Alessandro and I would be staying with an American family, at Patrick McDevitt’s house. Patrick McDevitt was Alessandro’s pen pal, and he lived in New Jersey, just a few dozen miles from New York. I hadn’t met him yet, but this Patrick McDevitt had already become one of my heroes.
But we’d totaled up the check without consulting the innkeeper, as we like to say in Rome—that is, we still had to inform our hero and pen pal that two young Italian men would soon be invading his home.
We made up our minds to just go ahead and place an intercontinental phone call to the home of Signore and Signora McDevitt. Alessandro and I pooled our resources and managed to come up with the considerable sum of ten thousand lire to purchase a phone card. We found a phone booth far from our respective apartments, because if our parents had caught either of us on the family phone calling America—in the middle of the night because of the time difference and at some unknown but undoubtedly vastly expensive cost per minute—they might very well disown us on the spot. But most important, Alessandro and I had agreed, looking each other in the eye with frank admission, that considering the embarrassingly bad level of our spoken English, if there was a cringe-inducing phone call to be made, better to do it together, in the privacy of a phone booth, than in the presence of other human beings . . .
We were pretty worried. We might be able to get out a few words of English, but would we be able to understand what the other person was trying to say to us? We agreed that, if it came to it, we could always hang up and run away. With these courageous thoughts in mind, we made the call.
The thankless task would fall to Alessandro, of course, because Patrick was his friend. And we shuddered to imagine what would happen if I had called and said something along the lines of “Hello, I am calling from Italy and my name is Luca Spaghetti . . .” Patrick would have hung up on me immediately, assuming it was a crank call. So we screwed up our courage and decided to go through with it: we both stepped into the phone booth and, with our hearts more than with our fingers, punched in Patrick’s phone number. I’ll never forget Alessandro’s expression—pop-eyed with astonishment and anxiety—when someone answered the phone on the far side of the world. Alessandro stood there speechless, catching his breath after gulping down his anxiety—it must have been something like gulping down a whole hard-boiled egg—and then broke into a stream of excited, convulsive, hopeful English.
I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, so I can imagine what the Americans made of it; anyway, the glowing display on the phone showed that the credit available was plummeting at an incredible rate, like a time bomb in a movie. In just a few minutes our hard-earned ten thousand lire was gone in a puff of smoke, but Alessandro had done it: once we got to New York, Patrick would come to pick us up at the airport, and we could stay for a few days at his family’s house in New Jersey.
Just a few days later, our plane landed at JFK Airport. All that stood between us and American soil was the terrifying immigration control. During the flight, even before landing, we had had to fill out the notorious green form that asked whether we were spies, had any infectious diseases, or were guilty of genocide; it immediately struck us that the best idea might be to answer no to all of the above. There was just one question we would have liked to answer yes to: “Are you bringing more than ten thousand dollars per person to the United States?” Unfortunately, the answer to that one was also no.
Despite everything—despite our rumpled, demented appearance, the result of the time difference, the jet lag, and the Finnair flight with a one-day layover in Helsinki—we were admitted into the United States of America. I couldn’t believe it—my dream was finally coming true!
As we walked out into the concourse, we found Patrick waiting for us, all American and smiling, just as I’d imagined him. Unfortunately, his smile disappeared the minute he realized he would have not one but two Italian guests; five seconds later, it dawned on me that the ten thousand lire we’d spent on the phone card had been a complete waste, that Alessandro and Patrick hadn’t really understood one another at all, and that absolutely no provisions had been made for me to stay at Patrick’s house. Once we got past the initial shock, though, it turned out there was no problem. In fact, the welcome I received at Casa McDevitt remains one of my finest memories of my trip to the U.S.A. Even though we were exhausted from the jet lag and all we were dreaming of was a mattress to collapse on, Pat’s mother had made dinner for us. When we walked into the dining room, I saw that there was nothing but a bowl of salad on the table. I relaxed. I told myself, They’re just going to give us some salad, and then we can go to sleep. Immediately afterward, though, a familiar aroma wafted out of the kitchen, ringing alarm bells in my mind. From that moment on, it became clear to me. In Italy, salad is a side dish served with the secondo; in America, it’s a prelude to dinner proper. And in fact, then I saw Pat’s mother emerging from the kitchen with a huge bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce! And after that, a delicious roast, and then dessert. And I thought I’d be eating only hamburgers and French fries in the U.S.A. . . .
After dinner, we retired to the living room, where I found myself with a guitar in my hands, playing songs for my new American friends, songs by my American heroes—James Taylor and Jackson Browne and Jim Croce. It was a magnificent evening. I would never have expected to find the same warmth I knew from the bonfires on the beach at Anzio thousands of miles away from home.
I was happily exhausted, but I couldn’t think of sleeping: it would be just a few hours now until I set foot in New York! I’ve never felt such a strong and abiding excitement about going to see a city. I kept wondering if it would be just as I imagined it: big, magical, filled with music and color, modern and breakneck and frenetic.
When I first glimpsed the Manhattan skyline from the bus, I felt goose bumps all over my body. We were really about to enter the city that never sleeps! I got off the bus, as if we were being pulled by some immense invisible magnet, and before we knew it, we were in midtown, on Fifth Avenue. With no particular destination, Alessandro and I wandered, openmouthed, eyes wide open, hearts overbrimming with joy. I was speechless, though in those first few minutes I had come to at least one clear conclusion: in a city this size, I’d never be able to just run into James Taylor.
Manhattan was a thousand times more—more of everything than I ever could have dreamed. It was indescribable. We understood once and for all that this was a world apart when—as we walked along, stunned at the sheer size of everything we saw—Captain Kirk in person came walking across the street in our direction. Or perhaps I should say, someone dressed as the captain of the Starship Enterprise, undisturbed, was walking the streets of New York—a golden yellow long-sleeved shirt over a black mock turtleneck, and a pair of black trousers—to the complete indifference of passersby.
We tried to imagine the same thing happening in Rome. If Captain Kirk had descended the Spanish Steps in Rome, coming down from the Church of the Trinità dei Monti to Piazza di Spagna, there would have been a chorus of laughter, and surely some Roman gentleman or other would have ventured to ask him whether, considering the inevitable traffic problems of the Eternal City, he’d found a parking place for his starship, or whether he’d had to leave his keys with some sinister-looking self-appointed parking honcho.
But in New York, anything is possible, anything is normal, and anything can happen. Anything and its opposite.
It is not hard to see that I have always been an enthusiast and an optimist. Even when things seem to be going badly, I can’t seem to help seeing the glass as half full—and usually half full of a very nice Italian red. In fact, I’m often so damned optimistic that I don’t even see the glass: I just see the red wine. (The truth is, every so often my friends suggest to me that I’m not really an optimist at all—maybe I’m just an alcoholic.) In any case, my enthusiasm always drives me to pursue my dreams with an unstoppable determination. And usually, so furiously do I chase after those dreams that eventually I manage to
achieve them. Perhaps because of the energy I put into pursuing my objectives, though, I often have the sensation that I cannot fully enjoy the moment in which I see a dream come true. Perhaps, incurable Roman romantic that I am, what I’m really trying to do each time is to create a series of memories, stockpiling them for some future date but almost forgetting to enjoy them in the here and now. I’ve gazed transfixed at I don’t know how many sunsets, entranced by their beauty but at the same time doing my best to capture the feeling of those moments in order to be able to remember them, someday in the future, exactly as they were.
And that first day in New York, stunned though I was by the all-encompassing excess of that incredible city, I still felt that I could hardly contain within my heart and soul the vastness of the dream I was finally achieving: the American dream of an Italian boy.
My legs were leading me through the Big Apple. Central Park left me breathless. It had first become a mythical place for me when, on a September evening in 1981, I watched the legendary Simon & Garfunkel concert on my TV at home in Rome. I spent the entire evening glued to the TV, and I recorded the whole event on my little tape recorder. I held it up to the speaker of our television set and sternly demanded that my entire family maintain the strictest silence. Luckily, the concert LP came out not long afterward, but I spent the first few weeks playing and replaying that hissing, staticky tape recording, learning the songs by heart. I loved “Mrs. Robinson,” but the true eye-opener was my first encounter with “The Sounds of Silence,” an authentic masterpiece. There are few other songs in which the voices of Simon and Garfunkel are so perfectly fused, few songs in which the music attains an equal level of perfection.
When we got to the World Trade Center, we slowly raised our eyes skyward, looking up at the Twin Towers, gazing openmouthed at those wonderful silvery structures that never seemed to come to an end. It was impossible to resist—we had to go up to the top immediately, to the rooftop of the world. It took us a full minute, aboard an elevator that looked like a spaceship, to be catapulted up to the roof of the north tower, well over thirteen hundred feet in the air. Up on the roof, the 360-degree panorama was truly unbelievable: as far as the eye could reach, the ocean was motionless, an immense expanse of blue cement. New York City looked like a giant hedgehog stretching northward, its quills luminescent with reflected sunlight, and the topknot of Central Park on its head. The Hudson and the East River looked like a couple of small creeks, and the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Lady of New York, was for once a Little Lady, still there, raising her light to give hope to those coming into port, looking down benevolently in her turn at the tiny wakes of foam that the watercraft left behind them as they crept slowly along, crisscrossing the seawater. There was an enormous sense of peace up there, so different from the frenzy that reigned in the streets and avenues that these two elegant colossuses surveyed from above.
Once we got back to earth, we decided to treat ourselves to an exquisite cultural experience: a visit to MoMA. We weren’t exactly experts in the mystery known as contemporary art, and we were more accustomed to Italian museums, where, frequently, the newest painting is five centuries old. So we didn’t really know what to expect. We enjoyed ourselves enormously, browsing among what struck us as a series of likable and whimsical oddities, especially the can of Campbell’s tomato soup. But at a certain point during our trek through the museum, I stumbled on something that really left me speechless: a huge canvas hanging on the wall, brightly lit, and completely blank. The first thing that occurred to me was that it had been put there by clever thieves to replace the painting that was supposed to be there. If I hurried to alert the guards, they could lock all the exits and we’d still be in time to recover the stolen masterpiece. The next morning, my photograph would appear on the front page of the New York Times: “Luca Spaghetti, the Italian hero who thwarted the art theft of the century.” As I got a little closer, though, I noticed a small metal label on the wall identifying the painting: White on White. White on white?! It was a famous painting by Malevich, and it was, in fact, completely white: it was hanging there, perfectly safe, and nobody had even dreamed of stealing it. When Alessandro came back to find me, I was still standing there, motionless, staring at White on White with a blank expression on my face, probably in the throes of an attack of Stendhal syndrome.
We took a moment to catch our breaths, and then we were off again, this time to visit the Dakota, the apartment building at the corner of Central Park West and West Seventy-second Street, featured in the movie Rosemary’s Baby, but sadly famous as the site of the murder of John Lennon, on December 8, 1980. I still remembered the tragic footage from the news reports we saw in Italy, the wrought-iron gates at the front entrance of the Dakota, all the people gathering around in a sort of spontaneous vigil. I thought there might be a plaque, something put up in memory of John, but there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing outside the Dakota, but across the street, in Central Park, we found a commemoration of him: a place called Strawberry Fields, a large mosaic memorial featuring the single word IMAGINE.
Three years before that trip to New York, in 1992, I had visited the Beatles Story, the museum at the Albert Dock in Liverpool. I can still remember how deeply moved I was when, thinking I’d seen the whole exhibit, I unexpectedly found myself in the last room: the walls were all white, and in the middle was a similarly white concert grand piano. On top of the piano was a pair of glasses with round lenses, like John’s, while the notes of “Imagine” filled the heart of anyone who entered the room.
There were no words accompanying the music, but I thought of all the things John would have to say to the world today. I turned and walked out in silence.
Between all the dizzying events of our days in New York, we managed to find time to plan our coast-to-coast trip; we were scheduled to leave in three days. Before I’d left Italy, Giuliana had given me a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. And as if my own brimming enthusiasm wasn’t enough, reading that book was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. I was hungry for miles, I wanted to devour them by the thousand, and I didn’t care how. I was going to get to California, to San Francisco, by any means possible.
And the means that proved to be possible had a name: the Amtrak California Zephyr.
But before we left for the coast, one more unforgettable New York experience awaited us: a baseball game at Yankee Stadium with Pat and his dad, John.
We were excited, both because of all the new things we were seeing and because—with all the things we’d learned in just a few days on American soil—we could finally teach something to this young nation: how to go to the stadium or, in this case, the ballpark! It didn’t really matter that we knew nothing at all about the rules of baseball. We had grasped the general underlying meaning of the sport: you were supposed to hit the oncoming ball with a bat just as hard as you could and try to send it as far as you could. Once we were comfortably seated in Yankee Stadium, we knew that after years and years of experience at the Stadio Olimpico and the Roma-Lazio derby, that baseball game was going to be a walk in the park for us—a walk in the ballpark.
That night the Yankees were playing the Milwaukee Brewers. There was just one minor detail I needed to understand. “Which team are we rooting for?” I asked Pat.
It’s a gift I have: I feel comfortable anywhere I go; even in a foreign country, among people I don’t know, I feel at home the first day, a full citizen the third day, and before a week is out I’m ready to join the army.
This time I was moving faster than usual. I might not have been ready to join the army, but I was definitely ready to fight for the Yankees.
“Home team wears white,” Pat replied.
Whenever something important happened, Alessandro and I joined in with the cheers of the Yankee fans, proudly rolling out our elegant hoard of shouts, jeers, and exclamations from the Stadio Olimpico, heaping Italian curses, oaths, and insults on the heads of the unfortunate Brewers. Poor guys. If it had just been a matter o
f the name of the team—they were Brewers after all—we would have been all for them. But as guests we had certain duties of allegiance!
Pat and his dad were highly amused by the lessons we were giving the relatively well-behaved American baseball fans in how to root with imagination and style, and we were proud to offer our small contribution. The fact that, in later years, Pat could never tell this story without laughing so hard that tears came to his eyes made me think that our enthusiasm might have been a little much even for a New York baseball stadium, but their love of the Yankees had infected us.
I had practically slipped into a sports fan’s frenzied trance when I found myself in a completely unforeseen situation. Back then, I was a smoker, a heavy smoker—in the sense that every day a pack of Marlboro Reds, always and only Marlboro Reds, was my one certain traveling companion. Out in the open-air bleachers of Yankee Stadium on that warm evening, I had already smoked four or five cigarettes, and was just lighting another, when I sensed a giant shadow looming over me. The security guard, an enormous black man with a terribly serious expression on his face and a menacing voice, had already started to read me my rights. The first thing I thought was: Shit, I must have filled something in wrong on that damned green form at the airport! Then I realized I must have done something much worse, but there, inside the stadium—could it have been the cursing? No, it was much, much worse: the cigarette. I had smoked a cigarette in an outdoor stadium! Chastened and silent, I put my Marlboro back into the packet. While the security guard threatened that he’d bounce me out of the stadium if I so much as laid a finger on the corpus delicti, my unlit Marlboro Red, John did his best to explain politely that I came from a less civilized country, but the guard wasn’t interested in hearing excuses. One more cigarette and Luca Spaghetti would have to use a telescope to get a glimpse of Yankee Stadium.
Un Amico Italiano Page 7