Holidays in Hell

by P. J. O'Rourke

  ACCIDENTS

  Never look where you're going-you'll only scare yourself. Nonetheless, try to avoid collisions. There are bound to be more people in that bus, truck or even on that Moped than there are in your car. At best you'll be screamed deaf. And if the police do happen to be around, standard procedure is to throw everyone in jail regardless of fault. This is done to forestall blood feuds, which are a popular hobby in many of these places. Remember the American consul is very busy fretting about that Marxist insurrection, and it may be months before he comes to visit.

  If you do have an accident, the only thing to do is go on the offensive. Throw big wads of American money at everyone, and hope for the best.

  SAFETY TIPS

  One nice thing about the Third World, you don't have to fasten your safety belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is fortyfive minutes.

  What Do They Do for Fun

  in 1arvaw?

  MAY 1986

  Usually, a plane ride gives me some distance on questions of dogma, the way a martini or a lungful of hashish does. We don't call it "high" for nothing; that was slang three centuries before the Wright brothers. Whatever those microbes down there think is no concern of mine-unless I fly into the Soviet Block. Something's wrong when harebrained ideas can be spotted from Olympian heights. On the outskirts of Warsaw, the whole countryside is scarred with the gravel pits and gray dust plumes of cement factories. Commies love concrete.

  Commies love concrete, but they don't know how to make it. Concrete is a mixture of cement, gravel and straw? No? Gravel, water and wood pulp? Water, potatoes and lard? The concrete runway at Warsaw's Miedzynarodowy airport is coming to pieces. From bumpy landing until bumpy take-off, you spend your time in Poland looking at bad concrete. Everything is made of it-streets, buildings, floors, walls, ceilings, roofs, window frames, lamp posts, statues, benches, plus some of the food, I think. The concrete that hasn't cracked or flaked has crumbled completely. Generations of age and decay seem to be taking place before your eyes.

  Yet all of this is new. The Poles rebelled against Nazi occupation in 1945, and the Germans, in their German way, dynamited Warsaw house by house. Some stumps of churches and museums survived, but nothing major in the central city is older than Candice Bergen. And the place is dirty with a special kind of Marxist dirt. I've seen it before in Moscow, Rostov and East Berlin: It doesn't reek like the compost heap squalor of Mexico City. It isn't flung all over the place like the exuberant trash of New York. There's no litter. There isn't much to litter with. It's an orderly and uniform kind of dirt, a film of dry grit and slough on everything and an atmosphere lachrymose with diesel stink and lignite-coal smoke.

  I got into an airport taxi, and the driver came right to the point, "Do you want to change dollars?" The Polish zloty is an animal tranquilizer on the international currency market. Even the official exchange rate is enormous, 163z1 to $1. Dinner at the best restaurant in Warsaw costs only 3000z1, a street car ride is 3z1. "I'll give you 500 to 1" said the driver.

  "How much is the fare?" I asked.

  "Business is business," he said, "the cab ride is free." I handed him ten twenties, made myself rich and tried to go shopping.

  The Polish Communists have done their dim-bulb best to recapture something of the pre-war Warsaw style. That is to say, not every building looks like a parking garage. And the Russian-type "Stalin's wedding cake" architecture is absent except for the huge Palace of Culture and Science, a "gift from the Soviet people," which everyone execrates. But there was only so much they could do with bad materials and worse sense. And they seem to have built the city from broad-shouldered, quick-breeding New Masses who never showed up. Meanwhile, a sparse stand-in population rattles around-tired looking, tending to middle age, not completely clean. There's too much room on the sidewalks and in the vast public squares. The farty little East German Wartburg cars and dinky Polish-built Fiats are at sea on the huge boulevards. Warsaw is empty. But not silent-too many trucks and buses are missing their mufflers, and the ill-machined wheels of the street cars squeal on the badly laid rails. The place sounds and smells more like a lonely freight yard than a capital city.

  I found the three main department stores, "Wars," "Sawa" and "Junior," next to each other on Marszalkowska Street, the main drag. They had a little neon on their signs, which was a relief. Lack of advertising leaves a weird hole in the urban landscape. You think, "What could be uglier than billboards?" But have you ever looked behind them? In Communist countries you don't get to see the giant pictures of the cars, boats and pretty faces that fill people's dreams. You just see the people and where they live.

  Each department store had the look of a small-town five-anddime a few months after the new mall opened out on the highway. Except they don't have malls here or many highways either. The merchandise in all three was identical. Pants, coats, blouses and jackets were badly stitched and lumpy and cut like Barbie and Ken clothes blown up to life-size. Everything was made of imitation polyester, if there is such a thing. Muddy purples and cheap sky blues predominated-the kind of colors you see when antinuclear activists try to dress up. The mannequins had hems falling down and collar points awry and lint in their synthetic hair. The housewares section was filled with nasty little glass tchotchkes and disposable-looking aluminum skillets and pans. The toys were fat, pad-faced dolls and sagging truck-shaped doodads made from plastic Americans wouldn't use for the bags the toys came in. The only interesting things I saw were the appliances, and the only interesting thing about them was that I couldn't tell the stoves from the washing machines or the washing machines from the refrigerators.

  There's a joke in Poland about shopping, as there's a joke about everything. A woman sends her husband to buy meat for dinner. He stands in line for six hours at the butcher shop, and then the butcher comes outside and says there's no more meat. The man explodes. He shouts, "I am a worker! I am a veteran! All my life I have fought and toiled for socialism! Now you tell me there's no more meat. This system is stupid! It's crazy! It stinks!"

  A big fellow in a trench coat comes out of the crowd and puts his arm around the man's shoulder. "Comrade, comrade," says the fellow in the trench coat, "control yourself. Do not go on so. You know what would have happened in the old days if you had talked like this." And the fellow in the trench coat pantomimes with a finger at his temple. "So, please, comrade, calm down."

  The man goes home empty-handed. His wife says, "What's the matter? Are they out of meat?

  "Worse than that," says the man, "they're out of bullets."

  I crossed Marszalkowska Street to a row of small private shops rented from the government. The first shop had a single shirt in the display case. The second had five hair ribbons and a ladies hat from the Jack and Jackie White House era. But in front of the third shop twenty or thirty people were gathered gawking at something in the window. I elbowed into the crowd and pushed my way to the front. They were looking at plumbing fixtures.

  I had 100,000 zlotys in my pocket, more than some Poles make in six months. I finally bought a hot dog. I suppose it was no worse than an American hot dog. Horrible things go into hot dogs. But in this hot dog you could taste them all.

  When I was applying for my Polish visa, I didn't know what to tell the people at the consulate. I couldn't very well say I was doing a story on "Does Thirty Years of Involuntary Marxism Make Folks Nuts or What?" The press officer wanted to see a copy of Rolling Stone, the publication I work for, so I told him I was doing a piece on Polish rock and roll. There actually is such a thing, if anybody cares. Poles themselves would rather listen to The Clash and Bob Dylan.

  But this fib got me press credentials so I could go to news conferences in Warsaw and listen to the Polish government do the "Modifier Bop." It takes a lot of adjectives and adverbs to give the Marxist side of the news. The official Polish press agency is called, no joke, Pap. Here's an excerpt from one of their releases:
>
  Wojciech Jaruzelski and Gustav Husak stated concordantly that Poland and Czechoslovakia attach essential importance to the further deepening of the relations of friendship and cooperation between the two countries, based on the princi- pies of Marxist-Leninism and socialist internationalism, the consolidation of fraternal ties with the USSR, cooperation within the political-defensive alliance of the Warsaw Treaty .. .

  You get the idea.

  At the first press conference I attended, government spokesman Jerzy Urban was refuting some statement on long-term effects of Chernobyl fallout. "False, erroneous news," said Urban, "due to a general psychosis which is being established in the West."

  An American reporter asked him, rather gleefully, "How's the blanket collection going?" Poland had volunteered to donate five thousand sleeping bags to New York City's homeless. But so far only five hundred sleeping bags had been found in the country and only one had been donated by a private individual. The American reporter wanted to know if there wasn't something strange about donations to the homeless from a country where so many people want to leave home. Everyone in the room, including Jerzy Urban, tittered.

  The person next to me whispered, "A classified ad ran in the Warsaw papers, `Will exchange two-bedroom apartment in Warsaw for sleeping bag in New York."'

  The American reporter quoted Lech Walesa as saying, "If the borders of Poland are ever opened, will the last person out please turn off the lights and close the windows."

  Urban laughed at that, too, and said Walesa could leave anytime he liked and "didn't have to bother with lights or windows."

  Then Urban went back to straining credulity on the fallout topic. "When you say you can't confirm something," asked a BBC reporter, "does this mean it's completely untrue?"

  "Is this your first time at a press conference?" said Urban.

  What ails Poland is, as the Poles say, "fatal but not serious." When I went to Interpress, the government agency that provides services to (and presumably keeps tabs on) foreign reporters, my "minder" immediately told this week's General Jaruzelski kneeslapper. The general is on a Polish TV quiz show. He has to answer four questions to win a prize. The host asks the first question, "What happened in Poland in 1956?"

  Jaruzelski says, "There were riots and strikes resulting from the justifiable anger of the working class."

  "Correct," says the host. "What happened in Poland in 1970?"

  "There were riots and strikes," says Jaruzelski, "resulting from the justifiable anger of the working class."

  "Correct," says the host. "What happened in Poland in 1980?"

  "There were riots and strikes resulting from the justifiable anger of the working class."

  "Correct. And now for the fourth and final question. What will happen in Poland in 1987?"

  Jaruzelski thinks for a long time and finally says, "I don't know but I'll take a shot at it ..."

  "CORRECT!!!"

  Telling the Poles I was writing about rock and roll turned out to be an inspired lie. It let me get official help to go have fun. It gave me not only an excuse but a mandate to be out prowling around at night, checking the dance halls and juke joints and trying to find the wild get-down side of communism. A nation's fun will tell you more about that nation than anything except its jails. And, if I got into enough fun, maybe I'd get into jail too.

  Interpress hired a translator for me, who I'll call Zofia, a tall and pretty, bespectacled and intense girl-half head librarian and half fashion model. She spoke five languages. "Will you want to interview many prominent figures in the field of popular music?" she asked, looking bored.

  I said, "Zofia, there's only one way to cover this story. We have to get inside it. We have to experience it in the social context. We have to capture the gestalt, get the big picture. We've got to go out and drink too much and boogie."

  "Your magazine pays you for this?" she said.

  "Of course they do. I'm behind the Iron Curtain. This is dangerous. No agency of the U.S. government can help me now. I might be grabbed for a spy at any minute. Held incommunicado. Interrogated. Days without sleep. Drugs. Electric shock. A story like this is bound to put me in touch with antisocial elements, people opposed to the government."

  Zofia began to giggle, "Everyone in Poland is opposed to the government."

  Zofia rounded up two friends, Mark and Tom, both Americans. Tom was a graduate student, studying Slavic languages in Warsaw. Mark was a college professor bumming around Europe on vacation. We drove off in Tom's car and were promptly stopped by the police, who stop you all the time in Poland for no particular reason, like your mother did when you were a kid and trying to get out the back door.

  "Do you know why the police have dogs?" said Tom in English as he smiled pleasantly at the cop. "Somebody has to do the brain work." "Do you know why police cars have white stripes on the side?" Tom continued, "To help policemen find the door handles." Tom turned to me, "Before Solidarity was crushed in 1981, these were all Russian jokes." The puzzled copper wanted to look in the trunk. Maybe we had the other 4,500 sleeping bags in there or some plumbing fixtures. "A man goes into a bar," Tom told him, "and tells the bartender, `I just heard a new policeman joke.' A man who's sitting three stools away says, `Wait a minute, I'll have you know I'm a policeman!"That's all right,' says the first man, `I'll speak very slowly and clearly."'

  "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 vide
o 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?"