Polish Psycho – inspired by Karolina

Disclaimer: All similarities are intentional and all described characters are real, apart from that of the anti-hero. And if you think you recognize yourself, you may be right, you may be wrong though you’ll probably be wrong because I see you differently than you do yourself.  And it’s not autobiographical, I’m melancholic, not psychotic.

„The chicken in a bun”, I told the waitress. I knew her name was Karolina. A pretty girl with unruly black hair that framed her face and cute eyes and eyebrows nicely. She had been working at Szpilki for the last couple of months, or 62 days exactly and she should really have known that I always take the chicken. It’s the only thing I can eat there and it goes down nicely with import beer. I prefer Redd’s, a mild ale with a nice head and a pleasant aftertaste. Much inferior to Caffrey’s of course, but Caffrey’s was the Cru of beers, its taste as creamy, fresh and pleasant as that of an 18 year olds kiss, which made Redd’s an excellent beer in its own right but not comparable.

“And a Redd’s of course”, I added.

Karolina smiled in her sweet way and left for the bar where she meet with her friend, a red-headed spiky-haired head waiter. It was dark outside. As a Polish rapper recently complained, winter last 8 months here. Maybe that has affected my psyche.

Szpilki had two levels, the ground with the bar and various low set tables and chairs around the walls and against the windows and stool and high table combinations in the center. The ground floor wasn’t much larger than my flat’s living room. The second floor was really an interior balcony with the diners above perfectly positioned to massacre those below with projectile bottles and glasses. The interior design suggested that somebody had spent a lot of money without knowing exactly what they wanted to achieve, cream mixed with white, brown mixed with steel, the walls hung with arty photographs. It rather reminded me of the house of a ex-publisher I knew. The waiters were either friendly or arrogant depending on how you treated them, they gave back contempt for contempt, I had toyed with various approaches and was currently (for the last month which meant that most of the staff only knew my nice side, staff rotation was a major problem in Warsaw bars) in my nice mode. Somebody brushed past me on the way to the bar. If we had been elsewhere I would have waited until they left and then killed them, brutally though quickly in their apartment, I hate physical contact that I haven’t initiated. But this was Szpilki, the Polish word for pin and it was such a small and popular club that such physical encounters occurred several times an evening and I couldn’t very well kill everybody there. Well, I had toyed with that idea and perhaps one day I would, but only when a new, cooler bar appeared.

I looked around after the brush, it had been a blonde copywriter, a jerk but with a handsome face and a trim body, I knew with an exotic looking girlfriend, that I wouldn’t mind knowing considering her long hair, pale soft skin emaciated model and body good looks, staring at the good, beautiful, brave and powerful of Warsaw as they drank, flirted, eat and discussed various banalities. I wondered if they would be sitting so calmly or happily if they had known who I really was. The regulars knew my face of course, and most of the girls I had slept with knew my name, some even knew that I worked at the Holland Park complex across the street (I had fucked on my desk a couple of times when I couldn’t be bothered to take them home or pay for a taxi or I just wanted a quick fuck without all that touchy-feel crap) or that I worked in PR which meant I had to wear a suit, because of that they sometimes took me for a lawyer or banker. Then again, I could have become a lawyer or a banker, they both require the lying that is so key to my own job. But my job isn’t my life, my life is that of a psychotic killer, I kill to live, I live to kill.

I smiled at the pretty girl at the table opposite. She was sitting with some nobody regular in a t-shirt with some Japanese comic heroine, a busty nurse. His clothes were unpressed, worn and rather bedraggled. He always wore glasses. He had spots and bad hair. And he wasn’t tall. Altogether unappealing partner for such a girl. Then again I had often seen him with various other girls in various of the cooler locales and he seemed to know a lot of people, I wondered who he was, probably a copywriter or graphic artist, he was too badly dressed to be an account executive and his clothes shouted: look at me, I can write or draw, I’m CREATIVE. Fuck you, you ugly nobody, I create death.

The girl on the other hand was a lot more interesting, dark, long hair, exotic features, looked a bit like Cleopatra, dark eyes like a predatory cat, slim and with a grace to her movements. I couldn’t recognize exactly what she was wearing, it looked expensive, which I liked and had an originality that I also liked. I hadn’t had her and I wanted her.

I mostly got what I wanted with my charming Adonis smile, my Appolian features, my Herculean workout-toned body and my Ulyssean ready wit, not forgetting my gold Citibank card, my Peugeot 406 and Hugo Boss suits, but she avoided my eye-flirting. I considered breaking my rule about killing Szpilki clients, they could die together. Who was she to ignore me and who was he to be with her?

No, they weren’t worth it, my self-made rules kept me from degenerating into the mediocrity and sensual ignorance of normal people, of society. They raised me to a higher level and justified my acts of violence against society. I would kill a prostitute at about 2am, depending on when I left Szpilki. And then I’d drove over and fuck my current half-steady account-executive girlfriend to the other side of moon, rough and violent. And she’d like it.

They were playing Moby again. They being the Szpilki staff over the Szpilki sound system, which depending on the volume chosen by the staff on that particular day or where you sat made conversation impossible, tedious difficult or disjointed.

Moby’s new/old Play album is still making the rounds in tediously pretentiously trendy Warsaw, where the cutting edge of cool is usually the cutting edge of terminally uncool elsewhere. Still I like the new album, a musical kaleidoscope as one internet reviewer called it. A mix of dance, fuck-tunes and lets-kill-myself-or-everybody-else-manic-depressive-hymns supported by samples ripped from everything from folk, gospel, blues and jazz, Moby becomes a vegan Prozac-popping Fatboy Slim. I have trouble deciding whether to dance or kill to the sound of “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad”, a track made excruciatingly popular by MTV though I’ve killed (while wearing my mp3 Rio 500 with additional 64 mb memory) to it and I’ve danced to it, I still can’t decide. I can’t really understand what the song is telling me, I haven’t felt bad for long since I discovered psychosis as a lifestyle. That and lithium and Prozac and coke and heroine speed-balling. The song starts with a simple piano melody and then develops with a great booming funky hip-hop beat and orchestral accompaniment, not forgetting the obligatory fat lady vocal. “Honey”, is a lively sample heavy ditty that just wants to make you get a girl and twirl her, squeeze her, throw her in the air and sodomize her all night long, sample heavy, with a lively piano, I personally believe think the piano themed songs are central to this album’s success, great beat and a corny country guitar and clapping motive. “Porcelain”, sounds like Beck on drugs singing a hymn to strings and a punching beat, it tries to be funny and happy, but instead makes me reach for the lithium and my Sabre Tooth combat knife, its 12 inch ground blade with full length sharp false edge. Sabre Tooth use Starrett 496-O1 high carbon tool on all their knives, they’re hardened, then selectively tempered, giving them a Rockwell C-scale hardness of 61-62 at the edge (hard as a file and easily capable of ripping through flesh. I’ve even gone through a car door with mine when the bitch tried to run and drive away and she looked very surprised when she got stabbed through the door), and HRC 50-54 throughout the spine and full hidden tang, giving them superior edge-holding ability with exceptional durability for prying and chopping (I do a lot of chopping). Each blade is hard chromed, providing excellent corrosion inhibition.  The ergonomic grip indexes the blade in the user's hand, so you know how the blade is presented, even in the dark, which comes in very useful in night time or darkened kill situations, like a car park, park, alleyway or even a disco toilet. The knife has a glass/epoxy composite grip material similar to G10 (with improved compressive yield strength) that is compression bonded to the hidden full tang. With a compressive yield strength of 79,000 psi, the grip can withstand tremendous punishment with no damage. The composite grip material provides 1,000 volts per mil (.001") dielectric strength that electrically isolates the user from the blade. Quality. Expensive quality but quality. Well, if you haven’t paid through the nose for it, it isn’t worth shit. “Find my baby” sounds like James Brown on amphetamine with a repetitive disorder to an old-skool beat. “Run” makes it clear that God has been speaking to Moby, the piano plonks, the chorus gospels, the beat runs along, I can’t stand the mystical religious New Age Christian heretical crap, being raised an orthodox Catholic makes me sick at his religious but do-what-you-like attitude, life has to have rules and they aren’t limited to not eating animals, but any track this good has to be divinely inspired. Well I sometimes feel that Satan speaks to me so why can’t God (or Jesus) speak to Moby? Play earns an A+ from me for its musical content despite its wanton use of repetitive themes (the piano and pumping beat) but F for its message. People aren’t to be loved and raised to grace. We’re predators, we need to rip each other with 12 inch blades and eat each other to be strong. Dog eat dog is sometimes literal in my case.

I was waiting for some friends, or rather associates for I have no true friends, friends I could laugh, play and kill with, of mine, Piotr and Gustaw. One was an on-the-upper in Arthur Andersen, a big bear of a man/boy with an intellect so fierce under his curly brown hair that it even scared me sometimes, the other was a friend of my current fuck, had in fact introduced us. Not a genius to match Piotr, but intelligent in his own right and making a career in an internet start-up, pity about the glasses and short build. I knew Piotr and Gustaw from the Warsaw School of Economics were we had both studied, or Psycho School as I fondly remembered it. It was there I had decided that I would become a true predator, both in business and in blood. They taught us everyday to destroy, conquer, eat and chew our competitors, gave us the intellectual tools we needed to do so and let us loose on an unsuspecting Poland, we were the blood-sucking elite, all-powerful among the uneducated, unprepared, unintelligent. Once we would have all become lawyers but we would buy our own lawyers in time, marketing/management is the new mantra for the new elite, as compared to the revolution/rebellions chants of our intellectual elite parents during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and the honor/heroism that our officer grandparents and great-parents embodied during the first part of the century. We were meeting to have a drink and discuss job opportunities, we are all actively headhunted of course despite the fact that we’ve only been working for a couple of years. I love lying, deceiving, conniving and manipulating, which is what a PR representative does but I wanted more power, real power, power to use and abuse, power over people and property. I had been offered a job as an executive at Nationale Nederlanden but was still negotiating terms. Piotr was being headhunted from Arthur Andersen to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (the asshole who thought that name up should die, though in all probability it was assholes, committees are simpleminded by definition) and Gustaw was thinking of setting up his own internet incubator. Normally I hate meeting Piotr, the money he earns makes me want to vomit though we were both richer than Gustaw. Still he had the potential to buy us both in the next year or so, but that was a slim chance taking into account the fact that the Internet boom was over and the Polish stock-market was completely and utterly controlled by the narcotics, political and financial mafias (or were they one mafia?). Only the well-connected would get rich and Gustaw wasn’t well connected, unlike the son of a presidential candidate I knew. Another reason to hate Piotr were his Armani suits. I could only afford Hugo Boss, which was still a lot better than Gustaw’s Polish Wolczanka which looked like they had been produced by drunken Russians out of old rugs.

“Hi, Piotr”, said Piotr, my name is also Piotr.

“Hi, Piotr”, said Gustaw.

My cell-phone, a Motorola v3690 was already on the table. Beat that, I thought, as they took out theirs. The Motorola v3690 was a newer version of the v3688, the original Vader. Mine had a titanium finish,  voice activated dialing, a memo recorder, a large high contrast display, a vibrating signal and weighed less than my weekend dose of cocaine. I had also bought an optional longer-lasting battery, something that those in the know wouldn’t go without, and a walk-talk headset so I could piss people off when I walked down the street talking loudly to myself with no phone in sight.

Gustaw had a Nokia 9110i. It could hardly be called a portable phone, it looked more like a personal organizer, which in fact it was. More powerful than PC’s at the beginning of the 90’s, the 9110i had fax, email, internet, WAP, loudspeakers, word-processor and calendar capabilities. It was the ultimate nerd’s phone and you looked like a nerd with it. Though it might come in handy if you lacked a brick in a dark alleyway as it was almost the same size and weight as a brick. Where did he carry that thing?

But it was the other Nokia that made me sick. A spectacular, silver, sleek, shiny, 8850, the current choice of phone to shout,“ Fuck you, I’m richer than you and even if I’m not then I spend more than you.” It had everything my phone had and was more expensive to boot and it was price that counted in the phallic-comparison cell-phone status wars. Piotr was beginning to piss me off, he drove a better car, a Saab 93, had a better job, wore better suits and now he had a better phone. Damn him. You’re a dead man walking, Piotr.

“Always good to see you, Piotr”, I told him.

“Yeah, good to see you as well”, his eyes laughed at me and my phone.

Piotr uses Gio Armani for Men, a strong but quickly dissipating aftershave that I find smells too flowery personally, though it does have a pleasant spicy undertone. Gustaw uses some Polish aftershave that I couldn’t even bother to name, it smelled cheap and probably was used in the production of toilet freshener, another reason to despise him and feel better than him even if he ever became as rich as God. I use Gucci Rush, an extremely aggressive smell that attacks the nose, seduces it, talks about lemons, pepper and sex on the beach and keeps on hammering on the smeller until they go to bed with me. Doesn’t match the smell of fresh blood though, with its tangy iron undertones below the overwhelming saltiness.

We talked banalities and about work as I chewed my suddenly tasteless chicken sandwich and sipped the sour beer. They both ordered the Gregory Peck steak and the Anti-Vegetarian salad (beef, lettuce and corn with a mediocre dressing that seemed to be composed of only sunflower oil) and a Miller and a Fosters, obviously they hadn’t heard that both the dishes were mediocre or their own taste-buds were so undiscerning that they could eat them happily without knowing they were tasteless until somebody told them. As for the choice of beers… well Miller spends a lot on advertising and it was a good beer to drink if you were a girl or wanted to get a girl drunk, it had alcohol but you couldn’t taste it or anything else really. Fosters was only a little better. Some connoisseurs they were.

“You going somewhere later?”, Piotr asked Piotr.

“I thought about going to the Soma”, I replied. Soma was supposed to be the ultimate multi-level trendy new club, with its own brewery, restaurant, bar and disco. All of the elements were lacking somehow, the beer was flat, tasteless and boring, the restaurant even worse, the bar expensive and they cheated you on the alcohol and the disco played techno music straight from the Love Parade (i.e. awful and untrendy) and altogether it was a good idea that got screwed up in the realization.

“Not for me, they water down their beer and its damn expensive”, Piotr said, sipping his watered down, expensive beer. The money we spent together every night was about half the monthly average wage.

“Yeah and its full of snobs”, said the nerd-snob Gustaw sitting in snob city Szpilki.

I was actually going to the Soma to find a prostitute, high class and expensive to kill but on second thought I realized I had a better chance of finding one at the Piekarnia, Warsaw’s trendiest and best night-club. Though the quality of its clientele had been decreasing recently. People who would had no chance of getting in a year previously where being greeted warmly by the doormen. Ugly, badly-dressed, poor people, the proletariat was getting in and that was not something I wanted to spend my evening with. I wanted classy hookers, body-building models, successful young businessman, people for whom I could attempt to cover my contempt for humanity with. I used to be able to spend an evening there only wanting to kill somebody out of envy for their clothes or car or girl, now I wanted to stain their blue jeans (who wore jeans nowadays, for Christ’s sake?) with blood and intestinal fluids or rip their tacky black dresses from those ugly girls backs. They didn’t even bother to dress up for the occasion parties, like Halloween or Valentine’s Day. Pathetic. The Muza on Chmielna Street was trying to become the new Piekarnia, but it was smaller and despite being more expensive had a poorer quality of clientele. Less of the advertising people and more of the people advertised to was an apt expression. You could tell it was a converted Chinese restaurant, there was still the patina of tackiness about the place even after redecoration. Still, they did have some good bands in sometimes. I personally liked dancing in clubs to Hard House music, finely balancing on the razor’s edge between house and techno, characterised by an aggressive, ugly beat that spoke to me of tribes, wolves and hunting. Though Moby was okay for more mellow moments. The current fashionable wave of garage and 2step disgusted me, homo’s like Craig David from Artful Dodger chatting over a hip-hop bass-line and I kept away from garage parties like the death. The term garage had odd connotations for me because I remember when garage denoted metal music recorded literally in people’s garages, Metallica had even released a CD of cover “garage” hits from the days when they hadn’t been the rich Napster-bashing, jazz and country playing bastards they were nowadays.

Two fags were talking loudly at a neighbouring table. One had brown, extremely unruly uncut hair and large glasses and looked like a cross between Gandhi and Julius Caesar, with an thin frame and large nose. The other looked like something like Mel Gibson mixed with Hugh Grant and Anthony Kedders of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a funky sexy band that it was sometimes cool to listen to, which I then did and sometimes wasn’t, when I didn’t. I couldn’t decide whether his hair was Mad Max 1 or Four Weddings and a Funeral. I often saw them him together, they often hugged, they seemed to be friends of the geek I had seen earlier, I cherished the thought that perhaps he was a gay as well, perhaps they all slept together in one flat nearby after getting drunk together. The two were laughing together, probably talking about gay parties or going to the fag disco, Paradies. I went there once, I felt like a cow at a farmers, I hated Polish farmers, they were always protesting about something, greedily demanding my hard-earned money for their poor quality products, if their lives were so bad why didn’t they move to the city, auction with all those prying eyes and fondling hands, I killed a fag that evening in revenge when I invited him back, he was salivating at the thought of spending the night with me and I hit him with a meat tenderiser as he tried to fondle me in the kitchen. I certainly tenderised his face. They were drinking cola with vodka, an unsophisticated drink but certainly more cultured than whiskey cola which only the uneducated or pathetic-trying-to-trendy snobs drank. Whiskey was meant to be drank straight, had to be malt and needed to be extremely expensive for it to be worth drinking at all. I preferred absinthe personally. I saw the manga creative geek had noticed them and was waving them over to join him and the girl alongside. They seemed to be preparing to leave and were saying goodbye.

When I looked back Piotr and Gustaw were greeting their girlfriends who had just come through the door. Damn, I thought we were in for some quality male drinking time and instead I was playing odd-one-out. The first person to ask where my girl-friend was would die.

“Where’s your girl?”, asked Gustaw’s girl. A tall, slender blonde with longish, recently shortened hair, she had cute slightly oriental eyes and was probably a model.

“At home”, I lied. Bitch was probably working, slaving on some project that meant fuck all for some fuck all client who was probably horny for her. This wasn’t meant to be happening, go home girls, I want to drink some, I thought.

Her friend laughed at that, I didn’t know why. She was blonde, but not naturally, with a fuller more oval face and shorter build than her companion that was somehow reminded me of Woodstock hippies for some reason, her eyes also intrigued me, I thought about taking her from Piotr in revenge but I prefer brunettes and anyway he would be dead soon. Perhaps alongside her.

I clicked my fingers at Marcin, the Rastafarian (white) barman and smiled, if I didn’t smile he’d think I was being arrogant and wouldn’t bother to serve me or do something nasty to my Shangai Sling, which was what the click was the signal for.

“Thanks”, I smiled to Karolina when she brought the drink. I said the thank you loudly, to interrupt the babble that was emerging from Gustaw’s mouth. I wondered whether he had been using cocaine or grass tonight, probably coke. Coke had only recently been discovered by Warsaw’s better citizens, they didn’t realise that the endless nights, the wonderful fucking and the pure aggressive adrenaline thrill that it gave came at a very heavy price. Me, I preferred the pure taste of blood. Laced with fear. Or malt whiskey. With a cigar.

Personally I smoked only Cohiba Esplendidos. A box cost almost as much as an used car (what cigar smoker would buy an used car anyway?) but its rich, fatty, root taste with nutty notes and a fine smoke made it my cigar of choice. I had got addicted to them during a holiday to Cuba. A place that had become intensely fashionable thanks’ to Ry Coder’s Buena Vista Social Club. Being fashionable, I had to visit it, to listen to the salsa, drink the Cuba Libre, smoke the Cohiba’s and taste the chocolate girls. I also made a lot of money off the cigars I smuggled through customs’, I hadn’t really needed to but the thrill of it was what motivated me. I had enjoyed myself in Cuba so much that I had only had to kill a couple of people there, anyway it had been more risky there as a rich white person stood out amongst its inhabitants like a tramp at the restaurants I went to. I pulled out an Esplendido from my leather holding case and cut the tip off with my sleek little portable guillotine, I had once cut off all of a man’s fingers with it, though I regretted having done so when I had to wash the blood off the Italian-forged blade. The man had been a piano player. A pity he got better reviews after the “incident” then he had before, last thing I heard was that he had learned to play the guitar with his feet.

            I was rapidly getting angry and disgusted at my present company, they would probably soon begin smooching and cuddling (I never cuddled unless I was trying to get laid for the first time) so I began to make my apologies, pretending that I had a previous engagement that I had forgotten about.

            “Pity that you have to see Philip, Piotr, we were just beginning to have fun”, said Piotr.

            “Yeah, well, I don’t want to leave you either but the bastard’s going to kill me anyway for being late”, I lied. As if anybody could kill me, the apex predator.

            I decided to walk a little. Perhaps I could find somebody to vent my frustration on before going dancing and fucking. The gutter fags that went to the extremely unfashionable and sleazy bar a short distance away from Szpilki, they always had quick ogle at me when I went by with my body, face and clothes to literally die for, were too easy a target, anyway I had killed one and hung him upside down in the public toilet opposite Szpilki, next to the Vietnamese “bar”, more like a roof over a microwave with a table than a bar, where they consummated their sordid new relationships once and I didn’t feel like doing it again. I was surprised that they would still continue going to same bar where one of them had left for his final journey but gays were stupid like that, no wonder AIDs was decimating them, they didn’t care about life or death. Anyway that murder had brought too much police attention to the area and I was characteristic (and handsome) enough to be noticed someday in the future if I wasn’t careful.

            I wondered whether I should hang around the nearby Sheraton, a horrible squat building that tried to mix the tacky classical style of the few surrounding buildings with modernity, which of course made it an atrocious hybrid, across the square, on the other side of the ornate, slightly romanesque church, that sat square in the middle of the square, for a while, so I could find somebody rich, successful and drunk to kill but instead I decided to take a random pick so I headed for the park to the South of Szpilki, whoever was stupid enough to walk in that park at night deserved to die. I fingered my knife handle in sweet anticipation.

The park was almost deserted but since most people are idiots, it wouldn’t be so for long. I sat down on a park bench, slightly hidden from sight, so I wouldn’t be taken for a mugger or drunk. I was something a lot more dangerous. I pretended to be asleep, listening though keenly, I wouldn’t like to be mugged myself though I had enjoyed killing some would-be muggers on a previous occasion, nobody would take what was mine from me. Their sobs of fear and pleas had fallen on deaf ears as hunted, a drunk suit with a fat wallet, had turned out to be a vicious kick-boxing psycho with a machete, a paralyser and a vial of acid.

The wind whispered through the tree leaves pleasantly, a perfect Warsaw summer night, warm but not too warm. I felt a tap on my shoulder and whirled round. I recognized the eyes but I was concentrating on the fangs, something I hadn’t noticed earlier. She smiled through soon-to-be-stained-red lips and said ,”You’re pathetic Piotr, you thought all the time you were at the top of the human food chain, the apex of food chain, the ultimate predator. Well, evolution has added another rung, us. The day might belong to scum like you but night belongs to us”, I noticed her companion, I had seen them both. I screamed shortly but felt little pain.