Traditional Fields Family Easter Protocols (Circa 1985)

5:30 am: Wake from dream about playing mini-golf with friendly monsters. Tremble at the sound of the “creepy bird,” whose song signals the arrival of the evil zombie Easter Bunny doppelganger who rises from the dead every Easter Sunday to abduct over-eager, non-sleeping children and fly them away to a dusty fairground populated by the dead. Quiver under the covers, as terrified of being discovered by the evil rabbit as you are terrified of being discovered terrified by your still-sleeping mother, whose habit of explaining away childhood fears by brain chemistry and behavioral psychology, is so effective you come out the other side feeling both comforted and completely ashamed of yourself. 5:45 am: Satisfied the demonic rabbit has moved on to the Orr’s house, you crawl out of bed making as much clamor as possible. Stomping across the landing, slamming the double doors, messing with the toilet seat and opening and closing the radiator cover cleverly disguised as a shuttered cabinet. Recoil in horror at the sight of a spider in the window. Contemplate the mermaid shaped bathroom toys. Braid their hair. Investigate the contents of the medicine cabinet. Make flowers out of toilet paper and bobby pins. Wonder what would happen if flushed one of your sister’s My Little Ponies down the toilet. Pretend to be the long-suffering political prisoner of a despotic regime and deliver a rousing, if whispered, l speech to the imaginary hard-hearted queen. Flush toilet. Flip the lightswitch off and on several times.

6:05 am: Upon exiting the bathroom, delight to find that the sun has started to rise, which means you can now go about waking people in earnest. Go first to your parents’ room and say “mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom,” until she rolls over, groans and tells you to go back to sleep. Calmly inform her that this is not possible. Scoff and walk across the hall to wake your three-year-old sister. Tell her if she doesn’t get up the Easter Bunny take back all of her candy.

6:08 am: Return to parent’s bedroom with the enlisted support of your sister, her security blanket and your own stuffed raccoon (named Violet DuBois). Stand perfectly still with stare at your mother with the most puppy dog expression imaginable, trying to create the illusion that you are a sweet, frail child, instead of the Machiavellian tyrant you know yourself to be. Sniffle a bit. Let your sleepy eyed sister say something stupid like “Did the Easter Bunny bring something for Daddy?” that parents just eat up. Listen to mother groan. “All right. All right. Go put on your slippers and give me a few minutes.”

6:10 am: Sit crouched on upstairs with little sister, awaiting the green light to go downstairs, as Mom puts on bathrobe. Wonder at the amount of noise coming from Dad’s study. Secretly hope the Easter Bunny has brought you a Walkman.

6:12 am: Enter den, where two large, beribboned wicker baskets sit atop the gate-leg table in front of the picture window overlooking the lake. The sun has just cleared the tops of the mountains. Dash over the soon-to-be completely refinished floor to gape the mounds of chocolate rabbits, jelly beans, egg shaped petit-fors, sour candies, gummy bears, white chocolate lollipops, tiny pastel stuffed animals and one of those imitation Faberge eggs made of sugar with a tiny confectionary vignette inside. Wonder if it would be satisfying to eat. Trade sister a bag of gummy bears for her petit-fors. Thrill to discover, at the bottom of the basket, a cassette copy of Wham!’s “Make It Big,” but no Walkman. Your cousin once got a Walkman from the Easter Bunny, despite the fact that your cousin is kind of an asshole. You explain this to your mother on the way to the kitchen as you lick marzipan frosting off your fingers.

6:35 am: Coffee is made. You request a cup. It is served “Nana-style” with a lot of milk and at least three heaping teaspoons of sugar. Mom sticks a pan of hot cross buns in the oven and requests that you stop tormenting your sister. Which strikes you as typically harsh and unfair, as your sister has been trying to bite your arm for the last half hour. Your father emerges in a disreputable brown terry cloth robe and discussion begins about when or whether to go to church. This discussion will last for at least three more hours.

7:30 a.m.: You are nominated to call Nana. Nana tells you she loves you and wishes you a Happy Easter as you jerk the cord away from your sisters grasping fingers. Before handing the phone to your mother, you tacitly suggest that Nana is infinitely cooler, more loving and more generous than either one of your parents. Oh, and by the way, Nana would totally make the Easter Bunny bring you a Walkman.

8:00 a.m.: Dressing begins. For you, this involves dress (sometimes with pinafore), white tights, white leather (but never patent leather—white patent leather is tacky) Mary Janes and a large hair ribbon. Your sister’s dress is in a complementary color with a French lace collar and satin sash. Your mother takes you outside to pose you in front of the forsythia and pink dogwood so she can get a few snapshots before you get grass stain on your tights and chocolate all over your dainty white gloves. Your sister gets a speck of pollen on her dress and starts to cry. You take off running for the swingset deaf to your mother’s appeals, promptly fall and get grass stain all over your tights.

9:30 am: Your father has yet to shower, but your mother looks like she’s ready to go to a yacht party in Monte Carlo with Cary Grant. Her high heels precisely match the indigo of her low cut, full skirted linen dress. She wears a shiny gold choker and matching earrings, and you think she looks quite fabulous, despite the fact that you would have gone with something a little more Diana Ross (ruffles, feathers, sequins). She taps her heel against the floor of Dad’s study and suggests that he might hurry up if you’re going to make Sunday School. Dad sits in a leather chair of roughly the same color and condition as his bathrobe. He looks irritated at having been distracted from The New Yorker. You cross your fingers and hope your father ignores this request. “I, for one, don’t need to go to Sunday School,” you say, in your best approximation of a world-weary thirty-six year old. “I mean, don’t we all know the story?” Your mother warns you against blasphemy and shoots your father a look that says this is why we need to take them to Sunday school. Your sister asks for some orange juice. Your mother sighs. Your father tells you they’ve reprinted a story in the New Yorker by James Thurber.

9:55 am: You sit on the sofa in the den with your sister, disappointed that there are no cartoons, only church programming, which is boring and weird, though sometimes they wear interesting costumes. It is clear you will not be attending Sunday School, which is fine with you, because Sunday School is always boring. Last weekend you spent the night at Kristina’s house and went to her Sunday School class at the Lutheran Church where you learned two important things: 1) Martin Luther was not the biological father of Martin Luther King and 2) Palm Sunday did not mark the occasion in which Jesus and his disciples rented a condo at the beach. It’s hard to say which of these realizations was more disappointing to you. A month ago, your mother took you to Sunday School at her church for a few consecutive Sundays and you were instructed to memorize the titles of the books of the Old Testament with the promise of a prize. So you did, thinking that prize might include a Walkman, but actually it was just a coupon for free French Fries at McDonalds, which was kind of a bummer as you’re not a huge fan of either French Fries or McDonalds. You wrangle the remote from you sister and manage to catch the conclusion of “Splash” on HBO before moving on to MTV.

10:10 am: The airing of Madonna’s “Material Girl” video prompts a frantic dance party. Your three-year-old sister knows all the words. You indicate that you have a personal relationship with Madonna. Your sister appears to believe you.

10:35 am: The entire family loads into Dad’s sputtering Saab. Your bangs have already been parted unattractively by cowlick. Your mother tries to correct this as you fiddle with the rapidly expanding hole in your tights. The backseat is cramped, and feels more so because the red felt upholstery covering the ceiling sags like an old lady’s panty hose and threatens to engulf your Easter bonnet. Your mother reminds your father that there will be neither parking nor seating still available at the church. Your sister breathes. It irritates you. You ask her nicely to stop breathing and she takes the opportunity to smack her lips in your ears. By the time you get to the expressway, you’re hitting her and she’s biting you. Both of you insist that the other one started it. Your mother threatens punishment if the violence continues. Your sister keeps slurping. You raise a hand as a warning. Your sister screams that you hit her.

10:52 am: A parking space is discovered in the drive-thru lane of the Biltmore Village branch of Wachovia. You hustle over the green in front of the Church, where two ushers try and direct the bottleneck of tardy, well-heeled parishioners. Inside they’re already vamping on the pipe organ and you hope maybe this year you will get a seat with a decent view of the stage. But of course you don’t. You’re directed to the furthest back corner of the side arm of the cross-shaped sanctuary, which pretty much guarantees you will see nothing but the procession and recession. Once seated you crane your neck, see a few of your friends and try to get up and go see them, but are directed to sit down or else by your mother who looks like she needs a cigarette and a Bloody Mary.

11:00 am-12:00pm: Stand up. Sit down. Kneel. Stand up. Kneel. Sit down. Sit down. Stand Up. And also with you. Scoot the embroidered prayer bench back and forth using the heels of your shoes against the stone floor. Pick up the Book of Common Prayer. Put It Back. Pick It Up. Skim the Text. Add “in the bedroom” to the end of every sentence. Giggle. Ask your mother for a mint. Flip through the hymnal. Add “In the Bedroom” to the end of every title. Tilt your head back to look at the people in the stained glass. Try to figure out which one of them is supposed to be Jesus. Ask Jesus for a Walkman. Ask Jesus for a copy of “Like A Virgin.” Think about being a nun. Wish you were Catholic so you could be a nun. Figure you’d make it in a convent about a week. Hope that the person responsible for your inevitable excommunication would look a little like Andrew McCarthy. Twiddle your thumbs. Mess with the hole in your tights. Wish your guardian angel still brought your presents. Listen to your mother explain, again, that all the flowers in the front of the church came from the Biltmore Estate. Find the choir sort of boring. Sit down. Stand up. Ask if you take communion because you’d like a snack. Get denied. Go with your Dad while he takes communion and kneel beside him on the bench. Get blessed by the rector, whose fingers smell like Vicks. Go back to seat. Be bored. Try to make faces at friends across the church. Stand up. Ask if it’s almost over. Thrill at the recession. Watch an acolyte stumble while carrying a candle. Wonder if you’d survive if they had to evacuate the church in a hurry.

12:05 p.m.: Help yourself to iced butter cookies from central table in fellowship hall. Find friends. Ignore little sister. Tell your friends that the Easter Bunny brought you a Walkman. Pretend not to hear when little sister calls you a liar. Walk outside and try to enter as many closed doors as you can. Get shepherded back inside by your neighbor, who teaches your gifted class at elementary school. Ask her if it’s true that the Episcopal Church only exists because Henry VIII wanted a divorce. Glow with praise that you are precocious. Figure being called precocious at church means that God wants you to have a Walkman.

12:30 p.m.: Drive to Biltmore Estate, using Dad’s pass. Listen to mother ooh and ah over the spring greening of the grass. Wonder why there’s so much bamboo on the estate and no pandas. Ask to go to the house. Get told that you’re just going to the gardens to take pictures. Sulk because the gardens are boring. Walk through greenhouse. Get posed with your little sister. Ham it up for photographs. Try to appear as if you are a glamorous movie star. Get annoyed when your father does not take a picture of every single one of your practiced facial expressions—furious, distraught, sultry, tragic, Wonder Woman. Run out through the tulips, imagining that Heathcliff or Prince Charming or Han Solo or ideally David M. from your gifted class will pop out of the jonquils to receive your theatrical embrace. Imagine that you are a princess. Imagine that you live in the house and all the other people around you are peasants. Call someone a peasant under your breath. Feel bad. Know that as princess you would abdicate to lead the peasant revolt. Ask your dad for fifty cents to buy a Fresca from the vending machines. Wish you were in the throes of an epic romance. Make plans to call David later and ask him if he likes you and then hang up before he responds. Complain that your father is wasting all his film on your sister.

1:45 p.m.: Arrive at Country Club. Immediate take off for Ladies Lounge to lounge on the sofa for a little while, pretending that every woman that comes in is a guest at your Parisian salon. Make rounds through dining room, greeting all your friends. Brag about your haul from the Easter Bunny while finding some way to highlight the tragedy of not receiving a Walkman. I mean, I got a Wham tape, but what does the Easter Bunny expect me to play it on? The Fisher Prince tape player. God, I think not. Get told by at least six people that the Easter Bunny isn’t real. Explain that you know that, but that your three-year-old sister does not and so you have to go on pretending. This is absolutely true. Explain to no one that you are terrified of an evil, Easter Bunny doppelganger that haunts the pre-dawn hours of Easter morning. After all, that one might be real. You don’t really have any hard evidence one way or the other. So better safe than sorry. Incidentally, this more or less encapsulates your religious beliefs in a nutshell.

2:00 p.m.: Order a Shirley Temple and join the Easter buffet line for large helpings of some sort of casserole, chicken salad, overcooked scalloped potatoes and whatever seafood options are available. Avoid the beef for fear that it might be too chewy. Excuse yourself to return to the Ladies’ lounge at least three times during the meal. Practice an English accent. Practice an Irish accent. Practice a Russian accent. Think your French accent is pretty believable. Elect yourself chair of an imaginary committee. Try to replicate the opening dancing sequence from “West Side Story.” Perform a “Camelot” medley. Pretend to be imprisoned. Practice your swoon. Think you have tremendous natural talent as a tap-dancer. Flush a bar of soap down one of the toilets. Try to hide in the lobby. Run into Teresa in the hallway. Encourage her to play Cabaret Singer by Day/ Spy by Night in the bar. Discourage Teresa from inviting Erin, your nominal best friend to play along. Erin will want to add babies into the mix. Everyone knows that a glamorous spy would have nothing to do with a baby. War is hell. Tough women have to make sacrifices. Dodge the Gestapo all the way back to the dining room.

2:30 p.m.: Convene outside the Pro Shop for the Annual Easter Egg Hunt in and around the tennis courts and the eighteenth hole. Listen as some guy in a green golf shirt who looks like he’d rather be getting a root canal explain that there will be prizes for the most eggs collected. And one lucky person stumble upon the Magical Golden Egg that contains a magical prize for one very special little girl or boy. This last bit is delivered in a monotone. Look at Erin and roll your eyes. The countdown begins. Three. Two. Egg Hunt.

2:35 p.m.: You’ve been shoved, elbowed, trampled and roundly inconvenienced. You’ve crawled through pine mulch to retrieve two or three empty plastic eggs under a buggy rhododendron. You’re too short to reach the high places and too tall to crawl around like under the shrubbery. After all, you have some dignity, not to mention three new holes in your tights and a lot of pine needles stuck to your pinafore. Erin has managed all the same things without getting one single thing on her pink smocked dress. Which defies logic. Likewise the fact that what’shisface has found the Magical Golden Egg for the second year running. Amy tells you that what’shisface goes to Asheville Catholic and has a real Pac-Man machine in his house. Also he breakdances. You are so over breakdancers. You tell Amy he’s probably lying about the Pac-Man machine. And you should know. You’ve totally told that lie before.

2:38 p.m.: The magical golden egg is not magical at all. It’s a plastic pantyhose egg spray-painted gold. Contained inside, however, is a ten-dollar bill which pretty much the most magical thing you can take to the mall. What’shisface walks through the crowd cradling his prize with a smug grin and as much swagger as a four-foot tall third grader with a clip-on tie can muster. That guy is a dork, says Amy; because dork is about the worst thing you know to call someone. I don’t like him, you say. One of the boys flips him the bird and gets in trouble. You have no idea what flipping someone the bird means and are embarrassed of asking for fear of being mocked.

2:55 p.m.: Your mother takes a million years to finish talking and leave. You try to get Kristina to invite you back over for a sleepover at her house, despite the fact that you were there the weekend before. Kristina has a laundry chute large enough to crawl through, a Persian cat and a large, round sunken hot tub. Last weekend at Kristina’s you broke one of the jets of the hot tub, got caught going through her mother’s dresser drawer, kept Kristina up all night to her parent’s great consternation and taught Kristina and her seven year old brother the word “motherfucker,” which you’d recently learned from a Goldie Hawn movie. It does not cross your mind that you’ve done anything wrong. Even after you are never invited to Kristina’s house to spend the night ever again.

3:15-9:15p.m: Return home. Eat candy. Sit in the kitchen hallway eavesdropping on your mother’s telephone conversation while your sister falls asleep on the sofa to HBO. Later your dad will play a Miles Davis record and you will eat a grilled cheese. “The Sound of Music” will be broadcast tonight on one of the networks and you just can’t get enough of the nuns. You will be made to go to bed just after the wedding, but before the Von Trapps must run from the Nazis. You will be unable to fall asleep and sit up reading one of the four books you have squirreled away beneath your covers the light of the streetlamp. You will finish a chapter of “Watership Down” and dream about rabbits—good ones and evil ones. And Easter will be over until next year.

Swords Drawn

In a stack of family papers, liberated from the back of a dusty cabinet at my father’s house, I came across an official certificate dated January 11, 1823, in which some relative of mine named Jacob Slaughter of Sullivan County, was given an official military commission from the state of Tennessee.

As a historical document, it’s not terribly interesting. I don’t know who Jacob Slaughter is, how or even if he is related to me. I’m not sure why he went into the army, or what he did there. The only thing noteworthy at all is a statement printed on the back that reads as follows:

“I, __________, do solemnly swear on Holy Evangelists of Almighty God that I have not given or accepted a challenge either written or verbal to fight a Duel, nor have I fought one since the passage of an act passed in the year eighteen hundred and seventeen entitled, An act more affectually to prohibit Duelling, nor have I been second or bearer of a challenge for such a purpose; and that I will not fight a Duel, or be bearer of a challenge either written or verbal for such a purpose, or act as the second of both or either of the parties concerned in a Duel, during my continuance in office, So help me God.”

A space at the end requires an initial, which Jacob Slaughter did not provide. Perhaps because he refused the commission, or perhaps because the Anti-Duelling clause was, by 1823, a mere formality. Maybe there’s an interesting story tied into all that, maybe not. From my 21^st century vantage, I find the fact that such as proviso was necessary, even as a formality, to be the more salient point.

Italy Complete Record: Day Three

Venezia
March 29, 2006
Hotel Antico Doge
2:15am

I start out of sleep, flustered, wide awake, and cursing jet lag. I can hear Anna’s even breathing downstairs which confirms that I am alone in this. I go to the bathroom, fetch a bottle of mineral water out of the mini-bar, and finish “The Talented Mr. Ripley,”

before trying (and failing) to fall back to sleep for about three hours. Every time I close my eyes I’m spinning in these swirls of Baroque detail—grand architecture and curlicues and busy trompe de l’oeil paintings. This kind of insomnia is incurable without drugs or alcohol, neither of which I have on hand. Instead, I lie back on the bed and contemplate the crude, white-washed ceiling beams above me, put in place by medieval hands. I stand up in the dark to run my hand along the ledge, half-expecting some haunted transmission, but instead only amusing myself by imagining melodramas taking place in this house three centuries ago. The mayor’s son. The doge’s daughter. A pregnant serving girl. The Spanish Inquisition. The alleyway outside the window stays busy all night, and I hear someone toss a bottle at our wall. The glass cracking and clanking against the cobblestones below.

I try to fall asleep again.

Still doesn’t take.

At four am, I contemplate Christianity, after failing to induce sleep by way meditation (usually works, which is why I’ll never be a mystic). It seems to me that all the great things (art, music, philosophy, architecture) Christianity (and in particular, Roman Catholicism) produced came out of the need to justify how you (and by extension, everyone else) should put aside all skepticism, rationality, and native intelligence in order to put all your faith into a bunch of Middle-Eastern fairy tales about a vicious, unforgiving, and unintentionally hilarious god and his eager, self-effacing hippie son. It’s certainly a challenge. And Italy, the cradle of Catholicism, provides a wonderful example of just how bizarre Christianity actually is. Like, how on earth did the descendents of Caesar, Virgil, and Ovid ever accept this shit? At what point did the general population just decide that Bacchanalia was uncivilized, but that drinking the simulated blood of a Hebrew radical was something to be praised (and in some cases, rigorously enforced)? I think most of the Romans probably agreed t

hat Jupiter probably didn’t have sex with the Lady of Sparta in the form of a swan, and that Castor and Pollux were probably not hatched out of shells. That was just a metaphor. But the Virgin Mary? Hey man, that’s the gospel truth (no pun intended).

But you have to love the holdovers from the ancient world. Italy’s writers for millennia have prided themselves on knowing exactly how to get to the gates of hell, and getting clearance to stop by for a friendly chat with their dead friends (all damned, by the way). They don’t get stuck ther

e—no getting eaten by a three-headed dog, or drowning in the river Styx, or pissing off the demons—but instead go home to report the experience as some kind of rollicking anecdote. It doesn’t matter if you’re a defeated Trojan who can’t keep a girlfriend alive or a malcontented Florentine in love with a dead nine-year-old. Hell is at your command!

*****

Antico Doge

5:20 am

On my fourth trip to the bathroom, Anna stirs and asks if I can sleep.

“I’ve been wide awake for three hours,” I say.

She sighs. “You wanna do something?”

“Like watch the sunrise over the Grand Canal?”

She shrugs.

I get my coat.

*****

5:30

The night desk clerk gives us a puzzled look when we tromp downstairs to hand in our room key well before dawn. We unlatch the great wooden doors and head out into the cool, damp alleyways around the hotel.

The streets are empty but for a small battalion of grumbling men and women in coveralls, armed only with plastic push brooms, against a truly amazing amount of litter. The canals are oily black, and the view down the small bridges is shadowy, but not sinister. It’s too peaceful to be sinister. I climb the steps to the top of Rialto Bridge, careful not to disturb the chorus of sweepers, and let the cold wind off the canal burn my cheeks and dry out my eyes.

A young British couple, very enamored of each other, appears on the bridge, travel-weary and dragging suitcases, and asks us to take their picture against the lightening Eastern sky. I oblige, and watch them walk away, my arms over the edge of the bridge. We take a lot of pictu

res, and I am hyper-conscious, as we walk back at the sound of my boots against the cobblestones and wooden walkways. The way every sound echoes throughout the campo.

Back at Antico Doge, I find our favorite bench is occupied by a sleeping young man, who is either passed out from drinking or the most fashionable homeless genius I’ve ever seen. We stand on the bridge speculating for a while, until he stands suddenly and wanders off in the general direction of the Canal. We claim his bench, still warm from his body and sit there unt

il the sky turns blue and the chimes in the belltower ring for six o’clock.

I leave Anna awake downstairs studying maps and I return to bed finally able to sleep.

9:00am

The included breakfast at Antico Doge is served in what was once, reputedly, a ballroom. I admit to having little experience with ballrooms, but I’m not buying that the small, windowless, gold breakfast nook was ever anyone’s idea of a party room.

Certainly the breakfast crowd is not in the mood to party. It strikes me as we walk into to the virtually (and awkwardly) silent space that we are the youngest people staying in the hotel by at least twenty (if not thirty) years. We take our plates to the bar in a veritable vacuum, passing several couples with facial expressions broadcasting: “Oh Bloody Hell, the barbarians have arrived.” I try to make as little noise as possible, which is challenging, as the more polite we try to behave the more hilarious the conditions seem. By the time we leave, I’ve spilled coffee on my lap and announced, “Fuck, I think I just ate half a ham” (the latter was supposed to be a whisper, but the acoustics in that room were such that I think the other gu

ests could hear my hair growing).

We drop the room key again with the young, American girl at the front desk:

“How in hell did she get that job?” asks Anna.

“Maybe her parents were Italian. There are family loopholes in the whole EU thing.”

“How can I get tha

t job?”

I sigh, and take off on a convoluted narrative in which I remind Anna that our respective familial connections to Europe are distant, to put it mildly, and I’m pretty sure we can’t get working papers because somebody 9 generations ago might have lived in Scotland.

“Did live in Scotland,” says Anna. “My mother’s maiden name is Stewart. My ancestors were related to the royals.”

“How bout that?”

“True story,” says Anna.

“Well in that case, can we start calling Charles the II “Uncle Charlie,” because I really like the way that sounds.”

“And James the First can be Uncle Jaime.”

“The Holy Bible—Uncle Jaime Edition. Sounds good,” I say. “I still don’t think you can use that to get a job in Italy though.”

“Probably not,” says Anna. “Damnit.”

9:30 am

We step onto RialtoBridge, to see the shuttered doors coming off the stalls and stores we’d passed earlier in the day. The sky is cloudless, full blue, and from the top of the bridge we can see the flowers and fruits of the street market on the other side of the river. Most of it is crap—shitty tourist stuff—plastic masks, bad t-shirts, but we walk slowly in case we miss something.

The other side of the Canal is quieter, and once we’re a few blocks out of the market, less clogged with tourists. On otherwise empty alleyways, we pass waiters in white aprons taking cigarette breaks from side work against high terra cotta colored walls. Venice has a lot of the following things:

1. Mask stores
2. Lingerie stores
3. Stationary shops
4. Restaurants that advertise both Pizza and Gelato. (In fact, one was actually called simply: “Pizza and Ice Cream”)
5. Hot men.

So many of the last in fact, that it becomes almost impossible to not be distracted by eye-candy at every twist and turn. It’s not just that men in Venice are tall, slender, dark, and handsome. It’s that the tall, slender, dark and handsome men in Venice are extraordinarily well dressed (even if they’re wearing hoodies and jeans—the jeans fit well), congenial, and inclined to smile appreciatively at every passing woman. When they speak, they look you in the eyes. And even hecklers from across the Canal are pretty flattering. (“Bella! Bella!” being infinitely preferable to “Back that Ass up!”) This has the benefit of making you, as observing/ed female, feel infinitely more confident, beautiful, and desirable than you may even be. This is not a talent that most American men have, and romance on this side of the Atlantic suffers for it.

On the way to Frari, we stray too far into the wrong direction and end up by a University where a bunch of students are participating in what looks like a Fraternity initiation, involving stripping, getting doused with all manner of shit, and then awarded a black robe and laurel wreath. There’s quite a crowd gathered, including a perambulatory band with accordion. Anna and I promise ourselves we will figure out what’s going on, and head back in the right direction to Frari.

10:45 am

Though spacious, high, and true to its architectural era, Frari isn’t a grand cathedral, but what it lacks in architectural opulence, it makes up in quality of featured art. Titian’s “Assumption” stands in full, brilliant glory over the altar, and each corner features pieces—both paintings and sculptures—of similar beauty and craftsmanship. Donatello’s John the Baptist—skeletal and decked out in animal skins. The Bellini “Madonna in Child” in the smaller chapel, which is truly magnificent. The Venetian painters, unlike their Florentine peers, had a gift for capturing beautiful women. This seems as if it shouldn’t come as such a surprise, but the fact is: most Renaissance art is all about glorifying the masculine. After days of seeing dulled female heads on lumpen, androgynous bodies, the business of the women in Venetian painting seemed all the more remarkable. Titian’s women are perfectly beautiful and remarkably human for their time, and Bellini, his teacher, painted the most gorgeous Madonna I saw in Italy, whose puzzling facial expression—acceptance mixed with regret mixed with tedium mixed with sadness and exhaustion—is truly remarkable to see. When I stepped in to see her, in that tiny Chapel, in the company of two elderly English tourists, I felt like I’d earned some rare glimpse into the real character of the mythological virgin, and found it rather heartbreaking.

We interrupted a tour group, lead by Enrique Iglesias’s mole, which has since evacuated to the face of a skinny young Italian man, on our way out. I bought lots of post cards, and we agreed to stop for coffee on the way to see the Tintoretto Chapel.

At a small cappuccino stand, run by two friendly women who didn’t speak a word of English, we sat outside to smoke and watched the parade of hot men. Anna determines the predominant fashion trend among young Italian women involves patterned tights and puffy jackets, and starts to revise her opinion on the latter, having previously filed it under the “Way Too Brooklyn Hipster for My Taste” heading. The back of Frari is under construction, so the entire square smells a little like nail polish remover, and every now and then you catch sight of the construction crew, who are all dressed like they came from Disco Night at the Star Trek Convention. Fuschia jumpsuits. Shiny silver stripes. Not kidding.

I drink a coffee and a lemon soda in quick succession and we head back to Scuola di San Rosso—a brilliant white building in a square of brilliant white buildings. Inside it is quite a bit darker. We wander round the first floor, looking up at Tintoretto’s often creepy and certainly elaborate biblical scenes before realizing that the real show is upstairs. This ballroom of a chapel with high gilded frescos on all sides, including ceiling. (They give you mirrors so you can see what’s above you without straining your neck—and this is a great idea, except you end up looking at all the pictures in reverse). I marvel at the opulence of the space and the, to be blunt, bat-shit crazy quality of Tintoretto’s work and subject matter. I get “Let’s Get It On” stuck in my head at the top of the stairs, and probably irritate the other patrons by humming the line “We are all sensitive people, with so much to give . . .” over and over, until Anna and I are distracted by a ceiling panel that appears to be God coming out of Godzilla’s nose in order to give Moses revision notes on the Ten Commandments. (This later proved to be “Jonah and the Whale,” but I had to buy a postcard in order to figure that out. And Tintoretto obviously had no idea what a whale looked like). I don’t know why—when confronted with the sublime—I am apt to devolve into a giggling adolescent. Chalk it up to my philistine tendencies, I guess.

After perusing the gift shop and finding no cheap coffee mug printed with Tintoretto’s likeness we head back out into the streets around the university and find more students engaged in the laurel wreath ritual around low-rent coffee stands and used book stores. We get turned around following two young mothers pushing babies in carriages and come out in Campo Santa Margarita, where Anna explains the history of the Rio Terre Canal (which apparently was once an actual canal, but is now a street. ) We stop in a lovely, quiet, and chilly church, and then head out through the archways to the area around the Accademia.

12:30pm

The Accademia Bridge is one of the grandest wooden bridges I’ve ever seen, rising in a high arch over the Grand Canal. From the top, you can see the view of Venice that’s printed on all the postcards. As such, it is absolutely clogged with tourists and gypsies selling ragdoll animals and praying mantises made out of palm leaves. Because we are tourists, we edge into the crowd to take our own series of predictable snapshots, and I fall into serious consideration of all the flying lions[1] around town. The water beneath us is brilliant blue green, and you could for a moment imagine it as tropical and pristine were it not for the omnipresent scent of old fish and rotten trash. After a while, you stop noticing the way Venice smells.

We go to the Peggy Guggenheim because we fear it will be our only real opportunity to see Modern and Post-Modern Art whilst in the country of ten billion crucifixion scenes. (This was, incidentally, correct). Twisting through the narrow streets back toward Ms. Guggenheim’s villa, we encounter a truly dazzling assortment of international hipsters, all of whom look like they’ve recently stepped out of an LCD Soundsystem show, except for the inevitable clutch of teenaged mohicans, who scowl when they sip their espresso and prove that, even in 2006, there’s really no place free of purple haired fifteen year olds in a safety-pinned Exploited T-shirts.

By the time, we reach the Peggy Guggenheim, there are only hipsters. Legions of them. Working at the ticket desk, lounging in the courtyard, smoking against the walls. I hear at least seven different languages, but everyone looks like they should be sitting on the back patio of OCSC on a weekend night. I do realize that I’m definitely playing the part of the pot to the kettle here, but seriously? It’s a bit unnerving.

I enjoy the art. Especially the Italian Futurist collection. It occurs to me that I’m never going to stand in awe of Jackson Pollack, and that the popularity of Surrealism at Campus Poster Sales has permanently compromised my ability to look at a Salvador Dali painting and not think about nineteen year old stoners. The temporary exhibit of B&W photographs documenting the Venice Biennale from 1948 to present is way more interesting than it probably should be, and, arguably, my most favorite piece is a recent Jenny Holzer bench, which like most of her stuff is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Peggy Guggenheim is buried there, in a grave in the courtyard alongside her fifteen lap dogs. I spend entirely too much money on postcards of the lady herself, in tricked-out sunglasses, partly because they guy working at the gift shop is incredibly charming.

2:30 pm

By this point, we’re exhausted and hungry. We cross the Canal to head back toward Piazza San Marco for lunch, and end up on the street with all the expensive designer stores (which I have no business even looking at). The plan is eat at one of the upscale tourist traps along the outside of the square, but we find, upon arrival, that they are, by and large, closed for the season. Spent, Anna and I collapse against a column in the corner to be observed by a thousand or so morbidly obese pigeons.

“These are the fattest pigeons I have ever seen,” I say.

“They look like turkeys,” says Anna.

“Tiny, fat turkeys.”

“Look, they can hardly fly even,” says Anna. “You figure they’re kickable?”

I sit back to watch a near-Hitchcockian drama play out between a group of high school students and about two hundred pigeons. They’re screaming and holding their heads.

“I don’t think anyone would stop you at this point. Might be kind of a public service. Of course, they might shit on you.”

“I’m just waiting for that to happen,” she says. “I read a whole section in the guidebook last night about how to get pigeon shit off of you. Apparently you let it dry first.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“It’s kind of gross.”

“So is eating the fat pigeons,” I say. “But in a pinch, I’m sure they’d be filling.”

“Hello Bird Flu.”

“This is like Ground Zero for Bird Flu,” I say, and quiet. An outbreak of avian flu in Venice would be like Night of the Living Dead. “Jesus.”

Sitting in Piazza San Marco is sort of like taking a sedative. After a while, you stop noticing how much time has passed or what you have to do. It becomes very hard to pull yourself away and motivate. Eventually, the hunger factor forces us up off our asses, and we wander out toward the canal, intrigued by the notion of excellent Bellinis at Harry’s (where we don’t actually end up eating due to a lack of outdoor seating). Anna balks at paying to use the toilet. I buy glass fish for my mother at the stalls by the Canal, and ultimately we end up at a pizza place about two blocks back from the Piazza, where our waiter initiates what is to become a popular thread on our trip through Italy.

He arches his eyebrows and smiles. “So you’re English, right?”

“No.”

“Scottish?”

“No.”

“Austrailian?”

“Nope.”

He puzzles. “Irish?”

“No.”

Anna rolls her eyes and raises her hand. “American.”

“No,” he says.

We shrug apologetically. “Yeah.”

He shakes his head and takes our wine order, still not convinced.

I had told Anna before leaving the States that I’ve rarely been identified as an American at first blush when traveling in Europe.[2] This is no put-on on my part. I don’t fake accents or adopt new personas. And I don’t know why this is, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take it as a compliment. Anna didn’t believe me when I told her, but when the maitre d walks away, she looks across the table and says:

“Okay, you’re right. That was totally flattering.”

I think for a moment on the semi-tragedy of how embarrassing it’s become to be an American in the Bush-era. And I try to not to wonder if the continual confusion over my nationality derives from the fact that I don’t have perfect teeth.

I eat most of a small pizza and we drink an entire bottle of wine sitting there, getting politely heckled by a table full of Italian boys in track jackets. We take off after lunch, opting out of the lines in front of the Cathedral to pay 7 euro for a cramped elevator ride to the top of the bell tower, where we gawk amid middle-aged tourists, and look out over the red tile roofs to the distant Adriatic. By the time we return to ground level, Anna and I decide to head back toward the hotel on the Vaporetto.

5:00pm

We ride up the Grand Canal watching the passing hilarity of un-self-conscious gondolier passengers. Seated on the front edge, I have a good view of what rush hour traffic looks like in a city of water. Behind me, a young Scottish couple muses about the possibility of Vaporetti-Spotting. We disembark at Ca’ D’Oro, and wander back down the Canareggio Streets to our hotel, and then onto the Rialto, where I spend entirely too much money on a leather journal, bought from a husband and wife team who make sketchbooks in an ancient style. Anna gets run out of a tourist stall by an angry proprietor for trying to take a picture of an incongruous American Civil War chess set displayed among the plastic lions and cheap glass beads.

We finally settle back for another cheap bottle of wine at a Caffe beside the Bridge and irritate an uptight young English couple by smoking. The sun is sinking lower in the western sky, and I take a short detour on the way home at a cheesy chain store to buy a skirt.

By the time we get back to Antico Doge, we’re dog-tired and fall asleep for about an hour and a half, rising late—at almost nine to wander around the corner to a small restaurant called Trattoria di Bepi.

9:00pm

In our (limited) experience, Venice is not much of a late-night town. In fact, by 9:30, Venice is pretty much sleeping save a couple of discos by the train station. This apparently has something to do with a necessary, of fairly Draconian, noise ordinance. Water and narrow alleyways do little to insulate against sound. By the time we arrive at the restaurant, literally one block from our hotel, at a few minutes after nine, the staff is already stacking chairs, anxious to go home. We settle into a communal dining area, and are seated midway down a table next to an older couple. An American woman, Brenda, who is from Atlanta and runs an international glass shop with a showroom at the High Point Furniture Market, and her attractive European significant other (we later speculate that he’s probably Greek). They come to Venice regularly to deal directly with the Murano people, but have spent the better part of the last week in rural Romania dealing with remote artisans in regions without real roads. We hear a collection of colorful anecdotes about fly fishing in the Carpathians before they offer up the location of a bar up the road called Tortuga and promise to meet us later for a drink, should we choose to join them.

Anna and I order an Italian variant of the seafood platter and are served plates brimming with tiny, crispy anchovies and squids. Anna puts her squeamishness aside and does tolerably well with the mystery seafood. I’m not squeamish, but find the meal mediocre at best.

10:30pm

After dinner, we wander the empty streets around the hotel searching for Tortuga. We find a movie theater and a lot of houses with darkened windows but no sign of nightlife. We finally surrender to return to Rialto and Signore Nefarious, who appears just as unhappy to see us as he did the night before. We sit in the far corner table, the Canal lapping mere inches from our outstretched feet.

“At risk of being cheesy, this really is the most beautiful place,” I say.

Anna nods. “Yeah.”

“Shame we have to go tomorrow.”

“True.”

I turn my head to look at the lights on the water and feel the brisk wind against my cheek. I wonder, idly, if I’ll ever come back, while somewhere inside the bar, the wait staff thumps the bar triumphantly at the end of the soccer game playing on the television.

And though we’re not leaving until the next morning, I take a moment to say goodbye to Venice.

---

[1] Not actually griffins, as I find out later. Flying lions are a symbol of St. Mark and a sign of the Enlightenment. They also, at least in Venice, bear a significant resemblance to the Cowardly Lion with wings. In other words, not terribly intimidating. I plan on dressing my cat, Maud, as a Venetian Flying Lion for Halloween this year. I’ll keep you updated on how this goes.

[2] Even in England my sister and I shared an elevator in a fancy hotel with a couple convinced we were Irish

Italy Complete Record: Day Two

March 28, 2006

Venezia
10:15am

The Venice airport is charming and small and laid back. Even the Italian military guys in baggage claim, wearing modified fatigues and carrying automatic rifles, mostly just lounge and laugh and try to flirt with female passengers (including Anna). We enter the small, marble and glass lobby to buy Alilaguna water bus tickets from a window beside an espresso stand where two attractive elderly men in designer eyewear bicker lovingly over a couple of cappuccinos.

We pull our suitcases outside to smoke a cigarette beside the taxi lane and watch the all of the following pass, in succession: Two nuns in full habit, four young men in Italia soccer jackets with complicated hair, a glamorous middle aged woman with Cat’s Eye sunglasses, high heels, two dogs, and a fur coat, a Marlon Brando lookalike in a long black dress coat and a black suit, and finally, a tall, black-haired, blue-eyed guy in what looked like surgical scrubs and a track jacket, who approaches with some measure of feline grace and asks for a light. Easily one of the hottest guys I’ve ever seen. After thanking us politely, he darts off into the parking lot, leaving Anna and I to sit stunned into silence on the bench.

“Wow,” I say.

“Wow,” says Anna. “Bad pants, but, Wow.”

“You figure they hire that guy as a greeter? Like, “hey, welcome to Italy where the hot men are.”

“Wow,” says Anna.

“Also the nuns and the fashionistas and the Sofia Loren look alike and the Mafioso looking dudes. Do you think the Italian tourism board pays these people to walk around the airport, play the stereotypes, and amuse the travelers?”

“Wow,” says Anna.

“So this is Italy,” I say. “May be premature, but I’m gonna say that I’m pro-Italy.”

Anna shakes her head. “That guy? So fucking hot.”

*****

11:45 am
It’s drizzly, quite foggy, and a little cold. We’re standing about a half a mile from the terminal on a covered dock, floating on the murky green water of the Lagoon, waiting for the waterbus with an eager English teenager[1] and his white-haired dad. I’m feeling a little high at present (it’s now almost 5 am, my time), a condition not aided by the ceaseless rocking of the dock and the occasional glimmer of blinding white sunlight through the fog. I close my eyes and hallucinate a sea serpent.

When the boat shows up, about fifty people converge out of nowhere to join us on our ride across the Lagoon. The guys on the boat are affable enough, drinking coffee from a novelty mug featuring a pair of breasts and what I imagine must be a cheesy joke in Italian. They steer with no great precision using a polished wooden captain’s wheel which looks like it was stolen of an 18^th century pirate sloop and attached with superglue to the metal dashboard.

I lean my head against the window as we pass through a colonnade of elaborate buoys and rock jetties, each topped with signs that look to have been painted about a century ago (at least). These markers are each topped by a single fat seagull—as if part of the gimmick—as we pass through the brightening mist. I halfway anticipate a pirate attack by the time we round past an island housing a villa and an enormous cemetery. Sunlight starts creeping through as we pass the Lido and through Murano, where we see the glass factory and lots of black fluffy dogs.

Crossing the grandest part of the grand canal in a near golden fog—the outline of the distant domes and towers rising out of the mist—I feel like I’m sailing into a Henry James novel or some strange, Italian Avalon that emerges from the haze sporadically to seduce the stray visitor into some decadent alternate reality. Wouldn’t be so bad, I think, as we round into the Grand Canal and I get my first look at the Byzantine archways of the Doge’s Palace, and beyond to the great, elaborate edifice of St Mark’s. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little teary at that first sight of Venice through the shimmering, damp mist.

We disembark at the far end of Piazza San Marco, just to the right of Harry’s Bar, and drag our now damp and heavy suitcases over a narrow waterside sidewalk abutted on both sides by market stalls selling Carnevale masks and Italia warm-up jackets. We pass a block of pay-to pee toilets and round the first edge of waterlogged sidewalk cafes to pass beneath the columns at the edge of the square. I give a nod up to Triton, standing on what appears to be a crocodile, and the friendly looking griffin with the fat paws as we merge into the crowd of tourists in front of the Cathedral.

Well past the point of standard exhaustion, wet from the rain, yet uncomfortably warm, Anna and I convene on the overturned pallets the Venetians use for walkways when the square floods at high tide for a cigarette break and a map consult. It starts raining harder even before I manage to light the cigarette with the now damp, globetrotting matches from Orange County Social Club. Hordes of tourists rush in the direction from which we have come to the Vaporetti stop, the rest huddle in awkward clutches under awnings and clear plastic ponchos of the Disneyworld model. I glance up at the aged, green Etruscan horses stampeding high over the Cathedral archways, and can’t summon up any energy to hurry. The pace and grandeur of the place is anathema to efficiency, and I can’t stop wondering at the vastness of the square, the long rows of colonnades, blackened with soot and age, the wide public space (one of the most magnificent in the world—urban planners teach seminars on it). It would be hard to live in Venice at any time in the last millennium or so and not have a deeply felt sense of civic pride based on the remarkable achievements of the planners, architects, and engineers who managed to create a kind of heaven on earth effect out of a swamp. Venice was the least likely to that became the richest city of medieval Europe. As center of trade and commerce, Venice played out of both hands, innovating, stealing, borrowing, or skimming off of the top from and for the East and the West, often at the same time. How else to explain how Europe’s most elaborately Byzantine city provided the financial backing, the transport, and the suggestion to the Crusaders that sacked Constantinople?

(Probably not coincidence . . . just saying)

At the end of the day, though, Venice’s ability to survive the last thousand years or so really boils down to is luck, bolstered by an appealing, if counterintuitive notion, that nature is no match for the wily, baroque sensibilities of the Venetian population.[2] The jewel of the Adriatic with waterways guarded by griffins and pagan gods, with a Carnevale that set the bar for debauchery on at least two other continents, with a list of noteworthy painters and artists (Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, et al) whose unique translation of Renaissance ideals showed less concern for piety and neo-Platonism and more for pleasure, feminine perfection, and other such worldly aims. (Among other things, Venice gave birth to Casanova). And there’s something quite intoxicating about the city’s historic flouting of its own obvious mortality. The gold encrusted facades of palazzos on the grand canal, slowing rotting and sinking into the lagoon. It’s some sort of testament to the ephemeral quality of human endeavor—no matter how grand. And it doesn’t take long to recognize that Venice is extraordinarily beautiful, and it’s beauty is not in spite of the grit and decay, but because of it. [3]

It is my idea to brave the rainy streets with a crude map and find our hotel on foot. It's not the best one. The shower has picked up considerable strength since we landed and we slog through with miniature travel umbrellas past crowds cowering under the awnings of jewelry shops and tourist traps. Schlepping a oversized suitcase through the alleys and over the white marble bridges of Venice is hard enough when it’s not raining. Factor in our condition (hungry, tired, wet), the crowds, and the smirking, dawdling gondoliers who took some pleasure in watching us take a suitcase over the same stairway three times before we finally figured out the right direction, it feels downright purgatorial. Venice is like a maze. There are plenty of dead ends, but you end up walking all the way around a block before you realize the sidewalk stops at the canal and unless you want to swim (not advised), you’re pretty much back at square one. About thirty minutes into the quest for our hotel, Anna and I land in an empty, perfectly charming courtyard just east of the Rialto Bridge, where we consider giving up entirely and surrendering to the fact that we are lost. Finding our hotel is futile. Why even try?

And, as usually happens in these scenarios, about five minutes later we arrive at our hotel.

Antico Doge is the former residence of the mayor of Venice, facing a little campo in Canareggio, fitted with its own small belltower and a great many tobacco stores. (This square is, incidentally, the only place with park benches in the entire city of Venice.) You enter the hotel through heavy wooden doors on the ground floor (which look somewhat less imposing for being wedged between a store selling off-price designer jeans and an extremely loveable video arcade featuring vintage Galaga machines, football betting, and cheap rates for internet browsing) and drag your sopping wet suitcase down their plush pink runner to a tiny check-in area where an attractive woman looks at you with obvious pity and tries to distract you from thinking about how long it’s going to take you to get in your room (top of the stairs) and into bed by offering a complimentary trip to the Murano glass factory in the back of a tiny motorboat owned by the manager of the hotel, which, right now, sounds like the last thing you want to do. And finally, you check in and a 50 year old man who is probably 5’2 and weighs (probably) forty pounds less than you do (at least), but otherwise bears a striking resemblance to David Straithairn starts hauling your luggage upstairs before you can stop him, and by the time you reach the stop of the stairs (narrow, marble, fitted with an itty bitty funicular), he’s purple from the strain and you’re red from embarrassment, and you have no idea what to expect when he uses an enormous brass key with an even larger silk tassel on the end to open your room (called “The Danolo”).

I worry that I accidentally booked the suite.

Anna puts it well.

“Shit, this is nice.”

High polished hardwood floors, gold silk brocade walls, crystal chandeliers.

“Italian MTV,” says Anna.

“Bidet!” I say. “Mini-bar!”

Anna opens the drapes to unlatch the seven foot tall windows. “Interesting alley views!” (Not the suite)

There’s a stairwell leading upstairs to a loft with a queen size bed. Downstairs there’s a twin size bed fitted as a sofa. Both (we will learn) are hard as rocks.

Slightly reenergized by our successful hotel room conquest, we leave the hotel to buy a phone card from the tobacco store across the campo. The guy running the place is chaming, though I findthat all the Italian I’d tried to learn disappears as soon as I tryto speak it. I buy a cigarette lighter and Anna and I walk deeper into Canareggio to sit on the edge of an empty fountain and smoke a cigarette.

On about the third drag, I slide on my sunglasses (the clouds are finally clearing), and woozily turn to Anna: “I think I’m either going to pass out or die.”

Though Anna insists she isn't tired, she agrees to put off further exploration until after a nap. We stroll back to the hotel, I slog up the steps to the loft, and without even bothering to take off my clothes, fall asleep in about five minutes.

*****

The nap you take after crossing the Atlantic is only ever supposed to last for an hour or two. Invariably, though, you lie down at two, fall into a deep sleep, and when you open your eyes again, it’s dark outside.

Such is the case our first afternoon in Venice. I don't roll over until about 7:30 and shuffle down the stairs to see Anna stirring on the bed below.

“We should eat something,” I say, opening my suitcase.

She groans in protest.

“Seriously.” I pull a clean shirt from the pile and a pair of heavy rhinestone earrings to trick me into believing I look clean, attractive, and well-rested. By the time I’m dressed and out of the bathroom, Anna has watched enough of Italian MTV to compare it favorably to American MTV.

“They play way better videos here,” she says.

In other words, they actually play videos here.

I flip through the channels while she dresses. We drop the key with the concierge and take off into the darkened streets.

*****

Our first meal in Italy is profoundly mediocre. We end up at a Trattoria with a nautical theme and lots of wood paneling full of paunchy, elderly Brits and an overfriendly techie with really fucked up teeth from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who insists quizzing us about the status of all of his favorite bars in the greater Triangle area. I guess he’s nice enough, but he looks a little like a hamster and I sort of wish he would leave me to enjoy my mediocre crab pasta and cheap white house wine in peace. We empty the carafe of wine with ease, trying to dull the awkwardness of the restaurant, and leave with a fond farewell from Captain Fayetteville.[4]

Over at the Rialto Bridge, we stumble upon a little bar at the base, with tables all the up to the Canal. It will become our home away from home for the duration of our stay in Venice. We order a couple of cappuccinos from a surly, bald waiter, whom I nicknamed Signore Nefarious, in honor of my favorite surly French waiter, Monsieur Nefarious[5]. Venice is very quiet, even early at night, so much so that you can hear the water lapping against the carved stone banks. We watch gondolas pass under the bridge, the water reflected under the arch like green sequins.

Anna yawns.

We pay the bill, check our email at the arcade beside the hotel, and go to bed.

---

[1] I hesitate to use the word “dorky,” but that’s probably closer to the truth.

[2] This logic is not as appealing as it once was. By all reports, the permanent population of Venice is shrinking every year, while the tourism trade grows exponentially. The most recent count put Venice’s population at about 65,000, less than half of what it was in the 1960’s.

[3] On a personal note, I found myself thinking about New Orleans pretty much from the moment I step off the boat. This is no passing thought. At some point in the future, as ocean levels rise, Venice will cease to be. If they had hurricanes in the Adriatic, it probably would have happened a long time ago. I doubt Venice would condescend to compare itself with an upstart colonial city at the mouth of the Mississippi, just as I doubt New Orleans could ever aspire to such great heights, especially not now. But I’m haunted by the latter the whole time I’m in the former.

[4] It occurs to me sometime later that he was probably in the military.

[5] He works at Brasserie Lipp on Blvd St. Germain in Paris. Eat there just so he can serve your food, make snide comments about your face or family members, and allude to his plans for world domination. I (and I say this without irony) absolutely adore him.

Italy Complete Record: Prologue/ Day One

The night before we left for Italy Anna and I inadvertently ended up hosting a celebratory send-off to ourselves in place of the now traditional Sunday night dinners. Wilson and Whitney came by (with additional) friends in tow, to fetch the keys. The Boop arrived to partake of the pizza we ordered from up the street and watch a re-rerun of “Grey’s Anatomy.” I handed out house keys like party favors, while Anna showed off her comprehensive list of instructions to the small army of friends and (in the Boop’s case) relatives we’d retained as housesitters and airport shuttle service. The Boop departed that night with a stern warning that we “better be ready to fucking go” when she came by to take us to the airport the following morning. Lateness would not be tolerated. I laughed at her worry. Barring packing, I was ready to go in January. Barring plane tickets and hotel reservations, I’d been ready to go for years. I just needed a little shot of travel catalyst to jolt me out of the sweet, if shrinking, complacency of everyday life in Carrboro.

By the time everyone left, I was a little intoxicated, a condition I’d hoped for, in order to insure sleep unencumbered by the Christmas-Eve-at-Eight-Years-Old variety of insomnia in which I’d toss and turn on “is it time yet?” until the pre-dawn light brought a bevy of less glamourous travel anxieties. I’d been quizzing myself on rudimentary Italian using homemade flashcards written out during a shift at CD Alley the week before. “Vorrei una bighlietta a Venezia?” “Dove vaporetto?” I was pretty sure I’d end up sounding like babbling idiot (in most cases, I did, but most Italians are reasonably good-humored about correcting pronunciation). I jumped out of bed two or three times in early evening to recheck the location of my passport, convinced that I’d merely hallucinated its presence the last two or three times I’d looked. Finally satisfied that I was reasonably sane, I crawled into bed with the Ripley Omnibus and finally fell off to sleep with visions of rich, young, murderous American expatriates dancing in my head.

That night, I dreamed I fell in love with a soft-spoken Irishmen. He worked at an over priced junk shop that sold banquet tables full of china and crystal swans of all types. The owner was, literally, a witch with white streaked gray hair and a talent for shape-shifting. I was a journalist—a feature writer for a large newspaper-- assigned to interview the sister of a high profile cult leader (who had, depending on who you asked, either been martyred or committed suicide), and at least as unsure of my skill at asking the right questions as I was of my ability to stay objective. The morning before the evening interview, I’d gone junk shopping with my friends to quell my anxieties, and ran into the Irishmen after accidentally breaking a pair of pink crystal swans. When I balked at having to pay the cost of the items, the witch dealer turned into a fireball and threatened to kill me. The Irishmen was able to extinguish the flames, both literal and metaphorical, and asked, in repayment, that I consider going out with him that evening. I laughed, not believing he was serious, not believing he was actually interested in me (he was tall and lithe i, more attractive than I thought myself capable of dreaming up), but he pushed on, and I finally agreed and asked him if he would mind accompanying me to the interview that night.

The cult-leader’s sister lived in a small white farm house with a tin roof on a street very similar to the one where I actually live. Her name was Ginger, and she was about twenty years old. Pretty, with long brown hair and wide set eyes. She welcomed us onto her screened in porch with an offer of green tea, and we sat in the light of pink Japanese lanterns as a summertime thunderstorm rolled in overhead. I stuttered on how to ask this girl, whose plight had been widely discussed in the media, for the story of her life. But the Irishmen, who knew nothing about her, simply took my hand and opened the floor with a simple question about her childhood. It wasn’t the question, but the way he phrased it, and I sat back, awed, as she started talking easily, shedding new light on circumstances I thought I already knew. From then, my job was easy. She answered all of my questions, and I left moved by her story. “You have a real gift for this,” I said to the Irishman, as we departed, hand in hand over the now slick streets. He shrugged modestly and admitted it was his first attempt at interviewing anyone. We went back to his room, an upstairs studio over the junk shop where he explained to me that his business with the witch was something of an informal indenture and he longed to find a way out of his current arrangement. We kissed there, and I think he told me he loved me, and I woke in that sort of glow, and that was pretty much my state of mind as I shoved the remaining toiletries in my bag and rolled my suitcase out to the living room.

Anna and I drank a cup of coffee and double-checked the locks on the windows and went to sit outside in the warm morning sun to wait for the Boop’s shuttle services.

DAY ONE—March 27, 2006

As promised the Boop arrives promptly at ten. I stub out my cigarette and listen to the trademark sound of blaring female melissma from her stereo as she speeds down our narrow, dead-end street. We reach a consensus that the two suitcases Anna and I have packed for the trip will prohibit us from taking the Volkswagen. We load into my car, and the Boop plays a burned copy of Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” on repeat as we ease down the highway to the airport. She leaves us with a warm bon voyage and a promise to return my car at the earliest convenience.

In American airports since 9/11, the security threat is apparently always yellow and everyone wearing shoes is subject to scrutiny, because, as you well know, terrorists never go barefoot. My passport receives some funny looks from the US Air ticket counter guy with the unfortunate eyebrows, probably because it looks like it was traded for two rolls of toilet paper and a bootleg copy of “Justified” in some third world streetmarket, and the interior picture (circa 2000) makes me look like a thirty-five year old woman with a bad dye job, desperate to sell you a McMansion in the Atlanta suburbs. Additionally, I seem to be one of those people who could set off the metal detector wearing nothing but a loincloth made of Kleenex. I don’t know why this is. My best guess would be that the penny I swallowed at the age of four has never managed to work its way out of my system.[1]

After establishing that I am not a security threat, we are released into the terminal to sit under the anachronistic (and not inoffensive) murals of antebellum South in the C concourse coffeeshop, where Anna grouses about the lack of breakfast food and I, in a fit of pre-flight hypochondria, suck down a handful of zinc lozenges. We go for a last cigarette break in the basketball themed bar beside our gate. The televisions overhead play a loop of highlights from last seasons' NCAA tournament, and I sit back to sip on scorched instant coffee and revel in the notion of putting an ocean between myself and a city full of bitter Carolina fans. A couple of baggage handlers wearing gold chains beneath their orange vests swagger in to sit beside us, and Anna smiles a little. I don’t know if they respond. We feign exuberance for pictures, but it was really too early to feel anything but premature cabin fever. I buy a New York Times from an airport newsstand looking for news from Europe and learn little except that the Paris suburbs are still burning and the British are dissatisfied with Tony Blair, but not enough so to vote Tory.

By the time we board, I’ve finished the paper, including the crossword and the obituaries. It’s a sold out flight to Philidelphia. We are offered incentives of free travel to take a later flight. A mustachioed British man, on the model of Falstaff’s conservative brother, groans audibly, while I eavesdrop on the conversation of an extended Indian family, also traveling on to Frankfurt.

Once seated, I realize I’ve left my journal inside the terminal and run back down to retrieve it. The woman at the gate, who has a face like a buttered pancake and a truly monstrous hairstyle (equal parts mullet, bouffant, and Marie Antoinette) informs me that she has no time for my hijinks and I will miss my flight if I do not board the plane. By some miracle, I notice my reject pile of newspapers to the left of the doorway and pull the book out from beneath. The Bouffant snarls, when I run back to the plane, like she’s disappointed I made it. And I take my seat, breathless, to the applause of the flight attendants.

Losing the book wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing. I had no important documents stuffed in its pages, save a poor quality Xerox of my passport and a collection of Post-It notes covered in chickenscratch directions from the various train stations to our hotels. I cling to the book like a security blanket during take-off.

*****

On a clear day, Virginia and Maryland look like England from 20,000 feet—like a patchwork, a rural checkerboard of well-tended, over-civilized farmland, broken only by water. White people fear the wilderness. Things can grow and flourish, but only after learning not to overstep their boundaries. After four hundred years, the original thirteen colonies look even more domesticated and compartmentalized than their old world counterparts.

*****

USAir

Philidelphia-Frankfurt

About 4pm, EST

So here’s the secret:

I don’t know why I’m going to Italy. Despite the anticipated nice scenery and good food and art, I feel ungraciously ambivalent. The trip derived from an offhand comment from an offhand conversation during which my mother asked me what I wanted for my thirtieth birthday, I responded by saying I’d like to go to Italy, expecting her to respond with something along the lines of: “Good idea. I’ll let you know when I win the lottery.” But instead, she quieted, and responded with a simple, “Then why don’t you go?”

I had the money to pay for it, or rather, I had an inaccessible bank account maintained by my grandmother containing a dwindling amount of funds technically reserved for foreign travel. Or something like that. Over the years I’d ended up dipping into it a half-dozen or so times to put down payments on shitty used cars, or to pay the security deposits on apartments and utilities. The foreign travel thing had never really come to fruition, partly because I had a run of semi-free trips abroad due to family circumstances, and, partly because I couldn’t find a traveling companion willing to actually go and not just talk about it. Most of my friends had already traveled extensively in Europe, having done some version of the Grand Tour post high school, followed by a semester+ of study abroad. And even those that hadn’t dismissed the whole notion of traveling in Western Europe as something so grotesquely unhip they wouldn’t even consider it. [2]

That said, as we walk through the Space Age International Terminal (“This looks like where they make the robots,” I say to Anna), I can’t help thinking that I’ve somehow made the wrong decision, and blown the rest of my travel money for the indefinite future on a place destined to disappoint me. Maybe I’m just a little freaked out by how spontaneous this trip isn’t. Or maybe I’m feeling a twinge of regret at having my wild European adventure when I’m thirty instead of eighteen, and no longer young enough to scrap my plans and take off for the Amalfi Coast on a back of a Vespa with some aspiring photographer of dubious background without anxiety about losing the deposit on hotel reservations.

I try to curb my misgivings by accompanying Anna into the Swatch store, where we’re observed impatiently by a young woman with exotic fingernails, and again at a terminal restaurant where we eat microwaved quiche in a clutch of plastic tables occupied by German families and British businessmen. Out of affected habit, I improve my posture and switch my fork to the left hand.

*****

I don’t fear flying, but I tend to take stock of my accomplishments before take-off just in case. On the plus side: I have finished my book, turned thirty, experienced some modicum of financial security, and am traveling to Italy for eleven vacation days. On the minus, I haven’t had any decent action since before 9/11, I am ludicrously single, the only people who have read the book are my mother, my current roommate, and one ex-roommate, and haven’t actually seen Italy yet, in person.

There’s a bone thin teenager on our plane with tight jeans and leather jacket and long wavy hair, who looks like he should be fronting a glam garage band in 1972.. He’s traveling with his paunchy, middle aged Dad who looks like he probably never listened to rock and roll, even in 1972. Anna and I try to determine his nationality. My money’s on Sweden. Anna insists he’s German. Possible he’s just from New Jersey. Whatever the case, we both find him oddly attractive, and consider asking if he has groupies back home.

The woman at the gate calls our row. I smile at the youngest Indian boy from the flight from Raleigh, who is surreptitiously cleaning the face of his IPod with the embroidered hem of his grandmother’s sari. I reassure Anna that we do in fact have window seats and step onto the plane.

*****

About 7:00pm EST

Seat 22 E

The sun sets over Nova Scotia (overheard chatter: “No, it’s not Nova Scotia” “Yes, it is” ‘No it’s not, just look at it. It’s obviously something else.” “Like what?” “I dunno. Something else.” “Like what, Bob?” “Like whatever is between Greenland and Nova Scotia, you know the other place.” “Jesus, Bob, you sound so ignorant.” “Can I have my magazine back?” “Turbulence makes me constipated.”) and I note the entire visible spectrum including green over the distant clouds.

*****

About 9:30 pm EST

Seat 22 E

I haven’t been on a TransAtlantic flight since they’ve adopted On Demand movie showings. Anna and I watch “A History of Violence” in staggered time, and I marvel at the fact that I’m still oddly attracted to William Hurt (who apparently does not age). I then watch “Walk the Line” and wonder how anyone has ever been attracted to Joachim Phoenix.

*****

About 11:00pm

Seat 22E

Anna leans over to me, after the lights have all been turned out and service suspended to re-tell the tale of the kid she knew from school who killed his mother. I hear the people behind us silencing to hear the story, which ends with: “It’s a shame he had to kill his mom and everything because he was totally cute.”

*****

About Midnight/ 6am

Seat 22E

No one in coach is drinking. Is it that five dollars for a cocktail is that unthinkable for these people? I see clusters of orange light below, and wonder what exactly we’re flying over (Scotland? Scandinavia?) Whatever it is looks like a poor attempt at creating paisley on a Lite Brite.

*****

Frankfurt

8:30 am

Landing in Germany, we take a shuttle bus from the plane to the terminal with the glam rocker, his dad, and a loudmouthed skateboarder in a red track suit, who complains to anyone who will listen about the size of old lady ass he was forced to sit beside over the Atlantic and thunks out a clumsy hip-hop beat against the top of his skateboard. “That guy is draining my will to live,” I say to Anna, feeling already a little loopy and discombobulated. The sensation is heightened because last time I went to Germany they were only six hours ahead of Eastern Time.[3] “I swear to God.” Anna shoots me a look that says, “you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about” and we mosey through Customs. Tragically, the hot German passport boy of yore has been replaced by a balding man with a facial tic and an uncanny vocal similarity to guy featured in all WWII U-Boat
movies, whose job is to glower frequently and yell “Schnell! Schnell!”

We find the first smoking station (what looks like a cross between a bar and a radiator with illuminated Camel ads on top) in the customs baggage claim, which coincidentally is in the same room as the American Military offices[4]

We bum a light from the track-suited asshole. His name is Kevin. He’s American. He offers up that he’s in the military, and with a glance to the uniformed officer across the room, covers his mouth to say: “I hate my life.” As I’m barely able to put two words together, I’m unable to determine whether or not he’s been to Iraq. Mostly he says he misses home (San Diego). Misses skateboarding with his friends, and sitting on the beach, working a crappy job and getting stoned on the weekends. I don’t press for more details. I’m pretty sure I can’t rationally discuss American Foreign Policy at the moment, not when jet-lagged and undercaffeinated, and huddled round a communal smoke-eater with at least one uber-hip German girl who looks like an also-ran in the Roxette lookalike contest. Anna and I turn to leave and I tell Kevin to take care of himself, and resist the urge to say “do whatever you can to get the fuck out.”

As usual, I get frisked at a security checkpoint, this time by a beautiful blonde German girl whose nametag read Astrid. I regretted that my sexual orientation did not allow me to enjoy the experience more than I did. I suspect others would have found it to be a pleasant surprise.

The flight attendants and gate personnel in Frankfurt ride bicycles through the terminals with bells on the handlebars. At least one of them was singing. I hoped they might gather for a choreographed routine about air travel.

Anna “geeked out” when she pulled Euros out of a Deutschbank ATM, and asserted that we were really in Europe, a fact I’d arrived at sometime earlier, when I tried to apologize for stepping on Astrid’s toes in broken German. We bought foamy, instant coffee from a stand called “Time Out” up the hall from our gate, and chainsmoked three cigarettes while checking out a table of exceptionally attractive African men with thumb-nail sized diamonds in their ears. By the time we board, I’ve determined that Lufthansa employees are the happiest people in the world, and I’d willingly take whatever they’re taking to appear that euphoric at 7:45 in the morning.

---

[1] The apparent consensus of the security personnel is that I must be hiding something in my left breast, by to the amount of time they spend waving the beeping magic wand round my nipple.

[2] There seems to be some consensus among a certain population of young Americans that the only real way to travel involves visiting developing nations with a recent history of extreme political violence, having a spiritual adventure among shamans in mudhuts, and coming back with hand carved pottery, a prolonged intestinal disorder, and stories of exploited children as souvenirs. I’m not begrudging anyone their holiday in Cambodia (I’m also a Dead Kennedys fan), but I got to the point where I found myself bristling whenever someone launched into an angry screed about how my desire to drink a glass of wine beside a Venetian Canal reeked of bourgeoisie small-mindedness and insensitivity. (Note to self: apparently, getting stoned in South America and taking artful pictures of impoverished, indigenous children to display and sell for $250 a pop on the walls of the Fair Trade coffeeshop back home makes one more than just a tourist, but a much more conscientious member of the global community.)

[3] I spend a good portion of the next two hours trying to figure out whether a new time zone was created and the US Government has censored all mention of it as part of some shady Homeland Securty initiative. I manage to get myself reasonably worked up about it before finally learning that Daylight Savings happens in Europe a week earlier than it happens in the US (thank you bewildered concierge in Venice). The only thing worse than thinking you’re crazy is realizing you’re stupid.

[4] Isn’t there a statute of limitations on occupation? Are we waiting until everyone who was alive during WWII to die of natural causes? And what have the Germans done recently to unnerve us other than be more progressive than at least 90% of Americans, and (understandably) less tolerant of our own forays into Imperialism. Maybe it’s just the David Hasselhoff thing that wigs us out.