Four Things My Geeky-Jock-of-a-Best-Friend Must Do in Europe (3 page)

It might be Saturday morning

Dear Delia,

I’ve never been so tired in my whole, entire life. Not even the time you made me stay up all night before that all-day band performance. (NO, I haven’t gotten over that yet.) I feel like an old sock that’s been worn by a hundred people, then dragged along the street for a few years, then stomped on by elephants, then used to clean toilets. In the boys’ locker room.

That was the worst flight EVER. You should have seen my water bottle squeezing in when we were landing in Rome. My head was squeezing in like that, too. You know those little toys with the eyeballs made of goo that pop out when you squish the head? Well, my head did that. My eyeballs were on the floor. Really. REALLY. (Okay, FINE, don’t believe me.)

When we got off the plane, we were greeted by a brigade of smiling Italian teenage boys in berets and uniforms. I immediately thought, “Delia would LOVE it here!” A couple of them smiled at me, even, and winked, and I started thinking that maybe it wasn’t going to be so hard to find Euro-hotties, after all. I was so completely out of it from sleep deprivation and the head-squeezing thing that I careened right over to where they were standing and started to actually introduce myself (although I’m not entirely sure I remembered my own name at that point). THEN I noticed the guns. Each of those cute Italian guys was carrying a MAJOR automatic rifle. You KNOW how I HATE guns.

(Well, you wouldn’t want me compromising my beliefs just to meet a Euro-hottie, now, would you?) (Of course you would.)

“It’s because of terrorism, dear,” my mother whispered pseudo-calmly as she guided me (with a death-grip on my arm) past the guns-and-berets guys.

Then we got on yet ANOTHER form of transportation. I bet you can’t guess how many different ways I’ve traveled since I left DC. Hey, I know! I’ll give you a quiz:

To get from Washington, DC, to a cruise ship near Rome, you must:

a) ride in a car

b) walk

c) run

d) use one of those people-mover-floors that are like escalators, only flat

e) use an escalator (would the verb be “escalate”?)

f) use an elevator (elevate?)

g) fly in an airplane

h) take a bus

i) all of the above

Well, here’s the answer: (i) all of the above. SERIOUSLY. We’re on a bus now, heading for a seaside town near Rome. It’s called Civitavecchia (pronounced CHEE-vit-a-vekkia), according to my mother, who asked me to practice saying it. I refused, though, on account that there is no reason for me to know how to say the name of this town. We’re going there to get on the boat, and then the boat LEAVES there. It seems to me that I’ll only need to say the town’s name if I happen to fall out the window of this bus and then have to tell someone where to take me when they pick me up hitchhiking. The window next to my seat is about six inches square, so I don’t think I’ll be falling out of it today.

So, HERE I AM in ITALY! I guess it’s time to describe some thrilling adventures! Well, I’m looking out the window, and I can see a, uh, road. There are cars and buses. And it’s really, really hot here. I don’t think there’s air-conditioning on this bus. Which is making me pretty sleepy. Really sleepy. Really, REALLY sleepy. Oh, look! It’s the ocean! I’ve never seen that EXCELLENT shade of blue...

Sunday

(I know this because the mat outside

the elevator in the ship says so)

Dear Delia,

Oh, my. I must have fallen asleep writing that last letter. I woke up and my pen was smashed against my cheek. I haven’t been able to get rid of the purple mark it left there, so this morning I turned it into a little heart. But I thought that looked silly, and, anyway, I remembered that purple hearts are things that soldiers are given when they get injured in war, and it didn’t seem right to have one on my face. So I made it into a circle, which looked REAL silly, because why would a person have a purple CIRCLE on her face? So I got my blue pen and made petals around the circle, and now I have a flower on my cheek. It looks really, well, RIDICULOUS. I tried to scrub it off, but it’s no use, and now my cheek is red. With a purple and blue flower on it. My sunglasses cover it just a little, but not nearly enough. I sure hope I don’t run into, uh, ANYONE.

It is PARADISE here, Delia, let me tell you. The sun is shining, and here I am, next to a sparkling pool, looking at Mount Vesuvius and listening to a Caribbean band. (And wondering if this band realizes they are on the wrong sea.) I slept twelve hours last night and then ran some laps on the top deck of the boat, gazing out at the INCREDIBLE, hypnotic BLUE of the Mediterranean. It doesn’t look at all like the Atlantic Ocean. It’s SO much darker. Somewhere between Hope-diamond blue and midnight blue. How nice it is to be surrounded by all this blueness. Mediterranean blue is my NEW favorite shade of BLUE.

I am TOTALLY rejuvenated now, and except for the obnoxious flower on my cheek, and the stupid writing all over my hand, life is GREAT. I’m actually wearing the bikini today, Delia, BELIEVE it or not. (SEE? I’m making progress with the LIST.) I put it on and looked in the mirror of our stateroom (that’s cruise-speak for bedroom), and I started to think that maybe I didn’t look too awfully bad in it, and I was STEPPING OUT of the cute, little door (which makes it seem like we’re living in a hobbit hole), when my mother said, “You know, Brady, you really HAVE developed quite a bit lately.” At which point, I grabbed a big T-shirt from my bag and put it over the bikini.

SORRY. I’m just not ready. There’s NOTHING wrong with swimming in a T-shirt, anyway. So WHAT if it gets caught up around your neck and keeps your arms from going over your head when you’re trying to do the freestyle? Who CARES if it bloats up and makes you look like a blowfish when you’re doing the backstroke? What of it?

Through the fog of jet lag, I am starting to remember some things about yesterday’s arrival at port. It wasn’t “thrilling,” but I’m going to tell you about it anyway. In Civitavecchia, we went to this building at the docks, where bunches of people were sitting around on benches with their suitcases, all looking extremely tired. Every once in a while, someone in a uniform called out a number or a letter or something, and people slowly got up and grabbed their suitcases, woke up their other family members, and schlepped (as my grandmother says), slow motion, across the hot room and into a line.

I watched this for a while, and in my quasi-sleep-state I was convinced I was on Ellis Island. It made perfect sense, too—at least in the la-la land I was in. It was not air and land travel which had worn me out, but TIME travel. I was a composite of my ancestors who had journeyed from Russia and Germany and Ireland, sick of Cossacks and Nazis and bad potatoes. I was ONE with their struggles. That IS, until I fell asleep again on my backpack.

I woke up thinking about those ancestors this morning. I felt, at first, kind of guilty, because they were poor immigrants, and they couldn’t afford to take vacations, I’m sure. Of course, they probably would have had no interest at all in going back across the Atlantic to get on a BOAT, of all things. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my great-great-grandparents (or whoever) would be really happy if they knew I was able to take such a COOL trip. It would mean that their idea to come to America had been a good one. Right? Didn’t they want their descendants to have better lives? Wasn’t that the point?

Okay. I’m done with that now. I feel better.

The ship sailed during the night and arrived early this morning in the port of Naples, Italy. My mother keeps saying we should go see the city, but I keep saying we should stay at the pool for a while longer. The water is actually very cold in the pool, and—here’s a shocker—it’s salty. This weirded me out at first, but then some waiter-type person who was delivering drinks with little umbrellas (the drinks had the little umbrellas, not the waiter-type person) told us that the pool is emptied every night and then filled up with water right out of the sea. Is that cool, or what? (Cold, actually. As I’ve already said.)

“What about Pompeii?” my mother has just suggested.

Pompeii! Now, THAT has potential. Lost world and all.

Ciao, baby!

Still Sunday, early evening-ish

Dear Delia,

Pompeii is very cool, a little weird, and decidedly creepy. Except for all the roofs being gone from every building, the town looks just as it did in 79 AD right before it was covered in spewing ash. (Spewing Ash. That would be a good name for a band, don’t you think?) It was there one day—a regular Italian town with, like, 20,000 people living in it—and then it WASN’T there. It was HISTORY. (Hehe.)

We took this bus there with an Italian guide who had one of those hairdos that’s parted real far over on the side and then lopped over the top of the head, very convincingly (NON) covering up a humongoid bald spot. His name was Sergio.

He gave us stickers to wear—big, round, green things with white numbers on them. I was number 11, and—choosing not to put this big round thing on my top, for fear of drawing unneeded attention to my, uh, TOP—I placed it on the right butt of my shorts. Which, for some reason, caused a reaction from my mother.

“Brady,” she said, “don’t you think that’s inappropriate?”

“What’s wrong with wearing a sticker on the right butt of my shorts?” I asked her.

“It’s just, somehow, inappropriate,” she said.

(I know what I’m getting her, now, for her birthday. A thesaurus, so she can find some synonyms for “inappropriate.” This is becoming tiresome.)

Even though this made no sense to me, I decided to be an accommodating daughter, and I peeled the sticker off the right butt of my shorts. Then I put it in a different place: the left butt of my shorts.

Her reaction to this was a LOOK and a gesture with her hand. But since I don’t have ESP, and I’m not fluent in sign language (her hand-wave looked something like the one I’ve seen for the word “elephant” . . . or maybe it’s “cabbage”), I had no choice but to ignore her.

I did end up moving the sticker again, but it was not because of my mother. It was because of Sergio.

You see, he said something in Italian to us as we were taking our seats on the bus, IN FRONT (mio madre’s idea—PLEASE!), which my mother scrambled to translate from the Italian phrase book. But before she found anything, he WINKED at her and repeated what he said, in English, with a major Italian accent (probably fake, just to impress tourists), which was, “Beautiful ladies, welcome!”

Then he touched his cheek, looked at me, and said something else in Italian, laughing in an Italian sort of way. I stared at him like he was from Mars (which I think he may be), while my mother flipped through the book again. Of course, he translated himself before she could find any of the words. (WHY, exactly, was he speaking in two languages?) Touching his cheek again, he said to me, “Flower child?” and laughed some more. I grabbed the phrase book from Mom and began to search for the Italian word for “moron” (which, by the way, is not in there—what a useless book), but by then he had taken up the microphone and was speaking to the bus-load of people in some combination of Italian and English (and Martian).

“Your little flower’s cute,” my mother whispered to me.

CUTE. Yes, I strive for CUTE. And I especially want people of the boomer generation to think I am CUTE
.
So I peeled the number sticker off my shorts and put it over the flower on my cheek.

I know that made no sense. But it was somehow satisfying.

When we got to Pompeii, Sergio displayed more mad tendencies by producing from under his seat a red umbrella. There was not a cloud in the sky, but he carried this umbrella around Pompeii. I did find it useful, though, since I made the decision early on that I was going to stay as far from him as possible, and the red umbrella served as sort of a flag to show me where he was, so I could hang back a bit and not get lost. In the lost city. (Hehe.)

When we were standing at Pompeii’s forum—which is a Roman-type gathering place, sort of like the grass fields on the Mall at the Washington Monument—we had a perfect view of the mountain, and Sergio told us what it was like for the people of Pompeii the day they got buried by the volcano. He said that people stood right where we were standing, probably talking about ordinary things and enjoying the view, when the ground started to shake. Then, before they could get home to their families or find their best friends, the top of Vesuvius blew off in an enormous explosion of lava, and even though the mountain was a few miles away, darkness fell over Pompeii within MINUTES, and 20 feet of ash covered the city within hours. And then it was all quiet. Very quiet. Very, VERY quiet. And it stayed like that, forgotten in time, until the 1700s, when someone was out digging a hole and found the place.

I saw some of the original Pompeii people while I was there. And I don’t mean ghosts, either. I saw THE PEOPLE. Well, OKAY, they were models. You see, the archaeologists who dug out Pompeii found lots of bodies, but there wasn’t much left of them, except these perfect outlines of their shapes in hardened ash. So they filled the outlines up with plaster and made casts of the people. There are a couple of buildings that have these people-casts in them, frozen in time, running, hugging other people. Molto eerie.

We didn’t see all of Pompeii because it’s really big, and I guess tour groups just get to see the guide’s favorite places. Sergio, as it turns out, has a special interest in frescoes, so we got to see lots of those. Frescoes, Delia, are murals that Italians have been painting forever and ever. They have some way of getting the paint to bleed into the wall, which sounds weird but seems to work pretty well, seeing how the frescoes of Pompeii were put there before 79 AD, then had a volcano erupt all over them, then were buried in ash for about 1,700 years, then were dug out and looked at by tourists for another 200 years or so, and the pictures are STILL there.

One place that had really cool frescoes was the House of Venus. My fave was a painting of—can you guess?—VENUS, lounging about in a seashell with little birdies flitting around. (I do mean the GODDESS Venus, not the planet, Delia.) And then there was this other fresco-covered place with a SPLENDID name: the Villa of Mysteries. In it there was a huge mural that went all around a room and was sort of like a life-sized comic strip. You see, there were different panels, and a story was going on in them. But it wasn’t the kind of story you’d see in the Sunday comics, because it seemed to involve things like animal sacrifices and drinking blood. I can’t tell you anything else about it, though (oh, I know you are MOLTO disappointed), because when Sergio got to that part in the explanation, the panini I had eaten for lunch started rumbling in my stomach. Fearing that I might be the next thing spewing all over Pompeii, I wandered outside to wait until we moved to a new destination, which, I figured, HAD to be less gross.

Uh, WRO-ONG!

The next (and thankfully the last) house we went to was the House of Vettii. At first, it seemed like a completely harmless, cozy home. There were frescoes of cupids all over the walls, everywhere, doing all kinds of fun things—cooking, making jewelry and clothing, chariot-racing, surfing on the backs of crustaceans. (You know, typical cupidesque things.) I was making a little game of counting how many cupids I found and had sort of wandered off on my own, when I rounded a corner and happened upon this fresco that covered a whole wall in what turned out to be the entry foyer of the house.

This thing, Delia, ranks right up there on my all-time, Top Ten List of Hideous Things I Have Encountered in Life. It was of a truly ugly figure, which had a HUGE you-know-what (think health class—the human body—males), and he was (I’m NOT making this up) weighing IT on a scale.

My first thought: Did the Vettii family have any kids? Because, if so, I feel REALLY sorry for them. Not only did they have a volcano erupt all over them, but—and this may be worse, actually—they had to bring their friends home to a house with THAT next to the front door.

My second thought: Must erase all memories of this experience from my mind FOREVER.

My third thought: Where am I?

(Hehe. I DO amuse myself, don’t I?)

SO, I turned to leave the room, but found myself suddenly surrounded by Sergio and his roving band of tourists.

“This fresco of the God of Fertility is one of the more important pieces in Pompeii,” Sergio was saying, and he went on about other stuff, but I was doing my best to block it out.

“La-la-la-la-la . . .” I said to myself (NO, not out LOUD), until the crowd melted away, and I was alone again. Actually, my mother was standing next to me. I guess she’d had enough of Sergio’s twisted tour. I was glad she’d appeared, because there was something I needed to ask her.

“Madre,” I said, pointing to the fresco, “don’t you think that’s inappropriate?”

She was non-responsive. (Catatonic, perhaps.)

I slipped the phrase book out of her hand, began flipping through it, and said, “I wonder what the Italians call a, uh—” which seemed to rouse her from her state. She grabbed the book away from me—rather rudely, in my opinion. (And I thought education was the POINT of the trip.)

Before we left Pompeii we went to the gift shop so I could find a postcard of the Venus fresco to send you, but the first card I saw was of the fertility god, so I had to run, screaming, from the gift shop. (Okay, not really, but in my mind I did.)

Guess what? I have just found some interesting Italian sentences in my mother’s little book (which doesn’t contain the Italian word for you-know-what, by the way), in a chapter entitled, COMMON PHRASES NEEDED BY TRAVELERS. Here’s a good one: “Dov’e la passerella?” It means “where is the gangplank?” And how about this one: “C’e tropp’acqua nella barca.” That means “there’s too much water in the boat.”

Do you find it troubling that these are considered “common phrases”? I do. Especially since I just heard the ship’s horn, which means we’re heading out into open water.

Tomorrow we’ll be at sea all day, and then we get to Barcelona the next day. (That’s in Spain, Delia.) But right now, I’m STARVED, so we are going to the dining room. Then there’s a party in the teen lounge, according to this little invitation I found on my bed when we got back to the stateroom today. It was under the claw of a lizard, which our porter (in land-speak: butler) had somehow made from a bath towel. I don’t know if I’m going to the party or not. Mom says there are teen parties every night, so I’ll have other chances.

I’m kind of tired anyway.

It’s MY vacation, after all.

I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.

I might want to READ or something, you know.

Okay. I’m SCARED to go. I’ve SAID it. So leave me alone.

p.s. I SAID, LEAVE ME ALONE!