A Word About the ZMP

Once, in some deserted place four ZMPers approached me. Green ZMP shirts, red ZMP ties, very wide ZMP pants, specific provincial-peasant ZMP haircuts and characteristically greedy and dim ZMP faces. What an ugly and disgusting organization this was and what despicable and mean youth belonged to it, I could write about them for a very long time. I had many troubles with the ZMP, managing always to provoke them terribly. 

I remember, when I was still in high school I was called on several occasions to their meetings. There with fake concern they pitied upon this that I wore colored socks and thin pants, that I had a different haircut, that I listened to American radio stations playing American jazz. Though they did not understand the word very well, they accused me of cosmopolitanism. This trait, being in opposition to the international proletariat, was considered a crime. 

Indeed it awoke certain suspicions among them and mobilized to action class sensitivity. They dreamed of my transformation to their models and norms—to abjure myself of my idols, those like Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Chick Webb and Benny Goodman, and to replace them with ZMP idols, people like Janek Krasicki and Hanka Shapiro-Sawicka, these idols which, just like their fans, were completely unable to impress me with anything. 

In high school I had a classmate a year above me, a petit light blonde, a ZMP girl, Kopec, and a second girl built heavier, who wore glasses—her name I don’t remember—and together they bewildered and terrorized most of the youth at the school. My friends and I read various pre-war works of European and American literature, of course such authors as Marczynki or Pitigrilli, and in the absence of contemporary translations, even nineteenth century work, mostly French classics. 

These ZMP bitches, meanwhile, led a considerable group of frightened idiots after class in the reading room and by turn, with outbreaks of excitement on their faces, read to them out loud pitiful representatives of pitiful Soviet or domestic social-realistic literature or some Bolshevik idiocy, for example about this young Bolshevik who was named Pawka and who was so abject, that he denounced his own father to the Cheka! 

Not only that, the listeners to this pseudo-lecture had to take notes too, and after the reading of each of these works of art there was a discussion, as if there were anything to discuss. And the worst part of it all, these girls came from decent intelligent homes and even just for that reason they should have had some measure of order and sense in their heads. Whenever I saw this sorry excuse for a reading group, I could not resist a face palm. 

Two or three times, as an attempt to gain numbers, I was even by some activist idiot against my will and even knowledge signed up as a member of this horrible organization. But because I ignored this membership, I was quickly demasked and happy to be stricken from the list, strengthening even further my poor political reputation as a class enemy and declared opponent of the Soviet Union. 

Higher education, usually one of the best times of youth, was even worse. There the organization primarily carried itself such that if they did not like someone for some reason, often they forced the rector of the school, who primarily did not want to have with any trouble with the ZMP, to expel the delinquent. Every candidate at every institute of higher learning, irrespective of whether they were or weren’t a member of this organization, in submitting their application for entrance examinations had to include the opinion of the ZMP, which found itself in a sealed and stamped envelope. 

When I once applied to the Advanced School for Film in Łodz, after a week my documents were returned with the note that, based on the opinion of the ZMP, I could not even take the entry examinations. To this day I feel a sort of lack of fulfillment in film and I often wonder if I’d have become one of the leaders of international cinema, or if I would also find myself among the ranks of filmmaker failures, had the ZMP not taken away from me this great chance of a lifetime. Soon after I received this negative correspondence, I showed it to STORMY WEATHER Zula. 

She explained seriously that she would have to take these papers and get to Łodz as fast as she could, where she would simply give ass to whoever she had to and I would, despite this miserable ZMP, within a half year be accepted to study film. To the feasibility of this entire action I did not have the least doubt—she was such a beautiful and attractive woman. Nevertheless, directed by jealousy, and most of all by high embarrassment, in no way could I accept her wonderful project nor even to discuss the matter with STORMY WEATHER Zula. 

In her conversations with me, she very often returned to this idea, such that in my paranoia I began to believe obsessively that my entire film studies were not so interesting to her as was the eventual fact of getting to give ass. And though I constantly told her that film school completely ceased to interest me, that my creative interest in film was absolutely gone, that it had definitively passed, STORMY WEATHER Zula, unyielding and opposed to my protestations, prepared a whole action. 

The most stressful for me were her conversations with her girlfriends, who with adoration gazed at her while often in my presence, blithely and shamelessly she regaled to them her plans. At the end the matter, as it were, washed out on its own. 

And returning again to the ZMP, these pieces of shit tried to butt in to everything, developing with this to perfection their entire wickedness. They collaborated with security and different kinds of denunciations were a daily affair. Through the years systematically addled, they directed themselves only with ideological class warfare and almost every one of them was capable of cutting with a blunt knife the throats of anyone who they considered a class enemy. 

They were so whipped in this mental degeneracy that primarily they went with full political maturation into the party ranks. What was worst, some of these people, and even their children, belonging to the political and intellectual elite of their country, often shamelessly congratulate themselves to what a wonderful organization they had belonged to in their youth.