Krakow Melt (2 page)
I realized that I had lost. For I was fighting not a man who disliked homos but a whole country that refused to acknowledge we existed. Is there a point in standing up for yourself if you’re invisible, if people will simply look right through you?
Now let’s do a safety check.
Nowa Huta is full of smoke detectors, though they’re blanketed with dust; even the newest ones would melt by the time smoke triggered the mechanism. Sure, the
administracja
appointed a fire warden for every floor, except they managed to pick all the vodka-hounds. Too sauced, I’m guessing, to tell an inferno from a good stiff one that pushes you over the edge.
There are other violations.
The evacuation plan isn’t shared with new tenants, escape routes are mapped to interfere with rescue personnel—whose stairway is it, anyway?—and the dry chemical fire extinguishers are only charged to 170 psi.
In answer to my own question, there’s always a point in standing up for yourself.
Don’t make me light a match, because I will win this war of visibility. You can see fires and the queers who start them for kilometres, especially at night.
Kraków is crows, but it is also parkour, the fine art of moving from point k to point z as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Imagine walking into a
cukiernia
in deepest summer and ordering a
paczek z marmolada
. Your order, it would seem, has disturbed a cluster of wasps who were feasting on the pastry, and through jelly-covered eyes they scowl at you, the enemy. You suddenly need to gain the most ground possible in the shortest period of time. You flap your arms, willing your shoulder blades to transform into wings and break through the skin of your back.
These are the things of fairy tales. Parkour is not.
You zoom out of the
cukiernia
and past the milk bar on Grodzka Street, and you perform a Cat Pass over an old woman selling cloves of garlic from a basket. Strive for the speed of sound. You have no time to waste, not with angry stingers coming to get you. The fence surrounding the Franciscan Church is no match for you and your Dash Vault. You tread lightly over the old bones in the cemetery.
The specialized parkour terminology doesn’t matter, nor would a face full of wasp venom, in the end. What matters is that you’re a free spirit, that you conquer the landscape of your city. This discipline— not sport, not sport—that has slowly leaked out of France and into the streets of Kraków will teach you to turn any physical or mental obstacle to ash.
Mind your language. Parkour is not “freerunning,” the same way that Nintendo is not Sega and
zupa ziemniaczana
is not toilet water.
Race north along Bracka. Flip not, for this is no performance and there are no spectators. You’re only trying to better yourself. Left on Goł
bia at full tilt and prepare for your Jagiello
ski University Dyno. Sneakers rap against the classroom windows before you drop, thud, and roll. A young woman stares through the glass, her startle melting to a smile. This
passe muraille
will not splinter your kneecaps because you have learned to absorb, transfer, give in. You have learned to turn on a
grosz
, and the soles of your feet have memorized the warp and woof of the cobblestone.
You are one with the city.
Run fast enough, and you can jump over a herd of crows before they fly away.
Someone told me it’s called a “murder” of crows, but that sounds like an urban legend.
If parkour were an Olympic sport, Kraków bagel carts would be standard equipment. You turn right on Szczepaska Street, and you spot, a hundred metres ahead, one of those steaming metal contraptions with fogged-up glass. Burnt sesame seeds roast in the open air. There is always a bit of smoke in Kraków.
But the vendor sees you coming and opens his retractable umbrella, giving your hurdle another two metres of height. At the very last second, you switch targets to a parked Polonez with a rusty roof.
There’s only one move that can get you over safely, the Kash Vault: Kong Vault + Dash Vault. Don’t get tripped up in semantics. Just make sure you push off with your hands at the beginning and at the end, and then keep-the-fuck running.
You’re amazed at all the
szopka
lying around. Who creates these random nativity scenes, in front yards and tree hollows and windowsills, ornate little dioramas on street corners and littering the Rynek Główny? It can be very confusing to
traceurs
—parkour fanatics like you and I—to run past Bethlehem so many times in one day. If time has stopped in Kraków, then parkour has frozen it.
Interesting. Every time you jump a wall, you feel the crumble of plaster or the chipping of wood. There’s not enough cement in old cities to protect them from an all-out fire. At least you know how to run.
You have long since lost the wasps, and you did it thirteen seconds quicker than your previous record. To a
traceur
, this can represent a lifetime of improvement.
Gratulacje
.
But you never did get that donut.
You’ve done well if you’re back on Grodzka Street. Ground rule: responsible
traceurs
can always get back to where they started.
And remember, you’re not Wonder Woman, you’re just repeating equations:
The flying squirrel can’t fly but can glide up to twenty-five metres by controlling its patagium, a furry skin parachute stretched from wrist to ankle. Its tail is an airfoil that stops it from smashing into treetops.
In the deserts of the southwestern United States, the
Crotalus cerastes
sidewinds over the dunes, leaving a trail of perfect letter Js in the sand. Snakes are wigged-out locomotives.
The mother-of-pearl moth caterpillar is a self-propelled wheel, touching its head to its tail and spinning downhill at 300 revolutions per minute, forty times its normal speed.
Backward
. Catch this pupa if you can.
Parkour, you see, has stolen from the best.
Now, sprint south to the greatest challenge of all, the Zamek Wawelski. You are approaching a medieval fantasy, a royal castle on a slice of land jutting into the lazily flowing strip of crystal known as the Wisła River. The Zamek is the centrepiece of Kraków. A reminder that this is one of the only large Polish cities that wasn’t demolished in World War II.
But you can’t see the Wisła. Between you and the water is a stone wall almost 700 years old, covered in pillowy, slippery ivy leaves, only a few metres tall in places. An evacuation slide, if you dare to use it. You’ll land on grass, and your kneecaps will be fine.
But you never know. I’m a dabbler, not a professional—I just do it to impress the guys. In general, I avoid obstacles taller than three feet because I have a bum knee and I’m as graceful as a rhino.
Besides, I have no idea how to apply parkour philosophies in my life, the sign of a true practitioner.
Être et durer
: to be and to last. Most days, this seems like an impossible task.
This miniature construction project seemed easy at first, but the tiny details are ballooning out of proportion.
There’s no way I can replicate the 17,500 buildings that burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. My popsicle stick supply isn’t the problem—it’s the restrictive 1.5 by 1.5-metre plywood foundation that’s forcing me to pick and choose between apothecary, blacksmith, and barber shops. Vegetable market or opera house: how does one decide?
Pink Floyd is the perfect soundtrack for resurrecting a ruined city. My LP copy of
Atom Heart Mother
doesn’t have a single scratch on it.
I’m lucky to be paid for my work, but there is a downside: the glue fumes. The ventilation in this gallery isn’t very good, but I can’t crack open a window because the wind could upset my whole operation. Besides, I don’t want my fans peeking in before I’m finished—they can wait for the vernissage. If I had decided to build Chicago at home, I would’ve had even less privacy because Nowa Hutans are the nosiest bunch I know.
The plywood is now a grid of pencil marks, blueprints for a highly flammable city. I’ve seen Old Chicago from above, upside-down, and clean through its transparent middle. Someone has to build it, to stoke the old embers.
A few days ago, I realized how I fit into the geometry of the universe.
The fire tetrahedron is a pyramid, the union of four equilateral triangles glued together at the vertices. It’s how all fires start. I rarely believe in universal absolutes—in fact, I usually detest them—but I can’t question this one, especially since I’m such an integral part of it.
Triangle 1: Heat. Transferred by conduction, convection, or radiation. Dancing molecules, swirling liquid or gas, or the toasty vacuum of space.
Triangle 2: Fuel. The combustible greats, none of which I need to name. Anyhow, I’m more interested in rogue materials not supposed to burn.
Triangle 3: An oxidizer, like oxygen, chlorine, iodine, or peroxide.
Make sure, unless you’re prepared to accept the consequences, never to smoke when you’re bleaching your hair.
Triangle 4: Chain reaction. Bingo. A catalyst has to bring these three triangles together, or else they’re useless. The catalyst must be insistent—ergo, human—to ensure continuity, to press for a truly destructive flame. Someone has to flick the lighter, light the match, match the fire’s intensity with their own will to keep it going. It’s an act of violence, sure, but also of creation.
I feel so grounded at the bottom of this pyramid.
With this foolproof formula, fire doesn’t need much time to accomplish its magic. The Great Chicago Fire lasted just twenty-seven hours, and managed to cut a swath of charred land across eight square kilometres of urban development and 120 kilometres of road.
I think I’m going to start with the Aragon Ballroom. It’s a rectangular box relatively easy to re-create. Let’s double up the popsicle sticks for thickness, to soundproof the walls. Big bands bray, and the brass section is a nightly riot. With surgical scissors, I can make everything fit.
There’s a well-known legend about how this fire started. Perhaps you’ve heard it: Catherine O’Leary’s milking cow kicked over a lantern in a hay-filled barn. The journalist who originally published this story later recanted, confessing that he made up the livestock angle to give the story some juice. But is it possible that O’Leary’s cow actually
had
set Chicago ablaze, and that
the confession
was the attention grabber? What do you think?
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I’d like to stab this from a few angles, if you will permit.
The past and present members of Pink Floyd, I’m now certain, believe the cow story. Just look at the cover art for
Atom Heart Mother
. A Holstein cow is standing in a field—perhaps the band’s vision of farm heaven—looking back inquisitively, as if to say, “Did I do that?”
Sure, sure, no direct link to Chicago. But when you probe a little deeper, it’s clear that Pink Floyd are a bunch of pyros. Originally, before it was renamed, the title track on
Atom Heart Mother
was “The Amazing Pudding.” Is it mere coincidence that the Great Fire of London in 1666 started in the bakery of Thomas Farynor on Pudding Lane?