Karolina Waclawiak: How to Get into the Twin Palms

IT WAS A STRANGE CHOICE TO DECIDE TO PASSas a Russian. But it was a question of proximity and level of allure. Russians were everywhere in Los Angeles, especially in my neighborhood, and held a certain sense of mystery. I had long attempted to inhabit my Polish skin and was happy to finally crawl out of it. I would never tell my mother. She only thought of them as crooks and beneath us. They felt the same about us, we were beneath them. It had always been a question of who was under whom.

I SEE A COUPLE FROM THE TWIN PALMS FUCKINGagainst their car across the street from my apartment. I’m hiding behind the newly purchased ficus on my balcony and watching them. I wonder if they know each other and I want to know what he’s whispering to her in Russian. I am a few feet away from them, in it with them, and I want to know if she’s a suka or his wife. He wouldn’t be fucking her like that if she were his wife. He grabs at her and she lets him touch her roughly and I wonder how he would touch me.

Is he a cab driver or a businessman?

He turns her around, face toward the car and pushes her against it. He moves his hand in between her legs and pulls one up around him. She doesn’t hesitate.

I whistle. He stops breathing and says something in Russian that I can’t understand. I lean forward, trying to hear better, still hidden behind the bush. It doesn’t matter. I’m not hidden enough and he sees me. The woman says something to me in Russian, spits on the ground, pulls down her dress, and pulls up her panties.

He buckles his belt. Zips. They walk quickly back to the Twin Palms and I sit outside on my balcony, hoping to see more but no one else comes out to fuck from the Twin Palms tonight.

If you walked by the Twin Palms during the day you would surely miss it. The doors are green and it looks like a rundown relic of old Los Angeles. The sign is yellow with a drawn on palm tree. The cabs are gone and the street is empty, clean of cigarette butts.

I want to get inside the Twin Palms. I want them to ask me what I am. So I wait for the cabs to come back, for the Russians to swarm back like birds.

The stores on Fairfax are called apteka and sell prosthetic body parts and humidifiers and medicine that I have never seen before. They are next to the grocery stores that sell aging fruit and herring and halvah. I hate herring. In tubs with oil and onions, the silvery pieces curl onto each other, unmoving. I should love herring. I should love borscht. I should slurp it up with pumpernickel or rye.

As I walk down the street the smell overwhelms me. The smell of rye bread and ponchki filled with prune jam. The yeast smell from the bakery overtakes everything and keeps it an immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles.

There are Russians and Ukrainians on my street. They are not like the Russians in the Twin Palms. They wear plastic shoes and stand with their socks pulled up. The men wear shorts and their bellies hang down and out of their yellowing undershirts. The women weep. The men yell. I see them watching me through their crocheted curtains, waiting to see who comes in and who comes out of my apartment. Picking the ones I should be ashamed of.

The next night something is happening in the Twin Palms and everyone going inside is dressed in fur. I want to really see them so I lean up close to the women in their coats as I walk through and feel the silver foxes and minks brush against my cheek. The coats smell like the one my mother used to have, the one I wanted. It was a silver fox and she used to wear it all the time in Poland when she was young. The age I am now. My grandmother had a fur too.

A sign of a good husband in Poland is one who puts you in a silver fox — short or long. Long is better. More exclusive.

The women in the fox furs don’t appreciate how close I am to them, how my face touches the scruff of their arm. The mink of their sleeve. They curse me in Russian. Suka. Bitch. In Polish, bitch is kurwa … coorvaaah, but could also be a whore. Was suka a whore too? Who else but a whore would rub her cheek against their furs? I watch them walk up the stairs and want to follow.

I round the corner and hear the sound wafting down the street. Suka. Suka. Suka. The women go upstairs. The men stay behind. Smoke. Snuff out cigarettes.

I try passing again.

The men stare at me in their black leather dusters. With their Eastern Bloc homemade haircuts — a custom they never gave up in America. Hair falling in between linoleum squares, beside refrigerators, ovens, the missed unswept tufts accumulating. I catch their eyes and know they wonder what I am. If I am one of them. Most of them have gray hairs weaving through those homemade haircuts. They watch my 25-year-old ass move, tight and upright in my black stretch pants, as I walk past them slowly. I want to get up there so I walk even slower. I know what they want to ask. Polska? Ruska? Svedka? Or maybe just Amerykanska. They can’t tell with me.

They won’t ask, instead they stare; whisper something to see if I turn. Flick ash near me to see if I quicken my pace. They want to know if I’m used to men like them. I keep moving slowly because I want to see if it’s working. They look at my ass, my tits, my face last. I turn my head and stare up the stairs into the Twin Palms. The walls are mirrored and I see the women without their furs, in silk and pearls and amber, their hair in root vegetable colors, their false teeth, metal wires showing between molars. I know some of them used to be village girls back in the old country. I can tell.

I lurk behind the community center and watch the cabbies start to circle again. They park. They stand outside of the Twin Palms and wait for the doors to open. They smoke. They laugh. They speak only in Russian. I stare at them and try to decide which one I would take on in order to get upstairs. They are a mix of young and old and the young look rough, like they’ve just arrived. Their leather dusters have a still-new sheen to them, bought with their first paycheck from the cabstand. Would becoming one of their girlfriends even get me upstairs?

I have to watch them closely. Who goes up. Who stays down. Who has a wife. Who is alone.

More people come. Do I want to wait for better Russians to come or should I try my luck with these? If I am going to spend my time at the Twin Palms I want it to be frequent. I want them to know me. I want to pass fully. What will my name be? I will have to change the I to Y . I will have to get my story straight.

THERE ARE 20,000 BABY NAMES IN THEbook I purchased from the store that has menorahs in the window and Russian paperbacks in the back. The most popular Russian baby names are as follows:

Sasha — spelled Sasha and Sascha. Both make the list.

Karina

Aleksandra

Calina

Anya

Nadya

Agnessa

I wasn’t sure if the last name was a girl’s or boy’s so I cut it off the list immediately.

They were all acceptable choices — all ending with A and having the same Eastern European feel. I wanted my Y to be prominent. Anya. It could pass for Polish or Russian. I could move easily with it. Fluidly.

I practiced speaking with an accent, but it just sounded like all the times I would mock my mother’s thick Polish accent. Beach sounded like bitch, count like cunt . I sounded like a crude caricature of her, my voice low and thick, rolling the R ’s. I could play her for humor but I could never be her, really. I switched back to my flat American accent and gave up. I was from nowhere and I had lived in too many places to hold on to anything permanent in my voice.