Robbing a Train

On the train. Feeling such a strong compulsion to come home. I miss home so much but at the same time I am right on that edge of having this language just spill open for me. right on that edge and my brain is struggling so much during the classes to learn and learn so I am really getting off on this. but the neighborhood I am in Rome just sucks so much that my heart is dying. I long for beauty so much. Rome has beauty yes but it is a zoo of tourists so you don't get that beautiful vibe. You end up copping a tourist vibe. And my neighborhood is in the worst part of town. All graffiti and bums and Asians selling cheap shit on the streets. 

So today I hopped on a train and headed for the tiny beach town of Gaeta. It is right on the ocean. The reason is because five miles inland is Itri. The town where my grandmothers mother and both of her parents are from. I am at the hotel now. right on the water. I got chills the whole way here. when I got here I felt so good for some reason. Little by little the pieces are coming together, the story of my life. of who I am and how I got to be who I am. It makes my heart beat faster. To think that tomorrow morning I will go this city where part my family lived for so many years before coming to America. 

The train I took was very old. It had these little booths inside each car that I have never seen before. you go in the booth with like five other people and close the door to get the AC. Very weird. As usual the train was packed and so I'm sitting in this little booth with like five total degenerate guys. They look totally different than northern Italians. They honestly look like middle eastern. Italy was invaded and taken over by the middle east in the first millennium I think so and it shows in the people of the South a lot. We were headed for napoli, which is the big town near the town of Eboli where my grandpa is from. so I was fascinated to be in the same booth with these men. They were dark skinned like grandpa. Very dirty. Bad teeth. Their accents are much different. They soften all their words with a “ssssshhhhh” sound. I could not understand their Italian very well at all. they were very animated, like you see in the movies. Their hands flailing around. They touched each other a lot. Grabbing each others faces and saying things like “and you, your so fucking beautiful you sonata bitch “ things like this. slapping each other’s backs. They spoke really loud. And very aggressive. I have only seen this in the movies. It was right out of a gangster movie. I kept quiet. Tried to mind my own biz. A little intimidated. For the first fifteen minutes they talked about salads and cheeses and argued vehemently about it. then into something I did not understand. 

Then the main guy, like the leader of their group, talks to me and asks me if he can light up a joint. I'm like go ahead and then they all realized that I didn't speak italian very well so we all started talking. they were very nice if not pretty fucking scary. I didn't tell them I was Fishy or who I was. Instead I told them my name was Edoardo, Ed for short, just made up this name out of the blue. I told them where my family was from and they were very happy. They told me my name was classic italian. They introduced themselves. Federico, Alfonzo, Frankie, Tony, and Gaetano. I told them my great great grandfather’s name was gaetano and we all laughed. By this time the booth was totally filled with pot smoke and they had the window closed. So we were all laughing our heads off at their attempt at English and my attempt at Italian. and the fact that we couldn’t see a damn thing in the car now from all the smoke...

I looked out the window and watched the landscape of Italy totally change. Big mountains in the background. Little hills in front. Hundreds of houses stacked up on top of each other on these mountains and hills. And below that tons of fields and vineyards. I'm in fucking Italy I thought. With a bunch of guys from napoli, just like my grandfathers family. This is cool. After a while they quieted.

Towards the end of the trip, they started talking again aggressively. They went into the hallway area on the car and keep looking. Some guys came up and gave them weird signals to the main guy in our booth Federico. One by one they all got out of the booth. I'm like “o.k. what the fuck is going on here?”

Tony comes back in the car and takes down a big bag from the baggage rack above me. he opens it up and pulls out a gun. My heart started racing so fast I thought I surely looked scared shitless. But I just sat there and tried to stare out the window at the scenery. He looked at me to see what I was doing. But I did not look back at him. he left me alone in the booth. And walked into the hallway. Then I started hearing all this commotion. And I could recognize the voices of the boys from my booth screaming and being aggressive. I could see their reflection sometimes through this window in the hallway area. They were robbing people on the train. One booth at a time. over a period of ten minutes they proceeded to rob from everyone on that car. they were very nervous and they were yelling at each other. After about ten minutes of this they came back into the booth the five of them and sat down. All of them were shaking their legs and moving around a lot. They all looked at me. and they all lit up cigarettes. I looked at the main guy Federico. Like I was next to be robbed. I noticed that my brain immediately started calculating what I could afford to lose and not. I can lose everything but the camera and the laptop because these have things on them that I cannot replace. All my pictures and all my writing. they can have everything else. I can always buy the stuff again. I wasn't carrying barely any money anyway. 

Federico was shaking his leg and smoking very nervously. He looked at me. like the rest of them I noticed he had his hair slicked back. totally different than guys from the north. Dark eyes. dark skin. “Edoardo you scared” he asked me. “Uh yeah,” I replied, “you just robbed every fucking person on the fucking train man,” I said in a very broken Italian. “Its cool,” he tells me. “your cool...” And he laughed. And then they all laughed. Then amazingly they all started getting up and walking out of the booth towards the opposite direction, maybe they were getting off or going to hide. I don't know. ten minutes later, I got to my stop. I was the only one on that train that didn't get robbed. I grabbed my bags and got off the train. As I was walking with my bags from the gate to the inside of the station they all hung their heads and arms out the windows and said good bye and good luck to me. Yelling “Ciao Edoardo! Buon fortuna!” It was a thing of beauty. How the hell did I just get out of that situation?

[when we were young we had to sit at the table during meals and just listen to the grown ups. Remember that? we couldn’t get up and go if we wanted to. and often times we couldn’t join in the conversation. And almost all the time we didn't want to anyway, because we didn't care about what they were speaking. remember that? once we grow up, none of that matters. We can do whatever we want to. I just realized the other night. I think that being here is making me have all these memories from my childhood since I am thinking so much about my family while I am here. the other thing I realized is that we don't have to eat all the food on a plate that someone gives you. like at a restaurant or even when we’re young. Most people have this tendency to eat all the food they are given at a restaurant. But portions are pretty relative. Depending on where you go. you can always just leave what you don't want. The goal is not to finish the plate, although some people think that. the goal is just to satisfy your hunger. I think this mistake is ingrained in some of us by unknowing parents who are so fearful that their children will somehow starve to death that they make them finish all the food on their plate. When I was young I always thought that was very funny. It was some kind of mandate. As if you were breaking a law or something by not doing so. I hope when I have children that I do not do crazy things like that to them.]