Uncomfortably Numb in Prague

"I made up my mind yesterday after talking with you that I had enough of your silly little game," begins a letter from my mom, delivered to the poste restante office in Prague's central post office. "I know that you and Sara are having problems and have decided to go your separate ways. I know that you don't have a job and no place to stay."

She was right. I was year into what would be my three-year tenure in Prague in the 1990s and I was broke, homeless, and heartbroken. Sara, my now-ex-girlfriend, had taken up with my best friend, a too-charming-for-his-own-good Brit named John. I fled our home in Prague for Munich hoping to re-make my life there. It didn’t work out and so two weeks later I limped back to the so-called Golden City. In the typed letter, my mom reminded me of the fairly low balance in my American bank account and then signed out, “Love, mom,” before handwriting below in large letters “GOOD LUCK!”

A day after receiving the letter, I was waiting for the bus in Prague's Vršovice district, a leafy neighborhood not far from the city center. Despite being a warm August day, I felt cold. I bunched up my jacket and looked down the busy street for the bus. It wasn't anywhere in sight. I glanced up at the typical socialist-era apartment block in front of me. The 20-floor building towered high above the surrounding late-19th-century and early-20th-century-era buildings akin to an unnaturally large junk heap, a functional obelisk-like reminder of an age the Czechs would prefer to forget. Colorful laundry was strewn across its balconies. Years of neglect and smog had turned the paint a spotty jaundiced hue. Still, its general run-down state was attractive. It warmed me. The people living there seemed to have everything I wanted: friends, a job, a room to sleep in. They were, in a word, rooted. Out of desperation and boredom, I closed my eyes and wished that I too could live in that very building. Then the bus stopped in front of me.

A portrait of the author as a young man in Prague.

Thanks to a 1960s population boom, the Soviets built structures just like this one all over the city. Constructed with bad building materials and even worse foresight, these ugly pre-fabricated pillars of parsimony, called panelak in Czech, have already started to deteriorate. Once the bus pulled away, I never expected to think about or see that inevitably crumbling building again.

But a week later, a friend told me about an available room she'd heard about. When I called, a friendly man named Jan who spoke good English told me he was looking for a foreigner to rent a room in his friend's apartment. Translation: someone who'd pay higher than usual rent. Even worse, the guy I'd be living with didn't speak English, and my Czech consisted of a few phrases best used in a pub. He reassured me that Petr Dvořak was a nice guy and that it didn't matter if we couldn't verbally communicate. This should have sent large red flags waving through my mind right away. But I was desperate.

The following day, when I got off the streetcar and looked up at the apartment building, I couldn't believe what I was seeing: it was the same structure that, one week earlier at the bus stop, I'd wished I was living in. Things were turning my way.

The small, clinical-feeling elevator chugged slowly up to the sixth floor. When the doors creaked open, a flickering light barely illuminated the drab, windowless hall. The sound of slowly dripping water echoed somewhere in the distance.

I knocked on the door of apartment 603. There was no answer, but I could hear muted rock music playing. I knocked again, this time a little louder, and the door swung open. A tall, waifish man in his mid-40s with long, stringy hair and a scraggly beard stood in front of me. I paused, wondering if I'd written down the wrong apartment number. Before I could look at the paper again, he yelled, "Ahoy!" an informal Czech greeting usually reserved for good friends, drinking buddies, and lovers.

When Petr Dvořak (pronounced: D-vor-zhak) invited me in it was hard not to notice his frail, but sinewy, six-foot tall frame. His skimpy tank top and bikini underwear barely hung onto him.

He ushered me around the generic apartment, showing me the converted living room that would be my bedroom. I stepped out onto the room's balcony, which looked straight down on the very bus stop where I'd made that wish. Meanwhile, Petr was already in the kitchen, still mumbling in Czech as if I were right next to him. When I caught up to him, he had a pantry door open and was showing off his extensive collection of unidentified pickled foodstuffs.

Next, he took me into his bedroom and plugged in a bass guitar. He played it exactly as he looked—like a wild man. When I pointed to the hand-rolled cigarette that dangled from his lips and asked if he was smoking marijuana or tobacco, he replied: "Marijuana and tobacco." Then he let out a hearty laugh that signified he was a very insane man. I decided I had to live here. It was fitting. My life was in complete flux at the moment, so why not welcome more chaos? Besides, I didn't really have any other options. A week later I was fully moved in.

Petr spent the first 35 years of his life under communism, where he made a living as a laborer by day and a rock musician by night. A few of my Czech friends actually knew his name, saying that he was "legendary" in some circles. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Petr gave up his day job and played music fulltime, supplementing his income with pupils. His shining moment came in the mid-'90s, when his band toured the diminutive Czech nation with the classic rock group Deep Purple. I figured this out the fourth or fifth time he made me sit in his bedroom watching the crappy video of one of the concerts.

American and British rock music-particularly from the 1970s-is as present in modern Czech society as the golden arches. Tribute bands of '70s rocks acts such as Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple, ZZ Top, Velvet Underground, and Kansas would play every weekend at clubs around the country. In supermarkets, it wasn’t abnormal to hear an obscure Queen song playing over the intercom. Ian Anderson, Freddy Mercury, and Frank Zappa were household names.

Not coincidently, the 1970s was a stifling period for Czechs. Following the failed Prague Spring of 1968, in which the Russians brutally stomped out Alexandr Dubček's "Socialism with a human face," Czech society was characterized by oppression and strict laws. This period, known as "Normalization," was responsible for ample crimes against free speech and jailed citizens for dissent. Membership in the Communist Party was encouraged. So was snitching on your friends and neighbors if they said anything that appeared vaguely in opposition to Soviet ideology. Western rock music, recorded on bad quality cassette tapes, and widely (and covertly) circulated among young people, became an obsession for Czech youths in the two decades before communism's demise. This was the environment in which Petr Dvořak came of age.

I may not have been able to speak much Czech at this point but I was fluent in classic rock. Thanks to growing up with two older sisters and a brother, I've always been able to distinguish Molly Hatchet from Nazareth, recite the words to nearly every Led Zeppelin song, and know that only Ozzy-era Black Sabbath albums are worth listening to. Having a gift for mundane music trivia reaped little if any reward with my fourth-grade classmates or little league baseball teammates. But one day while helping Petr hang some drab curtains in my drab living room-cum-bedroom we found a common language. I had a hangover and just before taking a sip of a beer, I said to myself, "hair of the dog." Petr, standing on a ladder, looked up at the ceiling, and scratched his scruffy beard. Then he said, "Now yer messing wiffa sonova bitch."

I stared at him for a long second, completely speechless, before uttering, "huh?"

"Nazareth," he said. "Hair ofta Dog." Then while straddling a ladder, he started playing air guitar and repeated the song's chorus, this time singing it, "Now yer messing wiffa sonova bitch." Then he belted out his madman laugh again.

In the weeks that followed, I began taking Czech classes. Though I still could only engage in basic conversation, I tried my hardest to "inadvertently" mention phrases that were also classic rock songs when talking to Petr. "We learned the past tense for the second time today," I struggled to say to him in Czech one day in the kitchen. "It was like a déjà vu." Petr whisked the roll-up cigarette from his lips and interjected, "Déjà vu! Crosby, Stills and Nash album. Very good!"

A few days later, when I mentioned that his mangy dog, Rita was, in English, a "black dog," he jumped up and sang, "Hey, hey mama said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove." He continued singing the Led Zeppelin song as I slipped back to my bedroom. I wondered if he even knew what he was saying or if the sounds coming from his mouth were simply just that.

Another time, I untruthfully told him I was born in "Kansas." Without blinking an eye Petr began singing, "Carry on my wayward son. There'll be peace when you are gone..." As usual, he supplied the guitar parts to the famed Kansas song, too.

A month went by quickly. Petr, I observed, lived a very minimalist life. He ate nominal amounts of food, usually consisting of lentil beans and rice. He had few friends outside his guitar students, and rarely emerged from his bedroom. He rented an extra bedroom to a girl named Magda. Unlike Petr, Magda was in her mid-20s and didn't possess an impressive prowess for '70s song lyrics. Not that I really ever talked to her. When she wasn't hitchhiking around the country with her junkie-looking friends, Magda was in her bedroom sleeping naked without the covers on and her door open.

Unfortunately, Magda wasn't around when I began noticing a highly noxious smell seeping from behind Petr's cracked bedroom door-and it wasn't his homemade concoction of tobacco and marijuana. Petr built guitars, and I initially disregarded the varnish-like smell, figuring he'd just painted one. I learned later, he wasn't using the varnish to splash on his musical instruments.

After finishing up an English lesson with some new students, I came home one night to make a rare Petr spotting outside his room. The toxic smell was like a wall. Petr was moving down the hallway in slow motion. He couldn't speak, and could barely lift his hand to wave to me, which took the form of a limp-wristed swoosh. He staggered to his room and closed the door, leaving me alone in the hallway perplexed.

The situation became more confusing when, while making dinner one night, I heard Petr banging into the wall from down the dark hallway. Suddenly, he came into the radiance of the kitchen lights. Wearing his usual outfit of bikini underwear and a skimpy tank top, Petr stumbled onto the kitchen floor and landed at my feet. He lay there, just below his cupboard of strange pickled food, in the fetus position. He was groaning. His body slowly swayed back and forth.

Bending down to help, I realized that I didn't know how to call for an ambulance. Nor did I have a way to reach anyone he knew.

"Stairway to Heaven!" I blurted out, not knowing what else to say or do.

Then, realizing that wasn't the most appropriate song for the moment, I screamed, "Jumpin' Jack Flash!"

Still, he lay there, curled at my feet. As I gently shook him, he finally groaned in Czech, "Good. I. Am. Good." Finally, he stood up, and—hunched over—wobbled back to his room. I didn't see him for days after that.

After telling my Czech friend Martin about the episode, he simply shook his head, knowing exactly what was going on. Martin told me that during the '70s and '80s, illegal drugs were nearly obsolete. Stiff penalties as well as the heavily guarded borders of communist countries, resulted in a relatively low amount of illegal drugs circulating in the then Communist Bloc. Petr, like many of young people at the time, resorted to sniffing toxins, such as paint, gasoline, and varnish. The problem is that he never really stopped—despite the fact that drugs were now rampant in former communist countries.

A few days passed and, despite seeming slower and tired looking, Petr was almost back to normal, consuming near lethal doses of Electric Light Orchestra rather than guitar varnish. Surprisingly, he said nothing to me about the strange events that had occurred. I breathed a sigh of relief and hoped that, at least for now, he'd kicked his varnish-sniffing habit.

But then one night, after having a few drinks with friends, I came home to complete chaos. Petr ran up to me as soon as I walked through the front door and screamed at me in nearly incomprehensible Czech. The only thing I could understand was that he was accusing someone of breaking his stereo. And by the sound of his voice, and the small droplets of his saliva that were pelting me in the face, I reckoned that person was me. It's true that I was listening to music in his room the day before, but I hadn't broken anything. I tried sidestepping Petr to my bedroom, but he followed me like an irate baseball coach chewing out the umpire after a bad call. To my surprise, Magda was there. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her head down. When she looked up, tears were streaming down her face.

After taking me by the arm and leading me into his room, Petr began randomly pressing buttons and turning knobs on his stereo while sputtering out more gibberish. Then he dragged me into the bathroom and erratically moved the shower curtain from one end to the other, saying "Like this, like that, like this." Then, pointing to my bedroom, he called me a pig. The evening's apex came when he told me that someone had called and told him I was a drug dealer—a claim that was utterly false and, I suspect, totally made up by Petr. "Do you want to talk about drugs?" I said, raising my voice and surprising myself at how articulate my Czech had suddenly become. "We can talk about drugs, Petr." I mimicked his varnish-inspired walk, banging into the wall and looking like a buffoon. Petr stormed into his room and slammed the door. I did the same, walking by Magda who was still crying with her head down.

Petr apologized to me the next day, muttering something about being "out of his head." I forgave him and was happy that the nightmare was over. I lived with Petr a month longer, before moving into the apartment of a friend who was relocating back to the States.

About a year after I'd moved out, I was in the neighborhood, and without really thinking about it, I took the creaky elevator up to the sixth floor. I had no intention of knocking on the door, but like checking up on an ex-girlfriend, I wanted to see what was happening without having an uncomfortable confrontation. The elevator doors shook open. The hallway was still. The sole light flickered. The echo of dripping water intermittently pervaded the hall. Nothing had changed. I nervously approached Petr's apartment door, biting my lower lip every time my shoe made a slapping noise on the drab tile floor. I feared the door would suddenly swing open, and Petr would be standing there in his tank top and underwear, just like the first time we met. I put my ear to the door, hoping I might hear the muted sounds of "Smoke on the Water" or "Comfortably Numb." Instead, I heard nothing. The loud vibrations of silence filled the air between the echoing drops of water. Unlike that afternoon months earlier when I was sitting at the bus stop looking up at this building and daydreaming, I made sure not to wish I knew what was going on inside.