“It’s not that the folks didn’t care about us very much. They cared to the maximum. That’s why they were never there.” [FRAGMENT]

It’s not that our elders were interested in us only when something went wrong, or that they didn’t care about us very much in general. They took great care of us, that’s why they were never there.

The fact that my father went out to the ocean for a long time was one thing, but the other was that when he didn’t go anywhere else, I actually only saw him in the evenings when he came back from fishing. He had barely taken a shower before he fell asleep in front of the TV with the boatswain in his hand after the first sip. I would do the same if I were him, because whenever he showed any signs of energy, his mother would rush him to help with the rooms. That’s why she usually chased me.

When my mother had nothing to do in the off-season, she would go to one of the larger towns in the area to do this or that. For some time she was cleaning in the hospital and every day when she came back she swore that she would stop even tomorrow, because no tourist, not even those from Warsaw, pisses like a sick person on his deathbed.

Another time she sold clothes at the bazaar, thanks to which I had a really nice windbreaker, which was probably the envy of everyone at school, because they quickly wore it out. But it doesn’t matter, nothing happened, it was waterproof and the rain disappeared on the way home.

My mother always wanted us to live with dignity, as she kept saying, and to have enough money, which seemed even more important, at least to me. And we actually did. If you think about it, I didn’t miss anything after all. Apart from the parents, of course.

I won’t say that I was raised by the streets, because that’s nonsense. What street, come on. But Seba often said that. He threw this text casually, as an answer to every doubt we had or an explanation for his behavior. It didn’t make any sense, we supposedly knew that, but on the other hand we were terribly impressed, especially after he played Sudden Attack of the Welder from a dachshund for the first time. Musically, at least for me, it didn’t blow me away, so to speak. I was still at the stage of fascination with George Michael and Modern Talking, but the fact that they were there throwing f***s and singing f**k made a huge impression on twelve-year-old minds.

If our parents or teachers knew what Seba and I were listening to, it would probably result in detention, but they had no idea and we simply preferred not to play it loudly in front of them, just in case. Once, Mareczek got a bit forgetful in his room and when his old man heard what was coming from the tape recorder, he ripped out the cassette, dragged out the entire tape, and then unceremoniously threw it out the window, stating that his son wouldn’t listen to some shit. **and for semi-morons, he expressed it so precisely, and that in his house there is no place for gutter language. Old Mareczka was a welder.

Seba played new cassettes on his fancy fat-fingered boombox for us in the porn bunker in which we had completely lost interest. This was, unless there were any gnomes in it, Our Bunker.

Where did you get the money for this, Mareczek and I asked Seb, but he only said that the old people gave him money? We believed because we didn’t know his parents and why shouldn’t we believe him. We haven’t yet realized that the guy’s studies are at least as bad as mine, so his parents don’t really have a reason to buy him anything, unless they were people deprived of some basic values, unaware of the principles of upbringing through which we perceived the world.

In general, Seba loved to brag and show what he wasn’t. Each time he repeated that he didn’t like to brag, but he would tell us so. In confidence. We appreciated it very much. I guess I was a little more than Mareczek, who was generally that type of person, which didn’t surprise him much or make any greater impression on him. He usually commented on Seba’s stories with a bland “wow”, as if he wasn’t listening at all, but I knew he always did. Even when he got a really cool remote-controlled off-road car for his birthday a few years earlier, that was his entire reaction. Wow, he said to his father. “Wow,” he said to me, showing me the gift. And that’s it, but I knew him well enough to know how much his “wow” weighed – and it weighed no less than he himself, which is, damn, a lot. Gosh, even when we broke the record on the slot machine with Metal Slug in the summer, which cost us a few dozen ziko and made our fingers go numb from all the button-mashing, all he could say was “wow”. There was nothing to worry about, but it must have irritated Seba somehow, because he got angry at Mareczek several times, and for some reason at me too, because if he did, he wouldn’t show us or tell us anything more. In the end, he never followed through on these threats, and we absorbed everything like sponges.

He told us all sorts of things, mainly about what he did in his previous school, from which, as he put it, he was expelled. He was clearly proud of it, and I didn’t really see why he wouldn’t be.

Once, to some guy who was bothering him – whatever that meant, I didn’t ask – he pissed into his backpack. Mareczek and I were laughing so hard when he was telling us this, but when we remembered our excesses with the scouts, somehow, I don’t know, we probably felt stupid because we immediately quieted down. I mean, me and Mareczek, because Seba kept digging, and I didn’t know what I was ashamed of.

Another thing Seba did at his previous school was, as he said, hacking a vending machine. In other words, the guy realized that if he tilted the machine at the right angle, he could shake the coins out of it with someone’s help. In my opinion, it was just theft, no hacking involved, but I didn’t see anything wrong with it, because he was robbing some stupid machine, not a human being. It didn’t bother me so much that we then did the same at our place, so we could play games in the living room all evening. I guess you could say that we returned the money taken to the machines.

It was that evening, when we spent it playing free games, that Seba told Mareczek, and only him, but of course he later repeated everything to me, that in the old school, apart from all that, he didn’t pass to the next grade and that’s why he passed transferred to us.

Of course, I was hurt that he didn’t say a word about it to me, it seemed to me that we were on the same page. I didn’t want to pursue the topic or accuse Mareczek of repeating something to me that he probably shouldn’t have, but at that moment I was more wondering why the hell the guy had actually changed not only the school, but also the city, because failing the class didn’t seem like enough to me reason.

Because it was like this: Seba came to us every day, he was brought from a town a few kilometers away and his mother, who looked like a cool chick, picked him up by car. Because there is only one school there – he explained to us when the topic was finally raised. The fact that he was a paratrooper could be hidden, but the fact that he wasn’t from here couldn’t be hidden. We bought his translation because why not – after all, the guy was already thirteen, and that means a lot to someone who is only twelve.

Seba told me about him kibbling a bit by accident, actually, when Mareczek and I pressed him a bit after he started yelling at us for watching Power Rangers, which he found out when Mareczek approached us excitedly one weekend. to tell you what the monster of this week’s episode was. I didn’t watch it because it was on during the mass that my grandmother watches every Sunday in our house. She did it at our place because she didn’t have a TV and kept saying she wouldn’t buy one because she didn’t need it, but I think she was just stingy. She stopped going to church many months ago when the priest from the pulpit said something that offended her, she didn’t like it or something like that, no one really cared about it, she didn’t want to go to church so she didn’t, who cares I don’t really care. What’s worse is that I couldn’t watch “my bullshit” because of it.

Fortunately, Mareczek had a video recorder and he recorded every episode for me so that I could watch it later, and now he ran out of breath and gave me the cassette. We only had one, so she was a bit worn out from all the constant recording, but it didn’t matter as long as we could see and hear everything.

He arrived all excited, starts talking, and Seba roars, what kind of kids are we, he can’t stand it, and laughs. We’re the ones pushing him, saying he’s such an adult, and Seba, saying yes, yes, he’s already thirteen, and we’re saying, but how, how could he be, and the guy had no choice, he had to tell us everything. .

Fat – cover ArtRage promotional materials