Cooper Śmiechu
Imagine if you lived with your best friend - your girlfriend or boyfriend lived nearby - you could stay in bed all morning, go to work in the afternoon to a job you enjoy and then afterwards go out for drinks and laughs with your friend, then you could do it all again the next day. It sounds too good to be true. That was my life for six golden Silesian months with Mr Simon Cooper.
During my time, Golden Gate employed two Native Speakers – me and somebody else – who taught at the school and lived together in a flat. Between October ’05 and December ’07 I lived with four separate Brits. I got along okay with three of these flatmates but Simon was a different story.
Simon was 22 and from Peterborough, England. He had not long finished university and couldn’t find a job that excited him so he thought he’d try teach abroad. I had been in the same position a year or two before. After getting his English-teaching qualification, I don’t think Simon really knew what country he wanted to teach in, but before long Poland was on the phone. The Golden Gators needed a lead guitarist and Simon’s online CV said that he could play. Boy, could he play. Before he knew it he was on a Wizzair plane to Katowice to come and work for Rafal.
He landed on New Year’s Day 2007, Rafal and I were waiting for him at the airport. When we saw him we were both amazed at how tall, skinny and bald he was. He was hungover too as on the familiar drive back to Tarnowskie Gory in the Golden Gatemobile he told us he had spent the previous night partying in London. Rafal dropped us both off at the flat in Fazos and I was still making polite conversation when Simon immediately stretched out on the sofa like a lazy snake. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was not how a proper Englishman behaved! But at least he felt at home.
After a few days of being friendly we became great friends using a traditional Polish method of bringing people together – piwo. In fact we were drinking Warka in...Warka. We drank and chatted until 3am and then walked home in the snow. We liked the same music, TV shows, films, everything. I felt like I’d won the lottery with this flatmate.
I had lived in TG for over a year by then so was able to give Simon advice about the town and Poland in general, for example I once stopped him drinking a bottle of wine that he thought looked nice. It was Komandos. I also gave him advice about teaching at Golden Gate but he didn’t need my help. He was so laid-back and he made a great connection with the students. I was a bit worried they might make jokes about his surname – Cooper – sounding like a particular Polish word, but thankfully it didn’t happen. He wouldn’t have cared anyway. In fact Simon was so relaxed I can think of three or four bars in TG that he fell asleep in. I hope it wasn’t because of my conversation...
Our partnership was like many others - one of us loveable, emotional and disorganised, the other one serious, straight and stressed. Sadly I was the latter. One of us had to be. Two of the same wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t laugh at Flip i Flip would you?
It seemed like Simon could make friends with anybody. But that wasn’t always a good thing. We went to Auschwitz once and it was very depressing. Unfortunately, during silent moments of reflection, there was a strange Londoner in a Hawaiian shirt who kept coming up to me and shouting “Where’s Simon?! Where’s Simon?!” I wondered what the Hell was going on, it turned out Simon had met this guy five minutes before the tour started when they were out smoking. Now this weird Londoner (who thought it would be a good idea to come to one of the saddest places in the world wearing a shirt with pineapples and palm trees) thought they were big buddies and wouldn’t leave Simon alone. Being popular didn’t work for him that day.
Saturdays with Simon are my favourite memories. I’d finish teaching at lunchtime and we’d meet in Bar Wojtacha for lunch. I could speak a bit of Polish by then and Simon knew nothing but he wouldn’t let me order for him. Sadly he could only say one thing on the menu – bigos. He’d stand up, walk slowly to the big motherly women that work there and say ‘....bigos?’. One Saturday he ordered bigos three times. Then we’d go to the Rynek and drink and chat and play the ‘lookalikes’ game, which is where we’d see people walking past and have to think of celebrities they looked like. Sadly we never saw a ‘Doda’. But this silly game was just to kill time before 3pm.
What happened at 3pm? Matrix, baby! We would get there a few minutes before 3pm and wait on the stairs for it to open, like kids at Christmas. Normally a few minutes after 3pm we would still be waiting and some boy who looked about 12 years old would get dropped off by his mum, he’d run up the stairs, nervously unlock the door in front of us, let us in and turn all the lights on. The only three words we’d say to him all afternoon would be ‘bilard’, ‘dwa’ and ‘Lech’. We’d say the first word once and then the last two many times.
We only really had one argument. It was because of a very important Polish tradition – The Cleaning Of The Stairs. We never cleaned the stairs because we thought it was a strange idea. Who cares about stairs? Then the neighbours complained. Rafal told us we really had to start cleaning the stairs and we felt like naughty boys. To cut a long story short I got really angry at Simon one day because I felt he didn’t put enough effort into stair-cleaning. It seems ridiculous to look back and think that best friends were torn apart not by a woman, money or power, but because of some dirty steps. Luckily we made up about twenty minutes later. The stairs never came between us again.
The summer of 2007 was like a wonderful dream. We spent days at the allotments between Fazos and Ohio, played tennis at Laryszów, laughed and drank in the Rynek, played the guitar and sang Oasis songs at whatever party we went to, chased each other in Onyx and it seemed like the sun was never out of the sky. Soon enough the dream was over. At the end of the school year Simon and I both left Golden Gate – I went back to Wales to try and get a job there and Simon went travelling around America for the rest of the year.
Circumstances changed and I came back to Golden Gate for a few more months in September, but Simon was still travelling in America and wouldn’t be coming back. Tarnowskie Góry wasn’t the same. The ghost of a tall, skinny, bald, English guitarist haunted the Rynek, Fazos, Conieco, Matrix and everywhere else. Flap was without Flip and the sun wasn’t out so much.
I left TG for good in December ’07 to fight crime in Wales. Tarnowskie Góry was easier to leave when Simon wasn’t living there. Simon himself bounced around jobs in Manchester, London and France and we always planned to meet but it never quite worked out. I hoped he wasn’t still angry at about the stairs-cleaning argument...
I next met Simon in December 2009 when I visited him in Copenhagen. He was teaching English and working as a journalist for an English-language newspaper in his spare time. We had great laughs like the old days but, professionally, Simon had become so organised, disciplined and focussed. He wore a suit to work and rarely had a day off. Was this the same guy who used to tape up his 10zl Tesco trainers when they’d break after two days?
The next and last time we met was July 2011 when he returned to TG the day before my wedding. I was so happy he and his lovely Lithuanian girlfriend Roberta could make the trip from Denmark. Everybody who ever met him in TG remembered him warmly and a couple of hours after being introduced to my other British friends it felt like they’d known each other for years. I could see the naughty look in his eye when we were back in the Rynek, a look I hadn’t seen in conservative Copenhagen. After a few glasses of Żywiec in Wiśniowy Sad it was like he had never left.
At the wedding party everybody was dancing and having a great time. Simon’s long legs were flying everywhere on the dancefloor and I’m surprised nobody was injured. After we’d all had a few Tyskies and more than a few glasses of Pan Tadeusz, Simon came over to me with tears of joy in his eyes. He gave me a big hug and we thanked each other for the old days. At the party on the next day we played the guitar and sang and it took me back to 2007, just like I hoped it would.
So these days we meet up every two years, in the future it’ll probably be every three years, then five, then whatever. I do know that whenever we meet, no matter what we’ve done or achieved in life, we’ll go back to being the two young men playing the lookalike game in the Rynek, playing pool in Matrix, drinking Warka in Warka. We’ll laugh and remember the time we were lucky enough to live, if just for a few months, a life that was too good to be true.
