This is an extract from Max Milano’s upcoming novel “A Common Terrorist”.
All the rich kids had gone to Europe for their semester abroad, but Alex had to work that summer. Hannah went to Prague to study opera or something, while Alex served tables at Sarabeth’s on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side while skimping and saving for a shoulder season ticket to Prague on Lufthansa and a couch surfing deal. That’s how he found himself confined to a two-bedroom apartment in a tower block of 1950s Cold War architecture just outside Prague. His punk hairdo and long West German army surplus coat he’d picked up in a thrift store in Soho made him stick out like a sore thumb in the gray world of the outer Prague suburbs. People would stare at him from passing trams when he ventured out, his heavy Doc Marten boots clanging against the cobblestones. But it was his Sephardic tan that caused the stares.
He'd called Hannah's apartment from a pay phone around the corner from the apartment for five days, only to hear the line ring. On the sixth day, a gruff voice picked up.
“Hannah Is not at the opera," the gruff voice said in a drunken New York-accented English. "Try her at the Roxy," he continued. "Hannah always spends Friday night at the Roxy."
Alex took an interminable tram ride from the Prague suburbs to the old town, wandering aimlessly on labyrinthine cobblestoned streets until he found the entrance to the club.
The inside of the Roxy was cavernous. The club had once been a grand old movie theater, but someone had removed all the seats to create a dance floor and left the screen and projection room intact.
Alex moved through shadowy figures on the dance floor as if in slow motion, but his eyes became fixated on the grotesque images projected on the movie screen.
The film flickered in black and white as ghostly shapes moved slowly across the screen, looking more like a succession of still images than a movie. Gradually, the strange shapes took human form, turning into an old war newsreel of Hitler riding into Prague in 1939. Hitler's outstretched arm seemed frozen in an eternal Nazi salute while crowds greeted his car by waving swastika flags.
The black and white newsreel was inter-cut with old color film that burst in for only a few seconds. Suddenly a flash of ochre red would explode onto the screen, a cattle slaughterhouse. Sepia blood splattering onto the camera lens.
Up on the screen, Hitler seemed to smile at the camera in a closeup. The hordes of oblivious ravers on the dance floor just jumped to the beat of the house music. There was a chaotic order to the whole thing: armies of speeders, shaking, sweating, and twisting in strobe-slow motion. Then there were the stoners, too lazy to dance, too stoned to move.
Alex drifted towards the bar, hearing California dude speak all around him, a small reminder of how far from home he was. But somehow, all the young Americans, like himself, still stuck together. Safety in numbers, he thought.
The local beer was cheap and pretty good. As Alex sipped his cold Czech lager, he was drawn to a makeshift hut in the middle of the dance floor. It was a bizarre sight. Perhaps a mirage, but it seemed solid enough, like a log cabin in the Bohemian woods. A suspicious weedy smell emanated from the hut, and a puff of smoke seeped out of the cabin's small chimney. Alex became curious and peeked inside the small cabin through its open front door.
Inside the blackened hut, a small group of stoners were sharing a giant water bong, and among them was Hannah. She was sporting a new haircut, her hair gone and replaced by a thin blonde peach fuzz. Something else was different, too; she was wearing old-fashioned 1950's granny glasses with pointed rims.
Alex stumbled inside and sat next to her. Hannah seemed quite stoned, lying among a mixed lot of a couple of blond and strung-out boys and a pair of Slavic-looking cackling girls.
"Alex, is that you?" Hannah asked in a raspy, druggy voice.
"I thought you came to Prague to study opera," Alex responded snarkily.
"I did…But it can't all be culture and f'king Mozart all the f'king time, right?"
Her unmistakable laugh pierced the room. It cut through the music, the smoke, and Alex's anger. He'd flown thousands of miles to see her, searched for her through cobblestoned streets, and now that he'd found her, she was a different person, or at least pretending she was.
Hannah introduced him around. Her friends spoke to him in a Slavic language that Alex couldn't understand.
"They're Slovaks," Hannah said as she planted a wet kiss on the blond girl she lay next to, "and don't waste your time trying to talk to them; they can't understand a word of English, they only speak Slovak, German, and a bit of Russian. Say...you speak German, Alex?"
"Nein," Alex responded dryly.
"Don't you wish you'd taken some German back in BU, eh?" Hannah blurted sarcastically. She accepted the bong from one of the girls and took a deep hit without lifting her head from her friend's shoulder.
One of the boys passed the bong to Alex.
"Watch out, weed is pretty strong here," Hannah said, "It's homegrown."
Alex coughed as the acrid smoke filled his lungs. So Hannah had cut all her hair, gone punk, and was kissing girls. So what? People change. What he didn't understand was the movie on the screen, and the nagging suspicion that began burning inside of him with each bong hit.
"The film out there?" Alex asked, "What the heck does it mean?" The weed was potent; he was starting to feel the familiar slurring of words, "And isn't it a tad antisemitic? to say the least..."
"It's just art, Alex," Hannah answered. "That's all it fucking is: Art...besides, that's why we're here. We made the film as part of my art project. I edited it myself. Got this big Sony BVE-600 editing console shipped to Prague from New York. The rest was finding old newsreels on videotape and slaughterhouse documentaries filmed by vegetarian eco-terrorists. I mixed the music by hooking a few VCRs to a CD player. Our DJ friend just premiered it today. Right here, right now. Didn't you like it, Alex? Didn't you catch the irony?"
"Is that want they call it now?" Alex responded icily. "You find Hitler ironic now? You know, back in 39, these kids you're hanging out now with would have ratted you out to the Gestapo in a second."
"They would have ratted you too, Alex!" Hannah burst out laughing like it was the funniest witticism in the world. "They would have ratted you too!"
“So this is what you’ve been up to? Selling Hitler as irony?” Alex blurted, a bit high already.
“We’re taking it back, Alex; we’re taking it back!” Hanna said as she stood up and crawled on all fours towards Alex since the hut was too low to stand up in, “We’re taking the Roxi back” Hanna continued, “In the shadowy depths of Prague's history is this, the Kino Roxy, it originally served the Jewish community but when the Germans took over Prague without a fight…talk about the French rolling over! No one ever mentions the Czechoslovakians rolling over without a fight, do they? Well, the Germans used the Roxy as a staging ground for transporting Jews to concentration camps. This cinema has heard the cries of our people before being sent to the death caps. So now we’re taking it back!”
A blast of cold eastern European winter air greeted them as they stumbled out of the Roxy in the early hours. It was like being vomited out of a warm, dark beast to splatter onto frozen, cobblestoned streets. Alex was so stoned that he wasn't sure if he was standing up or passed out and dreaming in a gutter somewhere. He could see Hannah walking ahead of him, shouting to pedestrians and blowing kisses to passing cars. Alex's head spun like a police siren as he drifted in and out of consciousness.
Alex followed Hannah and her entourage as they walked down a narrow alley and entered someone's apartment. It was a large, loft-like place. Someone was blasting reggae in the dark main living space that had no furniture apart from some dark shapes pushed against the walls and an old upright piano that had seen better days. There were lit candles on windowsills and on top of the old piano set on tea saucers. The blond Slovak guys were now kissing in the middle of the darkened room, and Hannah was walking around with a bottle of Stoli in one hand and a zip-lock bag full of tablets in the other. She had a tablet on the tip of her tongue, flickering it around for all to see.
Hannah approached Alex, flanked by the pair of blond Slovak girls who were grinning like it was the funniest thing they'd seen that week.
"Try this," Hannah said, "While it's still legal."
One of the Slovak girls kissed Hannah and fished the tablet out of her mouth. She then turned to Alex and French kissed him deeply, pushing the pill down his throat. Alex could feel the raspiness of the ecstasy tablet on her warm tongue.
"Come on, Alex, don't be shy," he heard Hannah say over the reggae. "I know that guys like you like to be pinned down and shown who's boss once in a while."
The reggae melded into chill-out techno. Someone lit more candles, shoving them into recesses and shelves as people began to undress until only flickering tongues of fire illuminated the naked bodies standing in the middle of the room. Alex kissed the Slovak girl until he couldn't feel his tongue anymore. The Slovak girl was taller than Hannah and had soft curls of blond hair. She was chunky and lovely in that grain-fed Eastern European way.
Alex could hear Hannah moaning in ecstasy across the flickering darkness. She was lying on the floor next to a fireplace filled with burning candles while the other Slovak girl was going down on her. Alex felt as if he was floating above himself. The other Slovak girl was eating Hannah out as if her life depended on it, and the two blond Slovak guys were now doing it doggy style right in the middle of the living room as people cheered them on.
Alex suddenly realized that the chunky Slovak girl that couldn't speak English was giving him a blow job. Alex searched for Hannah's face in the dim candlelight, he longed for her, and only the image of Hannah's curly jet-black bush, contrasting against her pale white skin, kept him hard as he felt himself being sucked into the anonymous Slovak girl's mouth.
Alex finally found Hannah's face across the room and focused intensively on her quivering, deep black eyebrows as she grabbed her Slovak girlfriend's head in a death grip between her legs. Alex felt that Hannah had to know that they were both coming together, gushing into other people, but somehow still focused on each other's faces. It was a kind of sexual telepathy, a synchronized mutual orgasm across a room.
Hannah's girlfriend was now giggling and greedily lapping her final wetness, but Alex felt stupid and spent, standing above his blond stranger.
"Don't take it personally," Hannah said right after her Slovak girlfriend moved up to her face to reward her with a juicy French kiss. "Sex is a lot better with strangers than among friends. Nothing like friendship to kill hot sex...believe me, I know..."
Alex felt guiltily naked and exhausted and, like Adam, suddenly ashamed of his nakedness, but his blond Slovak girl seemed to want more. There was a moan from the middle of the room. The blond Slovak boys were coming too. People giggled and applauded as one of the blond guys performed a French pullout on the other guy's back.
"Bravo, Bravo!" Hannah applauded the two guy's performance as she continued to pet her girlfriend on the floor lovingly. Alex's Slovak girl finally got the hint, dressed up, and left, only to reappear moments later to spoon-feed him a chocolate cake from the kitchen.
"Ashcake," she said as she stuffed Alex with mouthfuls and licked off the chocolate melting on his lips.
"Ash cake?" Alex asked, puzzled.
"Yes... ashake." the Slovak girl repeated with a grin.
It took a while before Alex caught up.
"Hash cake, you mean?"
"Yes, ashcake," the girl responded.
It was the last thing he remembered before total blackness.
Alex didn't know how much time had passed. He'd awoken abruptly from a dream of candles and orgies. The world was moving uncontrollably like a rewinding film. He was shivering, vomiting, and in the back seat of a car.
He could hear Hannah's voice. Cold, metallic, and aggressive, like an old radio broadcast.
"We don't look after lightweights here. You have to fend for yourself now. Welcome to capitalism!"
A blast of cold air greeted him as he was thrown out of the car. Dizziness turned to pain as he rolled over the hard cobblestones. The car skidded away—a black Skoda. When Alex got to his feet, all he could see was a set of mechanical stairs churning in the cold pre-dawn. They led into the nether lands of a Prague subway station. The automatic stairs churned sadly downwards, and Alex had no idea where or when they would spit him out again.
Somehow the subway and then a tram delivered him back to his block of Soviet-era flat. He crashed on the couch until exited noises awoke him. He was nursing the worst hangover, but the image on the TV and the cries of his hosts made no mistake. The World Trade Center towers were toppling, and Alex’s life would never be the same again.