“Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize. It’s time for Mambo number… six.”
The customer service in the pub has the air of a war crime trial. When I inquire whether there are any free tables the waitress asks me if I’m blind. The bartender stops just short of throwing the beer at me.
I sit as far away from him as I can, but even from across the room his eyes watch me with utter contempt. I feel far from welcome but the beer is delicious and the food prices aren’t as bad as in the city center.
It’s a hot day, but it’s cool underground. Much like all the other drinking establishments in Prague, the pub is beneath street level. Vintage beer advertisements from the fifties hang from the centuries old stone and on the far side of the bar, next to a foosball machine, sits a beat-up jukebox.
It’s lights flash on and off, as if inviting me to check what’s inside.
I order the fried cheese and another beer. The waitress audibly sighs when I choose French fries as my side, but my request for another beer is taken in better spirits. The food arrives twenty minutes later and I don’t regret my order. There’s something heavenly in the combination of Pilsner, cheap cheese and potatoes.
As my mind grows sluggish with the approaching food coma, my eyes drift back to the jukebox. The lights flash from the edges of the machine to its center.
The jukebox beckons and I consider its mystery.
The jukebox is digital, but it’s still a relic. Islands of dead pixels stretch across the smudged screen and the music selection is provided in garish green text on a puke yellow background.
The lights of the jukebox start to flicker faster.
The mystery of its contents is far too alluring to be left alone.
Before I get up, however, a bespectacled man with a pony tail walks over to the machine. His large flannel frame blocks out the screen and obscures his music choice, but it does not stay a mystery for long.
The Boys are Back in Town, by Thin Lizzy.
He struts over to his group of friends, keeping in beat with the guitar. They greet him with smiles and shot glasses of bright green liquid. They take their medicine and grimace and laugh, yet before the song finishes the group descends into quiet conversation.
I wait for the song to finish so that I can explore the jukebox myself, yet it doesn’t. Just as the song starts to fade out, the boys return to town once more. The encore of the song visibly irritates both the man with the pony tail and his friends. Before the second chorus is reached, the boys square up their bill and head upstairs.
I feel like I’m about to burst, but I still chase the few chunks of once-molten cheese around my plate and follow them up with more beer. As I chew, my eyes can’t help to wander towards the jukebox.
The lights flash to the rhythm of the guitar solo and grow progressively brighter. Then, with the last few reminders that the boys are, in fact, in town, the music starts to fade and so do the lights. Before I have a chance to get up and see what treasure troves this Central European music box might hold, however, the guitar kicks in again.
The boys are back in town, in case you weren’t paying attention the first two times.
I wonder and worry whether the song was ordered three times for good measure or whether the pub will forever be stuck in an endless loop of discussing the comings and goings of the titular boys.
Before I manage to get too deep into my thoughts, however, the gruff bartender approaches my table. He lets loose a torrent of sharp consonants that sound like a threat. I apologize and tell him I only speak English. With a growl he grabs my menu, opens it up and presses his thumb against it as if he were squishing a bug.
‘Heppy hour,’ he grunts, pointing to a section of the menu. ‘Ebsinth. Fifty koruna.’
Happy Hour seems to be scheduled for fifteen minutes at 90-minute intervals starting at six pm. I see no mention of absinthe, but the longer I look at the paper the more irritated the bartender becomes. He waves around a label-less bottle of bright green liquid and watches me with a stare that one would reserve for a man refusing a parachute in the midst of a plane crash.
Fifty knowns is just about two bucks and the green liquid looks exotic enough. I nod and the bartender wastes no pleasantries pouring me a shot.
For the price, I expect a thimble. The shot glass the bartender produces is bigger than anything I would get back home. When I remark on this, he hisses something in Czech and then retreats back to the bar from where he stares at me as if I’d done irreparable harm to his family.
The glass smells of harmless mint, but I’ve read enough about absinthe to know the drink isn’t harmless. The jukebox blasting Thin Lizzy implores me to let loose, yet the thought of passing out on the street on a foreign continent gives me pause. I find myself stuck in an endless cycle of smelling the shot glass and putting it back on the table. From across the bar the jukebox goes dark and lights up once again.
The boys are back in town.
‘It’s not absinthe, don’t worry,’ a voice comes from the table next to me. For the first time since I arrived in Prague, I see a smile. ‘It’s Zelena,’ she says. ‘Literally means green in Czech. Cheap peppermint schnapps. We tell tourists its absinthe so they believe they’re good at drinking.’
She has her own shot glass filled with a similar hue of liquor. She teaches me how to say cheers in Czech and, on my third attempt, she finds my pronunciation acceptable. The drink tastes like Listerine cut with cheap vodka.
The face I make after downing it makes her laugh.
Her name is Maya. She’s a local and a tour guide to boot. She’s in the pub for the same reason I am — fried food and pilsner.
‘They have the best cheese in town here,’ she says. ‘Loads of nicer restaurants have cheese on the menu, but they use good cheese. You don’t want to fry good cheese. Tastes weird. You want cheapest of the cheap. Eidam. That’s where the secret is. Cheap food should be made with cheap ingredients.’
Just as she finishes her thought, Thin Lizzy fades off on the jukebox. When the boys make their fourth triumphant return, I’m about to comment on it — yet before I get a word out Maya raps her knuckles on the table and gets up. She saunters over to the jukebox, delivers an elegant kick to its side and the music stops.
By the time Maya returns to the table the jukebox is belting out a different song. Immediately, I recognize the twangy baseline of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made for Walkin’ but the lyrics are foreign. And harsher.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘Boots Against Love, Yvonne Přenosilová, 1966,’ Maya says, tapping her sneakers against the table in rhythm. ‘We were behind the Iron Curtain for a good 40 years, but in the sixties there was a brief moment of liberalization when music from the West came in. Prague spring, we call it. Then in ’68 our comrades to the East sent half a million troops and a couple thousand tanks to change our mind. They called it a mission of brotherly assistance. A special military operation in modern parlance, if you will.’
The waitress comes by our table. I order another beer and Maya orders the fried cheese. She chooses the baked potatoes over French fries, yet the waitress still attends to us as if we were convicted of crimes against humanity.
Once the oppressive air of the Czech service industry leaves our table, I focus in on the strange, gruff, consonant filled version of Nancy Sinatra’s hit.
‘Are the lyrics the same as the original?’ I ask.
“He tells me he has something for me again,
And that something is apparently love,
I don’t want any love in my home though, no,
All it brings is sadness and strife,
I have these boots against love, and they protect their miss,
One of these days these boots are gonna stomp it all to bits,”
‘Different message,’ I say.
‘Is it?’ she asks. ‘I guess we’re just less romantic.’
The waitress comes back with two beers and, after about fifteen minutes, she returns with Maya’s fried cheese. All the while Boots Against Love keeps repeating on the jukebox over and over again. By then, however, the music isn’t a bother.
It’s simply background ambience to a fascinating history lesson.
With the gusto of a well-paid lecturer, Maya tells me about the Iron curtain and how the underground music scene behind it operated. She tells me about bone LPs and The Plastic People of The Universe and how The Scorpions took Moscow by storm. The pub itself isn’t without history either. In the fifteenth century it used to serve as a grain storage and, after the ‘68 invasion and the ’69 riots it was used for practice by all sorts of underground bands.
It wasn’t until 2001 that some enterprising Italian bought the building and established a traditional Czech pub.
From across the bar, as Maya takes breaks from talking to chew her food, the jukebox still beckons. Even as a smokey version of Nancy Sinatra sings songs about stomping on hearts— I can see the jukebox beckoning me closer. The machine’s flickering bulbs challenge me to see what other rare tracks I can find in its catalogue. The jukebox’s lights aren’t any match for Maya though.
She quickly gains my full attention.
It’s hands down the most historical bathroom I’ve ever been in, but it smells like any dive back home. From the ancient stone walls hang even more vintage beer advertisements and at the bottom of each urinal there sits a plastic toy turtle.
DO NOT STEAL THE TURTLES, reads a sign solely written in English.
For a moment I wonder whether we exist in a godless universe, but then my mind wanders once more. In the ancient stone, not too far from the sign, there’s a scratched-out message. At first, I feel as if I had stumbled upon a message centuries old, but on closer inspection I realize the message is no older than 1999.
Scratched deep into the stone by key or nail it reads:
Mambo Number 6
When I get back, I offer to pay for both Maya’s dinner and the two fresh beers on the table.She doesn’t stop me. In thanks, she pulls up a YouTube video of another cover.
A rendition of Jay-Z’s New York where the big apple is replaced by Ostrava — a city which, according to Maya, was known as the ‘Iron heart of the republic’ before the revolution.
Then, she pulls up another video. This time, it’s a cover of The House of The Rising Sun by communism’s answer to Frank Sinatra — Karel Gott. The operatic notes are far too much for me, but Maya starts listing through plenty of other covers while talking about how Western music would seep into Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.
‘Any cool covers of more recent stuff?’ I ask.
‘There was a lot of rap that would lift beats wholesale back in the early 2000s,’ she says, typing something into the search bar.
‘What about nineties music?’
Maya’s brow furrows in thought. From the other side of the pub Yvonne Přenosilová orders her anti-love boots to march and the trumpets kick in, again.
The words leave my mouth with little thought:
‘Something like Mambo Number 6 maybe?’
The trumpets fade off at the jukebox. I expect them to return, but they do not. The music fades and all we are left with is the drunken chatter around us and the clinking of glasses.
‘What?’
‘Mambo Number 5,’ I say, trying to pull the melody from the ether. The shot of green in my stomach catches up with me and bars my mind of memory. ‘There was a song called Mambo Number 5 in the 90s, thought a Czech version of that song could be called Mambo Number —’
‘No. There is no song like that.’
All the excitement has been drained from Maya’s face. I am no longer an audience to be entertained. I’m just some guy in a bar. She picks up her phone and tells me that she might have to go help out on a tour that’s starting in fifteen minutes. With three swift gulps she empties most of her beer and leaves but a couple of sips. I know she’ll be gone if I don’t say something.
‘Video Killed The Radio Star?’
The sides of her mouth twitch. Without a word Maya gets up and jogs over to the jukebox. The machine’s lights flicker without purpose but once she touches it, they calm. Soon enough they shine to the rhythm of a familiar piano.
“So I invite you home, but first I have to say,
I have just four walls and there is nothing in the way,
Not even television, really I don’t have anything,
So all we have left, ou-ah, ou-ah!
Is to stare into the darkness, ou-ah, ou-ah!”
‘We call it, The Radio Can Play Us Songs in The Dark. Different message, I guess,’ she says.
The opportunity for another historical factoid warms Maya up, but before our conversation has a chance to resume, a human storm cloud descends on our table.
‘Heppy hour!’ the bartender barks, waving around the label-less bottle and shot glasses. ‘Ebsinthe!’
To the utter irritation of the man, Maya looks down at her phone. She rattles off a message and then clicks it shut. ‘I hope work can manage without me,’ she tells me.
‘My treat,’ I say.
‘I assumed it was,’ she replies.
The air is cleared of any memory of Mambo Number 5 and is replaced with an ever-repeating rendition of The Radio Can Play Us Songs in The Dark. We drink and talk and mingle with the other guests of the bar. My lonesome dinner quickly turns into a night of shots and foosball and cultural exchange. On the back of alcohol and good company, I forget all my earthly worries and lose all track of time. It’s not until I’m back in the ancient bathroom that I think back to that one hit wonder.
Mambo Number 6
The scratched-out message taunts me as I piss on the plastic turtle in the urinal. Based on Maya’s initial reaction to the mentioning of the song, I promise myself I won’t ask about it again.
I am confident I’ll be able to avoid the topic, but the confidence stems solely from my blood alcohol content. Five minutes after I return to the table, I can’t help but to ask about Mambo Number 6.
She does not take kindly to the second mention of the song. When I tell her that the title is scratched out in the men’s bathroom her face softens though. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘There is a song called Mambo Number 6, from 2001. I just don’t like talking about it.’
‘Why not?’ I ask.
She sighs and gets up. ‘I need a cigarette,’ Maya finally says.
‘Can I come?’
I have no illusions about my sobriety, but it isn’t until the night air reaches my lungs that I realize I’ve completely lost track of how much I drank. I start to consider retreating back to my hotel and calling it a night, but Maya’s cigarette smoke lures me into more decadence.
Even though I don’t smoke, I ask Maya for a cigarette. Without a word, she gives me one.
‘I really love talking about our history, music especially. You might have noticed,’ she says, breaking the silence. ‘But talking about that song… I don’t like the history behind it. It scares me.’
There are streetlights around us, yet they scarcely reach out into the darkness. In an island of light not far from us stand three burly men smoking. They do not speak. Even Maya holds her silence in the quiet night. She avoids my gaze for almost half of her cigarette, but finally, with a sigh, she tells me the story I have been starving for.
‘There used to be a Slovak musician. Lukáš Benga, they called him. Not famous before the wall fell and not famous after. Not a particularly good musician, by all accounts. He used to practice down there though.’ She points her cigarette to the pub at our feet.
Past the window I catch the hateful eyes of the waitress. She looks as if she’s about to spit at the floor in disgust, but instead she just frowns at me and goes back to carrying beers.
‘He used to practice down there and it’s because of him that the place got turned into a pub.
‘Benga had a cover band, Papagáj — parrot in English. Not a very good band. Papagáj broke up around 2000 and the man was not seen for a long time. In 2001, however, he would return to this place to record his magnum opus. That was the last time he was ever heard of or seen again.’
‘Mambo Number 6?’
She nods. ‘He hired ten trumpet players. No drums. No other vocals. No one but him and the ten trumpet players. They started playing at around midnight. By one o’clock they say this street was filled with police cars and ambulances. Three of the trumpet players died on the spot of heart attacks. The other seven survived, but barely. Benga was never found.’
‘But the song got recorded?’
She nods.
‘Did you ever hear it?’
Maya takes a long puff of her cigarette and looks up towards the dark skies as if searching for an answer.
‘No,’ she finally says. ‘I researched the lyrics for a university paper once though. That was enough. That song is cursed.’
‘What was the song about?’
Maya shakes her head as if she was trying to get rid of the thought all together. ‘No,’ she says.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. Bad things happen when that song plays. You asked your questions and I answered them. Can we just leave it be?’
‘Of course,’ I say. The moment the words leave my lips, however, my drunken brain returns a long-lost query.
The long-lost tune of Mambo Number 5 fills my ears and it takes all my effort to not hum it.
For a moment I fear that the liquor has robbed me of even that shred of self-control — but before I ruin the moment Maya speaks again.
‘Where were you from again?’ she asks, putting out her cigarette against the back of her shoe.
‘America,’ I say, stubbing out mine.
‘I knew that, but where in America?’
‘I’ve moved around a lot, but I live in Virginia Beach right now.’
‘Ah, country roads?’
I think to tell her that the distance between where I live and the topic of the John Denver song is about the length of her entire country, but I don’t. I just nod and follow her downstairs into the pub.
‘Heppy hour!’ the bartender shouts threateningly the moment we cross his sight. ‘Ebsinth!’
He does not ask. He just pours.
Maya doesn’t resist the shot and neither do I. The melody of Mambo Number 5 in my head is drowning out any semblance of internal monologue and I find my steps lacking coordination — but I do not resist.
I fear the bartender might hit me if I do and I fear disappointing Maya even more.
‘I’d wager it was hands down the most popular cover we had,’ she says, once the glass of green is empty. ‘It’s called Lead Me On, Road of Mine. No mention of West Virginia, naturally.’
‘Understandable,’ I say, feeling the liquor settle in my stomach.
‘From all the Bolshevik era songs though, I find it the most fascinating. It’s a strange pick to cover granted the, uh, circumstances. Really wonder what was going through the head of the bureaucrat who approved the lyrics.’
‘What are the lyrics?’ I ask, trying not to think of Mambo Number 5.
She smiles and grabs my hand and leads me to the jukebox.
The pub is nearly empty. There’s only a few stragglers left sorting out their bill with the perpetually angry staff. I know that if I play my cards right, I might end up going home with Maya — yet my mind is far too full of trumpets to think straight.
The machine didn’t look to be in good shape from across the bar, but being close to it cements its status as a relic of history. The plastic of the machine is so scratched barely any of its original paint remains.
Beneath the dashboard, like stalactites in some primordial cavern, sit chunks of long-chewed gum the color of picked bone. Even the lights of the machine, which seemed so alluring from a distance, flicker with a terminal sluggishness.
Without letting go of my hand, Maya presses a 20 krown coin into the machine and taps out the first couple of letters of the song.
Album art of a smiling man laying on the grass in a dress shirt, corduroy pants and loafers flashes up on the screen. The jukebox tries to remind me of my home far away, but my heart is elsewhere.
“Lead me on, road o’ mine,
Lead me on, even I,
Where you end, that’s where I want to be,
Lead me on, road o’ mine,”
I smile at Maya’s translation but I’m barely cognizant of it. My soul is seized with liquor and mambo.
‘Wanna sit?’ she asks, nudging me back towards our table.
‘I, uhhh…’ The jukebox shines in rhythm to the foreign John Denver knockoff, but another song plays in my heart. ‘Mind if I check what else is on this jukebox? I’ve been eyeing it all night.’
‘Oh, sure. I’ll just pop to the bathroom.’
She lets go of my hand.
Somewhere deep inside I am certain that it’s the last time she will ever hold it.
It’s not until my fingers hover over the dashboard that I realize I can’t see straight. For an instant I consider abandoning my search and going back to the table or, better yet, retreating back to my hotel room to get a proper night’s sleep and plenty of water.
Even as the thought slurs across my mind I know that I cannot resist. I know there’s only one way to get rid of the trumpets in my ears.
I press M and then A and then M again and then B.
I have to squint my eyes to see the results. There’s two songs listed. Mambo Number 5 and something much more interesting. I fish out a handful of change and squint at my palm. I almost put the 20 in, but then I remember Maya.
I remember her reaction to me even mentioning Mambo Number 6. I am far too drunk to be a functioning adult, but I’m sober enough to know that nothing good will come of me playing that song.
The water in the bathroom is luke warm and tastes off, but splashing it on my face centres me. I decide I’ll leave the jukebox play knock-off Denver and leave the mystery of Mambo to another night. I stare into the mirror and promise myself I’ll follow through.
‘Looks like they’ll be closing soon,’ she says, finishing off her beer. ‘You want to go… somewhere else?’
‘They have Mambo Number 6 on the jukebox.’ The moment the words leave my lips I drive my nails into my palms and bite the edge of my cheek. I regret every single shot of Zelena I took.
All the lust and liquor leaves her eyes. She looks at me no different than the bartender or waitress.
‘Do not — under any circumstance — play Mambo Number 6 on the jukebox.’
Perhaps my parents didn’t discipline me enough. Perhaps they disciplined me too much. Either way, I find it difficult to not do something after being explicitly told not to. If I am drunk, that difficult task becomes impossible.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say as I take the twenty krown coin out of my pocket.
She blocks my way. At first, she simply positions her body between me and the jukebox, but when I walk around her she grabs my shoulder. Maya might be smarter than me, but she’s not stronger. I wrestle free and lean up against the dashboard.
As I struggle to fit the coin into the machine she pleads with me once more.
‘Please,’ she says. ‘This is for your own good. That song is cursed.’
From behind the bar, I see the bartender smiling at me. When our eyes meet, he winks.
Maya and me are the last patrons at the bar.
‘Sorry Maya,’ I say, as I slide the coin into the machine. ‘I gotta.’
“Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize. It’s time for Mambo Number… six.”
Without a word, Maya turns on her heel and runs up the stairs. Before the baseline of the song starts, she is out of the pub.
I am alone.
I am alone with two grinning pub employees who watch me with devilish grins.
The tune that comes from the jukebox is familiar, but the voice that accompanies it seems to have come from a wholly different world. It sounds tired and angry and it pronounces each word of the consonant filled lyrics with utter hatred.
The names that Lukáš Benga lists into the ether are not names of lovers. They are names of forbidden gods, of horrid cosmic entities, of things the mortal mind cannot comprehend. Though I do not understand the language in which Mambo Number 6 is performed, the foreign words brew a primordial fear within my stomach.
The music coming from the jukebox is inherently evil. Maya was right.
As the song picks up in tempo, both the bartender and the waitress start to dance. They pump their arms in the air, hitting the light fixtures. They kick their legs to the sides, overturning the chairs. They sing along to the incomprehensible lyrics with screaming zeal.
They dance towards me, insisting I join their horrid ritual.
Though I lack balance, I manage to ascend three steps up towards the surface. Three steps, however, is as far as I get. As I reach for the fourth, as I feel the gentle caress of the cold night air on my face — Lukáš Benga breaks the stream of rasping Slavic words with a single phrase I understand:
“The Trumpets!”
On the back of his horrid performance, as if forged in the raw syllables of his words — comes a booming dark sound which no instrument can make. My knees turn weak and I come tumbling down towards the spinning fists of the bar staff.
With what I momentarily believe is sheer luck, I manage to dodge the blows and squeeze myself into the door of the men’s bathroom. I breathe a sigh of relief. For a mere second, I believe I am safe.
With my second breath, however, I realize I am trapped.
The ancient windowless room smells like piss. The once-grumpy Czechs are beating down on the sole door with energetic frenzy and joyous screams. Only the plastic toy turtles peeking out of the urinals stand witness to my nightmarish ensnarement. From the wall the scratched-out words in worn stone taunt me.
Mambo Number 6.
Maya was right. Nothing good can come of that song being mentioned.
When the horrid music winds down, so does the banging on the door. In my drunkenness, I lose all ability at pattern recognition. For a moment, for a mere collection of seconds — I convince myself that the song will not repeat.
It repeats. Mambo Number 6 repeats and as Lukáš Benga wails his haunting song, the banging on the door resumes with renewed fervor. I feel far from well, yet when I hear the terrible call of the trumpets — I drop to my knees once more.
There’s a sharp pain in my chest.
There’s a sharp pain in my chest and I regret starting off my evening with melted cheese.