Early-morning rise, Rome at dawn in winter.
It is cold here, and via messenger, my friend Mike suggested in this season Caligula and Nero would have been Emperor...penguins.
My room with the gold chairs seemed like a gladiator's chambers. Outside I got coffee in a plastic cup from a man with wild symphony-conductor hair. I only bought it to have change for the Metro ticket. The ride was very smooth.
At Termini, the SPQR Grand Central Station, I bought prosciutto and bottled water while I waited for the display to reveal my platform. Like in Eastern Europe, they like to hold these things for maximum suspense often not revealing your gate or platform until moments before the train, ferry, or plane arrives. They live for the drama, praise The Scramble.
It occurred to me as a waited I hadn't seen a single pigeon in Rome. Too cold? Exterminated? Where are Rome's pigeons?! Train arrived and I got on with little confusion. I was prepared to be confused, but I was not. All my life I've heard 2nd class on an Italian train is like 8th class on any other, but it was just fine, comfortable even. From whence, I wonder, came this bias?
I sat across from a man with a silver goatee. He wore a vest and slept the whole trip. I tore through 250 pages of City of Night as nameless Italian towns and the pimples of the Alps rolled by. Such a book this was. Profound and strange. I am forever changed. It reminded me of Crash or, rather, it had the same effect of rewiring my brain. I looked around the carriage for a "score" to "clip."
A young man with curly hair read a Deadpool comic. I think of Deadpool like Elmo, a character from something I loved introduced after I stopped loving it.
Arrived in Bari after four pleasant hours of pure reading. The pages just melted away, and when I arrived I had but ten left. My bag for the Ryanair flight will "make weight" for sure. They sent ANOTHER email about it. That company treats its passengers like scores they're dying to clip! It's a sweet little seaside town is Bari, with the sea in question being The Adriatic.
I have a history with this sea. Many years ago, when I was a youngman, I sailed from Athens to Venice on the deck of a floating parking garage. It was fascinating and miserable, a voyage deserving of its own black annal. Stolen Apples! Flaming Cinders! A Horn! The Flower of Youth! Thomas Hardy! A Miracle, and a Movie Theater! Some day it will be told.
As well, I enjoyed its breezes on a previous trip to Split, Croatia. It's a fine sea, very fine indeed (though no Black).
One is greeted in Bari by a marvelous fountain forcing itself up from the fecund loam! You exit the central station to hear its plash and witness its force. Then you take yourself through a sensible grid lined with kebaberies until you find your place. In my case I had to download Europe's favorite social media application, WhatsApp, in order to communicate with my host.
He is... somewhere in the world, the caldera of a frozen volcano perhaps, and he simply pressed a button to activate the outer door. I was Inside!
But then... his system broke down and he couldn't get me into my room. I had to wait for someone named Giuseppe to arrive. I had access to a common kitchen and stole a tangerine from a cabinet called "Giuseppe's Food."
A dude popped out of a hidden door. He wore a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt and looked Serbian as hell. We each thought the other was Giuseppe, and neither of us spoke Italian. Through painful mummery and pantomime, it was determined he was Hungarian and also locked out due to our host's remote internet issues.
He used his phone to tell me he lived 220km outside of Budapest. I asked him if he was happy that Dallas had just beaten Seattle in the playoffs, and he had no idea what I was talking about. He was just wearing the shirt. It would be like me asking someone in sneakers if they knew Nike's current stock price.
At last jaunty, bespectacled Giuseppe arrived! What else could he be, all apology. He led us to our rooms, themed after the arts. The Magyar got the Music room (I briefly saw record album sleeves stapled to the ceiling) and I got the Cinema room. Various and divers Tarantino posters were stapled to the ceiling.
After folding my coat and tabling my bags, I went out into the streets in search of life.
The room was close to the Old Town and to the boardwalk where I saw the waves of the Adriatic crash on a stone jetty. Some iconic-seeming gaslights made the whole thing very scenic. I wished for the brush of a seagull's wing on my cheek. I wished for the taste of salt.
In the twisting marble labyrinth of the Old Town I saw my first Italian pigeon. There it stood, nastily sipping water from a pit in the marble. The wretched thing was hydrated as hell. At the gates of the Basilica of St. Nicholas, I wished the world a Merry Christmas.
Sweet old ladies made and sold orecchiette in alleys nearby. Happy old men ate orecchiette behind them. It was charming to see, and I desperately wanted some. But it was dry. I would have to... cook it! At home!!
Cold and still, white and stark, with the exception of these grandfolks (and that horrid pigeon), I was one of the only living creatures there. The whole scene was strictly de Chirico.
I stopped for a meal of fava beans and turnips (!!!) and crashed back at the Cinema room. I woke up in darkness and considered going back to sleep (in the morning I have a complicated plan to see remote sites of Puglia) but I had read a restaurant called The Fork of the Octopus had hot orcchiette. I wouldn't have to cook it myself! So I put on my thick Make It New scarf and headed out into the dark Bari night.
And... it was a different world. The streets teemed with people, crowds streaming from everywhere! Bari at night! The difference between day and night was night and day. From de Chirico to Seurat! Laughter, screaming, rushing, texting. All of the shuttered, cold-seeming places from the morning were unshuttered, warm!
Every man wore a thick rubber glove on his right hand, never knowing when they may need to shuck an oyster or strangle some calamari.
The Fork of the Octopus did not manifest itself, hidden perhaps in a cloud of ink through which I could not see. From a street person, I bought what any reasonable person would call an empanada but what the locals call panzerotto and knew ecstasy.
Bars and life. The young and old flinging their scarves with abandon in the cold sea air.
Settled down with some knock-off fernet at a place with silk lampshades and busted couches.
How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm now that they've seen Bari?
The music was all drunken jazz horns. I switched from the fake fernet to Unicum, and with the soundtrack it was very easy to picture a wild chase through '70s New York. Mustaches and chest medallions. Police badges and backalley fellatio.
I took many notes for the revision of the play and read crazy sentences from a book by DH Lawrence. He sure had some opinions. There was kind of a funny biographical bit in the intro about him loving this Bohemian lady, and she kept sleeping with every dude they ran into, so he moved them to the Alps where nobody lived. Dude, DH, you're not enough, bro. Let her have her life.
It got a little shovey in there, so I left. My brother sent me some messages continuing a private game we play where we pretend we have an Irish grandmother. He said, "Her spuds were shite, but she loved us all," and I shrieked so I feared someone would call the carabinieri.
Chilly little walk home, the Unicum a warm nugget in my belly. Last night I dreamed I had a job writing dialog for a talking gun. I got a promotion when I taught it to say "Honey, you're a mess" when the user pulled the trigger.
Tomorrow, I intend to see Ostuni, a whitewashed city of no importance. It's just where I want to be.
I stole all these pictures because the internet here is bad. I'll replace them with my own later. Probably.
I stole all these pictures because the internet here is bad. I'll replace them with my own later. Probably.
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