The Devil Is On Ecstasy

     I arrived and immediately decided that I would have to live the next two months of my life in a state of utter and complete drunkenness, a state so terribly wretched that I would almost have to be successful in every endeavor I made, if only by default. It would be ugly, indeed, but it would be fun. Or maybe I would not become so drunk, and maybe I would go through life with a sense of purpose, instead of a deep sense of longing for something that resembled purpose.

     The last night in Prague was decidedly preposterous, out of control, out of this world, out of my mind, even. Even kilter and smooth flow was not my style. But the last night in Prague I began an experiment that would last nearly twelve hours. I did not really understand what I was getting myself into, and, honestly, I did not really care. I care too much, about everything, so when I decide to ignore impulse and follow my mind it can become a very dangerous thing. It was not so dangerous.

     Or, rather, she was not so dangerous. Her name was Maria and she was an unmistakably sumptuous Brazilian. I met her on the plane ride from Barcelona to Prague, and given my knowledge of Prague and my keen affection for Brazilians, I was determined to show her around the Golden City, as it were.

     She had an English accent, and apparently she had studied in London for the year. Perhaps ‘study’ is a strong word; working as a cocktail waitress might be a more accurate description. She was only eighteen, three years younger than I was, but, similar to my affection for Brazilians, I also had a certain indefinable and undeniable lust for younger girls, or older teenagers. We walked around Prague like two lost lovers, examining the bridges, dodging the pigeons and stodgy and tedious tourists. I refuse to consider myself a tourist.

     AFTER dropping Maria’s mother off at their hotel on my final night in Prague, we found our way to one of the local bars in the center of Prague. The bar was located right off of the Uhelny Plaza on Martinska, but it was always very difficult to find. Three nights before, a Czech student named Ivo had introduced us to the place while fighting the boredom of late night Prague. It was a dreary place, unbelievably dirty and smelling of dank beer and awfully damp, as if it had been flooded only moments before we entered. We walked through the main bar and found our way to the back and down the stairs into the basement, where, like so many of the local bars in Prague, the real action takes place. The locals hummed silently to themselves and ignored us as we made our way to the stairway, nodding solemnly and only half-acknowledging that here were three more drunk kids coming in to hang out downstairs in the immense cellar to get still drunker and possibly even stoned. The thought had never crossed my mind, but Maria and Ivo had been mumbling about getting stoned all night, about finding hash and relaxing on a couch.

     Indeed. It began to seem logical. Fly to Barcelona after graduation and become so bored with the repetitive nature of life that you simply must get on a plane and fly to Prague, only to find yourself with an eighteen year old Brazilian club girl and a Czech student whose name you can barely pronounce. After this is accomplished, simply get drunk with the two foreigners and find a bar with a murky stone cellar and get stoned to the bejesus off poor hash. Never mind the fact that you do not like to smoke – forget that – useless facts never helped any situation. And useless is how I felt as I walked down the stairs into an aimlessly mingling crowd passing hash joints slowly but surely to each other.

     It was a hazy display of demented hysteria. We filtered into the room cautiously while Ivo and Maria scanned it for suitable parties to join. There were groups of three to eight people everywhere, lounging on old couches with tapestries hung over them, or sitting at aged wooden tables. I lunged agreeably right past the two of them, hurdling over the crowd right to the bar. Beers were only fourteen crowns, a paltry sum that is almost, but not quite, half of a United States dollar. I ordered three. In the States, we spend a fortune to drink decent beer. In Prague, you cannot spend enough money to justify the $86.75 you’ve taken out of the ATM, even though you will die trying.

     In any case, I juggled three beers in my fists and forearms, and set out to find Ivo and Maria. They have to be somewhere inside this maze, I thought, because there is literally no escape. I looked around me with a puzzled sense of misdirection - there was no way out. I began to walk with no destination in mind. I sipped on each of the beers to make sure they did not spill over into the laps of some helpless and cute Czech sixteen-year-old. If I spilled beer on her hash joint she would certainly not be pleased, nor would I, as that would ruin my chance of smoking with her, offering her one of my three beers, and possibly sleeping with her in the bathroom before I set off to order three more. It seemed like a hopeless dream, but my life was a hopeless dream, a cloudy disaster that only cleared when I thought of the big picture.

     I concentrated dutifully on the exit, because there is no exit to this sort of life. Once you graduate from college and find yourself in a bar in Prague among disastrous yet amiably crazy Czech students you have thoroughly resigned yourself to a life of radical insanity. There was no escape; there was only a keen sense of manic survival skills. There was no exit, simply a deep liver and powerful lungs to push through the scene of party hell.

     I reached Maria and Ivo and stood in front of them without a word. I was speechless, at this point, because speech had long since seemed to be an absolute waste of time. No one’s opinions mattered, for the flow was the only thing you were able to follow, words left no trail to be pursued. And, more to the point, if I am with a beautiful Brazilian teenager who has an affinity for drugs and a deep English accent that she learned as a cocktail waitress in North London, then going with the flow can certainly be promising.

     Ivo was fading at this point, both in my mind and in his physical presence. He had suddenly and without warning turned into a dope fiend, absolutely disappearing socially, totally withdrawing into the depths of his strong desire for hash. His speech was only recognizable when he muttered "yes" to accept the passing joint.

     I ignored Ivo and looked at Maria with a sort of curiosity that comes naturally for me, as I always fall into a crush here and there with an incredibly attractive girl. Always and forever – always. I can only look at Maria longingly and offer her a beer. What else could I do? I had three beers in my hand.

     She was not picking up on any of my leads. I asked her if she wanted a beer. She said no and then asked if I wanted a pull of a joint. I offered her a trade, which I thought to be a fair trade – one beer for one pull of a hash joint. Hash joint – I pulled and she put the beer down. She would never drink it. I shrugged helplessly and chugged the beer I traded to her. It was, after all, fair game at this point. Somehow I only had one beer left. I chugged it as well and headed over to the bar to buy three more.

     What I would do with the next three beers is unclear, but I would probably drink them. Maria and Ivo's cohorts were speaking about going to the Roxy on Friday evening. I knew about the Roxy. It was an insane dance club that was the home of the most popular rave scene in Prague. Not only was it the most popular, but it was also one of the most respected. I had been there before, months before, but never on ecstasy, which is the drug you are supposed to court as you enjoy the club. Maybe I would enjoy the Roxy more this time around.

     Indeed. Always take the right drug that the particular scene demands. Don’t mess around with different types of alcohol and concentrated sports drinks to get your blood pressure on the right level. It is not worth it to mess around with alcohol to get yourself ready for a scene when you can simply get yourself whacked out on the right drug. Alcohol is too general for club scenes, what you inevitably need is a good informant to point you in the direction of some serious drugs. Drugs –

     Drugs of course are, well, horrifyingly and hideously evil. But, then again, so is most everything in life. Of course, even though I am a professional, I should not be speaking as an authority on drugs. I simply do not have the experience to back up any positions I might take.

     Which is why I said nothing when Maria and I were walking home and she began to explain at length her involvement in the ecstasy/club scene in London. I was baffled by what she was saying, and when I am baffled I tend to ignore. I walked her back to her hotel and planned on kissing her goodnight. I was feeling the high of the evening. I have no idea how we found our way out of that place; Maria must have navigated. She obviously held me by the hand with a reserved sort of love in her eyes, and pulled me out of the place. She was stoned, but this meant nothing when compared to the state that I was in.

     But I was not so bad. But Maria was so wonderfully precious. She was the last person I expected to deem magnificent, but ever since I met her on the plane I wanted to taste the breath of her lips. What did she breathe? What did she utter when she was kissing? What did her lips emit? I could see they emitted laps of unuttered laughter and a sweet array of dancing absurdity. She hardly even talked to me on the plane from Barcelona to Prague. But when it became clear that I knew about Brazilians and even dated one in the past, her interest in me perked up drastically. And then she realized that I had been to Prague before and that I could show her around a bit. And then she would be showing me around.

     I held her hand tightly. There was no other way to hold hands. I held it tightly and massaged it with my index finger and thumb to show her that I was serious about this business. I was indeed serious about the business of receiving a goodnight kiss from her. It was becoming increasingly clear that she wanted me to be on her plane forever, and forever and ever and on into the night. And on into the night we walked, towards her hotel - adjacent to the Charles Bridge.

     She would be staying there, but I would not be. Her mother was awaiting her. Her mother was quite possibly awaiting her in a Brazilian nightgown that covered so little of her middle-aged figure that I would have thought it an ugly thing to see. But no matter, I would have seen it anyway if it renewed her mother’s confidence in me. I wanted her mother to goad Maria into kissing me late at night with a head full of mean drugs. I guess this would never happen.

     I still planned on kissing her.

     She went off to bed without a kiss, offering only a friendly hug. I suppose I ought to have offered the kiss, not her, but I realized that only on my walk home. I can initiate things like kisses and sex.

     It was late as I walked into Wencesslass Square. Characteristically, the square was still humming. It was nearly four in the morning, and the action was a combination of late night drunkenness and boredom combined with early morning activity. While preoccupied lovers walked throughout the square aimlessly, kissing and playing with each other, finding something, anything, to do to keep them from returning to their respective homes, early morning delivery crews stocked all the business’, cafes, and shops along the long, bitterly lit square.

     There was a definite sense of suspended time in the square. Morning had not yet begun, and there was still not a hint of sunlight, but it would come soon. Everyone knew it would come soon; it was, after all, obvious enough. Morning always came, and the sun always came up. Perhaps in the communist years this was not the common belief, perhaps the common man or woman would actually believe that the sun would never come up, but I will never know what they thought. Christ, they never even knew what they thought, for they were too afraid to think. But the suspended air continued. I stopped and lit a cigarette and looked around me helplessly. I could not control the scene – there was absolutely no hope of that. The fight between night and morning would never end. It proceeded without a hitch. The morning was pushing in, but the night was holding steadfast to its position. It would hold steady until nearly six in the morning, when the sky would be blue and the sun would be out, shining heavily over the wet-washed stone of Wenceslass Square - morning and sun winning for now, night and moon preparing for later battle.

     BUT I was not ready to stop yet, not ready to stop ever – never slow or delay, for the regret will creep up on you as you reach your grave.

     Friday night in Prague was unsightly. It was damned ugly, and yet it contained so much beauty and such a feeling of serendipitous closure that it made my body reek with the feeling of tortuous satisfaction. But what kind of satisfaction was there? Had I found love? Had I found a sense of purpose? Had my mind reached such a state of understanding that it actually had some idea of what it wanted to think? Was there actually a light at the end of the tunnel for my young adult frame?

     I could not think, which, come to think of it, meant that things were going quite well. I stood silently hugging Maria and her mother as they took off for the airport. I would go to the airport soon as well, but first I would need some wine. My pupils were still dilated to the point of clear delirium. What had happened the night before? I put Maria’s bags, as well as those of her mother, in the taxi as the hugs continued.

     But why were the hugs so plentiful? Where had all this affection come from? Her mother loved me, but I had slept with her daughter. The drugs were still strong. Or maybe it was the remnants of the drugs – honestly, I could not tell the difference between the two. The leftovers are often stronger than the actual meal. With the leftovers, you actually realize what you have had, and that may affect your mind more than the actual drug.

     They sped off in the taxi and suddenly I felt a strange twinge of longing. I wished to find a girl that I could make the happiest girl in the world. A girl I would actually want to make happy. I craved a girl who would make me happy merely because I made her happy. It would never happen, of course, but it was a dream. I was still dreaming, though I never went to sleep. The taxi sped off in slow motion and I smiled sadly in a secret sort of way, so that none of the tourists surrounding me in their idiotic stillness would notice that I would never see this girl again. I would be happy to make her happy, I thought, and because I will never see her again, I will not have to feel that sort of happiness, at least not yet. I can go on pretending that I care about nothing, and I can easily claim to have no heartfelt romantic connections to anyone on this evil brown earth. I thought reflectively that if I had gone to sleep the night before I might have woken up and promised her the earth, but instead I could only promise her a hug - she was gone.

     THE night before had been a continuous scene of terrible excitement. We walked around the neighborhood and searched for the foul-stench of the bar next to Uhelny Plaza. It was useless, utterly hopeless. We would never find the place. We walked around for hours in the twilight dusk of early evening Prague. We were supposed to meet a crazy and bold Czech student named Mitch. I knew what was going on here – it was pretty obvious to all involved in the situation that Mitch wanted to fuck Maria, but I did not care. You see, Maria wanted to see Mitch, because Mitch was a best friend of Playboy, and Playboy had the drugs. It was all very simple, really.

     It was, in fact, a test in endurance. How long could I take it? Would the drugs really be worth it? I had no idea. I had never taken ecstasy before, and I never really cared to, until a dark-haired Brazilian with curly, black sumptuous locks looked into my eyes and told me she wanted me to "roll" with her for the first time.

     Eventually, of course, we found the place. We made our way through the locals without any looks of scorn – we were now locals by attitude – and found the basement just as welcoming as ever. There was the bar. Fourteen cronas for a beer, why not? I took two. Really quickly, I mean really quickly, I chugged two beers. They went down easily, perhaps because I was afraid of drugs and attempting to cleanse my muscles with weary alcohol for the coming onslaught of terrifying narcotics. I was no drug addict, and I had not spent a year as a cocktail waitress in London frequenting clubs and getting to know on a personal level every form of ecstasy, so I was a goddamned rookie.

     It was becoming increasingly apparent that I had no idea where I was or, more to the point, who I was. I was not lost - not at all - I was completely comfortable with my surroundings. It all made complete sense to me, but there was still reason for appalling concern. I was not lost in any of this nonsense, any of this drivel that my life had become. I was absolutely at home in the madness. It was as if all the questions I had spent the previous two years asking myself about my life were ordinarily moot, because they had been shockingly answered. I was happy with a life in complete disarray, and this was the life that I had chosen. Traveling in a fit of drunken madness, clinging to foreign beauties without remorse, making old drunks in random local bars all over Europe my best friends, testing out drugs with people I had just met in cities such as Prague, it was all so random. But this is what my life had become, and I no longer questioned whether or not I belonged inside of my own life.

     Expectations may be the root of all evil, but I no longer allowed the hopes and desires of my family to bother me or confuse my already saturated mind. I felt very sure of myself in this European nomad lifestyle that I began to call my home.

     The questions stopped so suddenly, altering my mindset and whispering secrets of satisfaction into my sloppy ears. Three years of constant questioning of everything I did had suddenly stopped, and the clarity that the lack of questions produced is equal to that of a vacuum that erases the mind of every ability to think and produce reasonable thoughts and even to deduce humanity and respect life itself. It was disastrous that I was sitting next to ten Czech locals and a Brazilian and not questioning how I ended up there or why I was there. And I thought of it no more. I stood standing for a moment, pondering whether or not to buy two more beers to chug and ease my questioning mind, but there was no more questioning.

     Suddenly stricken with a clear mind, completely ignorant of my past for the first time in my continuous present, I found the need to drink a mountain of alcohol. I had a temporary wormhole into my soul long enough only to recognize that the present situation only included a decided need to drive forward, and an outrageous compulsion to ignore my past. It had never happened before, but, then again, nothing has ever happened before.

     AGAIN and again, there seems to be a recurrence of events. Someone sees the same person over and over again by chance, or they frequent the same bar and drink the same specialty drink or beer. Someone, anyone really, finds a routine, and spends the rest of their life either enjoying it or trying to get out of it. It can be incredibly obscure or comfortable or insecure or varied but it will never change. This system holds true for all lives, whether they cling to consistency or inconsistency.

     The point is that I was standing with two beers in my hand in the middle of what seemed to be a dungeon in Prague with no idea how to get out – if I ever wanted to get out – and no real interest of ever getting out in the first place. Here I was, seemingly out of options, absolutely at my wit's end and about to partake in some serious drug experimentation, and all I could think were rosey thoughts describing how happy I was. Fuck all the contemptuous desires of glory and riches and post-graduation fat checks with lots of money and big contracts in the business world. What was that all about, really? Nothing. No, but this here was something. I just did not care, and, more to the point, I finally did not care that I did not care. There was a breath of breezy fresh air that cleansed my lungs and relieved my soul as I finally grasped these inherent truths.

     I sat down and shook the hand of the man to my left. He seemed so strange, and I felt it a pleasure to be part of his happy cartoon, far removed from the hellish reality that the sitcom of my life presented to my mirror.

     "Hello, my name is Mitch, what is yours?" He spoke perfectly in English, which was somewhat shocking, somewhat scary, as was his eerie English accent.

     "It’s Caleb, Caleb Trafton." I paused, as if there was something more that I had to say to this blonde-haired goon, and mumbled "nice to meet you Mitch."

     But Mitch spoke before I had a chance to finish my response. "So Caleb, have you ever taken ecstasy before? It is really the drug of the future you know!" His words were too deliberate, their plans to convince me too thorough. If my guard had been up, I would have absolutely refused to take part in this little experiment. Why were they so concerned about me? Why were they not simply happy that they were taking the drug?

     Mitch began to confide in me everything there was to know about ecstasy. It was the greatest feeling in the world, he assured me, and it was not addictive or even dangerous. Yes, of course, he admitted to me in a whisper, some people fell into comas and some had seizures, and some even died, but those people were not careful. It is not difficult to be careful when rolling, just follow one simple rule: drink lots and lots of water. Overdosing was impossible, it was just a matter of keeping your body hydrated in the fits of serious sweating and dancing.

     What was this lunatic talking about? I was beginning to get very nervous about this trip, absolutely unable to drive myself into the possibility of falling into a coma. I had never participated in any grim drug experiments, and even if this was not an experiment to these people, it certainly was to me.

     I stood up, violently ignoring the joint that was passed in front of my face, and decided to head for the exit. It was a difficult exit to find, as I have already explained, for we were in the middle of a dungeon. There was a significant cloud of hash smoke everywhere I looked, and thousands of grungy Czech students occupying every corner, blocking every new avenue I attempted to pass through. Somehow, they all looked happy, which made me even more nervous, and set my feet walking even quicker. It was quite hopeless, I thought to myself, to escape this place, or maybe I just wanted it to be hopeless, maybe I just did not want to escape at all.

     Either way, my escape was rudely interrupted by the magical appearance of the bar right in front of my face. Its fiendish kegs beckoned me, and I began to drink heavily. Ordering one beer after another with an occasional shot of bad Czech vodka every once in awhile for a change of pace. I was sure this was the only answer. There was no way of escaping this dungeon, not when every entrance or would-be exit was shrouded with hash smoke, so I would have to hold my ground at the bar. I figured, using my last ounce of deduction skills, that they would never find me at the bar. These drug fiends were too busy conceiving plans of strung out turmoil for alcohol. These buggers somewhere in this dungeon, led by the lunatic demigod Mitch and his henchman Playboy (the dealer), were about to set the entire city of Prague on fire in the middle of some sort of drug-crazed delirium, attempting to ignite an anarchist Revolution. Which was fine, as far as I was concerned, but I did not want to be part of it when the deal went down. I wanted to be right here in the dungeon, far away from the mass arrests and hangings that I was positive would occur later in the evening not far from my stool in the Old Town Square.

     But I hesitated. I was, after all, completely stoned on my own. Whacked off alcohol and nicotine, two drugs that I had been taking with even more vigor than my usual habits, traveling Europe and finding every bar along the unbeaten paths. I really do not know the particulars of the situation, but I do know that I was becoming very drunk and talking to myself in a very loud tone of voice about impending doom.

     In an instant, I felt a warm, soft hand on my shoulder. I swung into action quickly, ripping the poor bastard’s arm right out of the socket, or at least I hoped that I had ripped it out of the socket. If a man is into some serious drinking for more than an hour at the bar in the middle of a crowd that is essentially a non-drinking sort, in essentially a hash bar for smoking pot, then everyone in his right mind should have the clarity to ignore him, and certainly not to approach him from behind.

     Maria’s scream was muted, and she smacked my face with extreme power in order to snap me partially out of my insanity. I looked at her with a face of regret, for I felt I would never recover from this one. But her pale face emitted a wonderful smile, and she playfully slapped me a couple more times, while I massaged her shoulder and smiled aggressively.

     She was laughing now. Her black curly hair seemed to bounce with every shuddering giggle that she emitted, and I was impressed by the tilt of her head as it looked at me adoringly. "I did not realize that you were so reactionary, so violent!"

     She looked at me for a long time, speaking silently through her dark, almost black eyes, begging for me to calm down. And then she spoke. "What exactly is it you’re doing?"

     "What does it look like I’m doing?" I shrugged and turned back to the bar, retrieving my beer. "I couldn’t find the exit of this miserable torture chamber, so I decided to do some heavy drinking at the bar. What else was I to do?"

     "Didn’t I warn you that ecstasy and alcohol don’t mix?"

     "Oh come on, everything mixes with alcohol!" I was not even sure if I had believed my own statement, with its barbaric implications and its obvious falsehoods, but that never stopped me from vehemently arguing for a cause. Why not, I figured?

     "But not when you’re dealing with ecstasy!"

     "Look, Maria, with all due respect, I am somewhat of a professional myself. Mostly I delve into perverse alcohol consumption and manic cigarette smoking, but I am somewhat experienced with the drug culture as well. I have eaten ‘shrooms on many occasions, even once here in Prague, and I could always drink like a thirsty fish in those situations. I also have tripped on gel tabs a couple of times, and once over at Penn State after a ghastly Strangefolk show I sucked down one of those tabs and then split an entire keg with three other drugged-up psychotics." I paused, finishing my beer, lighting a cigarette in defiance, or in celebration of my winning argument, and waited patiently for a reply.

     "What the hell are ‘shrooms’ and ‘gel tabs’?"

     "Psychedelic mushrooms and acid gel tabs."

     Maria began to shake her head brutally in shock. It was apparent that she had a clear mind to disagree. She probably had called my bluff, because though I had participated in those drug trips, I had not really participated in anything else, save the occasional joint. Plus, I had only taken ‘shrooms and acid a handful of times put together, and those situations were very guarded and solitary, or at least everyone around me was doing the same thing.

     "Mushrooms and acid, my god Caleb you’re talking about trips!" Her British accent was biting, almost parental, but not quite confrontational. "This is completely different! Ecstasy is completely different!"

     "How is it different? It’s all drugs, man. Alcohol is a goddamned drug, so is this cigarette. It’s all drugs, what’s the goddamned difference!" I was getting angry, agitated, drunk, and I assume was not very desirable at that point to Maria or any of the other Czech students that were now staring at us.

     "Let me tell you a story," Maria said calmly. "It has been a bloody long time since I experimented in trips, but I remember it well. I was sixteen and spending the summer in the Northeast, the most beautiful area not only in Brazil, but also in the world. It is completely barren, only beaches and little huts to live in, and little bars that serve you margaritas all day long. You simply sit on the beach and drink all day and pay only a dollar a day to rent the huts, and fifty cents for the margaritas.

     "Now when I was twelve, I was going out with a twenty-two year old cocaine addict. He was crazy, but he loved me. I was a little young, I suppose, but it didn’t matter. But the problem was, I mean besides the damaging effects of that kind of a relationship on both of us, real mental strain you know, was that I began to love cocaine just as much as he did. By the time I was thirteen I was doing five to ten lines a day! I loved it, but for heaven’s sake I was only thirteen. Eventually the difficulty of our disapproving families got to us, and we split up, and he took my cocaine habit with him.

     "I didn’t have any real desire for drugs after that, at least for a little while, until I ended up in the Northeast for six months when I was sixteen. At that point, I began to get real heavy into trips. Mushrooms, mescaline, acid, whatever I could get my hands on. There was a little jungle man, some sort of native tribe member from the inland, and he would roll through the little beach town once a week with a big sack full of goodies. My girlfriend and I would load up on goodies every week and simply experiment to the max on all sorts of different trips. Every kind that you could imagine, but especially mushrooms and acid, and we had simply the greatest of times. We would run around the beach and drink margaritas by the gallon and eventually return home for a nice relaxing drug-induced coma.

     "Now, Caleb, you’re right, you can drink like a fish on trips, it can add to or take away from the high, but alcohol can be used as an additive for this type of drug. But eventually, alcohol or no alcohol the trips got the better of me, sort of like they did to all your American hippie friends once the seventies set in. There was simply no way of going through life on these things! Every night I had visions, but not the visions of color and light shows and incredible delirium that usually contributes to the trip, but scary and ugly visions, visions that were too real to be part of the trip. In fact, these visions began to come whether or not I was under the influence of these drugs. They could come at any time.

     "One night, as my girlfriend returned from the beach, I was cowering underneath the covers of my bed and shuddering. She asked what was wrong and I told her that there had just been an evil man in our room and he ran out the doors that opened up from our bedroom to the beach just a moment before. I asked with tears whether or not she had seen him. She said no, but then asked what he looked like. I told her he had a big black cape with a black hood and was carrying a sickle, and I told her that I was afraid for my life.

     "Suddenly, she started screaming at me. She accused me of breaking into the new bag of mushrooms without her, and berated me with curses and insults. I swore to her that I had not even known about the new bag of goodies, and that we should really do something about getting locks put on our bungalow. She began shaking her head at me and told me that I had been hallucinating like this for three weeks, without the intake of trips, only she did not have the heart to tell me. I kept seeing these random people that no one else saw, only I was sure that I saw them! I was not imagining it at all, at least I didn’t think I was.

     "Then my girlfriend began to speak calmly to me, hoping to convince me of my problem, the problem that she had avoided revealing to me for almost three weeks. ‘Maria, I didn’t want to tell you this, but you have been hallucinating like this for three weeks, only this was the last straw. You just described seeing the grim reaper himself in your room, which could be true, except for the fact that he does not exist in any plane of reality. I did not actually witness this hallucination, but I have witnessed others. You complaining about bats on the ceiling that are not there, the odd remark about a beautiful boy across the beach when there is no one there - I could ignore those. Of course, once you see the grim reaper in your bedroom I think it is time you pack your bags and head back to Sao Paulo. The Northeast is no longer a good place to you. Get away from here, from the jungle men with their bags of goodies, and find a quiet place, find your home.’ So I left and headed back to Sao Paulo a couple of months late for the beginning of my fall term in high school."

     I looked at her, my mouth agape and my mind searching for any sort of connection between this appalling story and our final night in Prague. There must be a connection, I thought, there must. "What does that have to do with taking ecstasy in Prague?"

     "Well I am simply trying to explain to you that I too, probably more so than you, am experienced in trips." She was right; she was much more experienced than I would ever be in psychedelics, or in any other type of drug for that matter. Anyone who claims to have been a cocaine addict at the age of twelve must have been on serious drugs at some point, even if the story wasn't true.

     "So what?"

     "So I know all about how easy it is to drink alcohol while on trips. And I also know a lot of things about ecstasy. You don’t need or even want alcohol. It is the only drug I have taken where that is the case. But," she continued wearily, "for those who take ecstasy and still insist on drinking alcohol, the consequences are often ugly."

     I did not even need an explanation. At this point, I was totally sober. The girl had just talked my mind into a state of extreme sobriety. Maria took me by the hand and led me through the throng back towards the couches in the back. I was stumbling, but it was my mind, and not my feet, that were having trouble keeping up. Which is interesting, because later in the night, my mind would be in maximal shape, while my feet would feel like cinder blocks, completely immovable, absolutely frozen in the ground.

     I sat with vomit seeping down my chin and leaking onto the collar of my shirt. It was not as if I vomited on myself, at least not in any ugly way. I was just burping up little chunks of liquid that I could not stop from trickling down my chin ever so slightly. My head was freezing, I had a rush of cold fever and was sitting nearly all alone in a tiny room above the club reserved for regulars and locals. There were old Oriental women running around attempting to shut down the little room for the evening; it was nearly one in the morning. The room was designed in some sort of strange Southeastern Asia fashion, with Oriental rugs everywhere, on the walls and on the ground, and only pillows to sit on. It was small, perhaps twenty-five by fifteen yards. There was a bar near the entrance, where the Oriental women hung out most of the time, handing out bottles of water and cups of tea, and, only occasionally, a bottled beer. They only had one type of beer, only an idiot would drink beer in this room. I sat, alone, only seconds away from losing my respectability and swimming in a puddle of my own vomit, wondering how in the world I had gotten myself into this position.

     A few days before I had flown from Barcelona to Prague, seemingly all alone and without any ties, when I met Maria and her mother on the plane. Instead of a few days of winding down, the whole damn trip started up again, in more ways than one.

     We entered the Roxy, Prague’s largest and most famous nightclub, just before midnight. The Roxy is famous to not only locals, but also tourists trying to check out the local scene. Somehow, this does not bother the locals in the least, who are so wrapped up in their ambient-techno drug culture that they could care less about a few ugly weasels invading their scene. As it were, many of the tourists participate as locals in the first place, and the drugs they imbibe are decidedly strong drugs that erase all nationality lines and bring everyone together.

     We walked in and Mitch immediately led the entire group to the side of the dance floor, which had not yet begun to get crazy, though it was by now entirely packed with people waiting for it all to go down. What exactly would go down was a mystery to me, but I shrugged and followed Maria, Mitch, Playboy and the others up the stairs into the aforementioned Oriental Tea Room. There was a secret stairway leading up from the rear of the dance floor, and once we entered the room, it was becoming quite clear that I was to be forever cornered inside of some Chinese Red Square.

     It was true! The room was dripping with blood, and I wasn’t even tripping yet! It was flowing like a tiny creek, succumbing to gravity in a deeply disturbing manner. Someone had been shot!

     "You see that blood on the wall is supposed to pay tribute to the last Chinese Emperor!"

     "Which one?"

     "The last one!" Maria's British accent was suffocating.

     Perceiving obvious defeat, I shrugged my shoulders and resisted telling her that, according to my own brief detective experience and intuition, someone had been shot in this room, with his brains splattered all over the wall, no longer than twenty, neigh, fifteen minutes ago. This might seem a bit of an extraordinary conclusion to achieve in my state of mind, but I’m not sure it was.

     The blood faded, at least in my mind, if not on the wall. Fuck the wall, I thought, it’s all circumstantial evidence anyway. Who was I to judge? In the words of Jimmy Carter, "I am not a lawyer."

     The blood on the wall dripped on my face, and Maria handed me a tiny white pill that looked like an aspirin and had an engraved diamond on it.

     "What the hell is this?"

     "You know what that is!"

     "This is what the pill looks like?" I paused, examining the pill. The examination turned up no clues. It was hopeless. I was clueless when drugs were brought into the equation, into any equation. "What does this diamond mean?"

     "They’re diamonds, I swallowed them millions of times in London, they are really quite excellent!"

     "Quite…" I swallowed the pill and looked around me. The kids were all sucking on tubes of a hookah, which sported solid apple tobacco. I decided that this was the thing to do. Take some ecstasy, smoke a little apple tobacco, and wait for the high to kick in. Why not? I was in Prague, and it was time to get down to the nitty gritty of local life. I was there to learn, after all, so I might as well learn from professionals. Lots of hardcore drugs, a few Czech nineteen-year-olds, and a hookah. Though this was not exactly what I envisioned when I scheduled this trip a few weeks before I graduated, it was close enough. I had pictured drunken binges, and this was beginning to develop into a drug-crazed orgy in a Prague nightclub.

     It had been fifteen minutes since I swallowed the diamond, and the room was becoming quite obvious to me. That is to say, everything I saw in the room was becoming laser sharp and clear, with no blurry points to be seen. I was not sure if I was beginning to feel the drug, because I had never used it before, but my senses were becoming extraordinarily acute.

     But would I be naked? That was the main question I would ask myself for the next twenty minutes. Why is this called ecstasy? What does the high entail? Why does it have such an interestingly attractive name? Oh, let’s do ecstasy, it is, after all, ecstasy. Which is true, but why is it so good? And, again, would I be naked?

     I thought, as I sat silently thinking to myself and sipping on a beer and a hookah, that I would love to be naked. There was no mistaking it; I wanted to be naked with Maria. I looked across the room – there she was. Why was I not naked yet?

     Strange night. Forty minutes into it I still felt nothing. I was now only sipping my beer, though, as it was beginning to taste quite abnormal. This was the first time in my life that a beer had not tasted normal. It was beginning to taste sour and the world around me was becoming electrically numb, as I became increasingly unnerved. I glanced towards the door – Maria was walking very quickly towards me. She put her hand on my shoulder as she sat next to me. Her hand felt strangely warm, as if it was an extension of my own shoulder, and she looked at me handsomely. She was somehow interested in me, somehow concerned with my well being, and all at once it still seemed overwhelmingly clear that she was completely indifferent to me.

     "How do you feel?"

     I refused to recognize the exponentially mounting high. "Just fine." I took a chug of my beer, gulping rapidly and struggling with my insides to put it down. I was still putting on a show, defying my skeletal system and demanding that I drink beer and demonstrate to everyone around me that I was absolutely immune to ecstasy. I was a stubborn idiot, feeling the high and refusing to recognize it.

     "But do you feel the ecstasy? I mean, is your body feeling all sorts of sensations?"

     It was. I could sense it everywhere. The room was one massive web, and I was connected to every part of it. The web was rocked on the other side of the room, and I could feel its every whispering movement. And when something came close to the center of the web, something like Maria, then I would be completely floored at how little it took to make my entire body tingle with the expectation of contact.

     Maria’s arm was running up and down my back. I could barely even move. My beer was my only friend, cradling delicately in between my pinky and my thumb. I watched it closely and held it lightly; it danced back and forth like a buoy in the sea. I was not sure whether or not I wanted it to fall, but I could care less if it spilled all over me. Beer was so unimportant. Feel the hand rubbing up and down your back as you look down at the beer. The hand is so delicate, so connected to me; it is a part of me. It rubs over and over again, and it can be minutes, hours, seconds before I feel any desire to move.

     "Well, it looks like you feel it, but this stuff is so mild!" Maria paused, and when she took her hand off my back and put it into her pocket I felt the tension on the web decrease, and the connection that I felt to both Maria and the world faded back into the realm of bland nonexistence.

     She took something out of her pocket, but I was back on the beer. It was the only thing touching me, and it was such an odd object. It was glass, and it seemed to have such an impersonal side to it. It was severely impartial. I thought it to be such an impersonal piece of glass. I could drink it, but I was more interested in its composition. What was glass actually made of? Why did it feel the way it did? I gripped the beer more tightly and swung it slowly around to my back and began rubbing it up and down. I wanted it to feel like Maria’s arm, like Maria’s tender hand. The beer began spilling and a drop slid onto my forearm…

     The room was nearly empty, at this point. It was nearly one in the morning, and, from what little information I was in the mood to gather, the room would close at one-thirty while the Oriental women went to sleep and the rest of Mitch’s crew would take their rolling hearts down to the main dance floor of the Roxy. There were only a few of Mitch’s friends still sitting upstairs. I caught the bemused looks of my new drug partners and decided to simply look at the Oriental rug I was sitting on and place the beer squarely on my lap between two firm hands. My hands were shaking visibly, and the beer was shaking as a result.

     Maria held half of a pill in her hand. She had just taken it out of her pocket. "I have only taken half of this pill because I am terribly afraid that my mum will see my eyes tomorrow morning and be absolutely horrified. Look at my pupils! They are already dilated beyond comprehension!" This was true. Her eyes were now almost fully black, absolutely dominated by her pupils. It was scary, almost ugly, but it was not horrifying, at least not to me. She was so calm and so cute, and her hand had returned to rubbing my back.

     "So I want you to take this other half." So I did. She handed me the half of a pill, with half of a diamond in it, and with the potency to kill many small animals, including myself.

     Maria left me, and I have no idea how time continued to exist after that. She went downstairs to dance, or so she said, but I was convinced that she was off to India to start some sort of communal British-Brazilian slave combine. She was obviously some sort of aristocratic genius claiming to be Brazilian but sporting a preposterous British accent, and India seemed to be the only place for her. I was musing over her ranch in India, where she would crack the whip on all those not working hard enough, feeding them ecstasy to keep them under her power, when someone took famed beer out of my hand and away from me, away from the room, and away from reality. The beer must have ended up in a sewer somewhere, never finished, never even admired, and never adored. I was completely paralyzed and happy with the world around me.

     Cold sweat began to pour out of my veins, and the room was completely barren of all life forms save the Oriental women cleaning up and vacuuming all around me. They were ready to close, but there was no way I was moving anywhere. I felt my blood rushing in a frenzy right into my brain – I felt incredibly light-headed, flushed, and as if I was about to faint. I had felt this rush coming on before, as I dawdled with the beer in my hand and strained to listen to the voices and recognize the shadows around me, but the second half of a pill had put me completely over the top. I was sure that death was the next step, but, peculiarly, it felt absurdly wonderful to be dying.

     My face was dripping uncontrollably, presumably as a result of this wretched drug, which was piercing my brain and swirling my existence. Oh sweet obscenity, oh frightful insanity! What was happening? Where would this all lead? And, when would it all end? My shirt and neck were absolutely drenched with sweat. The cold my body was experiencing was overcome only by the warmth my brain was teeming with. My blood was now frozen, and the only thing that could move was my brain. There was no way to move my muscles. I was a living and breathing statue, unable to stir my body in any manner at all.

     I was sitting cross-legged on the floor – on an Oriental rug, holding a cigarette that I was not smoking. It was lit, to be sure, but I was not smoking it. I looked at the ash as it became larger and larger, engulfing the cigarette’s tobacco and firing into burned oblivion as each second passed. I wanted so badly to take a drag of the cigarette, but I could not. I was suddenly angry as mad hell that I had insisted on drinking the beer. Why was I such a stubborn idiot? Look at me now, I thought, fairly clearly given the circumstances, I cannot even move! I want to smoke this cigarette, but because of that goddamned beer I cannot even move! Or is it because of the ecstasy that I have consumed?

     A girl sat next to me. She began to rub my back. She asked in a cute Czech accent if I was OK. I could not respond. I responded with a long bout of sweating as she caressed my back. I could not control anything. The room only stopped moving when I held my head completely still and looked directly in front of me. When I wavered at all from this steady position, everything began to swirl uncontrollably around me. I felt myself burping consistently, and an unsavory liquid kept entering my mouth. I was very annoyed at the notion of continuous burping, especially because I could not control it, and especially because I was burping up vomit, and then of course swallowing it to prevent it from spewing out all over the room, or, worse yet, all over myself. Swallowing your vomit is generally considered to be quite dangerous, but it was my only option, for this horrid drug had rendered me incapable of moving. It was not supposed to be like this – at least I did not think that it was supposed to be like this.

     The girl must have sensed this, for she switched form and moved her hands from my back to my shoulders, furiously yet delicately trying to make me feel comfortable with my surroundings, myself, and my drugs. She probably knew all too well the possible effects of E, and this was one of them – or so I thought – complete immobility. Ecstasy is supposed to bring out the ultimate sensuous sensations in the user, making every slight touch and even glance incredibly orgasmic. Which it does, but not when you have imbibed nearly a keg of beer beforehand.

     The girl was cute. She had red hair and a tiny little lavender blue skirt. Her shirt was white, but it was stressful to turn and look at her, not to mention thinking about her. I have to think and turn my head in one goddamned minute? How was I expected to do all these things?

     "You have taken too much ecstasy, I think, yes, I think it is too much." The girl was pulling my sweating hair out of my eyes, and she was now facing me. She must have recognized what a mind-numbing strain it was to attempt to turn around to look at her. "And you have had beers. Too many beers. I think so – yes."

     It was as if she were about to kiss me. She had one arm rubbing soaking hair out of my face and the other running up and down my back, occasionally stopping at my shoulder for a tight squeeze. That was my favorite part. I looked at her with longing in my eyes, still sweating madly, still burping like a street bum after six bottles of Livingston Cellars, and still absolutely unaware of anything else in the room. My concentration could not be moved from one point to the other, for then I would puke all over this innocent girl (innocent enough to be whacked on ecstasy), so I simply looked at her and her alone.

     "I am with ecstasy too. It will get better." She handed me two waters. "Drink only this for the rest of night. No more beer. Beer is bad. Bad ghosts come to your head. I don’t like ghosts. They make me frighten."

     Which was probably true, beer brings out the worst spirits in all of us. Even if you are not a violent drunk, your eyes become glazed and you recognize very little of your surroundings. You stumble around even if you are the nimblest of drunks, and you are so far from your actual self that it is a terrible thing for a sober and gentle woman to even witness you. You can be a calm drunk and still be mad-crazy for sex – but what do people say about those who take ecstasy? I don’t know - my god I don’t know.

     I suppose it is an aphrodisiac, and I suppose I did feel aroused as this girl ran her hand through my hair and, well, she was also kissing my cheek. But she stopped that quickly, because that’s when the beer started coming up too fast for me to contain it. It was bursting out like a geyser, but my strong lips prevented it from soiling the entire room. I stopped most of it, swallowing most of what I choked up, but little bits of beer-entrenched vomit seeped down the corner of my lips and over my chin, trekking lightly down to my neck and shirt. The girl increased the pressure of her hug, hoping that I would somehow return to reality.

Ahh reality. I had known it once. It was a place that I hated. Reality was so ugly.

     THE vomit had all but disappeared from my chin, but the room was still spinning out of control. It was quite ugly, almost fashionable, like in a movie about some madman on drugs, only this time I was the madman, and I was on drugs. I was a lunatic alcoholic who felt comfortable playing any role that was offered to me, as long as that role was the role of an idiotic alcoholic. But now I was a madman on drugs, a role I was not used to taking on. And I normally take any role on full force and with incredible energy, as I am normally drunk and ready. But being drunk meant I was not ready for this role, which meant that I very quickly became a madman, which was in character, in one sense, but in another sense completely out of character because ecstasy is not supposed to make people throw up all over themselves.

     Loud pink colors shuddered through my brain in a tie-died swirl of hippie examination. It was so loud that I began to shudder – shaking violently I hugged the girl, she backed off quickly! She handed me a damp paper towel and wiped down what little vomit I had circulated on my body, and then she hugged me. She pulled me closer, and I began to return to reality. I returned and concentrated on the back right side of her neck. It was muscular, strong, yet delicately feminine. I saw a definite sense of balance in her neck, and was content to examine it for the rest of the night. The ecstasy had an effect on me that was not expected: it made me concentrate wholly on certain details while ignoring the world at large. This was the only way I was to survive: do not even pretend to recognize the things that you see.

     I saw nothing. There were little elephants walking on the ceiling, but I was wise to ignore them. They were all singing. It was a little chant about monkeys and their long, long noses. I thought it was an interesting tune, but hardly worth noting. The girl in front of me was more interesting.

     Still, I screamed at her, completely unable to ignore the elephants on the ceiling. "Hey you, can you stop those fucking elephants from singing on the ceiling? How do we get them down? Do we have to fucking call animal control? Goddamn it I am certainly going to need another cigarette!" I was in her face, quite abrupt and definitely a scary man to witness.

     "What you say?" She had no idea what I was saying. It was no use. She couldn’t stop those dreaded elephants from speaking. They were multiplying, too. The girl looked at me with extreme trepidation. I had just puked all over myself, and now I was complaining about elephants on the ceiling. I was not out of my mind, but these goddamned elephants had to be stopped. Any sane man would not want elephants dancing on the ceiling above him, especially if these elephants were dancing, for these elephants could quite possibly be drunk. They could not carry a tune, so why were they singing? If they were drunk, they could very well fall on my head, and then I would be as good as dead. Elephants on my head –

     "I think ok you have too much beer tonight." The girl, quite sympathetically, pushed the hair out of my face.

     "But those goddamned elephants are going to multiply and then fall on my head!" I was sweating now, absolutely out of my mind with a drunken sense of ecstasy. "I weigh fucking one hundred and forty pounds! Those elephants will crush me if my brain isn’t crushed first by these drugs!"

     "Can we no go downstairs now yes please?"

     "I’m not leaving unless those elephants leave."

     She looked at the ceiling, puzzled and frustrated. The Oriental women came over to me and looked at their watches. It was closing time. I bed goodbye to the room, to the elephants, to the vomit and to the girl.

     MARIA had returned to the room as the Oriental women were throwing me out. They were angry. At least I did not puke all over their rugs.

     Ceilings rush down on my head. There are no longer elephants; they walked into the jungle long ago. The jungle must have been deep and white, because those elephants disappeared very quickly. Those elephants ran away as if thirty blood-thirsty bats were chasing after them. Those bats were late. They should have chased the elephants away long before.

     As I say, Maria returned right as they were throwing me to the long, black, stream of death. Those Oriental women might as well have been expellers of religion.

     Maria came to get me, so I didn’t care. It was like I was drinking excellent wine and I was fourteen years old. I did not care. It all made sense to me, as long as I did not glance to my left or to my right, or god forbid, above or below me. Man it was a cool and brisk walk. The stairs down to the main club of The Roxy were basically shooting up with wind and firing breezes of stuttering insanity at my head. There were no longer elephants jabbering at me, but now there were donkeys. The donkeys seemed to make more sense. They did not talk from their elbows. They were telling the truth. They were telling the truth more than the elephants.

     Maria was a nice addition to the head of a man loaded up on ecstasy and beer and nicotine and cigarettes, so I concentrated on her. She was a nice scene to see regardless of prerequisites. Not that I had any preconceived notions as to how she should appear to me when my head was full of sensory overload. It was all a sense of making perfect and logical decisions. Here was this girl. Here was this man. I was this man. I was perfectly out of my mind when I puked on myself. The elephants spoke at a rapid pace above me from the ceiling. A young Czech girl tried to placate me with her timid fingers and thumbs. I puked on her. It was a natural progression.

     A longer examination of the shot would have led me down the stairs, falling slightly, almost dead, perceivably passed out, and without mobility in my legs. But I made it down the stairs and into a chair near the edge of the dance floor. The dance floor was huge. It was daunting. But the seat on the edge of the dance floor was quite comfortable.

     I settled into the seat on the edge of the dance floor as one would settle into a chair in a huge steak house. It was so comfortable, and it was the first step in a long process, so it might as well be as close to permanent as possible. This was, after all, a steak house. But then again, it was not a steak house. It was a goddamned club in the middle of Prague.

     I was feeling euphoric, but I could not move.

     Maria and I were meant to be together forever. We were meant to go together like twelve-year-olds of Sunday School familiarity. I could care less if it were a steak dinner in New Jersey or a dance club in Prague, for I was meant to be with this girl. But I began to notice a glaring mistake in the entire order of events – ignoring the fact that there was no steak, and that there were still elephants and dolphins and donkeys floating about the ceiling and threatening quite maliciously to shit on my head – the fact remained that I could not move.

     I was completely grounded. I was afraid of lightning. That was my brilliant excuse. But I could not even relay that to Maria. All I could say is that I could not move. I could only tell Maria that the drugs were too strong and that my life was balancing gingerly on the edge of terrible sanity. I was about to reach sanity, but then I went to Prague and I found Maria and I found that avoiding sanity was the best recourse available to my recently secured mind. Where was my mind secured? It was secured somewhere around that seat when I was sitting. I was sitting on the edge of the dance floor as the beats started to make sense to me.

     The music was quite odd. There were three DJ’s playing at once. They all played a strange mix of ambient and techno beats. The ambient music was slow, pulsating, quickening, enlightening, and I was rolling. A terrible fusion of understanding and immobility began to choke my mind, and I was beginning to realize that this drug did not mean dancing, it meant sitting and watching.

     Of course the other young lunatics in the room seemed to disagree. Over the extended beats and building duels between the DJ’s, there was a decidedly audible hum. The hum was not yelling, and it was not screaming, but it was the action of the young. This was their action, this dancing, this wild jungle party, these darkened black temples of their baby eyes, and their action, the hum, was an actualization of the drug that most of them were using – ecstasy.

     They were making themselves heard over the roar of daily life and future decisions. The nineties had brought them freedom and the weight of a new generation, and this was the only way they saw fit to step back and take that indescribable weight off their emaciated shoulders. They were young, but there was much expected of them. Once freedom came to their parents, no one really expected much from them, because they were thought not to understand freedom and what they could possibly do with it. Yes, they fought for it, but they did not necessarily understand what it meant in anything other than the abstract. But their kids were different, the young was expected to carry freedom and Eastern Europe to new heights. They would lead their aging parents and their previously decimated nations into the world arena, and they would be powerful.

     Or at least that is what was expected of them. And I could see it, from my little chair in the corner of the room, high on ecstasy and loaded with constantly changing disposition. Maybe I would dance with them, move into their dance floor and join the high, but I felt I was better left on my own. Maria joined me now and again, and I assured her that I was enjoying myself, that no one could compare with my own thoughts on the situation. This was my first experience, and I did not want to scare people with the barrage of questions I had. They were here to avoid the questions so that they would not have to provide any answers. I sat in the corner.

     The ambient beats reached inexplicable heights. Wild arms gesticulating in the winds of tomorrow. I stood up and promptly felt a breeze of standard nausea, and so I sat down. This was best enjoyed from afar, I thought, better let these kids do their own thing. Why couldn’t everyone be like me?

     SOMEONE once told me that the truth is out there, but that the world is a very big place. Maybe I said that to myself, forgetting that the universe indeed is a very big place, and out there could be anywhere. If the truth was out there, I was not going to find it in Prague, on ecstasy. So I left the following morning.

     As we were walking through the Old Town Square, and as the effects of the drug were wearing off and I was beginning to consider myself a mobile carbon being again, the actual feelings I had when I was on the drug were becoming lucent, but were still incomprehensible. We walked, hand in hand, and I had never felt a hand to be so wanting of my touch. We held hands at every angle, and we spoke only murmurs of promised emails as dim Prague lights and drunken Czech lunatics surrounded us at every angle.

     We slept together in my hotel room and I felt ready to go. I hugged Maria and kissed her. And her mother gave me multiple hugs right before jumping in the taxi and heading to the airport with her daughter. I would go to the airport too, but not before I had a few bottles of wine at a fake Spanish type restaurant just a few blocks away from the Old Town Square. What else could I do? I was, after all, being forced to go back to New Jersey. But I was not really being forced to go anywhere by anyone, which is why I wound up in a bar drinking lots of red wine an hour before my plane took off from an airport thirty-five minutes away from the center of Prague by cab -