The woman punched a hole for May the 30th. Since it was June 30th that meant it was only going to be good for one day. Well, that's not what I paid for! So I took it back into her and explained the sitution. She looked at it. She asked what month it was. I told her (patiently, oh, so patiently) it was June. June 30th.
She stared at the sticker for a few seconds. She disappeared into some hidden recess of the Shell station and re-emerged with a chirpy young blond woman. Who told her just to give me another one. The first one said "Wait. What about a receipt?" The other woman proceeded to open her register and help the building queue of impatient onlookers. I got a brand new sticker, with the correct hole punched.
I walked out, put it on my car. I needed fuel but I sure as hell was not going to buy it at Shell, which is always, like, five crowns more expensive per liter.
I drove to the next station, Unicorn and filled her up. The cashier was young and pretty and weirdly friendly.
I only stopped one more time on the way to Prague, and that was at a station near Brno to stretch my legs and to slurp down a vending machine cup of coffee. Overly sweet (I usually like my coffee like I like my women: without milk or sugar.)
When I got to the airport at eaxctly 12 00 I realized I had made the right decision in driving. Had I taken a train I would have left at 955 but not arrived until nearly two o'clock. And taking the train back from Prague would have meant not leaving until 5.22 and arriving at 915 in Vsetin. Sure, I was sacrificing comfort and I couldn't read and I wasn't able to do the work I had planned to do on the train. But, hey. At least Dad, who would have been up more than 30 hours, would get the chance to go to sleep earlier. I patted myself on the back.
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In the airport, of course, I had to wait. Dad wasn't due to arrive until 125. I walked from one Terminal to the other, realizing that I had forgotten to ask him which airport he was flying from. Wasn't it Barcelona? Or was it somewhere in England? If so, where? I know it wasn't Amsterdam. I remember he said something about NOrth Carolina, but I'm sure that NOrth Carolina doesn't fly direct to Prague. In terminal 1 a flight was landing at 1230 from England. In terminal 2 a flight was leaving to Barcelona at 1430 from Prague.
I decided to get a slice of pizza and eat. The pizza (Margarita, from an ancient Italian recipe that predated the invention of salt, basil, oregano or garlic) was improbably sized: it was literally bigger than a plate. It was like two plates. But thin crust. I proceeded to eat it with a fork and knife, European style. It was hard to cut. I kept sawing at it. I like thin crust pizza. I believe that the thin crust brings out the flavor of the toppings. Or, in this case, would have brought out the flavor of the toppings if the toppings had had any flavor to bring out. But the problem is, when trying to cut a thin-crust pizza, the knife gets confused. It seems to think you are trying to cut the plate. It's like it doesn't register the pizza as actually existing. So you saw at it and it sort of crumples up like a piece of pizza-paper, with a drawing of a thin-slized tomato on top. So I ended up cutting some pieces, but some pieces I ended up sort of quickly and furtively grabbing by hand and stuffing into my mouth, American-style.
I looked around me. Maybe there were other Americans around me, anyway, right? The couple to my left: he, a man with the sides of his head shaven and a magnificently luxurious beard, shampooed, conditioned and fucking moussed into a perfect flowing shape, like a glorious upside down pompadour; she, ugly, pimply, covered head to toe with blue woad tattoos, all over her face and arms: like a Pict from ancient times, lacking only her seal skin cloak.
I listened to them and realized they were not American, but British, every word of their mouth some permutation of fuck: So then we go to fucking fuck, right? And fuckity fuck if fucking fuck hasn't fucked it all to fucked, innit? And fuck-all fuckington fuck's fuckilissitudes of fucking fuck! I glanced at their hands: fork and knife held daintily therein, cutting at the pizza with the skill of twin gourmet chefs! How do they do it? What is the secret?
To my left I see a vaguely mediterannean looking couple, middle aged, the man decked out in hat, much like the one I was wearing. Talking too quietly to really catch the language they were speaking. Both of them wielding their cutlery with finesse and grace to equal the vulgar English couple to my right.
I shrugged, stuffed the rest of the pizza in my mouth, licked the grease off my hands and walked away.
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I finally decided that Dad wasn't flying from England or Barcelona but Madrid, which was the only incoming flight from Spain.
I guessed right and his flight actually arrived fifteen minutes early which meant he emerged from the bowels of the airport at about 1345. After walking back to the other terminal, buying a Pepsi (they only had Diet Coke, I don't even like Pepsi he complained) and smoking a cigarette, I paid for the parking (400 crowns) and we set off. It was 2.00.
I had noticed a bit of traffic jam coming the other way on the way out of there and I told him I hoped that it had cleared up in the two hours I had been walking around in the airport. But no. The traffic jam began almost immediately. No biggie, I told myself oh-so-patiently. As long as we get home before 915, things ought to be all right.
And indeed, things soon got better and we left the choking congestion of the airport's vicinity and were soon sailing along the highway smoothly. I knew there were road works between Prague and Brno, of course...there have been for years. The highway was built sometime back in the nineties, and due to corruption and cost-cutting actions of questionable legality the highway is the shame of the country. Every..(.what do you call it...tile?) of the highway is placed so inexpertly there is sometimes as much as four centimeters of difference between one patch of highway to the next. So when you are driving, there is this constant ka-thunk! ka-thunk! ka-thunk! ka-thunk!You think about your tires and hope like hell they are in good enough to take the savage beating the road is giving them because on such a road, when a tire blows you might as well kiss not only your ass goodbye but the collected asses of the drivers and passengers in your vicinity as well as you cause a brutal and deadly pile up involving dozens of cars. Pretty much a typical day on Czechia's D1, the Red Road of Death.
Anyway, at some point the Czech government decided to use money from the EU (all hail the Wise Masters of Brussels! May their sublime names ring out with honour in the Hallowed Halls of Eternity) to improve this road. I'm sure that a lot of politicians' palms got greased in the process, but, hey, what is the EU for if not to enrich the Corrupt and Lawless? The problem with this road improvements is that the road is really vast and really important and much used. It is the road that links Brno and Prague, the two most important cities in the country. So I expect long after I have gone to the great beyond and my six-year-old son is old and grey they will still be working on the road. In fact, I doubt they will ever finish. A thousand years hence there will be works on that road. It is not really an improvement of the road at all so much as a permanent fixture of the Czech Republic: an engineering marvel that, by rights, tourists should be coming from far and wide to observe: behold: the work of improvement goes on and yet is never finished, is never actually, y'know, improved. It's like a work of conceptual performance art.
So naturally we hit lots of pockets of these road works. That slowed us down of course, quite a bit. As my father oh-so-patiently observed somewhere halfway between Prague and Brno, "we've probably lost about a half hour, forty-five minutes on these places where they are working." But that's OK, I thought to myself. As long as we get there before 915, we will have made the right decision by driving.
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As we neared Brno, the traffic problems got progressively worse. We were crawling somtimes at twenty or thirty kms per hour. Somewhere in the vicinity of Brno, the traffic just stopped. And we sat. I realized that in my 12 years in the Czech Republic, I have never driven through Brno during the day and not found myself in a traffic jam. I sat their in the air-conditioned comfort of the car, reminiscing on old times stuck in Brno: the time Jana and I got into a screaming argument; the time Honzik and Patrik got into a fist-fight in the back-seat, shouting and howling in pain while we sat up front, jaws clenched, mouths tightly closed; the time when Lukas, then one-month old cried non-stop in the back, until we finally broke the law and took him front and stuffed a breast in his mouth. Ah, yes. Brno.
WE crawled forward roughly for about 100 meters. Then stopped again. This continued. For quite a long time. But I sat. Ohsopatiently reminding myself that as long as we arrived before 915 we would have made the right decision. As it was, I was thinking that, if the traffic let up soon, we would get there at about seven o'clock or maybe, at worst 7.30. Still worth it. Hey at least I was listening to good music. I find I have the best taste in music.
At some point I noticed that the air conditioning was no longer pumping cold air out. In fact the air felt a bit...warm-ish. I checked the controls carefully (there was no need for caution. The car was now pretty much stationary, crawling forward a hundred meters every few minutes. ) No, I hadn't accidently turned the heater on. How odd.
It wasn't long after that when the heating light went on. I don't have a heat gauge in my car. The inventors of the Ford Fiesta, in their infinite wisdom decided that it wasn't necessary. When the car is hot, the light goes on without warning.
So when it came on panic struck. I remembered how I had driven Jana's old Subaru into the ground by driving it overheated. Literally, I destroyed her car. I wasn't making that mistake again.
Now, on the right shoulder of the road, there was a steady stream of passing cars, illegally using the shoulder as just another lane. I pulled into the shoulder and turned on my caution blinkers (or whatever they are called and stopped my car.) Dad got out and lit a cigarette while I popped the hood of my overheated car to let the engine cool off.
Immediately behind me came an eruption of car horns hooting and honking in an furious cacophony. I avoided looking at other drivers, knowing I would see their faces drawn into a rictus of hate. I knew that they would be shaking their fist at me in anger. I had blocked an entire lane of traffic! Ok, it wasn't technically a lane, it was just the shoulder, which of course had been built to put your car on in case of breakdown. Or in case you need to take a piss. This is the Czech Republic, remember. But we weren't pissing. We were just overheated. But I had blocked a defacto, illegal lane that people were using. And they were pissed. Oh, it wasn't really my fault; and they were in the wrong. But they were miserable and somebody had to pay!! With their eardrums. The horns continued.
"This is miserable" said my Dad.
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Once I deemed that the engine had sufficiently cooled down (apparently the radiator fan isn't working) I continued on, getting back into the driving lane(the shoulder instantly filled again with cars) and continuing in one hundred meter increments until the car overheated again, at which time I pulled back into the shoulder, popped the hood and let the engine cool off while Dad stepped outside and smoked a cigarette and the symphony of car-horns began anew.
This continued for about an hour. At some point I realized my MP3 player was playing the same damn Joy Division song over and over and over again which was contibuting to my fraying nerves. I pushed on to the next song: the joyous guitar riffs of Van Halen's "Beautiful Girl" started up. If anything this was more grating than Ian Curtis moarning over an industrial post-punk grind.
Up ahead there was an exit:
--------------------------All I want... in this WORLD------------------------------------------
"Go ahead and take that exit." Said Dad. "No, you don't understand, Dad. If we take that exit we may never get back on this highway again. This isn't America. It could take weeks...months...to find another way to get back on the highway."
------------------------All I need in this sweet little WORLD------------------------------------
"But we have to get off this highway, we have keep moving so that hte air can cool the engine", argued my father.
---------------------------All I need is a beautiful GIRL--------------------------------------------
Sighing, I pulled onto the exit.
----------------------------Ohhh, YEAH!! BEAUTIFUL GIRL!-------------------------------------
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So we drove. And I eventually relaized that we were driving in some suburb of Brno I had never heared of: Lišeň. I mouthed the word to myself. Such a beutiful sounding place. But what a shit hole! Just a long industrial zone of factories and car places, a never-ending traffic jam punctuated by traffic lights. But at least we were averaging 30 kms per hour.
So we drove around in these huge circles for about an hour, going this way in that somewhere lost in the wilds of suburban Brno, bickering at each other, turning left and right and then left, and eventually I saw a sign that said "Olomouc". Olomouc. I heard heavenly choirs somewhere in the firmanent humming in Latin. (yes, it is possible to hum in Latin.) As I always do when I hear those three syllables. O-lo-mouc. Pronounced "Oh-luh-moats."
O Olomouc! Ancient capital of the Great Moravian Empire! That long-vanished capital of Slavdom on earth! City of Cathedrals and spires! Site of the University where Jana studied, the legendary British Council library which was my only source of reading material in the dark dark dark days before the invention of the Kindle!
Now Olomouc was not where I wanted to go but I knew that if I could get to Olomouc I would be able to find my way back home.
(And in case you are wondering: fuck GPS and Sat-Nav systems. You think I didn't try to use my 12 000 kc iPhone to get me out of this jam? Of course I did. But I couldn't figure it out. Get off my back.)
Eventually we got to the highway to Olomouc and joined it.
And then horror struck.
It was the same highway we had been on before with the same traffic jam, the same crawling increments of 100 meters! The same potential for overheating!
We had advanced five or eight miles, but the highway was essentially unchanged. In fact....wasn't that the same truck up ahead that I had been following an hour ago when I left the highway? Was that the same white SUV with the same beautiful blonde who had gnashed her teeth at me and given me the finger when I halted my car and popped my hood? I couldn't be certain.
So we continued. Coasting in neutral with the ignition off when I could. Turning on the car and nudging it forward then clamping down on the clutch to avoid overheating the ignition. Occasionally pulling to the shoulder, popping the hood and letting things cool off while Dad had a cigarette.
And after what seemed like days (but which was actually a mere few hours) we did get out of the traffic jam. And we did get home.
At 845. We had saved a half hour by using the car. I went to bed exhausted but victorious.
This was excellent. Thanks, Lance.
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