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.
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.
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. “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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
1 Comments:
Book? What book?
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