swine, an alchemist, a human. I am a curious boy of twenty-five.
One of those times, Karol was most rude.
“Radek, I would like to see you naked.”
“Je ne comprends pas.” I had already begun to speak the language of the revolution.
“Don’t be coy when I’m horny,” he said. “That just makes me frustrated.” He put his hand behind my head, yanked it like a slot machine handle, and I went down. Choked on pre-cum. I loved the feeling of his cock head stretching the back of my throat. It changed how I spoke, ever so slightly, giving my vowels a hollow touch.
“But I like it when you’re frustrated,” I said. “It makes you do things to me.”
I stood up, shucked my shorts, and instantly heard the voice of the apostle Paul, residual ramblings from somewhere in my childhood.
Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
I was not made for the Lord’s work. I was built for fucking, and I had known that for many years. But these scriptures echo across the land, and it’s hard to tune them out completely, to escape even subtle pangs of guilt. I had Karol’s stinky pubes in my teeth, his fingers near my shitty hole, and the stain of dried DNA on my belly; I processed these stimuli through years of programming and filters that told me the body was an unclean organism that worms its way closer to hell every day. Fail, fail, fail.
You cannot outrun echoes in Poland, but you can block them out. There are ways to loosen the church’s grip on your crotch.
Karol cupped my ass, perhaps to catch my sway, perhaps to centre my asshole over his cock so it would be a clean pierce when I eventually squatted.
I recoiled from his touch.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Maybe we can do it with my clothes on.”
“Are you retarded?”
“Don’t be a hater,” I said.
“How is sex even possible with your clothes on?”
In a way, clothing had protected me from sin though many sound fuckings: if my body was only a remote participant, then it wasn’t exactly sex.
“My jeans have holes in all the right places.”
I was ready to defy the apostle Paul with a striptease for the ages, but Karol was already zipping up.
“Someday,” he said, “we’re going to need you to fuck openly.” He pulled an elastic band around his pony tail. “We might all have to fuck in the streets until people get it. No more hiding.”
Sure. I was conquering the physical world, all right.