Anytime a body part collides with concrete, especially a shoulder, you are forced to reevaluate what lead you there. The Czech officer clung tightly enough to my elbow that any flinching or examining of my throbbing joint was impossible. I looked to the small crowd for an indication of how I would feel in the morning; they stared back to see if I had gotten the message to shut-up, but the thing is, I was still laughing. The sound though was now a desperate recourse that served as the only thing keeping me from admitting – this was a bad situation.
The Czech Republic is cheap, too cheap for me. I was broke by American standards, but, in Prague, I made it rain. There were four of us, and we each seemed to ignite the others’ passion for exploration and extravagance. We would spend our days lost in Prague trying to discover increasing obscure muses for writing, love, and beauty. Then our nights were heavily indulgent explorations into the bottles of Absinthe.
Absinthe, it’s black liquorish residue resided on every laughing breath I blew into the officer’s face, but he didn’t need to smell it to know I was wasted – I was a young American out late at night in Prague. I had been out of control for three days, and, until I now, it had been amazing.
There is an indescribable freedom that comes when money isn’t a problem. I was, for the first time in years relaxed, and it allowed me to grow closer to my ideal me, frivolous, fun, indestructible. People say there is a bullet proof mentality in youth, but here I didn’t feel bullet proof, I felt indifferent to pain and pleasure; I could take either and succeed. Except for this night.
This night I felt ugly, a feeling so viscerally disappointing that it was nearly impossible for me to face. So, I masked it; if I couldn’t be the most attractive, I would be the most outrageous. Had I made this decision later into the night, there is no way I could have gotten so out of control, but, having noticed my blemished face in the ATM mirror before our first bar, I had all night to load up on the alcoholic humor, that had caused my laughter up to this point.
Why was the policeman singing ‘Silent Night’? I fell silent. The Baz Lhurman-esk interlude was so unexpected it was terrifying. Despite all my laughter, the one undeniable truth of the situation was that this man had all the power, and if he was taking time to sing it only meant one thing, he knew he had me. In a last ditch effort to downplay the situation, I began to belt out the verse along with the officer, drowning him out.
As always we had ended up deep underground in a mausoleum bar, slamming drink after drink, and loosing track of time. We poured back onto the cobblestone street and into the hands of the awaiting cops. The situation started harmless, except I didn’t have my passport. However, having decided that I was going to be the wild child of the evening, I wasn’t about to let a few police demands slow me down. So as they demanded my documentation, I started to laugh.
The singing stopped. The officer stared into my eyes, and I stared back into his, though, with my head pressed into a spackled corner, I couldn’t stare anywhere else. I shut-up. There was no longer anyway to deny the situation, I was a drunk foreign boy in the hands of a government employed police officer who I had spent the last 5 minutes mocking. His hands moved from my elbow to my coat.
“Silent Night” he said, pressing his finger up to his lips.
There it was again, I found a ember bright enough inside me to mock the situation. Staring at him as if he were the idiot, I launched into another round “Holy Night. Round yon…”
With the grip he had around my jacket, it didn’t take my effort for him to shake the fun out of me.
“Silent Night. Shhh.” he said, again with his finger to his lips.
Finally I understood, I just needed to be quite, but as soon as I grasped his demands I was hit with the question ‘How could I come out on top?’. Since I had decided that my only worthy trait for the evening was unbridled energy, how could I now slow down enough to apologize? Where would I fit into the group if I had a vastly sobering moment?
Concerned so much with my own situation, I had underestimated the anxiety I was causing the group. My brief moment of clarity, gave enough of an acknowledgement to my understanding that a Swedish girl we had gathered during the night stepped forward and took control. She spoke calmly with the officer and the situation ended with a whimper, as had the night.
We loaded into a streetcar, quite. A few locals decided to inform me just how bad the situation was about to become before the girl stepped forward. The police had called for a car to come pick me up and take me to jail. That would have been a multi-day affair, and, as the locals put it, the inmates hate foreigners. I remained quite, which I mistook as being stoic.
It’s hard to be young, indulgent, and in the hands of foreign officials. It’s also hard to feel ugly. I’ve been really lucky (blessed?) throughout my life that my idiot nature hasn’t gotten me into too much trouble. This night in Prague is the closest I have ever come to an international debacle, and, unlike most of my memories, it only becomes scarier as time goes by and I understand more about the world.
