Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Finishing School for Panelak Girls



"Yeah, she was a panelak* girl
Raised on sausages"

-Sung to the tune of 'American Girl' by Tom Petty

"Panelaks are just vertical trailer parks"

- Butthead, expats.cz


The panelak girl guffawed at a table behind me in the local Turkish mafia billiards/ casino/restaurant. At the end of my first beer it was sort of cute, the way a baby gorilla is at first glance. By the end of pet piv* it was my pet peeve. Y'know, long fingernails slowly dragging across 100-year-old blackboard.

She couldn't help her horse laugh. It was inbred inside her in a cold, gray box, stacked number 7 in a row of 13, multiplied by 15,675* across the former Eastern Bloc. She thought she was cool and funny. Her knuckle dragging date did as well. He struck a pose: Brezhnev uni-brow and baseball cap with a knockoff Adidas logo with 4 stripes instead of 3 (at the Trznice* the sign read 'more stripes = more Adidas' and he believed what he read, his lips moving to each line on the sign). Though he dragged his knuckles and acted tough, he was a pussy. I thought could take him and his date--Him on the floor, taken 'Night Tram Avenger' style, beaten and bloody; her bent over a billiard table, taken 'doggy' style. But I don't like beating up skinny punks. Nor do I like fucking crank-addled white trash girls with horse laughs. But I digress.

I am very experienced in the white trash realm. I lived in a trailer from age 5-7 or so (those oh-so-important-formative-years). I shagged actual white trash girls with tatoos and redneck accents inside of actual double wide trailers parked on hilltops (not when I was 7, sicko. But later, when I regressed into my second redneck childhood. That would be between the ages of 19-25) The white trash girls were grateful, not because I was the monster fuck of their young lives, not because I bought them dinner, but because I didn't beat the crap out of them at the end of the date.


So as I sat there years later in the awful concrete village restaurant, the horse guffaws of the girl behind me reminded me of all I had left behind. Except of course, the alcoholism. I done brung that with me.


Czuppies* abound. They vex me. I am terribly vexed. I can't imagine how any form of Yuppie Scummery could apply to a former soviet peasant. The Czuppies used to live in panelaks. They abandoned them for newer, post modern housing with flat screen tvs and SUV and luxury cars. The newer, post modern housing has large parking spaces for the large SUV and luxury cars and more wall space for bigger flat screen tvs. But at the end of the day, the laugh is on them. They've just bought the exact same panelak they left. Same blueprint, same stack of concrete prefab shit. Only painted yellow. With parking garages. Silly Czuppie, don't you know? You can put frosting on a piece of shit and call it a birthday cake, but at the end of the day all you have is a frosted turd. Fnar, fnar! Guffaw, guffaw!

I live in a panelak, yet again. I say it's because it's my slow season, that I move into panelaks every winter to escape the slimy clutches of the greedy Czech landlords. Read my former posts. I don't like Czechs. And neither would you if you lived here long enough. Trust me. They are not quality humans. And by living in the panelaks from time to time, I am reminded of just how low the white trash scale can measure. By living in the overpriced, in demand Central Prague historic buildings, I am reminded of the yuppie and his superficial, materialistic, shallow ways.


And I want to move to Berlin or Bombay and take my chances with a new riff raff.


Footnotes:

Panelak - a prefab soviet era housing block characterized by gray concrete material, identical windows and other montonous, soul crushing attributes.

Pet Piv - literally 'five beers'

15,675 - a number pulled directly from my ass. I am not a math major, so I make shit up. I don't know the actual number of panelaks but I figure it must be in the billions. Go here for actual studies on the large gray boxes built for commie peasants, lovingly referred to as panelaky by the Czechs.


Trznice - an outdoor market in a Czech city characterized by tragic Vietnamese and other South East Asian refugees robbing people blind by selling counterfeit knockoff 'goods.'

Czuppie - I made that word up. Czech + Yuppie = Czuppie. See how clever I am?

More panelak poo here.