By Rocco Castoro

“Cześć zdejmij majtki.” That means, “Hello my beautiful rose,” in Polish. Or at least I though it did. It really means, “Hi, take off your panties.”

You see, I moved from Gainesville about half a year ago and the editor of this publication e-mailed me a couple weeks back asking if I’d contribute something about my transition from the maternally comfortable loins of Gainesville to an overpriced stretch of concrete and dog shit better known as Brooklyn.

Well, ef that jazz. It’s Sunday night, four full days past my deadline, and I’m on my fourth tallboy. Who wants to hear about someone else’s job or situation or “life journey” anyway? Not me.

Instead, I’m just going to tell you about my stoop. I live in an eastern portion of a neighborhood called Greenpoint, about a mile away from a giant hipster theme park where asbestos is cool and eating isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, gentrification has definitely wrapped its pasty white claw around communities further away from the L train than mine, but here you’re just as likely to see a 60-year-old Pole puking blood on the sidewalk as a 20-something, sleeve-tattooed cokehead who superglues his chest hair into unicorn figurines and sells them at some exhibition in Chelsea for $25,000 a pop. But I can’t complain too much, because it’s all pretty amusing.

There are a bunch of really interesting folks who stand outside the corner store all day, drinking 40s of King Cobra and selling dime bags at the front door of my building—the same guys who taught me the lovely line of Polish above. They’re great.

A few nights after I moved in I decided to enjoy a mild summer evening on my front steps. I stepped outside to find a half-dozen kids casually puffing a joint and bobbing their heads to Lil Wayne ring-tones at full speakerphone volume. You’ll have to excuse any overtones of stereotyping or naivety when I say this, but it was a weird scene; there were a few Polish kids, a couple Latinos, and a black dude—and they’re all gathered around a single cell phone as if it were a boombox.

One of them got up to let me pass and hesitated for a second before I sat down in his place. He went over and leaned up against a car, and after a few minutes of nothing but scowls and Weezy F. Baby’s latest opus I asked them where to get a good cheeseburger. The only one who replied was a Dominican kid, Havi, who slapped my hand and asked my name. He repeated it a few times with stressed vowels: “Raaaaaacooohhh.”
Now I pass them every day on the street, see what’s up, and that’s that. They’ve since told me that no one else in my building (a mixture of old Poles and young people) really even acknowledges them. But we’re all more or less cool.

One night I was outside, listening to two of the guys talk about how to pick up Polish women. Eastern European genetics have treated many of the female residents of Greenpoint very well and any attempt at conversation will be ignored unless the words are in their first language. Havi started laughing and said, “Oh yeah, I remember when I got with my first Polish girl. She was banging, oh man. Most of them won’t talk to them if you’re not Polish. But some will. You just got to test it out, and to get their attention all you have to say is ‘Cześć, zdejmij majtki.’”
He went on to tell me that it all it took to break the Polish fourth wall was whispering this magic password to her twice when he passed her on the street. Within a week of the meeting he had convinced her to come by his place late one night. I could sum all the minor details up, but Havi put it so eloquently:

“She wanted it bad. My friend tried to holler at her first but she wasn’t having it. He tried the whole ‘Cześć, zdejmij majtki’ thing and got her attention, but when he got her alone she ran out to the street where I was sitting saying, ‘No good! No good! No gooooood!’ And I told her, ‘Yeah, that guy’s no good for you. But don’t be upset, let’s go get a roast beef sandwich.’
“Then, psshh, it was all over. She wanted a roast beef injection. I got her back and at first she was nervous because I live with my mom and sister and this guy rents the living room out, but I just took her into the hallway and told her, ‘Who’s going to come home at four in the morning?’”

No one, apparently, because he went on to describe the entire experience in lurid detail. I won’t get into it here but it was eye-opening to say the least. He had convinced me of the skeleton key to any Polish woman’s heart, that is, until I looked up “Cześć, zdejmij majtki” on the internet later that night. I printed it out and the next day showed Havi the true definition. He looked at the paper, looked at me, and laughed until he was choking.

After calming down he explained, “Dude who taught it to me was a little Polish guy. No wonder so many Polish ladies are yelling stuff at me. Hahaha. That kid’s weird, always leaving a bunch of 40s in a plastic bag on the sidewalk and I’ll ask him if I can have one and he’ll tell me no. I always take them fuckers when he ducks around the corner. So maybe I deserved it?”

That reminds me. I just finished my beer, so let’s pause for a second while I run to the bodega and grab one… I’m back—a cherry cigarillo and a concluding anecdote richer.

It was drizzling and Paddy, one of the bodega lurkers, gave me the mini-cigar as a thank you for the $5 I loaned him earlier. A mother was rolling her child by in a stroller and he started to drunkenly sway, screaming, “GOTTA GO TO WORK TOMMORRAH! Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little work. I started working when I was 13 at five in the morning when my dad gave me the choice of going back to school or earning a paycheck. SOME PEOPLE ARE AFRAID OF WORK, NOT ME!”

We’ll see how afraid of work he is on Friday when he’s supposed to pay me back that five bucks. Until then I’ll be out on my stoop, greeting everyone with a nice “Cześć, zdejmij majtki” and a beaming smile as they stroll on by.