Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

We had come to Rome to take care of some business. Rafael had been born in Lecce, where I was teaching English as a second language. We had to register his birth, get him stamped on our passport. It was an opportunity to see some of Rome. We decided to alternate, one of us staying at the pensione to watch the kids, while the other wandered. My destination was The Vatican. I was sure Jingle wouldn’t want to go there. She mistrusted and feared anything Catholic, bruised by her experience at Catholic school in Winnemucca, Nevada. Even when we went into a deconsecrated church like The Duomo in Firenze she would grab my arm and cling, anticipating the long arm of Big Nun ready to snatch and drag her back to the church. She wanted to see ancient Rome.

I hopped a bus outside the train station. It was fun to be a straphanger with the working people of Rome. I noticed a young woman, voluptuous, in a tight green dress, dirty blonde hair slightly disheveled. She worked her way to the strap next to mine. She smiled at me. I smiled back at her. She was gorgeous, grey-eyed, lips glossed in a permanent pucker. When the bus jolted away from the next stop she pressed her body into mine. I almost passed out from the bouquet of her perfume and sweat. My erection pointed the way to God. It was a way greater revelation than I ever expected on a ride to The Vatican. She wriggled against me for a couple of stops, and when the crowd thinned at the stop between Piazza Navona and Campo de’ Fiori she jumped off. I could have followed her. My sense of loss was enormous. I found a seat as we crossed the bridge. A red-headed guy in plaid trousers, with a bad complexion, watched me from across the aisle. He was smiling. I thought it was a guy thing, that he had seen me rubbing against the beauty and sympathised. At Castel Sant’Angelo, he winked at me and jumped off the bus.

I went on to The Vatican. I thought it was good I’d calmed down. I doubted they’d let me in to the Vatican with an erection. I reached for my wallet to pay the admission, and there was no money. The train tickets were there, the passport was there, but no money. Those were some light hands that could lift the money and leave the rest, really skillful. All at once I understood what had happened. I had been so rubbed into distraction by the beautiful woman that lightfingers, with whom she was in cahoots, could lift my wallet, extract the money, and return the wallet to my pocket. This was a smackdown by my own horny demons. How embarrassing for a New Yorker, proud of his street smarts, to get scammed like this in Rome. I’d been hoisted by ancient wisdom, but blessed by the kindness. Without passport and train ticket I could have been stranded with my family, left on the street. I could still be there, begging for the money to get home.

I told Jingle that my pocket had been picked on the bus, but kept the particulars to myself. I couldn’t confess those circumstances, too embarrassing. I was ashamed. We decided to tour the ruins on foot. At the time the antiquities were open to the public for free. Without kids it’s a hike from Termini to the Coloseum. Going there wasn’t so bad. We rested inside the Coloseum, where Jingle sat down to nurse Rafael, and I told Nik and Avrum stories about Lions and Gladiators. It was a great vision, Madonna and Child feeding in arena of ancient combat.

The kids slept through the whole train ride back to Lecce. So did Jingle. I thought about my trip to The Vatican. That was a lesson to me. Let it be a lesson. Erotic on a bus can lead to trouble. It could have turned out a lot worse. From the train station in Lecce we took a horse and carriage, a little covered cabriolet. At the time there those were the taxis. They don’t exist any more. They hardly existed then. It was a sweet ride.

It was a bright spring afternoon in Manhattan, and I was headed uptown. George Plimpton had arranged a gathering at Elaine’s with a sappy name like Convergence of Genius, or the Genius Club. It was meant to create an artistic, literary think tank. Many eminences like Joseph Heller, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe and etc. were among the geniuses. I had just published The Exaggerations of Peter Prince at Holt and doors were opening for me, though I understood little about how to use this advantage. I was invited to this gathering but was too shy and insecure to know how to maintain myself among the literary/artistic glitterati. My seat was at a table with only Kurt Vonnegut and his friend, the photographer, Jill Krementz, whom he later married.

I had almost crossed paths with Vonnegut before. He just left his teaching gig at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, when I started mine. I did meet Edie, his daughter, whom I liked a lot. She was finishing school there, an art major. Edie visited me at my apartment on Morton Street once, with her boyfriend, little Geraldo Rivera. He hadn’t yet started on his way to being the media brute he is today. I could see he had little interest in what I was doing. Edie told me she’d shown my novel to her father, and he didn’t know what to make of it. I wasn’t attracted much to the writing in Cat’s Cradle , the only Vonnegut I’d read. My general social ineptitude and discomfort among geniuses conspired with those hovering opinions to make a nearly silent table. Mr. Vonnegut tried very hard to tell jokes and be jovial. Some of them must have been his ironic takes on the genius label. I might have enjoyed this under different circumstances. Jill Krementz enjoyed him immensely. I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t laugh. I could only think foolishly that we worked on different writing planets, his obviously more popular and lucrative. I didn’t have the grace to break through socially to a more congenial posture.

When I visited Dresden I thought frequently of Vonnegut, of his distress after writing Slaughterhouse-Five . I was on a research trip to see all the paintings of Antonello da Messina for my novel, Antonello’s Lion . Five months earlier I had emerged from a quad bypass extravaganza, and didn’t know what my life would be like, nor how much of it was left. The train from Berlin pulled into Dresden in the morning. My God, I thought, the city is still charred. Vonnegut, the fire bombing, why hadn’t I talked to him? The old city had been completely rebuilt, stones charred charcoal grey. They had preserved the scar. I could feel it in my scars. I imagined I could smell the death by burning. I could feel Kurt Vonnegut breaking down in New York.

A slight feathery angelic blonde woman with pink tints in her hair smiled at me as I got off the train, and I followed her flutter across the bridge over the Elbe onto the broad modern square. I was booked into one of the five high-rise hotels lined up like tombstones before the old city. My mission was to see Antonello’s Saint Sebastian . The Zwinger Palace holds one of the great art museums of the world, a pride of Saxon culture. The collection had been saved, had survived the fire-bombing. Vonnegut must have known this, people died, art survived. It was a “so it goes” item. I had no luck with Saint Sebastian, because the painting was in restoration. The Italians allowed me to look at works being restored, and even the Met let me look at an Antonello in storage, but the Germans have their rules, not to be bent. I never saw the painting until after my novel was published, when it was hung in Rome at the Antonello exhibition. It was, I realized, the greatest painting of all time. In Dresden that was a small disappointment, compensated for by the Raphael Sistine Madonna, and great works by Brueghel, Rubens, Veronese. Most interesting to me, almost embarrassing, was a series of paintings by Canaletto, the great Venetian painter of cityscapes, and the Grand Canal. He lived in Dresden for several years, and painted city scenes. The stones in his paintings were the same grey, the same charcoal as the buildings today. Grey is the color of the tufa they quarried to build Dresden then and now. I would have enjoyed a conversation about that with the gracious and troubled Kurt Vonnegut.