Essays & Road Stories  |  Postcards from the Past

I Went To Rome
But I Didn’t See the Coliseum

“Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive. They don’t line up, they don’t pay their taxes, they don’t turn up for appointments on time, they don’t believe in rules at all…They are too busy expending their considerable energies on the pleasurable minutiae of daily life – on children, on good food, on arguing in cafes – which is just how it should be. What a wonderful country.”
– Bill Bryson

“The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.”
– Graham Greene

Day One & Two

In a window seat on a large airliner bound for Milan, Italy, typing on a laptop computer like a crazed, longhaired executive from Hell, I couldn’t help but notice that I was being treated with exceptional deference by the stewardesses (flight attendants, in-flight peanut distribution technicians, whatever they’re calling themselves these days). I was pretty sure it was about the money. This flight was not cheap. It cost me most of the gross from last month’s tour. I was aware of how nice these people were being tonight because this was my third flight that day, after two connecting flights from Memphis to New York. On those first two flights, I’d been treated as I’m accustomed to being treated on a domestic commercial airline. Stony-faced, flinty-hearted women in blue uniforms had thrown an endless stream of bags of peanuts at me which I’d eaten against my will mostly because they were there, washed down with tomato juice served in a plastic cup that holds just enough to leave you thirsty. They aren’t big on amenities in steerage class.

Me: “Could I get a lemon wedge with that?”

Stony-faced, flinty-hearted woman: “NO!!”

You always get enough peanuts and pretzels for two people but never enough drink to outrun the salt. They do it to torture you.

But on this long, expensive transcontinental flight, I felt as if I were in first class. I couldn’t even imagine what was going on up there in the actual first class cabin. “Would you like a complimentary blowjob with that drink, sir?” Like I said, it’s all about the money.

I’d been in Memphis the last couple of days to do a showcase at the annual National Folk Alliance conference, where all the folksingers in the known universe gather to do some heavy-duty schmoozing. Folkies, to their credit, are not good at schmoozing. They’re far too earnest. I speak with authority on this subject: in Los Angeles, where I live and where I’ve watched the great schmoozers operate, my bullshit meter stays in the red 24-7.

After two solid days of this, I was really looking forward to getting on that plane.

I was flying to Italy to do my first European tour, except for when I’d gone to Scotland a couple years ago as the piano player in Freddy Fender’s band. I was apprehensive about the language barrier, though – especially after Scotland, where they were speaking English and I still couldn’t understand a word. One advantage this time would be that I grew up in New Jersey, so I do know a couple of Italian phrases, such as: “Yo Vinny, you want some fuckin’ marinara on that?” and, “Hey, don’t touch the Camaro, I just got it detailed!” and, “This is authentic gold fuckin’ leaf imported all the way from fuckin’ Sicily!”

Another thing I was apprehensive about was that I’d quit drinking two months back, and I was still getting used to being on the road sober. Especially when flying was involved. I hate airplanes and airports. But I love airport bars. I used to go down to LAX and have a couple belts just to catch the vibe. Something about drinking with a bunch of people from all over the world. No one has time to linger, so they drink like pros, all business: catch a buzz; catch the flight. A global brotherhood of drunks.

Anyway, I was now in my eighth hour of flying in steerage class sober. I was pissed off. First I’d had to face the folkies sober, and now this. It must be some kind of test. I was thinking I’d maybe have a little wine in Italy, though. You know, with dinner. So I wouldn’t feel uncivilized. I’d burn that bridge when I came to it.

As we made our way across France, the sun was coming up. I had outrun five time zones with no sleep. At 7:30 a.m. they brought around the continental breakfast. I still hadn’t digested supper. We touched down at Milan-Malpensa International at 8:36 a.m. Italian time, just about bedtime according to my body clock.

After clearing customs, I fell in love. This would happen approximately every five minutes on this trip (love, not customs). She was selling train tickets at the airport. After I got through the wall of bodies at the counter – lining up is not a part of the Italian culture – I tried to buy a ticket to Bologna. I pronounced Bologna wrong, and it pissed her off and she corrected me. She was even more sexy when she was mad. I’ve always had a thing for Italian women. I laid on the boyish charm, which usually gets me through when women are perturbed at me. Finally she smiled. Barely. She had the world’s best smile.

I took my ticket and bags – which had weighed thirty pounds when I left L.A. but were now approaching 5,000 pounds – and went to wait for the shuttle bus to the train station. Again, there was no line, just a large group of people who, when the bus arrived, all tried to squeeze through the door at the same time with serene, unperturbed looks on their faces. If this had been L.A., we’d have been seeing firearms for sure.

After an hour-long ride into the center of Milan, I was dropped off at the stazione and left to fend for myself in the biggest railway station (except maybe Grand Central) I’d ever seen, after having been up for two days and unable to read one sign. I had no idea where to go first. I finally spied a sign that said INFORMATIONIE about a football-field length away and headed there towing two tons of baggage. I had a fifteen-minute conversation with the guy at the counter involving much hand gesturing and puzzled expressions. If we had been able to understand each other, the conversation would have been exactly this long:

Me: “How do I get to Bologna?”

Him: “Track 9.”

At the Bologna station two and a half hours later, I called Mauro, the promoter who had booked this tour. It took ten minutes to find a phone that worked. Italian phone technology is roughly at the level of a communist third-world country circa 1954. This phone call to Mauro was the first time I’d ever actually spoken to the guy. This whole tour was booked through email, a frightening and astounding technology for a guy like me who, up until a year ago, had been using a manual typewriter. The whole reason this tour was happening was because Mauro had been surfing the ‘net one night and had happened upon my website.

While I waited for Mauro to show up, I got panhandled three times, once by a lovely, waifish girl with an expensive-looking haircut, who switched fluently from German to French to English until I understood that she wanted me to give her money. My response was a simple, concise “fuck off” – a phrase which is universally understood. Never have such impressive language skills been squandered so spectacularly.

Mauro picked me up in the smallest car I’d ever seen, and took me to his apartment. There were two hours before we were going to drive to the first gig to do soundcheck. I figured I could catch a couple of Z’s, maybe splash some water on my face. This was not to be: it was time to eat. I was about to discover that turning down food in Italy is a response not tolerated under any circumstances.

I was led into Mauro's parent’s apartment, across the hall from his own, and they seated me at a table that was groaning under the weight of much bread and salad and vino (a bottle of white, a bottle of red). Soon I was sipping red (so much for the wagon) and digging into the best pasta I’d ever had. A while later I leaned back from my empty plate, really needing a nap. I was about to compliment Mauro’s mom on the great chow before getting up and waddling over to the bed . . . when she brought out more food. Next thing I knew, I was eating exquisite veal. It was sex on a plate. I thought briefly of the vegetarian folkies I had just parted company with and wished they could all be here. All the while, Mauro’s mom was buzzing around the kitchen fretting and apologizing about how poor and inadequate the meal was. After a few more courses and glasses of wine and cups of caffe, but no nap, Mauro took me to the gig.

This first show was in a small seaside town on the northwestern Italian coast, called Sauvignano sul Rubicone. It was fetching and old-world in an upscale way, sort of an Italian version of Carmel. There was a gilded turn-of-the-century carousel in the town square, and many eighteenth-century-and-older buildings all around. The venue was a small, newly renovated concert hall with a nice stage and dressing room.

Soundcheck was a bit of a trial, with translations needed for such phrases as “turn up the mike” and “it sounds like shit.” We got through it eventually. Now, of course, it was time to chow down. Mauro and the local promoter took me to a little trattoria off a narrow alleyway around the corner from the venue. The food was spectacular. Everyone was taking their time, as is the custom in Italy when eating. Before I knew it, it was showtime and we were still working on our seventh course. I suggested that we might want to return to the venue since there was supposed to be a show tonight.

“Oh, yes . . . the concert . . . no worry, we go after dessert and caffe. First we eat! Have some more vino!”

A crash course in Italian priorities.

We arrived back at the venue to find the hall fairly full – surprising for a Monday night in a small town for an artist no one there had ever heard of. I went onstage, and my first song got enthusiastic applause. After it died down, I launched into one of my standard witticisms that always gets a laugh. Deafening silence. No one understood a word. I gave up talking and just kept singing. Each song received tumultuous applause. I did four encores before they let me go. I limped back to the dressing room, drained of energy but very happy. Mauro and I toasted to a successful first night of the tour, and he took me to the hotel room.

Day Three

I awoke dog tired and wide-awake at the same time. My brain registered (barely) that it was eight a.m.. My body furiously insisted it was nine hours earlier. After much debate between body and brain, I got up and tried to watch TV. But everything was in Italian. Watching Seinfeld with Italian dialogue dubbed in was more than I could handle at this point, so I went out to explore the town before the club owner came to take me to the train station.

In town, I ran into a local promoter I’d met at the concert the night before. I painstakingly communicated to him that I was hungry. He directed me to a trattoria around the corner and down a narrow alley (everything here was around the corner and down a narrow alley). The place was full of people sucking up pasta and drinking wine and gesturing frantically and eating pizzas the size of truck tires. The waiter and I established that we would not be able to communicate verbally, so he just started bringing on the food. It was all wonderful. I spent a happy couple of hours eating and watching people, then stumbled back out onto the street and wandered through an outdoor farmer’s market in the town square. People were dickering for all sorts of items. As a white Anglo-Saxon protestant from the suburbs of New Jersey, I’ve I never learned proper dickering skills. WASPs pay retail – it’s our heritage, along with Spam, Fluffernutters, and clapping on one and three.

I took the train back to Bologna, and Mauro picked me up and took me to tonight’s gig, at a little joint in the country called Loggia Delle Streghe (Cottage of the Witch). The club was run by a woman who did most of the cooking, made her own wine, and spoke excellent English. Mauro informed me that this was just a filler kind of gig, not a real concert situation.

“No stress, just fun, good food, good wine and women,” he said.

The very reasons I became a musician.

There was a small spinet piano onstage. Like most spinets, it was more of a piano-shaped object than a useful instrument. A couple of notes didn’t work. But it was in tune – at least they tried. Most American club owners, if you ask them to tune the piano, will respond with something like: “Whadda ya mean, tune the piano? I just had it painted last week!” The P.A. system didn’t work right – every time I touched it I received a tremendous shock – and the local promoter was late and he had the microphone, so soundcheck was a wash. But that didn’t matter, because it was once again time to tie on the feedbag. The place went from, as Leonard Cohen put it, “As dead as heaven on a Saturday night” to packed to the walls in about five minutes. Pretty soon we were all sitting at long wooden tables eating course after course of amazing food, washed down with wonderful homemade wine. Around eleven o’clock, I waddled up to do my set. It went great, though the piano-shaped object didn’t hold up too well. There were people in the audience who already had my CD, and I could see them mouthing the words. They knew all the words . . . and they didn’t speak English. For one of my encores, I did a cover of “Tangled up in Blue” by Bob Dylan, and they knew all the words to that, too. All sixty-eight verses! I can’t even remember all the words to that song half the time. You gotta really love music to learn that much text phonetically. Most people in America can’t even remember the title of a song they like. I’d be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time I had the following exchange with a drunken bar patron:

Drunk: “Hey man, do that song!”

Me: “What song?”

Drunk: “You know, man – that song!!”

Me: “I’m really sorry, you’ll have to be a little more specific than that.”

Drunk: “You know the one: (insert out-of-tune rendition of the middle of a verse of some song, usually ‘American Pie’or something by Steve Miller).”

Me: “I’m sorry, I don’t know that one.”

Drunk: “You suck!!”

Mauro finally got the local promoter to stop hounding me to do “just one more song!” (this guy would have fit right in back home), and I hooked up with a glass of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and stepped outside into the blessedly cool, smoke-free air to sit and relax.

Day Four

European hotel rooms are nothing like we’re used to here in the States. Rarely is there any carpeting on the floor. Usually its just tile, like in your kitchen. The showers have no walls, just a shower head sticking out of the wall in the bathroom, right next to the bidet, whatever that thing is for . . . I believe it’s some sort of water torture device. The rooms are about the size of a walk-in closet, with a twin bed if you’re traveling alone. Phones are hit and miss. Fifteen-watt light bulbs are de rigeur. On the way to your room, you usually have to grope through a pitch-black hallway (they do not leave the light on for you). Your room key is given to you on a ten-pound keychain so you won’t forget to give it back. There is no cable TV in Italy, no HBO, no Beavis & Butthead at two in the morning after the gig, no Home Shopping Channel. And dese people tink dey got friggin’ culture!

In this bleak and alien landscape I awoke sick as a dog. Fever, chills, headache, sore throat. I was barely able to move but not able to sleep. I skipped trying to deal with the locker-room shower, and put on my clothes from the day before (don’t make that face – you’ve done it too. You’ve also peed in the pool).

Today I had a five-hour train ride to Rome to play at Big Mama, one of the most legendary clubs in Italy – Chet Baker played there. And I had to get sick. I had worse timing than a drummer in a high school garage band (or a drummer in a grunge/alterna-trash/post-punk experimental noise band with a million-dollar record deal – take your pick). Forlorn, feverish and sullen, I packed and went down to wait in the lobby for my ride.

The local promoter was supposed to pick me up. But the woman who owned the club showed up instead. She offered to take me back to the club and make me breakfast. I felt like complete shit, but hey . . . this woman could cook!

When I saw her place in the daylight, it was unbelievably charming. The whole setting was so wonderful that I could hardly stand it: a narrow country lane with four-hundred-year-old stone and thatch buildings clustered around it, surrounded by lush countryside. I kept expecting Julie Andrews to throw open the shutters of a second-story window across the street and cut loose with a chorus of “The Sound Of Music.”

A couple of waitresses from the club joined us, and pretty soon the wine was flowing (not too much, it was breakfast) and a wonderful smell was wafting down from the kitchen upstairs. After much food and espresso, we were off to the train station.

The train today was the brand new Eurostar bullet train that had just started running in Italy. It was comfy and quiet and plush, like the first class section of an airplane. It even had the thing on the armrest where you could plug in headphones and dig some tunes. I settled in and dug out the headphones I always keep in my coat for airplane rides. I don’t see the point of paying five bucks to rent those vintage 1962 headphones they use on planes so you can watch an edited-for-TV movie where the actor’s lips clearly are saying “fuck!” but what you hear is “gosh-darnit!” I started flipping through the channels looking for classical music. There were only two channels, one playing bland “smooth jazz” (which has as much to do with jazz as Velveeta has to do with cheese) and another playing Italian rock and roll hits from the fifties. If you think European attempts at American-style pop music are bad now, you should hear what they were doing in the fifties. Imagine Bobby Vee or Pat Boone singing a rock tune in Italian and backed by a polka band like you might hear at a potluck supper down at the local VFW hall. This was much worse.

I spent the rest of the ride in the bar car.

How can I describe Rome? If you took New York City, made it bigger, took away all the rules that make traffic and pedestrians flow in an orderly manner, and threw in some three-thousand-year-old ruins, you’d begin to get the idea. I was taken on a white-knuckle, cold-sweat cab ride from the train station to the club, absolutely sure I was going to die at least forty-seven times. When we got there, I shoved a wad of lira into the driver’s hand and leaped out of the cab so he couldn’t take off again with me still in there.

Big Mama was a small place with a cool vibe. It reminded me of clubs in New York or Boston that I’ve played. As I wandered around the place, I started to forget I was in a foreign country – until I’d round a corner and see a sign in Italian, or go into the bathroom and sit on a toilet with no seat. (That’s if you're lucky. Most public toilets here just had a hole in the floor to squat over.)

Back at the hotel after soundcheck, I took a shower and tried to catch an hour of sleep. By this point I was really sick. I had no business doing anything tonight, let alone getting onstage and playing in front people. But the show must go on. I’ve done it before. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the gig I’d had one time when I had a stomach virus and had to run off the stage every twenty minutes to puke in the parking lot.

At the gig, I hid out in the dressing room trying to stay conscious. There was a good crowd tonight. It was gratifying to see so many people turning out for these shows, considering I was a complete unknown in this country. I went out to do my set, and began to feel better instantly. Music is like that: whenever I’m sick, I always feel fine as long as I’m playing, especially if the crowd is into it. The crowd was very responsive, and this being a tourist town, there were a lot of people there who spoke English. I hadn’t spoken much the last couple nights, so I was in a talkative mood, with a plethora of sarcastic comments stored up. I got lots of laughs. I finished the first set, signed some CDs, and went back to the dressing room. The flu roared back with a vengeance. I could not imagine going back on . . . but of course when it was time for the second show, I dragged my sorry ass up to the stage. It was another good one. A good crowd will get you through most anything. I signed a few more autographs and then disappeared.

After the crowd dispersed, the bartender brought me a pizza and a beer and a plate of these little oranges they grow in Sicily. The oranges were delicious. So was the pizza. So was the beer. As I was finishing, feeling very full and ready to collapse, the bartender came in apologizing that it was taking so long for my other pizza to come out.

“Other pizza?” I said. “I can’t eat two pizzas! I just had one!”

“Yes, but this is another kind of pizza!”

I passed. “No problem – I’ll eat it.” He said.

I love Italy.

Day Five

In the morning, as I was whisked from the hotel to the train station by another certifiable cab driver, I saw an auto repair shop built into the side of a 3,000-year-old ruin. As the train started rolling out of the Roma Termini, I couldn’t help being a little bummed that I’d come all the way to Rome and hadn’t gotten to see any sights. Not even the Coliseum. It’s the down side of seeing the world as a traveling musician.
But I’m not complaining. If I was, I would deserve to be executed for whining.

Today was a seven-hour train ride to Cosenza, way down in the south of Italy, the tip of the boot. Southern Italy has a history of being somewhat of a remote backwater, compared to the northern part of the country, which has always had easier access to the rest of Europe. In the mid 1960s, the Italian government decided to infuse cash into the economy down there for new buildings and highways, etc., hoping to force that area to catch up with the rest of the country. Unfortunately, much of this money was intercepted by the mafia and the hopelessly corrupt local bureaucracies. The result was a lot of horribly substandard construction of housing and public buildings, among other social problems. As I was driven into the heart of Cosenza on a gray and drizzly day, I was horrified by the squalor all around: crumbling high-rises straight out of the What Were They Thinking? school of architecture that was so prevalent in the ‘60s; roads and parking lots that were little more than rubble. The air was heavy with disappointment and anger. I did not want to be here. But I soon found out that this city was full of wonderful people. In my travels, it is almost always this way: the more gray and dismal the surroundings, the more generous the people are. Or maybe I’ve just been living in Southern California too long.

I was dropped off at a threadbare hotel that might have been nice twenty-five or thirty years ago, but now was struggling to hold onto what little dignity it had left. By the soft, warm glow of a single twenty-five watt bulb – the only light in my room that worked – I unpacked. I hung some clothes on a hook on the wall, and the hook fell off. I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face. When I grabbed a towel to dry off, the towel rack came off the wall with it. Defeated, I went and sat perfectly still on the bed, afraid to touch anything. This was as close to trashing a hotel room as I’d ever come. Keith Moon wouldn’t have wanted to party with me.

Two hours later I squeezed into the tiny elevator (which lurched downward in an alarming manner) and sat in the lobby to wait for my ride. I was picked up by the most nervous individual I’d ever met in my life. This guy was a walking advertisement for Valium. He would get about three words out in broken English, spitting all over me and gesturing wildly, before he couldn’t take it anymore and would let loose with a flood of Italian spoken so quickly that even the Italians couldn’t understand him. Also, he smelled bad – really bad. This dude took a bath once a year whether he needed to or not. And he had a problem with the concept of personal space. When he wasn’t in front of me, standing on my shoes and spitting on me, he was following so close behind that I couldn’t stop moving or he’d knock me over. Of course, what with the way he smelled and all, if he had been in the building next door he still wouldn’t have been far enough away.

The hall I was playing tonight was in the center of town, “Old Cosenza.” It was right out of the Middle-Ages: narrow cobblestone streets lined right up to the edges by a continuous line of gray stone medieval buildings whose walls curved along with the street. It looked quite sinister. I thought of the plague that had swept through medieval Europe in the fourteenth century: the Black Death. I pictured carts lumbering down the street with guys crying, “Bring out your dead!”
Great place to do a gig . . . gets you right in the mood.

The venue was an old building that had been refurbished as a cultural center, with multiple small concert halls. A string quartet was doing a concert on the first floor, a concert pianist was performing on the second floor, and my show was on the third floor. There was a black upright piano where I was playing (the concert pianist got the grand), in a large marble room with a high ceiling and seating for about two hundred. It was a beautiful setting for a classical music performance – too bad I wasn’t doing one. I played a song to soundcheck the P.A.. It wasn’t working. I was a little afraid of what would happen if it did work, because the acoustics in the hall, even without the P.A., made me feel like I was doing something sacrilegious, like playing boogie-woogie at the nine o’clock mass at St. Peter’s. I ambled over to the mixing board where five worried-looking guys were crowded around randomly turning knobs and moving sliders. I wedged in and discovered that the speaker wires were plugged into the wrong holes (or as Steve Earle likes to put it: “The sumbitch wasn’t connected to the motherfucker”). I pulled the cords and shoved them into the correct holes, over strenuous objection from the five sound engineering experts, and we were in business with a glorious squall of feedback. I set my own levels, and headed for the dressing room with the smelly guy hanging on my back.

That night I did my usual set of original tunes, with a few torchy jazz standards thrown in (which really sounded good in this room) and a couple of Fats Waller instrumentals. The performance went well and I did a long stretch of encores.

After the show, the promoter and a friend of his, a lovely girl named Diletta whose English was broken in a manner so charming that it made me weak at the knees, took me to a club across the street, called The Beat. It was crowded and dark, and the band, led by an ex-pat American trumpet player named Tom Kirkpatrick, was playing Dixieland. Perfect. We sat down and ordered vino and food, all of which was wonderful, of course. I bonded with Diletta. She revealed to me that she played piano and that her favorite classical piece was Beethoven's “Pathetique Sonata” – my favorite as well. I was in love again. Later we danced to the band, until they asked me to sit in. I played two songs, and the whole room was totally with me. It was better than sex (almost). After we shut the place down, we headed to an after-hours club and watched people dance to American oldies. Diletta knew all the words to “Help Me Rhonda.” I was considering marriage. We went to one more bar for one more round, then they dropped me off at my hotel. I bid a sad goodbye to the girl and went up to the room and passed out.

Day Six

Another car, another train, another soundcheck, another hotel room. I was approaching the fabled land of autopilot. Tonight’s gig was in the town of Pontecagnano, outside the seaside city of Salerno. After being dropped off at my hotel room between soundcheck and dinner, I opened the door on the absolute blue-ribbon winner, hands-down champeen of the world, worst hotel room of the trip. There was no phone. There was no heat. There was no TV (I wasn’t going to watch it, but it’s the principle of the thing). An indescribably foul odor practically blew my hair back when I opened the door. It smelled like a mattress that had been left to molder in the rain for a week in a vacant lot in Queens. I couldn’t open the windows, because the room was so cold that I was shivering even with my coat on. I spent the next hour sitting on the bed in my coat, looking in an English-Italian/Italian-English dictionary for translations for “It smells really fuckin bad in here!” and “Turn on the heat in my room or I’ll kill you in your sleep!”

Back at the club, called La Cruna Dell ‘Ago, I ate a wonderful pasta dish, followed by thinly sliced veal with gravy, and homemade bread. Then the show commenced. This was a regular bar gig, not really any kind of concert situation, but it was packed, and unlike most bar gigs in America, these people were exceedingly enthusiastic. I got that Star Search applause in the middle of the first song after the piano solo . . . which is better than getting it for holding a really long note in the middle of “Wind Beneath My Wings”while Ed McMahon gestures frantically for the stagehand to turn on the applause sign. I finished the first set, and left the stage in search of libation. I ordered up a shot of Jack and a pint of something called “Very Strong Ale.” It was dark and tasty and robust, and the alcohol content was way more than regular beer. By the time I figured that out, I was ripped out of my skull.

I found myself at a table with a bunch of attractive girls, having everything I said translated to them by a chick who had learned English while working for two years on a cruise ship out of Miami. She was affecting this eurotrash social-butterfly thing that was really pissing me off. Her clear contempt for Americans coated everything she said with slime – we were just so crude and provincial. I was thinking: Hey, at least our fucking telephones work. I got out of there and staggered back up to the stage.

The second set, the crowd was really with me and kept sending up more beer (big mistake). After two encores – fewer than they wanted, but I was barely clinging to the last vestiges of my motor functions – I scrawled autographs for a few people, sold some CDs, got paid, and was driven back to my poor excuse for a hotel room.

As I blearily surveyed my surroundings and crawled into bed fully clothed, I decided that James Crumley said it best when he said, “Home’s where you hang your hangover.”

Day Seven

I awoke to a blinding headache, and the sound of Stefano, the club-owner, banging on my door to take me to the train station. I jumped out of bed, already dressed, and packed and got out of there in record time.

On the way to Salerno, Stefano turned to me with a smile and said, “You get very drunk last night, no?” I groaned. He laughed.

Today I was traveling to the town of Frosinone to play at a club called Hot Ice. I got into the last car of the train and discovered that it was empty. My mood improved two-hundred per-cent at the prospect of having a train compartment to myself. I hoisted my bags into the overhead rack, closed the compartment door, and settled in with The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. Next thing I knew, I was standing at the window of the train car, watching the Frosinone train station fade into the distance. I’d been so engrossed in the book that I had missed my stop.

Frantic, helpless, and feeling dumb as a fencepost, I dragged bags and hangover to the door of the train and stood there cursing myself, waiting for the next stop, which might be Vienna for all I knew. After forty-five minutes, we pulled into a small podunk town. I got off and ran to the counter, and got in a line that consisted of one irate guy who was having a problem with his ticket. On and on he ranted and raved. After an interminable time, he gave up and I was able to purchase a ticket back to Frosinone.

On the way back, I got stuck in a car full of Italian Boy Scouts, one of whom figured out from my book and my confused manner that I was an Americano. He began to try out all of his newly acquired English skills on me. I could see the headline: American Musician Strangles Boy Scout. Unable to take any more, I moved to the next car.

When I finally reached Frosinone, my ride had long since departed. I tried to call the club and let them know they had not mistakenly hired George Jones for the gig (although “No Show Malone” does have kind of a nice ring to it). I went to phone after phone, with 2,685 pounds of luggage in tow. None of the phones had a coin slot; they only had credit card slots. I slipped my phone card into each one . . . nothing, not even a dial tone. I took out my English/Italian – Italian/English dictionary and painfully translated each word on the phone, and ascertained that I needed a special Italian government-issue phone card in order to make a call. Where to get one? For laughs, I stepped up to the newsstand and said, “Phone card?” The guy responded in such a way that, even though I had no idea what he was saying, it was clear I had come to the right place. Soon, with card in hand, I called the club. No one there understood a word I was saying. I called Mauro, and got his machine. I called his partner – he was in. He called the club and they sent a guy over.

When the guy showed up, he was just what the doctor ordered: he was driving a big American car, his English was great, and he was a musician. His name was Frioni Bruno, and he had written a nice review of my CD for the local paper. We stopped by a music store to pick up the keyboard the club was renting for my show. They tried to rent us a piece-of-crap keyboard that was totally unacceptable. After getting them to give up a nice digital piano – for more money than the club probably wanted to spend – we were off to a three-hour dinner.

Frioni introduced me that night to a packed room. This audience was a little slow to warm up, but once they did, they wouldn’t let me go. I must have done seven or eight encores. Finally spent, I shook some hands (including a table full of people who had driven over a hundred miles to see me play), signed some CDs, and slipped outside for some fresh air.

When the crowd thinned out, I went back in and discovered that there was ice cream for sale at the bar. It was the best-looking ice cream I had ever seen, and I had to have some. I struggled in Italian to make my order, to which the lovely girl behind the counter replied: “Sure, what flavor?” She was from New York. She had lived there until she was thirteen and then had moved with her parents back to the Old Country. She’d been in Italy ever since, but she really missed the States. I spent the rest of the evening trying to convince her to come back to America with me. She said her boyfriend, who owned the bar, would not be amused. But I could tell she liked the idea. And the ice cream was delicious.

As Frioni was taking me back to the hotel at 2:30 in the morning, he invited me to his house to have some vino and food. His wife had made some just in case. It was such a kind and wonderful gesture that I felt like crying. Why can’t more people be like that? Why can’t I be like that? Between the flu and the hangover, I was totally wiped out, so I reluctantly declined.

Back at the room, I headed for the shower that I hadn’t gotten to take that morning. It would be just the thing, after the day I’d had (half a bottle of scotch would have really been just the thing, but I had temporarily learned my lesson). I dozed under the warm, misty spray, unaware that the bathroom drain was not functioning. When I finally opened my eyes, there was four inches of water on the bathroom floor. I turned off the shower and emerged into the rest of my room and saw that it, too, was awash. Too tired to give a shit, I trudged through ankle-deep water to the bed and fell instantly asleep, wet feet and all.

Day Eight

In the morning, I tiptoed through the ice-cold water on the floor, pulled clothes out of the suitcase, tiptoed back over to the bed, and got dressed while standing on the mattress. Then I rolled up my pants, took shoes and suitcase in hand, and got the hell out before anyone saw the room.

Today I was going to play a place called Jona’s, in the town of Boara. I took a train to the city of Ferrara, and was met by Mauro’s business partner, Paride. He took me to his house to meet the wife and kids and have a snack before going to soundcheck. We put on a Miles Davis record, and his wife served delicacies that included a salami her grandfather had made. It was unbelievable; I could not stop eating it. Hunger had nothing to do with it.

We drove thirty miles to the gig in a light rain. Jona’s was just your basic joint, but it had a nice vibe to it. After soundcheck, Mauro came in with a stunning, black-haired beauty who was the music reviewer for the local paper. We all had dinner and waited for the crowd to arrive.

By 10:30, the place was packed. I went on, and my set went great, like all the other shows on this trip. Italians are wonderful people to play to. They love music with the same passion they apply to everything else. I did the usual post-gig stuff (plus a little extra bonding with the newspaper chick), counted the loot, and busted ass for the hotel.

After seven shows in as many days, I was ready for a day off (I have played as many as thirty one-night stands in a row with no days off in the States, but I wasn’t dragging four tons of luggage through train stations all day). I was beat. I wanted to get offstage and spend a week in a room with no sensory input.

Day Nine

This was the last gig of the tour. I faced a long train ride today, all the way to Turin (Torino if you’re a native), near the border with France. I had to change trains three times. After a long season in railroad hell, I caught a cab and checked into the Hotel Statuto, by far the nicest accommodations of the whole trip. The soundman from the club came to pick me up. We conversed a little in English, but he clearly was annoyed that I didn’t speak his language. He kept asking why I didn’t speak Italian, like I was doing it to piss him off. Eventually he fell into a morose silence for the rest of the trip.

At the club, a fairly large room called Magazzini Di Gilgamesh, I was pleasantly surprised to see a grand piano on the stage. And it was being tuned! There were posters on the walls advertising that Poppa Chubby would be playing there the following week, so I knew I was in a hip joint.

Soundcheck was a hassle. The sound guy – who also was tending bar and waiting on the occasional table – kept disappearing when I needed him most. And he continued to pretend he didn’t speak English, and made another waiter translate for him even when I knew he could understand me.

The show that night went real well and sales were good. This was the only night of the whole tour when no person was provided to sell merchandise for me, (in Cosenza, the smelly guy did it, which didn’t exactly make for record-breaking sales), so after the last encore, I sat on the edge of the stage with a stack of CDs and tapes, and people kept wandering by and buying stuff. I also signed an autograph for a chick who had her knickers in a twist like she was meeting Bruce Springsteen or something. I rather enjoyed that.

The soundman/waiter/cook/busboy/bartender was in no hurry to take me back to the hotel, so I went over to the bar to celebrate the last gig of the tour. Again I encountered the “Very Strong Ale.” Believing that you should always get back on the horse that threw you, I ordered a pint. This time I drank it very slowly, like a civilized person . . . and still got tweaked. This stuff was for professionals only.

Day Ten

In the morning, I took the train back to Bologna to tape an interview for a syndicated radio show called Fashion FM, which played on rock stations all over Italy. Mauro and I went over to the studio and met the guys who were putting the show together. I taped five ten-minute interviews, which would air over five days with a song from my CD being played at the end of each segment. Mauro interviewed me, translating what we were saying for the listening audience. He asked questions in two languages, remembered everything I said in my answer, and translated it all back into Italian. And he asked intelligent questions about my music, instead of the usual, “So, where did you get the hat?” I was impressed. And the guys from the show were so impressed with his radio voice, they offered him a job doing more interviews.

Afterwards, we hooked up with a couple of Mauro’s friends and went out to eat. Over yet another stunning Italian meal, they all confessed that they had been to America and their all-time favorite food was . . . Kentucky Fried Chicken. They couldn’t wait to go back to the States and have some more.

Like Chuck Berry said, “It just goes to show you never can tell.”

Day Eleven

I had left a day free at the end of the trip, so I could see Venice. I got up early and caught the train for Venizia, two hours from Bologna.

There aren’t words to describe what it’s like to see Venice, Italy for the first time. There’s absolutely no other place like it, so you are totally unprepared, no matter how many times you’ve seen it in movies or pictures.

I got onto one of the ferries (the Vaporetto – it’s the city bus) gliding down the Grand Canal through the center of the city. The architecture of Venice is mostly from between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I found myself standing at the rail on the boat trying to look in eight directions at once. The gondolas, the canals . . . I live for stuff like this. Venice is the kind of place you just can’tbe cynical about. I got off at the San Marco stop and headed for Harry’s Bar, looking for the ghost of Ernest Hemingway. It turned out I couldn’t afford to drink there, so I had just one glass of whiskey in honor of Papa, and then took off for San Marco Square to check out the pigeons.

I spent most of the day just bopping around. There wasn’t nearly enough time to hit all the hot tourist destinations, but I wasn’t here to see sights, I was here to feel something. To go to a city so unabashedly romantic and wildly iconoclastic just to check off a bunch of sights on a tourist map would be a sin. I wanted to feel this city’s ghosts. After all, Venice itself is a ghost . . . centuries ago it stopped being any kind of practical place to live.

After dark, I walked down quiet, narrow alleys and along the smaller out-of-the-way canals, away from the bustle of the Grand Canal district. Eventually I got on the ferry back to the train station. Along the way, we passed a gondola with a guy playing accordion and another guy singing to the couple riding in it. I knew it was a put-on for the tourists, but still, it just doesn’t get any more romantic than that.

I barely made the last train out.

Epilogue

So that was Italy.

I got up very early and flew back to Los Angeles. I was looking forward to getting back home, but was also sad to be leaving this wonderful place and these wonderful and generous people. The tour had been a success financially and artistically, and I knew I’d be back.

I went to Rome and didn’t see the Coliseum. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

© 1998 by Bob Malone