My friend Vojta (Vojtěch) Štefek was heavyset and collected books and old things. Among the things in his family there was an old Colt .45 revolver.

Somewhere between sixth and eighth grade we found bullets for it, although they were too small for it. I tied a string to it so that I could fire it from a distance, and Štefek watched from a window. It did not fire. I think the firing pin had been filed down. I liked that gun very much, since at that age I was very taken with cowboys.

In tenth grade Štefek agreed to sell it to me for a hundred crowns. I hid it in a drawer under my clothes.

My mother found it while she was packing my things for the school ski trip, and she woke my father. I explained where it came from. My father called Štefek’s father, and I had to run over there that same night and give it back. He told me that it made no difference that the gun did not work. Because of his arrest and his imprisonment, if a gun were found in our apartment it could be used against him. He said many times that he did not want to go to jail again.

For the ski trip I had my cousin Tona’s old skis, which were the old kind, taller than I was, with no safety bindings that would release. I was not a good skier, but I knew how to fall, which my sister did not. My parents wanted me to go.

We went by bus and then by horse-drawn sledges to a huge mountain lodge with many rooms and a dining room. There were no lifts. Skiing there meant walking all the way up, warming up in a mountain hut, drinking grog, and then skiing a long way down over whatever the terrain was. At that time nobody thought anything of serving grog in a mountain hut to students our age.

In the evenings we ate at long tables. There was a podium with a piano, and one of the teachers was an excellent pianist and played Joplin and boogie-woogie and rock-and-roll. The atmosphere was great.

I sat next to Václav Váňa, Vašek, and from then on we were good friends. What we had most in common was the same sense of humor. He was not a jock type either.

Across from us sat two girls. One of them was interested in Vašek, and the other, Dušana, who was in a parallel class, was interested in me. The four of us joked together.

Bohouš Fiala was in tenth grade with us, a year older than the rest of us since he had failed a grade. He was athletic, strong and good-looking, a rough type, though not exactly a jock. He was poor at mathematics, and a mathematics teacher recommended that I tutor him.

I went to his apartment. He lived with his parents in a one-room apartment, so his parents had to leave when we studied. His father was very nice and liked me.

Bohouš thought at first that I was a pushover, since I was small. He tested me. He opened the window and told me that a friend of his in the army had given him a live grenade. He showed it to me, pulled the pin, put it in my hands and told me I had ten seconds to throw it out the window.

I did not throw it. It was fake.

He was shocked that I had not thrown it. I told him that I had not believed it was real, since he would not want to die either. That was the end of the bad vibes between us, and after that we were friends. By the end Vašek and Bohouš got along too, and Jirka Jupa, who was in a parallel class, was another one of us.

During the months when I was skipping school in ninth grade I had gone to see the same film over and over, at least nine times as I remember it. It was an American film from 1942 called Syncopation, which was shown in Czechoslovakia as Synkopy. For a while after that I wanted to be Louis Armstrong.

A boy in a parallel grade, I think his name was Ježek, played the trumpet. He bought himself a cornet and offered me his trumpet.

To buy it I needed the money that Pepa owed me from Slovakia. Pepa told me that he could not pay it back, and that was that. I was angry, since I really wanted that trumpet and I knew that I did not have much time to buy it. I do not remember what was said between us. I stopped seeing Pepa, and I do not remember for how long.

At some point I happened to run into Anton, a friend of Pepa’s from architecture, who we called Lékař. I explained to him what Pepa had done. Anton talked to Pepa, Pepa paid me back, and I bought the trumpet.

I took evening classes in trumpet. I never became excellent, but by the time I went into the army I could play decently. I practiced in the garden behind our apartment building. Several blocks away there was a man practicing the trombone. I have forgotten his name, but he later played in a well-known orchestra. We used to play against each other across that distance.

Since I was small I had been afraid to put my head under water, and I had never learned to swim. By tenth or eleventh grade I badly wanted to. Pepa was an excellent swimmer, my sister could swim, and so could almost everybody I knew.

I went with Jana to the swimming place on Žofín island on the Vltava. On the island there was a building with changing rooms, places to lock up your clothes, and showers. Out on the river there was a large wooden platform where people could lie down and sunbathe, and there were several sunken platforms closed off to make pools of different depths, including shallow ones for children. There were steps down into the open Vltava, but otherwise railings to discourage people from jumping straight into the river.

The lifeguards gave swimming lessons. The way I remember it, they tied a line around your waist and the line was attached to the end of a long pole, like a fishing pole. The instructor held the pole and told you what to do while you swam from the steps at one end to the steps at the other.

I learned gradually. There was no moment when the rope came off and I could suddenly swim.

The real feeling of freedom came later, when I learned that I could simply lie on my back and float. I do not remember who taught me that.

Pepa’s mother had a garden parcel at Nespeky, about twenty miles from Prague on the Sázava, and Pepa built himself a cabin on it. He designed it himself, cut the wood and built it the way he wanted it.

It was tiny, maybe ten by twelve feet. Inside there were two beds arranged in an L and a small space by the entrance. Under the floor he built a little cool storage so that food would not spoil. There was a large window next to the door. The front had a wooden panel on hinges, which covered the front when it was closed, and when you opened it up it became a roof over the porch.

We were not growing vegetables there. If anything was being grown on that parcel it was his mother, or it happened when I was not there. We slept at the cabin sometimes, but most of the time Pepa and I spent together was still in Prague.

His mother bought him a small wooden rowboat, and at the beginning it was kept in a small protected harbor on the Vltava in Prague. One evening Pepa had the idea that we would row the boat up the Vltava from Prague to where the Sázava comes in, and then up the Sázava all the way to Nespeky. We collected everything we thought we would need.

Pepa left me on the bank upstream and went to get the boat. He was going to paddle out of the harbor and pick me up.

I waited and waited. After a long time Pepa came walking up, completely exhausted. As soon as he had come out of the protected harbor the current was so strong that he had great trouble just getting himself back into the harbor.

That was a shock to me. It was the first time I understood that there was a limit to Pepa’s strength.

We gave up the expedition. Later Pepa and his mother got the boat to Nespeky somehow. I was not involved in it and I do not know how they did it.

At Nespeky the bus stop from Prague was on the main road on the other side of the Sázava from the parcel, so we kept the boat tied up and used it to cross the river, and tied it on the bus-stop side when we needed it there. The place where we crossed was just upstream from a weir. Before we had the boat there we crossed by wading through a shallow place next to the weir, which I remember as not being very safe.

Pepa was very good at basketball and volleyball and that kind of thing, and he always got me involved. Sometimes the two of us played basketball against each other in a park nearby where there was a hoop. I had no chance against him. He never made me feel that I was no good at it. He simply ignored how I played and kept going.

We also went to Žluté lázně, in Modřany, on the Vltava. Pepa liked it because there was a beach volleyball court. A lot of his friends went there to play volleyball and to impress the girls, and they were very good players. Whenever they were short a player, Pepa insisted that I play with them. I had trouble keeping up and I was always hurting my arms and my fingers. They accepted me because Pepa had brought me in. When I ruined a play or a game they did not complain and they did not make me feel bad about it. I did not become reasonably good at volleyball until much later, in the United States.

Pepa always had beautiful girlfriends, sometimes actresses or models, and he had a lot of them. He kept trying to fix me up with somebody and it never worked. The difference between us was too big. Everybody wanted to be with Pepa and nobody wanted to do anything with me. I was not jealous of him.

I told him more than once that he did not treat his girlfriends well, since he was not faithful to them. He argued that in order to have one ideal girlfriend he needed several women. He usually had one steady girlfriend and other women besides. His rule was that he did not hide any of it. The way he explained it, all of them knew where he stood and knew that he was seeing others, so he considered it fair. I did not agree with his reasoning and I did not take it up myself.

In tenth and eleventh grade I never managed to have a girlfriend, although I tried.

Sometimes one of Pepa’s girlfriends, when he was not seeing her as much as she wanted, would arrange to meet me in a café and act a little interested in me. It did not take long to understand that they were talking to me because they hoped I could get them back together with Pepa. Even knowing that, I enjoyed seeing them and talking with them.

One of them was from Ostrava. She had first invited me for coffee to talk about Pepa. Later she seemed to be genuinely interested in me and invited me to come and visit her in Ostrava. I believed her and took the train.

She met me in front of her house and told me she was arranging for us to stay at somebody’s cabin and would be right back. She went into the house and did not come out.

After about two hours I knocked on the door. Her mother answered. I do not remember any more exactly how I found it out, but the girl had gone out the back and she was gone. Her mother let me stay there for the night, and in the morning I took the train back to Prague.

I told Pepa what had happened. We got drunk and talked about it. He was very good at making me feel less bad about it.

After the ninth grade, Pepa told me that skipping a day of school once in a while might be all right, but never at the cost of the work or the grades. In tenth and eleventh grade I kept to that.

One day Pepa told me that he had met some hairdressers, that one of the girls had her parents away and there was a party at their apartment, and that I should skip school and come. There were two girls. Pepa also brought Anton, who we called Lékař. We drank, Pepa told jokes, and it was going well.

At the height of it two men arrived. They were the girls’ boyfriends, both of them huge and tattooed. They announced that nobody was leaving and started to get threatening. Anton, who was not as big as Pepa, backed away behind a bed.

Pepa smiled, patted one of them on the back, and called him Sheriff, which he made up on the spot. He said, “Sheriff, sheriff, you really would like war?”

They backed off and let the three of us leave.

Another evening Pepa called me, gave me an address, and told me to come right away and to bring a towel and a toothbrush, since there was a party. I did not tell my father any of the details. I told him Pepa had called and wanted to see me, and since it was Pepa my father let me go.

At the apartment there were Pepa, Anton and three girls. I had no bag with me, only the towel, and the toothbrush in my pocket.

Pepa told me later that the girl I ended up with had been willing to have sex with me that night. While we were making out she felt something and asked me what it was. I pulled the toothbrush out of my pocket. We both started laughing so hard that it was the end of that.

To get back into school after an absence that was not excused, I needed a note from a doctor showing that I had been seen for some health reason. I stole several blank pages from the prescription pad of my cousin, who was a doctor. Pepa or Anton wrote the medical reason on them.

Pepa became very good at making false official stamps out of the flat eraser on the end of a pencil. First he drew the exact design and the wording on the eraser in pencil, and the lettering had to be done in mirror image. Then he traced the pencil drawing with fountain pens and drafting pens made for ink drawing, which came in different exact nib sizes. He made several test impressions, and when he was satisfied, and before the eraser wore out, he put the official-looking impression on the document. After a while I became good at it myself.

One time Anton wrote an excuse for me in the form of blood-test results. Medically it was complete nonsense, but to anybody who was not a doctor it looked perfect. He signed it Dr. Faust. The school took it without any trouble. That document stayed a joke among us for years.