6
Lampredotto
The plastic cups and utensils here in Bedford Hills leave a flat aftertaste, an echo of regret that rings anew at every meal. Sip of enervated coffee, spiral of contrition; mouthful of clammy gray oatmeal, swallow of remorse. A year into my sentence and I remain unsure what I regret. In my heart and in my guts, I know that if I had the chance, I’d kill them again. Maybe I regret not killing more, or killing better, perpetrating more, better murders with higher style and slyer humor. Murder in the vein of Schiaparelli’s Skeleton Dress.
Murder as homage to Louise Bourgeois’s Maman. Murder with the final beauty of Zaha Hadid’s Bridge Pavilion in Spain. Murders kissed with an artistic certainty, uniting us in our collective will to cross to our filigreed, immutable end.
Of all my men, Marco is the most important, though it might be more accurate to say that he was the most lasting. What is importance, anyway, but the weight of experience. Marco and I have the most history; our lives are the most inextricably bound. Marco and I grew together like wisteria vine on a building that, as the vine’s many tendrils burrow into the brick, causes the structure to crumble. The inescapable, imperceptible power of time reduces even mountains to molehills. Marco is the man I’ve known the most, the longest, and the best; we shaped each other during our lives, and we shape each other even after death.
Marco and I met in Siena in 1983 during my junior college semester abroad. Though Marco had graduated the Università degli Studi di Siena with a Scienze Biologiche degree, he lingered like a
mysterious stain. He traveled with a complement of testosterone- charged men, all decked out in the swinging velvet crush and smudgy eyeliner of the New Romantic, slaves to the glittery, fashionable charms of Bowie, Roxy Music, and Adam Ant. Marco and his friends were the best post-punk that la bella figura could bring in their tight black trousers, frock coats, and ruffled white shirts.
Life with Marco was delectable. I liked having a slightly older Italian boy to drink wine with and fuck on long, languid afternoons.
He had a Vespa, of course, and I loved careening around on the back of it, helmet on head, cigarette on my lips, Marco’s narrow hips scissored between my long thighs. I enjoyed having a man with whom I could visit other cities—Firenze and its salty joy of lampredotto sandwiches, sleepy Montalcino and its Brunello and pinci, Radda and its Chianti and its pici. And to be candid, most of all I liked having an agreeable Italian man on my arm when I didn’t want to be bothered by other Italian men.
You’ve seen “American Girl in Italy,” that famous Ruth Orkin black-and-white shot of the tall brunette sashaying past a pack of braying Italians, louche and lounging in suits. It’s a cliché because it’s true; you couldn’t walk down an Italian street without men slavering like dogs at veal bones. Though it was often uncomfortable to be a lone woman in Italy, it was sometimes even more uncomfortable to be in a group of women, especially a group of two or three American girls, or two or three non-Italian Europeans—in those days, Italian men weren’t adept at telling an American from a German from a Brit from a Swede, particularly if we were all speaking English. You and your friends would be in line at the pizzeria to get a bite after class, standing at the bar in a café to drink espresso, or standing in the piazza and deciding where you were going for dinner, and one or five Italian boys would glom on to your group like remora on sharks, unclear even to themselves what they hoped to accomplish.
I found Italy an interesting place to be a young American woman.
I rather enjoyed being objectified. I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining. It becomes annoying only when they start talking, as if I’d have any interest in anything that comes out of their mouths.
I remember this one man in Siena. Every Tuesday and Thursday, he would follow me from literature class to the pensione where I lived. I didn’t have class these afternoons, and I cherished this time by myself. (One thing about Italy: the natives don’t trust people who like to be alone. Italians abide by the saying, “Chi mangia solo crepa solo”—he who eats alone dies alone. I myself adore eating alone.
Like my hero M.F.K. Fisher, I love sitting at a restaurant table and chewing each bite thoughtfully and completely, lavishing every morsel with my undivided attention. Italians consider this kind of solitary endeavor an aberration; it horrifies them. Forgive the meandering. Sometimes it’s hard to keep a tale on the straight and narrow.) The man who followed me would watch me exit through the school’s stone archway, and he would peel himself from the side of the wall like a shadow. He would walk beside or behind me, talking in my ear. “Signorina, why do you-a notta talk to me? You are so beautiful. Like the—what do you call it, the America mountains—the R-r-rockies? You are Americana, si? Please talk to me, say-a one word to die me happy.”
Tuesday after Thursday, week after week, as long as the weather was dry, the same ritual. This man would lie in wait, smoking; he’d see me and separate from the wall; and he’d follow me, whispering Iago-like in my ear. Twice a week, week after week, I would hold my chin up and walk. There was no need to let him know that I could talk to him in his mother tongue, and there was no need to tell Marco about my shadow man, this lanky black-haired shade who trailed me like creepy clockwork. Had I told Marco, he and his gang of roustabout romantics would likely have beaten him to pulp. One of the wonderful things about true Italian men is that their default setting is about a cunt hair away from physical violence where their heterosexual bonds are concerned. I do enjoy men with a whiff of menace.
But I didn’t tell Marco, and I hardly spoke to my shadow. I let him slink beside me, sputtering nonsense seductions. After about a month, he started using his hands as well as his voice, briefly touching my elbow, my shoulder, my hip—tiny, tentative taps, as if he were checking whether a pan was hot. After a month, he grew
bolder, physically barring my entrance into my pensione, where my little old nonna pensione owner would often be taking her siesta, her snoring audible. Speech led to touch with this strangely obsessed Italian man, touch led to grabbing, and grabbing led to boldness.
One day he pushed past me as I unlocked the pensione’s door and made it to the top of my stairs. Only my shutting the door in his face stayed him.
And then one Thursday afternoon, I wasn’t fast enough. It was winter, late November or early December, and the lanky shade slithered past me into my room. He grabbed my shoulders and pinned me against the wall, pressing my face against a crack that, when I lay in bed, looked like a rabbit. This close, though, the rabbit was just a crack, a curving, thin fault in the plaster, abstract and disembodied. My face mashed against the wall and his elbow jammed against my spine, I heard the THWCKK of leather whipping through a buckle, the ZZHPP of a zipper unzipping. I felt my skirt lift and my tights and panties pulled roughly to my knees. A sharp elbow dug into my shoulder; my knees buckled from the pressure, and my face slid down the cool plaster wall.
I felt his fingers spread my labia and the sharp jab of his cock entering my pussy. I didn’t speak. I barely breathed. I’m being raped, I thought. Fascinating. I heard the shudder of his breath, felt him spasm against and inside me. Then he stopped, and so fast that it almost felt like a hallucination, he was gone. I straightened my clothes and cleaned my mascara from the plaster wall. I never saw him again. My shadow was no more. He evaporated into the medieval gloom that shrouds Italian towns.
Of course, I got tested for venereal diseases. It was hard work to find an Italian doctor to take my unmarried, American blood and run the tests—so provincial, Italian doctors. I chose a doctor on the wealthy side of town, feigned ignorance of the language, popped a cheap wedding ring on my finger before my visit, and cushioned my request for an STI panel with a breathy sob story about discovering my new husband with a blond “cover” at a nearby hotel. It worked.
Everything was blissfully negative. Whatever depravities my rapine shadow was guilty of, spreading syphilis and gonorrhea wasn’t among them. Naturally, I was on the Pill. I knew from a young age
that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit. Children make me turn on the oven and reach for the rosemary.
Life was merry in Siena; Marco was a lovely companion during my time abroad. He was jovial and gluttonous, two qualities I appreciate in a man. His friends were pleasant enough, and they appreciated our reciprocal relationship: I’d introduce them to fast foreign girls and they’d suffer my presence. My ability to converse in their native language helped—Italians have little patience with Americans and our boorish adherence to English. Marco and I had a grand time. I always enjoyed fucking him.
There was one trouble, however. Unlike my experience with the Pennistone boys, I failed to find any compromising information on Marco. Part of it was that I didn’t know the system well enough. Part of it was that Italy has never been known for its systems. The fact that something as nefarious and weird as the Mafia can replace government in a sizable portion of the country (and the fact that someone as nefarious and weird as Berlusconi can gain and hold power) suggests Italy’s ability to function without much of a system.
In this, America is not like Italy. Americans adore systems. We want a system that obscures the system so that we feel comforted by there being both a system and a conspiracy system behind the system. We Americans are absolute fiends for rules. Italians are not.
It was thus difficult to find dirt on Marco, and it was hard for me to relax into the relationship. For these reasons, the only man other than Marco that I fucked that extended year abroad in Siena was my creeping shadow. I was sure that Marco was dallying with others (and I’m now certain that his occasional trips out of town were to court the woman who would become his embittered Versace-wearing donna). But I couldn’t catch him at it. I knew that Marco wasn’t smarter than me; I just couldn’t prove his stupidity. It was frustrating.
But something about Marco’s malingering in Siena smelled noxious. While it wasn’t that out of character for young Italian men to be unemployed and practicing l’arte di non fare niente—the art of doing nothing—Marco’s dolce far niente was colored by his disquiet over it. I’d sometimes catch him staring with a cat-startled look on his face. We’d be lying in postcoital lassitude, sharing a cigarette, and, defenses down, Marco would freeze and prickle. He’d give me a
rueful smile and brush my hair, as if I liked to be touched after sex, and he’d murmur something about my beauty. It read like a script— his vulnerability, his body’s emotional betrayal, and his deflection on to me. He wore time like a man who feared it would fray and tear. He may have aspired to the relaxed carelessness of the ciondolone, the idler, but Marco was idle only in appearance. At his soul, he was angst-ridden as Kierkegaard pondering his deathbed.
I had to find out why, and I knew if I was vigilant that I would.
Marco’s secret began to coalesce with his absolute refusal to visit Rome, which I found inconceivable. Italians love Rome. A trip to Rome is less a holiday and more a pilgrimage that ends with excellent offal and artichokes. Italians rarely turn down the chance to show off the Eternal City, especially when it’s just a short train ride away. An Italian in Siena refusing to take his foreign girlfriend to Rome would be like a Bostonian refusing to show New York City to an Italian: inconceivable.
I, of course, love Rome. Aside from New York City, Rome is the only place that I could imagine myself living. Rome wants to lie back and let you stroke it, lick it, and devour it whole. Rome makes my head swim with its beauty, the sheer weight of its history, its crazy quilt of architectural movements, and its breathtaking men. The men in Rome saunter like they have great towering monuments between their legs. I find it difficult not to go entirely bent-kneed and supplicant, mouth open and teeth delicately bared, so great is the power of Rome.
But Marco, usually so generous and agreeable in indulging my whims, presented me with stony-faced rejection whenever I raised the topic of visiting the Eternal City.
“Mai,” Marco would say. Never. And then he’d change the subject.
And that was what it took. That refusal. That word. That adamantine tone. I knew that there had to be a reason why Marco, a man who’d drop everything to take a four-hour train ride to Genova to see a secret Stranglers show at the Milk Club, was so implacable about visiting Rome. I began searching for a missed connection, and it took months, but eventually I found one.
It was a business card. Small and unremarkable, found stuck to the bottom of a recently emptied wastebasket. Just a business card for a Roman macelleria, a butcher shop. This plain, utilitarian, stark piece of paper white as a winter landscape slashed with the black of wet trees. One side was in Italian, MACELLERIA IACHINO GIANCARLO, VIA DEL FORTE BRAVETTA 164, ROMA and the name DAVIDE MARCO IACHINO. The other side was in Hebrew, a language I don’t read.
My head spun. I knew Marco’s last name to be Iocco, a name that acts like Smith or Jones in America, inscrutable in terms of place or origin. I held the card in my hand, turning it over and over. Could it be that Iachino was Marco’s actual last name? In Italy, Iachino is like Goldberg or Silverstein in America; it’s a name that immediately marks you as Jewish. Was Marco Iocco really Davide Iachino? This, I thought, was at least the warm bullet casing, if not the smoking gun.
I began searching Marco’s room, rifling through his sheets and under his mattress, tap-tap-tapping on his desk drawers, shaking his books, and turning over the prints on the wall. And finally, finally, secreted away under a loose board beneath his bed, I found his passport. Marco was not Marco. Marco was Davide, and Davide was a Jewish butcher in Rome. Intriguing.
It explained a lot, actually. Why Marco took an almost orgiastic delight in consuming gamberi crudi, raw shrimp, and Aquacotta della Maremma, the seafood stew that’s served along the Tuscan coast, rich with bivalves, mollusks, and crustaceans. Why he ate cinghiale, speck, lardo, guanciale, and pancetta at restaurants every chance he got—but why there was never any pork, not even a paper- wrapped pile of thinly sliced prosciutto, the quintessential Italian staple, in his refrigerator. Why some Saturday mornings, particularly those that punctuated debauched weeks, Marco was nowhere to be found, and not even his band of floppy-haired velvet-coated amici knew where he went. But most of all, it explained why Marco wouldn’t go to Rome with me.
Rome may be one of the world’s great cities, but it’s not New York. It’s a small town by comparison, and it would take only one person who knew Marco to see me with him for his whole congregation—his whole community—to know his secret, hidden life.
His family knew he was living here in Siena, but they didn’t know the full extent of Marco’s activities, and if they had an inkling, they likely looked at Marco’s Siena time as his rumspringa, an adolescent interlude that would end when Marco assumed his adult responsibilities. Marco, it seemed increasingly clear to me, was biding his time before taking over the bloody family business.
To be a shochet, a kosher butcher, was, I soon learned, a serious occupation. Not just anyone could train to become a shochet; you had to be pious, sincere, and committed. You also had to be an Orthodox Jew, at least in Italy. Learning shechita, the Jewish dietary rules for ritual slaughter and butchery, takes many months; some people study for as long as a year, and understandably so—it is a complex process. The shochet has to slice through the animal’s esophagus, trachea, jugular, and carotid in one unflinching stroke.
The animal has to be exsanguinated and porged, or removed of veins, nerves, caul fat, and sinews; after, it has to be koshered, a process involving copious running water and salt. It is intense, precise, finicky, bloody work, and I could not fathom Marco—with his white skin, tousled hair, and kohl-lined doe eyes—doing any of it.
I pondered what to do with this knowledge now that I had it.
Marco’s band of eyeliner boys had no idea that Marco’s New Romantic velvets shrouded a secret Semitic identity. Marco’s group bonded with the casual racism so endemic to Italian culture, making jokes about Jews and indulging in the kind of armchair anti-Semitism that is the heritage of a formerly fascist country. After all, Italy’s famous Manifesto della razza, or Manifesto of Race, the 1938 document that stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship, wasn’t yet fifty years old when I was living in Siena. You need generations to cruise past that kind of racist thinking, and Italy had hardly seen one changing of the guard.
Marco may have been a louche layabout, but he worked hard to hide his history from his circle of friends, and from me. Not that I would have cared, though I admit I had wondered why Marco was circumcised. I felt disappointment the first time Marco’s pegged trousers hit the floor. I hadn’t yet been with a man with a foreskin, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. One hears things, and one hopes that other countries will gift you with at least a little
exoticism. Certainly, Marco wasn’t the first Jew I’d ever fucked.
Pennistone, for all its WASPish, clench-jawed elitism abounded with Jews, and my Connecticut day school was stuffed with them. In fact, the first person who ever used his mouth to give me an orgasm was Jewish; he was also almost kicked out of school when someone tipped off the principal that he had a fat wad of marijuana in his locker. Only his mother’s money and a generous donation to some school building fund saved him, I heard, though he did have to spend some time in rehab and he did get a suspension. Had he never breathed a word to his friends about that kegger and that blowjob, nothing would have come between him and his beloved bong, but I digress.
While I could not have cared less that Marco was Jewish, I was delighted to finally find his dirt. I knew Marco’s real name, his family’s business, what he was hiding, and whom he feared would find out. It was a wealth of information, and I had multiple ways I could use it. It put a spring in my step, a smile on my face, and a slick of wetness between my thighs. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
In the end, I chose to do nothing with what I knew, not immediately—not for a year. I bided my time and I treasured my find.
I stored the business card carefully in a book that I knew Marco would never touch (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple), and I kept quiet. I took so long to unearth this precious dirt that I had only six more weeks to spend with Marco before I was scheduled to meet up with my family for an obligatory turn around Europe. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to—at twenty, I’d already had a lifetime of watching my mother go glassy-eyed with the joy of being in Paris, and left to my own devious devices, I’d rather have plundered the boys of Capri—but my parents had stipulated my presence at a Daniels family vacation before they’d fund my stay in Siena.
After my classes finished, Marco and I made a mad dash to the Maremma coast, where we tanned on the beach and picnicked in the pineta, and enjoyed very quiet, very unobtrusive sex in some stranger’s cabana. Taking Trenitalia, we looped Italy, pretending we were married and spending a weekend in a hotel room in Verona, where we saw Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Verona Arena, and
held our breaths as Raina Kabaivanska sang “Come una mosca.” I recall that we had the most sublime risotto con capretto—the steaming rice suspended in a savory sauce, so light that the tiny bits of goat, bones intact, seemed to float above it, like Jesus walking on water—at a café that has been open since before Puccini was born.
From Verona, we crossed Italy to the Riviera, and we hiked through Cinque Terre, the Ligurian Sea hundreds of feet below us ruffling like cobalt silk caressed by invisible fingers, both of us clutching the iron chains bolted into the rock face, our feet on paths no wider than our hands. We made the most of those weeks, and I never, not once, raised the specter of forbidden Rome.
I returned to my senior year at Pennistone, and I became Arts Editor of the paper; I wrote some cover stories for The Green, the weekly in Burlington, Vermont; and I got my first piece published in the Phoenix. I thought of Marco often, frequently while fucking other boys. I decided that, after graduation, I would take a trip to Rome.
After my plane landed at Fiumicino, I waited for the jet lag to cool its engines and return me to my original upright position. I was going to be in Rome for ten days; there was no immediate reason to rush anything. I wandered through the Palatine Hill and got swimmy- headed with Stendhal syndrome in front of the Temple of Caesar. I may be a titanium-clad bitch, but I am undone by the swirl of Rome’s ancient air, the press of its ancient rocks, and the knowledge that these stones, right here, were touched by Marcus Antonius, by Cato, by Octavian, by Nero himself. The College of the Vestals, standing serene and decapitated in its terrible stone row, makes me quiver. To give up sex for thirty years is one thing, but the vestal virgins wielded serious Roman weight; power almost always compensates for other losses, and the vestals had much. To have and to hold the written wills of powerful men is to have a mother lode of information. Able to vote, able to own property, and serving as confidants of the powerful, these virgins were no one’s bitch. The fact that few married after their service was finished is telling; why abdicate power when you have become accustomed to the joy of it.
I walked Rome from snout to tail, traversed the line from the Circus Maximus to the Villa Borghese, from Vatican City to the Catacombs of St. Sebastian, from Trastevere to Castro Pretorio. I
walked and I toured and I wore my Walkman, carrying extra batteries and pretending to be just another American girl who didn’t understand a goddamn word of Italian, unless it served me. I didn’t want anything or anyone between me and my getting pelvic with this glorious rotting city.
To this end, I had lied to my parents. I had invented a friend, Amy, who was traveling with me, but whom I was meeting in Rome as her semester abroad ended. I concocted conversations, forged letters, and imagined scheduling; I made Amy so convincing that my parents were relieved that I had a good friend waiting for me. Imagined Amy aside, I was gloriously alone; I had a hotel room to myself, and ten lone days in Rome. Best of all, I felt secure in the knowledge that I was going to scare the absolute fuck out of my former lover the moment he saw me walk through his butcher shop door.
Part of my wandering for four days before I visited Marco was my desire to get to know Rome on my own terms. Part of it was the jet lag. And part of it was that I met an adorable banker from Bern at the Spanish Steps, and I spent twenty-four hours in his fine hotel room, fucking him tongueless. So anal, and I mean that in the best of ways.
You can’t fault a Swiss for his punctual proclivities.
But the greatest portion of my delay was that I was enjoying imagining how Marco would react when he saw me. Of all the kosher butcher shops in all the towns in all the world, I had to walk into his. I imagined Marco wrapped in the ubiquitous white apron, a large glass-faced case of meats between us. Marco looking up at me; it taking a moment for my face to register; his cleaver clattering to the floor. I imagined the blood draining from his face, his knees weak, his pulse thumping. I imagined his struggle for composure, and his loss of it. I imagined him stuttering and trying to formulate some kind of sentence as he tried to work the mental math of my being there, in his shop, in the Jewish ghetto, in Rome. I imagined him failing. And then I imagined fucking him. I always did enjoy fucking Marco.
This is more or less how it transpired. He didn’t drop his cleaver; he wasn’t holding one. He did stagger a bit, and that pleased me inordinately. He was, in fact, wearing a large white apron, a neat black beard, and a small gold band. Marco, it transpired, was married. This development was thrilling. Mistresses have much
power and so little responsibility; it’s hard not to respond to the pure erotics of the situation.
Marco came from behind the counter, he held out his arms—and he dropped them, pressing them against his sides like a penguin, restraining himself. He couldn’t hug me. Not only could it betray the secret of our carnal past, but as an Orthodox Jew, Marco couldn’t touch women who weren’t family. He struggled to control his speech, sputtering; I stayed cool and supremely confident. Speaking in English, I said I’d seen him through the shop window and felt compelled to say hello—it had been so long since Siena and the university, I said. I told him he looked well. I let him know where I was staying and how long I’d be in Rome. He didn’t say much. His face turned white, then red, and finally settled into pink. I had unsettled him, and I was delighted.
Two hours later, Marco was in my crimson-covered bed at the Hotel Campo de’ Fiori. “Mia cara, ti ho perso così,” he said, “odori come i fiori che crescono dalla figa di Venere. Come mi manchi leccarti, gustarti, il mio sogno Americano.” My darling, I missed you so. You smell like flowers growing from Venus’s pussy. How I miss licking you, tasting you, my American dream.
Looking in Marco’s eyes, I pulled his left hand to my mouth, pressed his finger to my lips, and pushed his ring finger down my throat far enough to make me gag. Coating his finger with spit, I worked the ring slowly off his finger with my teeth. When it was free, I spat it at his chest. It hit and bounced to the floor, where it lay for the next eight hours.
The first time I saw Marco in Rome was also the next to last. Which is not to say that I never saw Marco—I did, often. For almost thirty years, we would meet anywhere but Rome. Frequently, we met in Toscana; once we shared a Bolgheri inn room that was precisely the assertive pink of my interior labia; another time, we pushed together a pair of beds, narrow as a nun’s thighs and just as tight, at Terme San Filippo. The hotel held all the sensuality of an OB-GYN office, and the air wafted with the hellish sulfur smell of the mineral waters.
The food was medicinal and the wine list prescriptive; still, we had delightful sex. Another time, we stayed at this wonderful former
monastery turned aristocratic seat turned B&B in Chianti; the establishment had a grappa room, something I found very civilized.
Once we stayed in a friend’s seventeenth-century villa in Montalcino; we accidentally set fire to the compost pile, missing the embers in the ashes, and spent a precious hour and a half carrying buckets of water back and forth to quench the flames.
All told, we met about once a year, sometimes skipping years, rarely meeting more often, for almost thirty years. Marco’s and my get-togethers had a Same Time, Next Year kind of vibe, except they took place in a cavalcade of hotel rooms and with far less sentiment.
Sometimes I would come to Italy and Marco wouldn’t be able to get away from his donna; other times he wouldn’t want to. Over the years, Marco and his bleached-blond wife had five children, and with each succeeding birth, I felt more pride in my cherry, showroom- quality genitalia.
When I met Marco that first time in Rome, he’d been married only a few months. The marriage, he said, was a largely strategic union, joining his family, butchers from antediluvian times in the Ghetto di Roma, and her family, who owned a slaughterhouse in a small town near Firenze. The marriage meant that his family’s butcher shop had unfettered, direct access to a supplier; they would get the best meat at the best prices, and under Marco’s guidance, the company fattened.
Learning about Marco’s fledgling meat empire, I understood why Marco took his degree in biology; he followed it with an advanced degree in animal sciences, and, with this knowledge, he’d go full organic, or “bio,” as it’s called in Italian, making his company a boutique-driven purveyor of dead animals. Dario Cecchini in Panzano aside, Macelleria Iachino was the slow-food-movement meat poster child, if there were such a thing. Even people who didn’t care for kosher meat—so bloodless as to taste fatigued, kosher meat has little to recommend it—would visit Macelleria Iachino; such was the power of Marco’s animal husbandry. I was proud of his business acumen; I like successful men. They smell like money, confidence, and expensive hand lotion.
When he was with me, Marco generally reverted to his genial, jovial, gluttonous self. He ate everything. He fucked me silly. He
sang snippets of songs by the Psychedelic Furs. He was a reminder, every day I saw him and in every way he touched me, of our shared youth. That golden time when we smoked as if we were immortal, danced as if we were graceful, and fucked as if we would never have another opportunity.
The main thing that youth has going for it is porpoise-tight skin.
Raw, wide-eyed newness is meaningless. Nostalgia for knowing nothing is asinine; you can’t recapture it and you don’t want to relive it. Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger’s heart.
