Sicilian Lines

Between the Silicon Valley tech booms, Mikey and I had been able to ‘sneak into’ San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, (Mikey’s words, not mine) each of us paying a measly $325 or something for a studio on Hyde and Turk. The neighborhood was dense with squalor. You can put whatever label you’d like on the Tenderloin, but, there’s something objectively squalid about it. Even if the rent hadn’t been cheap, I’m not sure we wouldn’t have ended up there anyway. We didn’t exactly find the squalor appealing; we just didn’t care where we lived and when you don’t care, why not do everyone a favor and live in the Tenderloin?

This was in 2006, but it could’ve been 2005 because I had no reason to pay attention to the year back then. I’d graduated, applied to grad schools and then chucked the whole thing and convinced Mikey we should move to San Francisco after going through on a road trip. We packed up and said goodbye five or six weeks later. When we drove out of Michigan, everything started to blur together the way things do when you transcend a structure you’ve been leaning on for a long time. We even lost our conversational paradigm and all the way through Indiana, we looked out the window, no longer sure how to address each other until we came out on the other side of Chicago with the alliance only hours of highway driving and gallons of gas station coffee can induce.

The night before we were to move into our new apartment, driving down from Oregon, we stopped at a Denny’s somewhere off the 5. I bought a copy of the SF Chronicle thinking I’d look for work in the classifieds. I ended up with the paper all over my lap, too excited to pay attention to it after the sun came up and we turned west on the 80. We crossed the Bay Bridge in the gritty-eyed wonder of those who have spent weeks on the road and have driven through the night to reach their final destination. Once you’ve driven in SF like this, no entrance to any other city will ever compare. It rises up over the bridge, over the Bay, jutting from the ocean like an emerald city painted the wrong color.

Our apartment wasn’t far from where we came off the bridge. Just over Market St. One person had to stay with the car while the other ran our stuff up so nothing would get stolen. It didn’t take more than an hour. It was mostly books. I had a bunch of scarves different people had made me for the foggy weather. Mikey had more than a few brass instruments. Everything else could’ve fit into a single garbage bag.

I hadn’t been in the city a week when I got a job working in North Beach, the retail manager at a cafe, which meant I sold the beans, t-shirts, postcards (the place was well-known) and dusted off the espresso machines no one ever bought. The best part of the job was the walk there and back. I wrote multiple letters back to Michigan with my commute as the subject. I started in the Tenderloin, meandered into the shopping district of Union Square, climbed the Stockton Tunnel into China Town and then cut across Columbus into Little Italy. The variety in the 45 minute walk was incredible. It was more than neighborhoods, it was like crossing between countries. It got even better when I got a night job at the Tower Records on Bay St. and had to walk down Columbus after my shift at the Cafe. Then I hit the Pier 39 touristy area and came home over the esteemed Nob Hill which the city glittered beneath, distant and cold like an asteroid belt. After a 12-hour workday, it was a great place to slink home from, down from the cold, marble heights into the siren light and the streets peopled with addicts in every conceivable stage of addiction. Many of them yelling but, from Nob Hill, their yells blended with the rest of the night sounds and sounded no more significant than the chirping of crickets in the bushes that lined the quiet streets.

One night, coming down Hyde, still at the top of the hill, I noticed a bush in flower shedding petals of the most vivid purple on the sidewalk. I stopped, picked one up and examined it. Even under the streetlights, the petals were a matte florescent. That was the zenith. Up on the hill, over the glowing city, looking at those petals, I felt a surge of something like contentment. I was living in the only city that was effortlessly beautiful. Other cities were convenient containers for people to do what they needed or wanted to do. San Francisco was a landscape. It was less of a city and more of a park, a place you hiked through, camped in and woke to the fog moisture and the smell of the ocean with a feeling of calm reverence. When I wasn’t at work, I was hiking, exploring and losing myself to my own contented thoughts.

Despite the brilliance of the city, my job at the cafe was dull, probably duller than any other job I’d ever had, in part because I’d expected something complementary to the purple flowers and the unique nation state-character of the neighborhoods. Every morning, North Beach was aclang with espresso cups on marble bars. The fog slowly crept back to the water and the smell of coffee and pastries mixed with the salt air. Newspapers were shook open, tour books in various languages were considered, old shop fronts creaked open. Life alog Columbus Ave. was picturesque on weekday mornings , but the exterior of these institutions was one thing and the interior another. Like any museum, it had the tendency to turn boring without warning. In cafes, the conversation, the steaming milk and the rattle of the register kept life moving at a brisk pace, but in the back, ashtrays overflowed, dust seethed and old computers dreamed in that crunchy loading noise they used to make. In North Beach, for every busy cafe or breakfast place, there is a sleepy retail store trying to cash in on the flow of people coming through the neighborhood. But the flow of people is a focused thing. They want what they want and don’t plan on stopping for anything else. Thus, retail spaces like mine languished and sank behind their dead fly-littered windows, while, just around the corner, a line snaked around the block. For every person in the neighborhood slamming out espresso shots or yelling at fry cooks there were two clock watchers who read standing up, leaning on retail counters, adding yet another rubber band to the ball after getting the mail. In the retail area, behind the cafe, that job was mine. The museum guard who watches everyone come and look at the famous paintings who can only see the famous lines and strokes as part of his job.

Most of the time, I sat on a stool reading and the customers recognized that my time came cheaply. They’d either stand around talking, not waiting for my replies or act as if they were in a big hurry—something they’d never be able to get away with in the cafe where the baristas barked at the customers and slammed their orders together and the customers accepted this, heads down, pretending not to have noticed their insignificance; those who wandered over to the retail area, quickly unloaded this insignificance onto me as a representative of the same institution.

There were a few homeless guys who hung around and kept their stuff behind the counter where I worked. After I came to know them, I found myself spending most of my time getting their stuff and putting it back for them. Around Christmas, I spent over an hour with a guy trying to get one of those plastic, anti-theft locks off the top of a fifth of whiskey he’d stolen from someplace. We were unsuccessful, but he came back the next day with a bag of pistachios as thanks. I could only wonder where they’d come from.

Around noon, the cafe traffic would thin out and I’d go over for a snack. One of the privileges of working in the same building was that to the baristas, I was something of a coworker and I was given none of their disdain. If anything, they took pity on me, freely offering everything the cafe had to offer. I’d stand behind the counter eating a bagel, drinking my coffee chatting, glad for the recognition, until the customer flow started up again and I had to duck back to my quiet den hollowed out behind the cafe into which, in the 20 minutes I had been gone, no one had so much as peeked. I could tell by the way the dust motes swarmed, undisturbed.

It wasn’t a bad job, but for someone still high with newly acquired ocean proximity and palm fronds that could just be picked up from the street like oak leaves, it was too slow. In my visits to the cafe, I started to make friends with a few guys. One of which was a guy named Chuck who reminded me of my brother though they neither looked or acted anything alike. Chuck read a little and was interested in travel, so after the morning rush, I’d often tell him about what I’d been sitting there reading while he’d been ferociously knocking out espresso shots, steaming pitchers of milk, banging cups on the bar and yelling ‘next!’I tried to talk to him like we were on the same level, but I knew he’d been the one working all morning while I’d been staring out the window, wondering if anyone would come in and give some purpose to my placement behind the counter. It was hard not be slightly fawning in our conversations.

During the day, the place was too busy to do much talking, but at night, when the patrons switched from coffee to wine, the place was much more mellow, even if the tips weren’t as good. On the weekends, when I wasn’t working, habit often pulled me back up into North Beach. I’d be walking through the urine damp sidewalks of the Tenderloin, paying little attention to where I was going but it seemed like the maze of the financial district only had one outcome for me. No matter how I tried to navigate them, the streets dumped me out at the top of China Town and gravity carried me down into North Beach.

San Francisco is always chilly in the evening, that is, it’s always conducive to a cup of coffee, especially when you have no intention of sleeping anyway. Lured by the free coffee, I’d stop off at the cafe. Chuck did a lot of evening shifts because he was new and didn’t seem to mind the lowere tips. The evenings were better suited to him. He had the kind of face that never looked entirely awake. In the morning, looking at it made you feel like you hadn’t gotten enough sleep. His heavy lids seemed to mirror your own, but in the evening, it invited you to share the story of your long day to a sympathetic face—really, now that I think about it, more the face of a bartender than a barista. But the cafe itself changed in the evening, adapting well to the convivial evening crowd. The lights went down, the wine glasses tinkled on the metal tables, smoke—improbably else where, curled into the air. When there was no one wanting their glass refiled, Chuck would step outside and we’d watch the characters go by and talk about the places we wanted to go, knowing that we were already in one of them.

I dropped by one Saturday night, to find the place almost empty. It had been raining earlier and the regulars seemed to have assumed it was still raining from behind their wet garret windows. The wine bottles stood untouched behind the bar. The ringing of glass and porcelain struck down on the marble counter had been replaced by the splash of cars drifting up and down Columbus. I stood at the register, drinking my coffee, dripping water all over the floor and watching the wet night while Chuck and I talked about Cervantes. I told him he had to read Quixote. He told me he didn’t have time and I thought of how I was getting paid to read most of it, sitting on the stool in the room behind us which, now that it was the weekend, seethed in its coffee bean dust, waiting for Monday to creak its reluctant door open to the world again, but it was Saturday, I pushed the thought aside.

“Oh that reminds me.” Chuck said, turning from his sleepy daze at the window, you remember when you were here last and we were talking about Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi? You were telling me about how you could never find any good Italian music? That you had to buy the, uh, Laura Pausini and how everyone made fun of you?”

“It’s still good.” I said, only taking up the latter part of his question. “Maybe in Italian it’s cheesy, but to me it sounds different. It sounds genuine. Like she means the words she sings. Maybe it’s because I only understand about half the lyrics. What’s scary is what that says about our pop music and its perception around the world. Who knows how good Brittany Spears sounds if you’re from Calabria?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Chuck said, respectfully considering what I’d said, but steering the conversation back to its starting point. “Well, I was thinking about this—your Italian music problem, even if you’re not considering it a problem anymore—and I made you a CD. It’s in the back with my stuff. If you’re going to stick around, I can give it to you when I get off.”

No one had bought me anything other than a drink in years and I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had made anything for me. I wasn’t so excited about the CD, as I was the act. It seemed to say ‘I consider you a friend’. I tried to make my thanks address this, but perhaps the reason giving is considered superior to receiving is that it’s much more subtle. There are no shades of meaning in a ‘thanks’ no matter how often it’s repeated or turned around. It remains perfunctory. In an attempt to better show my appreciation, I asked what he’d put on the CD. “Anything I might know?”

He thought about it. “Maybe. Have you heard of Celentano? Andre Celentano?”

I told him it sounded familiar, but like anyone saying something sounded familiar, I wasn’t entirely sure if it did.

I went out into the night to wander around and get a beer while I waited for the cafe to close. I’d brought Quixote in my backpack, but it was too big to open at this hour, the print illegible in anything but full lamp light. So I went down to a pizzeria where they served beer in plastic cups, giving the place the air of a keg party.

I sat at the counter, busy with customers buying pizza and looked at the mementos and knick knacks against the back wall. Every restaurant or cafe in North Beach seemed to have a photo of someone famous visiting the place. You get the impression the whole neighborhood used to be real chic. But the pictures were all old—Pavorotti with the black beard, Bill Cosby with a smoother brow, young-looking boxers. The only famous people still around were the beat poets and no one had ever put their pictures up anyway.

Buzzed groups of bar hoppers passed the pizzeria, smelled the garlic and declared, almost in unison. “oooh, let’s get some pizza,” and then jammed themselves into the already crowded restaurant raising a hand with a credit card between the index and middle fingers, hailing the waitress. Outside, a bunch of people were standing around or sitting on the curb eating, most of them having to use the paper plate to prop up the slice. The later it got, the more people came out of the bars and ended up sitting over here, some of them obnoxious, some of them falling asleep.

I finished my beer and went over to Columbus and walked down toward the park. Compared to the pizzeria, the place was silent. One bench had someone sleeping on it, and two girls were jogged by but the lawn of the park was empty. The lamps glowed reverently, like tabernacle candles.

Even at night the Sts. Peter and Paul church hung a shadow over the place. The facade of the church impassively watching the Saturday night revelry with the piety of the old world, where life always takes place under the visage of such churches. Here, the sobering glance of the place didn’t travel far, but it was enough to quiet Washington Square even while the side streets buzzed with bar music feedback and revelers staggered from one bar to the next, howling any lingering inhibition out into streetlight dusk adding more noise and frenzy to the night. Yells from both men and women went up like wolves calling to the moon but weary of each other.

It was almost 11, nearly time for the cafe to close. I walked back down to Vallejo and, by now, the hedonistic shouts of Broadway were banging down the narrow streets like so many upset garbage cans, but the corner around the cafe was quiet enough to discern the buzzing of the streetlight above. Chuck was out there bringing the tables in. I grabbed a stack of chairs and followed him back inside, enjoying the purpose, however brief, after a day of indolence.

We tried to think of a quiet place in the area, but were unable to come up with anything. The whole neighborhood was turning inside out with light and noise as the bar patrons spilled out onto the street, made restless with the building noise in the streets. At ever bar, a group of people pushed to get in and another pushed to get out. Someone yelled for Ben. “Heeey, Ben! Heeeeey!” There was no response. Ben either didn’t care or was gone perhaps swallowed by that place on the corner of Grant and Green that was pulsing with music and inscrutability behind its dark windows. We got on Chuck’s motorcycle and went over to Polk, thinking we might find a bar between the Marina and Tenderloin that wouldn’t be too loud. We drove, seeing nothing but howling crowds—some of them howled at us as we slowed down to try to peak in windows of suitable bars. Each howl only sent us speeding back down the street. It was late now. Everyone who was going out was out. The people obscured the ambiance of the evening. Obnoxiously waving their own good time like it was a flag for everyone to rally around. Only there were too many flags and too many anthems to make sense of. We turned onto Geary, but even with the change in crowd, the night had become unappealing; the sense had been taken out of sitting in a bar, drinking, talking. There was no reason to force it and Chuck pulled over to the side of the street.

We were only a few blocks from my apartment, just above it, really, on the hill. I only had to walk down Hyde, as I did every night after work, down into the swirling light, sound and smell of the part of the city that was always at least partially awake. The chaos here was of a much less controlled nature. It didn’t emerge on Saturday night to howl out the pains of the Apollonian week, but was constantly present, fighting, sleeping, laughing, screaming. As destructive as that energy could be, there was something appealing in it. No matter how long the night seemed to drag on or darken, there would be someone, out on the street, wide awake, keeping watch. I said goodbye to Chuck and started to wade out into the lake of light beneath Geary. The neon was lapping at my ankles when Chuck called me back. I’d forgotten the CD.

I thanked him probably too profusely. I knew it wasn’t a gift I could reciprocate. We didn’t listen to the same music and, besides, the CD was meant as an introduction rather than an update. I can’t describe it now because I’ve forgotten, but there was a decorum of mixtape making and, in that decorum, somewhere, was the rule that I’d break if I made something for Chuck. I just had to accept his gift. He reminded me we’d see each other at work Tuesday. I wished him a good weekend and he drove away, east, toward the financial district. I started back into the lucent waters, looking over the CD, wondering if it was going to be worth listening to. As much as I loved Italian culture, the modern music I’d been exposed to all sounded bland in the way that early 90s college rock in the US had sounded bland. Like a stopgap measure. Chuck’s writing was clear but small, written in felt-tipped marker, the edges of the letters had blurred into themselves. I had to stop under a streetlight to try to read the titles. The first looked interesting ‘24,000 baci’ Andre Celentano. There are certain artists that one can not allow to be merely ‘heard of’. Any adherent to the music knows that such a claim only means the speaker has yet to be touched, yet to be apostatized by it. Back then, if anyone had told me they’d ‘heard of’ the Arcade Fire, I would’ve made them a CD, too. It was clear from the way it stood out at the top, he’d made the CD for the Celentano, everything else was too pad it out.

I put the CD away and continued past the shuttered Vietnamese cafes and social clubs. Outside the Brown Jug the same kid who was always out there at night selling, leaned lazily against a streetlight pole. The gel in his hair, shining under the light, looking like rippling water under the moon. The Lafayette Coffee Shop irradiated the sidewalk panels in front of it with the glow of old neon, pumping sluggishly through the glass tubes above the door. Someone banged what sounded like shopping cart into a hydrant. I went in and went to bed.

…

“Con viente quattro mille baci!” I sang, as we waited for the bus. Gina looked at me like I was crazy. I’d been singing the Celentano song on and off since we’d arrived in Italy about a week earlier. The song had become my anthem and, as I sang it, I tried to move in the appropriate Elvis-esque way of early rock and roll, the swinging hips, the pinballing arms. I did none of it well and when I almost fell over, I sat down.

There was only one other person at the bus stop besides Gina and me. The clouds were beginning to amass in the southern sky, blowing in from Africa. I thought of the stories of the Sirocco, the hot sandy wind that crossed the Mediterranean from the Sahara and killed the crops, spread pestilence.

My Italian had been corrupted by years of Spanish use and now I had something approaching the lingua franca sailors on the Mediterranean spoke, a patois of romance languages. I turned to the other person waiting and tried not to think about the words I used as I asked the question.

“You are waiting to the bus to go Palermo, yes?”

The other bus patron was kind enough to piece together the broken syntax of my question in her head and nod in response. It’s always comforting to know you’re not the only one waiting on a late bus. We probably wouldn’t get into Palermo until after dark, but there were always those cheap motels by the bus station. Gina and I’d get a room there, probably be kept up half the night by people yelling, playing music or knocking on the wrong door, but in the morning we’d go out and find something more accommodating. It wouldn’t be so bad.

The bus pulled in, a model like one imagines Greyhound ran in the 50s, when women still wore kerchiefs over their hair and everything that moved was done in chrome. There were already a few passengers on the bus because it had originated in Syracuse. We sat in the back near another backpacker, brought out the snacks we’d brought and luxuriated in the peace that arises from cessation of anxiety waiting for a late bus induces. For the next few hours, we had no times, no connections to anticipate. We could sit and relax and be ferried to our destination.

The interior of the island was choppy, low, rounded, grass-covered hills like Marin or Sonoma, but the smell was different, the citric, soapy smell of chaparral was missing and there was only the earthen sweetness of wheat; the ocean was too far to influence the climate. The hills and the sky were dry like an old unglazed terra cotta pot. The dry grasses rubbed together like cricket wings making a restless music.

I watched the undulations of the landscape for a while. I noticed the backpacker just across the aisle was doing the same thing. I called over to him, ‘There’s something of the ocean in it, right? Like a dry, woven sea. He turned from the window, nodded and introduced himself as John. He was a tree-planter in Canada, which he described as hard but rewarding work. We talked about our travels in Sicily and what we planned on doing in Palermo. Through our conversation, John discovered we had no place to stay and offered to ask at the place he was couchsurfing, a house of European Volunteer Service (EVS) volunteers. I was surprised that EVS had volunteers in western Europe at all. I’d imagined they were like the Peace Corps with no presence in ‘developed’ countries. John said from what he knew, they were all over Europe.

When we arrived, the neighborhood around the Palermo bus station was already inundated with the night that leaks out from under low buildings when they’re ringed around each other. The sun was going down over the horizon but its rays were walled off in every direction, giving Palermo a labyrinthine quality. The ocean was close enough to smell in a briny, seafood market way, but not close enough to hear and without the sound, we couldn’t tell where it was. The result was disorienting. From the bus station and the market outside, Palermo was like a moat of land around the Mediterranean, the land taking up three sides, the boats in the harbor ringing the forth, hull to hull, stern to stern, strung together with thick, sea-crusted ropes.

We waded out into the evening as one does after getting off a bus that’s traveled through a bright, dry afternoon, feeling our way through the city. It was difficult to see. The darkness was about five feet high and there were all kinds of small obstacles to bang your shins into. We did some sleepwalking around the neighborhood, arms outstretched, until we found our way to an internet cafe full of Bangladeshis calling home from plastic chairs, their faces framed by stacks of cigarette ashed monitors and lit up with the electric gray of a videochat in which the interlocutor is standing in front of a white wall the computer resolution can’t account for and projects with a weird, oilslick grayness. No one turned when we came in. There was no service counter. The entire place had been taken up with computer kiosks.

John sent an email to his couchsurfing host, asking if it’d be alright to bring us over and we waited to see if he’d answer while we talked in low voices and we watched the digital clock on the computer screen run down. The place was filled with the kind of hopeless homesickness that clings to reluctant Diaspora communities. I smoked and tried not to look around the room at the private conversations everyone was having in low tones.

Our half hour ran out with no reply. Which didn’t surprise John and he was undaunted. We walked over to the neighborhood of the EVS house, looking for a place we could wait while John went to ask if we could stay. We found a post office few blocks over, which was defiantly open to the night and John stashed us there. I stood in the doorway awhile, watching the neighborhood kids run all over the place. A butched shop at the end of the block illuminated the area with a mottled red light from the glistening flanks hanging in the windows. Carne di Cavallo. A sign above the shop announced. The smell of dried blood commingled with the salt of the sea.

The post office had a single seat in front of a neglected computer which looked primarily to be there for the neighborhood kids and half-hour rounds of video games. The letters of the keyboard were partially worn away and had the tacky grit of the keystrokes of many unwashed hands. As we set our bags down, a middle aged woman with died black hair and eyebrows wearing a loose pastel dress appeared from behind the counter and asked if we needed to use the computer. As the ancient CPU wheezed and spun its fans, we talked to the woman in our poor Italian. We praised Sicily, but she gestured in a vague way and said nothing. She asked us where we were from, but again when we answered, she lapsed into silence. It wasn’t an angry silence, but came naturally, like she was giving each response time to fade out of memory before asking another question. When I asked my own questions, she did the same thing before answering.

As I tried to fill up the silence, a large German Shepard came into the room from behind the counter. When he came over to sniff us and we started petting him, the woman’s silence lifted and she began chattering to the dog, half-heartedly scolding him for being so forthright, but while the tail swished in our faces and the tongue probed our ears she couldn’t help grinning like a mother hearing her toddler repeat a bad word in the tone-deaf way that implies incomprehension. After a few minutes with the dog licking, wagging and nearly knocking over the displays of packing materials, the woman lead him away with an air of delighted resignation. We’d passed the test in our appreciation of his affection and, on her way out, the woman told us just to yell if there was anything else we wanted.

There was no message from John. Rather than wait at the computer, we went outside and leaned against the wall of the post office, stretching our bones. Without heavy packs on it felt as if we were going to float away into the evening, above the kids and the lurid butchers’ windows. Every gesture flung out further, every word seemed to shoot into the rarefied air.

We sat down on a bench and watched the neighborhood. Which is all short-term travel is: finding a good bench to watch from. A young woman walked by, pulling a kid by the arm. An elderly man lingered over his passagiata. A light came on and shone like milk on the worn cobbles. A boy ran by. His sister yelled something after him and turned back. The boy stopped, turned around and, after a few seconds, ran after her. After being in the country for a few days, I was enjoying the clacking echos of the city and the coos of the pigeons from a roof crevice overhead. When it seemed like it had been about half an hour, we got up to get our bags, agreeing that if there was still no news from John, we’d find a hostel on the computer. It was getting late and I didn’t want to wait around all night.

In the post office, our bags had slid down the wall we’d leaned them against and were laying on the floor like exhausted children. Behind the counter came the sound of forks glancing off plates and low conversation. It was like coming back into someone’s living room and finding everyone at dinner. At the computer, John had written. We were welcome to stay. He’d supplied an address and vague directions. We left 3 Euro on the counter, the price for an hour of internet, shut down the computer and went off to find the place.

We found the street quickly, but the oval numbers seemed tacked up next to the doors with no sense of order. I couldn’t be sure if we were going the right way, so we stopped into a little grocery, crates of vegetables stacked and displayed outside the door, bottles of wine behind the counter and a noisy freezer that competed with the buzz of the florescent lights, so bright as to make the tile floor look wet.

I stood there for a while, waiting until the other customers had made their purchases and left so they wouldn’t overhear my terrible Italian, to which I tried to subject as few people as possible. I had to shout to be heard over the freezer’s compressor.

“Dov’e questo indrizzio?” I asked, holding up the paper I’d written the address on, not even sure I was using the right word. I could’ve been saying ‘toilet’ or ‘asthma’ for all I knew. I was too tired to pay attention. The grocer scrutinized my handwriting, worse than my speech in terms of incomprehensibility. His face impassive. But after a few seconds, he gestured out the door in a familiar way. The place was obviously nearby.

We bought a bottle of wine and went a few doors down the block to a solid, but worn wooden door. I rang and John opened the door like it was his house. We went upstairs and were introduced to Felix, the only EVS volunteer who didn’t go home for the Christmas break. He was German, but his mom lived in the States. He didn’t like Germany or Germans and had a young world-weariness to him. He said he wouldn’t mind living in the States, Los Angeles or someplace. He set some glasses out, we opened the wine we’d brought and the four of us sat talking and drinking. The conversation centered on different places we’d been. It was exciting to talk to other travelers and the wine was wiping away my inhibition. I spoke loudly and waved my arms to illustrate my points. Gina corrected my faulty memories and all of us laughed. It was one of those lucky occasions when everyone seemed compatible with everyone else and we were all at the same level of mild intoxication.

After an hour or so, we left everything in a hurry. The scene of our conversation that felt like it could go on all night, was abandoned—probably much to the neighbors’ relief—and we left the wine coated glasses standing on the table among the still smoldering ashtrays and undisturbed glasses of water. It’s not difficult to imagine this tableau as a stage set, standing bravely without actors as the lights dim, causing the audience to look closer than they had previously, noticing how simple it was. Just an ordinary table with some glasses and then the lights go out. Next scene.

We snaked down a few alleys I never could’ve found my way back through and went to a Erasmus student meet-up. As we walked in Felix told us just to pretend to be Europeans studying in Sicily. Not wanting him to doubt my American panache, I immediately pulled someone aside and began talking about my academic aspirations. I’d met Scandinavians who sounded like Americans, so I didn’t need to fake an accent, besides, no one really cared. There were free cans of beer and everyone lazily standing around sipping from them; one or two of the girls had gone to get glasses to pour their cans into. The event’s similarity to an American party seemed to indicate how quickly it had been thrown together. I didn’t know how to feel about that, but I thought about it while I talked about the work of Bellochio to Belgian film student. I couldn’t remember much about the movie we were discussing and waited to agree with him between sips of beer.

More students were making their way in, many of them looking like they’d come straight from a nap. They were all dressed well and had sleepy, half-drawn eyelids that took in the situation and asked only ‘what’s this all about?’ One conversation grew until it touched another and soon about 12 of us were sitting on wooden benches placed rockingly on the cobbles, sipping our beer and talking about whatever came to mind. A harmony of purpose was in the air and communicated between us. We were like the cast on a well-written sitcom with no overlap in our personalities. Individually, we were only people in Palermo, there for various purposes, but together, we were a group and something of a spectacle. We were slightly aware of our ability to attract attention, even if we left it underused.

Someone complained about the atmosphere of the wooden benches and beer cans and we all fell in line. There was so much more. Why stew around this quaint little place all night? En masse we got up to leave, taking the whole atmosphere of the place with us. I don’t doubt that anyone who stayed behind probably soon found themselves feeling just as dissatisfied with the place after the silence of our group’s departure settled in.

A light rain was falling. The lights of the alleys and arcades drained out to the street where the water ran between the cobbles. A few of our party had brought their beers from the bar and the cans were being passed around. I didn’t know whose they were, but I drank anyway. It didn’t matter. We were all the same, more or less. Our group was European, students mostly, some of them Sicilian, if not Palermitani, they were from nearby. One of our group, was a Roberto Begnini. He moved in an out of the rain in dramatic Chaplin-esque ways that were impossible not to laugh at. He placed himself at the group’s head, acting as our mascot, dancing ahead into the wet night, joking and dancing with middle-aged women on their way home from the market. They accepted him and his erratic movements in good humor like this sort of this happened to them all the time.

As we walked, Gina and I learned that we were headed to a street where there were a number of outdoor cafes. Another place with rickety tables on cobblestones, but some that didn’t have the same sequestered feeling as the previous place. This place was much less organized. Lots of people and lots of wine. Maybe with the rain there wouldn’t be...but he waved the thought away. Thinking of this place empty on a Friday night a week before Christmas was absurd.

We came around the corner into a scene of dripping light, glowing stands of hair, light on the rims of wine glasses, no tables. Everyone was standing and talking. The cafes were small and huddled together in the rain with wet rope lights garlanded around their awnings and porticos. People were stuffed in the alley between the buildings. During the day, it was obvious there’d been a few metal tables, but they’d already been taken inside. The rain brought the crowd up under the awnings, but when it slackened they’d spill back out into the alley. Walking up, I saw this happen two or three times. The action was like the working of some crowd-controlling bellows or waves pulling and pushing a cobblestone shore. But even in the rain, a few defiant drinkers remained in the middle of the alley, until the heavy drops began to splash the contents of their wine glasses and they’d run under the awning.

The talk of the crowd was rain-blurred until it resembled the indistinct sound of a train in the near distance. A voice would occasionally pop loose with a laugh or a comedic sound. A few people near the laugh would turn to look. If they looked long enough, they were invited over. The crowd was amorphic. Their dark wet eyes and hair shone like the wet cobbles, languid in the rain and fragmented light. Standing in doorways, perched on stairs, the people patched up the architecture of the place, became ornaments of the doorways and windows. It was easy to imagine them all as statues. Parties always have their indistinct lines. They can’t be seen, but are felt. Step over one, it’s like being back in high school, forcing entry into a clique above your social position. Maybe it was the new culture; maybe I just couldn’t perceive of the Sicilian lines, but even as I moved through the crowd, people I’d never met turned to face me like they were expecting me to greet them. Not wanting to rebuff anyone, I got Felix’s attention.

“What is this place?” I asked him, hoping everyone could hear my revealing question and English.

“La Vucciria” He called, partially turning back to me. “It’s like a market.” and then he added “of people” and chuckled.

I nodded at the useless information and followed Felix and the others into one of the cafes that formed the walls of the place. We nearly overwhelmed the place, but there was only one drink to buy: sangria. The bartender, who looked completely disinterested in, but not annoyed by the throng around him, dished out glasses of this stuff and took the euros in payment without bothering to count.

After watching others try to get their drinks outside and losing half in jostling against the crowd coming in, I drank off half of my drink at a gulp. The flavor of wine was stronger than it is in US sangria. Giving it less of a fruit punch quality and more of the Sunday evening quality wine has always induced in me since my parents used to give me a watered down glass of it with dinner on special occasions. Since I was a kid, I have ascribed to wine the flavor of boredom and the funereal feeling of Sunday evening. But, the fruit flavor in the sangria was strong enough to balance the rustiness of the wine. The awful feeling of a quiet, lonely Sunday was gone. Maybe it was the scene, the old buildings, the glistening hair, the light patter of rain on the awnings, the Sicilian conversation, but I could no more find the old flavor in the wine of my childhood than I could remember what coffee tasted like the first time I had it. Still, I was used to beer and the wine, tempered as it was by fruit, had a mature flavor.

We slipped between the shirt backs and long hair back to the street. The rain had recently thinned out to a mist and there was still room in the middle of the street where a small drain was gurgling with rainwater, spilled wine and urine from behind the dumpsters further up the street. Gina and I took our positions with the dignity of tourists in constant expectation of a spectacle, arms akimbo, legs spread out for balance. We sipped our wine and looked around, expecting to find the spectacle in anyone, anything but each other. But there was too much happening to stay so observant and we were soon discussing La Vucciria, probably as most of the people there were.

The mist began to fall a little steadier and soon regular drops were breaking the puddled light at our feet. The rain was spaced out. The drops were overflowing but irregular. I thought about making for the awnings, but there were already so many people crowded against the buildings. We moved slightly but not entirely out of the rain. I stood there talking to Gina with the sangria bouncing around in my glass, slapped around by the heavy drops. Our Roberto Begnini, noticing the opening, shot out from the crowd and began to mime actions of holding a desperate umbrella and make pathetic gestures, as if he were a maudlin character unable to get out of the elements. The universal little tramp.

The crowd was one probably accustomed to such spectacles. They took in the performance, but continued with their drinks and discussions. As the rain fell harder, Roberto’s comic actions took on a more desperate tone, which made them even more funny.

I couldn’t watch all this without a small bite of jealousy. Having once been a person to stand up in front of a crowd, I am always a little envious of anyone who does so before me, but here I was: Sicily, Vuccirira, Erasmus, Palermo, 50s buses. I was out of my element. I knew if Roberto wasn’t acting, I wouldn’t be and I was glad someone was doing it. I drank and watched and let my envy mellow into appreciation.

I went back to the bar, passed a few euros over came back holding two sloshing glasses of sangria when the opening strains of the song began.

Ahhhhh mamiiiiiiiiii

It was the song that Chuck had handed me so many years before, the one I’d been singing since Gina and I had arrived in Italy. I handed both glasses to Gina, who, not recognizing the song at first, was confused by my sudden launch into action. The crowd quieted. I ran up to where Roberto was already holding his mime microphone in the rainy opening between the two sides of the crowd, huddled under the awnings. The crowd quieted. Everyone knew the song, but they waited. I opened my mouth and the lyrics came out:

Tiiii voogliooooo beeeeen-eeeeh.

Roberto looked at me with surprise and then we wrapped our arms over each others shoulders and screamed the chorus, which is hoarsely shouted they way the chorus of “Twist and Shout” is shouted. Which makes it even more dramatic to be standing under the wet lights of La Vucciria with a tousled crowd huddled around, watching and enjoying the spectacle that we were making. We shouted the words together, eyes squeezed shut and soon, the entire crowd was singing along. The huddled crowd broke loose from the awnings and collapsed into the middle of the alley. In those Sicilian voices yelling themselves hoarse in the rain, there was that moment at the top of Hyde in San Francisco when Chuck gave me that CD. In that commonplace action, that empty night when the bars were all full, was the seed of this bacchanalia. I sang with my mouth open to the sky, letting my voice directly into the rain. I put my arm around Gina and finished singing the song to her. Now she knew I wasn’t nuts. I wasn’t the only one who sang of ‘24,00 baci’; other people sang, too. Italian people. Sicilian people and, for that moment, I was one of them. Like any significant cultural experience, it was all about knowing the words. How easily the moment could’ve fallen to blameless obscurity, but, it had been ordained, years before, in a slow-blooming gesture. I hadn’t been given a CD that night, I’d been given this moment. I couldn’t help but to wonder how many others I’d been given and how many would I be able to realize. In that moment, there was an opening on the frame of reference for the transmigration of souls. There’s so much in our experiences, stored up; it has to go somewhere. Right? If I hadn’t gone to Sicily, hadn’t walked to La Vucciria in the rain and hadn’t sung 24,000 Baci the burden of the unrealized moment alone would’ve been massive. As it was, I’m just glad I had the experience, especially because it was years in the making.

Thanks, Chuck.