I got out of subway to see my friend. He got fired yesterday, after one month of  working for a private PR agency. He got fired for “not being enthusiastic enough.” I had to see him now, for sure.

When I finally got out of the subway, I was asked (by a girl in her mid-twenties) if I wanted this Yellow Pages: the ultimate source of information and the book “most read.” As she claimed, the best-seller-kind-of-literature.

Sure I wanted to have that, to read that – the best way to learn, how to write and how to sell. I got a yellow bag with the yellow book. Weigh- and size-wise it seemed to be the bible. Exactly what I needed. The information.

The yellow bag got handy when I entered the local store to obtain three cold beers, since I was warned of lack of alcohol at my friend’s place. From there, I just carried the Yellow Pages under my arm. I put the three beers in the yellow bag there.

I had to ring the bells four times.  My friend answered with something sounding like my first name and a question mark. My yes and I need to pie rang the door open and made my finger to press the elevator button impressed with “5” elevating me to the fifth floor. Through small vertical glass window I was noticing a trash-bag, a pair of high-heeled shoes, a mat, a chair and then finally the open door subsequently, on the first, the second, the third, the fourth and finally, on the fifth floor.

“Hi,” I said.

“Do not even think of taking your shoes off and head to the bathroom”, my friend smiled and pointed to the open door of the bathing in light. I just dropped my bag and thankfully followed the orders.

Some bathrooms need some fixing. So does my friend’s bathroom and some of my friends too. But they all can serve their purpose. Just sometimes they do it in the funky way.

We had two cups of green tea and three bottles of beer. The last – the third one – I finished on the balcony, on the balcony covered with five walnuts. One I stepped on by accident, made it spin backwards and to leave the balcony for a fall into the depths of five stories. It hit the sunshade just one floor below us and it rolled on and off it just to fall a bit further from the house, at the pavement. It cracked, jumped and fell on the lawn. God, good, it might grow now, in the soil, I thought. At the same time, my friend was constantly talking about how unenthusiastic he was at work, at least in the view of his superiors. He did his best, he explained and claimed. I still believe him.

Suddenly, he had a meeting at the subway stop. He had to clean the apartments of all the tea cups (I was about the fifth one of the condoling once this morning), which were about ten. His friend got fired two weeks ago from another PR agency - for being too unenthusiastic too.

We were walking to the subway stop together to meet her. There I lost my friend, or he lost me. Either way, we lost each other right there. For a while, we knew.

I just wrote him this simple message. There was nothing else to add. He knew we will talk about another job later today. And this is what I wrote:

This typical little pickle

- jsem mořem, jsem-li i malou kapkou v něm -

could be vaguely translated as

Jsme rádi, že jste tu s námi -

- nebo po hamletovsku snad i:

Just be – be just.

I put the sticker PRAGUE SKA CONSPIRACY on my laptop, the sticker he gave me.  It was the second one on my computer. The first was FALLEN. In the middle, it was written DELL.

            I put the head-phones on and tried to play some Spearhead. It was playing alright, just my left headphone was dead, so my left ear did not hear anything. I was trying the fix the cable, sitting at the table, trying to turn the cord in anyway to transmit the sound, I was not successful, the other people in the bar not even noticing my struggle. They had no idea of the story either. They could not, could not, could they?

He just called me again, asking, where I was and how I got there. We might even read some of this Yellow Pages now, I thought. I stood up, said that I would pay, paid, said thank you and paid and went to the nearest KFC to get to their free on-line wi-fi to put this on-line and to wait for my friend there. With an idea, that a good Colonel’s Kentucky Fried Chicken with some hard core Yellow Pages might do me right, I headed outside, saying “Good-bye.”