Damien Galeone

How I Appear to Women when I Wink

Last week I winked at a girl on the tram. She had smiled at me and I gave her the benign one-eyed wink you’d get from an uncle with whom you had no inappropriate relationship. Her face went a bit red.

Then I recalled that the Czechs do the benign uncle wink with two eyes, something like a quick blink with pleasant zest. Their one-eyed winks are used by the lascivious to convey their concupiscent messages to their depraved communicants. So instead of reciprocating a good morning greeting, I had told a random young lady that I’d like to take our relationship to the next level somewhere near the tram’s cockpit. [enter pun joke here]

If you have experienced another culture, you know that facial and hand gestures are important. These valuable tidbits are often overlooked simply because they aren’t well known or the gesture expresses something different in the visitor’s native culture. Sometimes we risk offending those in our host country simply because they perform a gesture that means something benign in their culture.

When a visiting friend waves a raised hand to get a waiter’s attention, I say a small prayer to a god I don’t believe in for their soul, which is now going to rot in Ignored by Waiter hell. A friend was on a tram when a rebellious teenager walked in front of it before it could take off from the stop. When the (enormous) driver trilled his angry bell at the teen, the kid gave him a horned finger gesture, just like you’d see at an Ozzy Ozbourne or Metallica concert. My friend was stunned when the driver got out and dropped the kid with a right hook, until he learned that the kid had snarkily suggested that the driver’s wife was cheating on him.

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Jean-Luc reacts to Covfefe

About twelve years ago, I was travelling through France with a friend. While most of the hotels and hostels we stayed at had an English speaker, not a lot of people outside of that spoke English. This was great. As we had been through Germany and Italy as well, it was exciting to get on a train in German and get off of it in Italian. But this did mean stumbling through the rigid romance of German, the pronunciation hell that is French, and the full body workout that is Italian.

Neither my friend nor I are any kind of language genius, but we followed one rule. Before we went anywhere, we would learn ten major phrases to deal with basic situations in the country. These included where is…, how much…, excuse me…, and please get your hand off my ass. It’s a rule I still apply today on my travels. There are obviously miles of lexical gaps, but these could be filled in.

One afternoon my friend and I walked into a bakery in Nice in search of pastry. We ordered in awful French, the woman very much upholding the stereotypical French linguistic stinginess. She raised an eyebrow, clearly not impressed with our attempt at her language. Then she punished us by giving us the hardest and oldest croissants in the entire bakery.

This is an eventuality for which I did not possess language. I said something to the effect of “Hello!” and then backed that up with a rousing “When?” She squinted, more so as I began lightly tapping it against the counter with the deafening sounds of colliding rocks. She shook her head and shrugged. Then I said, in a French accent, “Hard!” which sounded sort of like “Chaarday!” and then “Old!” which was like “ewlde!” and then a “Stale” that came out “Unstahle!”

The wheels really came off when I began guessing what the French word for “stale” might be. I threw out a bunch of words that sort of sounded right. Though I can’t remember what those miserable incantations were, in my head they sure sounded French: maybe something like “Zhebrouh” or “Foisoo” or a big old “Champalog.”

The woman silently left the counter (I assume to vomit) and didn’t appear again. My friend and I dipped our croissants in some wine we bought at the shop next door.

I had used a filler and it had blown up in my face. Who doesn’t use one from time to time? I sing famous tunes whose entire lyrics are made up of lexical fillers (my rendition of Eat my Waffles, Yum Yum Yum! to the tune of Camptown Races has been especially appreciated by the neighbor who lives on the other side of my shower).

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About a month ago, I engaged in a Facebook spat with an old acquaintance. He ended up defriending me and I blocking him. An acquaintanceship officially ended in 21^st century style. I wonder at what point we are going to include lawyers in these disagreements.

While this was unfortunate, I regret neither the escalation of the situation nor its result. I haven’t given the “loss” of this “friendship” one consideration in the last month. But not a week goes by when I don’t edit my final comment to him. And every time I mentally edit it the comment gets more brilliant, more poignant, more cleverly volatile, and, each time, more perfect.

This is an occupational hazard for someone who writes for a living in some form. The constant tweaking of a sentence or a phrase, the true deliberation over a word. I return to a piece in the middle of the night, touching up a sentence whose rhythm bothered me in bed. A Facebook post can take thirty minutes to compose, a Tweet is a nightmare. Emails take me far longer to write than one would expect for someone fluent in the language. To be frank, writing an email in Czech takes less time. Anyone who writes and edits fully commiserates.

I was thinking about all of this Saturday afternoon as I rode a tram into the city. Since the weather has  become hot and touristy, it awards us locals a chance to ride the tram with an Italian tourist stuck in our colons, to hear an American wax poetic about Europe’s cultural superiority, or to enjoy the slurred singing of drunken German people. And really, who doesn’t?

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Since today seems to be national piss off this guy day, I find myself in the cafeteria downstairs. I need a hotdog. I need the meditative nothingness that comes along with eating bemustarded mystery meat in a crunchy bun.When I am eating a hotdog, I am nothing, I am all, I am One.

I open the door and find myself facing a line of young men. 12:15. Damn. Middle of lunch hour. They are clad in overalls that announce the wearer as a blue-collar worker. No doubt these guys are students at the tech school on the ground floor of the building.

I have no idea what kind of skills are taught by this particular school, but three of its major areas of study must be cursing, spitting, and smoking. Because when I arrive at school in the morning, the area outside is heavy with clusters of their little cliques doing those three things in unrestrained abundance. By the time they leave the area at 8 am or so, the ground can serve as a DNA testing site for future archaeologists.

Brutish cretins though they appear to be, on the whole they seem nice enough and ignore the university students and teachers. But today, they are in close proximity when I will have to speak Czech. Linguistic humiliation is nothing new to me at this point, so that’s no problem. The issue is that they will know or will be reminded that I am not Czech. And then it starts.

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Gone Shopping in 1957

Whoever put a Tesco Express at the metro station was a genius. It’s got to be the most convenient placement of a shop in my neighborhood. I take the metro everyday and being able to walk upstairs and into a shop right on my way home from work is enormously simple and easy.

Look, I know what you’re thinking. I should go to the other, local shops. I should support local businesses in lieu of a big megastore like Tesco. You’re right, but so do you. A lot of us have foregone patronizing local shops, and for pragmatic reasons, too.

Convenience is a big one. You can get everything on your shopping list at a big local shop – meat, dairy, veggies, kitchen utensils, prophylactics. To get these things at local shops, you probably (hopefully) have to visit five different shops. And if your butcher has condoms in his window, do not buy meat from him.

In the Czech Republic, there are other factors that lead to choosing a chain store over a local one. Tesco takes credit cards and has set opening hours. This isn’t always so with local Czech places. Many don’t accept credit cards. And anyone who has tried to buy a loaf of bread from a local shop on a Saturday afternoon (or a Thursday, Tuesday, or Monday afternoon or evening) has been frustrated by the rhymeless and reasonless operating times. A Czech shop’s Saturday hours may be from 10:30-13:45. That is, if they want. You might show up at 12:15 to find that they are ‘closed for repairs.’ So it’s also about some level of reliability.

A Czech cashier is the human barometer by which misery is measured. They are some of the grumbliest, more unpleasant people in the city. I understand to some degree. Their job might not offer huge satisfaction or personal reward, the money probably isn’t great, and people can be rude. So I get it. Nevertheless, I smile, I speak Czech as well as I can, and I am always polite.

If you are a non-fluent speaker of Czech (or any language really) you know that you are sometimes treated well by your interlocutor and sometimes not. Czechs are often seriously chuffed that a foreigner is stumbling through the hačeks and declensions of their particular linguistic minefield. This Czech interlocutor often tries to help said foreigner by speaking slower, offering correction, being patient.

Others are not so kind. They speak very quickly, build complex backwards constructions meant to confuse, and lace their discourse with insults. This frustrates the hell out of me for three reasons. 1. I am fluent enough to know I am being mocked, 2. I possess the language to call his mother a dog-fucking slut, but 3. I don’t have the lexical range, the nuance, or the eloquence of language to be able to justify doing 2 with examples from 1. So I grit my teeth and leave with my linguistic tail between my legs.

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In the middle of the room of testing students, a hand goes up. I approach. I know the guy from my Tuesday morning class. He’s is a friendly guy, but my brain rolls its eyes.

Two years ago, he took it upon himself to place himself in a higher level of English class. This would be fine is he was determined and hard working, but he’s not. So instead of studying in a class for intermediate students, which is the level he tested into, he demanded that he go to an advanced class. And for the last two years, he has mumbled a hybrid of proto-Swedish and Khuzdul into his phone screen.

When he forgoes this linguistic mix, we engage in a chess match of possum: he stares at me or the book, I wait. We do this until someone else gets bored enough to answer.

In tests is his time to come to life in the form of questions.

“Yes, hello,” I say to him.

“How long we have for the test?”

“What does it say on the board?” I point to the only 15 symbols in the middle of the board:

Test 15:30-16:30

Possum.

“Can you see?” I ask this genuinely.

Possum.

“How long did you have in the tests in the other three semesters?”

Possum.

“An hour. You have an hour.”

“Thank you.”

Every student has a testing strategy. For many this entails doing homework, studying, several days of review. Others try to cram the entire language into their hippocampus the night before the exam. Others try out their spy licks by trying to cheat their way through the exam. And some ask questions.

I don’t understand the strategy fully, but it seems halfway between trying to trick an invigilator into giving up an answer or trying to annoy them into giving up an answer. I do know that the strategy starts with an innocuous query, such as asking about the length of time for the test.

I am on alert.

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Truth

I am in class. Presently, my legs are twisted into a corkscrew, my hands pressing down on the back of a chair with enough pressure to snap it. I was speaking a second ago, but I have since stopped so that I could focus every molecule of my being into one act. Or non-act.

All eyes are on me, which just exacerbates my discomfort. They are eyeing me as if I’d done something odd, like suspiciously and abruptly stop speaking in the mid-sentence.

As each teacher understands, your body sometimes has to perform a function when you are in class. Sometimes this is as easily solvable as setting a long task and stepping off to the John. Other times you understand that what has to happen is going to take longer, but it’s OK because it’s not urgent. Other, more unfortunate, times you understand that what has to happen is desperately trying to happen right at that moment.

That’s when you enter DEFCON.

DEFCON 5 marks the lowest level of readiness for these scenarios. But I started out at DEFCON 4, which was my own fault. This past weekend, though it was the first week of May, Prague refused to respect that fact. It had decided instead to stubbornly hold onto winter. Instead of a warm blue weekend, it was gray, rainy, and cold. So I stayed home and made soup. Friday it was a pot of dark beer chili that I could enter into a county fair. Sunday it was a ham and bean stew and Monday it was a small pot of cabbage soup. It provided the comfort that my stormy soul needed in an extended winter weekend.

Like most people in their forties, I understand my body pretty well. Nine minutes after my morning coffee I am going to be in the bathroom with reading material. Two slices of pepperoni pizza will generate enough heartburn to run the electric in my flat. If I enjoy too many carbohydrates, my intestinal system lays concrete in itself, puts up a Road Closed sign, and is completely shut down for a day or two.

I had spent the weekend ingesting lots of beans, processed meat, beef, cabbage, and beer. Do the math. I prepared for the fallout by taking Alka-Seltzer on Tuesday morning and carrying Tums with me as though they were an Epipen.

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It’s Saturday, I am on Facebook. I have put myself on a strict time limit after I found myself moseying to Facebook anytime my writing got the mildest bit tough or the urge to procrastinate set in. So in order to accomplish things in my life, I only allow myself to Facebook for thirty minutes on Saturday and Sunday. During the week I only post a witticism or a blog, entities without which most of you would quite frankly lose the will to live.

Today as I scan through the pictures and posts of the last week, Burke points out pictures that obviously took place in the 1990s. No doubt the remnants of Throwback Thursday. There are sweatshirts mocking the presidential hopes of (the first) Clinton and tuxedo fashions that won’t be popular again until they appear in vintage shops. There are no mobiles in the photos and not one person is snapping a selfie. The mood is post-pogs and pre-George W. Bush. It is oozing nostalgia for the both of us.

Burke loves all things nineties. Movies (Forest Gump, Cool Runnings), music (Gin Blossoms, Weezer), soundtracks, (Empire Records, Singles), television (Seinfeld, Dawson’s Creek). For her the nineties meant high school, and high school meant a time when she was cool.

“Where are these pictures from?” she asks.

“These are some guys from my high school.”

“Why aren’t you in them?”

I shake my head; I don’t understand the question.

She asks again.

I shrug, physically asking for more input.

These are pictures of the cool kids, an invite list I didn’t exactly make. When it dawns on me that she is under the impression that I was cool in high school, I let out one serious laugh.

One great aspect of Facebook’s Throwback Thursday is that now, 25 years later, I can see what the cool kids were doing on Saturday nights back in high school. My Saturdays were typically spent in my friend Eddie’s basement eating popcorn and watching cable horror flicks or one of those 80s teen comedy flicks. We played a lot of pool and talked about girls as if they were as mysterious and terrifying as the creature stepping out of the black lagoon on the TV.

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