Fail File: A Guinness at The James Joyce in Prague
Blowing up you life doesn't always work how you think.
Thought we’d start a new bucket. Fail File is good for a Sunday read I think, because perhaps you start the week thinking about how to win your next six days. That’s a good way to combat the Sunday Scaries, sure, though I don’t mind looking back and visiting some of the shit that didn’t work out. But then kinda did. Fail File is about lessons learned and new perspective, because I don’t know what else failing is.
I told this story last week to a friend who was uprooting her life and moving to another city.
Bartending after college meant I was not living up to my “full potential” as so decreed by my brilliant mother and my college loans. I’d had a job at an advertising agency, but a downswing meant the last hired were the first fired. So not a career, just a blip on the resume.
I’m not sure of the exact trigger that made me decide to move to Prague in the Czech Republic, I just knew a lot of people were doing that in the late 90’s. I had taken the GRE for English to consider going to grad school, dreaming about a writing program. But that seemed like a reach and did I really want to take on more loans to sit in a room with other writers and talk about writing? Even the movie versions of this scenario gave me the ick.
There was no boyfriend, just hilarious and fun one night stands, and I loved the loose and counter-culture friendships I was gathering in the restaurant industry, but in truth: I was lost. I couldn’t find myself in any of the things I was doing. I could, however, recognize that there was an invitation to slowly slide forward in this manner and a life would be cobbled as such.
So I had to blow it all up.
Hence, Prague. Bohemia called, and I pictured myself in cafes with tiny coffees, reading and writing with friends from other countries. Oh yes, the expat life for me! I would start a literary journal. I actually told people that. That I would plonk myself down in a completely foreign country and found a literary journal (the chutzpah of that girl!!)
I told my roomies that I was moving out of the Uptown apartment, and moved back into my mom’s basement to save up money. I took on temp jobs and started learning Czech while doing mindless data entry at United Health Care. Through church friends we found a family just outside of Prague (or Praha as I had started annoyingly calling it) who would give me a room in their small apartment while I got on my feet. It was all clicking, everything was moving into place.
Did anyone really ask me: what the hell are you thinking?? I don’t know! I was so sure that it was the right thing. I think everyone else was also a bit seduced by my dream, living vicariously as they clocked into their entry-level jobs. Cheering me on was a small way they could stick it to the grind they were already committing to.
I sold my Jeep. My favorite thing in the world, and I just cashed her in.
There were huge goodbyes, everyone at the restaurant gave me a big chunk of their tips one night. I was sent off royally by my pack of friends at the airport, when you could still be at the gate. Just before getting on the plane, I stood on a chair and raised a toast to my friends: Sweet dreams are made of these, who am I to disagree, I’ll travel the world and the seven seas, everybody’s looking for something. (def a bit cringe now, yeah?)
And I left.
Reminder, dear reader that there were no cell phones at this time. No texts of encouragement, no checking in, no social media to record my life for others. I was off the grid for everyone I knew.
Praha was dark and mysterious and cold. It was January, 1997. The smell of cold city air tinged with heating oil will forever bring me back to those winding streets. The family I stayed with was sweet, they told me I could shower everyday if I wanted to and they enjoyed practicing their english on me. We ate so much cabbage in their brutalist soviet era apartment building which looked like a prison on the outside, but was warmly lit from within.
I learned the train system, I found the expat bars, I bought Kafka in a cramped bookstore that had a shiny embossed urn filled with cinnamon coffee in the corner. I was terrified daily. I was lonely. I was still lost, just on more picturesque cobblestone streets.
For my 26th birthday, I took the train to Vienna. Wandering around the city that was built by music, winged buttresses, small cakes, and creativity, I felt more grounded. In a cafe I sat next to two men who were speaking German, and I eavesdropped lightly, pretending I was a part of their friendship. I think they knew, and allowed me that lonely comfort.
On the train back, I met a guy who was working for one of the expat newspapers. He said they were always looking for people to review clubs or restaurants if I could write. I followed him back to the offices, got an assignment and a stipend and began my new life.
I went to a club, found it great, talked with a guy in a Packers shirt, lightly insulted a French woman by accident, and wrote up a little thing at an internet cafe.
I was a writer.
So buoyed by this, I called an agency about renting an apartment and went to look at one in the very old Vyšehrad neighborhood. It had yellow walls and was filled with light, the windows went all the way to the ceiling. I can still hear the hardwood floors creak and smell the cabbage of the neighbors if I try. The agent said I had to get a work visa before she could rent to me, so I popped off to the American/Czech agency office to work the process.
Turns out.
At the time, the Czech Republic was still quite new in their democracy. It had really only been four years since it had thrown off its former Czechoslovakia garb in favor of independence. One of the reasons people were traveling there was because of its openness and lack of rigidity. Things were still gelling. Rules were changing, often.
For instance, once you’ve accepted payment for a job without a work visa in place, you are in violation of your visitor visa. And you cannot get a work visa for at least a year. Even though the payment was only a stipend to help get you into a club and buy a drink so that you can insult a French woman and write a review. Maybe this wasn’t a violation before, but it was on that day.
I was invited to stay in the country as a tourist and keep spending my money, but I would not be allowed to work there.
I was dejected, and just walked and walked and walked. I turned down an alleyway and found a miracle, which is also known as an Irish pub. The James Joyce had bright and welcoming yellow walls, like the apartment I would never live in.
A Guinness later, I made peace with the city. It would not be here where I would be created. I could stay and try to work around the system, I could pull up stakes and try my luck in another country, or I could head home with my tail tucked.
Make no mistake, the weight of everyone else’s expectations was enormous. I had started writing a one-woman show that they had already bought tickets for. How could I go home having failed all of us? But, how could I stay and burn though my savings with no plan, no resources, no help? At 26 I wasn’t looking to get more lost, I’d already been wandering for years.
So I went home. To my mom’s basement again. I used the money I had left to buy a car and I started calling friends to let them know I was back. It hurt.
The restaurant didn’t have my bar job open anymore, but they offered to let me run the door as a floor lead. As it happened, they were about to launch into growth mode. Would I go to Milwaukee and help train the staff for the opening?
In that next year, I would move into my first solo apartment, meet my future husband, and move into the restaurant’s corporate office as the Training Coordinator for the expansion of Buca di Beppo. I started traveling the country, opening restaurants, eating in other cities, and watching the American food landscape blossom under chef culture.
Obviously, I would not have had this amazing food life and these amazing kids had I stayed in Prague. But I don’t think I would have them or the confidence to write either had I not gone and blown my life up. It needed the reset.
And perhaps I needed the humility, because as this chaotic life rolls, the most essential lesson for me has been: you really can’t control anything but the way you see this one life.
It’s the one I’m still learning.
If you have a Fail File that you would want to write about, send me a note under the Submissions tab!
SIDEBAR // On this past Friday night, a flock of broads and I left a refined dinner to hunker down for one more drink at Cuzzy’s, a dive bar in Minneapolis. It’s as welcoming as an Irish Bar in any foreign country and the walls are taped with dollars and dreams.
I ordered a beer and a bump of Jameson whiskey. I nudged my friend Christine to sip the Jameson to go with her sadly lonely beer, and she obliged. She told me it reminded her of the bar she was in recently. She said that she and her Jeff had been on a trip and it was kind of drizzly and gross outside, depressing. They’d wandered into an Irish bar and it ended up being the best decision of the trip. They’d met the owner, they made friends, all was not lost for them.
Me: Wait, you guys were in Prague recently, was that where?
C: Yeah!
Me: Is there any chance you remember the name of the bar?
C: It was like James something.
Me: The James Joyce maybe?
C: I think so! (And we begin to Google like mad to discover it was The James Joyce.)
Me: You’re going to love reading Pickle on Sunday.
What's weird is that I stayed in the apartment above the yellow James Joyce Irish bar in Prague last July. It's so funny how life works out sometimes, and we have never discussed that place. We would cruise around the city and always end up for a Jameson nightcap at the James Joyce, where we met the best people. Travel is a mind expander. Thanks for making so much of mine possible as my work wife.😉🥰
I remember the lovely BVH casually mentioning you were moving to Prague at our weekly choir practice. She looked pretty confident that you would figure it all out no matter what happened. And you did in spades. What a great story! P.S. Glad you came back❤️