This week, we were able to concoct three of the most bellisima cocktails it has ever been my privilege to sip.
The 'Gingerino Gondola' and the 'Canal Water Speciale' are in the right margin of this page.
The following post is a short story a wrote a few years back (about a trip to Italy). It was published at the time in Artella:
The Grinch Who (Almost) Stole My Vacation
Forget passport, money, tickets; the most important thing to bring on vacation is a good companion. And, no companion is better than a bad one. I’m about to tell you the entirely true story of a doomed vacation I took years ago with my friend, Sheryl (of course the name has been changed to protect the not-so-innocent).
This tragi-comedy opens in Paris one glorious Spring afternoon. The poodles are strutting thorough Montmartre, sporting weighty rhinestone collars. Waiters are gazing languidly from the corner cafés; communicating both utter disdain and mild flirtation with the same incongruous scowl. Stray balloons, both red and otherwise, are floating upwards toward the Eiffel Tower. The noisy children with wet hands who lost them are now sailing paper boats in a fountain.
Sheryl and I are at the Centre Pompidou agonizing over her choice of postcards. Should she send her teenaged brother ‘Paris at Night’ (a postcard that’s completely black and therefore hilarious)? Or maybe the holographic card that magically morphs the Mona Lisa into a bare-breasted porn star with a tilt of the wrist.
“Boobs,” I offer, as if it were obvious.
“But they’re only painted boobs,” Sheryl counters. “They’re not real.”
“So? It’s a postcard. What could your brother possibly do with photographic boobs that he can’t do with painted, Leonardo-style boobs?”
“What about for my aunt?”
“Not boobs. But also nothing at night. How about the L’Arc de Triumphe-during the day? Or a kitten riding in a wicker bicycle basket? Or a Dior model on the Champs -Elysées?” I hold up a handful of charming black and white cards.
“Banana Hammock,” she decides, tilting a postcard of Napoleon until his breeches transformed into a polka-dotted g-string.
“Zut!” hisses a woman behind us. “Are you buying zee’s? Qui ou non?” A feather on her frighteningly chic chapeau quivers and seems to be wagging its disapproval.
“Damnit!” Sheryl blusters, dropping the cards, “I’m taking them all!” and she dumps them on the counter. Her blustering has fractured into shocks of pure, negative energy, and I can sense the dark side taking over. The demon stirs as she paws through her wallet and tisks at the French bills as though they have no right to be bedding down with the dollars. “What the hell is this?” she flares, brandishing a Euro note.
“That’s enough,” I say, smiling at the feathered woman behind us. “We’re American,” I offer by way of explanation.
“Zat, I can zee.”
A deafening drum roll generated by the cascade of coins pouring out of Sheryl’s wallet suddenly assaults our ears, upping the tension ante.
“We must have got the three cherries or the three gold bars,” I twitter as I drop to the floor, frantically scooping. The feathery woman clucks and steps over our stooping bodies.
Sheryl is still visibly unhappy as we enter our hotel room. The fact that she deposits a jackpot of international coins (still clenched in her fist from the Pompidou’s floor) into a homeless man’s cup with the warm sentiment, ‘I can’t deal with this shit', alerts me to her mood. I’d never known her to be charitable. My heart tightens with fear and foreboding.
“I’m packing for tomorrow. Then I’m going to bed,” she announces. “What time’s the train?”
“7:20 a.m.” I tell her, cringing. “It’s early, but Florence is so far away and we’ll want the whole day to…” But she’s gone; rooting through her purse, turning her pockets inside out-- tearing through her suitcase.
I gulp.
“Where’s my wallet?” she asks, turning on me. I’m stricken with a vision of her clawing at me, ripping the back pockets of my jeans while biting a hole though my leather backpack.
“Didn’t you just have it?” Gulp. “Buying postcards?” Gulp. “At the Pompidou Center?” Gulp.
We race like two wild cheetahs through the dusky Paris streets, thundering over cobblestones, colliding with mimes, and for once blowing by the patisserie windows that sell bread shaped like the Eiffel Tower. Finally, hearts hammering and breathless, we arrive at the locked glass doors of the Pompidou Centre.
“It opens at 10:30 a.m.!” Sheryl bellows. Pigeons flap heavenward in a Titanic-sinking moment of alarm.
“And we’ll be gone by then,” I add numbly, half-expecting a cartoon sledgehammer to whack-weasel me into the pavement. Sheryl’s insane pounding on the darkened glass doors accomplishing nothing beyond rousing a homeless man’s interest and generating a lot of French scowls from passers-by.
For the remainder of the evening Sheryl is catatonic. There’s hardly ever an opportunity in life to use the word ‘catatonic’ in its truest sense. But here was the moment. Paris, Spring 1996. Without a word (because ‘without a sound' would be an outright lie in light of the door slamming), Sheryl packs. She kicks her clothes, from various heaps around the room into her suitcase like a soccer player skirting the net. I don’t once see her bend at the waist or use her hands. Okay, that is a lie; her gold hoops are lying on the sideboard and she flicks them with an angry fingertip into her suitcase. They land like two losing horseshoes on a laundry landscape.
I feel strangely like I’m baiting her as I fold my articles of clothing and seat-belt them into my case. I snap the locks shut and wind the combination with my thumb like a miniature slot machine.
“We must have got all cherries… or gold bars,” I joke, stupidly, remembering the scene at the Centre. Her nostrils flare like a dragon. I layer a cardigan and scarf over the back of a chair and tuck my earrings into my shoes - all done in sharp contrast to Sheryl’s kick-pack method.
At first, I think she’s napping sitting up. Then I sense she’s watching me from her bed. From my periphery, I can tell that her arms are folded and her legs are tucked Indian-style and still capped with boots (on the brocade coverlet!!!) The atmosphere had changed in the tiny room. Rather like an Edgar Allan Poe story, I can hear her slow breathing-- as though she’s relinquishing her will to live and welcoming the black bird of death. Death by dementia. ‘Tourist looses wallet and dies two hours later…it’s the fourth death this year attributed to wallet-separation anxiety.’ I can almost see the headline on the front page of Le Figaro.
“I’m sure when we call from Florence they’ll have found your wallet and they’ll be able to send it…” I hear my own teeth chattering and my voice sounds thready and tinsel. Sheryl just sits there, tucked into herself; eyes wide open and glossy. She reminds me of one of those creepy mechanical fortuneteller machines in an amusement park arcade. When I turn off the bedside lamp, post diary writing, postcard writing and reading, Sheryl still hasn’t moved or spoken.
“Mind if I turn out the light?”
A French voice wakes me the following morning. I’ve dreamed it was a parrot, insulting me from Sheryl’s shoulder as she sits unchanged on the bed (except for a sinister looking eye patch). Once I shake off the befuddlement, I look over to find the reality is not very different than the dream. Arms folded, legs folded, boots making a deep impression in the marshmallow mattress, Sheryl has not moved.
“What are you doing?” I demand, fed up and suddenly brazen. “We’re leaving in an hour - an hour! We’re going to Italy - Italy!”
I invade her evil force field; surely my breath will rouse her. Nothing. “You should be ready- this is my shower time!” Nothing. “That’s it!” I howl. “What do I have to do to get a sign of life? A word… a breath… a fart…I'll take anything!” I’m on a roll. My half-conscious daring allows me to press on. “This is my vacation too. So your wallet’s gone. Get over it! You have your passport, and I’ll lend you money. You’ve got to move on… we’re leaving for Italy in an hour! What do I have to do? Slap my face?” I slap my face several times (more for my benefit than hers). “Jump up and down like a crazy person?” I jump up and down until our neighbor pounds the wall. “Throw something?” With hulk-like passion, I lift my enormous suitcase above my head and hurl it at the headboard. Nothing.
Exhausted and defeated, I let myself drop limply to the bed. On the way down (too tired to raise my arms in self-preservation), I ricochet off the bed. I hit the wall and slide into the impossibly narrow crack, shifting the bed with my bulk as gravity swallows me. From the darkness of the floor, breathing in dust bunnies and wearing the coverlet’s fringe like a raggedy toupee, I hear a reluctant giggle. And then a laugh. And then a roar of laughter. I hear Sheryl’s skeleton snap, crackle, and pop as she scurries to her feet and disappears into the bathroom to gobble up my shower time.
My nervous chitchat probably spoils the train ride; not just for me but for everyone sitting around me. I think of it as our Paris-Florence soundtrack. A child comes bumbling up the aisle, falling over strangers’ laps as the train hurdles forward. He uses both hands to carry a small basket.
“Buy a pin for the blind,” he chants, “It’ll bring you good luck.” The hapless child plunks a handful of pins down on our tray tables and demands payment.
“Good luck?” Sheryl booms, fingering a pin and looking positively enraged. “This is Huey, Dewy and Louie! Since when are effing Huey, Dewy and Louie good luck?”
Without waiting for the answer, she sloppily tosses the pins back into his basket, careless of the fact that several fell on the floor. The boy quickly bends to retrieve them. “It’s a miracle,” Sheryl roars, “He can see! He can see!”
I shush and scold and desperately try to dissuade her from continuing the dialogue with the little (blind or not) peddler.
“What? Me?” she yells, “He’s the little scam artist! Since when are Huey, Dewy and Louie good luck”? She asks the question rhetorically, on and on for hours. It cuts savagely into my soundtrack of quiet cooing at the scenery and humming the ‘Sur le Pont D'Avignon’.
When we arrive in Florence the cabbie both literally and metaphorically takes us for a ride. We drive around and around, zigzagging back and forth across the Arno, and circle the Duomo like a substandard eagle who doesn’t know what it’s looking for. Finally, in a cloud of black exhaust, he deposits us at an ancient stone facade. If you can imagine being trapped in a library, the oxygen running out, and having to feel along the bookshelf for the one spine that is going to trigger that hidden door to the treasure tunnel – well, that’s what searching for the hotel doorknob is like. Sheryl helps a lot. She flips to a new page in her notebook and writes, ‘SCAMS’ in capital letters. She underlines it several times, her ballpoint ripping through the paper as she does so.
“Feel better?” I ask, once we’ve arrived in our closet-sized deluxe room with the toilet in the hall.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she barks, “I need some air”.
Happy and hopeful, I abandon my unpacking and trip out into the Florentine sun behind her. Down one side of the street is the Duomo, its rosy clay-colored roof looking like a massive stone in an ivory setting. The smell of leather floats in the breeze while motorbikes zoom past.
“Heaven,” I sigh, peering into a shop window that offers lime green gloves, Venetian masks and marbled journals. At the corner café, I am served (like a gift from Dio) the frothiest, choco-sprinkled cafe latte I’ve ever seen or imagined. In celebration of the froth, I point at a slab of chocolate riddled with hazelnuts and peanuts. Our waiter serves it to me on a painted dish. I bite down with a monster chomp that could match the dental plates of a crocodile. Even Sheryl agrees, the coffee is good, the food is good, the dishes are pretty… maybe things are turning around.
She pulls out her postcards and begans scribbling chirpy exclamations. “Should we get some stamps?” I suggest, “I’ve got to mail mine too”.
But the gods of comedy decided to send us on a small detour first. What seem like foolproof directions from our waiter became a roadmap connecting the Strada di Frustatione with the Via Insanite. Down every dark alleyway, carnival masks that had, an hour before, looked festive and winsome suddenly look grotesque and mocking. In a lather of impatiénza, Sheryl retreats to her previous mood. As we round a mossy, walled corner, I run my hand along the seaweedy growth and sniff between the loose stones in an attempt to extract the smell of centuries past.
“Come on!” she crows, “I think this place sells stamps. She bursts into the little shop and, in inglese, asks for a book of stamps.
“Non capisco,” the shopkeeper frowns.
“Stamps!” Sheryl insists assuming more volume will make the meaning clear. “Postage stamps!” She flaps the postcards in her hands and appears to be on the verge of taking flight.
“Ah, francobollo! Si, francobolli!.” The shopkeeper hands over two pages of stamps; one of high value, appropriately illustrated with a painting of the Virgin, and one of much lesser value to supplement decorated with a droopy fleur de lis. We stand leaning against the postbox, madly licking and pressing the colorful francobolli onto our cards. I smile at each one, skimming what I’ve written. ‘Frothy latte…wooden shutters…ancient frescoes, velvety cypresses…' Sheryl drops her last postcard into the box and stands, frozen, staring at mine.
“What?”
“You’re supposed to put one of each stamp on every postcard?”
Gulp. “Of course. What did you do?” Gulp.
“I just put two stamps on every effing card. I wasn’t paying attention to the numbers!”
“But they’re different colors too… I mean this one's the Virgin and this one's just puke green with a melted weathervane! It’s so obvious!”
Explosivo! Wrong thing to say. Sheryl begins to kick the postbox, her heavy boots mercilessly biting dents into its glossy metal.
“Stop it!” I cry, almost crying, “That’s government property!”
She pauses briefly, and tilts her head slowly, the way a tyrannosaurus might have when it thought it heard anotherosaurus in the brush. She fixes a haunted gaze on the gelato shop across the square, and I follow her gaze. A girl in a striped apron is peering out of the window, her curiosity and concern apparent from the ‘O’shaped expression of her fallen jaw.
“I want an ice cream,” Sheryl moans.
“Shall we go to that cute place we passed a few streets back?” I ask hopefully, willing Sheryl not to enter the shop from which her shocking abuse of the postbox has just been both witnessed and studied with zoological interest. Nonetheless, she crosses the quiet square. The shop girl rushes into position (and safety) behind the colorful vats of gelato. We peer into an aquarium of greatness; fantastic pastel sherbets, berry colored yogurts, chocolate mountains dimpled with marshmallows, drizzled with caramel and dusted with sculptured nuts.
“Pistachio, Nutella and Dulce de Leche for me, please” I announce! My stomach turns in cartwheels of anticipation. The girl proudly scoops and molds my cup until it looks like a museum piece. Now it’s Sheryl’s turn.
“I want that one on a cone.” She points.
“Scusa signorina, you may only have that flavor on a cup,” the girl chirps slowly in English.
“But I want it on a cone.”
“I’m sorry, signorina, that flavor is for the cup only.”
“Cone!” Sheryl bellows. “I want a cone!” But the silly girl persists. Finally, Sheryl slaps her palms down on the counter and leans over wolfishly: “Just put the shit on the cone,” she growls between clenched teeth.
The girl reaches back robotically for a sugar cone and hurriedly begins scooping the forbidden flavor. Almost immediately, the gelato starts dripping out the tip of the cone. Sheryl dabs, then licks, then sucks, but the creamy mocha is flowing as though some chocolaty dyke has burst and the end of the world is finally upon us. I silently pray that a rogue walnut or nougat chip will lodge itself in the tip, and slow the surging gelato.
“That’s probably why they don’t serve that flavor on a cone-- melts too quickly,” I venture, trying to sound scientific and non-judgmental. The silence is only broken by my itty-bitty spoon almost catching fire as I scratch furiously inside my empty cup. Sheryl grabs my cup and dumps her cone headfirst into it. A small caramel sea formed and white chocolate chips bobbing like wave caps.
As we near the hotel, we trip over a man crouched on the sidewalk. He’s selling paper cutouts of Mickey and his lady, Minnie. Their two-dimensional bodies magically dance on air. Their arms and legs made of red yarn and magnets, jitterbug in rhythm with the boom box that plays behind them. Sheryl is transfixed. Mickey and Minnie captivate Sheryl in a way that neither the Duomo, nor Ponte Vecchio can. Forget sweeping river views, and palm trees sprouting from sidewalks and eerily beautiful Madonnas painted on stucco street corners - these pieces of cardboard can really get their groove on!
“How much?” Sheryl asks.
“One hundred lire, but for you…fifty.”
“I’ll take ten. I want five Mickeys and five Minnie’s. Don’t give me any Plutos. Or Goofy; I hate that jerk. No, make it six of each.”
Before we take our leave, one stray Donald Duck is discovered, wedged under the boom box, and added to the menagerie.
“Let’s go back to the room and watch these things dance!” she suggests.
Great, I muse; I can’t think of anything I’d rather do on my first day in Florence than sit in a dark hotel room watching a paper Disneyland version of American Bandstand.
“Andiamo!” I agree, faking my enthusiasm.
We sit on the floor of our room leaving a wide, ballroom berth for the dancers. Sheryl tears one Mickey and one Minnie from their car-tree air-freshener bags and lays them on the cold floor. I position our walkman against my thigh and plug in its two little speakers, winding the volume to ‘high’.
“It’s Abba,” I say.
“Perfect. Is it Dancing Queen?” she asks. The xylophone intro confirms that it is. The drumbeat kicks in, then the blending of voices.
‘Aaahhh, you can dance, you can jive…’
However, Mickey and Minnie lay lifeless on the tiles, neither jiving nor dancing.
“Maybe there’s not enough rhythm,” I suggest, beginning to clap along with the tune. “Go, Mickey! Go Minnie! It’s your birthday! Get your groove on!”
Nothing. I must have looked like I was auditioning for ‘Soul Train’ by the way I gyrated. I raise the roof and wave my arms, all the while singing along at the top of my voice and staring expectantly at the red yarn legs… not even a twitch.
“Fuck it!” Sheryl explodes. “These pieces of shit are just another scam! And I bought twelve of them!”
“Thirteen,” I correct, not really thinking too well.
She lunges for her 'Scams' notebook.
“Thirteen’s an unlucky number,” I point out - as if that were the reason Mickey and Minnie refused to dance. She tears the head off Mickey, crumples him into a meaty little ball and hurls him out the open window. Ironically, his little yarn legs seem to break free as he flies through the air, and for an instance, it looks like he was soft-shoeing it to his death If his hand wasn’t a dummy magnet, I’m certain he would have given Sheryl the finger.
I sigh. Basta! Enough! I grab my purse and sling it over my shoulder, deaf to the cosmetics that fall, rolling on the floor.
“Where are you going?” she calls after me. I don’t speak. It’s my turn to be catatonic.
I walk for hours, blowing kisses at every statue I pass and filling my journal with sketches of the Duomo. Branches of a lemon tree peek out from behind a walled garden. A tiny sparrow hops atop the wall.
“What do you see, little friend?” I ask him. “Is this your lemon tree?”
I half expect him to answer, ‘No, I live in an olive tree’, or 'Inside the folds of a Madonna’s skirts in a piazza miles from here’.
I venture deep into the Palace gardens, loosing myself on the wooded hillside. I climb a set of timber steps, tripping on stones and giddily tumbling forward. A black cat with a tuft of white hair on her chest gallops out from behind a bush and begins kneading my purse. She purrs and blinks and circles and finally stretches her small body out over my bag and closes her eyes. I slide my journal out without waking Serafina (that’s what I name her). I can feel tears burning my eyes as the sun sets on the Boboli Gardens; it’s all so beautiful.
My little companion is fast asleep, maybe dreaming of catching a sparrow from out of a lemon tree.
‘Plenty of good company’, I write in my journal, ‘In just a few short hours I’ve met at least a hundred statues, a talkative little sparrow and an adorable tuxedo cat. I’m not alone. I’m not at all alone. And a red beam of sunset warms my hair, as if to agree.
Post note:
When Sheryl returned home to New York, all of her postcards had preceded her, as did her wallet, (money inside). It had been mailed by a Good Samaritan, with a note that simply said, 'Voila!'
