x Diary 6

Diary
6 Prague 2
  Other nights when Lubos and I weren't
pissing in the bushes we played pool.
   
There was this pool hall in Prosek where we could crash,
whack, curve, rack all night and still have enough cash left over from
a hundred crowns for a double beer on the tram home in the morning.
   
Coming from a family of addicts pool has always been my
cocaine. What can beat that ball going into a hole? It has the glamour
of conspicuous consumption, you know, visible bitch of cause and effect
without the bile of filthy lucre passing
hands.   
This place in Prosek had only four tables but they were
top-notch quality; blue-baized American style with solid mahogany
surrounds. Originally destined for the American embassy they had never
got there. That happened a lot in Prague. The fag end of communism had
gone out but it still hadn't been swept from the floor. 
    Lubos and I were always the
only ones in that Prosek pool club and the jaded ivory lady who ran the
place got into the habit of bringing us rounds of sandwiches at around
two in the morning like we were two dysfunctional kids she was trying
to bribe to bed.     She always asked Lubos if I
thought they were alright and after Lubos's circumventing translation,
'Make like you like them and she'll knock ten per cent of the bill' I
would nod and she would giggle like a little girl. She must have been
eighty.    People asked me what Lubos and
I talked about, we spent so much time together.
   
"I don't know," I said.
"Stuff."    This was partly true and partly
not. I should have told them what he and I didn't talk about was more
important.    For
example.    Communism. Lubos didn't talk
about that, except in the occasional dropped
sentence.    "Bread used to be one
crown."    "At sometime everyone stopped
working. That's how it happened. It just ground to a
halt."   
"People don't like to talk Russian
anymore."    We didn't talk about visiting
exotic lands.     "You should come to England," I
told him.    "I don't want to. It's too
far."   
"You'd like
it."   
"I wouldn't. Everything is
here."   
"So you've never been
abroad?"    "No. Except Slovakia. That's
like here but worse."    We didn't talk about sex. Read
there, my sexuality.     Lubos is the only straight guy
I've ever met who has not given a fuck about my sexuality. And I mean
deep down giving a fuck. Standing next to me at a urinal, sharing a
bed. Those kind of
things.   
**** At some point I found the British
Council. This was good because they had a library and I was getting
tired of the Wordsworth Classics, most of them were so goddam heavy.
Some notable books of this time are, The Redundancy of Courage, The
Samarkand, Chatterton.     Believe me, I had plenty of
time to read. Between teaching at the university in the mornings and
taking my class in central Prague in the evenings I spent half my life
on trams.     On good days I would be buried
in the pages. On bad days I would be gazing out the windows at the
condensed air hovering above the Vltava. There were more good days than
bad. In both reading and pool in my life this has often been the case.
One day pool might desert me and one day books, but never the two
together.    To get to the school l worked
at in the evenings I had to walk across the Charles Bridge. Amidst the
trillions of tourists, the Russian painters, and general hawkers, fine
Czechs after a quick buck, I would see Ales playing his accordion. Ales
had fingers like pineapples and a potbelly on a little body. Oh, and
Ales was blind. He worked in the school like me. He wasn't a teacher,
he was in charge of
photocopying.    The photocopier was in a room
by itself and only Ales had the key. He guarded this key more closely
than he had ever guarded his eyesight.
   
If ever we teachers needed any copies then we had to leave
the appropriate document on a chair by the door. It was important that
it was clearly marked. Clearly marked meant the top left or right hand
corner of the page you wanted doing being bent over. Being blind, Ales
worked by touch alone.    I would love to say that Ales
was a genius blind photocopier but he wasn't. Often you would get the
wrong page, or half the page, or sometimes, tantalisingly just the
first few lines.     And there was always 10 copies,
whether you had a class or 7 or 12. I had 13 and sometimes 10 copies
was neither here nor there. 
    At Christmas we read a story by
Roald Dahl, not one of the children's ones but a macabre one fitting in
with what I believed was the Czech cultural identity.
   
Ales did pretty well on this and we got all but the last
page.    
"How does it end?" Martin, one of the students, asked
me.   
"Yes," chorused the others, "how does it
end?"   
I was happy to be creating so much interest in the written
word. Proudly I held up the original
copy.   
"I have the
ending."    "Ah," said Martin, "he has the
ending. That is why he is the teacher. Because he has the
ending."    "Ah," said the other students
and nodded their heads.    "Te vole," said Lubos and he
laughed. "Te vole."    'Te vole' = 'You
ox'.   
I knew what Lubos meant. He could see right through
me. **** If Lubos was my best friend then Martin
was the love of my life. He arrived in the class a week after the
others. He was studying agriculture at university and had just come
back from a placement in the
states.    "How was it?" I
asked.   
"Shit," he said, "Shit shit shit. Bastard farmer had my
hand up the ass of a cow nearly every
day."   
One day when I found a local cinema was having a Jim
Jarmusch season and Lubos had declined all my invitations citing a sore
arm, leg, head, Martin offered to come with me.
   
In my book Jim Jarmusch is about the hottest director
there is and on this day they were showing 'Stranger then Paradise'
which is about his hottest
film.   
Arriving at the cinema I asked for two tickets in my best
Czech I was told by the server in her couldn't give a shit Czech that
there were no tickets
left.   
"Don't worry," said Martin, "we'll go in anyway. If anyone
asks we'll just say we're American. It'll be
ok."   
It worked and after that Martin and I were Americans all
over the shop. Quite literally. We were like Bette Midler and Woody
Allen in 'Scenes from a
Mall'.   
We were playing a role and for the first time I felt I
could be myself by being somebody else. If there was a zeitgeist then
it was this, this state of flux, in which at the end of an absolute
metamorphosis was a viable and attractive option. 
    Vaclav Havel wrote that the
Czechs as a nation suffered from a prison psychosis. And after you come
out of prison, then what? You don't know who you are because you have
spent so long being someone else. I wasn't Czech but equally I had
hidden myself and somehow it was easier to pull on this ersatz role
than to feel the guilt I felt at just being
myself.    The first time Martin and I
kissed was on St Patrick's night. We'd heard this old cinema had been
converted into a nightclub and we decided to
go.   
On arrival we found that the cinema had been converted in
the same spirit that the Czech Republic had been converted to
capitalism, i.e. on a wing and a
prayer.     Seats had been ripped out
to create a dance floor full of ankle breaking holes. The balcony rail
had been removed and a long continuous curtain had been tacked up to
fill the gap. Every metre or so on the curtain was a small sign, "Do
not lean here," it said, "you will fall." Drinks were served from
trestle tables into plastic cups. And I remember in the centre of the
dance floor was a telephone box. I didn't understand what the hell a
telephone box doing in a cinema in the first place? Mind you I didn't
understand a lot of
things.    Nor I guess did Martin. That
kiss surprised him, coming as it did when we were dancing laughing
trying not to bump into the phone box. It surprised me
too.   
That night, we went back to Martin's. He lived on the
fourteenth floor of a panelac near Praske Povestani metro. The flat had
one bedroom, one living-room, one bathroom. And it was full of
furniture. As if the family had once had a bigger life and squashed
into here. Or more likely as if the family had dreamt of a bigger life
and stocked up in
anticipation.    Martin decided that he would
cook. Plates of food came out of the kitchen, plates and plates. I
thought he had Jesus in there with him. Well, when I like a guy I do
tend to put him on a
pedestal.    Eventually it was time for bed.
At this point I should say that Martin wasn't gay. However, as I had
masturbated over the Hite report as a teenager I knew the kind of
things that went on. Besides Martin had told me up front that he had
had his hand up the arse of a cow. This would be horses for
courses. 
    "Martin," I said as he slid
under the sheets next to
me.   
"Drew," he
said.   
And at this point many things could have happened but only
one thing did. I was sick.
   
To this day I imagine that is the closest Martin has got
to buggery. Martin and I stayed friends. He was a
complex person and after a large number of drinks was often ready to
talk about the ambivalent feelings he had towards his mother.
   
He told me how night after night she would bring home some
man and he would hear them fucking through the thin walls. He told me
these men were communists. Hadn't everyone been fucked be the
communists? I asked Martin and he laughed and for a moment I thought he
was going to kiss me again. But he didn't.
   
I don't think Martin knew what he wanted to do. He had
lived in America but had no visa to go back. One day he told me had a
job as a street cleaner. He had to get up at 4 and go to this office
from where they were sent out to different locations in Prague. He said
all the other guys were drunks. They would collect their money at the
end of the day and spend it on alcohol. I hadn't read Bukowski then but
if I had I might have recognised something of Martin in
it.   
Then finally Martin told me he was going to join the army.
He said that he had just
enrolled.    Now the Czech Republic has
national conscription but I never met anyone who had been in the army.
They were so many ways of getting out of it. You had to get a blue
book, or green book from your doctor and this would disqualify you from
entry. Everybody had these books.
   
"This guy in the office was so surprised," said Martin.
"He said, 'Are you sure you want to join the army?' He said I was the
first person who had ever walked in there and offered to join
up."   
I shook my
head.   
"Do you want to
go?"   
"No."    "Then
why?"   
Martin only shrugged.
   
The only clue that I have is something that Martin once
said to me. We were in a theatre bar when suddenly Martin leant in
close and said, "I used to fart a lot but I don't
anymore."    That was honestly what he said
and he said it so sadly with such poignancy. In those words was the
loss of something, the passing of something. Change. And it wasn't
good.