So my mind is a sea of sexual stupidity and life is so short that there has to be a better use of my time. There are charitable actions I could take that probably would get my mind off of sex, but hospitals where one can tend to the suffering and ill are always overheated and this makes me very tired, and to be selfless and giving, you need energy. Thus for a long time I was always thinking that traveling was the only way out of the mental/sexual gutter. And then, sure enough, recently my prayers were answered: I was invited to come perform my one-man show, Oedipussy, in Germany. I was to be paid a handsome fee and provided with an open-ended round-trip ticket. So I left for the Continent on February 24, 1999, and had plans to travel for three weeks after giving my performance.
I packed lightly and simply. I took two pairs of pants, and everything else was in threes: shirts, underwear, T-shirts, and socks. I also had my favorite mustard-colored Brooks Brothers sport coat, one sweater, an overcoat, and four Raymond Chandler novels. But the most important thing I packed was a bottle of psyllium fiber in capsule form. I usually take powdered psyllium, but a large can of psyllium powder takes up too much room in one’s bag, and also once when I was visiting my son in Georgia, my can of psyllium burst open and for weeks all my clothing had fiber on it. So I felt very good that I would have my psyllium in Europe—no way did I want to risk travel-induced constipation. I also packed a bottle of vitamin C, my razor, toothbrush, and toothpaste. I figured I’d use hotel soap for my hair and as shaving cream. Well, enough of that, but packing isn’t talked about sufficiently in travel writing.
So on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, I arrived in Heidelberg, where I was to perform at the German-American Institute on the twenty-seventh. My very first night in Heidelberg I ate in some restaurant-bar, and while awaiting my food, I made this note in my journal: “Beautiful, tall raven-haired waitress with khaki pants wedged up her ass in a very attractive way. All of her is thin and tall, except the ass, which is sumptuous. Banana-type breasts, high cheekbones, taut skin . . . too taut, but oh, that ass. Very intriguing the way the pants are sucked up into it. Well, food is here. Will stop writing.”
I offer this very first journal entry of my trip to illustrate that any thoughts of freedom from sexual obsession were obviously hopeless. Do I mention in my little notebook the fact that I had seen Heidelberg’s famous lit-up castle in the mountains just moments before? No. I write with great rapture about a waitress’s wedgie. So for the rest of the trip, it was life pretty much as usual—thoughts about sex around the clock, punctuated only by hunger and exhaustion and, because I was in Europe, the study of train schedules.
But I should say that I was able to look around me a little bit, and I noticed that Heidelberg is very beautiful, almost as beautiful as that waitress’s ass, and the Allies didn’t bomb it very heavily for that very reason. Unlike much of Germany, Heidelberg still has its prewar elegance.
A river, like in most European cities, bisects this old university town, and to the right and left above the town are two small mountain ranges. And on the face of the eastern hills is this glorious castle, which has enormous spotlights shining on it at night to give one the feeling that the Duke of Heidelberg is still up there doing romantic things, like having banquets and sword fights and orgies.
So I walked around lovely Heidelberg for two days and hiked in the surrounding forests, and then on the evening of the twenty-seventh, I had my performance and it was very well attended. The publicity had worked: All over Heidelberg there were posters announcing my show and those of my two fellow New York performers who had preceded me—Evert Eden and Penny Arcade. Under my name and the title of my show was the phrase lust spiel, which I figured must mean sex talk. But I was later told that lust meant comic, which leads me to wonder what the German word for lust is. I should have asked. Probably something that if directly translated would mean punctuality.
During the course of my show, I cracked several anti-German jokes, which the audience good-naturedly enjoyed. In the first story I told them, I was talking about my life-changing back spasm that occurred at that Cub Scout picnic in 1972, and how this spasm resulted in my wearing of a corset for a year at the tender age of eight. And I said to the audience, completely off the cuff, “I don’t know what the German equivalent for Cub Scouts might be. Perhaps it’s the Junior Stormtroopers or the Baby Luftwaffe.” At “Baby Luftwaffe,” they really laughed and I had them in the palm of my Jewish hand. And so I duly informed them that I was a Nazi, but not the kind they liked—I was an Ashkenazi.
Later in the show, I told them that if, God forbid, there was another Holocaust, I knew that they wouldn’t use that shower trick again. They’d tell us Jews that we were going to watch a movie, since they know how Jews like to go to movies, especially on Christmas, and so they’d get us into some cinema and then the gas would come. To dramatize this, I then pretended to be choking on gas and cried out, “I thought I was going to see the new Woody Allen!”
At the end of the show, I received three encores, which gave me a chance to make meaningful eye contact with several blond maidens whom I hoped might find their way to my hotel. In fact, I had announced toward the end of the show the name of my hotel and gave my room number, but I received no late-night visitors.
After the performance, though, there was one woman at my celebratory dinner who might have come to my hotel room with me. She was an athletic-looking brunette with blood-red cheeks, and after she drank a few beers, she was rubbing my thigh under the table, which I might have enjoyed, but I found her breath to be vomitous. I don’t know what she had been eating earlier in the day, but I felt as if my eyelids were going to melt from the acidic nature of her halitosis. Also her personality was halitotic. She said to me, “Is everybody in New York in therapy?” But this wasn’t intended as a question, it was meant to be a put-down.
“No, everyone in New York is a therapist,” I said. “Going to therapy was a seventies thing. Being a therapist is what is de rigeur now.”
“Well, we don’t believe in therapy here,” she said.
“Oh, that’s good,” I said. “Any holocausts in your family history?” But this didn’t phase her, the hand still stroked my thigh, though I wondered if she thought it was odd that I was breathing through my mouth. I might have bedded her, but I love to kiss and she must have had nineteen garlic wiener schnitzels that afternoon, and you can’t hit a home run with someone if you don’t want to hit a single.
The next morning, I left Heidelberg quite early and took an eight-hour train through the Alps to Venice, Italy, where through international literary contacts I had a free room waiting for me at Hotel La Fenice et Des Artistes. This hotel is named after the famous Venetian playhouse Teatro La Fenice, which is right next door. I was told that Woody Allen, mentioned above, stays at this hotel when he comes to Venice.
But I didn’t stay in Woody’s suite. I was given a tiny room with no view, but the price, obviously, was reasonable. And the staff of the hotel was quite fascinating. On the walls of the lobby are black-and-white cast photos from shows at La Fenice from the past thirty years, and I realized that two of the older night clerks had been actors in those productions. It gave the place a homey and The Shining sort of ambience. There was also a wonderfully maternal seventy-something woman who served me breakfast each morning, and I adored her because she was kind to me.
Venice is the most melancholy, beautiful, and surreal city in the world. It provokes in me a yearning for romance. When I was first there in 1984 as a dreamy twenty-year-old, I swore that I would only return if I was with someone I loved. I failed to keep my vow; I came with someone I have mixed emotions about—myself—but I’d like to make that vow again, though it is pathetic. But traveling does this to me; it’s so annoying, it makes me believe in romance, in the possibility of union with a kindred soul. Usually I am happy just going about my business of being nervous and afraid and reading books, and I don’t think of sharing this brief life with another, but then you wander around Euro
pe, not worrying about paying your rent for a few weeks, and suddenly you wish that there was someone whose hand you could be holding, whose eyes would look upon the beautiful things that you look upon, someone whom you could need and not be ashamed to need, and someone whom you could comfort and kiss so as to protect them against all of life’s slings and arrows.
What mush. But I probably half-believe it. And it’s good to try to write mush once in a while, like practicing scales on a piano.
Anyway, one shouldn’t go to Venice alone. The beauty is too overwhelming and upsetting. I spent three days there wandering around like a ghost with his heart in his mouth. I spoke to no one but my own mind, though I did have my Chandler novels, which I was rereading for the first time in about ten years. So whenever I’d get too lonely, I’d open up the Chandler and let Philip Marlowe sing to me. Marlowe was my only friend.
Venice is broken up into sestieri and I mostly hung around the Dorsoduro sestiere, which is the students’ quarter and not at all touristy. On the edge of the Dorsoduro there’s this lengthy promenade along the very wide waterway Canale Della Guideca, which opens up to the Adriatic. And while you stroll along the promenade, this thin white fog surrounds you and out on the water there are ships, going somewhere, doing something, which gives one the sense that the world has meaning, or at least commerce.
It was chilly when I was in Venice, but not too bad, and I’d take breaks from walking along the promenade and I’d sit on a bench and clutch my coat to my neck and just stare at the water, at the small, insistent waves. And then when I’d get too cold, there were plenty of cheap student restaurants and cafés to warm up in. Italy has the greatest food in the world. Even the little sandwiches that all the cafés sell are delicious—they’re filled with cheeses, smoked fish, and all kinds of ham that this Jewish boy loved indulging in— and so I’d eat sandwiches all day long and drink espressos. And then at night I’d have my big meal.
But at night a bad thing would happen to me in Venice. I’d sit in the restaurants and then the student cafés afterward and I would crave alcohol. I’m the first to admit that I’m a dipsomaniac, but I’m only a dipsomaniac when I actually imbibe spirits. Sober I’m simply a maniac or simply dippy or simply boring, but all these are much more manageable states of being than what happens to me as a result of intoxication, which is hospitalizations, liver problems, and having to move back home with my parents.
Still, like most sots, I romanticize booze, and so I was sitting there in the Dorsoduro every night wishing I could have a glass of red wine, as if one glass would turn my life into a Fitzgerald novel. But I didn’t drink.
Then my last evening in Venice, I ate my big meal and at the end there was a large fruit cup. I took one spoonful and then a second and it occurred to me that the fruit was soaked in something that tasted quite familiar. I sensed what it was but wasn’t entirely certain, so I took a third experimental spoonful and was convinced— sure enough, the fruit was in a bath of wine! But wanting to be thoroughly scientific, I proceeded to have two more experimental spoonfuls. It was most certainly alcohol! Then like a good and outraged temperance society member, I summoned my waiter and pointed at the fruit cup and said accusingly, “Vino?”
“Sì,” he said, and I gestured with a wave of my hand that he should take away the offending fruit cup and he did. But the damage was done. I felt this most pleasing sensation in the center of my brain and my whole face flushed quite nicely. Liquor hadn’t passed these lips in almost three years, and those little spoonfuls of booze to my pure bloodstream were like hits of crack. It was lovely. I thought of throwing in the sober towel and getting a real drink, but I willed myself back to my hotel and crawled into bed with Marlowe, my friend, my lover.
The next day, I temporarily put the fruit cup incident out of my mind and in the morning I explored the Jewish ghetto of Venice, which is the oldest ghetto in the world because it’s where the word itself originated. When Ashkenazi Jews came to Venice, they were only allowed to stay in this one area, which was named geto and which was where munitions were manufactured and thus was an undesirable place to live. But these German-speaking Jews couldn’t pronounce geto with a proper Italian accent, so they made it sound like ghetto, and a new word was born.
So after my excellent tour of the ghetto’s old synagogues, I left Venice and took a train to Florence. During the train ride, I kept thinking about that fruit cup, like a first kiss that I was playing over and over in my mind. It was maddening.
At the station in Florence, I grabbed a tourist map and dragged my bag for about a mile in a rainstorm to a cheap hotel I had read about in my guidebook. And being in noisy Florence with its scooters and cars, I realized how incredibly silent Venice is, that an essential part of its magic is its quiet. It is a city without automobiles. A city where the only way to get around is to walk or take a boat.
I could have used a boat now in Florence—it was an incredible downpour—but I made it to the hotel, though I was completely drenched since I didn’t have an umbrella. My room was highceilinged and dreary, but I was glad to be out of the rain.
I took a long nap and when I woke up I was quite hungry. It was around eight o’clock at night and still coming down. I put my wet shoes back on and went looking for a restaurant I had read about, but the streets of Florence are narrow and dark and I became a little lost and was again soaked. I ducked in a doorway and I really wanted a drink. I thought of the way my face had flushed the night before. I was in a miserable position. Here I was so lucky to be on the vacation I had been longing for, a vacation that most people would die to take, but it was turning out to be a disaster and I felt like a fool. It was typical hubris. I had been so proud to go on a trip to Europe. But I guess I had been too proud. That will always do you in. Too much pride and you get slammed in the jaw. So my pride had turned into terrible loneliness and despair and a constant, morbid craving for alcohol. My mind was shouting for me to drink. It was painful to want something so bad. It was like there was a pressure in my temples, a teakettle that wouldn’t shut up.
I emerged out of the doorway and the next thing I saw was a bar. I looked in the window and a woman smiled at me, or so I thought. I walked past the bar, but I was doomed. Three steps later, I turned around, went into the bar, and the woman who smiled at me immediately left. But that was of no consequence. There was another beautiful woman at the bar drinking a red wine. I sat next to her and ordered the same. I couldn’t take it anymore. The wine came, I looked at it for a moment—what was going to happen to me? And then I lifted the glass and had my first drink in nearly three years. I waited for the face flush or pleasure in the center of the brain, but I experienced neither sensation. Then the beautiful woman next to me went and sat at a table. I had thought she was going to be my future wife. I drank the whole glass and nothing happened. So then I ordered a little carafe of grappa since I had been reading about grappa so much in my guidebook.
The grappa did it. Two sips of grappa and I was loaded and the pressure was finally off. I felt that click that Tennessee Williams wrote about in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Thank God it had come. Everything was now all right. I wasn’t miserable anymore. I had my journal and my Chandler in my large coat pockets and I took them out. I sipped my grappa and read and sometimes wrote about the barmaid in front of me. All my journals for years are filled with descriptions of waitresses. Some people note landscapes. I note waitresses.
So, in sprawled, messy writing, here’s what I jotted down sitting at that bar: “She is so beautiful. I’m drunk. The dent at the bottom of her neck is perfect. Drunk again. Am I doomed? Black hair parted in the middle, white flawless skin, sad eyelids, red flower mouth, gray V-neck sweater, hint of tiny breasts, black skirt, full womanly ass. She’s what the Masters were painting. They loved her. I love her. She’s the belladonna. This grappa is hitting me hard. Now there’s a white unlit cigarette in her mouth. Now the hair is down. Oh, God, she’s a vision. To look at a face like that with love and love returned—wh
at would that be like?”
Drunken mush. So after the grappa, I staggered out of the bar. The girl was too beautiful, I was going to disintegrate in her presence, and so I found my restaurant and had a very good meal, which I washed down with a bottle of wine. Then I went back to my room and had bad drunken sleep, but was quite happy that I hadn’t blacked out or vomited. Maybe I wasn’t a dipsomaniac anymore.
The next day, I was hungover, but I called up a friend of a friend. A woman. We met for lunch and she spoke wonderful English. It was my first conversation with someone in five days, which isn’t that long, but compared to my New York life an eternity. During lunch, I only had a few glasses of wine, since I had cured my dipsomania and was now someone traveling through Europe who could drink like a gentleman. I got a crush on this woman and she seemed smitten with me as well. Her name was Giulia and she was tall and she had blond hair that was the color of wet sand. She had green eyes and funny, imperfect teeth, which I thought were beautiful.
After lunch, she kissed me good-bye and told me to call her that evening, that perhaps we could have dinner. She then went back to work at the publishing company she owns and runs, and I climbed up into the hills above Florence and the sun was out, and from my elevation, the city and all its churches seemed to glow.
That night I did have dinner at Giulia’s apartment, but unfortunately, a girlfriend of hers called at the last moment and joined us. Still, it was very pleasant. Giulia’s apartment was an enormous duplex with a spectacular view of the Arno, the river that courses through Florence. We had a lovely meal and I drank about a bottle, but again was a perfectly well-behaved gentleman. I also had some port that Giulia brought out especially for me. At the end of the night, I had to leave when the friend left, there was no polite way around it, but after we kissed good-bye, Giulia leaned back against the wall and said huskily, “It’s been so lovely meeting you today.”
What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer Page 23