I scared Crispin Glover out of a bookstore in Prague.
That sounds like a pickup line, and I believe I’ve used it in the past, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I was in an English-speaking bookstore in Prague, and my surprised leering at Crispin Glover made him uncomfortable enough to get the hell out of there.
What’s a Stag Party?
Prague was weird like that. It’s a cliché for American undergrads to find themselves there, but for Europeans, it’s central for bachelor (stag) parties, due to the cheap beer and prostitutes – the latter of which came as a surprise to some of us in the Writing Program, though the beer (and lowered drinking age) was admittedly a primary motivation for the trip. Drinking, and taking it easy, is a central element of the Czech spirit – street sweepers taking a break with a bottle or two of Pilsner Urquell was not an uncommon sight – and that lower-key Mardi Gras-like spirit is a honey to the flies of intercontinental degenerates, English undergrads in particular.
I was already 21 by the time I entered the month-long program offered through my alma mater, Western Michigan University, though the obscene amount of drinking that I was a party to during that summer went beyond what I had experienced at college bars and frat parties so far, not in the least because Prague is the sort of place you can buy a shot of Jack Daniels at a hot dog stand. I have a distinct memory of someone opening a bottle of Champaign onto my forehead, at the back of a tram that was in motion, without the operator shouting at us, or really any of the other commuters even batting an eye. Drunks seemed as commonplace as pigeons, and locals weren’t bothered by the hordes of blacked-out strangers.
On the same tram-line, a few nights later (or hours, who knows?) I swear to God I saw a pair of dogs get on, unaccompanied, only to exit a few stops later, and race down a side street. No one else onboard seemed to think this was out of the ordinary.
Coif it like Beckham
Local tax rates also attract budget-minded filmmakers (another similarity with New Orleans), who often film in the Czech Republic on the cheap (XXX and Hellboy were produced nearby), so ongoing productions added to the cartoonish spectacles around the city. As the weeks unfolded we weren’t surprised by the actors and crews trooping out along the Saint Charles Bridge to film whatever awful dialogue the script called for.
Early after arriving, I took a walk down the district’s local square. I remember seeing WWII-era extras milling around a movie set behind a fence, and seeing the yellow stars attached to their shoulders, I realized what the adjacent train cars indicated. The scene was not a fortuitous portent on my first day in Europe.
It is a bit cliché to think about it after a few decades, though through all the bullshit it still seemed so romantic. I had grown up in a comfortable suburb in Mid-Michigan, and with a few exceptions, glamor and excitement for my people didn’t extend much beyond a weekend at an Upper Peninsula casino, or maybe even the odd trip to New York, or Baltimore. The wealthiest, worldliest people I knew growing up worked for GM or Chrysler, and after high school, the most exciting time for a lot of us were the first few weeks we decided to sell AmWay. The cultural cacophony of a place like Prague was a fever dream to me, with its castles and cafes. Twisting cobblestone back alleys, centuries old. Goulash. Kafka.
One thing that I really hadn’t anticipated were the mullets.
It had something to do with soccer – David Beckham perhaps included among other soccer stars who wore the business-casual coif for a period, making somewhat fashionable the hairstyle rednecks in my home country had cultivated specifically to intimidate city folk. I remember worrying at the time, very distinctly, that the trend would make the jump to the American glitterati in the next few years, as so many fashionable Europeans suddenly adopted the lifestyle of business-ing in the front and partying in the back.
The mullet became so ubiquitous on the continent, it seemed, that it had filtered down into the gutter punk scene, another notable phenomenon I was surprised to encounter during my time in Eastern Europe. Years later, I would come to know with some regular disgust the presence of Gutter Punks when I lived in Chicago – young, mostly Caucasian self-styled anarchists who begged and stole in some of the city’s more fashionable neighborhoods, like Andersonville, Wicker Park, eventually Logan Square, rumored to be the offspring of wealthy parents. I personally blame Kerouac.
Back in 2005, though, back in Prague, I was still a young and impressionable college student who hadn’t encountered this sort of misguided, voluntary homelessness, and the degree that these Euro-Gutter Punks reached in abject filth was astounding.
You’d come across these groups of five to thirty transients lounging in public squares and park benches, caked in grime, in tattered clothes that looked like the Apocalypse began right after a Sex Pistols show. Usually they had at least a few dogs with them, I always assumed to generate extra sympathy in the panhandling process, which could invoke some pathos. I remember one particularly scorching August afternoon, seeing a group lounge against the Kostel su. Mikulase – St. Nicholas Church – off Old Town Square, several canine companions laying at their feet like deflated balloons, while fat American tourists grimaced and waddled on to the Astronomical Clock, throwing them a few extra Czech crowns along with their tears.
Did I mention that I was in Prague for a Creative Writing program? Wasn’t I just talking about mullets?
“Sa-lad?”
The students and most of the visiting faculty stayed in a dormitory a few miles out of the city. It was a huge, hulking building, with a cavernous central lobby, lined with marble that echoed the clickety-clacking steps of people ascending staircases up the second, third and fourth floors that looked down on the massive room below. In the coming weeks those staircases were so often festooned with drunken undergrads, stopped to chat and canoodle, on their way up to the meandering residence hallways that extended in wings off the lobby. Supposedly the building had been designed in the Soviet era, like a lot of government buildings, to disorient and intimidate political dissidents whom authorities were detaining and questioning, and it was easy to get lost on the way back to your room, especially after several bottles of pivo.
It didn’t help that the dorm had two working bars in the basement, and beer in the vending machines. Only one bar ever seemed to be open at a time, usually the “discotheque” with booths and mirrored walls, though I preferred the beer hall, with its long communal benches and plates of sausage that appeared out of nowhere sometime around midnight. They would stay open until usually around 2 or 3 o’clock before kicking us out, some of us stragglers staying out a while more under the Beech trees in the courtyards, doing questionable things like drinking Absinthe straight from the bottle, or discussing Ayn Rand. One of those early mornings I still recall showing some friends a “trick” I had learned, smashing cheap cigarette lighters on the concrete pathway, the butane popping them like budget firecrackers. There’s no redeeming value in this, but at 4 am it has a tendency to impress drunk people.
The following afternoon, I was having a conference with one of my playwriting professors after class, when she apologized to me for seeming distant. She didn’t get much sleep, she said “there were people outside my window so late last night, and at one point it sounded like they were lighting off…fireworks or something.”
I couldn’t tell if she was passively shaming me or genuinely expressing her exhaustion, the look on her face didn’t seem to betray any agenda, but I felt horrible. This distinguished, brilliant writer and professor, a strong black woman who, in her sixties, was done with taking shit from white undergraduate punk kids like me, expressed her grief and disgust. Of course I replied, shaking my head with empathy “Oh my gosh, that is just awful. Some people just have no respect for others.”
Most shops and restaurants in the city understood enough English to talk to the constant crush of tourists, so outside of “pivo, prosím” (beer, please), or “na zdraví!” (cheers!), one could get by without speaking Czech. In Dejvice however, the neighborhood where the dorms were located, locals were less-accustomed to English speakers. One day, I decided on a whim to have lunch in the building’s elegant, empty restaurant. The staff had to roust a busser from the back, the only one who spoke enough broken English to communicate with my dumb ass. Eastern Europe, hell most of the continent, doesn’t hold customer service as highly as Americans do, so expats come to expect a little gruffness when asking for a glass of voda, and on top of that this guy seemed particularly irked to be conscripted as my de facto translator, especially when I ordered a salad after taking my time to scan the meat-heavy goulashes that comprised most of the menu. A deadness hung in the air, after I pointed to the dish on the menu. I made this guy go through all this trouble to order what amounted to a side dish. Coleslaw.
“Sa-lad?” he barked back at me, incredulous.
“Yes, sa-lad, prosím.”
The busser stormed off to relay my order, never to be seen again. I decided to patronize the café across the courtyard for the rest of my time there.
This wouldn’t be my last shake up with the Czech service industry, though. I’d go without dinner one night the following week after nearly coming to blows with a waiter at Cuban restaurant in Old Town. We went there after class one night and some friends had the audacity to ask the waiter for menus forty five minutes after we had been seated, around the time the other half of our party had been served at their table. I further angered him by ordering just a mojito, not wanting to make the other table wait for us to get our food, whenever that might be. Things seemed to be looking up for a brief moment when a second waiter swooped in and set a mojito in front of me, which I dove into assuming my order had been rushed. When our waiter returned five minutes later, the actual drink I had ordered in-hand, he gave me the angriest look I had ever seen before storming off in a huff, never to be seen again.
“I think everybody’s just in Church.”
My companion at that table was my friend Chris, then a rather husky fellow, looking a bit like Hemingway, if Hemingway had been really into conspiracy theories. It was Chris who suggested we take a weekend trip into Bratislava, the train ride there and back costing something like twenty dollars American. I could say that we went to further explore the unique local cultures and broaden our perspectives, but honestly we just went because it was cheap and we thought it would be funny to visit a place we had heard about in the movie EuroTrip.
Now, the decision to go somewhere because it was referenced briefly for a one-off joke in Michelle Trachtenberg vehicle is not the dumbest motivation in the world, but it’s up there. Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia, and while the economy there isn’t terrible, it was probably the least-glamourous destination we could have found, even in Eastern Europe. It’s sort of like a European student studying abroad in Chicago, deciding on a whim to go visit Flint because they saw a Michael Moore movie. Bratislava is Flint, Michigan with castles.
The exchange rate was still nonetheless helpful, allowing us to dine in an upscale, mostly empty restaurant across from our hostel, before we strolled down the back streets at dusk, popping into the wine bars popular in the country. Czechs brewed beer, but here in Slovakia wine was the popular potable, and a handful of Slovak Crowns could nab a decent bottle of red – not that we could tell the difference, but it was certainly better than Mad Dog 20/20.
It was the first time I felt sheepish when a waiter asked if I’d like to smell the cork. “It’s brilliant!” I assured the waiter.
We settled at the outdoor tables at our first café, admiring the orange and purple hues cast in the waning dusk. We asked about the building across the street that had a pyramid surrounding an eyeball – The Eye of Providence – carved into the stone near its precipice, amid other mystic symbols. We had peeked at it as we wandered into town, noting the sound of people inside, though the front doors were locked. Chris had spent much of the hours on the train ride telling me about the secret affiliations Scientology had fostered in Hollywood and Western Media, and watching him point out some of their co-opted symbols spooked me, as did the Dianetics bookstore that was RIGHT NEXT TO THE CAFÉ.
“That building?” asked our waiter, nodding to the eye-pyramid edifice across the street “The church? I think everybody’s just in church.”
Evidently, Friday night is when Slovakian Scientologists go to Church. So just a heads up on that.
We wandered through a few more wine bars. I tried to make a joke that my friend Chris was Earnest Hemingway’s grandson to a few of the servers, as supposedly he had come through here at some point. They nodded at me, smiling, completely oblivious to what I was saying. Sometime after dark, we wandered into Heavy Metal bar, which I surmised after the bartender set the bar on fire when a Rammstein song started blasting through the speakers (the Everclear burned off well-before the flame found its way down to the bar’s wood, through the lacquered countertop).
I can’t remember how long we were in that dark basement, and though I remembered feeling awkward, my huge backpack strapped to me as I tried to gyrate on the heavy metal dance floor, I recall our Eastern European hosts being overly hospitable. At one point in the evening, a lithe young woman danced up toward me, beneath the strobe lights and the flames from the bar, thrusting back into me as I tried to keep my balance with my European Traveler’s Backpack wobbling me back and forth. After a few minutes of awkwardly grinding up into her, a gregarious gentleman sidled up to me and offered me a shot of something.
“YOU LIKE HER? SHE PRETTY?” he shouted to me over the heavy metal din, handing me another drink.
“Yeah, I guess, she seems cool!” I shouted back!
“SHE’S MY WIFE! HAHA!” he shouted, handing me a third drink.
“Okay!” I responded and tried to balance the shot and the two drinks and my backpack and his wife.
Eventually Chris and I found our way to a small, lower-key dive that didn’t include so many ambiguous encounters with possible Slovakian swingers, and it was a welcome come-down. I’ve always preferred meandering drunken conversation to the more primal club scene, and it was nice to talk to folks who were genuinely appreciative to utilize their English. We even got to talking to an older couple about the subjects we had encountered during our time in Prague – the difference between Americans and Europeans, between the Czechs and other Europeans, Czechs and Slovaks, wine versus beer, and American Pop Culture. After about forty five minutes of buying each other drinks, I finally asked them what they do for a living, and that’s when they got quiet. They looked at each other, suspicious, guarded. It was the first point I noticed the husband’s lazy eye.
“We’ve become interested in finding financial freedom,” the wife said, sheepishly.
“We’ve become involved with this new American company,” the husband looked at me with one of his eyes, “it’s called AmWay. Have you heard of it?”
And it was at that point that I excused myself from our table. I found my way back to the men’s room, wondering if I could squirrel my way out the small window in its back corner. I had made my way to Slovakia, farther than I had ever been from home, or Grand Rapids, or the DeVos family, or the idea of “multi-level marketing” and here I was, in the capital of Slovakia, getting hit up for AmWay.
Chris and I scurried out of there soon after. The next morning we would wake up to realize that the Queen-sized mattress we had passed out on was actually two twin-sized mattresses we could have pulled apart. Months later, we would watch the movie Hostel and realize that we had gotten out of the Heavy Metal bar with more than just our bruised dignity.
Rain Dogs
When it came to drugs, Prague seemed a little like the Wild West. Supposedly, one could still be dragged off to anonymous Eastern European prisons for whatever the seemingly semi-Soviet state would spring on you, though certain bars would openly sell weed if you lucked out. A manager at the coffee shop I worked at had been on the program before and said to hit up the Chateau la Rouge, which happened to be the hip place the cool kids from the program would hang, though no bars would sell to Americans. You still had to find “a guy”.
So as to avoid any chance of someday being hauled off to an Eastern European prison, or incur any legal abnormalities regarding my association with Western Michigan University, I won’t confess to the extent of our cannabis-related activities. But if you happen to run into me in person, feel free to ask about The Most Paranoid Weed Dealer in Prague.
Prague is a lot like New Orleans, or New York, or any central cultural metropolis that lends itself to travelers, students, potheads, drunks, perverts, stag (bachelor) partiers, heads of state, poets, prophets and authors, and at the end of the day, I recommend it if you’re looking for something to consume your soul. It’s not a wonder that ex-pats like Crispin Glover find their way to owning large, ex-Soviet estates just outside the city.
So if you’re ever in an English-speaking bookstore in Prague, don’t be surprised if a dude like Crispin Glover walks in. And don’t be surprised if he doesn’t want to talk to American fans. Especially when they’re drunk on pivo. There’s a reason he moved to Prague.
And whatever you do, don’t chase after him shouting “George McFly! George McFly!” He’s done a lot more work outside of that Back to the Future thing.
