Like Ruby Tuesday, he would never say where he came from. Underneath the cadences he’d picked up from his years abroad was a flat Midlands accent. The list of nations he’d worked in was long, mainly European and peppered with exotics from the corners of the Earth. When new teachers introduced themselves to him, telling him their origins, he would light up with the pleasant jolt of coincidence and ask insider questions.
“Costa Rica?! Wheredja drink?”
“Amsterdam?! Ricky still posin’?”
“Auckland?! They ever sort out the—you know?”
“New York?! Ever see a li’l band called The Mumps?” “Uh…I saw The Cramps once…” “Tha’s it! The Cramps! I had to manage The Cramps one summer!”
Our estimates of his age ranged from 40 to 55. Whatever his vintage, he was slim, sound as a bell, had perfect skin and never missed a day’s work. All this with no exercise and the same diet of kebabs and pizza we youngsters insulted our bodies with.
On top of that, he was a two-pack-a-day man. He was the only teacher we knew who smoked Polish “cigarettes”—which tasted like the tailpipe of an idling Mustang. He swore it wasn’t the triple expense of our Marlboro Lights and Camels that kept him away—it was the saltpetre. “They put in fifty times the saltpetre they could get away wif in the West, you know that?” “…So Peter’s got like what kind of salt?” “Saltpetre. Gives pre-rolleds an even burn. Also addictive. Also”—the barest glance left and right—”you start losing your wang, mate.”
Reg didn’t drink because “beer’s not drinking.” Since the line-ups at the bars got so long, and since post-communist Poland had not yet reached the table service stage of capitalism, we would order two pints at once to save a trip. We would gamely drink off one pint, then the other. The cheap Polish lager went down like razors. Reg would drink both at once, alternating sips. Daytime at the school he would say the most erratic things, making us wonder if he’d been “utilizing” (he hadn’t). Consuming actual alcohol had no effect on him. But as those around him got drunk, he seemed more and more charming to us. In those Polish beer halls, so smoky you never saw the ceiling, in those bleary hours between checking out of sobriety and tumbling into a taxi, he became our leader. When one of us got to the bitter/aggressive stage, he would warn us to “stop starting and start stopping.”
One night, near dawn, two teachers got into an embarrassingly tentative fistfight. All the Poles put down their drinks to smile and watch. Even the bouncers, Tower and Panther, pros in dealing out the most ruthless beatdowns for any mischief in “their” bar, let them go at it. But they weren’t really going. They circled each other, pouting with rage, grabbing and shoving, too tense to get off one decent shot. It was like watching children bicker about who hated who more. My face burned as I saw our foreigner cachet evaporating so publicly, to be replaced with the other stereotypes: we were weak, queers maybe, exiled freaks, L.B.H.: Losers Back Home.
Tower was built like an industrial refrigerator with a crew cut. Panther was smaller, just a few inches over six feet, all scars and scowls as he patrolled his domain. I’d seen them lean their boots into laid out necks, tear shirts and, once, literally throw a man down the twenty-odd stairs leading back down to the street. I heard him bounce exactly four times. (My adult students thought a lawsuit was something you wore to the courthouse). Just as these goons were about to descend and thrash our two friends past the point of walking away—barely a metaphor for what that would do to our reputations—Reg stood up. He breezed up to Tower, who never spoke, let alone in English, assuring him: “I’ll handle it this time, son.” Then he threw himself between the combatants, crouching low, straight-arming both of them as if they posed some kind of danger to one another. It worked. With the buffer of Reg, they let themselves go and the fight was on. His tie flopped up on his shoulder, Reg was sweating visibly. “Make it look good, you baaahsteds!” he could have whispered. One of them landed a hook and the crowd had its first murmurs of concern. A minute ago they’d been that close to laughing us out of that pub forever. Reg corralled one of them in a headlock and dragged him back to our table. We all looked to Reg in total mystification.
“You, you, you—come with me. You, you—go with him. You, you—call Wacek and Grzegorz. You, you, you—take care of the you know. You—go call the taxis. You—fuck off.” He pointed around the table the way he drank—rapidly and with both hands–as he reeled off this “plan.” We had no idea what he was talking about but it was enough to get us moving and out of there before things could get any worse.
Reg could tell a story. We’d heard them all before and yet we always listened as he started in once again. Instead of songs you could get tired of, each one was like an ongoing theme and variations piece: every iteration brought a new wrinkle, a new fast food epiphany. He was a master of free association who could always bring the conversation around to one of his amazing, far-flung experiences. Together with him you would stumble on the incredible missing link: the geographical or social coincidence, the bit of skullduggery you had in common. Sometimes it was enough just to mention a definite year to set him off.
“1982? Was picking fruit in the San Fernando Valley. Union busters listening in in all the bars. That’s nice. Once came back to camp and they’d killed our dogs. Baahsteds. Used to leave rattlesnakes in our tents. Fine, nice. Screwdriver, back pocket, out, bang, drive it through their little skulls, campfire, frying pan, butter, bit of sage, nice,” and so on. He was an austere imagist, avoiding pronouns or any reference to cause and effect, which made his stories both vivid and shadowy, flamboyant and conspiratorial. At the beginning of his utterances was an implied “they” who were always out to get him and the common man, who wanted only to enjoy epicurean pleasures, without harming anyone, before moving on to the next adventure.
There was the time in his life when he used to fly a circle route from behind the Iron Curtain to Latin America and back again, carefully exchanging briefcasefuls of certain currencies in each city in such a cunning way that he created a perpetual money machine. Some miserable commissar got wind of the scheme, froze his accounts and packed him off with a one-way to Geneva. There was the time he’d tended bar in Manhattan at a fetish club where all the upstairs girls’ specialties were coded as “drinks” the customers would order from Reg. It would get loud on weekends, misunderstandings followed. An advanced masochist, one of the club’s best customers, though new to Reg, placed his order. Instead of discreetly handing him a slip of paper with a room number on it, Reg served him a Virgin Mary. The masochist was stunned, started to speak then stopped, finally nodding with grim appreciation. He pulled up a barstool, sipped the glass empty in silence, ate the celery stalk and stared at the empty vessel. Whether or not it revealed to him anything more about his utter depravity and worthlessness, he left four hundred and seventy-five dollars on the bar before departing.
Then there was Reg’s prolific love life. When asked if there was some nationality or stripe he hadn’t gone with, he went into himself for a minute before proclaiming Eskimo! It was undeniable that women were drawn to his confidence. He would routinely turn up with a girl half his age hanging on his arm, who would look up at him with buttery, half-lidded eyes. The more he pushed them away, the more they fought for his attention. This was a Jedi-like level of psychological profundity totally beyond our post-adolescent brains. He would tell us that he didn’t know why this current companion insisted on going around with him. She wanted to be his girlfriend or “something,” but what was the point of that mates, eh? We didn’t know what to say. For Reg let us know that he’d been there, done that so many times that the prospect of that kind of stock fling was about as appealing to him as some schoolyard game left behind long ago. From our angle, a generation younger, we had the usual girl problems that plague naïve, self-absorbed boys without style or substance. We wanted to know how he did it, but his secret stayed safely out of our reach. Throughout all this, he seemed to think we were all Casanovas feasting on a genetically blessed female population newly emancipated from the double whammy of communism and Catholicism. He winked and knighted us all his rakish “lads.” There was a lot of misogynistic banter in which it was unclear to me who was humouring who. These girls who would orbit him, he used to offer them to us quite casually, sometimes when they were within earshot. At the time I supposed they didn’t have enough English to understand. We were too proud, bewildered and self-conscious to ask for more information about how such an arrangement might work. Or if one of us wasn’t, he never told the others.
The last of the dirty ice melted away as the school year dragged on to its conclusion, when even the dingiest halls take on a glow of valediction. Tensions between teachers eased. Some of us, mostly men who’d found Polish girlfriends, signed on for another year of the same. Others were transferring within the organization to other Polish towns, taking teaching jobs in warmer climes or moving back to our home countries to resume the burden of getting an education or paying for one. In that state of forgiveness and transition, we let down our guards to try one last time to like each other and compare plans for the next phase of our lives. Besides Reg, the rest of us were so young that we still had years and years to wander, to sew oats, to make gorgeous mistakes, to feel the most intense joy and pain of our lives and believe that it would go on that way forever. Reg smiled and told us modestly that he was off to Portugal, without having anything definite lined up. He refused to go along with platitudes about keeping in touch. We laughed when we pictured him telling his stories and introducing his “companions” to unsuspecting, wide-eyed Portuguese and their greenhorn teachers. Yet now I think that if he told them the things I saw with my own eyes in the short time I knew him, they wouldn’t have believed that either.
I never saw Reg again. He was a good friend who accepted me, as he did everyone, without judgment or reservation. Whatever our attitude towards his Rabelaisian past, he was completely reliable and got us out of jams which were not of his making. In return for that, we smirked to his face and laughed at him behind his back. Reg had the last laugh, though, because he knew that people move on and don’t keep in touch—they just become each other’s stories.