There was this Polish guy, a completely crazy motherfucker, who I hanged out with in my student days. His name was Sowa which means “owl” in Polish and he looked like Owen Wilson. He was very smart, intuitive, emotionally intelligent, somewhat handsome and probably bipolar.
He walked on crutches and sometimes when he needed attention he would sit in his wheelchair and make me drive him around. We started hanging out some months before his wife left him and shortly after he jumped out of the window which is why he was lame and I didn’t know the story at first. And a storyteller he was, for nothing in the world would he deprive me of a good one.
It was in a bar the first time I saw him and watching him narrating with frantic arm gestures like a vet soldier depicting the fiercest battle you have ever heard of, you would surmise he had just came from a war somewhere in Somalia and after stepping on a land mine ended up crippled. In his distant gaze you could picture the treetops and the birds over the green valleys and the rivers and fishermen casting nets and colors and smells and rum he would drink up and order another.
Surrounded by listeners our eyes met and he spoke me directly. As my dough dried out and out of curiosity and boredom I accepted his invitation for a drink and we found a common ground very quickly. He was studying philosophy and I archaeology and we drank deeply into the night spicing the time with his African stories and my South American ones as well as with regular flatters with chicks that were approaching the bar counter to order a drink.
His wife was a beautiful Russian, prettier than any you would see on a Meet-Russian-bride homepage and I think she loved him a lot before he started with his paranoia and afterwards a little bit less. Few years later he even accused me and all our friends of having slept with her, while he was away on a business trip. He loved to talk about her and told me how they met and it sounded like one of the Nora Roberts novels. He went on a self-discovery trip to Siberia after he had got out of jail and bumping into her in the remote Irkutsk, the crazy motherfucker fell in love, brought her to Germany and married her and you wouldn’t know who’s more insane, she to have consented or he being as he was. After the wedding they left for Africa and spent time at a mission and he told me that they were happiest years of his life and he would go back if he could.
I’ve never understood why he wanted to kill himself and I realize now that I’ve never asked him directly. I recall him mentioning that something went wrong and I’m not sure what and as we were heavily drinking his divorce and he told the story very sparsely, merely reducing it to the facts. His wife was not at home as he opened a window and took a running start several times. Forth and back, forth and back. Flipping pictures of his life were rotating in front of his eyes like a movie. Then the final run…and out of the window in the air as only an Owl would do.
A split of a second and a fleeting remorse tore him out of his enthusiastic fall and his survival instinct woke up. The martial arts training enabled him to brake the fall gracefully as a cat, he would remark proudly punctuating every word by retelling the story which befell us every time he was drinking. Then, with the same gracefulness, the ground broke both of his legs and pushed his thigh bones deep into his hips and that window was too high even for the best martial-arts-trained cat. But he survived. After the jump people on the campus ceased calling him the Owl. Now, they called him Batman.
The campus management gave them a new flat that was on the ground floor just to make sure he doesn’t try to repeat the Batman stunt and I liked it and the garden in the summer where we drank beer every afternoon talking about past and future and meaning of life and in the winter when I helped him make a snowman while his wife watched us from the window white as a snow and with vivid eyes and we would wave her and she would wave us back without a smile.
Months were passing and the Owl’s emotional state deteriorated again. His wife was trying hard but nobody could stand him indefinitely and then she left for good. We attempted to reconcile them, tried to make him change but nobody understood his restlessness, not even himself and you could simply disdain any explanation saying he was bipolar but maybe he had another reason that can be led back to an event from his adolescence.
When he was seventeen his parents sent him for a school year abroad to USA. He blended in as only he could do and went to Miami where he lived to the fullest; he got involved with a stripper and found a side-job as a botanist for a marijuana drug lord. For some time things run well. The stripper and he had an exhilarating sexual romance, money was good and his boss provided him with the club benefits: a convertible, a speedboat and a waterfront house.
Then one day, as he was watering the plants, the Feds knocked on the door and locked him up for four years in a maximum-security federal prison where he bragged to have made friends with mobsters from all five New York families that were offering him new lucrative possibilities after he gets out. That didn’t happen as the US government deported him back to Germany as soon as he did his time but he talked pompously of the story while drinking the rum I brought and how he learned Italian and Spanish while there.
Then we would go out into the Berlin night and we managed to get kicked out of most of the clubs we entered but it was worth it because the Owl is himself a great story and you wouldn’t need any other thrill beside him. He would usually get himself into trouble and me too as I was trying to help him and explain the security that he hadn’t meant it but they would lump us together and I would end fucked up as well.
Once we went salsa dancing and there was a thing going on between me and that beautiful girl. Bachata song was playing and as I was holding her the way you should hold a girl and kissing her the neck down to the shoulder, suddenly came screams and shouts from the middle of the dance floor. We went to see what was happening and I don’t know how come that what I saw didn’t surprise me. The Owl was dancing alone, as he would always do after a missed attempt of hitting on a girl. He popped up on his crutches in the middle of the crowd, tossed and turned letting himself be seen and then swept by the music and in a trance-like state he started to spin his crutch over the people’s heads following the beat.
We got kicked-out again. I managed to convince the security that I had nothing to do with it and they allowed me to go back to the girl I was dancing with and we continued where we left off. But the Owl took it badly and claimed it was a treason of drinking code and he wouldn’t speak to me for some time.
That wasn’t unusual and he would break-up with me and our other friend who was Peruvian on a regular basis and close himself home as he didn’t have other friends and his wife left him and she was living now with another guy. Then he would reappear two weeks later as if nothing had happened and bring a bottle of whiskey to celebrate a great friendship.
This would go on and on indefinitely. He would have moments of lucidity and then again accuse everyone of sleeping with his wife and then he would sleeplessly read philosophy books for days and comment them over a green tea and then he would forget about the tea and remember only philosophy and the beer and dancing and freedom.
Gradually his legs got better and he started going alone in the crowds and wanted to do something constructive with his life. He began training Wing Chun, bought some gym equipment for home and was so serious about it that he even rejected a beer that I brought as I came to visit him. He accused me that I was bad company and kept him unfocused and broke-up with me again.
I haven’t seen him for a long time since and when he reappeared he had his bags packed. His smile was gone and I wish his lunacy as well. He told me he was leaving for Shaolin monastery to dedicate himself to Kung-Fu. I hope that it wasn’t because I kicked his ass the last time when we had a fight I told him. He nodded and gave me a serious hug.
That was the last time I saw him or heard of him. He deleted his profiles and disappeared from all the social networks. Years have passed since then and I moved out of Germany as well and think of him quite often without much hope that our paths would cross again. But unpredictable as he and the future as well I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Owl again hanging on a branch of some tree in some woods somewhere on a way to some better world.