Chapter 9
WE FLEW FROM CHARLESTON to Dulles, Dulles to Frankfurt, and Frankfurt to Rome.
I’d never been on an airplane and was a little nervous about the takeoff, but Paul gave me a stick of Wrigley’s and told me I’d be fine.
It was a weird sensation, entering the air for the first time, but I liked it and spent the first leg of the trip pointing out the window at farms and interstates and eventually big, fluffy clouds.
On our transatlantic flight, I barely had time to adjust the pressure in my ears before a stewardess placed a Manhattan in my hand and a shrimp cocktail on my seat tray, which I feel the need to remind you—since you were born long after the golden age of air travel—was set with a ceramic plate, cloth napkin, and metal cutlery.
We dined on teriyaki steak and pineapple upside-down cake and had several glasses of wine apiece, and after the stewardess had cleared our plates, she came around with a selection of cigarettes, which I smoked, against Paul’s recommendation, because why not?
We arrived in Rome, exhausted, hungover, and smelling like ashtrays, at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning.
Our instructions were to collect our bags and submit them to customs inspectors for clearance, then make our way to the domestic terminal where Alisarda Airlines ran flights to Olbia—a coastal town in northern Sardinia—twice a day.
Throughout the airport, I kept seeing these scary uniformed guys carrying machine guns, but when I asked Paul about them, he said he thought they were with the Carabinieri, which was Italy’s paramilitary police force.
We had been warned in the welcome packet sent by Paul’s sponsor that Alisarda had a reputation for overbooking their flights, so when we finally got to the right terminal and an agent explained in slow and halting English that we did not, in fact, have seats on the evening flight to Olbia, neither of us were entirely surprised.
“Cosa facciamo?” said Paul, because I guess he’d figured we were going to get further in Italian than English.
“Ritornate domani,” said the agent.
“Domani?” Paul repeated.
“What’s domani mean?” I asked him.
“Tomorrow,” he said, and the agent issued us a pair of tickets for a flight that did indeed depart the following morning.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Paul after he’d found a telephone exchange and left word with the switchboard operator on the ship that we’d be arriving a day later than expected.
“See Rome, I guess?”
I think it’s important to note that, while Paul was better traveled than I was, it wasn’t like he really knew what he was doing, either.
His family had enough money to take the train from Richmond to New York on occasion, and in the summer, they’d get in the car and drive to Virginia Beach, or to a river house that Paul’s mother’s family owned in Deltaville.
But he hadn’t been out of the country until his first sea tour, when his sub had put in at Faslane in Scotland.
He’d also been to Rota, Spain, in the fall of 1973, which I suspect had something to do with the Yom Kippur War, although he never said it did.
That was about it, though at the time I thought all this coming and going made him the most worldly individual to ever walk the face of the earth.
We changed some money at a little kiosk in the airport and allowed one of the men waving a sign over his head to steer us toward a cab.
His sign read PENSIONE MICHIGAN, which sounded like a funny name for an Italian hotel, and I could tell Paul was anxious, the way he was sitting straight as a board in the backseat, both eyes on the meter.
“Pensione Michigan?” he confirmed with the cabbie, twice, apparently convinced we were about to be driven to an abandoned lot and robbed or murdered or maybe both.
I decided right then and there that, since he was doing so much worrying, I was going to sit back and enjoy the ride.
And what a ride it was. We pulled away from the terminal and onto a busy street that soon turned into a full-blown highway.
There were cars and motorcycles going every which way, and beautiful trees that reminded me of marshmallows.
Everything was so foreign to me—the vegetation, the road signs, the graffiti, even the litter—that you could have dangled an empty potato chip bag in front of my face, and I probably would have said, Oh, will you look at that! Italian potato chips were in there!
The highway narrowed as we drew closer to the city center, and if we’d offered to pay our taxi driver extra to show us the sights, I doubt he would or could have done a better job.
We passed Circo Massimo, where the Romans used to hold their chariot races, and the Tempio di Portuno.
Then we were whizzing around a giant traffic circle with that scrumptious white wedding cake of a building in the center of it, and headed toward Rome’s Esquilino neighborhood, better known as Termini.