by Fabio Volo
I went back to my seat and after a while they served lunch. I drank a couple of beers, hoping they would help me fall asleep, but in the end I didn’t sleep a wink. There was the occasional loss of consciousness, just for a few minutes, just enough to hurt my neck, as my head fell forward.
I was tired, but it was useless, I can’t sleep sitting up. My feet swell and my legs turn into wood.
The person sitting next to me slept the whole time. At a certain point, I took out my phone, still wrapped in the toilet paper, and I dismantled it. By now it had dried out. I looked at the pieces spread across the tray in front of me; I picked them up one at a time and blew on them. I don’t know if it made a difference, but it seemed like the only thing to do at that moment. In the process, I found out that the buttons on the telephone weren’t divided into separate keys but were rather part of soft rubber mat. When I put it back together, I was curious to turn it on to see if it would work. I couldn’t wait. I went to the bathroom holding it in my hand as if it were a precious stone. I imagined that as soon as I turned it on, the plane would crash. I was curious, but at the same time I was afraid of screwing up. In the end, I turned it on without entering my password. The light turned on as it did before, but it didn’t read INSERT YOUR PASSWORD, as it did when it worked. I turned it off. As I was in the bathroom, I realized I still had to go. I did what I had to do, but this time I got up before flushing.
The intestines must be kept clean. Why didn’t my mother give me a macchiato or make me travel by plane instead of giving me all those enemas?
A voice announced that in a few minutes we would be landing in New York. At this point, I usually put my things away. I put my book in my bag, I turn off my music, I almost always have a mint, and maybe, if there’s time, wash my face. In other words, I get ready to go out.
The plane landed. Something I don’t understand about people is how quickly they get up as soon as the plane stops. The doors are still closed and yet everyone is already standing up, with their heads bent under the overhead bins, one the most uncomfortable of positions. It happens even on the domestic flights that only last an hour. I’ve flown Rome-Milan on business; before taking off I’d hear all those men talking about figures, budgets, cuts, dividends, re-branding, partners, and so on. They would stay on the phone until the last possible second, because they were very important people. If they were sitting next to a woman, they would often say things like: Without me, nothing gets done, when I say no, I mean no… And there I was, with my backpack and my t-shirt feeling like a useless man compared to those professionals. Some of them would skip lunch, I could smell it on their breath. Then the plane would land and they would immediately turn on their phones. They would jump to their feet, keeping their heads bent forward, uncomfortable, like birds of prey. That pose captured all their intelligence. Finally, standing in the aisle, they would excuse themselves, pardon me, trying to retrieve their bags. And then they would stand there. Then, on the bus, they waited, packed together like sardines, for the last passenger to come off the plane, who had remained seated until the very end and did everything in two seconds: he got up, grabbed the luggage, got off. The last one on the bus, he would be the first one at the terminal. They might have a huge network, but outside of finances, their brains are worthless.
At the airport in New York, I discovered that the procedures to enter the country were much more complex than they were the last time I visited: prints of your right and left index fingers, digital picture, scanned passport. I was starting to fear they would give me a prostate exam. However, the real problems started a few minutes later, when my bag didn’t show up on the carousel. It never came out first, but this was the first time it never came out at all. Could this be a sign? I imagined my suitcase at the airport in some other European city: it was circling all by itself, resting on one side, and perhaps it had come out first. It wasn’t in the airport where I was, but at least I had that little satisfaction. They told me they would send it to my hotel the next day. Honestly, I didn’t know whether to trust them, but the girl at the desk had been very kind, and as far as I’m concerned, kindness leads to trust. I believed her.
In the cab to Manhattan, I immediately struck up a conversation with the driver. I always do it, especially to gauge how my English is doing after not speaking it for so long. I understood him well. Watching movies and television in their original language had been good practice. Plus I learned that whenever I can’t say something I use the word get and that almost invariably does the trick. Get is the equivalent of the verb “to smurf” for Smurfs. It never fails.
The driver asked me where I was from. When I told him, he said he had never been to Italy. However, the following week he was going to Jamaica on his honeymoon.
“I booked a five-star hotel, an all-inclusive stay, one of those where you wear a bracelet on your wrist… You know, for once in my life…”
“That’s the way to go, Jamaica is a beautiful place.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You’re better off that way. All women, even the most beautiful and fascinating women in the world, become boring after a year.”
“Why are you getting married then?”
“Because I’m already bored. It doesn’t make any difference.”
We both laughed. When I got out, I told him, “Enjoy your honeymoon and make love as much as you can.”
“With my wife?”
“Of course!”
“Are you crazy? Don’t get me started…”
My hotel was in north Chelsea. Before checking in, I quickly bought the things I needed in order to survive while waiting for my luggage: underwear, a t-shirt, socks, and deodorant. I kept thinking about how to track down a telephone number on the Internet so I could call Silvia and ask her if she still had Michela’s address. I didn’t remember anyone’s phone number, except my grandma’s, who didn’t have any of my friends’ numbers. Plus, she wasn’t doing too well lately, and she hardly ever used the phone. In the past, when she was still healthy, we even tried to teach her how to use a cell phone. It didn’t last long; she couldn’t even turn it on. She would leave it on all day then forget to charge it. Most of all, she had a hard time reading: she kept saying she couldn’t see the screen too well. Since she didn’t know how to send or receive text messages, the memory on her phone would fill up with advertisements from the provider, and the phone would beep until she read all her messages. I tried to explain a couple of features to her, but I gave up when, reading the word ‘menu,’ she said, “Ah, you can order food, like in a restaurant?”
Sometimes she would leave the phone on the couch and then sit on it. Without realizing, she would dial the last number she called. It was almost always mine. When that happened I would shout, “Grandmaaaaa… Grandmaaaa…” She would never hear me, she was practically deaf and, since she was sitting on the phone, she would have needed ears on her butt to hear my call.
Once I was going skiing and had forgotten my wool hat at her place. From the street, I shouted, “Grandmaaaa, throw me my wool hat.” She went back inside and after a few seconds, she threw down a bath mat.
“The hat, not the mat… HAT!”
In the end her cell phone, still wrapped in its protective film, wound up in a drawer, tuned off once and for all.
All this to say that my grandma wasn’t the solution to my current situation. I thought I’d go up to my room, take a shower, relax and try to recover from my journey. Then, well rested, I would figure out what to do: one thing at a time. Anyway, I only had Michela’s work address, and it would have been useless since it was Saturday. Although I was curious to see where she worked.
When I got to my room, I did what I usually do when I’m staying in a hotel. First, I take the comforter off the bed. They never change it between clients, so it grosses me out a bit. I throw it on the floor or in the closet, and I un-tuck the sheets from under the mattress. I can’t sleep if I’m bundled up and sealed like
a spring roll. Sometimes I forget and I try to do it when I’m already under the sheets, but I never succeed since they are tucked far under the mattress. Then I usually manage to pull up the bottom sheet and I awake on the bare mattress. At that point it would have been better to leave the comforter on. Another thing I like about hotel beds is the way the sheets feel. They are slippery. They aren’t soft like the ones at home: they are strange. Sometimes the towels are like that too. When you use them, they feel as if they were covered in an invisible film. The TV remote grosses me out. I think about how many fingers of naked people lying in bed must have touched the buttons.
After a shower, I went out for a walk. For my first stroll in New York I blasted AC/DC’s Live Wire through my headphones. Then I chose a more relaxed type of music: Wilson Pickett’s Back in Your Arms, Al Green’s Tired of Being Alone, Bill Wither’s Use Me…
I was back at the hotel by eight, completely worn out. Eight at night is two in the morning in Italy, when you factor in the time difference. I still hadn’t found a solution to retrieving my phone numbers.
On the corner by my hotel I met Alfred, a homeless man. On a piece of cardboard he had written, “A dollar a joke.” I gave him a dollar. He told me a joke but I didn’t get it.
I went up to my room. As I was falling asleep, my subconscious spoke to me. A distant voice grew in my head, it was Dante’s and he was saying, “Did you notice anything strange about my number? It’s a palindrome… It’s easy.” I opened my eyes and I found myself shouting his phone number. I immediately wrote it down on the hotel notepad.
Fuck… I was saved. I had no choice. If I wanted to compare films with Michela, I had to go through him: like when you rent a DVD and you have to watch the previews because you’re not allowed to skip them.
It was too late to talk to him. But if I called him at that hour, I would have gotten his voicemail and could have left a message, which was quicker and easier than talking to him. I could have told him to call Silvia and tell her to call me at the hotel. That’s what I did. However, Silvia didn’t have the number for my hotel in Manhattan, and so I had to tell him. From that moment on, Dante had the number for my hotel and my room number.
He called at ten on Saturday morning, Italian time. It was four in the morning in New York. I tried to tell him it was still dark out where I was, but he kept talking undisturbed; he told me he was going to be with his son until six that evening and that he would go look for Silvia right after that. “How’s New York? How long will you be there? If you’re there for a while, maybe I can get a week off from work and join you… What do you say?”
“Let’s talk about it tonight. Thank you very much. Bye, bye.”
I couldn’t fall back asleep. I stayed in bed, trying to fall back asleep, but there was no way. At six in the morning, local time, I was already up and about. I went out for a walk. The city is beautiful at that time. After a while, I stopped for breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien on Seventh Ave. Then I went to Central Park.
Around ten, I went back to the hotel and, since they were still serving breakfast, I went to the dining room. I grabbed some ham and cheese and made myself a sandwich. I had walked a lot so I was hungry. I also grabbed some melon, but there was no prosciutto. Whenever I eat prosciutto and melon, I wonder who invented the combination. I eat it because I'd seen others doing it and liked it, but, if I’d had prosciutto and melon in my own fridge, I'd never have thought about combining them. Oh well!
There were very few people in the dinning room: a couple from South America that was speaking in Spanish, a man in a suit and tie, and, at the table next to mine, a woman that must have been in her forties. As he was clearing a table in the middle of the room, one of the waiters dropped a pitcher full of grapefruit juice. The woman and I looked at each other, made faces, laughing at the clumsy waiter. In the end, when I got up to get some coffee before they took it away, I asked her if she wanted some. She said yes, and she invited me to sit at her table. She was American, but not from New York, and she was with her husband, on a business trip. Her name was Dinah.
It was eleven in the morning and still no news about my bag. I called them.
“Maybe around two…” they told me. My task for the morning, however, wasn’t retrieving the bag, but rather tracking down Michela’s address and surviving Dante’s chatter. His stubbornness, his persistence, his determination, which were all detrimental to my health, tuned out to be invaluable assets for the mission I’d given him. At two in the afternoon, that is at eight in the evening in Italy, Dante called me at the hotel and, after wasting twenty-five minutes on useless preambles, he told me, “Mission accomplished. I left a note under Silvia’s door, since I rang the bell and nobody came to the door.”
“Thank you, Dante.”
“Don’t mention it… You can take me out for pizza and beer. That way, we can chat a bit.”
Right, exactly.
9
Waiting for Michela
Silvia called, and luckily she still had Michela’s address. I wrote it on a piece of paper, which I held on to as if it were a magic parchment. I also made three copies of it.
I was happy to find out that the office was close to the hotel. It wasn’t in a skyscraper downtown, but in the West Village.
“How are things with Carlo? Did you guys talk some more?”
“He told me he’s had enough of my complaining and of the fact that I’m never happy. That I’m a spoiled brat, and that he treats me like a queen, while he’s always away on business.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. Margherita was there and I didn’t want her to her me yelling. Plus, now he’s convinced I’m cheating on him. That I don’t love him anymore because there is another man, which doesn’t make any sense because, even if it were true, it could only be the opposite: that is, I’ve fallen in love with someone else because I don’t love him anymore. Oh well, come on, I don’t want to bore you with this sadness.”
“You know, it’s typical of those men who don’t want to face their responsibilities.”
“I told him it’s time to grow up. For him, too. Listen, Giacomo, have fun, sweep her off her feet and come back soon. Hugs.”
“Bye, Silvia.”
On Monday morning I went down to the dining room, poured some coffee into a paper cup, and went to stand out front of Michela’s office, hoping I would see her go in. On Perry Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue South, there is Doma Café. I went in and sat at a table; from there I could see the entrance to her office. I didn’t even know what time she went to work. I was very nervous, maybe because I had already drank two huge cups of coffee.
I was watching people walk by. I’ve always liked doing that. When I was little, on summer evenings, I would spend a lot of time on my grandma’s balcony looking down at people passing in the street. There were families with kids my age who were eating ice cream next to their parents. My mother was always at work and my grandma didn’t like to go out. Thinking of those evenings on the balcony, I also remember I would look up into my grandma’s room and I would see her illuminated by the blue light of the television. She would sit there in her slip fanning herself with her feet resting on top of her slippers. Whenever she wore them, her feet looked really swollen. It seemed as if someone had poured them in and then forgot to say “stop.” They were overflowing. She would sit there staring at the television and sometimes she would fall asleep. I never understood why, when that happened and I asked, “Are you sleeping?” she would answer, “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was just resting my eyes.” It’s as if she was ashamed to admit she was sleeping. Who knows! Sometimes, on those summer evenings, to overcome those sad moments when I saw other happy families, like a man drowning his woes in alcohol, I would open the fridge and drink from the bottle of the iced tea my grandmother had brewed. It wasn’t the powdered kind. It was very good. You could taste the tea but, more importantly, the lemon. She would squeeze in two or three of them.
She would
always say, “Listen, there won’t be anymore once that’s finished.” And that is a rather easy concept to grasp; she meant was that she wasn’t going to brew anymore until the day after. Often I would drink it all just the same. I couldn’t help it. I should have gone to one of those AA meetings and told the story of how I freed myself from my iced tea addiction.
“Hello everyone, my name is Giacomo, I’m eight and I started drinking for fun. Then one day I realized I couldn’t function anymore without my bottle of lemon iced tea. However, thanks to you, I decided to quit.”
Then the leader of the meeting would say, “Let’s give a hand to our friend Giacomo for sharing his problem with us. Thank you, Giacomo, for your courage.”
“Thank you.”
At the time I was covered in tattoos. At age eight I always had a tattoo. You could only tell the design on the first day, after that it turned into a shapeless stain. Those were the tattoos I found in chewing gum wrappers. You would apply the piece of paper to your skin, add water, and turn into a tattooed rebel. On top of that, at the time, my elbows, legs, and knees were always covered in bruises, scratches, scabs, so much so that I looked like a refrigerator covered in magnets. Bruised, tattooed, and trapped in the downward spiral of lemon iced tea addiction: what a tough life.
As I was waiting for Michela I felt like I was in a soap bubble. Certainly the time difference had something to do with it. I observed everything that was happening around me, but I didn’t feel involved in it, as if it was someone else’s life. This is what usually happens when I get to a new place. Then, suddenly, there’s a moment when I feel a strong desire to be part of it. I experience a sort of jealousy of those who live there. When I’m abroad I always try to blend in. For instance, I avoid touristy areas, street maps and cameras hanging from my neck. I remember when I was walking in Leicester Square in London and I would run into Italians on holiday wearing their backpacks: I looked at them as if I were a Londoner. I would avoid them but at the same time I felt like going up to them and telling them where to eat, what to do, and stuff like that. In other words, to play the part of the local.