Saying Goodby to Sal

Everybody say goodby to Sal Giannetta, who is leaving Los Angeles for Czechoslovakia to find America.

He’s going to open a restaurant in Prague and live happily ever after, serving klobasa and black bread to bearded malcontents who, no doubt, are planning trips to L.A. in search of Czechoslovakia. Nobody’s happy anymore.

Giannetta wrote us a letter in which he said he was sick of it all, meaning crime, poverty, indifference and all those other things that tend to screw up an otherwise be-happy, ain’t-we-got-fun society.

He’s going to Czechoslovakia because, thanks to Vaclav Havel, the revolutionary spirit burns anew, and because it’s cheap.

I was attracted to the letter not only because it was neatly typed on clean, white paper, but also because Giannetta said he was going to Prague. It’s a small world.

It happens that while you were here in L.A., smashing each other up on the streets and at football games, my wife and I were meandering through parts of Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia.

We were not there, however, to find America but to find a nice restaurant and a warm place to stay.

Well, actually, Cinelli was interested in the culture and history of Prague and wanted to see it before the 500-year-old cathedrals were torn down to make room for parking lots and Hilton hotels.

My goals were more modest. I was content with warmth and comfort, and maybe a little Scotch on a rainy night in Malostranske Square. I would have preferred martinis, but Eastern Europe still has years to go before it develops a functional free market economy and a decent martini.

This is not intended as a travelogue, by the way, because an editor told me on his deathbed years ago that travelogues belong in pamphlets and on feature pages, not in metro sections. Then he cursed and died.

In this case, however, my trip and the subject of this column are inexorably intertwined, like lovers on a beach, and it is necessary for me to refer to the trip in order to discuss Giannetta’s rationale.

I met with him in the back yard of his North Hollywood home, among the last of the herbs and edible plants he’s raised over the years to sell to restaurants: rosemary, thyme, lemon verbena and a fiery red amaranth the Mayans knew 3,500 years ago.

We were also surrounded by unsold remnants of a yard sale. Chipped dishes, drinking glasses made from jam jars and mismatched place settings were scattered on a homemade table like pieces of a half-remembered history, long after its time had passed.

Giannetta fit perfectly into the surroundings.

He’s a jeans-clad, long-haired 55, a guy time-locked in the 1960s, when he rode freedom buses in the South, campaigned for the end of the Vietnam War and cared about old people and kids.

He hung out with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and waited for social justice to rise arms-spread from the fires of war and racism to embrace a new society.

But that didn’t happen. “We failed,” he said to me that day among the herbs and the cracked dishes. “Damn it, we failed.”

By no measure is Giannetta a personal failure. He’s had three novels published and remains true to the lifestyle and social commitments of that heady time of guns and flowers.

But he’s tired now of what he calls the beady-eyed meanness of America and believes the promise of world reform lies in Czechoslovakia.

Well, all right. I liked Czechoslovakia too, except for the brown tap water, the Gypsies who picked my pocket and the taxi drivers who ripped us off.

Prague is probably one of the most beautiful cities in the world, blending history and architecture into a storybook fantasy of spires and steeples that spring from memory like roses in a snow bank.

Forget that they can’t make a decent martini. They’ll learn.

I saw no gang-bangers in Prague, no sports-fan mentality, no dealers in the streets and no Roseanne Barrs shouting Look at me, look at me! But still . . .

The last line in Giannetta’s letter says, “Nothing to leave behind, except a note on the door: Gone to Czechoslovakia. Gone to look for America.”

I don’t think he’s going to find what he’s looking for, because what he’s looking for is what we had 30 years ago, and that’s gone. Revolutions, even good ones, end, and promises fade like the psychedelic colors of an acid dream.

But wish him well anyhow, because here’s a guy whose quest is still rooted in an altruism we’ve almost forgotten.

Say goodby to Sal, L.A. . . . and at the same time wonder a little at the forces that are driving him away.