Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This?

by P. J. O'Rourke

  "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."

  Any content is suspect. The Commies objected even though they're supposed to be atheists.

  In Poland a Fender guitar costs between 150,000 and 200,000 zloyts. There are only about five officially sanctioned places to play in the whole c
ountry. I visited one of the best sound studios. It had sixteen tracks. To do a proper final mix the tape has to be taken to West Germany. It's impossible to say how many records the most popular groups could sell. There's a shortage of record plastic. But the Poles plug along, keeping up with the trends. The music videos I saw were no worse than MTV's, though many had been shot on 8mm home-movie film. The synthesizer tunes I heard were done on the kind of electric keyboards we used to have at roller rinks, but the results weren't any dippier than the new Prince album. All this jury-rigging was admirable, but it was like watching genius high school sophomores tinkering in the rec room with dad's dictaphone. And the people I talked to were no happier than genius high school sophomores usually are.

  I had some drinks with an extraordinary rock critic I'll call Kazimierz. Indeed, I had a great many drinks with him. We sat down with a bottle of vodka at three in the afternoon and drankPolish style-two-ounce shots taken at a gulp until the bottle was gone. Then somebody stopped by his house with another bottle and we drank that.

  Kazimierz is a vade mecum of popular music from Johnny Ace to Joy Division. He's a well-known editor and commentator in Poland and a popular disc jockey and journalist. He speaks English, German and Russian. And he lives with his mother in a housing development.

  The housing development was a high-rise, but with freightelevator-style electric lift and steel stairs and doors. The apartment had three tiny rooms. The walls were concrete, of course. It was a sort of basement in the sky. And here was Kazimierz, an educated, hard-working man of forty, with only an eight-by-ten-foot bedroom to call his own. We didn't talk about music for long.

  "I was working overseas when martial law came," said Kazimierz. "I was terrified of what might be happening here. It took me six months to get back in the country. And all that time I could get no news about anyone I knew. When I landed at the airport, I saw the ZOMO, the new riot police that had just been constituted. And they were standing at the airport eating ice cream cones. At that moment I knew they were human. I knew there was hope."

  And that was all the hope he had to cling to, just that the enemy was human. "This country has not had a hopeful history," I said.

  "I'll tell you a Polish joke you may understand now," said Kazimierz. "It explains something about our national survival. One Pole is telling another about his visit to America. He says, `I went to see a fellow and he fixed us drinks.'

  `Yes,' says the second Pole.

  `Then do you know what he did?' says the first.

  `No,' says the second.

  `He put the cap back on the bottle!"'

  I asked Kazimierz what had happened to Solidarity. "I haven't heard anyone mention Lech Walesa," I said, "except one American reporter."

  "No one cares about that any more. It's old history," said Kazimierz. "Only people from the West think it means anything anymore.

  We drank ourselves blind. In the next room Kazimierz's mother sat between narrow slab walls, stolidly watching government TV. My notes are a jumble. I can make almost nothing of them, except at the bottom of one page, in wobbly, painstaking letters I've written: "We have no weapons and no chances. No weapons and no church. We live in a -land that's not ours."

  On the day before I left I took a long walk with Zofia. "I'd like to see the West," she said.

  "Can you leave?"

  "If you are of a certain level, it can be arranged. But you need an invitation, a job or a sponsor of some kind. Do you think I could find a job in the West?"

  "Zofia, you're fluent in what, Polish, English, German, Spanish and Arabic?"

  "Yes. But -I am only fair in Russian and Latin."

  "And you have how many higher degrees?"

  "Nearly three now."

  "Zofia, you'd have to carry a pistol to keep from being made president of the World Bank. Would you defect?"

  "No. It would break my parents hearts. My father fought in the resistance. He is not a Communist but he belongs to the Peasant's Party, that is allied with the government." Zofia shrugged, "Besides, this is my country .-I should see it through."

  We were walking down Nowy Swiat Street in front of the offices of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party, which is what the Communists call themselves in Poland. Zofia said, "This will sound strange to you, but when the army took over and martial law was first declared, there was hope somehow. The army has always had prestige-for their bravery against the Germans in 1939 and the Russians in the 1920s and so on. All the reserves were called up, all the young men. When we saw the soldiers at the barricades, they were friends of ours from school-not like the police who come from a different class. General Jaruzelski raised the Polish national flag for the first time next to the Party flag on the Central Committee building." Zofia paused.

  "And?" I said.

  "And that was all." Zofia gestured to the street, to the lumpy, gray-faced people. "Everything is the same as it was." Then she brightened. "Have you heard about the Russian and American generals? They are arguing about who has the best troops. The Russian general says, `We feed our troops one thousand calories a day.' The American general says, `We feed our troops three thousand calories a day. `Nonsense!' says the Russian general, `no one can eat an entire sack of potatoes in twenty-four hours."'

  On the way back to my hotel I finally got arrested. Four large policemen blew their whistles and surrounded me on the plaza in front of the Palace of Culture and Science. They hustled me into a police van. One paged through my passport, while the other three glowered menacingly. I met their stares with a steady gaze. They weren't going to break me. I sat in the sweltering van with my legs crossed casually, a faint smile on my lips; I was determined to let no emotion show. I fancied they'd rarely dealt with as cool a customer as I. And I'd composed the lead sentence and first two paragraphs of the New York Times story about my arrest on trumped-up espionage charges before they got it across that I'd been nabbed for jaywalking. I was fined $2.

  So I didn't become a prisoner of conscience or see any salt mines or brain washing in Poland-that would have been too exciting. And I didn't see any Evil Empire-that would have been too interesting. Communism doesn't really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death. Life behind the Iron Curtain is like living with your parents forever-literally, in many cases. There are a million do's and dont's. It's a hassle getting the car keys. No, life behind the Iron Curtain is worse than that. It's Boy Scout Camp-dusty; dilapidated; crummy food; lousy accommodations; and asshole counselors with whistles. TWEET! "Count off by threes!" TWEET! TWEET! "Who short-sheeted the politburo?"TWEET! TWEET! TWEET! "A good Pole is loyal, helpful, obedient . . . " It's reveille and the buddy system and liver and Kool-Aid and capture the flag for all eternity; and Mom and Dad will never come to get you-they're snoring in the next bunk.

  Is it worth risking nuclear war and the annihilation of mankind to avoid living like this? Don't ask anybody who just got back from Warsaw.

  Weekend Getaway: Heritage USA

  JANUARY 1987

  My friend Dorothy and I spent a weekend at Heritage USA, the born-again Christian resort and amusement park created by television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker, who have been so much in the news. Dorothy and I came to scoff-but went away converted.

  Unfortunately, we were converted to Satanism. Now we're up half the night going to witch's sabbaths and have to spend our free time reciting the Lord's Prayer backward and scouring the neighborhood for black dogs to sacrifice. Frankly, it's a nuisance, but if it keeps us from going to the Heritage USA part of heaven, it will be worth it.

  Just kidding. In fact, we didn't actually come to Heritage USA to scoff. At least I didn't. I came because I was angry. Normally I take a live-and-let-live attitude toward refried Jesus-wheezing TV preachers. They've got their role in life, and I've got mine. Their role is to be sanctimonious panhandlers. My role is to have a good time. They don't pray for cocaine and orgies. I don't go on the tube and ask people to send me $100. B
ut, when a place like Heritage USA starts advertising fun in the sun and Heritage's founders start having drug blasts and zany extramarital frolics, I feel they're stepping on my turf.

  Heritage USA is a fair-size chunk of Christendom, 2,300 acres. It's half an hour from the go-go New South Sun Belt town of Charlotte, North Carolina-just over the border into the poky Old South Bible Belt county of York, South Carolina. The Heritage entrance gate appears to be a colonial Williamsburg turnpike toll plaza. Admission is free, however. Inside the gate you have the same vaguely depressing pine barrens that you have outside. A dozen roads meander through the scrub with the sly purposelessness of burglary lookouts.

  Not that Heritage USA is an "empty vessel" (Jeremiah 51:34). By no means. Recreation facilities are "ministered unto you abundantly" (II Peter 1:11). There are playgrounds, kiddie rides, bridle paths, tennis courts and swimming pools, where I guess you have to lose faith at least temporarily or you'll just stand around on top of the water. And there are vacation cottages for rent and condo homes for sale, plus campgrounds and acres of gravel to park your Winnebago on. You can see the house where Billy Graham grew up and make Amityville Horror jokes about it. A golf course is being laid out. I'll rush back as soon as it's done, to hear what new kinds of blasphemy Christian golf leads to:

  "The rough ways shall be made smooth"

  -Luke 3:5

  "Thou shalt not lift up any iron."

  -Deuteronomy 7:5

  "This cup is the New Testament in my blood."

  -I Corinthians 11:25