The Turk Who Loved Apples (17 page)

Even as I was spending time with the Lucy crew, I was also, to my surprise, growing tighter with the Bodhi Tree gang. Jed, the academic, introduced me to the Ubiquity record label and its compilations of dancehall jazz; his girlfriend, a Japanese woman with whom he communicated solely in Vietnamese, lent me a CD by UA, the quirky Tori
Amos of J-pop. Ted, the annoying New Yorker, helped me form a biweekly writers' workshop with Douglas and a couple of other wannabe writers, and although I bristled at his personality and heartily criticized his short stories (and he mine), we seemed to have come to an understanding. We didn't necessarily like each other, but we related—we were in this together. And we all spent nights drinking and smoking pot on someone's balcony, playing silly memory games (“One duck, couple of sheep, three brown bear, four running hare . . . ”) and flirting with friends of friends who'd come over from London for a few weeks, or were moving to Phnom Penh next month.

Once or twice, I tried to integrate the groups—the Bodhi Tree gang and the Lucy crew. Steve, Mai, and Tuyen were aspiring fiction writers, so I invited them to my workshop, but they just didn't fit in with Douglas and Ted—different goals, different sensibilities. The conversation was stilted, unfree. From then on, I kept my circles of friends separate.

But “from then on” did not last long. June rolled around, bringing with it clouds, humidity, the prospect of an end to the intense heat, and the looming certainty that soon I too would be leaving Vietnam behind. In the early spring, before I'd found my rhythm and my place in Saigon, I'd applied to graduate school—and gotten in. I'd looked into the future and seen none for me in Vietnam, and so now, at the end of July, I'd return to America. And without regrets, I figured. A month earlier, you couldn't have dragged me away from these new friends—the first people who'd accepted me, so calmly, as an equal. Now, after the ups and downs, our parting seemed natural and inevitable, and therefore not something to be mourned. There must have been a going-away party—probably at a goat hot pot restaurant with loads of rice wine—but I don't remember a thing.

F
ifteen years later, here's how things stand: Mai and Jason moved to Africa, married, then split up almost immediately, and Mai moved to New York and eventually married a guy who used to date
Tuyen's sister; their kid and mine play together happily, though less frequently than we'd like. Steve and Lien lived apart, got back together, had kids, got divorced. Hanh married her college sweetheart and lives in Massachusetts. After stints in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Manila, Hanoi, and, once again, Saigon, Tuyen lives in Mongolia, and remains single. Douglas and I were roommates for awhile in New York, then drifted apart; now we get together for drinks or lunch a couple of times a year. Ted moved to New York and now is one of my closest friends. I guess he mellowed out. Maybe I did, too.

Vivian I sold in Seattle for $1,800. I never heard from her again.

A
fter what felt like thirty minutes but was probably no more than five, I sensed movement on the other side of the police car. The lights were still in my face, and I squinted to catch a glimpse of what I thought would be Cassady's bruised, handcuffed form being dragged into the road.

Instead, Cassady and the policeman had their arms around each other's shoulders, and were laughing enthusiastically, like old friends. I didn't get it. They'd been hurtling toward a confrontation, but it had become something else entirely. The cop clapped Cassady on the back, told us to be careful on the road, and left us in the dark. I was too dumbfounded to ask Cassady what had happened.

“This is my island,” Cassady said as we walked on the shoulder. “I built that road, ha!”

The party was just up the road, in the front yard of a ramshackle house. Twenty men and women on the verge of being rednecks sat around drinking beer and smoking weed, which they eagerly offered me when they heard I was from New York. “Gotta try some of this B.C. bud!” was the refrain.

But the initial welcome soon turned sour. Cassady decided to bring up my
New York Times
affiliation again and again, and his
words had a nasty edge to them, like some kind of taunt. Others joined in the sneering, too, though with less vigor than Cassady. He was drunk, sure, but I was pissed. Hadn't I stood by him when the police threatened? Did that count for nothing? Instead of showing my anger and resentment, I took another hit off the joint, finished my beer, and said good night. I was pretty sure I would never see Cassady or the others again, and that was fine by me. I'd done my duty, and they'd done theirs: We'd been ourselves, for better and for worse.

________

*
Not his real name.

        
From: Stuart

        
Subject: Re: Back in NYC
. . .

        
Date: March 31, 2006

        
Matt:

        
How about coming by on Tuesday? I have a meeting from 11–12 and then from 3–3:30, but otherwise I'm free. Meanwhile, something to think about: How would you feel about a three-month, round-the-world trip later this spring, blogging from the road and gathering material for a couple of features along the way, if we were able to make it financially feasible for you?

        
From: Matt

        
Subject: Re: Back in NYC
. . .

        
Date: April 1, 2006

        
Let's try for 3:30 on Tuesday. That'll be best for me
.

        
A three-month, round-the-world trip?

        
Sure, why not? See you Tuesday
. . .

Bologna sucked. I only went because I'd already fucked up Venice. And I only went to Venice because the €50 nonstop flight was the cheapest out of Barcelona, an early stop on the round-the-world summer adventure that launched me as the
New York Times
' Frugal Traveler, the gig that everybody called “the best job in the world”—and an opportunity ripe for fucking up.

I didn't realize how bad things were until I got to Venice. Actually, I thought I was pretty smart. For example, I'd heard that lodgings were cheaper on Venice's Lido Island, so I'd booked a room there (via
LastMinute.com
) at the Hotel Windsor, on Viale Venezia. But when, after a bus ride from the airport and a vaporetto journey across Venice, I showed up on the Lido and asked around for the Windsor, no one had heard of it. Nor did they know where Viale Venezia was. Finally, the manager of the cell phone store where I was buying an Italian SIM card asked to see the confirmation e-mail from
LastMinute.com
. I showed him.

Oh, this was easy, he said as if it happened every day: I had the wrong Lido. This right here was the Lido di Venezia, but I wanted the Lido di Jesolo, an hour or so northeast by ferry and by bus—and an eternity from the romance and mystery of Venice. What could I do? I'd already paid for the room, a condition of
LastMinute.com
, and since my Frugal Traveler budget limited me to $100 a day, or about €80, I couldn't change course. I took the ferry and the bus, and spent a night in a hotel I've since forgotten. The next morning, ashamed of my mistake and unwilling to commute, I fled south to Bologna.

There things improved, but only temporarily. For a couple of midmorning hours, I walked around the city's historic center, loving the bricks and the cobblestones, the arched windows and arcaded passageways, the feeling of being in a true, old Italian city. At a café near Piazza Maggiore, I heard the echo of choirs singing somewhere and watched thin sunbeams fighting their way through a glittering light rain.

Over successive espressos, I hatched a brilliant plan for staying here on the cheap. It was late May, and the semester at the University of Bologna (founded in 1088!) was coming to an end. Many of the school's one hundred thousand students were leaving town, and those who were staying were losing their roommates; on notice boards near university buildings, I'd seen flyers advertising vacant rooms. Surely, at least one student would be happy to put up a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker for five or six nights in exchange for several dozen euros. When the rain slackened, I got up and rolled my suitcase down the street toward the university.

At first, I got lucky: roommate wanted; starting May 24; €17 a day. I called the ad's number on my cell and explained myself in halting Italian.

Okay, come on over, the student said, explaining that I'd have to take a bus or two from Piazza Maggiore to reach his place. Might take thirty minutes. Maybe forty-five.

See you soon, I said. Then I walked back to Piazza Maggiore to wait for my bus.

That's when it began to rain, harder this time. In about thirty seconds (maybe forty-five), I went from elation to absolute dejection. It all seemed so hopeless. I was tired, wet and getting wetter, and I didn't really understand where the apartment was or how to take public transportation there, not to mention that the now-heavy rain was (I was being told by fellow straphangers) delaying the bus line by two hours. A taxi was an exorbitant impossibility. And I wasn't sure I'd want to stay there anyway, since it seemed far from anything I might actually want to see in Bologna. And then what? I'd have to look at another apartment, and another and another, dragging my crap behind me. As I stewed in the rain, a procession of priests and the faithful made its way across the piazza, carrying an image of the Madonna to the Basilica of Saint Petronius.

My phone rang. It was Sarah, a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University's Bologna Center. A few days earlier, I'd e-mailed
her entire class, telling them I was an alumnus passing through on a round-the-world trip “and since I don't actually know anyone there, I was wondering if any of you would be up for having a drink or meal with me.” (I did not mention the
New York Times.)
Now Sarah was asking if I wanted coffee. Sure, I said.

A couple of hours later, I'd landed myself a complimentary spare bed in one of Sarah's colleagues' half-vacated dorm room. (I didn't ask, they offered.) Fine, so I wouldn't have an Italian student guiding me through Bologna, but I did have a posse of Americans willing to show me the city's best bars for aperitivi, where drinks are served alongside free, often grandiose spreads: cured meats and salty cheeses and dark olives and slightly overcooked pasta—a dream come true for impoverished scholars and travelers alike.

But after the first night of wine, camaraderie, and complimentary snacks, my Bologna fractured. With exams to take and papers to finish, the students were busy during the day, leaving me to wander the city alone. And that was what I did, clueless and aimless. I slept late, I glanced at the remains of the old Roman stock exchange, and I hiked up through 666 arches to the Sanctuario di Madonna di San Luca, one of many Western European religious structures that failed to impress me. And in a region known for having the best food in Italy, I was eating terribly—cheap pizza by the slice, mostly, with aperitivi-based dinners. All around me, I imagined, Italians were drowning in ragù bolognese, while I subsisted on oily, free focaccia.