A Man Walks Into A Bar

Vágtázó Halottkémek - Halló Mindenség!

The Hungarian language, Magyar, is mysterious. It’s appeal to me is that it seems always to be running the last few steps of a race, petering across the finish line. By that I mean that words seem to trail longer than they should, as if a sentence should’ve ended a few syllables before it did. It almost sounds like other languages to me, the linguistically untrained slob that has barely travelled, such as Turkish, but its closest relative is Finnish from what I remember after briefly reading about it. It’s strange and beautiful.

It’s also impossible to teach yourself to speak.

I tried once. Was brought on a trip to Budapest, then Prague. Not wanting to seem like the American asshole on a guided tour package, I picked up a phrase book and started practicing basics about two weeks before heading over. Without anything to guide me other than the little parenthetical pronunciation respellings, I tried to learn how to say helpful things, such as “Can you direct me to my hotel?”, “How many beers can I get for $1 US?” and “How on God’s green earth do I use this strange knife-thing to get the bones out of my trout?”

In the hotel bar I got silently mocked by a few staff after a lovely, unamused bartender cut me off mid-attempt to order a beer and shook her head, saying “It’s too hard, don’t bother, we get it” in impeccably Euro-accented English.

I had wanted to try at the bar I’d stopped at prior as well, but the bartender there never even gave me a shot. Just straight out the gate, English. Guess I was marked from the start.

That was a cool bar, a grungy Bohemian pub. The romance was all over the place. A few locals at the plank, heads a little sunk by the weight of several beers. Dark, no windows. May have been playing The Clash, may have been Nirvana, I honestly don’t remember but it felt right at the time, my first time in Europe, having a dark Bohemian lager in a real life pub with a narrow entrance and no sign but a red light above the door.

I did learn how to say “yes” and “no” very well. So well, that many years later, while sitting on the seawall in Vancouver British Columbia Canada (doot-doola-doot-do…) in an extreme gloomy funk, I heard a small child asking her mother a question, which perked my ears as the mom replied “Igen”. I felt happy for the child for getting an affirmative to whatever she was asking, and momentarily proud for having remembered probably the most basic word in Magyar I could have learned.

Vágtázó Halottkémek (Galloping Coroners), started in 1975 but never really got much recognition outside Eastern Europe, which seems like a common tragedy for so many musicians buckled under The Iron Curtain. Maximum Rock n’ Roll picked up on them, and grouped them with Sonic Youth and Big Black as kindred menaces. Galloping Coroners is an excellent name for a band, but don’t ask me how to pronounce it, or this song’s title, in its native language.