The two men meet in their usual spot, a bar with pounding artificial light and mirrors on every surface. Bruno’s hand is clammy and slick, like a raw fish. They gulp down two Fernets each.
“So, bello,” Bruno says. “How’s New York treating you?” He’s wearing linen in May, a rumpled suit the color of dirty doves, no tie. He’s bald but doesn’t shave his head, and there are sad white wisps of hair on his neck. He has the air of a man who still talks to women with great passion.
Sergio is unaware of his own affectations when the two of them are together. “Well, Bru”—this is what he calls him—“I’m thirty-eight and I’m still not bankrupt, so I can actually afford to party and fly first class.”
“You’re just like Grandma. She loves parties.”
“You do, too; you just can’t hold your liquor like we can. Grandma and I, we know what we’re doing.”
“Better that than being a happy man with a sad son and a sad mother.”
“I really hope you mean that. Otherwise it’s just depressing.”
Sergio studies himself in the mirror. His father is breathing long yoga breaths. Sergio tells him he’s stressed out: first London, then Milan, now Rome. “These trips really fuck up my immune system.”
“You’re drinking Fernet, though.”
“That’s the great Italian tradition. You don’t mess with that.”
“All right, but just two for me, at least before dinner. Let’s go upstairs,” he says even though his office is on the ground floor. He and his second family have always lived in this building on the fourth floor. His two daughters, undergrads who live with their parents, live just two ceilings from where Sergio and his father are now sitting facing each other. Sergio has met them fewer than ten times in his life.
I can’t understand why I’m seeing this, this encounter between father and son. It appears that I’m experiencing it just from Sergio’s point of view. I read his tweets through his eyes: “Small-time fathers” and “The only justice is money” and “You bet you’d love to be wealthier than your father if you had my father.” In the meantime, his father is pulling his son’s papers out of a binder and arranging them on his desk. He uses a bulky gray PC to pull up spreadsheets for the last six months’ worth of transactions. He speaks lightly but briskly, like someone who’s trying to hurry things along. But I can’t understand whether this is what’s actually happening, or whether it’s just what Sergio’s seeing. Bruno manages his son’s Italian investments (Sergio doesn’t trust American banks; he pays taxes there, but he won’t invest) and the interest rate on his home mortgage. Sergio usually loves to hate on Bruno’s generic homilies about the recession, but he’s annoyed by their implication now: “You knew it when you sold the apartment—you knew where the market was going.”
“Listen, Bru, all anyone talks about in New York is money. I don’t want that kind of vulgarity here.” I realize how difficult it is for my dear Sergino to know that what he felt just moments earlier as he was riding over the bridge has to be suppressed and suffocated. Here, in front of his father, he has to stick to his pose—the pose he has no choice but to deploy anytime he doesn’t feel free enough to be himself.
“Sure, but I’m your accountant, so we have to talk money.”
A tweet: “I expected less vulgarity from Rome.”
“But the real losses are over…And I’d say that Mommy’s money”—which is how he’s always talked about the €700,000 Sergio got for the apartment and the €50,000 thousand he inherited, so he could imagine that his mother loved him even from the great beyond—“is still relatively safe.”
Tweet: “It’s great to have more money than your father, yes it is.”
Sergio checks the cuff of his pants, smooths it out, folds it over again. His father leans forward in his chair, his forehead the most visible part of him, his flimsy reading glasses lit up by the hot glow of the lamp.
“Listen, Bru, I have to ask…You haven’t been forging the double signature, have you? Maybe snatching a few bucks here and there? If you’re in trouble I can understand, but I hope you’re not doing it behind my back.”
I’m inside Sergino, I have to be, or else I’d know how his father is reacting. Sergio has no idea, and I’m not getting anything from Bruno, which can’t be right. Sergio flaunting his earnings over the last fiscal year. He’s asking how high the tassa sulla casa has climbed. He’s bragging about how much money he’s bringing in under the table by subletting a room in Williamsburg to some Italian acquaintances.
Sergio begins to notice his father’s state only when Bruno starts one of his yoga breathing exercises again. He places a finger on his right nostril and breathes in through the left, then puts his finger on the left nostril, breaths in through the right, and starts over. His son is offended and changes the subject. “I’m flying back on the BA001.”
“What?” says Bruno, a finger still on one nostril.
“BA001. BA’s special New York flight.”
His father seems unimpressed, but he finally removes his finger from his nose and places it on the desk. Now he’s hunched over the little gray mouse he uses to slowly click through the spreadsheets.
“BA. British Airways, zio, the airline.”
His father is silent. He hunches forward even farther, as if he were trying to pick something up from the floor. He pushes his office chair backward, rests his forehead on his knees, disappears below the desk.
“No, listen,” his son says, increasingly animated. “We fly out of London City Airport, in Canary Wharf, the financial center—the Manhattan of London. The airport is really small—it only has one runway. It’s a small plane: it used to have like a hundred seats, but it’s been remodeled, so it only has thirty, and they all fold down into beds. The whole plane is business class, so you leave from this tiny-ass airport, this ridiculous strip of land right on the water, and you have to stop in Shannon, this airport in Ireland, where you can clear U.S. customs because of this agreement they have with the U.S. government.”
His father hasn’t lifted his head or his back. He’s continuing with his antipanic breathing technique.
“The flight from London to Shannon is supershort. You get an aperitivo in-flight, and then you’re basically there. You get off the plane and clear customs in less than twenty minutes in this, like, shit hole of an airport while they fill the tank. You get back on board and do Shannon–JFK, and they give you the entire package: you get wined, dined, champagned, napped, iPadded, blanketed. You’re barefoot, totally comfortable, lying down, and then you walk off the plane and go straight to a cab because you already cleared customs.”
And here’s Bruno. He finishes his yoga exercises and resurfaces with red cheeks, his hands pressed against the mahogany desk. He speaks in a way that’s utterly his: “If I may speak my mind…”
“Please do.”
“I think the real luxury on a trip to America is a nonstop flight.”
The pores of Sergio’s bald head start prickling at the same time. “Oh, Madonna! You’re so fucking provincial! Nonstop? Yeah, sure, and then you have to stand in line for an hour at passport control. You spend as much time there as you would on a fucking domestic flight. Instead I get this leisurely hour in Shannon among other people who are also into traveling well and have three grand to spend. And then I’m on this little plane, the least-populated little plane on earth, watching Jason Bourne on an iPad. The real luxury is a nonstop flight? Tiburtina State of Mind, man.”
His father resumes his yoga position under the desk as his son pontificates. “How can you even think that a nonstop flight is luxury? All that means is that you never listen. Never.”
Bruno reemerges and begins putting his son’s papers in order as the young man gets up, says “ciao,” turns, and leaves. His father calls after him, tries to stop him: “Sergio!” But he has to know that at this point in the relationship, one goodbye is as good as any other.
Sergio crosses the road, goes back to the bar, his legs weak. He
fires off a couple of tweets complaining about his father. He looks at himself in the mirror under the bottles of amara, orders a negroni. While he examines the shiny yellow color of his own forehead, of his bloodless cheeks, he gets the idea to convince Marzio, my brother, to fuck Tullio’s wife.
Maria Tullio, Marzio, and I all went to the same high school, and she was there around the same time as us. In those years, Marzio was considered the most beautiful boy in our high school. He had a gorgeous nose, straight and long like Louis Garrel’s, and like Garrel he had hair that was messy and curly, though paler. He always wore a jacket in the nouvelle vague style.
Like me, he got a down payment on a two-room, seven-hundred-square-foot apartment as a gift from our parents, but he can’t make the monthly €700 he owes on the mortgage. So he rents the place out to three female friends of his, students, who pay €800 a month and lives with my parents. He sleeps there, or with whoever will take him home. He’s lost jobs in music shops and small publishing houses, and now he works as a waiter at Bar Necci in Pigneto. He’s still beautiful, according to Sergio, who every so often consoles himself with the thought of Marzio trading blow jobs for a set at the Circolo degli Artisti nightclub. Marzio only plays in little San Lorenzo pubs that barely register on Rome’s indie scene, and if he’s kept up a friendship with Sergio, it’s certainly not because he likes him: Sergio is friends with Gassa and worked for him as a road manager, and he told my brother that there was a chance that Gassa might sample one of his songs.
And then there he is in the bar with Sergio, as if summoned, in a black linen jacket, a white shirt tucked into tight black pants. He has the crooked posture of a seasoned Bob Dylan/Rino Gaetano impersonator, a grizzled Jewfro, a sweet little double chin that gives him an air of innocence, and a minuscule belly under a faint smile. He retains the gestures of the boy who conquered the school by singing quirky love songs in the age of rage rock, and who’s continued to seduce new generations of students.
“What are you drinking, honey?” Sergio says. “I have an idea that’s so dumb that I need you to be super wasted before you hear it.”
“What are you having?”
“Negroni.”
“Negroni, then. I’m broke.”
“On me, bro.”
“All right, bring it on.”
“Would you be willing to bang a high school classmate of ours? Someone who’s desperate for cock and doesn’t even know it yet?”
“Well that depends! What are her tits like? Does she have kids?”
“Tons. So just imagine how much she’d love to fuck a handsome, carefree man like yourself?”
Sergio is asking Cugino Hitler for Maria’s mobile number via Whatsapp. He gets an answer and a bit of extra information: “Gossip. Ludovica (the Berengo hand job) is babysitting at Tullio’s.”
“That’s lame.”
—
THREE DAYS LATER, Sergio picks up Maria and takes her to a bar in San Lorenzo where Marzio’s playing a set. She looks older, but she still dresses like a tomboy: Air Max and a hoodie over her old, round hairdo. He kisses her and tweets “the unbangables.”
“It’s crazy, I was just thinking about how much I want to go out, and then you called me—it’s like ESP!”
Sergio keeps tweeting: “Random,” “matchmaking,” “Fixing up dates for money.” This is the same Sergio who only three days ago was weeping in his old neighborhood. If I’d known that his father was having such a bad effect on him, I would have told him to find himself a new accountant; he’s been unbearable since he crossed the Tiburtino Bridge.
“This is so fun, Marzietto! I haven’t seen you in, what, ten years?”
“Make it twenty.”
“Twenty!”
The rest of the evening is live-tweeted in two languages.
“Hope I don’t crash my car in #pratifiscali”
“In shock after visit to #pratifiscali. Still lame after all these years. Rome, grow up”
“Back to zone decenti. Talking to milf. Will the milf fuck the singer?”
“Your #pratifiscali pussy has delivered five children. Will singer’s cock be big enough?”
“Back to San Lorenzo with old schoolmate turned milf for big concert by big Marzione. Emotions”
“San Lorenzo bar, always a sad state. I arranged mikes and speakers there for years and it’s still the same shit”
“You were a great cocksucker, milf. What’s the story with Christianity? Do you still EAT COCK?”
“You still rock the Air Max and the Public Enemy sweater. Your pussy is all used up”
“You say, justifiably. Okay, he’s cute, what does he do for a living? He does nothing, love. And I like men”
“Milf, I just told you there’s this rapper whose career I once managed—you’re impressed—wanna come to his show. Milf’s in heat.”
“Milf, your pick: either Marzione or the rapper. Both? Naughty girl!” (Cugino Hitler’s reply: “They’re all bitches”)
“Don’t shoot the Marzione”
“Leaving Milf to singer. Not much hope in a happy ending. Singer kinda outta steam.”
Sergino left the bar halfway through Marzio’s act when he realized that his prank didn’t make any sense. He told Maria he was going to go have a cigarette.
In the next twenty-four hours, messages go back and forth in preparation for the second prank. Sergio texts Gassa to say he’ll bring him this wild-ass milf he can bang. Meanwhile he calls the milf on the phone and apologizes for stranding her there the night before, leaving her to hitch a ride from Marzio. She felt embarrassed, she says, but he resolves all the bad feelings and misunderstandings by renewing his invitation to take her backstage to meet the rapper.
So Sergio and Maria go out together again. They go backstage as soon as Gassa’s show is over. Betani, the “Negro Hipster,” lets them inside, and they get cozy with the others in the little room, a three-couched, smoky closet.
Sergio is dozing off, doesn’t feel like partying. Maria is talking to the rapper and his dreadlocked Sicilian hype man, who insists that all Neapolitan girls are game.
At one point somebody starts trying to get backstage, begging on the other side of the door behind two girls with straight black hair. “Marzietto, listen, I’m sorry man; I can’t let you in.” Betani has known my brother for years. “Come on, zio, we’re working.”
Sergio is struck by this, by the fact that it’s Betani who closes the door—Betani, the decent, funny, depressed, African-Italian former web series actor-turned-roadie. So he walks out and goes to look for my Marzio in the garden. Kids smoke pot under the trees and stand in line for pizza. Marzio sees him and looks at him with mournful eyes. “Why didn’t you call me tonight? I could have met Gassa. Is my sample still happening?”
“Well, first of all, it’s Gassa’s the one who calls the shots, not me.” Now he’s defensive. He tweets: “A long line of beggars backstage after show.”
Marzio tries to cover the screen of Sergio’s phone with his hand. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”
Sergio pushes my brother’s hand away and keeps staring at the screen.
“Why did you leave me with the bocchinara yesterday?”
“Did she blow you?”
“You wish. She took it badly when you left: hailed a cab and left on her own.”
“That’s awkward. Damn. She didn’t tell me.”
“She said you were going to take her to see Gassa. That’s what she told me.”
“So you two did get along. Did you have a chance to bang her? Was there even a remote possibility, at all?”
“No.”
“But she left her husband at home with the kids for two nights in a row. It has to mean something.”
“Sure. But to bang somebody, that’s a whole different story.”
“Fair enough.”
“You make me feel like shit.”
Facebook status: “Never trust me ever.”
“Stop writing on that fucking thing, man. Don’
t I look miserable?”
“Yes, Marzio, yes.”
They’re interrupted by a sophisticated-looking kid in a buttoned-up army jacket on his way to drunk: “Hey, everything all right over here?”
Marzio: “We’re talking.”
But Sergio takes the cue. “My bad, champ. We were arguing.”
“Then you should apologize.” The kid wraps himself around Sergio, hugs him from the side, like a girlfriend. Marzio lets out a sigh and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Puts one in his mouth and rolls it back and forth with his lips.
Marzio pulls the cigarette out of his mouth without lighting it. “Sergio,” he begs, “Come on, man…”
“Let’s talk on email, OK?”
Sergio leaves with the boy still attached to him. They end up by a trellis in a corner of the garden, a vine enveloping them on all sides. “Do you need to go figure things out with that guy?” the boy asks. “Is he a writer? A musician?”
“I’m sorry, do you know me?”
“I do.” The words send shivers of pleasure down Sergio’s spine. The two-bit pranks he organized to make the bad feelings from Via Tiburtina go away have brought him this: a good-looking boy who knows who he is and is trying to hit on him.
“I’m a detective,” the boy says.
“Oh, yeah?” Sergio laughs. “What, Instagram got too boring? You got sick of taking pictures of food at restaurants? Now it’s detectives?”
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