Pablo Rides the 22

Tony Ozuna

Waiting for the “22” they greet each other with a head nod, as they have every now and then over the years, for at least two decades. And this morning it is drizzling and crowded as usual at the tram stop for the metro station I.P. Pavlova, with everyone waiting impatiently for their tram to get to work.

“Jak se máš?” (“How are you doing?) Pablo asks the Fat Man, a middle-aged porky that he knows, in the same sarcastic and upbeat way used in the film Borat, with Sasha Baron Cohen. Then Pablo asks, “Back to work?” They are both standing in front of Starbucks. One building over is Popeyes; two buildings up the block is a McDee, across the street from KFC. Next to that is Pizza Hut. Two buildings back down the block, there used to be the French cafe and bakery franchise, PAUL, to compete with the toxic fast-food circuit, but it is now a Deluxe Burger King Café Bar with a line out of the door for Double Burgers so early in the morning. Taco Bell is setting up shop around the corner.

With a Burger King XXL stuffed in his mouth, the Fat Man nods nervously, over-caffeinated and sweating while scanning the area. As the red trams pull into the stop, he scouts the options and only embarks on the ones that have riders pushed up hard against each other like in a sweaty disco-room. It could be the “6” or the “10” or the “16” or “14” or “7” or the most popular one for tourists, the “22.”

“Jak se máš?” replies the Fat Man to Pablo. He has a non-Czech accent, and Pablo has always wondered where he comes from. The Fat Man probably came to Prague in the early-90s so around the time that Pablo did, but in any case, he has made the place home, like Pablo Cruise (born Cruz). 

Pablo, who is a tall twig compared to the Fat Man, looks around the busy tram stop. When he first moved here after the Revolution this area was grey and dull, hardly any shops at all. It took ingenuity and progress to bring to this city so many McDee’s, KFC’s, Burger King’s, Pizza Huts, etc. 

Pablo has been taking the tram as long as he has been in Prague always riding the 22 tram for the view, which he is still not tired of looking at. He really feels like he is traveling when he is on the “22” just like all of the other tourists. Travel is real, it is the only way for him to be in touch with reality. On the “22” he sits and reflects on everything; the tired-looking workers coming and going, the more easy-going students, families or mostly stressed out Moms with their kids, the drunks of all ages, and of course, the tourists. Pablo first came to Prague as the bassist with Ruben & The Jets. They played at an underground place called “The Loser’s Club” on Celetna. Then he came back again, some years later, considering himself a tourist, but then a traveler, meaning an open-minded one. One might get bogged down in a place for years, or for the rest of your life. You never know, but you've got to be ready to do it, if you are traveling. When you are truly traveling, it means that you don't have any home to go back to when you're done with your trip. So you can just keep going. That's not being a tourist. That's traveling. And anyway the Jets had kicked him out of the band, so he had nothing more to lose.

Pablo notices the Fat Man on the tram getting close to him. If there is just a little wiggle room between riders, and as long as there are no interior lights in the tram, so excluding the new models now used, the Fat Man can always do alright on these. His hand slips into pockets of his fellow tram-goers, unfazed. Then he gets off with an impressive profit, getting off at the next stop, Stepanska. He'll return on any of the tram lines back in the opposite direction for one or two stops, and wait again for the next tram “22” over and over, till he has done his work for the day. This means thousands of crowns, Euros or dollars on short tram rides. Ruben remembers once seeing the Fat Man during Christmas walking down the street Na Prikope hands full with shopping bags from every luxury and children’s toy shops. 

Everyone needs to make a living, and this is the Fat Man's way to pay for so much more than just his daily American burgers and Coke for breakfast. Tram “22” is a fat cash cow, riding past some of the most ornate and elegant buildings of the city, and through several “must-see” spots for tourists. Prague still has that shabby beauty like Paris had, while now a cosmopolitan mecca, so Prague has hordes of tourists eager to be on the “22” as it crosses the Vltava river (get your breathtaking view of the Castle!) and then proceeds to wind through lower Mala Strana (the Lesser Town) before heading up the hill to the sprawling Emperor's Castle, which overlooks the city, and all of Central Europe it seems.  

Pablo likes to sit where he can see the Prague Castle dominating the city’s landscape from the top of a hill, built meticulously over 600 years of architectural additions and extensions incorporating neo-Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Neo-Baroque, Modern and the absurd additions and details done under Communism. The Castle was built for kings and emperors who resided here to rule the land of Bohemia, the Habsburg Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. His grand-dad once played jazz in the castle, or at least that is what his grand-dad told him; but these days, merely the Czech president lives there and one can imagine him prancing the halls, moving from room to room with the best view on the continent, but wearing such small shoes for the job. The Castle was built for God-ordained rulers, but now it is an extraordinary residence for unremarkable politicians, out-of-touch with their nation of 10 million. The nation has a smaller population than the city of San Bardo, where Pablo is from originally.  

Sometimes Pablo will have headphones on. He'll do this especially after visiting a church for a daytime concert, certain classics played in Prague on a regular basis. So after hearing a heart-wrenching concert in a church, he'll rush out to jump on the tram and listen to it again on his headphones. His favorite now is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and this one is best heard while observing the Fat Man at work, for as many years it seems, as Pablo has been riding the tram listening to this music. At first, it irritated Pablo that no police seemed to care about catching such a bold pick-pocket—a flat-out thief in broad daylight. But the Fat Man is also a seasonal worker, so he is not on the tram all of the time. Sometimes Pablo doesn't even see him for months, forgetting about him altogether, but then inevitably he's back, more lithe than ever, working a few days then he's gone again.

So on some days, as Pablo has his headphones on communing with the spirit of Bach or Beethoven or one of the major Czechs, Smetana or Dvorak, on the “22” past the grand Czech National Theatre, which was opened one hundred years before—to the same day that Pablo was born—but it took another 20 years before the theatre was completed and it opened in 1881, as the pride of the Czech nation who were at that time ruled by the Viennese Hapsburgs. Then three months after the opening of the National Theatre it burnt to the ground; for Czechs this was like the fallen Twin Towers on 9/11—so they rallied to raise money (one million gulden in 50 days) to rebuild it again in two years!

If Pablo were a tour guide, he would point out with great enthusiasm to his group that all of this, so many centuries of European history is there along the tram line “22” so that just after it passes the noble National Theatre, it glides over the murky Vltava, and one gets the best views of the Charles Bridge, the 600 years-old stone bridge lined with baroque statues of Saints and Catholic martyrs connecting the oldest sections of the city. Then on the other side of the river up the hill, there is the omnipresent Castle. Between the National Theatre and the Castle, the “22” passes the unremarkable Church of Our Lady Victorious which has in its chapel the glorious Infant Jesus of Prague, that regal little miraculous babe with 365 costumes, changed every day like soiled diapers, does not look down on worshipers, but he gazes out like a pampered Prince of Robes.

Pablo is certain that it was only because of the Infant of Prague, that the city was left practically untouched during the two World Wars. The First World War left no mark on Prague, while during the Second World War, its most historical sections, basically the Old Town center and the Castle district were left intact under Nazi occupation, even especially protected by Hitler. It was only bombed once by the Americans on Valentine's Day, 1945, at the end of war. Tram “22” goes past these two areas that were bombed; one area is in the upscale residential neighborhood of Vinohrady, where buildings were hit around Peace Square, which is one tram stop above I. P. Pavlova. The Church of St. Ludmila towers over Peace Square, which is a calm park and general meeting area for the neighborhood. The hardest hit area was two tram stops below I. P. Pavlova on the south end of Charles Square. Bombs hit the Emmaus monastery, originally an abbey built in 1347. This was the first and only Benedictine monastery in, at that time, the Kingdom of Bohemia, and in all of Slavic Europe. Gothic wall paintings, the vaults and the roof were destroyed by US bombers. Pablo’s grand-dad was in the US Army during this time in South Bohemia, and he told Pablo that the bombing of Prague was done by mistake. The pilots had thought that they were bombing Dresden in Germany, but due to clouds they were mistaken. Dresden was fire-bombed by the Allies, the Americans and British, into a wasteland of rubble on February 13^th, so the pilots over Prague were sure late for the job. Czech articles and books on the tragedy have quotes of civilians insisting that it was a clear day on February 14, 1945 when the bombers killed up to 700 Prague residents, and wounded 1,184 more. Just across the street from the Emmaus monastery, the notorious Faust House was also bombed. Faust's building, the home of the German legend was a Bohemian who sealed a deal with the devil, trading his soul for knowledge and earthly pleasures. Pablo thinks that this was likely the true target for the bombers, and they hit it good. Still the Faust building remains, now part of a larger and quite mysterious, run-down hospital complex.

Tram “22” passes by all of this directly or just within a few minutes-walk and so no wonder it's packed with tourists from around the world, all day and night. A few times, Pablo has tried to be a hero by warning tourists especially if they had kids or if an old granny happened to be squeezed in next to him in the tram; cautiously, he has told groups getting on at Charles Square to watch out for 'that big guy.'

But the Fat Man doesn't always work alone, and his partners in crime are not to mess with. Years ago, a few “partners” of the Fat Man noticed that Pablo was secretly warning tourists, and so once when he got off the tram at Charles Square, they got off after him and pushed him into some nearby bushes. One of the thieves swiftly kicked Pablo in the balls, and as he dropped to the ground gasping for air, the guy said to him in stilted English. “Don’t you ever do that again Batman, Superman, fuckin Hero, don’t you dare to do that again.” Then they rushed off to get on the next tram, and as the doors shut and the tram pulled away, they waved to him with mock heartfelt smiles. This happened right at the stop closet to the Faust House and Emmaus monastery, known as Charles Square, originally called the Horse Market Square. Pablo backed off from being a hero to the pickpockets’ victims after this. It shook him up, this new breed of pick-pockets, who move across Europe like migrant workers.

On that day, Pablo decided that there would be no more hero days for the sake of all tram-riders in Prague. “So many bad guys to kick my balls,” he decided to let them be. So it became his motto to keep to his own, especially since as far as the regular Czech commuters were concerned, swarthy Pablo looked more suspicious to them than the hard-working Fat Man, and so the daily tram-riders held their bags much closer to themselves worried about standing next to suspicious-looking Pablo, and often moving over to the Fat Man for their own safety. Then the Fat Man would have a field day, practically thanking suspicious-looking Pablo as he hopped off the tram at the next stop. Pablo was sure that the Fat Man originally thought that Pablo was also “working” the tram, as a Gypsy, and this is how they initially gained that unspoken camaraderie. Eventually, the Fat Man realized that Pablo was just loafing, hanging around with no real job, playing music on his headphones, an American goofball.  

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Sometimes Pablo feels like an accomplice since he looks suspicious for Czechs. American tourists and the American Embassy employees in Prague also give him the same suspicious look over, automatically thinking that he is a Gypsy. Maybe if Pablo wore a suit and tie or a Yankees cap or any image with an American flag on his t-shirt (like the Czechs of all ages do), he would not get this reaction. But with his Czech workingman’s clothes (even though he doesn’t work), they look at him as the most suspicious one when he gets on the tram; so when he knows that the Fat Man is nearby, he gets some satisfaction, that while they are intentionally moving away from him, they are moving right into the Fat Man’s reach and so they deserve it, Pablo thinks to himself with a guilty smile.  

But sometimes Pablo still takes risks to warn tourists. He'll do it if they have kids, or if they are Filipinos or Mexicans, since he knows they not big spenders, and he is not suspicious-looking at all to them. They smile at him. Hindi-Indians think that Pablo is a “dot” Indian or Indonesians also think he is one of them, a Southeast Asian. Gypsies think he is one of them too, though for the Mexicans, they think he is either an Egyptian, or Persian, or a French-Italian. Anyway, these are the tourists who approach him on the tram for directions since they are only visiting Prague and they've come only to see and pray to the Little Infant of Prague. For some of them, it is a once in a life-time spiritual journey for them and they have saved their money for many years to make this trip. They have to ride the “22” to get there, and Pablo cannot witness them getting robbed on that tram, by the Fat Man or anyone else.  

All of this happens on a daily basis irregardless of the season, the police simply ignore it unless a local cultural celebrity gets robbed, for instance, once when the writer Wilhelm Willow, once a young dissident and then later one of the most prominent poets and now an established prose writer got pick-pocketed on the “22.” At that time, Willow had a working-man's street-smart reputation, and so when Pablo met him by chance at a pub, shortly after he had gotten robbed on the” 22” he was indignant.

“How could I, Wilhelm Willow, have gotten robbed on the “22”!” he was almost sobbing in embarrassment and shaking his head between gulps of beer while sitting in a smoky pub in Old Town.

Pablo remembers that the police patrolled the tram like storm-troopers for a few days after the Czech's post-revolution literary treasure, Wilhelm Willow, had lost his wallet on Tram “22.” They looked at Pablo as the only odd-man out every time, meanwhile the Fat Man and his associates just sat it out in KFC or their favorite casino bar along the route the entire time, joking with each other and downing shots of slivovice while looking on until the police retreated for another long stretch of inactivity.

Since the police even seemed to go out of their way to not monitor the thefts on the “22,” Pablo assumed that they were regularly bribed to not bother with “a foreigner's business.” But it was odd to Pablo that even the local riders in general were oblivious to the robberies, but possibly since it mostly affected the tourists, the ones who didn't belong and were not much wanted anyway, those foreigners.

So here is Pablo sitting on the tram knowing who is robbing passengers on a daily basis, and it is not just the Fat Man anymore, because there are others—he can recognize them all—but for the Czechs, Pablo has no “place” in their world. Despite the fact that he knows more about what's going on around them than they do. They are too busy to notice what is happening since their faces are buried into their mobile-phones or lost in their own worries personal or work-related, or they are simply too busy to care. And so, he is excluded from their world and from their concern because he is a foreigner.

Pablo learned basic Czech right away, and he had always been curious how the word for “foreigner” is used in Czech. There is the novella by Camus, “Le Etranger” or in American English “The Stranger,” but in British English it's “The Outsider” while it is translated in Czech as “Cizinec” which means the foreigner, and so the meaning is something different altogether. It is like “The Other.”

“Cizinec” pronounced “see-zee-nets” or in plural “Cizinci” “see-zeen-see” have a special police force just to deal with any problems involving foreigners, but the foreigner's police will still only rarely speak a language other than Czech. So for them, Pablo has always been a perfect foreigner.

A common phrase in Czech is “nežádoucí cizinec” which means undesirable foreigner, and this term should pertain to the Fat Man, who is also not a Czech. Pablo thinks that the Fat Man comes from Albania or Macedonia, while his assistants were Ukrainians or Russians (Eastern Slavs). There is usually a look-out, and a guy who can serve as distraction or the hand-off. It's a lucrative business.

“Cizokrajný” (different-country) means exotic and Pablo falls into this category, even if in more recent times, the reality is that he is looked at more as an undesirable foreigner, than exotic.

Just moving down the list in an English-Czech dictionary, after “cizokrajný/exotic” “cizoložit” means “commit adultery” or “be adulterous” while “ložisko” the geological term for bedrock, deposit or layer, meaning also Mother Earth. “Založit” means to insert or set something in place (which has certain sexual connotations) and then  “založit rodinu” means to set up a home or start a family.

Combining “cizi” to “ložit” thus implies a sexual taboo.

“Cizoložnice” means adulteress, while “ložnice” means bedroom.

“Cizoložný” means adulterous.

“Cizoložství” means adultery.

This all adds up to something foreign (or there is a kind of “invader”) in the bedroom.

Do the Czech Foreigner's Police then occupy most of their time following around suspicious foreigners who are most likely adulterers? Either that or clear the street of riff-raff, or the unproductive.

“Cizopasit” means to live as a parasite, a sponge, a free-loader.

“Cizopasnictví” is parasitism, sponging and free-loading.

“Cizopasník” is a sponger, parasite, or a cadger.

“Cizopasný” means to be parasitical.

And “cizost” means unfamiliarity or strangeness. In other words, Pablo is living in a small country in Central Europe which has never been open historically, nor linguistically to foreigners. And what is he even doing here? He sits in cafes for hours reading books or magazines. He goes to see matinee screenings at the Kino. He collects music. Years ago, “cizost” was meant for sailors, wanderers and longer-term travelers, all considered strange like aliens, and these terms still apply today.  

Despite this there is something about the Czechs that Pablo loves. They are strangely 

peaceful. This means they don’t bother him at all. They leave him in peace. Maybe it is only because of the language differences. But despite that, overall Pablo thinks there is just something special about a city that can have in the center, a large public space called Peace Square. There is Peace Square in Hiroshima, and in Nagasaki. There is a Peace Square in Guanajuato, Mexico, and one in France, in Macon. Pablo is not aware of any Peace Square back home. It would be un-American. Besides that, the Czechs that he first met were so strange; they were manic fans as they loved his band Ruben & The Jets. No one knows the group anymore, and most of them look at him with a perplexed expression. “The party is over! So why don’t you go back home and work!” seems to be what they are thinking.

A few weeks ago, coming home on the tram late on Saturday night, a drunken old man jumped onto the tram just before the doors closed. He sat down next to a young girl, and made some comments to her, trying to start a conversation with her. She ignored him, with her face glued to her mobile phone. She scooted away from him, just a bit and just pretended that he wasn't talking to her. So he proceeded to talk to a man sitting across from him, but since this man wasn't drunk at all, he was on the quiet side. The drunk old man then started talking aloud, until a younger man, professionally dressed and noticeable for his shiny black shoes with bright pink laces made a shushing gesture to the drunk old man to keep it down. This caused him to talk even louder, and then he said, “What do you mean keep it down, for me to shut my trap! I'm free, damned you to tell me to shut up. You're worse than the Russians, and you're even too young to know how that was under the Russians. I'll talk as much as I want, I'm a free man, and I'll talk as much as I want. What kind of people are you anyway?”

When Pablo had first arrived to Prague with Ruben & The Jets playing their Chicano doo wop from out in Cucamonga, it was the heady time when Czechs loved any and all kinds of Americans like long-lost family members, welcomed into homes and pubs and brothels galore. This was just after their Revolution, and the only thing that he expected (or thought he knew about the country) was that it was going to be a wild and crazy time, because everybody knew the music of Ruben & The Jets, thanks to the Czech Underground. Meanwhile, he knew nothing of these former Commies. In his childhood, the region was only a red spot on the map, meaning “warning” it is a Totalitarian Regime. But this was a simplification. His grand-dad had told him about the time he was in South Bohemia in WWII. And since his grand-dad Freddy Cruz also played the trumpet, he told Pablo, that after the war, they did once play jazz at the Castle. In the 1940s, he had played with an Army Big Band known as the Latin Lovers Soul Serenaders. They had played (apparently) at the President’s Ball in Prague – a very good band, according to his grand-dad, with six saxophones, four trombones, three trumpets (including Freddy), a singer, a comedian, and a rhythm section—it was a swinging jazz band with a Chicano.

However, no one that Pablo has met in Prague believes this story about his grand-dad. They tell Pablo that his grand-dad must be cuckoo. But it is true that Czechoslovakia was liberated by Americans on the Western front and liberated by Russians on the Eastern front. But then it became a socialist country after the war, in 1948; then in 1968, the Russian army came and stayed for the next 23 years. Now decades since then, the democratic Czechs (after splitting with the Slovaks) despise the Russians, but they are also jaded, suspicious even resentful of Americans, most of them so unsophisticated, and the younger the duller, then if not those who have stayed for such a long time—who knows how many here like Pablo, waiting for something more than toxic fast food and bad coffee rackets in the city. 

Pablo remembers one young Slovak video-artist who told him many years ago, when he first came to Prague. “What are you even doing here? You Americans are like a plague!” 

However, since Pablo comes from the West, the Pacific coast, he had always heard of people coming from the East and ending up with fortunes made in the West. Pablo had some money saved and he had read an article where Dave Eggers bragged about his great-grandfather “Hollister” coming to California and in a blink, he owned half of the state and still owns it. It is the economic-migrant scammer stories like this still held out in announcements by his own country-folk, and even though this case was more of a swindle at the expense of Mexican-Alta Californian landowners of that time, it doesn't matter. These are the tales that inspired Pablo to head to Prague, to give it a go in “the East,” and since as a Chicano from San Bardo, he had no command or only basic knowledge of Spanish.

Pablo gets off of the “22” at the stop called Ujezd, just across the river from the National Theatre. He heads into a scruffy pub or dive bar called Ujezd, and this one was there even before the Revolution. It used to be called “Borat” and Sacha Baron Cohen hung out there back in the early 90s. “Jak se mas? The bartender asks Pablo, with a grin as he enters, and Pablo replies, “Dobré, “Jak se máš?” Hours later, Pablo heads out of the pub with his beer-goggles on; this corner is still untainted by the plague of American fast-food chains reminding him that Prague is still astounding, as the cliché goes, among most beautiful cities in Europe, and even without the beer-goggles, it's still the tops.

Pablo early on realized what he wanted in Prague. He is not living here for love though he was at first. Early on, he had met her. It was the day after his first concert in Prague. He was riding on Tram 22 and so was she, a Bohemian empress with short blonde hair, who he assumed was going back to work from her lunch break. She was blasting Led Zeppelin on her headphones, and he heard it because she had it on so loud. For Pablo, this pale young rocker, not a typical dissident “big-beat” fan represented the symbol of the Velvet Revolution—to play Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Ruben & The Jets as loud as she wanted and not be afraid to be harassed by the police for it. There was once a time when playing any music from the West was a crime; some say that this caused their Revolution. 

Both riding the tram on that magical day, Pablo asked her nervously if she spoke English.

“I’m American,” she replied with a blush. “And you’re Pablo Cruise….“I saw your band last night at the Loser’s Club… I’m Georgia….”

“So you’re a Beverly Hillsbilly?” he said eagerly then planted his-self beside her for a longtime.

One night they were coming out of Borat drunk and stumbling onto the sidewalk, when they bumped into a group of fellow drunken Americans, who mistook Pablo as being from somewhere else.

“Go back home where you came from, you fucking Arab…You Gypsy!” they snarled at him.

Pablo said nothing back to them.

Georgia screamed back “Fuck off assholes!”

Pablo made a choice then and there to never go back to where he came from, to where such assholes were born and raised and more than anywhere else flourished in great numbers like a plague.

Georgia left a few months after this, and the Chicano doo wop that Pablo played is now obsolete, while the Czech contemporary pop is as inane as Communist “pap” music in its darkest times. Still, he is living here without any Czech roots at all, and not fluent in the language, so there is nothing keeping him here; but he has stayed as he truly is rooted, even if it has become in a love-hate way. In other words, nothing can free him. He has become a spectator all around the city, a perfect stranger, but also a loner, just like in the song by Neil Young, whether it is rush hour or not, he observes the view in no rush to go anywhere else in the world – as a perfect stranger like a cross of himself and a fox.

Pablo knows which trams to take according to his mood, and he has only gotten to know the city so well because he has taken all of them (trams and buses) up and down for so many years.

Now it's the middle of the afternoon. If it were past midnight, he would do the same. Leaving the pub, Pablo hurries across the street and waits at the tram stop. When tram “22” arrives, coming from the direction of the Castle, he gets on and quickly finds a seat. Pablo fumbles with his CD player to play his favorite song for the city, beginning it just as the tram turns left towards the river, Pablo has this synchronized perfectly so that as the tram heads to the bridge to cross over the river, his current favorite, “Vltava” (or “Moldau”) by Bedrich Smetana begins with its sound of the gurgling, shiny black water and its light-hearted flutes like little birds in the trees of the island that he is just about to cross over. The music shifts gears from a cascade of flutes singing over and around each other so playfully while slowly building, then swiftly blending to strings that kick in to the heart of this symphonic poem’s Second Movement. There is a sudden and unfortunate lurch on the tram due to traffic. But then the tram slowly picks up speed again, while “Vltava,” which was first performed in 1875 in the newly constructed Czech National Theatre, roars in his ears. By this time he is gliding over the river, seated comfortably looking around him and when the tram gets to the other side of the river, stopping right at the National Theatre, it's time for the Third Movement, appropriately for this newer part of town.  

Even though he has very few friends in Prague, and no family in the country, Pablo is content with his life since unlike the Fat Man, or everyone else, at least he doesn’t have to beg, borrow or steal. In the early 90s in Prague, coming with money that he had saved from touring with Ruben & The Jets, he cut a deal that earned him enough to get by for a long time, and especially if he just watches his budget and lives it low. “A deal in what?” people will sometimes ask him. “Pork Knuckles” he says.  

“But if anyone ever gave him more pressing questions about this, or asked him what is he doing here, he replies that “I’m living here and that’s all. My grand-dad recommended the place before he died.” Pablo also points out that there is an Hungarian-American who made so much on a ‘deal,’ that for many decades, he has been pumping millions of dollars into Central Eastern Europe to make changes—a more progressive plan, but Pablo is not interested in changing the world, and especially not Prague. After losing her and his doo wop band kicked him out, he came as a traveler on a stop-over in Prague that has taken longer than he expected, but he is still cruising on in his own slow way.