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.

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[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.

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[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.