My Generation 1. – 12.

MY GENERATION

In 1964 my life changed. Until then I had been a well-combed, hard-working, gentle little boy. All day
long I spent my time with books and maps. I was going to be an archaeologist. From then on, all I
cared about was beat music, friends, girls, long hair and jeans. I was 12 years old.

I was living with my grandparents in a hospital’s servants' flat in a basement on Üllői Street in the
eighth district of Budapest. My grandfather was a porter there. My friends were the children of
hospital officers, doctors, surgeons and nurses. We used to hang out in the clinic gardens, in this
metropolitan oasis, near Szigony Street, the Botanical Garden, the Alfa cinema, the Orczy Garden, the
Church of Eternal Adoration, the Nagyvárad square and the FTC football ground. We played football
on the grass under the park's ancient plane trees, flooded the tennis courts and played ice hockey on
them, explored the labyrinthine dark tunnels of the tunnel system connecting the hospital buildings,
and climbed over to the neighbouring Botanical Garden. At that time, gardeners were tending the
hospital’s garden, mowing, watering, planting dahlias and all manner of other ornamental flowers. I
can still smell in my nose the fresh water and fresh cut grass in the air.

One early spring afternoon in '64, tired from a school field trip, we were sitting on our trunk bench:
Tibi Kohuth, Balázs Kozma, Józsi Takács and me. We were waiting for our spiritual mentor, Géza
Lőrincz, then already a university student, who came daily with his usual sex education lecture,
carrying under his arm the bible: the forbidden book of Fritz Kahn: The School of Love. That day
things were different. As he arrived, he hung his transistor radio on an old sycamore tree and played
a strange song of irresistible power, which we had never heard before. All Géza said was: It's a new
Beatles song called "She Loves You". It was magical, like nothing I'd ever heard before. We didn't
even dare to ask what „Beatles” was. And what „She Loves You” meant.

The first Beatles album, "Love Me Do", was released in London in December 1962, and the „Liverpool
sound” reached Eastern Europe by the end of 1963 and early 1964.

Then, day after day, the overwhelming flood of music reached us, music was everywhere, rock & roll,
beat bands, rock bands, records smuggled in from abroad, jeans, rock magazines, photographs,
posters of band members with shoulder-length hair, in coloured shirts, trapeze, parachute or bell-
bottom trousers, pointed toe or trainer shoes, moccasins, etc., started to swirl.

All this was the exact opposite of what we had been surrounded by: cropped hair, white nylon shirt,
trousers that were baggy on top and tapered down (but not baggy!), old style shoes, old style music,
Communist Party, young Communist Association, Red Workers Guard, cabaret, ice dancing, Operett
Theatre.

Back then, the world was not as free as it is today. The bands wore suits, white shirts and ties, and
the audience was only allowed in as such. Girls were not allowed to wear miniskirts.
But we didn't feel or understand the weight of the dictatorship of the Kádár regime. We were
children.

We looked down on the youth leaders, the pioneer movement, the marchers, the Young Communist
Association (KISZ, which we called ”the Monkees”) the Fourth of April, and the Seventh of November,
the communist holidays.

The memory of the revolution flickered fainter and fainter. There were only a few whispers of
executions and prisons full of political prisoners. The hatred of power, of the bigwigs and of the
police was deep inside us.

Half my family emigrated. My mother was an actress in Győr in 1956. In 1957 she was sentenced to
two years in prison for incitement. Her crime was to tear up her membership book at the theatre
communist party meeting in the spring of 1957. Her best friend, the communist Gábor Földes, was
executed for trying to save the mass murdering state defenders in Mosonmagyaróvár from the
justified wrath of the people. Something like this.

We hated the world of the sixties, with its white nylon shirts, crombic jackets, nylon socks, alpaca
suits and „rubber” ties. We tried to get out of this society before it sucked us in.

We developed - or rather, borrowed from Salinger's hero - our own style of long hair, sunglasses,
leather jacket, jeans, trainers. These external, distinctive features were needed to express both
belonging to each other and difference from the official society.

The blues was born at the end of the 19th century. The first electric guitar was played in the 1940s.
Rock & Roll exploded in the early fifties. The Rock Revolution broke out in the early sixties.

It spread like wildfire. It brought everything down in a flash. It was built from nothing. All the radio
stations were Luxembourg Radio and Free Europe Radio. In between Péter Cseke's Rock Afternoon
Rendezvous and Teenager Party, we inevitably listened to a bit of western politics

The hairdressers' shops were yawning with emptiness and we stopped going to the tailor. We
listened to songs by Animals, Searchers, Dave Clark Five, Swinging Blue Jeans and Zombies on the
shoddy vinyl records bought in the doorways of the Great Boulevard and Rákóczi Road. We cut our
own hair and sewed our own clothes. The „hurricane” coat craze was over. Nobody went to the he
dance schools to learn cha cha cha and mambo.

Beat clubs opened and new bands formed one by one: Nevada, Atlantis, Blue Star, Syconor, Echo,
Bajtala, Liversing, Atlas, Thomastic, Sankó, Gemini, Dogs, Chess - Matt, and Beat clubs opened Lajos
Street, Törekvés, Kapás Street, Kecskeméti Street, Builders' Club, Bosch, Castle Club, SOTE, „Antal
Smiling”, Páris Yard, Citadella, Ganz - Mávag, University Stage, Közgáz, Bercsényi, Danúvia, to name
but a few.
It was no longer possible to put together a pioneering team worth a damn.

The more skilful boys made a pretty good living cutting hair, sewing shirts, jackets and trousers. I
know quite a few of them who are now wealthy boutique owners. The best downtown tailors were
the „Emperor”, the Stoyan and the „Blind”. In our neighbourhood, in the VIII - IX district, the
"gentleman tailor" was the „Stammerer” in Ferenc Square. He sewed excellent trousers with Spanish
belts, parallel, trapeze or bell trousers, coated buttoned, double-breasted, wide jackets and shirts
with a collar that reached to the waist, at very reasonable prices. Sometimes he sewed a trouser only
for writing down the phonetic (as he said: 'fanatic') lyrics to a British song. He was at war with
English. He once whispered to me that the singer of Beatles was the „Lennonmcartney”. Gyuri
Miszlay, the surgeon, who couldn't afford even a botched amateur tailor, had his only sweater
tanned one hot July evening by cutting holes in it with a pair of scissors. Little did he know that he
was way ahead of his time in design and vintage.

It was a mind-boggling trick to invent for anyone who wanted to grow her hair. The most common
method was to put the hair in a high neck turtleneck and tie it up in a bun at the back. To this day I
still don't understand how some people could grow shoulder-length hair by 1963 when it takes at
least a year, and even Jagger didn't have long hair in 63.

I was later a photo-optical industrial student at a big company’s shop , also with a turtleneck and a
pony tail behind the counter. I only sold ORWO 100 film because it was in the waist-high drawer. I
didn’t dare bend down to the shelves below to other types of films, lest my ponytail untwist.

The first rock concert of my life took place as Tibi Kohuth, Balázs Kozma and myself were rushing in
the number six bus from the 8. district to Óbuda, to the Goldberger factory’s club ("Goli" Clubí) in
Lajos Street, where the band Liversing was playing. I didn't have ten forints for the entrance fee, so I
listened and watched the party from outside, clinging to the bars of the open window of the club on
the ground floor. They played Rolling Stones, Them, Animals, Zombies, Searchers, Ventures and
Pretty Things

Zsolt Szendrődi played lead guitar. Next to Béla Radics he was the best Hungarian guitarist of the
early era. If he had been born in London, he would be a star today. I don't know what role his total
neglect played in the development of his later serious mental illness.

Árpád Túri sang. He was a real front man. A character reminiscent of James Dean, with a good voice
and cool stage moves. Zsombor Homonnay played the drums. He had very long hair even then, and
shook it to the beat, much to the delight of the audience.

Through the open window, the heavy, humid air, smelling of sweat, hit me in the face. A new era had
begun in the former blue-painting manufactory of the late Baron Goldberger family of Buda.

Then, if only from the ground, I had to dig out my Saturday night ten forints. Later we went to the
Waterworks Club in Kecskemét Street, to Atlas band parties. They also played hard rock music.
Ferenc Flamm sang and played bass, Pál Makrai and Gábor Bíró (Doki) played guitar, Szekeres played
drums, and György Szabó (Goblin) played harmonica and piano. The piano was crooked because it
was missing a leg and had been replaced with a chair, but „Goblin” still played some very good blues
solos. I have never heard such a good harmonica player in a Hungarian band since. Unfortunately, he
disappeared later, loitered in pubs and gave up music altogether. He died many years ago.

Atlas parties ended with the songs „Rockers” and „Romanian Dance” in the evenings. Then the crowd
would ritualistically surround two couples who rocked out very well and clapped to the beat. The
boys had long, shoulder-length hair, the blond one was called „Rolling”, the black one „Imi”. Of the
girls, I only remember the name of „Paunch”.

That was the text of the Romanian dance: „Hey - hey motherfucker”, chorus. Once the Atlas
performed on TV, and we all watched excitedly to see if they dared to sing the original "lyrics". If I
remember correctly, a compromise was reached and we heard the song performed in a version of
"Hey – hey mother Lover".

On one occasion, the members of the band were invited to a Sunday television recording session.
The organisation was not good, the door of the club room with the iron bars was locked and they
couldn't go in to get their stuff. Bíró, the lead guitarist, went into a rage and slammed both fists
through the iron bars into the glass door. Blood was pouring from his hands. He cut everything he
could: muscles, tendons, nerve fibres. He could never play guitar again.

What was extremely difficult at first was getting jeans. The first real pair of blue jeans I ever saw were
Géza Berecz's. They were brought from Vienna by a smuggler. They were twice his size and cost a
fortune to alter. There were dozens of counterfeits, but we were very strict and critical of the jeans.
The real deal was the Levi’s with the silver zipper button and red (not orange) label. We were as
meticulous about that as we were later about beer brands.

The bands multiplied like mushrooms. I don't think there is a single able-bodied boy among my
contemporaries who hasn't been a member of a band, even for a day.

Later I was involved in forming a band, but we never got beyond two rehearsals. And I only played
once, much later, in a village in Somogy county, where, as a university student, I helped the people's
farm with the harvest. (It was usual at that time) After the first song, the members of the local band
left the podium and threw themselves on the drinks on the tables. Four of my friends („Bream” - Keki
- Béla Pokol - Szabó Kati) and I drunkenly took their place. Needless to say, alternative - repetitive
music is a Schubert song, compared to what we improvised.

The beat band from the Jázmin Street primary school in the eighth district could only play one song:
Hanky - Panky (Tommy James & the Shondells), but they could play it twenty times a night, if there
was a demand for it, and with great success. We were dancing the "everybodying" dance all night
long. (everybody dance with everybody)

Years later, at a KEX band concert in Vörösmarty Square, John Baksa, the lead singer sang the Song
„Come Back” 30 times in a row, now for fun. Playing the song once was a big joke in itself, as it was a
cheesy bubblegum song with a style that was fundamentally different from his alternative music. The
fact that they played it twice got another laugh out of the audience, some people were still smiling by
the third, but I remember the concert hall was completely empty by the tenth.

Baksa also started in a school band at the Zsigmond Móricz High School, called „Stormy Applause”
and they played quite well. Their lead guitarist – Melchior Gereben - was so shy that he played with
his back to the audience the whole time. Their chord guitar player was Mathias Fonó. His guitar was
so horribly over-excited that you couldn't hear anything else from it. Baksa was still the "manager" of
the orchestra at the time.

After primary school, I went to the Helena Zrínyi High School, but I finished the semester with only
satisfactory, as an indirect effect of the aforementioned musical revolution. My mother was then
frightened that I would not become an archaeologist, and she had me transferred to the Sigismund
Móricz high school, where she had also attended at the time when the school had the name Baár-
Madas Secondary School.

The admission was awkward, because the director immediately found the little note in my report
card that I had disturbed the Latin class with a loud belch. I told him in vain that it was actually my
school mate Wagner, and that it had been written in by mistake, but this only gave rise to further
humour.

I was even admitted to the Zrínyi with difficulty, because a friend and I had scrawled a swastika on
the wall of a house and were interrogated at the police station for half a day as dangerous nazis. Our
parents were only informed late at night.

We had no idea what was attached to this symbol, we just drew it because it was not allowed.

News of the police case spread quickly, and the next day the whole hospital garden knew that Auntie
Kéri's grandson – I - had "stolen a suitcase ". I was lucky, the incident happened a few days before my
14th birthday, but my buddy - Rudolf Ivánka - was older, so he was prosecuted.

When I was 12, Ivánka Rudolf and his brother and I formed a three-member secret opposition
"party". We also made party membership books for ourselves. Rudolf's father would have beaten us
up if he had found out about it, because he was deported to the Hortobágy desert in the 1950s
because of his aristocratic origins. In the sixties he supported his family as an electrician and haulier.
Rudolf's mother was a stocking picker. The only activity of our party consisted of trying to light the
edge of a red flag with matches in Szigony Street on 7 November, the Russian communist holyday.
We felt that we had performed a great feat.

The neighbouring Botanical Garden was one of the targets of our raids. We climbed over the fence of
the hospital garden and imagined ourselves as Boys from Paul Street. (Famous Hungarian youth
novel) On one occasion we were caught and reported to the school.
In desperation, we decided to defect to the west. Neither of us dared to admit to the other that he
did not dare to go, each of us expected the other to retreat. We left on tram number sixty-three and
continued our journey on tram fifty-six. From the Buda hills we continued on foot. At Solymár village
Joseph Takács burst into tears. So the rest of us were able to accompany him back with our heads
held high, but the plan of defection was still on our minds for a long time.

It was not for political or existential reasons. Rather, it was that you was not allowed to go out and
see the world. So many people left for good. Many of my friends.

Among the first were Kirill, Sztoján, Szekfű and Blond, later Julius Emmer, Black Brown, Alarm, Keki,
Poppy, Begger, Little Cotton, Vince, Gipsie, Silvie, „Bream”, John Baksa, Thomas Bartha, Jean, Little
Thomas, Doleviczényi, Doxa, Kernyainszky, Dóczi, Csere, Rope, Motyovszky, Little Spider, Louis Kű,
Julius Nagy, Bozsó Lia, Jona, Haselnut, Ali, Big Gabesz, among the last ones Karsai „Lung” Thomas and
Bodola George. They were in a hurry, because a few days later, on 1 of January 1989, the world
passport was introduced in Hungary. Most of the time, Imóka and George Bodola defected, three
times each. Peter once via Moscow to India.

In 1972 I was admitted to university. Until then I was sure that I would go too.

Apart from the prohibition and the sense of adventure, fear of the military was another main reason
for defection.

We did everything we could to avoid being taken away to join the army. We thought it was
unnecessary bullshit. It was. Two years stolen from our youth. I've hardly got a mate who's done his
time in the army. Adam Török used to chase the admin girls at military office to hide his file. Others
had lost weight before the military draft, smoked a lot of cigarettes that morning and drank a lot of
coffee. Some put hot fries under their arms to get the thermometer going high. Those who were
drafted, however, pissed in bed in the army every night, until they were discharged from the military.
Still others enrolled every year as industrial apprentices to avoid the military draft. Those who made
it through, endured. Géza Berecz was a border guard for two and a half year, Thomas Végh and
George Bodola attempted suicide, Julius Takács and Bodola were in penal squadron. Only „Scotty”
had a good time in the army, as a clerk of the squadron he run a business of military goods, and
earned a lot of money.

I enrolled twice as an industrial apprentice. First as a photo-optician, and the following year as a
bookbinder. That's how I got away with it. Later, a psychiatrist friend of the family diagnosed me with
the remnants of a childhood nerve disease. I pretended to faint at the draft board to confirm the
illness. The conscripting doctor was also a friend, and soon I had my military record stamped as unfit
for service in peace, and a conscript in war.

I made friends with Gábriel Szemző at the Zsigmond Móricz High School. He was later called „Alarm”,
because there was always something wild in his appearance. Once he cut off half his moustache and
put a photo like this on his ID card.
Another classmate of ours, Nicholaus Ertl („Lace”), had an ID photo of his own in a water polo
swimming cap, in the water.

For many years, Gabriel Szemző and I had been planning to defect, following the well-tried and
tested route of climbing a fence in Yugoslavia, near Nova Goriczia - Goriczia border post, to Italy.

„Pipo” once said to „Alarm”: "Alarm!" You don't defect to Germany, or they'll call you „Achtung” out
there. It didn't work. Alarm lives in Washington D.C. now. What he wanted to avoid most of all, he'd
done before: served his time in the army. We're richer with a dozen of his military stories, but what's
he richer with?

At that time, we had our meeting place in front of the Downtown Ice Buffet. The "downtown gallery"
used to go there.

Flower-patterned shirts, ankle-length trousers, pink socks and canvas or corduroy shoes were the
compulsory attire, with a hunched, stooped walk and a 'downtown' hairstyle (hair parted in the
middle and curled upwards, with long side partings on both sides).

In the afternoons, a party of 40 to 50 people would gather there. There was a party almost every
night. Youth Park, Bem Rakpart, KEX in Jókai Club, Citadella, or in the Paris Courtyard, Jókai club on
Freedom Hill, Gerlóczy street, Vigyázó Ferenc street, Várklub, E building, Csanádi street with Syrius,
Ganz MÁVAG, Törekvés, Kapás street, and one could go on and on. There were lots of party places.
There were concerts on weekdays too. The old places - Goli, Danuvia, Kecskeméti street -
disappeared, but new ones were created in their place.

The golden age ended when the first disco opened. Then came the decline. The slow, steady
destruction of live music. In the beginning, even we liked to go to the discos. They didn't play as bad
music then as they did later. As the number of discos increased, the old rock clubs closed down in
proportion.

I saw my first discotheque in Bulgaria in 1969. I went there with Tibor Kohuth and George Novak. We
only had enough money to travel by train one way. As soon as we arrived, we started bumming,
hitchhiking, tarching and starving.

If we had to live a normal civic life for most of the year, we wanted to be like Kerouac's heroes, at
least in the summer.

In Bulgaria we made a big splash with our long hair. We posed as Danes to win the sympathy of the
local young people, but we were confident that relatively few people spoke Danish, which explained
our poor English.

Our Bulgarian friends had booked for us a hotel in Burgas. We had to get our passports at reception.

Then we quickly amended our story and told them that one of us – George Novák - was Hungarian.
We had met him on the train on the way here, and we had forgotten our Danish passports at our
friends' house, who would be following us tomorrow.
In the end, whether they fell for it or not, they paid up and we were back in bed with pillows after a
hard week. We had the foresight to throw the sheets out of the hotel window into the park before
leaving, in anticipation of the uncertain nights ahead.

In Nesebar, we had a bit of a hassle with the local authorities. They were stocking cognac outside a
convenience store when we walked past. We couldn't miss such an opportunity. With a gesture and a
bottle of cognac called „Sunny Beach”, we walked to the corner. Turning there, we picked up the
pace. George Novak didn't understand where we were running with Tibor, because he didn't see the
movement, he only heard the loud shouting after us.

A few minutes later we found ourselves on a deserted stretch of beach, where we quickly drank the
whole bottle. Half an hour later, we were frolicking through the picturesque streets of the old town
Nesebar in high spirits. We bumped into two English girls, to whom we mysteriously whispered that
we were Danish spies being hunted by the secret service. They had a good laugh about it. They were
very surprised when the next minute, with a squeal of brakes, a Bulgarian police car blocked our way.
The girls (probably grandmothers by now) probably still think we were really spies. The first question
the police asked was where we lived. We were hanging out without any accomodation, but they
didn't allow that at the time, so we lied and said we were at the campsite. Within a minute we were
speeding towards the campsite in a police car with sirens blaring. Tibor and I looked at each other
with great pride.

We explained to the campsite receptionist in German language that we wanted to stay in a

bungalow, but there were no more empty bungalows, and the police probably misunderstood or
story. This new story caused some reluctance on the part of the police. Then there was a bit of a
tussle at the police station. From the other room, Tibor heard me shouting in Russian to the police: „I
didn’t do that! I didn’t stole!” It would have been physically impossible to get the price of the drink
out of us. We didn't have a penny. An hour later we were put on the wing boat heading to Varna and
deported from Nesebar.

But we loved it there. There was a Swedish holiday village there, called "69". The number 69 had an
erotic connotation. In the club area was a discotheque called „Hakka – Bomba”. Admission was one
dollar, but Bulgarians were not allowed in. The deal was already done. We lent our passports to
Bulgarians for a dollar. So everybody got in. Even those without passports and those without money.

Once inside, we got a stamp on our hand and we could go in and out. The disco was right on the
beach. The young Swedes were smoking weed in the sand. We offered one of them a bag of gummi
bears and asked if he wanted some LSD. He said: no thanks, but he'd be happy to give us hashish. We
accepted with thanks. He asked if he could roll us a cigarette, but we didn't want to look boys
without routine and said thanks, we'll do it "at home". We pulled up in an abandoned construction
site. We squeezed the tobacco out of a few sticks of Bulgarian cigarettes, cut the tar into small pieces
with a shaving blade, and pressed the mixture back into the cigarette cases combined with tobacco.
Excitedly we went in the evening to the beach to smoke it, but we cut the hash pieces too big and the
wind kept blowing the stuff out of the cigarette. Ignoring the pain, we picked up the glowing
"treasures" from the sand and stuffed them back in. But the effect was not felt. None of us admitted
this. We pretended to "see", and to "fly".

We had money from somewhere that day. We went to a bar and drank a lot of Bulgarian cognac to
make up for it. Slowly, however, the weed took its toll, and the double attack made us feel seriously
ill.

Later we were kicked out of the construction site, and from then on we slept in the sand on the
beach wrapped in blankets, because it was so cold at night. At noon we would usually wake up, by
tourists taking photos of us: „crazy people, sunbathing in blankets and jackets in 40 celsius degree
heat”.

The biggest cause of our grief was a boat called Vassily Kolarov. It left for Istanbul every two days, full
of cheerful young Swedes. And we stood there with our good Hungarian socialist red passports in our
pockets, helpless because it was invalid for „West” countries. I made a friend of a Swede who would
have lent me his passport, (with a similar face in the photo) but I didn't dare go alone.

We decided to lie to everyone at home that we had been to Istanbul. On our return home, this part
of our travelogue was greeted with incredulity by our envious buddies. They asked a lot of cross-
examination. Especially „Little” Sipos. But as they had never been there, we could easily give them a
detailed report.

On the way home we met Tibor Farsang and the „greek” Micsos in Varna. They had two girls with
them who had a soft spot for us, and lent us some money for the journey home. If you happen to
read these lines, please send us their addresses so that we can repay the loan fairly.

The trips to Eastern Europe made up for our isolation somewhat. Most of our visits were to Prague
and Krakow. Prague attracted us with its beers, Krakow with its jazz and rock concerts. Later, both
with unlimited bootlegging opportunities.

The trips to Prague usually took place while we were already drunk on the train at the Budapest
Western Railway Station. All the time we travelled in a curtained-on compartment, and drank beer,
but if there was a way, it was in the buffet car. Joseph Gegesi once pulled the curtain aside on
Hungarian territory and before letting it back down, exclaimed, "Typical Czechoslovakian landscape!"

We knew almost every pub in Prague by name: U Fleku, U Svyata Tomasu, U Kalihu, U Tri Kocseku,
etc.

On one occasion, about twenty of us flew to Prague to meet „Alarm”, - who had defected a few years
before to Paris, - in "neutral territory", because if he returned to Hungary the police would arrest
him. The atmosphere was good, we were queuing in the pubs and we were already around 20 pints
beer each. We were sitting on the pavement outside the „Three Hearts” pub and were not very
quiet. Just then the police Volga car arrived, this time with Czechoslovak police officers, not
Bulgarians.

They picked out George Schneider („Bream”) - he had the longest hair and beard - and put him in the
back of the car. Then they came back for more victims. Bream meanwhile got out on the other side
of the car and walked into the pub for a drink. This infuriated the police, who scolded him and
brought him back from the pub and were about to leave with their loot, as it would have been
impossible to take us all. Then some of us started to argue that they should take us with them. Now
three more of us were caught and I found myself in a police car with sirens again. This time in the
company of „Bream”, „Szert Minyo” and „Szemző Csipi”. They took us to the station where about 20
police trainees were watching Kojak on TV.

It was all so comical in Czech language that we were doubled over laughing. After a while I started
demanding that they call the Hungarian consul because I was a Hungarian lawyer. Again, my well-
established Russian language skills came to the rescue: „I am a Hungarian lawyer!”. I got a good slap
in the face from a policeman.

An hour later in the evening they put us in the car again. We drove further and further out of the city.
We were afraid that we would be beaten up and thrown out of the city. At the end we saw a building
with the illuminating words: „Psychiatric Hospital” written on it. We blinked, a little frozen, and a
beating would have been better than that. We arrived at the detoxification centre, where every day
the drunken people were transported.

We were taken to a young doctor. He spoke German and so did we, but the police did not. So we
could say that we were not drunk, we were just in a good mood, and we were glad they had brought
us here anyway, because we had accommodation problems.

We had to strip naked. All our clothes and objects were thrown into a bag and we were given a white
robe and a pair of „Vietnamese” slippers. The police left and the doctors left us alone. They took us
into a huge room with about 50 beds, but all empty and freshly sown. In one corner of the room, a
well-built nurse was reading by the light of a small lamp. We could not fall asleep. On the wall was a
picture of a pint of beer, crossed out with two red diagonal lines. Well, needless to say, that was not
a very educational effect in our minds. But we almost choked with laughter. Then we slowly drifted
off to sleep.

At dawn, we woke up to something strange. At night, when they brought us in, it was quiet, and
through the open window the intoxicating scent of summer flowers wafted in from the Prague hills.

And now I was surrounded by a sickening stench and a sickening noise. The clue was soon revealed.
While we were sleeping, the ward filled with real drunken patients. Gorky's „night shelter” must have
been a girls' reformatory by comparison. Pitiful human wrecks snorted, croaked, hissed, chicken shit,
pissed themselves and vomited in their own faces.
It turned out that the people who the police had brought here were the ones they were taking by the
police away. So we had to wait for the police, they wouldn't let us go.

It was a new shift at the police station. The only thing left to do was to fill in the fine cheque. The
passports didn’t contain any information about the address or place of work, so we had to fill them
in. A glimpse. We had a lot of experience in this, thanks to the stories of the Budapest Transit
Authority inspectors in Budapest.

I always had an expired pass in the name of „Robert Dog”, Budapest, II. district Ribáry street. 6.,
which I nervously tried to "hide" from the inspector, but he "routinely" snapped it up and wrote out
„my” details with a mocking smile. I hereby apologise to the residents of the house at number 6
Ribáry street, for any inconvenience caused by the fine tickets sent there.

I have entered „my” details again. Address: Bázakerettye, Rekettye street. 8., place of work:
Nagykunság State Forestry and Timber Processing Enterprise, Hódmezővásárhely, Görömbölytapolcai
street. 12.

It took the brave Prague policemen a long time to scribble down the four (me and my friends) similar,
incomprehensible, Hungarian-language data sets on their typewriters with their index fingers. Half an
hour later, the meticulously completed cheques were whizzing off the Charles Bridge into the Moldva
(Vltava) River, folded into airplanes.

It was not another ten minutes before we were back in the clutches of the Czechoslovak state
apparatus.

We laughed as we rode the tram to Vencel Square. Suddenly we were approached by inspectors.
They took out their badges and asked for tickets. Szert was quick to pin on the Lenin badge he always
carried and asked if they would change badge? The inspectors had no sense of humour and used the
electric bell to signal something from the back of the car to the driver, who didn't stop until the
police station.

It stopped at the same station where we had left in the morning. We had a good laugh wondering
what they would say when they saw us again. Sure enough, to the inspectors' utter dismay, we were
kicked out within half a minute. They didn't even want to see us.

The inspectors continued to follow us around the streets for a while, demanding punishment.
„Bream „ threw them pennies on the ground, which they eagerly picked up. The rest of us slept on
the floor of our painter friend Lajos Luzsicza's house, in terrible conditions. We were proud to tell
how we slept in sumptuous, soft beds.

There was never a problem with accommodation in Prague. Most of the time we went to the
university dormitory near the Spartakiad Stadium. The college students there always put us up for a
night or two.

Many memorable trips took us to Prague, a city that was still peacefully dormant at that time. We
drank frothy Prázdroj, Budweiser, Kozel or Staropramen beer in the cool tap bars hiding in the alleys,
and old gentlemen snuffed tobaco from burnot stoves next to us.

Once, in a beer bar in Paris Street, next to the old Jewish cemetery, Joseph Gegesi was sitting under a
table drinking his beer and never failed to grab the leg of a passing waitress.
In the pub, we made friends with two Czech boys who invited us to the Zimnij Stadium for the
Canada - Czechoslovakia ice hockey match. One of them picked up Joseph Gegesi, who was sitting
with two pints of beer in his hands, high in the air. When he reached the Moldva River bridge, he
ordered a halt, drank both pints in one go and threw the empty pitchers into the river.

We entered the stadium using the backwards trick, (we pointed to the back to show that the tickets
were there), which meant that the four behind us were only allowed in after a long delay and a long
explanation. By then we were already far away. I don't remember much about the game, except that
with each goal Joseph threw his new shoes he had bought that day high into the air whith their box,
and each time they landed in a different sector. The brave Prague supporters, instead of taking
offence, returned them to its rightful owner in a man by man chain.

On the train back home, the only problem was how to hide the circa 50 pairs of jeans for sale from
the customs officers. However, „Szicso” spotted with his eagle eye that a large group of pioneers was
also travelling on the train, so we distributed the goods among them in a matter of minutes.

We were not always so lucky. Once I was with „Frank the Hazelnut” in East Berlin on a jeans buying
trip, and that turned out worse. By then we had really lost our heads. We always went out with two
empty suitcases each. At the airport in Berlin, the customs officer made us open all four suitcases,
and then, seeing the contents, nodded sagely and made a note of something.

On the tram on the way into town, Peanut took out a book and, in front of everyone, tore open the
glued pages and took out the hundred dollar and hundred mark notes. On the tram where the East
Berlin citizens showed each other their tickets when boarding and everyone threw money into the
ticket machine when buying tickets, even though it worked without throwing money in. Needless to
say, we never had any trouble with the ticket inspectors in East Germany, because we always had a
veritable serpentine bundle of tickets hanging around our necks, „free of charge”.

Hazelnut's currency manipulation made the air on the train cold. Moreover, in the intershop, he
began to put the jeans he had chosen into his bag by putting two of them together and looking the
salesman coyly in the eye and saying: „one”, and so he continued counting.

Frank changed his holey boots in the shoe shop for a brand new pair. The shop assistants noticed,
and he ran out and pushed the glass front door marked "pull" with terrifying force. They almost
caught him when he finally heard me yelling, "Pull, don't push!" I left by the exit, thanks to my
superficial knowledge of German.

The shoe shop was on Karl Marx Allee. As far as the eye could see, I could follow him and his pursuers
with my eyes. They hadn't caught him then.

The next day at the airport, we stood at separate windows with our suitcases full of jeans. He got
caught, I got through. He looked for me, asking for help, and I was arrested too. They asked me what
was in the suitcases. Only clothes, was the reply, and it was true, as we had collected at least a
hundred pairs of jeans. When they opened it, Peanut made a surprised face and exclaimed: 'So many
Levi’s! Within minutes, the customs officers were trying on the jeans. They were nice, they made
sure the plane was waiting for us. It waited for us for over an hour, full of passengers. When the
customs officers finally escorted us up, we discovered one of our smuggling buddies on the plane.
Hazelnut "kindly" sneered at him, and the dude turned whiter than a wall.

Back home they came out of the police for our passports. Peanut's dad was so experienced that he
asked if they wanted the red or the blue one. Of course they wanted both. (The red passport was for
Eastern Europe and the blue for Western Europe.)
The most painful thing of all was not being able to go to the Rolling Stones concert in Croatia in
Zagreb.

We couldn't stop smuggling. After that, we mainly went to Poland, where it was mainly Italian money
that was worth taking, because it was easy to sell to priests on pilgrimage to Rome. Otherwise, selling
currency was a dangerous business, because in Warsaw, in the square in front of the Russian-style
skyscraper called the House of Science, there were dark-looking currency converters with bundles of
polish currency in their socks, and quite a few of our mates had been tricked by them into various
tricks.

One time we went out for hide coats, and Peanut ordered me to come in my sleeves, because we
were going to take on two times two the way back, plus we'd put two times two in our suitcases.

It was November and it got brutally cold as we arrived. On top of that it was All Saints' Day and it
was, as it turned out, an official holiday there, everything was closed. My partner had previously
talked about hotels and champagne, but now he gave us the password to save money and we went
to some mate's place, which was a run-down hippy flat. We pretended we had no money and
wanted to stay here. We had no problem with that. The next day we arrived with a pile of hide coats,
soaked through in the thick snowfall, and our arrival reminded us of the arrival of a flock of sheep, as
far as the smell part of things goes. The dude must have had three dogs. They instantly got a nervous
breakdown. They burst out of their millennia of repressed herding instinct and pounced on us. You
could barely get them off. The peacefully "smoking" and "getting shot" guys just looked at these
„poor, unfortunate, penniless” Hungarians.

At Budapest Airport George Mátsik was waiting for us. He worked for Hungarian Airlines. When we
landed, he got into a Russian "follow me" pilot car and came out to the plane. As we got off the steps
of the plane, he took the skin coats from us and took us through customs without controlling. Just
because we were friends. For free.

Later we switched to currency exchange, which was much easier, only to exchange the polish
currency back home, we had to ask for export papers from other passengers. (Everybody had to have
a Currency Export Document, which allowed the exchange of foreign currency for Hungarian
currency) This meant that we took the dollar to Poland, sold it at a nice profit, brought the polish
currency home, and at home we went in front of every train, coming from Poland and asked the
young people for a currency export permit, saying that ours was lost and we had kept our money.
With the permits we could change the polish currency into Hungarian. In those days, they didn't ask
for documents when you changed back.

Again I digress with these stories.

In the beginning the meeting place was in front of the Ice Buffet in downtown and it stayed there for
a long time for some of the team.

There were tougher guys here, too.

Skoda, who, when he got off the law-breaking act, chose the Habsburg family motto: "O happy
Austria, you just marry!" and married a wealthy bourgeois girl.

Kuxi, who, as he said it, served seven years for fear of love. One night, while he was asleep, two of his
drunken friends got his young lover, drugged and raped her. When he woke up in the morning and
found out, he hit one of the bastards with an iron rod. The other fled. The court convicted him: for
attempted murder. The only mitigating circumstance in his favour, according to the Court, was that
he wrapped the iron rod he hit the bastard with in rags because, as he said, he didn't want to hear
the sound of his head being smashed in.

Jean walked the streets of downtown with his huge stature, his stern gaze and his stomping steps. He
envied the amorous successes of the young Italians with their cars who then were swarming Pest.
Every now and then he would stop an Italian car, look in kindly, the 'wops' would roll down the
window, and he would spit in the car and add: „Mangiare”!

He used to earn his money at dawn in the Big Market. He had a two-wheeled cart and used it to
transport fruit and vegetables from the farmers to the retailers' cars. He earned a nice sum and a bag
of primrose a day.

Once I borrowed his car for a day. To this day, a merchant's two hundredweight of raspberries still
regrets my enterprise, because I was pulling the loaded cart along the ramp and suddenly I was in the
air, and the raspberries were flying off the cart, crate by crate. As always, I was expecting a long run.

A familiar figure in the city centre was Szentjóby, the irresistible poet, with his long blond hair, his
inevitable short brown leather jacket, and always a book of poetry under his arm. He and ten others
were picked up in one dawn in '74 and put on a Hungarian flight to Zurich. Iványi Pierre, and the
others who had been always dreaming of defection, did not see it that way and demanded that the
Swiss authorities put them on a flight back to Budapest immediately. They refused to emigrate in
defiance of the aggression of the communist authorities. Szentjóby stayed.

But almost everyone left. Jean runs an astrology show on a radio station in Honolulu, and Stojan and
his brother Kirill are antique dealers between Vancouver and Los Angeles. „Carnation”, „Blondie”,
„Tony” went away, and a long list of others. Since Prince Thököly, it's at least the tenth wave of
Hungarian emigration. This time not soldiers, citizens and politicians had to leave the country, but a
lost, groundless, burnt-out generation that had nowhere to go and was almost looking for trouble.

In the mid-60s, we were still full of hope. We believed in our indestructibility, in our righteousness, in
our otherness. For all our illegal actions, we were morally pure, purer than our judges and teachers.

We have not yet been corrupted by money, by interest. We still believed in eternity and denied
transience, we did not care about tomorrow, we lived only for today. Everything could still happen.

Those were the years when we could have been learning and preparing for our careers. We didn't do
all that, but we don't regret a single minute of those 'wasted' vagabond years.

It was an era of freedom, of eternal summer, of pack spirit, in which, had we not participated, our
lives would not have been complete.

When I think back, it really does seem like it was always summer. Most of the time I see us in T-shirts,
sandals or clogs on our feet. We used to go to the steps on the banks of the Danube, near the
Elisabeth Bridge ("Liz"). In those days, you could smell the Danube there in the afternoons, not the
smell of petrol. From there we went to the parties. Most of the time in summer we went to the
Youth Rock Park.

I personally didn't know the members of the "Big Tree" gallery, I only heard about them. Much later I
ran into Judo and the Indian at a party on the M7 band, and it wasn't until the early nineties that I
met Rough Khan, now in his fifties, as a grandfather candidate.
Almost all Hungarian bands performed at the Youth Rock Park. We mainly went to „Chess Matt” and
„Kex” parties. One of the most memorable parties was the Nashville Teens concert. The first real
British bands were a miracle. Nashville Teens, Spencer Davis Group, Traffic.

You could always feel that there was a huge power lying dormant inside you. The official power
couldn’t do anything with us. Crowds of tens of thousands can't be slashed with swords all the time,
can't be treated as a minor phenomenon. What the young people of the 1956 anticommunist
revolution could not achieve with Molotov cocktails, (bottles full with petrol against the Soviet tanks)
our generation has achieved with pocket radios, electric guitars, hair extensions, and dressing up.

The seeds of Russian Bolshevik culture had fallen on barren ground, our generation, with the
exception of a few Young Communists Association („KISZ”) secretaries, had stepped over them, had
not even trampled them underfoot, had not even noticed them, jazz, rock, beat, rhythm and blues,
soul, were playing so loud that we could not even hear the „KISZ” marchers. At the height of the
military expansion of communism, the whole thing began to rot from within. There was no
manpower, no supplies to enjoy the spoils of war of the tanks. The empire was in vain, there was no
one from within to stand in solidarity with it.

There were two kinds of Hungary. The official one, which can be reproduced from the press organs,
and the country of the beat generation, which was many - many light years away from the previous
one. There were no points of contact. The sons and daughters of other countries start to integrate
into society at the age of teenagers, start to find their place, start to take over the baton from their
parents, prepare for generations of inherited crafts, we had no such perspectives. We unconsciously
felt that to make a difference in society, we should have put on our pioneer ties a long time ago and
sat around the campfire at the Balaton Young Communist camp, not watched Béla Radics' guitar solo
in rapt fascination.

The children of the chiefs were among us most of the time. A lot of the kids from the „Cadre Hill”,
(real name is Rose Hill, the most elegant area of Budapest), came to Móricz high scool, and almost
without exception they became the recipients and spreaders of the culture that was then called
„beat”. They were even more so, because their dad had gone west and had enough money to buy
turntables, records, guitars and jeans. These children mostly disowned their parents' beliefs, and
sometimes even their parents themselves - at least when they were teenagers. Some of them, like
„Hobo” - the son of a 56-year-old communist party leader - became the front man of one of the most
popular opposition „Black Lamb” band, the Hobo Blues Band.

But I also unfairly singled out the KISZ secretaries, who at that time didn’t adore the communist
movement at KISZ parties any more, but were exploring the mysteries of sexuality to rock and roll
music. Indeed, the wildest parties were held under the guise of KISZ patronage. Once - much later - I
saw a new wave concert series in Füred, organised by the KISZ Veszprém County - I had never seen so
many Iroquois punks in wild war colours, even in Western European cities. West German tourists
bumped into their Mercedes cars one after the other, so amazed were they by the strange military
folk.

I've wandered far again, zigzagging through space and time.

But now I want to write about the Nashville Teens' performance at Youth Rock Park. There were a lot
of us stuck outside, maybe ten thousand of us. We could hear the thumping bass, the pounding
drums, the screaming guitar, the zigzagging piano, and we couldn't see, only imagine the singer's
spread legs: so Tobacco Fields! Tobacco Road!

It was so crazy that we couldn't be bothered, a regular street fight broke out between the police and
us. We threw everything we could get our hands on at them, gravel, stones between tram tracks,
pieces of iron, slats. But at that time – 1968 - we had never heard of student riots in Western Europe,
South Asia or North America. We didn't even think that two systems of thought were at odds in this
harmless skirmish, we just wanted to get into a concert with maddeningly good music.

For a long time, I envied the young people in England and America who could go to Animals, Stones,
Doors or Kinks parties in the evenings and understand the lyrics. Nowadays I'd rather say they could
more envy us. What was natural and commonplace for them was an unattainable miracle for us.
What was a given for them, we had to fight daily with our parents, teachers, police, judges, youth
leaders and everyone else. And so the youth built its own customary law, its own society, its own
morals.

I don't want to attribute everything to ourselves, but we started the sexual revolution - which I know
was neither the first, nor the last in human history. It is true that the technical conditions for it were
created at the time, with the widespread use of contraception. We were born in the age when the
hypocritical, prudish, hidden and repressed sexuality of previous ages burst into the open air. Our
generation was a watershed in that girls were no longer expected to be virgins when they married.

The frequent change of couples did not mean a lack of emotion. Boys sometimes spoke roughly
about love and girls, but this was more of a put-on mannerism. We loved to love, and we could. In
those days eroticism had nothing to do with the business world, there were no sex magazines, peep
shows, massage parlours, just young girls in tight blouses and young boys in tight jeans and we simply
liked each other and gave vent to our feelings. Make Love Not War!" was the challenge, and indeed,
it is difficult to refute this simple but very true statement.

Like so many things, it has now degenerated, as clubs have become discos, rock has become funky,
and free morality has become passionless, professional, everyone for everyone, and later still,
anyone with money, massive unethicality.

The first signs of ageing, I'm sure, but I still feel that back then, when I went for my usual daily walk in
the City Centre, I didn't meet a fraction as many bad-faced people as I do today. Even the most
famous crooks were good-humoured, open-faced guys compared to the characters who now infest
the city.

Our haunts were in the City Centre, the „Water Town” the Castle, the Tabán, and Moscow Square.
The Carpathia, Alabaster, Corso, Quiet, Fisherman's Garden, Old Parliament, Treasurer restaurants,
and the only pub in the city centre that has since closed, the Comrade, now the Copper Rooster.

Later, a group of people who were excellent footballers got together and set up camp in the Taban
futball field (the „cage”). They played every Tuesday and Thursday from 5 p.m. and Saturday
mornings. I had poor skills, but as everyone was my mate, I was taken on as goalkeeper.

There were a number of excellent footballers who, for various reasons, did not make the national
first team.

Most of them went on to play for second or third division teams: Financial Officer, Jeweller, Baker,
Auras, Perbál, Debrecen. The best of the best were Bream, Little Spider, Old Man, Lord, Jocó Gegesi,
Alarm, Duda (Gyuri Bodola, son of world famous footballer Julius Bodola), Töpi, Kristóf, Zoli Katavics.
All were obsessed with the game: Rude, Cadaver, Hédi, Scotti, Little Thomas, Szpari, Degesz, Göbbels,
Larva, Tiger. Many of them came out just for meeting with friends, and walking nearby the pub for
drinking bear or wine. They didn't even play football: Klamar, Pudding, Jose, Köteles, Dög, Little Jam,
Beer Brewer, Sapi, the names are just buzzing in my head, I'm only writing down a fraction of them

After football, we had a scandal bath in the „Rác” Spa, which basically meant that we performed
"fake" love scenes in the water for the "sharp" homosexuals, which really stirred up the mood.
Afterwards, we'd have beers or spritzer in „Green Tree” buffer to make up for the calories burnt and
off to the Corner House, or the Rendezvous, or maybe the Casanova. These were the first discos.

At the time, we foolishly fell for them, not realising what kind of musical proliferation we were
helping to create, and that we were becoming the gravediggers of our own musical culture.

A 20 year old man doesn't philosophise, he goes where he can find good music, girls, mates and
booze! That was all there at the time in the Corner House, Casanova or the Rendezvous. We had a
social life here. Friendships and loves were formed, grudges flared up, fights broke out, chatter went
on, news came and went, in short, it was like a Roman agora. We lived like Roman hedonists. In the
morning the Thermae (Palatinus), in the afternoon the Agora (Discotheques, Pubs).

The Palatinus was the "lido". We went there not only to bathe, but also to sunbathe. There were
football matches and foot-tennis battles, all-day chats and dips. Many of us also worked there as
cabin crew. It really was a place where you could have everything you needed for well-being.
Sunshine, water, football pitches, girls, beer and total carefree. The only problem was the entrance
ticket, but we always solved that by climbing the fence.

I arrived at the „Pala” early one morning to find Scotty shaving outside by the big pool. The odd thing
was that not only his face, but the middle of his hairy belly was lathered, and he was shaving a
horizontal stripe right there. To my curious look, he replied: 'Don't look so silly, „Bullet”, I'll draw the
maginot line so the flat lice don't creep up my face.

One of the colourful characters in the Pala was the Belgian (József Gyarmati). He maintained his
modest lifestyle by professionally taking the rightful property of others, so when he arrived he always
began by saying, "Hey kids, everybody show me your stuff, not to steal from a friend”.

Then he would go on his rounds, and with the loot he would run to the Corvin cinema to finish his
busy day's work as a ticket-seller. One day the Alarm asked him for a bonus, a twenty. The Belgian
said: If I give you a 20 bonus now, you'll actually take a two hundreds out of my pocket, and he
explained how a 20-grand a day in the Corvin cinema fails a thousand in 4 performances. (At that
time, the cinemas were full with people, so you could sell your ticket for a higher price.)

On another occasion, Alarm stepped barefoot into a bee and it stung him, so he asked the Belgian to
suck the sole of his foot. The Belgian looked at the unattractive bunion foot with disgust and said: 'I
can't do that mate, because my mouth stinks!

It was a habit of the Belgian to buy a serial number tag in the paper stationery shop, which was used
in the cloakrooms, and then to sit at a party with a bottle of beer in his hand, contemplating the
cloakroom. In the meantime, of course, he kept a close eye on the number of the best furs. Once, he
failed by forcing two skins on himself and trying to open a door by pushing it inwards, with the angry
crowd in behind him. Just as Haselnut in Berlin. History repeats itself!

Another of his favourite tricks was to go to the chandelier department of a department store, pick up
a chandelier at random, and with a charming manner, go up to the salesman and tell him that he had
bought this chandelier yesterday, but his wife had bought the same one, so he would like to
exchange it, and would be happy to pay the difference. Of course, these tricks could only be played
once in one place.

There was a Greek guy - we had a lot of Greek friends - I can't remember his name, he was obsessed
with board games. He used to come to Palatinus spa with a suitcase full of games. When he arrived,
he always asked: are you playing a game? "What do you want to play: cards, dominoes, chess,
snooker, snob? I'll play anything! Sometimes, when we met him in the street and called him to
Palatinus, he would always answer: first Laundry, then Pala! We never found out if he worked at a
Laundry factory or if they had so much laundry all the time.

There were huge beer matches at Palatinus. Many famous footballers came out (Törőcsik, Nyílasi,
Ebedli) and it turned out that the boys from Taban were not so weak.

If I remember correctly, you could buy the "dancing" Polish beer for 20,- Ft, and it gave you a
headache very quickly in the hot sun.

Lake Balaton was a legendary place for us. We couldn't hitchhike from the East Coast to the West
Coast, so for us "On the Road again" and "Route 66" was hitchhiking to the Lake Balaton.

Some hitchhiked as far as Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, or even all the way to Bulgaria, but the obligatory
test drive was the road number seven for everyone.

I was on holiday in Agard in 1969 and was a lifeguard on the beach. It was a great boost for me, as I
had a boat and a key to the G 6 cabin. There was a very large group of people there, and in the
evenings a band from the city Fehérvár, led by „Lui”, played at the thatched roof tavern. I was able to
grow my hair to a good length by the end of the summer, and so the older guys: Tamás Végh, Nyeka,
Kenyő, Pecó, honoured me with their friendship. The decisive moment in my honorary
vagabondhood was that at the end of the summer the water police cut my hair. I was surrounded by
a veritable nimbus.

I started my first hitchhike-tour from Agárd. I was on my way to Balatonfüred. I had an old suitcase
with bread and bacon in it and about 50 Ft. I left the suitcase everywhere, but they kept bringing it
back. Later, back in Füred, I gave it to Sylvester, who used it as a cushion on a bench in the park of
the Heart Hospital, where he stayed overnight. One night it was stolen out from under his head, but
it only clattered when he woke up in the morning.

Later, we became friends with a guy named Tamás Tamás who lived in Balatonarács and had a
weekend house, which was for us a dormitory. We slept there about thirty of us. Sometimes, when
he was really bored of us, he simply didn't come home. Then the whole group would hang out in the
waiting room of the railway station in Arács until morning or until he was disturbed.

From Füred we moved to Badacsony, because we heard that the Mini band, led by Ádám Török, was
playing in the bar „Tátika”.

We had known Ádám from the Buda Castle district for a long time, we used to go up to a guy called
„Telescope” (Géza Wehner) to participate in the button football tournaments, where everyone
played with their own lathe-turned 'stars', named after the big names of the day. Adam expressed his
unquenchable desire for the weaker sex here too, naming his players Clitoris, Vagina, Boobs, Tits, etc.

Guggeros’ father was a well known pianist, and he had a sign on the gate of his house advertising
lessons, so when we first went to his house, Sylvie thought, that the father of our friend was a
watchmaker.
At Adam's, we were greeted by a whole commune. They rented a farmhouse, which would have
been comfortable for four, but we slept there with at least fifty of us. So we hardly slept at all. If, for
example, someone had only one chair and went to the toilet at night without thinking, he could be
sure that when he came back there would be two of them sitting on his chair.

It was the year when John Mayall released the album: Empty Rooms, the first Rythm & Blues band
without a drummer. When we told Adam the news, his drummer, Doxa - whose real name was
Sándor Drummer (!) - went all pale. "Who is that faggot?" he asked. John Mayall! we answered.
Wow, he's not going to be stupid anymore! An orchestra without a drummer! He felt lost, because
he knew that Adam loved Mayall very much. He wasn't a bad drummer, though, nicknamed for his
accuracy. (Doxa watch)

That autumn, Adam opened the Rock Party Club at the shore of the Danube, on the Buda side. We,
friends, made the first posters. I drew Arthur Brown's head in crayon. The heated audience tore them
all down as a souvenir. I was very proud when a few weeks later I saw my "artwork" on the wall of
my new girlfriend's room.

Almost everyone was trying to be a musician themselves. It happened, for example, that Alarm
envied Ádám Török's flute and bought one himself. He could hardly play it in the instrument shop.
Later, his younger brother Tibor Szemző became a renowned jazz- and then repetitive contemporary
flutist.

Many became visual artists, John Szirtes, Zuzu Méhes, John Vető, Kelemen, Minyó Szert, Fityi
Veszely. György Bodola was an exceptional talent. He drew the caricatures of our idols for the Rock
Lexicon. The age, the lack of socialist connections, counter-selection, lack of perseverance, and a
bosom friendship with the alcohol, all prevented him from making an impact.

The appeal of the film was also strong. There was no video yet, commercial American film was not
yet dominating the market, and we went to the cinema almost every day. Legendary films were the
Blow-Up, The Strawberry Statement, If, Zabriskie Point, The Adventurers (Les aventuriers), Hombre,
Cool Hand Luke and Easy Rider.

After my graduation, I applied to the Film Academy to study directing. Three of us prepared for the
exam at the City Library: the rock singers John Baksa and Hobo and me. I was the youngest. All three
of us had long hair. I asked them: “What do you think, should I cut my hair, then I might have a
better chance?” They all answered at the same time: "Nonsense, they won't hire you anyway”. And
indeed, none of us got in.

John Baksa brought with him some excellent drawings and wrote a sensational cartoon short story -
or comic strip - as an exam paper. I failed the in first round, Hobo in the second and Jancsi in the
third. One of the test questions was to write a typical Pest street name. Hansel wrote: Circle Street.
He was usually willing to do anything for a joke.

One time we were at „Pentecost” Baths. He stood in line for ice cream. We were talking in the
distance. When it was his turn, he shouted at me, "Bullet, here's your ice cream! And, he threw a
cone full of ice cream between my eyes. Then he stuck a funnel in his own eye like a black eye and
jumped belly first into the pool.

I found out later that poor Gábor Bódi – later famous film director - had applied for the same
admission test, and he had been accepted in the first occasion. He worked with her good friend and
first assistant Zoltán Bonta (aka Travolta, or Bézé) for many years
There were those who disparaged cinema and wanted to devote their lives to literature, like
"Debreceni" Caspar, the only café figure among us. He wore a crumpled white suit, his fingers were
yellow with tobacco and the undersides of his eyes were circles from writing at night. He always had
a volume under his arm. We respected him very much, but none of us read a single line of his. Today
he is a big fashion merchandise retailer, going to Thailand and New York fashion weekends on buying
trips.

We wouldn’t have thought that Csaba Tóth would become a famous literary figure in the US, because
he was more famous for the story of the time he went up the elevator with his parents' old friends
on the way home, drunk out of his mind, and they tried to have a nice conversation with him until
they noticed that Csabi had peed in the elevator, smiling. They couldn't humour him.

Csaba had blessed good parents. One winter, I spent three months sleeping rough outside with
Silvester. I had a fight with my mother and I didn't feel like going home. It would have been difficult
alone, but Silvie joined me out of solidarity - he lived in Szentendre - a small town near Budapest, -
and was lazy to go out. Most of the time we didn't even know where we were sleeping at midnight,
but only twice during the three months we had to sleep in a wagon at the Déli station - but it was
cruel. We never had any money. Silvie, alone in the company, already had a child.

When we were very hungry, we went up to the Tóth Csaba's home, as if we were looking for Csaba,
even though we knew he was not at home. But Csaba's mother knew that Silvie had a baby. All it
took was a few bullshit words about looking for a job, and the food love package for little Silvester
was ready, which was then eaten by Big Silveszter and the Bullet on the street.

Sleeping rough was a difficult school, and if you haven't tried it yet, I recommend you start in the
summer, otherwise you might lose the romance of it. We were walking along the boulevard with
Silvie, drenched, freezing and hungry, and suddenly he said in her stuttering way: Bullet! I feel like a
fucking red light is flashing on my head: homeless, homeless! And indeed, it was pretty clear that we
weren't exactly walking into work.

In the mornings, we begged for money in downtown at the Liberation Square, and then we used the
proceeds to go to the „Rac” Baths, where we not only bathed, but after washing our socks and pants,
we also had a good long slap on the lounge beds. Without that we would have had a hard time. In
ninety days, we stayed at nearly ninety friends. In most places we were on fire after one night.
Sometimes we were lucky and the parents of one or two friends were travelled away.

One of these was at Tímar „Doggie’s” Family. There the food left by his parents at home was so
lavish, that we made a stew of sirloin steak the first night.

Then the Rozsnyai parents went away. We could have stayed longer, but Skoda's brother Romeo
arrived and the host's watch disappeared. On top of that, Rozsnyai's brother came home on leave
from the army, bringing a tidy supply of whisky with him. Silvie had cooked spaghetti that night.
When I passed by our „soldier’s” bed at night, I thought at first that he had gone to bed shaving and
had a froth on his face. It was only later that I realised that he had swallowed the spaghetti noodles
whole and vomited them like geysers onto his face in his sleep. But what could have been easier than
to slander our master chef Silvie. If I remember correctly, the last straw was losing the parents' dog
while out walking the dog. But maybe I'm mixing things up and we got a strange dog used to the
apartment.

Fortunately, the Lex Andrews' house was "emptied" at the same time as we left. However, the day
after the arrival of our team, which had grown into a troika with Andy, the Lex brothers and sisters
followed the example of the Lex parents and couldn't stand us either. We recruited Andy to the team
by selling his parents' ski equipment, and we lived like kings for two days on the proceeds. There was
no problem after that either, because close to the flat of the Lex family was a big drugstore, and I had
a long lined leather jacket with a silk lining, which I split down in the middle, so that the jacket acted
as a veritable cornucopia, until one time I threw the lining away, and the silk lining ripped out at the
bottom, and all the food and drink spilled out of the jacket as I passed the cashier.

We were then forced to dip into the Lex family's gold reserve. The father was an army officer and had
an immense supply of treasury brandy essence in a tube at home. We used it to flavour our tea.

On one occasion, when we were under the influence of the essence, the water in the house was
turned off. The only thing we noticed was that the water stopped coming out of the taps. We turned
on all the taps to see if any of them were working and then left the house in a huff. In wintertime!

I won't go into details. The landlord was supposedly only able to slalom up the stairs in a kayak, and
the water poured out of the apartment. Andy was so drunk that he stayed home and slept naked on
a bed that rocked softly on the water. The whole thing was discovered when the flat two floors
below was flooded. The Family one below us had enjoyed a cruise in the Mediterranean with the Lex
parents and didn't come home for two months, but by then the TV in their flat had rotted. When we
arrived home in the evening, Andy was using an eye dropper to collect water in a basin and was
humming. Luckily we had left the door wide open, although it was impossible to close it because of
the banged up parquet floor, but otherwise we would never have been able to open it again.

We hung one of the more valuable Persian rugs out to dry on the terrace railings, of course it froze
overnight and half of it fell to the street after it broke in two. It was a terrible scandal. Andy even left
his tape recorder behind, so we fled.

Weeks later, he phoned there in a disfigured female voice, but father Lex recognised his voice and his
outbursts of rage kept discouraging him from retrieving the tape recorder.

It was one of the most ridiculous nights I've ever spent sleeping at „Scotti”. He lived with „Jose” in
one of the old ground floor houses on School Street that has since been demolished. Maybe there
will be a plaque there one day: this is where Scotti and José lived. Little Thomas used to live there
too. He was the first scabies infected man in town after the war. When the doctor examined him, he
congratulated him, saying that he hadn't had this disease in his practice since 1945.

In fact, because of scabies, he had been scratching his legs all night, rubbing them together like a dog
running in its sleep. We all tossed and turned, and finally José had had enough. He was a nail-gunning
artisan. He took his nail gun, walked up to Thomas's waffle, put it to his temple and said to him: if you
don't stop right now, I'll shoot you like a mangy dog. He didn't move all night.

Work was a big problem. Not just because of money, because we always got it somehow, but at that
time there was still the “public nuisance at work”, (everybody had to work, if not, you got a
punishment) and with a fake ID card was not a long way to go, (at that time your work place - if you
had one - was written in your ID card) you were caught and soon on your way to prison.

At that time, word got around that there was a gentleman's workplace with a royal occupation:
namely the Land Surveyor's Company in Baross Street, and they were hiring well surveyors. Probably
the later housing estate construction needed all that surveying. The job was discovered by Silvie on
the recommendation of a girl called Sáveli who worked there.
The job was to get a tape measure with a handle and a whistle on the end. This was to be lowered
into specific wells and when the end reached the water, the whistle would whistle and we had to
record the centimetres. It soon became apparent that a week's work could be done in a day with a
moderate effort. And they paid quite good money (at that time), 1.200 Ft per month. I was later
accepted to university, but I wanted to keep the job, so I rented it on paper to John Bodó, the
"Whale", who was happy to have a registered job. He took the pay, kept 200 and handed over 1,000
to me who actually did the work.

This factuality was a relative concept, as we very soon realised the close correlation between the
water level of the Danube and the water level of the ground. The Danube water level was published
every day in the newspapers. Man is fallible. At first we only went out to the wells every two weeks, -
and meanwhile read the newspapers - then every month and finally once every six months (each of
us had a separate area). But we gave or „measurement results” every week, as we „worked” 6 days a
week. Unfortunately, we didn't even think about monitoring, and once, when it turned out that Silvie
had been measuring a well for two years, on which a four-metre pile of gravel had been mistakenly
spread, the whole crew was fired.

The first chronicler of the company was Beethoven, with a camera hanging inevitably around his
neck, and he took a lot of pictures. I hope they're still around somewhere. He was the first of his
close circle of friends to grow curly hair down to his waist. She wore a red leather jacket with it. He
worked as a bricklayer and took the tram to the suburban workplace at dawn. What he got from the
workers on the road was not to be envied. They called him everything: Susan, Liz, Faggit, except that
he didn't get a boy's name. At that time there was still a strong aversion among the workers to long
hair. Today, there are hardly any people who don't have earrings.

Beethoven also emigrated, supposedly inheriting a prosthetic factory from a relative in the USA.

Later, George Bodola became the chronicler. He also made a lot of recordings, most of which have
survived.

One summer evening, after football in Taban, we were sitting on the terrace of the Green Tree
restaurant. Someone suggested that we should go down to Lake Velence. I brought up the idea that
we had the family weekend house in Agárd and I could steal the key from home. Within an hour we
were on the train. There were ten of us: "Bream" "Alarm" "Lung" Keki" "Imóka" "Scotty" "Bagpipe"
"Little Thomas", „Hooked Nose”, and me: the „Bullet”. We did not buy tickets, but the guide did not
ask us to. All the way there he was with Hooked Nose, who was lying in the mesh trunk of the wagon,
because he thought, that he would not be noticed so. The conductor kept on driving in vain, but he
refused to come down until Agárd.

In Agárd we entered the Plexi glass pub next to the station. Klamar was mistaken for Fazekas, the
famous footballer, by local youngsters. In our deep drunken stupor, we quickly became close friends.
I have a picture of us smiling and embracing, people from Agárd and Budapest. Only on closer
inspection can you see that the hands of both Nooked Nose and Little Thomas are elbow-deep in the
pockets of some local bone-drunk boy.

The next day we arranged a big beer match on the Agard pitch. (Since then only half a goalpost has
been left of the pitch.) We were given equipment and stopper shoes. We were one man short, so
they generously gave us a 10 year old boy as goalkeeper. The slope of the pitch was at least 10%, and
the African ivory grass was mown English turf compared to the grass conditions there. The referee
was one of them, but he was so stupid as to award a throw-in for a penalty, and his own players
kicked him so hard in the head with the ball from two metres out that he had to be taken off the
pitch. Scotti didn't touch the ball once, he was only playing because the local policeman in the Agard
team stepped up, and Scotti enjoyed kicking him with impunity the whole time. He had been kicked
enough by the police before. I won't go into the details of the game, everything was ganging up
against us, we lost and had to leave the ground in a hurry, not to pay many gallons of beer.

By the way, Hooked Nose was the first 'black' „privat” taxi driver in the city, long before the age of
business, and as far as I know he still adheres to this legal formula to this day, so he is also the last.
The first one he had was a small Fiat with a convertible roof. Once we went somewhere in the
country. We overtook a motorbike. Hooked Nose opened the roof and stood up while driving,
holding the steering wheel with one hand and raising a baseball bat over the motorcyclist's head with
the other, he picked up the motorcyclist's speed and said at length, looking him sternly and seriously
in the eye: Be very careful! Be very careful! The motorcyclist waddled for a while and then he hit the
ditch.

On our national holiday, 15 March, his favourite pastime was to ride around town with the top down,
sometimes standing up and shouting: 'People! Up to Buda! (These were the revolutions first words at
the time of 1848.) We called him the mechanized dating machine because he had a huge advantage
over us in his Fiat.

The „Rope” once tried what it was like to drink for 3 days straight without eating or sleeping. Well, it
was a great success, half a pair of his shoes got stuck in a tramway switch on the way home. His mum
trusted her son to come home every day, there was always something ready to eat after the journey.
That day, stuffed cabbage was ready. „Rope” started to eat it, but then he fell asleep. His long hair
got stuck in the pot, and by dawn in the unheated kitchen he was frozen in the stuffed cabbage. In
the morning he had to cut half a side of his hair to get to work.

It was a life of great fun and carefree, and we didn't even notice that we were growing up. Slowly, we
were out of school desks as we settled into jobs and the 'wedding wave' began.

These were still very happy things. Much to the dismay of unfortunate registrars, hundreds of scruffy,
shaggy-haired characters gathered for the wedding of a mate. Even my wife's parents froze when
they saw their new son-in-law's circle of friends.

Weddings were followed by christenings, then divorces.

The winds of death struck us too soon. Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Béla
Radics the talented Hungarian guitarist.

A great friend of ours, one of the most talented footballers, Christopher, passed away the earliest of
us all. He died of haemophilia. We will never know what his death had to do with the Soviet
Chernobyl nuclear explosions in the atmosphere at the time.

We stood stunned. Until then, we had practically no idea where the cemeteries were. According to
the obituary, we said our final farewell to Kristóf in the Buda cemetery. We stood there hesitantly in
the football field in Taban, (the most loved place for Christopher) no football that day, but we were
not really capable of expressing our emotions. „Belly” asked, "Children, where is the Buda cemetery?
„Spartacus” answered: You don't even know that? Opposite the „Grief Forgetting” pub!

It was not what we did, but how we did it. We believed that we were different from everyone else.
"I'm not like everybody else" (as you can hear in the Kinks ballad).
I can still smell the smoke from the steam engine as we travelled on the train wagon steps towards
Lake Balaton. We fancied ourselves as Jack London heroes, even though we had tickets most of the
time and the galettas (train watch men in Jack London’s book: The Road) didn't come.

Once Julius Big and I were in the train's toilet the whole time of the journey. The train was full of
people. Julius, with his thousand faces and mouth, performed his famous private candle-blowing
number. The point of the number is that various deformed mouths can't blow out the candle. Then
we almost peed ourselves laughing. On top of that, „Bream” used to travel up the stairs and
occasionally sneak in through the toilet window from outside.

We were Eastern European activists for rock and roll, the hippie world and the sexual revolution, but
the collapse of communism and the Iron Curtain was not for us at twenty.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if that day had come not only in 1989 but in the
spring of 1968. What would have happened if our will to do something had not been taken away by a
lying system? How many lives - gone wrong - could have turned out differently? How much more
talent would have been given its rightful place? Footballers, musicians, writers, actors, painters,
photographers, the neurasthenic, misfit fifties and sixties who are out of place today. And at least
100,000 fewer people would have emigrated. Maybe my generation wouldn't be so burnt out. It
wouldn’t be so devastated.

We call ourselves the "Great Generation" but we know we were no greater than the generations
before or after us. We were just different, not comparable to anyone else.

And what have we become? Today we are no different from anyone else.

A few faces in a flash of light:

"KEKI".

One autumn day in the early seventies, a small group of us went hiking in the Pilis mountains. We
were like the vagabond kids in Jack London's books, or the Eskimo dogs. Individually we were normal
people, but in a gang we were scary. At times, the gang spirit took over, and everyone wanted to
outbid the others in coolness.

On the way up we looted the village market in front of the shopkeepers. There were two of them,
but they didn't know where to look, for we were ten, with our huge bags. They couldn't see anything,
but they could sense that we had put much more in our bags, than the few bottles of beer we had
paid for. We left with rucksacks full of drinks. With great difficulty we climbed on the „Red Stone”
mountain peak. By the time we reached the tourist chalet, we were drunken. Keki, Bream, Csaba,
Hooked Nose, Haselnut, Lung, Imóka, myself and a few others I can't remember.

On the way down, we found a hut where the owner had collected the year's harvest of medlar. In
less than ten minutes, the hut had become ruins and the medlars had become jam. Down in the
village, Lung got stuck into the peasants putting up haystacks. In the end we were chased by
horsemen, we could barely jump into the arriving commuter train to Budapest.

As we were, dirty and drunk, we went into the University Club. Keki got into a fight with the Baron
and gave him such a slap that he broke through the gallery railing and fell to the ground floor. Keki,
Hazel and I were law students. Keki was taken away by the police as the main culprit, and only one of
our teachers - a friend of Keki's foster father - saved him from being lured away from the university.
I was one of the witnesses at his wedding. Imóka was the other, who had returned that day from her
second or third defection. In the eyes of Keki's parents, Imóka was the evil spirit of their son. He was
forbidden to come to the wedding. Keki then forbade his own parents from the wedding. Before that,
his father had paid for the newlyweds to go to the former Red Star Hotel for a honeymoon for a few
days. Keki, when he chased them away from the wedding, shouted after them to fuck off to the Red
Star Hotel. Late in the evening, after a modest "wedding" with a small group of friends, he thought
that if he was paid up, he should move to the Hotel on Mount Széchenyi, for a few days. We
accompanied them upstairs, and there we were surprised. Keki's father - a well-known writer - and
his stepmother - a prominent dramaturge - had moved from their comfortable family house in Buda
into the cramped hotel room for a few days because they paid for the room. We stood at the door of
their room. Keki's parents were reading in their pyjamas by a small lamp. We didn't know whether to
cry or laugh. Then laughter broke out and we all went down to the bar to make up and have peace.

He graduated summa cum laude and went on to practice as an inner-city lawyer. He also defended
Lacko the Great, „Chubby”'s brother, who at the time was accused, quite „unfoundedly”, of taking
some gold and was temporarily living in the prison as a result.

He married, had a son named Matthew, and later divorced and ran off illegal to Sweden to his lover.
He had once defected to Italy years before, but then came back. From Sweden he moved to Paris,
where he graduated from the Sorbonne Law University.

In Paris, he lived in the same street as his old friend „Andy”, who by then had acquired a great
knowledge of the science of drugs and had become a druggist. They met in the mornings. Keki went
to work at a bank in a smart suit, white shirt and elegant silk tie. Andy was stumbling from some
séance - as he felt he was 'flying' - on his way home. Keki half seriously, half jokingly threatened him
with his umbrella.

Keki came back home in the nineties, after graduating from the Paris Diplomatic University and years
as a banker in California, and started a business. In December 1993, his heart stopped beating and he
died. Andy still lives his life.

"IMÓKA".

He was one of the uncrowned kings of defection. I know of at least three of his departures. He came
home again and again, and after a few years, he always managed to get a new passport. On the other
hand, he had everything in Hungary. He was one of the coolest guys among us financially.

At the age of 18, he bought cheap white athletic jerseys in bulk at Corvin store, bought a Levi’s logo
printing cliché, and without his father's knowledge, printed hundreds of jerseys with the pattern
every night in his artisan father's workshop, which he then sold at a hefty profit. Funnily enough, I
recently met his 18-year-old son David, who looks just like Imo did back then, but with much longer
hair and earns his money for fun by painting t-shirts. Imóka first defected to Italy, where he helped
the former lead guitarist Mogyoróssy in his document forgery workshop. They mainly 'enhanced'
Hungarian driving licences.

His big trip was to India. At that time, the fascination with Buddhist mysteries was already spreading
in the Buddhist circles. „Big Egg” and „Jean” became professional astrologers. „Little Egg” also threw
himself into the study of the East. Then Master Baghwan came on the scene, and Imóka could not
stay out of it. He left Moscow on a tourist trip to India and took an adventurous route to Puna, the
Baghwanist camp, where a number of Hungarians were already camped, with many American and
Western European guys and girls. The master had a camp of tens of thousands. A magical world
opened up for Imóka. The "Troop" moved to the USA after a year. Imóka was not allowed to travel to
USA with his "socialist" passport, so he fled to Vienna. He stayed there for a while, then came home
to prepare for the "even bigger journey". Later he went to Florida, married a girl from Puerto Rico,
named „Chick” and they were palm gardeners in a hacienda. He worked in a famous esoteric
institute, then moved to Los Angeles, then to Vancouver Canada, and was living in Hawaii for a few
years. He died a year ago.

"SILVIE”.

He was a faithful partner in sleeping rough. I'll never forget that Christmas afternoon when we
realized that even the meanest dude had a family somewhere. Just the two of us left on the street.
Everything was closed, the „Pilsen” pub in the city centre, the „Elisabeth” pub, and even the
„Comrade” pub, and we were freezing in the street. He still had a sense of humour. We both were
probably the biggest hangers-on in those days on the trams and buses of Budapest. For Christmas he
gave me a tram ticket as a Christmas gift. Once we were going on a food shopping trip in
Balatonfüred, and he was already holding his intended victim, a well-bred hen, when a police patrol
approached us. We quickly looked at each other, Silvie's long curly hair reached her shoulders, the
only solution was to hug and make fake kisses. I, while half-eyed in the darkness, watching the
policemen passing jokingly by us, noticed two chicken legs slowly extending from under his coat, a
sign of surrender to her fate and to his two giant hands.

Silvie was a true artist of life. He could live from nothing like a prince. He made himself absolutely
comfortable in dilapidated apartments where no one else could find anything. Once, in one of these
flats, where we all went to bed with a rumbling stomach, I got up in the night and went to the toilet. I
realized that Silvie was squatting in the kitchen on the table in a pair of purple silk panties. In one
hand he toasted a slice of dry bread, stabbed with a fork, on the wall-mounted radiator, and in the
other he studied an interesting book called Fiery Fingers. (A book about knitting and crochet.) It was
the only book in the whole apartment. On the table, his freshly brewed tea, flavoured with lemon
substitute and saccharine, was cooling. In the bathroom, meanwhile, he was preparing her hot
bubble bath.

He was obsessed with phone numbers. He knew at least a hundred by heart. It was one of the
foundations of his existence. Something always fell from somewhere. A dorm, a party, a meal, a
change of underwear, a "free girl", a party of chess, or at least listening to music, maybe a Country-
City-game.

He really liked to play. He often broke the rules. While playing chess, he would often distract his
opponent and lure a pawn off his board. Nothing was impossible for him in the game of Country-City.
Let us take the example of a game with the letter ű: He wrote: city: Üröm, river: Üröm River,
mountain: Mount Üröm, plant: üröm flower, drink: üröm wine, famous man: Ürgüblü Türgüblü,
famous Turkish writer. Up to this point we had been able to get by without laughing, but then all hell
broke loose. And he, in turn, wildly insisted that we were the jerks because we had never heard of
this famous poet, even though he was Nazim Hikmet's (really famous türkish poet) best mate. He
usually made us believe his nonsense by always adding some reality to his invention from his vast but
unorganised lexical knowledge.

He was a big, good-looking boy of nice stature, who sometimes earned his living as a mannequin.
Apart from the already mentioned well-measuring, he supplemented his income mostly by begging.
Sometimes he had a more serious job. Once he restored the Greek Orthodox church tower in the
village of Izbeg, with a skill that defied the acrobats and the Russian icon painter Rublyov. He had bad
eyesight, though, holding books two inches in front of his eyes.
Once, there was a party at the „Szicso”s' house, and the father of a 17-year-old girl came to pick up
her daughter after midnight. It was a New Year's Eve party, and at that time Silvie - Silvester - drank
double ex officio. Word about the girl spread instantly that she was a virgin, and she had just had her
period.

The Lung was the only one who didn't hear this, and he pulled her aside into a small room. Then the
"good-natured" friends started banging on the door, Lung opened it, panting, and the good friends
gave him a can of tomato juice, without an opener. Lung took it in a second and sought solace
elsewhere.

Then came the worried father. He was immediately convinced that his fears were unfounded. Silvie
opened the door, naked as a babe, and politely asked: What can I get you?

He played the flute at the same time. He played in a band called Star on the Roman Coast by the
Danube. Then he, too, saw fit to leave Hungary. He started to study sociology in the Netherlands. At
the time, his wife, jazz singer Stefanidu Janula, told me that their son, little Sylvester, looked just like
his father. He has long hair and is interested in nothing but music.

In the late nineties he came home and moved back to the old family house in Szentendre. He died in
December 2008 of an autoimmune disease in St. László Hospital. He died more than ten years ago.

"BREAM".

The eternal youth. As a teenager he had already visited Italy, played football for „Iron” Youth Team
and was taken to Viareggio for a cup. He didn't get along with his coaches, he was always telling
them off. As talented as he was, he didn't make the first league team.

One of the changes in his life came when eleven skilful footballers were admitted to law university at
the same time. He was one of them. At that time, the University Football Team did quite well for a
while. „Bream” never had any ambition to get a law degree. He loved the free university life. So
much so, that it took him ten years to get his degree. He was a phenomenon with his long hair,
beard, and breath-fine football game.

And then he left too. He went to university in Freiburg in Germany for another six years. In the late
eighties he moved back home. He didn't turn his back on his university years for a long time. Every
year he enrolled at a German university, and was able to work in Germany tax-free without a work
permit, which enabled him to make a living at home.

You can't blame him for becoming obsessed with money. Twenty years ago, we used to go together
every day to exchange the money of West German tourists coming to the Buda castle, one to ten (Ein
zu zehn), and then take the loot to the Garay market, where we would sell it to the Poles for twenty.

Like Páger in Swansong, he did not save up for land or a house. Occasionally, he would take the train,
and through his love, the Czech Republic, he would burst his way to the German border, where he
would drink his last pint of Czech beer in a sleepy Czech border town, cross the border and hitchhike
to the university town he had chosen.

Later he became the managing director of a German company, co-owner of two elegant apartments
in Buda and owner of a holiday home in the Danube canyon.

In his last years he used to call himself sunset and say he was walking contemplatively. He died five
years ago.

"LUNG".
Lung is a wild type of „gentry” from the books of the Hungarian naturalist writer, Móric. He was an
excellent fencer, but then he wasn’t a compromising type. He didn't even have much of a sporting
career, although after 20 years of being out of the sporting game, he flashed one in Canada and was
immediately offered a coaching job. He was kicked out of high school for peeing in the old-fashioned
closed school desk through the inkwell opening, during class hour. He didn't give up at night school
either. At roll call, the names of women with small children who were absent from class were
followed by the names of their friends who said: she was breastfeeding. When it came to his friend,
Alarm, Lung also said: He is making a girl sucking.

Lung always had money, although sometimes he had to pawn the family silver, but when he ordered
for his friends, we drank champagne. Once there was a garden party at their house. In a fit of rage he
threw the tape recorder, the record player, the amplifier and the speakers into the fire.

Everybody was amused, even Joseph Gegesi, until he saw his favourite tape recorder flying towards
the fire. But by then he too was floating in the air, pushing his treasured treasure over the fire.

Lung seemed to have everything, and was not burdened by financial worries. He owned a well-
established buffet on Rákóczi Street and inherited a family house with a garden in Buda, but when he
heard that the world passport was being introduced in Hungary and that it would no longer be
possible to leave the country illegally, he quickly sold his share of the house and the buffet, invested
the money in stamp rarities, packed his bags and left Hungary with his family, first to Austria and
then to Canada to return to his never-loved trade, car mechanics.

He also holds the record for marriage and divorce, having married and divorced his wife four times.
He died seven years ago.

"SCOTTY"

He did not come to his senses in time and defected after the introduction of the world passport.
True, he did not set off on a world-changing journey. He anchored at Bruck an der Leitha, but in his
defence, at least he left the territory of historic Hungary - Burgenland - and crossed the Leitha the old
border river. He soon had run-ins with the Austrian authorities and was expelled. Hopeful, he went to
Hazelnut, who by then, after his Budapest law studies, had also graduated from the Vienna Law
University and was already practising. According to Scotty, he smiled at the sight of his papers and
said: 'Scotty, it's all over! You fucked it all up! You have to go home. Scotty saw in this manifestation
of wolf law and bread envy, the ancient Hungarian discord. To find out the truth, the other side
should be heard.

For me, the dissidents in Vienna were always the strangest guys, especially until they were not
allowed to go home. In my opinion, if you have to go, go as far as possible. Julius Nagy also ended up
in Vienna, and for many years he was a lifeguard at the luxury Eldorado spa next to the South-City-
Mall, now an insurance agent. His performing skills could have made him a talented actor. In the
seventies he was invited to sing in renowned bands, although he only knew a few songs with
gibberish lyrics. One of these was Napoleon XIV, which began something like that: “And they are
coming to take me away haha hoho hiho hihi hehe” and so on.

In the evenings, the band would announce "Julius the Great is home again from America". We went
on a rampage, which the audience took over, even though they didn't know who Julius the Great
was. Gyula performed the song really well, with gibberish lyrics. He was also invited to the opening
concert of the Youth Park in Pesterzsébet by Omega, but was asked to learn the original lyrics. When
he was called in, he didn't turn up for a long time, he was sleeping in a bush, drunk out of his mind,
and they found him after someone had pissed on his hand. With great difficulty they got him up on
stage, and there he stood squinting in the glare of the spotlights, lost in the half-learned lyrics of the
song, and then he just shrugged, said, "You don't give a shit," and got off the “world-famous stage”.
Julius struggled on for a while, then gave up, went out for a drink. He died three years ago.

IVÁN

He is one of those who put into practice the Rousseauian principle of withdrawal from society: "Back
to nature!" Going up to the country! Like many other asphalt bums from Budapest, he bought a
farmhouse in the countryside and moved down. He keeps animals and farms. In the meantime he has
become a sort of village handyman. He was always very skilful, able to do the hardest physical work
while consuming an enormous amount of alcohol. We once glazed a two-storey house together in
one day. While working, he drank a litre of vodka and two litres of cider. In the meantime, he cut and
fitted the huge panes of glass into place without a hair out of place. A special mixture of poetry and
wildness was at work in him. When we met, he was writing poetry and playing his own songs on
guitar. He wanted to open a jazz disco. He made aquariums, collected fish baits worm for sale in
warm water streams, was a mushroom picker and a gourmet. He once cooked pigeon soup by
shooting pigeons in the attic with an air rifle. A friend of his watched him cooking in amazement and
asked, almost unconsciously, pointing to the pot: What will become of this? Ivan's brother, who was
smoking a cigarette in silk underwear in the kitchen, answered in his place: 'In the end? Shit! He said
with deadly seriousness. He was even stranger than Ivan at certain things. He was fluent in three
foreign languages, but he hadn't cleaned his room for ten years, there were mountains of cigarette
butts in it, and nobody was allowed to touch them.

Ivan kept hunting crows and ferrets. His deep freezer was always full of rabbit and venison. Once,
after a serious drinking session, he decided to hunt sheep on a farm near Kecskemét. They killed
about ten animals in a Farm barn and carried the carcasses back to the farm, where they fell into a
deep sleep after "processing". What they hadn't noticed in their drunken stupor was that the trails of
blood on the fresh snow led the policemen right to their hiding place with the greatest of ease. They
got away with "strapping", no need to go to jail.

He later became a fashion dress maker, then a carpenter. I met him first in "Date Night Disco", where
he started to provoke me in the toilet, we got into a bad fight, but then he hugged me and said,
"You're a tough guy, let's have another drink.

Even now he lives outside his "estate", in a village near Budapest, and when he goes into the pub,
everybody pulls aside respectfully, and the barman already pours the double shot, because he knows
that Ivan never drinks a simple shot.

"BEGGER".

He was one of those obsessed fellows who set up a humble gym in the cellar of his house and worked
out all day long. Cooking was his second favourite pastime. Then he went to Germany and became a
coach for a karate team in Essen.

I once went out to visit my godfather, a doctor, who emigrated in 1956 and has lived out there ever
since. They lived in a nice apartment, but in a tower block. I asked him to take me to my friend,
Begger at the address I gave him. Begger was living on his unemployment benefit and besides
working as a trainer. The Social Helping Office gave him a beautiful family house with garden on a
lake in the most beautiful part of Essen. My godfather was overwhelmed with rage that these
hooligans were living in such mansions on his taxes.
Incidentally, Doleviczényi, the former 'tambourine man', later Kex band keyboard player, also lives in
Essen and makes, repairs and tunes musical instruments.

Begger has also been hit by the wave of repatriation, I see him more and more at home, he wants to
open a vegetarian restaurant.

"BLOODCOCK".

He's one of the late emigrants. He went to Israel and lived in a kibbutz for a while. His father was an
archaeologist, who found the remains of the caveman from a Hungarian village. Bloodcock was
initially a member of a driver training workshop. He told sensational stories. Once he was instructing
a female driver, sitting sleepily next to her, it was a dark night, they were driving on the highway
towards Szentendre. There was nothing in front of them, no oncoming traffic, only a car behind
them. Suddenly, his student put his turn signal on the left, moved into the oncoming left lane,
accelerated, then signalled right, returned to the right lane and calmly drove on. By this time
Bloodcock had woken up and asked in shock: what did you think you were doing? She replied: I
overtook a car. Did I do the wrong thing? Bloodcock then realised that his pupil had overtaken the
car "in front of her" in the centre rear-view mirror, which – the mirror - was really „front of her”.

Later on, Bloodcock also switched to making fashionable clothes or "ragging" and made very good
money doing it. He had some excellent creations. One was a huge canvas western jacket, the other a
prison jackie with a black prison number.

He was a bartender in a bar in Jerusalem for a while. He has lived in Haifa for a few years and has a
thriving business.

BODOLA the "BAGPIPE"

His father was Julius Bodola, the famous footballer from Oradea. He also played football, he was a
certified player of National 2. League.

He was the chronicler of the heroic era, with the inevitable camera around his neck. He captured
everything.

He was a great cartoonist. He did the cartoons for the Rock lexicon.

In the early eighties he inherited 300,000 Ft. He turned it into drinks with good friends. Not for
whisky or cognac in expensive nightclubs, but for small splashes in cheap bars. Even so, the operation
only lasted two weeks.

He married three times, had two sons and four defections.

After 1989 he lived in Vancouver, Canada.

He died of throat cancer in 2007.

PIPO

Once upon a time, in the late sixties, we had an empty „free” flat. (Parents went to countryside) Pipó
said with sparkling eyes: a free digs in winter! A real treasure! We drew lots for him to go out for a
drink. He said, when he was coming back, it would be a sign that he won’t ring the bell! So we didn’t
need to answer the door for other guys! We agreed on that. He took it seriously, stood outside the
door for hours just for fun, and then when he was almost cold, he started ringing. And we said:
"We're not going out, it can't be the Pippo,", because we agreed on not ringing the doorbell! In the
end we let him in because of the booze. The booze ran out quickly, we didn't have any money, so we
started to play card. The loser had to drink water, on the basis of a glass of water. After a game we
lost, especially if there was a contra or a recontra or, God forbid, a subcontra in the party, we looked
lustfully at the water drinker who had lost. We all drank a lot of water until dawn, and then we were
all drunk out of our minds. We called each other tap, drain, fountain, etc.

Pipo was one of the early emigrants. He went to California, after his buddies, the "Hungarian paper
mafia", but ended up as a carpenter. He had no workshop, only tools, and went out to apartments to
repair furniture. He repaired the furniture in the customers' homes. He didn't ask for much money,
but he moved into the flat and what he ate or drank or even smoked was a serious amount. He's
been around a lot more now, last time I saw him was at a David Bowie concert, where the security
people busted him for selling the same Bowie patterned t-shirts the geeks were selling without a
license. He cut himself off for not selling it, he just happened to buy that 50 jersey from their
colleague because he liked it so much, he's taking it home to the commies back home.

He went back to Pécs for his old age, had a stroke and didn’t leave his home any more. He died a few
years ago.

LESLIE CZECH

He was a distinctive figure in the city. In the early 70s Péter Dobai made a reportage film with him
called Archaic Torso.

He was the first serious body builder in the country. He worked his body terribly.

Later he proclaimed a minimalist existence, which basically meant that he worked for nothing,
earned nothing, but spent nothing. How he amassed his library of thousands of books is a mystery.

He was a veritable living encyclopaedia, with biographical data on artists, poets, philosophers and
sportsmen.

He was once invited to dinner next door. It was a nice evening, they talked about Rousseau. The next
day he got up, looked out of the window and saw an excavator clearing the trees from the square in
front of his house. He ran outside, for some reason thinking that his host from yesterday was in
charge of the machine, and shook his fist and ran towards it, shouting: “And you dare to talk about
Rousseau!”

For a long time, I saw his marconian figure in the city, wearing workman's trousers tied with a string,
half-trampled boots and a leaked jersey, explaining to someone about an undeservedly forgotten
Hungarian poet or the 1928 Tour de France cycling champion.

He was placed under guardianship a few years ago and I understand he was institutionalised. He died
ten years ago.

"RED PARISIAN"

He is one of those who stayed at home.

He's all about cards, horse racing and the blues.

I ran into him recently in Baross Gábor Square. He was standing in front of his boutique, wearing
several kilos of gold and twenty kilos of overweight. His hair and beard were still the old red. He told
me: My Bullett! I haven't changed a bit, I'm still the same hipster I used to be. Meanwhile, he
shouted something to the employees in the boutique. I was standing opposite him, wearing a suit,
white shirt, tie, lawyer's bag, also having twenty kilos overweight. What could I say in reply? “I'm still
a hipster, just like you. I haven't changed a bit either”.

Then we said our goodbyes and he headed off to the racetrack, his regular haunt, to double or beat
that day's take.

He died half a year ago.

So much has changed since then that there is no race track anymore.

Balatonakali 1991 – Budapest 1992 - 2022