Empire of Light (18 page)

Most artists would have wanted to show Judith hunched over Holofernes, hacking into his neck like some hick butchering a fresh kill. Instead, Caravaggio gave Judith a mythic presence simply with a concave arch to her spine. As she hacks through the neck of the general, her body curves away from the carnage, as if this young lady is normally above such a messy homicide, especially of someone as crude as this Babylonian punk.

I sit in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica on a bench and just stare in awe of Caravaggio’s work. It’s captivating and the darkest painting I’ve sketched so far, both in subject matter and contrast. There’s absolutely no detail in the shadow area; and the red contorted drape that hangs above the scene is the color of freshly oxygenated blood, and it melts eerily away into the inky black background.

I guess I should sketch it.

Ugh. Why ruin a nice moment like this by getting my ass kicked all over the gallery by my number 2B drawing pencil.

But because Judith’s figure is such a textbook example of form, I quickly find my sketch’s
center line
and get off to a good start. Before I know, it I have a fluid stick figure living on my page. From there I begin to build flesh, clothing and shadows. It looks…good! I wouldn’t hang it on a wall, but it’s serviceable. It’s maybe a solid D+. It’s movement in the right direction, and for now that’s cool.

A German couple walk behind me, trying to take a peek at my sketch. I clumsily try to cover it by hovering over it as I pretend to get a call on my iPhone.

“Hello? Hey, yeah, I’m at the Galleria. I’ll meet you for lunch. No. Really. It’s cool.”

I babble on like an idiot until they go away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I now spot a docent approaching me.

“Shit,” I mumble to myself.

The guy seems sweet enough, a gentle old guy with a big smile. He shuffles over to me at the speed of a molasses spill.

“
Mi dispiace,” 
he apologizes as he points to his watch,
“Ma deve lasciare adesso,”
he says, telling me that I have to leave now.

“It’s only one o’clock in the afternoon,” I complain in Italian.

And, like the waiter at the restaurant my first night here in Rome, this kindly old dude also assumes that I speak perfect Italian and goes the hell off in his native tongue. All I hear is a bunch of gibberish, sprinkled with one or two recognizable words.

Blah blah galleria. Blah blah acqua. Blah blah ripara! Blah pavimento. Blah blah domani. Blah blah scusi. Blah blah mi dispiace.

I piece together the few words I recognize…

Water. Floor. Repair. Sorry. Tomorrow.

“
Ho capito,” 
I say sadly, letting him know that I understand.

The docent keeps an eye on me as I put away my drawing gear and pull out my Brownie camera. I point it at the painting, asking with a gesture if it’s okay to snap off a shot.

The docent looks around, knowing damn well taking pictures is not allowed, but I guess the guy feels bad for kicking me out.

“
Certo. Ma non puoi usare un flash,”
he says shaking his finger, ordering me to take the shot but without the flash.

I line up the snapshot of the great
Judith Beheading Holofernes
.

Click!

I stand pat for a moment, hoping that whatever magic encounter that’s going to happen will happen now. The last thing I want to do is run outside into a pile of shit again. But the docent is not having it. All he wants is to see my butt moving in the direction of the exit.

“
Andiamo. Andiamo,” 
he says gently, herding me out of the room.

But I take my time leaving the place, meandering through the galleries to the gift shop and giving the docent a case of agita in the process.

After I pick up a couple of trinkets, I slowly head to the exit, looking over my shoulder and hoping that Judith will appear atop the stairs and yank me into another men’s room ghost sex encounter. Be careful what you wish for. Right? That woman might end up trying to hack my head off.

Relenting, I walk back down to the Piazza Barberini, a bustling square that up until the 1800s was where the city placed its unidentified corpses on view for public identification.

Wow, what a distant memory that shit is now.

The square has an upscale baller vibe to it, buzzing with traffic, a cool little movie theater and this awesome fountain by Bernini called
Fontana del Tritone
. It’s a very cool sculpture of the water god, Triton, kneeling on an open scallop, which is supported by four fierce-looking dolphins. Triton’s head is thrown back as he blows into a conk shell, sending a jet of water into the air.

I pop out my iPhone and hit up wikipedia to find the story on this guy. It turns out that he’s the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, the god and goddess of the sea. Triton’s super hero power, besides being able to live in the sea like my boy Stan Lee’s Namor the SubMariner, is that when he blows loudly into his conch shell, he can raise the waves of the sea.

While staring at my iPhone, an email pops up. It’s from a Production Design Fellow at AFI.

From: Ashok Michael

Subject: A favor, my friend…

Hey Jason!

Edgerton tells me that you’re in Rome! I spent some time there a few years ago helping to paint a mural at the
Università degli Studi di Roma
,
La Sapienza
. I had to come back to the states before the thing was done, and I never saw the finished product. Would you mind visiting the school and taking a picture of it for me? I’ll text you the addy…

There’s no time like the present, I decide, especially since my day at this joint ended so early. I make my way to the school quickly, but there’s no way I’m going to find this mural on my own. Luckily, there’s a security guard stationed behind a glass window who seems eager to give me a hand.

“
Scusi? Parla l’ingelse?”
I ask him.

“Yes,” he says as a smile spreads across his giant head. “911! 911!” he suddenly screams with his hands in the air.

“What?”

“Crip or blood?” he demands as he points his sausage finger at me.

“WHAT?”

“Crip or blood?! Come on! You look like a Crip!”

The only thing holding me back from going off on this big oaf is that I hope we’re experiencing some sort of linguistic misunderstanding. Maybe in Roman dialect these words mean something different to him. Let’s clear this up.

I ask him the meaning of his words.

“
Che significa queste frase, Crip o Blood?” 
I ask smiling.

“Gang bang, yo! Check yourself, fool!”

Goddamn it.

I’m going home.

I begin to walk away when he suddenly calls after me.

“Wait! I’m a very big fan of the Wild West! I shoot guns. Six Shooter. BANG! BANG! BANG!”

Oh shit…

I suddenly realize what’s going on.

This crazy son of a bitch is Holofernes!

I turn slowly back to him as he stands up from his desk.

He’s a huge bastard with a square head and jaw.

His mouth is full of tightly packed monstrous teeth. When he smiles they radiate immorality.

“You like weapons, do ya?” I ask cautiously.

“
Like
?” he yells back at me, making me jump a little. “I love guns. They are my passion. They are what I live for. Come here, homie!”

Did that Herman-Munster-looking jerk just call me,
homie?

I walk back to the window, now extremely happy that there’s a pane of bulletproof glass between us.

“Yes. I shoot Six Shooter for show. Competition! I am Cowboy Action Shooter.”

He points to the wall, and I’ll be damned if that big Frankenstein-looking bastard doesn’t have a poster of himself tacked to the wall wearing a cowboy outfit. As God is my witness, the fool is wearing a 10-gallon hat. As if he wasn’t tall enough as it is, he’s actually going to compound it all by plopping a giant Hoss Cartwright hat atop his fat skull.

“Peacemaker! I fire Peacemaker!”

The guy goes on to talk a hole in my head about his weapons of choice: Winchester Lever-Action rifles; Double Barrel shotguns; and of course, the classic Colt Single Action Army Peacemaker—the gun of choice for Clint Eastwood’s legendary western character,
The Man With No Name.

The guard stops talking, and in the quiet is when I really begin to get anxious as he stares at me, menacingly. He reaches down at his hip and snatches his Glock 9mm from its holster.

I nervously take a step back.

He begins to yell at me, punching his glock into the air with each syllable for emphasis.

“Crip or blood?” he bellows at me. “I am man with no name! Crip or blood?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“HAHAHAHA!” the guard suddenly bursts out laughing.

He holsters his weapon, falls back down into his chair with a swagger.

“What can I do for you my friend?
Dirmi
,” he asks sweetly.

My mouth still hangs in shock at this fool pulling his nine on me.

“Um…right. Look, I’m here because my friend asked me to take a picture of a mural.”

I take out my iPhone and try to read the name of the room, but I flub the Italian pronunciation. You’ll have to excuse me because I’m still a bit nervous after this fool PULLED HIS GODDAMN GLOCK ON ME!

Seriously, what the hell!

“Give me your phone,” he orders as he motions for me to slide my expensive device, my only link with home, under the glass.

I watch as his fat digit begins to finger my precious iPhone, scrolling through Ashok’s email.

“Ah!” he says as he stands up and calls for another guard to watch his post. Holofernes then bursts out of his office and slaps my iPhone back into my hand as if it’s not a four-hundred-dollar piece of precious computing equipment.

“Follow me, partner!” he says with an Ice Cube scowl on his face.

I try to keep up with him as he bounds up the stairs, skipping bunches of steps with each giant stride, the students parting for him. It’s like a sperm whale coasting through a school of herring.

We arrive at what I assume is the room I’ve been looking for.

“Here we are.”

“Cool.”

The door of the room is closed and another guard stands steadfastly in front of it. He’s obviously a subordinate as he steps aside passively and allows Holofernes to peek inside.

“
Scusi! Scuisi!” 
Holofernes begs as he slowly shuts the door.

He turns his massive frame to me, his scowl burning a hole into my head.

“Look, there is testing going on in there,” says Holofernes.

Oh shit.

I heard about this testingin Italy. It usually involves hundreds of students taking an exam all at once and the stakes are always jacked up. This is a country where the die is cast on your adult occupation by the time you reach the age of fourteen. Back in the states, at age fourteen the only adult thing on my mind was Real Sex on HBO Late Night.

“Okay. Fine. I’ll come back. No problem,” I say.

“No. We do this now!” orders Holofernes. “You’re here on my watch and I’m not going to allow you to become somebody else’s problem. What? You’re going to run away every time you come up to a little trouble. What kind of gangster are you?”

“I’m not a gang member,” I say angrily.

“No. You’re too big of a pussy to be down with
tha boyz
. Pull up your panties and get in that room,” he demands, perfectly aping any character in any LA gang movie made since ’91.

It’s at this point that the other guard decides to get in on the action.

“
Cosa?”
he asks, jutting his chin out in a questioning jerk.

“This one wants to leave,” says Holofernes.

“
Cosa? Asolutamente no.
Come on,” the guard says as the two escort me toward the classroom like I’m a crook on a perp walk.

This is seriously getting out of hand. I’m supposed to be on vacation, and this is the second time I’ve had armed security forcibly moving me. Now it’s two armed Italian rent-a-cops forcing me to barge into a university testing hall.

BOOM!

They push me through the doors and into the classroom, and instantly, I’m face-to-face with about 300 students. I’ve rudely interrupted the test of their lives. I can tell just by looking at the teacher that she is a no-nonsense taskmaster, none too happy with the intrusion on her exams. She yanks Holofernes aside for a frank discussion, seemingly immune to his Ice Cube like scowl. All I can do is ask myself,
how the hell did I get here?