A German Invasion

I have the best job in the world. I can’t believe how lucky I am. I wish Nicole were here, so I’d have someone to talk to. (I’m writing this on my computer on Saturday night. Nicole is, for all intents and purposes, in Poland) Eddie, who is probably at The Blind Eye right now, deserves some serious pats on the back for finding me this job. It’s perfect. I’m not usually one for drunkenness, but a job that just kind of watches and smiles as its employees get drunk can’t be all that tough. I was so worried about messing up, but if I can do this job slightly intoxicated, on my second day, at the busiest time of the week, I have nothing to worry about. I didnt go to work drunk, obviously. It just so happened that when I got to Gulu Gulu on Saturday night, it was almost entirely bereft of customers, and Satan, the owner of Gulu Gulu’s building, decided to school me in the ways of the dark side.

Who’d have thought the devil would frequent Gulu Gulu? Perhaps the most honest, most gentle, most well-meaning restaurant in Prague, and the building is owned by the prince of darkness! Could be a case of opposites attracting. Satan is, not surprisingly, a German.

Why does Germany still exist, by the way? After Nazism, all decent Germans should have said to themselves, “There is nothing good about being German. The German national identity should be abandoned forever,” and they should have evacuated and raised their kids as Czechs, or Frenchies, or Brits, or Indians, or Thais, or Americans, or just about anything else. Maybe not Albanians. Then, once Germanness had been completely assimilated away, the territory once called Deutschland could be re-settled. Why oh why are children still raised as Germans? No good can come from a German upbringing. Is this not entirely obvious by now?

Historians scratch their heads about how Nazism arose in Germany. “But they were so artistic,” historians say. “Look at Fritz Lang!” Anyone who has met a German, however, wonders how it didn’t arise earlier, and how it ever stopped. Germans are fascists through and through. I flew Lufthansa airlines to Europe, so all the flight attendants were German. They were all gigantic, Aryan, and eerily polite with a sinister undertone. They didn’t ask, “Vill you do us dees favor?” They said, “You vill do us dees favor.” How could a genocidal totalitarian ideology not come out of that country?

Nevertheless, I approached Hans, the owner of Gulu Gulu’s building, with an open mind. Only because I at first didn’t know he was German. He was at the bar talking to Philip, the world’s best restaurant manager. Hans was gigantic, tanned, with light brown eyes, a face with firm wrinkles that never move, and short hair with a newscaster poof in the front. I later learned that he is 40 years old. For whatever reason, Hans liked me instantly, and assumed I was an elite businessman, not a common waiter.

“So yore in Prak to start a com-pany,” he said “No,” I said. “What kind off com-pany,” he continued, unabated. “Yore yonk, zo you must know sometink about computers. Is it an IT com-pany?” “No, I’m not starting a company,” I insisted. “What kind off IT company,” he pressed. I had no choice but to play along. “I don’t know, what do you recommend?” “Definitely not makink Veb sites,” he said. “Maybe I’ll make video games,” I said. He didn’t understand. He nodded and said, “Hum.”

Hans moved to Prague a decade ago and made a fortune by buying five buildings and renting them out, one of which now houses Gulu Gulu. Hans thinks I should do the same thing, except in Romania. “Prague is too Vestern now,” he said. “It’s too lot. But yore yonk. You con open dees business, close dees business, you don’t care. Me, I half to look offter my pension.” Hans warned me, though, that Romania has no middle class, so it would be useless to buy buildings there for restaurants or theatres or anything entertainment related. “Zey liff like cavemen dere,” Hans reported.

“You shut start a pob,” he told me. He even agreed to move to Romania with me and give me the money to start that pub. No doubt I’ll take him up on it, and will be the proud owner of a pub in Bucharest called Hans and Son within a year. “You vill be there every day from four p.m. until closink every night, cos it’s a cosh business, und ze bortenders vill cheat you. But offter five yars you con sell ze pob and use that money for yore IT com-pany. Und ve sure to hire Russians. Zey are cheap und vork hart.” Will do, Hans. Will do.

When Hans heard that I was from Texas, he was suspicious of me. The East and West coasts were blue, and okay. They know where Germany and the Czech Republic are, for instance. But the red states in between! They scare Hans. You bring an Uzi to the flyover states, and everyone thinks you’re their friend. You bring a nudie magazine, and they turn their uzis on you. Even worse, they’re all religious, “belief-ing in Got, like idiotes!”

Hans told me about this guy he used to work for in New Jersey, a fundamentalist Catholic who had never been married or had sex, “Because Jesus vos his loaf. He belief-ed in Got, like on idiote! He said dis to me, a Garman! Ve Garmans, ve loaf nipples. To tell me this, that he never vucked, was on offense os big os saying he didn’t kill ze Jews!” Then he laughed, “Hoh, hoh, hoh, hoh.” See what I mean? Germany has to go.

Throughout this forth and forth, Hans ordered us three shots each of Slivovice, the Czech liquor distilled from plums that I was sometimes tempted to drink because I had a silly hope it might taste like plum juice. It didn’t, but it wasn’t bad. I was a bit worried about getting drunk when I was supposed to be working, but Philip, by far the best restaurant manager in the world, happily poured the Slivovice for us, so I figured I was okay.

And I was. I just got slightly intoxicated, the only consequence being that I realized how strange Hans’s face looked if you really stared at it. Though he had a big head, his eyes were slightly closer to the edges of his face than most people’s, paradoxically giving his face kind of a stretched yet crunched look. He looked like an orange raisin. I also took note, maybe because of the Slivovice, that he kept glancing over his shoulder at the door, as if he feared capture for crimes against humanity. “He’s right here!!” I should have shouted to the world police. That would have been a risk, though, because Hans had drunk a lot of wine earlier, and the Slivovice had taken him over the edge into full-on sinister mode.

One of the reasons I never got drunk before a month ago was fear that I had all these demons hidden inside of me, and when the alcohol released them, I would turn into a rampaging Hulk, smashing things, screaming incoherently about injustice, and beating up people. Turns out, all that happens is I get more smiley and talkative. Not Hans, though. Hans gets angry.

Hans tried to explain his theory to Philip and I. He had to repeat it a few times before we could decipher it through his thick German accent. “Ze lower people, zey are attracted to ze lower leffel” we finally heard. That was the theory. The practice was that he thought I should take one of the waitresses home.

“Har. You shut half har,” he said, pointing to Petulka. “I have a girlfriend in the states,” I protested pointlessly. “Ja? Zo vot?! Vemon are nathing but pieces of meat!” Yes, he actually said that women are nothing but pieces of meat!! The conversation got even stranger, though.

Hans asked how long I was staying in Prague. My line for anyone at all related to my job is that I am staying indefinitely. “A yar,” Hans asked. “Two yars?” “At least a year,” I said. “If you stay a yar,” Hans said, “She (Petulka) will vant to half bay-bies. Dat is a responsibility. Are you veady for dat?” “Yes, I am,” I said firmly. “Goot,” Hans exclaimed, and slapped me on the back, hard. Then he invited me to Žižkov to try to bring women home. To express the idea of women, by the way, he cupped his hands over his chest and giggled.

I had hoped he would just leave and pay a visit to one of his other fabulously successful buildings in Prague, but finally I told him I had to get to work, and that it was good to meet him. This just made him more belligerent. “Nein, it is not goot to meet you!” he blurted. Fortunately he was too drunk to chase after me as I went to the back room to put up my coat and put on my apron. He was still at the bar when I came back, but he failed to recognize me after my transformation from globetrotting venture capitalist to lower-leffel waiter, and he eventually wandered out.

What Philip sees in this guy, I don’t know. He has to deal with him because he’s the owner of the building, but Philip seems to have respect for him too, which I have to think is because of the language barrier, and Philip’s trusting nature. “Hans, he is very sympathique,” Philip explained, “But he drinks too much. I ‘ave never seen him like that.”

I love Philip the way Nicole and Kristen love Zdenek. He has the widest eyes and the friendliest smile, poofed up salt and pepper hair, and calls everyone “sympathique,” as if it were an English word. The restaurant itself absorbs his joy.

I had such a good time after Hans left! Philip had brought me in to help out before my official start date, supposedly to ease the busyness, but there were hardly any customers at all. Those that were there, though, were the best.

I got to wait on the sweetest elderly British couple in the world. Before I said anything to them, the British woman asked, full of hope – in the most polite voice I’ve heard since Wallace discussed cheese and crackers with Gromit – “Excuse me? Are you English?” “I’m American,” I said. “Oh. That’s second best,” she said cheerfully, and we talked about Prague, which she and her husband had never seen before. I said that it must be nice living in Europe, where you can travel to so many other countries so easily. “But there’s that little bit of water around Britain that makes it that much more expensive,” she reminded me. They were so nice, it made me wish I were raised British.

I messed up once. Someone with a Czech accent asked for a bill, I heard wrong, and I brought what would have been his third beer. Usually you can’t go wrong bringing beers to Czechs, as I learned early on here (props to Yuval!), but he really did just want the bill. No one cared, though. I think one of the waitresses drank the beer.

By the end of the night, I was kind of drunk, because one of the waitresses had messed up and made three needless margaritas. I hesitated, and then had one. That could have been why, after all the customers left, when the waitresses were talking amongst themselves in Czech, I was at rapt attention, understanding nothing, yet smiling and laughing every time they did, thinking about how great life was. But I think I was just happy.

I know I’m going to keep this job, because it’s a world that instantly made sense to me. The building itself has so much personality, and I can already see a cast of characters forming in the waitstaff, the cooks, the managers, and the customers. Working there is like being in a sit-com. An innocent, happy, TGIF sitcom. People wander in and out, and nothing too serious is at stake.

After we’d closed, an Italian guy the waitresses knew and grudgingly tolerated came in, chatted them up in Czech, and shouted boastfully at the waitress behind the bar. She shouted back even more ferociously (she would have wiped the ceiling with Hans if he´d dare tell her his theories), and they got into a furious, incomprehensible, discussion that eventually calmed down. About a minute after I realized that the Italian guy kind of looked like Robert Deniro, except for a gap tooth, he turned to me and said, “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?” Then he grinned, winked, and ran out the door.

This place is a 5-minute walk from where I live! How could I get so lucky?