Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (15 page)

"Let's start with nightclubs," I said as soon as the cop had
given up on us. Zofia raised an eyebrow.

"There's one called Kamieniolomy, `The Quarry,"' said Tom.
The decor was budget Mafia. Because of the name, I guess, the
walls were covered with Permastone house siding. There were little
strips of disco lights around the dance floor, but they just flashed off
and on; they didn't move around the room or change colors or
anything.

A bored combo-one singer, one guitar player and a guy on
the electric organ doing the rhythm, bass and drum parts-played
a Ramada Inn lounge arrangement of "I Got You, Babe," lyrics in
memorized English:

A fat lady came out and sang "Feelings," also in English. A dance
team gave a disco exhibition more reminiscent of Saturday Night
Live than Saturday Night Fever. There was a mild strip act, the
stripper winding up in the kind of two-piece bathing suit worn by
Baptist ministers wives, but with sequins. The fat lady came back
and sang "My Way." A very pretty girl in a harem outfit did a dance
with a python. The disco team returned in Twenties costume and
did a Forties tap routine. The fat lady came back a third time and
sang "Hello Dolly." "Maybe they should put the snake in every
act," said Mark. And the stripper finished the show doing "Dance
of a Couple of Veils' with three large scarves and a blink of total
nudity at the end. To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine
a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the
sleaze.

There were some odd ducks in the audience. The women were
all milkmaid types with too much hair spray. The men were dark
and greasy with Cadillac-fin lapels on their suits and tie knots as
big as their ears. "What kind of people go to nightclubs in Poland?"
I asked Zofia.

"Whores and Arabs," she said.

"What do Poles really do for fun?"

"Drink," said Zofia.

The next night we went to a student club, Stodola, "'Be
Barn." (They do not have the knack of snappy nomenclature in
Poland.) During the winter Stodola is the Student Union for Warsaw
Technical University. The dance was held in the gym. The records
were American or British with an occasional ABBA cut that
cleared the dance floor. This night the kids were mostly high-school
age. They had dressed up, doing their best to find T-shirts, at least,
in bright, clear free-world colors. Some almost succeeded in looking American in a Michael J. Fox way. The crowd was shy and
square acting: The boys danced in groups of boys; the girls danced
together in pairs. And the dancing was terrible, stiff and clunky
like spilling a can of Tinkertoys. There's a tragic lack of black
people behind the Iron Curtain, which explains the dancing. "The
only ethnic group we ever had was Jews," said Zofia, "and they only
dance in circles."

Several video moniters were suspended above the dance floor showing Polish and European music videos and American cartoons. Whenever the brilliant hues of Porky Pig came on, the
teenagers would dance in place and gape at the screens.

Stodola captured perfectly the sock-hop ennui of the early
1960s. One whiff of Canoe and I would have time-warped completely and started doing the Pony and the Locomotion. Those
freshman mixers were fun, I remember, sort of. But I also remember how a bland future stretched out before us like an endless
front yard full of crab grass. There would be school and more
school, job and more job, a wife or two and indifferent kids of our
own. Of course, we were crybabies. When a Polish kid says he's
facing a boring and meaningless life, he's not just pulling his dad's
chain at the dinner table.

A few of the boys were sweat-faced and stumbling. "Guess
they got into the vodka," I said to Zofia. "At least you don't have the
drug problem we do in the West."

"They are not drunk," she said, "they are on heroin." Poles,
she explained, were the first to figure out how to extract opiates
from poppy straw, the stubble that's left in the field after the poppy
harvest. Now kids are doing it all over Europe. It's called "the
Polish method."

Outside two cops were manhandling a stoned teen. "Maybe if
we stand here and look well-dressed, they will not beat him," said
Zofia. One cop had the face of a young Barney Fife from hellnasty pop eyes, a receding fish chin and big, weak lips. Four or five
of the stoned kid's friends interceded. First they reasoned. Then
they yelled. "The police are scared," said Zofia. "That is why they
travel in pairs. Everyone hates the police." The ugly cop pulled out
his rubber truncheon and waved it. But he didn't do anything.
Finally, the policemen walked away. The ugly cop called the kid a
name. "That policeman is from a very low element," said Zofia.
"You could tell from one word?"

"Yes."

"Zofia, I thought this was a classless society."

"You are kidding."

The third night we went to Remont, Warsaw's only punk club.
The kids didn't look very punky; more like it was a party game
where everybody had to do a quick impression of Patti Smith. Remont was, however, as smelly as CBGB's or the Mudd Club ever
used to be. The manager, Grzegorz Brzozowicz, showed me a
videotape about the Polish punk scene done by West German
television. The punks all said the usual stuff: "Everything is shit."
"Life is shit." "This is shit." But they were matter-of-fact about it.
These were foregone conclusions, not statements of rage.

I couldn't, off hand, think of anything to ask Grzegorz. "Does
the Polish punk movement have any political significance?" I said
and realized I'd put my foot in it. In a Marxist country even a dank
and stinky place like Remont needs some kind of official sanction,
and Grzegorz must have some kind of official status. He looked
miffed.

"I notice a certain regularity in questions from the West," said
Grzegorz. "First you're interested in punks. Usually your stories
have two objectives, that punks are opposition to authority, breaking the rules that exist here. Also your articles show that there are
no polar bears walking the streets." He gave me a condescending
smile. "There are moments when our country is very normal."

"Hopelessly normal," I said. "I notice your punks don't go in
much for spiked hair and face tattoos."

"They have some inhibitions," said Grzegorz. "Also we don't
have the commercial products to do the hair styles."

Grzegorz paused. He didn't want me to get a bad impression,
but he didn't want me to think Polish punks were complete wimps,
either. "There was a smoke bomb a week ago," he ventured. And
then he sighed. "There are contradictions within the Polish punk
scene. Remont is the only place they can come to express their
rebellion against institutions. But once they get here they enjoy
rebelling against the institution of the club. The root problem is
boredom."

"That's what made my generation rebel in the sixties in
America," I said, trying to be nice. "You know, we were bored with
commercialism, bored with materialism . . ."

Grzegorz sighed again. "They're rebelling here from lack of
this."

The two bands playing at Remont that night were Trubuna
Brudu ("Dirt Tribune") and Garaz w Leeds ("Garage in Leeds').
Trubuna Brudu rhymes with Trybuna Luda ("People's Tribune"), the Communist Party newspaper. Garaz w Leeds is a "Cold Wave"
band. Cold Wave being, according to Grzegorz, the latest English
style, like New Wave but gloomier. Both bands were rotten.

Some of the punks began slam-dancing, or trying to. They
were so drunk they kept missing each other. An enormous punk
with a knife in his belt and a neck like a thigh began eyeing Zofia,
Mark, Tom and me. "One good thing about a socialist system," I
said to Zofia, "is the low crime rate."

"There are neighborhoods in Warsaw that I will not even go to," said
Zofia.

"At night?"

"In the daytime."

"Is this one of them?"

"Now it is."

A large fight broke out as we left.

Remont is as hip as it gets in Poland. "That's enough of that,"
I said. "Let's do something normal. Let's see what ordinary people
do in the evening-you know, just by way of contrast."

Zofia looked dubious. Tom shrugged. But Mark was all for it.
He had one of those over-earnest guidebooks to Europe's nooks and
crannies. "There's a wild boar restaurant," he said, flipping
through the guide's back pages. "It's supposed to have local color."
Zofia looked very dubious.

We found the restaurant, at the corner of two dark streets. It
was called Dzik, which means "wild boar." A political argument
was raging as we came in. Two elderly and very inebriated men
were shouting nose to nose.

FIRST OLD SOUSE: "Reagan's our man!"

SECOND OLD SOUSE: "He's a prick!"

FIRST OLD SOUSE: "Reagan and Gorbachev, they're both pricks!"

SECOND OLD SOUSE: "Not Reagan! Reagan's our man!"

Zofia translated and said, being serious, I think, "There is a
wide range of political opinion in Poland, fundamentally it is proAmerican."

"The only pro-American country in Europe," said Tom, "except for maybe Czechoslovakia and Hungary."

We sat down and ordered vodka. An ancient bag lady
clumped in and began screaming at a woman at the table next to
ours. I asked Zofia to translate this, also. "It is very vivid language," she said.

"Remarkable colloquialisms," said Tom, and he pulled out a
notebook and began to scribble. The waitresses leaned against the
walls, listening intently to the tirade. The cook came out of the
kitchen and listened, too.

"The nicest thing she's said so far is that the woman at the
table is a whore," said Zofia.

The bag lady stumbled out and stumbled back and started
over again. This somehow set off a fight between two men who
didn't seem to have anything to do with either of the women. They
cuffed and wrestled their way across the room until the head waiter
reluctantly pried them apart. But one of the men was too drunk to
stand up without the support of the fellow who had been slugging
him. He fell onto our table, which flipped into the air catapulting
vodka and Mark (who'd been leaning his elbows on the dirty place
mat) across the room. Nobody made a move to clean up. We
changed seats.

A large and extraordinarily unwashed young man came up and
jabbered at us. "He says his name is Zygmunt," said Tom, "and he
wants to shake our hands because we are Americans." We each
shook the fellow's filthy mitt. Three minutes later he came back and
said his name was Zygmunt and he wanted to shake our hands.
This continued through dinner. When we left, the fight victim was
snoring on the sidewalk. "I usually try to pull them into a doorway,"
said Tom, "so the police won't get them." But this one was too
befouled to touch.

The wild boar, by the way, wasn't bad. Pig meat in any form is
pretty good in Poland. Everything else except the beer and vodka is
horrid. You could use the beef for tennis balls, the bread for
hockey pucks and the mashed potatoes to make library paste. If you swallow any of the gravy, do not induce vomiting. Call a
physician immediately. I had mentioned to Tom that we should
probably avoid fresh, leafy vegetables because of the recent Chernobyl contamination. He almost choked laughing. "If you see a
fresh, leafy vegetable, let someone know," he said, "they'll want to
announce it on television as a triumph of state planning."

The subject on which I was supposed to be reporting was not,
as you may have guessed, very interesting. The only thing that
seemed to set Polish rock apart from the rest of Europe's colorless
pop music was a certain dark and somber tone. I talked to an
American exchange student who'd been kicked out of Dupa ("Ass'),
a Krakow Cold Wave band, because his guitar playing "wasn't
gloomy enough."

But the meetings that Interpress set up with musicians, producers, studio engineers, etc., were interesting-morbid and horrible, but interesting. It's amazing what obstacles are thrown in the
way of work-a-day existence when the government is bigger than
the country it governs and bureaucracy encompasses all animate
and most inanimate objects. I talked to music-makers, but, if
they'd been brain surgeons, architects or biochemists, only the
details of frustration would have been different.

Every song, whether it's to be recorded or performed in
concert or even sung in the smallest club, must be submitted to the
censor board. "Poland is the only country in the Eastern Bloc that
admits to having censorship," a Polish record producer told me,
with something akin to pride. The censors look for political meaning and sexual innuendo. They may veto a whole song or
bowdlerize it line by line. As a result, lyrics tend to be Dylan-
esque. But, unlike old Minnesota Mud Throat, Poles have good
reason to be cryptic. Zbig Holdys, leader of Perfect, which I was
told was the best Polish band of the eighties, went too far with his
song, "There Is No God."