Happy Boys
by Lin Sedlar
They are right there—five of the biggest, swarthiest, most muscular and intense-looking men the three of us have ever seen.
We're in a tiny restaurant in the center of Zizkov, the neighborhood in Prague where I was living then. With me are Michael, an American who lives around the corner, and Paul, one of my best friends from Chicago who has just come to visit.
The restaurant is called Ve Dvore, but we all know it as Happy Boys. That's because, when my friends first discovered it, they were infatuated with the gorgeous blond Slovak chefs they prayed were gay. They weren't, but “gay” in Czech translates as “happy” and the name stuck as a reminder of my friends' eternal hopes. The restaurant was warm and intimate with golden walls, lots of dark wood, stained glass windows, and iron candelabras for a faux-medieval look.
During those years, Happy Boys served as the nightly clubhouse for the riotous, polyglot group of Czechs and foreigners I'm immensely lucky to be a part of. A few of the regulars included a brazen Polish priest, who just recently caused a scandal at the American Embassy's annual marine ball by using the blessing to take a stand against the war in Iraq. Then there was Vaclav, who defected from communism but later returned to run the computers at Prague's airport—getting all our flights upgraded to first class. And there was Srdjan from Belgrade, who plied the vast former Soviet territories as a trader in nonferrous metals but was much better known as the infamous Balkan Bottom.
But the undisputed ringleader of our group was Steve, a man who possesses five passports, speaks over a dozen languages, and is a magnet for adventure and international intrigue. He was once on a plane hijacked out of Addis Ababa and forced to land at a terrorist training camp in Sudan. He had absorbed enough of the Amharic language backpacking two weeks in Ethiopia to negotiate with the hijackers and save 104 lives. Steve, like my friend Paul, knows how to wring every drop of gusto from life and doesn't have many regrets… but missing what happened this particular night at Happy Boys would be one of them.
Tonight, it's just Michael, Paul, and me for a late supper. The restaurant is
already cleared of all its ten tables except ours and the one with the mysterious hunks across the room. We go through the motions of ordering our food but are totally focused on those men—staring at them sideways and straining to make out what language they are speaking.
We can always count on Paul to figure something out. He suddenly tells Mike and me to hide our watches, and before we know it, he is prancing across the room to ask the men, with comical exaggeration, “Time? You have time? English? Time? Time?”
The men bemusedly show Paul their watches but don't say much, so he doesn't get very far. But when he returns to our table, he describes how even more breathtaking they are up close—with beautiful chiseled faces and raven-black hair and eyes. And those muscles… Our curiosity is getting uncontainable, and something will have to be done.
So Paul sashays back across the room, this time abandoning all pretext. He exuberantly announces, “Me Paul. Paul. Me Paul. Me gay. Gay. Ho-mo- sex-u-al. Gay. Over there my friend Michael. Michael also gay. Ho-mo-sex-u-al. Gay. And there our friend Liliana. Yes, Liliana. Liliana not gay, no, she like men. But…Liliana lonely. Lonely. So you come. You come now.”
“WHAT has Paul gotten me into this time?” is all I can think as the five giants unfold to their full towering height and head toward me as fast as they can.
I am sitting alone on one side of the table in the corner with Mike and Paul across from me. As the men pull up chairs and arrange themselves around us, the largest of them—the unmistakable alpha of the group—claims the seat next to mine, thereby locking me in between him and the wall. There is no doubt this guy knows exactly what he's doing.
Paul brings everyone the first of what will become many rounds of that
delicious Czech beer, and we soon make out the men are from Algeria. Paul, Mike, and I struggle to recall every fragment of French we'd ever learned, and through odd bits of several other languages, charades, and scribblings on our napkins, we all manage to communicate surprisingly well.
It turns out Prague has been the site of the world amateur bodybuilding championship for the past week. Four of these men constitute Algeria's winning team and the fifth is their trainer and manager. The monolith sitting next to me is none other than Mr. World Champion Body himself!
By now, Paul is on a roll and just can't help himself. He begins playfully touching the men's muscles: first their arms—“Mike, Mike, you have to feel this muscle!”—then their chests and abs and thighs—“Mike, put your hand here. You won't believe it!” The Algerians laugh and eat up every bit of this unexpected worship of their magnificent physiques.
Over in my corner, Mr. Champion is getting amorous. He puts his massive left arm around me, and I feel like I'm encased in concrete. There is absolutely no give in that flesh. He keeps trying to kiss me, and I sort of let him because I can't move—and that isn't entirely unpleasant! Paul and Mike look on jealously since it is clear this is another case where the boys aren't “happy.”
Now the real show begins. With his irresistible charm, Paul convinces the men to remove their shirts, and soon, before our dazzled eyes in our little restaurant in Zizkov, they give us a full-fledged private bodybuilding demonstration. We stare spellbound as they go through their competition poses—their muscles quivering and pulsating under that glistening, hairless skin.
Meanwhile, Mr. Champion is getting increasingly persistent. He keeps taking my right hand and putting it on his penis. “Heh, heh, heh,” I giggle—removing it as discreetly as possible. But with his iron grip, he keeps putting it right back. I don't know what to do. Paul and Mike catch on by the movement of my arm and demand to know how big it is. Well, the rumor about the inverse proportion between immense musculature and penis size certainly isn't true in this case!
Now Mr. Champion urgently tries to entice me: “You, me, sex. Good. Bon. Not take long. Pas beaucoup temps. Only few minutes. No problem.” Clearly, he needs a little help with his marketing strategy. Paul and Mike egg me on, saying if I turn down this opportunity they'll never speak to me again.
And then—swept away by this surreal circus and not wanting to be outdone, Paul, who'd been an acrobat in his youth, begins doing backflips around the restaurant like a deranged slinky. Our waitress, the Slovak chefs, and even passers-by looking in the windows, stand utterly transfixed at the wondrous sight of the massive, half-naked bodybuilders with Paul gyrating backwards among them. We know we are truly in the land of Kafka.
But the magic bubble eventually has to burst. It happens when the manager insists, “No more beer! We compete in Dubai tomorrow. Men sleep now.” We are all a little bleary and dazed, like waking from a dream, and as normal reality slowly returns, we feel a powerful emotional connection to these men with whom we'd shared such exquisite madness.
As we exchange addresses, we wish with all our hearts it were in our power to fulfill their dreams of getting to Muscle Beach California and out of the bloodbath that is Algeria.
And now I will wonder for the rest of my life what it would have been like to climb aboard the best body in the world.
Lin Sedlar began her career entertaining the troops in Korea, which sparked a lifelong love of soldiers and travel. Mainly a writer and editor, Lin has also done voiceovers in various parts of the world and acted in TV commercials in the Czech Republic. In the last several years she has taken performance classes with Trevor Martin, Donna Blue Lachman, and Lydia Diamond. Most recently she studied with Brigid Murphy, which led to a solo performance at Live Bait Theater. Lin is currently working on a one-woman show about Prague in the '90s.
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| Photo by Robert Klein-Engler |