When I finished undergrad, my father decided to take the family to Europe. Being a man of wealth and Don Johnson taste, he further decided we should go on a Mediterranean cruise. I remember being embarrassed about this at the time. It seemed simultaneously ostentatious and provincial, like if The Cheesecake Factory sold vacations. People would ask me in years after that if I had gone to Europe, and I would say, “Kind of.” What I really did was get on a big plane, then get on a big boat. Occasionally, I would leave the boat, and think, “Wow, this place is nice! We should visit it sometime!”
This is an entirely fair recollection that is also entirely unfair to my parents, for two reasons: First, they had ponied up for my ticket on that big boat, and there aren’t many people in the world who can say, “Next time I go to Europe, I’m going to do it the right way.” Americans have died smiling with boat-based memories of Europe; mine came free and unrequested.
Second, my parents come from an older generation of traveler. Up until basically the internet, Americans’ international travel was several things that it isn’t anymore. For starters, it was a moral reward: you didn’t just set off to Europe unless you had earned the right through decades of mind-sanding labor. (Virtuous, mind-sanding labor, you would quietly remind members of the cul-de-sac cookout.) Related, it was a sign of status. It was best to earn this status through blue-collar or at least corporate toil; but if you were like a Kennedy or whatever you could skip ahead with just a few sneers. If you cut in line and weren’t a Kennedy you were a burnout or a beatnik or just generally lazy, untamed, and seedy in a way maddeningly difficult to categorize.
Finally, international travel was unsafe, terrifying, and rarely enjoyable. It was a chore, at the end of which was a trophy. If you correctly did the things you were supposed to, in the right order, you would have a photograph of something famous and the same wallet you came with. Your friends (from the cul-de-sac) would applaud your bravery in the face of the savage, godless Europeans.
This is amazing to me, because I lived on spec for a year in China, and then moved to Philadelphia. Philly is 100% more foreign to me than, like, Cologne. (I grew up with functioning sidewalks and roads with lanes, and Philly is not on board with that pussy-ass shit.) If you want to find someone to violently accost you and maybe shoot your face, you factually can’t do better than the United States in the first world (as long as you’re politically muted, the home of the brave is way the hell more dangerous than China). And I know crime is (historically!) down Stateside and that my parents didn’t have Google; but, like, fuck: there were books, right? (Interestingly, the Alt-Right seems likewise deathly afraid of Europe; and is in fact so terrified of it that some of the Europeans are starting to be likewise scared of the safest, most advanced region on the planet.) I want to know how this terror of the completely known and thoroughly documented corroded suburban psyches for decades.
But I never probably will. What I do know, as my plane descends into Rome, is that I’m excited, but unable to trust my memory. I’m coming back to a place, but I’ve changed enough times to forget both it and much of the self who was there. This time, at least, I’m pretty sure “grazie” has three syllables.
_ _ _
I’ve arrived, suddenly and underpacked, in enough countries now to think I know what I’m doing. This is dangerous, because the first rule of Fight Club is, “Make sure you’re damn sure what Fight Club is before you try to join Fight Club.” I am always trying to join Fight Club.
Italy’s chapter is pretty safe, and there’s plenty of English to guide my ignorant ass. I remember this airport – I remember this ground transport section, specifically: I remember waiting for ages as my father grimly negotiated with a shuttle driver to transport our mountain of luggage to a hotel somewhere. I was just a baby hipster then: I didn’t realize that you needed a mustache to go with that beard, or else you were just doing an Amish; and “doing an Amish” is both the worst sex and the worst sex position, studies show. (See? I’m better at entitled snark now. Please don’t ask me what the best sex position is; I only know the one where you clutch for dear life and cry after.)
It’s not crowded now: My flight was delayed out of Heathrow, and this is causing about six problems. First, I can’t contact my host at the AirBnB: With the airport empty, there’s no SIM card to purchase, which was my vague plan. And I’m not sure how long my host will even be conscious. And I don’t know how to get into the room. And I don’t know if trains are still running to that area of town, which I saw once on Google Maps without really thinking it through. But the ace up my sleeve is that I definitely probably I think know how to order exactly one beer in Italian. Sometimes when you walk into a meeting of Fight Club unannounced, your ass gets beat.
So. Problems to solve. From Southeast Asia, I’m used to the crowd of aimless rogues insisting, “Sir, you need taxi? Hey; Hey! Sir!” Italians are renowned for their dress; these exclusively wear Versace’s famed “Disreputable Miscreant” collection. (“When your clothes say everything the cigarette odor can’t, but you choose to yell additional information at pedestrians in transportation hubs.”) I keep walking.
I don’t know where, of course, but I see a sign or two that looks like what I want, and then: “TRAINS” in English. (English! Language of business and cultural isolation!) I dodge a few more loungers promising buses and/or taxis, and find a bank of automated ticket dispensers. These tell me the new schedule: there’s an express train to the main station, and a longer train to my digs – at least, my digs as near as I can tell from my hand-drawn map. (If they showed you this map in court, you would say “I forget what the charge was, but I find this dude guilty of serial killing.”)
Now: Express – which will require a connection – or the other thing, to a station my murderer’s map links to a bed and a hot shower? My phone flickers to life, and right before the airport WiFi blocks me for lack of European cell number, I get a message from the AirBnB app. It’s from my host. It says, “I’m going to bed now.” I buy a ticket for the express train.
I feel like there’s a saying about what happens next, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ll sub in, “Those who ride the fast train to a mystery station take the long walk home.” Because: it’s fucking past midnight, and I am not in a Linklater movie. The metro is closed, and if it wasn’t, I’m not sure exactly how I’d get to the place, since my map is all relative to the other station; the one I did not take a train to. I keep imagining, as I’ve gained degrees and passport stamps, that there’s an alchemical brew of age, experience, cunning, and intelligence; which, once sipped, will keep me from that twelve-year-old feeling of savage inadequacy at literally everything and the vague yet piercing understanding that girls do not like me very much but think my friends are pretty cool. Here, in Roma Termini, I am twelve. Alchemy was some old bullshit, anyway.
My recourse at this point:
(1) Sleep on the street. Or stay up all night. Again.
(2) Try to catch a bus. Without knowing the routes. Or speaking Italian.
(3) Find somebody wearing the Disreputable Miscreant Collection.
“You need taxi, sir?”
(Christ.) “Yeah, I need a taxi. Si. Fuck.”
I negotiate down to a mere 250% of the standard rate (in one more way, I am becoming my father).
“Okay, we go!” he cheerfully announces and walks, in one motion.
We pass a line of capable humans waiting for a bus, like adults with maps and savings accounts. We wander down the street, and then turn up an alley. I can’t help but think, at this point, that my parents were maybe right. I check my six.
“Italiano?” He asks.
“Non parlo,” I admit.
“Eez-oh kay; eez oh kay,” he lilts.
I didn’t really believe that Romance languages were intrinsically beautiful until I lived in a country with a language that sounds like a housecat enduring castration. So I don’t care, in this moment, that I sound like a sophomore at a Midwest state school: It’s musical. Italian is musical, even when it’s kind of English.
“Poco Ehn-Glissh,” he sings to me. “eh-Sahrr-ay.”
I tell him it’s okay.
He says he knows my destination, and this is an apparent lie. “Google maps!” he says, but he also taps his head: “Mi com-poo-terrs! You-ah understand?”
I do, and it’s not super reassuring. We spend a lot of time trading the GPS console between ourselves. At one point, he tries to program it and drive and cross-check direction on his cellphone, and he does not do these things sequentially. We jointly fail to attach it to the windshield; he gives up, then gestures for it again; then gives up. “Not so-ah fahr!” he serenades, and I know better than to trust him.
Since China, I’ve become fascinated by cultural driving rules. In America, we regard exactly every other society as a factory of congenitally incapable drivers; meanwhile, we text and drink ourselves into thousands of homicides per year. In Shanghai, there is no pretense: every turn might be your last; might as well make a damn strong turn while muttering some choice passages from the Little Red Book. (“The imperialist, who is of the West, knows not the four ways and three strongs of driving; for these are forever of the people, who in them know their hearts, which long for revolution.”) And yet: I was part of zero accidents and witnessed few; in a city of 24-27 million, depending on which estimate you like (for perspective: the difference in amounts in question is one Chicago). The Chinese drive horribly, but everyone knows it, and plans for it, and it kind of works out okay – in China.
So: my new friend has a strange hierarchy of dangers: Taking his eyes off the road appears to be something between harmless and a moral obligation. Merging into traffic by simply going where you want to go, without recourse to mirrors, is about as frightening as brushing teeth. But: Rome has a lot of cars parked on streets at this hour; they cluster on central medians and reflect streetlight. If we cross one of these medians, Compooterrs crunches the breaks. He peeks out gingerly, edging the nose of the van just past the nearest sedan, and leaning out of his seat to scour the road. This, for him, is a danger: he might get broadsided. If I had to guess, I’d say he knows this from personal experience. Somehow, Italians have tacitly agreed that this – and possibly only this – is what brakes are for. But hell, relative to the Philippines, it’s some pretty relaxed vehicular work.
Finally – and demonstrating that two heads can be way fucking worse than one – we attach the GPS console, by plastic suction cup, to the mirror. There’s a moment, which is beautiful and golden, when comprehension telegraphs itself across my driver’s face; and I realize I’m actually going to have a bed to sleep in. As we get close, he tells me several times, “I good-ah pehr-sone!” (As an erstwhile composer, I want to record him speak and turn it into a sonic electropop odyssey.) I tell him I don’t doubt it; cosmically speaking, this is not a lie. He says he has three… somethings; he repeats this a few times. Seeing my blankness, he tries “Tres bambino!” Italians are wonderful. He makes a pretty solid salesman turn here: “So-ah, twentee-a-fiyv-ah? Theer-tee-ah?”
I hold the line at twenty. He’s not that good of a person.
I do at least pay, when we get to the place. I tell him thanks, and he says goodbye, and we’ll never meet again; and I wonder, as I usually do in these moments, if he’s happier than I will ever be.
The place is seven floors up. I ring, and wake up my host, and I have a little bed to sleep on. She looks like I woke her up from the sleep of death. I feel bad about this, until I take a hot shower for the first time in many thousands of miles.