Chapter Text
Feliks Łukasiewicz was a true icon of our times. He was an unconventional person in an unconventional band. The band, as well as Feliks himself, were certainly not the most expected artists at the top of the Billboard music charts due to what they represented. Feliks was born in The People’s Republic of Poland and that was crucial to his identity as an artist.
From the very beginning of his career, Feliks had a certain title attached to him. He was the one who escaped a communist regime and lived to tell the tale. He was the one who somehow managed to create meaningful art in a language he couldn’t properly speak at first.
Feliks never told anyone how he got out of his home country. Whenever he was asked about it, he said that one day he was in Warsaw, strolling through the streets and looking at the Palace of Culture and Science and the next he just wasn’t. That had to be enough for the reporters.
His first days in the USA were also mostly unknown to anyone who didn’t know him well. Even in private, he was hesitant to speak about them for many years.
“You know how it is,” he told me once while taking a sip of some alcohol. Feliks loved his alcohol more than anything. He said it reminded him of home. “The moment I speak about how I escaped, these bastards are going to do everything to make sure nobody does it again. And I don’t want that. I want more people to get out.”
On the 11th of November, Feliks always got emotional. At first I assumed he just really loved celebrating his birthday, but his reasons were entirely different.
“My grandfather was there that day,” he said, sniffling. “He met my grandma moments before they heard they were free. That their country was free.”
He was always very emotionally tied to his home. I thought he felt guilty that he left, but he never outright said it. It had to be partially related to the fact that his parents still lived in Warsaw. Contacting them was very hard, mostly because of the insanely high phone bills one would have to pay after making even the shortest call overseas.
I met Feliks in October of 1981. He was twenty years old and walked around the streets of Los Angeles with a guitar on his back and a spring in his footsteps. I was similar, except that inside my case was a bass. He was the one who started a conversation with me when I was in line to the bakery.
“What’s inside there?” He asked me while pointing his finger at the instrument case on my back. There was something about him that just made me want to tell him all my secrets right then and there, but I opted for just that one.
“It’s a bass guitar,” I said. He bit his lip for a moment and looked somewhere to the side. Then, he looked back at me with this weird spark in his eyes.
“How do you fancy starting a band?” he asked me. Keep in mind, this was a guy I just met on the street. His r’s were vibrating on his tongue, his word endings were very prominent. It made me wonder if I would have spoken like that as well if my parents didn’t leave their home country at the right moment.
But Feliks was always hard to resist, so I gave in.
“I’m Taurys,” I said. His eyes opened a bit wider when he heard my name, but he didn’t say anything about it. Years later he told me he once met a guy named Tauras, back in Warsaw. He was Lithuanian, just like my parents. That’s when I learned my name was entirely made up.
“Feliks, spelled with a ks at the end,” he replied, grinning. He hated when others spelled his name as ‘Felix’. He always corrected them, I don’t think I’ve seen him let it slide once. He also always instructed people on how to pronounce his name properly. Feh-liks, not Feelix, he said. I adored this part of him, he was always unapologetically himself.
That day, we went out for a drink. I suggested a cafe, but Feliks said he knew a good bar. He never missed an opportunity to get some alcohol, like I said. We exchanged home phone numbers in case of a change of plans and decided to meet at seven in the evening.
At 6:50pm, I arrived at the bar where Feliks and I agreed to meet. He appeared a few moments later.
“Hey, you’re here early,” Feliks said and smiled at me. “C’mon, let’s go inside.”
That evening we spoke about anything and everything. He told me he came to Los Angeles a few months ago because he always wanted to be a musician, but Poland had very strict censorship laws. He asked me about what I did here and why I spoke English with such a funny accent. Feliks always thought my accent was funny, which was ironic considering everyone thought the same about his. I think he lost it over the years too, since I never remembered him speaking with his vibrating r’s when we were talking at night in bed, but in interviews he showed it off like a badge of honor. It was like he wanted to make a statement.
Nevertheless, his personality was so captivating that I actually agreed to look for bandmates with him. Feliks decided we needed a drummer and maybe a keyboardist. He asked me if I sang.
“I do sing,” he said, stressing the ‘do’. “But I would prefer to give the job to someone with more confidence.”
“I guess you’ve found the right person then,” I told him. He beamed at me after he heard this.
Until the end of our careers, Feliks sang the majority of our music with me, even though I was technically the main vocalist.
The week after that, we handed out flyers informing random pedestrians that we were looking for band members. Soon, we received a few calls. But no one interested us as much as Eduard von Bock and Raivis Galante, a duo that called Feliks very late on one Thursday evening. Raivis was a drummer, Eduard played the keyboard. For some reason, the decision to let them into our band was made before we even heard them play. At that time, I already tried to play a few songs with Feliks. He was a good guitarist, maybe nothing amazing, but that was alright. He was determined to improve.
Both Eduard and Raivis were first generation immigrants of Baltic origins, just like me. All of us were jealous of Feliks and his upbringing. Even though he was from a different country than our families, he got to experience living in his motherland for the majority of his life. We never stepped foot in the land of our ancestors. Whenever Feliks would tell me that he always loved visiting Vilnius in the summer, I felt a weird pain in my heart. He promised he would show me around once the USSR falls. It was one of the most romantic things he ever promised to me.
Our band soon began practicing regularly and we were getting pretty good at utilizing each other’s strengths. I was often asked in interviews whether I felt like some of us were being overshadowed by the others and I always protested against the idea. I thought that in a four person group, everyone was equal. But that didn’t mean we never quarreled.
You see, Feliks wasn’t without his faults. Probably one of his largest flaws was that he could never detach a person’s nationality from them. One day, Eduard casually mentioned that he was actually half German; his father emigrated from Germany after the war. We knew he couldn’t have been involved in it in any way due to his age, but Feliks acted like the opposite was true. One mistake from Eduard at a concert could result in a string of insults, most of them having to do with his German roots. Feliks never understood that he had to control his hatred in this aspect. He managed to shut up in public, but in private he would talk about how he felt cheated by Eduard, who should have disclosed his father’s nationality before joining the band.
“I don’t agree with you,” I straight up told him when the topic first came up. At that point, we had been a band for a year. “Eduard is not his father, besides his father was a literal child during the war.”
This argument somehow calmed him down; he was always very sensitive to tragedies involving children. I was surprised he didn’t start blaming Eduard’s grandfather for anything. The man was dead; that was enough for Feliks to not mention him. I thought his prejudice would wear off in time, but now I know I was very wrong.
After practicing for a month and a half, we played at Raivis’s sister’s wedding reception, because the band she hired previously randomly split up right before the wedding and finding a replacement was difficult. We didn’t have fully finished original songs at the time, so we played ones that were popular on the radio. The guests seemed to really enjoy our performances. Some told me we should try to make our own music.
“We’re working on it,” Feliks told everyone. At that point, we didn’t yet know what he was planning.
In December of 1981, Feliks seemed to lose some of his spark. At first I didn’t know what was going on, but then I read the papers. Martial Law was implemented in Poland.
He stopped talking to me for a few days, which made me worry. In only those few weeks of knowing me, he already managed to develop a habit of calling me at any time during the night or day just to share something with me. The information he’d passed onto me was never particularly useful; it could be that he just heard a new song on the radio and wanted me to try to listen to it too or he saw an ad for a new movie, and did I perhaps want to come see it as well? But then, the calls just ceased. A few days later, Feliks came to my house in the middle of the night. He was considerate enough to ring the phone I had in my room and not the doorbell, so nobody else in the house was awake. I went downstairs in the dark, trying to feel each step of the stairs with my bare feet. When I opened the door for Feliks, I noticed that the only things he brought with him were his keys, his wallet, a pen and a piece of paper. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“Read this,” he said and walked inside my house without being invited. He knew he was always welcome at my place, even if we didn’t come here often but I hadn’t considered he’d visit me at 3am. I reminded him to keep quiet before I focused on what he wanted to show me; my family was all asleep just a floor above us.
I took the crumpled paper from him and began reading, having previously turned on a small lamp in the living room. It was a song, a fully finished song. It was clearly inspired by the martial law announcement, but it wasn’t mentioned by name, probably to make the whole thing a bit more universal. It was a piece about being enslaved by something you just can’t defeat on your own, but even if you find a group to fight with, you may be brought down. The important part was not giving up.
“I love it,” I told him as he was nervously pacing around my living room. He seemed distressed and clearly not in his right mind. I wondered if he had been drinking or if it was just the exhaustement affecting his actions. I couldn’t smell alcohol on him and I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, so I didn’t ask.
“You do?” he asked, as if I could have lied to him about that.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice suddenly getting a bit quieter. There was just something in Feliks’ eyes that made me unsure of my next move. He looked like his mind was somewhere else, despite him staring right into my eyes.
“That’s…” he began and made his way towards me. When he got closer, I realized what his intentions were. For a moment, we just stood in front of each other in silence, looking deep into each other’s eyes. I should have probably pushed him away when he touched my nose with his, but instead I grabbed him by the neck and kissed him gently. He kissed me back and the paper with the song lyrics fell to the floor.
We met not even two months earlier at that point, and yet we already knew we were made for each other. Sometimes you can just tell.