Pete Hamill - Loving Women

Then in 1947, when I graduated from grammar school, my grandfather sold the grocery store to a Puerto Rican and took me on a trip to Italy. He must have seen that I was on my way to being just another guinea hoodlum. He told me the trip was a gift for my good grades, but I always thought it was to save me from myself. And it was also a gift to himself. He hadn’t been back since 1900. More than half of his life. Part of it was, he wouldn’t go there while Mussolini was in power, part, he didn’t have the money, part, some kind of crazy pride (he wouldn’t go there as poor as the day he left). Now he wanted to see the Old Country. Just one more time .

I loved that fucking trip to Italy. Jesus Christ, I loved that trip. We went on a ship called the Genoa; it was all white and everybody spoke Italian and there were some war brides on board, and I thought they were the most beautiful women I ever saw in my life. Even the ones with the moustaches. I could understand most of what they were saying (from my father’s Italian and the Latin) and they made me so horny I whacked off five times a day, at least. At night, I would go out on deck with my grandfather and we’d stand next to the lifeboats and look out at the Atlantic with the moon shining and the waves slapping the hull and a band playing somewhere and I guess that’s where the Navy thing came from later .

On that trip, I started to think that Grandpa knew everything. He talked about the Mediterranean as the place where civilization came from, and he woke me up and dragged me to see Gibraltar when we went by in the night and showed me where Africa was and pointed toward where the Alps were and explained about the way all the rivers of Europe came from them. When we came into Genoa, he started to cry. Home at last .

Florence was pretty much a mess that year. There’d been some fighting there during the war and Grandpa’s old house on the Arno was gone. They were still repairing the bridges and the museums weren’t open yet because they were trying to figure out what was hidden and what the Germans stole and what had been destroyed. Most of the people he knew were dead or off to America or Argentina, but he didn’t seem to care. He showed me the house where my grandmother lived. It was a pension now, filled with students. And he showed me the place where Savonarola was burned at the stake. We sat at a table in a outdoor café and had coffee with a slice of lemon and he looked out and said, Leonardo walked here, and Michelangelo and Machiavelli. He talked like they were there when he was young. He told me to look at the light, too, the way the shadows fell. Clarity, he said. Always clarity. The clear light of Firenze. That’s why they painted that way he said, with passion. And he told me to look at the faces of the people. And he told me, no matter what anybody says, no matter what you feel when they call you Wop or Dago or Guinea, remember this day. Remember this place, remember where you came from .

We were back home three months when he died. And there ain’t a day goes by I don’t miss him. I graduated top of the class at Hayes and I wanted to go to college. But Korea broke out. We had no money (my mother blamed my grandfather for wasting the store money on the trip to Italy and my father wouldn’t ask the wiseguy in-laws for a dime). I had a girl at the time, an Irish girl from Brook Park. Her father didn’t approve of me, but at least I was white. She’s still my girl, I guess, but it seems like a long time ago. I decided if I went into the service I could go to college on the Bill when I came out. Study history or Latin. Teach, maybe. I know you don’t believe that, seeing me fuck around the way I do sometimes. But I mean it. Fucking around keeps me from going crazy. When I told my father I wanted to enlist, he said, Go in the Coast Guard, go in the Navy, go in the Air Force. Go anyplace, but don’t go in the goddamned infantry. And I thought of those nights with my grandfather, standing on the deck looking at the moon over the Mediterranean, and it wasn’t even a choice .

Maybe, when this Navy bit is finished, I’ll make that trip to Italy. Sometimes, just before I go to sleep, I see myself coming down a gangplank and there are people from customs and signs telling you where to go and a band playing music and everybody crying and laughing, and there, right down there in the crowd, waiting for me in Italy, is Grandpa .

Yeah .

They buried Stalin, and a fat little guy named Malenkov took over. He had a high unlined forehead with a spear of hair falling over his brow. After one look at him the whole country calmed down. Even the Navy. Liberty and leave were restored. Sal organized a Josef V. Stalin Memorial Service at the Dirt Bar and we all got drunk while he tried to teach us the words of the “Internationale.” Even Dixie Shafer gave it a try. Joe McCarthy got on the radio to warn us that Malenkov was worse than Stalin and had agents everywhere in the United States. Nobody believed him. In the mornings on the base, Captain Pritchett supervised the flowers of spring. Business at the Supply Shack was brisk. In the late afternoons, Bobby Bolden played the blues again, with the shades up and the windows open in the Kingdom of Darkness. I did seven portraits of women I didn’t know. And there was still no word from Eden Santana.

I started to write her a letter, telling her how much I missed her and how I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about her and how I wanted her now and next month and for the rest of my life. But there was nowhere to send it and so I destroyed it without finishing it. One afternoon, I walked all the way to the lake. Nothing had changed; the car was still gone, the trailer still locked up. I sat on the front step for an hour, breathing in the jasmine and honeysuckle, sweet alyssum and magnolia, the aromas of our days together. When the no-see-ums arrived at dusk, I walked back.

On Friday, Miles Rayfield asked me if I wanted to go with him to the Rex to see Moulin Rouge . He wanted to see the movie again before it left Pensacola forever. I hesitated, mumbled about how I was waiting for my girlfriend to come back, and Miles said: “When a movie leaves the Rex, they burn the prints.” The truth was that I was a little afraid of going to a movie with Miles Rayfield. What if he put a hand on my leg during the show or something? He was my friend and I didn’t want anything to ruin that friendship. But what if Harrelson was right ? And what about those drawings of Freddie Harada and the way they walked along Perdido Beach. Then I thought: Jesus, you are letting Harrelson do your thinking for you . “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”

We took the bus downtown. I remember thinking the movie was amazing, with color that I’d never seen before, and lovely music and even a great performance by Zsa Zsa Gabor, who until then I’d thought was a joke. It turned out that I didn’t have anything in common with Toulouse-Lautrec; but sitting there in the dark, I wanted to live the way he did, in a studio in Paris, prowling around the cafés and whorehouses and music halls at night, making drawings. But even that vision reminded me of Eden. After all, how could I spend the nights in whorehouses and bring Eden along? How could I live that way and still go home to her at night? I watched the movie while another movie played in my head. Until Zsa Zsa Gabor’s shimmering white skin forced me to embrace her. Good-bye, Henri , she called to me. I have a rendezvous with a Russian guard .… While her breasts pushed up out of her silky gowns. When the picture ended, I felt like crying. Miles Rayfield, as they say, never laid a hand on me.