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06/16/01
-----Original Message----- The young Czech women are phenomenally beautiful. They are all fair-haired, and are slender, with sizeable bosoms. They wear tight, revealing clothes, flaunting their youth and juiciness. Nubile does not do them justice. It's like a city of prom queens, or cheerleaders. A city of princesses. Mistresses. A city of wet dreams. My host Brian swivels his head constantly to check them out. He is not tired of looking at these women, and he's lived here almost a year. I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb, as if my whole appearance screams, "Jew!" or "American!" After a few days now, I've begun to find the homogeneity of this city a little boring. It makes me miss the subway rides of New York a bit, where everyone is so different and interesting-looking. And everyone knows how much I hate the Manhattan subway system. Brian, Mike, and I discussed the Czech women after dinner last night. "They don't age well, do they?" I said. "Yea, that's the thing," said Mike. "One day they look twenty, and the next they're forty. Just like that." Brian added that he thought they flaunted their good looks while they were young, because they were all aware that they would eventually lose them, and lose them forever. "Hm. Well, at least I know I'm going to age well," I said. "All of the women in my family get better looking as they get older." I don't know why I feel this competitiveness with Czech women. Everything rides on their looks, and not one part of my life has anything to do with my appearance. It's all about my brain and my sense of humor, and those things are propelling me to personal satisfaction. I'm much, much luckier than them. But it would be nice to walk in the skin of just one of their waitresses for a day, to see how the heads turn. *** I walked around the tourist area of Prague yesterday, attempting to do the tourist thing. I hate tourists. The sun was shining bright, and I got sunburned. It made me a little cranky. I eventually resigned myself to walking the perimeter of the city centre, just to get away from the hordes of people. It wasn't enough that I didn't understand what most of the people were saying - I had longed for an absence of English for months, you know. I needed complete silence. Later I went to a cafe at the metro stop near Brian's house. I drank two Campari and sodas, because it seemed like an appropriate thing to order. My dogs were killing me. I rubbed my calves, sipped my drink (which was served as follows: a tall glass with a shot of Campari, a smaller glass of soda, and a small dish of ice cubes, with a serving spoon. Make your own drinks! Me like.), and read the first 100 pages of Auster's "Moon Palace." A Czech man in his late 30s sat next to me, engaged in a passionate discussion about what I imagined to be the music scene. He had short salt and pepper dreds. A book on Patti Smith lay on the table, written by someone named Victor Bokris. I wanted to talk to him for a moment, and say, "Hey, you like Patti Smith? I love Patti Smith. I've seen her perform. She's great." But then, I would have had to explain for the millionth time that I was from New York, what I was doing there, and so forth, and I'm already tired of explaining who I am. So instead, I simply smiled at him. My unwillingness to engage does not disturb me. Nothing is disturbing me right now, except for the goddamn tourists. *** On page 50 of "Moon Palace" I burst into tears in the middle of the cafe. He wrote: I had jumped off the edge of a cliff, and then, just as I was about to hit bottom, an extraordinary event took place: I learned that there were people who loved me. To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what terror means. Fucking Paul Auster making me cry in public, and I'm only on page 50 of a 300 page book. I'm afraid to finish it. Oh no, it's wonderful, of course. Don't worry. I'll be just fine. *** Last night Brian and I headed over to Mike's place to pick him, his boss Daisy, and her Chilean husband, Gonzalo up for dinner. They also had their beautiful baby, Emma, with them, who had had a recent incident with a stove, so her hands were covered in white bandages, which looked like little mittens. They were all wickedly stoned, I was later to discover, so the dinner, which occurred at a Latin American expat hangout, meandered pleasantly but unevenly. The parents and child left after dinner, which meant the three remaining Americans had to get really fucked up and say things like, "You remember that episode of 'Three's Company' where there was a misunderstanding and everyone got into trouble?" Or, "Remember that episode of 'Three's Company' where everyone thought Jack was gay?" And, "Remember that episode of 'Three's Company', where Chrissy wasn't wearing a bra and you could totally see her nipples?" I think these expats might be starved for a little old-fashioned Saturday afternoon television watching, but don't tell them I said that. It'll ruin their whole image. And then: more bars, more drinking, more joking around. We went to one bar, Chateau Rouge, which was predictably decorated in red and like a bordello. We concluded everyone there was on ecstasy, and Mike told us about an Algerian drug dealer named NuNu, who held court in the bathroom there, every day, between 6 and 7 PM, selling pot, ecstasy, and coke. "He's like the Fonzie of Prague," laughed Mike. We ended our bar-hopping at Image (Yo, it's totally cheesy here. Did I mention that? It's 80s night every night. And every day, too. So a bar named Image fits right in here.), drinking shots of Becherovka, the Czech liqueur that goes down easy, and stays there. The bartenders were all shitty drunk when we got there, as were the patrons, so the entire bar was dancing and groping and throwing drinks on each other. Occasionally, somebody fell flat on their face. Two particularly flexible Czech women danced on chairs, until men would grab one or the other, and fling them over their shoulders and carry them around the room, their tightly-clad, firm asses bouncing to the bad dance music. It was chaos. In fact, as it was later explained to me, it was a redneck bar. We headed back to Mike's pad, where we drank more, smoked a little, and stayed up until the sun rose, marveling at the colors of the sky unfolding against the various colorful buildings visible from Mike's balcony. We were shit-faced. I danced with Brian to Roy Orbison's"Crying" (he's super fun to dance with, by the way), and to a couple of Rolling Stones songs with Mike. We had more fun with the puppets. I eventually grabbed a stuffed kangaroo, and headed to Mike's bed, where I slept fitfully, drunk, stoned, and slightly delirious. Everytime I opened my eyes the sky was a new color, and the buildings were different, too. Everytime I opened my eyes, I saw something new. It's almost more than a girl can handle. Love you miss you wish you were here
xxoo P.S. Am I missing anything good in the East Village?
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